Dan Vogel Responds to Lars Nielsen (Part 5) - pseudepigrapha

[dan vogel]

Why would someone attempting to perpetuate a fraud use names associated with fraud?

Picking up at 1:26:50, Lars can’t resist correcting my generalized use of the term “forgery.” My use is not unlike the one used in Bart Ehrman’s book on early Christian literary deceit titled “Forgery and Counterforgery” – “A ‘forgery’ is a literary work with a false authorial claim” (p. 1, n. 1). This includes both pseudonymity and pseudepigraphy. Kircher pretended to quote or cite a document that didn’t exist. This is similar to what Ehrman calls an “embedded forgery.” Montmaur was a plagiarist, a fabricator of sources, and accused of forgery.

So, why would Prof. Smith and Spalding use the names Nephi and Mormon associated with literary fraud if they wanted to fool people into believing their fake document was real? It would be ironic if Smith and Spalding were writing a novel. I understand fiction writers using ironic names, but pseudepigraphists?

Joseph Smith’s Nephi writes Hebrew words using Egyptian script. This fits with what Joseph Smith’s contemporaries believed about Native Americans. That is, they compared Native American spoken language to Hebrew in support of the ten tribe theory, but compared pictographs on rocks and Mayan glyphs to Egyptian hieroglyphics. This has nothing to do with Kircher’s Nephi.

At around 1:30:25, you try to make it seem that I made an argument that affirms the consequent. However, I didn’t argue for sole authorship. The statement you quote was merely a hypothetical in response to what you think Smith sole-authorship theorists have to do. You wrote: “Even if the proponents of sole-authorship theories could satisfy the burden of showing how Smith might have been so deeply exposed to Kircher, they would still have most of their work ahead of them.” No, they don’t. You have assumed the name Nephi and the Liahona are Kircherisms. However, as I have shown, there are other explanations for them being in the Book of Mormon that have nothing to do with Kircher.

Even you ask the obvious question: “Why would Smith intentionally leave such a titillating trail of bookish breadcrumbs directly to Kircher?” (Not Smith, therefore Spalding?) This is better asked of your theory about Prof. Smith and Spalding. Why would they leave such a titillating clue? But since you asked it of Joseph Smith sole-authorship theorists, I responded: “This is a good reason to believe that Kircherisms aren’t in The Book of Mormon. Assuming Joseph Smith is the author of The Book of Mormon,” which is the position you were arguing against, “it makes more sense to conclude that what Nielsen calls Kircherisms are, in fact, either coincidence or his own inventions.” So my response was given within the Joseph Smith sole-authorship paradigm, which favors the other explanations over your assumption that Kircherisms are undeniably in the Book of Mormon. It is important to note that I was more concerned about exposing your assumption than defending the sole-authorship theory.

[Moksha]

Is there any chance of concatenating these responses to Lars Nielsen into a megathread so readers can follow along better?