David Bokovoy Issues a Devastating Critique of the Mopologists' "Scholarship"

[Everybody Wang Chung]

Yet before LDS apologists seek to counter this extensive body of research, it would be best if they first sought to understand it. I suspect simply producing apologetic essays such as this, which make fantastic claims about the implications of recent scholarship, and which misrepresent the DH will ultimately do more harm than good for those trying to maintain religious devotion to LDS scripture.

Instead, I would suggest two possible approaches: 1. Believers such as Thompson could simply ignore the implications of mainstream scholarship and just choose to believe. This would never work for me, but it does for some. 2. Believers such as Thompson could accept these historical views about the Bible and shift their belief paradigms to accommodate the implications of scholarship. It is possible to do, and many believers in a variety of faith communities are able to make that approach work.

In my view, either approach would be superior to publishing apologetic work, which shows that the authors have had very little exposure to the topics they’re addressing.

This is brilliant and devastating.

Enter David Bokovoy, looking simultaneously Santa Clausian and like he could pop your head as if it was a grape.

I don’t think there is much David couldn’t pop with those massive arms. Good Lord!

[Mayan Elephant]

Possibly so, Dean Robbers, and yet I find myself feeling magnanimous towards Dr. Peterson at the moment, and I can’t help but wonder if the pivot to the “Witnesses” movie was strategic. Given the pressure from the Heartlander movement and the Brethren’s unwillingness to publicly endorse a MesoAmerican model, it perhaps makes sense to shift focus to the witnesses. Because, hey: they still had a powerful religious experience, even if it was just about an anachronistic book that turns out to be fictional. This may be the moment you predicted—I.e., the shift to an “inspired fiction” model.

Dr. Scratch, thank you again. While I do not follow the apologists closely, I respect your thorough work and tenacity on our part. I think you are doing a great service. I believe that you are a great influence on what is happening among the apologists by being a balanced and centered critic.

I am, in this post, about to ask you a speculative question. I fully respect you wanting to punt on it if it is over the top.

First the question in two parts:

• What is the real personal motivation for these apologists (part a), and:
  have you noticed a change in those motivations (part b)?

Now the context of the questions:

• Selfless priorities seem to have been present in early apologist works. When I tried to read Nibley and took his class at BYU he seemed like a useless lunatic kook. And yet, he also seemed like a tool that was fine imitating scholarship and research to be something for his church, his ideology and his employer. I had the impression that his priority for his nonsense was to be a soldier of sorts for the institution.
  
  My run-ins with these contemporary apologist clowns was mostly with DCP and Midgely. I also bantered with the sub-clowns in what was once the Mormon archipelago or whatever they thought they had. Those characters, seemed to be self-centered, self-promotional and self-aggrandizing. My (emphasis here on MY) impression then was that the institution no longer had the backs of the apologists like they did for that clown Nibley. The apologists were working for themselves, and the church's scripture and mythology was merely their widget. I could be VERY wrong about this.
  
  I look at the links and reviews that you highlighted in this post, and I do not see much more than a bunch of dudes (forgive me if I failed to find a reference to a woman author, peer or critic) who are all looking out for themselves. These reviews give me the impression that they are promoting themselves and stomping on each other for personal reasons, and that there is no motivation other than that. I do not see any of this working as a service for their professions or their shared loyalty - the corporation of the president of the church of blah blah day blah saints blah.

I know my questions and background are simplistic in comparison to your work and experience. I get that. I just do not understand what in the hell these guys are trying to accomplish. It looks to me like a bunch of guys stepping on each other and saying, "I could have been wrong better, goshdarnit!" I would really like to understand what motivates them. What is their priority in doing this? Who is their priority? What sacrifices are they making to their own characters and professions in order to be right about something that is fictional and, frankly, risky for pseudo-scholarly attachment? I do not get it. On the one hand, they are overly conscientious about their religion, and on the other hand they are shameless about the sh** they will say and do. The characters just make me scratch my head with awe.

[Symmachus]

Another instance of dazzling incompetence from the Interpreters. I don't share the same faith in the Documentary Hypothesis as some here do, but David Bokovoy's strengths as a scholar are undeniable, so they should take his critique seriously, even if he is not a lawyer.

I do think Thompson deserves some credit here for at least taking the Book of Mormon as the conscious product of an agenda and how the scholarship on the Pentateuch could serve as a model or at least an inspiration. I would never claim to have original insights or any influence, but I have wondered on this board several times over the years why believing Mormons hadn't done so (with the exception of Grant Hardy, but his was a literary analysis that didn't get into the historical or philological side of things). On the old board I amused myself in posting a few nugatory examples of what this would look like.

Speaking of amusing:

Brigham Young, for example, who lived most of his life before Wellhausen’s version of the Documentary Hypothesis was settled in 1878, observed that Moses obtained his information from those who went before him and “picked out what he considered necessary” when he compiled his canon.

Oh, that old surly cabinet maker! Nibley surely was right in believing Young to be the greatest genius of the 19th century.

The Documentary Hypothesis is a completely circular argument with very little external evidence to support it. It is built as a response to a number of scholarly assumptions. So there are serious critiques to be made of it, and some have been. The comparative linguistic evidence—not the literary analysis—is the best indication that we are dealing with layers of textual composition (archaic verb forms, for example, which we can establish as earlier because of evidence external to the text). I'm a little taken aback by Bokovoy's confidence in, for example, words like this:

“Skeptics of the Documentary Hypothesis observe that none of these alleged source documents exist except in the minds of their hypothesizers” (p. 86).

The fact is these source documents do exist. They appear in the first five books of the Bible. We can see them there today.

No, that is just circular reasoning here. The Documentary Hypothesis is meant to explain discrepancies in the Pentateuch by positing that this text is made up of separate sources within itself; the evidence for that is deducted from certain assumptions. The deductions may be sound, and the assumptions may be accurate, but if the hypothesis is "this is actually separate sources put together," you can't say that the evidence for the hypothesis is the hypothesis itself. Homeric scholarship, working both as an inspiration to and in response to the Biblical scholarship, took a similar approach to the Iliad and Odyssey, and it came to a dead end until the insights of Milman Parry and Albert Lord. What their insights did was draw the scholarship away from essentially self-referential arguments about the text in determining the poems' composition while still keeping the text central (unlike archaeological approach, which was an approach using external evidence but which generally took the text at face value). I personally think the Documentary Hypothesis is a house of cards, but there hasn't been an equivalent Parry-and-Lord insight to improve on it yet, so it is the best structure on offer right now.

So that is why Bokovoy really nails it here:

Yet before LDS apologists seek to counter this extensive body of research, it would be best if they first sought to understand it. I suspect simply producing apologetic essays such as this, which make fantastic claims about the implications of recent scholarship, and which misrepresent the DH will ultimately do more harm than good for those trying to maintain religious devotion to LDS scripture.

Yes, if you are going to start from the same assumptions about the text and you follow the deductions made that produce the Documentary Hypothesis, you don't get to pick and choose as is convenient. You can't just focus on the cards at the top level and ignore the bottom level; the cards on the right will fall if those on the left do.

Instead, I would suggest two possible approaches: 1. Believers such as Thompson could simply ignore the implications of mainstream scholarship and just choose to believe. This would never work for me, but it does for some. 2. Believers such as Thompson could accept these historical views about the Bible and shift their belief paradigms to accommodate the implications of scholarship. It is possible to do, and many believers in a variety of faith communities are able to make that approach work.

I think #2 is incoherent: "believers" in X can't "shift their belief paradigms" in X without changing what X means: they won't still be "believers." We have to acknowledge that this comes at a serious cost. But If they are serious about maintaining belief in X, then they need to make a better theory than the Documentary Hypothesis. Mormon apologetics is responsive and negative (that is, it denies the claims of others but doesn't advance its own claims), not assertive and positive (that is, positing a claim). That is unlike traditional Christian, Jewish, and Islamic apologetics for most of the history of those traditions. Mormon apologists have such a long way to go because they have yet to develop the competency even to understand what they are up against, let alone how to overcome it. That is what David Bokovoy is showing here.

#1 is a safer bet, and I would suggest that until traditional believers get serious about scholarship and building a real tradition of their own that can be taken seriously, they stay with #1. In fact, they already do! Because here is the thing that makes all of this discussion, both the paper and responses, pointless: the New Testament. Whatever the Brass Plates contained, Alma contains quotations from the Gospel of Matthew before Jesus was even born, and most bizarrely contains whole phrases from Paul a good century before he wrote any of his letters, as well as perhaps Revelation (e.g. have a look at Alma 5). If we are going to start tackling textual anachronisms, let's start with that. If you can't explain that, then no amount of parsing any "E" or whatever sources is going to matter one damn bit.

[Ramus_Stein]

Belief in what or being a believer in what are salient questions here. What is at the core of belief within an LDS framework? Is a certain kind of scriptural literalism necessary for belief? If that literalism is lost, does belief necessarily go out the window too?

[Gadianton]

re: Tom

He probably didn't have time, as he never seems to have time whenever his guys are getting creamed. Remember how Bill "took one for the team" from Jenkins? No help. At least the guy died a soldier.

I'll be he's familiar with Grant though and endorses his work. Had R.E. Friedman been cited, the paper might have been rejected.

I don’t think there is much David couldn’t pop with those massive arms. Good Lord!

It's kind of ironic that from certain quarters we hear so often about how "belief" is necessary for good health.

Yes, if you are going to start from the same assumptions about the text and you follow the deductions made that produce the Documentary Hypothesis, you don't get to pick and choose as is convenient. You can't just focus on the cards at the top level and ignore the bottom level; the cards on the right will fall if those on the left do....

Mormon apologetics is responsive and negative (that is, it denies the claims of others but doesn't advance its own claims), not assertive and positive (that is, positing a claim)

Some heavy insights here, as usual. I can think of one very general counterexample. the LGT. Maybe this is why I considered it the reigning paradigm of old-school Mopologetics. I believe I had discovered the theory died abruptly in 2011, but I can't check the old board. I wish I'd had your insight back then, because I think why the LGT stuck out so radically is because it just might be the ONLY example of an actual theory. e.g., a positively asserted framework or model of some kind from the apologists. But participation in the theory was scant over the decades it reigned supreme, and it was never something you could say, take a class on at the BYU. A certain blog owner had said that there wasn't much to do for the LGT but assert it. After that, the work had been done. I thought that was an insane observation.

I definitely agree with you that broadly, Mopologetics, aside from attacking critics and living in anger, is denying what others advance against Mormon scripture or the church generally. The positive apologetics, including NHM and "how could he have known" assert consistency with what the rest of the world says, but doesn't inform us about how that world works. Theoretically, it leaves us with gaping holes.

The only other theory I can think of is Early Modern English. While it's not big in terms of participation, it's big in relative dollar amounts spent.

Alma contains quotations from the Gospel of Matthew before Jesus was even born, and most bizarrely contains whole phrases from Paul a good century before he wrote any of his letters

I'm sure I'm not telling you something you don't already know, but they'll just say that's a "textual layer", Joseph Smith using the the KJV. Oh wait, since we have Early Modern English on the table, that is the reformers using the KJV in the spirit world -- the reformers did a looses translation so that Joseph Smith could do a "tight" translation.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Enter David Bokovoy, looking simultaneously Santa Clausian and like he could pop your head as if it was a grape.

omg

I know, right? Dude is jacked.

- Doc

[Gadianton]

If that literalism is lost, does belief necessarily go out the window too?

It's tempting to say "yes", but some of us believe in a "inspired fiction" model of the Book of Mormon that could be assumed by the Saints.

Bill Hamblin argued to his death that you have to believe the Book of Abraham is really the translation of the actual Abraham autograph that exists other wise you're in apostasy. We might never find that document, but we must believe it exists. We aren't allowed to believe the Book of Abraham or Book of Mormon is fiction.

I'm sympathetic. The "secular fiction" model of the Book of Mormon, where it's a 19th century document that Joseph Smith made up, perhaps being inspired by the Holy Ghost, will never be suitable because there is no way in principle to demonstrate the "magic" of Joseph Smith. It's like saying maybe Ted Kaczynski's politics were inspired by God.

There are many "inspired fiction" models possible. What's compelling to me is to think about Early Modern English. The Book of Mormon is both a 15th century document and an ancient document? One way to resolve the tension is to go all in on the 15th century. Early Modern English already crap-cans a whole host of Mopologist rationalizations about Joseph's translation process. Joseph Smith read words off of a stone. His mind did not participate, the seer stone was only "training wheels" in the most banal way imaginable, you see the letters in your mind directly vs. first on a rock.

Imagine if the Book of Mormon is a great fictional epic written by a 15th century "ghost committee", but perhaps it was Shakespeare leading the committee and not Tyndale. Perhaps the writers were inspired by the "great library" of holy books collected in the spirit world (as we learned about in Return From Tomorrow), and Nephi and Lehi are characters in a novel.

But none of that precludes Joseph Smith's supernatural encounters. Moroni perhaps really did show him a set of plates -- a fake set. Oh yes, God can mislead Joseph Smith -- the apologists already accept that. They believe that Joseph Smith misunderstood the geography of the Book of Mormon. We also know that God speaks to men in the language that they understand. That's just how it had to be for his dispensation.

But the Chapel Mormon loses very little, if anything. Sure, you can no longer point to "Nahom" or gold plates that existed in parts of the world of no relevance for the Book of Mormon, but most of the evidence lately for the Book of Mormon is linguistic. And proving the Book of Mormon is 15th century still allows us to declare, "How could he have known!". And this theory involves the spirit world in ways that are very meaningful to Chapel Mormons via extant Mormon folklore.

And so yes, I do think it's entirely possible to believe the Book of Mormon is fiction, but in this restricted way where there is plenty of supporting Chapel Mormon magic, and I think Early Modern English, if it ever gains traction among TBMs, inexorably pulls the Book of Mormon in this direction.

[Doctor Scratch]

Dr. Scratch, thank you again. While I do not follow the apologists closely, I respect your thorough work and tenacity on our part. I think you are doing a great service. I believe that you are a great influence on what is happening among the apologists by being a balanced and centered critic.

I am, in this post, about to ask you a speculative question. I fully respect you wanting to punt on it if it is over the top.

First the question in two parts:

• What is the real personal motivation for these apologists (part a), and:
  have you noticed a change in those motivations (part b)?

Now the context of the questions:

• Selfless priorities seem to have been present in early apologist works. When I tried to read Nibley and took his class at BYU he seemed like a useless lunatic kook. And yet, he also seemed like a tool that was fine imitating scholarship and research to be something for his church, his ideology and his employer. I had the impression that his priority for his nonsense was to be a soldier of sorts for the institution.
  
  My run-ins with these contemporary apologist clowns was mostly with DCP and Midgely. I also bantered with the sub-clowns in what was once the Mormon archipelago or whatever they thought they had. Those characters, seemed to be self-centered, self-promotional and self-aggrandizing. My (emphasis here on MY) impression then was that the institution no longer had the backs of the apologists like they did for that clown Nibley. The apologists were working for themselves, and the church's scripture and mythology was merely their widget. I could be VERY wrong about this.

Hello, Mayan Elephant. You pose some very interesting questions here. First of all, I think you are absolutely right that the Mopologists, to no small extent, are "self-centered, self-promotional and self-aggrandizing." And while you may be right that Nibley saw himself as a "solider," I think the same is true for the Mopologists: they see themselves as doing something that's in the service of the Church. But, it gets complicated. Take Dr. Peterson, for example. Apparently, he was told in his patriarchal blessing that he was supposed to be a "defender" of some sort, and so that is part of his motivation. But he is also desperate to be seen as a "public intellectual," hence his blogging, and his various dumb articles. He's spent more time writing in that vein that he has in any kind of "scholarly" capacity. Finally, there is the influence of the Brethren. Not all of the Brethren (apparently) support Mopologetics, but *some* of them do. It used to be that Elder Packer was the main supporter (the torch was passed to him by Elder Maxwell, evidently), though it needs to be said that individual Apostles aren't necessarily on board with every last thing that the Mopologists do. So, you might get a case where, e.g., Elder Holland oversees them getting kicked out of the Maxwell Institute, but then, later, he "does them a solid" by delivering a rather strident lecture to the "new" Maxwell Institute--an incident that Midgley interpreted as "a spanking." (And Midgley has been remarkably disrespectful towards some of the Brethren who opposed their ideas: e.g., he said that they were all waiting around for Elder Mark E. Petersen *to die* so that they could publish their ideas about the LGT.)

My point being: it's very tempting to generalize, but I think the motivations tend to be rather complex. And yes: I do think the motivations change (sort of). I think that, at the heart of everything are: egoism; a desire to fight with critics; a desire to defend the Church; a desire to be seen as "smart," and so on, but these things manifest themselves in various ways. Today it's the Witnesses movie, but ten years or so ago, it was that now-pratically-defunct "Mormon Scholars Testify."

I look at the links and reviews that you highlighted in this post, and I do not see much more than a bunch of dudes (forgive me if I failed to find a reference to a woman author, peer or critic) who are all looking out for themselves. These reviews give me the impression that they are promoting themselves and stomping on each other for personal reasons, and that there is no motivation other than that. I do not see any of this working as a service for their professions or their shared loyalty - the corporation of the president of the church of blah blah day blah saints blah. [/list]

I know my questions and background are simplistic in comparison to your work and experience. I get that. I just do not understand what in the hell these guys are trying to accomplish.

I think your perplexity is perfectly understandable. I mean, if we look at this from a more "Celestial" perspective, then these guys are doing this so that they can get into the Celestial Kingdom, right? Except that their behavior is so often at odds with the things that all of us were taught in Sunday School, which makes you wonder if there's something else at play. And, of course, it's the usual petty human things like greed, a need for attention, a desire for revenge, and so on.

[Mayan Elephant]

Very, very, very interesting Dr. Scratch. Thank you.

Well, I am a believer in service. I think it is valuable personally and valuable to the group and community. I also believe that the core traits of service are being selfless and shameless - the good kinds of selfless and the good kinds of shameless. Selfless in that one can make others a priority. Shameless in that it can be done without regrets, expectation of return, fear of failure. That kind of service is what makes institutions work and makes families work. I believe that.

In the extreme, that combination becomes imitation where one casts aside one's authentic self to wear a costume of sorts. Shameless in the extreme, and selfless in the extreme. You describe these evolutions in a way that leads me to think the intent began in a wholesome way and morphed or evolved to an extreme. Again, we do not know as these are individuals with their own experience, but it is interesting to hypothesize.

My experience with the apologists is that they are unmoored. Perhaps I am most influenced by my personal interaction with Nibley. He seemed like a soiled and crazy nutcase who was used (a tool) by greater forces. But, hell, what do I know?

Again, thank you. My mind is spinning with this. I may never know what their real motivations are, but I am still spinning it in my own head.

[simon southerton]

Keith Thompson seems to like writing about things he knows nothing about.

In 2014 Thompson published “Fashion or Proof? A Challenge for Pacific Anthropology” in Interpreter volume 8 (2014): 205-232. In his paper he issued a call to Pacific anthropologists (who apparently read the Interpreter,)

to write the story of the origin of mankind in the Pacific a bit larger and perhaps to look scientifically for additional explanations

From his brief peek in the literature Thompson had formed the view that contemporary anthropologists believe the enormous diversity of people in the Pacific arose relatively recently. This is flat out wrong.

To have a meaningful understanding of who the Polynesians are and where they came from, anthropologically speaking, we need to search out more of the story and open our minds to the nuances that do and must exist in the story of the colonization of the Pacific in pre-European times. Understanding a little about evolution, I find [it] very difficult to accept that my native friends in Tarawa, Majuro, Honiara, Lae, Port Vila, Noumea, Salelologa, Vavau, Rotuma, Niue, Aitutaki, and Moorea all come from precisely the same gene stock originating fewer than 5,000 years ago because they all look so different.

The sheer ignorance displayed in this quote is staggering. Thompson has not got a clue about the colonization history of the Pacific. The island locations he mentions span the entire Pacific and include Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. Modern anthropologists do not believe these diverse people descend from common ancestors who lived ‘fewer than 5,000 year ago’. Australia and New Guinea have been inhabited for about 50,000 years. The ancestors of the Polynesians and indigenous groups in Australia and New Guinea had been separated for about 60,000 years. Waves of Asian migration from Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia also passed through New Guinea into the western Pacific during the last 30,000 years.

The central argument of Thompson’s 2014 paper is completely wrong. But Peterson was happy to publish it and Keith Thompson can add another paper to his CV. This works well for Thompson because he is employed at a Catholic university and they turn a blind eye to the inclusion of apologetics in their listings of their academic work.