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

The catch-all forum for general topics and debates. Minimal moderation. Rated PG to PG-13.
Benjamin McGuire
Sunbeam
Posts: 50
Joined: Wed May 26, 2021 1:14 pm

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

Post by Benjamin McGuire »

It's the nature of longer texts to have all kinds of patterns in them whether random or not. And it's the nature of critical methods to make the world look like nails to match the available hammers. Tolkien for example put a lot of thought into trying to make his stories about Middle-Earth part of a larger mythology, which he constructed in loose analogy to what he knew of real old myths from his part of the world. So there would be plenty for a critic to do in projecting source theory onto Tolkien. The reason not to bother doing it, though, is that every possible conclusion one might thereby advance would have to be followed by "—unless, of course, Tolkien just did that because he felt like it." There's a default alternative theory that is going to be at least as plausible as any critical conclusion, and we already know it.
I don't think I really want to get bogged down in this discussion. I am not sure it goes anywhere. I think that all of your points, at least to a degree, are valid if you start from the assumption that it is a work of fiction. I think that your argument that "any interpretation of them in terms of ancient layers of redaction is entirely at the mercy of whatever unknown principles governed the final redaction via Joseph Smith" is largely meaningless and empty of value. It essentially states that there is no discernible difference between a Book of Mormon that is translated from an ancient text and a Book of Mormon that is a modern work of fiction. I think that most believers would not be willing to accept such a claim, and most believers are not at all interested in simply assigning everything to that final redaction layer.

Setting that aside, I simply don't agree with your proposition of a default argument that is as viable as an argument built on principles of source criticism. I can think of more than one instance in Tolkien (to use your example) where the reality that Tolkien took material from a specific source is evidenced in such a way that there is no real possibility that Tolkien simply made something up on his own. And this is where your premise really falls flat. Consider, for example, this passage from the The Seeress’ Prophecy (Voluspá), starting in stanza 9:
(https://archive.org/details/poeticedda0 ... 8/mode/2up):
Then sought the gods their assembly-seats, The holy ones, and council held. To find who should raise the race of dwarfs Out of Brimir's blood and the legs of Blain. There was Motsognir the mightiest made Of all the dwarfs, and Durin next; Many a likeness of men they made, The dwarfs in the earth, as Durin said. Nyi and Nithi, Northri and Suthri, Austri and Vestri, Althjof, Dvalin, Nar and Nain, Niping, Dain, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Nori, An and Onar, Ai, Mjothvitnir. Vigg and Gandalf, Vindalf, Thrain, Thekk and Thorin, Thror, Vit and Lit, Nyr and Nyrath, — now have I told — Regin and Rathsvith — the list aright. Fili, Kili, Fundin, Nali, Heptifili, Hannar, Sviur, Frar, Hombori, Fraeg and Loni, Aurvang, Jari, Eikinskjaldi. The race of the dwarfs in Dvalin's throng Down to Lof ar the list must I tell; The rocks they left, and through wet lands They sought a home in the fields of sand. There were Draupnir and Dolgthrasir, Hor, Haugspori, Hlevang, Gloin, Dori, Ori, Duf, Andvari, Skirfir, Virfir, Skafith, Ai. Alf and Yngvi, Eikinskjaldi, Fjalar and Frosti, Fith and Ginnar; So for all time shall the tale be known, The list of all the forbears of Lofar.
Clearly, Tolkien gets his dwarf names (and the name of a certain wizard) for his boot The Hobbit from here.

But in any case, I don't get the sense that you have any real interest in the topic, and consequently, I am not all that inclined to continue.
Lem
God
Posts: 2456
Joined: Tue Oct 27, 2020 12:46 am

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

Post by Lem »

Benjamin McGuire wrote:
Mon Jun 07, 2021 7:16 pm
Physics Guy wrote:
Mon Jun 07, 2021 4:43 pm
It's the nature of longer texts to have all kinds of patterns in them whether random or not. And it's the nature of critical methods to make the world look like nails to match the available hammers. Tolkien for example put a lot of thought into trying to make his stories about Middle-Earth part of a larger mythology, which he constructed in loose analogy to what he knew of real old myths from his part of the world. So there would be plenty for a critic to do in projecting source theory onto Tolkien. The reason not to bother doing it, though, is that every possible conclusion one might thereby advance would have to be followed by "—unless, of course, Tolkien just did that because he felt like it." There's a default alternative theory that is going to be at least as plausible as any critical conclusion, and we already know it.
. I don't think I really want to get bogged down in this discussion. I am not sure it goes anywhere. I think that all of your points, at least to a degree, are valid if you start from the assumption that it is a work of fiction. I think that your argument that "any interpretation of them in terms of ancient layers of redaction is entirely at the mercy of whatever unknown principles governed the final redaction via Joseph Smith" is largely meaningless and empty of value... It essentially states that there is no discernible difference between a Book of Mormon that is translated from an ancient text and a Book of Mormon that is a modern work of fiction.
Based on the concepts you have established in the last several pages, the part I bolded seems a perfectly valid assumption for PG to make in this discussion of the text. Please correct me if I am misinterpreting your position, PG, but it seems to me that PG’s consideration “that it is a work of fiction” should carry at least the same weight as the opposite, so why would consideration of one option go nowhere at the expense of the other? It seems both should be considered.
I think that most believers would not be willing to accept such a claim, and most believers are not at all interested in simply assigning everything to that final redaction layer.
Possibly, although I have seen quite a few comments recently from believers who seem to embrace the ‘inspired fiction’ approach. In any case, whether most believers are willing to consider it or not doesn’t seem to be a valid reason to not have the discussion here.
User avatar
Physics Guy
God
Posts: 1557
Joined: Tue Oct 27, 2020 7:40 am
Location: on the battlefield of life

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

Post by Physics Guy »

It's true my interest in this point is cursory and nearly idle, but I think that this is an issue that will have to be addressed at some point if you want to pursue higher criticism of the Book of Mormon. The final redaction through Smith, however it really occurred, was a very different step from all other examples of texts getting combined and redacted. And that logically allows almost anything to occur to the text in that last step, because there doesn't seem to be any way to judge whether something would be typical or atypical for a unique process.

I'll be surprised if you can go very far in your analysis, though, without finding some need to make some kind of assumptions about how that unique process worked and what it would be likely or unlikely to do. Everything we actually have of the text came through that process; I don't see how you'll be able to hedge it out, as it were, and make a lot of statements about the hypothetical history of the text that are agnostic about its final redaction through Smith. Or do you really think you can?

If you can't, then as soon as you do make some untestable assumptions about the final redaction, I expect you'll find other faithful Mormons as well as skeptics who disagree with you about some of your assumptions. And then you'll just be at an impasse, a bunch of scholars with divergent assumptions and no way to test which assumptions are better. That sounds to me like a recipe for pouring a lot of work into something to which too few people will pay attention; you might give talks and publish papers but I'm afraid you might find that nobody ever really engaged with your work or cited you in any meaningful way because instead of that they could just dismiss your assumptions. So the project might be rewarding as a personal devotion but I think it would be frustrating if you were hoping to move a scholarly community.
I was a teenager before it was cool.
User avatar
Physics Guy
God
Posts: 1557
Joined: Tue Oct 27, 2020 7:40 am
Location: on the battlefield of life

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

Post by Physics Guy »

My own belief about the Book of Mormon is that it is a work of fiction, but all I've been saying here is indeed something a bit like the claim that whether or not it is fiction cannot matter to source criticism. My point is that even if the Book of Mormon isn't fiction, it was still produced in an unprecedented way that seems to bring all the same problems, as far as source criticism is concerned, that a fictional text would present.

Maybe no faithful Mormon wants to separate the text that was revealed to Smith from the ancient people who engraved the plates, but the fact seems to be that every jot and tittle they carved in those plates has come to us only in English through Joseph Smith's seer stone. How can we expect that process to have preserved subtle features revealing redaction history, when we know that it didn't even preserve the language family?

Suppose you find some feature of the text which you think might be evidence of some ancient redaction layer. You have to assume that this feature was deliberately preserved by the final redaction layer through Smith—deliberately, because the final redaction clearly changed so much that even if we argue that it would not have changed some things, we cannot say there was anything which it could not have changed. But if we have to assume that our evidence was deliberately preserved by the final redaction, how can we be sure that it was not in fact produced by the final redaction?
Last edited by Physics Guy on Tue Jun 08, 2021 7:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
I was a teenager before it was cool.
User avatar
Symmachus
Valiant A
Posts: 177
Joined: Sat Feb 20, 2021 3:53 pm
Location: Unceded Lamanite Land

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

Post by Symmachus »

Benjamin McGuire wrote:
Sat Jun 05, 2021 2:09 pm
Simply put, we don't have that [presumaby, a text-as-literature anachronism] here.
Well, it depends on how closely you believe the English translation reflects its putative source text. Alma could not have quoted or alluded to an as yet unwritten text. Or else, under the theory of a rather literal translation, Alma is post Pauline.
Benjamin McGuire wrote:
Sat Jun 05, 2021 2:09 pm
In general terms, once you get away from the religious question and just look at the way this is treated in literature and literary theory, once you establish that a text exists in two places that is close enough to be considered a quotation, we then attempt to establish the direction of the borrowing (if not an exact genealogical relationship). If we had the gold plates, and we found such a quotation, we would simply revise the history of that piece of text - and consequently, it would stop being an anachronism. This is the issue of chronologies.
I'm not sure I can travel with you to that position because anachronisms are often used in establishing chronology. It wouldn't stop being an anachronism: it would be a primary bit of evidence that the text is later than St. Paul. It is not that "what makes something an anachronism is a chronological inconsistency" in general but an inconsistency with established chronology of a text. If I find an anachronism, I have several options, some of which may be interpretive, but some of which of might be inescapably questions of fact that cause me to revise my understanding the chronology of a given text.

Sometimes anachronisms are secondary to that chronology in the sense that they are not part of the evidence used to establish the chronology and don't affect it one way or the other. Thus you are right that the quotation of Paul by Alma, which is strictly an anachronism in its narrative context set as the 2nd century BC, is not an anachronism from the perspective of the Book of Mormon's English, since the Book of Mormon was published in 1830, long after St. Paul. But sometimes they are primary evidence in establishing chronology, which is a problem for people who take assume a literal translation of the Book of Mormon.

So, if we accept that the Book of Mormon is a fairly literal translation in the traditional sense taken by the Thompson article, then it is an anachronism that would cause us to revise our understanding of the text's chronology—hence my original comment that you object to. For it would suggest that the source text's chronology—which, in that understanding, isn't merely 2nd century BC in a narrative sense but actually reflects text produced by someone in the 2nd century BC—would have to be revised, or that our understanding of St. Paul's chronology would. You are not acknowledging this problem but rather avoiding it by appealing to something like a higher metaphysics of literature. I see this in your comment to Gadianton here:
We have the text as artifact, and we have the text as literature. Finding, for example, a legible English text in a second century BC context would be a text-as-artifact anachronism. Finding a second century BC text in an appropriate language quoting Mark Twain would be a text-as-literature anachronism. Literature is read and interpreted.
Yes, the fact that literature needs interpretation is a truism. But it's not really relevant yet because there are pre-interpretive choices one makes before you read a text at that level. An intertextual relationship is by definition a chronological relationship, and one must first determine 1) whether a relationship exists and 2) what its chronology is—the direction of the borrowing—which is not an interpretive question except for the most dogmatically incoherent post-modernists. I've done some very fun work with allusivity in Ennius and Vergil and a Horatian ode, finding a motif that ultimately goes back to a western dialect of Proto-Indo-European (in my view). That's an interpretation, but it wasn't an interpretation in each case to treat Ennius as earlier than Vergil and the latter earlier than Horace. There is nothing interpretative about that. If you think there is, well, in that case, we have severe philosophical differences about the nature of time and epistemology and language but not necessarily a literary one (which recalls to my mind Dr. Stak's comment about the philosophy of language as a significantly under-appreciated issue).

In the case of an intertextual relationship between Mark Twain and a 2nd century BC text apparently quoting Mark Twain, no interpretation will be of value if it does not put the relationship in its right order: if a 2nd century BC text quotes Mark Twain, then it's not 2nd century BC. It's not more complicated than that, and it's just a rhetorical trick to treat it as otherwise. This is not an interpretive question but rather one that sets the horizon for what interpretations are possible.

The horizon of interpretive possibility narrows in one way if the text is not 2nd century BC, which it cannot be if it quotes Mark Twain (no longer have to figure out what Mark Twain was doing) but it expands in another (what kind of document are dealing with if it's not 2nd century BC?). The Book of Mormon, taken as a literal translation of an ancient text, has this problem. Now, perhaps you don't think it is a literal translation; fine. But that is a choice that is made in order to increase this horizon of interpretive space. It's not just the result of an interpretation from the text itself.
So when we deal with this in the Book of Mormon, there are different ways to approach this question. But the assumption should always be that the language in the Book of Mormon occurs in the way that it does because that language occurs somewhere else prior to the writing of the Book of Mormon (in 1830). And even from the perspective of a believer, as I noted in that presentation:

The issue isn't that the Book of Mormon isn't quoting a later text. I don't know of any post-1830 texts that the Book of Mormon quotes. The issue is that the Book of Mormon quotes the King James text. This doesn't surprise us. The anachronism that you suggest only exists in the context of the narrative of the Book of Mormon - in what the text claims to be. And this makes it an act of interpretation. Anyone who disputes the Book of Mormon as a translation of an ancient text wouldn't see this as anachronistic at all.

Do you see the point I am trying to make?
Yes, I have seen your position for some time; I've been pushing back against how much breadth you are giving it. This isn't purely a question of interpretation. Their is a sharp fork in the road that is pre-interpretive. When "once you get away from the religious question" and treat it a work of literature to which you can apply this or that literary-theoretical approach, you have made a choice, before you have really started to understand the text, which will set the stage for your interpretation. I really don't think that choice is determined by literariness, but who am I to say?

The question may ultimately be religious, but let's think of it more in a more distilled fashion before assigning it that quality: one has to know where the text comes from. One doesn't arrive at the conclusion that Mark Twain's novels are from the nineteenth century because of interpretive sophistication or any interpretation, really (short of an absurd reductionism). One starts with that assumption before any interpretation begins. I have said repeatedly that I have no issue with your interpretation on its own terms, but if you first suspend or avoid the origin question before mixing in some Kristeva or whoever to whip up a sophisticated interpretation of these anachronisms, and then go on to speak as if you have solved the problem of anachronisms while referencing "Egyptian texts" and a "Hebrew original," you have stealthily gone back to the origin question and provided an answer to it. That is what is apologetic about how you are applying this, and, as I say, a bit slippery. You've made a choice within which your interpretation seems not merely sound but quite insightful, but you haven't made the problem go away tout court.

Since we have no Gold Plates to test how literal the translation is, believers and non-believers will each have their reasons for their position on the origin of the text. Someone who does not believe will not be likely to see this as a case of literary allusion except as an allusion created by Joseph Smith in a work of fiction. The Thompson article, by contrast, assumes a rather literal translation of an ancient text, so within the bounds set by that choice, the problem of anachronisms is not solved. My original comment still holds for those who accept a translation so literal that you can discern strands of the E source based on the English language of the 1830 text:
One Who Should Not Be Resuscitated wrote: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.
Lower than Dust wrote:Not to my mind. Herodotus is also a lot more than a series of Esther-like stories, and then there are other kinds of evidence. And then of course there is the fact that often he is demonstrably wrong about, e.g., Egypt.
And of course, this is a point of contention (as Berlin suggests in her article). But in any case, as you keep illustrating, part of your argument is an act of interpretation. We have to read Herodotus and interpret what he is saying to come to any conclusions about what he is trying to do.
I agree. But out interpretations will vary wildly depending on whether we think Herodotus was a Greek writing in the fifth century or a Puertan Rican writing in the 1950s. In your opinion, what's to say he's not the latter? Surely, this isn't an interpretive question, is it?
The challenge is that we actually have a lot of good historical information about the narrow slice of time that Esther refers to. So the absence of external confirmation is significantly more problematic than you suggest here.
I haven't suggested anything on Esther. I am far more familiar with scholarship on and source material from fifth-century BCE Persia than I am with scholarship on the Book of Esther. I see Esther referenced time to time by Iranologists and ancient historians (e.g. Pierre Briant), usually as evidence for a bit of social or administrative history, but I don't understand the claims made that it can't be historical because of external evidence. Beyond a few inscriptions in Old Persian, Akkadian, and Elamite, almost all of our textual evidence for this period comes from Greek writers, most of whom were later anyway and not that reliable, as well as some Aramaic archives from Egypt (which is one way we can tell the Greeks aren't always that reliable). The Arshama archives are interesting in terms of Esther, because they show us a subordinate of Arshama who collaborated with some local Egyptians to destroy the Jewish temple at Elephantine. There you have a case of a Persian official leading what could be seen as an anti-Jewish persecution, if not a pogrom. It's not unlike what you have in Esther, though obviously on a much smaller scale but in roughly the same century as Esther. I know Briant sees some reflection of the Persian court in Esther, and certainly there are some details that are correct.

I'm not saying it's historical, just that its lack of anachronisms + a lack of substantial contradictory evidence makes the case for its historicity much stronger than the Book of Mormon, for which there is much contradictory evidence + anachronisms. I understand that you have an explanation for most of those; all I am suggesting is that your explanation, interesting and persuasive as it is on its own terms, can't really operate beyond those terms. It doesn't work, as I think Physics Guy shows, for someone who doesn't already believe the Book of Mormon to be historical, which is ultimately a faith claim.

That's why I ask my question about Parry and Lord and oral formulaic theory. It seems from my interactions with you here that you don't want to get into the mechanics of how the Book was produced, but I wonder if it might be more fruitful than you think. Treating the Book of Mormon's English as a kind of Kunstsprache would open a space where I think believers and non-believers could find a common ground. It would make things harder for people who favor a literal translation (whether they say it outright or merely imply it in their work, as Thompson does), but things are already pretty hard for those guys (that was my point with the initial comment). It leaves plenty of room open for the kind of approach you take, though, while also not demanding a pre-existing commitment to Book of Mormon historicity from non-believers. As far as I know, for example, oral-formulaic approaches to Homer and Hesiod have not even approached the topic of whether, e.g., Homer was inspired by the Muses or whether Hesiod really had a vision of the Daughters of Zeus and Memory. I can't prove he didn't, but I don't have to, because that sort of question is not where that kind of scholarship takes you.
Last edited by Symmachus on Tue Jun 08, 2021 12:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
(who/whom)

"As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them."
—B. Redd McConkie
User avatar
Gadianton
God
Posts: 3842
Joined: Sun Oct 25, 2020 11:56 pm
Location: Elsewhere

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

Post by Gadianton »

Ben,

Since you're getting more popular by the day, I'm going to keep it short.

when you say:
Ben wrote:We explain the Rebecca-camel issue by saying that the stories were (re)written after camels were domesticated
I feel like you are affirming what I said, the bold is added wording in case it wasn't clear:
We don't leave the option open that the scribes put the story into the scriptures for the very first time. The scribes during the time of the Rebecca didn't put 'camel', because they didn't have camels, but our rule says that later scribes either inherited the word camel from the prior text, which in this case is impossible, or it is a translation artifact, the extant story is re-written with the new-fangled word camel, which means the story is guaranteed to be authentic by the assumptions we've made about artifacts. Any artifact, after all layers are examined, are artifacts of translation.
Benjamin McGuire
Sunbeam
Posts: 50
Joined: Wed May 26, 2021 1:14 pm

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

Post by Benjamin McGuire »

Physics Guy wrote:
Mon Jun 07, 2021 8:47 pm
I'll be surprised if you can go very far in your analysis, though, without finding some need to make some kind of assumptions about how that unique process worked and what it would be likely or unlikely to do. Everything we actually have of the text came through that process; I don't see how you'll be able to hedge it out, as it were, and make a lot of statements about the hypothetical history of the text that are agnostic about its final redaction through Smith. Or do you really think you can?
The angel is, of course, irrelevant. All of the same things can be said about hypothetical biblical texts which are no longer extant, but which are necessary for the Documentary Hypothesis. We have no way of proving that there was in fact a P source or an E source.

*shrug*
Benjamin McGuire
Sunbeam
Posts: 50
Joined: Wed May 26, 2021 1:14 pm

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

Post by Benjamin McGuire »

Lem wrote:
Mon Jun 07, 2021 8:20 pm
Based on the concepts you have established in the last several pages, the part I bolded seems a perfectly valid assumption for PG to make in this discussion of the text. Please correct me if I am misinterpreting your position, PG, but it seems to me that PG’s consideration “that it is a work of fiction” should carry at least the same weight as the opposite, so why would consideration of one option go nowhere at the expense of the other? It seems both should be considered.
I haven't said otherwise. I have tried to be consistent in explicitly stating that all of this is relevant only if we assume that there is an ancient source and that the Book of Mormon is a translation. As a work of fiction, questions of anachronisms are largely meaningless.

I suppose it all depends on what the purpose of the dialogue is. If you want to convince a believer that the anachronisms in the text challenge belief, then you have to argue from that perspective. Simply labeling the text fiction isn't going to generate meaningful dialogue. If on the other hand, you are able to make a coherent argument adopting the same assumptions, it can lead to meaningful dialogue. The reason why the suggestion that PG makes doesn't work in that context is because the outcomes he sees conflict with the outcomes that a believer would look for. A believer is not going to effectively attribute everything in the text to Joseph Smith (in a final redaction layer) because this is generally inconsistent with the assumptions that they make about the nature of the text, its purpose and its contents.

In other words, in my discussion with Gadianton, a significant part of that discussion has revolved around proposed anachronisms and the question of where we assign those proposed anachronisms. If there is a translator, then some can be assigned to the translator and some to the original text. Since there is no translator in the Book of Mormon as an original work, then they are all assigned to that original text. PG claims that this distinction is meaningless because a believer could simply assign everything to that translator layer. But in the context of the believer/critic debate, the distinction is really quite important (from my point of view), since it creates an overlap (and this leads to the necessary space for discussion). And while PG suggests that a believer could assign all of the proposed anachronisms to the translation layer, this would mean expanding the role of the translator to the point where there is no real distinction between a translator and an original author in the 19th century. And this is a position that a believer would not be able to sustain because it makes an original text conceptually empty or meaningless.
Suppose you find some feature of the text which you think might be evidence of some ancient redaction layer. You have to assume that this feature was deliberately preserved by the final redaction layer through Smith—deliberately, because the final redaction clearly changed so much that even if we argue that it would not have changed some things, we cannot say there was anything which it could not have changed. But if we have to assume that our evidence was deliberately preserved by the final redaction, how can we be sure that it was not in fact produced by the final redaction?
The same question can be asked of the Documentary Hypothesis (which comes up in the OP right?). And there is a great deal of discussion in that context about this question. I don't think we need to cover that ground.

However, in this case, there is, as I point out, an additional constraint. How much change will a believer be able to accept while still asserting that it is a translation? This whole part of the discussion is complicated because there isn't some sort of consistent view. In the tight translation model, Joseph Smith isn't even involved in the translation. And there are plenty of LDS believers who would suggest that the Book of Mormon is in some sense a very literal word-for-word sort of translation. So, what do you think?
Benjamin McGuire
Sunbeam
Posts: 50
Joined: Wed May 26, 2021 1:14 pm

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

Post by Benjamin McGuire »

Symmachus wrote:
Mon Jun 07, 2021 11:06 pm
Well, it depends on how closely you believe the English translation reflects its putative source text. Alma could not have quoted or alluded to an as yet unwritten text. Or else, under the theory of a rather literal translation, Alma is post Pauline.
The book of Alma is not post-Pauline though, is it. See, you keep conflating the text of the Book of Mormon with its putative source. If you want to contextualize it by saying, "assuming that the English translation is a word-for-word translation of its putative source ....". But then, I certainly don't believe this to be the case (as should be evidenced from my presentation on translation). As long as you make your assumptions clear, there isn't a problem.
Sometimes anachronisms are secondary to that chronology in the sense that they are not part of the evidence used to establish the chronology and don't affect it one way or the other. Thus you are right that the quotation of Paul by Alma, which is strictly an anachronism in its narrative context set as the 2nd century BC, is not an anachronism from the perspective of the Book of Mormon's English, since the Book of Mormon was published in 1830, long after St. Paul. But sometimes they are primary evidence in establishing chronology, which is a problem for people who take assume a literal translation of the Book of Mormon.
Right. And this creates the need to distinguish between the two, right? Those that can be limited to the translation, and those that can't.
So, if we accept that the Book of Mormon is a fairly literal translation in the traditional sense taken by the Thompson article, then it is an anachronism that would cause us to revise our understanding of the text's chronology—hence my original comment that you object to.
Just remember, I am highly critical of the position taken by the Thompson article. I don't accept that the Book of Mormon is a fairly literal translation. Literal translations are, as I point out in great detail in that presentation, generally poor translations. And this is an important observation because you are making an argument against a very specific set of assumptions.
Yes, the fact that literature needs interpretation is a truism. But it's not really relevant yet because there are pre-interpretive choices one makes before you read a text at that level. An intertextual relationship is by definition a chronological relationship, and one must first determine 1) whether a relationship exists and 2) what its chronology is—the direction of the borrowing—which is not an interpretive question except for the most dogmatically incoherent post-modernists. I've done some very fun work with allusivity in Ennius and Vergil and a Horatian ode, finding a motif that ultimately goes back to a western dialect of Proto-Indo-European (in my view). That's an interpretation, but it wasn't an interpretation in each case to treat Ennius as earlier than Vergil and the latter earlier than Horace. There is nothing interpretative about that. If you think there is, well, in that case, we have severe philosophical differences about the nature of time and epistemology and language but not necessarily a literary one (which recalls to my mind Dr. Stak's comment about the philosophy of language as a significantly under-appreciated issue).
No. An intertextual relationship is not a chronological relationship except when we are speaking of the specific sort of intertext we call dependence - where we can establish a genealogical relationship. It is not always possible to determine direction and path that borrowing takes. Sometimes it is fairly easy. I have some longer discussions about this (with some examples) in the review essay that I published about Rick Grunder's book. You want to talk about Paul, and a Pauline corpus, but, Alma in the Book of Mormon doesn't quote Paul. Alma quotes the King James Bible's translation of Paul. This relationship is almost certainly genealogical (even if we cannot determine the exact path of the borrowing). The Book of Mormon also quotes Isaiah, but it is quoting the KJV. I can say with absolute certainty that the language in the Book of Mormon in places occurs in the way it occurs precisely because the KJV language occurs the way it does. This is an intertextual relationship but it is also dependence. Can we even say that there is an intertextual relationship between the Book of Mormon and Paul? And if so, what do you mean by Paul?
Yes, I have seen your position for some time; I've been pushing back against how much breadth you are giving it. This isn't purely a question of interpretation. Their is a sharp fork in the road that is pre-interpretive. When "once you get away from the religious question" and treat it a work of literature to which you can apply this or that literary-theoretical approach, you have made a choice, before you have really started to understand the text, which will set the stage for your interpretation. I really don't think that choice is determined by literariness, but who am I to say?
As I noted, we will just have to agree to disagree.
Since we have no Gold Plates to test how literal the translation is, believers and non-believers will each have their reasons for their position on the origin of the text. Someone who does not believe will not be likely to see this as a case of literary allusion except as an allusion created by Joseph Smith in a work of fiction. The Thompson article, by contrast, assumes a rather literal translation of an ancient text, so within the bounds set by that choice, the problem of anachronisms is not solved.
There isn't, as far as I can tell, any difference here between your position and the position of a critic of the Documentary Hypothesis who argues that E doesn't exist because there is no text that represents E.
I agree. But out interpretations will vary wildly depending on whether we think Herodotus was a Greek writing in the fifth century or a Puertan Rican writing in the 1950s. In your opinion, what's to say he's not the latter? Surely, this isn't an interpretive question, is it?
Yes. It is an important question. And as I note, I think that we deal with this question in this context by simply making our assumptions explicit.
I haven't suggested anything on Esther. I am far more familiar with scholarship on and source material from fifth-century BCE Persia than I am with scholarship on the Book of Esther. I see Esther referenced time to time by Iranologists and ancient historians (e.g. Pierre Briant), usually as evidence for a bit of social or administrative history, but I don't understand the claims made that it can't be historical because of external evidence.
Well, what can I say. You can take it up with the literature. My point is a generally held consensus - but it does take one clarification. There is no question that Esther is historical. It is an ancient text. It just doesn't have historicity. This is the distinction between having historicity and being verisimilar. The document clearly has a lot of details that are correct. It's the people that didn't exist.
It seems from my interactions with you here that you don't want to get into the mechanics of how the Book was produced, but I wonder if it might be more fruitful than you think.
I have already written a great deal about this. What more do you want? What were the mechanics of how the Book was produced? Perhaps you could enlighten me.
User avatar
Physics Guy
God
Posts: 1557
Joined: Tue Oct 27, 2020 7:40 am
Location: on the battlefield of life

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

Post by Physics Guy »

We don't have the hypothetical E from the Pentateuch or the hypothetical Q from the synoptic Gospels, but we have a limited range of plausible hypotheses from which to choose in accounting for these texts, given our knowledge, limited though it also is, of when they were written and how. If one ancient text refers to a somewhat more ancient text, the use that the first text makes of its predecessor cannot depend on the thousand years of history that followed after them both.

If instead the entirety of our access to the whole culture of the ancient texts is a miraculous revelation in 19th century English, which in many ways seems aware of the expectations of its 19th century audience, then we have no way of knowing what artefacts may have been introduced in the revelation itself. I mean, the Book of Mormon has a number of direct quotations from the Old and New Testaments in the King James Version, which I'm pretty sure have to be interpreted as final translation artefacts. If important chunks of text can be pasted in because of how they would read to a 19th century audience, rather than because ancient Nephites really wrote them that way, then it's hard to see what kind of textual evidence in the Book of Mormon could be safely identified as not being an artefact of the final translation.

It is not my point that Mormons should want to say that all of the features of the text did come from the 19th century revelation, so that the historical Nephites become just as irrelevant as if Smith indeed made them up. My point is that faithful Mormons cannot be sure that any features of the text did not come from that final redaction through Smith. At least in itself that's not necessarily a problem for Mormons in believing their Scriptures to be based on real history. But it seems to be a problem for higher criticism of the Mormon Scriptures, because even if faithful Mormons all agree that most of the text is ancient Nephite writing, they can't be confident in any particular critical conclusion.

Suppose I have a load of apples in which everyone is sure that 90% of the apples are fine, but everyone has to admit that 10% of the apples are bound to have worms in them, and nobody can tell in advance which ones have worms. With the apples I can probably still sell the load at a discount, though it might take more than a 10% discount. I don't think critical conclusions about Scripture are going to work that way, though. If any conclusion is in doubt because it might easily turn out to be based on a translation artefact, then the faith that most of the conclusions will still turn out to be sound isn't going to be enough to make this line of scholarship thrive. As far as criticism is concerned the whole text might as well have been created in 1830, because any particular feature of it could well have been, even on the faithful Mormon account.
I was a teenager before it was cool.
Post Reply