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.