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

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

Post by Gadianton »

Ben,

I might not have the concepts nailed down yet.
Ben wrote:But I would suggest that uses of the word "church" is an example of this sort of anachronism. The term "synagogue" may be as well, but it is much more closely connected to the KJ text
I had no guesses about the difference, so I looked it up. according to wiki:
The meaning of the word "church" in the Book of Mormon is more comparable to usage in the Bible than Modern English. The concept of a church, meaning "a convocation of believers", existed among the House of Israel prior to Christianity.
Critics[who?] of the Book of Mormon note that synagogues did not exist in their modern form before the destruction of the temple
You may have had something else in mind, but if going by this, then 'church' simply wouldn't be an anachronism, and "synagogue" would be an anachronism. As I understood (1), synagogue would fit because "translating put it there" via using the KJV text.

So what am I missing?
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Re: David Bokovoy Issues a Devastating Critique of the Mopologists' "Scholarship"

Post by Benjamin McGuire »

You may have had something else in mind, but if going by this, then 'church' simply wouldn't be an anachronism, and "synagogue" would be an anachronism. As I understood (1), synagogue would fit because "translating put it there" via using the KJV text.
No, this is what I had in mind. Synagogue is there because translating it puts it there. But for the other, the Wikipedia article simply isn't very good. The wiki article says this:
According to the Book of Mormon, this exchange happened in Jerusalem, around 600 BC. The meaning of the word "church" in the Book of Mormon is more comparable to usage in the KJV than modern English. The concept of a church, meaning a convocation of believers, existed among the House of Israel prior to Christianity. For instance, Psalms 89:5 speaks of praising the Lord "in the congregation of the saints"; the Septuagint contains the Greek word "ecclesia" for "congregation," which is also translated as "church" in the New Testament. The Book of Mormon using the word "church" in the same "style" as the KJV is seen by some apologists as support for the Book of Mormon.[citation needed]
Don't get me wrong, there is some clever sleight of hand going on here. This, referencing a 1611 translation of the Old Testament as a way of trying to demonstrate an ancient concept seems, on the surface, silly. But it also can be seen to be really problematic in this case. Here are a couple of translations:

KJV: And the heavens shall praise thy wonders, O Lord: thy faithfulness also in the congregation of the saints.
NIV: The heavens praise your wonders, Lord, your faithfulness too, in the assembly of the holy ones.
NRSV: The heavens praise your wonders, Lord, your faithfulness too, in the assembly of the holy ones.

These aren't 'saints' - especially in the context of LDS terminology. If I continue quoting from the NIV, it reads: "For who in the skies above can compare with the Lord? Who is like the Lord among the heavenly beings? In the council of the holy ones God is greatly feared; he is more awesome than all who surround him."

This is the divine assembly in heaven, not some church on earth. The idea of a church as a group of Christ worshipping individuals, while perfectly at home in the 19th century, is completely alien in 600 BC. Further, the instance given in the wikipedia article is atypical of usage in the Book of Mormon. Most of the references in 1&2 Nephi are to the church of the Lamb and the church of the devil (a.k.a. the great and abominable church). Note that this isn't simple a "convocation of believers".

On the other side of the coin, while the fully formed synagogue at the heart of rabbinic Judaism is relatively late, it is the end of a development as a religious communal meeting place apart from the temple (and necessitated by the absence of a temple - in the destruction of the first and second temples, but also in diaspora groups). And while the evidence of when an actual synagogue-like structure first shows up is debated (arguments range as early as the 3rd century BCE), it seems very likely that it develops out of earlier spaces like the communal meeting space of the city gate (at least where there were walled communities). In the Book of Mormon, a replacement temple is built very early, and the synagogue is mentioned as being in use at the same time as Book of Mormon temples so it isn't easy to tell what is being referred to. In fact, the only thing the text seems to tell us is that a synagogue is a non-temple house of worship, and possibly a place for prayer. That's pretty much it. A framework for such a thing exists historically. So it isn't unreasonable that there is something that is there that is being referred to and simply being labeled as a synagogue. We could systematically change the word in the Book of Mormon and do virtually no damage to the text. This is not so apparent when we deal with the concept of a church, which is much more conceptual and much more connected to narrative throughout the Book of Mormon.

Back to the wikipedia article, if we want to assert a meaning that is understood in 1611 (King James text) but not 1830, I looked in the OED2, and didn't find anything that would match such a suggestion.

https://www.oed.com/oed2/00039531

So perhaps it is more an issue of a translation really working hard to make the text understandable. But that involves a significantly different sort of argument. And perhaps this helps you understand why I differentiate between the two issues (church and synagogue) so differently from the wikipedia article - especially in terms of the notion of an anachronism. And this doesn't mean that you can't explain the notion of a church in the Book of Mormon in a reasonable way, it just isn't going to be as simple as saying that it comes from the King James language. There's a lot more that could be said, but this is probably enough as a response.
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Re: David Bokovoy Issues a Devastating Critique of the Mopologists' "Scholarship"

Post by Gadianton »

I'm still not sure I'm getting it.

Here are three things you've said
The term "synagogue" may be as well, but it is much more closely connected to the KJ text
Synagogue is there because translating it puts it there
So it isn't unreasonable that there is something that is there that is being referred to and simply being labeled as a synagogue
Synagogue is an anachronism. Synagogue is an anachronism that exists because of translation. Synagogue was chosen because of the translator's familiarity with the KJV text. Synagogue qualifies for (1) because it's plausible that it captures something essential about the thing in the text, if it was totally unrelated to that thing, then it wouldn't be an example of (1), an anachronism due to translation, but something else.

If I made it all the way through that paragraph above without botching it, then supposing that "synagogue" was totally unrelated to the 'something' there, presumably "synagogue" would still be an anachronism, how could it not be? But it doesn't fit the only other category we have, which is "anachronism was in the original text".
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Re: David Bokovoy Issues a Devastating Critique of the Mopologists' "Scholarship"

Post by Benjamin McGuire »

I guess I will try something a little different.

In Webster's dictionary (1828 edition) we get the following definition for the word synagogue:
1. A congregation or assembly of Jews, met for the purpose of worship or the performance of religious rites.
2. The house appropriated to the religious worship of the Jews.
3. The court of the seventy elders among the Jews, called the great synagogue
We can say that the synagogue (at least in terms of the traditional view of a synagogue) didn't exist in 600 BC. This makes the existence of a synagogue (that assumes all of the stuff that goes with it) in 600 BC an anachronism. But, synagogue as a word exists in English, and it appears in the King James Bible. So, we might have two options for the appearance of the term synagogue in the Book of Mormon. The first is that it appears in the original text (in some form or other - who knows what it would appear as in 'reformed Egyptian'). And in this case, the translation is a very literal rendering of the concept of synagogue into English. And the anachronism should be attributed to Nephi (and the other authors of the original text). Our second option is that the concept of synagogue (and everything that goes with it) isn't in the original text. There may be something similar (in terms of meaning), but the English translator chooses the word synagogue because it is understood to the intended audience. The anachronism occurs because of an English word choice, and doesn't necessarily exist as an anachronism in the original text. We make efforts to try and differentiate between the two choices (there is no third option really if we assume an ancient source).

So as an example. One of the features that is standard to a synagogue is an ark in which the torah scrolls are kept. If the Book of Mormon text were to talk about how the priest went into the Synagogue, went to the ark, and removed the scrolls to read to the community, it would be much, much more difficult to assert that the use of the word 'synagogue' on the part of the translator was simply a preferential selection of one possible word out of several similar choices. In this case, we would really view the term synagogue as a more literal translation of an underlying text. But, in my opinion, we don't have this sort of interaction in the text of the Book of Mormon for the word synagogue (in the twenty-five times that it occurs). We have a much stronger interaction of this sort in the term 'church'. So, I tend to place 'church' in (2) and 'synagogue' in (1).

Having said that, there are a couple of features in the text that are worth discussing. Consider the chronologically earliest instance in 2 Nephi 26 -
Behold, hath he commanded any that they should depart out of the synagogues, or out of the houses of worship? Behold, I say unto you, Nay.
See the parenthetical? Is this a part of the original text, or a part of the translation? It seems to read: "Behold, hath he commanded any that they should depart out of the synagogues (or out of the houses of worship)? Behold, I say unto you, Nay.

It could be either, potentially. If I were Nephi, and I was inscribing a text on gold sheets, and I made a mistake and decided to change it, what do I do? Or it could simply be a parenthetical (Joseph Smith seems to like these sorts of explanatory asides as evidenced by later texts). 2 Nephi 26 is a fascinating text in its own right because of its intertextual nature (I have a significant discussion of it in my postmodernist paper on pp. 154-156).

The text that brings 'synagogue' closest to (2) is Alma 16:13
And Alma and Amulek went forth preaching repentance to the people in their temples, and in their sanctuaries, and also in their synagogues, which were built after the manner of the Jews.
But this one has an interpretation issue. If the subordinate clause "which were build after the manner of the Jews" applies only to synagogues, then it is a stronger argument for (2). If on the other hand, it applies to all three - that is the temples, sanctuaries and synagogues are all built after the manner of the Jews, it lessens the impact.

And finally, we have in Alma 31, the discussion of the Zoramite synagogue, which is clearly very different from any Jewish synagogue - particularly in verses 12-13:
Now, when they had come into the land, behold, to their astonishment they found that the Zoramites had built synagogues, and that they did gather themselves together on one day of the week, which day they did call the day of the Lord; and they did worship after a manner which Alma and his brethren had never beheld; For they had a place built up in the center of their synagogue, a place for standing, which was high above the head; and the top thereof would only admit one person.
Likewise in Alma 21:4:
And it came to pass that Aaron came to the city of Jerusalem, and first began to preach to the Amalekites. And he began to preach to them in their synagogues, for they had built synagogues after the order of the Nehors; for many of the Amalekites and the Amulonites were after the order of the Nehors.
So another potentially different synagogue (one not built after the manner of the Jews). And yet this is still a synagogue. So the Book of Mormon clearly has a view that a synagogue is a place of worship. But it doesn't really seem to go beyond that, and it could be argued that it is a term that seems to be used rather generically. On the other side of the coin, the word 'church' seems to be connected to a great deal more in the text.

So this is the way that I approach it. It may not be right. I'm certainly open to discussion.

Was that better? Or am I trying to answer something that you aren't really asking?
Last edited by Benjamin McGuire on Mon Jun 07, 2021 12:38 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: David Bokovoy Issues a Devastating Critique of the Mopologists' "Scholarship"

Post by Gadianton »

If the Book of Mormon text were to talk about how the priest went into the Synagogue, went to the ark, and removed the scrolls to read to the community, it would be much, much more difficult to assert that the use of the word 'synagogue' on the part of the translator was simply a preferential selection of one possible word out of several similar choices
I think I understand now what you're saying. I'll get back to you with more tomorrow. thanks.
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Re: David Bokovoy Issues a Devastating Critique of the Mopologists' "Scholarship"

Post by Gadianton »

I'm going to hold myself to one point.

I think I get what you're saying that you choose (2) over (1) in the case where you have an ample description of say, a "synagogue", because the text really commits you to "a synagogue", but why would you assume the ancient redactor made up a synagogue (if the description is a synagogue) any more than Joseph Smith did? Or for the kingship code, why is there any more reason to believe Moroni inserted the kingship code vs. Joseph Smith, as both could have known about it? In this case, I'm not suggesting Joseph Smith as translator awkwardly wielding the kingship code to elucidate 'bad, greedy king' as I suggested before, but straight-up as story fabricator? Why rule that out as a possibility?

the answer might be: for this exercise we're assuming the text is ancient. We're going to suspend disbelief, and see how far we get, we're simply assuming that Joseph Smith didn't invent anything.

I can sorta understand that but I think it's going to lead to a problem. Take the "camel" example. Camels were included in the Rebecca narrative about a time hundreds of years before camels were domesticated. Thus, in the KJV, "camel" isn't an artifact of translation, it's an anachronism in the original text. What is "original"? Presumably, the latest text available to the KJV translators. But go back in time to when that text was created. If we're consistent, then we say of the scribes back then, that they either put the Hebrew word the KJV translates as "camel" due to a translation artifact, or it was already there in the text. 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 from the prior text, which in this case is impossible, or it is a translation artifact, 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.

The only way out is to say that we're assuming away flagrant interpolations for only the top layer of sentiment. Shouldn't the rules apply to all strata consistently? Wouldn't we want rules that work had we been born during the last stratum? We know the KJV didn't wholesale invent stories because we have the texts it came from. There is no downside for assuming only either translation artifact, or artifact from the original. But if we didn't have those manuscripts, then that would be a dangerous assumption. And there is no reason I can think of to justify it as an assumption for the top stratum but not the lower stratum also.
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Re: David Bokovoy Issues a Devastating Critique of the Mopologists' "Scholarship"

Post by Benjamin McGuire »

Gadianton wrote:
Sun Jun 06, 2021 9:31 pm
I can sorta understand that but I think it's going to lead to a problem. Take the "camel" example. Camels were included in the Rebecca narrative about a time hundreds of years before camels were domesticated. Thus, in the KJV, "camel" isn't an artifact of translation, it's an anachronism in the original text. What is "original"? Presumably, the latest text available to the KJV translators. But go back in time to when that text was created. If we're consistent, then we say of the scribes back then, that they either put the Hebrew word the KJV translates as "camel" due to a translation artifact, or it was already there in the text. 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 from the prior text, which in this case is impossible, or it is a translation artifact, 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.
So what makes something an anachronism is a chronological inconsistency. This is where texts are completely different from other types of anachronisms, as I noted earlier - like a material archaeology (even a contemporary archaeology so to speak). When you are digging in the dirt, and you come across something unexpected, it may be anachronistic. And that anachronism may lead us to extend our historical views so that it is no longer anachronistic, or we might conclude that there was some sort of contamination of the dig site (this would be somewhat analogous to our original text/modern translator ideas). But texts have two contexts. 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. So by putting a camel into the story of Rebecca, the literature contains an anachronism. The text-as-artifact, being produced long after camels are domesticated doesn't contain an anachronism. This is why I suggested a while back that anachronisms for the Book of Mormon mostly appear as an interpretation of the text. Many (most?) literary anachronisms can be explained. We explain the Rebecca-camel issue by saying that the stories were (re)written after camels were domesticated. It doesn't eliminate the anachronism, it just explains it. This is a tool that is used to help put together literary histories of texts as we see in the DH.

When we are discussing the Book of Mormon, it is all text-as-literature anachronisms that we are interested it. I say 'we' loosely, since we can see and read a group of people who are highly interested in the text-as-artifact anachronism created, they argue, by the use of Early Modern English. The Early Modern English argument has no interest at all in the actual narrative of the text (if that makes sense) and so it is unconcerned with the text-as-literature. When we talk about the language of 'church' and 'synagogue' in the Book of Mormon, because these terms are not anachronistic in 1830 American English, there is no anachronism in terms of the text-as-artifact.

While text-as-artifact is a term you can encounter from time to time, I am using the term text-as-literature simply to refer to the fact that we read the text to find the narrative in it.
I think I get what you're saying that you choose (2) over (1) in the case where you have an ample description of say, a "synagogue", because the text really commits you to "a synagogue", but why would you assume the ancient redactor made up a synagogue (if the description is a synagogue) any more than Joseph Smith did? Or for the kingship code, why is there any more reason to believe Moroni inserted the kingship code vs. Joseph Smith, as both could have known about it? In this case, I'm not suggesting Joseph Smith as translator awkwardly wielding the kingship code to elucidate 'bad, greedy king' as I suggested before, but straight-up as story fabricator? Why rule that out as a possibility?
In the absence of any original text, people can pretty much make whatever claims they want to. I don't disagree with you. We tend to get around this issue by insisting on formal methodologies and criteria that can be applied. And of course, you have to conform to some sort of standard if you want to be taken seriously.

Where this works well is that we can produce our theories, our methods, our criteria, and then apply them to known texts and textual histories. This is true even of the King James text, right? It doesn't exist in a vacuum. And so we see how our set of rules interacts with other texts and their hypothetical histories. In any case, the moment we attribute to much to Joseph Smith, we turn him not into a translator, but into a redactor (at best). The Book of Mormon becomes pseudepigrapha. So while people could claim that Joseph Smith introduced all sorts of stuff into a historical record, it stops being a historical record at some point and becomes entirely a modern text. And this, I think, is inconsistent with the purposes of those who want to insist such a thing as a way of avoiding anachronisms.
The only way out is to say that we're assuming away flagrant interpolations for only the top layer of sentiment. Shouldn't the rules apply to all strata consistently? Wouldn't we want rules that work had we been born during the last stratum? We know the KJV didn't wholesale invent stories because we have the texts it came from. There is no downside for assuming only either translation artifact, or artifact from the original. But if we didn't have those manuscripts, then that would be a dangerous assumption. And there is no reason I can think of to justify it as an assumption for the top stratum but not the lower stratum also.
I believe that the ground work that I am laying out here argues that rules are applied to all strata consistently. I think that the end of this process - at least from the perspective of a Book of Mormon that is a translation and not an original work - is to try and define where the real issues are, and where we have cosmetic problems. This whole foray into anachronisms really starts with this Symmachus comment a week ago:
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.
Here, he uses the term "textual anachronism" which I have narrowed to "text-as-literature anachronism" to indicate that the anachronism comes out of reading the text. This is important because the Book of Mormon comes long after the Gospel of Matthew and long after Jesus is born. So it is not anachronistic for us to find it in an 1830 text (we have lots of contemporary texts that use it without it being an anachronism). So if we want to make an issue out of it, we need to do so in a precise and appropriate way. It may be adequate to note that these texts cannot be easily extracted from their context, and so shouldn't be viewed as a redaction on the part of the translator of the Book of Mormon. But, it is important to make that argument. Whatever the Brass Plates contained, the only version of Alma that we have is produced in 1829. And in 1829, these anachronisms do not exist for the text-as-artifact.

My goal has never really been to create answers on these issues. I have my own opinions. I find that not a lot of people share them. But, we can never have a meeting of the two sides without first creating a space where we can agree on something. I think that there is a desire from a broader LDS population to be able to use higher criticism (as has been done with Bible) to explain the text of the Book of Mormon (and the Thompson essay is a part of that narrative). So it seems like it as good a place as any to work on that common ground. And if we get nothing else from it than a recognition that even with an inspired translation process (whatever that means), we do not end up with a perfect text (if we reject a Mormon textual inerrancy principle), then it is a terrific place to start.

Finally, back to something I said a little earlier, this sort of approach to the Book of Mormon is in its infancy. It is only relatively recently that we have started to really look at the text of the Book of Mormon in terms of its intertextual nature. We have only recently started discussing a textual history beyond the sort of original manuscript efforts that culminate in Skousen's work and turned to the internal features of the text. And this effort will eventually (and I think it will be some time in the making) lead to a Documentary Hypothesis of sorts for the Book of Mormon that isn't simply a series of scattered and sometimes mutually exclusive ideas. And in the end, this is why these discussions (and critiques of the sort I do) are important for contributions to Book of Mormon studies.
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Re: David Bokovoy Issues a Devastating Critique of the Mopologists' "Scholarship"

Post by Physics Guy »

I can see that anachronism may be a subtle issue in a text that was produced in English in the 19th century but that may have had a complicated composition history in previous millennia. Furthermore it seems clear that these layers of translation and redaction are bound to affect a lot of the interpretation of the text. It's not just a matter of straightening out what exactly a Nephite "synagogue" might really have been.

A lot of pious Christians over the centuries have naïvely assumed, in effect, that a handful of traditionally identified authors wrote their books of the Bible as wholly original works and then submitted them for publication by God, who had after all commissioned the books in the first place. The Bible didn't actually get written that way and that has a lot of implications for how we should read it. The Documentary Hypothesis for the Pentateuch was really just the tip of an iceberg. It might have seemed like a big step to go from Moses personally compiling his notes from conversations with God to a set of four documents getting woven together by later scribes, but compared to what one might reasonably expect by default for the chaotic production history of ancient religious texts the DH isn't that far at all from the inspired single author of tradition.

So if the Book of Mormon is a translation in any sense of an ancient text then sure there can be a lot of work to do in identifying textual strands that got combined in various stages and ways. And one might argue that Smith's role in the production of the final English text is just another of those layers of redaction.

But my concern is pretty much: come on, Smith's redaction layer came, what, 1500 years after the supposedly last of the previous layers? Wasn't he supposedly translating a dead language that he could not read or speak into his own native English using a seer stone? Weren't the previous layers lost to us not through the ordinary vicissitudes of time but through an angel taking the plates away to heaven? Isn't all that pretty wildly different from any other examples of redacting ancient texts? Can it really make sense to just go on playing the usual source criticism game when a literal angel has stepped onto the field?

The project of applying source criticism to the Book of Mormon seems both eminently reasonable and completely surreal. Even if you accept Smith's miraculous translation, it would seem to be an unprecedented form of textual transmission. Yet this unique redactional layer was solely responsible for the only text that we actually have. So aren't all speculations about how the pre-Smith text might have been generated simply moot?

In the flow chart for the production of the Book of Mormon the final step seems to be what computer scientists call an oracle, a black-box function which is simply postulated to produce its result in a single step, somehow. So what's the point of speculating about the pre-Smith composition history, when any possible phenomenon in the text can always be attributed to that final stage with the seer stone?
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Re: David Bokovoy Issues a Devastating Critique of the Mopologists' "Scholarship"

Post by Benjamin McGuire »

Isn't all that pretty wildly different from any other examples of redacting ancient texts? Can it really make sense to just go on playing the usual source criticism game when a literal angel has stepped onto the field?
I think so. The thing about the angel is that it doesn't change the nature of texts. Having an angel involved doesn't somehow privilege the text into being different from any other text. It only has meaning as we encounter it. We have to read it. The angel is merely part of a description of how the text came into existence. Likewise, there is no such thing as a universal text that means the same thing to everyone everywhere (and every-when). Texts, once they exist, don't change, but the way that individuals read (and encounter the texts) does. So how does the angel change the way we read? And what happens to the way we read when we take the angel away?

Further, the text itself describes a history in a way that suggests that higher criticism is a valuable tool to discuss the text. The Book of Mormon in particular seems to have an almost obsessive concern with texts, discussing meaning, reading strategies, sources, redactions, translations, and so on. If we want to take the text seriously, and we are interested in understanding the text in light of these features, then this sort of criticism is important.

Finally, even if an angel provides the translation (or God does, or some other divine mechanism), it is still a translation. And we can still ask the same relevant questions that we ask about all translations. To what extent is it a good translation? Is the use of archaic language in the translation a deliberate rhetorical strategy? Does the translation attempt to replace culture specific references (that are inaccessible to the target audience) with something more familiar and understandable? And of course, the question of who exactly is the target audience? These kinds of questions can all be a part of the higher criticism, and are, I think, important to ask. How can we become a part of that target audience so that we can understand the text as the translator intended?
And one might argue that Smith's role in the production of the final English text is just another of those layers of redaction.
And of course this itself is apparently a contested idea - that is, exactly what Smith's role really was. Was he only a reader of the text? If so, then his role in the production of the final English text is completely minimal.
So aren't all speculations about how the pre-Smith text might have been generated simply moot?
I don't think so - as long as we make it clear that we are taking the text at face value, and bringing with us a number of assumptions which may not be provable. And while you are right that people can attribute anything they want to Joseph Smith, the reality is that if we invest in a strong methodology, we can always discuss whether the methods have been appropriately applied rather than simply making stuff up as we go along. This of course is, in a nutshell the problem with this text in particular. Without good attempts to formalize the discussion, it always goes nowhere.

One of the things I have discussed elsewhere in some depth is the notion of how our understanding of a text in terms of its form and function and nature impacts how we read it. To use an example (not mine), the story of Cinderella is very different if you believe that it is in some way biographical. Instead of being a fairy tale with elements about justice and human nature, it becomes instead the story of a psychotic young woman prone to hallucinations (and yes the comparison is intentionally absurd). To read the Book of Mormon as a modern fiction written by someone (perhaps Joseph Smith) is to start from a fundamentally different place than to read it as a legitimate historical text. The encounter with the text is radically different. And this difference makes it easy for believers and non-believers to simply talk past each other. How often does serious engagement occur?

For a further thought on my part. Mormon orthodoxy pushes a very specific narrative about the Book of Mormon (not the narrative we read in the book but a narrative about what the book is and how that understanding should create a framework for reading the text). This narrative very much involves (from my perspective) a viewpoint that is locked in to a certain view of texts, and a sense of inerrancy in the text of the Book of Mormon. Asking the kinds of questions that I ask, investigating the text using the tools of higher criticism, ends up challenging this orthodox understanding. This is, I think, an important process - if for no other reason than that it creates a larger space for believers, critics, and especially those that are neither, to engage the text. I managed to spend a bit of time this past spring with the novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It is arguably one of Nietzsche's most important works. It is also a work of fiction. The fact that it is fiction, and we read it as fiction, doesn't alter our use of the novel as a way to understand Nietzsche's philosophy.

By comparison, No such space currently really exists with the Book of Mormon for discussion - it is, as you note, polarized by the angel.
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Re: David Bokovoy Issues a Devastating Critique of the Mopologists' "Scholarship"

Post by Physics Guy »

Critics and skeptics of Mormon belief would certainly say that one can apply higher criticism to pseudo-historical fiction, like The Lord of the Rings, but that it isn't worth trying to do that (except perhaps as a game) because we know in advance that it will only be seeing false patterns in noise, because in reality there was one text with one author who simply put into it whatever he wanted, for reasons that had nothing to do with the reasons why texts that really evolved over many iterations actually evolved as they did.

I'm not just trying to repeat that point with a big sneer, though, or anything. What I mean to say is that even if there really was an angel and a miraculous translation via seer stones and everything, rather than a single-author fiction, aren't the implications for the applicability of higher criticism still essentially the same? No matter what patterns one may think to detect in the text, 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. On the faithful Mormon hypothesis God was willing to break all the usual rules of text transmission in order to get us the Book of Mormon through Smith. So why should we assume that any rules whatever would have been maintained by the process?

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.

Smith making it all up however he felt like would be a similar default alternative theory for the Book of Mormon, of course. But even for faithful Mormons there is another default alternative theory with what seems to me like an exactly similar effect. Surely any faithful Mormon theory about why this or that feature of the Book of Mormon is so has to be followed with, "—unless, of course, God just revealed it that way to Joseph Smith for reasons only God knows."

If that disappointing outcome from a heap of study is guaranteed in advance, why should anyone bother trying to do source criticism in the Book of Mormon? Isn't all that inevitably moot, because the final stage of miraculous revelation to Joseph Smith is such an unprecedented kind of transmission that it's like ending a long contest with a coin toss that can make any outcome happen regardless of what came before?

The source criticism might indeed point to previously unnoticed patterns in the Book of Mormon, just as in Tolkien's text, but there would be no reason to be sure the patterns weren't there just by accident, because just as we have no reason to think that Tolkien's effort at consistent pseudo-history must have been perfect, we have no reason to think that God must have been at pains to preserve the genuine traces of ancient redaction layers when transmitting the text to Smith. God and Tolkien might perfectly well have broken any of the usual rules just because they felt like it.
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