When you have time ;-) could you tell me what Hebrew rituals are contained in the Book of Mormon that were not well understood at the time? I asked earlier, but I'm sure it got lost in the shuffle.
Jersey Girl
Hey, here it is 3 a.m. Maybe that is why my cut and paste on links won't work. Sorry.
An easy read is found on Jeff Lindsay's site, which even quotes ------get ready here---- A NON-LDS SCHOLAR!!!!
To get to the article google "King Benjamin farewell" and it comes right up.
Another one is on the FAIR wiki site under the title "Legal Codes in the Book of Mormon." This isn't on ritual, but is on an interesting correspondence.
Thanks for staying patient with the shuffling process!
Hi Charity: couldn't sleep and getting ready to go to the gym. Can you please read my Joseph Smith and automatic writing post and let me know about what you think of pearl curran. I know she did her thing at the beginning with a ouija board but to some people a seer stone and a ouija board are about the same thing. I would really suggest you finding the book american apocrypha. It's a great read and has changed the way I see things. There are a bunch of essays and real good ones.
thestyleguy wrote:Hi Charity: couldn't sleep and getting ready to go to the gym. Can you please read my Joseph Smith and automatic writing post and let me know about what you think of pearl curran. I know she did her thing at the beginning with a ouija board but to some people a seer stone and a ouija board are about the same thing. I would really suggest you finding the book american apocrypha. It's a great read and has changed the way I see things. There are a bunch of essays and real good ones.
There have been instances of this kind of thing which when they can be examined are easily debunked. A famous one was the Bridget case. A Denver housewife supposed to have been the reincarnation of an Irish woman named Bridget. Lots of the "how else could she have done it" type of statements. It was easily explained when they got into her background.
All the "great stuff" Pearl wrote is gone out of the literature base now. Unlike the Book of Mormon which is getting increasing and not decreasing attention and study.
Mercury wrote:How can you give them the benefit fo the doubt whe most, by their actions , discounted their original forced "testimony" to begin with?
As I said earlier--BECAUSE IT DOES NOT MATTER.
Imagine this. I am standing on an large, open plain with a three-year-old child. I say to the child, "I'll race you a mile, but just to be sporting I'll give you a ten-second head start."
Get my drift?
“I was hooked from the start,” Snoop Dogg said. “We talked about the purpose of life, played Mousetrap, and ate brownies. The kids thought it was off the hook, for real.”
charity wrote:Sorry Shades, no one ever talked about a second manuscript until the first one was found and was such a laughable thing it could not possibly have been it. So then, the story of a second manuscript was made up. Experts on writing know that the idea that the "Manuscript Story" could have been fixed up to produce the Book of Mormon is ludicrous. Even those completely opposed to Joseph Smith, the Church and the Book of Mormon find that argument a desperation attempt.
Experts on writing? Who are these experts? What expertise led them to these conclusions? What evidence were they using?
To be clear, I do not think Spalding provided the prototype for the Book of Mormon, but, then again, your assertion that the evidence for two manuscripts is the illusory product of the anti-Mormon imagination is ill-founded.
“I was hooked from the start,” Snoop Dogg said. “We talked about the purpose of life, played Mousetrap, and ate brownies. The kids thought it was off the hook, for real.”
charity wrote:To get to the article google "King Benjamin farewell" and it comes right up.
Although I personally like Jack Welch, I still wish I had been present at the Book of Mormon Roundtable in which David P. Wright, I believe, tore the King Benjamin thesis to shreds, leaving Welch quite shaken. Welch never returned to the Book of Mormon Roundtable. Well, I take that back. I would simply like to read the argument that supposedly dismantled the thesis. I have no desire to see Professor Welch upset.
“I was hooked from the start,” Snoop Dogg said. “We talked about the purpose of life, played Mousetrap, and ate brownies. The kids thought it was off the hook, for real.”
charity wrote:Chiasmus. Nahom. "Land of Jerusalem." Mulek/Malchiyah. The Hebraisms in the original /printer's copies. The differences in the Isaiah texts. Stained swords. There are more.
In the Book of Moses there are all the Enochian discoveries.
In the Book of Abraham the stunning correspondences with the ancient Abrahamic literatures that is being discovered.
Enough for a start?
Of everything you list here, Nahom is surely the most interesting. Evidently it did appear on maps of the day, but still... I rather doubt that Joseph Smith had access to everything people like to conjecture he did. Land of Jerusalem? Hardly compelling. Mulek/Malchiyah? Likewise. It could also be a mangling of melech, or any number of other Hebrew words Smith could have known about through reading commentaries or the Bible itself.
In fact most of what you have here can be easily explained in other ways. The stained swords thing is silly. So many people have used that expression to talk about blood on metal swords that the only surprising thing is a Mormon scholar acting as though it were somehow odd.
Enoch legends were prevalent in Masonic and magical circles. Same with information. on Abraham. In these cases, we can easily imagine Smith having access to these works through his family and friend ties to Masonry and magic.
“I was hooked from the start,” Snoop Dogg said. “We talked about the purpose of life, played Mousetrap, and ate brownies. The kids thought it was off the hook, for real.”
charity wrote:The politics that you mention are not frontier American politics of the ealry 1800's. One man began to prepare a July 4th speech (for some kind of Church fireside) and thought he could make parallels with the Book of Mormon. And then when he began to study it he found that political systems in the Book of Mormon are not the American political system.
So you can take that arrow out ofyour quiver, runtu.
I wasn't talking about democracy that parallels with the 4th of July.
And it's interesting that you refer to a "quiver," as if we who have left the church have some sort of arsenal of attack evidence. Weird.
Mercury wrote:How can you give them the benefit fo the doubt whe most, by their actions , discounted their original forced "testimony" to begin with?
As I said earlier--BECAUSE IT DOES NOT MATTER.
Imagine this. I am standing on an large, open plain with a three-year-old child. I say to the child, "I'll race you a mile, but just to be sporting I'll give you a ten-second head start."
charity wrote:Sorry Shades, no one ever talked about a second manuscript until the first one was found and was such a laughable thing it could not possibly have been it. So then, the story of a second manuscript was made up. Experts on writing know that the idea that the "Manuscript Story" could have been fixed up to produce the Book of Mormon is ludicrous. Even those completely opposed to Joseph Smith, the Church and the Book of Mormon find that argument a desperation attempt.
Experts on writing? Who are these experts? What expertise led them to these conclusions? What evidence were they using?
To be clear, I do not think Spalding provided the prototype for the Book of Mormon, but, then again, your assertion that the evidence for two manuscripts is the illusory product of the anti-Mormon imagination is ill-founded.
Have you read what the anti-Mormon apologist called "Manuscript Story" and the Book of Mormon?
Sort of like someone finding Dr. Seuss' "Red Fish, Blue Fish" and then claiming that was just a first draft, and after they fixed it up it became "Moby Dick."
I will admit there are some reasonably intelligent anti-Mormon claims. This just isn't one of them.