A 'Book of Mormon Evidence' implodes at a touch

[_Chap]

What the crap? It did disappear and I think maybe they banned me for posting it? I try to log in over there and it says "you do not have permission to view this board." Banned?

Touch not the Lord's anointed.

[_asbestosman]

Gw'an .... tell us what he said ... we won't snitch on you.

No way.

God is watching us.
From a distance . . .

[_mms]

Here is DCP's response:

The thread in which I was asked to respond to a critique of a transcription of a small portion of some remarks I made several years ago about the Book of Mormon was closed before I'd even seen it.

But here, quickly, is my response:

-1-

I don't regard the cognate accusative in 1 Nephi 8:2 as a "killer point." I don't regard it as proof that the Book of Mormon is ancient, and have never said that I did. To overstate the importance I place on it is merely to create a straw man.

Moreover, I'm aware that the idiom to dream a dream exists elsewhere in English. Not only in the Bible-drenched John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress alluded to by the critic, but in the English of the musical Les Miserables, which the critic doesn't mention:

I dreamed a dream in times gone by
When hope was high
And life worth living

http://www.actionext.com/names_m/michae ... ables.html

John Bunyan, an English Puritan whose principal education came from reading the Bible, quite predictably uses biblical cadences and figures in his writing. That's one of the reasons he's so fine a stylist. In Fantine's song, I doubt that there's any biblical connection. The dreamed a dream idiom simply suits the rhythm and the poetic flavor of the piece. It's not typical English -- we normally have dreams in English -- but it's certainly grammatically acceptable and not at all jarring.

Thus, while I think that the existence of a potentially double cognate accusative in 1 Nephi probably points to the underlying Hebraism of the Book of Mormon, and is, therefore, worth pointing out, I don't see it as anything remotely like a "slam dunk." It's possible that Joseph Smith picked it up from his study of the Bible, imitating it either consciously or unwittingly. That said, there is very little evidence that the young Joseph Smith was a close student of the Bible, let alone a stylistic sponge like the autodidact John Bunyan, and there is explicit evidence to the contrary.

For that matter, I think that the evidence is strongly against Joseph Smith as author of the Book of Mormon. I reflected on that issue a few years ago in my "Editor's Introduction—Not So Easily Dismissed: Some Facts for Which Counterexplanations of the Book of Mormon Will Need to Account":

http://maxwellinstitute.BYU.edu/publica ... 7&number=2

In contrast to the idiom to dream a dream, the seemingly Hebraic if/and conditional sentences of the Original Manuscript (in Helaman and Moroni) are ungrammatical, jarring, and, accordingly, a much, much more important potential indicator of the Semitic character of the underlying text of the English Book of Mormon. If the critic can find parallel English constructions to those, I'll be impressed.

-2-

Of course I know that the Latin equivalent of English hand is manus, not manis.

The critic is responding to a transcription of remarks I presented orally. I didn't transcribe my oral remarks, I don't know who did, and I've never before seen the transcription. I'm not accountable for the way in which some person unknown to me transcribed the word manus.

If I'm going to be proved an idiot, it will have to be on the basis of better evidence than this.

[_moksha]

Imagine what wonderous proofs that Finnish and Welsh scholars could find in the Quenya (High-elven) and Sindarin (Grey-elven) languages. I say good for Dr. Peterson in finding new connections to the Arabic way of speaking.

[_beastie]

So how does this:

I don't regard the cognate accusative in 1 Nephi 8:2 as a "killer point." I don't regard it as proof that the Book of Mormon is ancient, and have never said that I did. To overstate the importance I place on it is merely to create a straw man.

and

It's possible that Joseph Smith picked it up from his study of the Bible, imitating it either consciously or unwittingly.

correlate with this:

Now, I ask you how a nineteenth-century farm boy could have come up with something like that, which is a perfect illustration of an Arabic grammatical point. Probably he did a lot of his work in the graduate school there at Palmyra University—well, of course there wasn't such a place. And there was no such Joseph Smith. This came to him via another route, not through academic study.

I think we should all understand that apologists asking "how could a farm boy like Joseph Smith do such a thing?" is really just a verbal tic, and completely meaningless.

[_Brackite]

What the crap? It did disappear and I think maybe they banned me for posting it? I try to log in over there and it says "you do not have permission to view this board." Banned?

Hello mms,

Yes, they did indeed banned you there. Welcome to the club! Here is your profile now there:

mms

Seasoned Member: Separates Light & Dark


Group: Banned
Posts: 517
Joined: 15-July 07
Member No.: 5953

( URL Link: http://www.mormonapologetics.org/index. ... 160&st=400 )

[_Chap]

I am grateful for the chance to read DCP's reply. It is as much fun to read as one could have hoped.

Beastie has already pointed out one of the more obviously silly shufflings to which he is reduced.

What is interesting here from the point of view of intellectual pathology is that we can see signs in this post of the building of a new defensive outwork for LDS apologetics: we now have to believe not only that Joseph Smith was an uneducated farm boy, but specifically that he was not very familiar with the Bible.

An early 19th century American Protestant is living in a district notorious for its religious fervor. But he is not very familiar with the Bible.

When he is in religious perplexity, he gets an answer by scripture reading:

History of the Church, chapter 1:

10 In the midst of this war of words and tumult of opinions, I often said to myself: What is to be done? Who of all these parties are right; or, are they all wrong together? If any one of them be aright, which is it, and how shall I know it?
11 While I was laboring under the extreme difficulties caused by the contests of these parties of religionists, I was one day reading the Epistle of aJames, first chapter and fifth verse, which reads: If any of you lack bwisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.
12 Never did any passage of ascripture come with more power to the heart of man than this did at this time to mine. It seemed to enter with great force into every feeling of my heart. I reflected on it again and again, knowing that if any person needed bwisdom from God, I did; for how to act I did not know, and unless I could get more wisdom than I then had, I would never know; for the teachers of religion of the different sects cunderstood the same passages of scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible.

http://scriptures.LDS.org/js_h/1

But he is not very familiar with the Bible.

When an angel appears to him, he recognises every scriptural quotation the angel makes:

36 After telling me these things, he commenced quoting the prophecies of the Old Testament. He first quoted part of the third chapter of aMalachi; and he quoted also the fourth or last chapter of the same prophecy, though with a little variation from the way it reads in our Bibles. Instead of quoting the first verse as it reads in our books, he quoted it thus:
37 For behold, the aday cometh that shall bburn as an oven, and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly shall burn as cstubble; for they that come shall burn them, saith the Lord of Hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.
38 And again, he quoted the fifth verse thus: Behold, I will reveal unto you the aPriesthood, by the hand of bElijah the prophet, before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the cLord.
39 He also quoted the next verse differently: And he shall plant in the hearts of the achildren the bpromises made to the fathers, and the hearts of the children shall turn to their fathers. If it were not so, the whole earth would be utterly wasted at his coming.
40 In addition to these, he quoted the eleventh chapter of aIsaiah, saying that it was about to be fulfilled. He quoted also the third chapter of Acts, twenty-second and twenty-third verses, precisely as they stand in our New Testament. He said that that bprophet was Christ; but the day had not yet come when “they who would not hear his voice should be ccut off from among the people,” but soon would come.
41 He also quoted the second chapter of aJoel, from the twenty-eighth verse to the last. He also said that this was not yet fulfilled, but was soon to be. And he further stated that the fulness of the bGentiles was soon to come in. He quoted many other passages of scripture, and offered many explanations which ccannot be mentioned here.

But he is not very familiar with the Bible.

I also like the way that Joseph Smith's intellectual circumstances are contrasted with "the autodidact John Bunyan". "Autodidact" means "self-taught". Wasn't Joseph Smith? Naah. He went to Palmyra University, and they didn't teach the Bible there.

[_Infymus]

Gw'an .... tell us what he said ... we won't snitch on you.

No way.

God is watching us.
From a distance . . .

He is the wind between our knees.

[_Chap]

Oh, by the way, another nugget of fun to share: did you notice that DCP gets inaccurately transcribed by people, and that the results are never checked or even seen by DCP, and end up being published without his knowledge?

The critic is responding to a transcription of remarks I presented orally. I didn't transcribe my oral remarks, I don't know who did, and I've never before seen the transcription. I'm not accountable for the way in which some person unknown to me transcribed the word manus.

Now didn't that happen to Brother Brigham too? Yup, all the time. So treated they the prophets which were before you ...

[_ludwigm]

There was a song by Louis Armstrong and Heintje : Dream A Little Dream Of Me.
Was it a semitic song?

To dream a dream (or dream something) is a valid expression in hungarian. We are not semitic (OK, most of us are not ... ).

To manis <-> manus :
The "i" is the right next of "u" on the keyboard. Manis is a simple mistyping, committed frequently. I could cite tens or hundreds even from this site. It is not worth to mention.