KEP Debate in Pundits

[_dartagnan]

http://mormondiscussions.com/discuss/vi ... php?t=3836

It is all covered in that thread

[_cksalmon]

Yea, he is just mimicking Dan Peterson. It makes him feel like part of the group over there.

DCP-lite is exactly my impression of him.

While I think DCP is occasionally quite vindictively derogatory (as when, in a recent MADB thread on anti-Mormonism, he "misspelled" poster Markk's moniker as Markkk twice in one response), I've never once seen him indulge the sort of vulgarity Will has on this board, ostensibly in the service of LDS apologia. To wit: "By the way, I for one am quite confident that most of you losers here in the Trailer Park are shameless buggerers. Else why your proclivity for the orgiastic circle jerks in which you all enthusiastically participate? Like this thread, for example. Graham tosses out the biscuit, and you're all in a circle on a moment's notice."

I'd rather think that this sort of "defense" might even cause DCP's cheeks to rosy up, though he was utterly silent on the matter when I brought it to his attention here on MDB.

I'm sure Schryver emulates DCP, but he's not in the same class. At the very least, DCP generally invokes a certain level of dignified restraint (perhaps hard-won: "Metcalfe is Butthead," and all that).

If you mean "DCP-lite" as in something approaching "Miller-Lite-in-a-very-sun-warmed-can," then I'm with you.

All in all, though, I think a comparison to DCP at this point might just be insulting to DCP.

Chris

[_dartagnan]

Chris, I now get what you were trying to say about the words being vertically compressed.

But the problem with this is that there are several other instances of "the" on the same page, which is about the same size as this one. And Brent has already pointed out that the "h" in "the" had already touched the so-called parenthesis and pulled ink down with it.

[_dartagnan]

Chris, would you share this with the folks at MADB. I think this is the point you were tying to make. Will is obfuscating and pretending your point is so off the wall that nobody could have caught what you were saying. I happen to think you're wrong, but I understand at least why you would make this argument to begin with. It seems you were reading the previous words similar to "the" and they were clearly larger than the examples in the compressed area, as well as the example in the next line.

Tell me if this illustration helps.



The red circled texts are clearly larger than the yellow circled examples. The purple circle is what you're saying appears compressed. And you're right, if all we did was compare it to the immediate examples above. But there are other examples on the same page where the word "the" appears just as small, without any aparent need for compression.

[_dartagnan]

Response to Will's comments at MADB.

I’m not sure I understand the motivation that you (and Metcalfe?) presumably have for contending so resolutely against the conclusion that this phrase was, in fact, inserted after the scribe had proceeded to the subsequent lines on the page

Because there is absolutely zero evidence for this assumption. All of your so-called evidence works quite well with the scenario we proposed. Nobody disagrees that there is an insertion of compressed text. All your "after the fact" theory does is create more questions, and answers nothing. And what's worse, it completely disregards the significant correlations that exist in the parallel manuscript transcribed by Parrish. You're approaching this with tunnel vision by ignoring what the other manuscript tells us they were doing.

I can’t see how it threatens the “simultaneous dictation” theory to any appreciable degree.

What you are trying to do is complicate the matter beyond recognition. You're not trying to answer questions; you're trying to create more problems based on your overblown speculations. The ultimate end here is to throw your hands up and say it is just an incomprehensible mystery.

And I’m rather confident that just about every qualified text critic would look at this evidence and almost immediately pronounce it an obvious case of secondary insertion.

No non-LDS "textual critic" would agree with any of this crapola. Not when presented the overall context of all mss anyway.

And what you think doesn't matter, because you are a proven sciolist who is willing to lie about the evidence. You ramble on with wordy diatribes to try compensating for your utter incompetence. Again the whole world is still waiting for you to return to the forum and explain how you could have "innocently" misrepresented the manuscript evidence as you have. There is no excuse for it, and I think you know this.

[_Wheat]

[dartagnan] And what's worse, it completely disregards the significant correlations that exist in the parallel manuscript transcribed by Parrish. You're approaching this with tunnel vision by ignoring what the other manuscript tells us they were doing.

I don’t understand what you mean here. How does the other manuscript relate to this whole argument about an insertion in this manuscript?

[_dartagnan]

Well, the evidence points to both manuscripts being simultaneous dictation manuscripts. If you read my first post in the linked thread above, it explained several points that show this and Will hasn't even begun to explain how these could be explained as copying errors. Even with 1:12 he now admits it does nothing to discredit the dictation scenario we proposed.

So in the case of Abraham 1:12 in Ms1a, we see there is something going on. To better understand what it is, we need to look at the parallel manuscript Ms1b transcribed by Parrish. If there is nothing strange going on at this point of the manuscript then I think it would be evidence against the dictation theory. However, if the dictation theory is true, then we would expect there to be something going on in the parallel manuscript.

So, is there something unusual? Clearly.

Abraham 1:12 in the WIlliams manuscript (Ms1a):


Now compare to the Parrish manuscript (Ms1b):


It seems clear something is going on here. So putting myself in the position of the two scribes transcribing a dictation, I easily came up with a plausible scenario that would explain these phenomena. While Joseph Smith was dictating his translation, he changed his mind in mid-sentence after saying "representation that is lying before you." Naturally, that meant both scribes had to make immediate adjustments at whatever point they were at in their manuscripts.

Parrish was transcribing at a faster pace, which explains why he had written as far as "lying before you" before making the correction at the behest of Smith. Williams was a few words behind Parrish, so by the time Joseph Smith corrected them, Williams had only made it as far as "that is" - so there was nothing for him to erase. But he was clearly drifting upwards until crashing into the line above, which suggests something was causing him to divert away from what he was doing. I suspect he was looking over to Smith when he informed them of the needed correction. When Smith told them to change "that is lying before you" to "at the commencement of this record," Williams had made a gap to be filled. So he filled it in, with the corrected translation. He didn't bother to erase "that is" probably because it made perfect sense with or without it. So that's it. "Problem" easily explained within the dictation scenario. Will started a thread over there making it sound like this caused a huge hurdle for us, when in fact this creates more of a hurdle for the copyist theory. Because what are the chances that 1) Smith would employ two professional scribes to simply copy the same exact text, and that 2) both scribes would be told to copy the errors from the mysterious source document (highly unlikely) and 3) neither of them managed to do that because their errors are different (borderline impossible). They haven't even begun to answer any of this other than to say "We don't have answers for this yet."

ROFL! And they want to pretend we're the ones who have problems explaining things??? What the hell have they explained? Nothing.

And we know for a fact that the scribes stopped whenever they were finished transcribing a given character, to then write in the next character in preparation for the next series of dictated text. This was proved by the truncated portion of verse 5 in both manuscripts. The scribes literally stop in mid sentence before reaching the end of the page, to insert the next character to be translated.

So this is what I mean when I say Will and Brian completely ignore the evidence from the Parrish manuscript. They don't even want to acknolwedge the similarities that reinforce the dictation argument. Responsible textual critics would deal with this. They don't. They are only interested in whatever evidence they can fabricate from thin air, to support their predetermined conclusions.

[_CaliforniaKid]

The red circled texts are clearly larger than the yellow circled examples. The purple circle is what you're saying appears compressed. And you're right, if all we did was compare it to the immediate examples above. But there are other examples on the same page where the word "the" appears just as small, without any aparent need for compression.

Hey Kevin,

I think your image expresses fairly well the point I was trying to make. I did notice that, at least from the microfilm copy, the last few lines on the page appear to be written in smaller handwriting than the preceding paragraph, and in fact line 40 (second from the bottom) includes an instance of "the" that is of comparable size to the one in question. This, despite the fact that there is no obvious reason for it to be "compressed". My opinion is that, like the instance on line 39, the instance on line 40 is compressed. But the compression on line 40 was unconscious rather than deliberate. Perhaps the following image well help (crappy though it is). The purple boxes denote text that I think was deliberately compressed. The red boxes denote text where I think the scribe unintentionally/unconsciously continued to write in smaller lettering even though there was no obvious reason or need to do so. You'll notice that the red box on line 40 (second from the bottom) includes an instance of "the". On the whole, the text in the red boxes is less compressed than the text in the purple boxes, but is also not as spacious or loopy as the unboxed text. (I hope that made sense.)



-Chris

[_CaliforniaKid]

For the record, I explain this a bit differently than Kevin does. Three things happen in MS 2 after the word "alter". First of all, there is almost no space between "alter" and the "I" that begins the next phrase. Secondly, the "I" is abnormally small. And thirdly, the text here strays upward quite abruptly-- too abruptly, I think, to have been accidental. My opinion is that the change here is intentional. I have one other reason for disagreeing with Kevin. He thinks that the interlinear insertion starting at "(commencement..." was made in order to restore the balance of the text. That may be so, but I prefer to explain this as something Williams did out of necessity. (I should add that even though I disagree with Kevin's model, I do not think it unreasonable.) Here's my theory:

1) Joseph dictates the preceding line up to the word "alter," at which point he stops and says, "next character." Both scribes finish writing the paragraph.
2) Having finished writing the paragraph, the scribes now need to copy the next margin character from the papyrus into their manuscript margins. Williams goes first; Parrish is waiting his turn.
3) While Williams is in the middle of drawing the character, Joseph says, "No, wait. Add 'I will refer you to the representation that is lying before you' to that last paragraph." Since Williams is occupied drawing the character, Parrish starts writing the additional line a little before Williams does. This accounts for Parrish being a bit ahead of Williams.
4) Williams finishes drawing the next Egyptian character, then crams the additional English phrase into the space at the end of the previous paragraph so as not to throw his English text out of alignment with the just-drawn character.
5) Joseph Smith says, "No, make it 'at the commencement of this record' instead of "that is lying before you'."
6) Parrish, who had started writing the insertion a bit before Williams, has to strike out "that is lying before you." Williams, however, has not yet written "lying before you" and so is able to finish the sentence without any strike-outs.

Anyway, regardless of whether you think my model or Kevin's model is the more persuasive, I think the take-away is that this can be explained from a simultaneous dictation POV. We've yet to see an explanatory model from the copy folks.

[_Trevor]

OK, time for the dumb questions from the guy who isn't intensely following the debate.

Is the bulk of the compressed text next to the bottom of a page?

Is it possible that the scribe did not anticipate how much translation had to fit in that space beforehand, so he found it necessary to squeeze it in?

If the characters were laid down beforehand, then the scribe may have found it necessary to squeeze the dictated translation in the space left, next to the Egyptian characters?

Is this what you guys are talking about?