Redux: Hauglid's 2006 KEP Presentation

[_dartagnan]

As I listen to this over and over I am constantly reminded of the conversations he and I had just prior to his talk, and I soon realized about everything he was saying, was an indirect response to thing I said. But what pisses me off is the way he totally ignores the evidences I presented. He doesn't address a single one. What's worse, he tears up straw men. Take for example an exchange a week before his presentation:

July 28, 2006

Kevin Graham: The photos are beautiful, professionally done, and serve to rebut many of the apologetic arguments that are generally made

Brian Hauglid: It is not true that the photos rebut all of the apologetical arguments. One person's treasure is another person's trash. The photos, like scriptures, or doctrines, or sacred stories are subject to interpretation.

Juliann: How accurate could any assessment be from photos? I see problems from both sides but what continues to amaze me is how willing the countermopologists are to make hard and fast declarations when they do not have access to the primary documents.

Brian Hauglid: Amen Juliann!

Kevin Graham: Keep in mind that it is Gee who asks us to make assessments based on photos. That is, after all, why he provided six of them. The critical side is simply taking that challenge, while relying on photos of superior quality.

Notice how Hauglid twists what I actually said and used it for straw in his "Myths" outlined in his presentation. This is what he said at the conference just a week later (trying his best not to mention my name):

Let's start with myth #1. I've seen this as I monitored the board and as I've heard from different people. So myth #1 is: The High resolution photos provide an accurate portrayal of the Book of Abraham Mss.

Actually, what was argued is that the high quality photos provided by Brent refute the argument presented by Gee who was using inferior photos. And what Hauglid doesn't tell people is that John Gee is the one who started the arguments using photos. Yet, when we refute the apologetic, he and Juliann want to mock us because we don't have access to the originals. It gets worse with his next straw man:

Myth #2: Ink Analysis on photos will give complete and accurate information.

Who the hell ever argued that? Brian then proceeds to fish for giggles by noting how stupid it would be for critics to say you could do ink analysis on photos. So, who said it??? He admitted that this wasn't something Brent argued, but he doesn't say who did. Well, who was it Brian? Why are you wasting so much of your valuable presentation time or meaningless straw man fluff?

This is why I find you intellectually dishonest and a fraud.

You then go on to declare with bombastic certitude that the Williams manuscript shows "with absolute certainty" that the Egyptian and English texts were written in different inks, thus throwing a lifeline out to Gee's failed apologetic.

The crazy thing about this is that Brian said this just after mocking the critics for not doing a proper ink analysis. Well, neither has Brian. At that time all he had done was "look" at the two under a microscope and assumed darker ink was synonymous with different ink. That is all he did, and any forensic document expert would laugh at Brian for his conclusion based on such shoddy methodology. He performed no chemical analysis, which would be required by real scholars before declaring "absolute certainty" on a question as technical as this.

More to come...

[_Dr. Shades]

Yeah, I remember that huge hullabaloo on MA&D about ink analysis. But now we see that Brian, their apologist champion du jour, hasn't even done any ink analysis??

I'd hate to be a MA&Dite right about now. It just keeps on getting worse for them.

[_dartagnan]

Incidentally, last night I posted as "Critical Thinker" on the "Shinehah" thread. I responded to Mormon Mason's ridiculous comments and then I responded to Will's. Mormon Mason tried to talk down to me as if he were some kind of Textual scholar and I was just some idiot. But then he started to describe the KEP as manuscripts that were "bound" in a book. I told him to go get educated on the subject.

I didn't save the first post to MM, but here is my response to Will.

Needless to say, once I pointed out that these guys were only aware of the KEP portions that Brian Hauglid carefully shared with them, it became clear they were all ignorant on the matter, and they were in no position to make educated conclusions about what these mss represent. Will's got more people over there singing his tune about the "text critical evidence argued against dictation"! What blind sheep they are... I also pointed out that Hauglid erroneously claimed credit for discovering the true author for Ms1a. It was actually Edward Ashment who figured it out, many years before any of these amateurs came around and agreed.

Oh, and of course, the mods immediately deleted my account and removed the three posts I had up. Anyway, here is my response to Will that was up for a few hours:

There is no evidence that Joseph Smith hired Williams and Parrish to make these copies.

Nonsense. The fact that they were in the paid services of Joseph Smith, working in the capacity as scribes, is evidence to suggest they were hired for this purpose.

Let's take a parallel analogy to see just how absurd this is.

If you knew Johnny and Jimmy were painters who were in the paid services of Mikey. And then one day you find out that both Johnny and Jimmy were painting Mikey's house. It isn't a great leap to conclude Mikey approved of the work. That is what the "critics" are doing, and you guys make it sound like they are complete idiots for drawing the mostly likely conclusion. It is a logical connection, it isn't a great leap. A great leap would be something along the lines of the apologetic “explanation” that appeals to mystery and offers no plausible scenarios to support its case. The apologetic equivalent in this instance would be to argue that Johnny and Jimmy were painting his house without Mikey's approval, and that “there is no evidence to suggest Mikey knew anything about it.”

Seriously. You aren't really going to resurrect the Nibley theory that the KEP represent a concerted, private endeavor by Smith's scribes without his involvement, are you?

You guys are going backwards, not forwards. How sad.

In fact, the evidence tends towards the conclusion that they were making the copies for their own purposes

So goes the rumor. But so far no evidence has been presented.

To the contrary, copyists routinely reproduce in the abschrift (the copy) exactly what they see in the exemplar (the source document.)

So you agree that this is the primary assumption for the copyist theory. Good. And if it is truly "routine" then you should be able to provide examples of this in the work of Smith's scribes. I'll be waiting anxiously for your examples.

Then when you're done, maybe you can explain why is it that they are not exact copies?

For the Book of Mormon, there is an Original manuscript filled with all sorts of dictation errors. And then there is the Printer's manuscript that is a copy of the original manuscript with an attempt to exclude the scribbles and grammar errors. Nothing in Smith's translation history supports your proposition that he was letting his scribes, one of whom was just recently hired, take a try at translation skill on their own. There was only one prophet in the Church, and only he was expected to produce translated texts.

In the case of Mss. #2 and #3, the text critical evidence does, in fact, suggest that these are visual copies (see the various threads I have commenced in the School of the Pundits for details)

I have, and the evidence is weak if not mostly exaggerated. And none of it takes into account the evidences that point towards dictation. You have not dealt with them, and neither has Hauglid.

The emendations (corrections) are, almost without exception, secondary.

This is not true. Some corrections can only be explained as corrections made as the text was written. This was pointed out to you in early 2006 by Metcalfe on this forum, but you abandoned the discussion.

Of course you can now choose to dismiss these as examples of a scribe making an "exact copy" of whatever mysterious document he was allegedly copying, but this just an example of a predetermined premise driving the evidence. This isn't the evidence driving a sound conclusion. This doesn't make for sound reasoning whatsoever.

The Metcalfe theory suggests that these common emendations are evidence of a dictation scenario.

Yes, and you guys have not addressed these evidences. However, your list of evidences have been addressed on multiple occassions from the critical standpoint.

And no one has ever presented any evidence that Joseph Smith was involved in the creation of these documents.

Then that's because you don't understand what evidence is. The simple fact that these were penned by his hired scribes, is evidence in and of itself that Joseph Smith played a role. The fact that Joseph Smith claimed to be a translator, and the heading on one of the documents says, "Translation," is further evidence he was involved. The fact that the GAEL (signed by Joseph Smith) illustrate the process by which Abraham 1:1-3 was created from invented Egyptian (as they appear on the Phelps/Parrish manuscript 2) further points to Joseph Smith's involvement. Were the scribes in the business of filling in lacunae on papyrus, with a supposed missing Egyptian characters? Only Joseph Smith would have thought he could do that.

There is no reason to believe any of these scribes decided to get together and "try their hand" at translation on their own. There is no evidence that anyone in the Church at that time, aside from Joseph Smith, was in the practice of translating ancient documents. The image of the scribes getting together with the intention of pulling this off on their own, is so absurd it is difficult to take it seriously.

An interesting observation, to be sure. But it is one that presents many more problems for the dictation scenario than perhaps you realize.

No it doesn't.

No, Mss. #2 and #3 are NOT identical.

That's what I said. So how do you explain it, keeping in mind the scenario the copyist proponent must be arguing for, and the unsupported assumptions upon which it rests:

1. For some reason, even though Joseph Smith had supposedly translated the entire Book of Abraham by October 1835, there existed a mysterious "Q" document which only contained Abraham 1:4-2:28.

2. For some mysterious reason two of his scribes decided on their own (Remember, because Smith couldn't have possibly been behind it!) that they would make "copies" for their own "purposes" (whatever those are, they remain yet another unanswered mystery created by the copyist theory).

3. These guys decide to copy everything exactly as it is, down to the last scribble and misspelling, but strangely enough, they happened to misspell words that are particularly difficult to discern audibly. How is this possible if they are "copying" them from a "source" document?

Before we go on, we have to stop to recognize this scenario for what it is: utterly ridiculous. For what purpose is there in making copies of an error ridden text, unless you're going to clean it up? Why would anyone want an identical copy of such a text, bending over backwards to include dictation errors from the missing "original," yet failing to accurately copy the way words were actually written? I mean how hard is it to copy a word correctly? It is much easier to do this than it is to transcribe a dictated text properly. And how is it that they both just happened to stop within the same vicinity if the Book of Abraham had already been completed by that time?

Again, the copyist theory creates far more problems that it pretends to solve.

While they do attest similarities at certain points, they are notably different at other points

That's what I said. So now you have the burden of explaining the sense behind all of this if they are copies. The dictation theory explains them with ease.

The issue, of course, is not whether they were bad copyists, but whether or not the documents exhibit visual copying errors.

If you want to maintain that these are copies, then you have to deal with the repercussions of the argument. One of them is this: these guys must have been horrible at their job. Not just bad, but utterly pathetic. How hard is it to copy words? Sure, you can expect an occasional error here and there in longer copying projects, but this was a very brief exercise involving a few pages, taking maybe ten minutes at most.

They do.

No they don't. You assume they do, but none of this has been demonstrated in a manner that could convince anyone other than other apologists.

And I have yet to hear any explanation (assuming a “dictation” scenario) for these instances of visual copying errors.

Which instances? Of all the instances mentioned by the apologists, there have been explanations, and you have heard them. If these explanations were so easily destroyed, you would have been beating them up on this forum for years. I don't there is anyone here who believes otherwise.

But instead we all we get is silence. Nobody is even willing to point out what these explanations are. Instead, we see the destruction of straw man presentations.

Within the next few days, I will commence another thread in the Pundits forum which will focus on some of the most compelling evidences for copying. We’ll see then if those who defend the simultaneous dictation scenario can explain these apparent visual copying errors.

Why not do it here?

First of all, I would suggest that you refrain from referring to these documents as “1a” and “1b”. Those designations originate with Ashment and Metcalfe and are specifically designed to suggest that these documents were created at the same time – via simultaneous dictation

And for good reason too. That is precisely what the text-critical evidence suggests.

The documents should be designated as:

Why? Because that just so happens to be the "folders" they were dropped into by chance? At least Ashment gave some chronological sense to them which even the apologetic position would agree. Hauglid agrees that KEPA 1 is a copy of 3, so that means 3 came before 1, using the "folder" designation. And by the way, it was Ashment who first revealed Williams was the author of Ms1a. He did this in 2001 while the apologists were still arguing that it was Parrish. It was also Metcalfe who proved Gee's two ink theory was DOA. So I think it is well established that these guys are way ahead of the apologetic pack.

[_dartagnan]

Response to Schryver's latest ...

“Critical Thinker” is, of course, not advocating a novel position. It has been the assumption of the critics since 1967 that these two particular documents are the “translation manuscripts” of the original dictation of the portion of the Book of Abraham that they represent.

Will is ignorant of the relevant history. This has not been strictly an assumption of the "critics." It was the assumption of Church officials who knew about them, long before the papyri were rediscovered.

Seven years before their rediscovery, Dr. James R Clark of BYU spoke of the KEP manuscripts during a conference:

I have in my possession a photostatic copy of the manuscript of the Prophet Joseph Smith's translation of Abraham 1:1 to 2:18. This manuscript was bought by Wilford Wood in 1945 from Charles Bidamon, son of the man who married Emma after the death of the Prophet. The original of this manuscript is in the Church Historian's Office in Salt Lake City. The characters from which our present book of Abraham was translated are down the left-hand column and Joseph Smith's translation opposite, so we know approximately how much material was translated from each character (Pearl of Great Price Conference, December 10, 1960, 1964 ed., pp.60-61).

Wow, so according to Will Schryver Dr. Clark must have been a "critic" too, right? Of course not. It was just safe to make the most logical conclusion back in 1960. In 1967 things changed dramatically. Logical conclusions became forbidden because they threatened the faith.

But to buttress this assumption, they employ several other assumptions that lack sufficient basis.

It is like clockwork. Schryver says this same ole thing every damn time, but he doesn't have the balls to come discuss it here outside his safety zone. Every time we get into a rubber-meets-road discussion, on this forum, he ends up fleeing the scene after it is shown how utterly dishonest and/or stupid his arguments really are. He is not interested in truth. He never was. He is and always will be interested in protecting his "Kingdom." He has shown that he believes this cause is so noble, that it is not above lying.

One of these is the argument that these two men, Frederick G. Williams and Warren Parrish, would have never, at any point in their association with Joseph Smith, have been inclined to do something like make copies of the translation manuscript and, in conjunction with W. W. Phelps, have attempted to do something like “reverse engineer” that English “translation” with the Egyptian texts to which they had unique access as part of Joseph Smith’s inner circle.

More hyperbole to build up another straw man? Of course it is. This is another reason why Schryver doesn't face his critics. He can't get away with his straw man rants, and it pretty much takes all the wind out of his sails since rhetorical sophistry is what drives 95% of his rants. He never provides substance. I challenged him to produce his evidence just the other day, and the mods removed the post. And he still hasn't done it. We just get another "state of apologetics" address that mischaracterizes what has actually been argued. He couldn't get away with this crap here.

Indeed, it would not surprise me if Joseph Smith invited them to give it a go.

Assumptions anyone? Schryver's assumption is not a "novel idea." It is teh same lame duck theory proposed by Hugh Nibley some 50 years ago. Again, they are dead in the water if they can't move beyond their history of bad apologetics.

He was willing for Oliver Cowdery to try his hand at translating from the plates of Mormon. There is much compelling evidence to suggest that Joseph Smith would have likewise invited these later associates to do the same kinds of things.

Where? Where? Where?

There isn't a single historical reference to any of these men being given a chance to "try their skill" at translation. Not one. Yet that doesn't stop desperate people like Will from "assuming" it happened anyway.

He has asserted this crap a dozen times and he never presents this "evidence." And all evidence for him is described as "compelling." This is just more rhetocial sophistry. Nobody is compelled to believe anything he says except other mopologists who are as ignorant on the KEP as he is. When I posted at MADB and make any type of assertion I got threats from the mods to back it up with evidence. Yet, Schryver lives in that forum because it is his world. It is his fantasyland where he can create facts via assertion, and nobody there is allowed to challenged him.

We must remember that these men were no ordinary “scribes” who aspired to do little more than dutifully perform their assigned tasks, ask no questions, and offer no opinions on the matters to which they were privy.

What is this crap all about? Oh, I see. Will is taking the first steps at creating this vision of "abonormal" scribery, so he can start pushing his "assumption" that Joseph Smith "invited the brethren to try their skill" at translation.

Not only were they, to a man, extremely intelligent, extremely talented, and possessed of the belief that they were more “learned” than the frontier “prophet” with whom they had cast their lot

And they probably were. How does that support the crazy theory that they thought they could "show him up" by translating a text better than he could? WOuldn't taht be a matter of inspiration, and not intelligence or education? Schryver's argument is just too stupid to even entertain. Who the hell was around to verify their translation? Nobody! There were scarcely a dozen people in the world at the time who could, none of whom were in Kirtland.

they had also been led to believe, via revelations they took as divine in origin, that they would have the opportunity to personally contribute to the body of revelatory material being showered upon the Latter-day Saints at that point in time.

And they did contribute. Parrish gave a testimony later that he sat beside Joseph Smith ane penned the translation of these papyri as he dictated them. That's "contribution" no matter how you slice it! There was never any talk about this crazy hypothetical incident that Schryver logic calls "compelling."

Phelps and Cowdery (who also took part in this Egyptian project) were especially attracted by the notion that they also could do the things they observed Joseph Smith do.

Where is the evidence? Schryver continues to tell his "story" as a mother does to put her child to sleep. Where is the documented evidence? WHERE???

Simply put, to describe these men as nothing more than hired-hand scribes does violence to the peculiar history these particular individuals had with Joseph Smith.

Does violence! More rhetoric geared to decorate his apologetic with mystery and intrigue. That's fine for apologists I supposed, but critical thinkers need that little thing called evidence. Where is it? ( and for the record, Will is misrepresenting the critical view. Who teh hell ever said these men were "nothing more" than scribes? He is just trying to set up a straw man by exaggerating the critical position, so when he finally presents whatever it is he thinks he has up his sleeve, it will appear to be a victory for the simple-minded at MADB).

The assumptions that flow from viewing them in such a distorted fashion are warrantless

This straw man is warrantless. Cut to the chase already and stop boring the hell out of us with your recreations.

One assumption that underlies much of the critics’ argument is that these two particular documents date to 1835. They may. But we simply don’t know that at this point.

Ah, of course we don't. Everything is a mystery for a Book of Abraham apologist.

It is conceivable that they were made anytime between late 1835 and prior to the disaffection of these men from the church two or three years later.

What's "conceivable" and what's likely supported by the evidence, is a crucial distinction that people like Schryver like to blur for apologetic purposes.

These documents don’t identify themselves. No one seems to have talked about them. They were not known as the original “Book of Abraham Manuscripts” by those who carried them around.

How do you know? Where is the evidence? And why does this matter anyway? They were locked away for a century and hidden from public view, which is all the evidence we need to know how the Church felt about them.

They contain, after all, only a little more than a chapter of the published text of the book. They were simply part of the “Egyptian Papers” that were included in the archives carried by the church from Nauvoo. They seem to have been completely forgotten for many years after the Saints settled in Utah.

Forgotten? Why? Because nobody knew if they should just burn them? Being kept secret and being forgotten are not the same things.

Whatever these papers represent, they obviously did not command a level of interest among the early Saints commensurate with the critics’ assertion that they are original translation manuscripts.

Is this really the direction Schryver wants to go? "Screw the text-critical evidence and all the historic references backing up the critical argument! The fact is nobody after Joseph Smith seemed to think these documents meant much of anything, therefore they couldn't have meant a damn thing to Smith." What a stupid argument. Weren't the Book of Mormon manuscripts also lost and ruined?

Finally,..

Finally what? You're leavings o soon and not going to provide your evidences?

What are you afraid of? That you will get laughed off the stage again? Don't worry Will, your credibility can hardly drop any lower than it already has.

I don’t believe the critics fully appreciate the burden of proof that necessarily accompanies the assertion that KEPA #2 and #3 represent simultaneously-created transcripts of the original “translation” session of the Book of Abraham.

Tons of evidences have been provided, but you and Hauglid prefer to lie to your audience by pretending you don't know of any! Is that how you defend your "Kingdom of God," by lying? Is that the right thing to do?

[_Kevin Graham]

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