Roman Story & Book of Mormon Similarities

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Ah, this back and forth reference literary similitude; I can’t help but reminisce upon my youth spent reading many a fantasy narrative.

There was one novel in particular that struck me as being very similar to J.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. It was The Sword of Shannara by fantasist Terry Brooks. As a young man I absolutely adored this novel, but was troubled by the similarities it brought to bear with J.R. Tolkien’s works. I’ll spare you the details, but plagiarism doesn’t simply end with word counts and sentence structure. It is clear Terry Books plagiarized his idea from J.R. Tolkien, even though he may have had the prescience to spare himself the trouble of being sued by not directly plagiarizing his inspiration.

The same can be said of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. It’s troubling to see the issue confused and clouded by apologists who want to niggle over minutiae when it’s clear the Book of Mormon plagiarized large conceptual elements from other books, to include the one that’s been discussed to death on this thread.

[_Daniel Peterson]

Because such an analysis has been missing from FARMS's discussions of evidences for the Book of Mormon, from what I've seen.

Perhaps you need to read more?

I've never seen the best evidences weighed against the fishiest supposed anachronisms

You haven't?

Man. I thought that was one of our most common approaches.

or a statistical analysis of how many things the Book of Mormon can be expected to have gotten right randomly.

Feel free to do one.

Or am I mistaken in thinking that we haven't seen such a thing from you or any other critic, either?

"Work harder, you!" he called out from his veranda before sipping again from his drink.

[_JohnStuartMill]

Because such an analysis has been missing from FARMS's discussions of evidences for the Book of Mormon, from what I've seen.

Perhaps you need to read more?

Perhaps.

I've never seen the best evidences weighed against the fishiest supposed anachronisms

You haven't?

Man. I thought that was one of our most common approaches.

I've seen articles dealing with supposed anachronisms, and I've seen articles about Book of Mormon "bullseyes", but I haven't seen one yet that does a serious job of weighing them against each other. I think that, in order to be really "serious", it would have to use some kind of the statistical analysis mentioned in this thread. But I haven't seen anything even moderately serious, although I don't claim omniscience with regard to FARMS's publications.

or a statistical analysis of how many things the Book of Mormon can be expected to have gotten right randomly.

Feel free to do one.

Or am I mistaken in thinking that we haven't seen such a thing from you or any other critic, either?

"Work harder, you!" he called out from his veranda before sipping again from his drink.

Maybe I will.

[_Roger]

The discussion on this thread is getting busy... which is what I enjoy, so I'm not complaining. But with my limited time I won't be able to respond to everything for a while, but I'm not ignoring anyone.

Jersey girls asks a simple question:

I do agree that the Relief Society/OM is not the manuscript that was submitted for publication to Patterson.

What is your reasoning for the above, Roger? Doesn't it make more sense that if Hurlbut were coaching witnesses that their testimony should line up with the Book of Mormon?

To a certain extent, but think about what S/R critics claim... they claim that Hurlbut concoted this whole thing perhaps because he heard some rumor during his LDS days that there was a connection between Spalding's writing's and the Book of Mormon. So, they allege, because he became a disgruntled former TBM, he latches on to that concept and runs with it in order to "get" Smith. But what does he have to back it up? Nothing. So he gets permission to look through Spalding's trunk and comes up with the Roman story. Now what does he do? It doesn't really match the Book of Mormon at least not to the extent claimed by his witnesses?

If he's out to get Smith and he doesn't care about the truth and he's not above putting words into the mouth's of his witnesses--and S/R critics generally claim all of this--then what is to prevent him from slipping the name Fabius into the testimony? What's to prevent him from having other witnesses "remember" a shipwreck in the story? etc, etc. Okay so now we have testimony that lines up with both the Book of Mormon and the Roman story!

Remember that S/R critics think Hurlbut and Howe were in on this together and none of the witness statements can be relied on. If that is really what happened then either Hurlbut or Howe could have manipulated the testimonies any way they desired before Howe published his book. Howe even admits to not publishing all of the testimonies submitted, so, if we are to believe S/R critics on this then why assume Hurlbut and Howe were so stupid as to not work any of the Roman story into the testimony? If I'm out to get Smith at any cost and I don't care about the truth and I'm not above putting words into the mouth's of witnesses and I've got the Roman story sitting in front of me, why not?

But that, of course, is not what happens, which indicates to me the witnesses were not coached and were stating what they truly remembered.

[_Roger]

mikwut:

This is utterly false.

Which is exactly why I stated:

I really hesitate to speak for either Craig or Dale because both are much smarter than I am and both can do a better job, so take what I say here with a grain of salt if it in any way differs from what they have or would say....

...given that disclaimer, however, I do not think

Because I do not use whatever the proper terminology is I knew people would jump all over me, no matter how "carefully" I attempt to state what I do know.

I stated it before, but it bears repeating: people a lot smarter than me think Criddle's work supports Dale's observations. I have still seen nothing (written in layman's terms) that refutes that.

Absolutely false. Reasonableness is not yet met. Seriously. Craig is working on other statistical outlays for a reason, he knows that. If you did the same study but took Spalding out of it and used the other authors one of the left authors will have the highest relative probability, would you then state that it is reasonable to conclude that author wrote Alma?

I can at least follow your logic, but I suspect Craig or Dale might differ with your interpretation on this.

Yet, your are the one throwing bias around like a frisbee. Why?

This is one tactic that really annoys me. I am biased. You are biased. CNN is biased. EVERYONE is biased. So yes, I flaunt my bias and challenge anyone to show me where I'm wrong despite the bias thing. (And I enjoy throwing frisbees too).

[_Roger]

Ben:

Roger, this is one place where there exists a body of literature with accepted sets of criteria to judge this issue. If you want to move away from subjective labeling as much as possible, this is the direction it has to go. Otherwise we never get much beyond where we are in this discussion. It is a problem which has plagued LDS studies for quite some time, with a whole spat of "my parallels are better than yours" kind of issues.

I appreciate that you take me seriously enough to seem to suggest I need to give up the day job and go into formal LDS history studies, but I am simply not in a position to go that far. I do what I can which is listening to others, reading & researching as time permits and discussing on the web. If you want to express what is wrong with the way I am looking at the parallels Dale mentioned, be my guest. If not, no biggie. I see parallels, you see parallels. I think they are significant, you don't. The world probably won't end if we just disagree.

If you want to wait, I talk about formal methodolgies in this regard in my forthcoming article in JOBMSARS (my that's a mouthful now), coming out in the next issue (which I have been told is being released this month, but the date keeps getting pushed back). And I am happy to discuss your issues at that moment.

Sounds good.

As far as dating goes, chronology has no impact on the question - except, of course, that it does exclude some things. An early work obviously can't steal from a late work.

That is true, however I meant the chronology of events as described by both Spalding and Smith.

But simply putting two works into the same time and space creates an additional burden not a smaller burdern - precisely because you have to find a way to exclude the kinds of parallels that are created by a common language, a common dialect, shared euphamisms and so on. These can just as easily be attributed to environment and not to creative borrowing from another text. For example, as with the phrase that was something like 'on the banks of the river', you have to look at other contemporary accounts and see how often other authors used the notion within that same environment, and if it occurs regularly, then it loses a lot of value as evidence of direct borrowing from one source to another.

I agree. That's why I find things like the lever, the hill, the stone, etc. to be indicative of borrowing.

I can't state unreservedly that Smith borrowed from Spalding to create his discovery narrative. However, I can note that a lot of witnesses claimed that Smith used a Spalding manuscript to create the Book of Mormon BEFORE Smith wrote his discovery narrative. That is what makes the parallels that much more intriguing.

Similarly, when looking at this kind of reliance, you have to make sure that there isn't a related body of literature. Where does Spalding get the idea of buried records for example? Vogel argues that buried stone boxes in Indian Mounds was a fairly common notion at that time period in that area, and so it shouldn't be taken as having come from any particular source (and he lists several similar types of accounts).

These kinds of problems have to be taken into consideration, and in a way that reduces the subjectivity as much as possible.

Again, that is all well and good. Disect the parallels any way you wish. Get as objective a methodology as you want. In the end, I don't think you can rationally come to the conclusion that the parallels could not have been produced by Smith copying from Spalding.... do you agree? Assuming so, then what are we left with? You think they weren't, I think they were. If it weren't for the prior claims made by the witnesses, then that would be the end of it. But that isn't the end of it because those claims were indeed made long before Smith wrote his discovery narrative. Unfortunately, you're stuck with that. And here's the deal... it's either what I think it is--Smith borrowing from Spalding... or a really unfortunate (from your standpoint) set of coincidences converging in 1838.

Unless you can establish the veracity of the testimony, it isn't really that valuable - for the reasons I have already listed. You can always use it for your own reasons, but understand that in general, such an argument won't be accepted - and not simply because there is a desire to throw out as much as possible - rather, because the evidence itself is quite contested (and not just by believing LDS).

I agree that if all the testimony is unreliable then there's not much of a case to be made here. On the other hand, the sincerity of the witnesses has been scrutinized left and right and I really don't see the logical, rational reasons for rejecting it. If we were talking about one or two or three or four witnesses who were from the same family or were very close friends then there might be some basis to suggest that they are all lying, but that is simply not the case. Not one of them ever claimed Hurlbut put words in their mouths.

You accept the testimony of Book of Mormon witnesses, so surely you must have some "objective" standard for accepting witness testimony that you can apply objectively in both scenarios?

Criddle's study has very little to do with this subject. And I reject it's validity for a number of reasons. I would be happy to bring these issues up for discussion. I think the two biggest issues are - 1) that the study can only give us comparative probabilities - that is, for any textual sample, it can only tell us which of the test authors was most lkely to be the real author. In connection with this, it cannot tell us how likely it is that that person is the real author. If we reduce the test authors to a single author, that chance is (and this can be seen mathematically) 100% every time. Even if we know that that person cannot be the author. Can this be fixed? I think so.

2) The problem with the control samples is pretty big. The two control authors were fairly similar to the Book of Mormon - but also very similar to the artifical Isaiah/Malachi author. If we exclude the obvious chapters copied from the KJV of Isaiah, about a third of the text was incorrectly attributed to this Isaiah/Malachi author. Were we to run the test again without this author included, many of these misattributed chapters would appear to be reassigned to the two control authors and not to Spalding/Rigdon/et al. Meaning that the artifical Isaiah/Malachi identification ought to be seen as a control text and not immediately dismissed as the study does.

And of course, Joseph should have been included in the list of authors. Better yet, they should have scrapped the somewhat arbitrary vocabulary, picked another 200 authors, used a most common word list from that era (what they get is actually pretty close, so that's not much of a change) and tried to repeat the calculations using a lot of authors. In theory this shouldn't change the results, right? But when it does, we can only conclude that the narrow selection of authors pre-determined the outcome. However, such a wordprint study still can't tell us if plagiarism occurs, since it deals exclusively with vocabulary and not structure.

My own examination of 3, 4 and 5 word locutions indicates that on a basic phrasing level, there isn't any particular similarity between Spalding's work and the Book of Mormon that rises to a level above what we find between the Book of Mormon and other contemporary literature.

I will grant that what you state here sounds reasonable. The wp study is one area that I am simply not familiar with enough to discuss on a very deep level. Dale and/or Craig would certainly do a better job. I think Dale is offline for a while and I don't know if Craig posts here--although I would sure love to see him join in these discussions.

Again, from a layman's point of view what appears to have happened is that somebody noticed parallels between Spalding and the Book of Mormon to such an extent that they finally decided to run a wp study and see what would result. Dale had noticed similarities between Spalding and Alma long ago and apparently his observations were supported by the wp study. Now you can argue that the reason for that is because Spalding was included and Smith wasn't... or you can argue that the reason for that is because Spalding was included and Alma wasn't included. Or you can argue that the reason for that is because Spalding was included and God wasn't included. All I know is that smart people looked at the text and thought they saw some similarities and those similarities were also "observed" by the computer when the computer was given the choice between Spalding and whoever else was on the list. So this stuy may or may not be conclusive--I am not in a position to say one way or another--but at the very least, it certainly did not seem to do any damage to the S/R claims.

You're asking me to read Joseph Smith's mind. The answer could be that he was simply lazy--an attribute, by the way, that some of those who knew him claimed he possessed. Why should it be up to me to attempt to discover Joseph's motives?

Because otherwise you aren't making a very coherent argument. That's pretty simple. The act of plagiarism involves deliberate mimesis (not accidental, not coincidental, but deliberate). Being deliberate implies very strongly some kind of intention. Intention can be discussed in terms of the text. So you have to have something to say about it, or the argument starts to lose a lot of its impact. If Joseph has no reason to borrow from Spalding in these rather common details, then why does he do it? To say that it is unimportant when you are suggesting that he did so intentionally isn't going to go very far.

My forthcoming article which does deal with a case of literary borrowing in the Book of Mormon spends a fair amount of discussion on the question of intentions.

Correct me if I am wrong but you seem to be stating that unless I can read Joseph Smith's mind, then my "argument starts to lose a lot of its impact." But then what happens when I take the bait and come up with a possible motive? Could it be that at such a point you might object to my speculation?

I suggested that laziness could have been a possible reason for Joseph to borrow a discovery narrative from Spalding. Can you rule that out?

You could easily demonstrate that the coincidences I am suggesting are extraordinary, are not, by simply taking me up on the challenge I put to you in my previous post. I note that you ignored that challenge. If you can produce a genuine text written by one author prior to 1838 that has an equal or greater number of parallels to Smith's 1838 discovery narrative and was written by an author that people had been associating with the Book of Mormon since 1832, I will be convinced.

I ignored it because your challenge is too narrow. The reason is that coincidence isn't bound by content.

With all due respect I'm just not buying this. The fact is you want to argue that this set of circumstances is not that out of the ordinary. I'm saying it is and you can show that it isn't by showing that it happens all the time. What occured in this case is that parallels are observed and acknowledged by you as actually being parallels in a text that was also written by an author who had already been associated with the Book of Mormon before 1838. That has been my point from the very beginning when Dan Peterson and others were claiming these parallels just aren't that significant.

But when I challenge you to reproduce the converging coincidences that happened in this case, you can't. That tells me that I am indeed correct to conclude that this is something out of the ordinary.

If I can produce two texts which share a list of parallels between them (and they don't have to have anything in common with the Book of Mormon, the discovery story, or Spalding's work) that should work, right?

No.

I would be happy to provide that - because that would show that this kind of set of parallels occurs by coincidence. I don't need to duplicate them exactly.

That does nothing to address this specific set of converging coincidences.

So far you presented one story that has three rough parallels to the Smith/Spalding texts. I have no doubt that you can present coincidental parallels in unrelated texts--perhaps even to an impressive level. Such an argument might be effective in throwing doubt on these parallels such that we could not say with certainty whether Smith borrowed from Spalding or not--however, you still could not rule it out entirely, no matter how much doubt you successfully cast, agreed?

Given that, the results would simply be inconclusive.

But the story does not end there in the case of these parallels precisely because witnesses made their claims before Smith published his discovery narrative. You can't pin this one on bad witnesses. Bad witnesses have virtually nothing to do with parallels between a Spalding text and something written by Smith LONG AFTER they had given their testimonies.

Frankly, I don't think you can come up with an explanation for that. Other than: that's just really, really wierd.

[_Brackite]

...
Manuscript Found is the Spaulding's Roman story.
...

You appear to say that with the same assurance that you might state that 2+2=4.



...

Yes, I should have instead stated that, I believe that the Manuscript Found is the Spaulding's Roman story. It is my Opinion, and it is Not a statement of Fact like 2+2=4.

...

I haven't mentioned the witnesses of the Book of Mormon. I think they are irrelevant to the question at hand. In fact, it doesn't take belief in the Book of Mormon to challenge the Spalding theory as evidenced by Vogel, Palmer, et al. The theory can be challenged without appealing to some kind of faith tradition.

I haven't suggested that the only way to understand the Book of Mormon is through some kind of faith process. What I have done is to specifically attempt to deal with claims of plagiarism by Joseph Smith from Spalding - and this question can be answered without having to make claims of ancient origins for the Book of Mormon. In other words, you are doing what I have had happen to me elsewhere many times - you are trying to invoke the angel in what has to this point been an argument about literary concerns. And to be quite honest, I have no desire to talk about the angel.

...

Whether or not the 3 witnesses are telling the truth is irrelevant to the question of whether or not Joseph Smith used Spalding. This is nothing more than a distraction. And it isn't a good one at that. Vogel, for example, who is not LDS, is not a believer, also challenges the Spalding theory - and does so without an appeal to the three witnesses - just as I am doing now. Let's get back to the real subject shall we?

Ben

Good Points, Ben

[_marg]

For example, as I'm sure you know, there is no mention of Lamanites or Nephites in the Roman story, whereas the witnesses claim there was in Spalding's ms.

And this begs the question of whether or not this comes from the Book of Mormon (or rather accounts about it) than from any Spalding MSS. I note, for example, that the primary characters are repeatedly listed as Lehi, Nephi, and Moroni, but Lehi is actually a rather minor character, and the text itself isn't primarily about a small colony of refugees. Where is Alma? Or Mosiah? What elements from these witnesses indicate details from Spalding's MSS that couldn't have been taken from newspaper accounts of the Book of Mormon?

Below I list the Spalding book characters mentioned in the Conneaut witness statements put into Howe's book. They aren't all exactly the same, only one mentions Moroni. But since they had the Book of Mormon available and Hurlbut was very familiar with it...if it was all a big anti Mormon conspiracy it would be no problem to mention Alma or Mosiah or Moroni or whomever else is in the Book of Mormon...that they didn't means diddly squat... Ben.

However you bring up something interesting, why mention Lehi as if Lehi was very memorable and a main character? Surely Hurlbut wouldn't coach them to do that knowing Lehi was a minor character. Perhaps Ben, "Lehi" was mentioned much more frequently and played a larger role in the manuscript the witnesses did hear and read. Quite possibly either a portion of Spalding's manuscript was not used or even that lost 116 pages by Harris contained the relevant parts with Lehi that they had memories of.

With regards to your last line "What elements from these witnesses indicate details from Spalding's MSS that couldn't have been taken from newspaper accounts of the Book of Mormon?"

I think I answered that..re "Lehi". To you Ben..Lehi played a minor role in the Book of Mormon and shouldn't have been mentioned but obviously that's not what they thought, despite having the Book of Mormon available to them and Hurlbut to coach who knew the Book of Mormon extremely well.

John Miller did mention that Spalding told him he landed his people near the Straits of Darien which he called Zarahemla..that was not in any newspaper account. I believe later J. Smith conjectured something similar, so perhaps Smith got the idea from reading E. Howe's book.

-----------------------------------
Character names mentioned in statements:
John Spalding: Nephi, Lehi, Nephites, Lamanites

Martha Spalding: Nephi, Lehi, Lamanites

Oliver Smith: Nephi, Lehi,

Nathum Howard: 0

Aaron Wright: (says "names are the same without any alteration", no specific name mentioned)

Henry Lake: Laban

John Miller: Nephi, Lehi, Moroni, "in fact all the names"

Artemas Cunningham: Nephi

[_Brackite]

A Review Here:

Here are 37 words that are found in the Manuscript (Roman) Story and found in the Book of Mormon, but not in the King James Bible, the Apocrypha, and the writings of Josephus or in Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews:


1. abyss
2. attitude
3. burthen
4. burthens
5. clasped
6. crisis
7. crossing
8. defiance
9. depravity
10. dispelled
11. dormant
12. dragged
13. encircle
14. encircled
15. energies
16. explaining
17. ferocious
18. glut
19. gushing
20. hemmed
21. impeded
22. listened
23. manifesting
24. massacred
25. monster
26. movements
27. plans
28. pleasingly
29. puffing
30. regulations
31. shrink
32. spurn
33. steadfastly
34. tumbling
35. waving
36. worried
37. wrestling


Unique Textual Parallels:




And, Here are 35 words that are found in the Manuscript (Roman) Story, but Not found in the Book of Mormon:


1. beans
2. carrots
3. cotton
4. Elk
5. feathers
6. flowers
7. frogs
8. geese
9. knives
10. mammoons
11. opossums
12. porcupiness
13. shells
14. shovels
15. snails
16. squashes
17. stockings
18. tomahawks
19. turkeys
20. wigwams
21. apartments
22. constitution
23. dames
24. damsel
25. empire
26. alternative
27. consternation
28. perpetual
29. preposterous
30. billows
31. instantly
32. perpendicular
33. pimples
34. warts
35. quagmire


The corrected e-text.

The Book of Mormon -- Simple Searches:

[_Benjamin McGuire]

Roger writes:

If he's out to get Smith and he doesn't care about the truth and he's not above putting words into the mouth's of his witnesses--and S/R critics generally claim all of this--then what is to prevent him from slipping the name Fabius into the testimony? What's to prevent him from having other witnesses "remember" a shipwreck in the story? etc, etc. Okay so now we have testimony that lines up with both the Book of Mormon and the Roman story!

But, as you know, anyone can compare the texts and see that the kinds of similarities aren't there. There is no Nephi in the Spalding MSS. Unless the Spalding MSS is published however, no one has to know this. So the witnesses only remember those parts that are widely recognized to be in the Book of Mormon (and perhaps not so accurately at that). I am sorry, but I still don't see this as a very logical train of thought.

I can't state unreservedly that Smith borrowed from Spalding to create his discovery narrative. However, I can note that a lot of witnesses claimed that Smith used a Spalding manuscript to create the Book of Mormon BEFORE Smith wrote his discovery narrative. That is what makes the parallels that much more intriguing.

A lot of people said a lot of things about the Book of Mormon from a very early date. I simply don't agree with you that we should priviledge these accounts, and I am not at all convinced that they don't all stem from a single common source.

Not one of them ever claimed Hurlbut put words in their mouths.

Why would they (even if he had)?

You accept the testimony of Book of Mormon witnesses, so surely you must have some "objective" standard for accepting witness testimony that you can apply objectively in both scenarios?

I keep telling you that whether or not I accept the Book of Mormon witnesses is somehow relevant to the issue here. It isn't. I think that the situations are probably quite different, but that is also irrelevant. In this case, I think there are some very good reasons to question these particular testimonies. Among them is that there isn't any good indicators that they had actually read either the Book of Mormon text or the Spalding MSS.

In the end, I don't think you can rationally come to the conclusion that the parallels could not have been produced by Smith copying from Spalding.... do you agree?

No - in fact, I have already come to the rational conclusion that there is no copying from Spalding involved (and its not just me of course, others are also quite rationally convinced - Dan Vogel, Grant Palmer, etc.)

And here's the deal... it's either what I think it is--Smith borrowing from Spalding... or a really unfortunate (from your standpoint) set of coincidences converging in 1838.

What makes it unfortunate? You, I am sure, at quite aware that the Spalding theory is hardly a popular one - even among LDS critics. That there happens to be a number of supporters in this forum is hardly representative. I am reminded though of another widely published set of "unfortunate" coincidences that you may have seen before between Abraham Lincoln and Ted Kennedy:

Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846.
John F. Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946.

Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860.
John F. Kennedy was elected President in 1960.

The names Lincoln and Kennedy each contain seven letters.

Both were particularly concerned with civil rights.

Both wives lost their children while living in the White House.

Both Presidents were shot on a Friday.

Both were shot in the head.

Lincoln's secretary, Kennedy, warned him not to go to the theatre.
Kennedy's secretary, Lincoln, warned him not to go to Dallas.

Both were assassinated by Southerners.
Both were succeeded by Southerners.

Both successors were named Johnson.

Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln, was born in 1808.
Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy, was born in 1908.

John Wilkes Booth was born in 1839.
Lee Harvey Oswald was born in 1939.

Both assassins were known by their three names.

Both names are comprised of fifteen letters

Booth ran from the theater and was caught in a warehouse.
Oswald ran from a warehouse and was caught in a theater.

Booth and Oswald were assassinated before their trials.

Oh well.

You accept the testimony of Book of Mormon witnesses, so surely you must have some "objective" standard for accepting witness testimony that you can apply objectively in both scenarios?

This is an assumption you keep making, but the point isn't relevant. I haven't actually made any claims in this forum (or I think anywhere else) what I think of the Book of Mormon witnesses. Its an assumption you are making. The problem, of course, is that many of the critics of the Spalding theory are not believers. So obviously this isn't as relevant as you keep trying to make it. I have pointed out that at best, their testimony is about what they believed occured. The same is true for your witnesses. But this doesn't mean that your witnesses are actually competent to make those kinds of claims - particularly if they haven't actually read the texts.

Correct me if I am wrong but you seem to be stating that unless I can read Joseph Smith's mind, then my "argument starts to lose a lot of its impact." But then what happens when I take the bait and come up with a possible motive? Could it be that at such a point you might object to my speculation?

What I am saying is that you have already claimed that there is a motive. That is what plagiarism or borrowing is - a deliberate mimesis. I am suggesting that you need to explain this - whether or not I agree with you - because it is already a part of your discussion. It becomes an issue with most claims of plagiarism. It could well be that Joseph simply wanted a good story (but that also begs the question, having read Spalding's MSS). As far a laziness goes, it works as well as anything else - but if it is lazyness, don't you think that we would see more direct influence? Ah, that's right - we still don't have the source text do we ....

With all due respect I'm just not buying this. The fact is you want to argue that this set of circumstances is not that out of the ordinary. I'm saying it is and you can show that it isn't by showing that it happens all the time. What occured in this case is that parallels are observed and acknowledged by you as actually being parallels in a text that was also written by an author who had already been associated with the Book of Mormon before 1838. That has been my point from the very beginning when Dan Peterson and others were claiming these parallels just aren't that significant.

I disagree with you. I think you are wrong. I think you actually don't understand the argument you are making here. Would you please define "coincidence" for me? And then explain why it is that it has to be a specific set of parallels instead of any set of similar parallels? I mean, I can start dredging out discovery narratives, but I really don't have an interest in it - after all, at some point (as you already hinted) you stop seeing thigns as coincidences and instead are looking at alternative sources (look what you said about Scott!). I would simply rather produce equivalent sets of parallels from unrelated texts. That way, you don't have a vested interest in the specific subject matter, and I think you will be more inclined to accept what I think are the obvious conclusions.

Personally, I think you are so involved with this theory (as are some others here) that all you can see is weird, weird, weird, when in fact it seems to me (and others) to be quite typical - perhaps even normal.