maklelan wrote:Chris or Brent: Can you provide an explanation for why it would be at all reasonable to conclude Smith desired the same text be copied out twice on the same sheet of paper? This is the scenario that Kevin insists makes more sense than homoioteleuton. I contend it makes no sense whatsoever. Unless it can be shown to be a probable scenario, I fail to see how the occurrence of homoioteleuton could possibly be rejected.
Hi Mak,
I am probably alone among the "critics" in this debate in that I do find the "Haran" dittograph argument fairly (though not entirely) persuasive.
I agree that the deliberate recopying explanation is problematic. The objection you raise is one that I have raised on several occasions on this very board. One explanation that was suggested in response is that they were trying to fulfill a requirement for "two or three witnesses" and didn't think it through very well. Someone observed that since the second instance of the paragraph is much messier than the first-- i.e. contains more errors and sloppier punctuation-- it may be that Williams realized the futility of recopying it, and so rushed through it. But I haven't seen good evidence that the "two or three witnesses" requirement was being applied to manuscript-creation during this period. The "revision" rationale also doesn't seem to hold up, since the second instance was actually worse than the first. And re-writing it on the same page obviously wouldn't help protect against manuscript loss. So if this is a deliberate recopying of the previous paragraph, I can't explain why it was done.
I do agree with Kevin that there are some anomalies here though. The characters were not recopied for the second instance of the text or the following phrase; the recopied text is quite lengthy (though not, I think, unprecedented) for a dittograph; the margin is violated; the recopied text is sloppy; and the repetition also occurs in an odd location for a dittograph-- at the end of the document. (It's hard to imagine a scribe coming within five words of the end of a document and then accidentally skipping back up a full paragraph.) The beginning of the recopied portion also happens to coincide exactly with the end of Manuscript 3. These anomalies are not by themselves enough to overturn the copy error interpretation, in my opinion, but perhaps they should give us pause.
What
does cause me to have serious doubts about the copy-error explanation is that in pretty much every
other respect, Manuscript 2 looks like a dictation transcript. I am at something of a loss to explain the rest of the manuscript evidence under a thoroughgoing visual copying scenario. So at the moment, I am undecided as to the relationship between the translation manuscripts. I'll be looking at the Abraham manuscripts in much more detail when Hauglid's volume is published, and I can look at his high-res images and careful transcriptions. The microfilm just isn't good enough for this kind of detailed text-critical analysis.
Which is to say, I'm not really interested or prepared to debate that question at present. My main interest here is the question of the relationship between the EAG and the Abraham manuscripts. So hopefully I'll have time to get back to you on that issue soon.
Peace,
-Chris
