The Isaiah Problem

[_DarkHelmet]

You guys are over thinking this. Typical of intellectual pride. Obviously god put all of the Isaiah scriptures on the brass plates that he wanted the nephites to have.

[_Willy Law]

Yeah, FARMS brought up that argument as well. You are just going to have to explain to me why that matters to the argument of the Book of Mormon?

No evidence for a disunity.

so is your argument that Isaiah was written by one person? Or that the book of Isaiah was written by multiple people but "unified" prior to Nephi chopping off Laban's head?

[_cinepro]

There's this recent discussion at MDDB:

Deutero-Isaiah In The Book of Mormon

[_Cardinal Biggles]

It would seem that Deutero-Isaiah remains just a hypothesis, not even a theory.

In contrast, the FAIR article on the subject admits:

Why do scholars-and I hasten to point out that the Deutero-Isaiah theory is today accepted almost without question by most Jewish and Christian scholars-believe that there must have been more than one author? As the introduction to the Anchor Bible volume on Deutero-Isaiah relates it:

Some doubt concerning the unity of the Book of Isaiah was first expressed in the twelfth century by Rabbi ibn Ezra [a famous Talmudic scholar]. In modern scholarship the theory that Isa xl-lxvi were written later than the prophecies of Isaiah of Jerusalem (Isa i-xxxix) was proposed by two German scholars, Eichhorn in 1783 and Döderlein in 1789. The anonymous author was called Deutero-Isaiah (often in English Second Isaiah). Bernhard Duhm suggested in 1892 that Isa lvi-lxvi is still later than Second Isaiah; and this second anonymous author was called Trito-Isaiah (often in English Third Isaiah). The distinction between First Isaiah and Second Isaiah is so widely accepted in modern scholarship that the argument against it need not be examined at length. The distinction between Second Isaiah and Third Isaiah is almost as widely accepted…

The distinction between First Isiah and Second Isaiah has been made on the basis of vocabulary, style, and thought. The most striking feature of Second Isaiah is the two occurrences of the name of Cyrus (xliv 28, slv 1). That Isaiah of Jerusalem (First Isiah) could use the name of a king, in a language unknown to him, who ruled in a kingdom which did not exist in the eighth century BC, taxes probability too far. It is not a question of placing limits to the vision of prophecy but of the limits of intelligibility; even if the name were by hypothesis meaningful to the prophet, it could not be meaningful to his readers or listeners. Yet Cyrus is introduced without any explanation of his identity, or of why he should be an anchor of hope to the Israelites whom the prophet addresses. If the prophecy is to be attributed to Isaiah of Jerusalem, then these passages must be regarded as later expansions. "But if they are so regarded, other questions remain unanswered. The reader of Second Isaiah becomes convinced that the work has a style and vocabulary of its own. In an unpublished dissertation at the University of Chicago, Mrs. Judith Reinken has made a vocabulary study according to modern statistical methods which simply does not support the thesis of different authorship; nor does it support the thesis of unity of authorship. This is to say that the vocabulary alone is not decisive. Nor is the style alone any more decisive.

What is decisive-for chapters xl-lxvi as a whole, postponing for the moment the consideration of a Third Isaiah-is that the work moves in a different world of discourse from that of First Isaiah…

There is no period of Israelite history known to us which offers a suitable background in which such a community could exist except the period between the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 587 BC and the surrender of Babylon to Cyrus of Persia in 539 BC.

http://www.fairlds.org/Book_of_Mormon/D ... ormon.html

I'd say Nehor is right in the other thread when he says you'll only convince LDS who don't believe the ancients could prophecy.

In contrast, the FAIR article on the subject admits:

There are two issues: the insertion of Cyrus's name, and the totally different historical context of the latter part of Isaiah. As McKenzie points out, it's not enough of a defence simply to say, "well, you know those 'higher critics,' they don't accept prophecy anyway-they just can't swallow the reality of prophecy," but the issue is that that's not the way God works. There are plenty of examples of specific prophecy in the Old Testament (i.e., Isaiah 7:8, where Isaiah prophesies that within 65 years Ephraim will be destroyed-note that this is in "Proto-Isaiah" and its authorship is not questioned), but prophecies have to make sense to the people to whom they are addressed, and as McKenzie says, the name "Cyrus" and the concept of the Persian Empire wouldn't have made sense to Isaiah's contemporaries. Furthermore, it is the nature of apocalyptic scripture to lay things out in a vision which is symbolic in nature (cf. Daniel's vision of the idol with clay feet, and John's symbolism of angels and beasts).

Try to keep up, BCSpace. You'd do well to study the most recent apologetics on the matter; yours are somewhat dated.

[_Willy Law]

There's this recent discussion at MDDB:

Deutero-Isaiah In The Book of Mormon

Allright, someone has to explain the importance of the Deutero Isaiah being used in the book of John?
Someone in the thread Cinepro linked brought it up again as a defense for the Book of Mormon and BC Space has not been willing to explain it to me.

I just do not understand how that in anyway helps explain the Isaiah problem in the Book of Mormon.

Are they trying to say that if you are going to throw out the Book of Mormon because of Deutero Isaiah then you have to throw out the Bible? Or is the argument that if those chapter existed in the Scriptures at the time of Christ then they must have existed 600 years earlier?

Edited to add: Reading the responses on the Mormon Dialogue thread is a trip. The mental gymnastics people will go through to maintain their belief is painful to watch.

[_Cardinal Biggles]

Allright, someone has to explain the importance of the Deutero Isaiah being used in the book of John?
Someone in the thread Cinepro linked brought it up again as a defense for the Book of Mormon and BC Space has not been willing to explain it to me.

I just do not understand how that in anyway helps explain the Isaiah problem in the Book of Mormon.

I'll go out on a limb here and say that it doesn't in any way help explain the problem; An explanation would involve accepting the Deutero-Isaiah theory but then showing how the Book of Mormon can be true even in the presence of that theory (like Bokovoy's idea of Smith expanding the Book of Mormon beyond its original text in response to inspiration). Instead, it's an attempt to say that there is no problem in the first place because there is no (according to him) proven disunity in Isaiah.

My guess is that it's an attempt to criticize the Deutero-Isaiah theory by pointing out the lack of actual physically separate copies of the texts. I think that BCSpace is saying that there weren't separate texts extant in John's time, or even 200 years earlier, so that (in his opinion) hurts the credibility of the theory significantly enough to reduce it to a mere hypothesis. BCSpace wants to see separate scrolls, one with Proto-Isaiah only, and another with Deutero-Isaiah, before he's willing to call it a theory.

[_jon]

If I recall correctly the Book of Mormon only quotes a couple of chapters from the area identified by the Deutero-Isaiah hypothesis.

How many chapters would need to be quoted errantly before it became an issue with the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon?

[_Willy Law]

If I recall correctly the Book of Mormon only quotes a couple of chapters from the area identified by the Deutero-Isaiah hypothesis.

How many chapters would need to be quoted errantly before it became an issue with the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon?

Regardless, BC's claim is incorrect

Isaiah
48, 49 = 1 Nephi 20, 21
50, 51 = 2 Nephi 7, 8
52 = 3 Nephi 20
53 = Mosiah 14
54 = 3 Nephi 22
55 =2 Nephi 26:25

[_Fence Sitter]

I'll go out on a limb here and say that it doesn't in any way help explain the problem; An explanation would involve accepting the Deutero-Isaiah theory but then showing how the Book of Mormon can be true even in the presence of that theory (like Bokovoy's idea of Smith expanding the Book of Mormon beyond its original text in response to inspiration). Instead, it's an attempt to say that there is no problem in the first place because there is no (according to him) proven disunity in Isaiah.

My guess is that it's an attempt to criticize the Deutero-Isaiah theory by pointing out the lack of actual physically separate copies of the texts. I think that BCSpace is saying that there weren't separate texts extant in John's time, or even 200 years earlier, so that (in his opinion) hurts the credibility of the theory significantly enough to reduce it to a mere hypothesis. BCSpace wants to see separate scrolls, one with Proto-Isaiah only, and another with Deutero-Isaiah, before he's willing to call it a theory.

I would expect that were such scrolls to be found that the apologetic response would be to question the length of the scrolls.

[_stemelbow]

I've offered this view before.

It is quite possible that the Deutero Isaiah portions found in the Book of Mormon were not put in there by Nephi, nor Mormon. Perhaps what Nephi and Mormon had in the Book of Mormon is something a bit different than the Deutero Isaiah portions that are also found in the KJV. But, since the KJV in Joseph Smith' time was by and large the Bible in English, God let it be that the KJV, Deutero-Isaiah, stuff was used in the translation.