The Incredible Internal Consistency & Integrity of the Book!

[_MrStakhanovite]

FAIR hosts a video from the much beloved Backyard Professor, where the talented director gives about 30 minute presentation about the incredible internal consistency of the Book of Mormon as some kind of evidence of for the book historicity and divinity ( be warned, it’s just him reading an essay from a BYU Dead Sea Scrolls scholar).

There is a delicious irony here, namely that strict internal consistency of a text is never seen as a virtue for any of the great texts in the Western canon. Even better, all the body of world scriptures that I’m familiar with have internal inconsistencies. The rigid internal consistency as described ( or rather, read to us) by Shirts is a fairly modern concept, and it is wildly anachronistic to think that such consistency is proof of anything other than a modern person (e.g. Joseph Smith) writing the work.

If the Bible (Tanakh and Greek Testament) were to be used as an example of God inspired scripture, then inconsistencies would be a hallmark of divine inspiration. From the Torah to the Pauline corpus, conflicting and contradictory passages abound! The ancient redactor(s) of the Tanakh literally merged stories together, putting conflicting accounts within a few lines of each other. They did this not because they were stupid or sloppy, rather they didn’t care about internal consistency at all. It just was not a concern for them.

Such things exist in the body of work that we call Plato’s canon, the survivors of Plato’s thought kept the conflicting and contradictory ideas, and they were dialectical to a fault. Shakespeare’s body of work, hell even a work of brilliance that we know came from one person only still has internal inconsistencies (speaking of Goethe here).

Man I love the study of mopolgetics, I’ve never met a group of thinkers who inadvertently hurt their own cause while trying so hard.

[_Doctor Scratch]

I miss The Backyard Professor. He had an infectious energy that's clearly lacking in most of the Mopologists. Even though his association with FAIR/FARMS made him very bitter, I think he was a real asset to them.

One thing that I've noticed is that the FAIR people have gone "underground." None of them is willing to openly stand by their Mopologetics. Wiki Wonka--who is probably [possible real name deleted]--recently posted the FAIR "newsletter" on MDD, and the only actual, human person connected to any of the information was our old buddy Scott Gordon. None of these other jokers want to be mentioned by name. This is both bizarre and hilarious to me. I guess we won't be hearing any more complaints from them about "anonymous" critics. They've gone into hiding themselves, and what this proves is that their old approach has utterly failed. And this will fail, too. Rather than trying to reconcile, and be decent, they've retreated into their little hole. They should have realized that they needed to change tactics, but they've opted instead to cower and re-trench.

[_Chap]

...
Man I love the study of mopologetics, ...

Someone once said 'I do like Aristotle. He's so nice and dry.'

Similarly one might say : 'I do like Mopologetics. It's so nice and bizarre.'

And the strange thing is that much of Mopologetic writing apparently seems to strike ordinary Mormons as being just as bizarre as it seems to critics. Can any other religious apologetic make that claim?

[_Aristotle Smith]

Stak,

I think you are seeing here a very Mormon phenomenon. For the most part, Mormons are still fighting the battles as they were defined in the 19th century. They still see Christianity as being what it was in the 1830's and 1840's, because that's what Joseph Smith History says. There is also a tendency to import views on the Bible from that period as well.

This is aided and abetted by a general tendency to import views on the Bible from the early to mid 20th century, the last time that any general authority interacted (at least publicly) with other Christians' views on the Bible. You see this in James Talmage's Jesus The Christ. If you look at his footnotes, it's mostly references to conservative English Bible scholars at the end of the 19th century. You also see this in J. Reuben Clark's Why the King James Bible?, which is largely cribbed from conservative American scholar's disdain for the Revised Standard Version and other attempts to modernize the English Bible. This is I think is the source for Mormons' mostly literal hermeneutic combined with an expectation that the Bible is entirely self-consistent: because those other groups also thought that.

This is why you get people putting forward the Book of Mormon's consistency as evidence for its historicity, they are still trying to fight those old battles and are still imbibing those old assumptions. This also sets up a nice "Heads I win, tails you lose" argument because now the next apologist can come along and argue that the inconsistencies also prove its historicity because modern scholarship now recognizes inconsistencies in the Bible. No matter what, the Book of Mormon is historical.

[_zeezrom]

Do Mormon scholars ever get tired of the Book of Mormon? I know I did after reading it 30 minutes a day for 20 years. God, what the hell?

[_SteelHead]

Internally consistent? Explain the Book of Mormon name: Timothy.

Why does a Greek name show up?

[_RayAgostini]

Internally consistent? Explain the Book of Mormon name: Timothy.

Why does a Greek name show up?

Perhaps you should peruse Book of Mormon/Anachronisms/Names?

Timothy

Critics have argued that "Timothy" is an unlikely Nephite name, since it is of Greek origin.

Hugh Nibley pointed out:

[R]emember...that in Lehi's day Palestine was swarming with Greeks, important Greeks. Remember, it was Egyptian territory [prior to being seized by Babylon] at that time and Egyptian culture. The Egyptian army, Necho's army, was almost entirely Greek mercenaries. We have inscriptions from that very time up the Nile at Aswan-inscriptions from the mercenaries of the Egyptian army, and they're all in Greek. So Greek was very common, and especially the name Timotheus.[7]

Compare: Lachoneus

It would thus not be at all surprising for Lehites or Mulekites to be familiar with the name "Timothy" (or a derivative), or even for a "Timothy" to have accompanied Mulek's party of immigrants.

Of possible interest also might be Consig's thread on MDDB (2006):

The Full Text Of The William Albright Letter.

Dear Mr. Howard:

Thanks for sending me a copy of the publication of Joseph Smith's Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar. There does appear to be evidence that Joseph Smith had studied some Egyptian. For one thing, he undoubtedly spent a great deal of money and effort in trying to master Egyptian, but, as you know, when the Book of Mormon was written, Egyptian had just begun to be deciphered and it is all the more surprising that there are two Egyptian names, Paanch and Pahor(an) which appear together in the Book of Mormon in close connection with a reference to the original language as being "Reformed Egyptian." I read an extremely interesting account by Fawn Brodie, No Man Knows My History, in chapter 12, in which she deals with Joseph Smith's tremendous efforts to learn languages. There were, however, as yet no Egyptian grammars or dictionaries in existence, so the best he could do was to follow books from the seventeenth and eighteenth centures (including some from the nineteenth) which treated the hieroglyphs very much as Horapollo did about the sixth century A.D.--as pure ideographs. Joseph Smith's translation does not, however, follow the pseudo-Neo-Platonism of Athanasius Kircher in the seventeenth century, but is a kind of quasi-biblical composition. In any case it has nothing whatever to do with the original Egyptian manuscript of a copy of the Book of the Dead.

The supposed digits have nothing whatever to do with the figures. You must remember that our digits go back to India through the Arabs and were not brought to Europe until less than a thousand years ago.

I do not for a moment believe that Joseph Smith was trying to mislead anyone; I accept the point of view of a Jewish friend of mine at the University of Utah, that he was a religious genius and that he was quite honest in believing that he really could decipher these ancient texts. But to insist that he did is really doing a disservice to the cause of a great church and its gifted founder.

Cordially,

(signature)

W. F. Albright

[_Darth J]

Perhaps you should peruse Book of Mormon/Anachronisms/Names?

Timothy

Critics have argued that "Timothy" is an unlikely Nephite name, since it is of Greek origin.

Hugh Nibley pointed out:

[R]emember...that in Lehi's day Palestine was swarming with Greeks, important Greeks. Remember, it was Egyptian territory [prior to being seized by Babylon] at that time and Egyptian culture. The Egyptian army, Necho's army, was almost entirely Greek mercenaries. We have inscriptions from that very time up the Nile at Aswan-inscriptions from the mercenaries of the Egyptian army, and they're all in Greek. So Greek was very common, and especially the name Timotheus.[7]

Compare: Lachoneus

It would thus not be at all surprising for Lehites or Mulekites to be familiar with the name "Timothy" (or a derivative), or even for a "Timothy" to have accompanied Mulek's party of immigrants.

I've always been impressed by the influence that Greek language and culture had in the pre-Columbian Americas.