Sethbag wrote:Aristotle, would you mind giving a short synopsis of Maklelan's ideas, which you say the church won't be too happy with? I haven't paid enough attention to him to realize that he's got unorthodox ideas.
Sorry I never saw this one Sethbag.
The funny thing about maklelan's ideas are that they are pretty much mainstream for critical biblical scholarship. For example:
Documentary Hypothesis: mak supports at least some version of the Documentary Hypothesis. There are lots of versions of this, but they all are going to have two things in common. 1) The five books of Moses are the product of weaving together at least three (the standard theory has four) different texts that told the story of the early history of Israel and 2) The final weaving together of this stuff into five separate books took place no earlier than the Babylonian exile. Since Nephi and company left before this, it's odd that they steal scriptures from Laban containing "the five books of Moses" (1 Nephi 5:11) before they were five books.
3 Isaiahs: mak also supports multiple Isaiah authorship. This is a standard argument against the historicity of the Book of Mormon. Nephi and others quote from 2 Isaiah, which is also written during the Babylonian captivity.
Textual Criticism: mak's specialty is text criticism. However I have noticed a tendency for Mormon apologists to avoid text critical analysis of the Mormon scripture, it just doesn't work out for them. The end result is always the same, text critical analysis shows that Mormon scripture was copied or draws heavily from texts that are later than the purported dates for Mormon scripture. If you want a highly technical, but well written, example of this:
http://signaturebookslibrary.org/?p=10171
The problem for someone with a specialty in text criticism is that text criticism is as close as you can get to an exact science in biblical scholarship, there just isn't much room for BS and throwing sand in people's eyes. In short, if you want to go to war for LDS scripture, don't choose text criticism as your main weapon, but that's the weapon mak brings to the battle.