Liahona Irreantum Rabbanah deseret

[_Themis]

As stated in the Kevin Barney article I cited before, virtually everything about the nature of God revealed through Joseph Smith has now become the dominant consensus among Bible scholars: (1) God created the cosmos from pre-existing chaos, not ex nihilo. (2) There is a plurality of gods. (3) The Gods met in a council. (4) Jehovah was the son of Elohim. A (4) God is embodied is still a minority position, but is gaining steam.

One of the objections here is that polytheism was nothing new. But imputing it to the Bible was.

I am not certain what you think the dominate position among Bible scholars is. That early groups in the middle-east believed in multiple Gods is nothing new. Joseph was a great borrower of other ideas, and we see this here as well. Joseph was studying Hebrew among other things, and we can actually find some of these ideas in the Bible. Interesting that the nature of God in the Book of Mormon and early church was in line with trinitarian ideas. It wasn't tell later that Joseph came out with different ideas. Given the changing aspect of Joseph's first vision and changing doctrine in line with it, one has to wonder about the reality of the first vision.

This is what the father of Biblical archaeology said:
http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/195 ... +%2Bletter

I cannot see the site due to immature rules of the site on how many page views. I know you can get around it, but not that interested to try.

http://maxwellinstitute.BYU.edu/publica ... =11&id=301
http://maxwellinstitute.BYU.edu/publica ... m=6&id=369

There are a whole bunch more.

Lets hope there are better. He brings up the name Nephi, but it really is a stretch. I would be embarrassed to have my name on that article. They are again guilty of trying to see similarities or parallels. It's a dangerous game, and should not even be attempted here. It is a stretch to fit Nephi to nfr, and then fit the use of such a common word good to Nephi. It could help a little if the Book of Mormon defined the name Nephi as good, but then only a little since nfr doesn't seem much of a match for Nephi. Could we not play this game easily with other names or words to other languages? I thought this was funny from a link some gave in another site. I think it states what I see wrong here.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/undeniable-proof-that-the-walking-dead-and-toy-story-have-th

I agree that if you make up a bunch of Semitic-sounding names, some of them will turn out right by chance. And this is the same game critics play with place names in the Great Lakes area. But many Egyptian and Hebrew names in the Book of Mormon were used in a way in which it's clear the author knew their definitions in Hebrew. For example:

I would think if we are going to be skeptical of the great lakes we should be skeptical of this as well. Some on both sides play this game to often without really being able to show in objective ways how it is significant to what they are claiming.

You seem open to new evidence, but most ex-Mormons are not. They dismiss whatever the MI says. The bulk of (though by no means all) of MI's material is not peer-reviewed [though then I don't know of any critics material that is either]. But that ex-Mormons refuse to evaluate their arguments on their own merits is very telling.

I am not ex-Mormon. Maybe due to my education I gleaned that if one wants to get to best picture of an issue they will need to study all sides. Many will not read what they deem anti material, but they will always be left with a less accurate picture of the issue if they do, just the same if some EV will not read material other then what is provided for them from EV friendly sources.

[Guest]

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[_Themis]

Yeah I'm pretty certain.

I was asking what you specifically felt certain about. It might help if you give one thing you think Joseph knew that no one else knew in his time.

But that it is what is taught in the Bible did not become known until archaeological discoveries surfaced in Syria mid 1900s.

Joseph borrows heavily on the Bible. What I am suggesting is that the ideas Joseph came up with are almost all from his environment around him. What apologists try to suggest is things Joesph couldn't have known. One example would be a good place to start.

A generation ago, when I was a graduate student, biblical scholars were nearly unanimous in thinking that monotheism had been predominant in ancient Israelite religion from the beginning—not just as an "ideal," but as the reality. Today all that has changed. Virtually all mainstream scholars (and even a few conservatives) acknowledge that true monotheism emerged only in the period of the exile in Babylon in the 6th century B.C.E., as the canon of the Hebrew Bible was taking shape. . . .
I have suggested, along with most scholars, that the emergence of monotheism—of exclusive Yahwism—was largely a response to the tragic experience of the exile

So? Most scholars think people like Moses and Abraham are only mythical figures. I am not seeing how Joseph's ideas were what the early people of these regions believed. It's probably not a road you want to go down.

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

I am not seeing how this helps Joseph. We know he didn't understand Egyptian from his utter failure with the Book of Abraham. Again we seem to be ignoring how these names are first matches to Egyptian names. If I were to create some new names how many could I relate to Egyptian names, and should it be significant that I had some supernatural knowledge when I do, or would you just consider it expected from such a large source of material that many connections will be made.

http://maxwellinstitute.BYU.edu/publica ... =11&id=301
http://maxwellinstitute.BYU.edu/publica ... m=6&id=369

Maybe someone is embarrassed. :) It seems the links no longer contain the articles.

f you read the footnotes more closely the NFR evolved to NFY is based on external evidence. He didn't try to fit it in.

I still don't see it as much of a match, and what time I spent looking up nfr did not result in it being defined as good. It did seem very related to the concept of Beauty. It was also used in many names (I could see why). Good is such a common word, and many words in English mean the same thing. How many relate to good? Good is a concept that relates to almost everything. Good and bad. Love and hate, like and dislike, beauty and ugly, etc. I would hope you see the major problems here. The Book of Mormon never identifies Nephi as meaning good or attaches itself to the name. This is an apologetic stretch. They are just as guilty as those critics you bring up with things like Great lake names in the Book of Mormon.

Like I've already said, unlike the correlation with place names in the Great Lakes, the names in the Book of Mormon do not just correlate with ancient names, they are used in a way in which it's clear the author is new of its meaning.

So far not with the example you have shown.