Possible Modern Source for the Book of Mormon

[_EAllusion]

My best guess for the main apologetic to come out quickly will be a refutation of a strawman plagiarism hypothesis. I'd give it 5/2 odds.

[_AlmaBound]

If the similarities to Joseph's own life found in Mormon 1 and 1 Nephi and the obvious borrowings from Isaiah don't cause a second thought about 19th century source material for the book, due to assessed coincidence or other reasoning, I wonder how much this finding would cause additional wavering.

I can hear the "parallelomania" calls already. Leaves of Grass and all that.

[_Runtu]

I'd further add that this work is similar enough to the Book of Mormon that it is a handy example to make a mockery of some of the Book of Mormon historicity apologetics by providing a 19c counterexample. It shows how silly and grasping those apologetics were in the first place. I see that isn't lost on some people in this thread right now. It would by an interesting find for the world of Mormon apologia for that reason alone.

It does do some damage to some "old chestnuts."

Chiamus? Check
"And it came to pass"? Check
Cognate accusative? Check

This could get interesting.

[_MrStakhanovite]

As Kuhn says, "It makes a great deal of sense to ask which paradigm is better." Are the lost Romans in Spalding's Manuscript Found a good parallel for Lehi's group from First Temple Jerusalem? Better requires comparison. None of the 19th century approaches I have read impress me as "better." Only rarely do they attempt a serious comparison, and never, in my experience, a genuinely comprehensive one. And since no two paradigms solve all the same problems, we also have to decide for ourselves "which problems are more significant to have solved." At stake is which paradigm are we going to use to approach unsolved problems.

My God this man has drunk deeply from the Kuhnian waters. He can’t even bring himself to say paradigms are true or false, but has to put the word “better” in scare quotes. I wonder what Kevin thought of DCP incompetent rant against “Postmodernism” last FAIR debacle?

Here is a little gem from the master himself:

Perhaps there is some other way of salvaging the notion of “truth” for application to whole theories, but this one will not do. There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like “really there”; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its “real” counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle.

'The Structures of Scientific Revolutions' Page 205 (Postscript)

[_Shulem]

The path has been made easier for the whole church to crawl over the Book of Mormon and trample right over it. Pretty soon they won't even be able to give those books away! They will make good Christmas yule logs.

[_EAllusion]

If the similarities to Joseph's own life found in Mormon 1 and 1 Nephi and the obvious borrowings from Isaiah don't cause a second thought about 19th century source material for the book, due to assessed coincidence or other reasoning, I wonder how much this finding would cause additional wavering.

I can hear the "parallelomania" calls already. Leaves of Grass and all that.

David Wright's work not only demonstrates the dependency of the Book of Mormon on the KJV, but also provides a compelling case for the author inventing scripture in response to peculiarities in the KJV translation. He put together a pretty devastating argument. People still believe in the Book of Mormon as translated ancient history.

The lost 116 pages incident is about as caught red-handed of a moment as you could hope for, and that obviously is not a hurdle too great to overcome for many Mormons. I don't think many outright hoaxes have that big of a red flag hanging over them, and this is not an obscure factoid. Religion is funny like that. There are plenty of already articulated good reasons in isolation or together to take a skeptical attitude towards the Book of Mormon, yet people press on. If anyone thinks this is a nail in some proverbial coffin, I think they are being unrealistic.

[_Runtu]

David Wright's work not only demonstrates the dependency of the Book of Mormon on the KJV, but also provides a compelling case for the author inventing scripture in response to peculiarities in the KJV translation. He put together a pretty devastating argument. People still believe in the Book of Mormon as translated ancient history.

The lost 116 pages incident is about as caught red-handed of a moment as you could hope for, and that obviously is not a hurdle too great to overcome for many Mormons. I don't think many outright hoaxes have that big of a red flag hanging over them, and this is not an obscure factoid. Religion is funny like that. There are plenty of already articulated good reasons in isolation or together to take a skeptical attitude towards the Book of Mormon, yet people press on. If anyone thinks this is a nail in some proverbial coffin, I think they are being unrealistic.

Yep. What I will say is that it the best sign that the Johnsons are onto something is the reaction among some people from outright hostility to mocking of the "Holy Grail" attitude of us benighted critics. But it won't last. Pretty soon the apologists will respond with "already dealt with" when it comes up. as far as I know, there hasn't been a decent response to David Wright, and as you say, the 116 pages fiasco is a pretty obvious sign that things weren't on the up and up, but it doesn't matter in the long run. This is a matter of religious belief, and faith will always Trump anything we moral degenerates can come up with.

[_Shulem]

I can just imagine the expression on Holland's face when he gets the news! The man isn't going to have a thing to say. The Spirit of the Lord won't be uttering a thing in that very moment.



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Elder Holland resigns from the church to spread the news!



Paul O

[Guest]

Here is some phrasing shared by LATE WAR and The Book of Mormon which (on a cursory search) is not used in the KJV Old or New Testaments:

LATE WAR, XI:17, Pg. 40

17 And the army of Columbia went into winter quarters ; for the earth was covered with snow, and the waters of the great lakes, on the borders of which they had pitched their tents, were congealed.

Book of Mormon, Alma 51:32

32 And it came to pass that they did harass them, insomuch that they did slay them even until it was dark. And it came to pass that Teancum and his men did pitch their tents in the borders of the land Bountiful; and Amalickiah did pitch his tents in the borders on the beach by the seashore, and after this manner were they driven.

People in the KJV Bible definitely pitched tents in, at, by, beside and between places, but they don't seem to be described as having done so "on the borders" or "in the borders" of places. Maybe that's a 19th century thing, or a non-KJV thing?

-JV

[_sock puppet]

So, how much of the language of the Book of Mormon was just common vernacular for the time Joseph was writing?

I looked for a couple of the 4 word strings in the link from the Johnson's.

With regard to 'wound their delicate minds' (from Jacob 2) - This term was used in an English travel document from the period.

'Inflict a deep wound on his delicate mind' p277 A Picturesque Promenade Round Dorking, in Surrey - John Timbs, Jan 1, 1823

At what point do the similarities in the two documents become statistically significant? How much weight should be given to thematic likenesses and how much to word and sentence analysis?

There are other writings by JSJr. Letters, talks written down, etc. This would create a JSJr baseline, sans Hunt. Then, the Book of Mormon bearing more of a similarity to Hunt's the Late War than JSJr's baseline would point to the Late War being a loose template for the Book of Mormon.