robuchan wrote:The most difficult apologist to deal with IMHO is Brant Gardner. Not because anything he says is compelling, but because his theories completely eliminate the ability to prove the Book of Mormon false. Book of Mormon is a loose translation of a record written by prophets who were from a completely lost civilization, neither Hebrew nor Mayan. Of course the language is in Joseph Smith's 19th century perspective and you'll find all kinds of matching source material. But the ideas and stories he is conveying, though told in 19th century English are from this lost civilization, which incidentally we don't have any archaeological evidence for and won't (and shouldn't!). Brant would say to this research that this is exactly what he would expect to find. F***ing brilliant.
But, what, really, is there to deal with here?
I like Brant. He is an interesting and smart guy. But the very act of deliberately reducing Mormon antiquity to the unfalsifiable should raise red flags for anyone.
"Petition wasn’t meant to start a witch hunt as I’ve said 6000 times." ~ Hanna Seariac, LDS apologist
mms wrote:And you think the book may have just been in his mind? It was right there next to him. Probably with others, but I cannot be convinced with all of the similar passages that it was not right there next to him.
I don't know. Some people have amazing recall. We don't know enough about Joseph Smith's exposure to the book. There are a lot of questions that remain unanswered. I am not comfortable saying that he definitely had to have Hunt open next to him as he wrote his notes for his own manuscript.
"Petition wasn’t meant to start a witch hunt as I’ve said 6000 times." ~ Hanna Seariac, LDS apologist
Kishkumen wrote:But, what, really, is there to deal with here?
I like Brant. He is an interesting and smart guy. But the very act of deliberately reducing Mormon antiquity to the unfalsifiable should raise red flags for anyone.
Agreed. Brant is a great guy and very sincere. I don't find his arguments compelling for a number of reasons, but that's neither here nor there. In terms of his apologetics, I think he's done what you have to do with the Book of Mormon. Given the complete lack of external evidence for the book, you have to find ways to reduce the conflict between the archaeological record and what the book describes. That technique raises red flags with me, but I don't see that there's any other option.
Kishkumen wrote:Up until now, most of us were unaware of an early nineteenth century work that bore this close of a resemblance to the Book of Mormon. I am confident that it poses a challenge to certain arguments made in favor of the work's antiquity, as should be apparent by observations about Hebraisms in this thread.
Obviously, people will take from this what they want. Thus far apologists have been able to adapt to knowledge of various 19th-century influences on Joseph Smith. Those who still maintain it is ancient may press on with their researches into that hypothesis.
yes, apologists with a secular Mormon Studies type approach will be able to absorb this; old style FARMS guys who spent decades selling chiamus etc. to the rubes, not so much.
robuchan wrote:I read a couple times in this thread, reference to chiasmus in the Hunt book? Link?
i believe it's covered in the Grunder article, but i was only using chiamus as a stand in for all the over-reaching linguistic and parallelism work they've done over the years.
Last edited by Guest on Tue Oct 22, 2013 3:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I think the Late War will be devastating to Book of Mormon authorship word print studies like Jockers, Criddle. If the Late War was included in their analysis, I think their methods would have almost certainly predicted that the Book of Mormon was written by Hunt ... and we all know that isn't true.
