DarkHelmet wrote: The Book of Abraham is probably the single most obvious fraud in Mormonism. We have pieces of the source document. We have the Egyptian alphabet and grammar. The facsimiles and Joseph's explanations. It's a slam dunk case. It's all over the Internet, yet apologists have no problems coming up with crazy theories and TBMs don't care anyway. If something that obvious has no impact on TBMs, this Hunt book won't either.
I think as critics we expect too much when new evidence against the church pops up. The LDS church has always been considered a fraud by the vast majority. Most people saw through Joseph Smith from the very beginning. Those who know it's a fraud never joined or have already left, for the most part. It will always be around, and there will always be a small number of people who buy it. For those who want to see the church disproved, it's not going to happen because it has never been proved in the court of public opinion. Mormons are not a part of the world dialog and never have been. How many people believe in Bigfoot or UFOs? Probably more than .02% of the population.
I mean, in terms of methodology, when the "translation" (and subsequent redaction) process occurred, at one point Joseph turned to Isaiah for a portion, then Matthew, and at some point, if this method has merit, to Hunt's work.
SteelHead wrote:I've got to say that between barges sealed with pitch that discuss windows, and a cataclysmic earthquake producing darkness...... I am seeing some really strong thematic correlation. Add that to the stippling warriors and the curious workmanship, and the 1/2 dozen other hits.......
There are orders of magnitude more correlation in hits for this, than anything produced in defense of the Book of Abraham.
Someone needs to compile a side by side running list of all the things mentioned in both books and then we can clearly see how Joe stole his ideas from the Late War, which was written first. I think this running list would delight the eyes of the critics and put a pit in the stomachs of the faithful. Just look how they compare!
DrW wrote:Where in the world did you pick up the phrase "cracking on like smoke and oakum"?
(The expression is actually smoke'n oakum, I believe.)
Anyway, pretty arcane stuff. Do you happen to remember in what context you heard or read this old wooden sailing ship expression?
I certainly do: Patrick O'Brian sometimes used it as a euphemism for risking spar and canvas to gain a knot or two. (A devotion to O'Brian is one of my great vices.) I figured maybe an old salt like you would appreciate the gratuitously arcane expression, as well as its equally arcane double-meaning in the context of repairing leaks at sea. :)
Phaedrus Ut wrote:I think there are other things that resemble the language of Book of Mormon much better than Hunt's book. That would be the Book of Abraham, the D&C, and Joseph's language in the JST. So in my opinion this text is running a distant 4th place in texts with similar language to the Book of Mormon.
I think that's a fairly accurate assessment. Here is a scatter plot visualization of our results:
We have 2 "The late war" entries in there because we cleaned up some of the OCR errors in one and wanted to see how much impact these were having on matches.
It would be interesting to see the King James Version of the Bible plotted on the graph, and to take other pseudo-biblical works to see how they fared.
Is the methodology good? Craig C appears to be arguing that other methods are more accurate for assessing authorship. Could the methods that Jockers et al used be applied to these works?
Edited to add: I think the similarities go beyond word and phrase analysis as Grunder points out in his article.
"It's a little like the Confederate Constitution guaranteeing the freedom to own slaves. Irony doesn't exist for bigots or fanatics." Maksutov
This thread is crazy....I stop reading to get some work done...turned around and its grown an additional 12 pages....glad I caught it when it first appeared on Sunday or I'd have never been able to catch up...
"...The official doctrine of the LDS Church is a Global Flood" - BCSpace
"...What many people call sin is not sin." - Joseph Smith
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away" - Phillip K. Dick
“The meaning of life is that it ends" - Franz Kafka
1) Provide evidence Joseph Smith Jr had Hunt's book in his possession. 2) Provide motivation for the use of this source document to achieve the stated goal of reconciling the hearts of fathers and sons. 3) Demonstrate the influence of Hunt's work on 1 and 2 Nephi. 4) Demonstrate the influence of Hunt's work on the pre-Columbian visitation of Jesus to the Americas. 5) Explain the influence of Hunt's work on the desire to "restore" ancient ordinances.
