Possible Modern Source for the Book of Mormon

[_Nightlion]

Man! What the heck were you guys so scared of that you had to start this panic. eh?

Call out a boogieman and run around screaming. Wow!

[_Quasimodo]

Maybe 30 years from now the future apologists will deny that the Book of Mormon was ever considered doctrine. The whole keystone of our religion thing was just opinion.

I'm wondering if there will be any apologists in 30 years. My guess is that they will have given up long before then. They seem to lose ground every month. How long before there is nothing left to defend?

[_canadaduane]

If reverse-engineering the Book of Mormon, where would you place this find as source material?

Alma 53?

We did an internal textual analysis between The Late War and The Book of Mormon and found that the strongest matches seem to occur from about Alma 20 to about Helaman 6:



The "blockiness" of this image is due to the fact that we split the two books into 4,000 word segments, but shifted the comparison window every 2,000 words so that we could pinpoint hotspots if needed.

[_canadaduane]

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.

Adding the Bible to this graph wouldn't make sense, since each book on the plot has had its biblical content explicitly removed. We *could* make another graph with biblical content included, but so many works from that period are influenced by the Bible that it adds a great deal of noise to the signal.

Other pseudo-biblical works would be very interesting on this particular plot, however. If you have any suggestions, and have a text file to send me, I could add it.

[_Abaddon]

There are numerous references to destroying robbers in the Book of Mormon and none in the Bible. While there are no doubt other potential sources (and I wouldn't make the claim that the robbers in the Book of Mormon are solely based on this one passage) it is interesting that both the Late War and the Book of Mormon speak of going against the band of robbers and destroying them.

You're on a roll, there, Hasa!

Keep up the good work. Before you know it, you'll be winning grants to travel to Mesoamerica to find the ancient homeland of the real authors of Hunt's history of the War of 1812.

Literal LOL from me right there....hahaha

[_Gadianton]

Anybody who knows anything about warfare, ancient or modern, who understands the land area and logistical issues involved when even a few thousand men engage in hand to hand combat (let alone a million or more), and understands the probability that, after such a series of battles, only two men would remain alive (one from each side, no less), must see this story as simply and utterly ridiculous.

One of those devastating points that would never had occurred to me. Interestingly, there is at least one credentialed expert on medieval war with a book published on the subject who argues for the credibility of the Book of Mormon battles. I wonder how many battles he's studied resulting in a lone survivor from each side.

[_The Mighty Builder]

This is all fun and everything, but the Bottom line of it all is that the Book of Mormon IS NOT Historical.

There are no Jaradites, Nephites, Lamanites, Anti-Nephite whateverites, NOTHING! No Civilizations, No Ruins, No Languages, No DNA, No Written or Oral Traditions, NOTHING.

The Mormons can shout all they want about the Truthfulness, Historicity, Soon to be Found Evidence, etc. all they want. It will NEVER HAPPEN.

They are like little kids in a bathtub who Fart and think they're in a Jacuzzi tub. They are the source of the truth and it stinks

[_SteelHead]

Is this the fastest developing thread of all time?

[_Kishkumen]

The answer Kish meant was "I use a 12 gauge deer slug."

I think I used to know that back in the days when I lived at the foot of the Shenandoah Mountains. It wasn't that I was a hunter; I just came within a hair's breadth of joining the Future Farmers of America. I lived in the sticks.

[_Kishkumen]

This book (and I can't believe I had never heard of it before the other day, and had never heard of Rick Grunder's work on it, either--I guess I am a lazy and slothful apostate, lol) strikes at the heart and soul of Book-of-Mormon apologetics. All of those things that "Joseph simply could not have known" were, apparently, known by this Hunt feller.

Yes, I think that this is a likely outcome of this discovery. But, frankly, I never understood why anyone would lend much credibility to the notion that we can reliably get to the underlying language of a supposed translation when we have no access to the source document and can't even say what language it was supposed to have been written in.

2 Yea, I make a record in the language of my father, which consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians.

Given this cue, the most natural thing to do is to go looking for Hebraisms.