Possible Modern Source for the Book of Mormon

[Guest]

So Sic et Non has drawn our attention to a wonderful parody of discussions like the one taking place on this thread:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson/2013/10/was-the-book-of-mormon-plagiarized-from-walt-whitmans-leaves-of-grass.html#disqus_thread

http://www.jefflindsay.com/bomsource.shtml

It is really quite funny.

And I think it implicitly proves that any book recognized as scripture could not be plagiarized, especially if that plagiarism involves pilfering a source that postdates the plagiarism.

After all, that would take a miracle, which is the last thing we want to concede when it comes to the issue of translation by the gift and power of God.

[_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.

What do I win?

[_Sammy Jankins]

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.

What do I win?

Wow you nailed it.

It also appeared on r/latterdaysaints so I suppose this is the response for now.

[_Sammy Jankins]

It's just baffling that they dismiss this offhand.

Yeah, the book is only from the same time period and the same place.

We should start following the example of the apologists and widen our nets looking for parallels. Same continent? Close enough. Languages that existed in time period? Good enough. Tapir? Similar enough.

[_Gadianton]

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.

What do I win?

wow. Good call. You win an all-expenses-paid trip to the Island of Britain. You will fly in luxury on the white wings of the university Gulfstream and stay in the most curious of accommodations for six days and nights, and even the next day thereafter.

[Guest]

If the experience I just had is any indicator, the greatest impact the Late War parallels may have on the Church may be its use in preventing the Church from growing. I showed a non-Mormon just a couple of parrallels and he laughed out loud. Then shook his head. When a simple-to-understand explanation of the Johnsons' analysis is presented along with sample parallels on mormonthink.com, it could be quite impactful on those researching the Church. It is one thing to have an obscure, rarely-mentioned book like the Book of Abraham be a fraud. It is quite another to show an obvious source used in the production of the Keystone of the religion.

And what of the Mormon Studies program at Virginia and other places? Imagine the whispers and giggles over this. If a program is to be taken seriously, it will have to include a rigorous to the issues presented by Late War.

[_mms]

Elder Holland's comments from his PBS interview came to mind as I was considering this issue, so thought I would share them for any interested:

Q:The origins of the Book of Mormon have been criticized. There have been counterclaims to its origins. ... What are the counterclaims that you've taken seriously?

A:... The Book of Mormon is ... a matter of faith, but it's there. It's readable. It sits on the table, and it won't go away. ... For me it is ... another testament of the divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ and the single most [important] piece of evidence, the declaration that Joseph Smith was a prophet. ...

I've thought about it a lot, read it often. ... I wrote a book about the Book of Mormon, partly just because I wanted my own conviction, my testimony, to be in print, even if only for my children's sake. I dismiss out of hand the early criticism that somehow this was a book that Joseph Smith wrote. The only thing more miraculous than an angel providing him with those plates and him translating them by divine inspiration would be that he sat down and wrote it with a ballpoint pen and a spiral notebook. There is no way, in my mind, with my understanding of his circumstances, his education, ... [he] could have written that book. My fourth great-grandfather -- this goes back to my mother's pioneer side of the family -- said when he heard of the Book of Mormon in England, he walked away from the service saying no good man would have written that, and no bad man could have written it. And for me, that's still the position.

So I disregard the idea that Joseph Smith could have written it. I certainly disregard that somebody more articulate or more experienced in ecclesiastical matters could have written it, like [Smith's close friend and adviser] Sidney Rigdon. Rigdon doesn't even come to the church until the Book of Mormon is out and in circulation for eight or nine months. ...

Now, in terms of more modern theories, there are those who say it's more mythical literature and spiritual, and not literal. That doesn't work for me. I don't understand that, and I can't go very far with that, because Joseph Smith said there were plates, and he said there was an angel. And if there weren't plates and there wasn't an angel, I have a bigger problem than whether the Book of Mormon is rich literature. ... I have to go with what the prophet said about the book, about its origins, about the literalness of the plates, the literalness of the vision -- and then the product speaks for itself.

I don't think we're through examining the depth, the richness, the profundity, the complexity, all of the literary and historical and religious issues that go into that book. I think we're still young at doing that. But the origins for me are the origins that the prophet Joseph said: a set of plates, given by an angel, translated by the gift and power of God. ...

Q: [You say] there are stark choices in beliefs about the origins of the book. Explain why there's no middle way.

A: ... If someone can find something in the Book of Mormon, anything that they love or respond to or find dear, I applaud that and say more power to you. That's what I find, too. And that should not in any way discount somebody's liking a passage here or a passage there or the whole idea of the book, but not agreeing to its origin, its divinity. ...

I think you'd be as aware as I am that that we have many people who are members of the church who do not have some burning conviction as to its origins, who have some other feeling about it that is not as committed to foundational statements and the premises of Mormonism. But we're not going to invite somebody out of the church over that any more than we would anything else about degrees of belief or steps of hope or steps of conviction. ... We would say: "This is the way I see it, and this is the faith I have; this is the foundation on which I'm going forward. If I can help you work toward that I'd be glad to, but I don't love you less; I don't distance you more; I don't say you're unacceptable to me as a person or even as a Latter-day Saint if you can't make that step or move to the beat of that drum." ... We really don't want to sound smug. We don't want to seem uncompromising and insensitive.

... There are some things we can't give away. There are some foundational stones. If you don't have those, you don't have anything. So the First Vision, the Book of Mormon, those are pretty basic things. ...

http://www.pbs.org/Mormons/interviews/holland.html

[_Shulem]

If the experience I just had is any indicator, the greatest impact the Late War parallels may have on the Church may be its use in preventing the Church from growing. I showed a non-Mormon just a couple of parrallels and he laughed out loud. Then shook his head. When a simple-to-understand explanation of the Johnsons' analysis is presented along with sample parallels on mormonthink.com, it could be quite impactful on those researching the Church. It is one thing to have an obscure, rarely-mentioned book like the Book of Abraham be a fraud. It is quite another to show an obvious source used in the production of the Keystone of the religion.

And what of the Mormon Studies program at Virginia and other places? Imagine the whispers and giggles over this. If a program is to be taken seriously, it will have to include a rigorous to the issues presented by Late War.

Thank you for sharing your story and testimony of how this new find is going to help retard future growth of the church. This new witness of the Book of Mormon is a dead ringer and it will sound true in the ears of all honest and good people everywhere inasmuch as they will see with clarity that the Book of Mormon is truly the product of thievery and that its author was nothing more than a dirty rat pretending to have the ability to translate ancient languages.

I'd like to bear my testimony that I know the Book of Mormon is a book of nonsense and is utterly not true. I know this with every intelligent part of my working brain. I also know the apologists are fools that have through their own folly shut down critical thinking mechanisms of the their own brains. The apologists think backward and have wasted their ability and talents in defending lies. It's so sad. But those are the facts.

Now as I say, never mind the apologists -- they are just church worms. They aren't the real players. It's the General Authorities who ultimately must answer for the crimes of Mormonism and all the damage this rotten church has caused. This book needs to be dropped into the lap of each one of those lying lapdogs and a general call for the prophets to answer the charges of Mormon plagiarism.

Paul O

[_Mayan Elephant]

i have not read all 31 pages of this thread, so this point has probably already been made - this must be just what that midgley guy is looking for to finally smear grant palmer for good. it wasn't the gold pot, it was hunt that inspired Mormon origins. midgley is vindicated, lets move his ass back to the MI and make him a seventy in april.

[_Gadianton]

Here's a fun one that Rick Grunder makes easy since he lists all of the dates from the Late War. For this post, it isn't the way the dates are written that is interesting but the numbers themselves. Suppose that Vincenzo de Francesca had discovered both the Book of Mormon and Late War in a garbage bin with the cover and title page burned off and he wanted to find out which of them were true, both of them bearing a powerful witness but not having the ability to research either.

Well, there's this ancient article by RFMer Duwayne Anderson attempting to refute the Book of Mormon based on dates, and while a bit of an overkill to make the point, it's kind of interesting nonetheless.

http://lds-mormon.com/numbersinthebookofmormon.shtml#f2

The idea is that the human brain is a bad randomizer, which is among other things, why password-cracking software can be effective even when you think you're being really creative. He says that the days of the month when (uncorrelated) notable things happen in history should be random and gives several examples. Well, looking at the Book of Mormon, he sees that all the dates in the Book of Mormon happen at the beginning of the month, suggesting they are contrived. Here is his list of Book of Mormon dates:

day--month

1---1
2---1
4---1
5---2
3---7
4---7
12--10
10--11

If there are 30 days in the month, then you'd expect the average day something happens on to be around 15. His model says the average Book of Mormon day is 3.4 standard deviations from this mean, giving it a 1/2000 chance of being a random sample from a real distribution of historical events. Somebody likely just made them up.

Now for all the suspicion its stylistic gusto raises for a critic, taking just the first 8 dates mentioned in the Late War, to be fair:

1---6
12--7
16--8
19--8
4---10
13--10
25--10
1---1

These days come out 1.34 standard deviations per his model and more or less plausible as real dates that things happened on, despite the possible fabrications for how things happened.