Possible Modern Source for the Book of Mormon

[_sunstoned]

Is this the fastest developing thread of all time?

As of Tuesday at 11:00 P.M Mountain Time, there have been 11,383 views. There are also over 117 guests and members currently on this forum. I would say this Last War/Book of Mormon topic has stirred up some interest.

[_moksha]

The start of Chapter 3 was rather catchy: "And it came to pass..."

This needs to be reviewed post haste by the Mormon Interpreter. They need to put their lumberjacks on it.

[_Shulem]

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

Most everything in the Book of Mormon is recorded to have taken place on days 1-4. I guess Joe Smith liked those days best. And it shows!

Paul O

[_Michael]

I hope this isn't the so-called October Surprise. If it is it is underwhelming to say the least.

From Tom Phillips posted today:

http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1058872

It is true I have been extremely busy this month on the matter some have named the 'October Surprise'. Due to this it was impossible for me to attend the Exmo Conference which I dearly wanted to attend. Not just to speak but to meet the wonderful people like yourself, whom I have met on the boards. The obstacles I am facing were quite unexpected, have taken more time and attention and delayed the outcome. Some of those obstacles are 'political' and there have been attempts by highly influential Mormons to stop me.

This is the main, though not the only reason, for me having to bail out of the Conference.

Be assured, however, that I will survive and I will take the fight to them, regardless of what they try. Truth Will Prevail.

[_Mary]

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.

Thanks, for the response and for reasons for excluding the Bible, which make sense. I'm not a statistician and am just trying to understand the significance of your research. Nevo, in the thread referred to a non definitive list of pseudo biblical works.

[_Mayan Elephant]

i can hardly keep up with this thread. damn this has more gas on the fire than a good old fashioned dehlin v. peterson thread.

i have read a bunch of the late war stuff and only a bit of the napoleon book. i agree with what others have said on the thread about the sentiment it leaves. i have joked about palmer's book and how midgley attacked palmer for what he wrote. when i first read palmer's book it rocked me. we have talked about that book here many times. without going back and looking up who said what about it, i think i recall kishkumen and others saying the book and the logic was less than spectacular. i agree with that, and i think it has many flaws, but it was the tone of the book that carried the torch. the simple strings of logic, together with palmer's bio, gave it some weight that sent me searching deeper and deeper for information that drew me out of the church. was Origins enough to break my shelf? absolutely not. but it was certainly written well enough to keep me going. it was not a thousand pages of weird twists around the facts like bushman's book. it was simple and appropriate for me at that time, and weighty enough to get midgley and his ilk to lose their crap over it.

hunt's book is not slam dunk evidence that joseph smith was a fraud or a plagiarist. that is not the effing point. the point is that we have, in this book, an example of then-contemporary writing that is very similar to the Book of Mormon. we have something that has elephants, stripling warriorish warriors and all sorts of ripped off terms that appear 12 years later in the Book of Mormon. hunt's book doesn't prove that smith did not dictate his book while sniffing glue out of a hat. it just says that there was some similar crap to read long before smith gave his crap a title and binding.

like palmer's Origins, it is a very basic and simple piece of the puzzle for anyone who's interest can be piqued. it is not a bullet, it is not a gun. it is just very fascinating. and, like midgley's horrific and ugly response to Origins, the apologists response to this book will be more damning than the actual book.

[_lostindc]

i can hardly keep up with this thread. damn this has more gas on the fire than a good old fashioned dehlin v. peterson thread.

agreed, this is a very difficult thread to keep up on. A lot of developments. I am hoping someone from Cassius U will summarize the best findings for us lay folks.

[_Kishkumen]

Regarding 19th century influence, The Late War obviously isn't needed to point that out, and the problem is more than the Book of Mormon being written with 19th century literary style and form. The 19th century content in the Book of Mormon covers protestant theology, post-revolutionary notions of liberty and government, moundbuilder myth including (incorrect) ideas about the origin of Native Americans, etc. These all fit Smith's time and place well but are highly anachronistic to pre-Columbian mesoamerica. That's the backbone of the work. It's not something that can be layered in translation without the translation not having to have much of a relationship with the underlying text. Such a proposed source document might as well be an ancient recipe for lentil soup.

Well put, EA. One of the greatest contradictions in the apologetic discussion of Book of Mormon origins has been this absolute demand that any person forwarding a hypothesis on the composition of the text essentially spell out in detail, supplying all pertinent evidence--firsthand accounts being a must, exactly how it was done. Naturally this has had the impact of driving people to do exactly that. But the usual way literary analysis is done does not involve proving that Edgar Allen Poe had the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning open at his elbow when he was composing The Raven. It instead involves comparing the language of Poe's famous poem with the poetry of Browning. Where there are echoes, one assumes that the influence of Browning has exerted itself in Poe's mind, whether Poe consciously summoned it or not.

Those of us who fiddle around with music composition have perhaps had the experience of jamming on some chords, stumbling onto something that is very pleasing, and then thinking, "Eureka! This is amazing!", only to realize, suddenly, that you are playing a song someone else had already written.

Is that what is going on here? I don't know. The proposed influence appears to be pervasive, but I think that those who object on the grounds that the narrative and content of the Book of Mormon are quite different from Hunt are making an obviously true observation. So, is Smith or "the author" deliberately drawing on Hunt for a purpose? Is he simply using the few resources he has to cobble together an ambitious project? Is he a musician or poet, riffing on the material he knows best, and composing a rather remarkable prose epic?

Personally, I am intrigued by the latter possibility. I view the Book of Mormon as a continuation of the epic tradition, which is, in its ancient roots, a prophetic enterprise. Epic poets and bards all drew upon the tradition of their predecessors and worked to add something of their own to the tradition. We can view the pseudo-biblical prose epics of the 18th and early 19th century as Smith's epic predecessors. For all of the obvious flaws of the product, I would argue that his work is more ingenious than these others and certainly it was more enduring.

One of the problems we face in grappling with these issues is our naïve way of chopping up the world of literature and assigning what may be rather arbitrary values to it all. But, the boundaries that are set for the purposes of community construction and maintenance have little to do with the larger history of literature. The Book of Mormon, humble as it is in many ways, belongs in the tradition of not only the Bible, but also Homer, and, more immediately, Spalding and Hunt.

I don't think this is anything to resist, make fun of, or take for granted. It is something that could be much better understood by those who choose to have any particular relationship with the text. The problem starts, in my view, when we demand that our choice be at the center of the universe, or, having rejected that choice, decide that our former choice should be stomped on and ridiculed. We see that predictable drama played out every day in conversations between LDS and ex-LDS people.

I am salivating, but maybe not for the reasons others are. As a student of ancient epic, I have long viewed the Book of Mormon through that lens. In fact, I see the Book of Mormon as being like the Christian epics of the Renaissance in many ways--think Jerusalem Liberated or the Lusiads. Unfortunately I was lacking a reasonably close epic model in Smith's environment from which some of his framework was perhaps being borrowed. I think in Hunt I have found one such work. Hunt is not the key to unraveling the mystery of the Book of Mormon.

I see it as a key to better understanding the literary tradition in which Joseph Smith was operating. It is a tradition that can be appreciated either secularly, spiritually, or both secularly and spiritually.

[Guest]

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.

Dean Robbers,

If you would have the time to provide a reference here, it would be interesting to see how this credentialed individual explains away the far fetched epic final battle story in Ether (if indeed he or she even addresses it specifically.)

2. He saw that there had been slain by the sword already nearly two millions of his people, and he began to sorrow in his heart; yea, there had been slain two millions of mighty men, and also their wives and their children.

First and foremost there is the logistical and technical improbability (or impossibility) of gathering more then two million people, including women and children, into close enough proximity for series of set battles involving hand to hand combat.

Consider: Utah has a population of about 2.8 million (this would include fewer than two millions of mighty men). Imagine trying to take the population of Utah (farmers and hunter-gatherers included), putting them all on foot, dividing them into two groups (say Mormons and non-Mormons) and trying to get all of them into a physical proximity whereby every man woman and child, except for one one Mormon adult male and one non-Mormon adult male, could be killed personally, one-on-one, by an adult wielding a sword.

That is just for starters. Here is the main problem with the slaying of two millions of mighty men (and their wives and children, no less) in a running battle as described in Ether.

Two millions of mighty men slain by the sword would require the manufacture of at least, say, 100,000 swords or more (assuming an average mortality ratio = 20:1 per sword). The problem is that swords are made of steel, and steel had not been invented by the time the Jaredites left the Old World (no later than 2500 BC). In fact, the first known precursor to the iron age steel sword is a bronze age dagger dated to 1600 BC and found in China.

This means that the Jeredites could not have had sword making technology unless they had developed it independently, in isolation (and in parallel with the Chinese). There is, of course, no evidence for this whatsoever.

Metallurgy in the pre-Columbian New World was confined mainly to Western North America and to South and Central America and consisted mainly of working of found nuggets of gold and copper. In South America, the smelting of ores on or near the surface to obtain copper and silver was developed, as was simple alloying technology. Metals were used mainly for ornaments. There is no evidence for steel making technology anywhere in the pre-Columbian New World, and certainly not of sufficient capacity to manufacture 100,000 swords.

So, unless the word *sword* in the Book of Mormon really means club, spear, or arrow, the credentialed individual has a problem. Perhaps the individual who claimed that accounts Book of Mormon battles were credible has been privileged with special knowledge that no other credentialed individual on the planet possesses.

[_Kishkumen]

DrW's interesting discussion shows what kind of results one can come up with when one expects the Book of Mormon to be a history of a very modern kind instead of an epic of an ancient kind. It is fascinating to see how different perspectives bring about such diverse interpretations. I would never expect the huge numbers in the Book of Mormon to be taken literally because I come at the text with a primarily literary perspective.

The Book of Mormon is filled with very dramatic expressions of number and size. I would contend that this is an obvious literary device, and the "two million" in Ether is yet another example of this device.