Sammy Jankins wrote:By arguing that the language used in the Book of Mormon is not special you may succeed in delinking the Great War and the Book of Mormon, but you simultaneously destroy the supposed langauge evidences. All of the alleged hebrewims and other language evidences are now dead in the water. The metholodgy is now shown to incredibly flawed and prone to false positives. Where once the arguments were made for their rarity and uniqueness of the langauge of the Book of Mormon they must now be made to show how common it was as you have done above.
You might suceed in separating the Book of Mormon from the late war, but by doing so you will demonstrate the Book of Mormon is simply a product of its time.
So good luck!
Well, and a simple Google search, as I believe I suggested some time ago on this very thread, is not going to suffice to show that the way these phrases are deployed is or is not similar in the two books. One has to look at the usage of the phrases. If they are used in closely similar ways, whereas other texts do not deploy them in the same ways, then that suggests a relationship that should prompt further examination.
I like our friend the narrator, and I am not trying to identify him as an apologist when I say this, but I have seen this silly trick with Google several times now and it simply does not cut it. Literary analysis is not a Google search. Establishing or arguing against intertextuality requires a closer examination of the texts with special attention to the contexts in which these phrases are used.
I was trained by some of the finest scholars doing intertextual analysis, and I am fairly confident that I know how to do this. One may start with a Google search of 19th century English books, but that would only be a very first step.
"Petition wasn’t meant to start a witch hunt as I’ve said 6000 times." ~ Hanna Seariac, LDS apologist