Possible Modern Source for the Book of Mormon

[Guest]

More telling than the occasional shared common phrases between the Book of Mormon and LW is how little so much of the regular language of the LW appears in the Book of Mormon. If Joseph Smith really pulled from the LW, we would certainly expect to see much more of LW's themes and language to appear in the Book of Mormon. Sheesh, most of the LW involves naval battle--none of which occurs in the Book of Mormon. Do search of "fleet" "ship" and "ships" in LW. Those terms are spread throughout the whole book, but "fleet" never appears in the Book of Mormon and "ship/ships/shipping" only occurs twice outside of Nephi (Alma 63 and Helaman 3)

You expect different books to be substantially different. It's what these books share in common, both in theme and phraseology, that is most relevant. Besides, while Smith might not have been familiar with anthropology and world history enough to avoid many of the glaring anachronisms we see in the Book of Mormon, we can at least expect he would not be so careless as to insert sea battles (cannons included) in a story about ancient civilizations sharing a continent, not divided by any oceans.

Here is another nugget. LW Ch. XX gives us some Christopher Columbus love/adoration (possible inspiration?), similar to what we get in 1 Nephi. Verse 9 states as follows:

"Now when the people heard that Columbus had found a new land, they were astonished beyond measure, for it was many thousand miles off; moreover some of them strove to rob him of the honour, and he was treated wrongfully."

The phrase "astonished beyond measure" isn't in the KJV, but it does appear in Helaman 3:25:

25 And so great was the prosperity of the church, and so many the blessings which were poured out upon the people, that even the high priests and the teachers were themselves astonished beyond measure.

It's easy to scoff at and dismiss any single parallel identified between the two texts, but the cumulative effect is not insignificant.

That said, I may have to side with some of the less optimistic contributors in this thread in that I don't think this will cause much ripples among the rank and file. Certainly a well-organized, reasonably concise, side-by-side comparison will be a nice addition to sites like Mormonthink, but most investigators will probably snort and stop reading at the face in the hat bit. This more in-depth examination of the Book of Mormon will be both unnecessary and uninteresting to that audience.

I have shared the link to the Late War with a mostly uninformed TBM sister and a somewhat liberal and well-informed (yet still believing) cousin. The sister's reaction was to sidestep the issue, make some halfhearted inquiry as to the author's background, and then gush about how it was so great that the author wanted later generations to remember history and hero figures. The cousin merely remarked that he had heard about this and understood it was another text Joseph Smith was supposed to have copied/borrowed from. Hopefully this small sample is not representative, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

[_RayAgostini]

And where have I said that supposed Hebraisms were evidence of ancient origins?

To the contrary, I would say that these stretched parallelisms between the Book of Mormon and LW are just as problematic as attempted parallelisms between the Book of Mormon and other ancient texts.

Terrific so we are on the same page. One of the precious few "evidences" for the Book of Mormon is b***s***.
Do any have any other pseudo-scholarship to prop up my sagging testimony of the Book of Mormon? How about you tell me that if I feel really good about it that means it's true.

What a great demonstration of how objective you people really are.

[_RayAgostini]

This is the end for the Book of Mormon. It's doomed and no one can save it now. Gather the troops and prepare for war.



Paul O

Objections? Objections? No objections?

Then carry on.

[_Gadianton]

That said, I may have to side with some of the less optimistic contributors in this thread in that I don't think this will cause much ripples among the rank and file

You probably represent the majority then. Though unstated by most of us, my guess is that most of us believe this will have little impact on the typical believer, and initially, it will have little impact on the apologists. Well, the silence we hear is somewhat substantial because it means they aren't quite sure how to play it yet.

We'll see if it gets some publishing behind it, if it does, the apologists will have to deal with it. And if the critics pushing the matter are on sound footing, then what we will see is a shift in the apologist positions. Notice Darth J is already sniffing this one out. Hey, scientific progress is still progress, even when the abandoned positions are never formally admitted to be wrong.

[_Gadianton]

A ready example is the duration of the Trojan War. Homer says it lasted ten years, but Thucydides saw this was, in terms of the warfare of his day, impossible, and concluded that it had to be an exaggeration

Yikes, I almost forgot about this one! This thread is mounting so much devastating evidence, it's hard to keep up.

My support of Dr. W's post came with being fully aware of the apologist position that numbers are exaggerated in the Book of Mormon. This is one of Brandt's proofs that it is an ancient text. Whether it was a million or a thousand, the probability of two lone survivors duking it out is very low, and if that's fabricated too, along with the dramatic gasping for breath with severed head -- well, hey, we can pretty much throw out all the details and say there was an important war and the general result was X. But at that point, we have to wonder what clues we must take at face value to inform the apologist that the battle rings true.

Anyway, your statement here I quoted is devastating to the apologist position, and I mean devastating. The reason why, is that the apologist spin "history as fabrication" as an ancient practice for the sake of establishing the truth of an alleged ancient document -- with all the irony in that one -- and chastise modern readers for the "presentism" of expecting history to be reported objectively as we understand it. Your quote here demonstrates that ancient historians were able to ascertain history objectively, there is no issue of incommensurability here.

If I had 1/1000th the knowledge you have of history, the apologists wouldn't dare crawl out of their holes. It speaks to your compassion that you restrain yourselves, and allow them to have their day. You're a better man than I am.

[_cognitiveharmony]

They then proceed to analyze the Book of Mormon with the same expectation of randomness. This is a reasonable and rational expectation.

And this is where I note they go wrong and change their criteria from comparing similar events as they did in their examples. Instead of taking similar events (let's say a death) from all over the Book of Mormon and comparing those, they instead select very different events from a very narrow portion of the Book of Mormon. So, I want you to try to explain to me why this selection bias isn't a BIG problem here and why it should merit your praise as being either reasonable or rational choices?

So if I were to take all of the birthdays and all of the deaths of a subset of people such as prophets. Since I've now mixed birthdays and deaths, I should no longer expect random dates? Come on....let's have some intellectual honesty here. If anything I would expect more randomness. Are you seriously arguing against the premise that the dates in a historical text would be expected to be random? In order for there to have been selection bias, they would have had to limit their selection based on some criteria which could bring bias into the selection. They did not limit their selection at all. They included ALL of the dates which in and of itself rules out selection bias. You can argue that the Book of Mormon is actually the 1 out of the 2000 but don't try to argue that the expectation of randomness is unfounded.

[_Equality]

Here is another nugget. LW Ch. XX gives us some Christopher Columbus love/adoration (possible inspiration?), similar to what we get in 1 Nephi. Verse 9 states as follows:

"Now when the people heard that Columbus had found a new land, they were astonished beyond measure, for it was many thousand miles off; moreover some of them strove to rob him of the honour, and he was treated wrongfully."

The phrase "astonished beyond measure" isn't in the KJV, but it does appear in Helaman 3:25:

25 And so great was the prosperity of the church, and so many the blessings which were poured out upon the people, that even the high priests and the teachers were themselves astonished beyond measure.

It's easy to scoff at and dismiss any single parallel identified between the two texts, but the cumulative effect is not insignificant.

Mark 7:37: "And they were astonished beyond measure, saying, 'He has done all things well. He makes both the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.'” Sorry, I got excited when I saw this find, but it looks like the Book of Mormon author and Hunt may both have lifted the phrase from the Bible.

[_canadaduane]

Mark 7:37: "And they were astonished beyond measure, saying, 'He has done all things well. He makes both the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.'” Sorry, I got excited when I saw this find, but it looks like the Book of Mormon author and Hunt may both have lifted the phrase from the Bible.

This is what I'm seeing in the KJV:

Mark 7:37: "And were beyond measure astonished, saying..."

Are we looking at different translations?

[_RayAgostini]

Scratch has only commented three times on this thread.

Weird.

[_cafe crema]

Scratch has only commented three times on this thread.

Weird.

What's weird is that you went through 38 pages and counted how many times he posted.