Possible Modern Source for the Book of Mormon

[_Kishkumen]

No. No. No. Ray, not everyone sees Mormonism or religion in the context of authentic/fraud, true/false. One can say much the same about the historicity of the New Testament, and sadly the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

We don't know who half the New Testament authors were, we know that the New Testament was formally put together in the 300's for reasons that probably had little to do with assessing and finding historical accuracy, we know that quite a few of the New Testament texts are 'fraudulent' or 'pseudonymous' in the sense that they were not written by the name attributed to the texts, we know that the texts were copied, redacted and edited to suit contemporary listeners and orthodoxy.

When it comes to Jesus of Nazareth, who he was, what he stood for, what he said was debated almost from the beginning. It's messy.

So, when it comes to the Book of Mormon, this is just part and parcel (for me) of assessing what is historically true and accurate and what is myth, all in the wider context of Joseph endeavouring to begin a new religion adapted to a distinctly American audience, within an American historical context. And given that the active membership is now about 5,000,000, he did a very good job of it thank you very much.

I'm not waving my hands in the air here Ray. What this does is help me understand how Joseph wrote the Book of Mormon, what likely influenced him, and the effect it had on it's listeners. (My interest areas would be the impact it had on women and race, but there you go).

Ray, this is interesting, fascinating and enlightening. I look forward to seeing how the conversation develops.

Well said, Mary.

[_Tim the Enchanter]

Tim, I also noted your impressive work.

If you have the time, go back to the Bible and make sure that this isn't a story that appears there too, as many of the battles in the Book of Mormon are lifted from the Bible, and Late War is also lifting from the Bible.

As an example, the "stripling issue", well, David in the KJV is referred to as a "stripling". That's obviously the common source for the Book of Mormon young warriors and the Bible talk of Late War. Add in the reference to 2000 and it gets more interesting; but must keep the KJV as a control. Even if it is in the Bible it's interesting, but the points that are very interesting are what go above and beyond.

Thanks for the kind words. You are right that that those things that are not in the Bible but are common between the Book of Mormon and the Late War are the most interesting comparisons. I haven't gone through the Bible to see if the similarities in Late War Chapter XXIX and Alma 49 has a common ancestor there.

[_Equality]

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?

Probably. All I did was Google the phrase and came up with a bunch of online Bible references to Mark 7:37, like this one: http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Mark-7-37/. I didn't bother to look it up in the Bible that Joseph Smith owned or anything like that.

[_Tobin]

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.

When trying to show a correlation such as this, adding multiple subsets to the data does not help your results. If the Book of Mormon is really a work of fiction and not historical as claimed then the intellectually honest thing to do would be to make the case as simply and clearly as possible with something such as birth dates. That by itself should be more than sufficient to demonstrate the contention is true.

That is not what they did with the Book of Mormon. What you are championing and what the authors did is take many events from only a portion of the Book of Mormon history, put them all in one basket and claimed they were as a result made-up by a human-being. But any critical review of your results naturally blows up in your face because of the apparent bias that was introduced in your sample (comparing many different events together that may not even meet the criteria of being a random event). That is not how scientists or scholars should work. It is sloppy and unprofessional.

Why did you even respond? You've said nothing new. Your argument here is just as defeated as it was 3 posts ago. Until you respond with something substantive, I'll be ignoring you.

Fascinating. So instead of justifying this clear case of selection bias here and unprofessional behavior, you just say you'll ignore the apparent issues. I seriously doubt you even know what intellectual honesty means.

[_cognitiveharmony]

When trying to show a correlation such as this, adding multiple subsets to the data does not help your results. If the Book of Mormon is really a work of fiction and not historical as claimed then the intellectually honest thing to do would be to make the case as simply and clearly as possible with something such as birth dates. That by itself should be more than sufficient to demonstrate the contention is true.

That is not what they did with the Book of Mormon. What you are championing and what the authors did is take many events from only a portion of the Book of Mormon history, put them all in one basket and claimed they were as a result made-up by a human-being. But any critical review of your results naturally blows up in your face because of the apparent bias that was introduced in your sample (comparing many different events together that may not even meet the criteria of being a random event). That is not how scientists or scholars should work. It is sloppy and unprofessional.

Why did you even respond? You've said nothing new. Your argument here is just as defeated as it was 3 posts ago. Until you respond with something substantive, I'll be ignoring you.

Fascinating. So instead of justifying this clear case of selection bias here and unprofessional behavior, you just say you'll ignore the apparent issues. I seriously doubt you even know what intellectual honesty means.

It pains me to respond to this since there is obviously nothing substantive in this post either. I guess I should have completely dispelled all of your assertions once again in my last post.

First of all, a collection of random subsets based on one common correlation such as the "day of the month" would be expected to be random as a whole in the EXACT same manner that each individual subset is random. This expectation of randomness would neither INCREASE nor DECREASE when these subsets are combined. Are you following me? This is a very simple premise and if you can't understand this then we're at an impasse. The ONLY argument that you have in this case is to prove that the event in any of these subsets would NOT be expected to be random in a historical context. You can't. We can take each specific event type and look at that type in a historical context and immediately see a random pattern on how they fall in the month such as an assassination of a leader :

Lincoln Apr. 15th
Kennedy Nov. 22nd
King jr Apr. 4th
Malcom X Feb. 21st
John Lennon Dec. 8th (not exactly a political leader but I couldn't think of anyone else when compiling this list)

Of course you could argue selection bias for this list because it is a subset of a larger list and I admittedly just looked up 5 of the most well known assasinations and I couldn't prove that it wasn't. But it can only be argued as selection bias because I've left out KNOWN data. Once all KNOWN data is included, the possibility of selection bias is ruled out.

Second of all, you have completely either misunderstood the analysis, or you are purposely misrepresenting it to make your case for selective bias. They did NOT take "many events" from "only a portion of the Book of Mormon history", they did in FACT take ALL of the events that actually had a day of month specified in the text (which is essential for this analysis) from the ENTIRE Book of Mormon history. In addition to this, every date except for 2 actually had more than 1 year separating them which increases the expectation of randomness. Do you even know what selection bias is? I would advise you to review this for your own benefit.

Third of all, your're suggestion that they should have used something such as birth dates for their analysis is asinine considering that there were no birth dates described in the Book of Mormon text specifying a day of the month. I was seriously laughing when I read that because I was contemplating if you might actually be joking. Obviously not.

Clear case of selection bias? Ridiculous. You can argue that the Book of Mormon is in fact the 1 historical book in 2000 but you can't argue the expectation of randomness.

[_mms]

It pains me to respond to this since there is obviously nothing substantive in this post either.

Candidly, it pains all of us when people respond to Tobin (who I am sure is a very sincere and nice fellow...sometimes). Resist.

[_Spanner]

Another avenue being discussed elsewhere by Craig Criddle:

" there are many other word usage patterns worth discussion. What nobody in the Smith-as-sole-author camp seems to want to discuss is why we see the "wherefore-therefore" shifts that correspond to Spalding attributions. We also see usage of "wherefore" correlating with use of an unusual Early Modern English usage of "that' (because that, before that, after that) And we see that Spalding attributions align well with known Spalding plagiarism patterns, with known Spalding name construction patterns. and with phrases used by Spalding in the Oberlin manuscript. I'm surprised by the silence about these word usage patterns. They need to be explained, just like the patterns that Chris Johnson has identified."

I think many critics wrongly think Craig's hypothesis excludes Joseph as an author. They see the clear signs of Joseph in the Book of Mormon and stop there, stamping "case closed" on the case. Issues like the appearance and evolution of Campbellite theology in the book are solved by making Joseph a wunderkind. Others fallaciously invoke Ockham's razor, and think a simple answer is better, not bothering about the fact that their simple solution does not explain all the data in front of us.

[_DrW]

I think many critics wrongly think Craig's hypothesis excludes Joseph as an author. They see the clear signs of Joseph in the Book of Mormon and stop there, stamping "case closed" on the case. Issues like the appearance and evolution of Campbellite theology in the book are solved by making Joseph a wunderkind. Others fallaciously invoke Ockham's razor, and think a simple answer is better, not bothering about the fact that their simple solution does not explain all the data in front of us.

Exactly right. Proper application of Occam's razor requires that the most parsimonious explanation must also be an adequate explanation. Otherwise, it wouldn't be all that parsimonious, would it.

[Schreech]

I've just been reading Richard Snowden's book mentioned earlier in the thread.

https://archive.org/details/americanrevoluti00snow

There are references to 'curious workmanship', fair daughters, the same romantic view of women, and the occasional use of 'It came to pass'. I have to agree that despite these similarities, it felt very different to the Hunt text and to the Book of Mormon.

I wonder though, whether Hunt had read the Snowden book. He got the idea from somewhere?

[_Kishkumen]

I wonder though, whether Hunt had read the Snowden book. He got the idea from somewhere?

I thought Johnson had proposed such a relationship in his work.