Possible Modern Source for the Book of Mormon

[_Kishkumen]

I guess we have different definitions of "remarkable." The fact that two nineteenth-century writings contain the words "brass" "ball" and "curious" in proximity while describing completely different things doesn't strike me as especially remarkable.

• Are both objects balls? Not exactly. One is "a round ball" and the other is ball-like ("as it were a large ball").
• Are both objects of a similar size/weight? No.
• Are both objects made of brass? Yes. However, one is "made partly of brass and partly of iron" while the other is "of fine brass."
• Are both objects said to be "curious" in some way? Yes. But there are differences. One is simply said to skillfully/beautifully made ("of curious workmanship") while the other is said to have elaborate clock-like ("curious") internal mechanisms.
• Do both objects have a similar function? No. One is a large, tethered explosive device for destroying ships and the other is a hand-held instrument that provides divine instructions.

If you want to see some actual remarkable coincidences, check this out: http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html

Did you ever have an English course other than composition, Nevo?

Just curious.

[_Gadianton]

I guess we have different definitions of "remarkable." The fact that two nineteenth-century writings contain the words "brass" "ball" and "curious" in proximity while describing completely different things doesn't strike me as especially remarkable.

•Are both objects balls? Not exactly. One is "a round ball" and the other is ball-like ("as it were a large ball").
•Are both objects of a similar size/weight? No.
•Are both objects made of brass? Yes. However, one is "made partly of brass and partly of iron" while the other is "of fine brass."
•Are both objects said to be "curious" in some way? Yes. But there are differences. One is simply said to skillfully/beautifully made ("of curious workmanship") while the other is said to have elaborate clock-like ("curious") internal mechanisms.
•Do both objects have a similar function? No. One is a large, tethered explosive device for destroying ships and the other is a hand-held instrument that provides divine instructions.

If you want to see some actual remarkable coincidences, check this out: http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html

Hi Bazooka,

Apparently Nevo just "doesn't see" the spindles of the Liahona and their complex functionality that point to the food as anything like the standard for 19th-century precision, the clock. Only critics see this. Here, for instance, is a web page planted by Satan, that deceives critics into seeing a clock in the Liahona.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mormonshar ... 86/detail/

Clock hands glued to a washer make liahona spindles. They are glued on top of a small screw for...

And just look at the artist's depiction of the relation between the clock spindles and the internal workings exposed by the cutaway. I'm probably seeing a face in the clouds though.

Anyway, as the link to the Bible codes shows, even if every aspect of the liahona was matched to every aspect of the tordpedo, the Bible-code objection could still be made. One has to wonder, by what standards does his 19th century parallels hold. I suppose only the eye of the trained historian sees the difference -- (unless it's Kishkumen).

Tim's point about the Vanilla Ice riff stands.

[_Kishkumen]

Ordinarily I don't like reposting things in the same thread, but since Nevo is determined to revisit old points on the thread that have already been addressed better than one would think given the way he lamely revisits the topics:

Hunt Ch. 29. 13 is particularly striking, in my opinion:

And their weapons of war were of curious workmanship, and they sent forth balls of lead; such as were known to Pharaoh when he followed the Children of Israel down into the red sea.

Here you have a reference to "curious workmanship", a ball of metal, and the Exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt. When you put that alongside the Liahona, a metal ball, which is described as being "of curious workmanship" in the context of the exodus of the family of Lehi through the wilderness to the promised land, that is very suggestive indeed.

1 Nephi 2:5

5 And he came down by the borders near the shore of the Red Sea; and he traveled in the wilderness in the borders which are nearer the Red Sea; and he did travel in the wilderness with his family, which consisted of my mother, Sariah, and my elder brothers, who were Laman, Lemuel, and Sam.

Also noteworthy is the description of the torpedoes in Hunt, Ch. 50.28

Now these wonderful torpedoes were made partly of brass and partly of iron, and were cunningly contrived with curious works, like unto a clock; and as it were a large ball.

Just as the Book of Mormon account of the Liahona describes the machinery of this device as a compass and having "were two spindles", the torpedoes in Hunt, made partly of brass and partly of iron, were contrived with curious works, "like unto a clock; and as it were a large ball."

I Nephi 16:10

And it came to pass that as my father arose in the morning, and went forth to the tent door, to his great astonishment he beheld upon the ground a round ball of curious workmanship; and it was of fine brass. And within the ball were two spindles; and the one pointed the way whither we should go into the wilderness.

[_Gadianton]

Several developments worth noting about the alleged "late war" against the Book of Mormon.

Syc Et Non has has announced the new Interpreter Piece.

The Interpreter article is getting comments. The Faith-Promoting Rumor author showed up to cite his findings that are quite opposite of Ben's. Junior-tier Mopologists have shown up to hoist the McGuire/Nevo/Mak/Mopologist banner that the find is part 2 of the Bible codes. The well-poisoning by those who posted the Lindsay article that fulfilled EA's prediction seems to have worked, and shaped the conclusions the Mopologists would draw from the Late War before even looking at it.

Grant Hardy himself showed up to support the Faith-Promoting Rumor author at Faith-Promoting Rumor, Grant says that the find is intriguing and deserves attention.

Of all those who have commented on the matter with academic standing -- I'm obviously excluding myself here from academic standing (as I'm more of an administrator;)-- it seems the apologists were the only ones to have reached final conclusions within minutes of hearing the news about the late war, everyone else is saying that more analysis is needed, even if preliminary study is most interesting.

I think I'm beginning to see now why those within Mormon Studies are concerned about the role Mopologetics has within their community. On the one hand, it seems the apologists have a point that historico-critical research should have a place. Personally, I don't think Book of Mormon archeology should just be ruled out as a legitimate field of study for a Mormon. But on the other, incidents like this show just how problematic carrying out any research in the name of apologetics is, there is little to no concern for truth, only to win their battle and protect the Book of Mormon from criticism. I wonder if someone from Faith-Promoting Rumor had discovered the Late War, and not a couple of young guys at an ex-Mo conference announcing victory, if the dismissals wouldn't have been so hasty. Apologists are a highly reactive crowd. Notice how the Faith-Promoting Rumor author took the events in a stride, he announced what happened and proceeded with a scholarly analysis. The apologists on the other hand, began to manipulate their readership days before announcing recent events, and then publish a dismissive review titled "the Late War against the Book of Mormon" framing the discussion as nothing but another underhanded attack on their faith. What it shows is that the apologists are not really interested in scholarship, and this could very well be an issue for those who take Mormon Studies seriously.

[Guest]

Below is the concluding paragraph from The Late War Against the Book of Mormon by Benjamin McGuire, as published on the MI Website.

I certainly do not claim to have the knowledge of Mormon History of an Uncle Dale, or the classical historical knowledge and insight of a Kishkumen or the debating or textual analysis skills of a Dean Robbers, or EAllusion, or Aristotle Smith, or any of others who do this for a living, but I do know apologetic obfuscation, deflection, dodging, empty denial, and straw man arguments when I see them, and this is an example, folks.

Conclusions

It isn’t a particularly difficult feat to reconstruct the Book of Mormon using phrases found from many different sources.

The point is that, in this analysis of 100 thousand possible source books, only three or four could be differentiated from the "point cloud" as having significantly influenced the Book of Mormon. These included the 1822 Koran, The First Book of Napoleon, and The Late War, along with the King James version of the Bible.

In the 1960s, Julia Kristeva coined the term intertextuality to describe this feature of all texts. They were, as she described them, a ‘mosaic of quotations’ all coming from other sources. Some of this is certainly due to textual influence and reliance. There is no doubt that the Book of Mormon owes a great deal of its contents to the King James text.

Exactly. From the KJV we had more than influence, we had direct plagiarism, mistakes and all. This fact alone should end the debate (if indeed there really ever was one) as to the authenticity of the Book of Mormon.

But, as Harold Love points out, given a large enough body of literature, you can also find these phrases caused by coincidence. In the long run we note that there are some real similarities that can be found in the texts of these two books. But, most of these similarities are not discovered by creating a list of these four-word phrases – because these phrases are not themselves meaningful. Does this process attempt to reduce the significance of the Book of Mormon to a few hundred four-word phrases, stripped of punctuation and context? That seems to be the outcome.

So now Ben admits that the Johnson brothers were right in their analysis and must now retreat to asking if the statistically significant outcomes they reported should be considered significant to believers. Ben could have started and ended with this admission and follow up question and saved the reader from plowing through the rest of the article.

Hunt wanted to create a text that read like scripture as a marketing tool. In this way we get a lot of biblical sounding text. The Book of Mormon, on the other hand, doesn’t just use biblical language, it engages biblical issues – it asks questions about morality, about agency, about creation. It ponders the meaning of writing and reading. It describes religious experience.

Notice that the author fails to take this opportunity to claim historicity or divinity for the Book of Mormon.

At this point, this preliminary work of statistically mining electronic databases does not deal with Love’s concerns or rehabilitate the practice. Perhaps future refinements will help. I do see uses for these kinds of approaches to the text. They can help us see where to start looking for real potential overlap. Substantial phrasing that does not occur commonly will encourage us to return to the text and evaluate it in a more traditional fashion. Once we do this, we may find a copyright statement with an identifiable textual history, Or we may discover that the parallels tell us absolutely nothing because they are most likely due to coincidence.

Whether the faithful will catch it it or not, the author just admitted that he did not understand the significance of work that the Johnsons did in applying big data textual analysis techniques to the Book of Mormon and some hundred thousand other books that could have possibly influenced the Book of Mormon.

[_Blixa]

Grant Hardy himself showed up to support the Faith-Promoting Rumor author at Faith-Promoting Rumor, Grant says that the find is intriguing and deserves attention.

This duplicates my own feelings. I found the Faith-Promoting Rumor take on the Late War very interesting, too.

I confess I know little about 'word print' and other data algorithm approaches to literary analysis, so I can't really comment on that aspect of the original study. But, in terms of general historical/cultural background and possible influence, the Late War is very interesting and suggestive. Early to mid 19thC American religious literature is not my primary area of scholarly expertise, but I am familiar enough with 19thC American literature and history in general that the Book of Mormon never seemed like anything other than a product of its place and time. And that aspect of the text never had any bearing for me on its possible spiritual 'truth' or wisdom: I've never been interested in making those arguments as they had no bearing on my own membership in the LDS church, nor do they seem especially intellectually interesting.

My caveat about analysis of its possible relation to the BoM--in any scenario or on any level--is that the term 'plagiarism' can and has been thrown about too loosely.

I wonder if someone from Faith-Promoting Rumor had discovered the Late War, and not a couple of young guys at an ex-Mo conference announcing victory, if the dismissals wouldn't have been so hasty.

No doubt. Obviously, how to assess the importance of this "find" needs careful and thoughtful reflection. Too hasty reactions are unhelpful, even though I am sympathetic to the quick pleasure any interesting new bit of data brings to historical research. That said, over hasty mopologetic dismissals are unscholarly in an a very banal fashion.

[_robuchan]

What's coming out of the Mopologists right now is not making sense. This stuff seems all so qualitative that all you can do is look at things case by case. I think their best comeback would be to show examples of books that seem to correlate to another book but then to show how it would have been impossible due to logistics and availability to actually be plagiarized. Simply saying "doesn't look like it correlates to me" is fine but certainly can't go in the "asked and answered" category.

[_Kishkumen]

My caveat about analysis of its possible relation to the BoM--in any scenario or on any level--is that the term 'plagiarism' can and has been thrown about too loosely.

Indeed. Plagiarism is a term that works well for scholarship, but not so much for this kind of writing. Moreover, I think everyone who has read both texts understands that there is a lot going on in the Book of Mormon that is nowhere close to the contents of Late War. So, slavish copying is not what this is about. The interesting discussion on the nature of the influence of the LW on the Book of Mormon is one that has not even begun, and that is the discussion that needs to take place.

The apologists have rushed to manage the reactions of members to the news of this discovery. My guess is that they will quietly do their own work on the issue, come to realize that such influence clearly does exist (if they do not already accept it), and then accommodate their theologies of divine translation to the facts. In the meantime, their immediate reaction is the stuff of rueful laughter. Damn if we all didn't know this was going to happen. Somehow it only makes the predictable reaction worse.

I like Ben McGuire, but DrW nails it on the head. This is the slippery rhetoric of damage control, and it adds very little that is productive to the conversation. Does chance yield some similarities? Sure. But how many? How many alleged coincidences do there have to be before one starts to wonder whether these overlaps are not the result of mere coincidence at all?

If Ovid uses Vergilian language in quite different contexts from the original Vergilian ones, a scholar usually doesn't attribute this to chance. The discovery of this overlap is instead taken as a starting point for an investigation. I feel comfortable saying exactly the same of Hunt and Smith. One need not ask whether there is influence so much as for what purpose. It could be a simple nod to the familiar language of a favorite author. My immediate impression is that there is more to it than that, and I am hopeful that those with the time and expertise will exert the requisite effort to illuminate these issues.

[_Bazooka]

I like Ben McGuire, but DrW nails it on the head. This is the slippery rhetoric of damage control, and it adds very little that is productive to the conversation. Does chance yield some similarities? Sure. But how many? How many alleged coincidences do there have to be before one starts to wonder whether these overlaps are not the result of mere coincidence at all?

I think if the Late War contained the characters of Nephi, Moroni and Korihor, Ben would still be yelling 'coincidence' to anyone and everyone within earshot.

[_robuchan]

If all we got for Late War was a straight up trade: Late War for Margaret Barker/temple in the Book of Mormon BS, then it would be successful. Let's say Nahom/Comoro-Moroni is a trade and both sides stop talking about it. And Late War/Margaret Barker temple rites is a trade and Kevin Christensen has to retire from posting.