Right on Target!

[_DonBradley]

So God thinks the Book of Mormon took place somewhere in the Americas, with the Lamanites having spread to Missouri by then.

Yeah, but He's been wrong before.

Hahahahahaha! =)

[_DonBradley]

Yes.

The 16th-century-English apologetic is powerful enough that I suggest we use it in our missionary work:

"But Brother Smith, of course the Book of Mormon has to be an ancient American-Israelite document divinely translated for a 19th century audience. Why else would it be written in 16th century English?"

I can see the blank stares of feeling the Spirit on the investigators' faces already.

[_DonBradley]

It's a good thing we have precise and inarguable bull's eyes like the Book of Mormon containing English from centuries off-target. Otherwise we might have to draw targets around the random places our arrows have landed and just declare them bull's eyes.

Thank God we don't find ourselves in that awkward situation. Imagine how silly we'd look to everyone else!

[_Kishkumen]

It's a good thing we have precise and inarguable bull's eyes like the Book of Mormon containing English from centuries off-target. Otherwise we might have to draw targets around the random places our arrows have landed and just declare them bull's eyes.

Thank God we don't find ourselves in that awkward situation. Imagine how silly we'd look to everyone else!

I think you are overlooking the explanatory power that the obvious involvement of Dee and Kelley in the translation process possesses. This is not random, good sir! Dee and Kelley were precisely the two figures whom one would expect to guide an Enochian revelatory process.

Based on descriptions of the translation process, my tentative conclusion would be that Dee and Kelley were the actual translators, and they simply communicated their translations to Smith through his stone. Kelley in particular was well skilled in scrying, while it was Dee who was the linguist, capable of organizing Dee's rough materials systematically. Thanks to the speed of work outside the mortal body, they could transact the business much more quickly than they could in mortality, resulting in a very speedy translation process from Joseph's point of view.

Joseph Smith was not actually the translator. He was a seer. The true translators of the Book of Mormon were Dee and Kelley!

[_EAllusion]

In all seriousness, we are looking at two potential ideas here. The first is that regardless of whether the Book of Mormon was written or translated by a 19th century author, that person attempted to mirror KJB language and in that attempt at using that style used words or phrasing that precede KJB era English because those archaisms persisted and blended into that person's understanding of how to write in the style of the KJB.

The second idea is that ghosts from the late middle ages wrote the translation that later appeared in words of light on Joseph Smith's magical stone.

Scorndog attacks the former idea by citing the OED. The natural reply, already given, is that it looks like the Book of Mormon provides evidence of continued use of that language, at least insofar as a writer is attempting to recreate KJB language based the literary knowledge they acquired in their time and place. A lot more groundwork needs to be done to even establish that such archaism use is even unlikely in a 19th century context. But forgetting that reply for a moment, even if we accept the OED makes former idea unlikely, even very unlikely, that doesn't make the ghost-theory likely. Where's the body of evidence that makes this a reasonable account of what is going on? It's not as though we have other well-attested accounts of ghostwriting (see what I did there?) to compare against.

Further, it seems like there are many ideas on the table if "ghosts did it" is on the table. Maybe aliens wrote it as a prank. Maybe it a hoax written in the 16th century that Joseph Smith found. Those are absurdly unlikely, of course, but when you can hold up an alternative as a default based on remaining unconvinced in a particular natural account, why not?

I can't empathize with worldview where any time I'm confronted with only unlikely accounts of why something happened that leads me to conclude that ghosts did it. Just the other day I accidentally microwaved some food for 30 seconds when I meant to microwave it for 3 minutes. Yet the food came out done. I haven't the slightest idea why, but that didn't lead to me assuming ghosts did me a favor by hyper-cooking the food. That would just be an ad hoc account tailor-made to solve that which I cannot actually explain. When it comes to this issue, I'm sure such reasoning is compartmentalized to the religion, but to me this speaks negatively to the influence of religion on that person's thinking.

There's simply no way a person with a modicum of self-awareness would submit the ghost theory in earnest to a respected academic journal. Anyone intelligent enough to come up with it is intelligent enough to appreciate how foolish it would be perceived. I can imagine how that might embitter a sincere believer. After all, they are no dodo.

[_Kishkumen]

Further, it seems like there are many ideas on the table if "ghosts did it" is on the table. Maybe aliens wrote it as a prank. Maybe it a hoax written in the 16th century that Joseph Smith found. Those are absurdly unlikely, of course, but when you can hold up an alternative as a default based on remaining unconvinced in a particular natural account, why not?

I can't empathize with worldview where any time I'm confronted with only unlikely accounts of why something happened that leads me to conclude that ghosts did it. Just the other day I accidentally microwaved some food for 30 seconds when I meant to microwave it for 3 minutes. Yet the food came out done. I haven't the slightest idea why, but that didn't lead to me assuming ghosts did me a favor by hyper-cooking the food. That would just be an ad hoc account tailor-made to solve that which I cannot actually explain. When it comes to this issue, I'm sure such reasoning is compartmentalized to the religion, but to me this speaks negatively to the influence of religion on that person's thinking.

There's simply no way a person with a modicum of self-awareness would submit the ghost theory in earnest to a respected academic journal. Anyone intelligent enough to come up with it is intelligent enough to appreciate how foolish it would be perceived. I can imagine how that might embitter a sincere believer. After all, they are no dodo.

Yes, it is true, EA. Secular scholars, under the sway of a fashionable atheism, will dismiss the most parsimonious explanation: John Dee and Edward Kelley translated the Book of Mormon from beyond the grave and Joseph Smith contacted them through his seer stone. It is the only explanation that really works, but they will, out of their prejudice, ignore the only truly viable explanation.

[Guest]

I think you are overlooking the explanatory power that the obvious involvement of Dee and Kelley in the translation process possesses. This is not random, good sir! Dee and Kelley were precisely the two figures whom one would expect to guide an Enochian revelatory process.

Based on descriptions of the translation process, my tentative conclusion would be that Dee and Kelley were the actual translators, and they simply communicated their translations to Smith through his stone. Kelley in particular was well skilled in scrying, while it was Dee who was the linguist, capable of organizing Dee's rough materials systematically. Thanks to the speed of work outside the mortal body, they could transact the business much more quickly than they could in mortality, resulting in a very speedy translation process from Joseph's point of view.

Joseph Smith was not actually the translator. He was a seer. The true translators of the Book of Mormon were Dee and Kelley!

As usual, Reverend, you have scored a bullseye and vindicated the Prophet. The extent of Dr. Dee's linguistic skill is shown in his renowned translation of the Al-Azif of Abdul Alhazred via the Latin of Olaus Wormius into English so precise that it preserved the spiritual efficacy of the original. And, shadowing forth the Prophet's most sublime doctrine, they entered into spiritual marriage at an angel's behest! (No mention of a flaming sword, however.)

It is so faith-promoting to realize that, despite the apostasy, the skills necessary for the latter-day revelations have come from Enoch through such spiritual giants as Iamblichus, Petrus Abanus, Cornelius Agrippa, and Dr. Dee even to the Prophet Joseph.

[Edited for the sake of accuracy]

[_Symmachus]

Yes, it is true, EA. Secular scholars, under the sway of a fashionable atheism, will dismiss the most parsimonious explanation: John Dee and Edward Kelley translated the Book of Mormon from beyond the grave and Joseph Smith contacted them through his seer stone. It is the only explanation that really works, but they will, out of their prejudice, ignore the only truly viable explanation.

John Dee and Edward Kelly...hmmm. One thing that the Elizabethan Approach to the Book of Mormon does is to make it more difficult directly to access the Ancient Near Eastern background to the Book of Mormon. In fact, Elizabethan diction—which Scorndog has shown cannot have been known to Joseph Smith—suggest an Elizabethan genealogy to the text that could undermine the heroic efforts of the FARMSian faithful to orientalize the Book of Mormon. Thus these Spencerisms might be more testimony-damaging than faith-promoting, as I think this thread bears witness.

When I think faith-damaging anti-near-eastern-Book-of-Mormon I think: liberal Mormons. The onomastics of this are interesting, too, and may support the thesis that this is a liberal Mormon attempt to undermine faith in the book's antiquity. No one better exemplifies this trend among liberal Mormons than John Dehlin.

It's possible that these instances of Spencerian diction are in fact akin to the so-called Satanic Verses in the Qur'an, and when I think Satan, I think women-priests, and when I think women-priests, I think Kate Kelly.

So, have you ruled out the possibility that it could have been John Dehlin and Kate Kelly who might have channeled Spencer to Joseph Smith while they were still only pre-mortally existent? They could have been secretly in combination with John Dee and Edward Kelly, at that point post-mortally existent but presumably within the same communicative realm and probably within gliding distance.

[_hans castorp]

Another bullseye!

Dee seems to have had an almost obsessive facination with the lost Apocrypha, especially the Book of Enoch.
Joseph Peterson, editor of Dr. Dee's Five Books of Mystery

[_fetchface]

This reminds me of when Mormons were going crazy about that 24,000 year old skeleton found in Siberia that had European and Asian DNA (and shared a lot of DNA with modern Native Americans) and were touting it as evidence for the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon. It makes one want to ask, "How much time did you spend thinking about this, exactly?"

Archaic English in the Book of Mormon does nothing to support it as a factual record in any way. All it does is raise the question of why it wasn't written in 19th century English in the first place.