David Bokovoy Issues a Devastating Critique of the Mopologists' "Scholarship"

[Gabriel]

If Joseph Smith is just saying what he is told, he clearly isn't a translator, is he. I think that we do not have any particularly useful descriptions of the translation process. I do not think that we can say with any degree of certainty what it involved or how it worked, we can only discuss what it looked like when it was happening.

Even if we had a divine translator providing Joseph Smith with a text, the translation process I outline remains the same, we just change who is acting in which role. We have a text that has an intended meaning for a specific audience (and texts cannot have a sort of universal meaning that is valid for everyone). I find myself asking, was Joseph Smith the ideal audience? Was he merely similar to that ideal audience? And the further we are from that intended audience, do we become increasingly incompetent readers? (All assuming of course that the Book of Mormon is a real translation in some sense of an ancient text).

That echoes Keith Thompson's closing paragraphs in his Interpreter article that only the righteous will be able to understand all this stuff.

[Gadianton]

I recognize that this is a Moroni interpretation of a history, and not some translation from the Jaredite record, meaning that to place it within the context of the Jaredite record is an anachronism.

ohhh, now I get it. Okay great, I've got it. Let me allow the pinball to rattle around my head a bit and I'll get back to you.

[Gabriel]

I recognize that this is a Moroni interpretation of a history, and not some translation from the Jaredite record, meaning that to place it within the context of the Jaredite record is an anachronism.

ohhh, now I get it. Okay great, I've got it. Let me allow the pinball to rattle around my head a bit and I'll get back to you.

I agree. We shouldn't hide our light under a bushel on this one.

Ben, you should notify the Brethren of your staggering insight into this matter. The whole of Mormondom has gotten this wrong for two hundred years now. Obi-Wan McGuire, you are our only hope.

Or, at the least, you should write an article on this for Interpreter.

[Gadianton]

Ben,

Perhaps, but this certainly isn't the way that I would approach the text. And I suspect that unless you were already inclined to believe such a proposition, most people wouldn't accept this sort of explanation either. On top of which, this clearly adopts some sort of position on what sort of translation was going on (and it isn't tight).

A note on 'loose' vs. 'tight'.

A 'tight' translation is an oxymoron. It isn't a translation. A loose translation is simply a translation. If there was a translation committee in the spirit world -- an idea entertained both by Skousen and DCP -- then even though Joseph Smith's translation is 'tight', it's irrelevant because the spirit world committee pored over the plates in the usual way and produced the text that he copied as a 'loose translation'. All roads lead back to a loose translation, or simply, an actual translation.

Please don't let that note derail, more important for me is:

1. translating to English put them there.
2. they were anachronisms in the original text. ex. Moroni who had been exposed to Deuteronomy interpolated the king code into the 24 plates of Ether.

My examples for (1) have failed, so can you give an example of an anachronism due to translating into English?

[Symmachus]

First, no Benjamin, I have not had a chance to read your presentation closely. I perused it quickly but have only responded to what you posted here, not the linked articles that require more attention. I will have some time to give it next week.

Perhaps we will have to agree to disagree. This is a fundamental problem with texts that make them different from other objects. As an artifact, we can always discuss its context. Words can be dated. Grammar can be dated. Bindings, and ink and paper all can be examined. But once we shift to what a text means, it has to be interpreted. And interpretation is not something that is objective and external.

I don't think we really disagree here on the principles but on their application. I'm amused by the idea that anachronisms are somehow inherently an interpretive question. They may be in certain cases but not inherently. I wonder if you could provide where exactly your conception of anachronism applies as dispositive of historicity, because it seems you do accept certain categories where an anachronism does not serve a literary function can do that (you appear to accept that there can be a grammatical anachronism, so why not when a text is quoted before it has been written?).

Our point of departure is in that you are taking things presented as objects (horses, for examples) but that are not ostensibly questions of meaning or interpretation and then suggesting that, in fact, these aren't objective entities, which you term a "superficial" reading, but rather ciphers resulting from deliberate literary choice (of the translator, or of the original source) that need interpretation. That may be so or may not be, but one has to wonder on what basis you make that decision (you called them "deliberate" anachronisms in a writing you quoted above, and maybe I missed how you know they are deliberate). I'm sure you can appreciate that it appears like a terribly convenient way of having your coke and snorting it too.

Incidentally, I wonder if you saw something I posted on the previous iteration of this board on the etymology of the name "Alma" proposed and often touted by our friends at the Interpreter, which, would contain a demonstrable linguistic anachronism at the level of sound change that we can measure with external evidence. It's better for their case if their etymology is wrong.

This is the point of the issue of historical fiction. In dealing with the Book of Esther in the Old Testament, Adele Berlin makes the following points (and she does a much better job than I do in explaining this) - JBL, 121/1 "The Book of Esther and Ancient Storytelling":

On what grounds is a story to be judged fictional? Because it is easier to accept a patently unrealistic story, fictionality was sometimes determined by whether or not the events of the story could have happened or by whether the story seemed realistic. But to judge a story’s historicity by its degree of realism is to mistake verisimilitude for historicity. Verisimilitude is the literary term for the illusion of reality. Just because a story sounds real does not mean that it is. Realistic fiction is just as fictional as nonrealistic fiction. Among the leading arguments for Esther’s historicity are that its setting is authentic and that its knowledge of Persian custom is detailed and accurate. But this realistic background proves nothing about the historicity of the story, as our aforementioned commentators were well aware.

Fine. No disagreement.

What about the current reassessments of the Bible’s historicity, especially by the scholars known as minimalists? Clearly, the minimalists do not believe that the large block of narrative from Genesis through Kings is credible history. Do they, though, think that these writings were intended to be read as historiography in ancient times? Ancient historiography is quite different from modern historiography in that ancient historiography may include fictions, myths, legends, and hearsay. So Genesis–Kings can still be called historiography even if it is patently untrue (from a modern perspective). Just to make matters more confusing, I will mention that at least one classical scholar questions whether Herodotus’s work was historiography. Where this leaves us is that the ancient Jew read the Bible much as the ancient Greek read Herodotus. But what they believed about it, and in what sense they believed it, remains unclear. We moderns should not believe either one, but I suspect that Herodotus still has more credibility than the Bible, although not as much as he used to. Actually, it may be more correct to conclude that the ancients did not care about historical accuracy, although they surely cared about the past. If so, this entire discussion would strike them as trying to make a distinction without a difference. But that will not deter us from pursuing it.

Totally misleading on the classical evidence. On the whole, ancients writers certainly cared very much about historical accuracy—they often make a point of saying so, which tells you that readers expected them to aim for it—but what is foreign to us are the means by which they established that sense of accuracy for themselves and for readers, particularly in light of the constraints they faced as compared to modern writers. I have a lot to say about this topic, but it will derail us.

So we get to this point you make - it can be verisimilar without having historicity but not have historicity without being verisimilar? How could you even tell the difference between something that is merely verisimilar and something that has both the qualities of being verisimilar and having historicity?

Evidence external to the text, exactly as I said. I don't think this is nearly as complicated as a general principle as you are making it out. Reconstructing the past by weighing multiple strands of evidence is the historian's task. I'm not sure the example of Esther is all that apt: you initially introduced it to show that the lack of anachronisms isn't an indicator of historicity. I haven't disagreed. Anachronisms are one mechanism by which historicity can be argued but alongside many others, and no serious scholar would look at a text and say "no anachronisms, here, so it must have happened" without looking at other available evidence (or noting its lack). Nor, would that person say "anachronism here, must be false" without similarly weighing externals. However, something claimed to belong to time X but that lacks other evidentiary support and also has n+1 anachronisms from some time after X is rightly suspected not to belong to time X, despite its claim. I don't think even Adele Berlin would disagree with that.

Does the fact that Herodotus tries to provide history through narrative (through the use of form and conventions) suddenly mean that it has no historicity?

Not to my mind. Herodotus is also a lot more than a series of Esther-like stories, and then there are other kinds of evidence. And then of course there is the fact that often he is demonstrably wrong about, e.g., Egypt.

And here we go. The claim that Esther is fictional isn't really open to dispute. Yes, you can find a lot of people who dispute it. But, there is a relative wealth of external data for the period that is described in the novel. And none of it matches in the personal and immediate details. Again though, this merely illustrates the problem.

I'm sure you are much better on the Esther scholarship, but aside from its internal contradictions and improbabilities and the absence of external confirmation for some of its more significant plot elements, what external evidence does it contradict? I'm most familiar with the discussions about its linguistic form (which contains an interesting mixture of late and early Hebrew), but I genuinely don't know what details you are referring to, and I thought the whole point of your introducing it was that it appears consistent with its alleged time and place, thus undermining the idea that lack of anachronisms suggests historicity.

The challenge with the Book of Mormon (and I will agree that it does not fare well under historical analysis for a variety of reasons), is that we do not have a way of placing the context of the text in a real world setting. And this is why so much discussion is limited to the first two books (which do have connections to a historically known context). And also where there is so much ongoing debate over the geography, in an attempt to establish a historical context. So we do not have a relative wealth of external details. And this means that the Book of Mormon is anything but a poster-child for this sort of question, while the Book of Esther is.

Yes, that is an insightful characterization, especially about the first two books (something which, as I remember, Nibley also talked about in An Approach to the Book of Mormon).

See, that is where I think you are again being quite slippery, in this case with your over-literal distinction between text and translation (just as in the inaccurate opposition you make between verisimilitude and historicity). By definition, a translation is a text that has an origin in another text. A given Text B that is a translation of necessity has an origin in Text A that precedes it in time. Otherwise, we are not talking about a translation at all and have no need of either the category or the word. So, in your view, is the Book of Mormon the text a translation of another text or not?

I think you probably didn't really read my presentation on the translation of the Book of Mormon, did you ....

First, see top of post. Second, I don't think I finished the questions here that this was all supposed to lead to: if it is a translation, why can't the translation tell us anything meaningful about the source text? If it can't, then should we even believe there is a source text? I don't see the point of even positing it as a translation, other than that Joseph Smith said he translated it, but if you ignore his other statements about the Book of Mormon (on geography etc.) why not on that too? Maybe it's not even a translation. You seem to accept that above in the comment to Dr. Stak.

Suppose I find you a book called the The Book of the Generations of Samir ibn Mu'ammar al-Maqlad and His Descendants, the Maqladiyun. Now, this history details Samir's migration to California 30 years after the death of Harun al-Rashid, and it contains a wealth of information about the civilization he founded there, complete with vague prophecies about things that will happen after my time but also with about things before my time, like the detailed prophecies of Ronald Reagan. Unfortunately the Maqladiyun annihilated each other long before the Gipper arrived in Sacramento to jail them, so they're not around to confirm any of the details. Ok, now suppose we have no evidence for this civilization at all actually, and we also don't have the original Reformed Arabic, only the English translation, which appears to contain anachronisms. It may not even have been in California. That is our only text, but there is no faith claim involved and no church to join or anything. It's just me and the manuscript of the translation (sorry, I lost the original), and for the sake of argument let's say I don't know even know Arabic.

Now, do we treat the English text as an instrument that can recover and reflect information about the source text or not? Is there anything meaningful we can say about the Maqladiyun and their civilization, or should we just limit ourselves to what we can know from the English text? Should we even open the question of whether this reflects a historical reality? Do we try to interpret the anachronisms as deliberate authorial or translational choices? I can appreciate a reading where the prophecies about Reagan are really a kind of speech-act that establish some point with the audience, even though I wasn't aware of that while translating from the Reformed Arabic. But why should we get to that point?

Obviously, a significant difference is that there is no faith claim with this history that I have mystically translated from the Reformed Arabic I don't know, so I didn't get any witnesses and lost out on that movie deal. Absent the faith claim, it's pretty obvious where everyone will come down on these questions.

I do find your arguments about the Book of Mormon as presented here fairly intriguing; I look forward to reading what you do with horses and Isaiah, especially, and I see this approach as a massive improvement on efforts that make horses into tapirs or deer and things of that nature, and especially where they find this or that element from Nuzi or Mari show up in the Book of Mormon 1,000 years later for no apparent reason right next to something from the sixth century AD (Stubb's use of Syriac verb forms, for example, which would be a genuine anachronism in the chronological terms of the Book of Mormon). These kinds of approaches operate within certain terms, but within those terms, they lead to absurdities. The Thompson article is like that: it wants to operate within a world where you can excavate the English Book of Mormon for a level of detail it can then pair with a scholarly construct that is intimately dependent on Hebrew (the various names for god, for instance, that are used to distinguish the strands of composition of the Pentateuch). Well, that's absurd. My post that you responded to was that, if you are going to apply that kind approach, you have bigger problems, like New Testament quotations before there was a New Testament.

You don't see them as problems, and I think I understand why and accept the argument with in its terms, but that's because you also are not operating in the same terms at Thompson. Wisely.

It seems to me, though, that you are over-arguing your point about anachronisms. And as a result I find myself defending pretty milquetoast positions. I really don't see why it has to go that far. If one accepts the historicity of the Book of Mormon already then it makes sense also to accept that you can read these anachronisms as deliberate choices within the framework of a historical Book of Mormon. I find that really intriguing, as I say, and it not only avoids the sinkholes that so many of the Interpreters keep waltzing into but also makes the Book of Mormon more interesting for believers as a text. It's hard to scale that across the membership, probably, but interesting all the same. Yet, if one does not have a faith commitment, then the anachronisms in the Book of Mormon don't need special treatment and are yet further indicators of the book's 19th century production, alongside much else.

One of these days, I would be interested to hear your thoughts an a Parry-Lord approach to the Book of Mormon's composition, given that it is by all accounts not just an English text but an oral one that was merely dictated.

No. This isn't the case at all. Let me quote Royal Skousen, who I think coined the notion:

The manuscripts and text show that Joseph Smith apparently received the translation word for word and letter for letter, in what is known as “tight control.”

Tight translation means that Joseph Smith read the text using the interpreters/seer stone. He saw words, and read them. He didn't even need to have the text in front of him (hence the later descriptions of the stone in the hat). Whether this corresponds to a word-for-word translation or even a letter-to-letter translation is purely speculative.

Thanks for that clarification.

I would almost have to believe that Nephi's education included some of the classics (which for 600 BC says a lot right?) Had he read Phaedrus? Cratylus?

150 years before Plato was born? Sure, why not? After all, Abinadi was a Nicene Christian and Korihor was a philosophe. And something tells me Moroni was a libertarian.

[hauslern]

One historian of things LDS told me that he believes the Book of Abraham was a 19th century creation. So if as some LDS argue the same about the Book of Mormon does all this argumentation about "translation" really matter. In Facsimile 2 Smith only attempts to interpret the pictures. The writing 12, 13 etc he says "will be given in the own due time of the Lord"
Facsimile 2 is a garden type of hypocephalus examples of appear in museum collections like the British museum.
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collectio ... 5hzRooFkQA
Many of the pictures that Smith gives his interpretation of can be found in numerous catalogues of hypocephalus and what they mean shows Smith did not know what he was talking about.
See Tamis Mekis
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fc7 ... t3DDc/edit

[Benjamin McGuire]

That echoes Keith Thompson's closing paragraphs in his Interpreter article that only the righteous will be able to understand all this stuff.

Not really. Certain kinds of knowledge are necessary to read any text. At its most fundamental level, the language of a text is a barrier - you can either read it, or you can't. This is what I am saying. The competent reader is one who understands the language of the text, understands the references and allusions, understands the stylistic elements and rhetorical tropes - that is, someone who can (but not necessarily will) understand because they have the necessary knowledge already.

Thompson (if I am understanding your point) writes this:

Moroni teaches that those who search and ponder with sincere hearts will receive personal revelation that unfolds meaning and can answer their questions ahead of those who do not exert that effort.

The problem here is that he seems to assume that texts have a fixed and determinate meaning, and that if we follow a process like this, we can get to that meaning. I reject this notion. Texts simply don't have determinate meanings, since meaning is something that is created when we read, which means that if we accept this idea of personal revelation, everyone who goes through this process will come up with something different (something personal and relevant perhaps, but still different). This idea of a determinate meaning to a text is generally based out of the notion of an infallible biblical text. Thompson further writes:

My concluding suggestion is therefore that a deeper awareness of the likely content of the Brass Plates will improve the insight of diligent Book of Mormon readers because they better understand the scriptures that inspired those prophets.

Compare this with what I wrote (Nephi: A Postmodernist Reading, pp. 143-144):

Returning to 2 Nephi 25, we find that Nephi describes his intended audience by what they don’t know rather than what they do: “for they know not concerning the manner of prophesying among the Jews” (2 Nephi 25:1). The narrative audience that Nephi is addressing seems to know little about the Jews — “their manner of prophesying,” “the manner of the things of the Jews,” and even “concerning the regions round about.” The suggestion here is novel. While we might be interested in studying language, history, culture, and other features of Israelite (and Jewish) society to help us understand Isaiah as he intended his writings to be understood, we may need to suspend what we know of the Jews, their manner of prophesying, even their regions and history to appreciate Isaiah as Nephi intended. Nephi’s approach to understanding Isaiah outlines a method in which that knowledge is conspicuously absent. For us to read the Book–of-Mormon Isaiah with that sort of knowledge is to avoid participating in the narrative audience. It is akin to reading Cinderella only to find a psychotic, paranoid young woman.

In other words, Thompson is arguing a reading strategy that Nephi has already excluded as being all that significant or important. Nephi, in his likening process, is uninterested in teaching his people how to read Isaiah. And deliberately so - look where it got the people at Jerusalem that they left behind ...

[Benjamin McGuire]

A 'tight' translation is an oxymoron. It isn't a translation.

And all of this is in that presentation that I have mentioned. Consider what I wrote there:

Earlier, I quoted Goffman who explained that “Animator and recipient are part of the same level and mode of analysis.” There is no third act of communication if Joseph has no interpretive involvement, and does not transform that second communicative act into his own experience. Joseph simply does not translate here.

Because there is no third act of communication, when we deal with questions of scribal changes, or changes in the copied text prepared for the printer, or changes made during the printing process, what we are really describing is the transmission of the text (and not some sort of translation, or even evidence for translation – these kinds of issues cannot provide us with any information about the translation or the translator). This does bring me back to the idea that we often favor the kinds of tools used in Biblical studies, and those studies have a lot of interest in these sorts of issues in transmission: orthographic variants, errors of various sorts, emendations, and so on – because they are helpful in moving towards an original text. And of course, when we engage these issues, those tools are profoundly helpful – and they can help us move towards the original text. But that text remains the text that Joseph read, and shouldn’t be confused with the original writing on the Gold Plates ...

Back to Gadiantion:

My examples for (1) have failed, so can you give an example of an anachronism due to translating into English?

Any reference to King James language is this sort of anachronism - especially if it designed to bring to mind some biblical passage (as an allusion or quotation). And this is a bit of a challenge because it is so pervasive. But I would suggest that uses of the word "church" is an example of this sort of anachronism. The term "synagogue" may be as well, but it is much more closely connected to the KJ text (hopefully you can understand why I am differentiating there). I don't have a lot of time this morning, but I think it might be helpful to use an example not my own here. The following is a discussion by Givens in his book By the Hand of Mormon discussing this specific sort of claim made by Blake Ostler. This is from p. 173:

By attributing to Joseph Smith real possession of an ancient record as well as powerful cultural influences at work throughout the translation process, Ostler believes he has accommodated both the orthodox reader and those prone to environmental explanations. The plausibility of Ostler’s theory would hinge at least in part on the problem of synthesizing seamlessly modern elements into an ancient record. In the case of Alma’s narrative, for instance, the chiastic structure of the whole is not separable from the more modern elements of the story. This particular example is not a problem for Ostler, since he does not consider such inverted parallelism a uniquely or convincingly ancient form. Still, it is hard to see the pervasive Christology in the narrative as mere insertions into a preexistent account. As Mark Thomas demonstrates, “the Book of Mormon is christocentric in its understanding of scripture, its theology, and its typology.” Such difficulties aside, Ostler’s theory is one of the most appealing products of the new détente in the Book of Mormon wars. In his rendering, ancient forms have an ancient source, and apparent anachronisms (like pre-Christian theology) have a plausible explanation. His theory also avoids the charge of conscious fraud since “it would not be necessary for Joseph Smith to be aware of his expansions and interpretations of the Book of Mormon simply because they were a part of his experience.”

So this is a useful example because we have a suggestion of an interpolation in the text that comes through the modern authorship process, and a subsequent argument that argues against this by showing that the alleged modern insertions are integral to the narrative, which makes such a claim much harder. So this is both a good example and a bad example. Good, because it clearly illustrates the sort of thing we look at (something that isn't the low hanging fruit of just language). Bad, because I think that Givens is right about this issue in this context, which means that it probably isn't an example of type 1 after all.

[Benjamin McGuire]

I don't think we really disagree here on the principles but on their application. I'm amused by the idea that anachronisms are somehow inherently an interpretive question. They may be in certain cases but not inherently. I wonder if you could provide where exactly your conception of anachronism applies as dispositive of historicity, because it seems you do accept certain categories where an anachronism does not serve a literary function can do that (you appear to accept that there can be a grammatical anachronism, so why not when a text is quoted before it has been written?).

Simply put, we don't have that here.

In general terms, once you get away from the religious question and just look at the way this is treated in literature and literary theory, once you establish that a text exists in two places that is close enough to be considered a quotation, we then attempt to establish the direction of the borrowing (if not an exact genealogical relationship). If we had the gold plates, and we found such a quotation, we would simply revise the history of that piece of text - and consequently, it would stop being an anachronism. This is the issue of chronologies.

So when we deal with this in the Book of Mormon, there are different ways to approach this question. But the assumption should always be that the language in the Book of Mormon occurs in the way that it does because that language occurs somewhere else prior to the writing of the Book of Mormon (in 1830). And even from the perspective of a believer, as I noted in that presentation:

We could extend this idea even further. If we follow what the text of the Book of Mormon seems to suggest, then the Isaiah passages that Nephi quotes come from an Egyptian text, which was translated from a Hebrew original. That Egyptian text is then translated into the language on the gold plates, which is then translated into English in the Book of Mormon into a nearly exact copy of the King James translation. Is this really likely?

The issue isn't that the Book of Mormon isn't quoting a later text. I don't know of any post-1830 texts that the Book of Mormon quotes. The issue is that the Book of Mormon quotes the King James text. This doesn't surprise us. The anachronism that you suggest only exists in the context of the narrative of the Book of Mormon - in what the text claims to be. And this makes it an act of interpretation. Anyone who disputes the Book of Mormon as a translation of an ancient text wouldn't see this as anachronistic at all.

Do you see the point I am trying to make?

Not to my mind. Herodotus is also a lot more than a series of Esther-like stories, and then there are other kinds of evidence. And then of course there is the fact that often he is demonstrably wrong about, e.g., Egypt.

And of course, this is a point of contention (as Berlin suggests in her article). But in any case, as you keep illustrating, part of your argument is an act of interpretation. We have to read Herodotus and interpret what he is saying to come to any conclusions about what he is trying to do.

I'm sure you are much better on the Esther scholarship, but aside from its internal contradictions and improbabilities and the absence of external confirmation for some of its more significant plot elements, ...

The challenge is that we actually have a lot of good historical information about the narrow slice of time that Esther refers to. So the absence of external confirmation is significantly more problematic than you suggest here.

You don't see them as problems, and I think I understand why and accept the argument with in its terms, but that's because you also are not operating in the same terms at Thompson. Wisely.

I want to say that I do see some of these issues as problems. But, I also have a profound respect for the Book of Mormon on grounds other than its existence as a religious text. I find it useful as a way to explain my personal literary theory and philosophy.

150 years before Plato was born? Sure, why not? After all, Abinadi was a Nicene Christian and Korihor was a philosophe. And something tells me Moroni was a libertarian.

Exactly. It's a problem. I think that this is one of the most anachronistic parts of the text. It's views on language and meaning are almost as out of place in 1830 as they are in the 6th century BC.

[Gabriel]

ohhh, now I get it. Okay great, I've got it. Let me allow the pinball to rattle around my head a bit and I'll get back to you.

I agree. We shouldn't hide our light under a bushel on this one.

Ben, you should notify the Brethren of your staggering insight into this matter. The whole of Mormondom has gotten this wrong for two hundred years now. Obi-Wan McGuire, you are our only hope.

Or, at the least, you should write an article on this for Interpreter.

Ben, I was being deliberately snarky. I don't have time to express the reasons for my frustration here. But I do want to first apologize for taking it out on you personally. Please accept my mea culpa.