Manetho, Josephus, and the Book of Abraham

[Res Ipsa]

Not a conundrum at all. A simple factual observation. If you want to go all-out post modernist to defend your own opinion of Smith, knockk yourself out.

I’m also making a simple factual observation.

Regards,
MG

Really? Which part of what you've said do you claim to be a "simple factual observation" as opposed to, say, passive-aggressive apologetics by insinuation.

[MG 2.0]

I’m also making a simple factual observation.

Regards,
MG

Really? Which part of what you've said do you claim to be a "simple factual observation" as opposed to, say, passive-aggressive apologetics by insinuation.

Ever the lawyer. On and on. One piece of minutiae after another in order build up enough ‘evidence’ to purportedly have enough to settle or win a case. Or at the very least, confuse the jury.

You can have this one, Res Ipsa. I don’t find it worth my time to go back and forth on this. I’ll let my words on this thread stand as they are unless I see something substantial to respond to.

Have a nice rest of the week.

Regards,
MG

[Res Ipsa]

Really? Which part of what you've said do you claim to be a "simple factual observation" as opposed to, say, passive-aggressive apologetics by insinuation.

Ever the lawyer. On and on. One piece of minutiae after another in order build up enough ‘evidence’ to purportedly have enough to settle or win a case. Or at the very least, confuse the jury.

You can have this one, Res Ipsa. I don’t find it worth my time to go back and forth on this. I’ll let my words on this thread stand as they are unless I see something substantial to respond to.

Have a nice rest of the week.

Regards,
MG

One would think there would be a better prize than an ad hom attack.

[MG 2.0]

Ever the lawyer. On and on. One piece of minutiae after another in order build up enough ‘evidence’ to purportedly have enough to settle or win a case. Or at the very least, confuse the jury.

You can have this one, Res Ipsa. I don’t find it worth my time to go back and forth on this. I’ll let my words on this thread stand as they are unless I see something substantial to respond to.

Have a nice rest of the week.

Regards,
MG

One would think there would be a better prize than an ad hom attack.

If that’s how you choose to take it, so be it. As it is, I think you’re over reacting for effect.

Victim mentality.

Nothing mean being said here. Truth? Possibly.

Toughen up.

Regards,
MG

[Res Ipsa]

One would think there would be a better prize than an ad hom attack.

If that’s how you choose to take it, so be it. As it is, I think you’re over reacting for effect.

Victim mentality.

Nothing mean being said here. Truth? Possibly.

Toughen up.

Regards,
MG

When you got nothin’, just double down.

[MG 2.0]

If that’s how you choose to take it, so be it. As it is, I think you’re over reacting for effect.

Victim mentality.

Nothing mean being said here. Truth? Possibly.

Toughen up.

Regards,
MG

When you got nothin’, just double down.

Yep.

Regards,
MG

[Marcus]

You might be interested in W. Davis' piece, then. In his opinion, Smith was considerably influenced by Bunyan's storytelling.

Huh again. I remember bringing up The Pilgrim's Progress here myself once, as a possible source for the archaic language of the Book of Mormon, since I had read somewhere that PP was still a popular book in Smith's time and place, with many copies available. The rather silly error on which Skousen and Carmack based all their Early Modern English stuff seems to have been to confuse archaic language with inaccessible language, when in fact usages remain known and understood, and are even available in print, long after people have stopped using them in natural writing and speech.

I hadn't thought, though, about Bunyan's allegorical adventure stories as influences on Smith's characters and plots. Bunyan's characters are remarkably less thin than one would expect from their explicitly allegorical names and roles, but they are still two-dimensional mouthpieces for pious or reprehensible views. Although Smith evidently decided against writing an outright allegory, Bunyan might have given him the idea that a good religious book would feature a lot of sternly upright characters preaching sermons, and overcoming their vile enemies in contrived ways.

I've been thinking of the Book of Mormon as Old Testament fan fiction, and I still think it is that, but perhaps I should have been expecting that Smith's idea of a cool restored Scripture might have been shaped by a wider range of literary influences.

I'm still curious about Smith's choice of using so much first-person narration. Where would he have gotten the idea to do that? Maybe Robinson Crusoe? Written in 1719, it was also very popular throughout the English-speaking world in Smith's time, and it features sea voyages, settling uninhabited land, and religious themes. And it's narrated by its protagonist.

Here from Project Gutenberg is the first paragraph, which does ring at least faintly of Nephi's beginning, with the narrator naming himself and boasting of his good family.

I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull: he got a good estate by merchandise, and leaving off his trade, lived afterwards at York, from whence he had married my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a very good family in that country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual corruption of words in England, we are now called, nay we call ourselves, and write our name Crusoe, and so my companions always called me.

Coming back to your mention of the first person approach, as well as the description of pseudepigrapha used upthread, while looking into Carmack's pseudobiblical comparisons, I found this by MOSHE J. BERNSTEIN, of Yeshiva University. It is a paper I found fascinating, which gives some interesting insight into why first person may have been used, and especially in its description of 'pseudepigraphy' as opposed to 'pseudepigrapha.'

He is addressing the Qumran scrolls, and this is an older paper (1997) but as someone interested but from outside this field, I found his clear definitions and reasoning behind the use of first person in pseudepigrapha/pseudepigraphy to be very enlightening. Some excerpts:

PSEUDEPIGRAPHY IN THE QUMRAN SCROLLS:
CATEGORIES AND FUNCTIONS *

MOSHE J. BERNSTEIN
Yeshiva University
I. INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the practice of pseudepigraphy in the scrolls found at Qumran....


After surveying literature from the last decades on pseudepigraphy, I have found that a great deal of the scholarship focuses on the function of pseudepigraphy in the context of apocalyptic literature. 7 Several of the works and genres which I listed above belong, to greater or lesser degrees, to that family. Once prophecy was believed to have come to an end, the cycle of history, visions of the future (especially eschatological rewards and punishments), the revelation of cosmic truths and the disclosure of long-hidden secret doctrines were most effectively expressed through the mediation of a sage or visionary whose words bore the mark of divine authority and approval. Since everything prophesied before the time of the actual author could be "foreseen" with great accuracy, greater weight was given to future predictions. The authors of these works may have regarded themselves as heirs (or even redivivi) of the writers whose names they borrowed, mediating and reproducing the message of biblical figures in the post-biblical age.

The Enoch literature, 2 Baruch, 4 Ezra and the Testaments certainly belong to this category and Jubilees, because of its apocalyptic perspective, probably does as well. The function of pseudepigraphy in these examples is to strengthen the work's authority. This phenomenon is "strong" or "authoritative pseudepigraphy." Prophecies are placed in the mouth of the ancient patriarch or prophet to make them more convincing...

In the case of the testamentary literature, what better way to inculcate morals and values in a society which needs chastisement than through the patriarchs of old? 9 The loosely authoritative, even prescriptive, nature of the pseudepigraphy remains but the technique is adopted to convey a moral message. This "convenient" pseudepigraphy is a "lighter" or "weaker" form of authoritative pseudepigraphy. We shall see other examples of convenient pseudepigraphy where the authoritative dimension is lacking. The model of the Testaments is actually intermediate between the purely authoritative and the purely convenient techniques.....

Rewritten Bible

1. Introduction

Unlike prophecies or testaments, legal texts and narratives need not have an explicit author. A rewritten Bible text makes no claim to strong pseudepigraphy if the text does not speak in the first person, whether in the name of, or as a narrative about, an ancient figure. Likewise, narrative texts which retell a biblical story but make no explicit or implicit claim to be part of a canonical work also lay no claim to strong pseudepigraphy. Jubilees is thus the exception to the model of most rewritten Pentateuch texts because it claims the authorship of the angel/Moses. Unlike Jubilees, narratives which include first person speeches by characters in the story ought not be construed as authoritative pseudepigraphy but rather as convenient pseudepigraphy. The goal of convenient pseudepigraphy is, in this case, obvious. The retelling and expansion of the biblical story is accomplished more easily, and the narrative rendered more vivid, through the creation and insertion of speeches into the mouths of characters. At an early stage of biblical exegesis, before the development of the commentary form, rewriting offered one of the few literary options for interpretation. The rewriter/interpreter was able to put words into the mouths of characters to convey his reading without creating an authoritatively pseudepigraphic work since the work as a whole makes no claim to authority or to pseudepigraphy....


....how are we to evaluate the larger adjustments made to a work which is fundamentally the Hebrew Bible, slightly enlarged and expanded? Herein lies one of the key distinctions between works which are wholly pseudepigraphic and those which contain so-called "pseudepigraphic interpolations."

...If we are to characterize this literary activity as pseudepigraphy, it is of the type that I call convenient, rather than authoritative, pseudepigraphy. It is simply a formal way to supplement the biblical text and to introduce exegetical or interpretive remarks without rewriting the whole in a non-pseudepigraphic style, an approach which seems not to have been available as yet. This is the same kind of convenient pseudepigraphy which we will find in the Genesis Apocryphon, where it is less obvious because it is not surrounded by biblical passages written in biblical style. I would suggest, therefore, that convenient pseudepigraphy not be considered evidence of intent to deceive on the author's part.

The legal passage regarding the wood festival, on the other hand, cannot be categorized as convenient pseudepigraphy, for the author of RP introduces the law with rm)l h#m l) 'h rbdyw, "The Lord spoke to Moses, saying." He attempts to give the force of Mosaic law to a practice which was apparently important to his group and its calendar and which, furthermore, has scriptural precedent (Neh. 10:35; 13:31). 18 The author of RP (or his source, if the final editor of 4QRP is not responsible for the composition of this passage) meant the reader to take it as a divine imperative, to be obeyed like the remainder of the commandments in the Pentateuch. This phrase constitutes an internal claim to pseudepigraphy in a way in which the above-mentioned additions to Genesis and Exodus do not. It forces us to consider whether this work, which we would not have defined as pseudepigraphic on the basis of the rest of its contents, is actually a pseudepigraphon or pseudepigraphy for the sake of halakhic rulings, similar to what we find on a much broader scale in Jubilees. This characterization is awkward, however, since the passage is surrounded by the biblical text and does not merely resemble it or build upon it, as Jubilees does. The alternative is to suppose that the composer of RP assumed the authority to add to the biblical text and did not intend to compose a pseudepigraphon. This passage (but not the work as a whole) must be considered pseudepigraphic in the strongest, authoritative sense by the modern reader...


A first person narrative by a biblical persona must be considered more pseudepigraphical on the formal level than first person speeches embedded in a third person narrative. In the Genesis Apocryphon, not only are the speeches pseudepigraphical but so are large portions of the narrative....

Whatever the reasons for the shifts from first person narrative to third, the fact remains that the first person parts of the text show, at first glance, an appearance of strong pseudepigraphy. In the case of 1QGenAp, unlike some examples of rewritten Bible, we can view this problem from two perspectives, that of these sections of the work and that of their likely hypothetical sources. 29 It is possible that some sources of the Apocryphon may have been completely pseudepigraphic, both externally and internally, from a formal standpoint and that the editor of the Apocryphon integrated their first person form into his narrative. That is to say, these sources could have been pseudepigraphic works which purported to speak in the voices of Lamech, Noah and Abraham. But from the standpoint of the final author/composer of the Apocryphon (and possibly his sources, if they were not authoritatively, but conveniently, pseudepigraphic), this form of convenient pseudepigraphy should be recognized as another example of a technique employed by the earliest biblical interpreters.

In order to retell the story vividly and to rewrite in a fashion which commented on, but did not directly interfere with, the biblical text, some rewriters (going beyond the examples of rewritten Bible discussed above where only first person speeches are introduced) apparently chose to place their stories in the mouths of characters in the narrative who are clearly different from the biblical narrator. Moreover, the author of the Genesis Apocryphon avoided the forgery issue by writing in Aramaic...

V. Conclusions

My investigation into the topic of pseudepigraphy at Qumran, its levels, roles, and functions, is still in an initial phase. My conclusions, such as they are, must be considered tentative; perhaps at this stage it would be more appropriate to call them observations.

1) There are at least two major (and one minor) levels of pseudepigraphy in ancient literature:

a) Authoritative: the speaker of the work is a purported ancient figure.

b) Convenient: the work is anonymous and individual pseudepigraphic voices are heard within the work.

c) Decorative: the work is associated with a name without particular regard for content or, more significantly, to achieve a certain effect.

Convenient pseudepigraphy is particularly important for the genre we call rewritten Bible, since much rewritten Bible is anonymous, like Scripture itself. Jubilees is an exception to that rule and its strong authoritative pseudepigraphy makes it stand out (in contrast to 4QRP, for example). The addition of pseudepigraphic speeches to rewritten biblical narrative creates a localized, weaker form of pseudepigraphy which is completely conventional and which functions to render the work more vivid.

2) We should distinguish between texts which are both internally and externally pseudepigraphic, and thus strongly pseudepigraphic, and those which are pseudepigraphic only internally, where the pseudepigraphy is convenient. Only the former can be said to function pseudepigraphically as a whole. Decorative pseudepigraphy is only external.

3) We should probably classify only authoritatively pseudepigraphic works as pseudepigraphy....

[From Footnote 7]A representative selection of references...

"A much cherished literary genre was pseudepigraphic-apocalyptic prophecy, where exhortation is based on special revelations which the authors claim to have received concerning the future destinies of Israel. Pseudepigraphy, i.e. the placing of the revelations in the mouths of the great men of the past, endowed the admonitions and consolations with special prestige and great authority"; E. Schurer, G. Vermes and F. Millar, The History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ (175 B.C.-A.D. 135) (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1973-87) III.1.179.

http://orion.huji.ac.il/symposiums/2nd/ ... ein97.html

[bolding added.]