From a quick look at just the first page of the first article, it doesn't seem to me that this article is even trying to be apologetic. It just takes for granted the Mormon assumption that the Book of Mormon and the Book of Moses are miraculous modern translations of real ancient texts. For most audiences that would be a bizarre starting point, but this is Interpreter. People can have specialised journals dedicated to whatever suppositions they want.
A Journal of the Flat Earth Society might well publish an article that demonstrates that the edge of the world must be octagonal rather than circular. Within the weird premises of flat earthism, this could even be a landmark article applying insightful reasoning to make a convincing case for an initially surprising conclusion. I see Lindsay's article as aiming to be something like that, not to convince any non-Mormons.
The introductory paragraphs explicitly say what the article is trying to do, listing several goals. Only the last of the goals is apologetic:
Jeff Lindsay wrote:[The article's conclusions] ... can provide stand-alone evidence for the ancient origins and authenticity of both the Book of Mormon and the Book of Moses.
And I think that even this apologetic goal is really kind of an easy one, if one considers that "provide evidence" is not at all the same as "provide sufficient evidence". If Lindsay demonstrates that the Book of Mormon seems to draw on the Book of Moses, then this really is evidence for both texts being ancient, in the Bayesian sense that an ancient Jewish Book of Moses would be more likely to be referenced in an ancient Jewish Book of Mormon than any two random modern texts would be likely to refer to each other. A Book of Mormon that subtly but clearly alludes to the Book of Moses makes the two texts as we have them slightly more consistent with the hypothesis that both are ancient Jewish texts.
On the other hand, of course, even if Lindsay makes his case about Moses-Mormon intertextuality then I as a skeptic will only say, "Hey, now, that was a nice touch by Smith, slipping in some allusions to his background mythology like Tolkien mentioning something in
The Lord of the Rings that only appears at length in
The Silmarillion." Since this would mean that Smith would have to have been a better artist than I had previously thought him to be, and better artists are
a priori less likely, I might have to adjust my Bayesian likelihood that Smith was a fraud from 99.9999% down to only 99.9995%. That would still mean that Lindsay had "provided evidence" against fraud, technically.
A change in the fourth decimal place would hardly be worth mentioning even as the last goal in a list, but how much difference evidence makes depends on one's starting point. If my estimate of how likely the Mormon texts are to be ancient goes from 0.0001% to 0.0005%, that's a five-fold increase, and Bayesian inference is multiplicative that way. To somebody with a much higher prior likelihood for the texts to be ancient, Lindsay's point might well make a more significant difference.
So there's my lance duly broken in defence of Jeff Lindsay. As a matter of fact I expect that reading his article would not even slightly weaken my belief that Smith made up both texts, but rather further strengthen it, by showing that Smith wrote the Book of Mormon with some of the ideas of the Book of Abraham already there in his mind. It's not at all uncommon for authors to have early ideas that only come to light in their later books, because it took a while for the author to learn how to make their juvenile visions publishable. I'd see Lindsay's "intertextuality" as making the Mormon texts fit this common pattern more closely.
I still wouldn't say that the article is dishonest at all. It's just assuming Mormon beliefs, in a Mormon journal. Intertextuality between Mormon and Moses is obviously not puzzling at all if the same person wrote them, but it is indeed puzzling
if one assumes that both texts are ancient. Proposing that the ancient Nephites had a version of the Book of Moses is a reasonable enough way to resolve that puzzle within Mormon assumptions. I don't see Lindsay claiming anything more than this. He doesn't go out of his way to acknowledge that non-Mormons won't give a damn, but once again, it's Interpreter. Articles in a flat earth journal won't always waste lines talking about how round-earthers think.
I was a teenager before it was cool.
