Did Skousen just throw shade at the JSP team?

[I Have Questions]

In a blog post attempting to aggrandise the lengthy retirement hobby of Skousen at which Interpreter has thrown many times over the cost of a small bowl of potato soup at the JSMB garden restaurant, we get the following narrative from Skousen himself.

Next I turn to the work of the Joseph Smith Papers on providing photos of the two manuscripts, along with my (revised) transcription of the text of those manuscripts. I discuss both the positives and the negatives of the JSP work. I go into their failure to recognize two leaves from the University of Chicago as forgeries.

Will the JSP team respond to this attack on their credibility?

[Tom]

Robin Jensen and Skousen presented their viewpoints on this issue in an appendix to Revelations and Translations, Volume 5: Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon. It is available online here: https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/intro ... of-chicago

[I Have Questions]

Robin Jensen and Skousen presented their viewpoints on this issue in an appendix to Revelations and Translations, Volume 5: Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon. It is available online here: https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/intro ... of-chicago

Thanks Tom, the dating of the ink to the 1830’s feels like the deciding piece of information. And it’s something Skousen hasn’t explained away as part of his claim that the Church purchased, and the JSP included, two forgeries.

[Tom]

I don’t know whether the JSP team will feel it necessary to respond. Perhaps they will invite Brother Skousen to have lunch at the Garden Restaurant to debate the issue. (I recommend ordering the French Dip Sandwich and washing it down the gullet with a cold Dill Pickle-favored Fresca.) But perhaps the team will decide it’s not worth saying or doing anything. Skousen made an argument contesting the authenticity of the University of Chicago leaves eleven years ago. Why does he feel it necessary to reargue the issue in the final volume of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project? (I sense that the Relief Society Sister in Parowan will question why her donations to the project were used this way.)

I’m not eager to purchase this latest volume given my disappointing experience dropping $100 on the badly flawed The Nature of the Original Language of the Book of Mormon (NOL). Brother Skousen claims now that “[m]ost of the archaic readings [that he and S. Carmack claimed in NOL] are still holding, and no scholar has found evidence for their use around the time of Joseph Smith (late 1700s and early 1800s or after), neither in upstate New York nor in Kansas!” I’m not convinced.

[I Have Questions]

I don’t know whether the JSP team will feel it necessary to respond. Perhaps they will invite Brother Skousen to have lunch at the Garden Restaurant to debate the issue. (I recommend ordering the French Dip Sandwich and washing it down the gullet with a cold Dill Pickle-favored Fresca.) But perhaps the team will decide it’s not worth saying or doing anything. Skousen made an argument contesting the authenticity of the University of Chicago leaves eleven years ago. Why does he feel it necessary to reargue the issue in the final volume of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project? (I sense that the Relief Society Sister in Parowan will question why her donations to the project were used this way.)

I’m not eager to purchase this latest volume given my disappointing experience dropping $100 on the badly flawed The Nature of the Original Language of the Book of Mormon (NOL). Brother Skousen claims now that “[m]ost of the archaic readings [that he and S. Carmack claimed in NOL] are still holding, and no scholar has found evidence for their use around the time of Joseph Smith (late 1700s and early 1800s or after), neither in upstate New York nor in Kansas!” I’m not convinced.

The forensic dating of the ink on its own should have given Skousen pause to rethink his assertion and consider that they are probably, more likely than not, the genuine articles. Rather than doubling down on calling the Church and the good folks at the JSP a bunch of dupes who fell for a hoax. I suspect it’s an example of the sunk cost fallacy. Skousen simply cannot allow himself to believe he might be wrong about something.

I also note that this is another example of Peterson throwing hundreds of thousands of donated dollars at a chum of his. One assumes the Relief Society Sister in Parowan has received a fully transparent accounting of how her donations have been used?

[Marcus]

This is from the op link, where DCP quotes Skousen:

Stan Carmack, my collaborator, and I then have a large chapter going through all the archaic entries in parts 3 and 4 of volume 3 and using more up-to-date databases from earlier English are able to make a more databased analysis of which word meanings, phrases, expressions, and grammar were actually in earlier English and those which were still in use near the end of the 1700s. Most of the archaic readings are still holding...

I bolded the part that I find simply astonishing. In no way have 'most of the archaic readings' that Skousen and Carmack have presented over the years been found to be 'still holding'. That was not what happened, as I've documented on this board.

...Skousen did end up redacting about 80% of Carmack's previously published evidence on behalf of his theory, on the basis that further research ruled out legitimacy of the vast majority of his work. (I would love to have been a fly on the wall for the discussion between Skousen and Carmack that preceded those redactions.)

[I Have Questions]

This is from the op link, where DCP quotes Skousen:

Stan Carmack, my collaborator, and I then have a large chapter going through all the archaic entries in parts 3 and 4 of volume 3 and using more up-to-date databases from earlier English are able to make a more databased analysis of which word meanings, phrases, expressions, and grammar were actually in earlier English and those which were still in use near the end of the 1700s. Most of the archaic readings are still holding...

I bolded the part that I find simply astonishing. In no way have 'most of the archaic readings' that Skousen and Carmack have presented over the years been found to be 'still holding'. That was not what happened, as I've documented on this board.

...Skousen did end up redacting about 80% of Carmack's previously published evidence on behalf of his theory, on the basis that further research ruled out legitimacy of the vast majority of his work. (I would love to have been a fly on the wall for the discussion between Skousen and Carmack that preceded those redactions.)

Only a Mormon apologist using donations to fund his hobby could claim that “most are holding up” when the reality is that four fifths are not holding up. Why do apologists always have to lie about stuff? I think I understand why Skousen is throwing shade at the JSP team, claiming they’ve been hoaxed - it’s to try and stop people looking too closely at his own claims.

[I Have Questions]

The latest volume claims

This six-book set, titled Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, fulfills the central task of the critical text project, to restore the original text of the Book of Mormon to the extent possible using scholarly means.

Will the Church be editing the current Book of Mormon to reflect the most accurate version of the revealed text, as it was given to Joseph Smith? Because if not, then Skousen has wasted 30 years of his life and hundreds of thousands of dollars. My other question would be, why has Peterson thrown Interpreter money at a BYU project - where they have plenty of Church cash coming their way? Did BYU underfund it, or stop funding part way through? Is Peterson trying to buy attachment to a BYU project that he thinks will bring kudos? Does Interpreter get a slice of the proceeds from sales of the volumes, or is has this just been a vehicle to launder donations into his friends’ pocket?

[Physics Guy]

Retracting 80% of the claimed examples of "archaic" language is worse than just leaving the case at 20% of its original strength. Finding that many examples that turned out not to be so archaic, when one looked harder for more recent use examples, suggests that the remaining 20% of examples may not really be archaic either. It may just be harder to track down examples of them from Smith's time, searching now 200 years later. Losing 80% of the examples weakens the case qualitatively, not just quantitatively.

The whole idea that archaic language could be evidence against modern composition of the Book of Mormon was badly flawed from the start, anyway. People don't normally use archaic forms by accident, when they're intending to speak in a contemporary colloquial register, but people are definitely aware of archaic forms, as archaic forms, long after those forms have passed out of colloquial use. People today can still imitate Shakespeare English, if they choose to do so on purpose. So to show that Smith could not possibly have copied some archaic form consciously, Skousen and Carmack would have had to show much more than just that this form had not been published anywhere within Smith's lifetime, or even well before his time. They would have had to show that no examples of this form were accessible to Smith at all, even in much older books or in oral quotations from much older books.

And even that would not have been enough to make the case that Skousen and Carmack wanted to make, because Smith could easily have produced archaic grammar by accident, rather than by copying an authentic example. It is obviously possible that he might have tried to imitate King James English, but messed it up, through haste and lack of education. It is then further obvious that Smith's errors in reproducing King James English might have produced features that could have been correct, at least in part, in some older era. Language change over time is not just random, but often follows logical trends, such that something which seems very old-fashioned in 1800, and was actually already rather uncommon in 1600, was still quite common in 1400. So aiming for 1600, and overshooting by over-emphasizing the stuff that stood out most in 1800, could naturally produce something that fit pretty well in 1400, at least in some ways.

Carmack and Skousen have tried to address this possibility of "hypercorrection" on Smith's part, but they never seem to have appreciated how serious the problem is for their argument. They've tried to brush it off by comparing the Book of Mormon with a handful of other contemporary texts using fake archaic English, and finding that the Book of Mormon does a significantly worse job than the other texts do at imitating King James. All this says is that Smith was a clumsier imitator than the other writers, who were all better educated, better edited, and writing for sale rather than to put over a hoax.

To argue convincingly that Smith could not have produced somewhat archaic language by accident would require a rigorous psycholinguistics of uneducated attempts to imitate old-fashioned styles for the purpose of fraud. There is clearly not enough evidence available for anyone to construct such a sub-field of psycholinguistics—but by no means does this mean that Carmack and Skousen must be entitled to the benefit of the doubt. On the contrary, it means that their whole argument is just a non-starter, requiring a foundation that cannot be supplied.

The whole Skousen-Carmack thesis was a house of straw from the beginning, inherently flimsy. The amount of attention that their archaic Book of Mormon English thesis has gotten from Mormons is a measure of how desperate conservative Mormons must be, to be clutching such straws.

[Tom]

The latest volume claims

This six-book set, titled Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, fulfills the central task of the critical text project, to restore the original text of the Book of Mormon to the extent possible using scholarly means.

Will the Church be editing the current Book of Mormon to reflect the most accurate version of the revealed text, as it was given to Joseph Smith? Because if not, then Skousen has wasted 30 years of his life and hundreds of thousands of dollars. My other question would be, why has Peterson thrown Interpreter money at a BYU project - where they have plenty of Church cash coming their way? Did BYU underfund it, or stop funding part way through?

Brother Skousen and the Maxwell Institute had some sort of falling-out in 2014 (noted here). In early December of that year, the Proprietor wrote:

[O]wing to unwelcome external circumstances, Professor Skousen’s landmark Critical Text Project suddenly needs to find a new home and (certainly by our standards) substantial funding. He has just approached The Interpreter Foundation for help. The amount required—approximately $40,000 for a year—dwarfs anything we’ve heretofore done. But this is an opportunity for Interpreter to participate in an undertaking that will benefit the Saints and the Church for generations to come. If you would like to help with this effort, donations will need to be sent to The Interpreter Foundation by check, annotated to indicate that they are earmarked for the Critical Text Project, Volume 3. Anybody who might be interested in speaking with Professor Skousen and/or with me about the current situation and the needs of the project should contact us via [email address omitted].

I hope the full story about the split emerges one day. Is BYU or BYU Studies providing funding? (I don’t know why the BYU Studies website would be carrying the project’s books for sale absent financial support.)

As of yearend 2024, the Interpreter Foundation had apparently spent more than $600,000 funding the project. (This figure is based on reporting in Interpreter Foundation expense statements and 990s.) We’ll have to wait to learn the final total.