Zub Zool oan and Abraham 1:2b?????3

[_Nomad]

Graham-

I already decimated many of the points WIll thought he made with respect to the "cipher."

I have no doubt that, in your mind, this is true.

That's part of the reason you are so frightening to sane people.

All the same, from what I have gathered over the past two weeks, the Schryver Unified Theory of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers is being justifiably hailed as quite an amazing piece of analytical work. Its virtue is that it has explanatory power that harmonizes not only with the text critical evidence, but with the historical evidence as well.

It really is a "game changer," and if you people fail to realize it, it's just because you were never in the game to begin with.

[_Kevin Graham]

You still can't explain why it is there.

And I never said I could now did I? So you're beating a straw man again.

You can come up with a scenario that puts the copied text there, but you explicitly ignore the fact that the scenario is irrational.

Here you are being disingenuous again. I already acknowledged that it was silly and irrational (at least from an outside perspective), so how the hell is this evidence that I "explicitly ignore the fact that the scenario is irrational"?

Whether it's Smith or Williams putting the text on the same sheet, you cannot provide a logical reason why it would have happened.

Logical has nothing too do with possible. I only claimed to have provide one of an endless list of possible scenarios. That's it. You decided to ridicule me for it while pretending this had anything to do with my primary argument for which you willfully ignore.

You only assert that it must have happened despite being inexplicable.

Where did I say it "must have happened"? I explicitly stated that this is one of many possible scenarios. Why doesn't this compute?

This means your theory doesn't connect the dots.

What friggin "theory"? I simply offered a possible scenario, one of many. My "theory" is about the manuscripts being simultaneously dictated and it is based on a number of text-critical evidences that you refuse to "get into." You're too busy playing offense and attacking comments that were never intended to be crucial arguments, and don't want to answer questions.

Your theory is not a reasonable enough scenario to overrule the data that points to homoioteleuton. Your theory fails unless you can make Williams' choice reasonable.

Nonsense. The text-critical evidence pointing to dictation make this an overwhelmingly dictaated document. Which means the addded dittograph at the tail end was intentional. There is no rational basis for saying the last paragraph was an accident unless the entire document was being copied from something else. Those who think rationally about this and weight the evidence according, will agree. Unfortunately, Nomad can't think rationally and you refuse to "get into" the evidence for dictation.

Last sheet of paper? Now your professional scribe is out of paper?

Continue mocking my rather innocuous, proposed scenarios if you wish. I can assure you that you'll receive similar treatment whenever you have the balls to deal with the evidence for dictation and try to squeeze it into your silly copyist theory.

The page ends mid-verse. There was clearly another page.

Yes, there were many extra pages, but not for this particular manuscript. There could have been, but there is no evidence to suggest that. "Mid-verse" means nothing since the final product was divided up into verses in 1842.

And what good does it do on the same sheet of paper? You still have to account for that hurdle.

And it isn't much of a hurdle when I have a slew of evidences telling me the document was primarily a dictated text. This is like expecting someone to explain why an English text contains a Portuguese phrase. By your method, you focus only on this phrase and conclude the document was written in Portuguese. As the surrounding English text is drawn to your attention, you respond:

Mak: The fact is I'm not dealing with any of that right now, and I am an expert in Portuguese and there is no question this is Portuguese therefore, unless you can explain to me why an English speaker would intentionally incorporate Portuguese into his text, you lost the debate.

Kevin: But the surrounding context is..

Mak: I'll get to that later. But right now the fact is you don't know Portuguese. And you cannot explain why Portuguese exists in the text.

Kevin: Maybe the writer was trying to impress...

Mak: Maybe! That is a poor theory for which you have no evidence. Only when you provide evidence that this author wrote in English can your theory be reasonable.

Kevin: That isn't my theory. My theory is based on the evidence that I alluded to when...

Mak: I already told you I am not discussing that now. For now the evidence demands that we aaccept the fact that the author wrote only in Portuguese and if your next post doesn't concede this point, this conversation is over.

[_Droopy]

It's really quite simple: the meaning and purpose of the KEP is that they were produced after the translation of the Book of Abraham in a rather clumsy attempt (quickly abandoned) to encipher some of Joseph Smith's previously received revelations.

Which is the dumbest thing I have ever heard, and which doesn't fit any of the manuscript evidence that we have.

Anyone who is not at this point aware that this is the typical Kevin Graham bluster, intended, as Will has pointed out time and again, to mask Graham's thorough and nearly comic ignorance of the actual evidence at hand, is either new to the discussion or hasn't been paying very good attention.

Others on your side who aren't stupid like you

Masks upon masks...

have already conceded the point that Will didn't explain its "meaning." So why are you pretending that it has? I already decimated many of the points WIll thought he made with respect to the "cipher."

Like your comic assertion that the ancient Egyptians did not use their own indigenous signs and symbols in their numbering system? The fact that you still apparently believe that Joseph had anything to do with the production of the KEP stigmatizes you as a rather remarkable ignoramus.

Which is why Will had to manipulate the evidence to fit his theory? I have illustrated his misuse of the A&G, what do you have to say about that? Quick, pick up those pom poms and dance for us Nomad. Tell us why it is logical to assume Joseph Smith lied when he said he was translating Egyptian to English.

Joseph also claimed he translated the Book of Mormon, but he never claimed to have taken it character for character from the gold plates themselves. He also retranslated portions of the New Testament, but never claimed to have the autographs of the original New Testament authors, or anything approximate to them.

You see Kevin, its obvious to some of us that you are nothing but a gasbag with an agenda, and that you cannot hide that fact behind your pseudo-intellectual posturing.

Oh I know, it is just as Wilbuyr insisted: translate doesn't mean translate, Egyptian doesn't mean Egyptian, and English really means "substitute value." Genius!

Most of the characters aren't Egyptian, and Will showed without question that much of the textual material used in the A&G have been selected from the entire Book of Abraham and portions of the D&C

Could you possibly be more stupid?

The question isn't stupidity, but the infectious intellectual dishonesty you bring to this forum and which appeals to others with a similar agenda.

[_Droopy]

I'm quite honestly aghast that this kind of cognitive dissonance, ignorance, and dishonesty is presuming to lecture me about scholarly methodologies. I'm done with this discussion.

I've been here some four years, almost since this board began, and I'm not shocked at Graham's arguments in the least.

[_Doctor Scratch]

I think it's really unfortunate that Maklelan is apparently backing out of the debate. Obviously, Kevin has piled up a lot of evidence in favor of a dictation theory, and it seems clear that Mak just wants to ignore the mountain of evidence. Sure: the alleged "homoioteleuton" is interesting...hard to explain, perhaps. But I'm curious how/why this lone anomaly is supposed to impact or defuse all the other evidences that Kevin listed. I mean, if the key passage was being dictated, it's fairly easy to imagine reasons why the same basic paragraph would have been written twice on the same page. Anyone with enough experience with writing can identify with this: you are composing a paragraph, and you decide either that you don't like it, or you get distracted, or whatever else. So you decide to start from scratch. You pitch the whole thing, or you re-write it more or less verbatim, managing to change a couple of things here and there.

You can even look at a more modern manuscript, like the opening passage from Don DeLillo's great novel, Underworld. He rewrote the passage over and over again on a typewriter, changing things a bit each time, so that you get different (sometimes different in very subtle ways) versions of the same paragraph on the same page. What I'm saying here is that I don't understand why Maklelan thinks that the same-page copy is necessarily a "homoioteleuton" rather than, say, a revision.

[_TBSkeptic]

I'm not sure what parts maklelan thinks are dictated. I haven't come across anything that appears dictated. It all looks copied to me. But I can envision a situtation where, while the copies were being made, someone could have said something like, "that should really have been ..." and then dictate a change in the course of the copy. No big deal, really.

But isn't the argument that that particular manuscript was part of the 'enciphering' project? If so, how did the changes that were made from that end up being incorporated into the final text of the Book of Abraham? Also, who made those changes?

[_TBSkeptic]

You can even look at a more modern manuscript, like the opening passage from Don DeLillo's great novel, Underworld. He rewrote the passage over and over again on a typewriter, changing things a bit each time, so that you get different (sometimes different in very subtle ways) versions of the same paragraph on the same page. What I'm saying here is that I don't understand why Maklelan thinks that the same-page copy is necessarily a "homoioteleuton" rather than, say, a revision.

Also, how does the straight up copy theory account for the fact that there are some differences between the 2 paragraphs? If this were simply a direct copy from the same "missing" document, would they not be the same? However, if the first paragraph was dictated, and then copied (for whatever reason), would it not be unreasonable to assume some changes could have been made when it was copied from above?

[Guest]

You make silly predictions like this all the time and you're always wrong. The theory that the Book of Abraham was already translated before the GAEL, is utterly ridiculous, if for no other reason, because the overwhelming historical evidences suggests so.

This is always what we get. "The evidence" or "the evidentiary sources" or "the text critical evidence" "says so".

And yet, you cannot or will not engage Will in a serious, civil discussion of the relevant points and make your case. You are content, like Metcalfe, to poke and prod around the edges and speak in broad generalities about "the evidence".

How long can one emperor walk the streets buck naked in this manner before he realizes that he's been seen?

You don't get to invent a new paradigm and call the "game changed" and expect to be taken seriously outside your religious circle. If you want to pretend you've killed arguments, you must first show how you've dealt with the evidence that was used to support said arguments, otherwise it is just a cop-out.

He did just that at the FAIR conference, as anyone who was there and not chemically impaired can attest.

This is standard methodology in scholarship, but I understand we're not dealing with scholarly methods. We're witnessing the epitome of apologetic thinking.
Enjopy the ride.

You know, you have actually descended into self parody at this point. You've actually become an ugly send up of Decker and Martin, the worst of the EV countercult (or perhaps of classic Dialogue and Sunstone intellectual snobbery, but I don't think you have the temperament to be a true intellectual snob).

Congrats.

[_Kevin Graham]

Graham-

I already decimated many of the points WIll thought he made with respect to the "cipher."

I have no doubt that, in your mind, this is true.

That's part of the reason you are so frightening to sane people.

All the same, from what I have gathered over the past two weeks, the Schryver Unified Theory of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers is being justifiably hailed as quite an amazing piece of analytical work. Its virtue is that it has explanatory power that harmonizes not only with the text critical evidence, but with the historical evidence as well.

It really is a "game changer," and if you people fail to realize it, it's just because you were never in the game to begin with.

Give us a friggin break moron. We already know that NOBODY buys into these argument except other Mormons who have a stake in this. By contrast, you can't say only anti-Mormons buy the critical argument.

In fact, many of the critics LEFT the faith over issues such as these. Stephen Thompson, trained Textual Critic who saw the evidence you're babbling about and concluded that the Book of Abraham was inspired fiction. Believe it or not the guy is still active in the Church, but he decimated Nibley's apologetic attempts.

Ed Ashment and Brent Metcalfe you already know about. Ashment was working for the Church's translation dept and was trained as a text critic at the University of Chicago. He was studying the KEP in detail for years when he came to the conclusions he did.

Brent's credentials are mysterious, but given his intimate involvement with the KEP project back in the 70's I suspect his credentials aren't as meaningless as you guys like too pretend, otherwise the Church probably wouldn't have condoned his involvement. Suffice it to say he is highly intelligent, and has the respect of a number of LDS scholars, like Kevin Barney and Brian Hauglid. Only those who don't know him personaly are those who despise him.

And of course over the years we've seen several people leave MADB, including long time Book of Abraham guru, Paul Osborne, and head on over here. People like Zeezrom and DarthJ and a few others I can't think of right now. You're losing the battle, and you know it.

So please, don't pretend your apologetic are convincing anyone who wasn't already wedded to these conclusions. All you have done is rally the echo chamber, but a truly successful argument is one that wins minds of the opposing group. Our arguments have done that on a regular basis. By contrast I doubt you've done it once. WIll's apologetic nightmares are becoming so convluted, they are guaranteed to attract only those kinds of minds that are suckers for any argument from symbolism. I mean if thay can believe God strikes sacred symbolism into their underwear, then they'll believe just about any argument from encryption.

[_maklelan]

And I never said I could now did I? So you're beating a straw man again.

By asserting the theory is preferable to homoioteleuton you assert it is a reasonable explanation. If you cannot explain it then your assertion fails. If you claim you cannot explain your theory fully then you are admitting your theory fails.

Here you are being disingenuous again. I already acknowledged that it was silly and irrational (at least from an outside perspective), so how the hell is this evidence that I "explicitly ignore the fact that the scenario is irrational"?

Because the fact that it's silly and irrational means it's invalid. Your last two sentences have stated that you recognize your theory does not account for the dittograph.

Logical has nothing too do with possible.

And "possible" is not enough to outweigh the evidence which points to homoioteleuton. Your cognizance of rudimentary academic axioms is paltry.

I only claimed to have provide one of an endless list of possible scenarios. That's it.

Then you cannot respond to the evidence that it's homoioteleuton, and your objection fails. Period.

You decided to ridicule me for it while pretending this had anything to do with my primary argument for which you willfully ignore.

I assumed that you weren't making such a self-defeating argument. I won't make that mistake again.

Where did I say it "must have happened"?

When you asserted it was more likely than homoioteleuton.

I explicitly stated that this is one of many possible scenarios. Why doesn't this compute?

Because it means your arguing against your thesis. The data points to homoioteleuton. You say it's not homoioteleuton because your theory is stronger. Suddenly your theory is nothing but a possibility. This doesn't even come close to calling into question the occurrence of homoioteleuton.

What friggin "theory"?

The theory you've been defending. The theory that you claimed made more sense than homoioteleuton.

I simply offered a possible scenario, one of many. My "theory" is about the manuscripts being simultaneously dictated and it is based on a number of text-critical evidences that you refuse to "get into." You're too busy playing offense and attacking comments that were never intended to be crucial arguments, and don't want to answer questions.

You're equivocating like I've never seen. You tried to argue against homoioteleuton. Now you're telling me you were not arguing it, but just trying to segue into a discussion of other manuscript pages?

Nonsense. The text-critical evidence pointing to dictation make this an overwhelmingly dictaated document.

That has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on this page of the manuscripts. Like I said before, dictation in one section or even many sections does not mean dictation in every section. You ignored that.

Which means the addded dittograph at the tail end was intentional.

Way off base. You're trying to make evidence from another section overlap into this section. Doesn't work that way.

There is no rational basis for saying the last paragraph was an accident unless the entire document was being copied from something else.

Exactly. The portions that were dictated were likely dictated from another written text. I've stated this already.

Those who think rationally about this and weight the evidence according, will agree.

Of course.

Unfortunately, Nomad can't think rationally and you refuse to "get into" the evidence for dictation.

Because we're talking about evidence for transcription on one page of the manuscript. You tried to argue against me, but you're now telling me you were doing no such thing, and that you're argument has been inadequate the entire time.

Continue mocking my rather innocuous, proposed scenarios if you wish.

It's a ridiculous assumption.

I can assure you that you'll receive similar treatment whenever you have the balls to deal with the evidence for dictation and try to squeeze it into your silly copyist theory.

So what you're saying is that you're bowing out of this argument, but I'm in trouble when I get to the next stage of the debate? Isn't that what everyone said when I first got into this debate?

Yes, there were many extra pages, but not for this particular manuscript. There could have been, but there is no evidence to suggest that. "Mid-verse" means nothing since the final product was divided up into verses in 1842.

Now you're being dishonest. You know as well as I that the mid-verse division also happens to be a mid-sentence division. Verse division is utterly irrelevant. The sentence was left hanging. I thought you had a better grasp on these manuscript than me. Why this rather uninformed and ad hoc excuse?

And it isn't much of a hurdle when I have a slew of evidences telling me the document was primarily a dictated text.

But you're presupposing a single method of copying, which is not supported by the evidence, and is thus a fallacy. You'll say that the evidence does support it, but when asked the homoioteleuton, you'll say that the evidence points to another explanation, which is begging the question.

This is like expecting someone to explain why an English text contains a Portuguese phrase. By your method, you focus only on this phrase and conclude the document was written in Portuguese.

You've misrepresented me. I've stated numerous times that I believe portions were dictated and portions were transcribed. To carry on your analogy, by my method, I focus only on this phrase and conclude that this phrase was written in Portuguese.

Your argument is becoming increasingly incoherent and fallacious, and you've entirely abandoned your theory. You're clearly way out of your league.