Intellectual Bankruptcy of Book of Abraham apologetics

[_William Schryver]

I have been watching Hauglid's presentation, and a question has come up:

If there are a number of variants in the Phelps passage in Mss. 1, then how can we be confident that homoioteleuton occurs instead of the missing phrase simply being another variant?

Either this was an exercise in stringing together random phrases for effect, or you haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about.

To what instance of homoioteleuton do you refer?

[_William Schryver]

Obviously you are seeing something that almost every non-believer is failing to see. I wonder why that is.

Do you?

Really wonder, that is?

Somehow I think it's just a rhetorical flourish on your part. I don't believe you wonder at all how this could be.

And that, of course, is at the root of what has become your current spiritual status.

[_Kevin Graham]

Put up or shut up Cracker Man. If you’ve got anything, bring it. Otherwise, shut your pie hole on that topic once and for all.

Right. Go ahead and pretend I'm the one who hasn't put up. I recently resurrected a half dozen threads where I have "put up" and you had tucked tail. So stop pretending you've dared to respond to any of my counter arguments. I'll have my wife email me the relevant file so I wont have to write up the response again, but we both know what your response will be. Silence as always.

Why is it these people only see through you when you’re taking a stance opposed to them? I find it astounding how they suddenly come to the conclusion that you’re a genius, so long as you’re supposedly “putting Schryver in his place.”

Any moron can put you in your place, genius isn't required.

[_William Schryver]

Right. Go ahead and pretend I'm the one who hasn't put up. I recently resurrected a half dozen threads where I have "put up" and you had tucked tail. So stop pretending you've dared to respond to any of my counter arguments. I'll have my wife email me the relevant file so I wont have to write up the response again, but we both know what your response will be.

Do what you have to do Cracker Boy, e-mail your wife to send you a "detailed explanation" if she's got one for you. But I say you're a backpedaling maniac right now. If you had any idea what your "detailed explanation" actually consisted of, it'd pouring out of your brain this very moment.

Instead, you're stalling for time.

Hey, that's fine. Take all the time you'd like.

E-mail your mentor Metcalfe and see if he'll forward you some "detailed explanation." Get two scoops.

Whatever it takes.

Because the presence of this dittograph is one of the key elements arguing against a dictation scenario. In fact, this dittograph has treasures hidden in it that ... well, all in time. You claim you can explain it as something other than a visual copying error. You claim to have already done so. Great! I'll be here waiting for that explanation ...

[_Kishkumen]

To what instance of homoioteleuton do you refer?

You are such an annoying prat. In pt. 4 of the Hauglid video, which you recorded, H. claims that in Abraham 1:3 "it came down from" was omitted because the copyist's (here Phelps) eye skipped from the preceding "fathers" to the next "fathers." He then proceeds to explain that Phelps has seven omissions in his part of KEPA 1, which are difficult to explain other than by the claim that he is copying from an earlier, unrevised manuscript. I would suggest that the argument for homoioteleuton is undercut significantly by the fact that there are seven other omissions in Phelps' section.

Do you grasp what I am saying now?

[_William Schryver]

You are such an annoying prat. In pt. 4 of the Hauglid video, which you recorded, H. claims that in Abraham 1:3 "it came down from" was omitted because the copyist's (here Phelps) eye skipped from the preceding "fathers" to the next "fathers." He then proceeds to explain that Phelps has seven omissions in his part of KEPA 1, which are difficult to explain other than by the claim that he is copying from an earlier, unrevised manuscript. I would suggest that the argument for homoioteleuton is undercut significantly by the fact that there are seven other omissions in his section.

Do you grasp what I am saying now?

Yes, I do.

Now.

It was so out of context with the thread that I didn't understand what you were talking about. We've been talking about one of the instances of homoioteleuton in KEPA 2. So I take back all the bad stuff I said about you in that one post. But just that one.

by the way, we'll get to Abr. 1:1-3 down the road. One thing at a time, or it'll turn into a free-for-all.

[_Kishkumen]

So I take back all the bad stuff I said about you in that one post. But just that one.

by the way, we'll get to Abr. 1:1-3 down the road. One thing at a time, or it'll turn into a free-for-all.

That's OK. You wrongly assume that I have no idea what I am talking about and have no basis to comment intelligently. Therefore, it is easy to see how this prejudice could lead you to assume I was spouting nonsense, when in fact I knew exactly what I was talking about.

I note that once again you have put off a fairly straightforward question. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but I still think it is worth noting, again.

[_Kishkumen]

And that, of course, is at the root of what has become your current spiritual status.

In other words, you have no intelligent response to the worthy point that it is odd you should insist on the existence of an actual ancient papyrus fragment of the Book of Abraham, which was at one time in Joseph Smith's possession, when we have no proof that he ever translated accurately an ancient text that was in his possession. Very well then.

[_Kevin Graham]

Do what you have to do Cracker Boy, e-mail your wife to send you a "detailed explanation" if she's got one for you. But I say you're a backpedaling maniac right now. If you had any idea what your "detailed explanation" actually consisted of, it'd pouring out of your brain this very moment.

Instead, you're stalling for time.

You idiot. I have been making you look stupd ever since I woke up this morning, and now it is midnight and I am not about to write up a repeat of what I have already written when I can just wait till tomorrow to post it. Stalling for time? You have been stallng for three years, scared to death of having to deal with teh seven hard hitting pieces of evidence I presented.

Hey, that's fine. Take all the time you'd like.

It doesn't matter, you're going to tuck tail and run like you always do.

E-mail your mentor Metcalfe and see if he'll forward you some "detailed explanation." Get two scoops.

Whatever it takes.

I've never emailed Brent to respond to you - ever.

Because the presence of this dittograph is one of the key elements arguing against a dictation scenario.

Are you bragging or apologizing? You should be embarrassed by presenting this as evidence, let alone the "key element."

In fact, this dittograph has treasures hidden in it that ... well, all in time. You claim you can explain it as something other than a visual copying error. You claim to have already done so. Great! I'll be here waiting for that explanation ...

Well in the meantime, why don't you go ahead and respond to the seven points? Haven't found your balls yet?

[_Kevin Graham]

Hold onto your gonads Will (once you find them) because this is going to hurt.

This was posted a year ago on this forum: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6354&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

You participated in this particular thread, yet you just claimed you have NEVER seen ANY response from me regarding this dittograph argument. The thread proves I addressed it when Hauglid first raised the issue three years ago! I'll simply cut and paste what I wrote last year, just to prove you can't keep up with anything.

You can't even keep track of what your own mentor says even when you're the one recording him! So I guess it shouldn't be surprising that you can't remember responses to your precious arguments, even if they have been thrown up in your face on numerous occasions. This is the first post, but read the entire thread to get more explanation, in a discussion that seemed to have left you way behind. That's right, you never responded, you gradually made your presence scarce until you disappeared altogether. But not before tryng to pick a fight with Brent, whose response persuaded you vacate the premises.

I will still find the post from my old forum because it goes into more detail, but this post from last year should serve to prove you're an idiot when you accuse me of refusing to address your BS dittocrap argument.

May 22, 2008, I posted:

-------------------------------------------------------

Concerning the so-called dittograph, Will suggested that this was something he discovered that no critic ever addressed it. Will raised this issue on the FAIRboards in Octber of 2006. Had he been paying closer attention to the exchange between Hauglid and myself, which took place in August of 2006, he would have realized that this had already been addressed by me:

Brian, you bring up the issue of the truncated portion of one manuscript. Though this is interesting, as I said before, it can be easily explained because the second scribe takes over at the precise spot where the first scribe leaves off. One only needs to consider that Smith wanted two copies of the dictation - as evidenced by the fact that he had two scribes working on it - and wallah, "problem" solved - Graham to Hauglid, Aug 7, 2006

Now there is no question that the last page of Ms1a contains a copied paragraph. But what hasn't been established by Will is why it exists. A dittograph is understood as an unintentional duplicate of a copied text. This is why Will and Brian like to use this term so much; it throws in all sorts of unwarranted assumptions and takes their conclusion for granted. Instead of actually arguing this was an unintentional copying error, they just rely on the term "dittograph" to assume the argument. This is laziness. It takes more than unsupported assertion to establish a dittograph. In all the KEP manuscripts, there exists no other examples of sloppy scribal copying, and these scribes were professionals. Yet, Brian and Will would have us believe that Williams was so clumsy that he overlooked more than a hundred words covering half a page! And since we have already established the fact that the Egyptian characters were placed in the margin as the English text was being written, how do they explain the fact that this double-paragraph contains no corresponding character in the left margin? Naturally it wouldn't if it were an intentional double-post. But they don't consider this, and I seriously doubt Skousen and their mystery team of scholars have either. They don't even acknowledge the fact that the repeated paragraph starts precisely where Parrish stopped transcribing in Ms1b. Ths cannot be without significance. But they don't deal with this either because they have already dismissed the connection to Ms1b, out of hand.



For some reason Parrish had to excuse himself from the process before finishing. By following the sequence of characters that correspond to the papyrus, we see that the scribes stop once they reach the very end of line two. That is a convenient place to end that session.

The fact is Ms1a and Ms1b provide us with numerous evidences suggesting the two were transcribed in concert. Will and Brian want to thwart this mountain of evidence by relying on this single piece of evidence, driven by assumption, for a copying scenario. And I say single, because that is all they have provided so far. The rest of their evidences amount to a bunch of empty promises and "wait and see" rhetoric. But Will has just deflated most of the suspense because he said this "dittograph" is the strongest piece of evidence they have.

So the question should be this. All of the other evidence pointing to a dictation ... do we simply turn it on its head and say they're unexplainable? They have to account for these other evidences in the same model for a copyist scenario. But Will and Brian never want to do that. Instead, they just assert the dictation theory is "fatally flawed" in sporadic faith promoting rants, and then when it comes time for them to account for the evidences, they concede they don't have any answers. So they really explain nothing.

Brian concluded with his intended purpose which I already knew. He went into this thing with the intention, not to provide a plausible model that explains the KEP, but rather to argue in any way he can that the critics cannot be right:

"Although some questions will be left unanswered it will be very clear what these mss are not."

As did Will:

"Now, what does this all mean? That is a good question, and I don’t pretend to have a complete answer."

No of course not. It is just a mystery which they know nothing about. But they know the critics are wrong because, well, [i]they have to be[/] because the Church s true! I mean didn't Metcalfe strangle three guards to death before stealing the microfilm of the KEP? Wasn't he best friends with Mark Hoffman? Isn't he just an expert in playing video games?

This for me proves they are not really interested in getting to the truth so much as they are interested in trying to come up with any kind of excuse to dismiss the conclusions drawn by the critical thinkers. This is not respectable scholarship. In scholarship one of the worst things you can be considered is an apologist, and these guys prove why.

Brian's precious copying theory leaves at least a dozens questions unanswered, while the dictation scenario leaves only one question left open (What were the circumstances that fully explain the double post of Abraham 2:3-5?). In scholarship, which model, then, would be considered the more reasonable one to follow? I have an extremely difficult time believing any scholar outside their apologetic circle, would buy into any of their nonsense.

In scholarship, models are proposed to explain how and why things happen, while reducing the number of unanswered questions. Hauglid's apologetic is the antithesis to this. While he never really offers a model to explain much of anything, one can be inferred by his dismissive attitude towards every facet of the critical argument. What he offers is just a lazy conclusion that the whole thing is really just a mystery. He chooses a path that is constantly raising more questions than it ever intended to answer. This is by design. All the scholarly jargon aside, this is not a scientific model that one would expect from a scholar operating within the parameters of textual criticism.

I see Will and Brian scrambling for books on Texual Criticism and immediately running to the sections dealing with copying errors. They then pull out technical terms that most people don't even understand, and then they plug them into their copyist model where they think they can force them.