Decapitating Laban to steal his clothes:a perfect crime?

[_Doctor Scratch]

It's not completely separate though - because I am talking about the rhetorical strategies of the text of the Book of Mormon - of this particular narrative in the Book of Mormon.

The principal "rhetorical strategy" of the Book of Mormon has *always* been, ever since the translation first emerged via Joseph Smith, to convince people of its authenticity as an ancient text. Everything else, including the smaller, ancillary, "literary" things you're referring to, are subsidiary to that main goal.

I am talking about what the author was trying to say in providing us with the details that he provides us with. I think it is quite relevant.

Relevant to what? If it is not "relevant" to the question of the Book of Mormon's authenticity, then how is it relevant at all?

[_Scottie]

I gave my answer already :)

The only reason Nephi was there to steal the plates was because he told God, "I'm not writing the whole Brass plates on new Metal Plates"

Where is that said??

And, what about Lehi writing them?

[_Themis]

Ostensibly good guy decapitates bad guy. That's about the only similarity between David vs. Goliath and Nephi vs. Laban. Do you see others?

I think the connections between the two stories is to weak. I could probably find many weak similarities between any two stories. This is a common problem I see in LDS Apologia, and a disappointing one as well.

[_Benjamin McGuire]

And that, Doctor Scratch, is exactly what Wimsatt and Beardsley call the intentional fallacy. Thank you for demonstrating my point. And with that comment, I think I am done here with this topic. So enjoy.

[_Themis]

Where is that said??

And, what about Lehi writing them?

It is recorded in Themis 2:4. At this time Lehi had developed Carpal tunnel syndrome and could no longer write.

[_Doctor Scratch]

Doctor Scratch writes:

Boy, is that ever an understatement! Wimsatt and Beardsley would make mincemeat out of your argument.

Actually, I really doubt that you could participate in a reasoned discussion of Wimsatt and Beardsley (have you even read them?).

Yes, I have. Have you?

I think my position would hold up quite well though, actually, since I never engage in the intentional fallacy (which is quite different from talking about authorial intent).

Lol. I guess maybe you haven't read them. Your FARMS article is actually very reminiscent of the Donne critic that they cite in their essay.

[_The Dude]

I think it makes perfectly good sense on its own terms....Your insistence that it has to answer these kinds of issues seems to me to be only motivated by polemical desires - not by any real attempt to understand the story or why it was told.

Which explains why you have nothing to add at this level, but lots of people don't think it makes sense. Not just polemicists and critics, but believers on the MADB are jumping with creative solutions for a widely (not universally) perceived problem. You don't see it that way? Okay, that's fine, I'm not going to make an issue out of your possible desires as an apologist and a believer. I find that kind of thing to be impolite.

[_Doctor Scratch]

And that, Doctor Scratch, is exactly what Wimsatt and Beardsley call the intentional fallacy. Thank you for demonstrating my point. And with that comment, I think I am done here with this topic. So enjoy.

Rofl! Really, it's not, since W. & B.'s work is primarily concerned with "poetry." Presumably, though, you don't want to treat the Book of Mormon as a work of poetry or fiction, right? And yet you're more than happy to appropriate the tools of literary analysis for apologetics. If you think that the "author's intention" here was to create effective, allusive poetry, then you might have a point. Is that what you think that Nephi (or Joseph Smith?) meant to do?

[_Euthyphro]

For Euthyphro, I wrote a rather lengthy article on the topic and it was published a while back in the Farms Journal.

Okay, just finished reading the highlights of your paper and I just have one question to start out: Why should readers of the Book of Mormon confine themselves to the Ben-Porat interpretive methodology? The only answer I can think of is because then all these inconvenient problems with the Nephi vs. Laban story are neatly set aside. If that's the case then I have to agree with The Dude.

Honestly, if I'd found this story anywhere, no matter what other story it alludes to I'd wonder about the need to have the brass plates in the first place, the need to cut off Laban's head as part of the plan to get them, the absurd justifications that the Holy Ghost used to get the pliant Nephi to do the deed, the likelihood that Nephi's impersonation scheme would have worked, and the spontaneous Stockholm Syndrome of Zoram (that part reads like a Jack Chick comic).

While your paper does point out some interesting analogies (intertextualities, if you prefer) between 1 Sam 17 and 1 Nephi 3 and 4, I really hope you didn't write all that hoping we'd pipe down about the issues that nag us about some of Joseph Smith's work.

[_Doctor Scratch]

I think it makes perfectly good sense on its own terms....Your insistence that it has to answer these kinds of issues seems to me to be only motivated by polemical desires - not by any real attempt to understand the story or why it was told.

Which explains why you have nothing to add at this level, but lots of people don't think it makes sense. Not just polemicists and critics, but believers on the MADB are jumping with creative solutions for a widely (not universally) perceived problem. You don't see it that way? Okay, that's fine, I'm not going to make an issue out of your possible desires as an apologist and a believer. I find that kind of thing to be impolite.

Well, I don't care if it's impolite, Dude. What is Ben really up to here? (And all the other apologists who have taken this "turn" whereby the Book of Mormon is to be treated like a literary text?) Do you really think that he went to all that effort in his FARMS piece just to show us that, like the David and Goliath story, the Nephi/Laban story really is about the "little guy" sticking it to the big, mean guy? Or to show that the Book of Mormon has textual similarities to the Bible?

His whole article is devoted to trying to locate legitimate allusions to the Bible in the Book of Mormon. You know how I mentioned "The Intentional Fallacy," by Wimsatt and Beardsley? Toward the end of the essay, they mention T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland---a long poem that is littered with allusive footnotes to various different texts. Obviously, there's no such intertextual mechanism if the Book of Mormon, so Ben is just playing guessing games about that Book of Mormon "author's intent." (He cannot even make a persuasive case as to who the author(s) is/were, beyond the internal textual evidence itself.) At least with Eliot, we know for certain that he lived, and that he'd read these footnoted texts.

But, it doesn't matter. Ben has already bailed out of the discussion, and so I bid him "Adieu."