Other Religious Forgeries

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mentalgymnast
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Re: Other Religious Forgeries

Post by mentalgymnast »

DrStakhanovite wrote:
Fri Mar 12, 2021 11:05 pm
mentalgymnast wrote:
Fri Mar 12, 2021 8:02 pm
Just a quick question from a non academic layperson.

OK, let’s take the plates out of the picture. If you, DrStakhanovite, were to take a purported scriptural record appearing in our day seriously, what would be the acceptable means by which that record would appear? And just for kicks, let’s say that the record is also from God.

As in God with a capital G. The BIG guy. The real deal.

Regards,
MG
I take the Book of Mormon seriously in the sense that it is considered divinely inspired by a large group of people and have no problem seeing it categorized with the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, Qur’an, Baháʼí scriptures, etc, etc. I think close study of the Book of Mormon can be equally rewarding for Mormon and Non-Mormon alike, regardless of beliefs about the book’s origins.
OK. I’m of the same mind.
DrStakhanovite wrote:
Fri Mar 12, 2021 11:05 pm
Now if you want the Book of Mormon to be treated as an ancient document then people are going to need more than a text written in 19th century English, ideally some kind of vorlage that predates Joseph Smith. We are also going to want a material culture that was capable of producing alloyed plates with engravings on them, along with information about the languages employed by this literate culture, even if the language is incomprehensible and unable to be translated.
Not going to argue with that. Although I’m unsure about the alloyed plates.
DrStakhanovite wrote:
Fri Mar 12, 2021 11:05 pm
What would it take for me to believe a modern (or ancient) text was divinely inspired? I don’t know. I’m not really confident that if God existed that would be their chosen method of communication.
In order for information to be transmitted uniformly it would have to be in a permanent written form. Even if God used flash technology or some other super-dee-duper way of communicating, it would essentially have to come to us as text. What’s the alternative?

Plates actually sound like a good way to transmit information from an ancient culture to our flash technology culture. Better than paper or other media that deteriorates over time.
DrStakhanovite wrote:
Fri Mar 12, 2021 11:05 pm
I’ve yet to come across a compelling reason to believe that God would even use language as we understand it today.
Yeah, but then we wouldn’t understand it now, would we? 😉

Seems like He’d have to communicate with us in our language.

Regards,
MG
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Re: Other Religious Forgeries

Post by Themis »

Bought Yahoo wrote:
Fri Mar 12, 2021 11:39 pm
What about the Bible? The New Testament specifically. It stands on weaker ground that the Book of Mormon.
I don't know any believing LDS academics that would ever suggest this, but in what way are they on weaker ground?
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Symmachus
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Re: Other Religious Forgeries

Post by Symmachus »

DrStakhanovite wrote:
Fri Mar 12, 2021 7:21 pm
The Book of Mormon is a text without a corresponding artifact, purportedly written in a language that is completely unknown to everyone, whose production and proliferation can only be traced back to the first half of the 19th century.
That is at present the state of things, but my researches into the fragments of the Jareditical language in light of Stubbsian comparative philology have yielded some excellent results. In time, conversational Jaredite will appear on our horizon.

This is a significant issue that you raise, Reverend, and I think of the context in which these kinds of "discoveries" so frequently occur: markets and money. That kind of motivation is easy to perceive when it comes to the antiquities market (or, for that matter, the market for early Mormon documents in the era of Mark Hoffman). It is harder to perceive in the case of the Joseph Smith story because he was not marketing the gold plates. Yet I think your very convincing theory of Mormonism as a tourist gimmick that deteriorated into a religion goes far in terms of motive. I am convinced, at any rate.

I am not as convinced about this part:
Thus, for someone to attempt to declare the Shapira Strips ancient or authentic in spite of the fact that none of these analyses (such as those listed above) can be done is an absolute deal breaker. We simply must be able to analyze the Shapira Strips themselves (i.e., the actual documents) before anyone can make a compelling declaration of antiquity.
I don't know enough about the Shapira Strips (or anything, really), but I think it is ludicrous to dismiss something out of hand for the reasons that Rollston gives in that quotation. Many inscriptions in the numerous volumes of the Corpus inscriptionum latinarum have subsequently been lost without any such scientific testing having been performed, but it doesn't follow that they are forgeries.

I think it is also a form of intellectual laziness. It reminds me of the Brian Hales argument: since we don't have DNA evidence of any children of Joseph Smith by his wives, he would have us conclude that Joseph Smith didn't have sexual relations with any of them (for my own part, I'm sincerely hope that eyewitness testimony will eventually come to light and give us the hard evidence on that). The job of a textual critic, even of the lower criticism, is to make judgments. If at the end of the day some lab tests are what settle it, we don't need any critics.

I consider all arguments about motive found elsewhere in his blogpost to be totally worthless. I see an irony in the way that Rollston attributes motive in his arguments for their being a forgery. The Shapira Strips support the traditionalist view of Deuteronomy as being of deepest antiquity, yet since modern scholars have established that Deuteronomy is itself a kind of forgery from the late 7th century BCE, the Shapira Strips are clearly forgeries (doing my best Wallace Shawn voice here) because they would be earlier than the 7th century and would thus support a view opposed to the scholarly consensus. However, there is exactly no material evidence that Deuteronomy is in fact a 7th century text—that is entirely a philologically derived claim of modern scholarship and literary critcism. What happened to the insistence on hard, material evidence? After all, we simply must be able to analyze the Book of Deuteronomy itself (i.e., the actual documents) before anyone can make a compelling declaration of 7th century provenance.

I also consider arguments that are basically guilt by association worthless. Even forgers traffic in genuine documents. That is one means of establishing their credibility in the first place (as in the case of Mark Hoffman). Crying "wolf" falsely five times is no guarantee against the appearance of a wolf at some point.

He appears to be on much firmer ground in discussing the script, and that to me is where the real evidence would lie, though he says tantalizingly little: "the script of the Shapira Strips has a handful of eerie similarities to the Moabite Clay and Stone Forgeries"...yes, ok, such as? He doesn't tell us, probably because it would be too technical, but I think that must be where the evidence is. Ron Hendel, in the comments section, has fleshed some some of this out, and the case looks much more compelling there, although I would like to read the Dershowitz article and study the Shapira Fragments myself before making a judgment. But most of the blog post is about the Shapira Strips' provenance, which according to Rollston is very fishy. Well, I suppose it is. But that's not evidence of anything. His discussion about "patterns" of forgeries is also not evidence of anything and is basically nothing more than saying that, because forgeries follow real finds and gullible people will pay for them, this too must be forgery, since it followed a real find and someone probably gullible paid money for them.

Now, I can appreciate the retort that all of these strands, taken together, suggests the circumstances in which forgeries arise, thus increasing the likelihood that it is a forgery. But it is intellectually inconsistent, at least, to begin with an unequivocal appeal to material evidence (the absence of which is "an absolute deal breaker"), which at best should mean skepticism of any claim one way or the other when the artifact doesn't exist to test, only to settle on circumstantial evidence to make a firm conclusion against their antiquity. Rollston says they are "demonstrably modern forgeries," while demonstrating nothing about them at all.

I'm not saying that I think they're ancient—I've not even read them!—I just don't see, from his blogpost, how he gets to that conclusion. Except for the bit on the script, which I wish he would have said more about, it's a collection of non sequiturs. I'm sure the article/reply to Dershowitz will have more substance.

And here the Book of Mormon comes in. I think Nibley was basically right: you don't need the material artifact in order to determine that a text embedded in that artifact is ancient or not—at least not a text the length of the Book of Mormon (short or fragmentary texts are another issue). We have the text, and it is clear that the text is not ancient, no matter what medium you find it on or in. Unlike NIbley (and apparently Rollston), I don't think the moral character of the discoverer has any bearing on whether a text is ancient. Perhaps epigraphers, like BYU scripture schoalrs, do have the gift of discernment and can determine forgery on the moral mettle of the soul in the absence of metallurgical analysis; I'm sure philologists can't and doubt historians can.

The epigrapher's art (or science, as Rollston might have it) needs data, but even if we had the golden plates, that wouldn't give anyone enough data. We would need several sets of plates, so that we could get relative chronologies. Without a host of plates to establish relative chronologies, forget any kind of analysis of the script, assuming we could even read it. But suppose we had the plates, and that metallurgical analysis or carbon dating or whatever it is gave us a date of 300 BC—well, wouldn't that be problem, since the abridgement of the plates would have been 700 years after that? If it's not around the time of Mormon, then it's not Mormon's book and thus not the Book of Mormon—it would call the story into question. Probably for many believers, the fact that it would pre-1800 at all would be enough—at least for those impressed by the Skousen stuff. Yet not much reflection is required to see the blinding possibility that an ancient set of golden plates with a unknown script engraved upon them could have existed in Joseph Smith's backyard but also not contain the text of the Book of Mormon. If that were the case, we'd have a situation like that of the Book of Abraham. And yet the fact that the papyri are ancient in that case doesn't affect our judgement that the Book of Abraham is modern and not ancient, because that judgement is based on the text and not the material artifact that bears it.
(who/whom)

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Kishkumen
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Re: Other Religious Forgeries

Post by Kishkumen »

Symmachus wrote:
Sat Mar 13, 2021 5:19 am
This is a significant issue that you raise, Reverend, and I think of the context in which these kinds of "discoveries" so frequently occur: markets and money. That kind of motivation is easy to perceive when it comes to the antiquities market (or, for that matter, the market for early Mormon documents in the era of Mark Hoffman). It is harder to perceive in the case of the Joseph Smith story because he was not marketing the gold plates. Yet I think your very convincing theory of Mormonism as a tourist gimmick that deteriorated into a religion goes far in terms of motive. I am convinced, at any rate.
Why thank you, dear consul. My humble hypothesis about the tourist angle is something I hope to be able to pursue more seriously someday. I am certain, however, that I would have to work through the extent to which it is best classified as a simple hoax, gag, or gimmick, and the degree to which there was a deeper motivation behind it. One factor to consider is the nature of the relationship between the "plates" and the translation. For quite a while, Joseph Smith had no plan to translate the plates himself. This opens up a fairly large period of time in which Smith may have been motivated by something other than the religious goals tied up in the translation.
I don't know enough about the Shapira Strips (or anything, really), but I think it is ludicrous to dismiss something out of hand for the reasons that Rollston gives in that quotation. Many inscriptions in the numerous volumes of the Corpus inscriptionum latinarum have subsequently been lost without any such scientific testing having been performed, but it doesn't follow that they are forgeries.
I take your point, but I think the difference is that both in the case of the Shapira Strips and of the Book of Mormon, there were good reasons from the beginning to conclude that the thing in question was a forgery. From here we get into a kind of measure of probability, which ultimately leads to a judgment regarding whether it is possible to reverse the initial conclusion that the object was a forgery. I know that you addressed these issues somewhat later in your post. My point is that I don't think that these two cases are truly similar to inscriptions in the CIL in the way you are suggesting.
I think it is also a form of intellectual laziness. It reminds me of the Brian Hales argument: since we don't have DNA evidence of any children of Joseph Smith by his wives, he would have us conclude that Joseph Smith didn't have sexual relations with any of them (for my own part, I'm sincerely hope that eyewitness testimony will eventually come to light and give us the hard evidence on that). The job of a textual critic, even of the lower criticism, is to make judgments. If at the end of the day some lab tests are what settle it, we don't need any critics.
Again, I don't see the parallel here. Naturally we can't go back in time to see whether Joseph Smith conceived kids with his female sex partners, but there is no compelling reason to believe that he did not have sex with his partners, whereas, in the cases of the Shapira Strips and the Book of Mormon, all of the hallmarks of a forgery are there. Hales is arguing from the outset that we must believe something truly exceptional occurred; Rollston is arguing that we should probably assume something very unexceptional happened. A known forger probably created a forgery. So?
I consider all arguments about motive found elsewhere in his blogpost to be totally worthless. I see an irony in the way that Rollston attributes motive in his arguments for their being a forgery. The Shapira Strips support the traditionalist view of Deuteronomy as being of deepest antiquity, yet since modern scholars have established that Deuteronomy is itself a kind of forgery from the late 7th century BCE, the Shapira Strips are clearly forgeries (doing my best Wallace Shawn voice here) because they would be earlier than the 7th century and would thus support a view opposed to the scholarly consensus. However, there is exactly no material evidence that Deuteronomy is in fact a 7th century text—that is entirely a philologically derived claim of modern scholarship and literary critcism. What happened to the insistence on hard, material evidence? After all, we simply must be able to analyze the Book of Deuteronomy itself (i.e., the actual documents) before anyone can make a compelling declaration of 7th century provenance.
OK, fair enough, but given the fact that others already concluded the text was a forgery, physical evidence to the contrary would go a long way to making a compelling case for the opposite. My guess is that what we are asking is this: what do we know now that we did not know then, that would lead us to overturn former conclusions that this is a forgery? Maybe you are right. Perhaps we know so much more about earlier Hebrew epigraphy that past judgments about the Shapira Strips can be overturned. I would be surprised to see an epigrapher who apparently knows his subject telling us that it simply cannot be done when it is obvious to everyone that it can.
I also consider arguments that are basically guilt by association worthless. Even forgers traffic in genuine documents. That is one means of establishing their credibility in the first place (as in the case of Mark Hoffman). Crying "wolf" falsely five times is no guarantee against the appearance of a wolf at some point.
Yes, and there is only so much time in the day, so much time in a life, to spend watching broken clocks. My overall feeling is that if Dershowitz wants to watch broken clocks, then that is his business. At the same time, Rollston is not obliged to agree that it is a worthwhile enterprise.
And here the Book of Mormon comes in. I think Nibley was basically right: you don't need the material artifact in order to determine that a text embedded in that artifact is ancient or not—at least not a text the length of the Book of Mormon (short or fragmentary texts are another issue). We have the text, and it is clear that the text is not ancient, no matter what medium you find it on or in. Unlike NIbley (and apparently Rollston), I don't think the moral character of the discoverer has any bearing on whether a text is ancient. Perhaps epigraphers, like BYU scripture schoalrs, do have the gift of discernment and can determine forgery on the moral mettle of the soul in the absence of metallurgical analysis; I'm sure philologists can't and doubt historians can.

The epigrapher's art (or science, as Rollston might have it) needs data, but even if we had the golden plates, that wouldn't give anyone enough data. We would need several sets of plates, so that we could get relative chronologies. Without a host of plates to establish relative chronologies, forget any kind of analysis of the script, assuming we could even read it. But suppose we had the plates, and that metallurgical analysis or carbon dating or whatever it is gave us a date of 300 BC—well, wouldn't that be problem, since the abridgement of the plates would have been 700 years after that? If it's not around the time of Mormon, then it's not Mormon's book and thus not the Book of Mormon—it would call the story into question. Probably for many believers, the fact that it would pre-1800 at all would be enough—at least for those impressed by the Skousen stuff. Yet not much reflection is required to see the blinding possibility that an ancient set of golden plates with a unknown script engraved upon them could have existed in Joseph Smith's backyard but also not contain the text of the Book of Mormon. If that were the case, we'd have a situation like that of the Book of Abraham. And yet the fact that the papyri are ancient in that case doesn't affect our judgement that the Book of Abraham is modern and not ancient, because that judgement is based on the text and not the material artifact that bears it.
Exactly, the Book of Mormon text is not ancient. The text is in English, and it bears all the marks of 19th century production. I don't think we disagree here. What I thought this was about, based on my reading, is what it might take to overturn that conclusion. If plates were produced, and they were authenticated in some way, and the text on them matched the Book of Mormon, then we might be able to take the antiquity of the Book of Mormon, at least is some sense, seriously. Without the plates, however, we are unable to do much to get beyond the obvious marks of forgery, and what Rollston said about the Shapira Strips is more applicable to the case of the Book of Mormon. I had supposed that what Rollston was saying is that he did not detect anything in Dershowitz's work thus far that overturned the conclusion that the Strips are a forgery, and that, in his view, it would take access to the Strips themselves to overturn the conclusion of forgery decisively.

He is probably overstating that, but I think in the case of the Book of Mormon it is not an overstatement to say that, barring some unforeseen corroborating discovery, the lack of the plates leaves the question of the Book of Mormon's authenticity as an ancient text comfortably in the category of forgery.
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Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: Other Religious Forgeries

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

Manetho wrote:
Fri Mar 12, 2021 6:15 pm
Given the incident in which William Hussey tried to uncover the plates in a drawer and found only a tile brick,
This, much to my shame, is the first I've heard of this man and incident. I'm sure Grindael shared the information, but I admit I didn't read all of his material mainly because I'm pretty thick and his posts were so exhaustive my wrinkle-free brain would tire easily. Would you mind fleshing this out a bit or linking me to a Grindael post covering Mr. Hussey's discovery?

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Re: Other Religious Forgeries

Post by Lem »

Symmachus wrote:
Sat Mar 13, 2021 5:19 am
Perhaps epigraphers, like BYU scripture schoalrs, do have the gift of discernment and can determine forgery on the moral mettle of the soul in the absence of metallurgical analysis; I'm sure philologists can't and doubt historians can.
Clever. Those BYU scholars are surely well-rounded.

It reminds me of an accounting Professor I once had. While handing out the course evaluations, he said drily, 'please note the question that asks whether I have included the Gospel principles in every aspect of my teaching. Whether it is possible to imbue the principles of double-entry and full disclosure with the Gospel of Christ is irrelevant. Just know that every lecture given has been done so with the Spirit of God.'

Or something like that. Even sitting on the front row, those large BYU classrooms make it difficult to see how far back a Professor's eyes might be rolling.
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Dr Moore
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Re: Other Religious Forgeries

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Welcome back, dear Symmachus!!
mentalgymnast
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Re: Other Religious Forgeries

Post by mentalgymnast »

Kishkumen wrote:
Sat Mar 13, 2021 4:38 pm
I think in the case of the Book of Mormon it is not an overstatement to say that, barring some unforeseen corroborating discovery, the lack of the plates leaves the question of the Book of Mormon's authenticity as an ancient text comfortably in the category of forgery.
Hi Kishkumen, would you be willing to respond to the questions I posed in my post to DrStakhanovite? Maybe he’ll respond, but I’d be interested in your thoughts.
mentalgymnast wrote:
Fri Mar 12, 2021 8:02 pm

If you, DrStakhanovite, were to take a purported scriptural record appearing in our day seriously, what would be the acceptable means by which that record would appear? And just for kicks, let’s say that the record is also from God.

DrStakhanovite wrote:
Fri Mar 12, 2021 11:05 pm
What would it take for me to believe a modern (or ancient) text was divinely inspired? I don’t know. I’m not really confident that if God existed that would be their chosen method of communication.
mentalgymnast wrote:
Fri Mar 12, 2021 8:02 pm

In order for information to be transmitted uniformly it would have to be in a permanent written form. Even if God used flash technology or some other super-dee-duper way of communicating, it would essentially have to come to us as text. What’s the alternative?

Plates actually sound like a good way to transmit information from an ancient culture to our flash technology culture. Better than paper or other media that deteriorates over time.
DrStakhanovite wrote:
Fri Mar 12, 2021 11:05 pm
I’ve yet to come across a compelling reason to believe that God would even use language as we understand it today.
mentalgymnast wrote:
Fri Mar 12, 2021 8:02 pm
Yeah, but then we wouldn’t understand it now, would we? 😉

Seems like He’d have to communicate with us in our language.
My questions are highlighted. And they are posed with the hypothetical that there were no plates, although in my post I did express my preference for plates.

Regards,
MG
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Re: Other Religious Forgeries

Post by Lem »

Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:
Sat Mar 13, 2021 5:01 pm
Manetho wrote:
Fri Mar 12, 2021 6:15 pm
Given the incident in which William Hussey tried to uncover the plates in a drawer and found only a tile brick,
This, much to my shame, is the first I've heard of this man and incident. I'm sure Grindael shared the information, but I admit I didn't read all of his material mainly because I'm pretty thick and his posts were so exhaustive my wrinkle-free brain would tire easily. Would you mind fleshing this out a bit or linking me to a Grindael post covering Mr. Hussey's discovery?

- Doc
I recall grin talking about someone seeing a corner of a 'greenish stone', so not sure its the same incident, but try this link:
http://mormondiscussions.com/viewtopic. ... 8#p1170108
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Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: Other Religious Forgeries

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

Thanks, Lem!
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