Historicity of _American Primeval_

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Moksha
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Re: Historicity of _American Primeval_

Post by Moksha »

Brent Metcalfe wrote:
Fri Jan 17, 2025 2:17 am
What I do know is that the actual historical record of the massacre at Mountain Meadows is potentially more harrowing than the limited series portrayed. So why not reenact the actual history?
Perhaps they wanted to give Brother Brigham a break. As Shades pointed out, the show portrays only eighty men, women, and children murdered by the Saints rather than the higher number of 123.

Of course, the apologists will argue about what difference the official number makes when you are talking about mass murder (which they will then deny because that is what they do).
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Re: Historicity of _American Primeval_

Post by Brent Metcalfe »

Fence Sitter wrote:
Fri Jan 17, 2025 2:14 am
Brent Metcalfe wrote:
Wed Jan 15, 2025 10:01 pm
You’re very kind. My time is limited given other projects. A couple of weeks ago Mormon Stories and Mormonism Live collaborated on a podcast interviewing me...

https://www.youtube.com/live/G6le6mltJw ... rvq9C6oo_b
Brent,

In this podcast at the 2:00:35ish mark you talk about Smith using a KJB while he is dictating the Book of Mormon and you mention a specific edition that was used, a 1769 Oxford Standard Edition KJB. What more is known about this specific Bible? Who did it belong to and is it still extant? If they were using the Oxford Bible in Mar-June 1829, why did they purchase another Bible (the 1828 Phinney) in Oct of the same year? Maybe the Oxford Bible belonged to someone else besides Smith?

Thanks
Joseph Smith's 1828 Cooperstown Bible purchased in October 1829 reproduced the text of the 1769 Oxford edition, which made numerous changes to italics as found in the 1611 KJV. We can be confident Joseph Smith used such a Bible because he changes the biblical text at approximately one-third of the italics as found in the 1769 Oxford edition, not the 1611 edition—and that requires a visual prompt.
Last edited by Brent Metcalfe on Fri Jan 17, 2025 6:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Historicity of _American Primeval_

Post by I Have Questions »

Brent Metcalfe wrote:
Fri Jan 17, 2025 2:17 am
I Have Questions wrote:
Thu Jan 16, 2025 7:13 pm

I think the show does a very good job of delivering exactly what it set out to deliver.
... Perhaps. I doubt most folks read the Netflix summations—my wife & I rarely do because we understand it’s entertainment. I don’t know what others do.

What I do know is that the actual historical record of the massacre at Mountain Meadows is potentially more harrowing than the limited series portrayed. So why not reenact the actual history?
I'm no filmmaker but I'd speculate it's down to budget constraints, storytelling pace, and desired audience. To film an extensive five day event when it's designed to be a scene setting in the series narrative was probably deemed counter productive. They weren't trying to do a documentary on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, they were using that real event to portray the time, the place, and the complexity of tensions that existed in that time and place - which they did successfully as I see it, whilst hitting the key factual elements about who was involved, how they went about it, what led to it etc. Had they made it more realistic to the event itself it may well have turned the Western Drama into, as you put it, a very harrowing gory horror series, and so limit the audience, and now Mormon's would be complaining about the series for showing too much of the facts and the historical speculation about the event.

It's an uncomfortable event for Mormon's to acknowledge happened. The angst over the series seems to come from a place of wanting to sweep it under the carpet and not have people shown what happened (I'm not suggesting that's where you are coming from). Because that's long been the Church's modus operandi.
1. Eye witness testimony is notoriously unreliable. 2. The best evidence for The Book of Mormon is eye witness testimony, therefore… 3.The best evidence for the Book of Mormon is a type of evidence that is notoriously unreliable.
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Re: Historicity of _American Primeval_

Post by drumdude »

A companion podcast from LHP on the real history has been released, part 1 is here:

https://sunstone.org/episode-140-the-utah-war-part-one/

Hopefully this satisfies critics like DCP who are so worried about historical accuracy.
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Re: Historicity of _American Primeval_

Post by dantana »

* Spoiler alarm *

Well, I managed to get through it the other night and rating it just on entertainment value, I give it a yawn. I'd say it is pretty much a cross between a boiler plate horse opera, John Wick, Dudley Do-Right and The Revenant.

For instance, horses, when they go lame don't buck off their rider and stomp them because they're mad that the rider is trying to get them to keep walking. They just stop walking. A guy with two bullets in the back and an arrow through the leg does not get up and back in the fight two days later because the natives treated him with ancient Ivermectin. Writing a good, plausible escape scene is difficult. In fact, the only one I've ever seen is in the movie Rob Roy. So, to have the crew get the upper hand on the gang of cut-throats by having the little girl run through the camp with a burning branch is pretty much not even trying. And this is just the obvious stuff, and not getting into travel distances, mountain passes in winter, sharpened shovels.

It's always a sure sign of a good bad movie when the writers can't figure out how to wrap things up and tie up loose ends...so they just kill off everybody. Since I don't want to take the time to look up character names - Half scalped guy, whom the writers want us to like, knowing that it's the white guys that did the dirty, goes ahead and saddles up with the white guys to go kill natives, and in the process kills his sweetheart. Then kills himself. Yeah, I know, they both needed to die to protect the white guy secret but, you didn't you have to turn him into a bad guy to do it. As for Dudley, I guess the writers felt they hadn't put in enough disappointment and carnage so... no California for him and Nell.
Last edited by dantana on Mon Jan 20, 2025 2:24 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Historicity of _American Primeval_

Post by Fence Sitter »

Brent Metcalfe wrote:
Fri Jan 17, 2025 3:32 am

Joseph Smith's 1828 Cooperstown Bible purchased in October 1829 reproduced the text of the 1769 Oxford edition, which made numerous changes to italics as found in the 1611 KJV. We can be confident Joseph Smith used such a Bible because he changes the biblical text at approximately one-third of the italics as found in the 1769 Oxford edition, not the 1611 edition—and that requires a visual prompt.
Thanks Brent.

I have no doubt that as part of the process of writing the Book of Mormon, Smith had Bible on hand, though I had never seen any mention of which Bible he was using until your recent podcast. I have a collection of 60-80 books from 18th & 19th century, including Bibles, that Smith is known to have owned or used. (Not the actual books of course, but copies of the same books.) I have several Phinney (Cooperstown) Bibles including 2 from 1828. I thought that in the podcast you might have been referring to a specific Bible he was using, and I was interested in which version it might have been. As far as I know he owned three different Bibles in his lifetime, an 1828 Phinney, an 1831 Yost and a miniature Bible printed by the Phinney press.

By the way, according to Kent Jackson in his 2001 article Joseph Smith's Cooperstown Bible, the Phinney Bible was based on a Bible from the Cambridge University Press and not the Oxford one.
Regardless of what can be said about the origin of the tables, lists, and layout of the Phinney Bible, the evidence suggests that the text itself derives ultimately from contemporary Bibles of the Cambridge University Press, probably by way of the Collins quarto and Elihu White’s quarto published by D. D. Smith. In a comparison of over three hundred verses between the Phinney and the Collins, I found only rare and inconsequential differences in punctuation, and all are likely attributable to typographical errors. In contrast, comparisons with Carey and some other contemporary Bibles showed many more punctuation differences. Collins noted that he took his text from an Oxford edition of but comparisons of punctuation and orthography between Collins and contemporary British Bibles show Collins to be virtually identical to a Cambridge edition but significantly different from an Oxford edition. The Elihu White Bibles are closest to Phinney in spelling also, again suggesting a common genesis. Whatever the origin of all these Bibles may have been, it is safe to say that the texts of American Bible makers such as Collins, Elihu White, and Phinney descended from a respectable and mainstream King James tradition. In spelling, Collins and related Bibles like Phinney differ from the archaic system of Oxford Bibles of their generation and follow the more modern spelling used then by Cambridge.
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Re: Historicity of _American Primeval_

Post by Markk »

Brent Metcalfe wrote:
Fri Jan 17, 2025 2:17 am
I Have Questions wrote:
Thu Jan 16, 2025 7:13 pm

I think the show does a very good job of delivering exactly what it set out to deliver.
... Perhaps. I doubt most folks read the Netflix summations—my wife & I rarely do because we understand it’s entertainment. I don’t know what others do.

What I do know is that the actual historical record of the massacre at Mountain Meadows is potentially more harrowing than the limited series portrayed. So why not reenact the actual history?
A friend I work with, a Catholic, were having lunch together the other day. I told him to check out the series. He laughed and told me he had just binge watched it and loved it. He had no idea about the true narrative and could have cared less as I tried to explain. It was just a great frontier western to him.

Maybe a reason not to make it true to the actual History is it would have taken away from the fast moving story line. Maybe setting up the reasons for the massacre would have either slowed it down, required a larger budget, add more episodes, or all the above.

Mel Gibson was interviewed by Joe Rogan a few weeks ago and he mentioned that it is very difficult to make a film these days (post covid?) in that the big budgets are gone, and there is less time to get it done. If I remember correctly he said he had 90 days to make his last movie, Flight Risk. The actual filming was less than a month according to a quick google.

So maybe that is the reason, and like most things in business, follow the money....they hit a home run it seems.
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Re: Historicity of _American Primeval_

Post by Dr. Shades »

dantana wrote:
Sat Jan 18, 2025 1:21 am
It's always a sure sign of a good bad movie when the writers can't figure out how to wrap things up and tie up loose ends...so they just kill off everybody. Since I don't want to take the time to look up character names - Half scalped guy, whom the writers want us to like, knowing that it's the white guys that did the dirty, goes ahead and saddles up with the white guys to go kill natives, and in the process kills his sweetheart. Then kills himself. Yeah, I know, they both needed to die to protect the white guy secret but, you didn't you have to turn him into a bad guy to do it. As for Dudley, I guess the writers felt they hadn't put in enough disappointment and carnage so... no California for him and Nell.
AAARGH!!! >:-( >:-( >:-(

Would it have killed you to type "Spoiler alert" before typing all of those spoilers??
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Re: Historicity of _American Primeval_

Post by Kishkumen »

dantana wrote:
Sat Jan 18, 2025 1:21 am
Well, I managed to get through it the other night and rating it just on entertainment value, I give it a yawn. I'd say it is pretty much a cross between a boiler plate horse opera, John Wick, Dudley Do-Right and The Revenant.

For instance, horses, when they go lame don't buck off their rider and stomp them because they're mad that the rider is trying to get them to keep walking. They just stop walking. A guy with two bullets in the back and an arrow through the leg does not get up and back in the fight two days later because the natives treated him with ancient Ivermectin. Writing a good, plausible escape scene is difficult. In fact, the only one I've ever seen is in the movie Rob Roy. So, to have the crew get the upper hand on the gang of cut-throats by having the little girl run through the camp with a burning branch is pretty much not even trying. And this is just the obvious stuff, and not getting into travel distances, mountain passes in winter, sharpened shovels.

It's always a sure sign of a good bad movie when the writers can't figure out how to wrap things up and tie up loose ends...so they just kill off everybody. Since I don't want to take the time to look up character names - Half scalped guy, whom the writers want us to like, knowing that it's the white guys that did the dirty, goes ahead and saddles up with the white guys to go kill natives, and in the process kills his sweetheart. Then kills himself. Yeah, I know, they both needed to die to protect the white guy secret but, you didn't you have to turn him into a bad guy to do it. As for Dudley, I guess the writers felt they hadn't put in enough disappointment and carnage so... no California for him and Nell.
Agreed. What a crap show. One stupid act born of bad writing after another. Jim Bridger’s character was the only main one that didn’t annoy the crap out of me. Two thumbs down.
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Re: Historicity of _American Primeval_

Post by Moksha »

I Have Questions wrote:
Fri Jan 17, 2025 8:44 am
Because that's long been the Church's modus operandi.
Up until the Church historian admitted the Mountain Meadows Massacre happened, the apologists at the MAD board would claim otherwise. Why? Because Mormon apologists believe they are commanded to Lie for the Lord. Dishonesty is an inherent part of their nature due to their understanding of that commandment.
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