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.
