Symmachus wrote:
#1 is a safer bet, and I would suggest that until traditional believers get serious about scholarship and building a real tradition of their own that can be taken seriously, they stay with #1. In fact, they already do! Because here is the thing that makes all of this discussion, both the paper and responses, pointless: the New Testament. Whatever the Brass Plates contained, Alma contains quotations from the Gospel of Matthew before Jesus was even born, and most bizarrely contains whole phrases from Paul a good century before he wrote any of his letters, as well as perhaps Revelation (e.g. have a look at Alma 5). If we are going to start tackling textual anachronisms, let's start with that. If you can't explain that, then no amount of parsing any "E" or whatever sources is going to matter one damn bit.
There is a lot to say about this paragraph. So first the obvious (especially since it was discussed by others in this thread). It is difficult to have certain discussions about the Book of Mormon because of the conflation that occurs between the Book of Mormon and the Gold Plates. The text of the Book of Mormon does not come "a good century before [Paul] wrote any of his letters". The Book of Mormon is a 19th century production, it is written in a language Paul could not understand. When we discuss the textual history and reliability of the New Testament, no one starts with a Coptic text and claims that it represents exactly what Paul wrote. It becomes a question of when the text was translated, and what the state of the manuscript was that was used for that translation, and so on. Exactly what we mean when we speak of the Book of Mormon as a translation is an important question. A few year back, I started a bit of a dialogue about it:
https://www.academia.edu/48984482/The_B ... in_Context. There is, as I noted in that presentation, a tendency for LDS to adopt this conflation - and to do so by attempting to apply the tools of biblical scholarship directly to the Book of Mormon as if it were the ancient text just like the Hebrew Bible (speaking of its ancient manuscripts). This effort will always yield problematic results. This is no less true of Symmachus in the quote above, who wants to assert the existence of anachronisms in a translation - but that assertion comes with a host of assumptions about the text of the Book of Mormon and the nature of its translation. I don't have any issue with people bringing assumptions to the table - as long as those assumptions are clearly spelled out. To extend the rationale of Symmachus, The Book of Mormon quotes extensively from the King James Version, right? Alma quotes from the KJV a millennia and a half before it is written (translated).
Don't get me wrong. The challenge with the essay that is being critiqued is that it too doesn't try to explain what we see in any systematic or methodological fashion. Consider this:
First, in several places in the Book of Mormon the reference is to “the books of Moses” rather than to “the five books of Moses,” and even where there is now reference to “the five” books of Moses, he suggests that Joseph Smith may have added the number “five” because he felt he independently knew there were five books of Moses, and he was justified in being more specific. Second, he notes that the version of the Ten Commandments which Abinadi quoted to the priests of King Noah varies a little from our King James version in Exodus 20. We ought not be surprised, since there is variation between the version of the Ten Commandments familiar to modern-day Protestants and Catholics. Barney’s point is that there may have been separate E (Brass Plates?), P (Exodus 20), and D (Deuteronomy 5) versions of the Ten Commandments, and we do not know which version Abinadi memorized, presumably with the Brass Plates as his source.
So, the question I would ask is this, why doesn't the rationale behind the first example also work for the second? Couldn't we argue that the version of the Ten Commandments occurs in the way it does precisely because it was a version that Joseph Smith was familiar with? (Again, I discuss ways of talking about these issues in the presentation I linked earlier). This essay isn't particularly useful to me because it doesn't actually answer its own questions.
There are more statements that I find highly problematic in this context. Consider this: "Nicholas Frederick identifies additional possibilities when he suggests the term “biblical interaction” rather than mere “allusion” to explain intertextuality in the Book of Mormon." Frederick understands what I set out to explain in my first published piece - that intertextuality can be a deliberate and interactive process between two texts (or traditions) or it can be something incidental. I am not sure that Thompson really understands why this difference is important, and why the distinction between the gold plates (ancient source) and Book of Mormon (modern English text) is important. But as Frederick points out in his conclusion:
The final step, proper analysis, can realistically be performed only once the first two steps have been fully explored. Once we have ascertained where the precise and probable biblical interactions exist within the Book of Mormon and we can set aside those phrases that are simply the result of a shared vocabulary, we can begin to look more closely at why biblical phrases constitute such an apparent, yet so very intrinsic, part of the text. Are they the merely the result of a nineteenth-century translation? Are they more easily explained as author-oriented or audience-oriented?
Of course, I might question the idea of being 'merely the result of a nineteenth-century translation' only in that such a statement contains embedded assumptions about what a translation is. Should we consider translators to be authors in their own right?
Back to Symmachus:
I think #2 is incoherent: "believers" in X can't "shift their belief paradigms" in X without changing what X means: they won't still be "believers." We have to acknowledge that this comes at a serious cost. But If they are serious about maintaining belief in X, then they need to make a better theory than the Documentary Hypothesis. Mormon apologetics is responsive and negative (that is, it denies the claims of others but doesn't advance its own claims), not assertive and positive (that is, positing a claim). That is unlike traditional Christian, Jewish, and Islamic apologetics for most of the history of those traditions. Mormon apologists have such a long way to go because they have yet to develop the competency even to understand what they are up against, let alone how to overcome it. That is what David Bokovoy is showing here.
I think that this is much more likely than you do. My answer is based on my experience working with the Joseph Smith papers. It's been a while since I have spent a lot of time reading there, but, one thing became very clear to me early on. Several of the sections in the D&C were constructed from earlier sources and ideas. A good example is Section 27. The whole thing about the sticks from Ezekiel first shows up in the 1835 version (it isn't a part of the original revelation) following an article that William Phelps wrote in which he merges several ideas from
Jahn's Biblical Archaeology with details about the Gold Plates and the Book of Mormon. These are tacked on to the August, 1830 revelation and there we have Section 27. If there is any doubt about the kinds of editorial changes, scribal insertions, issues related to copying, and the like, that are discussed in textual criticism of the Bible, we don't have to go very far in early Mormonism to find them playing out in real time (and very well documented). When we discuss the different versions of the ten commandments, what about the different versions of the Articles of Faith. Mormonism will, eventually, confront its own text critical discoveries (and they won't be as speculative as the ones made about Biblical texts). I think that this shift, while taking some time, is inevitable (to the extent that believers are interested in these discussions). And so I believe that accepting the reality of these kinds of literary theories will become much more natural and an accepted part of belief at some point.
