Loan shifting the anachronisms away

[Marcus]

While I personally don't think there ever was an ancient text to be translated into the Book of Mormon, I agree that there's no point in discussing an apologist's theory about translation without taking the theory seriously. One might take the theory seriously in order to demolish it, if one could, but just saying Nope to the translation theory isn't a discussion.

Hence the discussion of anachronisms! No one so far, in my opinion, is saying 'nope' and refusing to discuss, which I agree would shut things down, but in a similar manner, a believer requiring or imposing an acceptance of a belief before starting a discussion with a critic would shut things down.

This was my reasoning when I talked earlier about using suspension of disbelief to discuss these issues. The problem is, suspending disbelief, as you note, would require the anachronism arguments to have weight, and they just don't.

Part of taking the idea of translation seriously, though, seems to me to be asking a translation to really be a translation. I could pick up a copy of the Iliad in Greek and claim to translate it into English, but if I turn the Iliad into a hard-boiled detective story by interpreting the funny little squiggles in ways that I'm just making up, then I don't think my so-called translation is really a translation at all. It's just a story I've made up—even though in this case there really is an ancient text there which I could have translated.

Whether or not the golden plates were real, they're not accessible now the way the Greek Iliad is, so we can't tell just by comparing whether the Book of Mormon is a close translation or a wild one. If an apologist tries to explain away anachronisms by appealing to translation artefacts, however, then I think they have to make sure that their proposed mechanisms really make sense for a translation.

Exactly.

To invoke code switching in ways that don't actually make sense for a translation is to take a big step towards calling something a translation when it really just isn't one. If the relationship between the absent original and the available English version becomes too strained and arbitrary, the so-called translation theory can degenerate into a mere refusal to say the word "fiction".

I think the LDS church has recognized this, as evidenced by comments such as 'it's not meant to be a history alone.' It's a hard switch to make, however, especially while refusing to acknowledge past positions that were completely different.

There are lots of different kinds of translations that do still count as translations. Some aim for closer fidelity, others for smoother reading in the target language; some deliberately try to convey some flavour of the original language even if it sounds odd in translation. So Book of Mormon apologists may well be able to make some kind of case. They can't just get away with anything and everything by appealing to translation, though. If we're going to take a translation theory seriously, it has to be a serious theory that is really about translation, and not just a get-out-of-anachronism-free card.

That would also very strongly apply to the Early Modern English approach, in my opinion. Carmack started out by (in my opinion) casually coming up with so many matches that he presented as Early Modern English after a non-rigorous approach (again in my opinion) and thought people would just accept his analysis, especially believers. He ended up having to retract around 70-80% of his findings as his analysis became more rigorous. I still disagree with his premise, and still don't believe it's anything but fiction, but the discussions, especially here and over on Jeff Lindsay's blog, were very helpful in analyzing his works. (If I recall correctly, you participated on Lindsay's blog quite a bit during the Early Modern English discussions, or at least I was pretty sure it was you! Always a pleasure to see logic introduced, especially with Carmack's claims and Jeff's 'just try to believe' politeness. )

[Gadianton]

If a critic doesn't engage the translation layer, then the believer has no real need to respond to the critic.

Part of taking the idea of translation seriously, though, seems to me to be asking a translation to really be a translation.

I think the problem here is translation layer vs. translations layers (which renders the word 'translation' as metaphorical), and maybe I misspoke also, but the context of the discussion has been translation layers, plural. Brandt was the champion of this point. The problem has always been that there are so many possibilities that could account for the text, that any theory about it becomes unfalsifiable. Ben has essentially said this in so many words (as I read him). From a believers perspective, the KJV copy/paste is an additional layer that a believer will certainly embrace. In some cases, Joseph's mind is looking for one-to-one mappings between what's on the plates and English, but certainly when encountering huge sections of the KJV, something else is going on that must be accepted. But, if huge sections of the KJV are allowed imported, it raises the possibility that there are in-between cases -- Book of Mormon writing sounds an awful lot like KJV writing, and Joseph may be coloring the output by his inspiration from the KJV, even when the wording isn't exact. Now what about Reformed Egyptian? This is another layer. The Nephites spoke Hebrew but wrote in Egyptian because it's so compact. Clearly, encoding into and out of Reformed Egyptian will color meaning. And it doesn't stop there.

One thought I had that may end up being pro-Ben, maybe it's what Ben is in part trying to say, is that anachronisms driving the discussion is really problematic when you consider that whatever legitimate reason might explain the anachronism, those things could also explain the non-anachronisms. The way the believer reads the Book of Mormon is that everything happened just like it says, unless something doesn't fit, and then that part has an exotic explanation. Horse could mean tapir or steel could mean some metal that we think they could have had. Well, if those instances are true, then just because it says "bow", the fact we believe bows were available at the time, doesn't mean that "bow" couldn't have meant something else.

[Moksha]

I think the LDS church has recognized this, as evidenced by comments such as 'it's not meant to be a history alone.'

"It is meant to be an allegory that brings us a steady source of revenue from our members."

[Benjamin McGuire]

One thought I had that may end up being pro-Ben, maybe it's what Ben is in part trying to say, is that anachronisms driving the discussion is really problematic when you consider that whatever legitimate reason might explain the anachronism, those things could also explain the non-anachronisms. The way the believer reads the Book of Mormon is that everything happened just like it says, unless something doesn't fit, and then that part has an exotic explanation. Horse could mean tapir or steel could mean some metal that we think they could have had. Well, if those instances are true, then just because it says "bow", the fact we believe bows were available at the time, doesn't mean that "bow" couldn't have meant something else.

Yes.

I was thinking about all of this a bit this afternoon (my light reading that I need to take a break from right now is John Stuart Mill). The thing is, apologetic argument will never turn someone into a believer. All of the apologetic arguments out there right now do not amount to even a plausible case for the Book of Mormon on their own. People come to believe the Book of Mormon for other reasons (sometimes it is just what you were raised with). My father was a convert - his belief in the Book of Mormon is much stronger than his belief in the Church and its leadership. Plausibility isn't a satisfying argument in any case.

Apologetics, it could be argued, is really about trying to have an answer to prevent the loss of belief once you believe - it is to create a framework to manage and prevent cognitive dissonance. The problem with apologetics is that it needs to make real sense. It needs to be coherent (even if it is only about plausibility). I am of the opinion that bad apologetics results in an almost inevitable loss of faith - and especially in the current context because there is a transfer of belief based on the meaning of the text as a communicative act (its religious and theological arguments) to a belief about the historicity of the text (the text as an artifact) - and if that history relies on this sort of smorgasbord of ideas, eventually we are going to have this patchwork of contradictory ideas and view-points - a position from which there will always be problems. I was struck by something this afternoon in the Mill text (On Liberty is what I am reading right now). He writes this:

To abate the force of these considerations, an enemy of free discussion may be supposed to say, that there is no necessity for mankind in general to know and understand all that can be said against or for their opinions by philosophers and theologians. That it is not needful for common men to be able to expose all the misstatements or fallacies of an ingenious opponent. That it is enough if there is always somebody capable of answering them, so that nothing likely to mislead uninstructed persons remains unrefuted. That simple minds, having been taught the obvious grounds of the truths inculcated on them, may trust to authority for the rest, and being aware that they have neither knowledge nor talent to resolve every difficulty which can be raised, may repose in the assurance that all those which have been raised have been or can be answered, by those who are specially trained to the task.

Apologetics in a nutshell right? Mill's position is that if you are going to engage in these arguments properly, then you need to take them all seriously:

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty. ... Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess.

I think that this is part of what is so bothersome for me about this idea of trying to create a score for anachronisms. Apart from the problem that Gadianton mentions here - the answers that compete with each other (earlier someone pointed out the problems that might come with the idea of a completely divinely provided translation and the idea of loan-shifting), the reality is that we get this score based on this history of interactions between apologists and critics. And if we uncritically equate the worst arguments with the best, and we resolve all of the worst arguments but leave the handful of the best arguments unresolved, is this scoring really an accurate image of what we have in front of us? And from the critics side, the constant pokes at the tapir get old - because they represent the same sort of thing.

Do I think that lexical expansion is the best way to explain the anachronisms in the text? Not really. The arguments I present here would be probably the tactic I would use if I was constrained to make those kinds of arguments. On the other hand, the complexity I see in the text comes at least in part from the dialogue created by the text as it interacts with a range of texts (including the KJV Old and New Testaments) and with itself (it is highly self-referential). The Book of Mormon is a modern text. And this complexity changes the way that I view many of these anachronisms. But just as importantly, I reject the idea that the best way to understand the text is through a notion of historicity. The reduction of the text to artifact is never going to result in a better understanding of its message. To quote myself:

For us to read the Book–of-Mormon ... with that sort of knowledge is to avoid participating in the narrative audience. It is akin to reading Cinderella only to find a psychotic, paranoid young woman.

If the Book of Mormon is a divine revelation, it is already a text that (in its translation) has been likened unto us. It is a modern text that is already inseparably connected to our own experience. And in a nod to Marcus, this isn't a point I make because I think that it is the most defensible apologetic. It certainly isn't a view that has caught on among the LDS that I have interacted with. It is the view I take from own reading of the text in the context of my own understanding and my personal experience. I think you could make the argument (reasonably) that this would also reflect a completely modern authorship - but it would certainly not be merely a historical romance with its engagement with theology, interpretation, and social criticism.

[Physics Guy]

The world's ancient Scriptures are interesting to me as voices from an earlier time, a time in which some things were much the same as they are today, but many things were different. A couple of thousand years are nothing in evolutionary time, so people still basically thought the same then. And it was the same world; rockets and lasers would have worked just as well then as now, if people had known how to make them. Yet human life was so different. So I see opportunities to gain insights that may still be valuable now, that we're unlikely to see on our own because features of modern life have obscured them for us, even though they're still real.

The Book of Mormon is not really ancient, but on the other hand it was written by and for people who were still greatly impressed by some real ancient Scriptures. For Joseph Smith and his contemporaries, moreover, the Bible had been fermented over the previous two thousand years, so that what they thought of as Biblical also held a trace of two thousand more years of history.

The real ancient Scriptures can be said to have come from an Axial Age, a time in history when humans first organised themselves in large groups and built cities. Producing Scriptures may have been a mere minor side effect of that change, though the Scriptures have long outlasted the cities. The context of axial change within which ancient Scriptures appeared is likely a big part of what gives them their lasting force. They watched Memphis give birth to rock and roll, as it were. Things that we can't easily see because we can't help just taking them for granted were novelties then; people noticed.

And perhaps early 19th century New England was part of another Axial Age, the last generation before steam and electricity, the top of the roller coaster before the plunge into modernity. A great writer in that time might indeed produce a profound secondary Scripture, mixing ancient insights as they had mulched over history with new perspectives that were starting to shine. Perhaps even an uneducated farm hand could have been such a great writer. A retrospective Scripture from the cusp of modernity might even be the kind of thing a modern Prophet would write.

I myself don't find anything like that in the Book of Mormon, I'm afraid. I see something closer to Bible fan-fiction than Vergil answering Homer. I see a hoax aimed at starting a cult. For me the set-up is good, but the execution falls flat. Maybe it just came a generation too soon to reveal anything profound about the meaning of modern technology for human life. But I can see some good reasons, besides having had Mormon parents, for being interested in the Book of Mormon. Maybe you just need to read it right.

I'd be better persuaded by even one good example of a passage in the Book of Mormon that really says something important in an impressive way: something that could legitimately stack up with the Sermon on the Mount, the Diamond Sutra, the Opening of the Quran; something profound and arresting, that doesn't need to be excused and defended.

Maybe you do just need to read it right. The Bhagavad Gita is just a weird rant wedged into an ancient war epic until the penny drops and you see the allegory, and then you can't get it out of your head that we have to fight our own nature even though it is us. Maybe there's some similar trick that will unlock something in the Book of Mormon. So far I just haven't seen it.

[Gadianton]

the reality is that we get this score based on this history of interactions between apologists and critics. And if we uncritically equate the worst arguments with the best, and we resolve all of the worst arguments but leave the handful of the best arguments unresolved

I was never captivated or much invested in the Book of Mormon as a believer, and I didn't transition to non-believer due to Mormon history or the Book of Mormon. I was a big Nibley fan, and I tried to be excited about the Book of Mormon, and I was amazed by his speculation, but that never translated into me reading it more or getting scholarly myself with it. I have limited insights into the state of Book of Mormon scholarship.

When I made my point about a critical stance assuming the Book of Mormon is a human composition, what I had in mine is Bible scholarship. The state of the documentary hypothesis has nothing to do with the history of interactions between Christian apologists and atheists. You could become a Bible scholar without having a horse in the race of whether Christianity is true. Likewise, the state of paleontology has nothing to do with atheists battling the creation institute. Serious Book of Mormon scholarship, should it ever arise, will assume the Book of Mormon is a human composition, but where that leads may be uncertain. The problem non-believers often have is the investment of demonstrating a clear sham, rather than really getting to the truth.

This doesn't mean a critic shouldn't take a believer's assumptions seriously. I have an irk when non-believers drag out "burden of proof". There is no such thing as burden of proof outside of certain structured settings. If I want to convince anyone of anything, the burden is on me to figure out how to do it. In that sense, yes, a critic will need to entertain whatever possibilities the believer imagines. It's just that, if something like serious source criticism ever arises for the Book of Mormon, the assumptions will be naturalistic, but it won't be advanced by partisans, or at least, such partisans will need to stay covert for the long game.

[Gadianton]

A great writer in that time might indeed produce a profound secondary Scripture, mixing ancient insights as they had mulched over history with new perspectives that were starting to shine.

The Bible had an advantage in that it is an actual collection of books picked over and redacted over a very long time. You mention evolution, and the Bible itself may be the best example in the world of a text that evolved. That's what makes it so interesting. Studying the Bible is as close as you're going to get to being a paleontologist but in the realm of the written word.

But not all books of the Bible were created equally. If I recall, the book of John is considered a literary masterpiece, while the Revelation is on par with a trailer-trash romance novel. That probably explains why right-wing Evangelicals are so into it.

[PseudoPaul]

What's the loan shift explanation for the biggest anachronism in the Book of Mormon? I refer of course to Jesus Christ, son of God, slain for the sins of the world.

[Marcus]

...A great writer in that time might indeed produce a profound secondary Scripture, mixing ancient insights as they had mulched over history with new perspectives that were starting to shine. Perhaps even an uneducated farm hand could have been such a great writer. A retrospective Scripture from the cusp of modernity might even be the kind of thing a modern Prophet would write.

I myself don't find anything like that in the Book of Mormon, I'm afraid. I see something closer to Bible fan-fiction than Vergil answering Homer. I see a hoax aimed at starting a cult...

I agree,especially the fan-fiction part. Even if you leave off the last sentence, it is still a piece of writing that fits in very well with the psuedo-biblical efforts of the day.

I agree with the last sentence, but even if I didn't, there still is not a significant argument that this writing is anything other than an example of what was current thinking in Smith's time. I've always felt he was a master at being an extremely charismatic reflection of the people and society around him, which drew people to him and allowed him to exercise considerable power over people. In my opinion, because I do believe pg's last sentence about starting a cult, Smith was very manipulative in exercising this power. That takes away from the likehood that his book was anything but a part of his hoax.