David Bokovoy Issues a Devastating Critique of the Mopologists' "Scholarship"

[malkie]

My mistake. I just assumed that the Benjamin McGuire posting here is the same one who writes for Interpreter. Ben, I apologize.

That is certainly me.

I first posted on Dr. Shades messages boards back in 2007 (long before Interpreter was a thing). I am not a frequent poster. On the old message board, I managed to hit just over 500 messages in 13 years. Dialogue is often helpful for the kinds of topics I engage in. And while some of my exchanges have not been particularly friendly (perhaps even downright antagonistic), for the most part, I believe that just about everyone is willing to have an open dialogue with me. I have also participated on occasion on the MD&D Forum. I was an early participant on the FAIR message boards (before MD&D existed). Many of these message boards are highly partisan. The closest, I think, that our communities ever had to something that was more centrist was ZLMB, where I participated a great deal (I had long running debates with Metcalfe and others back then). Those discussions really drove my interest in the process of identifying parallels and how to understand them in the context of literature and literary devices. And those discussions resulted in some of what I published. If we really want to get back into ancient history, my first taste of Mormon internet discussions occurred on COMB (the Christiantiy On-line Message Boards) on AOL. I began participating there back in 1987 - that might date me just a little bit. Living where I do, in northern Michigan, there isn't much opportunity for the sorts of intellectual discussions I like to have about Mormonism and its origins and evolution.

So my writing here certainly won't come as a surprise to anyone (at least not anyone who I have communicated with over the decades). And I have never had anyone at the Interpreter ever give me grief over it. Sometimes, these message boards are the only places I can interact with some of these internet personalities that I know. And several of them I have known for a very long time (like Kerry Shirts). In general, I am well treated in all of the forums where I participate. And usually, once I have said my piece, I end my involvement in the discussion.

Thanks for clarifying, Benjamin.

And, sincerely, good for you (and for "us") that you come here and share your wisdom.

I hope you will correct any mistaken impressions that I, in my ignorance, may have given.

[Mayan Elephant]

Possibly so, Dean Robbers, and yet I find myself feeling magnanimous towards Dr. Peterson at the moment, and I can’t help but wonder if the pivot to the “Witnesses” movie was strategic. .......
.......... This may be the moment you predicted—I.e., the shift to an “inspired fiction” model.

Y'all keep my attention with these suggestions about their strategies and motivations. I am fascinated by it as the scholarship never seems to justify or satisfy one move to the next. Each example I see along the way (admittedly, a fraction of what you see) gets blown apart in an instant by peers like Simon S. and others. I rarely find that there was ample evidence for one shift, other than their foothold from the last shift was not firm.

I do, however, notice that these pivots/shifts tend to favor individuals even when the shifts are damning from a so-called scholarship perspective. It leads me right back to my bigger questions with these apologists - who/what is their biggest priority? I feel like I have less insight on the answer with more time and more information.

[Philo Sofee]

Possibly so, Dean Robbers, and yet I find myself feeling magnanimous towards Dr. Peterson at the moment, and I can’t help but wonder if the pivot to the “Witnesses” movie was strategic. .......
.......... This may be the moment you predicted—I.e., the shift to an “inspired fiction” model.

Y'all keep my attention with these suggestions about their strategies and motivations. I am fascinated by it as the scholarship never seems to justify or satisfy one move to the next. Each example I see along the way (admittedly, a fraction of what you see) gets blown apart in an instant by peers like Simon S. and others. I rarely find that there was ample evidence for one shift, other than their foothold from the last shift was not firm.

I do, however, notice that these pivots/shifts tend to favor individuals even when the shifts are damning from a so-called scholarship perspective. It leads me right back to my bigger questions with these apologists - who/what is their biggest priority? I feel like I have less insight on the answer with more time and more information.

From my point of view, their biggest priority is to make sure they bear their testimonies. They obviously have no respect, let alone need, of actual valid scholarship or thinking reasonably through issues. They just want to be able to tell God, "Lookit here man, we testified! Now may we pleas wear that grand celestial crown you promised due to our valiance?" It isn't about truth to apologists. It's about being true to testimony regardless of how blatantly obvious the testimony goes against all the facts, science, and reason which shows it is all just make believe and fluff. Every single apologist's writing demonstrates this and demonstrates it fundamentally. It is their GROUND. Nothing else actually matters to them except bearing their temple recommend questions testimony. Is Joseph Smith a true prophet? YEA! Is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints the Kingdom of God on earth and is it true? YEA! Is Russell M. Nelson God's living prophet on this earth in these latter days? YEA!

Literally, nothing else matters to the apologists. To them that is the only universal truth that will last and exist through the eternities.

[Mayan Elephant]

Every single apologist's writing demonstrates this and demonstrates it fundamentally. It is their GROUND. Nothing else actually matters to them except bearing their temple recommend questions testimony. Is Joseph Smith a true prophet? YEA! Is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints the Kingdom of God on earth and is it true? YEA! Is Russell M. Nelson God's living prophet on this earth in these latter days? YEA!

Literally, nothing else matters to the apologists. To them that is the only universal truth that will last and exist through the eternities.

Thank you. Reading that is brutal. Though, I imagine living it is much worse. Oddly, I find myself feeling rather empathetic even though it reads like a pathological horror story.

[Philo Sofee]

Every single apologist's writing demonstrates this and demonstrates it fundamentally. It is their GROUND. Nothing else actually matters to them except bearing their temple recommend questions testimony. Is Joseph Smith a true prophet? YEA! Is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints the Kingdom of God on earth and is it true? YEA! Is Russell M. Nelson God's living prophet on this earth in these latter days? YEA!

Literally, nothing else matters to the apologists. To them that is the only universal truth that will last and exist through the eternities.

Thank you. Reading that is brutal. Though, I imagine living it is much worse. Oddly, I find myself feeling rather empathetic even though it reads like a pathological horror story.

It is. I can say, at one time, I did not even care if it was logical or correct, I *WAS* bearing my testimony and God would sustain me in my efforts. It was testimony bore to others that mattered, not historical consistency, or mathematical logically presented or whatever. Testimony we were taught for decades is ALL that matters. And the very BEST way is simply tell what you have learned in church. Regurgitate what you KNOW to be true. And I guarantee you anyone here 50 or over will bear me out in this. It WAS how we were told. I went through ALL 4 years of seminary hearing this non-stop in preparation for my mission. My seminary teacher during lunches would coach me on how to bear a better testimony, and we practiced it!!! OMG, thinking back on those hours is painful. The math I could have learned!!! The history or philosophy. Instead, I learned to properly include Joseph Smith, church, and Jesus (in that order), and with all the right words to be more spiritually effective. I mean I had it down, Good Lord it makes me want to cry realizing I threw away so many hundreds of hours of schooling I could have had. But......and I mean this, BUT, it was my experience, and I am better prepared now to see the contrast, so I can use it as a learning tool. Gadzooks though......I mean SHEESH!
This indoctrinating brain wash NEVER leaves a person. Sure I can tame it, but I hear the words......gawd, I still hear the words........

[Mayan Elephant]

This indoctrinating brain wash NEVER leaves a person. Sure I can tame it, but I hear the words......gawd, I still hear the words........

Philo, those words took me on a ride.

I am over 50. I know what you are describing.

How we learned this, and how we incorporated these tactics we were taught, shaped who we are. It is no different than learning violence in a violent home, or even learning to be passive to keep the peace in a violent home. I am not suggesting that the tactics are violent, I am merely saying that our coping methods (the HOW) became innate after so much early practice and training. In my case, some of these tactics became so innate I struggled to behave after tossing the old strategies aside and trying new things. I ended up drinking all the whiskey, which is why there is none left for you. My bad. I found myself rejecting that old how, and experimenting with other methods of coping.

Perhaps that is why I feel empathy for the apologists, even when I cannot fathom how they do this. When I ask what is their motivation for doing it, I really am not doing so rhetorically. I do not know the answer. But, I get your point which is that this is how they coped. This is how they have always done it. This is the costume they always wore. This is the institution they always served. And this is how they do it - SHAMELESSLLY! They have set themselves completely aside to serve this other thing, this other person, this other God!

As you described it and as I understand your description, it is a devastating compromise, even if it is a working strategy.

[Mayan Elephant]

Hey Philo. Here is a strange confession. When I was really really battling with DCP, Midgley, the folks at M* and Michael Otterson (anyone remember that clown?) I had a real passion for all this stuff and thought that fighting them was important. I also was having a lot of fun doing it with some great friends. I got a kick out of triggering Otterson over at the Washington Post until he responded to me directly, as if that was worth a damn thing. I liked the banter with Louis and and Dan, until they banned me, of course.

And here is the strange confession - I thought back then that if Dan were not a member of the church and wearing this costume of sorts, that he would be one hell of an interesting guy to know. I have no idea if that is true, but he always left me with the impression that it would be a blast to talk about the things he was passionate about, if it did not have these effing filters and facades to it.

[Symmachus]

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).

Yes, some would surely see that last as a problem.

To clarify, these aren't my assumptions in asserting the existence of anachronisms to determine whether the Book of Mormon is an actual translation of ancient document. I'm channeling the conclusion that leads from the historicists' assumptions. If you are going to do what Thompson attempts on the grounds he attempts it, then anachronisms are by the terms of the argument a valid mechanism for weighing the claim, and in doing so you will run in to more significant problems, of which I highlighted one. However, I don't personally see these as anachronisms or even consider that a valid category when we are talking about the Book of Mormon as a nineteenth century text.

If you believe there is an ancient origin behind the nineteenth century text, you will run into that problem again, however, because anything that is claimed to have occurred, by definition, will reflect the context in which it is supposed to have occurred. To say that something has an origin at some point in the past is to say that the number of historical anachronisms contained in that something is close to 0.

I see things like the "loose translation theory," a form of which you seem to present here, as an attempt to deal with that. Thank you for the link, by the way, to your article. I think it is good that the believers have push-back from within. My impression of the historicists is that they are really trying to do apologetics for a view of the Book of Mormon they learned in Primary, so I think it is good that there is someone trying to advance a more "grown up" view. That danger I see with it (as everyone else has) is that it can run into inconsistency: something is historical until an anachronism comes up, then there is Roland Barthes and the slipperiness of language and what is a translation anyway? If you take this approach, how do you balance this tension?

I hope you'll find this place interesting enough to discuss this from time to time. And please invite Midgley; he will fit in just fine in the Telestial room.

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.

I don't disagree per se but what I keep highlighting, whether the inspired fiction theory or something else, is the logistics over the strategy: ok, how is this going to happen? It's not enough just to describe a position on the text by appealing to whatever literary theories are most helpful for maintaining some kind of allegiance to the Book of Mormon as a sacred object and then declare it a valid alternative, especially when there is already a dominant tradition of reading the text and when that tradition is rooted in claims made by the text itself and when those claims are the primary locus of faith assertions. I understand that progressive Mormons already have alternatives that satisfy them; but they are not very satisfying to the majority of believers. So I would counter that this is not inevitable at all. The cultural status and interpretive approaches to the Book of Mormon can go in a lot of different directions, though not an infinite number of them, and they have to be worked out by individuals making choices and advancing claims—and then of course there is the views of the institutional Church to reckon with. Granting those views the ultimate authority has been the main criterion separating believers and non-believers in the Utah tradition of Mormonism.

It is not as if rabbinical Judaism was the inevitable result of the destruction of the 2nd temple. That tradition had to be built on the ruins of the temple by people as a new kind of worship, worldview, and way of life. Sure, there materials to work with on a nascent tradition, but it's not like it was the natural result or obvious in any way that this would survive or win out over other kinds of Judahite religious practice.

That's pretty fascinating. I wasn't aware that he had any impact on real-world scholarship. He had some published essays with lots of footnotes, but back in the day, powered by my own feeble research powers, I never discovered any real impact that he had. One day if you are bored, I wouldn't mind seeing your post outlining the full list of impacts he had that you are aware of. I'm sure the Rev has some ideas also.

I should like to clarify that Nibley was not the originator of the idea; Walter Bauer, for example, had made an argument in that vein 30 years before (I should go back and see if Nibley cited Bauer, though I doubt it), not to support a claim like the Mormon one that the true Church had vanished but that that there was not single church in the first place. There were instead various branches of an inchoate Christianity that were in competition and were even hostile to each other, and that these were only later recast in terms of an Orthodox church with heretical deviations. That is the more or less the standard view now, except in more sectarian kinds of scholarship, but nobody really read Bauer until he was translated into English in the 1970s. Nibley was ahead of his time in the sense that he questioned the link between the orthodox Christianity of the Fathers on the one one hand and the apostolic and sub-apostolic churches on the other. He could have pushed that a lot more, undermining the idea of there being an "orthodoxy" in earliest Christianity (because to Nibley everything was heretical anyway), but he didn't really develop it. I don't think he published much in non-Mormon venues after that, actually. There was one more article about Christ's secret teachings to the early church leaders before his ascension (and of course Mormons would see the message behind that), but I think that was it. Maybe there were a few stray articles but certainly not like this. A few more articles and a secular, more scholarly version of The World and the Prophets would have made the Mormon position something to reckon with, as I think the HIllerbrand/Grant exchange in Church History shows.

Nibley, to me, seemed to have a long-running model that was the inverse of evolutionary models. Start from purity, ideas degenerate, but then ideas are restored again. He had the stones to go so far as to directly state that the atonement reversed the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Okay, I'm not sure I'm right about his grand project, but if so, was there something like the sound-shift law operating to figure that out? I'm not a huge Kuhn fan but he has some great starting points, and I think your sound-shift rule is the paradigmatic example of what grounds a proper research paradigm.

What's the sound shift rule that you're referring to?

In general, I think you are correct about Nibley's entropic view of history, partly derived from Mormonism but I think also influenced by his early admiration for German writers like Oswald Spengler, whom he cited often. It had the added benefit of providing him with numerous parallels from the ancient world, because that was the starting point that every ancient culture used for understanding the past. So, when Nibley found Lactantius or whichever Church Father you pick saying something like, "the earliest Christians had a purer understanding of the gospel than many Christians today do," Nibley reads that as confirming his hypothesis: "See? They are admitting that it was in apostasy! It was already known in the fourth century that the church was gone!" Meanwhile, I just see an ancient person expressing a view of the past as old as the Gilgamesh epic.

[Doctor Scratch]

Wow...look at this: none other than Jeff Lindsay himself has admitted that the article was posted in spite of many problems:

[Editor’s Note: Comments made shortly after the original publication of this paper identified several errors in need of revision. These should have been caught pre-publication. We apologize for the unfortunate gap in our editorial process and are grateful to those who assisted us in recognizing the errors so that needed corrections could be made in this revised version of the paper. We strive for high-quality peer review and editorial processes that will continue to make such errors a rare exception. —J. Lindsay]

On the one hand: yes, this is a step in the right direction. On the other hand, why aren't they crediting Bokovoy and the others for helping out? A simple "thank you" aimed at this message board would be appreciated.

Meanwhile, Thompson's addendum is far more bitter:

[Author’s Note: It is apparent that some readers have misunderstood the point of my paper, so I’ve made a few minor changes to hopefully clear up any ambiguity on the part of readers. I apologize for any confusion that my word choices may have caused. That being said, let me state that I am fully aware of the history and purpose of the Documentary Hypothesis approach to the Pentateuch. The focus of this article, though, is not the Documentary Hypothesis, but the ideas behind the Documentary Hypothesis. The point is that the concepts underlying the Documentary Hypothesis — that ancient authors selected from existing materials to compile later works and that they made selections to suit their agendas — are not unfamiliar and should not be unfamiliar to Book of Mormon readers. All authors, all redactors, and all editors are human and, as humans, make human choices and can make human mistakes. To assert that any theory of textual development — whether the hypothesis be documentary, supplementary, fragmentary, neo-documentary, or any other human conception thousands of years after the fact — is somehow neutral or natural or self-evident is less academic than apologetic and, most of all, very human.]

Pretty weak if you ask me. I wonder if he'll ever be allowed to publish with Interpreter again? I also wonder if these editorial notes were added by the Editors on their own, or whether they were ordered to do this by DCP? In any case, this is quite an embarrassment for the Interpreter Foundation. Right on the eve of the Witnesses movie's (second) premiere, the "journal" is faltering big time.

[Dr. Shades]

Author’s Note: It is apparent that some readers have misunderstood the point of my paper, . . .

TRANSLATION: I wasn't wrong about anything; it's others' fault for misunderstanding me.

. . . so I’ve made a few minor changes to hopefully clear up any ambiguity on the part of readers.

TRANSLATION: The readers are to blame for any disagreement with me; everything I said was 100% correct in every way.

I apologize for any confusion that my word choices may have caused.

TRANSLATION: I wasn't wrong about anything; I simply misspoke and my readers misinterpreted me.

That being said, let me state that I am fully aware of the history and purpose of the Documentary Hypothesis approach to the Pentateuch.

. . . even though there wasn't any evidence of that in his actual article. Just declaring it is good enough. "Officer, I was not speeding."