Joseph coulnd't possibly have relied on Adam Clarke

[_Kishkumen]

Why does it matter whether Joseph plagiarized 1% or 100% of the JST? That’s like saying it isn’t a bank robbery unless you get all the money.

I think it does matter to believers how we characterize Joseph Smith's work. Critics tend to treat this as a real simple question, but I don't think it is, after all, that simple. It would not be very simple if you were trying to see this through believing eyes, certainly.

Personally, I think plagiarism is the wrong way to look at this, and I am a critic. Are we wont to say that Matthew and Luke plagiarized Mark?

[Guest]

I've read several articles about this, and await the book for their full "case."

I would be interested in seeing these several articles. AFIK there are only three publications on this. The short publication put out by Wilson for her grant, the expansion of the same article published as chapter 11 in Producing Ancient Scripture, and the agenda driven legacy protecting review by Jackson in the Interpreter. I have not heard of a forth coming book and the grant paper and the final chapter are very similar. What are the several articles you have read?

So far, in my view, the crumbs they've let out are underwhelming.
It all depends on how compelling the parallels are, not whether or not they're "into the hundreds."

Like Jackson, you are misstating the case Wayment and Wilson are trying to make, perhaps that is because you have not actually read the paper?. Wayment and Wilson are not arguing compelling impact so much they are pointing out that Smith was referencing Clarke's when he was working on the JST. The number of instances becomes important because a "few crumbs" can be dismissed as coincidence as Jackson attempts to do, a few hundred cannot.

The "hundreds" of Book of Mormon/Book of Abraham parallels proposed by Nibley and others don't move critics, despite their number.

Hardly an apt comparison at all, Nibley et al look[ed] for anything and everything across thousands of years, through multiple cultures and languages, disregarding conflicting time frames, in an attempt to show tenuous connections to antiquity. It is and was parallelomania at its finest. Wayment and Wilson have compared one contemporary book to the JST and found evidence that the former was referenced in creating the latter. Frankly if you are going to find what Nibley, Sorenson, and Gee have done as evidence of antiquity, than what Rick Gunder has put together showing 19th century sources is much more impressive. Mormon PARALLELS: A Bibliographic Source And, to preempt the argument from ignorance "How could Joseph Smith have known?", that isn't Rick's point This point is the material was available in the 19th century. It is up to those making supernatural claims about how Joseph Smith produced something to show he did not take it from his own environment, Rick is just showing it was there.

It's like the Tanners' "3913 changes to the Book of Mormon." Fewer than 10 are significant at all, and how they ran up the score can get comical. My favorite is the 26 word section in Alma that the printer erroneously left out in the 1830 edition (but which is in the manuscripts). When this was corrected in the 1837 edition, the Tanners count this as 26 changes.

From what I've seen so far, Wilson-Lemmon is at minimum holding back the best stuff. I am curious to see if they address the uniquely "Joseph" items at all --- items that form a much higher percentage of the overall JST than their Clarke parallels (Book of Moses, lengthy JST excerpts in the appendix, etc., items with uniquely LDS theology, etc.).

I think it is clear you haven't read their article. They are showing Smith used Clarke's.
In their conclusion they state:

However, while Smith apparently turned to Clarke's commentary to provide grammatical, linguistic, and historical assistance as he carried out his work, the commentary was not a source for the content in Smith's significant expansions. Therefore, it can be argued that it was less a theological source than a practical source.

What is really going on with the Jackson review is that the people at the Interpreter do not like scholarly treatments that provide a naturalistic explanation for how Joseph Smith may have produced his scripture and will go to any lengths, from poor reviews like this, to preventing highly qualified people like Bokovoy from getting hired, to driving out people like Hauglid at BYU, and even trying to get professors fired who publish scholarly naturalistic explanations on the subject. This article is just another example in a long list of articles that justifies BYU decision to fire these people from the MI. The stuff the Interpreter is throwing out wouldn't pass muster in any respectable journal.

[_moksha]

Are we wont to say that Matthew and Luke plagiarized Mark?

Clarke and Smith both had functional seer stones and access to the Q gospel?

[_Gadianton]

I can understand the position that Joseph Smith took 10% and "restored" the ideas bound up in that 10% as God is efficient with revelation, and uses up what's in circulation first, rather than injecting new currency. The Mopologists are already committed to this given they don't deny the sun in noon day during summer in Phoenix -- where global warming doesn't exist for the high concentration of right-wingers -- accepting that the KJV exists in the Book of Mormon. But if they accept that, then they can't in principle reject the idea that Joseph Smith took 90% or even 100% and put the pieces back together. There are famous examples within Mormonism that seem to establish that such as "The 17 Points of the True Church". It's all right there in the Bible. It just need proper arrangement.

Why can't the Mopologists accept this?

Pretty simple. The Mopologists strongly lean toward the worldview of Gemli, ironically, and can't accept the Book of Mormon unless there is proof. It doesn't need to be 100% proven, but it must be at least 55.7% likely the Book of Mormon is true, based on science, otherwise they would reject it. Just like masks. If masks are shown to work with 55.7% certainty, then that is enough reason to wear them. As the example of masks show, the Mopologist strawman of "absolute proof" as the natural alternative to faith is easily dismissed.

Accepting the strong view that Joseph "put it together" while theologically tenable, pretty much nullifies the belief that material evidence will establish Joseph Smith as prophet with at least as much certainty as mask-wearing. They can't have a gotcha that shouts, "How could he have known!" And that's the center of their faith. Without it, the content means nothing to them.

[_Dr Exiled]

Dr. P and his cheerleaders are determined show one conclusion, that their brand of Mormonism is correct, the brethren be damned. They really don't care if on the one hand they doggedly attempt to prove the Book of Mormon historicity through parallelisms a la Mormon Codex and then deny parallelisms when it shows a 19th century fabrication like with the latest from Dr. Wayment. They will selectively use science when it suits them and deny it when the conclusions don't support them. And then will vehemently deny that this is what they are doing, all the while creating dossiers on their enemies and sometimes stalking them.

It is maddening for sure. However, my guess is that if a poll were taken, a highly significant number of those who leave, leave due to the lack of good answers from, and the intellectual dishonesty of the mopes. So, keep up the duplicity, Dr. P, mope cheerleaders. You are doing true science work through negative examples, as those who see the duplicity are probably more likely to espouse scientific reasoning and leave the silly mope religion.

Time to wear the clown suits, Dr. P, Midge. It's time.

[_kairos]

I do not personally know Dr Wayment but he has been kind to reply to my email of two days ago when i wrote that rumors were that there there were hundreds of parallels between the JST and Clarke's work not yet published. He replied that he was working on getting the long list of parallels in publication form- he said he did not yet have a venue for publishing but is working in that direction. he earlier emailed that he knew of jackson's word dated in 2018. he did not mention any current jackson work or its rebuttal.

all i can say is stay tuned because if he does publish his work on hundreds of parallels , i believe that will stir the hornest's nest even more.
i hope he can do so and hold his job.

k

[_Fence Sitter]

I do not personally know Dr Wayment but he has been kind to reply to my email of two days ago when i wrote that rumors were that there there were hundreds of parallels between the JST and Clarke's work not yet published. He replied that he was working on getting the long list of parallels in publication form- he said he did not yet have a venue for publishing but is working in that direction.

Those are not rumors. His chapter in Producing Ancient Scripture states:

The direct parallels between Adam Clarke's commentary on the Bible and Joseph Smith's revision of the Bible are simply too numerous and too close to explain as mere coincidence or happenstance. Parallels between the two texts number into the hundreds...

he earlier emailed that he knew of jackson's word dated in 2018. he did not mention any current jackson work or its rebuttal.

Wayment is very familiar with Jackson's work, he quotes or references Jackson 7 times in his article on Clarke in the JST.

all i can say is stay tuned because if he does publish his work on hundreds of parallels , i believe that will stir the hornest's nest even more.
i hope he can do so and hold his job.

k

I would not hold your breath on this one. The chapter in "Producing Ancient Scripture" took over five years from production to publication but then the Uof U press is notoriously slow. They do put out really excellent books with actual peer review.

[_Stem]

Jackson's article comes off as not much more than a desire to fulfill the need put out by Oaks that someone needs to say something when critiques come out. It doesn't matter too much what it is, but you have to respond. I was curious because I knew when Wayment and Lemmon first notified everyone of their findings they suggested it was but a small sampling that was to be published. That alone made the announcement of Jackson's piece come off as empty rather than complete. But, again, I was a bit surprised to see Jackson made a better go at it than I anticipated.

I don't know. Whose really inspected it quite as Wayment/Lemmon claim to have done? No one as far as I've seen. SOunds like there is plenty more yet to come on this. I'm surprised by Jackson's conclusion...I mean I shouldn't be, but I am.

[_moinmoin]

I would be interested in seeing these several articles. AFIK there are only three publications on this. The short publication put out by Wilson for her grant, the expansion of the same article published as chapter 11 in Producing Ancient Scripture, and the agenda driven legacy protecting review by Jackson in the Interpreter. I have not heard of a forth coming book and the grant paper and the final chapter are very similar. What are the several articles you have read?

Several online articles/blog posts, and the University of Illinois Press-published item from the Mormon History Association (I have this one through JSTOR). I haven't read the chapter from the book published by the University of Utah Press, but given its length and descriptions of it, it doesn't seem any different from what has already been published.

kairos said that "[Wayment] replied that he was working on getting the long list of parallels in publication form- he said he did not yet have a venue for publishing but is working in that direction" (personal email).

I don't personally think anything else will be forthcoming; I think that Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon have been trading on the few parallels they've shared, while hinting that they have "hundreds" of them.

Like Jackson, you are misstating the case Wayment and Wilson are trying to make, perhaps that is because you have not actually read the paper?. Wayment and Wilson are not arguing compelling impact so much they are pointing out that Smith was referencing Clarke's when he was working on the JST. The number of instances becomes important because a "few crumbs" can be dismissed as coincidence as Jackson attempts to do, a few hundred cannot.

Wilson-Lemmon indicated that "there are maybe 25 to 30 relevant passages in the New Testament, and fewer, maybe 10-15 in the Old Testament (or numbers something like that). That occurrence is very believable to me. I did a study of every JST revision to 1 Corinthians, and one thing I looked for was whether any of them were attested in a secondary source (the four sources I used for this purpose were the Clarke Commentary, the Campbell translation, the Coverdale translation and Wesley’s Explanatory Notes). As I recall, the incidence of possible secondary source influence I noted was in the range of 7%, which seems consistent with Haley’s findings." (Kevin Barney)

https://bycommonconsent.com/2019/08/15/ ... ommentary/

Frankly if you are going to find what Nibley, Sorenson, and Gee have done as evidence of antiquity, than what Rick Gunder has put together showing 19th century sources is much more impressive. Mormon PARALLELS: A Bibliographic Source And, to preempt the argument from ignorance "How could Joseph Smith have known?", that isn't Rick's point This point is the material was available in the 19th century. It is up to those making supernatural claims about how Joseph Smith produced something to show he did not take it from his own environment, Rick is just showing it was there.

At some point, though, this growing massive library of what Joseph Smith "could have used" runs into Occam's Razor, doesn't it? When I was a member of FAIR, we had an inside joke: "Joseph Smith: The Cambridge Years." Clarke's six-volume work is now added to this hypothetical library, next to "The Late War" on the shelf. Future academics, trying to make their mark on pretty well worked-over ground, are going to add other massive works to add to the mix of hypothetical works Smith (and inevitably, a committee of others) used in producing what Smith produced in his environment.

I think it is clear you haven't read their article.

As I said, I've read the MHA article published by the University of Illinois Press.

If the shoe were on the other foot (if what you call Mopologists were hinting for years at "hundreds" of parallels, but only ever giving a handful as examples), this place would be going bananas over it. But, because it aligns with the desired outcome here, they are given a pass at using the "Elder Perry's briefcase" tactic.

[_Dr Moore]

Jackson's article comes off as not much more than a desire to fulfill the need put out by Oaks that someone needs to say something when critiques come out. It doesn't matter too much what it is, but you have to respond.

Right. Jackson actually sows doubt in a Clarke influence on the JST in at least 3 ways:

1) Outright dismissal of the body of evidence as meaningless coincidences

2) Nit-picking to cast doubt on each individual instance of correspondence

3) Categorizing instances of correspondence with Clarke as meaningless academic clarifications, not central to the revelatory messages throughout the JST

The third in particular stands out. If Jackson is so convinced that Clarke didn't help paint the house, why does Jackson bother mentioning that the spots Clarke may have painted are in unimportant rooms? Clearly, Jackson himself isn't convinced by any of his own arguments.