How Much Money Has Royal Skousen Made from Mopologetics?

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Dr Moore
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Re: How Much Money Has Royal Skousen Made from Mopologetics?

Post by Dr Moore »

Marcus wrote:
Tue Nov 22, 2022 2:13 am
I spent some time this afternoon reviewing past threads documenting Early Modern English arguments and marshalling some specific arguments. I'll post some comments soon for the various gentlepeople following the thread.
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Re: How Much Money Has Royal Skousen Made from Mopologetics?

Post by Philo Sofee »

Dr Moore wrote:
Tue Nov 22, 2022 2:24 am
Marcus wrote:
Tue Nov 22, 2022 2:13 am
I spent some time this afternoon reviewing past threads documenting Early Modern English arguments and marshalling some specific arguments. I'll post some comments soon for the various gentlepeople following the thread.
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Re: How Much Money Has Royal Skousen Made from Mopologetics?

Post by Kishkumen »

Marcus wrote:
Tue Nov 22, 2022 1:14 am
I was about to add my thoughts. But, this sentence brought me up short. Maybe some do not realize the impact of such limiting language. But it does have an impact. An ice-cold, divisive impact.

At some point, one would think we could just address participants in --and even readers of-- a discussion without language that acknowledges only half of them.
According to my knowledge, both Doctor Scratch and Dean Robbers identify as male. They were the ones who engaged with my post in critical ways at some length. For these reasons, I addressed them with gratitude as gentlemen. I would do so again, unless they consider it rude for me to address them as men. I await their correction. If others of other genders had done the same, I would naturally have used different and appropriate language.
Last edited by Kishkumen on Tue Nov 22, 2022 6:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: How Much Money Has Royal Skousen Made from Mopologetics?

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Tom wrote:
Tue Nov 22, 2022 1:06 am
The last solid figure I had was $329,289.65: viewtopic.php?p=18288#p18288

I don’t know if Dr. Skousen received additional funding in 2021 or this year. A specific line expense for Critical Text volume III appeared for the last time in the Interpreter Foundation’s expense report for the fourth quarter of 2020.
Of course, I do not have any information on the amount of money spent on the project from 1988 (when Dr. Skousen became involved) through 2014. In any case, I think the effort to recover the original English language text, and to ascertain the history of the text (i.e., how the text has changed over time) was worthwhile.

However, I think Drs. Skousen and Carmack went off the track with some of their recent work. For example, as I pointed out two years ago, they have retracted a sizable share of their findings regarding words, phrases, and expressions in the Book of Mormon that supposedly disappeared from English one to three centuries prior to 1830 (see The Nature of the Original Language of the Book of Mormon (Parts 3 and 4, Volume III)). To quote from an editorial note from Dr. Peterson:
In The Nature of the Original Language [of the Book of Mormon] (hereafter, NOL), Royal Skousen and Stanford Carmack indicated that additional research into the language of the Book of Mormon might mean that some of the archaic words, phrases, and expressions identified at the beginning of NOL would eventually be discovered to have also occurred later in the 1700s. They were hampered by an inability to fully use the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) database. Now, however, much of that difficulty has been overcome, and Carmack has spent the last year or so reviewing the potentially archaic words, phrases, and expressions discussed in NOL. (During the past few months, Skousen has reviewed these potential archaisms as well.)

In what follows—a pre-print of what will appear in part 8 of volume 3 of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project—Skousen and Carmack report on what they have found. Some of the examples given in NOL did not die out as early as they had proposed. But a good many solid examples still hold up as almost certainly or probably archaic.
(emphasis added)

Dr. Peterson's note doesn't inspire much confidence. As I asked two years ago, "if the two good Doctors entirely overcome their inability to use the ECCO database, will they drop more items from the archaic vocabulary list? Will the list eventually disappear like a 16th century spirit"?

(I won't even get into Dr. Skousen's argument in The Nature of the Original Language that "the themes of the Book of Mormon – religious, social, and political – do not derive from Joseph Smith’s time (also an 1831 claim of Alexander Campbell’s), but instead are the prominent issues of the Protestant Reformation, and they too date from the 1500s and 1600s rather than the 1800s – examples like burning people at the stake for heresy, standing before the bar of justice (often called the pleading bar in the 1600s), secret combinations to overthrow the government, the rejection of infant baptism, the sacrament as symbolic memorial and spiritual renewal, public rather than private confession, no required works of penance, and piety in living and worship. Skousen believes that the Book of Mormon would have resonated much more strongly with the Reformed and Radical Protestants of the 1500s and 1600s than with the Christians of Joseph Smith’s time.")
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Re: How Much Money Has Royal Skousen Made from Mopologetics?

Post by Kishkumen »

That accords with my recollection, Tom. They did the right thing in toning down their conclusions to match their updated understanding of the evidence. Again, I don't find that particularly Mopologetic of them. Obviously their interest is in supporting LDS claims, but they are not sacrificing their scholarly integrity in reaching conclusions that flatly contradict the best evidence.
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Re: How Much Money Has Royal Skousen Made from Mopologetics?

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What is the least expensive way to buy Skousen’s complete set of reporting on this project?

If the funding was all donations, why the hell isn’t that material free to the public?

The audience is so small, charging for those books can’t be about making a fiscal return. Pricing online is insane for the 6 book series, further limiting distribution.

Therefore I conclude, the only reason to charge high prices for the reporting is to artificially limit the audience who sees it.

They’re embarrassed, in other words.
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Re: How Much Money Has Royal Skousen Made from Mopologetics?

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Dr Moore wrote:
Tue Nov 22, 2022 7:43 pm
What is the least expensive way to buy Skousen’s complete set of reporting on this project?
[...]
Good gravy. Out of curiosity, I went to see how much they cost over at BYU Studies. For the price of just Volume 4, I could get a complete Anchor Bible Dictionary.
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Re: How Much Money Has Royal Skousen Made from Mopologetics?

Post by Tom »

The first edition of Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon (2004-2009) is available online. As far as I know, the second edition (2017) is not online.
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Re: How Much Money Has Royal Skousen Made from Mopologetics?

Post by Informant »

It’s free to read online, too.

https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/atv/p1/
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Re: How Much Money Has Royal Skousen Made from Mopologetics?

Post by GiordanoBruno »

"I'm unaware of any METI projects that can be construed as "Mopologetic.""

The critical editions of Maimonides included On Asthma (2 vols.), Medical Aphorisms (7 vols.), On Poisons and the Protection against Lethal Drugs, On Hemorrhoids, On Rules Regarding the Practical Part of the Medical Art, On Coitus.

Even Mopologists get hemorrhoids. And (at least occasionally, one presumes) engage in coitus.
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