Lars Nielsen's "How the Book of Mormon Came to Pass"

[Imwashingmypirate]

There is an interesting thread about this going on over at MAD here. With a poster named Zosimus arguing that this Kircher was a well known figure who could have influenced Joseph Smith. (Kirsher was known to John Smith at Dartmouth who taught Hyrum.) Ben McGuire is arguing that Kirsher was not that well known and it would have been unlikely that Joseph Smith could have borrowed from him. Nevo is a bit more direct in his rejection of Lars Nielsen's theories.

Well, I've reached a preliminary conclusion about Lars Nielsen's work so far. It's utter nonsense.

This seems to be Nielsen's main argument:


"Nephi in The Book of Mormon was to some degree intentionally modeled on (or named after) Kircher’s Barachias Nephi, as opposed to being a coincidence. . . . More than one hundred years after Kircher had passed away, memes from his life and works got into the mind of Dartmouth’s Professor of Oriental Languages (the second link in the Kircherism chain) as he read, translated, and studied the works of the immortal encyclopaedist. Professor Smith transmitted some of those memes to his student, Solomon Spalding (the third link) as part of his graduate-level research and in the form of a fiction that Professor Smith had started but did not publish, fearing that it might injure his reputation as a theological writer. Professor Smith was therefore both a source and an influence on what eventually became The Book of Mormon. After finishing his master’s work, Spalding served as a Dartmouth missionary for ten years, after which he deconstructed his faith and became an atheist. When Professor Smith died in 1809, Spalding decided to finally finish what I now call Stories from Lost Manuscripts Found, which consisted of several nested storylines, including the F, N, J, and M texts. Some or all of these sources ended up in the possession of Sidney Rigdon (the fourth link)."

— Lars Nielsen, How The Book of Mormon Came to Pass: The Second Greatest Show on Earth, pp. 306–307 (Kindle edition).

The main problem with Nielsen's "Kircher-Nephi" theory is that there's no evidence for it. There is no evidence that Professor John Smith ever read anything by Kircher or wrote a "fiction" inspired by him. There is no evidence that Professor Smith and Solomon Spalding ever interacted after the latter's graduation in 1785. And there is no credible evidence for Rigdon coming into possession of a Spalding manuscript or for Rigdon meeting Joseph Smith prior to 1830.

The "Nephi" thing is interesting, but the name is also in the Apocrypha and is not far off of "Nephilim" mentioned in the book of Genesis (or it could be Egyptian). Likewise, I don't see an obvious connection between the Liahona and Kircher's magnetic clock. There are some similarities but nothing that demands that the two items must be linked.


Edit: The word nephilim isn't mentioned in KJV Genesis 6:4, but is in Adam Clarke's commentary.

Don't be silly. Memes didn't exist back then

But seriously, if you were inspired by someone else's works, would you be dumb enough to use the same name?

[brianhales]

Hi,

I just thought I'd throw in an additional piece of the puzzle that is historical and as factual as we can achieve these days:

https://journal.interpreterfoundation.o ... y-sources/

Thanks,

Brian

[Kishkumen]

Hi,

I just thought I'd throw in an additional piece of the puzzle that is historical and as factual as we can achieve these days:

https://journal.interpreterfoundation.o ... y-sources/

Thanks,

Brian

Thank you for dropping by, Brian. I appreciate you sharing a link to your article here. In response, I will say that the question of divine origins for the Book of Mormon is not susceptible to scholarly proof, as you well know or should know. The Book of Mormon is only accessible through its English text, and so there is no way we can test its claim to be an ancient text originating in Mesoamerican antiquity. This is a problem not unlike our lack of access to the lost Spalding manuscript. Our standards must be consistent across the board, if we are to maintain credibility.

I support people having a spiritual testimony of the Book of Mormon. I do not support people rewriting ancient history from a position of a dearth of evidence. There is a reason why a BYU class on ancient Mesoamerica does not feature the Book of Mormon as one of its primary texts. Even BYU faculty in full faith and fellowship know that would not be appropriate.

[Kishkumen]

Guessing where was a popular game; British Israelism was even a thing. Since no ten lost tribes had actually left any discernible trace in any places with history known to Europeans, the guess that the tribes had slipped out of Old World history by going to the New World was an inspiration that struck many people.

I want to dilate this point by adding that the Book of Mormon has obvious Anglo-Israel material in it, specifically the prophecy of Joseph Smith's appearance as the prophet descended from the patriarch Joseph. This is a key point that I doubt Spalding would have incorporated in a novel about Hebrews arriving in ancient America. Anglo-Israelism is born in the England of the late 18th century, and I don't believe it really fully hit its peak popularity until the mid-19th century, right about the time that Joseph Smith was in Nauvoo and about to be assassinated. In a way, Mormon Anglo-Israelism predates the popular brand of Anglo-Israelism in England, although Richard Brothers is perhaps most responsible for promoting the idea near the end of the 18th century.

[Physics Guy]

Why does either name need an explanation at all? Nephi is from Judges. Lehi is from 2 Maccabees.

I didn't know, or at least didn't remember, either of these. Picking obscure Biblical names is a smarter move than just trying to make up Hebrew-sounding names, and I guess if you read the Bible a lot you're going to notice that there are a lot of obscure names there for the taking, so it might not take a genius to think of this smarter plan for naming characters.

There are indeed a lot of obscure Biblical names, though. If Spalding really did use both Nephi and Lehi for major characters, then it would be quite a coincidence for Smith to pick precisely those two, out of all the options. So no, it's not that we desperately need Spalding to explain how on earth Smith might have hit upon "Nephi" and "Lehi" as names, but it is a significant point, if Spalding really did pick those names, too.

I don't know how this strikes anyone else, but I realise that I have the feeling that neither Smith nor Spalding could have gotten away with using any really well-known Biblical names. If it had been, "I, Solomon" or "I, Joshua" who was born of those goodly parents, then it somehow seems clear to me that everyone would have thrown the book down right away. Even if the story had made it perfectly clear that this character was only a namesake, a name like that would just have stretched something too far.

[Fence Sitter]

Hi,

I just thought I'd throw in an additional piece of the puzzle that is historical and as factual as we can achieve these days:

https://journal.interpreterfoundation.o ... y-sources/

Thanks,

Brian

Thanks Brian.

Interesting article.

In my opinion, Joseph Smith was incapable of producing the Book of Mormon without outside help and or a preexisting text of some sort. A minor quibble I have with your article is the use of 270,000± words in the Book of Mormon as a baseline for Smith's production. Given that the book consists of 14-18% biblical quotes as well as repeating the phrase "and it came to pass" over 1400 times, the number of words as a baseline should be significantly lower, perhaps as low as 220,000 words.

[Physics Guy]

The length of the Book of Mormon doesn't seem like a big issue to me. Writing a long coherent novel, with an intricate plot and many vividly realistic characters who grow over time—that's a major intellectual challenge that usually requires years of practice to achieve. Merely writing a long book, on the other hand, needs nothing but the stamina to keep on pumping out words. If you can pronounce one word per second, on average, you can do 270 thousand words in 75 hours of dictation. Keeping it up for a few hours each day, you can be done in a couple of months; in a heroic marathon, you could be through in a week.

I grant that the Book of Mormon has more coherence than so many hours of mere babbling. War and Peace it is not, though. It's rambling and repetitive. It's episodic—a collection of short stories rather than a continuous epic. Its plot relies constantly on arbitrary miracles that don't require careful thought to make a consistent chain of causes and effects. Most if not all of its characters are fixed roles rather than relatable people with complex internal lives. Much of its dialog is just sermonising on standard pious themes. The few major themes that do link the whole text together are rigid formulas rather than story arcs, and some of these are simply recycled in different eras with little change.

The Book reads to me, in short, as exactly the kind of thing that a talented but uneducated amateur storyteller would dictate without much preparation. In no way at all is the writing of the Book of Mormon to be compared with writing a sophisticated novel of similar total length.

[Dr Moore]

The length of the Book of Mormon doesn't seem like a big issue to me. Writing a long coherent novel, with an intricate plot and many vividly realistic characters who grow over time—that's a major intellectual challenge that usually requires years of practice to achieve. Merely writing a long book, on the other hand, needs nothing but the stamina to keep on pumping out words. If you can pronounce one word per second, on average, you can do 270 thousand words in 75 hours of dictation. Keeping it up for a few hours each day, you can be done in a couple of months; in a heroic marathon, you could be through in a week.

I grant that the Book of Mormon has more coherence than so many hours of mere babbling. War and Peace it is not, though. It's rambling and repetitive. It's episodic—a collection of short stories rather than a continuous epic. Its plot relies constantly on arbitrary miracles that don't require careful thought to make a consistent chain of causes and effects. Most if not all of its characters are fixed roles rather than relatable people with complex internal lives. Much of its dialog is just sermonising on standard pious themes. The few major themes that do link the whole text together are rigid formulas rather than story arcs, and some of these are simply recycled in different eras with little change.

The Book reads to me, in short, as exactly the kind of thing that a talented but uneducated amateur storyteller would dictate without much preparation. In no way at all is the writing of the Book of Mormon to be compared with writing a sophisticated novel of similar total length.

I've seen versions of each of these observations before, but never quite so succinctly articulated. If only the critics (and apologists) had editors like Physics Guy.

[Kishkumen]

It's episodic—a collection of short stories rather than a continuous epic.

The three great epics of Classical antiquity are all very episodic. So are the Gospels and Acts.

[Physics Guy]

Yes, and that made them much easier to compose than a novel. I don’t know how much education their ancient authors would have had, but I’m guessing it might have been less than Smith’s.