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

[Nevo]

Odd that there don’t appear to be any books. Am I just missing them? I see he left copyrights to books he authored. I do not see his personal library here.

Yes, it is odd. Perhaps any books he had at home were considered to belong to the Hanover Bookstore, which he maintained at his house and "was continued three or four years after his death by his wife" (according to Richard Husband).

A catalog of books for sale at the Hanover Bookstore was published in 1799. It's in Evans's Early American Imprints series, which I don't have access to.

The title is "Catalogue of books, for sale at the bookstore in Hanover, (a few rods fom [sic] Dartmouth College on the road leading to Lebanon.) : Consisting of a great variety of authors in divinity, physic, surgery, chemistry, philosophy, history, voyages, travels, geography, husbandry, architecture, novels, poetry, lives, memoirs, plays, &c."

(I'm sure if anything by Kircher was in that catalogue, Nielsen would have mentioned it.)

[Kishkumen]

Yes, it is odd. Perhaps any books he had at home were considered to belong to the Hanover Bookstore, which he maintained at his house and "was continued three or four years after his death by his wife" (according to Richard Husband).

A catalog of books for sale at the Hanover Bookstore was published in 1799. It's in Evans's Early American Imprints series, which I don't have access to.

The title is "Catalogue of books, for sale at the bookstore in Hanover, (a few rods fom [sic] Dartmouth College on the road leading to Lebanon.) : Consisting of a great variety of authors in divinity, physic, surgery, chemistry, philosophy, history, voyages, travels, geography, husbandry, architecture, novels, poetry, lives, memoirs, plays, &c."

(I'm sure if anything by Kircher was in that catalogue, Nielsen would have mentioned it.)

Well, thank you very kindly, Nevo! I am impressed by the amount of time you have put into this issue. I agree with you when you judge John Smith unlikely to be the kind of fellow who would devote a lot of time to reading Athanasius Kircher. At least Husband doesn't describe him in a way that would be compatible with the fanciful portrait of John Smith the wizard.

I did read the part about the Hanover Bookstore with interest. It would be nice to see what kind of books were there, if only to get a fuller sense of what kind of fellow John Smith was outside of his academic and pastoral life. I doubt he was selling Kircher, but I should not exclude the possibility entirely. I guess I am also having a difficult time seeing the holdings of the Hanover Bookstore finding their way to the Dartmouth collection. His spouse had every reason to sell off the books he had instead of donating them. It does not look like Smith was exactly rich, and it seems unlikely that his wife would have continued to run the bookstore if she felt like she was left in a comfortable financial state by Smith's passing.

[Craig Paxton]

Why go to all of these unprovable theories? Who wrote the Book of Mormon? Joseph Smith.period

[Dr. Shades]

Why go to all of these unprovable theories? Who wrote the Book of Mormon? Joseph Smith.period

Because it's interesting to find out where he got his ideas.

[Fence Sitter]

Why go to all of these unprovable theories? Who wrote the Book of Mormon? Joseph Smith.period

Because it's interesting to find out where he got his ideas.

If God can just wave his magic wand, why ask how something was done?
Religion is so much more interesting when one no longer believes in divine intervention.

[Craig Paxton]

Why go to all of these unprovable theories? Who wrote the Book of Mormon? Joseph Smith.period

Because it's interesting to find out where he got his ideas.

Nielson has built his entire theory on the Spalding - Rigdon connection, which has been so thoroughly debunked that I can't personally get past anything else. Please help me understand why we should give any more value to Nielson's explanation for the writing of the Book of Mormon any more than we do Joseph Smith's which involved gold plates and an angel? Both explanations are built on sand.

[Benjamin McGuire]

I have just one comment to add to this discussion -

The only place that Kircher uses the name Nephi is in private letters to Peiresc to della Valle between 1628 and 1632, which ended up in the Vatican archives. As a collection, these letters have never been published - they have only recently been discussed in literature in the last few decades (with brief excerpts quoted). In his published books, that person is always identified as Abenephius the Arab. Nielsen grabbed on to some of that material that was recently published, saw the name 'Rabbi Barachias Nephi' and figured he had hit a gold mine. No one who read Kircher in the 18th and 19th centuries would have found a Babylonian rabbi named Nephi in his works.

[Marcus]

Because it's interesting to find out where he got his ideas.

Nielson has built his entire theory on the Spalding - Rigdon connection, which has been so thoroughly debunked that I can't personally get past anything else. Please help me understand why we should give any more value to Nielson's explanation for the writing of the Book of Mormon any more than we do Joseph Smith's which involved gold plates and an angel? Both explanations are built on sand.

Agreed. Except that one person's sand is imaginary. Just by definition, non-imaginary things are going to get more of a look from me than imaginary things, so it's difficult to place them on the same level. In the end, the non-imaginary things may not carry weight either, but the imaginary things NEVER did, so it's a difficult comparison.

[Kishkumen]

I have just one comment to add to this discussion -

The only place that Kircher uses the name Nephi is in private letters to Peiresc to della Valle between 1628 and 1632, which ended up in the Vatican archives. As a collection, these letters have never been published - they have only recently been discussed in literature in the last few decades (with brief excerpts quoted). In his published books, that person is always identified as Abenephius the Arab. Nielsen grabbed on to some of that material that was recently published, saw the name 'Rabbi Barachias Nephi' and figured he had hit a gold mine. No one who read Kircher in the 18th and 19th centuries would have found a Babylonian rabbi named Nephi in his works.

This was something that really irked me about the book from the beginning: the fact that Nielsen kept calling this figure Nephi even though a careful reading of his own book makes it clear the name did not appear as Nephi in Oedipus Aegyptiacus. It is misleading, to say the least.

The more I think of his trigger warning, the more irked I get. “Let me cook up something to make it look challenging to people’s faith, and then warn them that it inevitably will be.”

[Kishkumen]

Agreed. Except that one person's sand is imaginary. Just by definition, non-imaginary things are going to get more of a look from me than imaginary things, so it's difficult to place them on the same level. In the end, the non-imaginary things may not carry weight either, but the imaginary things NEVER did, so it's a difficult comparison.

It seems to me that the major differences are what is being imagined and who is doing the imagining. There is plenty of imagining all around.