Dan Vogel Responds to Lars Nielsen (Part 7) – The name Mormon
Posted: Sun Jan 12, 2025 8:24 pm
Is the name Mormon a Kircherism? Did it originate in seventeenth-century France?
The name Mormon in the Book of Mormon is not a Kircherism. It’s a completely separate issue. My purpose in discussing the surname Mormon was to show that it isn’t exclusively the name of a seventeenth-century book.
How large is truly large? When I argued that coincidences are bound to happen and mentioned the law of truly large numbers, I was talking about the totality of data in the Book of Mormon, not just names, against everything in Joseph Smith’s world or at least everything in print before 1830. It’s hard to get a much larger data set than that. Anyway, with a large set of data points in the Book of Mormon, you should expect coincidences. Lars wants to limit the data set to names only, and then to Nephi and Mormon specifically, saying that they were rare names. Nevertheless, I regard Camora Islands and Moroni as well as Nahom as coincidences. Nephi and Mormon are not linked in a way that makes the odds against coincidence for either less likely.
Lars, you keep dodging my argument, which you quote at 2:24:38—“Anyone familiar with Le Parasite Mormon would not have used the name as the main character in a pseudepigraphic creation.” Even you have said: “Why would Smith intentionally leave such a titillating trail of bookish breadcrumbs directly to Kircher?” You recognize this is a problem, but try to escape it by citing literary works that adopt or create names that allude to known villains or heroes. This has nothing to do with the discussion at hand. These literary authors want readers to make such connections, whereas pseudepigraphists would obviously avoid using such names for the same reason they want to avoid making anachronisms. They would especially want to avoid names associated with fraud. This seems like a serious conceptual problem to me.
For me, the suggestion that Prof. Smith and Spalding wanted their work to be exposed to teach the Christian public not to be gullible is not convincing and makes absolutely no sense. Also, this is a solution to a problem that didn’t exist. You made it up because you knew there was a major problem with your theory. You don’t get any credit for solving a problem you created yourself. This is ad hoc added to ad hoc hypothesis, a sure sign of a struggling theory. This is really a weak way to overcome the problem I discussed in the previous paragraph.
If Nephi and Mormon in the Book of Mormon are to be connected to Kircher and Montmaur, it would be for reasons other than what you have ascribed to them. [Edited to add: Some one on Reddit suggested the names could have been transmitted through Walters the Magician, who had learned the art of Mesmerism in Paris.] Because no reasonable route to Joseph Smith can be demonstrated, the best explanation to take at this time is coincidence.
Next, you respond to a concluding remark I made about the name Mormon—“Without anything to prop it up, the name Mormon appearing in 17th-century France is no more authoritative than other possible sources Joseph Smith had available to him. In fact, any 19th-century American source is far more likely than Vayer’s Mormon.”
Your response is weak (2:26:08): “First of all, Vayer’s Mormon isn’t a source for The Book of Mormon under any authorship theory; it is an influence. Sources and influences are different things.” You are only quibbling, but Vayer’s Mormon would be a source for the name in the Book of Mormon. You might describe Kircher’s glass balls as an influence for the Liahona, but the name Mormon is too specific to be merely an influence.
“Second, there are several supports propping up the idea that the character Mormon was inspired by the caricature Mormon, including Thomas Boys’ conclusion, which, again, Mr. Vogel concealed from his viewers.” I didn’t conceal Thomas Boys’ 1859 statement because I couldn’t mention everything and I wasn’t impressed with his comments, which are uninformed and useless. Not even you believe “the Book of Mormon ... derived its first hint from Paris.” He even tries to parallel Utah polygamy with the Vayer’s Mormon and makes a few other parallels that no one should take seriously. He concludes—“whoever was the author [of the Book of Mormon], that in his first conceptions of the work he borrowed a hint from that tissue of fictions and forgeries which at Paris, in the middle of the seventeenth century, enveloped the unfortunate P. de Montmaur.” There’s that word “forgery” connected with Montmaur. I have seen nothing in Vayer’s caricature Mormon to compare with Joseph Smith’s character Mormon. Rather, a better argument can be made that Mormon is one of Joseph Smith’s alter egos.
•Both were named after their fathers (Mormon 1:5).
•Both were “large in stature” (Mormon 2:1).
•Both moved with their fathers from the north country to a land southward at about age 10 or 11 (Mormon 1:6).
•Both moves were followed by war with the Lamanite/Indians and a period of peace (Mormon 1:8-12). Andrew Jackson’s army defeated the Seminoles in 1817-18.
•Both lived in a time of apostasy (Mormon 1:14).
•Both had a remarkable manifestation of Jesus at age 15 (Mormon 1:15).
•Both lived in a time when Gadianton robbers (or “secret combinations”), slippery treasures, and magic were prevalent (Mormon 1:17-19).
•Both were instructed to go to a hill and remove a record engraved on gold plates (Mormon 1:3-4).
•Mormon was about 24 years of age, which corresponds to 1830 when Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon.
“Third, Spalding was very well educated on the history and literature of all aspects of the Enlightenment, including the roles played by influential French authors-- not the least of which was Madame de Staël, born in the 1700 ...” I won’t bother quoting your long and irrelevant digression into the Celes MS. You follow this non-evidence with an attempt to lecture me for not reading the Celes MS, which is of very questionable relevance to our Solomon Spalding.
So, you didn’t really respond to my statement—“Without anything to prop it up, the name Mormon appearing in 17th-century France is no more authoritative than other possible sources Joseph Smith had available to him. In fact, any 19th-century American source is far more likely than Vayer’s Mormon.”
At 2:28:03, you claim: “Before my book, no present-day Mormon Mormon historian and no non-Mormon Mormon historian ever knew that the names Nephi and Mormon even existed as bona fide person names associated with fake ancient texts.” At this point, Nephi and Mormon are much like Camoro/Moroni or Nahom. Unless one can connect them to Joseph Smith in a meaningful way, there is nothing to distinguish them from coincidence.
The name Mormon in the Book of Mormon is not a Kircherism. It’s a completely separate issue. My purpose in discussing the surname Mormon was to show that it isn’t exclusively the name of a seventeenth-century book.
How large is truly large? When I argued that coincidences are bound to happen and mentioned the law of truly large numbers, I was talking about the totality of data in the Book of Mormon, not just names, against everything in Joseph Smith’s world or at least everything in print before 1830. It’s hard to get a much larger data set than that. Anyway, with a large set of data points in the Book of Mormon, you should expect coincidences. Lars wants to limit the data set to names only, and then to Nephi and Mormon specifically, saying that they were rare names. Nevertheless, I regard Camora Islands and Moroni as well as Nahom as coincidences. Nephi and Mormon are not linked in a way that makes the odds against coincidence for either less likely.
Lars, you keep dodging my argument, which you quote at 2:24:38—“Anyone familiar with Le Parasite Mormon would not have used the name as the main character in a pseudepigraphic creation.” Even you have said: “Why would Smith intentionally leave such a titillating trail of bookish breadcrumbs directly to Kircher?” You recognize this is a problem, but try to escape it by citing literary works that adopt or create names that allude to known villains or heroes. This has nothing to do with the discussion at hand. These literary authors want readers to make such connections, whereas pseudepigraphists would obviously avoid using such names for the same reason they want to avoid making anachronisms. They would especially want to avoid names associated with fraud. This seems like a serious conceptual problem to me.
For me, the suggestion that Prof. Smith and Spalding wanted their work to be exposed to teach the Christian public not to be gullible is not convincing and makes absolutely no sense. Also, this is a solution to a problem that didn’t exist. You made it up because you knew there was a major problem with your theory. You don’t get any credit for solving a problem you created yourself. This is ad hoc added to ad hoc hypothesis, a sure sign of a struggling theory. This is really a weak way to overcome the problem I discussed in the previous paragraph.
If Nephi and Mormon in the Book of Mormon are to be connected to Kircher and Montmaur, it would be for reasons other than what you have ascribed to them. [Edited to add: Some one on Reddit suggested the names could have been transmitted through Walters the Magician, who had learned the art of Mesmerism in Paris.] Because no reasonable route to Joseph Smith can be demonstrated, the best explanation to take at this time is coincidence.
Next, you respond to a concluding remark I made about the name Mormon—“Without anything to prop it up, the name Mormon appearing in 17th-century France is no more authoritative than other possible sources Joseph Smith had available to him. In fact, any 19th-century American source is far more likely than Vayer’s Mormon.”
Your response is weak (2:26:08): “First of all, Vayer’s Mormon isn’t a source for The Book of Mormon under any authorship theory; it is an influence. Sources and influences are different things.” You are only quibbling, but Vayer’s Mormon would be a source for the name in the Book of Mormon. You might describe Kircher’s glass balls as an influence for the Liahona, but the name Mormon is too specific to be merely an influence.
“Second, there are several supports propping up the idea that the character Mormon was inspired by the caricature Mormon, including Thomas Boys’ conclusion, which, again, Mr. Vogel concealed from his viewers.” I didn’t conceal Thomas Boys’ 1859 statement because I couldn’t mention everything and I wasn’t impressed with his comments, which are uninformed and useless. Not even you believe “the Book of Mormon ... derived its first hint from Paris.” He even tries to parallel Utah polygamy with the Vayer’s Mormon and makes a few other parallels that no one should take seriously. He concludes—“whoever was the author [of the Book of Mormon], that in his first conceptions of the work he borrowed a hint from that tissue of fictions and forgeries which at Paris, in the middle of the seventeenth century, enveloped the unfortunate P. de Montmaur.” There’s that word “forgery” connected with Montmaur. I have seen nothing in Vayer’s caricature Mormon to compare with Joseph Smith’s character Mormon. Rather, a better argument can be made that Mormon is one of Joseph Smith’s alter egos.
•Both were named after their fathers (Mormon 1:5).
•Both were “large in stature” (Mormon 2:1).
•Both moved with their fathers from the north country to a land southward at about age 10 or 11 (Mormon 1:6).
•Both moves were followed by war with the Lamanite/Indians and a period of peace (Mormon 1:8-12). Andrew Jackson’s army defeated the Seminoles in 1817-18.
•Both lived in a time of apostasy (Mormon 1:14).
•Both had a remarkable manifestation of Jesus at age 15 (Mormon 1:15).
•Both lived in a time when Gadianton robbers (or “secret combinations”), slippery treasures, and magic were prevalent (Mormon 1:17-19).
•Both were instructed to go to a hill and remove a record engraved on gold plates (Mormon 1:3-4).
•Mormon was about 24 years of age, which corresponds to 1830 when Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon.
“Third, Spalding was very well educated on the history and literature of all aspects of the Enlightenment, including the roles played by influential French authors-- not the least of which was Madame de Staël, born in the 1700 ...” I won’t bother quoting your long and irrelevant digression into the Celes MS. You follow this non-evidence with an attempt to lecture me for not reading the Celes MS, which is of very questionable relevance to our Solomon Spalding.
So, you didn’t really respond to my statement—“Without anything to prop it up, the name Mormon appearing in 17th-century France is no more authoritative than other possible sources Joseph Smith had available to him. In fact, any 19th-century American source is far more likely than Vayer’s Mormon.”
At 2:28:03, you claim: “Before my book, no present-day Mormon Mormon historian and no non-Mormon Mormon historian ever knew that the names Nephi and Mormon even existed as bona fide person names associated with fake ancient texts.” At this point, Nephi and Mormon are much like Camoro/Moroni or Nahom. Unless one can connect them to Joseph Smith in a meaningful way, there is nothing to distinguish them from coincidence.
