The “two ink theory” first proposed by John Gee, the primary KEP apologetic that held fence-straddler’s at bay for so many years, is in fact dead.
He actually said "people believe the two ink theory is dead ..." and then went on to explain why it isn't.
You don’t really expect him to dog Gee like that in front of his fans now do you? When he admitted it was wrong on the FAIR forum a year ago it was like pulling teeth to get him to just come out and say it. But he did.
Anyway, it's not that big of a deal.
For those who care nothing about integrity, I suppose.
But the only thing Gee has regretted is that the photos weren't the ones he wanted to use.
Wow. He doesn’t regret misleading the entire BoA-interested world with sloppy scholarship? Remember, Juliann assured us for years that Brent’s photos and his analysis should be dispensed with since John Gee is an “expert” who was trained in examining documents and that he had personally “handled” the source documents. And now we’re to understand that Gee only dealt with bad photos?
What the heck is Gee doing writing about the KEP while relying on “bad photos”? At the bare minimum he is guilty of sloppy scholarship. He is guilty of the very thing the FAIRites, including you, criticizes every critic for.
What I think happened is that the goof proved to be so embarrassing he had to choose between one of two ways to fall. He could fall as a guy who was trying to deceive us or he could fall as a guy who sucks at his job as a scholar. If he said he analyzed the documents first-hand - as we were ALL led to believe for so many years - then there is really no way he could have avoided being a trickster. I mean just a glance at Brent’s photos proved his two ink argument was bunk, so a first hand analysis of the documents would have done the same. But he was counting on the fact that nobody else in the world had access to color copies, so he was safe in his “argument.” However, if he said he never really saw the documents, and instead relied on some mystery “photos” that someone in the Church sent him, then we could look elsewhere to blame. That’s what’s happening now. Gee is sitting there with a “who me?” look on his face, while expecting us all to believe the Church is at fault. But you can’t really blame the Church since that is worse than blaming the apologists.
There really wasn’t much else he could do, but he clearly went with the latter route, and he has relied on his apologists to downplay the significance of his errors as though he were merely “revising” his views. Any way you slice it, Gee’s little book is going to be the bane of his career as an apologist.
And where did these photos come from if he didn’t take them himself? And why do the photos in his book have different hue? To conceal the color contrasts between the ink and the paper? That was my first impression. And it isn’t as if there were hundreds of possible examples and he just chose three or four at random. The choice was very limited and he was clearly very methodical in choosing photos he thought he could use to his advantage, like the ridiculous “over run” which he tried to wiggle away from later.
John Gee must be held accountable, but all we see is a bunch of back-pedaling by him, along with excused offered by his subservient followers. Now we are supposed to believe that John Gee was also a victim to bad scholarship; even his own!
He couldn't persuade the church archives, at the time, to release a full set of images of the KEP.
But he could have examined them if he wanted to – as we were assured was the case by
his apologists - and this would have precluded his ridiculous two ink fabrication that Brent demolished.
He and Hauglid (and also Royal Skousen, I believe) still maintain that (at least on Ms. #2) many or most of the Egyptian characters were written at a later time than the English text.
Ah, the old bait and switch. You’re clearly hoping we will assume that the “two ink” argument that is actually valid is the same one Gee argued for. Brent and the critics have never denied there were two inks involved in making the KEP. They denied Gee’s contention: that the Egyptian characters were all written in “ink A” while the English text was all written in “ink B.” That was the entire point of Gee’s argument. He sat around and tried to figure out a way to make critical thinkers hold out hope for some “plausible” explanation. Well naturally if the Egyptian characters were written in a different ink than this could make it seem possible that the papers were not translation papers since the characters were written in afterwards.
Posted by Jan, Aug 5 2006, 08:18 AM
Brian passed on a message from Dr. Gee in response to criticism of Gee about the "two ink" theory. I won't try to paraphrase since Brian is posting on this thread.
After Brian initially relayed this message, he then asked if scholars were not allowed to make mistakes as Gee did. I'd like to add the comment that Gee's "mistake" wasn't necessarily a "mistake' in the sense of bad scholarship. Gee proposed a theory based on the materials he had available at the time - poor quality photographs relative to examining the originals or digitized photographs of the originals. Once seeing the materials that Brian had available to him, Gee revised his opinion --- that is not a "mistake" in the common sense of the word --- it is scholarship. Scholars are noted for continually revising hypotheses and theories as new information becomes available. Please, let the haranguing of Gee on this point be laid to rest.
Gee revised his opinion only after Brent provided the world evidence that he was sloppy as a scholar. He had no choice really but to “revise” it. But his apologists are reluctant to even say he was wrong, even though they might reject the original argument.
In that same thread I asked Brian to stop beating about the bush and just answer the question unambiguously: “John Gee argued that the Egyptian characters and the English text was written in different inks in all of the manuscripts. Do you concur with?”
Brian responded: “No. And John does not believe this.” He should have said “John doesn’t believe this
anymore,” but I guess he was trying to give people a reason to wonder if Gee
ever believed this. In any case, Brian made it clear almost a year ago that he does not accept the original two ink theory as proposed by Gee. His argument now is confined to one manuscript I think, and deals mostly with punctuation marks, which really doesn’t do damage to the transcription theory, despite all the hyperbolic claims by you guys; especially since that same manuscript contains too many other anomalies that can only be reasonably explained in a transcription context.
… even if the ink were to be chemically analyzed, there's no way to distinguish from ink used to write English text during one week in 1835 and ink used to write Egyptian characters a couple weeks later. It's really the province of the textual critic rather than the document analyst. And I'm not sure it would really represent a big gain for the apologetic arguments either way.
Then what did you claim was “overwhelmingly evident” a year ago? Do you even remember? And for something that doesn’t help the apologists that much, they sure to have a tendency to get awfully excited about it.
I mean, it still looks like someone (if not Joseph Smith, then the scribes) believed that the BoB text was the origin of the Book of Abraham "translation." So you're still left with having to explain why they thought that, even if the characters were written at a later date. And, of course, even if you were able to disassociate Joseph Smith from the KEP manuscripts, you still have the fact that he indisputably provided translations for the facsimiles -- translations that don't jibe with current Egyptological knowledge.
I can’t believe you typed any of this. It sounds like too much compromise on your part. What happened to the Will we know?
“All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it...Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality." - Albert Einstein