Response to Jockers, Criddle, et al., Now Available

[_GlennThigpen]

How any Spalding manuscript made its way back into the
hands of Mr./Mrs. Spalding, history does not record. Probably
one of the Patterson brothers turned down the opportunity
to have the story published, and it went from the hands of
Mr. Engles back into the hands of the Spalding family, c. 1813.

Sidney Rigdon's association would have been with Engles and
with Lambdin -- not with the Patterson brothers.

UD

From William Small's record of the Patterson interview:

He also stated to us that the Solomon Spalding manuscript was brought to him by the widow of Solomon Spalding to be published, and that she offered to give him half the profits for his pay, if he would publish it; but after it had laid there for some time, and after he had due time to consider it, he determined not to publish it. She then came and received the manuscript from his hands, and took it away.

That almost assuredly was before she moved away from the area in 1817. But there is your history.

Glenn

[_Uncle Dale]

How any Spalding manuscript made its way back into the
hands of Mr./Mrs. Spalding, history does not record. Probably
one of the Patterson brothers turned down the opportunity
to have the story published, and it went from the hands of
Mr. Engles back into the hands of the Spalding family, c. 1813.

Sidney Rigdon's association would have been with Engles and
with Lambdin -- not with the Patterson brothers.

UD

He also stated to us that the Solomon Spalding manuscript was brought to him by the widow of Solomon Spalding to be published, and that she offered to give him half the profits for his pay, if he would publish it; but after it had laid there for some time, and after he had due time to consider it, he determined not to publish it. She then came and received the manuscript from his hands, and took it away.

That almost assuredly was before she moved away from the area in 1817. But there is your history.

Glenn

You have completely missed the point.

What we wish to establish, is what happened to the manuscript that
Solomon Spalding brought to the Patterson brothers in Pittsburgh
during the winter of 1812-13. How did it get back into the hands of the
widow? When did that occur? Was the document the widow took back
to Mr. Patterson in 1816-17 the same one that had been returned?

The simple answer is that we do not know.

Reports say that a Spalding story was submitted in about 1812-13,
and that a Spalding story was submitted in about 1816-17 by the widow.

If your purpose is to demonstrate that Sidney Rigdon could not have
obtained access to the contents of a Spalding story between 1812 and
1817, you have failed in that effort.

If you only wish to show that Mr. Rigdon did not abscond with the
document returned to the widow in about 1817, you have succeeded.

So -- which is it?

UD

[_Benjamin McGuire]

Dale writes:

Unless you can demonstrate that Alma the younger and Amulek spoke Elizabethan English, I do not think you can say that the KJV translators copied the wording from Alma 34.

I don't have to Dale. You are making a claim that a specific phrase is evidence for authorship attribution. You are making that claim on the basis that the argument sounds good to you. You need to show us that there is some acceptance of the kind of data you are trying to introduce in accepted literary theory.

If you locate examples prior to 1812, they might be worth looking at.

In 1803, in a letter to a R. Bowyer Esq., John M. Mason wrote (as published in his memoir):

and there shall be gathered all the children of the kingdom to go no more out.

Historically, in our discussions, you introduce these ideas - things you think aren't all that likely, and then I produce them. We chase them around. You still haven't come to grips with most of what I repeated a few days back. What you have developed isn't a collection of Spaldingish language. You haven't produced something that represents Rigdonish language. What you are doing doesn't begin to resemble any kind of widely accepted model of authorship attribution. The kind of lists you produce have largely been discredited for over a hundred years. We expect to see echoes of contemporary language in this book - whether it was authored entirely in 1830, or whether it was a translation from something much older. So finding echoes themselves isn't particularly noteworthy from either perspective. You have given it an unwarranted prominence. The problem, Dale, is that the kind of parallels you find here can be found between any texts, between any authors - and I have demonstrated this.

And finally, I see a continued resistance on your part to apply the same kinds of standards you use here to other situations. The conneaut witnesses, for example, where we have much, much stronger evidence for a textual relationship.

Ben M.

[_MCB]

What you have developed isn't a collection of Spaldingish language. You haven't produced something that represents Rigdonish language.

Ben, don't you recognize, that at the very least, the language of the Book of Mormon comes from the early 19th century? Your honing in on individual leaves misses the forest. Dale can metaphorically see the forest. He just likes to look at leaves.

[_Uncle Dale]

...
In 1803, in a letter to a R. Bowyer Esq., John M. Mason wrote (as published in his memoir):

and there shall be gathered all the children of the kingdom to go no more out.
...

Not bad. Not a perfect duplication, but close enough for my purposes.

So, to repeat my question -- How did this language find its way onto
the tongue of Joseph Smith, Jr?

Could a non-LDS be forgiven for wondering if Oliver Cowdery could
have introduced the wording into the text?

Would any Mormon scholar even acknowledge the fact that a 95.7%
shared vocabulary with Oliver Cowdery, on page 284, where the passage
is located, is grounds for saying that page greatly overlaps Cowdery's
use of English?

My purpose is not to belabor whether Smith or Cowdery copied directly
from Pitkin, or one of his English-speaking predecessors. My purpose is
to inspect the texts and determine whether there is any support for
Jockers' attribution of Alma 32-33-34 (and Alma 7) to Mr. Cowdery.

Do you wish to see a list of all the word-strings on that page which
are shared by Cowdery? If so, how might we go about determining if
that page in Alma 34 matches up with his language use significantly
more than with that of other author-candidates?

UD

[_Roger]

Ben writes:

We expect to see echoes of contemporary language in this book - whether it was authored entirely in 1830, or whether it was a translation from something much older.

Possibly so, but what we would not expect is to find "echoes of contemporary language" in a book allegedly translated from legitimately ancient documents that also contain numerous contemporary religious doctrines and activities that are unlikely to have been contemporary at the time of their alleged writing. It would get even more unlikely if those doctrines and activities, oddly enough, just happened to support the religious viewpoint of the fellow(s) who played a part (or allegedly played a part) in bringing it to the modern world. Stranger still when Jockers' comes along producing results that have most chapters lining up pretty well with what had been predicted under the S/R model.

Given that as a backdrop, a high level of vocabulary overlap, including unusual phrases and/or errors that reinforce the non-contextual patterns and religious overlap is certainly noteworthy.

So finding echoes themselves isn't particularly noteworthy from either perspective. You have given it an unwarranted prominence. The problem, Dale, is that the kind of parallels you find here can be found between any texts, between any authors - and I have demonstrated this.

You can condemn each line of evidence as unimpressive--and no doubt the tactic works--but at some point the weight of the combined evidence becomes impressive. I know you dismiss that notion along the lines that a bunch of unimpressive things don't add up to something impressive, but that is simply not true. A bunch of large rocks can make up an unimpressive pile of large rocks, but if we step back from the pile and realize we are staring into the Great Pyramid we become more impressed.

The problem is not that "the kind of parallels you find here can be found between any texts" but rather that you cannot find parallels written by authors that meet all of the criteria set by these parallels (as in parallels between Mormon scripture, Smith, Cowdery, Rigdon, Pratt. & Spalding). In fact, when challenged to find the equivalent to the Spalding/Smith discovery narratives, you acknowledged that the challenge itself--when including the historical context in the criteria--is ridiculously difficult to reproduce. That means there is something about these parallels that sets them apart from the others you can easily find.

For example, what are the chances that we could take the R. Bowyer Esq. parallel you found, get a larger sample of the context, then produce samples of the writing of 4 of his close associates while eliminating him as a candidate, then compare the non-contextual patterns of the remaining candidates to the original, extended Bowyer sample--producing a false "winner" through NSC and Delta, only to find that whoever wins ALSO has a high degree of shared contextual vocabulary? If not totally impossible, it still seems a bit unlikely, does it not?

[_Uncle Dale]

...The Black Hole
...

1. The Smith-alone crowd says that Joseph Smith wrote the
Book of Mormon text, all by himself -- thinking up its
contents, vocabulary, phraseology, etc., as he went along.

2. The Mormons say that ancient American Nephites wrote it.

3. The Smith+helpers crowd says that multiple sources went
into the text, with Smith acting as the final editor.

Which of those three theories best explains the following? --


"the Lord hath said... that the righteous should sit down in his kingdom,
to go no more out..." (Amulek -- Oliver Cowdery? -- Alma 34)


"O how do I delight... to think of rest in God in his kingdom --
of being in a holy heaven, where pain and sin never shall enter --
to go no more out..."

"Memoirs of the Rev. Timothy Pitkin"
Connecticut Evangelical Magazine
Volume 5 (1812) p. 342


?????

UD

Let's review the possibilities here -- If ancient American Nephites wrote it,
then the tenets expressed must have somehow been important to the
Nephite prophets. They expressed a gathering and final rest precept that
was already resident in the Israelite religion, but did so in words that easily
translated into the expressions we see printed in the Book of Mormon.

But, if that was indeed the case, how is it that such expressions end up on
the tongue of Joseph Smith, Jr.? Was he supplying an exact, literal
translation of ancient Nephite (or Nephite Egyptian, or Nephite Hebrew)?

If so, then why do the words -- their very spelling, order and inner relationship
-- duplicate 19th century expressions provided by Rev. Pitkin and others?

Can the entire situation be explained WITHOUT resorting to Nephites?

Would we expect Sandra Tanner or Dan Vogel to call in Nephite explanations
at this point? I sincerely doubt it.

A second possibility is that the Book of Mormon was composed by one or more
early 19th century American writers who gathered together ideas, vocabulary
and phraseology from a number of different sources, including the KJV Bible.

But the expression we have been examining was not taken directly from the
Bible -- nor does it exactly duplicate the prophetic tenets given in Revelation.

The two-part expression was derived from religious phraseology that was in
public circulation during the late 18th and early 19th century. Nephites did
not join those word-strings together -- American religious writers did that.

For me, at least, it is far, far too improbable to assume that Nephites first
joined together those ideas, using that phraseology, and later the writer
of the Book of Revelation happened to independently come up with half of
the expression (just the latter part, and not exactly the same wording).

No -- Nephites did not join those phrases -- and John the Revelator did not
copy half of the "Nephite" expression.

We have no need to resort to Solomon Spalding at this point. Alma 32-33-34
is very much unlike his writing. He did not compose the instruction given by
Alma and Amulek. If Matt Jockers has any reliable evidence to offer, then
Mr. Spalding first of all composed a narrative including Alma 31 and Alma 35,
and the Smith-Cowdery team inserted the Alma-Amulek material into it, as
comprising what we now call Alma 32-33-34.

The question, then, is -- "Did Cowdery write the inserted text? or Did Smith
write the inserted text?" No need to ask if Spalding did it -- He did not.

If Smith-alone composed the phraseology, then the Spalding proponents may
have to concede a defeat here. If Cowdery composed Alma 32-33-34, then
we must acknowledge that there was a conspiracy underfoot, and we really
ought to investigate to see how far that authorship conspiracy extended. Did
it include Sidney Rigdon? And, if it did, can we identify Spalding material in the
text supplied by Mr. Rigdon.

Is anybody out there interested in this investigation -- other than just to
condemn it as an assault upon their faith-promoting Nephite beliefs?

UD

[_Roger]

UD & MCB:

I do not follow this:

Same as above, but with Cowdery added in:

expedient Cw Sp 1N 2N JR MS AA AH HE 3N MI

No "expedient" for Rigdon, one each for Cowdery and Spalding.

What do you mean by "No 'expedient' for Rigdon," MCB? That "expedient" does not appear in the Rigdon sample texts?

[_Roger]

Glenn wrote:

Rebecca Eichbaum's testimony is irrelevant on this matter. She ceased to have any connection with the post office in 1816.

Assuming I am remembering correctly, I don't think that's accurate. If I remember correctly she married the guy who became the postmaster, so she continued to have a connection, and a pretty unique one in that her father was the postmaster and then she married the guy who replaced her father.

In any event, her testimony is QUITE relevant and it's interesting that you want to insist otherwise. Before the mail-waiting notice, her testimony was characterized as the unreliable musings of an old woman. Since that no longer works, the switch is on to re-characterize it as "irrelevant."

Not buying it.

All the best.

[_MCB]

What do you mean by "No 'expedient' for Rigdon," MCB? That "expedient" does not appear in the Rigdon sample texts?

That we have available from Dale's file. Whether it is present in Rigdon texts in the LDS vaults is another question.

This is Dale's file on Rigdon's texts:
http://premormon.com/resources/r010/Sidney4.txt