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

[_Roger]

UD:

We could simply conclude that Joe Smith was a fraud, liar, charlatan, con man, knave, and criminal -- and bypass any of his alibis.

Sure, but I was asking Ben what the solution is from his point of view. I don't think Ben ultimately wants us to conclude that.

I am asking what is Ben's solution to the very real problem that no evidence exists for reformed Egyptian. How does he propose we should best move from the position in which we now find ourselves to his?

You wrote:

A. It was composed, as the book itself claims, by ancient Americans
B. It was written by the man who in 1830 called himself its "author"
C. It was partly written by that "author," from multiple modern sources

And Ben complained that:

Your option A is still facetious Dale - because in the context of examining particular words and phrases, in English no less, whatever ancient American author there might have been certainly didn't write in English. And so for us to be comparing words and phrases, you have to include the notion that it was allegedly translated in 1830 in some fashion, and that the translation process is the process that results in the choice of English words and phrases that are found in the book. But yet, in your arguments here in this thread on that topic, you repeatedly impute the English phrasing and verbiage to the ancient American author and not to the translator. So, I don't accept your list of three simple options - because you are not merely presenting three simple options. And you are not seriously accepting Joseph Smith's version of events or presenting them as one of the options here.

So I would like to know what solution he proposes to solve that problem and start us moving toward an understanding of the Book of Mormon translation as he understands it to have occurred.

[_Uncle Dale]

...
I would like to know what solution he proposes to solve that problem
...

He will have to speak for himself, but most LDS scholars I've interacted with
see no problem requiring a solution. One way or another, the language of the
book is supposed to reveal Divine truth, as taught in ancient America.

Other than inspecting the text itself, I do not know how a non-Mormon
is expected to respond to that LDS conclusion. If we had Nephite artifacts,
such as inscribed metallic plates, or magical compasses, or Jaredite barges,
perhaps we could look beyond the text -- but no such concomitant evidence
has yet been put forth for our inspection.

Therefore we turn back to the text.

Either it is what it says it is, or it is not. If it is not what it claims to be,
then there are a very few historical possibilities for our consideration,
all of which lead to Smith's publishing the book in 1829-30 in New York.

I have spoken to some well educated Community of Christ people, who
still hold the book to be an authentic ancient text. Their explanation of
its frequent reproduction of KJV biblical language and other fairly "modern"
language, is that Joseph Smith, Jr. made use of that sort of phraseology,
as being the best possible existing English available for "translating" the
ancient American records.

None of that response informs me as to how wording from the Westminster
Confession of Faith made it into the translated text -- if indeed that is
what happened.

But, let's consider Dan Vogel's notion for a moment. Joseph's mother was
evidently a Congregationalist who was accepted into the Presbyterian
church upon the authority of her earlier, Calvinist baptism. As a person of
that religious persuasion, she would have shared her creed and testimony
with her son -- perhaps even repeating that Confession to the young fellow.

I can live with that explanation. There is substantial evidence pointing to
the fact that Smith possessed a remarkable memory. Even if he only
encountered the Westminster Confession via oral instruction from his
mother, she may have conveyed its wording accurately enough for Smith
to recall its text very distinctly during one of his dictation sessions.

That sounds perfectly reasonable to me. An explanation only slightly less
reasonable, is that Smith did a great deal of reading and possessed a
photographic memory, sufficient to allow him to recall vast amounts of
his prior book-learning at the time of Book of Mormon dictation.

And a third possibility, again, only slightly less probable -- is that Smith
wrote down much of what he intended to dictate, and consulted that
written material surreptitiously from time to time, relying upon something
less than a perfect memory to still recall chapter length passages of text.

All of that I find possible, even if not testified to by any of the early witnesses.
I had not earlier heard Dan imply that Smith could have remembered texts
from past experience, and introduced excerpts into his dictation.

I count that as a rational step in the right direction for continued research.

UD

[_GlennThigpen]

If that is all you are doing, and if the "established standards of evidence and literary science" back you up then, "literary scientists" the world over should agree with you that Nephi was a real person.

Roger, this is a strawman. We are only talking about the Rigdon/Spalding theory here. Evidence of Nephi as a real person is irrelevant to this discussion.

You have produced no contemporaneous evidence for a second manuscript, on which the S/R theory absolutely depends.

Which is not likely to occur (as you know) given that it was very likely destroyed by those who had an interest in making sure it never became public.

You cannot destroy something that never existed. I cannot prove that a second manuscript never existed. However, that is not my burden. It is your burden to find some evidence that it did exist.

All of the assertions that a second manuscript ever existed came after Hurlbut obtained the manuscript now in residence at Oberlin College and found that "it did not read as expected".

Not correct, but we've been through this before and you still don't accept it. A reasonable definition of insanity is repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting different results. Your mind is set.

Yes, I know that we have been through this before. If I remember it was the Nehemiah King thing supposedly at one of the LDS presentations in Salem. But this was reported after Hurlbut returned, as supposedly reported by Aron Wright in a draft letter not in his handwriting and unsigned.

Even if Rigdon had copied a manuscript, (which evidence you have failed to produce), found in one of the offices of Lambdin or Patterson, it would still be a copy of the Oberlin manuscript. That is the manuscript delivered once to Engles and rejected because Spalding could not come up with the surety to cover the cost of printing, and delivered next to Robert Patterson Sr. by Spalding's widow with the offer to give Patterson half of the profits if he would print it. The manuscript was returned to the widow and placed it in the trunk where the daughter reported seeing it in, naming the year as 1817.

That is also not correct and we've been over that before as well and you continue to ignore the response. Your mind is set.

I know we have been over this before, and you have yet to give a coherent response, other than "it could have happened this way" types.

You also ignore the results of the word print studies which over the years have consistently shown that Spalding and Rigdon are not viable candidates as authors of the Book of Mormon, which includes the extended NSC method.
There are murmurings that the use of King James English spoils those results, but have produced no scientific evidence for such. And have ignored the finding by Royal Skousen that the Book of Mormon is not written in King James English (seventeenth century), but in fifteenth century English.

You also have ignored the vast amount of research that has been produced on the Book of Mormon over the years. Some of it includes semitic word structures and literary devices in the Book of Mormon of which there are more than a few, far too many to have been there just by coincidence.

See above.

Not an evidentiary response.

You have yet to provide Ben with any scientific basis for accepting your parallels.

Nor do I have an interest in doing so.

I guess that is the crux of the problem. Accepted standards of evidence and literary analysis does not work for the Rigdon/Spalding theory. But it does not matter if you are not interested in learning why you methods do not work. They only work for you and those who believe as you do and have no impact on reality.

Conversation with you is never dull, Glenn!

All the best.

[_Benjamin McGuire]

Dale, with the bit of time that I had today, I started a comparison between the three chapters in the Book of Mormon and a work titled Memoir of John Codman. You can find the memoir here:

http://www.archive.org/stream/memoirjoh ... g_djvu.txt

The electronic text is a bit rough - I figured for the purposes of this discussion, its problems wouldn't help for making comparisons, and so it wouldn't really matter if I tried to fix them or not. Since the formatting is a bit time consuming, I am going to present just the first paragraph from chapter 32 right now. Formatted just as you formatted the text where you linked it above (color coded, underlined, highlighted). Not having a way to highlight (that I can see), I am going to bold the phrases that would have been highlighted in the text below. Here are the results:

And it came to pass that they did go forth, and began to preach the word of God unto the people, entering into their synagogues, and into their houses; yea, and even they did preach the word in their streets. And it came to pass that after much labor among them, they began to have success among the poor class of people; for behold, they were cast out of the synagogues, because of the coarseness of their apparel; therefore they were not permitted to enter into their synagogues to worship God, being esteemed as filthiness; therefore they were poor; yea, they were esteemed by their brethren as dross; therefore they were poor as to things of the world; and also they were poor in heart.

The rest of it is quite similar in comparison. I noted several similarities immediately.

1: In that same paragraph, your Cowdery comparison yielded 4 words not in common between the Book of Mormon and Cowdery. Those four words, coincidentally enough were the same words as above - dross, coarseness, apparel, and filthiness.

2: Of the eight significant verbal parallels you listed in your comparison, the following are found also in my comparison:

"to pass that" (twice)
"the word of God"
"because of the"
"not permitted to"

Of the three that are left, "they were poor" (which is used twice), and "the ... cast out" are not replicated in the Memoir. (I didn't bother looking for examples of this last sort - I simply used verbatim word sequences). But this means that 62 percent of your examples of significant phrases are found in a text I essentially picked at random (it wasn't, of course, entirely random, I wanted something published after the Book of Mormon of an at least related genre).

My preliminary study suggests at least as significant a correlation exists between these three Book of Mormon chapters in Alma and the Memoir as between the Book of Mormon chapters and the Cowdery texts you reference. This is, I think, a significant problem for your approach. Apparently, the Book of Mormon (or at least its authors) were involved in the writing of John Codman's sermons and his Memoir, right?

Ben McGuire

[_Benjamin McGuire]

Dale writes:

Simplified list of options:

1. The book is a translation of an ancient text, as it purports to be.

2. The book was not written by ancient Americans.

I do not think it is possible to present the book's reader with a more basic choice. But, if so, I'd be happy to see what it might be.

Obviously, these two options are not exclusive. That is, it can be a translation of an ancient text, at the same time that we can assert that it certainly was not written by ancient Americans. So, I am not sure this is what you meant to suggest here. No ancient American wrote a single word of the English text. It is entirely in English ...

Ben McGuire

[_Benjamin McGuire]

Roger writes:

It's pretty difficult to accept Joseph Smith's version of events when accepting them requires the belief that the original language, for which there is no evidence, was a real, spoken and written language. It's pretty difficult to imagine what the Book of Mormon might have read like in that completely unknown language. The fact is all we have to go on is Joseph Smith's English rendition--which is itself a strike against taking any of his claims seriously.

What do you suggest we do to remedy that conundrum?

My suggestion (which has been made repeatedly in this forum - and at least once in this thread) is really quite simple. All we have to do is ignore the claims of Joseph Smith. We can take them completely off the table. The question of whether the Spalding theory is a good or bad theory can be answered without having to deal with Joseph Smith's version at all. As far as I can tell, it is the comparison that you and Dale want because for a certain audience, anything juxtaposed with the angel can seem reasonable (even if it really isn't).

So, my suggestion is that we evaluate the claims of parallels and literary borrowing while working from the assumption that the Book of Mormon is entirely a modern production.

Ben McGuire

[_Benjamin McGuire]

Roger writes:

Ben will no doubt complain at that suggestion, but the fact is we are not in a classroom attempting to sort meaningless parallels from meaningful ones. WE ALREADY HAVE CLUES BEFORE WE EVEN GET TO THAT POINT THAT THERE IS A CONNECTION BETWEEN RIGDON/SPALDING AND THE Book of Mormon and Ben flatly refuses to acknowledge the value to ANY of that but instead insists the parallels are meaningless from the start because he can find others like them. But he can't. He can't find parallels that come with the pre-existing historical criteria these carry with them.

You are absolutely right Roger. It is incredibly rare for anyone to have a serious discussion about authorship attribution, when the source text is alleged to be a text that no one has seen, where those whose testimonies are used to attest this non-existent manuscript are clearly either based on one another or a common source (and in some instances include details that can be attributed to commentary - not about the alleged original source, but commentary on the document alleged to be borrowing from that non-existent source. And of course, where the complete sum of accusations of borrowing come from blatantly polemical sources. No Roger, it is very hard to find something in the real world that matches that kind of scenario ...

Instead of turning to widely accepted scholarly methods, all we get from you is that you know it when you see it. We get a string of facts and details along with volumes of speculation that attempts to make it all possible (but in fact, it remains purely speculation). There is no shred of information about the non-existent manuscript that cannot be attributed to contemporary accounts about the Book of Mormon. You don't have a historical case, and you can't make a historical case. I remain absolutely convinced that, despite its flaws, Vogel's theory is far superior to the one you present.

Ben McGuire

[_Uncle Dale]

My preliminary study suggests at least as significant a correlation exists between
these three Book of Mormon chapters in Alma and the Memoir as between the
Book of Mormon chapters and the Cowdery texts you reference.
...

It would be very helpful if you would follow through on this exercise,
and color-code the entire text for those three chapters, underlining
the shared vocabulary (as you have done) and bolding, or otherwise
marking examples of three or more contiguous shared words -- if not
interrupted by punctuation in either of the texts.

If you will take the trouble to complete the study, your results can be
quantified as follows:

First, provide a percentage for vocabulary overlap for each page, by
dividing the number of shared words on that page by the total number
of words on the same page.

Secondly, provide a percentage for phraseology overlap for each page,
by dividing the number of boldened words on that page by the number
of shared words on the same page.

Lastly, add the two percentages together, to produce an overlap sum
for each Book of Mormon page.

I can then chart out the set of sums, and we can thus compare one
page to the next, in terms relative language use resemblance.

The numbers thus generated may not be exhaustive, but I do think
that they will provide a uniform method by which we can examine
each page's shared language occurrences, to look for instances of
unusual clustering.

I believe that the results will be worth the effort. The goal is not to
prove whether one text derived from the other, but rather, to attempt
to monitor what a typical set of shared language distribution patterns
and intensities looks like.

If we had 100 appropriate texts to thus examine, we might even come
up with something like a baseline standard for future quantified
comparisons of two texts. But that sort of attempt at exhaustive
standardization will have to await implementation of some reliable
automated methodology.

In the meanwhile, you can take a good step in that direction, just
by finishing up what you have already started.

UD

[_Uncle Dale]

Dale writes:

Simplified list of options:

1. The book is a translation of an ancient text, as it purports to be.

2. The book was not written by ancient Americans.

I do not think it is possible to present the book's reader with a more basic choice. But, if so, I'd be happy to see what it might be.

Obviously, these two options are not exclusive. That is, it can be a translation of an ancient text, at the same time that we can assert that it certainly was not written by ancient Americans. So, I am not sure this is what you meant to suggest here. No ancient American wrote a single word of the English text. It is entirely in English ...

Ben McGuire

Radically simplified readers' choice:

1. The book is the translation of an ancient American text that it purports to be.

2. It is not.


UD

[_MCB]

So, my suggestion is that we evaluate the claims of parallels and literary borrowing [from a large range of works available to the authors] while working from the assumption that the Book of Mormon is entirely a modern production.

I'm a'workin' on it. And I will not unveil the results except to a select audience at this point. Sorry.