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

[_Roger]

Dan:

I’m keeping a tab on your conspiracy theory—so far, we have Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris, and Emma Smith as coconspirators with Joseph Smith, right?

How did you get that? I can't speak for marg, but under what I think is the most likely scenario, we have Oliver Cowdery who might be classified as a "co-conspirator" but probably not in the sense you are thinking of. Under my thesis he would simply have been privileged to information the others were not. But even he might have still believed Nephites were real and that the ms pages being supplied to them by Rigdon represented a genuine history combined with true revelation. He would have also believed that Joseph was selected by God to finish the work, add his own revelation and present it to the world. So in that case, he would not have been a "co-conspirator" as you are likely using the term.

I am convinced that we should be viewing all of the early Mormon followers of Joseph Smith in the same way we view modern followers of Warren Jeffs or Benny Hinn. It is difficult to determine whether such followers truly believe in the claims being made by the charismatic leader or they simply see an opportunity, but either way, they are not usually inclined to report information to the public that might be damaging to the cause. And any report they do give is calculated to put the cause in the best possible light. That is exactly what we see with most early Mormon witnesses. And of course, those who broke the mold, were labelled apostate pawns of the devil.

Viewing the witnesses in that light would reveal that they ALL were co-conspirators in exactly the same way the followers of modern cults are co-conspirators.

When you theorize that Oliver may have been instructed by Joseph to copy the KJV with the changes he (Joseph) had made to the text, you are agreeing with me that, at least in that sense, Oliver was indeed a co-conspirator. I realize you will object to that since you think Oliver would have been sincerely duped by Joseph Smith, but in actuality there is no ground for such a protest. There is very little actual difference between your position and mine with respect to Oliver's status as a "co-conspirator." In other words, if you are going to charge my version of S/R with accusing Oliver of being a "co-conspirator" then you will need to apply the term to Oliver in your theory as well. Under both scenarios, Oliver believes Nephites are real and Joseph is chosen by God and therefore has the right to ask him to copy the Bible with the changes he's made to it. The only real difference between your position and mine (that I can see) is Oliver's state of mind and rationale for never mentioning the Bible, and, consequently, what he would have stated had he ever been directly asked. As far as I am aware there is no way to prove it either way, so in a practical sense, there is essentially no difference between your position on Oliver and mine other than the volume of secrecy and the motivation for silence.

As far as the others, they fit very nicely into the view that they are simply devoted followers who would tend to publicly state only things that will support the cause and reluctant to mention things that might damage the cause. But those who were lower in the hierarchy would simply not have been privy to certain information.

[_MCB]

I use umich version for comprehensive search. If you know generally what you are looking for, you can go up to upper left corner if using Explorer and "search this webpage" within "book" when using hundredsheep..

[_Roger]

MCB:

I use umich version for comprehensive search. If you know generally what you are looking for, you can go up to upper left corner if using Explorer and "search this webpage" within "book" when using hundredsheep..

I'm using google chrome. I might have better results if I simply switch to a seer stone.

Dale, is the 1830 text you have online searchable?

[_Roger]

Glenn:

It is apparent that you do not place much stock in Schaalje's conclusion. However, if you read Matt Jocker's post very early in this thread, he says that Bruce has made some very valuable contributions to the original NSC methods. I will quote what he said: "Professor Schaalje's work in trying to deal with the closed vs. open set problem is innovative and will likely inform future work in the field. As a new approach to authorship problems, I think he and his team have likely made a valuable contribution. I do not, however, see Professor Schaalje's paper as a refutation of our work, and perhaps this is because I read the results of our work differently than he does.

The paper we wrote was designed to answer the question of who among the suspect candidates was the most likely. That's it. In my opinion, Professor Schaalje's paper takes aim at a fictionally constructed argument that we did not in fact make: hence my reference to the "straw man," "playing fast and loose with our conclusions," and "slight of hand." I understand that Professor Schaalje and other readers may believe that our paper was about "proving" who wrote (or most likely wrote) the Book of Mormon. That is most certainly not what it was about for me, and this is why I do not believe that Professor Schaalje's paper stands as a rebuttal of our work. Our work was designed to rank a closed set of candidates who had been suggested by other researchers as possible authors. From my point of view our results showed simply that one candidate in the set was more likely than another (for any given chapter)."

Bruce's conclusion about 19th century authors was not drawn from PC1, but from the methods he employed to check for the possibility that none of the authors included in a paticular candidate set were actually the author of a particular manuscript.
According to Matt himself, their NSC methodology did not pick an author, but just selected the most likely candidate in the list. Bruce's work corrected for the possibility that no one on the list was the actual author.

Which seems to boil down to.... Ben's assertion is correct: If the real author is among the candidate set, then Jocker's method is very reliable.

So I ask again, what 19th century person is any more likely to have produced content for the Book of Mormon than Joseph Smith? Even Dan has to agree, I would think, that Joseph Smith should be the most likely candidate! Of course you don't agree because you think ancient Nephites produced the content in the Book of Mormon, which also explains why you want to latch on to Schaalje's results. But until you can identify some real Nephite ruins, show us the Nephite alphabet, produce some ancient Nephite chariots, etc. there is simply no good reason to think Nephites ever existed and every reason to think the text of the Book of Mormon did not exist until the 19th century.

So I ask again, what 19th century person is a more likely producer of content for the Book of Mormon than Joseph Smith?

Jockers latest results include Joseph Smith. If Nephites never existed, according to Ben, those results should be pretty accurate.

[_MCB]

And that part of the text which is most like Joseph Smith's writing has the exact autobiographical content predicted by Dan V.

[_Dan Vogel]

Marg,

Dan the problem is that Elizabeth, David Whitmer’s sister and wife of Oliver Cowdery had her entire family's reputation and name on the line if she were to disagree with the claims which had been made.

What claims? Her affidavit precedes David’s statements by ten years. Her husband’s statement was given in 1848, and published in Utah in 1850. I doubt she saw it. But even if she saw it, her statement gives more details than Oliver gave—details that are closer to Whitmer’s statements, which she had not seen.

For any of these people related and involved, saying anything which went against what had been claimed by the originators for the translation process, would have negative repercussions for all family members currently living and into the future. And they would have known that.

Her brother hadn’t made a statement yet, and Oliver had been dead twenty years and she had remarried. She didn’t have to give a statement at all. She did it at McLellin’s request. Elizabeth’s statement is independent, and it’s doubtful that David saw McLellin’s unpublished affidavit. You can’t simply assert that she lied to save her family embarrassment.

They simply are not good reliable witnesses having a vested interest in protecting their families physically, their family's name and reputation in the present and into the future, and for some they had at the beginning a vested interest in benefits of power, prestige and employment/potential financial returns.

The assertion that Elizabeth would lie to protect her family assumes she had something to lie about. As I showed, Elizabeth wasn’t in any different situation than someone giving an independent statement. She wasn’t under pressure to conform to previous claims, either by her brother or late husband.

by the way Dan, Oliver claimed the Urim and Thummin spectacles were used...so did they glow words as well and were they used with the hat or without?

If OC’s statement as reported by Bishop Miller is interpreted to refer to the spectacles, then either OC was misquoted or he altered his testimony to conform to Joseph Smith’s 1838 official history, which purged out magical elements from Joseph Smith’s early history. No one saw the spectacles, except Joseph Smith and the three witnesses in vision with the plates. Joseph Smith used the spectacles briefly at the beginning, but he was behind the curtain as Anthon remembered. So that part of the statement needs to be corrected by reference to those who saw Joseph Smith dictate to OC with his head in the hat. It is possible Miller, not being familiar with Joseph Smith’s use of a seer stone, added the phrase “or, as it is called by that book, ‘Holy Interpreters’” after the phrase “Urim and Thummim” by way of clarification. Whatever the case may be, we know Joseph Smith didn’t use the spectacles while OC was scribe.

To answer your question—there’s no reliable description of how the spectacles worked.

Conspiracy theory tabulation—so far, we have as coconspirators with Joseph Smith: Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris, Emma Smith, Elizabeth Whitmer Cowdery.

[_Dan Vogel]

MCB:

I usually use the hundred sheep one.

You can search the online text? How do you do that? The only search engine I see is the Google search that you can select to search the 2think site, but (apparently?) not the Book of Mormon text.

I just go into each book's file and search it with find (control+F).

[_Dan Vogel]

Marg,

Dan, seer stones which glow words and special magical spectacles by which one can read words are totally different scenarios.

Yes. So Mullen six years later has conflated two stories. Easy mistake. Whitmer probably explained Joseph Smith got the spectacles with the plates, which were called “Urim and Thummim”, and then told the story where Joseph Smith puts the “Urim and Thimmim” into his hat. Although garbled, I included it to show my wife was discussing the translation as early as 1874. This is the earliest account I have, and it comes four years after his sister’s statement, but not published until 1880.

It appears the problem was that Smith and Cowdery by using the explanation of "spectacles" instead of "seer stone" .. created a bit of a problem for all those who had previously said he stuck in head in a hat and read words off a glowing stone.

Your chronology is off, but it’s true that Joseph Smith’s 1838 history confused the reporting of the witnesses’ statements. The witnesses themselves were not confused, although their attempt to tell both stories didn’t help. Joseph Smith’s switching from the spectacles to the seer stone complicated the situation and his suppression of the head in hat story confused believers when they first heard it.

They simply are not the same term and explanation. This is an example of ad hoc fallacy. The first explanation is head in a hat + exclude light and read words off a glowing with word stone. Then Cowdery and Smith later say magical spectacles were used. Well spectacles don't glow words Dan and where's that stone when the spectacles are being used. So the ad hoc new explanation that is created to account for the difference in translation process is..."the words spectacle ala Urim & thummin means the same thing as seer stone." Ya right "rolling eyes"

It’s not ad hoc. I didn’t make it up. The term “Urim and Thummim” was used for both instruments. As I explained, Joseph Smith made a shift in 1838 to a more acceptable story to Christians by purging out the folk magic elements from the story of the Book of Mormon’s coming forth.

[_Uncle Dale]

...
Dale, is the 1830 text you have online searchable?

You'll find 1830 copies with far fewer errors here:
http://premormon.com/resources/r009/009BoMx.htm

Don't use the one Vogel is pointing you too -- it has
several uncorrected text problems.

UD

ps -- one copy already has all of the come/came to pass
occurrences colorized....

[_GlennThigpen]

Glenn:
Which seems to boil down to.... Ben's assertion is correct: If the real author is among the candidate set, then Jocker's method is very reliable.

That is not in dispute. Jockers et al, tested the method against the Federalist papers and it worked very well and produced results that are in accordance with other wordprint algorithms.

So I ask again, what 19th century person is any more likely to have produced content for the Book of Mormon than Joseph Smith? Even Dan has to agree, I would think, that Joseph Smith should be the most likely candidate! Of course you don't agree because you think ancient Nephites produced the content in the Book of Mormon, which also explains why you want to latch on to Schaalje's results. But until you can identify some real Nephite ruins, show us the Nephite alphabet, produce some ancient Nephite chariots, etc. there is simply no good reason to think Nephites ever existed and every reason to think the text of the Book of Mormon did not exist until the 19th century.

So I ask again, what 19th century person is a more likely producer of content for the Book of Mormon than Joseph Smith?

Jockers latest results include Joseph Smith. If Nephites never existed, according to Ben, those results should be pretty accurate.

Roger, Bruce's method is religion free. It does not believe in Nephite, Lamanites, etc. It merely corrects for a skew which is introduced in the results if the correct author is not in the mix for any text that is being tested. If Nephites never existed, there is still the uncertainty that the real author(s) is/are not in the mix. Have you actually read the paper? Bruce's method eliminates the "if", the uncertainty, that is introduced when the real author is not known.


Glenn