Everybody Wang Chung wrote:Lemmie wrote:Even if they don't believe Smith dictated the book from his head but rather dictated it from a written source, they should be considering it as an alternative hypothesis. It's too bad that they are quite studiously ignoring this 'oral text' alternative, because it is quite compelling as an explanation.
I guess this means Skousen wasted the last 25 years of his life and the Mormon Interpreter wasted $150,000 they could have used for other projects.
dr s wrote:I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. Regardless of the source of the pre-written text--Spalding's manuscript or the seer stone--Skousen has been saying for years that the text was dictated, just like Lemmie explained.
Skousen is indeed giving us the actual words that were dictated, regardless of the written source thereof. . . so the 25 years weren't wasted.
I take your point about Skousens work, but I will disagree that it is definite that Skousen is giving us the actual words, which is what I took Everybody Wang Chung to mean.
Gadianton pointed out that the majority of the work was not extant and was reconstructed solely by Skousen, and whether his biases were conscious or unconscious, we essentially have in Skousen's work only one single man's unevaluated opinion on what almost 3/4ths of it really said:
The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text wrote:
A typographical facsimile of the surviving pages of the original manuscript.....even greater problem is that 72 percent of that document is no longer extant. In contrast, the printer's manuscript...intact since 1903..RLDS...fill in the gaps of original...comparisons reveal that Oliver made about three textual mistakes per page copying from original to printers...so unperceived errors are undoubtedly contained in those portions that we cannot check against the OM, nevertheless...not completely unrecoverable
By working backward... it is possible to reconstruct in large degree the original text of the Book of Mormon using the standard techniques of critical scholarship.
No matter how good a linguist he is, it is not academically sound to accept one single person's non-peer-reviewed replacement of that much of a book, and still call it Joseph Smith's work. We have Skousen's version of the Book of Mormon, but nothing more. This is no insult to Skousen, he has done.tremendous work, but to do it in total isolation, except for Carmack, for decades, is not a sound research methodology. Even Carmack admitted recently he's only talked to one linguist he knew "from the 90s," and whom he referred to as "independent," about his research. Who works in such isolation? And what is an "independent" linguist?
(And Dan, since you seem to be reading a lot here lately: once again, no, the Interpreter is NOT a peer-reviewed journal.)