Others will thank you for your work and turn it to deeper questions.
I don't know. So far there have been very few comments on this thread other yours and nobody has bothered to step forward and support my assumptions but nobody stands behind you either. So it seems I'm just a lone wolf howling at the moon. Not even RFM has anything to say. Imagine that. His mouth is shut. His lips are sealed. Not so much as a peep. He must be getting his beauty sleep. People do that when they get old. Poor RFM.
Others will thank you for your work and turn it to deeper questions.
I don't know. So far there have been very few comments on this thread other yours and nobody has bothered to step forward and support my assumptions but nobody stands behind you either. So it seems I'm just a lone wolf howling at the moon. Not even RFM has anything to say. Imagine that. His mouth is shut. His lips are sealed. Not so much as a peep. He must be getting his beauty sleep. People do that when they get old. Poor RFM.
It turns out that even though it wasn't used in the English of the KJV Bible, "start" is a word that was used in Early Modern English (or as really smart people call it, Early Modern English). How could Joseph Smith have possibly known that? This turns out to be even more evidence that the Book of Mormon is true!
Yeah well, how much money do you think you could have gotten by scrapping his gold plates? I think the case is closed that you wouldn't have gotten much. The plates under the cloth were fake just like the novel he dictated was not historical by any means. It was ALL a fraud. All of it!
Don't spend any money on a degree in literary studies, Shulem, because Joseph Smith's contemporaries knew more about literary genre than you do.
The Book of Mormon is a Bible, not a novel.
They called it. That is what he made it to be. Novel just isn't the right word.
I'm good with novel. What's the right word then? Pretend Bible, made up Bible, imaginary Bible?
The translators of the King James Bible were careful in selecting the words in which to translate and obviously the word "START" was never ever employed.
Long before the KJV, Wycliffe used derivations of "start" in his translation and several modern translations have followed suit (e.g. RSV, NIV). It should hardly be necessary to point to the obvious implication: Wycliffe had a seat on the celebrated "ghost committee" yet doesn't consider himself too hoity-toity to lend a hand to translators who don't have access to magic rocks and hardly ever bother to bury their source material in the woods.
I'm good with novel. What's the right word then? Pretend Bible, made up Bible, imaginary Bible?
Bible works just fine. Imaginary on what basis? Given the dubious or fictional authors of much of the original Bible, it is not clear to me what makes the Mormon Bible all that different in this regard.
"He disturbs the laws of his country, he forces himself upon women, and he puts men to death without trial.” ~Otanes on the monarch, Herodotus Histories 3.80.
