Zosimus wrote: ↑Tue Oct 11, 2022 2:24 pm
Shulem wrote: ↑Tue Oct 11, 2022 12:11 pm
There are no other voyages described in the text by which the plates were taken from an Asian island or peninsula. I’m afraid that is a fantasy, your fantasy, so it seems.
Shulem, you keep referring to Asia and Malay as if it's some sort of outlier with nothing to do with the Book of Mormon. So I'll repeat this.
In 1828, Samuel Mitchell confirmed to Martin Harris that the characters of the Book of Mormon were of a nation now extinct, and he named that nation. I've shared a link to the very thorough research done by Richard Bennett on this. Richard Bennett proposes that Samuel Mitchell had told Martin Harris that the characters of the Book of Mormon were Malay. No doubt Martin Harris then went back to Joseph Smith and told Joseph that the great Samuel Mitchell had confirmed that the characters were ... Malay. I've shared screengrabs above confirming that the Malay Peninsula used to be called Kamarah and the founder of Kamarah was named Maroni.
Think about it.
Joseph Smith had validation from one of America's leading scholars that his chicken scratches were Malay. Bingo! Joseph then borrowed the names of Cumorah and Moroni -- and a few others like Comron and Cumr and Morianton and Ramah and Sidon [1] -- from pirate tales and Arab geographies. Should we then be surprised to find that he also borrowed the template for his peninsula from the same sources?
Well, yes. It’s not necessarily good logic to assume that because Smith liked and borrowed names, he had to have also used the area geography. The two may be correlated, but one doesn’t imply the other.
Shulem has very thoroughly made the case that Smith used a piece of geography from a map he was familiar with as a prompt, like a physical variation on Davis' idea of leads, to set out and guide you his story.
Just because he cribbed names from one story doesn’t mean he couldn’t have used a map from elsewhere also. He took ideas from many places to pull things together, we've seen that in the Bible commentaries, in other pseudo-biblical writings, his father's dreams, etc etc etc.
To insist that things must come from only one source, in the face of overwhelming evidence otherwise, is insupportable, in my opinion.