Carmack's current position on Book of Mormon authorship

[huckelberry]

I read McClellan as a deflection. Explain that the Bible’s transmission is messy too, and you don’t have to explain how the stone in the hat process actually works.

Yes. It borders on denying all the hat, stone, plates and angels, if you think it through.

Marcus, I am lost here. Are you referring to a different person than author biblical scholar Dan McClellan? He has repeated no data supports historical Book of Mormon though faith may affirm the book. He has observed it is best understood from the English usage of time of its production,19 century America. He explains that in a paper on the meaning of"after all we can do". Dan notes the phrase commonly meant despite.

[Marcus]

Yes. It borders on denying all the hat, stone, plates and angels, if you think it through.

Marcus, I am lost here. Are you referring to a different person than author biblical scholar Dan McClellan? He has repeated no data supports historical Book of Mormon though faith may affirm the book. He has observed it is best understood from the English usage of time of its production,19 century America. He explains that in a paper on the meaning of"after all we can do". Dan notes the phrase commonly meant despite.

I don't see that we are disagreeing. If McClellan "has repeated no data supports historical Book of Mormon though faith may affirm the book" and "He has observed it is best understood from the English usage of time of its production,19 century America". in my opinion. that is the equivalent of "denying all the hat, stone, plates and angels".

[I Have Questions]

Hilton and Carmack both make the same “mistake” in assuming that “multiple writing styles = multiple ancient authors”

You must be right that this is a super old finding, from the 90s even? But here's the thing, Carmack and Hilton actually contradict each other, in fact, as I'm delving into this research independently (back in the 90s it might have taken talent to do but not now), I'm wondering if Skousen and Carmack and the Ghost theory is a reaction to the laughable failure of earlier studies.

The Hilton study is claiming multiple ancient authors, essentially, one for each book of the Book of Mormon. This is the most naïve take on scriptures possible, which of course is the Chapel Mormon understanding. Nephi wrote a diary, Jarom wrote a diary, Omni wrote a diary, Alma wrote a diary and so on, and then somebody put them together into a single set of plates, and then they were translated into English. Based on the "purity of language" hypothesis -- that Joseph Smith translating by the gift and power of God simply found the right English symbols that corresponded to the pure concepts as they were thought in Nephite Language -- the student of faith should find that all the authors of the Book of Mormon are different.

What I'm thinking is this group of apologists posted their most striking result, that Nephi and Alma are two different authors, and then hard stop, hoping the lie would sell. They didn't post any results showing how similar many of the Book of Mormon authors are. My tentative finding is that indeed Alma, Mosiah, and Helaman seem to go together, 2nd Nephi is on its own (due to massive KJV plagiarism), and the rest of the books seem to go together. In other words, while Nephi and pre-Mosiah corpus don't predict Alma, they predict Ether and Moroni very well. The same argument I could use that says Nephi and Alma are different, says that Nephi and Ether and Moroni who all come completely different time periods are the same author.

In other words, the apologists in their secret meetings must have at some point admitted to each other that they will never show that each author within the Book of Mormon has its own unique voice. What they really did, is undertake a line of inquiry that falsified the Book of Mormon. How to save it? One way to save it is exactly what Skousen did. Now that I understand the problem he and the other apologists were up against, I can understand his new line of inquiry. Focus on the translation layer.

The translation layer may provide cover. In my own "research" perhaps the most startling conclusion for me (which should have been obvious for a smarter person) was how well the KJV predicts itself. I expected the KJV to be "noise". We know that Moses isn't the author of the Pentateuch and basically, the Old Testament especially is the work of dozens if not hundreds of different individuals. So really, there shouldn't be any distinct styles with a few exceptions (Paul / Revelation), but yet, apparently, the distinct KJV translation layer is so potent that random chunks of KJV predict other random chunks of KJV was well as Jane Austen predicts Austen, Shakespeare predicts Shakespeare, Hemmingway predicts himself and so on.

So the apologists thinking must have bent towards what they could do with the translation layer instead of the underlying "prophets". The discovery of multiple authors, but the authors don't correlate to the Chapel Mormon version of reality either as distinct prophet voices or Joseph Smith has a seer, essentially points to fraud. How else do you explain one guy wrote Nephi, Ether, and Moroni? Something like the Ghost Committee theory would be virtually forced to be invented to save the Book of Mormon as magical. This is quite interesting to me, because for so long I sat laughing out loud at not just how silly the Ghost theory is -- and yes, it really is silly -- but how unmotivated it was -- why? Why shoot yourselves in the foot with something so ridiculous? But now it's making more sense as to why something like it had to arise.

I see it that way too. Born from the desperation of knowing that all the other scholarly endeavours that studied wordprint analysis etc have relied upon dishonest methodology to avoid their study pointing to the obvious conclusion - that it’s a 19th Century production. Skousen appears to have tacitly accepted that it isn’t a translation of ancient plates by seeking an alternative explanation for why the Book of Mormon itself points to a more modern production. So it’s obviously not a translation of ancient plates by Joseph, but we cannot accept the nuclear option - that it was written in the 19th century, so we have have to find something in between, no matter how ridiculous, no matter the vacuum of anything approaching evidence, there has to be something that stops the shelf from crumbling entirely. Ah! By Jove I’ve got it! Ghosts translated it!

It feels like Interpreter has spent an awful lot of money helping Skousen overcome his own personal faith crisis.

[PseudoPaul]

A direct response to Carmack's academically unpublishable years long hobby horse:

https://www.dialoguejournal.com/article ... of-Mormon/

[Physics Guy]

It always seemed obvious to me that Carmack and Skousen were just turning blind eyes to possibilities like the ones Davis (the author of PseudoPaul's linked article) has found. Reading Carmack's assertions was for me kind of like hearing a neighbor claim that aliens toilet-papered his house. I was sure that we should be looking harder a lot harder at the neighborhood kids before jumping to aliens.

Davis has now cornered Jimmy and Billy, and they are looking sheepish.