Peterson's latest old smoke and old mirrors...

[_grindael]

Respectfully disagree, Jersey. Having studied the man for years, I think he easily could have. But that's just my opinion.

[_Symmachus]

Pretty sure Sic et Non will pretend Symm's comments never happened and so won't be posting a response to them.

I found the analysis fascinating, and I can't help but think of the Late War. The Late War does the same thing, triumphantly explaining the point of the story. It's only accidental that Joseph Smith got in the ballpark with the archtype characters, with the Late War as a guide.

A smoking gun if there ever was one.

A generous sentiment, Gad. Like the apologists, I used to think aesthetics and ethics were irrelevant to the historicity debate—it doesn't have to be pretty to come from god or to say anything of moral value to be divine—but I no longer do. The reason why is because it doesn't just claim to come from god but from society where writing held a unique place.

Consider the technology of writing and the logistics of using that technology: writing something down in antiquity took a lot of highly skilled labor, and any written document you find from the ancient world presupposes quite a bit: a kind of social infrastructure that fostered the skilled labor needed for writing. We find this in the Near East and the Mediterranean, and what this social infrastructure tended to produce were eloquent laborers: scribes. It still takes years for a child to master the art of writing, but even college students have a hard time learning how to write because written language is different from spoken. And that is in a society where writing materials are plentiful, cheap, and easy to come by. But in ancient societies, this sort of training also took years but the materials of writing were costly and rare. So these scribes and adepts of writing got to be good at what they did in a community setting that was centered on mastering not just a script but different registers of language. And so, what kind of text are you going to spend the time and material resources in actually memorializing in writing? And what kind of text are you going to write on gold? A description of senums and senines?

Since the Book of Mormon wasn't commissioned by kings but by god, you'd expect to find the kind of linguistic and literary forms in the Book of Mormon that we find elsewhere from the region and time period. They don't have enough respect to use more than workaday language to describe their deity and his interactions with them? I mean, my god, the Nephites took the effort to use damned gold as a writing material—but they didn't feel the compunction to make the language a little less like a 19th century farmer's speech? And they don't filter their narrative through the values of a scribal culture—a culture that is defined by the continual copying and editing of literary texts? How unexpected of them. Judging from other texts from the region and time period, a complex work detailing god's conversations with and directions to people was something we would expect to be memorialized in marked language—i.e. literary language—because a medium like that marked the message off as something special, different, unique, cosmic.

Maybe in Nephitish it was much better and Joseph was translating it into the language of simple farmers from upstate New York. But it's more than just artful overlay—after all, there's plenty of biblical phraseology—even the themes of the book are, well, silly: pride is bad (we never learn why it is bad, unlike in, say, the Greek tradition) and is something rich people and eggheads have (gee, no farmer ever thought that). There's plenty about pride in the proverb literatures of scribal cultures, but it's not a world view (except in Greece, where it is highly developed) just an observation on human behavior and psychology. The anti-intellectualism of the Book of Mormon is not the kind of message we find in texts produced in scribal cultures in antiquity:

When they are learned they think they are wise, and they hearken not unto the counsel of God, for they set it aside, supposing they know of themselves, wherefore, their wisdom is foolishness and it profiteth them not. And they shall perish. But to be learned is good if they hearken unto the counsels of God.

I can see somebody like Paul saying that, a semi-educated tent-maker with a cultural chip on his shoulder. But it's hard to imagine that coming out of an ancient near eastern scribal culture.

So, I don't think it was much better in the original Nephitish, because, on the other half of my criticism, ethical content, I have to ask: since it has no real ethical value, what's the point of the book? It functions purely as a signifier of something else—Joseph's ability to translate and thus his prophethood. I don't think many Mormons would dispute that function, and I was taught that even at BYU by CES people.

But aesthetics and ethics are related. Literary language is language that calls attention to itself and the message encoded by that language; since the language of the Book of Mormon is non-literary, it calls attention to something else, namely, Joseph Smith, interlocutor of angels and translators of buried books. He is the book's only message, so it's no surprise that it basically doesn't say anything for 500 pages (notice how impressed apologists are by the book's length. They are measuring quantity, not quality).

Now, if I'm a Nephite scribe or even a Nephite prophet but I don't know who the “F” Joseph Smith is or where New York is going to be, I have to ask myself: why the hell am I doing this? Why am I lugging gold plates around and getting arthritis by writing on metal things that are pretty pointless and vapid? I mean, I have spent years mastering this technology of writing. It's going to be easy to pick up a pen 1500 years hence, but for now, inscribing on gold using an a reworked Egyptian script to write a Mayan-Hebrew hybrid (which thus must have had many logographic elements alongside some alphabetic elements) takes a lot of work. If these apologists think Demotic is a good representative of "reformed Egyptian," go ask John Gee how easy it is to read Demotic. Then ask him to write a page of Hebrew—something in Isaiah—using Demotic. Then give him a summer to make his own gold plates and tell him to write it on the gold plates using a stylus—and make sure he does so in a way that will be legible 1500 years hence. That's my Book of Mormon challenge.

So, our putative Nephite scribe has spent some time mastering a complex script, which means he has copied and copied from lots of texts. What were these texts? I mean, how else would these guys have learned to write except by writing? From analogues in Egypt, the Near East, and the Classical Mediterranean—the cultural stew that this Nephite's culture was supposedly cooked up in—we can safely assume that Nephite scribe-prophets learned and perfected their craft in copying ethical texts and literature (stories, poems on gods, and so on). From the Book of Mormon, we know that this scribe also has access to the Hebrew Bible, so he knows what good writing and literature look like; he has seen scribal literature, and he has probably copied it more than anything else and imbibed its forms and values. We should expect something of its nature to be in the Book of Mormon, then, but instead we just find pale imitations on the the superficial level of some stock phrases.

Surely, our scribe, brought up as a scribe in that kind of writing culture, must have wondered why he was copying these jejune chronicles, and one of them did:

Wherefore, the Lord hath commanded me to make these plates for a wise purpose in him, which purpose I know not.

It's not just that we have no evidence of this culture of writing but that the text itself shows no awareness that such a culture would need to exist in order for the Book of Mormon to come into being in the way that it claims to have been born. It displays none of the forms of such a culture. We should have a lot more proverbs, stories, poems, etc.—in other words, the sort of stuff we find in scribal subcultures of antiquity. And we should expect the filter of that education to color the Book of Mormon's presentation in some detectable way. Instead, all of these scribes were writing something that says nothing, bears no resemblance to literary forms or mentalities of ancient scribal cultures, and whose sole purpose was to be evidence that some half-literate farmer could read the nothing they were writing a millennium and a half later.

I don't buy it.

The Book of Mormon is self-consciously a piece of evidence to support Joseph Smith's story. Since it is a fatally flawed piece of evidence for that, we have to wonder whether it has any value independent of Joseph Smith. It doesn't. The claims of Jesus or Yahweh do not depend on the Bible, because it has its own series of arguments about things human and cosmic (ethics) that are presented beautifully (aesthetics). One doesn't need to care about Jesus's existence to appreciate those. The Book of Mormon, on the other hand, is nothing without Joseph Smith. Ditch his prophethood and it's just a historical curiosity. It says nothing, and it says it awfully.

Conservatives believe in the book because they believe in Joseph Smith's story, and there is nothing you can do for people who don't want to learn more about Joseph Smith's story beyond what the Church says. So in the final analysis, it is the liberal Mormons who have the real problem in terms of the Book of Mormon, because it offers them nothing. There is no sermon they can get out of it, there is no repository of social criticism to speak of, no vein of human pathos to tap into, no strain of musicality to delight in, no artistic pleasure to derive from it. It is little more than a reminder that their religion is the result of a 19th century farmer's delusions of grandeur. Conservative approaches to the Book of Mormon will endure as long as gullibility and willful ignorance exist, but liberal Mormonism has a half-life measured by one's ability to tolerate the notion that the Book of Mormon has any value that transcends academic interest.* If liberal Mormons want to keep the Book of Mormon, they'll have to learn from their conservative brethren and sistren and avoid reading books that are actually worth reading.

*this is why, in my view, so many liberal Mormons are academics, especially in the humanities and the psuedo-sciences (sorry, I mean social sciences): they just extend their professional life into the space that was formerly occupied by religion. It's easier for them to maintain Mormonism than non-academics, because they academicize their own experience. It doesn't help that fact-value distinctions have vanished in certain sectors of academia, as have old-fashioned concepts like literary taste. Academics, accordingly, have a very high tolerance for bull crap.

[_I have a question]

Conservatives believe in the book because they believe in Joseph Smith's story, and there is nothing you can do for people who don't want to learn more about Joseph Smith's story beyond what the Church says. So in the final analysis, it is the liberal Mormons who have the real problem in terms of the Book of Mormon, because it offers them nothing. There is no sermon they can get out of it, there is no repository of social criticism to speak of, no vein of human pathos to tap into, no strain of musicality to delight in, no artistic pleasure to derive from it. It is little more than a reminder that their religion is the result of a 19th century farmer's delusions of grandeur. Conservative approaches to the Book of Mormon will endure as long as gullibility and willful ignorance exist, but liberal Mormonism has a half-life measured by one's ability to tolerate the notion that the Book of Mormon has any value that transcends academic interest.* If liberal Mormons want to keep the Book of Mormon, they'll have to learn from their conservative brethren and sistren and avoid reading books that are actually worth reading.

I feel exceptionally inadequate as a communicator when I read erudition like this.

[_Chap]

Symmachus's elegant and erudite piece makes me think of the following story.

The king wanted to have a traitor decapitated. Because the traitor was of one of the highest nobles in his kingdom, he felt constrained to give him an honourable and swift end.

So he set his advisors to locate the best swordsman in his extensive domains. The man was found, and arrived at court on the appointed day. He was a quiet and modestly dressed person, and his weapon was just a plain ordinary two-handed sword.

When the time came for the execution, the swordsman gripped his sword, breathed in a little, then moved the weapon so swiftly that nobody saw exactly where it went. But -- the culprit was still standing there with his head in place. The King stared and made a 'what's going on?' gesture at the swordsman, who said in response:

'Wait till he sneezes'.

Yes, Symmachus has completed severed the head of the Book of Mormon from its body. But (as he indicates) most Mormons are extremely unlikely to see very dead it now is.

We may have to continue with cruder methods for a while yet.

[_Johannes]

Some excellent points there, Symmachus.

This part made me wonder, however:

So in the final analysis, it is the liberal Mormons who have the real problem in terms of the Book of Mormon, because it offers them nothing. There is no sermon they can get out of it, there is no repository of social criticism to speak of, no vein of human pathos to tap into, no strain of musicality to delight in, no artistic pleasure to derive from it.

It made me remember something Karen Armstrong wrote about the Book of Mormon some years ago. Her angle was that it contains a remarkable critique of 19th century economic injustice, shaped by the experiences of Smith and his family. She thought that it really stood out as a piece of social criticism.

Is there anything in this, do you think? It seems to me that only Armstrong seems to have noticed it. The Bible's critique of social injustice leads to periodic outbreaks of social radicalism even in very conservative established churches; but I'm not aware of the Book of Mormon inspiring any counter-cultural socialist movement within the Mormon milieu - which it should, if the material was really there.

[_moksha]

When he was writing about the history of people none of them had ever heard about? If he were a fraud, how could he be exposing himself if there was no way for people to investigate, research, verify or disprove his claims?

Excellent point, unless nearly two centuries later some pointy headed professor from Baylor asks to show even one single shard of pottery as proof the civilization written about ever existed and not one shard is available to show him.