Symmachus Demonstrates John Gee Has Unsound Arguments

[_Philo Sofee]

This response to John Gee's FAIR presentation is far too powerful to let get buried in an already powerful thread. I post it here knowing The Mormon apologists simply cannot and will not respond to actual analysis of the weaknesses of their materials anymore. The torch of truth has passed by them, and they are as rudderless ships in the night. I post it here so it will not wallow in obscurity but that the full light of day and appreciation may be given such a magnificent response to the inept defense of the faith by Mormon apologist John Gee. We are aware by now, of course, the apologists are simply unable to abide by the truth that they have no valid arguments defending their interpretation of Mormon scriptures. They are losing the battle, and, unlike the Evangelicals, Mormon apologists do, in fact, know it.

Symmachus
I have tried to get through Gee's talk, but it seems predictable enough. In ascending order of importance: 1) Mormonism is identical with its historical claims, and thus without them it is not Mormonism, 2) Gee has done his homework, and his claims rest on his Egyptological authority, and 3) the Brethren are always right.

The grand take-away is that Gee has essentially pronounced the end of Book of Abraham apologetics. If he is not going to engage with Ritner, then he is not really defending the Church's position anymore, is he? Justin Martyr wrote his First Apology to a Roman emperor, but John Gee won't bother responding to a fellow professor in Illinois.

I was hoping he would say more about his book, which I haven't read but have been intending to on the assumption that it contains at least a summary of all the significant apologetic arguments in defense of the Book of Abraham's historicity. I for one would actually welcome a book like that. I am really curious to see the responses to the problems raised by the text itself professionally laid out and not just blogged about in the amateur-ish style of FAIR. No Mormon scholar has ever done that (Nibley's three books on it are hardly systematic responses). It sounds like Gee has done something else in his book, and in fact that he is not that interested in scholarly defense of the Book of Abraham it turns out. He's "done his homework," and we should also just repent, start believing, and get in line. Bruce McConkie had a more liberal mind.

I also think he might just be kind of limited in his thinking, not just illiberal, and too limited to be an effective apologist and certainly lacking in any originality. It's not just that his comparison between the Documentary Hypothesis and the Book of Abraham is ridiculous because they are not comparable. Johannes has done an excellent job exposing the ignorance behind Gee's assertions about it in his talk. But of course the Documentary Hypothesis in all of its variants is explicitly an interpretive model that explains more inconsistencies in the text than it creates; that is why it is persuasive. The claim that "there is no evidence" for it is really a rhetorical ploy. Of course it is an inference, dummy; sort of like how we can infer that Joseph Smith copulated with his wives because he slept with them on occasion in the same room and the same bed, despite not having any video footage of these acts, which is the threshold that Brian Hales would like to impose. In that sense, it is not about evidence but explanatory power. Gee is faulting a deductive solution for not being an inductive solution. It's like how I hate Latin because it isn't Greek.

The Book of Abraham is a totally different sort of issue. No one infers that it is historical because doing so lends coherence to the text and explains its inner contradictions. The Documentary Hypothesis is an attempt to address problems internal to the text and thus by definition doesn't depend on any external evidence, but the problem with the Book of Abraham is that it flies in the face of all that is external to it.

From what I have read of his work, Gee prefers to analyze neatly limited categories of his own invention ("there are three possibilities, either X, Y, or Z..." before settling on one, when there may actually be many possibilities, and even combinations and permutations of possibilities, which he can't or won't see). It's a sophisticated kind of straw-man technique, but it's still about straw men. That seems to be what he is doing here, yet again, with the claim that one cannot accept the Documentary Hypothesis and accept the historicity of the Book of Abraham. Thus, his argument is basically this: if he can make it seem that the Documentary Hypothesis is a baseless theory, then the historicity of the Book of Abraham must rest on solid ground by implication, since they are inverses of each other.

That's shallow sophistry, and it's too bad for the traditionalist position because the Documentary Hypothesis is actually a goldmine with many rich veins that apologists have never tapped. The evidence of the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls shows quite clearly in some cases (Jeremiah, for instance) that there were different versions floating around in the third century BCE, but Gee should think a bit more about his claims in light of Mormon scripture. The Book of Moses, for example, essentially presupposes that the text of Genesis as we have it bears little resemblance to its original. Joseph Smith anticipated Wellhausen's school, in a certain sense. And the Book of Mormon is an entire record of redactors who openly splice bits of texts from Nephite and Jaredite history for their own rhetorical ends. The compositional history claimed by the Book of Mormon for itself is not all that different from that of the Hebrew Bible.

The Documentary Hypothesis actually opens the possibility, depending on how much latitude you give yourself in reading the archaeological evidence, to argue for the essential historicity of the Bible, an opening Albright and his followers exploited so well. As formulated by Wellhausen, the Documentary Hypothesis laid the groundwork for form criticism, for example, and it was that that opened the way for the arguments from archaeology. Without the Documentary Hypothesis, if you wanted to establish the historicity of, say, Genesis from Abraham onwards, you had quite a lot of work to do to make it all work coherently. But with form criticism, you just had to pick little episodes—Isaac sending his son Jacob back towards Mesopotamia, for example—and correlate those with some extra-biblical evidence (marriage contracts the cuneiform tablets from Nuzi or Mari or something) and all of the sudden you could claim that archaeology supported the biblical record. The consequences of the Documentary Hypothesis are what made that possible. It is ironic that a die-hard literalist like John Gee can't see how dependent his literalism is on the Documentary Hypothesis.

If apologists like Gee had minds that weren't so resistant to expansion and so impermeable to ideas, they might see that this could really be an interesting path for historicist apologetics to take. If the Book of Abraham (and the Book of Mormon) were suddenly a human document—divine in ultimate source, but mediated through human beings already in antiquity in the way that G. Ernest Wright took the Bible—then they could start to create a broad framework in which to understand the book's composition and to continue their focus on its individual parts. The latter is what they have been doing since Nibley, but there is no coherence to it all—there is no general theory about the Book of Abraham's composition that can account for how bits of evidence that are millennia apart are supposed to be meaningful. Gee has so far offered us, for instance, evidence for place names (Olishem) from the early second millennium BC, as well comparison to some Coptic text from the fifth or six century AD or later! What they lack is a general theoretical model into which they can fit these bits of evidence, which are otherwise pretty useless. Something like the Documentary Hypothesis for the Book of Abraham could help them—an anciently redacted text with some connection to Abraham, say—but then they haven't even learned how to read the Book of Mormon in this way, though it quite explicitly instructs them to do so.

In short, they should take the "historical" part more seriously. By "historicity" they seem to mean nothing more than that the events described in Mormon scripture really happened (whatever that means! Didn't Gee actually read Peter Novick and Hayden White?). But historicity also means a situatedness within history—or as the founding father of form-criticism, Hermann Gunkel, put it, "social location" (Sitz im Leben). On one level, it seems simply astounding to me that Mormon apologists have done absolutely nothing with the riches this might offer them, but of course that would have meant taking cues from outside their own social location. On that level, it is not astounding at all.

The truth is that John Gee and his sort are less interested in defending the historicity of Mormon scripture than they are in defending the version of Mormon scripture taught to eight-year-old children in primary (a point I believe Dr. Scratch has made before). It is thus no wonder that their scholarship, like John Gee's talk, is so puerile.

[_aussieguy55]

How does Gee deal with the ba bird. I notice in google images it has a human head unlike in Fac 1 in Book of Abraham and it seems to be always hovering over a couch scene. Any evidence suggested by LDS apologists of instances with the bird having a normal head hovering over the couch?

[_Johannes]

Well played, Symmachus.

I've tried to start the ball rolling with some ideas about the ancient redaction history of the Book of Abraham:

http://mormondiscussions.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=49527&p=1135694#p1135694

[_Dr Exiled]

Now if there only were Early Modern English in the book of Abraham then the ancient redactor theory might have some traction with the apologists .....

[_Fence Sitter]

Ironically, EMOD rests on textual evidence, the same basic methodology Gee is attacking. I would love to put Gee and Skousen in the same room and watch them try and defend EMOD while attacking the Doc Hypothesis at the same time.

I have stopped reading what Gee has to say about the Book of Abraham. His openly dishonest two inks fiasco and similar tactics on the scroll length (like trying to compare the unrolled length of the Toronto scroll to what we know of the characteristics of the Hor scroll) coupled with an inability to comprehend basic math concepts (seriously, who can't understand what "derivative" means in math or the difference between "radius & diameter"?) has shown me he is either seriously incompetent as a scholar or is intentionally throwing out any half ass defense so the faithful who won't bother to check what he says can sleep well at night, knowing some guy with a PHD has replied to the critics. I am pretty sure it is the latter, but I have over estimated Mopes before.

It isn't even apologetics any more, it is meant to be a book that sits unread on someone's cog dis shelf support.