Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:Isn't that the catalyst theory? I know Clark has been talking around it, but it seems to me that's exactly what he's driving at.
The catalyst theory, as I understand it, is that the mummies prompted a revelation about Abraham but that's unrelated to the papyri at all. I believe most proponents of the catalyst theory think the accounts about Abraham are accurate but completely reject anything about the papyri. The problem with that, as I believe was mentioned in one of the recent threads, is the apparent reference to the vignette in fac 1.
This theory which one might call the deconstructive or interrogative theory worries about 1st century syncretistic use of these texts.
Themis wrote:I don't really understand what you mean by use here. Are you suggesting the person who wrote the papyri had some hidden meaning hidden in a clear Egyptian funerary story? Maybe someone else can help me out.
I am anything but an expert on things Egyptian. I know a bit more about the Roman context though. So it's that broader context and not what the original scribe understood in the Egyptian context which is what's at issue. I emphasize use because while the papyri by and large appear standard funerary materials (as best I know - again I'm no expert in the least) the use of such texts and images in the broader non-egyptian context involves other religious and "magical" uses. Scribes were making tons of copies of these but we shouldn't assume all that matters is that context. The question then becomes what's the meaning in other contexts. I raised as an example the Isis cult in 1st century Rome but one could easily find other contexts.
As I said this is a broad claim, so there's lots of very different theories that would work with it.
Gadianton wrote:This is based on some deep theories of realty that Clark is into that go well beyond ancient texts and translating them,
I don't think I have any particularly deep theory of reality. I'm basically a pragmatist and an empiricist and largely a materialist. Pretty pedestrian in terms of ontology. The claims are much more about again fairly straightforward semiotics not metaphysics that I can see. (Beyond the fairly pedestrian claim that there's a God and he can communicate)
...but the pedestrian version is not that the original authors put some extra meaning into the text, but that some community at a later date had the scrap, and had a different level of understanding and purpose for it.
Not necessarily at a later time - especially since the scribes as I understand it were largely just making hundreds of copies of the same thing with minor variations. But yes, you have the general idea. It deals with the ability of a text to be quoted/used in a new context. Again this is pretty pedestrian. It happens all the time especially in the ancient world. Just look at how many New Testament quotations are acontextual to the original text in its original setting.
Let me prime your intuition for accepting this as a not-so illogical proposition. If an alien visitor came to earth and saw a phone book, would it be wrong for thinking a phone book was for boosting the height of 4 year olds at the dinner table? If modern society ended, and thousands of years later our civilization were uncovered and the Mona Lisa was found, would their understanding of the Mona Lisa as iconic in some way of the final modern age be invalid? Would they need to recover the original thoughts and feelings of Da Vinci in order to understand the painting?
I'm not sure that's a good example. A better one might be the famous novel A Canticle for Leibowitz although you could argue that Umberto Eco's sendup of religion and conspiracy theories Foucalt's Pendulum is the classic example of this. The reason your analogy doesn't really work is that we know Rome was "quoting" in unique ways Egyptian religion and culture. Much as you find folks in the Renaissance doing the same leading to Masonry. So the question of how something was used or understood outside of its original context is actually pretty common. Standard semiotics.
The mnemonic device theory is "getting warmer" in the direction Clark is going, but Clark's position is more general than that.
Is there a full mnemonic theory for the Book of Abraham? If there is could you point me the way? I'd be interested. I think that relative to the Book of Mormon John Tvendtes had a theory back in the 70's but he largely abandoned it. Relative to the Book of Mormon (not Book of Abraham) I actually think it's still an interesting theory. I know some have pushed an hieratic model for the plates, but even knowing as little as I do, that seems pretty implausible given the characters we've seen reproduced not to mention the length of the text. A more likely scenario is some combination of shorthand and abbreviation which in many ways resembles a mnemonic theory. However given we can read the Book of Abraham extant papyri I don't see how that's relevant there.
I do wonder if Clark is being entirely consistent though. Think about this: We have a scrap of papyri that say, in the mnemonic theory, is anachronistic because we are missing this layer of reality -- community X that used the sensen text as part of their culture in this other way -- and now we have the Gold Plates. We really have no idea what the Gold Plates represent, abstracted from their interpretive community. Maybe the Gold plates were a mnemonic device? And how about the sword of laban and the U&T? Clark speaks as if their appearance in the box with the plates suggests historical reality, but they could have been props for some other reason and our instinct to interpret them as actual historical objects is as flawed as interpreting the sensen text per the narrow layer of reality we currently have access to.
Certainly one could postulate such a theory and that's compatible with the theory I presented since it is so general. The question again then becomes why be deceptive in that fashion since Moroni does describe these other items. So far as I'm aware he said nothing about the mechanics of translation.