Executive Summary
Skousen’s study of the first Book of Mormon manuscripts found evidence that the awkward grammar often displayed Semitic influence or, in some cases, came from Early Modern English, predating the English of the KJV. This theory is developed much more fully in a recent Mormon Interpreter article, “A Look at Some ‘Nonstandard’ Book of Mormon Grammar” by Stanford Carmack. Carmack argues that a close look at the initial language of the translated Book of Mormon reveals that much of the seemingly nonstandard grammar is actually acceptable Early Modern English that is frequently independent of and earlier than the King James Bible, seriously challenging the notion that the Book of Mormon is based on plagiarism from and imitation of the Bible.
However, I felt a weakness in Carmack’s paper was neglect of a nonstandard form that to me was particularly annoying: the use of “a” before many verbs, as in Alma 10:8 in the Original Manuscript: “…as I was a going thither….” Isn’t that just “hick language”? After posting my question at Mormon Interpreter, I did more digging and found, to my surprise, that this is an important and standard form of the English progressive in Early Modern English, again consistent with Carmack’s thesis. Brother Carmack later responded to my query, confirming what I had found and also noting that there are some instances of the “a” + verb form in the KJV, though so far I only know of two and never consciously noticed them in my reading.
But what does this all mean and why would pre-KJV language be used? A hypothesis I offer below is that this is an example of one of God’s little ironies jokes, but a meaningful and helpful one.
Update, Sept. 10: “Joke” in this post was a poor word choice, as a couple readers took offense at the idea of joking God who would therefore seem to not be adequately concerned about the problems of the world. I do not have trouble with a God who embraces humor in addition to all forms of joy even while also fully feeling and knowing our pains, but suggest that “irony” might be better for my post.
If the strange evidence for pre-KJV language is real and did not from Joseph and his environment, then perhaps it will serve as one of the evidences that overthrow some common attacks on the Book of Mormon. If so, it would be ironic that all these years the hick language we had to correct and apologize for might actually support the miraculous origins of the book. Ironic. Almost humorous. Not a callous prank, but a hidden little gem that could strengthen faith while still raising many questions for further research and debate. Or maybe all just a human mistake to be eradicated with further research. Stay tuned
God’s Little Joke? Divine Irony? Thoughts on the Bad Grammar in the Original Book of Mormon
One of the first anti-Mormon challenges I encountered as a teenager shortly after my own serious study of the Book of Mormon was the claim that 3,913 changes had been made in the Book of Mormon. (That’s actually a very poor estimate–way too low!) Looking at the changes and understanding the reasons for them gave a little appreciation for how different the original Book of Mormon was from the way I would put a book together. The lack of punctuation, verses, etc., naturally necessitated a great many changes to prepare the text for a readable edition.
There were other problems, including many typos or other errors due to both the dictated nature of the text and the errors that arose in copying from the original manuscript to the printer’s manuscript and then preparing the printed text. Those are understandable. But then comes the problem that makes it easy for critics to poke fun of the book and its miraculous origins: the original text, as dictated by a prophet of God to his scribes, is loaded with bad grammar. Numerous changes would be needed to fix awkward, non-standard phrases that just sounded bad. Why couldn’t the Spirit help Joseph dictate proper English?
We’ve had a plausible answer: the inspired meaning still came out of Joseph’s lips in his language, and his own bad, farmboy grammar with a strong dose of “hick language” had to be cleaned up into more proper standard English, but in King James Style. Fair enough. Being a prophet doesn’t make one a grammarian.
Some scholars discovered that some of the corrections made over the years in the text were fixing odd patterns that were actually perfectly good constructions in Hebrew. That passage with Moroni impossibly waving the rent of his garment–later scandalously changed to the rent part of his garment to cover up that gaping hole in the grammatical fabric of the book–turns out to make perfect sense in Hebrew. Many other structures that are good Hebrew but bad English have been identified that were in the original text but typically later cleaned up. (Say, if all those Hebraisms were some clever attempt to add credibility to the Book of Mormon, why quietly clean them up and never point them out in Joseph’s day? It was only in recent decades that scholars began to observe the abundance of Hebraic forms in the Book of Mormon.)
Then came Royal Skousen, the scholar who has done so much to help us appreciate the granular details of the original and printers manuscripts. In 2005, he published a short article for the Maxwell Institute’s Insight publication with a shocking statement. In summarizing his findings through studying the early Book of Mormon manuscripts, he begins by listing the following:
1. The original manuscript supports the hypothesis that the text was given to Joseph Smith word for word and that he could see the spelling of at least the Book of Mormon names (in support of what witnesses of the translation process claimed about Joseph’s translation).
2. The original text is much more consistent and systematic in expression than has ever been realized.
3. The original text includes unique kinds of expression that appear to be uncharacteristic of English in any time and place; some of these expressions are Hebraistic in nature.
So far so good. Then comes what I would call a shocker:
Over the past two years, I have discovered evidence for a fourth significant conclusion about the original text:
4. The original vocabulary of the Book of Mormon appears to derive from the 1500s and 1600s, not from the 1800s.
This last finding is quite remarkable. Lexical evidence suggests that the original text contained a number of expressions and words with meanings that were lost from the English language by 1700. On the other hand, I have not been able thus far to find word meanings and expressions in the text that are known to have entered the English language after the early 1700s. [emphasis added]
He then lists some plausible examples. So strange. So unexpected.
That theme is taken up in force in a recent article at the Mormon Interpreter, Stanford Carmack’s “A Look at Some ‘Nonstandard’ Book of Mormon Grammar.” Carmack contends that so much of what were dismissing as Joseph’s bad grammar actually turns out to be acceptable grammar from Early Modern English, featuring many elements that were from decades before the English of the King James Bible, almost as if the translation given to Joseph by inspiration had been deliberately translated into that slightly earlier English. So strange. What is going on?
As interesting as it was, I immediately thought I saw a flaw in the analysis and posted this comment to Carmack’s article:
One of the criticisms the Tanners make of the grammar of the original Book of Mormon when they discuss “the 3,913 changes” of the Book of Mormon is the use of “a” before many verbs, such as “As I was a journeying to see a very near kindred …” [Alma 10:7], “And as I was a going thither …” [Alma 10:8], “… the foundation of the destruction of this people is a beginning to be laid …” [Alma 10:27], “… he met with the sons of Mosiah, a journeying towards the land …” [Alma 17:1], and “… the Lamanites a marching towards them …” [Mormon 6:7].
I’ve heard this described as “Pittsburgh dialect” I think, with a suggestion that it might have been Oliver’s language. But I also read someone say or guess that this construction can be found in Chaucer. Haven’t had time to check. What are your thoughts?
What I didn’t say was that this “a going” and “a marching” pattern really annoyed me, for it sounded like “hick language” to my ears. Why no mention of that in the article? I suspected it must be because it didn’t fit the Early Modern English hypothesis. After all, Carmack is not claiming that every case of awkward grammar is squarely from standard Early Modern English. But this form isn’t Hebraic either, as far as I know–it’s just bad, even embarrassing grammar.
Turn out I was wrong. After posting my comment, I poked around for more information about this verb form. It’s very hard to search for since the key term “a” is ignored or obscured in many of the search strings one might try. But I did stumble upon some articles that led me to look up the history of the English progressive form, and that’s where I found interesting material.
The best source I found was The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. III, ed. by Roger Lass, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 217:
Some earlier scholars (e.g. Jesperson MEG IV: 168-9) espouse the theory that be + -ing goes back to the combination of the preposition on > a + the verbal noun ending in -ing (I am a-reading > I am reading). The available evidence makes it more likely, however, that the verbal type without a preposition and the nominal type with one represent two separate constructions which lived side by side from Old English on. In the course of the Modern English period, the verbal type superseded the nominal one. In the seventeenth century the nominal type can be found even in formal and educated writing, but it becomes non-standard in the course of the eighteenth (Nehls 1974: 169-70). There are only half a dozen Helsinki Corpus instances of the nominal type dating from 1640-1710, all of them in fiction, private correspondence or comedies. Lowth (1775 [1979]: 65) gives the following comment on the principles preceded by a: ‘The phrases with a… are out of use in the solemn style; but still prevail in familiar discourse . . . there seems to be no reason, why they should be utterly rejected.’
The full form of the preposition on is much less common than the weakened a in Early Modern English. Also other prepositions are possible; instances with upon can be found as late as the eighteenth century (159)….
So yes, that annoying verb form is also good Early Modern English. Carmack’s thesis still works on that issue as well. I’m surprised, though pleasantly.
By the way, for an interesting theory of the development of the “on” construction in Middle English and Early Modern English, see Casper de Groot, “The king is on huntunge: on the relation between progressive and absentive in Old and Early Modern English” in M. Hannay and G. Steen eds., The English Clause: Usage and Structure, 175-190, Amsterdam: Benjamins 2007).
Carmack would later respond to my comment by confirming that it is an Early Modern English form, and one that can even be found in the Bible. He mentioned Luke 8:42 and 9:42. Sure enough, there’s “a dying” and “a coming.” Never noticed that, and haven’t found other examples of this in the Bible yet. Do you know of any? Seems like a rare occurrence to me.
So yes, much of the awkward grammar of the original Book of Mormon appears to reflect language that is not typical of the KJV, being earlier than the KJV era and earlier than Joseph’s dialect, though remnants persisted in his day and in ours as nonstandard forms in modern grammar. Carmack sees this as evidence against a modern, fraudulent origin and evidence for divine translation–but why would a divine process result in English forms predating the KJV? Was some sort of Celestial Translator Device set the wrong century by a clumsy angel? However the divine translation process worked, however the language was selected or “seasoned” for delivery to Joseph’s mind, what came out can no longer be explained as mere imitation of the KJV or as a modern fabrication that Joseph and his friends or family were capable of.
Here’s one hypothesis: The translation into language actually predating the KJV is an example of one of God’s little ironies jokes. A helpful little joke, that is, a almost humorous gem to bless and strengthen those willing to pay attention, offering surprising evidence that there is far more to this text than meets the eye. Yes, it is quiet and easy-to-overlook evidence that the Book of Mormon is not a modern translation, is not merely drawn from the KJV or any other modern source. It’s a little joke, but the real joke is on those who cry plagiarism. Now the difficulty of explaining the origins of the Book of Mormon text is far may be greater than we imagined.
John 21:3 a "Simon Peter saith unto them, I go a fishing."
Hi Jeff,
I'm a little surprised that this theory is gathering momentum. It seems a bit concerning that something so far-fetched is being given credibility.
I first heard about Skousen's theory a year or so ago. I started going through the "dead phrases" in the list in the first article you linked to in your blog post.
Most of his examples are not conclusive. Some are outright wrong.
For example:
Extinct, referring to an individual's death
Alma 44:7 reads "and I will command my men that they shall fall upon you and inflict the wounds of death in your bodies that ye may become extinct." Such usage seems very odd today since, as the OED explains under definition 4 for this past participial adjective, we now use extinct to refer to a family, race, or species as having died out or come to an end. But in Early Modern English, extinct could refer to a person's death. The OED, under definition 3, lists citations from 1483 through 1675, the last one from an English translation of Machiavelli's The Prince: "The Pope being dead and Valentine extinct."
This is not evidence of a 1500s origin. The sentence makes sense in the 1828 definition of the word:
"and I will command my men that they shall fall upon you and inflict the wounds of death in your bodies that ye may become extinct."
"Ye" is talking about a group (it's plural), not an individual as Skousen presumes ("thee" would be singular). So he warns a group of people that they will become extinct.
A quick look at an 1828 dictionary confirms this is a fair choice of phrase:
"and I will command my men that they shall fall upon you and inflict the wounds of death in your bodies that ye may…"
(be out of force)
(be abolished)
(be at a stop)
Dictionary of the English language by Samuel Johnson & John Walker (1828 edition)
http://books.google.com.sg/books?id=z3kKAAAAIAAJ&pg=PP5&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=extinct&f=false
Or:
(be at an end)
(have no survivor)
Webster (1828 edition)
http://1828.mshaffer.com/d/word/extinct
This is one of several phrases that can be either found in 1800s or even still today. Others could easily be a dictation/transcription error.
Having some of the church's defenders get excited about this undermines credibility of work elsewhere for me. I hope it dies a death soon.
I very much like Brant Gardner's views as discussed in "The Gift and Power: Translating the Book of Mormon," where besides discussing literal translation vs. functional translation, he attributes the "pre-1800" language to the fact that rural, less educated communities often use older language than the kind you'll find in the high-brow encyclopedias. If there are any copies of the "Oxford Dictionary of Language Among the Rural and Poorly-Educated" out there, I think it would be a good source.
Personally, I think Gardner pretty much demolishes the literal translation theory. Its proponents seem to ignore all the evidence people like Metcalfe have come up with showing the many instances where the Book of Mormon really is in the language of its day. The functional translation theory accounts for this and also does wonders for explaining away some of the anachronisms and absent archeology that people have criticized over the years.
Jeff – Have you already reviewed Gardner's book "Translating the Book of Mormon…"? What are your views?
As a professional translator myself, only two options hold any water in my mind at all (assuming a divine origin): translation into KJV language to create a consistent scriptural language or translation into the language of the day. Anything else would be stupid and pointless.
Haven't read Gardner's book yet, but just bought the Kindle edition and will get to it. Thanks for the suggestion!
Gideon, I shared the bewilderment when I first heard of the theory, but the evidence seems to point in that direction. Carmack and Skousen have significant credentials that should give us pause to look at what they are finding. This is not a hypothesis that is required by anything in our faith, not a natural thing that someone would like to find evidence to prop up, but a surprising, unexpected find that I think is being driven by the evidence, not a preconceived notion.
When I looked up "extinct" in the back of my Book of Mormon during church today, after seeing your comment, the first thing I saw was its usage in Alma 36, where a single individual is discussing his extinction. Not a group. Not a race. It's definitely an example of an archaic usage.
I reposted your question on M.I. to get Carmack's response, which you can see there. He makes the good point that Webster and Johnson do not distinguish between uses that were already extinct in their do and those that are current. OED is where to go to see that.
Carmack notes that Welch's theory admits for both current and archaic usages to be found, as they are in the Book of Mormon. So we can read of a people going extinct, and of Alma wishing to be extinct. Not a problem – a range of usages was available in Early Middle English.
I think even if literal words were given to Joseph, it would seem reasonable to recognize that he was still the translator and that he could rephrase things in dictating to his scribes.
What of the possibility that the Book of Mormon translation was dominated by an Early Modern English language that predates the KJV English AND Joseph's dialect (if that is the case)? Is it really "stupid and pointless"? In differentiating the origins from the KJV, at least Carmack seems to find a point that may not be so stupid after all. I'm not sure he or Skousen or right, but I'm intrigued. When the gap I thought I found in their analysis ended up fitting it rather nicely, that added more a little more pizzazz to the theory in my mind. I'll read Gardner and will consider additional views as I ponder this puzzling issue. Perhaps the joke is on me after all, but let's see.
Moses got a burning bush. The LDS apologists offer parsing antiquated syntax and renaming cureloms and cumoms.
I wonder if anyone would invest money on the strength of similar "evidence".
As a linguist I have found so many correspondences between EModE and BofM language that it is impossible to honestly deny them. Some of these carried through to Joseph Smith's dialect but many others did not. Plus, analysis of more advanced syntax will show sophistication in arcane usage that was impossible for Smith to produce (to appear in near future). Gardner must provide dialect examples of things like "hearts delighteth" and "if it so be" to support his view. To my knowledge he has not. Most non-linguist discussions of BofM language have wrongly concluded that it is similar to KJB language, and that that is basically all there is to say about it. Yes, it is similar, but it is different too, in many concrete ways. My recent article begins to show that. Syntactic analysis that I am currently undertaking shows by extensive analysis of examples that it is very different in distinct ways and that inexpert composition or translation would not have produced the overall syntax of the BofM.
Hi Jeff, thanks for your reply. Just to clarify, I referenced Alma 44:7 as a direct quote from Skousen's essay.
You've also given the example of Alma 36:15 "Oh, thought I, that I could be banished and become extinct both soul and body, that I might not be brought to stand in the presence of my God, to be judged of my deeds."
You've suggested this is "…where a single individual is discussing his extinction. Not a group. Not a race. It's definitely an example of an archaic usage…"
It's not archaic. I've found several examples of 'extinction' being used in early 1800s literature, specifically referring to the idea of both soul and body being destroyed.
For example:
(1828) "If God kills or destroys both soul and body, is there not a total extinction of the whole man?"
http://books.google.com.sg/books?id=obwWDM7tVekC&dq=both%20soul%20and%20body%2C%20is%20there%20not%20a%20total%20extinction&pg=PA338#v=onepage&q=both%20soul%20and%20body,%20is%20there%20not%20a%20total%20extinction&f=false
The essay goes on to explore the idea that this extinction, destruction of soul and body, might put people beyond the reach of pain and affliction.
The horror of Alma's sins means he has no desire to have to face God. This is so terrifying that he would prefer for God to destroy both his soul and body… to make him extinct, finished, extinguished, put out… so that he wouldn't have to face God, to be judged of my deeds.
I'm not suggesting Joseph plagiarised the essay I quoted. But it does show that being "extinct both soul and body" was a phrase still in use in the 1820s.
Can we agree that "extinct" in the Book of Mormon can not be considered one of Skousen's archaic phrases?
I don't have time to work through each and every one of the archaic phrases he proposes. But given I've been able to eliminate one with a little amateur googling I can't help but wonder at the rigour that has been put into this.
Here are a few more examples from early 1800s:
(1834) "…in hell though the death of the body is the extinction of the soul yet man has a life capable of being killed after both body and soul is extinct…"
http://books.google.com.sg/books?id=O94YAAAAYAAJ&dq=extinct%20both%20soul%20and%20body&pg=PA191#v=onepage&q=extinct%20both%20soul%20and%20body&f=false
(1821) "Death, therefore, which, at first sight, looks like an extinction of both soul and body at once…"
http://books.google.com.sg/books?id=tkkrAAAAYAAJ&dq=extinct%20both%20soul%20and%20body&pg=PA130#v=onepage&q=extinct%20both%20soul%20and%20body&f=false
(End of page 17)
(1815) "We must consider too the nature and consequences of death. We are not to regard it as a total extinction of our being but only a temporary separation of soul and body…"
http://books.google.com.sg/books?id=mBk3AAAAMAAJ&dq=both%20soul%20and%20body%2C%20is%20there%20not%20a%20total%20extinction&pg=PA421#v=onepage&q=both%20soul%20and%20body,%20is%20there%20not%20a%20total%20extinction&f=false
it was back in the 1980's that i came to know that "hick speak" was a legitimate archaic form of English, and not a corruption.
The fact that archaic English lived on in frontier America, and continues to live on in deep back-woods and rural areas ( even today in places like Kentucky and West Virginia and many places in the South) has been known a long time. It had to do with the classes or groups of British immigrants who spoke that archaic form and the fact that those groups tended to go to the frontier and back-woods instead of congregate in the cities with the more modernly educated classes of immigrants.
The more refined immigrants who were educated in their contemporary grammar tended to stay closer to the coast in cities.
it was perhaps lack of strong connections to more educated population centers that tended to keep those frontier/backwoods populations from beong raised with "proper"/modern education. it then became a "traditions of the fathers" kind of thing, which is exactly how dialects are propagated.
I don't know what vernacular was spoken among the Smith family, what JS Jr or even JS Sr grew up with.
Skousen and the Interpreter really aren't providing anything new here. if anything, it's really just a reminder that "hick talk" was at one time in British history the standard grammar of its time, that just happened to live on (and has been well documented outside of apologetic or critical circles for a long time) in pockets of rural and Southern America.
Anti-Mormons are just going to say that the "a going" type of grammatical constructs were merely JS's vernacular, and evidence of his lack of formal education.
Mockers who aren't aware of the historical grammar connections between England and the US are going to mock those BoM passages as "hick talk".
Faithful defenders are going to point out that what is thought of today as "hick talk" does have a documented and well-accepted (outside of LDS circles, and outisde of any LDS related matter) anthropological connection to archaic English.
And it's not just grammatical constructs, but pronunciations. Such as dropping Rs, where sugar becomes shu-gah, -ing becomes -in', and the th aound becomes "f", such as "Arthur" becomes "ah-fuh".
So this is really much ado about nothing. At best it will educate some of the mockers who were unaware of the rural American connection to archaic English grammar. They will still be anti-Mormons. Joseph Smith and his family were rural-Americans.
In sum this is no "score" for either side. it's just a history lesson.
I do see one more lesson or example, but only for those who already believe: Faithful people will see this as another example of how the Lord uses simple, "low class" and uneducated people to bring about His purposes; and how the Lord uses the humbleness and plainness of His servants to confound and be stumbling blocks to proud and worldly people. We have to humble ourselves to "get" the gospel. Proud people can't "get it" even though it's in plain sight.
Good grief, Jeff.
Do you really believe this? — The translation into language actually predating the KJV is an example of one of God's little jokes. A helpful little joke, that is, a humorous gem to bless and strengthen those willing to pay attention, offering surprising evidence that there is far more to this text than meets the eye. Yes, it is quiet and easy-to-overlook evidence that the Book of Mormon is not a modern translation, is not merely drawn from the KJV or any other modern source. It's a little joke, but the real joke is on those who cry plagiarism. Now the difficulty of explaining the origins of the Book of Mormon text is far greater than we ever imagined."
You introduce this little stinker by telling us it's just a hypothesis, but then immediately you switch to saying it provides "surprising evidence." (Of course it does nothing of the sort, and anyway, since when does a "hypothesis" constitute "evidence"?)
I could just as easily argue that Joseph Smith and the eight witnesses were suffering from a temporary collective psychosis, induced by sharing some moldy bread, all under the direction of a God playing one of her "little jokes" with the purpose of warning us about human susceptibility to fake revelation — and then saying that this hypothesis turns the witnesses' testimony into "surprising evidence" against the BoM.
I could do this, but I never would, if only as a matter of intellectual self-respect.
I would classify this post in the same category as the creationist argument that God created a fossil record that looks like it supports evolution, not because evolution is true, but in order to test our faith. You really ought to retract this one, Jeff. Your enthusiasm has gotten the better of you.
Sorry, no one has done in-depth linguistic analysis on the BofM, just vague literary stuff or phrasal work. Dismissive comments without real evidentiary work don't do much ultimately, although they may work on blogs. Command syntax, causative constructions, did syntax all point to the 1500s, and it's all markedly different from the KJB. And no one in the 1820s was speaking with did go, etc. 25% of the time or with heavy biclausal command syntax or with any biclausal causative constructions. That only happened in the mid-1500s. Things like "it supposeth me" are very old and not in the KJB or in the 1820s.
The past-tense syntax in the book argues directly against characterizing Joseph Smith’s dictation as one of LOOSE CONTROL — ideas revealed, with Smith putting them into his own words. Under that theory, would there have been 25% usage of affirmative declarative periphrastic did in the text? No. Would there have been 10% usage? No. Would there have been 5% usage? No. Would there have been 2% usage? Perhaps. Under loose control we would expect either biblical patterns or usage of the syntax in a constrained 1820s way — for emphasis and contrast and with heavy doses of SUBJECT–did inversion. LOOSE CONTROL theorists must view Smith as so conversant with the King James Bible and its modes of expression that he was able to subconsciously mimic many of its structures in his dictation. But had Smith been using the biblical text, subconsciously, as a model for past-tense narration, then he would have certainly used the periphrasis only about 2% of the time, since that is the rate of use found in the biblical text. And if he had used his own language for past-tense verbal expression, then he would have used the periphrasis at an even lower rate. These are concrete, exemplar-driven conclusions with respect to loose control, not semi-valid, sometimes vague assertions that agree with preconceived notions and explanatory prejudices but which end up, however, lacking a basis in reality.
Bookslinger,
There's more to the Interpreter article than hick speech, much more. You may have read only part of it. And once the correspondences increase in number, where we have one dozen EModE correspondences without anything in ModE or the KJB then even skeptics must acknowledge it if they want to approach the data honestly, which I suppose you do.
Champatsch –
I'm genuinely confused. At one point, you say, "Sorry, no one has done in-depth linguistic analysis on the BofM." You then proceed to provide proof of the BOM through what seems to me (a confessed layman) to be that very thing – linguistic analysis.
Also, would you mind listing a few of the key articles discussing the past-syntax theory you are discussing, as applied to the BOM? Or, if you are working towards publishing such an article, when might an interested person anticipate seeing it?
Another general issue with all types of proof is that random statistical variation occurs with all evidence. One would need to have some statistical model of how these things arise, then show that the proof is one of statistical significance. But a 5% level probably wouldn't convince anyone, because of the huge publication bias in fields like this – people are literally scouring the Book of Mormon for any kind of scholarly support, and a huge number of potential ideas or studies simply get shelved because the evidence doesn't exist or support the desired outcome. To account for publication bias, some people in the medical sciences rely on a 1% cutoff, or even more stringent.
So there's plenty of work to do before "proof" of tight control can be shown.
Also, the benefit of the loose control model is that it accounts for so many of the archeological anomalies, which skeptics always point to for disproof of the BOM. It also accounts for all the correspondences between BOM phraseology and 19th century sermons that "anti-Mos" have pointed out.
I submit, based on faith, that God will NEVER allow convincing PROOF of the BOM (which would eliminate the need for the fundamental principle of faith), but that He will allow people to show the FALSITY of DISPROOFS.
Based on these premises, it is mind-boggling to me why people are trying to bolster the tight control model rather than the loos control model.
Most of the discussion on this article, and much of Jeff's attention, is actually at the website of the article that Jeff linked-to.
I'm slightly annoyed to try to discuss a subject on Jeff's blog, only to find Jeff making most of this comments elsewhere.
I'm feeling very unloved.
Sorry, Anon., I was unclear at the beginning of my last longer post.
Why tight control rather than loose control?
At the moment, I can think of three concrete reasons.
First, let's assume there are 60 non-KJB linguistic elements that we find in the BofM — 5 found in EModE but not in ModE, 5 found in ModE but not in EModE, and 50 found in both.
Tight control accounts for all 60.
Loose control accounts for only 55. The 5 that is misses are not simple in nature — whether semantic or syntactic.
Second, tight control aligns with consistent eyewitness testimony that says that Smith did not use any outside material when dictating — he did not dictate from the KJB.
Third, tight control is consonant with 3 Nephi 21:11 and 2 Nephi 27:6,9,19,20,22,24. Loose control only fits these with a very strained interpretation of the language of the BofM text.
OK, suppose for a moment that a rigorous and independent linguistic analysis showed that significant parts of the Book of Mormon "came from Early Modern English, predating the English of the KJV" (to use Jeff's words), or (to use Stanford Carmack's words) that the BoM's "grammar presents extensive evidence of its Early Modern English character, independent in many cases from the King James Bible."*
Suppose it were shown that these miscellaneous EModE-isms were somehow authentic and not random hits scored by a 19th-century writer striving to sound old-timey. Suppose we were all convinced "that the BofM is, in large part, an independent, structurally sound EModE text."
What exactly would that suggest? What could possibly be the significance?
Why would God choose Early Modern English as the linguistic vehicle for restoring his gospel to users of modern English in the 19th century? I know His ways are mysterious and all, but still.
Carmack says "that this [EModE] character stems from [the BoM's] divine translation" and that "God chose the language variety…despite its archaic and obsolete character, consistent with his divine purposes."
What could that "divine purpose" possibly be? I think it's pretty telling that so far the best suggestion is "God's little joke."
This whole line of faux-linguistic-analysis-cum-apologetics is itself a joke.
* See what I did there? I made a chiasmus!
We need an apologist who can explain why God delights in making little jokes like this while watching people starve or be burned at the stake. Where's Blake Ostler when you need him?
Blake – any suggestions? Jeff?
Kolob et al., you ask why there would be non-KJB EModE in the BofM. The why of course is fraught with speculation. But here's a why. God wanted the language of the BofM to be similar to the dominant English-language Bible used in America in the 1820s, but not identical. And the way that it is different does not impede comprehension any more than the EModE that is in the KJB does. As I read it, the nonbiblical parts of the BofM are at least as plain as KJB language is. That Bible is a mixture of early 1500s English (Tyndale) with late 1500s English (the translation committees). The BofM, on the other hand, is a mixture of English language of a larger range, from the early 1500s (even perhaps late 1400s) to sometime in the 1700s. (The Lord had a greater range to work with in the 1820s.) But a lot of the framework syntax like past-tense usage and clause-relation largely follows structures whose usage peaked in the middle of the 1500s.
Faux linguistics? Wrong. Actually what's faux is the speculation that many are interested in. Let's see, as someone without a degree in engineering I don't feel qualified or justified in off-handedly criticizing the substantive engineering analysis of someone with a doctorate in that field. I am right in allowing for some expertise in the analysis. By the same token I need to show a degree of respect for the linguistic work of someone with a PhD in that field.
What is in the relevant article is exemplar-driven linguistics. That's actually less faux than the dominant formal approaches to linguistics that dominate the field globally. No intricate theory is used in the article. Did you read the article? Did you see how many examples are given throughout it, looking at the footnotes too? Yeah, the analysis could have pointed out more often that some of the structures might have carried through to 1820s ModE, but the author was trying to make the point that everyone has viewed the original language as nonstandard ModE but that it can be viewed as typical EModE. So he focused on the fact that the seemingly ungrammatical language was not just nonstandard ModE dialect but had roots in EModE when there wasn't a standard.
Champatsch suggests that "God wanted the language of the BofM to be similar to the dominant English-language Bible used in America in the 1820s."
But as the author of the BoM, Joseph Smith would have wanted the exact same thing! He would naturally have wanted his putatively ancient scripture to sound like the real ancient scripture with which he and his society were most familiar, which required the kind of mimicry we see wherever his text is not quoting the Bible outright.
And guess what? Smith's motives in this regard are a lot more obvious than God's.
Combining this kind of mimicry with certain features of Smith's native dialect would naturally produce features that look like EModE. This in turn sets up an opportunity for the cherry-picking* apologist to discover "evidence" of divine origin.
This statement is worth some comment as well:
… the author was trying to make the point that everyone has viewed the original language as nonstandard ModE but that it can be viewed as typical EModE. So he focused on the fact that the seemingly ungrammatical language was not just nonstandard ModE dialect but had roots in EModE when there wasn't a standard.
First, it's not adequate to say simply "that everyone has viewed the original language as nonstandard ModE." This fails to distinguish between those who claim that Smith was too uneducated to use his contemporary standard, and those who (like me) claim he was engaging in mimicry.
Second, if in fact the BoM "can be viewed as typical EModE," I suggest a simple exercise. Read a bunch of genuine EModE texts and compare to the BoM. In addition to Milton and Shakespeare, I've read Thomas More, Philip Sydney, Francis Bacon, William Bradford, Robert Burton, and many others, and when I compare their language to the BoM's, the latter is obviously…different, let's say.
Finally, you should not trust an author's Ph.D. You should trust the peer-review process. You should ask yourself why Carmack hasn't submitted his article to a professional linguistics journal. Given the tremendous value of such a professional imprimatur to his apologetic efforts, he has every reason to submit his work to a "legitimate" journal. So why are we reading it in the Mormon Interpreter rather than the Journal of Linguistics? (Answer: because it's methodologically flawed and agenda-driven.)
*Oh, sorry. I meant "exemplar-driven linguistics."
One thing that we don't know, and have no way of knowing, is what was happening on the other side of the Urim and Thummim or the seer stone. Was this device somewhat like a heavenly Google translator? Or more like an advanced text transmitter? Was the Book of Mormon translated on the other side of the veil and then just texted line by line to Joseph through the seer stone? If so, what version of English did the heavenly translator know (or learn, since he/she also had to know the Nephite language). Obviously, this is all speculation too and we will probably not know how this all works until we get classes at the post-mortal universities. But there may be a very simple reason why the Book of Mormon sounds like EModE with quite an undercurrent of Hebraisms.
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Duke,
Speculation. The translation may have been attached to the plates somehow and transmitted to the stone, all this by miraculous means. Notice that the plates needed to be close by, but they weren't consulted directly; they were covered in linen. Was only short-distance transmission possible? Otherwise why couldn't they have been elsewhere, far away? Again, speculation.
Kolob cherry-picked the first quote, leaving off "but not identical", meaning that the BofM is different linguistically from the KJB in significant ways — the evidence he has not confronted. I anticipate that eventually two dozen concrete non-KJB EModE linguistic elements will be substantiated as not carrying through to the 1820s but found in the text. Then those adhering to naturalistic explanations for the BofM text will ascribe every one of them to fortunate mimicry, but against astronomical statistical odds. Why astronomical, because each one will involve complex, unpredictable semantic shifts or complex syntactic structures and patterns that a non-native could never reproduce.
Take Thomas More. Yeah, BofM content will be different from More, but some linguistic structure is not. For instance, "if it so be", found in More. That's just fortunate mimicry by Smith against biblical usage of "if so be".
Take past-tense narrative syntax, 25% affirmative declarative did-usage in the BofM, 2% or less in the KJB, and 1% or so in 1820s America. So where's the biblical mimicry? Or mimicry of 1820s American English? Smith failed, utterly. But oddly enough he didn't fail at all like pseudobiblical authors did, like Snowden, Ethan Smith, and Gilbert Hunt. They failed to match biblical past-tense syntax in the other direction.
Some will say, of course, that Joseph Smith used did-syntax 25% of the time because he just wanted to be different and he was enamored of the construction. He may have thought of it himself, against his own native-speaker intuitions. Okay, but he matches usage of a few authors in the mid-1500s: Boorde, Machyn, Elyot. Obscure authors he would have known nothing about. Just another lucky hit, I guess. Except there is not one English-language book from the year 1600 to 1829 that ever used past-tense syntax the way the BofM does. Only the above authors have been found to do so (maybe there are others in the 1500s as well). Another linguistic correspondence, and they will continue to add up.
Orbiting K. said "Good grief, Jeff. Do you really believe this?"
Undecided. What I believe is that the Book of Mormon is a genuine witness of Christ translated from an ancient record. How it was translated is open for debate and further research. But following the data leads to an unexpected find: that the language of the Book of Mormon cannot be readily explained as a mere derivation from the KJV.
It's the data that I am interested in. I am intrigued by the careful work of Stanford Carmack which merits substantive responses rather than eye-rolling. I don't know why or how, but it appears that much of the bad grammar in the earliest version of the Book of Mormon translation is standard Early Modern English, and it does not appear likely at this stage that this is simply a case of Joseph's use of the dialect in his area. More research is needed. It's an area for data and discussion. But so far the data appear to present a factor that may be difficult to explain using old models of plagiarism and modern fabrication. Perhaps. I am interested in seeing where this leads and if it holds up.
It would be fine, perhaps even comforting in the light of the puzzling questions raised by the work of Carmack and Skousen, to have the language prove to be merely the dialect of Joseph Smith and his neighbors. But I don't think there is evidence already that something else is required.
I think the theory of BOM translation may need to allow for at least occasional tight control. Maybe "leaky" tight control.
I see that in many translated texts involving Chinese and English: passages where you can see and feel that the original language has been somewhat closely followed (usually not word-for-word, but in structure and idiom) resulting in unnatural or awkward wording in the translation, and then there will be sections that read naturally in the translated language. Many times I can read an English passage and know right away that it came from Chinese, even when it has been translated with skill. Sometimes.
In Chinese, especially in the formal Chinese of a proclamation or political speech, the way things are said are so different from the way we say and do things in the U.S. or Europe, that the if the translation does justice to the original, it will often sound foreign after translation. Then if someone is translating a classical Chinese passage, from what little I know, it gets much harder, and I think the poetical and most refined parts have to be completely reconstructed or sound hopelessly opaque.
Champatch's comments add some significant linguistic data to this debate. Fascinating. Thanks!
Brant Gardner's loose control theory for the translation seems to require that these older English structures be attributed to Joseph's dialect, but that doesn't appear to fit the data. His one instance of the "and = then" Hebraism that he said he found in Joseph's own writings turns out to be a type by the scribe that was crossed out, and is not relevant. Gardner does make a good point that tight control does not fit what we see in many passages. That's data to be considered as well. But Carmack's work does not require that every translated word and phrase be strictly tightly controlled. I think Gardner's theory is not all that different. Translation is a "leaky" process. Some sections can be tight, others loose. We don't escape the mind of the translator in the process.
Anon, sorry you aren't feeling loved. I did look to M.I. and interaction with Stanford Carmack there as a way to better understand some of the issues. Still much to learn.
Gideon, I'm not sure about the issues around extinct You raise excellent points. The world of Big Data and millions of books to search will raise new challenges and opportunities for the OED classifications. Archaic forms persist in various places. How many examples require reclassification from archaic to, say, dialectical? Not sure. But your evidence weakens the impact of Skousen's example of extinct, though it may still be part of the overall case for EMOE forms persisting in the Book of Mormon. I'm interested in understanding how that word was used in Joseph's environment. Thanks for the detective work and interest.
My guess is that no non-Mormon linguist would buy any of this, which is why Carmack has not submitted his work to a real journal — just as no non-Mormon Egyptologist accepts the ancient origins of the Book of Abraham. (Doesn't this last fact tell you folks anything? How do you explain it — are we to believe that the whole non-Mormon world is somehow blind to all the "evidences" that are so obvious to the believer?)
Taking my own advice, I went to the shelf and re-read some passages from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Bacon's New Atlantis. The latter begins with a description of a landing on a strange coast after a long voyage, which inspired me to revisit 1 Nephi 18; what impressed me most in the comparison is Smith's limited vocabulary. A close second is his lack of narrative skill, and third is his puerility (e.g., the obvious psychological projection seen in Nephi's obsession with his status vis-a-vis his brothers).
Smith was indisputably great as a church-builder, but he was a terrible writer. "Not mighty in writing," indeed, and certainly undeserving of the praises heaped upon it. It's bad enough that your zeal corrupts your logic; even worse is the way it degrades your taste.
Vocabulary and narrative skill are inconsequential; the projection view is laughable: Nephi had older brothers who hated him and wanted to kill him; Smith had older brothers who loved him and supported him.
It is understandable that a journal would not accept apologetic arguments for divine provenance. That’s not what journals do. But they will accept data stripped of that. So what, you can see the same data in the apologetic paper and draw your own conclusions. You can reject correspondence after correspondence, or not.
Bias and agendas are found in all peer-reviewed journals – I know you know that. If you espouse a theory that an editor holds dear your chances of publication are much higher. The paper might be strong or it might be weak but it will likely get published. The fact that it got published doesn’t mean the analysis or data were weak. It could be a very strong paper, or not.
You show puerility by your scorn of chiasmus. Don’t you acknowledge the objective existence of the blasphemer chiasm in Leviticus 24 or the transgression chiasm in Mosiah 5? Surely you’ve seen the rigorous statistical treatment given a number of well-defined chiasms in the Book of Mormon by two researchers, something this blog referenced 10 years. If you have then it supposeth me that thou art a child of obfuscation and denial.
Champatsch,
I posted these questions over at the Interpreter. Hopefully Stanford will respond, but I would be very interested in your take on them.
1) In the book “The Gift and Power: Translating the Book of Mormon,” the author makes the point that in rural communities with less education, it would not be surprising to find older, non-standard variants of English being used. Why should the non-standard forms identified here be attributed to the divine translation process, rather than as a by-product of less educated, rural 19th century America?
2) Is it true or false that rural or less educated communities will tend to use older variants of English? Are there scholarly articles discussing this? Doesn’t the type of grammar that one uses depend heavily on the community one is in, the amount of contact that community has with other communities, the diffusion of language, etc.?
3) How do you respond to the idea that any scholarly authorities that define what constitutes “Early Modern English” would have largely been based more on language used in cities and the better-educated (i.e. derived from those who write books, rather than oral language)–and that you are inappropriately applying these results to a language of a person from an entirely different community? (i.e., applying a result applicable to A inappropriately to population B).
4) Have other studies (outside of mormon scholarship) used English textual variants to date a text composed at an unknown date?
5) What would falsify this theory? For example, if one were to find a different 19th century book that included Early Modern English in similar quantities to the Book of Mormon (but presumably with no divine intervention), would that falsify it? Are there any other ways the theory be falsified?
6) Is there a statistical model for showing that the evidence is not due to chance? For example, in the biomedical sciences, a p<0.05 is often used. But to account for publication bias, many people really hope to see p<0.01 or less. How do we get a "p value" from your work? And since simple statistical tests are based on the assumption of the normal distribution, is there any reason to expect a normal distribution in these linguistic studies? (As opposed to a "power law" / "Zipf's law" distribution, for example)?
7) Should't case controls on these methods be applied to other texts from the 19th century?
8) It seems like a decent methodology for doing a study like this would be to assume that the date of authorship is unknown, and then to classify ALL the linguistic evidence by time period (so, for example, you might end up with some evidence in the 1500s, some in the 1600s, 1700s, some in the 1800s, etc.). I would expect you would find some evidence of 19th century English in the Book of Mormon. Is this the process that was undertaken? Quickly scanning the article, it looks like most of what you discuss relates to evidence for Early Modern English. But surely there must also be evidence for 19th century English. How much? How does the quantity of 19th century English compare to Early Modern English? The BOM has about 250,000 words, so even if there are dozens of examples of Early Modern English, it still accounts for only a minute fraction of the text.
9) Some authors (I believe Brent Metcalfe) have shown many similarities between language used in the Book of Mormon and the language used in sermons of the early 19th century. I personally interpeted this as evidence that Joseph used the language of his day during the translation process. How does this theory account for evidence by people like Metcalfe?
10) Who are a few non-mormon scholars who would be qualified to critique this work?
Champatsch, the argument is not that chiasmus is absent from the Book of Mormon, but rather that chiasmus is such a common literary figure that it's presence does not prove ancient origin. It's everywhere:
All for one, and one for all.
Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.
Because chiasmus is a common form of parallelism in the Bible, it would only be natural if someone striving to write in a biblical style would pick it up.
The BoM frequently uses the phrase And it came to pass. So does an ancient work, the Bible, but even the most diehard apologist agrees that this proves exactly nothing about BoM origins. The BoM uses chiasmus, and so does the Bible, and again this proves exactly nothing, for the simple reason that anyone familiar with the Bible would also be familiar with chiasmus.
So Smith authored half a dozen complex chiastic passages based on deep biblical familiarity with it, and never pointed it out when the text he composed was being attacked as a cheap imitation of the Bible?
And Smith interwove the complexity in his writings when Bengel, Jebbs, and Boys had only presented poor to fair examples of it by the 1820s?
That’s a daunting list – kind of like a thesis committee person’s punch list for a PhD candidate.
1) Yes, in them days, they was, had gave, etc. found in American dialects, some in Smith’s, all in Smith’s? don’t know that for sure. Other nonagreement items too. However, certain items did not carry through to dialects like they seeth, it supposeth me, if it so be, the more part of, etc. So the EModE hypothesis covers (virtually) all forms found in Book of Mormon, but a ModE hypothesis falls short, missing a number of intrinsically complex items, only covering a proper subset.
2) Conservative dialects will have a proper subset of older variants. No doubt there are articles. But some dialects will be innovative. Just like languages coming out of Indo-European – some conservative, Lithuanian, others innovative.
3) Consider “to that” found in 1 Nephi 18:9 = ‘until’. That was found in northern Early Modern English and in Scots in the 1600s. Relatively far from London and cannot be classified as used by the better educated. That use can be found in the OED and at dsl.ac.uk.
4) Perhaps. Don’t know about that one.
5) That would point to the possibility that someone or a group of persons could have conceivably composed the Book of Mormon text and that Smith somehow acquired it. But corroborating witnesses all said he didn’t dictate from a MS, when one of those was never a Mormon, and others became disaffected later and had ample personal reasons to reveal such a state of affairs.
6) We could assign each item used in the text that was nonbiblical EModE and didn’t carry through to ModE a fractional probability, akin to the Drake equation. So if there were 20 such items then we could say there was a one in a million chance (assigning a 50% probability to each item) or a one in a quintillion chance (assigning a 10% probability to each item) , etc. that Smith would have hit all of them in his dictation/composition.
7) Yes.
8) Looks like Carmack article just wanted to point out apparent/possible EModE correspondence, and begin to point out difficulties with loose control theory.
9) Many phrases will be found in early 1700s too, like “infinite atonement”. Google Books will show both OED obsolete forms carrying on longer than thought (to the early 1800s), and 1820s phrases originating earlier than thought (in the early 1700s) . Which Metcalfe article?
10) Need to find some EModE scholars willing to look at something involving the Book of Mormon.
Here's another interesting correspondence: thou hadst and thou had. According to ngrams thou hadst was used 20 times as often as thou had in 1830. And thou had was declining more rapidly than thou hadst throughout the preceding 130 years. KJB only has thou hadst. Smith, so familiar with the KJB that he was able to compose complex chiasms, used thou had, against the KJB and 1820s usage. (Thou received/beheld elsewhere in the BofM shows that thou had wasn't an aberration.) But it turns out that thou had was the most frequent usage of the 1540s when "did preach" etc. was very common as well. Thou hadst only arose in the 1520s according to EEBO and overtook thou had in the 1550s.
Dang Champ, lots of good information there.
10) Need to find some EModE scholars willing to look at something involving the Book of Mormon.
Yes, Champatsch, by all means do that. Run this by some scholars who are not already committed to the authenticity of the Book of Mormon, and who are willing to put their work out there for peer review. Oh, yes, by all means, go for it. Good luck.
So Smith authored half a dozen complex chiastic passages based on deep biblical familiarity with it…
Basically, yes. And why not? Humans have impressive linguistic abilities generally; we all develop complex linguistic skills without formal training.
…and never pointed it out when the text he composed was being attacked as a cheap imitation of the Bible?
Why would he point it out if he was not consciously aware of it? That would be like expecting a kindergartener to consciously point out her use of metaphor. She might use it quite creatively without being aware that she's doing anything that has a special name. The same could have been true of Joseph Smith.
Champatsch,
Thanks for your reply to my 10 questions. I'm way out of my depth here, but I do appreciate your patience in attempting to explain. I am a believing member with an interest in apologetics – not an "anti" – but this theory of Carmack and Skousen's just strikes me as totally bizarre and undermines my faith in apologists. It's just so weird! I don't mind finding evidence of archaic English in the BOM…but before jumping the gun and saying that God did it for a special reason, I'd much prefer to rule out possible naturalistic explanations (e.g., hick language, etc.). I'm not sure if this has really been done.
When an apologetic argument causes a faithful member to begin doubting the rock stars of apologetics, you've got an issue. I don't think this argument will ever convince a skeptic, and it may cause more problems than it solves for members who aren't linguists.
As for your question about which Metcalfe article, I may be mixed up. The book "Digging in Cumorah" by Mark Thomas (pages 132ish?) discusses the use of revival language in Alma 5, among other topics. I think Metcalfe's "New Approaches to the BOM" may raise similar issues. Both books are "anti" so you are put on fair notice. I have not read them, but they are cited in Gardner's "Gift and Power" book.
6+ level chiasmus does not happen subconsciously. Subconscious syntactic nesting seems to occur only to three levels. And even that is rare: The dog the guy I saw yesterday owns is barking. Once more elements are added, even without increasing the nesting, it starts to sound less coherent: ?The dog the guy that I saw in the park yesterday owns is barking.
I've read a lot of Skousen and he hasn't sounded very apologetic to me. Nor has he ventured into the why. All he's done is notice unexpected lexical meaning not found in the KJB and then look in the OED and elsewhere to find usage.
And wasn't Carmack more about tight versus loose control?
Champatsch writes that 6+ level chiasmus does not happen subconsciously.
Actually, there's no reason to think that such extended chiasmus couldn't be produced unconsciously by certain individuals. History is replete with savants with amazing abilities.
Also, of course, "chiasmus" like that supposedly found in Alma 36 is an artifact of the apologist's creative analysis rather than a feature of the text. See, for example, Critique of Alma 36 as an Extended Chiasm, in which Earl Wunderli notes that "One has only to highlight these thirty-four elements in Alma 36 to see how much text — more than 80 percent of it — Welch has ignored in constructing his chiasm."
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I wasn't thinking of that wide-ranging chiasm but of other, tighter passages.
Your view is highly speculative and problematic — and yet you condemn other views on the basis of their speculative nature. You need, against all external evidence and first-hand, personal testimony, for Smith to be a savant-reader, then capable of speedy dictation while acting as a savant along many different dimensions.
My views about the text itself are not at all speculative, though you're right when it comes to my views of Smith. This is only natural, since the text is right in front of me, but Smith is not. How did Smith do what he did? Who knows? To the world of peepstones and staring into hats I'm a stranger, as are you. All I know is that I don't see anything in the text that requires any supernatural explanation. Nothing.
FWIW, Alma 36 is not a "wide-ranging chiasm," for the simple reason that it's not any kind of chiasm at all.
All of this so-called "evidence" for the ancientness of the BoM is massively outweighed by the evidence for a 19th-century origin. Sorry.
While you belittle the literary aspects of the book, another literary-minded analyst states that Wunderli overlooks "the Book of Mormon’s deep structure, narrative complexity, and often intricate rhetorical patterns." See Rees in today's Interpreter: Inattentional Blindness: Seeing and Not Seeing The Book of Mormon.
Rees writes: At a session at the 2013 Sunstone Symposium dedicated to proving that Joseph Smith was the author of the Book of Mormon, as an audience member I made the following statement: “If Joseph Smith composed and then dictated the Book of Mormon as he and other eyewitnesses attest and under the circumstances that seem firmly established and which you seem not to question, then please explain how he did it.” To dictate such a narrative hour after hour, periodically over a three-month period with frequent interruptions, personal crises, and abundant stressful episodes — and with no discernable manuscript, notes or other means of assisting the process of anamnesis — seems not merely superhuman but humanly impossible. At the very least Joseph Smith’s critics must be compelled to agree that in the long history of narrative composition, no one has accomplished a similar task. While ancient poets memorized catalogues of formulae that they used for improvisational tellings of such epics as The Illiad, The Odyssey, and Beowulf, and while some authors have used a process called automatic writing to dictate a wide variety of texts, there is no evidence either that Joseph Smith had the gift of voluminous memorization (especially dictated seamlessly over a period of months with numerous interruptions) or that his book was a product of automatic writing, as I tried to demonstrate in an article on the subject written a number of years ago.
An 1820s "savant" who never read nonbiblical 16th-century literature could not have conjured up lost syntax and meaning.
Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks.
The Book of Mormon is not as great a work as you seem to think. It's repetitive, it quotes the Bible for long stretches at a time, its characters are shallowly drawn, and its plots are simplistic. It doesn't hold a candle to the Bible.
The fact that someone like Smith could crank it out in the time he did is really not all that impressive. Maybe if he'd taken his time it would be better.
Champatsch,
In a few of your posts, you've referred to articles you've written. Would you mind citing them or linking to them, so that I can satisfy my curiosity about your identity and work?
Orbiting Kolob,
You forgot to mention that the Book of Mormon is internally consistent (timeline, geography, characters, obscure references), Joseph "wrote" the book as his first work when he was 25, all 500+ pages of "boring plots (aren't there only 7 plots anyway – but I digress), simplistic characters and repetitive Bible quotes." Faulkner, an excellent writer, wrote As I Lay Dying when he was 33 and was a published author by this time (one short story and 3 novels preceded As I Lay Dying).
But, as we know, the Book of Mormon is to bring souls to Christ and not win literary awards so I will not hold it against Mormon for his sloppy editing and not putting in the most exciting historical characters.
Although I would bet that there are more copies of the Book of Mormon sold than copies of As I Lay Dying.
Steve
O.K.
Rees, who's taught writing and literature at various universities, and who seems fair-minded and deferential from what I can read and from what I know of the man (I grew up with his kids long ago), has a very different opinion of the text from you. Interesting.
Some think the Bible a cheap imitation of the Qur'an. Wrong. You have now classified the BofM as a cheap imitation of the Bible. Wrong.
Champ, who thinks of the Bible as "a cheap imitation of the Qur'an"? Just curious, as I've never heard that one before.
Steve, I'll bet Faulkner is also outsold by Archie comics. But so what? And FWIW, the Book of Mormon reads very much like a rush job by a young and inexperienced writer.
Champatsch, I very much appreciate your insights and the analysis you provide and have conducted. Thanks so much for sharing. Gideon, thanks to you also for the analysis and digging you have done. Vsry helpful.
O.K.
Google the phrase in quotes and two results will come up.
So the savant did a rush job, all the while incorporating numerous rhetorical devices, yet to be discovered old world geographical correspondences, complex chiastic passages, and arcane, remote, inaccessible linguistic features. I reject the savant view as untenable because though savants can do amazing things, what they cannot do is utter concrete verbal expression involving many items of previously unencountered data that cannot be synthesized by savant-like abilities. Those involve many of the matches mentioned above, and there are dozens of independent instances that reject analogical or experiential leaps that a savant might do.
I think another naturalistic explanation must be put forward. One that others have thought of is that more than one person — covering differing areas of expertise (literary, linguistic, religious, etc.) and with access to the best research libraries in America and England, and including a field agent conducting original research in Arabia — toiled over the preparation of a MS for a decade. Somehow Smith acquired it but no attribution was ever sought. Now while the foregoing is highly doubtful, the remainder strains credulity. Smith had to manufacture the peripheral stuff as a hoax and deceive many and dictate through holes in the hat (because the orig. MS is clearly a dictation MS) while somehow hiding the source MS from his scribes and observant wife, or Smith had to involve many in a conspiracy that they would never reveal though many became disaffected later. And there were many independent souls to control in this regard. D. Whitmer in particular, being a principal witness and strong personality who brooked no funny business, would have revealed such a thing in a heartbeat. His reputation suffered but he never recanted.
To me, to put it succinctly, we're left with the earthly impossible pitted against the divinely possible.
I know that many people cling to the former, and they do so for many reasons. If one is an atheist or if one believes strongly that the BofM is heretical or an attack on the Bible, etc. then the former is the only acceptable view.
Q: Why is it that atheists and believers alike can produce convergent academic scholarship on the Bible, but not on the Book of Mormon?
A: Because the Bible really is a collection of ancient texts grounded in ancient cultures and geographies that really exist. The Book of Mormon is not.
Tell me again, someone — Where is Zarahemla? What exactly is "Reformed Egyptian"? How exactly does an Egyptian funerary document turn into the Book of Abraham?
If all this evidence is really so convincing, why won't our esteemed apologists submit it to genuine scholarly journals? Why won't they submit their linguist musings to independent linguists? Their archaeological musings to independent architects?
Why not?
"Why is it that atheists and believers alike can produce convergent academic scholarship on the Bible, but not on the Book of Mormon?"
An alternative view is that there is more than a significant difference between the Old World and the New World. Record keeping, culture, preservation of records, populations, and even archaeological studies are just a few a few aspects that are night and day difference. There is also a very different method in which the Bible was transmitted and how the Book of Mormon was transmitted.
The hypothesis offered by Jeff at the end of the blog, that the Book of Mormon being translated into pre-KJV English can be explained as a divine joke, actually works for a lot of things: the problem of evil, the discordance between the names written in Egyptian in Facsimile 3 and their translation in the Book of Abraham, the Book of Moses' claim that the entire earth was flooded, the origin of dark skin among New World peoples in the Book of Mormon, etc. This hypothesis is in fact an apologetic panacea. It works for anything. Between that and time travel, you can get out of any plot difficulty, as JJ Abrams showed in his Star Trek reboot.
Apologists don't seem to be nearly critical enough of each other. How else but in an echo chamber could such idiosyncratic arguments flourish? If Book of Mormon language reflects ancient Hebrew patterns, that's evidence of divine origin. If it reflects pre-Jacobian English, that's evidence of divine origin. Anytime something isn't readily explainable, that's evidence of divine origin. When something appears in the Book of Mormon that shouldn't be there, that's evidence that God allowed Joseph Smith some license to insert his own thoughts. These are all examples of the ad hoc fallacy.
Jacob said, "Anytime something isn't readily explainable, that's evidence of divine origin." Not so. There are many issues in the Church that we struggle to understand without the ridiculous "I don't get it – must be divine!" fallacy that you lampoon. Issues of race, for example, which you cite, are not treated in this manner as you claim. Care to offer any evidence for this allegation?
But LDS theology does handle the problem of evil well. I would encourage you to look into our teachings there. Maybe read some Terryl Givens along the way for some background, but also see David Paulsen's article. And the Book of Mormon. I don't know of any LDS author or thinker who has taken the approach you caricature.
As for pre-KJV English, this does have logical relevance to debates on the Book of Mormon because it weakens claims to the Book of Mormon being Joseph's worked based on the KJV and his environment or manuscripts from his someone else in his day. Yes, I don't get why pre-KJV English would be chosen, especially English that all of us for decades thought was just bad, hick language that needed lots of fixing, only to find it was good English from an earlier frame that undermines the plagiarism theories that have been proposed.
Is this real? An evidence-filled "joke" rich in irony that turns the tables on some lines of criticism? Or is it an artifact and error that will and must be discarded, as Gideon urges? If it is something real, then the data will need to be considered carefully in any theory of BOM origins. More work is needed.
Mormanity –
I am not convinced that Jacob claimed that Apologist claim racism is evidence of divine influence. However your response provides further evidence of what Jacob was describing. Gideon merely suggested that the BOM language as used can be supported as of the time period. You took this to mean it should be discarded, which is exactly what Jacob was describing. Any evidence that suggests that BOM is a product of its space and time is to be discarded, whereas, the minutest statistical voodoo (word print studies, etc) that might suggest influence from an extra-terrestrial time and space is to be grasped on to as evidence requiring more work, not an artifact that can be discarded. More to do with the principle of falsifiability than an ad hoc fallacy.
Since you bring it up, the recent essay on race on the priesthood does indeed concede that Mormon racism was extremely similar to is time and place, but nonetheless Divinity was calling the shots. “After praying for guidance, President McKay did not feel impressed to lift the ban.” That begs the question. If McKay would have asked three times the way Joseph Smith did with the 116 pages, would God have acquiesced?
I'm not sure what you mean, Mormography, by saying that I think Gideon's point means "it {the Book of Mormon text?] should be discarded." Gideon's perspective is compatible with divine origins of the Book of Mormon – a major LDS theory of translation, advocated by Brant Gardner and many others, is that the translation generally was a functional one, relying on the translator's language and often his choice of wording. This would result in a text that would not be translated exactly the same way twice, but would still be miraculous and divine, yet capable of grammatical oddities, other anomalies and even anacrhonisms arising from the translation rather than the text. It's not a perspective that I feel needs to be "discarded" though I'm puzzled about the evidence of pre-KJV language, and wish to see what further research reveals. Something intriguing appears to have been uncovered, whatever it's cause.
Oh, I see. You sought to discredit Jacob with a demand for evidence of an uncertain claim attributed to him. I acquiesced and you had no response, then you completely further validated Jacob’s observation:
”If Book of Mormon language reflects ancient Hebrew patterns, that's evidence of divine origin. If it reflects pre-Jacobian English, that's evidence of divine origin. Anytime something isn't readily explainable, that's evidence of divine origin. When something appears in the Book of Mormon that shouldn't be there, that's evidence that God allowed Joseph Smith some license to insert his own thoughts.”
Anything and everything proves the BoM true, nothing proves it wrong. Original claims are easily disavowed by playing dumb and replaced with new theories suspiciously similar to critical ones, only with contradictory and orbital conclusions. A clear violation of the principle of falsifiability. Fantastically unscientific. To quote yourself ”He claims he has a Ph.D. (but then, don't they all?).“
With reference to Mormography's question about "it being discarded" I think there's a bit of crossed lines.
I'm saying I hope this theory is discarded soon, not the text of the Book of Mormon. It doesn't make any sense to me and the evidence proposed for it seems relatively weak.
Gideon,
We must confront evidence like "depart" = 'part' and "it supposeth me that" (4x).
These and others like it must be substantively dismissed if we are to take BofM language to be only biblical and 1800s English.
I haven't found "it supposeth/supposes me/us/them/him/her/you that" in the 1700s or 1800s. "Me supposeth that" is found in Caxton, 1482. He used it to replace Trevisa's "me troweth that". ("It supposeth me that" is the direct syntactic analog, with semantically null "it" taking the required subject slot.)
A British example: "if it so be that" (39x in BofM) is found in Middle English and according to EEBO its use may have peaked in the 1540s and 1550s. It peters out in EEBO to one instance in the 1630s and one in the 1680s. We don't find it in America beyond that time in GoogleBooks. But we do find it in Great Britain. Found (so far) in 1756 (London book), 1773 (Hibernian Magazine), 1781 (British Parliament), 1813 and 1815 (London books), 1825 (Gaelic dictionary – London) and "if it so be" as a parenthetical in an 1820s book. Many other possibles in GB are false positives: old 1500s language reprinted. So the use in the 1820s is not common and appears to be only British. And again we know it was an old use that flourished in the 1500s.
There is much more than that to address.
So the use [of "if it so be that"] in the 1820s is not common and appears to be only British….
Not necessarily, Champ. It might be uncommon in the published books you searched, but that doesn't mean it wasn't persisting in nonstandard dialects. I hear No it don't spoken all the time — far more often than I see it published. Searching a corpus of early pubished books is not a very reliable way to learn about nonstandard usages.
Also, of course, the very close phrase "if so be that" is all over the King James New Testament. Why not think of Smith's "if it so be that" as a slight variation on a phrase he would have had echoing in his head via his familiarity with the KJV?
Depart/part could just as easily be a dictation/listening error as being archaic grammar. Nevo, on mormondialogue.org found some 21stC examples of people talking about Moses/God "departing the Red Sea."
Out of interest, is there a searchable archive of 1800s newspapers? That might be closer to spoken language of the day.
Skousen's latest discussion of "depart" (Interpreter 7.91) leads one to think of the BofM use as transitive. But Hel. 8:11 is intransitive = 'divide' (the waters..departed hither and thither)! This is from the printer's MS, so it would have to be a copying error. You can cling to that as a possible reason if you will.
The current usage you mention is irrelevant to this issue, I believe. We must find Amer. usage in early 1800s / late 1700s. Anyway, current usage is transitive = 'part the Red Sea' or intransitive = 'leave the Red Sea'.
The complete relevant entry from the OED is:
†1b. intr. To divide, become divided. Obs.
1387 Trevisa Higden (Rolls) I. 63 Þe Rede see [i.e. Arabian Sea] streccheþ forþ, and departeþ in tweie mouthes and sees. Þat oon is i-cleped Persicus‥þat oþer is i-cleped Arabicus. 1548–77 Vicary Anat. v. (1888) 37 [The sinews] depart agayne into two, and eche goeth into one eye.
The OED entry suggests that intransitive obsolete [1b] may have been less common than the obsolete transitive one that Skousen implied. It may have lost currency by the year 1600. Maybe we can find it in the 1600s. Perhaps you'll find it in the 1700s. I doubt it.
On "if it so be that".
It is formal, acceptable throughout its run, dying in 1600s, revived in late 18th c. as an uncommon British use, peak use in mid-1500s. No evidence of Amer. usage in late 1700s early 1800s. That usage must be found to debunk above strong view. Bret Harte's late 1800s poetic use is irrelevant. False positives are irrelevant.
KJB phrase "if so be that" (consistent,9x) peaked around year 1600, and was always much more heavily used than "if it so be that" (BofM consistent,39x). On average "if so be that" was 35x more common in EModE (EEBO, 400m-word corpus) except in mid-1500s when it was only twice as common. Same usage difference continues into 1700s (see Google books Ngram Viewer). Because of 100% textual consistency, contamination argument is flimsy (very low odds that consistent usage was unintentional.)
A fascinating discussion. Like Kolob, I'm bewildered at the conclusions Champ draws. Seems to me that Joseph Smith wrote in the dialect he spoke, peppering it with KJV phrases and constructions (the way preachers did). It's not at all surprising that non-standard lexical and grammatical features would be found in his 'hick' dialect, some of which can be traced back to pre-KJV times. We don't of course know precisely what spoken English was in upstate NY in them days, because there were no tape recorders. And in general, when people produce written documents (not just published material, but letters etc) they tend to switch to a higher register, so these are very imperfect informants.
Here and there I sense the old non-sequitur that because JS was uneducated he couldn't have been intelligent, and therefore he couldn't have concocted the BOM. That too makes no sense. JS was undoubtedly very intelligent, and indeed very wily. But let's not confuse intelligence with virtue either.
I suggest you reread above comments as they go to knowledge base, not intelligence. And the BofM has a substantial non-KJB component that is EModE. You are dismissing evidence rather than confronting it, and only picking on evidence that can be ascribed to 19th-c. language rather than dealing with the evidence that cannot be. I suggest reading JBMS 12.2.20 and many other treatments like that one which deal with surprising evidence of literary knowledge as well as of linguistic knowledge as I've been pointing out.
Could it be that some aspects of EMod English better correspond to Hebrew than KJV English? Where departures from the latter are preferable, it'd be nice if they still had grammatical precedent in some form of English.
Although this article is a bit aged, it may be timely today. Recent publications regarding Athanasius Kircher may provide a bridge to understanding where that language came from. After all he was active in the early too mid 1600’s when the “a” was in use. Now add in Kircher’s person Nephi who wrote records in an Egyptian dialect only he could translate, Kircher’s balls of curious workmanship with spindles and writing on them that he would show off to visitors and we may have some puzzle pieces being rearranged to fit much better.