Category: Scholarship
Fifty Years of Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon: The Story of Its Discovery
One of my favorite stories from the world of Book of Mormon studies is the discovery of chiasmus in the text by a young missionary serving in Germany. Fifty years…
Elder Holland on LDS Apologetics
Recent weeks have been interesting for the unofficial, highly heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory cluster of so-called “LDS apologists.” I fall into that motley group. In fact, I was doing LDS…
FairMormon 2017 Conference, Day Two
Day two of the FairMormon 2017 Conference offered another series of outstanding speakers with messages covering a broad spectrum of topics. (See also my summary of day one.) Ben Spackman…
Unncessary Attacks, Part 2: In Defense of Grant Hardy
My previous post responded to Duane Boyce’s critique of some modern LDS scholars who pointed to the fallibility of human leaders in the Church in ways that Boyce felt were…
David and the Psalms in the Book of Mormon: Weakness or Strength?
Overview A 2016 graduate thesis from Kyle Beshears at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, “Davidic References in the Book of Mormon as Evidence Against its Historicity,” proposes an intriguing new…
Evidence At Last: The Many Aspects of John Lloyd Stephens’ Work That Strengthened Mormons in the 1840s
A delightful trend in modern Book of Mormon criticism today is to scour books, articles, and maps for information that hypothetically could have aided Joseph Smith in fabricating many of…
In Defense of Dr. John E. Clark’s “Ludicrous” Assessment of Early Criticism of the Book of Mormon
Dr. John E. Clark’s presentation on archaeology and the Book of Mormon, the subject of a recent post here, has been taken to task by one of our critics for…
Evaluating Book of Mormon Claims: Where Do We Stand after 187 Years?
After 187 years of critics poking fun at the Book of Mormon and exposing its weaknesses, today it seems to be the established view of numerous highly educated elites that…
Janus Parallelism in the Hebrew Bible: Could It Also Be in the Book of Mormon?
One of the most interesting books that I have read recently is Scott B. Noegel’s excellent research work, Janus Parallelism in the Book of Job (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press,…
Uto-Aztecan and Its Connection to Near Eastern Languages, Part 3: The Egyptian Infusion, Plus the Explanatory Power of Stubbs’ Framework
In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, we introduced examples of cognates characteristic of two Semitic infusions into Uto-Aztecan, named by Stubbs as the Semitic-p and Semitic-kw infusions,…
