Yeah I know I could probably dig thru all the farms and nibley books but what some of the so called evidences that mopologists cite as evidence for its Hebraic or pre-Colombian source? I know of some of the obvious ones like chiasmis and NHM but what are some lesser known ones or ones?

I you all think Mormonism is made up, as do I, but I'm just curious what some of the so called scholars have come up with. I used to skim through some of it when I was Mormon but it's been so long. I felt like none of it was really solid proof otherwise I'd remember them and I also felt like it was scholarly mumbo jumbo that I felt like I needed a phd in Semitic studies to really debunk the claims they were making.

So for fun pretend you are a bom scholar at BYU; what would you be teaching you students as historical and linguistic evidences for the Book of Mormon?

N O N E !!!

I have a BOM on my bookshelf. It would be hard to argue that it wasn't real, especially since I have seen the BOM with my own two eyes.

My sister is convinced because at a fireside someone gave a secondhand account about some language expert claiming the the bom translates perfectly into Egyptian.

She has always been extremely gullible. She will jump on anything that someone tells her is evidence for the church, and 8refuses to look at anything that might be at all critical.

Oh yeah, and chiasms people, chiasms!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/31/2014 12:30PM by closer2fine.

Those are the only kind of "evidences" I've ever seen. An apologist might say that the way things are worded in english is the same way they would have been translated from hebrew. However, they ignore the fact that the book was supposedly written in the imaginary reformed egyptian...and the fact that you can find similar working in other books of the time that weren't translated works.

I read one article about some obscure native american language that had some similarities with hebrew. However, when real unbiased scholars review the same info, they say there's nothing there.

There are some videos on YouTube on the BoA. The LDS egyptologist cherry-picks certain things that Joe got close on. However, if you read other egyptologists' reviews of his work, he's has a soiled reputation. He's absolutely destroyed his credibility with his bias...he's looking for, and finding, things that aren't there...like "Abrah" on an ancient document being proof that Abraham lived in Egypt, ignoring the fact that it was found in a list of other "Abra-" magic words like abra-cadabra, etc...

There was an article recently about thousands of arrowheads being found at a location in New York. Some mormons think that the BoM is finally going to be proven as an authentic history, but they ignore the fact that the arrowheads are about 10,000 years old.

I feel good when I watch Lord of the Rings, so I KNOW it's true!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/31/2014 02:15PM by nonsequiter.

"We are not required to prove that the Book of Mormon is true or is an authentic record through external evidences—though there are many. It never has been the case, nor is it so now, that the studies of the learned will prove the Book of Mormon true or false. The origin, preparation, translation, and verification of the truth of the Book of Mormon have all been retained in the hands of the Lord, and the Lord makes no mistakes. You can be assured of that."

The Prophet Ezra Benson, April 1987



"The evidence for its truth, for its validity in a world that is prone to demand evidence, lies not in archaeology or anthropology, though these may be helpful to some. It lies not in word research or historical analysis, though these may be confirmatory. The evidence for its truth and validity lies within the covers of the book itself. The test of its truth lies in reading it. It is a book of God. Reasonable men may sincerely question its origin; but those who have read it prayerfully have come to know by a power beyond their natural senses that it is true, that it contains the word of God, that it outlines saving truths of the everlasting gospel, that it came forth by the gift and power of God."

The Prophet Gordon Hinckley, October 1984

There ya go.

I think it takes either a very intelligent person to construct a framework that could explain the BoM, or a complete moron. To date, I haven't heard a convincing one from any source.

The best I could offer would be to suggest (in my role as apologist as church authorities no longer want to make definitive statements on these things) that the pre-Columbian civilizations had an understanding of eternal truths and a relationship with God. This knowledge is unique to their culture and history, the qualities of which alienate us from understanding their truths in the context of our culture and history. To make it sensible to those needing and waiting for the restoration of the church and to convey the essential, stand-alone truths of those ancient times, God used Smith to put it in storybook, fable form. Consequently, historical details are irrelevant. It was not a translation - it was a conveyance of truth.

(Poor Joseph Campbell is probably spinning in his grave..)

In other words, scrap any hope that the BoM has anything to do with history and try to sell it as a gloss on an "inner" message. True understanding only comes with great study and prayer to be able to see beyond the superficial. (So you can say goodbye to the principle of "plain and precious truth." This approach is anything but plain and precious. If you can't understand it - don't worry, greater minds have worked it all out.)

The BofM mentions Jerusalem-- which is an actual city-- so it must be true.

hangar18 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The BofM mentions Jerusalem-- which is an actual
> city-- so it must be true.


Yes, it does. Jerusalem is the birthplace of Jesus, according the BOM...

Lol

A testimony is only found in the bearing of it. So if you publicly announce that the BoM is true, it actually makes it so.

I'd now like to bear my testimony that Scarlett Johannson has the hots for me.

I remember something my brother said in the early '70's when he converted (among other things, like carbon dating being unreliable); some skulls found in Egypt and South America both had similar holes cut in them, proving that both the middle east and the New World did brain surgery.

I thought that was decent evidence, but realized, years later, that the ancient ISRAELITES were never said to have done brain surgery. So I figured it was more probable that Egyptians came here, not Jews!

http://en.fairmormon.org/Book_of_Mormon/Archaeology

Take a look at this and see if there is a single issue that makes sense. We could help you shoot any of it down.

The Book of Mormon is written with words like "thee" and "thou."

PROOF!

Packham's info on the misuse of "thee", "thou", and other KJV english in the BoM (among other language problems) is pretty interesting.

PROOF...that either Joe or God wasn't/isn't too bright...

It's annoying how they dance around the evidence like it's not an issue. Also when they try to make it look like the facts are just random pieces put together to discredit the BOM.

Its easy to dodge accusations by saying the nonanswer of lack of evidence is not proof of no evidence.

They're lack of proof is evidence enough for me.

A rock from Arabia with the letters "NHM" carved into it is, in my opinion, BY FAR the best evidence they've been able to dig up... which tells you a lot about the exceptional lack of evidence for the Book of Mormon!

"The bare facts of the matter are that nothing, absolutely nothing, has even shown up in any New World excavation which would suggest to a dispassionate observer that the Book of Mormon, as claimed by Joseph Smith, is a historical document relating to the history of early migrants to our hemisphere."
-Professor Michael Coe (Harvard PhD of Anthropology, specializing in Mesoamerican archaeology)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/31/2014 01:14PM by nickname.

"Evidences" usually fall into one of three categories:

1. Preliminary/outdated/poor scholarship findings that have long since been corrected by subsequent examination.
Example: The Lehi/Tree of Life stone, which has been thoroughly debunked by LDS scholars: http://publications.maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/jbms/8/1/S00006-50cb9720813af5Clark.pdf, http://publications.maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/jbms/8/1/S00004-50cb96fca45e23Brewer.pdf


2. Straw man beatings of invented criticisms or criticisms from uninformed evangelical critics.
Example: The use of cement among Mesoamericans. Ironically, cement use in the BoM is one of its GREAT FALSIFIERS. Sources available in Joseph Smith's day mention the use of mortar, plaster, etc. among the Aztec and Maya, so it should be NO SURPRISE that the BoM mentions cement. However, the explanation the BoM gives directly contradicts what is NOW KNOWN about Mesoamerican lime production: it required vast amounts of timber, which led to massive deforestation and environmental problems for the Maya. Meanwhile, the BoM describes cement as being used in response to deforestation that had been inherited from the Jaredites.


3. Flat out lies by lying liars like John Gee and John Sorenson.
Example: In "Echoes and Evidences of the Book of Mormon", Gee and Sorenson falsely claim that "Joseph Smith could not have known in 1830 from published books or his contemporaries that an ancient civilization had existed anywhere in the Americas."

Note: The Echoes and Evidences quote is actually Sorenson's, but Gee contributes to that argument with a section dedicated to grossly misrepresenting Ethan Smith's "View of the Hebrews". I confronted Gee about these misrepresentations in an email exchange back in 2003--he promptly discontinued correspondence when I provided excerpts from "View of the Hebrews" that directly contradicted his lying lies.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/31/2014 01:27PM by facsimile3.

SOmebody in the BoM chopped off a bunch of arms. All native Americans have two arms, that can be chopped off. Therefore the BoM is true.

That is the quality of the evidence.

http://www.jefflindsay.com/BMEvidences.shtml

I haven't seen anything particularly compelling in here but its the most comprehensive attempt I've seen online.

I've read a little Nibley - he basically finds some obscure reference somewhere that coincides with something in the Book of Mormon and then calls it a home run.

Everything I've ever seen uses the correlation equals causation logical fallacy.

I've also see other things along the lines of chiasmus like King Benjamin's speech following biblical patterns of kingly speeches and such. I've never seen any tie that would give me a reason that Nephites - who had almost no tie to Jewish culture according to 1st Nephi would be more privy to such information that Joseph Smith.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/31/2014 02:05PM by The Oncoming Storm - bc.

My TBM mother sent Lindsay an email asking about BoM cement after I explained the issue to her. His response was that the BoM peoples must have burned scrub brush to produce the lime. I am not aware of any such practice and that is NOT how Mesoamerican scholars explain it, but Lindsay is not one to let science get in the way of an "answer".

One thing I've noticed about Lindsay in particular is that, although he updates his website often, he never takes down anything that might be used to prop up the Morg, even if it has been disproven (even by LDS scholars!).

For example, he is still claiming that the "River Laman" is the Wadi Tayyib al-Ism. Even though all other Mopologists that I know of have long since abandoned their attempts to connect them. BYU's own Maxwell Institute even published a paper explaining, in detail, why the Wadi Tayyib al-Ism couldn't possibly be the River Laman. Lindsay, of course, doesn't mention any of this, and presents his false conclusion as indisputable fact.

He's either one of the world's worst scholars, or he is intentionally trying to mislead his readers. Or both. Yeah, probably both!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/31/2014 02:34PM by nickname.

I think his primary approach is argument by verbosity.

He doesn't attempt to really show anything, just make it seem complicated so you can't know for sure and thus trust your current beliefs and the spirit since it is too complex. I think he has effectively done this to himself.

I've never actually finished reading anything he has written because it just gets too boring and too bogged down in red herrings.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/31/2014 02:40PM by The Oncoming Storm - bc.

It's the only fair way of doing things.

<rimshot>

You know, I've never found these historical/anthropological/archeological/literary arguements compelling on one side or another. Some Mormons use them to bolster their house of cards, and some critics use them to knock down the house of cards. Either way, it's a house of cards. I based my decision to leave the church on the way Mormons today treat people today (women, gays, etc.) which is horrendous.