Posted by:
Russell Mallard
(
)
Date: August 06, 2020 07:23PM
To some degree I agree with your premise, that definitive history is essentially impossible. But you should be aware that this is a point used by more educated mopologists to try and justify fidelity to a religion that's probably fraudulent.
What people like Daniel Peterson and others will say is that because the ancient world was so dynamic but also non-documented, this means that it would always be impossible to find the existence of a small group of people who lived in the jungle and had their artifacts consumed by the forest.
This is a technique that they've imported from biblical fundamentalists who try to use it to explain away things like the evidence for Judaic polytheism and its many borrowings from other, more ancient religions in Phonecia or Babylon.
Your idea of looking within the text itself though is a perfect response to this gambit though.
I would highly recommend reading the original editions of the Book of Mormon or the Doctrine and Covenants. Both texts have been massively cleaned up by the church to disguise the evident fact that they were written by a barely educated hillbilly. Revelations that were supposedly dictated from God himself are filled with bad grammar and backwoods slang.
For a brief look at this issue, please see this excellent article from RfM member Richard Packham:
http://packham.n4m.org/linguist.htm