tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post5739797645184586714..comments2023-11-02T07:25:45.884-05:00Comments on Mormanity - a blog for those interested in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Mormons and Fear: Introducing One of Our Favorite FearmongersJeff Lindsayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08776493593387402607noreply@blogger.comBlogger141125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post-36398901035393092402015-09-21T19:24:14.341-05:002015-09-21T19:24:14.341-05:00James, once again thank you for contributing so mu...James, once again thank you for contributing so much here. Appreciate your thoughtful tone and willingness to discuss as well as point out flaws and questions that we need to consider. I also like the scientific angles you take in some of your responses. Thanks for being patient with us Mormons and for giving us food for thought. Similar kudos go to nearly all the participants here. I think we Mormons are all better for learning from those who may sharply disagree with us but are willing to discuss and engage, and I hope you also gain something from interacting with us. Jeff Lindsayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08776493593387402607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post-78110303139631216322015-09-18T04:10:24.987-05:002015-09-18T04:10:24.987-05:00Re: parousia
The idea that you should radically c...Re: parousia<br /><br />The idea that you should radically change how you live, because you suddenly appreciate the nearness of God's kingdom, has certainly always been a major Christian theme. In cases where this became a brief but concrete mass movement, the nearness of the kingdom was indeed usually understood as the end of the whole world happening soon. But there have always been more pietistic interpretations, by which people converted and reformed their lives, without any particular conviction that the grand end was nigh. <br /><br />One interpretation of the nearness of the kingdom has always been geographical (metaphorically) rather than temporal: the kingdom already exists, and it lies within reach — turn and see! I can pull a few proof-texts for this view, but the more convincing major pattern I think is that Jesus's parables all begin with 'the kingdom is like ...'. They describe it as an existing thing, not a coming state or event.<br /><br />If you take every exhortation to change one's mind or one's life as an implicit warning that the end of the world would be soon, then Jesus's message was pretty thoroughly apocalyptic. But this seems arbitrary to me. If every urging to change is apocalyptic, then pretty much all of every religion is apocalyptic. This seems overdone. And if you don't assume an imminent-end-of-the-world context for all of Jesus's teachings, then he actually didn't talk explicitly about the world ending soon very much at all. James Anglinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18266855639647700167noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post-18420927095236974252015-09-18T03:50:27.458-05:002015-09-18T03:50:27.458-05:00Re: desert voices
I have no expertise on these tr...Re: desert voices<br /><br />I have no expertise on these translation issues myself; I'm just interpreting Symmachus, and it seems there is a trivial ambiguity that confuses what I wrote about his post, namely that 'desert' isn't necessarily 'desert'.<br /><br />What Symmachus seems to say is that in the Hebrew original of this two-verse parallel couplet, desert or wilderness is mentioned twice, once in each half of the couplet. In Symmachus's post, the word that occurs in the first half (prepare a road in the wilderness) is referred to as 'wilderness', while the word that occurs in the second half (make a straight path in the desert) is denoted as 'desert'. Symmachus's point (as I understand it) is that the Septuagint (and the KJV) omit the wilderness/desert word from the second half of the couplet (make the way straight). <br /><br />So as Symmachus put it (I believe), these mistaken translations omit the 'desert'. But in fact 'wilderness' and 'desert' are probably interchangeable as English renderings of both Hebrew desert/wilderness terms. So one could just as easily (and some translations may well) mention 'desert' in the first half of the couplet (prepare a road in the desert, or a voice crying in the desert). This has no effect at all on Symmachus's point, which is that the mistaken translations have neither 'wilderness' nor 'desert' in the second half of the couplet. <br /><br />That's the omission that Symmachus is talking about, as I understand him.<br /><br />Since the NT and Nephi only quote the first half of the Isaiah couplet anyway, the relevance of an omission in the second half is only indirect. But the second half omission of desert/wilderness is relevant, because it indicates a plausible explanation for how the grammatical structure of the first half could have gotten messed up: the otherwise obvious two-verse parallelism had been destroyed by omitting a key word in the second half. This makes it seem much less likely that the Septuagint version was really an equally valid alternative to the Masoretic version, and more likely that the Masoretic version correctly reflects the original and the Septuagint is just wrong.<br /><br />Again, that's just my take on Symmachus. It is not based on expertise of my own, and it might not accurately represent him, either.James Anglinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18266855639647700167noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post-36993674129875998712015-09-17T19:10:43.273-05:002015-09-17T19:10:43.273-05:00James, it seems to me that the idea of an imminent...James, it seems to me that the idea of an imminent parousia is in keeping with the admonition to sell your possessions and give the money to the poor, to give no thought to the morrow, etc. One possibility is that the phrase originated very early and was retained later out of respect for its earliness, even though doing so had become rather inconvenient. If we can trust scholars like Richard Friedman (<i>Who Wrote the Bible?</i>), redactors tend to be very reluctant about omitting old stuff, even when keeping it results in contradictions -- as happened, e.g., when the J and P sources were interwoven to produce the flood story we have today. The combination produced contradictions that would have been obvious to the redactors, but they had too much respect for their sources to simply leave stuff out. Maybe consistency was just not the highest priority back then.<br /><br />Steve, my initial reaction re Isaiah 40:3 was to favor the reading that produces what seems to be a very typical parallelism. But now I'm wondering about a possibility I haven't seen mentioned anywhere, namely, that what we're seeing is a deliberate structural ambiguity. Maybe it's something like <i>Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas</i>, though presumably written not for comic effect but for some other effect. Though it would be pretty funny if everyone were trying to resolve an ambiguity that was intended <i>not</i> to be resolved, just as it would be funny to imagine a bunch of scholars trying to figure out just who was "really" wearing Groucho Marx's pajamas that night....Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04668073406352787818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post-37978454184612498482015-09-17T18:02:19.024-05:002015-09-17T18:02:19.024-05:00There seems to be a lot of interesting discussion ...There seems to be a lot of interesting discussion that I cruised over in favor of the Isaiah 40:3. The phrase "in the desert" was not omitted. Here are a handful of different readings (KJV and NIV included)<br /><br />http://biblehub.com/niv/isaiah/40-3.htm<br /><br />Hebrew / English side by side for those so inclined:<br /><br />http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt1040.htm<br /><br />1 Nephi 10:8:<br /><br />https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm/1-ne/10.7-10?lang=eng<br /><br />Unless I am not referencing the same verses, "in the desert" is present in all translations. I had a year of Hebrew at university which is enough for me to recognize some words and butcher all the vowels (we didn't learn vowels - my Israeli teacher thought that they were a waste of time). Dr Sargent was mentioning that the Septuagint does a direct word for word translation of Isaiah 40:3. Here is the Hebrew Romanized:<br /><br />Kol kora bimidbar pnu derech yahvey<br /><br />No punctuation nor canticles. "Hark, one cries in the desert, let us clear a path for the Lord"<br /><br />or:<br /><br />"hark, one cries, let us clear a path for the Lord in the desert."<br /><br />bimidbar is the prepositional phrase in question which means "in the desert."<br /><br />What is also interesting is that 1 Nephi 10:8 is paraphrasing and not a direct reading of one translation or another although it is paraphrasing the "wrong" translation. Again, from a Christian perspective, both readings are accurate if we submit that they refer to John the Baptist as the one crying (yelling, shouting, declaring...)<br /><br />The "corruption" that Symmachus alludes to is the misplaced prepositional phrase. The prepositional phrase as it was translated into Greek gives a reading similar to what is in the KJV. Dr Sargent mentioned that the Septuagint does a direct word for word translation. In my opinion, Dr Sargent does a better job at explaining Isaiah 40:3 than does Symmachus (although Symmachus is eloquent as well).<br /><br />Steve<br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post-71722843439418740122015-09-17T15:44:33.367-05:002015-09-17T15:44:33.367-05:00About Matthew 24: there is a long tradition of int...About Matthew 24: there is a long tradition of interpreting Jesus's words here as a prophecy of the siege and fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. Insofar as some details do seem to fit with this, there is also reason to suspect that the passage was written after AD 70, with details of Titus's siege deliberately written in from hindsight.<br /><br />I'm pretty sure that the oldest firm evidence we have for this text already dates from long after the literal generation of original hearers had indeed passed away. I guess it's conceivable that the words were first preserved by a much earlier generation, which really did expect the world to end soon, and that by the time those guys were all dead, the passage had already achieved too much authority to be suppressed or altered. But I'd be surprised if we had any actual evidence for that scenario. <br /><br />My feeling is that, if the obviously failed prophecy were really the only interpretation of this text that seemed natural to people near its original time, then they would just not have preserved it. They didn't have to exercise mental gymnastics to excuse an overdue parousia, after all. They could just stop copying those lines.James Anglinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18266855639647700167noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post-15627470303843166402015-09-17T15:30:21.111-05:002015-09-17T15:30:21.111-05:00I think you're onto something about how the ve...I think you're onto something about how the version control problem suddenly began to bite Christianity after a couple of generations. I'm fuzzy on details, but I remember reading some collection of early church documents, and really getting the impression that it was the Wild West there for a while. The Christian brand was becoming popular ... and suddenly every huckster or enthusiast in the ancient world seemed to notice that. Who was really entitled to speak for Jesus Christ? <br /><br />The improvised rule became that everything had to be traceable to an apostle. The efforts toward version control ultimately grew into ecumenical creeds, a canon of Scripture, and ecclesiastical hierarchies. I'm not sure, but I think a lot of this formal structure was well underway before Constantine, and I wonder whether Christianity emerged as a state religion in large part because it was already organized enough to take on the job. Since this eventually led to torturing and burning heretics, it definitely became a Fall at some point. I'm not sure whether version control was really innately evil from the beginning, though.<br /><br />It's an interesting thought that Genesis presents Eve as making the first important decision. Adam had previously named the beasts, but I always thought the point of that was that names weren't really important. God made reality, but names are human conventions. <br /><br />Being a physicist, I'm embarrassed to have to say that I sometimes take the Fall story half seriously — as an allegory of entropy. I certainly don't take it seriously as history. It has a talking snake.James Anglinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18266855639647700167noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post-73832684242527926052015-09-17T15:13:21.485-05:002015-09-17T15:13:21.485-05:00Quite the contrary, Glenn. It is you who misunders...Quite the contrary, Glenn. It is you who misunderstands the context.<br /><br />Here's the context: When Jesus makes his "this generation" prediction, he is speaking directly to the disciples: <i>When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately, saying, "Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?"</i> In what follows in Matt. 23 and 24, when Jesus uses the word <i>you</i>, he is referring specifically to the disciples. So when, after listing all the signs of his return, he says this:<br /><br /><i>when <b>you</b> see all these things, <b>you</b> know that he is near, at the very gates. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place</i><br /><br />he clearly means this:<br /><br /><i>when you, <b>the disciples, personally</b> see all these things, you, <b>the disciples,</b> know that he is near, at the very gates. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.</i><br /><br />So the signs of the parousia are to be seen by the disciples themselves. At some point when the disciples themselves are still alive, the returning savior will be "at the very gates." At the very gates! Just outside the city!<br /><br />How is this even remotely compatible with the idea that the return, in fact the signs of the return, will still be 2,000+ years in the future? It isn't. Yours is an interpretation that only makes sense to those whose faith demands some way around the failed parousia.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04668073406352787818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post-55253356707296654882015-09-17T14:48:23.850-05:002015-09-17T14:48:23.850-05:00Well, maybe the exact words of Jesus didn't ma...Well, maybe the exact words of Jesus didn't matter early on because his followers all agreed on the basic ideas. Maybe it's only when the believers start to disagree with one another that it becomes handy to have an official text to point to in supporting one's own position. And, of course, if the text that one cites demolishes the opponent's argument, the opponent will be tempted to argue that (a) the text is being misinterpreted, or (b) the text has been corrupted (in the course of copying, translating, whatever).<br /><br />So maybe the controversies over translation, transmission, and interpretation that seem so natural to us today are rooted in that moment when the original ecclesial unity started to fall apart. In the early Christian movement, that moment might well have occurred when "this generation" began passing away without seeing their prophet return as promised on clouds of glory. Surely there would have been a lot of internal dissension about the meaning of the failed parousia.<br /><br />This has parallels in one of my favorite readings of the Garden of Eden myth. This brilliant story* is a mythic account of the emergence of humanity and of what it means to be human. As the story progresses, Adam learns he is <i>not</i> like the other animals but <i>is</i> like his fellow proto-human, Eve. Then the two proto-humans acquire such distinctively human traits as being ashamed of nakedness, wearing clothing, and using technology (e.g., sewing fig leaves together). This transition to a fully recognizable humanity is precipitated when the serpent arrives and presents Eve with an alternative viewpoint to God's. God says it would be bad to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, for such-and-such reasons; the serpent, adducing other reasons, says it would be good. Eve is confronted with two competing arguments, and in the course of thinking them through and making her choice, she (and then Adam) basically emerge as <i>Homo rhetoricus</i>.<br /><br />It's all right there in the story.<br /><br />Before this key moment, when dissension first enters Eden, Adam and Eve do not have a canonical text stating "Thou shalt not eat from the tree," but they don't really need one. It's only when presented with a dissenting opinion that they would have benefited from a reliable text. (Note how, when Eve says she's not allowed even to <i>touch</i> the forbidden fruit, she misstates God's original stated command.)<br /><br />Perhaps we can think of the earliest church as prelapsarian, and of the rise of textualism as the consequence of a kind of ecclesial fallenness. The more dissension, the more textualism. To resolve disputes over what Jesus meant, people write more texts, and we get the New Testament. Centuries later, to resolve a whole new set of disputes, we get yet more texts -- the BoM, the Book of Abraham, the Docrine and Covenants -- as well as the (rather refreshingly honest) prediction that there will be yet more "revelation" (that is, canonical text) to come.<br /><br />To me, this all seems to be leading us deeper and deeper into our own fallenness, in a direction opposite to that of a "restoration" of the original church and a recovery of "the plain and simple truths" of the original gospel. But who am I? I'm no prophet, just a guy who likes to think about stuff.<br /><br />* Why anyone would read this as anything other than a story is beyond me. I mean, really: it's got a talking serpent in it, and it's <i>history</i>?Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04668073406352787818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post-10604847268403472082015-09-17T14:17:38.057-05:002015-09-17T14:17:38.057-05:00@Orbitting Kolob,
I think that you are misreadi...@Orbitting Kolob,<br /> I think that you are misreading, taking that verse about "This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled" in Matthew 24 out of context. If you put it back into the context of Jesus' prophecy concerning the last day, the signs of the times, just prior to His Second Coming, it is pretty evident that Jesus was talking about the generation that was seeing those signs, a generation some time in the future.<br /><br />GlennGlenn Thigpenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16289698106336334148noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post-46477976367042006172015-09-17T13:10:15.381-05:002015-09-17T13:10:15.381-05:00Well, does posterity matter, though? I think the w...Well, does posterity matter, though? I think the whole idea of preserving information just for the sake of preserving information probably comes from times when preserving information was easy enough to do for slight cause. But either the exact words of Jesus were vitally important, for more than just idle curiosity; or they weren't. If they were important, then they were important for all the people who would be left until the end of the world — whenever that would be. If they weren't, then they weren't — no matter how long the world might still last. <br /><br />If the reason not to bother with exact words was the idea that all saved Christians wouold soon get to hear his original voice anyway, in at most a few decades ... well, Christians still have that idea today, even if the expectation is simply that of meeting Jesus in the next life, after individual death.James Anglinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18266855639647700167noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post-73543306293179412392015-09-17T12:08:58.946-05:002015-09-17T12:08:58.946-05:00James, you raise some very interesting points. I a...James, you raise some very interesting points. I actually think that LDS apologists <i>do</i> read LDS texts, including the AofF, just as carefully as any lawyer, at least when it's faith-affirming to do so, but on your other points I totally agree. I would maybe go a bit further and suggest another reason why there was no initial concern about accurately transcribing the words of Jesus: the apocalyptic context in which he uttered them.<br /><br />Remember that the end was to come "before this generation passeth away." If so, then there would be no reason for the original followers of Jesus to write down his words and carefully preserve them for posterity. There wasn't going to be any posterity.<br /><br />All of the problems that bedevil people today re translating and transmitting the words of Jesus arose only because Jesus was not, in fact, what his original followers thought he was.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04668073406352787818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post-89248626723009388302015-09-17T11:51:39.871-05:002015-09-17T11:51:39.871-05:00Says Anon 12:47, Polygamy was a headache so I fail...Says Anon 12:47, <i>Polygamy was a headache so I fail to see any real personal gain. Joseph Smith did not become rich, and neither did his widow after his death. So please enlighten on the personal gain from lying. I truly am at a loss as to what the personal gain was.</i><br /><br />I am truly at a loss as to how anyone can have such a narrow understanding of human motivations. As everyone knows, "personal gain" can take many forms. We aren't motivated solely by the promise of wealth; we are motivated also by the promise of prestige, status, and so on. Think of the blowhard down at the local VFW who brags about his exploits in combat when in fact he did his military service behind a desk. Is he lying for money? No, he's lying to elevate his social status.<br /><br />Joseph Smith might well have done the same. Religious figures in his day enjoyed tremendous prestige.<br /><br />Also, of course, people can lie in the <i>hope</i> of getting rich without ever actually <i>succeeding</i> in getting rich. So the fact that "Joseph Smith did not become rich" is entirely beside the point.<br /><br />The same argument applies to polygamy. JS might have <i>thought</i> that polygamy would be a lot of fun, and this thought alone might have motivated him to lie about it. Later, when polygamy turned out to be a headache, he could hardly admit that D&C 132 was a lie; the most human thing to do would be to double down on the original lie. Far better to suffer the unexpected headaches of the situation he got himself into than suffer the ignonimy of publicly exposing himself as a liar.<br /><br />Isn't all of this pretty obvious -- at least to those whose thinking is not occluded by cheap apologetics?Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04668073406352787818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post-59474503580065410832015-09-17T11:34:10.775-05:002015-09-17T11:34:10.775-05:00To count all that as a rigorous argument would pro...To count all that as a rigorous argument would probably be to build too much upon the absence of a second 'insofar' clause from the Article of Faith. Yeah, a really carefully corporate-lawyer-ish set of Articles would no doubt have added such a clause if it meant it, but Articles of Faith aren't usually that kind of document. I don't think it's overly pedantic to just say that the 8th Mormon Article of Faith is non-commital about translation issues in the Book of Mormon. <br /><br />But as a riff, it's an interesting riff. Translation issues have been a huge deal for the Christian Bible from the very beginning, since the original text was in a crude Greek that was everybody's second language. Nobody preserved Jesus's original Aramaic words — and apparently nobody even thought of this as an issue. <br /><br />One of the biggest themes of the New Testament is the expression of Jesus's gospel, which expressly began as an exclusively Jewish sect, as a trans-cultural message that could be preached to Romans and Greeks and Ethiopians as well as Jews. Writing everything in common Greek was part of that. Different versions proliferated, and nobody seemed to mind this until much later. I'm actually impressed with this attitude, because to me it indicates a confidence that the essential message was robust. <br /><br />The Christian gospel was digitally mastered, so to speak. The basic gist of the gospel <i>was</i> the gospel. The goal of lossless transmission could therefore be achieved, not by perfect reproduction, but by not fussing over details. So go right ahead and put your bad Greek words into the mouth of God Incarnate; go and preach to all nations.<br /><br />The Book of Mormon's supposed 'tight control' origin, with every English word revealed on the seer stone, is certainly different from that.James Anglinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18266855639647700167noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post-88125418187399481132015-09-17T10:41:39.396-05:002015-09-17T10:41:39.396-05:00This is kind of an aside -- just a bit of riffing ...This is kind of an aside -- just a bit of riffing rather than an argument -- but the discussion of mistakes in Isaiah 40:3 raises what seems to me to be an interesting logical problem involving a certain strand of apologetics and the 8th Article of Faith, the one that says this:<br /><br /><i>We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly; we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God.</i><br /><br />A distinction is made here between an imperfectly translated Bible, and a perfectly translated BoM. (If the BoM shared the same imperfection as the Bible, the 8th AoF would presumably read, <i>We believe the Bible and the Book of Mormon to be the word of God as far as they are translated correctly.</i>)<br /><br />So, what happens if portions of an imperfect Bible are quoted at length in a perfect BoM? Apologists have offered some rather unconvincing arguments about how those 1769 KJV errors might have shown up in the BoM -- for example, it is suggested that when Joseph Smith recognized a passage on the plates as coming from Isaiah, he set the plates aside and for the sake of convenience just copied out the passage from his Bible. This has been contested in several ways: it's "loose control"; you can't know whether the symbols on the plates match a passage in the KJV until <i>after</i> you finish translating the symbols, at which point there's no time-savings in copying from the KJV; and JS wasn't using the plates anyway, he was using the seer stone.<br /><br />To those objections we can now add this more general one: how can anyone argue that the Bible is imperfect and the BoM perfect, when the BoM so extensively quotes the Bible?<br /><br />This is not a trivial question. The LDS insistence on the possibility of errors in the Bible is a very handy theological tool, since (among other things) it allows the Church to resolve conflicts between the two books, to demonstrate its own superiority to other Christian sects (the LDS Church has the perfect book, the other churches only have the imperfect one), etc.<br /><br />So, how might the Church address the logical problem of a perfect book that draws extensively on an imperfect book? I mean, in a logical rather than a faith-based way? There seem to me to be two options (maybe I'm missing others):<br /><br />(1) The KJV Bible passages quoted in the BoM are error-free. The BoM never quotes any of the mistranslated passages of the KJV. But of course most Bible scholars today would dispute this.<br /><br />(2) The KJV Bible passages quoted in the BoM <i>do</i> contain errors, but the importation of those errors was Joseph's -- the imperfection was not in the original text of the plates but in Joseph's decision to switch from plates to Bible. But this amounts to saying that "The Book of Mormon is the Word of God <i>insofar as it was translated correctly by JS, and unfortumately it appears not to have been translated correctly by JS</i>, and this, of course, contradicts the 8th AoF.<br /><br />To me, though, the 8th AoF is <i>already</i> compromised <i>by the BoM itself</i>, which tells us that "if there are faults they are the mistakes of men." So, on the one hand the AoF tells us that we may read the BoM without worrying about the possibility of mistranslation. On the other hand, the BoM's title page tells us that the perfectly-translated BoM might well contain "the mistakes of men."<br /><br />The Bible, marred by imperfect translation.<br /><br />The BoM, marred in its original composition by the mistakes of men.<br /><br />Shouldn't the 8th AoF say something lke this? -- <i>We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly; we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God except where it contains the mistakes of men.</i><br /><br />And doesn't all of this mean that Bible is superior to the BoM? I mean, the upshot seems to be that the original text of the Bible was perfect, whereas the original text of the BoM might contain mistakes.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04668073406352787818noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post-75996496603272494002015-09-17T07:46:48.337-05:002015-09-17T07:46:48.337-05:00Mmm, not quite. The Septuagint apparently omits th...Mmm, not quite. The Septuagint apparently omits the 'in the desert' of the second verse, which is really there in the consonantal Hebrew text. So even if the 'in the wilderness' could grammatically go either way (without cantillation marks), any translation that has only wilderness and not also desert has omitted an original word. <br /><br />As Symmachus argues, I think persuasively, leaving out the "desert" was probably the original error. FIrst of all, it's an easy error to make in copying. If you've just written 'wilderness' you might not notice that you failed to write the synonym 'desert'. And then secondly, the omission of desert would naturally explain the displacement of 'wilderness', because giving the wilderness to the voice, instead of the way of the Lord, would seem to keep better parallelism between 'prepare the way' and 'make the path straight'.<br /><br />I think the best explanation for a Mormon would be to rely on the fact that Nephi's text agrees with the gospels' versions. So you could argue, I think, that either John the Baptist himself messed up on Isaiah, or else he deliberately skewed Isaiah a bit in his answer, maybe even as a joke, and the gospel writers missed the word play, maybe because it matched the Septuagint translation that they knew best. Then Nephi just prophesied John the Baptist, in John's own words, regardless of Isaiah.<br /><br />I'm not saying I buy that myself, just that it's argument that doesn't seem to really take much in the way of mental gymnastics.<br /><br />What I don't think anyone can get away from is that these texts show the New Testament playing loose with the Old Testament. But that happens in lots of places. The relatively recent fundamentalist Christian insistence on the literal inerrancy of Scripture is contradicted by Scripture itself.James Anglinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18266855639647700167noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post-26718791120541605842015-09-17T06:41:41.148-05:002015-09-17T06:41:41.148-05:00Hi James,
I did miss those points that Symmachus ...Hi James,<br /><br />I did miss those points that Symmachus made. As a point of clarification, one translation leans on the Septuagint for understanding and there doesn't appear to be any copying mistake, just a difference in how the verse was translated. If I were to guess, the original Septuagint did not the canticles to rely on. This is more the point that Dr Sargent makes with this same verse. The stronger argument is in favor of the poetic nature of the verses as the "voice" is seen in verse 6 as well.<br /><br />What is interesting from a Christian perspective is that both translations are accurate. The Book of Mormon does not preserve the poetic nature of the verse but it is not an inaccurate translation.<br /><br />Steve<br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post-76201775819823174232015-09-17T02:59:30.199-05:002015-09-17T02:59:30.199-05:00Steve, if you read carefully through that guy'...Steve, if you read carefully through that guy's post about the Isaiah text, you see that he is taking for granted the knowledge that the canitllation marks are only in the so-called Masoretic text of the Torah. He explicitly acknowledges that the Masoretic text is rather late, but he defends it as probably accurate for the traditional reading of the verses. <br /><br />And from the beginning of his post, he says that the poetic parallelism of the verses is another reason to prefer the reading he advocates. <br /><br />And I think this Symmachus guy also has a point when he tries to explain the two versions in terms of likely copyist errors. Given the two versions, it must be that mistakes were made. The mistakes that would produce 'crying in the wilderness' out of a 'road in the wilderness' original seem more plausible than the mistakes that would be needed for the other way around.<br /><br />Plus, as one of the later posters after Symmachus mentioned, it never really made so much sense for a prophet to be calling for a road to be made, while addressing an audience of cactus. Especially when the context of the verses is about speaking to Jerusalem.<br /><br />If you want a Mormon rebuttal to the criticism of Nephi, though, I think this is a good one: whatever Isaiah really said, John the Baptist did call himself 'a voice crying in the wilderness' (according to the gospels of Mark and John). So maybe Nephi was just prophesying John the Baptist, without bothering to correct John's mistaken reading of Isaiah.James Anglinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18266855639647700167noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post-60168588664418348542015-09-17T02:38:20.702-05:002015-09-17T02:38:20.702-05:00Pierce, what I meant by 'gain' was really ...Pierce, what I meant by 'gain' was really more general than money. I'm afraid the gain I mainly suspect that Smith sought from polygamy was just sex. If it also brought him trouble, well: it's not uncommon for men to get into trouble, in pursuit of sex.<br /><br />About your reasoning in your latest argument with EBU, about the virtue of Biblical figures: I see your logic now; thanks. <br /><br />I do still wonder whether you and EBU may have been talking at cross purposes, though. He may have meant the character issue in the narrower way that I see it, as being about honesty in particular, and not about all-round virtue in general. And he may then have interpreted your responses as a some kind of defense of Smith's honesty, specifically. Perhaps, by each mistaking what the other was really driving at, you may both have been fighting straw men. That would explain the mutual frustration with an opponent who was getting his stuffing knocked out, yet refused to go down.<br /><br />Or maybe you guys' problem was something else. I do think that the straw man duel I've described is something that often happens in religious arguments, because each side is so eager to fit the other into a Wrong box as quickly as possible that they don't always take the time to get the Wrong box right. <br /><br />Or another thing that often goes wrong: people switch horses, to a different argument, without explaining clearly enough that they are doing so. They're just eager to ride back into battle, and don't take the time to explain the change of horse. This can reasonably give their opponent the impression that all their arguments are interchangeable, and equally flimsy. <br /><br />But often it's not really that, I think. People often have just one or two big and basic reasons for their position, which are their real reasons; but these reasons are hard to articulate clearly. Big ideas are often like that. Somebody whose main reasons are hard to explain will often advance another argument as a short cut, because it seems easier to make, even though it's not as important a point. If the short cut argument doesn't work out, they'll fall back on their main point. The confusing thing is when they don't explain clearly that this is what they're doing.<br /><br />It seems to me that short cut arguments are just a mistake, in fact. Skirmishes over side issues are a waste of time. Tempting as it is to try to knock Goliath down from a safe distance with one little stone, we aren't David. It never works. I feel it's better to let the side issues go, and struggle away at making the major issues clearer. <br /><br />Side issues may be useful as test cases, to help figure out how the other side thinks — and maybe not even with the goal of defeating them, but just of understanding them. But I think that works better if the side issues are treated as questions, rather than arguments.James Anglinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18266855639647700167noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post-27836373390843882452015-09-16T23:32:41.011-05:002015-09-16T23:32:41.011-05:00Isaiah 40:3 intrigued me a bit more so I've be...Isaiah 40:3 intrigued me a bit more so I've been doing some reading. I realized that the original rendering of Isaiah would not have the canticles. In fact, not only would it not have canticles but it wouldn't have had vowels either. The argument for the "devastating analysis" of Joseph's Book of Mormon rendering was because of the canticles. Vowels are an after thought in written Hebrew which follows that canticles are definitely the after thought after vowels. The canticles are used by the cantor to aid in orally delivering the written word.<br /><br />Here is an interesting article that makes the argument in favor of the "devastating analysis" but for different reasons:<br /><br />http://drandrewsargent.com/2015/01/fun-with-hebrew-poetry-isaiah-403-in-the-new-testament/<br /><br />The reasons he makes are strictly for poetry, which makes more sense. He also opines that both readings are accurate from a Christian perspective and it isn't just KJV that got it "wrong," (translated differently is more accurate since all we can do at this point is make a reasonable guess as to the correct translation) a lot of translations chose the Greek version (which is what KJV did) of translation.<br /><br />Steve<br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post-38909003945156689792015-09-16T15:43:07.893-05:002015-09-16T15:43:07.893-05:00James: From what I gather, you seem to be more on ...James: From what I gather, you seem to be more on the fence about all of this stuff, or religion in general. So I would not have approached you this way. Flying Fig, on the other hand, is a very strong believer in the Bible. So he and I can test his claim against the prophets and apostles of the Bible.<br /> I'm afraid you missed the point of why I used Biblical figures in this way. It wasn't to <i>justify</i> Joseph Smith, the way you would justify someone's actions by saying "well so-and-so did it, <b>so it's ok</b> for blah-blah to do it." The point was to show that if character is the defining characteristic of a prophet, the way that Fig proclaimed, then the Bible is rubbish. <br />Once that has been established, you can have a separate conversation on the strengths and weaknesses of Joseph's claim to prophethood.Piercenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post-69777548223745789642015-09-16T15:26:45.196-05:002015-09-16T15:26:45.196-05:00Fig,
From the very beginning, I have contradicted...Fig,<br /><br />From the very beginning, I have contradicted YOUR limited version of Paul. It does not harmonize with the rest of the Bible, and you failed to make a case for it. I happen to believe all of Paul's words, so thanks for the warning but I won't be joining you in limiting the teachings of Jesus and Paul to what a Reformer taught. This post was just one of many arguments that you couldn't satisfactorily respond to, and one that you spent little time on--and it was all Paul! You guys have done a splendid job ignoring weighty counterpoints, and fallen back on the "big list" criticism approach when the going gets tough. Hopefully we wont subjected to evangelical rhetoric unless it's an actual topic, because it took us all nowhere.<br />Piercenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post-29930139602415756232015-09-16T13:33:03.579-05:002015-09-16T13:33:03.579-05:00Too bad ebu left at this moment; would like his ta...Too bad ebu left at this moment; would like his take on what alternative he had in mind here: "Even if Joseph Smith [or proposed author] clearly couldn't have written it because of the antiquated language, it still does not obviously follow that God did it!"<br /><br />So please tell us which Oxbridge polymath/philologist wrote it, and how Smith and company managed to fool all the various witnesses about how the dictation was actually proceeding.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post-16730954305921439242015-09-16T13:16:12.975-05:002015-09-16T13:16:12.975-05:00The hypocrisy of the critics is astounding.
T...The hypocrisy of the critics is astounding. <br /><br />They attack LDS scholars credentials and work with glee, and even get personal, but someone questions the credentials of an anonymous person whom no one knows anything about and whoo boy, the critics get testy. Someone said this before.......the critics can dish it out but can't take it. Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7139169.post-22162979299255235712015-09-16T13:03:03.777-05:002015-09-16T13:03:03.777-05:00The term anti Mormon came from the very people who...The term anti Mormon came from the very people who fought against the Mormons every way conceivable during Joseph Smith's lifetime and even afterwards. Being called anti Mormon was a badge of honor. The enemies of the LDS religion used anti Mormon to describe and identify themselves.<br /><br /> Anti means against. Those people that come on sites such as this one who do nothing but mock, use inflammatory language, use caricatures to describe certain aspects of beliefs, use personal attacks, and so forth are against Mormons = Anti Mormons. <br /><br /><br /><br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com