So, even though this discussion long since done, and nobody will ever read this comment again, I’ve (finally) taken the time to go back and read Sorenson’s chapter that Blake cites in support of his point 1 above, which says this:

1) Those who write about the Book of Mormon in its ancient American setting necessarily adopt the expansion theory implicitly. (e.g., John Sorenson et al.)

and I’m pretty durn sure that that this is a pretty blatant example of misprision, because the portions he cites are taken out of context. In the paragraphs preceding the citation that Blake uses, Sorenson repeatedly brings up examples of Old World conquistadores using Spanish words to describe new world beasts (vaca for buffalo, “kind of a little goat” for deer, etc. see page 294 of An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon). From this portion of the text, I believe he would argue not that Joseph, seeing a tapir called it a cow, but instead that the Nephites themselves, seeing a tapir or buffalo or what have you for the first time would use the hebrew/reformed egyption/nephite word for cow and place that word on the plates. This view requires no use of the expansion theory at all, since, from this point of view, all the cross-cultural naming of things would have taken place back in 600 b.c.e. etc.

I don’t believe that this necessarily hurts any evidence for the expanisionist theory, just that it doesn’t
lend any support to it whatsoever. If anybody ever reads this and has something to say on the matter, I’d love to hear it… :) Not that I think that’d happen, since the party is clearly, looooong over.

why? even a literal translation can be changed, especially when the subject matter is understood differently. i’m pretty sure that those with translation experience understand this.

Here’s the link to his paper:

http://www.fairlds.org/pubs/conf/2004GarB.html

Hi Blake!

I have been wondering for a while how you reconcile the replacement of the “lost 116 pages” with your views on divine foreknowledge.

If God doesn’t possess precise foreknowledge of what will happen, why did the Book of Mormon plates providentially contain a replacement for the lost manuscript? To know that this replacement text would be needed, God would have needed to foreknow the free choices of Martin Harris, Lucy Harris, Joseph Smith, and (if it wasn’t Lucy) the thief or thieves who took the manuscript. It could be argued – I suppose – that God foresaw the *possibility* of the theft and provided a potential replacement text as a contingency plan. But this is problematic. The number of possible futures at the time of the compiling of the plates was vast beyond comprehension. That there would be such an individual as Martin Harris, that he would live near Palmyra, that he would marry Lucy Harris, that he would act as Joseph Smith’s scribe, that Joseph would be living away from Palmyra at that time, that Lucy Harris would insist on evidence that Martin wasn’t merely throwing himself into a fool investment while away in Harmony…all these represent only one constellation of choices out of a universe of possibilities. Surely there were a great many things that could have gone awry during the translation of the Book of Mormon. Did the plates contain a solution to *each*?

Also, the Small Plates cover the period of the lost manuscript quite neatly. The Words of Mormon ends precisely where the retained manuscript picks up. The fit is almost uncanny. Royal Skousen has found that our present Mosiah 1 was actually Mosiah III in the earliest manuscript, indicating that the first two chapters of Mosiah were part of the lost manuscript. And Skousen has also found that the chapters of the original text usually marked divisions between distinct narratives. Notably, The Words of Mormon summarizes two narratives of conflict during the reign of King Benjamin, one military (13-14), the other spiritual (15-18):

12 And now, concerning this king Benjamin—he had somewhat of contentions among his own people.

13 And it came to pass also that the armies of the Lamanites came down out of the land of Nephi, to battle against his people. But behold, king Benjamin gathered together his armies, and he did stand against them; and he did fight with the strength of his own arm, with the sword of Laban.

14 And in the strength of the Lord they did contend against their enemies, until they had slain many thousands of the Lamanites. And it came to pass that they did contend against the Lamanites until they had driven them out of all the lands of their inheritance.

15 And it came to pass that after there had been false Christs, and their mouths had been shut, and they punished according to their crimes;

16 And after there had been false prophets, and false preachers and teachers among the people, and all these having been punished according to their crimes; and after there having been much contention and many dissensions away unto the Lamanites, behold, it came to pass that king Benjamin, with the assistance of the holy prophets who were among his people—

17 For behold, king Benjamin was a holy man, and he did reign over his people in righteousness; and there were many holy men in the land, and they did speak the word of God with power and with authority; and they did use much sharpness because of the stiffneckedness of the people—

18 Wherefore, with the help of these, king Benjamin, by laboring with all the might of his body and the faculty of his whole soul, and also the prophets, did once more establish peace in the land.

Mosiah “1″ (III) then picks up the narrative with “And now there was no more contention in all the land of Zarahemla, among all the people who belonged to king Benjamin, so that king Benjamin had continual peace all the remainder of his days.”

It appears that the two missing narratives at the beginning of Mosiah are those summarized by Mormon, and that the extant text picks up at precisely the spot where the Small Plates replacement text leaves off.

To prepare so perfectly for the loss of the “116 pages,” God would have had to tailor the contingency-plan “Small Plates” precisely to a very specific set of decisions that *might* be made millennia later. But what if the manuscript theft had occurred a month sooner? a month later? two months later?… Did the plates contain a replacement text tailored to *every* possible point at which the manuscript could have been lost??

Here, I think the expansion theory might have something interesting – perhaps even shocking – to offer. Assuming the basic structure of the narrative to be ancient, it is entirely possible, and, I think, far more probable on a non-absolute view of foreknowledge, that the Small Plates, either in toto or in part, are a modern expansion.

“Mormon” wrote The Words of Mormon *after* having abridged the plates of Nephi and immediately before delivering the plates to his son Moroni (WoM 1:1-3). He then ‘finished his record’ on them, stating that he did so for a wise purpose known to the Spirit, but, it is implied, not to himself (1:7).

And how does “Mormon” choose to close the plates just before delivering them to Moroni? Bizarrely…with stories of King Benjamin that would later be lost in the “116 pages”!

Mormon appears to know precisely what he implies he does *not* know – the providential purpose of his inclusion of the Small Plates in his own compilation and of his completing his own record on them – to replace the exact text stolen from Joseph Smith in June of 1828. Mormon’s behavior is otherwise incomprehensible.

Other odd features of the Small Plates are also readily explicable on an “expansion” model. For instance, if the text from Enos through Words of Mormon were a modern expansion created to fill the gap between a real ancient record ending at Jacob 7 and another beginning at Mosiah III, this would explain its brevity and lack of detail. The expansion theory could also account for Nephi protesting rather too much that he does not know why God instructed him to make these additional plates. The Book of Mormon would then be either a substantially ancient record with a modern composition replacing its lost portion, or two ancient records connected with a modern “bridge” – a much more interesting and complex work than has been thought.

But if a sizeable section of the Small Plates, or even the whole text, is modern in composition, this raises the question of whether the same might be true of the remainder of the book as well.

In any case, it seems to me that for anyone accepting the limited nature of God’s foreknowledge, the replacement of the “116 pages” with the Small Plates creates an enigma: How does this putatively ancient text so perfectly and knowingly address a modern problem?

Thoughts?

Don Bradley

[Kevin C.] My observation about the applause was just that. Like my observation that most of the people in the room at the Sunstone panel on Digging in Cumorah accepted your Expansion Theory. An observation. Not a point, not an argument. So there is no need to refute or contest it.

To say Barker’s “arguments have not been well received by other scholars” is much like saying “have any of the rulers or of the scribes believed on him?” or “most scholars dismiss Joseph Smith’s religious claims.” But I’m personally aware of many scholars who have received Barker’s works enthusiastically, just as most LDS scholars, almost by definition, accept Joseph’s claims, and there are many non-LDS scholars who respect them. A group of Cambridge scholars a few years back asked Margaret to head up a study of the Temple roots of Christian liturgy. In 1999 she was president elect of the Society for Old Testament Study. She gets invited for a serious of lectures at Heythrop College at the University of London, her talks there get published by an academic press. She was invited to write on Isaiah for the Eerdman’s BIble Commentary. She gets published in a wide range of peer reviewed journals. I’m also aware of her critics. But we both know it’s not the numbers that matter either way. How many of the scholars who you might cite as critical of her views would turn and publicly affirm your views on God, Christ, Joseph Smith and the Restoration, and the translation of the Book of Mormon? Or is it not fair to ask for that kind of consistency in citing Authority?

[Blake] “Her arguments are flimsy in my view and based on begging the questions constantly.”

[Kevin C.] I wonder if we are reading the same arguments. Which of her works have you read? And how about providing a specific example or two to illustrate, say from “Text and Context”, an important essay, in my view very significant for the LDS, and easily accessible on the web.

I think one of her most interesting arguments is that there is no Day of Atonement in the list of festivals in Deuteronomy. And lo, I observe that there is no Day of Atonement in Deuteronomy. She says that Deut. 32:8-9 is different from the MT in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint, and lo, so it is. No question begging there. Where then? Does her overall approach involve self referentiality? All approaches do. I don’t have a problem with that. I know that Dan Vogel and Brent Metcalfe dismiss all LDS apologetics as “begging the question,” whereas any true, rational, enlightened investigator would start from the assumption that there is no God, and would employ objective critical tools designed to verify just that proposition. They refuse to believe in a God who will not compel their belief. I’ll settle for being invited to believe, and to find cause to believe with respect to the problems that are for me (if no one else), most significant.

[Blake:] I am quite sure that there is not a large acceptance of her views among scholars because she is long on assertion and short on evidence.

[Kevin C.] I trust that evidence of this assertion will be forthcoming, and that it will be more substantial than that offered by Paul Owens in TNMC or by Terrence Szinc in FR 16.2. A couple of years ago I got am email from a BYU professor explaining that Barker’s views of Wisdom could not be correct, and he cited von Rad to back up his arguments. He managed to persuade me only that he had not read The Older Testament, and Barker’s chapter on Wisdom which had already dealt with von Rad’s view and arguments, as well as those of Whybray, and others. Had I not seen the evidence she had presented, I would likely have been both persuaded by the arguments and overawed by the authority of the Tenured Person. But I had partaken of the tree of knowledge in advance, and saw the opposition in all those things.

My own view is that what makes her interesting is her individual attempt to “redraw the landscape of Biblical scholarship.” She is offering a new paradigm, and granted that one useful definition of a paradigm is that it is a ‘group licensed way of seeing’ I find that I am neither surprised nor dismayed that others such as Szinc or Owens, operating in other paradigms, do not see things the same way. What intrigues me are the kinds of things I see from inside her paradigm that no one else seems to see. Richard Elliot Friedman, for example, claimed in Who Wrote the Bible? that Jeremiah agreed with Deuteronomy on every major point. I checked and found that while Jeremiah appears to cite Deuteronomy some 200 times, he also contradicts Deuteronomy on issues key to Barker’s view of the reform. Friedman is a good scholar, but his approach does not define those particular points as “major.” To me, they have become so. I checked Marvin Sweeny’s recent King Josiah of Judah: Lost Messiah of Israel, a very good book by a careful, conventional scholar. He has read and dissected everything in the Bible using his own tools and approaches, but it never occurs to him to ask why there is no Day of Atonement in Deuteronomy, or to consider the implications of 1st Enoch or other non-canonical texts in considering the Reform. He does not, as Margaret does, notice the apparent critique of the returning exiles in the 3 Isaiah. So Margaret asks questions that he does not, considers evidences that he does not, and sees things he does not. I read Sweeny as a check on Barker’s view, but what he sees only helps me in my exploration of her views.

[Blake] The fact the LDS may be enthusiastic because it supports our preconceived idea of what the evidence should say (as I believe it does for her as well), we still need sound evidence – and I don’t see much that she offers.

[Kevin C.] This has not been my experience, nor is it what she herself reports. Do you honestly think that she imagined that her work would be relevant to Book of Mormon study, or that over thirty years of reading the Hebrew and Greek Bibles in many versions in the originals, the Pseudepigrapha and Apocrypha, the Aramaic Targums, the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds, Josephus, Philo, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Gnostic texts, and four centuries of the Early Christian Fathers, not to mention thousands of secondary works, would have led her to publicly say that the Book of Mormon appears to accurately depict conditions in Jerusalem 600 BCE and that it accurately prophesies and demonstrates the restoration of plain and precious doctrines from antiquity? The material behind The Great Angel was clearly not what she had been taught to expect–rather, her readings overwhelmed her expectations–and left to herself, she would have never considered the Book of Mormon.

Moreover, if you look at the other essays in Glimpses of Lehi’s Jerusalem, you will see a definite tension in the views of Josiah in comparing her essay and mine to the rest. Szinc’s review of her “What King Josiah Reformed” in FR 16.2 clearly does not show enthusiasm, and he does not find his preconceived LDS ideas confirmed in her work. But just as clearly, in my view, he is the one hanging heavy weights on slender threads. He uses the initial questions that naturally arise from an LDS background in facing her approaches, but he uses them to close doors. When I ran into the same conflict and questions years ago, and I went through the doors and explored things he didn’t even consider. I’m not better a better scholar than Szinc by any measure. On this topic, I just looked where he didn’t.

She is clearly not just telling us what we expected to hear, and she clearly did not expect to find in the Book of Mormon what she has found.

Well, we are all going to differ on what constitutes sound evidence. I’m enthusiastic with respect to Sorenson and Gardner and Clark on the the Book of Mormon, and you, apparently are not. There is nothing we can do about that but accept each other as doing the best we can according to our lights. Like Joseph Smith says, I want the liberty to believe as I please, and I know you do as well. Don’t think that I don’t appreciate your light (I do), but I think that on this topic, we are not likely to agree. That’s Kuhn’s mechanisms for “distribution of risks” in a community in action..

It’s so very odd to be dismissed by Dan Vogel (in Sunstone) and Blake Ostler in the same month. I expect it from Vogel, but this, I admit, surprises me. But I do find some compensation in knowing Margaret.

Best,

Kevin Christensen
Pittsburg, PA

At the Joseph Smith Conference, Margaret Barker spoke directly on the topic that her 2003 BYU Devotional Address only suggested. (She gave me a printout of her talk, so all of the following are direct quotes from a manuscript in my possession. She pointed out that the first footnote is to my work in progress on Jeremiah.)

“Do the revelations to Joseph Smith fit in thtat context, the reign of King Zedekiah, who is mentioned in the beginning of the First Book of Nephi?” She commented “If prophets revealed the past as well as the future, the revelation of history to Joseph Smith is not out of character.” “Enoch traditions could have been very important in 600 BCE, just as the revelation to Joseph Smith implies.” “Imagine my surprise when I read the account of Lehi’s vision of the tree whose _white fruit_ made one happy, and the terpretation that the Virgin of Nazareth was the mother of the Son of God after the manner of the flesh. This is the Heavenly Mother, represented by the tree of life, and then Mary and her Son on hearth. This revelation to Joseph Smith was the ancient Wisdom symbolism, intact, and almost certainly as it was known in 600 BCE.” (Here she footnotes Daniel Peterson’s Nephi and His Asherah in JBMS 9.2) Later she discusses the Narrative of Zosimus and footnotes John W. Welch’s paper, and then talks about The Great Angel’s thesis and reception, and notes that “The older religion in Israel would have taught about the Messiah, and so finding Christ in the Old Testament is exactly what we should expect, but something obscurred by incorrect reading of the scriptures. This is, I suggest, one aspect of the restoration of “the plain and precious things which have been taken away from them” (1 Nephi 13:40).”

Amazing. The applause was loud and long, and in my opinion, very well deserved. It’s a brave and marvelous thing for her to do.

Kevin Christensen
Pittsburgh, PA