(continued)
From reading from the links you provided, I am more convinced that Margaret Barker is more than a little unconventional. Very knowledgeable, sometimes persuasive, touching on esoterica, but in her own way, not entirely credible. I do not say this as criticism of her, but as a description of how I view her writing.
You suggested that Tarquin and Lax16 should get come to an agreement on whether Barker is a scholar. I responded, but now you have linked to an essay by Barker that carries an important confession. In “Joseph Smith and Preexilic Israelite Religion” she has written,
“I am not a scholar of Mormon texts and traditions. I am a biblical scholar specializing in the Old Testament…” She continues, “What I offer can only be the reactions of an Old Testament scholar: are the revelations to Joseph Smith consistent with the situation in Jerusalem in about 600 BCE?”
While I have to agree that an Old Testament scholar may be in an excellent position to provide useful “reactions” to a comparison of “the revelations to Joseph Smith” with Jerusalem of 600 BC, there is a large problem involved, of which one who is not also a scholar of Joseph Smith’s revelations and/or the Book of Mormon will not be aware.
1
In the first case, the problem is twofold. First, those “revelations to Joseph Smith” got dramatically
CHANGED even during his own lifetime, and then after his demise, they were changed more!
Secondly, those revelations came
after Joseph Smith had familiarized himself with the Old Testament over a course of two or more years.
In Letterbook 1, The Joseph Smith Papers:
“At about
the age of twelve years my mind become seriously imprest with regard to the all importent concerns for the wellfare of my immortal Soul which led me to searching the scriptures…”
(
josephsmithpapers.org/paperSummary/letterbook-1?p=8#!/paperSummary/letterbook-1&p=8)
And his mother reported in “Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith, the Prophet, and His Progenitors for Many Generations” (Liverpool: S. W. Richards, 1853), p. 90, that he had most humbly informed her:
“I can take my Bible, and go into the woods and learn more in
two hours than you can learn at meeting in
two years, if you should go
all the time.”
(
archive.org/stream/BiographicalSketchesOfJosephSmithTheProphet/Biographical%20sketches%20of%20Joseph%20Smith%20the%20prophet%20and%20his%20progenitors%20for%20many%20generations#page/n91/mode/1up)
If he learned more in two hours with the bible than his mother could in two years “
all the time”, then in the two years between that statement and the alleged date of his “First Vision,” he would have learned more from the Bible, at the rate of two hours per day, than his mother could have learned in . . . 730 years of continuously studying the Bible!! But perhaps Joseph Smith was exaggerating. Perhaps he exaggerated other things.
So, Joseph Smith’s revelations were not revelations to some uneducated farm boy. They were revelations to a boy who had worked to familiarize himself with the Bible. Did Barker have some means at her disposal to weigh the degree to which Joseph Smith may have simply mimicked the Old Testament in dialect and culture?
2
In the second case the problem is this. Barker wrote,
“I am not a scholar of Mormon texts and traditions.” After knowing Mormons for years, she still could not help but warn us,
“I am still, however, very much an amateur in this area.” This means not only is she unlikely to be familiar with the details of the changes made to the texts, nor with the historical changes, sometimes a 180 degree turn-around, of Mormon traditions (baptism, priesthood offices, temple rites, etc.); but she also probably missed the language and linguistic problems: the unhebraic misuse of pronouns, passages changed to read contrary to the original, and so on.
“Frankly, it doesn’t matter to me what his level of training is in these fields. What matters is whether his arguments hold any merit” – Casey Luskin
To be a scholar is to be a scholar. It is not to be right. One may be a scholar in the American history without being “credentialed” to speak authoritatively on biochemistry. One may be a scholar in the Old Testament without being “credentialed” to speak authoritatively on the Book of Mormon. One may know a lot about the Book of Mormon without knowing very much about the cultures and theologies represented in the Bible. Just as one may be an expert on U.S. History, Buddhism, horse training, construction work, without ever taken a single class or obtained the most elementary “credential” in that subject. What matters is not one’s “credential” nor the label “scholar,” but whether one is right or wrong. (If you had the impression that earlier I was denying Barker’s “scholarship,” that misimpression may have due to my caution in viewing scholarship as a sign of training, obeying, and passing tests in a certain field, rather than “proven expertise” in a field. Which is why I am not as unquestioning as some others, when a credential or label is used to bolster an argument by the holder of that credential or label. Barker has credentials and labels, granted, but she herself admits her deficiency in Mormon texts, traditions, historical changes, textual criticism, the Book of Mormon, and Joseph Smith’s revelations.
As above,
…her writings do not seem to lend much in the way of “significant” … support to particularly unique aspects of Mormon teachings of the 19th and 20th centuries.
