wademann:
Casen,
You are teaching me so much. I just had to start this thread from the end of an exercise for Mormons Thread. What is your evidence that the BOM is true?
Oat Soda,
It would be interesting if you were not Catholic and wanted to come up with arguments against the Catholic Church. I bet you could find all kinds of problems if you used to the same standards that you use against the Mormons.
Anyone,
What absolute irrefutable evidence do you have that the BOM is not true?
About this:
frontpage2000.nmia.com/~nahualli/LDStopics/2Nephi/2Nephi27.htm
[This is a Mormon page]
The visit of Martin Harris to Charles Anthon is described in the Joseph Smith story in the Pearl of Great Price:
Joseph Smith - History 1:62
63 Sometime in this month of February, the aforementioned Mr. Martin Harris came to our place, got the characters which I had drawn off the plates, and started with them to the city of New York. For what took place relative to him and the characters, I refer to his own account of the circumstances, as he related them to me after his return, which was as follows:
64 "I went to the city of New York, and presented the characters which had been translated, with the translation thereof, to Professor Charles Anthon, a gentleman celebrated for his literary attainments. Professor Anthon stated that the translation was correct, more so than any he had before seen translated from the Egyptian. I then showed him those which were not yet translated, and he said that they were Egyptian, Chaldaic, Assyriac, and Arabic; and he said they were true characters. He gave me a certificate, certifying to the people of Palmyra that they were true characters, and that the translation of such of them as had been translated was also correct. I took the certificate and put it into my pocket, and was just leaving the house, when Mr. Anthon called me back, and asked me how the young man found out that there were gold plates in the place where he found them. I answered that an angel of God had revealed it unto him.
“Egyptian, Chaldaic, Assyriac, and Arabic” - if this incident took place in 1828, as the page - part of a Mormon commentary on 2 Nephi - says, there is a problem.
In 1828, the study of Assyrian (which is *presumably *what is meant by “Assyriac”) had not even begun, because the cuneiform script in which it was written was not yet fully deciphered. So how could Professor Anthon be qualified to comment on a translation of a language which could not yet be read ?
Here is a sample of what it looks like:
enlil.lib.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/eos/eos_page.pl?DPI=100&callnum=PJ3835.B85_cop2&ident=243
The script - called cuneiform because of its wedge-shape - was being deciphered, but in 1828 it was not yet clear what language was being expressed: whether it was Semitic or not.
Cuneiform is written syllabically - not alphabetically, with separate letters, like Hebrew or Arabic. Egyptian, even *if *“Reformed Egyptian” is demotic Egyptian, is in origin a language written with a syllabary - not an alphabet. Hieroglyphic Egyptian had been deciphered only in 1822, by Champollion. As for Chaldaic, this, or Chaldee, was the name of the language now known as Aramaic: another alphabetic language.
Sumerian and Akkadian (the languages of ancient Mesopotamia before the addition of Aramaic about three centuries before the area was incorporated in to the Persian Empire - the text at the end of the link is mostly in Akkadian) are wholly unrelated languages, true - but, they both used cuneiform script. One of the problems with the languages mentioned in the Anthon letter, is that they were written in different types of script.
Comments ? ##
Either something is all right or it is all wrong, either something is all bad or it is all good. If it is all wrong, then how come so many people believed it? Especially people on the edge of the frontier who had opportunities for cultural exchange with Indians?
And lice would be even more valuable, because they are far more numerous than blues and men combined, despite their lack of size 
