I have given responses in the past, especially about the kinderhook plates. But it really doesn’t matter since the same old same old is trotted again and again. It really makes very little difference what the mormons say or post. It has no impact whatever. So no one is failing me. How often have mormons presented their arguments on this forum in response to catholic attacks. Often. And what was the result? Same old same old.
So, my point was simple. Since you and other salt lake catholics have all the answers and conviction, you should begin a missionary effort by giving speeches about the truth in the catholic faith and how mormons ignore the truth. It could work wonders.
Now this has nothing to do with the thread because I answered the author problem and now the thread is dying and breaking off in all directions.
I understand why you are frustrated, and I will vouch that I am not unaware of the existence of LDS responses to criticisms. I read far more of LDS apologetics than I do of anti-Mormon literature, which I find quite boring. I think you have made some good points in your defense, so I will try to give you different argument.
Sometimes very good evidence in a debate is misused because its significance is misunderstood by the person who argues from it. Take, for instance, the example of
adieu that you responded to earlier on this thread. There is actually a very good argument to be made from
adieu, but not the argument I think you are used to hearing. People always overstate the case and say that
adieu shows that the BOM is not ancient. This claim is silly for precisely the reasons you pointed out, but that does not mean that
adieu is unimportant: it only means its importance lies elsewhere.
The thesis that people who quote
adieu ought to argue is that the English idiosyncracies of the BOM undermine any attempt to objectively define its linguistic connection to its supposed Semitic source text. The undermines LDS attempts to provide evidence for the BOM, except for those based on actual Hebrew words and names.
Adieu is one small example of why. There is no Hebrew salutation that corresponds in meaning with “
adieu.” The idiosyncracy of the English text makes it impossible to make any non-speculative claims about the Hebraic original. There are yet better examples. Take for instance the question of swords and horses. LDS scholars would have us dismiss these objections on the grounds that “sword” could mean a wooden club with obsidian pressed into it, or that horses are tapirs (adding that the Aztecs gave to Spanish horses a name that was related to their word for tapir), or any number of similar speculations. Like the rebuttal to the
adieu argument, all of these replies assume a loose, non-literal translation theory for the BOM. “We cannot,” the Mormon apologist must assert here, “assume a word-for-word correspondence between the BOM and its Hebraic source text, for that would entail a naïvely literalistic philosophy of translation.” Warming to this theme, he might say further, “God speaks to people according to their capacity, and so he inspired Joseph to translate the BOM in a way that would be most understandable to him and to his nineteenth century readers; this involved using term and idioms that might not have been in the original text, but would have conveyed the thoughts of the BOM authors more clearly to the understanding of modern people.”
In and of itself, I think this is a reasonable response; but I lose my respect for this argument when I find that the same LDS scholars who reason this way will then turn around and look for grammatical parallels between the English BOM and any ancient Semitic document and declare, whenever they find a parallel, that it is “evidence” for the BOM, not noticing that this line of argument assumes the same literalistic translation theory that underlies the
adieu fallacy. This holds even for some of the impressive evidences like chiasms. English and Hebrew do not have the same syntactical structure, and words rarely fall in the same order in a Hebrew sentence and its English translation. That is why many chiasms in the Hebrew Bible are invisible in English translations. Why assume that a chiasm in the English text corresponds to a chiasm in the original? We should actually expect the opposite. The overuse of “and it came to pass” in the BOM is another example. In Hebrew, a word that is sometime translated “and it came to pass” is a tense marker used to indicate that the following verb will be in the past tense, just as the verb “will” marks the future tense in English. The frequency of “and it came to pass” is taken by LDS apologists as a Hebraism in the BOM, but only a literal translation philosophy would justify translating it at all, like translating “will” directly into a foreign language that has no such tense marker.
The consequence of all this is that pro-BOM apologetics is lost in a double-standard. Every evidence against the antiquity of the book is dismissed by assuming a loose translation philosophy, but whenever a literal translation philosophy can help the case for Joseph Smith, it is embraced at once and the results then presented as “evidence.” If you have to use one standard to deal with evidence against your position and then use a wholly different standard to judge arguments in your favor, you have not made a case at all. Inconsistency in standards is the mark of a failed argument.
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