The Trickster God

[RubinHighlander]

Worth more than a thousand words as far adding to the trickster god pile.

[Hagoth]

Oh boy. Don't get me started on admitting when someone is wrong. I refer you to the discussions I've had with Maksutov over on MormonDiscussions and with others of how I retracted a book I wrote with Wayne May entitled This Land: Zarahemla and the Nephite Nation in 2002.

Hey, I bought that book at the Palmyra church bookstore and read it on the plane ride home. Thank you for the brave retraction.
I think a problem that a lot of us here have, Ed, is that there seem to be better, more parsimonious answers that are not faith-supporting. I enjoyed your paper about puns as placemarkers for a missing text. There's a lot of fascinating thinking in there, and obviously a great deal of time and hard work. The general umbrella of apologetics with which I have a problem is that it takes soooo much scaffolding to prop up something that seems better addressed with simpler answers. I realize that is where critics and apologists differ, and I also realize that it splits along lines of faith and non-faith which is the most difficult gap to bridge.

[oliblish]

Worth more than a thousand words as far adding to the trickster god pile.

This photo was also in the June 1980 Ensign. There was a three page article titled: "Original Copy of Gold Plate Characters Discovered." It included a photo of the forged Anthon document which was presented as authentic in the article.

The online version of the Ensign for that month does not include that article any more. I remember a few years ago you could look up PDF versions of the Ensign on LDS.org and pages 74,75 and 76 were missing with no explanation. Now they have removed the PDF versions of all of the Ensign back issues. The page numbers are not included with the articles today so you can't detect the missing pages or the missing article.

Here is the article:

[foolmeonce]

Please read this carefully, multiple times if necessary, until you understand precisely what I am doing with this. Thanks.

I don't really need to read carefully multiple times to see that you are looking to piggyback off what Jerry Grover has done to try and crack Reformed Egyptian.

The problem is that if you take ANY set of random characters you can try to assign a pattern to them... especially since Joseph Smith never let anyone look at the plates to verify the characters.

And more to the point, the characters are effectively a crudely modified form of the English (Roman) letters/numbers:



The Pure Adamic language isn't really related although it does show that Joseph was no stranger to using modified English to claim ancient languages.

And last, I leave you with this use of the Reformed Egyptian characters:



I'm not trying to be mocking here, but to show that the more obvious, simple, and logical conclusion to Reformed Egyptian is that Joseph took familiar letters/numbers and modified them to look ancient and foreign.

That's not very convincing, by the way.

When I look at this, I feel like the most gullible person in the world. All I had to do before leaving for my mission is spend more than 5 minutes looking at those characters to realize what was going on.

[Random]

The problem is that what "matches" is one of the very basic shapes. If I drew out 50 characters that I was trying to resemble language with, almost surely a few would match any language.

You make me want to create a new written ancient language, and pretend (at least for fun) that it is a real one.

[Random]

If The Book of Abraham was what the church claims it is, and if Joseph Smith was what the Church claims he was, it would be clear and we wouldn’t need convoluted, brain-twisting arguments to try and prove those things true.

Good point. Very good point.

[Hagoth]

If The Book of Abraham was what the church claims it is, and if Joseph Smith was what the Church claims he was, it would be clear and we wouldn’t need convoluted, brain-twisting arguments to try and prove those things true.

Good point. Very good point.

How many other ancient found documents have been demonstrated to say something completely different than the literal translation after extensive convoluted apologetics? I can't think of any. Apologetics are only required when the facts are not on your side.

It's another form of conspiracy theory.

[Random]

This thread has definitely got me rethinking any ideas I might have had about a literal translation of the book of Abraham.

[Random]

Does anyone have a copy of the letters that Joseph Smith actually wrote as a sample of the Book of Mormon? I looked through this thread and saw a parody about it, but I would like to see the real thing if it's possible. (It's possible that it was here, and I just missed it as I scrolled back through the several pages in this thread.)

[jfro18]

Does anyone have a copy of the letters that Joseph Smith actually wrote as a sample of the Book of Mormon? I looked through this thread and saw a parody about it, but I would like to see the real thing if it's possible. (It's possible that it was here, and I just missed it as I scrolled back through the several pages in this thread.)

This is the real "caractor" document we have, but there is some debate as to who actually wrote it. The thinking is that I believe Martin Harris' brother copied the original document and this is the second copy, but the characters themselves are what Joseph had originally put in there.

[Random]

Thank you, jfro.

[Random]

I wish I knew which English verse it was supposed to be so I could compare them, but my understanding is that no one knows.

[Random]

Wait. That was written while Joseph was translating the first 116 pages, wasn't it?

[jfro18]

Wait. That was written while Joseph was translating the first 116 pages, wasn't it?

I believe it was done right at the beginning of the BoM so yeah - it would've been either right before or during the 116 pages... I believe right before since Martin Harris wanted some confirmation the BoM characters were legit before mortgaging his property to pay for part of the publishing.

I might be mixing details here but I think that's the basics of it.