Fantastic Mormon Discussions Interview with Haley Lemmon

[Hagoth]

https://mormondiscussionpodcast.org/201 ... lagiarism/

Haley Lemmon (formerly Wilson) is co-author of the BYU paper that reveals Joseph Smith's plagiarism of Adam Clarke's Bible commentary for his inspired translation: (http://jur.byu.edu/?p=21296). This is really an excellent interview, not only for the JST insights, but for Haley's own story of how it changed her and the potential consequences she had to deal with.

Apart from the fascinating scholarship, a couple of highlights for me were when Haley discusses being afraid to talk about her discovery, for fear of repercussions for herself and her professor, until the paper had received approval of the Q12, and how she feared loss of her academic standing at BYU and was called in and warned about "infecting" other students.

Check it out.

[Hagoth]

Question: Haley discusses a new BYU book about what translation means in changing views of Mormon scholarship. Does anyone know if this book is available and what it is titled?

[Corsair]

I'm in the middle of this podcast right now. Great pains are taken to show that this does not have to be a faith destroying discovery. Apparently there is another interview between Laura Hales and BYU Professor Thomas A Wayment in another podcast that takes a much more faithful approach to this approach. I can happily accept this although noting that this still is problematic for more orthodox believers.

[Red Ryder]

I saw her AMA on reddit last week.

https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comme ... that_neat/

How did it click? We're you reading Clarke's Commentary and noticed similarities, or did you come across other documentation that linked JS to owning/reading Clarke?

I found the parallels first. I just got curious and looked up some JST passages in Matthew and compared them to Clarke while I was sitting in a boring Sunday school class in June 2015. It went from there.

[Mormorrisey]

I saw her AMA on reddit last week.

https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comme ... that_neat/

How did it click? We're you reading Clarke's Commentary and noticed similarities, or did you come across other documentation that linked JS to owning/reading Clarke?

I found the parallels first. I just got curious and looked up some JST passages in Matthew and compared them to Clarke while I was sitting in a boring Sunday school class in June 2015. It went from there.

Clearly boring Sunday School classes will eventually bring about the apocalypse.

[jfro18]

My favorite part about this podcast is how much Bill tries to put a faithful spin on it, and Haley is effectively like "Yeah I see what you mean about the church needing to change the narrative because the entire JS story is a lie"

I get why some faithful would dismiss the JST as not a big deal, but it's just another nail in the coffin of how easy it is to prove that JS is a fraud. The pattern is undeniable, and if you were on the outside looking in you would *never* join this church knowing these things.

[Hagoth]

My favorite part about this podcast is how much Bill tries to put a faithful spin on it

I suspect thatBill is a complete non-believer at this point, but his approach is to give believers a safe window to poke their heads in and get exposed to things that are otherwise kept behind the wall. I wonder what percentage of his listeners these days are actual believers. My guess is that many of them have been cogdissed to other, more faithful podcasts.

[Arcturus]

Just listened and thought it was fantastic. I'd love to see more research done into Clark's recommendations and to what extent they fit into the BofM - the small snippets she highlighted were fascinating.

Does anyone know how advanced her and Prof. Wayment's textual analysis is? Are they using cosine similarity type analysis with digitized text?

[Corsair]

Just listened and thought it was fantastic. I'd love to see more research done into Clark's recommendations and to what extent they fit into the BofM - the small snippets she highlighted were fascinating.

Does anyone know how advanced her and Prof. Wayment's textual analysis is? Are they using cosine similarity type analysis with digitized text?

It did not sound like the full report was entirely available yet. We are going to hear about this again on various uncorrelated, LDS oriented news and podcast outlets over the next year.

[FiveFingerMnemonic]

Excellent discussion. I love these academic confirmations of 19th century contemporary parallels and plagarism. Bill Reel just posted another one concerning professor Anthon's dictionary having very similar names to the BOM names.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_ ... 1307236400

[Hagoth]

Ho-ly-sh*t.

All of the apologetic ancient parallels combined don't add up to this.

[FiveFingerMnemonic]

Ho-ly-sh*t.

All of the apologetic ancient parallels combined don't add up to this.

Here's the google books version that is searchable. Easier to look up the names and terms.

https://books.google.com/books/about/A_ ... E_AAAAYAAJ

[Just This Guy]

I got the impression listening to this that this was recorded several weeks or months ago and then Bill purposefully waited to release it until Haley gave her Okay. Make sense that she would not want to potentially stir up more trouble with BYU leadership than she already had until she had her diploma in hand and the book in question was published or near so.

I do wonder when was this actually recorded.

I do get that Bill is trying to straddle a fine line with maintaining a faith promoting podcast, but at some point he needs to just call a turd a turd. I was frustrated at several points that there were obvious questions that they carefully avoided.

[blazerb]

I got the impression listening to this that this was recorded several weeks or months ago and then Bill purposefully waited to release it until Haley gave her Okay. Make sense that she would not want to potentially stir up more trouble with BYU leadership than she already had until she had her diploma in hand and the book in question was published or near so.

I do wonder when was this actually recorded.

I do get that Bill is trying to straddle a fine line with maintaining a faith promoting podcast, but at some point he needs to just call a turd a turd. I was frustrated at several points that there were obvious questions that they carefully avoided.

Over on Reddit, Haley reported that they waited until her degree was posted in order to be safe. It's sad that scholarship and honest expression has to be suppressed. https://old.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comme ... that_neat/ She gives that detail in the comments.

Here is the link to the podcast her advisor did with Laura Hales: http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/09/ ... ommentary/

I admire Bill for trying to stay safe for faithful members, but I think that train left the station. Even the faithful podcast reveals that JS changed his procedure for translating the Bible when he came into contact with the Clarke commentary. This is all completely different from what we were told in Sunday School.

[Corsair]

Here is the link to the podcast her advisor did with Laura Hales: http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/09/ ... ommentary/

I read through the transcript. Clearly, Dr. Waymant is scholarly and nuanced, but definitely is a believer. The revelation apparently occurs early in the JST of Genesis, but it's more of a consideration of the best commentary of the day once you get to the book of Matthew. This is one more place where Sunday School and Seminary trotted out the JST as this remarkable treasure of divine translation and an improvement over the error prone biblical translation. This level of expectaiton is not addressed in this interview.

Also lost in this discussion is any notice of actual and verifiable translation taking place through divine means or even secular means. I don't see any place where Joseph Smith actually translated anything. Is there a set of ancient characters where Joseph made a translation then later scholarship verified the translation? (Answer: No)

It's like whenever the seer stone is mentioned. Faithful commenters want to talk about some type of translation process and never approach the question of whether or not the seer stone works today or has verifiably worked ever.

[slavereeno]

The revelation apparently occurs early in the JST of Genesis, but it's more of a consideration of the best commentary of the day once you get to the book of Matthew. This is one more place where Sunday School and Seminary trotted out the JST as this remarkable treasure of divine translation and an improvement over the error prone biblical translation. This level of expectaiton is not addressed in this interview.

Exactly, My parents bought me a JST version of the bible published by the then RLDS church I was pretty excited to read it but never finished. I produced quite a bit of cog dis in my mind. The translation did not really seem to clarify or fix anything, it seemed a bit off at times to me, as in the "translation" was worse than the original. Not fully shelf-broken at the time I decided that this was just Joseph Smith's amateur attempt at making the bible more readable.

[jfro18]

One thing that sticks out to me is the pattern between the JST and the BoM...

In these podcasts we get the impression that JS switched to just lifting from the Clarke works in the New Testament, but up until them was doing *something* different to get whatever changes he made.

In the BoM we are told that JS used the gold plates/Urim&Thummim and then after the lost pages just switched to the rock in a hat method.

It's like in both instances he started doing them in a way that seemed just magical and Godly and then at some point was just like "screw it - just do something easy and call it revelation."

The translation of JS is so inconsistent even within specific projects that I can't understand how anyone can buy it once they know the actual history, but here we all are.