Names in the BoM that were also coincidentally from Charles Anthon (somewhat a repost)

[jfro18]

I saw this posted on the JS Translation podcast thread by FiveFingerMnemonic and thought it deserved its own... you can see the post from Bill Reel here:
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_ ... 1307236400

Basically this highlights all of the names in the BoM that are either directly copied or closely related to names from Charles Anthon's 1827 dictionary of ancient names. I had come across this in the last month or so as I've been doing my research, but I'm so glad it's resurfacing again as it really highlights just how often the JS pulled info from other sources and how easy it would be to create the BoM with all of those sources combined.

Take a look:

(Most of these are not found in the Bible)

Mormon
Memnon (p.454) -- A war hero who lead 10,000 men to battle in the Trojan war and won. He later died in a subsequent war. He was known as a writer and inventor of the alphabet.

Cumorah
Cremera (p.214) -- 300 people died there in a battle, only one remained alive

Helorum
Helorum (p.334)

Zenos
Zeno (p.335,884-887)

Sidon
Sidon (p.763)

Alma
Alma- / Almamon (p.n17)

Melek
Melek (p.668)

Teancum
Teanum (p.763)

Pachus
Paphus(p.578)

Antion
Antion (p.106)

Antionum
Antium (p.106)

Coriantum
Corinthum(p.208)

Coriantumr
Corinthium-br (p.208)

Chemish
Chemmis (p.577)

Mosiah
Mosa (p.504)

Omni
omnis (p.557)

Pahoran
Pavorane (p.220)

Helaman
Haliacmon (p.325)

Zarahemla
Zamora (p.883)

Egyptus (PoGP)
Egyptus (p.105)

Curelom
Curium (p.219)

Irreantum
Erythraeum (p.284)
-- Both terms are referring to the Arabian Sea

Nephites
Nepherites (p.520)

Antiparah
Antiparos (p.63)

Lachoneus
Laconia (p.377)

Enos
Ænos (p.19)

Ether
Æther (p.282)

Neas
Nea (p.516)

Morianton
Marmarion (p.460)

Gadianton
Gaditanum (p.305)

Corom
Coron (p.210,378)

Moroni
Morini(p.313,503)

https://archive.org/stream/1827classica ... 3/mode/2up

There is also a lot of sections on Egyptian culture and Egyptian theology. Joseph Smith would by this book alone knew that the word Nephi was of Egyptian origin (page 520)

This Charade is coming to an end with anyone who in the least degree wants to know the truth rather than hold comfortable beliefs.

Parralellomania? I dont think so.

[Cadahangel]

Thanks for this keep up the hard work I wanted something broke down on this. God Bless

[Corsair]

Parralellomania? I dont think so.

Hugh Nibley and FairMormon love parallelomania when it (allegedly) supports the LDS church. I think you are allowed a rather wide latitude for use in this regard.

[Red Ryder]

I'm surprised the Johnson's didn't pick up on this in their analysis with the Late War stuff.

There's an obvious pattern of plagiarism that's emerging.

At what point does the church pivot from its past? A Universalist approach based on good clean family living and non exclusive admittance would probably be pretty popular today.

[jfro18]

At what point does the church pivot from its past? A Universalist approach based on good clean family living and non exclusive admittance would probably be pretty popular today.

They can't ever do that - who in their right mind is going to waste 10% of their income on a church that effectively admits the entire history is made up? Family values are great, but you can get those anywhere.

I hope one day this church burns in its own truth, but I don't think it will be because they turn to a more open, honest approach.

[Rob4Hope]

I hope one day this church burns in its own truth, but I don't think it will be because they turn to a more open, honest approach.

I think the turning will be slow...but as it seems to be. In the mean time, lots of plausible deniability will be used...

[Reuben]

John Walker's pronunciation guide for Greek and Latin names was a likely source, too:

http://www.rickgrunder.com/parallels/mp453.pdf

Nephi, Lehi, Laman, Lemuel, and Laban might all come from here, as well as the curiously Latin pronunciations of names ending in "i."

Google has the book scanned, for the curious:

https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/ ... dUrgEACAAJ

[Hagoth]

Aw, its all just one big coincidence, unlike NHM.

[asa]

jfro. I recognize that you are simply repeating Bill Reel's stuff so please note that any harshness you may detect is aimed at him not you although you have spread this sophomoric argument so you at slightly guilty . The whole idea that the B of M is a fraud because names appearing in it bear similarity to proper names from the ANE or the classical world turns the traditional criticism of the B of M on its head. Through much of the last 150 years the traditional criticism was that the book had otherwise unknown names and this was inconsistent with a book that should reflect its ANE origin . Thus the name Alma as a masculine name was attacked, The name Sariah which didn't appear any where in the massive ANE corpus ( until 1965 when it was discovered on a 4th century papyri from Elephantine )were both used to "prove " the B of M false. Yours or Bills approach is apparently the mirror image of that argument. You argue the B of M can't be true because certain names appear both in it and the corpus of the ANE . This is an illusory issue . Supposing arguendo for a moment that the B of M is authentic and it tells the tale of 2 groups of people who leave Jerusalem about 600 bc ( 597 to be precise). Wouldn't you expect that they would carry their cultural history with them particularly when the book makes such a big deal of that history ? The book tells us there was a very tight connection between this group and Egyptian culture . Nephi 's name is Egyptian ( meaning good hence the constant reference to good in the first chapter) , the brass plates are written in Egyptian and they were surrounded by Egyptian culture. They certainly would know about the Colosi of Memnon among the most famous statues of the ancient world . They still attract tourists. I stood before them last year. They would certain know about Sidon the great city only 100 miles from Jerusalem ( where I spent time 2 years ago ).Zenos as the book explains is known through the brass plates. Melek is the Hebrew for king so they certainly would be familiar with that Egyptus was a mere variation on a place name very familiar to them. I could go on and on but that is my initial response without looking at a single item . i have traveled a bit in the middle east and this is simply my initial untutored response. I have not time to go through each item seriatim but if i did i bet I could explain why it wasn't necessary for Joseph to seek a look at a classical dictionary to which he almost certainly didn't have access ,write down a bunch of names and then construct a complex lengthy narrative around his purloined names all within ,if multiple witnesses may be believed 3 months. I could go on but this is too prolix already. If you want a smoking gun look at the Jewish settlement on Elephantine. Jews leave Jerusalem in 600 bc ,travel 1000s of miles to the then end of the earth ,establish their own communityy, itermix with locals ,build their own temple and flourish for 100s of years and even have a woman named Sariah a name found no where else )

[jfro18]

jfro. I recognize that you are simply repeating Bill Reel's stuff so please note that any harshness you may detect is aimed at him not you although you have spread this sophomoric argument so you at slightly guilty . The whole idea that the B of M is a fraud because names appearing in it bear similarity to proper names from the ANE or the classical world turns the traditional criticism of the B of M on its head. Through much of the last 150 years the traditional criticism was that the book had otherwise unknown names and this was inconsistent with a book that should reflect its ANE origin . Thus the name Alma as a masculine name was attacked, The name Sariah which didn't appear any where in the massive ANE corpus ( until 1965 when it was discovered on a 4th century papyri from Elephantine )were both used to "prove " the B of M false. Yours or Bills approach is apparently the mirror image of that argument. You argue the B of M can't be true because certain names appear both in it and the corpus of the ANE . This is an illusory issue .

I did repost Bill Reel's post w/o any additional comment because I just have not had time to really go through it - I definitely plan to, but it was mentioned in another thread and I thought it was worthy of its own thread for discussion. The idea of your reply is one I've seen a few times as I've been bouncing between critics and apologists (fair, ldsanswers, etc), so I'm not responding this way to you personally but just to the idea that critics are changing their arguments in recent times in a disingenuous way.

I think that one of the reasons that the criticism of the first 150 years of mormonism has changed is because we now have more information. We now know that the surviving book of abraham papyri proves that joseph smith's translations were wrong. We now know that Joseph Smith's "translation" of the Bible lifted change after change from Clarke's Bible discussions.

We also know thanks to the work of people like the Tanners that JS borrowed heavily from the Bible across the Book of Mormon - so much so that he neglected to remove all of the KJV specific text. In addition we now know about the deutero-Isaiah problem, which is another dagger to the authenticity of the Book of Mormon.

Thanks to the internet we now have more sources of information about how Joseph Smith abused polygamy, how he changed revelations from God when he needed to in order to serve his own interests, and how the church continues to lie about their history in the essays.

DNA has now shown us over the last 10-20 years that the narrative that the BoM being a story of how Native Americans came from the old world are complete nonsense.

If that's not enough, we have learned in the last 40-50 years about new first vision accounts and how they changed between each telling, becoming sharper instead of more generic which is what most retellings do.

I'm not saying this alone is the "smoking gun" against Joseph Smith, but I am saying there is an absolute pattern that JS incorporated names, stories, ideas into the BoM that were from other works that we *know* he was familiar with.

Circling back to this particular post - we know the JS was not only aware of Anthon but that he valued him so much that he sought him to verify "reformed Egpytian" so that he could get the $$ to get the BoM published. So while this alone doesn't prove the BoM is false, is does add yet another source of information that JS could've borrowed from when he wrote (translated) the book.

And I'm not trying to rail on you here - I actually am kind of venting in general because a common apologetic approach I've seen is to try and take every piece of evidence and use a "divide and conquer" strategy. They tell believers to not focus on them and certainly not to try and connect the dots. Clearly a piece like this on its own does not provide much more than suspicions against JS, but combined with everything else we have it proves a pattern that JS used other sources to complete his works, which he of course claimed was divine revelation from God.

I tend to think that with all of these issues, it is important to look at the bigger picture to see how each piece fits into the puzzle, and that is something you will never hear an apologist say because they know exactly where that will lead.

[Hagoth]

The whole idea that the B of M is a fraud because names appearing in it bear similarity to proper names from the ANE...

Whether or not Joseph borrowed names from Anthon, you gotta admit that the presence of those names all in one volume is at least as impressive as apologists finding BoM names when they have the entire ancient world to cull them from. Is it less likely that Joseph took them from a book that was available at exactly the right time in his general neighborhood, written by the very person that Harris visited for confirmation, or is it more feasable that a resurrected ancient American prophet led him to a book made of gold where he found those names, and which he translated with magic glasses? Or is it just as likely that apologists have been able to also find a list of parallel-ish names from among the many names that have been recorded throughout the history of the ancient world?

Or is it possible that if you make up a lot of ancient-sounding names based names you have heard from the Bible, the apocrypha, tales like Aesop's Fables, what have you, a handful of them might resemble the finite list of names that you would find in a dictionary of ancient names, or in the BYU library?

If you want to talk about whether or not the Book of Mormon is a fraud, pious or otherwise, the place to look for supporting evidence is in the ancient Americas, but the apologists have had to fall back to the disappointingly anemic stance of rewriting the story under the assumption that the book misrepresents itself about the scale of the epic events it portrays, and that all of its peoples were really just very minor players in the Americas who have somehow fallen through the archaeological and biological cracks. In defending the Book of Mormon, in my opinion, they show very little respect for what the book actually says about itself.

[Hagoth]

Circling back to this particular post - we know the JS was not only aware of Anthon but that he valued him so much that he sought him to verify "reformed Egpytian" so that he could get the $$ to get the BoM published.

And now we know that even that story (like just about every other element of church history) is a heavily exaggerated and re-imagined version of the real story. It wasn't written down until 11 years later, and the "sealed book" revelation fulfillment that is taught as the highlight of the narrative, it turns out, was written in between the lines even later by someone else:

Sealed Book.JPG (27.65 KiB) Viewed 17845 times

http://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper- ... st-1834/11\
Joseph and company knew about Anthon and they wanted to get his name attached to their project to give it more validity. When he saw through the ruse they rewrote the story to turn out the way they wanted it, and when it didn't agree with Anthon's own accounts he became one of those wicked men who tried to impede the coming forth of the new scripture.

[moksha]

Somehow this reminds me of the Vern Holley maps.

It is an unforgivable mistake of presentism for anti-Mormon critics to claim that Verbal Kint is Keyser Soze. What clues could they possibly give to substantiate this blatant attack on the faith?

[Hagoth]

Somehow this reminds me of the Vern Holley maps.

It is an unforgivable mistake of presentism for anti-Mormon critics to claim that Verbal Kint is Keyser Soze. What clues could they possibly give to substantiate this blatant attack on the faith?

Hey, do any of the fictional characters in the Book of Mormon have names that are parallels to the names of other fictional characters (like from the apocrypha, masonic rites, etc?), like the way Hyram Smith was originally named Hiram, after Hiram Abif?

[Red Ryder]

Somehow this reminds me of the Vern Holley maps.

It is an unforgivable mistake of presentism for anti-Mormon critics to claim that Verbal Kint is Keyser Soze. What clues could they possibly give to substantiate this blatant attack on the faith?

Hey, do any of the fictional characters in the Book of Mormon have names that are parallels to the names of other fictional characters (like from the apocrypha, masonic rites, etc?), like the way Hyram Smith was originally named Hiram, after Hiram Abif?

What about Moro Skywalkoni and Hela Soloman?

[asa]

Hey, do any of the fictional characters in the Book of Mormon have names that are parallels to the names of other fictional characters (like from the apocrypha, masonic rites, etc?), like the way Hyram Smith was originally named Hiram, after Hiram Abif?

He was not named after that Hiram . You need to read your OT more. He was name afterHiram the King of Tyre a friend of Soloman and his father David . He supplied valuabe lumber ie the cedars of lebanon for the construction of the temple.Actuaaly there were mutiple kings of Tyre and Byblos with the same name . The ceterpiece of the Lebanese National Museum is his enormas and beautiful sacophagus
that contains the earlest example of Phoenician alphabetic script

[slavereeno]

I never thought lists of this type were meant as definitive proof that the BoM was a fraud, rather just another data point amongst hundreds. For such a work to make the claims it does, the burden of proof rests on the one making the claim. One of the "proofs" I was presented with several times growing up was:

There are way too many unique names in the BoM, just so, so, many more than in a normal work of fiction. Even really good authors like Chuck Dickens and Mark Twain could only come up with like 3 or 4 unique names. So Joseph Smith who was just an uneducated dolt could never have come up with that many unique names, so that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the book of Mormon is true, ergo your life is mine.

So this doesn't have to "prove" anything in my mind, it merely hast to cast a shadow on the flimsy proofs like the one stated above.

[Hagoth]

I never thought lists of this type were meant as definitive proof that the BoM was a fraud, rather just another data point amongst hundreds. For such a work to make the claims it does, the burden of proof rests on the one making the claim. One of the "proofs" I was presented with several times growing up was:

There are way too many unique names in the BoM, just so, so, many more than in a normal work of fiction. Even really good authors like Chuck Dickens and Mark Twain could only come up with like 3 or 4 unique names. So Joseph Smith who was just an uneducated dolt could never have come up with that many unique names, so that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the book of Mormon is true, ergo your life is mine.

So this doesn't have to "prove" anything in my mind, it merely hast to cast a shadow on the flimsy proofs like the one stated above.

I think the takeaway is that parallelism works both ways and therefore can be negated from the equation. You simply can't argue that one side's parallelisms are valid and the others aren't. Even if it came down to nothing but a coincidence of BoM names sounding like other ancient names, that is still a more parsimonious answer than angels with gold books. Apologists insist that a city named Moroni on an island named Comora is pure coincidence. I'll give them that one if they'll trade me a NHM.

If we were going to do hand-to-hand combat over parallelisms we need to take into account not only the ancient Old World parallelisms in the Book of Mormon, but also the 19th century parallelisms, which are generally overlooked by apologists even though the number of ancient parallels is dwarfed by comparison. The argument for ancient parallels is always "how could Joseph Smith, ignorant farmboy, have possibly known about the names of ancient people?" while the argument for 19th century parallels is "how could Joseph Smith, ignorant farmboy, have possibly known what was in those books in the library?"

[jfro18]

I look at it two ways:

1. I get why random sources with a name that matches or is similar to the BoM can go either way - on one hand it shows that the names were not unheard of, but TBMs can point to them as being proof that JS was right.

2. BUT... if the source is one that we know JS was familiar with, I don't know how any apologist turns around and says that it's proof JS was right. We know that JS not only knew of Anthon but viewed him as a credible source to try and get some confirmation for the 'reformed egyptian' characters. You can't then turn around and say "Wow, a scholar of ancient languages had similar names as the BoM which means JS was a prophet" when JS clearly has an interest in that scholar.

It's like the JST and how we now know he lifted a ton of references from the Clarke teachings of the Bible.

At some point you have to stop making excuses on these cases one-by-one and step back to see the insane pattern.

Another way to look at it - would you ever date/marry a person who you constantly found lying to you about little things? I mean one or two you could brush off as no big deal, but at some point you would stop making excuses and see the pattern for what it is. This is no different besides being indoctrinated with it from birth... which of course makes the hold that much tighter.

[FiveFingerMnemonic]

I look at it two ways:

1. I get why random sources with a name that matches or is similar to the BoM can go either way - on one hand it shows that the names were not unheard of, but TBMs can point to them as being proof that JS was right.

2. BUT... if the source is one that we know JS was familiar with, I don't know how any apologist turns around and says that it's proof JS was right. We know that JS not only knew of Anthon but viewed him as a credible source to try and get some confirmation for the 'reformed egyptian' characters. You can't then turn around and say "Wow, a scholar of ancient languages had similar names as the BoM which means JS was a prophet" when JS clearly has an interest in that scholar.

It's like the JST and how we now know he lifted a ton of references from the Clarke teachings of the Bible.

At some point you have to stop making excuses on these cases one-by-one and step back to see the insane pattern.

Another way to look at it - would you ever date/marry a person who you constantly found lying to you about little things? I mean one or two you could brush off as no big deal, but at some point you would stop making excuses and see the pattern for what it is. This is no different besides being indoctrinated with it from birth... which of course makes the hold that much tighter.

In this case the names are defined in Anthon's dictionary as Roman characters, which reminds me of the spaulding manuscript story being about Romans who came over by boat to the americas.