I haven't read Price's comments about the BofM but equating it with other pseudeigrapha doesn't seem too much of a stretch (or a compliment). The need to create a work to impress a farmer out of his money is about as noble as some of the Bible writer's motives. Smith and his cohorts plagerized Spalding's work and the KJ Bible and then edited it themselves when the most obvious anachronisms were being recognized.
The Lost Ark of the Covenant and Hidden Treasure
by Leolaia 13 Replies latest watchtower bible
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peacefulpete
Hey Leolaia did you catch the piece about Jerusalem at the NYT link you provided? Interesting is who is funding the dig
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Leolaia
Here is a quote from Price: "If we still wish to dismiss Smith as a hoaxer and a liar, or to put it another way, if we feel entitled to decree that God could never sink to inspiring a pseudepigraph ..., then we have no option but to dismiss the biblical pseudepigraphs along with the Book of Mormon. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. What's good for the stick of Ephraim is good for the stick of Judah. This point hardly escaped the literalistic biblicists of the past who tried to defend the historical genuineness of 2 and 3 Isaiah, 2 Zechariah, Deuteronomy, Daniel, and the Pastoral Epistles just as zealously as they sought to debunk the Book of Mormon. A case in point would be Gordon H. Fraser, author of the polemical What Does the Book of Mormon Teach? One can scarcely imagine him welcoming Higher Critics of scripture to apply the same critical tools on Fraser's beloved Bible as he himself has used in vivisecting the Mormon scripture" (pp. 333-334).
American Apocrypha is, incidentally, a fascinating book well worth the price of purchase. There are some intriguing studies on how the BoM was literarily composed -- which compares fascinatingly with the book of Daniel (such as how the BoM is exceedingly anachronistic and inaccurate about the distant past, then amazingly accurate to the tee about the 1820s, and then stunningly inaccurate about what was supposed to happen from the 1830s onward). There is another fascinating article on how the loss of 116 pages of the original manuscript shaped the current literary form of the BoM.
About the Jerusalem dig, I welcome these new finds to add to our understanding of the Iron II period but I am also a little dismayed by the polemical interests of the financial backers:
Her work has been sponsored by a conservative Israeli research institute and financed by an American Jewish investment banker who would like to prove that Jerusalem was indeed the capital of the Jewish kingdom described in the Bible.
However I understand that there is a widespread denial among Palestinian Moslems that Jews had anything to do with Jerusalem and ever had a Temple or capital there (including the Second Temple), and if the object is to simply substantiate this basic historical fact known from multifold sources (and prior epigraphic remains in Jerusalem), in the face of unscientific historical revisionism, then I'll all for it ... as long as the excavation is conducted responsibly.
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Narkissos
This thread must have been hidden too, I never saw it until today!