FAIR

DCP at Olivewood on olive trees and evidences

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The Olivewood Bookstore in Provo has done it again! After February’s fireside featuring John Sorenson, for an encore they brought in another prolific Mawell Institute scholar, Daniel C. Peterson. Dr. Peterson did not disappoint, but if you missed it, don’t fret as it was captured on video and I have updated this blog now that it has been made available on YouTube. The event was well attended. John Clark and John Sorenson were in the audience. Bill Hamblin arrived late, but seeing that no anti-Mormon contingent had materialized to disrupt the event as they had threatened, did not stay long. I met a few personalities who I originally became aware of over the internet, but I don’t know if they wanted to be outed in this space.

From what I hear, Dr. Peterson is a busy man these days. I don’t know how he managed to squeeze in time to do the fireside in between all the globe trotting he does, all the time he puts in as a bishop over a student ward, all the time working on four book manuscripts, etc. So it is understandable that he constructed his presentation from previous writings. He gave us a dramatic reading of portions of a essay covering the miraculous translation process of the Book of Mormon that draws on the observations made by Royal Skousen and early witness accounts. Dr. Peterson insisted the challenges he has brought up have not got the serious attention they deserves from critics, so it is worth repeating and disseminating to give them a better opportunity.

But whether critics respond or not, I think it is important to educate the Saints on such matters. From the question and answer period, it was clear Joseph’s later translation method that involved a seer stone placed in a hat but did not involve a curtain or the plates being physically present was news to some of the audience members. Peterson’s response to this persuasively flips such concern around and makes it a selling point of the Book of Mormon’s authenticity. I remember lurking on a message board when Dr. Peterson originally made this point:

A knowledgeable academic friend who does not believe in the historical authenticity of the Book of Mormon once asked me, since it seems that the plates were not actually necessary to the translation rocess and were sometimes not even present in the room, what purpose hey served. I responded that I did not know, exactly, except for one thing: They are an indigestible lump in the throats of people like im who contend that there were no Nephites but that Joseph Smith was nonetheless an inspired prophet. If the plates really existed, somebody made them. And if no Nephites existed to make them, then either Joseph Smith, or God, or somebody else seems to have been engaged in simple fraud. The testimony of the witnesses exists, I think, to force dichotomous choice: true or false?

Dr. Peterson talked about some his favorite evidences (not proofs!) of the Book of Mormon. He told us the story of how he got interested on reading about guerrilla warfare tactics as a young man and how Book of Mormon authors illustrate the problems that occur when guerrillas try to start occupying territory prematurely. He contrasted that to Joseph Smith and his culture had romantic notions of military, just picture the Nauvoo Legion parades.He explained his belief that the Gadianton Robbers correspondences more to guerrillas than they do 19th century Masons.

Dr. Peterson talked about the presence of if … and conditionals which make good Hebrew, but is not typical of any known English dialect. He also mentioned a statistical study of chiasms, or literary structures that use inverted parallelisms, in the Book of Mormon that concluded the probability of them being unintentional was virtually nil. He discussed the significance of the Nahom find. He brought up a subject that one Gospel Doctrine teacher got excited about, with Jacob’s long allegory pending in Church curriculum. He discussed the paper he did with John Gee on olive tree culture entitled (bad puns intended) “Graft and Corruption,” which unfortunately is not available over the internet. Dr. Peterson contended that Lehi was a refuge from the Northern Kingdom and that Zenos would have been right at home with the olive tree culture which had its origins there before spreading.

It was fun listening to Dan as he stayed late to do some book signings and continued to answer questions. I got to talk to John Clark about his Hickman lecture. Apparently about 20 or so of his slides are being worked to add footnotes and before long they will be available through a department secretary. We also talked about some of the difficulties overzealous Great Lakes geographers are causing. Eventually those of us who still remained got the hint that we needed to leave, because the bookstore manager started packing up the refreshments.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Keller says

    Bill Hamblin pointed out to me that Deseret News also covered the event. You can get a longer summary of Peterson’s remarks at http://mormontimes.com/DB_index.php?id=927 .

    As a way of illustrating how easy it is for members to get confused about the subject, note the accompanying art that shows a curtain between Joseph Smith and Cowdery.

  3. Robert Fields says

    I like Dr. Peterson’s comments on the plates. Joseph Smith still did claim to have physical plates. The plates were hidden even if not in the room in translation. Dan Vogel once proposed they were tin plates. But the non-historical view of the book has the plates as mere props in an inspired story.

    It might be a good idea to take the quote and insert it into FAIR Wiki article on Book of Mormon historicity. The historicity of the book does matter.

  4. Keller says

    TrevorM, they advertised this event on the FARMS site, Deseret News, and Olivewood bookstore site. I could probably do a better job with presenting interesting events on this blog as well.

    Olivewood has two upcoming firesides scheduled:

    May 15: Mark Alan Wright
    June 19: John Gee

    John Gee is the top expert on the Book of Abraham, so I look forward to that event. Does anybody know what Wright’s specialty is?

  5. Keller says

    Robert, that is a good idea for the wiki. We might have to tone it down for the humor impaired though.

  8. Ray Agostini says

    Robert Fields: “But the non-historical view of the book has the plates as mere props in an inspired story.”

    If I read Dan’s comments correctly, he doesn’t explain the presence of the plates either, and does seem to indicate they were in fact “props” of some sort, since Joseph didn’t use them, but used the seerstone. (?)

  10. lpoulsen says

    Mark Wright was one of the commentators on the “Journey of Faith: The New World”

    Larry P

  12. Keller says

    Ray A.,

    Thanks for chiming in and I like your thoughtful blog. I think you are right that Dr. Peterson doesn’t speculate on what role the plates had in the translation process, but he does stress their importance in building up faith, whether Joseph Smith’s or the Witnesses.

    My personal theory is that the seer stones or disassembled Nephite interpreters only worked as a translation device when the plates were in the vicinity. I have zero evidence for this other than an anecdote that Joseph could read words off the pages of an open book with the aid of his seer stone with his back turned. That comes from recorde of the 1826 examination hearing of Joseph Smith. An ability/spiritual gift like that could help explain how Joseph could utilize KJV text with no manuscript present at the translation venue.

  13. Ray Agostini says

    Keller,

    Thanks for your comments. I’m not against any theories or ideas about how the Book of Mormon was produced (they are in fact welcome), and I realise that since Joseph himself gave no explanation, we are all left to speculate to some degree. Not that this will prove or disprove anything. I’m not satisfied with most of the theories, especially the bogus “Spalding Theory”, which makes little sense to me, given eyewitness accounts. I am convinced that Joseph, and Joseph alone, “produced” the Book of Mormon, and I don’t believe he had the “intellectual” capacity to do this like some kind of “inspired novelist”. Even Tolkien took years to produce his work, and he was a trained academic. In my blog entry “Is the Book of Mormon History?” I raise some points I feel are not answered. The anachronistic nature of the Book of Mormon, or rather, some BoM content, does not seem to justify it as a fully ancient text. That’s not a problem for me, by the way, only in accepting it as ancient, or exclusively ancient.

    I’m not a literalist, and perhaps heretically, I can accept the Book of Mormon as a modern revelation, and I don’t fall into the either/or camps. I know Dr. Peterson does, and perhaps most Mormons do. So do most ex-Mormons. But what happens to a spiritual witness in this case? Are we going to walk away from the Book of Mormon if it’s not shown to be authentically ancient? Is archaeology going to determine this? What if, speaking totally hypothetically, God revealed a text that is both ancient and modern? Is this possible? Why not? Has the Book of Mormon changed lives? Has it spiritually impacted on people? No question about that. It is an extremely powerful modern revelation, and also the “Keystone” of Mormonism, love it or hate it. Agree or disagee with it.

    Does it have to be “authenticated” by archaeology? In my opinion – No. If someone loses their belief in the Book of Mormon because of archaeology, what does that say about the spiritual witness they had? Void? Nullified? The concept of “waiting for evidence” doesn’t impress me either. If you’ve had a spiritual witness, what is greater than this? Could that be why Joseph said “the means” is not important? Was he thinking that the truth about the “translation” of “literal documents” would be too much to bear for the average person?

    I’ll give you my wayward theory about why Joseph didn’t reveal the “means”. Because the “means” incorporated a modern redaction which Joseph included by the authority of God, so that it would be pertinent to our times, and this is why it’s a mixture of ancient and modern, which is too much for, excuse my prejudice, “simple minds” to understand, minds which must have an either/or dichotomy.

    I personally see lots of problems in fully accepting Mormonism, but the Book of Mormon isn’t one of them.

  17. Tyler says

    Bayrak,
    Email me if you are interested in translating some of FAIRs work into your language.
    Tyler