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Spencer, I saw one of your footnotes referring to planned work on the Book of Mormon’s biblical passages. There is a text-critical volume dedicated to just that: Skousen, The King James Quotations in the Book of Mormon, 2019. I helped him with that.
When you write that Gardner looked at MS evidence for this, that’s not right. He read what others wrote and he read what Skousen wrote. S was the one who looked directly at the MSS. And most of the others that G quotes on pp. 303–307 got various things wrong. What G did there was relay defective research and speculation. G relied on others’ statements, which weren’t always right, while S did primary research on this.
What I’ve found is that researchers have taken shortcuts for biblical passages (and also for Book of Mormon English). They haven’t analyzed all the passages, all 17,300 words. They don’t count differences systematically. They don’t get italics rate changes and italics not changed. Skousen did all that. Instead, they take a small sample and generate theories based on that. It isn’t a scholarly approach.
I was curious as to what Spencer quoted from me. What I found was an accurate quotation, but nothing that said I had looked at MS evidence at that time. I’m not sure where you got that impression. It is true that I had not in 2011. That has changed, and I spent quite a bit of time with the manuscripts in the last couple of years.
As for biblical passages, I have gone through the a couple of lists, including the one Nicholas Frederick put together for New Testament quotations. I have also been through Skousen;s King James Quotations. I’m not sure what you specific point is, but it is no longer true that I haven’t been through the manuscripts or the biblical quotations.
In Spencer Kraus’s article: “both Royal Skousen and Brant Gardner have pointed out that such a reading of the text is not supported by the manuscript evidence,97” (n97 cites pp. 303–07).
So you were put on a parallel with Skousen, even though he was the one who transcribed the MSS. That was my main point.
What I see in pp. 303–07 is you quoting others’ incomplete analyses and their speculations, and taking your discussion from there. It isn’t you discussing the MS evidence you had discovered from transcribing the MSS and analyzing them.
Before offering an opinion as if it might be accurate, Hardy or Tvedtnes or whoever, if they had been approaching this topic in a scholarly manner, would have compared every biblical passage, as best they could, with the earliest sources they could.
For your 2011 book, you didn’t compare all the biblical passages in the Book of Mormon with King James Bible readings. And you could have, with the dictation language, which was available in September 2009. If you had done so, then you would have realized (at least one hopes you would have, based on evidence), that there are too many differences (700+) for your 2011 theory to be explanatory.
In KJQ, page 5, we get hard figures, not speculation, on italics: “Only about 23 percent of the differences involve italics. And of the italicized words themselves, only about 38 percent of them show differences.”
I recently had to read parts of this book. On page 313, Neville stipulates that the dictation language of the Book of Mormon is how Joseph Smith spoke. I have studied the syntax and vocabulary of the text thoroughly and comparatively. So I know that this amounts to an assertion that Joseph spoke Elizabethan English (late 16c) in late 1820s America. When we look at his earliest writings [1829–1833], we can see that he wrote very differently, like an early 19c American. So Neville would have us believe that Joseph, without scribal training, spoke Early Modern English and wrote modern English (200+ years apart). Preposterous. And Bushman just cited this work approvingly in a BYU Studies paper. The bar for scholarship has been set low in this field of inquiry. Anything goes. Various researchers seem to be led away by the foolish imaginations of their hearts.
No offense, but this is not really a book review, this is more of its own academic paper. Which would normally require it’s own peer review and input from Neville where possible and appropriate. Also the first rule of a book review is it is a review of the book not the author. There seems to be a fair amount of vitriol towards the author here which I find a bit over the top, just my opinion. Perhaps there is some previous interaction you have had with Neville in the blogosphere?
“Besides,” said Mr Norrell, “I really have no desire to write reviews of other people’s books. Modern publications upon magic are the most pernicious things in the world, full of misinformation and wrong opinions.” “Then sir, you may say so. The ruder you are, the more the editors will be delighted.” “But it is my own opinions which I wish to make better known, not other people’s.” “Ah, but, sir,” said Lascelles, “it is precisely by passing judgements upon other people’s work and pointing out their errors that readers can be made to understand your own opinions better. It is the easiest thing in the world to turn a review to one’s own ends. One only need mention the book once or twice and for the rest of the article one may develop one’s theme just as one chuses. It is, I assure you, what every body else does.”
From Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, (2004), p. 120.
Interested readers may consult my March 2020 paper (https://journal.interpreterfoundation.org/pitfalls-of-the-ngram-viewer/), in which I lay out my 2019 research on the popularity of the phrase “infinite goodness” over the centuries. According to the widest ranging English textual sources I was able to consult, having made large corpora myself, the peak popularity of this phrase could have been in the 1500s.
It is possible that Neville obtained the idea to research the phrase “infinite goodness” from my paper on the limitations of the Ngram Viewer.