Ghost Writers in the Sky?

Last updated on: August 9, 2016 at 2:32 pm by Dan Peterson

Ghost Writers in the Sky? 2016-08-09T14:32:30-06:00 Dan Peterson

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This is serious scholarship, and it deserves a serious response. (Photo from Amazon.com)

In connection with the challenge to certain critics that I offered yesterday, my friend Royal Skousen has just sent me the following note:

Well, Dan, early on I did mention the possibility of a committee. I have never speculated on who might be on the committee, not even jokingly that it included William Tyndale (in fact, his English is too early). I definitely do NOT recall the conversation you put on your blog. But this is what I have written in ATV [Analysis of Textual Variants] on page 1052 (under Jacob 6:13, referring to “the pleading bar”):

And the actual translator of the Book of Mormon – the Lord himself or his translation committee – seems to have been familiar with the term!

I have removed this offending sentence from the second edition of ATV. I no longer refer to a translation committee, although I have said we do not know “how the Lord did it or had it done”. That is as far as I will go because it does no good to argue about this issue. Instead, let’s study the text.

Best wishes, Royal

Professor Skousen is claiming the hundred dollar reward that I offered.

Sorry, though. Even this doesn’t qualify according to the standards that I outlined yesterday. I required a “passage in any published writing by either Dr. Skousen or Dr. Carmack in which either of them seriously advocates the proposition that the Book of Mormon was rendered into English by a mysterious spirit-world committee of translators.” A mere passing mention in a disjunction (“the Lord himself or his translation committee”) — and, with the concluding exclamation mark, plainly a rather lighthearted mention — doesn’t count as “serious advocacy,” by which I mean the assertion of a proposition on the basis of marshaled evidence and analysis.

But, I expect, that’s about as good as it’s going to get.

There’s no serious advocacy even here of a spirit world translation committee, no “theory,” no academic argument for such a thing. And that’s the most germane passage out of literally thousands of pages of published material.

Drs. Skousen and Carmack have been publishing serous historical-linguistic analysis pointing to hundreds of examples of a quite puzzling presence of Early Modern English in the Book of Mormon.

My point in issuing yesterday’s challenge was to call out certain critics who have been alleging (for years, though with ever diminishing excuse) that the existence of a “ghost-translation committee” in the spirit world is the very core of the Skousen/Carmack position. It’s not. It doesn’t really even rise to the level of peripheral.

The fact is that Drs. Skousen and Carmack have identified unexpected linguistic phenomena in the Book of Mormon that they weren’t originally looking for, didn’t expect to find, and can’t really explain — but that, though such linguistic features are not essential to a case for the historical authenticity and divine inspiration of the Book of Mormon, are extraordinarily interesting. (For one thing, in my judgment, they represent a potentially enormous problem for secularist critics.)

My challenge was intended to call out certain of those critics for their dismissive and sneering reactions to the work of Professors Carmack and Skousen, reactions that plainly demonstrate either of two things: a) They haven’t read any of it, because they consistently treat as its principal thesis a proposition that is never really advocated in any of the articles or massive books that Drs. Carmack and Skousen have published, or b) they’re shamelessly disingenuous.

P.S. I do remember that conversation with Professor Skousen. It probably occurred around 2006 or so, and I distinctly recall both the mention of William Tyndale and that the conversation occurred after dark in the main hallway, near one of the stairwells, on the ground floor of BYU’s Jesse Knight Building. It’s possible that I was the one who mentioned Tyndale’s name — this was a brief exchange that occurred a decade ago, after all — but I don’t remember the conversation that way.

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