There is a rather silly thread on a facebook page by a former member of the LDS Church who wrote the following (which shows they never bothered to study the issue in the first place and/or they are just being disingenuous):
For those who actually want to be informed on the topic, Brant Gardner wrote a book that was released just under a year ago:
Traditions of the Fathers: The Book of Mormon as History (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2015).
The book won the AML religious non-fiction award in 2015 and is one of the best books on Book of Mormon antiquity that has ever been released.
Incidentally, this critic should know better; for instance, they were in a to-and-fro with Blake Ostler a few months ago on facebook, and could not answer any of the evidence Blake offered for the antiquity of the text such as the prophetic lawsuit motif in 1 Nephi 1. Blake ably discussed this and other issues in his 1987 Dialogue article, The Book of Mormon as a Modern Expansion of an Ancient Source (esp. pp. 87-101)
It is a common tactic for critics to act (superficially) sincere when in reality they are ignorant and/or unwilling to engage with the other side in any meaningful way. This one individual is no different. However, intellectually honest individuals would do well to track down a copy of Brant's book and see the many evidences for the historicity of the Book of Mormon from various fields.
Please.. someone inform me, where is there one shred of evidence from linguistics, epigraphics, anthropology, sociology, archaeology, translation theory, that I have to wrestle with, that cant be explained more simply using a 19th century origin model?
For those who actually want to be informed on the topic, Brant Gardner wrote a book that was released just under a year ago:
Traditions of the Fathers: The Book of Mormon as History (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2015).
The book won the AML religious non-fiction award in 2015 and is one of the best books on Book of Mormon antiquity that has ever been released.
Incidentally, this critic should know better; for instance, they were in a to-and-fro with Blake Ostler a few months ago on facebook, and could not answer any of the evidence Blake offered for the antiquity of the text such as the prophetic lawsuit motif in 1 Nephi 1. Blake ably discussed this and other issues in his 1987 Dialogue article, The Book of Mormon as a Modern Expansion of an Ancient Source (esp. pp. 87-101)
It is a common tactic for critics to act (superficially) sincere when in reality they are ignorant and/or unwilling to engage with the other side in any meaningful way. This one individual is no different. However, intellectually honest individuals would do well to track down a copy of Brant's book and see the many evidences for the historicity of the Book of Mormon from various fields.
