Seeing behind the Biblical Unitarian's Curtain

Dr. Dale Tuggy has just posted part 1 of a 2-part series on "Mormonism" on his Trinities podcast:

Mormons seeing the man behind the curtain--Part 1

In light of his comments, I realise that Dale may just reject what I have to write here--he claims that apologists tend to be intellectually dishonest and it is often unwise for people to link to apologists for different perspectives. However, as one who (hopefully) has intellectual integrity, this brief post won't be dismissed . . . 

While Dale will think this is just typical Mormon knee-jerk response to criticisms, nothing new crops up in this podcast, though Dale is much more, well, nicer than, say, James White, when he discusses the Church.

Sadly, very little research went into this. We are told, among other things, that Mormons are supposed not to read anti-LDS literature (which means that I have over 200 books to give away now—who wants them?) and even gives John Dehlin huge kudos (to see a review of his Mormon Studies podcast and his documented intellectual dishonesty, see here and here, both pieces written by my friend Gregory L. Smith).

Dale also mentions (rather favourably) the "All About Mormons" episode of South Park. However, even this Website, which ain't friendly towards the LDS Church, acknowledges that the episode got a lot of things wrong. The fact that Tuggy thinks this episode is good is amazing. It would be like someone thinking that the movie Dogma or The DaVinci Code contain pretty good descriptions of Catholicism and early Christianity.

He quotes from Richard L. Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling (Knop, 2005) on the death of Joseph Smith about the death of Joseph Smith and his use of a six-shot pistol (and Hyrum having a one-shot pistol) as is shocking. And yet such has been discussed in LDS literature, including Church manuals, for a very, very long time (I know it has been discussed in LDS classroom settings, among other things [e.g., different accounts of the First Vision]). For a listing, click here.

The analysis of the Book of Mormon is, well, superficial. Mark Twain's comments about the volume from Roughing It are quoted, and the use of "and it came to pass" is critiqued. As I wrote in my review of Trent Horn's volume on "Mormonism" from Catholic Answers:

Trent Horn vs. “And it came to pass”

[T]he text of the Book of Mormon bears many of the earmarks of an improvised dictation, especially the repetition of the phrase "it came to pass," which is used nearly 1,500 times.

The corresponding note (no. 52) for this argument reads, in part:

Keep in mind the same phrase is used less than five hundred times in the King James Bible, which is five times longer than the Book of Mormon.

 Firstly, comparing the entire King James Bible with the Book of Mormon is a false comparison, as the New Testament is written in Greek; it would be fairer to compare the Old Testament with the Book ok of Mormon.

Secondly, the phrase translated as "it came to pass" is וַיְהִי (e.g. Gen 4:3). This word is made of the conjunction וַ and the Qal imperfect conjugation of the verb היה, “to be.” This particular combined form changes the tense of the conjugation, putting it in the simple past. A literal translation would be “and it was,” “and it became,” or “and it happened.” The word is virtually exclusive to narrative, where it is very common in the Hebrew Bible, occurring 1204 times. The KJV only translates the phrase “and it came to pass” 727 times, as it can get rather repetitive translated the same way repeatedly within the same verse. It uses a number of other phrase in substitution. The Hebrew Bible has roughly 22,500 verses of Hebrew in it, giving the phrase a frequency of about 5.4%.

The phrase “and it came to pass” appears 1297 times in the Book of Mormon. There are almost 6,600 verses in the Book of Mormon, which gives the phrase a frequency of 19.7%. The discrepancy in frequency is clear and that ends the story for the Scripture Project, but there’s much more to it. As stated above, the word ויהי appears virtually exclusively in narrative in the Hebrew Bible. It very rarely occurs in poetry, prophetic literature, or law. The Book of Mormon is almost exclusively narrative, and, chapter for chapter, contains much more narrative than the Bible. There are about a dozen verses of poetry scattered around it and a few hundred verses of exclusively prophetic material. If we remove 500 verses from the Book of Mormon to account for non-narrative, we get a frequency of about 21.3%. The Book of Mormon, however, does not employ the substituting phrases that the English translations of the Hebrew Bible do.

The Hebrew Bible has much greater frequencies of non-narrative verse. A seminal article by Francis I. Anderson and A. Dean Forbes (Francis I. Anderson and A. Dean Forbes, “Prose Participle” Counts of the Hebrew Bible in Carol L. Meyers and M. O’Connor, The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman in Celebration of his Sixtieth Birthday [Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1983], 165-83) presents a statistical analysis of prose v. poetry in the Hebrew Bible. It points out that the Hebrew Bible contains 900 chapters written Hebrew. It breaks down the text according to frequency of a combination of particles virtually exclusive to prose. Chapters with less than 5% frequency for the particles are purely poetic. 10-20% frequency marks mixed poetry and prose. This is where prophetic literature falls, for the most part. Over 20% marks pure prose, or historical narrative, where the word in question occurs by far with the most frequency.

392 chapters fall below 10%, meaning the word in question rarely if ever appears. To illustrate this, 40 of the 66 chapters of Isaiah have a frequency of less than 7%, but the word ויהי appears in none of them. It only appears 11 times in the other 26 chapters. The word appears 4 times total in the 150 chapters of the book of Psalms, which rises above 10% 11 times. The Wisdom books (Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, Proverbs, Song of Solomon) have a frequency of 0.28% for the word ויהי. The 386 chapters between 10-20% are a mixture of poetry and prose, which means the word will occur sporadically. This is primarily the major and minor prophets and large chunks of the Torah, in which the verses with the word ויהי have a frequency of around 3 to 4%. The chapters over 20% (122) are most likely to have the word. These are the historical books, which make up about a third of the Hebrew Bible. The segments of pure narrative and genealogy in these books have the same frequency of the word ויהי as the narrative and genealogy in the Book of Mormon.

When the literary genre is taken into account, the frequency of the word ויהי in the Hebrew Bible is roughly the same as in the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon was putatively written in a language which is referred to as a reformed Egyptian. It is described as a mixture of Jewish and Egyptian languages. Many recent philological discoveries show that it was not uncommon for Northwest Semitic grammar and syntax to be combined with Egyptian scripts (e.g., Charles F. Nims and Richard C. Steiner, "A Paganized Version of Psalm 20:2-6 from the Aramaic Text in Demotic Script," Journal of the American Oriental Society vol. 103 no. 1 [Jan. - Mar., 1983], pp. 261-74).

Joseph Smith was not at all trying too hard. If anything, this shows that the Book of Mormon is more closely related to Semitic literary conventions than to English, and blows Trent Horn's misinformed comments out of the water.

 If Dale ever discusses “Mormonism” again, I would hope that he will contact someone such as Blake Ostler or even myself or Daniel McClellan (both of us are facebook friends with him), even if to critique Latter-day Saint theology, history, and Scripture---I would have preferred a discussion on LDS vs. Biblical Unitarian on various issues, including Christology. Indeed, it should be noted that in 2014, when Dale “added” me as a friend on facebook, I dropped him a private message and offered to put him in contact with Blake Ostler and/or offered my assistance in any discussion of “Mormonism.”

I will note that that it was rich for a Biblical unitarian and Open Theist to claim that certain aspects of LDS theology are out in left field. The theological equivalent of the pot calling the kettle black.

Dr. Dale Tuggy is undoubtedly a very smart fellow--I have followed his podcast and blog for a few years now, and, while I disagree with him on many issues, he tends to show great intellectual integrity, especially on the issue of Christology. Hopefully his future articles/podcasts critiquing the LDS Church will be more intellectually informed and less superficial.

Novak's Rule proves true yet again--when you become anti-Mormon, expect your IQ to drop 85 points, or, in other words, God strikes you stupid. Critical thinking skills, honesty, and integrity are thrown out, not when one becomes a Latter-day Saint, but often when one critiques (in Tuggy's case, rather ignorantly, alas) "Mormonism," utter nonense is the result. It would be akin to me using Sam Shamoun's arguments against Unitarianism as proof "Biblical" Unitarianism is false--intellectually disingenuous.