Sunday, September 13, 2020

Proving Joseph Smith Plagiarised Sources to Produce the Book of Mormon: Ether 14:1 and "Bloody Boring Prophets"

 

For years, astute scholars like the Tanners, Wesley Walters, Walter Martin, and others have tried to find the source(s) of the 1830 Book of Mormon. However, until now, we have been unable to find the source of the book of Ether, a book in the Book of Mormon. However, today I would like to present the source for the book of Ether, one that provides stronger parallels than those proposed by Persuitte et al for Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews and Varnick et al. re the Spalding Manuscript(s).

 

In Ether 14:1, we read the following:

 

And now there began to be a great curse upon all the land because of the iniquity of the people, in which, if a man should lay his tool or his sword upon his shelf, or upon the place whither he would keep it, behold, upon the morrow, he could not find it, so great was the curse upon the land.

 

Joseph Smith, being the plagiarist he was, cribbed the above from the following source:

 

There shall, in that time, be rumors of things going astray, and there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things with the sort of raffia work base that has an attachment. At this time, a friend shall lose his friend's hammer and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o'clock . . .

 

This parallel alone is more explosive, more explicit, than many of those between the Book of Mormon and other sources (e.g., The Late War). The source? A work called “Bloody Boring Prophets,” a scene from the greatest movie of all time, The Life of Brian.

 

Now, some will bring up the fact that The Life of Brian was released in 1979, and the Book of Mormon was initially published in 1830. While some desperate apologists like Dan Peterson and Stephen Smoot will raise objections like this, it is nothing but a smokescreen—Joseph Smith obviously had access to the same manuscript John Cleese et al used to write The Life of Brian, a “Proto-Life of Brian” of sorts. I am sure Dr. Michael Quinn, when he examines this issue in detail, will prove that, just as they possessed medieval parchments discussing magical practices, possessed such a manuscript, too (expect an appendix in a future [3rd] edition of Early Mormonism and the Magic World View). Indeed, what Jeff Lindsay, wrote in his Was the Book of Mormon Plagiarized from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass? also applies to The Life of Brian and Joseph Smith’s plagiarism thereof:

 

Mormon apologists will immediately nitpick at the slight problem of publication dates (Whitman's first edition of the Leaves of Grass in 1855 appears to postdate the 1830 Book of Mormon by about 25 years), but such arguments are mere smokescreens that can be readily blown away. The simple fact is this: Walt Whitman is surely the best nineteenth-century candidate ever proposed for Book of Mormon plagiarism, offering parallels far richer than other writers and scholars have proposed using other texts. The details of how such an early copy of Leaves of Grass fell into Joseph's hand may require further investigation, but with the evidence I present below, the case for Joseph Smith as a plagiarist should be greatly clarified. 

 

It is now game-over for LDS apologists and scholars who try, desperately, to defend the Book of Mormon as a translation of an ancient document.