Talk:Book of Mormon and the King James Bible

Untitled
This page has recently been created from a large section in Linguistics and the Book of Mormon. I made this move after a recommendation from Dlugar on the talk page. Current issues are:
 * need to migrate relevant references from the original article
 * need to check the style guide to see what sort of case formatting we are supposed to use on our headings, which are currently quite inconsistent
 * need feedback on the current transclusion/embedding setup I made to get the two articles to share the summary section
 * POV on "In other cases, the source is not acknowledged, especially in the case of seemingly anachronistic borrowings." ???? It's pretty minor, but still...

If anybody feels that this move has been made without sufficient discussion, please make it known. Suggestions are welcome! --RockRockOn 07:48, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Well...
Wow... this article has some hard-core NPOV problems, as well as verifiability, NOR, and... well lots of stuff... It seems like a very bad example of a POV fork to me, but since it was decided to keep we need to do some major rewriting, restructuring and renaming of sections. gdavies 21:50, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

I thought that the articles in this web site were neutral this one is strongly biased and is therefore disputable so why is it here?


 * Can you give some examples of "hard-core NPOV problems" (as opposed to softcore?) -- Ķĩřβȳ ♥  ♥  ♥  Ťįɱé  Ø  00:28, 20 March 2007 (UTC)


 * The problems with this article (which aren't limited to NPOV...) stem from the fact that there are virtually no citations, just one reference from FARMS (which doesn't seem to be heavily relied on). This has resulted in basically an essay on this subject, rather than an encyclopedia article. I can't think of a good solution or even a reason to keep this article. If the subject is notable, certainly more reputable sources can be found and we can make something other than "a brief synopsis on arguments regarding the authenticity of the Book of Mormon with respect to similarities with the King James Bible."  This is basically a minor element of common Mormon/Anti-Mormon debate that (IMHO) isn't very notable. gdavies 00:46, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Unsourced tag
I just added an "unsourced" tag, this article is in serious need of more referencing. There are plenty of scholarly LDS sources out there, but no real scholarly non-Mormon sources, so this is a very difficult subject to add appropriate sources. Unfortunately what we're going to end up with is what we have now (instead of an article): an aggregation of arguments and counterarguments against the church with regards to the Book of Mormon and the King James Bible. It also seems to read somewhat like an essay to me... well not exactly an essay, but a bunch of POV statements from both sides of a debate back and forth. Anyone else? gdavies 06:03, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
 * The original motivation for this article was the enormous size of the Linguistics and the Book of Mormon article, of which all of these arguments were a part. Obviously this doesn't of itself justify the continued existence of the article; however, it does explain some of its current incoherence.
 * As for neutrality, a lack of citable sources on one side of the issue hardly invalidates the arguments of the better-documented viewpoint. I imagine that here are a good deal more relevant, citable publications from the anti-LDS-leaning viewpoint that haven't yet been exploited. If so, I expect the citations to balance out over time as people aware of those sources contribute to the article.
 * Maybe what we need most of all is "refactoring," to borrow a computer science term. We need someone to look at the current pile of mostly disconnected information to try to infer common themes around which the text could be restructured, and then to carry out that restructuring. Who knows, maybe I'll feel ambitious sometime soon. --RockRockOn 21:46, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Looking for references
Hi, editors. I'm trying to add a very brief summary of this article to Book of Mormon. In particular I'm looking for references on the versification issue. The original Hebrew was not versified - the divisions were added later - and yet the KJV and the BoM exhibit exactly the same versification. Does anyone know if this issue has been tackled somewhere? DJ Clayworth (talk) 16:08, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

I don't know if this issue has been discussed anywhere, but I would question the significance of such a discussion. The original reformed Egyptian of the gold plates was not versified either, neither was the first addition of the book of Mormon, it wasn't until the fifth edition was printed in 1879 that major versification changes had been made for the readability of the text. It would make sense that the words of Isaiah also recorded in the Bible would be versified similarly in the Book of Mormon. There is an article that discusses the evolution of the Book of Mormon called "The Coming Forth of the Book of Mormon" and I found you another article of some of the other changes made to the book of Mormon as well; "Understanding the Process of Publishing the Book of Mormon" I don't know if these are the kinds of references that you want, but like I said, considering the fact that the similar scriptures in the Book of Mormon and the Bible both came from the ancient writings of Isaiah, it would make sense to make the B of M verses correspond with the already established verses in the Bible. I guess I'm saying that you might find difficulties looking for references on the "versification issue" because publishing idiosyncrasies are't what most academics would consider a canonical issue. --Shemseger (talk) 07:47, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

Achieving Neutrality
The main body of this article appears biased towards the suggestion that the KJV Bible was used as a source for writing the Book of Mormon. It is very likely that The King James Bible may have been used as a model for the translation of the Book of Mormon, but the authorship of the book is attributed to the man Mormon, who is reported to have compiled the book around 400 A.D., which happens to be the approximate year that Jerome compiled the first Christian Bible. I believe that in order to achieve neutrality that the article needs to be either re-written in order to show the harmony of two books written from the same source material, or re-written to demonstrate how the King James Bible may have been used as a translation model. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Shemseger (talk • contribs) 15:42, 9 February 2010 (UTC)


 * New stuff goes at the bottom. Do you sources showing any non-Mormon scholars that accept the Book of Mormon being older than two centuries?  If you have Mormon sources, we can add "Mormon scholars argue that..."  Ian.thomson (talk) 20:39, 9 February 2010 (UTC)


 * There are more than enough Mormon sources, BYU has been funding expeditions in mesoamerica for quite a number of years, in 1952 they organized the New World Archaeological Foundation whose sole purpose is the study of Preclassic history from about A.D. 200 and earlier. There have been non-LDS members of the association in years past, but it seems that many of them end up becoming members of the Church as a result of their studies, so I don't know if they could be sourced as "NON-LDS" scholars. I would assume you have to remain a non-LDS in order to qualify as one to be sourced? However that would be material for the Historical authenticity of the Book of Mormon would it not?
 * There are also certain Jewish experts of the Hebrew language that have been known to use the Book of Mormon as "a better example" of translations of ancient Hebrew linguistic phenomenon than the Bible. But I believe that these particular sources would be better suited for the larger section Linguistics and the Book of Mormon that this page was supposedly created from.
 * This page is comparing the contents of the two books, although as I mentioned before, the comparison feels biased towards using similarities with the Bible as a measure to disprove or discredit the authenticity of the Book of Mormon. I only see massive restructuring as the solution for remedying this. The other solution would be to nominate it for deletion again, as it's been 3 years since it was last kept and still there's no neutrality, but I'd rather see the page restructured. --Shemseger (talk) 05:58, 10 February 2010 (UTC)


 * p.s. Thank you Ian, for your assistance in familiarizing myself with wiki editing. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Shemseger (talk • contribs) 05:57, 10 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Some additional Mormon sources would be fine, but yeah, that'd probably be better for the historical authenticity article. The Hebrew language stuff would also be more appropriate for the linguistics article.  Thanks for being willing to hear fellow editors out and discuss things with them. Ian.thomson (talk) 15:22, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Intro section plus
Skousen is quoted herein, and has a critical text published by Yale UP. That should be referenced somewhere. Plus, he wrote more than 3 pages on "Sun of righteousness" in his ATV. That should be mentioned. Skousen's studied view is not what is in the last part of the intro. His tight control theory explicitly views the KJB being part of the translation. But his view is that Smith didn't translate it or use the KJB in his dictation. I say nothing here about what I believe, but his take is that it was a divine translation, not made by Smith, just received by him. Take it for what you will, but the last part of the intro should be modified since the linguist Skousen is the foremost authority on the text, having studied it for 25 years. -Champatsch (talk) 18:10, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

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Footnotes 8 & 13 reference an earlier footnote that seems to have been deleted?
This text appears in the popup when you hover over footnotes 8 & 13, "Tvedtnes, John A (1984), "Isaiah Variants in the Book of Mormon", Featured Papers, Provo, Utah: Maxwell Institute, archived from the original on 2007-04-08, retrieved 2007-04-16" but is missing as an actual reference earlier.

Also, if we look at the code for this reference, it uses Internet Archive/WayBack Machine (https://web.archive.org/web/20070408014044/http://farms.byu.edu/display.php?id=2&table=transcripts) - Why do this when the actual article is readily available from the BYU Religious Studies Center (https://rsc.byu.edu/isaiah-prophets/isaiah-variants-book-mormon) on a site that is current/maintained? 24.52.4.156 (talk) 03:22, 5 July 2023 (UTC)