I like Bill a lot, and I do appreciate that he is trying to make space for those on the margins of belief. I was in a very similar place a couple years ago. But this whole episode feels like justifications after rationalizations for any means of staying connected with a premise that just fails on its own evidence, in numerous ways, and contradicts the expectations of the Book of Mormon's own premise and the history of its translation. I don't want to get into the whole of it, though... But one comment in particular by Sam Brown really made me shake and scratch my head. See what you think.
"The Book of Mormon quite self-consciously advocates a vision of scripture that is hybrid. And the hybrid scripture specifically requires a written text and a living prophet. And scripture arises from the conjunction of a written text and a living prophet, much as the traditional Mormon model of a human being is a spirit and a body representing the soul of a person. In the case of scripture according to the Book of Mormon, a text and a living prophet here constitute scripture. Now if we take that model of hybrid scripture seriously, then I think we're forced to expect that the Book of Mormon, particularly the Book of Mormon as it comes to be in the world will be both a 19th century and an antique document. So as I read the Book of Mormon, speaking solely academically, I think the Book of Mormon requires that it be both ancient and 19th century. So in this case, I think the academic reading of the Book of Mormon is quite compatible with a devotional reading, or a believer's reading of the Book of Mormon that says that anachronisms belong in the Book of Mormon... The Book of Mormon, according to its own self-understanding expects anachronism... The Book of Mormon wants to be anachronistic. And when you find 19th century material in the Book of Mormon, you haven't caught the Book of Mormon in a mistake. You've finally begun to grapple, if you're thoughtful, with the reality that the Book of Mormon rejects strict linear temporality and rejects the notion that any given encounter with God has to be locked in the temporal space in which it first occurred."
So the modern Mormon apologists are having to redefine the understanding and expectations from the Book of Mormon itself. Okay, fine. New angles and approaches should always be welcome. But I maintain that they do so in this case at odds with the history. They need the translation to be very loose for this approach to work, when the 116 pages incident and direct witness testimony and other evidence describes it as being very tight. And it's amusing how for years the approach was to say that there really aren't anachronisms in the book, it's just that we haven't learned or discovered enough to verify some things, but now it's "Hey, really there should be anachronisms! See?? You just don't get it. You're just not thoughtful." Anything to keep the fire going.
The full podcast can be heard here, or through your usual podcast player: http://www.mormondiscussionpodcast.org/ ... storicity/