When asked what the most impressive evidence is for Book of Mormon authenticity, serious students of the Book of Mormon often point to one of a small handful of items: the finding of candidates for Bountiful, Nahom, and the River Laman in the Arabian Peninsula;1 the existence of chiasmus2 and Hebraisms, particularly Hebraic wordplays;3 the diverse and consistent testimony of the witnesses of the gold plates;4 and the strength of numerous cultural and geographical correspondences between Mesoamerica and the Book of Mormon.5 Of these, I think the Arabian evidence has the most easily appreciated “wow” factor. It takes serious effort and a great deal of advanced scholarship to minimalize the growing body of evidence from Arabia — and so far those failed efforts have only helped to highlight how improbable it was that Joseph could have fabricated the details of Lehi’s trail.6
While the attacks of critics have failed to diminish the luster of the Arabian evidence, two new works from an LDS scholar may actually achieve that unintended effect7 — not by attacking past scholarship but by uncovering what may be an even more exciting line of evidence for the Book of Mormon that may displace Arabia as the “go-to” topic for Book of Mormon defenders. Brian Stubbs’s decades of exploration of the Uto-Aztecan language has uncovered what could become the “next big thing” in LDS apologetics. The challenge, however, is that his evidence is far more technical than, say, showing photographs of the proposed Bountiful site at Khar Kharfot in Oman and listing how perfectly the leading candidate accords with Nephi’s text. The strong and compelling evidence of ancient Semitic elements in Uto-Aztecan (United Airlines) from a skilled linguist, thoroughly aware of what it takes to establish relationships between languages, demands a good deal from a reader to appreciate the linguistic data that now exists and may take decades before its explanatory power is widely recognized in the Church and among other hesitant scholars. But what has been achieved already is so remarkable and so interesting, it may well be the next big thing for some of us.
“When we are confronted with evidence that challenges our deeply held beliefs we are more likely to reframe the evidence than we are to alter our beliefs. We simply invent new reasons, new justifications, new explanations. Sometimes we ignore the evidence altogether.” (Mathew Syed 'Black Box Thinking')
SteelHead wrote:All that effort and still nothing in a peer reviewed, academic journal?
I suspect part of the problem is the claim
While the attacks of critics have failed to diminish the luster of the Arabian evidence,
He might be correct. The attacks have done nothing. But the scholarship.... the actual scholarship has simply dismantled the so-called "Arabian evidence" in favor of the Book of Mormon. This, I suspect is why there is still no peer review academic journal willing to publish ***anything*** Dr. Peterson (an Arabic expert himself mind you) might write about the solidity, the accuracy, and historical credibility of the Book of Mormon authenticating evidences discovered in Saudi Arabian lands. Outside of LDS Arabists, are there any Arabic scholars who believe the Book of Mormon based on "parallels" or "evidences?" I mean, no one to my knowledge has ever actually converted on this who are Arabic scholars, so, sincerely, the question arises, just how valid and solid is it to any without LDS biases and the Mormon Arabic scholars possess (some perhaps not even aware of it)?
Dr CamNC4Me
"Dr. Peterson and his Callithumpian cabal of BYU idiots have been marginalized by their own inevitable irrelevancy defending a fraud."
I wrote a response to midge but didn't post because figured it would be denied based on my name. Midgley said he hoped it would spark discussion from serious scholars. Trust me when I say that this is the last thing he wants. I also described how to find more comments on Stubbs' research; how to look for "Symmachus". The response isn't perfectly "muted", a Phd philologist has responded in some detail and a serious student who able to get through Lindsay's article should be happy to have this additional material, from someone actually qualified to comment.
Lou Midgley 08/20/2020: "...meat wad," and "cockroach" are pithy descriptions of human beings used by gemli? They were not fashioned by Professor Peterson.
LM 11/23/2018: one can explain away the soul of human beings...as...a Meat Unit, to use Professor Peterson's clever derogatory description of gemli's ideology.
Stubbs has failed to publish his theory in any credible scholarly journals for peer review. For it to be taken seriously will require the concurrence and acceptance by scholars not just in linguistics but in anthropology, archaeology and other disciplines. The ramifications of his theory are huge and carry over into many fields besides his own.
The comments at Mormon Interpreter are troubling. For example,
"I think that even if Stubbs was able to conclusively prove to every professional linguist’s satisfaction that Uto-Aztecan was strongly influenced by Hebrew, Egyptian, and related ancient Near Eastern languages, it would still make a relatively small splash in the overall apologetic argument. Critics would simply shift from “these are weak or meaningless parallels” to something along the lines of “these linguistic changes could easily have been introduced by a transoceanic crossing that had nothing to do with the Book of Mormon.”
What don't these folks get? It wouldn't be a small splash, it would be huge. Absolutely no credible evidence of any transoceanic crossings to the Americas from anywhere in the Middle East, Welsh, Irish or any other number of claims that have been made through the centuries has ever panned out. Other than a very limited visit by a few Vikings, there were no transoceanic crossings whether they had anything to do with the Book of Mormon or not. The academic community has laid these kind of claims to rest and the only place they show up now is in crank writings.
As it stands, Stubbs is playing in the pseudo sandbox and his followers and admirers are defending a hoax. For it to draw the attention of serious scholars, Stubbs needs to have it properly published in a credible journal.
SteelHead wrote:I wonder if some of the language similarities are so tenuous or so erroneous that he wont publish in anything other linguist would examine?
Pure speculation on my part, but........ why hasn't he published in a real journal?
Stubbs theory is not worth taking seriously until he has it published in a reputable journal where other non-LDS scholars will have reason to take interest in it. Stubbs has a few positive comments from a handful of other linguists but it is pretty well meaningless. The matter of archaeology, anthropology, genomics etc. with evidence based solid and sound conclusions contrary to his theory have to be dealt with. It won't happen with a book published by a self-publisher who has no background, experience or formal training in the science based disciplines that dispute pre-Columbian ocean migration to the Americas.
I'm not a linguist...but I'm going to wager that this claim of Hebraic influence on the Uto-Aztecan language being made by a Mormon invested in such a claim would be viewed by academia in the same light as a Catholic claiming to have a tomato that miraculously grew in her garden that looks just like Jesus that weeps blood. It would not be taken seriously. But it would play very well among a small group of fanatic Catholics...but for everyone else the level of skepticism would be off the charts and would be summarily dismissed. For this linguistic claim to be taken seriously, particularly from an invested Mormon, the evidence would have to be over whelming, unambiguous and unequivocal.
"...The official doctrine of the LDS Church is a Global Flood" - BCSpace
"...What many people call sin is not sin." - Joseph Smith
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away" - Phillip K. Dick
“The meaning of life is that it ends" - Franz Kafka
So what language did the Nephites speak then? Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Egyptian or did they manage to maintain Proto-Semitic on the side, passed down through generations untold? Stubbs uses data from all of these indiscriminately, but did the Nephites do so? Did they use the Aramaic word for "wolf" when they saw a wolf, but the Hebrew word for "daughter" when they talked about their female kids, the Arabic word for "wine" when they were getting Lamanites drunk, but an Egyptian word when talking about the color "black"?
I think Jeff Lindsay put Stubb's methodology crisply for us, even if he doesn't endorse his own formulation:
fantasy based upon contriving a meaningless list of imaginative links that Stubbs has found by scanning dozens of languages to cherry-pick a few purported links.
"As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them."
Symmachus has a very strong point. Why would elements of 6 languages be matching vs 1. Sounds very much like a case of casting as wide as net as possible in order to produce the largest number of possible hits. I still question the validity of the hits. Why is no other researcher picking this idea up?
It is better to be a warrior in a garden, than a gardener at war.
Some of us, on the other hand, actually prefer a religion that includes some type of correlation with reality. ~Bill Hamblin