Bogus Chains of Transmission in the Book of Mormon and the Old Testament
Kevin R. Henke
November 30, 2022
Lundahl (2022y) is a relatively long response to statements that I made in Henke (2022bx), which is entitled: “Lundahl (2022L) Rambles on and Fails to Make Any Mythology Look Believable.” I made the following comments in Henke (2022bx):
“As I also discussed in Henke (2022b), Mr. Lundahl’s proclamations in Lundahl (2022c) and here in Lundahl (2022L) do absolutely nothing to demonstrate that anything in Genesis is history whether it was given by God entirely through visions (Hypothesis #2 as discussed in Henke 2022a and Henke 2022b) or by arbitrarily dividing Genesis into sections with limited visions from God and the rest supposedly through human transmission (Hypothesis #1). Even the internal evidence in Genesis and Exodus fails to support Hypothesis #1 as I explained in Henke (2022b). That is, how did Moses know that Aaron was his brother?* How did Moses know anything about his family, ancestors or anything that supposedly happened in Genesis when he was supposedly given up for adoption as an infant? Everyone agrees that Moses was not physically there to witness anything in Genesis, if anything mentioned in Genesis ever happened at all. Now, the Mormons have a bogus, but simple, chain of custody for the book of Mormon, which is: Mormon à Joseph Smith, Jr. à The public. But, what is the chain of custody for Genesis? Lundahl (2022m) speculates about the descendants of Adam memorizing oral traditions and effectively passing them down until they were eventually written down. Again, Lundahl (2022m) has no evidence whatsoever that these biblical characters ever existed or ever memorized anything. Now, even if Adam, Noah and others wrote down what they saw and gave these documents to their descendants as speculated by Hypothesis #1, who gave these documents to Moses? Where’s the confirmed chain of custody? There’s no evidence of Adam, Noah or other Genesis characters writing any document any more than there’s any evidence for the Golden plates of the Book of Mormon.
Advocates of Hypothesis #2 would groundlessly speculate that no matter what, God must have intervened to tell Moses what happened in Genesis through visions or audible confirmation. Advocates of Hypotheses #3 or #4 would argue that there’s not a shred of evidence to support any of the far-fetched claims about the Garden of Eden, the Talking Snake, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, the Nephilim, etc. in Genesis.
Now, false stories or legends often become associated with real people. The Oxford English Dictionary, Mr. Lundahl’s favorite, provides the following definition of legend:
“A traditional story sometimes popularly regarded as historical but not authenticated; a fable, a myth.”
So, legends are either unreliable or false stories. They may become associated with famous individuals that actually lived. For example, George Washington was a real person. However, the famous story about him chopping down the cherry tree is probably a legend. Another legend that George Washington saw an angelic vision about the future of the United States at Valley Forge is also a likely work of fiction. Yet, these stories are widely believed by the American people along with the myths that the Europeans believed that the world was flat before Christopher Columbus and that Columbus actually landed in what is now the United States (see Henke 2022dg). These are examples of how lies and propaganda can widely deceive people and why Mr. Lundahl’s “earliest known audience” charade is not reliable evidence of history. [original emphasis in bold; my emphasis in bold and italics]
*It turns out that Moses’ sister supposedly saw Pharoah’s daughter take Moses (Exodus 2:4). If this event ever happened, it could explain how Moses knew that Aaron was his brother.
Lundahl (2022y) comments on various parts of Henke (2022bx). I am replying to these comments starting in Henke (2022Lu). In response to my above bolded and italicized statement, Mr. Lundahl in Lundahl (2022y) says the following in red:
“Let's fact check the simplicity:
According to Joseph Smith, in 1823, when he was seventeen years of age, an angel of God named Moroni appeared to him and said that a collection of ancient writings was buried in a nearby hill in present-day Wayne County, New York, engraved on golden plates by ancient prophets.
· Moroni was an angel (purportedly), so the claim is prophetic rather than historic
· and the authors had no direct human contact with Joseph Smith, again making it not normally transmitted history.
How exactly do you get a more or less invisible transition (seamless is a word) from a bogus chain of transmission of bogus history to a real chain of transmission of real history? The simple answer is: you don't.
The relevance of Hercules and Romulus to my argument (and I could add Odin in Uppsala, as well as his descendants up to Ingjald Illråda for the Swedish-Norwegian accounts, or Frotho of Denmark) is, they have by learned men been seriously presented as examples of this mysterious process. I don't buy that.
Part of the reasons they would have is the stories are too spectacular. Reality is spectacular. Part of the reasons are, people want origin myths for their nations. USA has not forgotten George Washington and New York has not forgotten Nieuw Amsterdam. Part of the reasons are the few parts of the stories linked to pagan gods actually acting as gods (unlike Odin who acted as a false prophet) - usually, this would be misinterpretation, confer the words about Achilles. Part of it is certain people are shown with a strength that would seem to some "supernatural" - which a) means it begs the question why one would impose naturalistic philosophy as a criterium for historic credibility, except for those who for other reasons believe it; b) foregoes that while the average non-African percentage of Neanderthal genome is 2 %, what is available is 30 - 33 % (forget which) and Neanderthals were stronger. Someone 20 % Neanderthal would be stronger than any other around him not having that percentage. And if they worshipped Zeus as a strong god, they would probably attribute it to Zeus. And part of the reason is, Herodotus doesn't caution the Iliad without reserves - but the thing is, he has no qualms about the Ring if Gyges, and his tactic reason for dismissing the historicity of the Iliad was that Persians were taking its historicity as "Greek agression on Asians" and making this a case for "Asian retaliation on Greeks" - as reason after reason for the present paradigm is refuted, it should go. Which is my reason for using an opposite and older one, including in apologetics. Obviously also defending it against Mr. Henke's blatant prejudice.”
My current reply: I agree with Mr. Lundahl that a bogus chain of transmission exists for the Book of Mormon. The Mormons simply state that Moroni and others wrote the “God-inspired” Book of Mormon on golden plates and then he buried them. In his supposed vision to Joseph Smith, Moroni simply told him where the golden plates had been “safely buried” for 1,400 years. The story does involve a “recovered history”, but again the Mormons would argue that the plates were well-preserved, original God-inspired history and that, unlike the Bible, they were not corrupted by centuries of human copying and manipulation through “normal transmitted history.”
At the same time, I keep stressing the Knowledge Gap associated with the Old Testament, which is just as bad as the Mormon’s far-fetched “recovered historical plates” story (Henke 2022iL). We simply don’t know how the Pentateuch was composed, when it was composed and how it may have been manipulated from the time it was finished to our oldest copies in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Mr. Lundahl simply refuses to recognize that his Old Testament also lacks a legitimate chain of transmission. There’s no more evidence that Joshua, Moses, Joseph, Abraham or Adam ever existed than Moroni, Nephi, Omni, Mosiah or Alma.
People certainly want to believe that their nations were founded by great people doing great things for their great gods. Unfortunately, people often tend to make up or exaggerate stories to make their nations, heroes and gods look superior to their competitors. This is exactly why we can’t trust the unverified George Washington cherry tree account (Henke 2022gg), the William Tell story (Henke 2022ek) and most of the Old Testament (Henke 2022LL). So, it’s important not to accept any of these stories at face value. We should be skeptical of all of them unless they are confirmed with external evidence (Henke 2022dv).
Certainly, claims of miracles in any story should raise suspicion because no miracle has ever been demonstrated under strictly controlled laboratory conditions (Henke 2022co). Again, I don’t have an irrational “prejudice” against the supernatural. If a miracle can be demonstrated under strictly controlled conditions, I’ll accept it (Henke 2022ae). Nevertheless, many stories, such as George Washington and the cherry tree, contain no miracles. Yet, because they have no independent external confirmation, there’s no reason to accept them. Even without referring to Jesus’ miracles, Carrier (2014, pp. 387-509) still easily identifies many flaws in the Gospels that expose them as works of fiction (e.g., Mark 8:4 in Henke 2022hg). The rest of this section of Lundahl (2022y) contains a lot of meaningless and incoherent rambling about Neanderthals, Zeus, Herodotus, and the Persians. Mr. Lundahl needs to write better.
Reference:
Carrier, R. 2014. On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt, Sheffield Phoenix Press: Sheffield, UK, 696pp.