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Supposedly they have found new evidence of amazing plagiarization…..anyone familiar with it? You can also watch the Author on Youtube. Search for “Mormon Doctrine Has Been Plagiarized”
Feels a bit infomercially…
I’m highly skeptical, although I haven’t read the book. If the summary were correct, it would have been extremely obvious to so many researchers by now that this wouldn’t be news. Seriously, the books they cite are common enough that someone would have written about it by now – and to say it took 25 years to research and find this sort of evidence just doesn’t sound plausible with those sources as the foundation. It sounds like people who read thousands of things looking for something to piece together from multiple sources to make their claim – and if it took them that long to put it together, in a day of readily accessible plagiarism software, it just doesn’t sound plausible to me.
I think Ray is right on this. john, do you want to find that the BOM is fraud? Can someone summarize please, can’t be bothered buying this! Tempted to buy it. But my gut feeling is that it’s bogus. The few reviews sound a bit like infomercials. I mean if you want to make a few bucks seed some Mormon groups with fake reviews about your groundbreaking information. Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I727 using Tapatalk 2
It’s the usual sensationalism to flog any book/film etc these days. Usually disappoints due to high expectations. Someone claimed that Skyfall is the “best Bond film ever”. It’s not, not even close, although it’s watchable, and better than the last one. (Not better than Craig’s Casino Royale though) I digress, although I refer to sensational claims.
Something tells me that even with the somewhat remote possibility of JS turning up in an ancient video saying, “Gee made it all up”, people would still believe. That’s because it has a value and life of its own. And why do people have testimonies and spiritual experiences with it? Not because they’re told to, but because they get something out of it, beyond the mere text.
Go with your gut feeling, John :thumbup: Quote:[BofM is] nothing more than cleverly disguised plagiarism of The Travels of Marco Polo, the voyage of Christopher Columbus to the New World as recorded by his son, histories of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, and travel journals . . . all readily available to Smith.
I’m sorry, but that is laughable. I’ve always thought the “anti” crowd was stupid for overshooting. I bet JS read The Hobbit as often as he read the Travels of Marco Polo.Quote:“Book of Lies” will alter the course of global religion, finance, and politics.
It makes me laugh… Mormons think Joseph lived in a hovel which was a cross between a dog kennel and a chicken coop, with only the KJV for company.
Certain critics think he lived beside the flipping Library of Congress!!!
Come back Spaulding, Rigdon and View of the Hebrews, all is forgiven.
Marco Polo?! Conquest of Mexico?! Come on! Do we really think these were “readily available” in remote New England at the time?!
Of course, we all know that Joseph was an avid reader of The Critique of Pure Reason, the Nicomachean Ethics, the Bhavagad Gita, Tao Te Ching, Piers Plowman, the Decameron, Sappho’s poetry, the Prose Edda, Goethe’s early works, MacPherson’s Ossian and Voltaire. All of these would no doubt be readily available to him.
Did you know Marco Polo might be a fraud? Not only is there no Chinese record of him, the internal evidence is shaky too.
SamBee wrote:Did you know Marco Polo might be a fraud? Not only is there no Chinese record of him, the internal evidence is shaky too.
My theory is that Marco Polo got lost, inadvertently crossed the Behring land bride, and found “China” which was actually Mexico, where he appeared as the great winged (and white) serpent God Quetzalcoatl, and stole all the horses, elephants and wheels to take back with him to the Old Word, leaving only a note that said, “Brethren, Adieu.”
Maybe the original read ,,¡hermanos adios!”
On Own Now wrote:Book of Lies” will alter the course of global religion, finance, and politics.
Yeah, This claim really boggles the imagination. Must be willing to believe anything to swallow that one.
As far as plagiarism? Is the Sword of Shannara a plagiarism of the Hobbit? Is the sitcom Friends a plagiarism of Sienfeld? I have no problem with JS having read any and all of these books and then when the inspiration struck him what came out of his head had similarities to things that he might have actually read and heard about before. I already take it as a given that the translation process was inexact and that a certain amount of JS ended up on the page mixed with the divine inspiration. I also take as a given that JS was formed and influenced in the culture of his day and may have been exposed to significant literature of his time. We already know that JS took inspiration from things in his environment (see temple ceremony). Must I live in a cave in order to create something original?
If anything, the head in hat model of the translation process certainly seems to be at odds with the plagiarism claim. Was he pouring over source documents (gold plates or Travels of Marco Polo/View of the Hebrews) or was his face obscured in a hat? It is hard to have it both ways. Even if they argue that some of the main themes had been done before, the direction that JS took it was certainly unique (he did found a world religion after all).
My hypothesis is that BOM is a 19th century revelation and it has multiple ear marks of that era. A similar hypothesis might hold that there are some nuggets of ancient origin in the BOM that get filtered through the 19th century mind of JS – so we end up with something ancient wrapped up in something not so ancient. I have no problem with either of these constructs.
SamBee wrote:It makes me laugh…
…Did you know Marco Polo might be a fraud? Not only is there no Chinese record of him, the internal evidence is shaky too.
What? The book the BoM was copied from might be about something that didn’t really happen? Egad…there goes my testimony!
Sorry…just seemed funny considering the thread. The part I really want to read is that he claims to have “decoded” Lucy Smiths record and found a cleverly disguised confession to the whole scam. I really want to see how he comes up with that…..I know…it would stretch credibility but I do like the occasional Weekly World News article…..Who knows…maybe Cher did have bigfoots baby…SamBee has a picture as his avatar
Quote:
What? The book the BoM was copied from might be about something that didn’t really happen? Egad…there goes my testimony!Nooooo!
Quote:Sorry…just seemed funny considering the thread. The part I really want to read is that he claims to have “decoded” Lucy Smiths record and found a cleverly disguised confession to the whole scam. I really want to see how he comes up with that…..I know…it would stretch credibility but I do like the occasional Weekly World News article…..Who knows…maybe Cher did have bigfoots baby…SamBee has a picture as his avatar
There goes the family secret.
😆 Museum of Hoaxes
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/archive/permalink/the_travels_of_marco_polo Quote:The basic argument against Marco Polo involves a set of telling omissions. First of all, no reference has ever been found in Chinese archives to an Italian visitor like Marco Polo, despite the fact that China’s bureaucrats kept numerous forms of documentation and recorded the presence of many other westerners. If Marco Polo really did serve as a special emissary to the Great Khan, it seems unusual that his presence would never have been noted.
Second of all, Polo’s account omits many details about Chinese culture that seemed very important to almost all later European travellers. For instance,
Wood notes Polo’s “apparent failure to pick up even a few Chinese or Mongol place-names in his seventeen-year stay in China.” Nor does he ever mention the Chinese style of writing, despite the dramatic difference between Chinese script and the Roman alphabet.Marco Polo does not mention seeing woodblock printing, which was then unknown in Europe.
He never mentions the Chinese custom of drinking tea (also unknown in Europe at that time), despite the fact that he discusses varieties of Chinese wine. He never mentions the practice of foot-binding, even though this custom fascinated all other Europeans who travelled to China. He never mentions the use of chopsticks; and finally, he fails to mention the Great Wall of China.Marco Polo did, however, identify some important features of Chinese society. For instance, he described porcelain, the use of coal, and the use of paper money—all unknown to Europeans in the thirteenth century. Nevertheless, it is still hard to imagine that someone could actually go to China and manage to miss all the details that he missed.
Wood suggests that Marco Polo probably never travelled further than his family’s trading posts on the Black Sea, but that he had access to Persian or Arabic guidebooks to China from which he was able to piece together his account of China. He probably wrote his account in response to a growing demand for geographies during the late thirteenth century.
Was Marco Polo a fraud?
http://www.guerrillaexplorer.com/mysteries-of-history/was-marco-polo-a-fraud/ A longer treatment, worth reading, interesting:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/doubleissue/mysteries/marco.htm If the church considers the hundreds of years of church reformation was necessary and done by inspired men why would any of us have a problem with some writers being “inspired” to write books that have a thread of truth and helped JS to expand his mind past the standard beliefs of the time. I had someone bring up a view of the Hebrews on my mission. They were shocked when I said I not only knew about it but I’d read it and found it fascinating. Its like they thought knowing that more people than JS considered the native Americans might be from lost tribes would destroy my testimony.
My companion on the other hand took some patching up. He was shocked both by the fact such a book existed and that I’d read it.
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