How many authors does the Bible have?

[DapperDan]

I don't think anyone says Spaulding assisted. I think the work that Craig Criddle and others had done suggests that Rigdon had access to a copy of Manuscript Found. I don't think we'll ever know.

[YOUTUBE]utDU45lm210[/YOUTUBE]

Thanks, he's one of the authors in the study. I'm not familiar with any of them or their work beyond finding the study the other day.

[Moliere]

Thanks, he's one of the authors in the study. I'm not familiar with any of them or their work beyond finding the study the other day.

In some ways this article makes me look forward to GD next year when we study the BoM. I've got to start getting read up on some of this stuff as well as Hardy and Givens before the new year starts.

[NorthShoreCoug]

I wonder what this software would say about the BoM, D&C, and PoGP. I also wonder how many authors we should expect there to be.

My master's thesis chairman, Alvin Rencher (BYU statistics dept), had performed a word-text analysis of both the New Testament and the Book of Mormon. It's been quite a while ago, but IIRC, the BOM word patterns indicated the likelihood that Joseph Smith wrote the BOM was extremely unlikely, that most of the claimed authors had some similarities to each other, but the words attributed to Jesus had very different patterns than either the claimed authors or Joseph Smith. I don't remember him including Spaulding, Rigdon, or other contemporaries in the analysis, but I could be wrong.

[Sleeping in EQ]

Let's throw a bone to the postmodernists:

For every person who has read the Bible, there is at least one author of it.

[LA Ute]

Let's throw a bone to the postmodernists:

For every person who has read the Bible, there is at least one author of it.

[DapperDan]

I found a follow up/rebuttal to the Jockers et al study that was published in April of this year. I haven't found a free link to it yet, but the summary seems to be that the Jockers method works really well when the actual author is one of the candidate authors, but not so well when the actual author is not included.

[Ma'ake]

Spalding: "I want a cheeseburger, I want a hotdog, I want a..."

Judge Smails: "You'll get NOTHING...and LIKE it!!!"

[jay santos]

They felt Cowdrey's contributions were mostly in his editing.

They found Cowdery in a couple chapters in Alma. Incidentally the time frame would work out very well with when Oliver with his magic divining rod allegedly took his shot at translating the Book of Mormon, per Book of Commandments versions of D&C 7-8.

The conspiracy angle is really really hard to swallow, but what I find fascinating about the Jockers study is that it fits almost perfectly with the narrative:

Rigdon took Spalding's narrative and spliced in his theology borrowed from Alexander Campbell. The book was written starting Mosiah and then starting over with Nephi and the 116 page replacements. In this chronology Spalding's voice is strongest at beginning and dissipates the further they get into it.

[jay santos]

PS I've studied this word print topic a lot as it relates to Book of Mormon. My bold prediction is that in my lifetime we will see enough advances in this technology and in identifying enough source material to compare Book of Mormon with that we will have pretty definitive answer how the Book of Mormon came about.

[Moliere]

I found a follow up/rebuttal to the Jockers et al study that was published in April of this year. I haven't found a free link to it yet, but the summary seems to be that the Jockers method works really well when the actual author is one of the candidate authors, but not so well when the actual author is not included.

I haven't read the study yet (only skimmed it) but from what I can tell they only used the 6 or 7 potential authors in the study. Doesn't this study only tell which of those authors was most likely to write a certain chapter? If so, that seems kind of lame. Couldn't you pick 7 authors at random and do the same thing? Am I missing something?

[jay santos]

I haven't read the study yet (only skimmed it) but from what I can tell they only used the 6 or 7 potential authors in the study. Doesn't this study only tell which of those authors was most likely to write a certain chapter? If so, that seems kind of lame. Couldn't you pick 7 authors at random and do the same thing? Am I missing something?

I'm not an expert, but this is my understanding. You could pick seven random authors and do the same thing, and you should get random results. The Stanford study did use two random authors. The two random authors showed up nowhere, and the other authors showed up in the places they should have. Not definitive at all. But at least mildly compelling.