Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: frog!jp@harvard.harvard.edu (John Pimentel) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Book of Mormon Message-ID: Date: 12 Aug 90 08:48:29 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Charles River Data Systems Lines: 85 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu >Stephen Simmons writes >>swindle@spanky.stanford.edu writes about the Mormon church: >> Without bogging you down with too much doctrinal detail, >>here are some important points about the book and the church: > >I think the case about errors in the Bible is a little >overstated...The English Bible has (except in very early times) been >translated from the Greek and the Hebrew; most copies of the Bible (I >would suppose) have been translated only once; that is, they have been >translated from Greek/Hebrew/Aramaic --> English/German/French/etc. What the original poster was refering to and what I am refering to is: The Bible was translated to the extent that the original meaning has been, in parts, lost. What do I mean by that, you might say? Simply, that, if I take something (I've done this for others) say, in Portuguese, and translated into english I have two ways: 1) Meaning for meaning, in which the meaning is preserved; 2) Meaning for words, in which the meaning is translated to the approximate meaning, because the meaning for meaning might be just too long, thus in this case I would lose the author's true feelings, and have my interpertation of what he/she wanted to say. Essentially, the original poster was refering to an article of the LDS faith in that [paraphrase if not correct] "We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is correctly translated; we believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God." From what I understand the Bible was translated into english in 1540, or thereabouts, but prior to this time, scholars preserved the bible by writing out copies of it. The belief is based on, in my opinion, on these rewrites, to the extent that errors may have crept in. The Book of Mormon, on the other hand was translated once into english, and any corrections to the BoM were made from the original or the printer's manuscript (which I understand was copied once by Oliver Cowdery). >A Mormon friend of mine says that he trusts the Bible over the Book of >Mormon because the Bible has been out in the open and under scrutiny I, personally, would say that this is a very isolated incident and does not reflect the membership as a whole, much less a minority. >In many of these cases [of the Bible], we have entire passages repeated >word for word. This goes back to the example, in part, I listed above, if I were given a work to translate and during my reading I found a section that looked familiar,e.g., something I wrote earlier, I would copy that section in the spot of this familiarity, rather than translate that section again. Joseph Smith did the very same thing {reference 2 Nephi 20 approx.} were he was translating a passage that was very familiar, and he found it to be similiar to Isiah (as you read through the section you can see that the Prophet Nephi is reading the works of the Prophet Isiah -- kindly don't argue about how did he have a copy, that's the silliest argument I've heard yet, unless you wish to convince me that there was only one copy of what the Prophet Isiah wrote), and while translating this section he put in the missing meanings as he was inspired. One further item, Joseph Smith also retranslated parts of the Bible, to put back the meaning that was accidently/deliberately omitted (not intended as an accusation, but covering all the bases). --- ------------------------------------------------------- John Pimentel ...!{decvax!mit-eddie!harvard}!frog!jp Disclaimer: The opinion presented, is just that; I take full responsiblity for those parts I've entered. [I'm not entirely sure what you are saying about the history of the Bible. If you are simply pointing out that no translation is exact, then you are surely right, but the same thing is true of the Book of Mormon. Even if Smith had angelic help, he would have had to make the same compromises in going into English that modern Bible translators have to, because no two languages map onto each other cleanly. Having multiple modern translations of the Bible is probably not a disadvantage. Looking at several different translations often allows us to get a clearer view of where compromises had to be made in the translation, and what the nature of those compromises is. Obviously we're not as near to the original as we are to the original of the Book of Mormon. But it's not true that translations are based on multiple generations of copies ending up in an Nth generation copy in 1540. In fact current NT translations (I don't know enough about the OT text to comment on it) are based on manuscripts from about 200 to the early 300's. The manuscripts from about 200 do not cover the entire text of the NT, but coverage is good enough to be a good check on the accuracy of the later manuscripts. So I think we can be fairly sure that nothing substantive changed after 200. --clh]