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From: lew@ihuxr.UUCP (Lew Mammel, Jr.)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Re: Russell Anderson's Enoch article
Message-ID: <1102@ihuxr.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 28-May-84 15:58:18 EDT
Article-I.D.: ihuxr.1102
Posted: Mon May 28 15:58:18 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 1-Jun-84 06:37:21 EDT
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Naperville, IL
Lines: 65

In his article relating Joseph Smith's "The Book of Moses" to the
Enoch texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Russell Anderson stated,

	Although there were no copies of the Book of Enoch in
	Joseph Smith's time, several versions have been found
	and published.

Russell also fixed Smith's production of this work around 1829. Consider
then the following excerpt from THE OLD TESTAMENT PSEUDEPIGRAPHA, edited
by James H. Charlesworth:

	It took another century before copies of 1 Enoch finally arrived
	in Europe.  They were brought in 1773 by J. Bruce, the adventurous
	Scottish traveler to Africa.  Nothing occurred until 1800, when
	Silvestre de Sacy, in his "Notice sur le levre d'Henoch" (in
	MAGAZINE ENCYCLOPEDIQYE 6/1, p. 382), first published excerpts
	form the book together with Latin translations of chapters 1, 2, 5-16,
	and 22-32.  In 1821 Lawrence issued the first English version of
	the work.  In 1853 Dillmann published a translation which aroused
	much interest in the work.

That 1821 date is provocative, although I don't know whether it's necessary
to invoke outside sources to understand Smith's productions from a secular
viewpoint.

I was still interested in these purported correspondences, and Charlesworth
doesn't include the "Book of Giants" in his work, referring the reader rather
to Milik.  I found THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS 1947-1969, by Edmund Wilson. It had
a heading of "Mormonism" near the back.  This turned out to be part of
a section entitled "General Reflections". Here is the keynote of this authors
assessment of Mormonism:

	Here we have had growing up, as it were, right under our noses,
	in our familiar American West and as lately as the last century,
	the cult of a swindler, a charlatan and an unscrupulous and
	insatiable lecher, and the establishment, based upon it, of a solid
	and respectable church, which now flourishes with huge ugly sacred
	buildings, a Tabernacle and a Temple, its special educational system
	and its international missionary service, on the basis of fraudulent
	and nonsensical scriptures and the legend of Joseph Smith the martyr,
	as well as of the able management and the inculcation of discipline
	contributed by his successor Brigham Young.

He characterizes the Book of Mormon as "a farrago of balderdash".  The Library
had a copy of the Book of Mormon, which I riffled through. An Appendix
lists upwards of a hundred names which "originate in the Book of Mormon", with
a sprinkling of Biblical names mixed in.  The Library did not have "The Pearl
of Great Price", which contains "The Book of Moses".  I also did not find
Milik's book on the Dead Sea Enoch, so I'm at a Dead End in my pursuit
of an independent critique of Russell's scriptural comparison.

David Dyer-Bennet, in his positive reception of Russell's article, stated,

	... this sounds infinitely more like 'evidence' for SOMETHING than any
	other religious argument I've heard on this net.

I'll agree that it "sounds like" evidence, but I invite David to examine
the supposed scriptural correspondences that Russell provided in his
article.  Many of them bear only the vaguest thematic resemblance. If
you combine this weakness with the blatant and self-serving (whether
consciously so or not) misstatement I mentioned above, and the general
background of Smith's writings, I think you'll see that sounding like
evidence is not the same as being evidence.

	Lew Mammel, Jr. ihnp4!ihuxr!lew