Comments on: Knowledge of the Book of Mormon http://bycommonconsent.com/2008/07/15/knowledge-of-the-book-of-mormon/ A Mormon Blog Tue, 14 Feb 2012 01:09:49 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: J. Nelson-Seawright http://bycommonconsent.com/2008/07/15/knowledge-of-the-book-of-mormon/#comment-104066 Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:20:18 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/?p=3987#comment-104066 TT, I agree that it is easy to Google the right answers. The text of the survey question asked respondents not to do so, but there’s an honor-system component of this, obviously. In any case, the results suggest that large numbers, at least, didn’t cheat. If there was substantial cheating, the implication would be that the results discussed above are upper limits on people’s textual knowledge of the Book of Mormon.

]]> By: TT http://bycommonconsent.com/2008/07/15/knowledge-of-the-book-of-mormon/#comment-104068 Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:05:09 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/?p=3987#comment-104068 You may have answered this, but did you consider that it was easy to google the right answers for the citation identifications?

]]> By: bbell http://bycommonconsent.com/2008/07/15/knowledge-of-the-book-of-mormon/#comment-104064 Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:18:05 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/?p=3987#comment-104064 Hey JNS,

This is pretty good stuff. I would tend to think that you would really have to be an avid reader of the BOM to pick up on all the BOM quotes except for the Moroni quote.

Your last paragraph pretty much sums it up.

]]> By: J. Nelson-Seawright http://bycommonconsent.com/2008/07/15/knowledge-of-the-book-of-mormon/#comment-104062 Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:44:16 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/?p=3987#comment-104062 Matt W., I don’t think the “plagiarism” idea is relevant. Some short phrases are clearly borrowings, as well. Suppose I say, “To do or not to do?” Six short words, all very common, and yet I’m clearly borrowing. In any case, I find your numbers a bit problematic, in that the explicit, cited block quotes themselves are over 10% of the text. Nonetheless, this is a messy area and I agree that there can be a lot of different results.

]]> By: Matt W. http://bycommonconsent.com/2008/07/15/knowledge-of-the-book-of-mormon/#comment-104059 Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:36:50 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/?p=3987#comment-104059 JNS, the problem with going down to 4 or 5 words is that you begin to pick up phrases which contextually are not plagiaristic in nature, but just common phrases. I did an analysis with 8 words and the numbers get much closer to the 5 to 15% range. In fact, the vast majority of 8 words+ quotes are linked in the footnotes.

]]> By: J. Nelson-Seawright http://bycommonconsent.com/2008/07/15/knowledge-of-the-book-of-mormon/#comment-104025 Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:15:52 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/?p=3987#comment-104025 Left Field, the quote = plagiarism information came from emails, not the survey itself (this, unlike many of the other questions discussed in this post, was a closed-choice question). But emails made clear that people from various ideological positions saw the question as relating to “plagiarism,” by which in this context they seem to have had in mind the claim that Joseph Smith simply copied from the KJV and didn’t have any revelation or inspiration. The answers were clearly in part contaminated by this and in part by the other two possible meanings of “quotation.”

]]> By: Left Field http://bycommonconsent.com/2008/07/15/knowledge-of-the-book-of-mormon/#comment-104027 Wed, 16 Jul 2008 12:17:47 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/?p=3987#comment-104027 Did you have answers that suggested some people were conflating quote with plagiarize? Those terms seem antonymous to me. Quote implies that you give a citation, which rules out plagiarism. Nearly all of the biblical quotations in the Book of Mormon do cite the original author (e.g., “And now I write some of the words of Isaiah” 2 Ne 11:8). A case can be made for plagiarism of the work of the King James translators and a few short passages of Paul, but all of the major biblical writings (Isaiah, Malachi, and Jesus) are correctly attributed to the same authors those works are attributed to in the Bible.

]]> By: AlexG http://bycommonconsent.com/2008/07/15/knowledge-of-the-book-of-mormon/#comment-104029 Wed, 16 Jul 2008 08:09:33 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/?p=3987#comment-104029 In a recent stake conference where Elder Oaks was presiding, in his remarks he said that his memory wasn’t good and he couldn’t quote from memory where many scriptures are located. But with enough key words and with the help of the topical guide, he could find them. That brought a lot of comfort for my otherwise diffuse memory. Interesting exercise, nevertheless.

]]> By: J. Nelson-Seawright http://bycommonconsent.com/2008/07/15/knowledge-of-the-book-of-mormon/#comment-104031 Wed, 16 Jul 2008 01:02:34 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/?p=3987#comment-104031 Jacob J., the angel/Benjamin issue actually wasn’t a problem. The speaker in the text is Benjamin, relating words from an earlier vision. Some respondents noted this; only one or two said it was an angel but didn’t specify that Benjamin related the words. For those couple of respondents, I gave them credit anyway. But most people who knew it was an angel also knew it was from Benjamin’s sermon.

]]> By: Jacob J http://bycommonconsent.com/2008/07/15/knowledge-of-the-book-of-mormon/#comment-104057 Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:49:10 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/?p=3987#comment-104057 JNS,

I was surprised when I took the quiz that you picked a scripture from Mosiah 3 because the text you quoted is spoken by an angel to King Benjamin. Of course, King Benjamin is relaying what the angel said, so it is KB speaking in that sense. I wasn’t sure if that ambiguity was intentional or not, but it appears it was not.

The most surprizing thing to me is that anyone missed the author of “Moroni’s promise.” C’mon people. My favorite answer is “Allegedly King Benjamin but really it’s Satan.” lol

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