Talk:The Greek Psalter Incident

Merge

If this draft keeps being declined, a possibility may be merging important parts in the existing Historicity of the Book of Mormon article. —PaleoNeonate – 19:22, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

Feedback from New Page Review process

I left the following feedback for the creator/future reviewers while reviewing this article: Interesting, thank-you..

Ifnord (talk) 19:54, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Criticism

Smith may have studied some Greek, but given that the Greek script used in modern lexicons would not match the script used in the Greek Psalter, he likely would not have been able to read the Psalter text, which was a medieval script that significantly differs from Koine Greek script and modern Greek script. Kornbelt888 (talk) 05:20, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

"Criticism of the event"

Said section seems to be alleging Joseph Smith could have known enough to not in fact misidentify the thing. But apparently he did misidentify it. Are there RSes saying it's unclear whether that happened, saying maybe he did not refer to them as Egyptian hieroglyphics? If so, those should be included; as it stands this looks like a WP:SYNTH/OR attempt to downplay the event. CharredShorthand.talk; 06:56, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

I agree with this; the criticism section doesn't actually reference any criticisms of the event, if anything it provides further evidence that identifying things that badly should have been impossible. I'm flagging it for cleanup on that basis alone. Additionally the section is somewhat flawed in its description of the reading materials he received. The meaning of "Lexicon" changed over the years and what Smith refers to as lexicons are simple dictionaries. The journal quote is "At Evening, President [Oliver] Cowdery returned from New York, 125 bringing with him a quantity of Hebrew book’s for the benefit of the school, he presented me with a Hebrew bible, lexicon & Grammar, also a Greek Lexicon and Websters English Lexicon."

The clues there are that the only English (plus Latin) language Hebrew + Chaldee dictionary that existed before 1890 was this. There was no formalized full grammar yet to the best of my knowledge. I would say there still isn't given the number of possible translations of simple phrases in the bible, but it's sufficient to communicate with for those who know it; the first full Lexicon was Brown-Driver-Briggs in 1906 which was a committee effort to produce a stable reference for the language.. The English "Lexicon" was probably the Webster's dictionary first published in 1928 which wasn't selling well at first and wouldn't have been hard to come by midway through selling the first print run. Finally the greek dictionary... I don't know what other languages Smith actually knew / claimed to know, but even though there were no Greek->English or Hebrew dictionaries published prior to that year one of the fairly recent Greek->German editions should provide enough knowledge of the alphabet to spot it. The capitalized letters in even ancient greek instantly pop out at me as greek, and I never bothered looking at any of it until today.

My opinion is that the section should either be criticism from a source or deleted. The diaries referenced are slow and unwieldy to access online and I'm not going to dig through them more than I have. I just started this fun bit of excess pedantry because I saw a criticism section with no punchline. I guess "THE ARISTOCRATS!" would suffice, but it wouldn't really help matters.

I also changed gifted -> gave because going out of state and buying things specifically to bring back to somebody doesn't fall under the meaning of "gifted", which these days is used wrong but used to indicate that you were giving someone a prized possesion, and in Joseph Smith's time it probably only would have been used to describe Ye Olde Gifts From The Lord of the Dance® and not a stack of books. Since I've established that none of the books Smith could actually read, ignoring church lore, were particularly old at the time or impossible to find 500 year old manuscripts that had been passed down through the generations (or we can at least assume that would be mentioned), and I can reasonably assume that they weren't at burning man (where this exciting way of making buying somebody a present or giving them some food because you're a food camp sound as noble and self-sacrificing as possible kinda got started) exchanging trinkets while loaded to the gills on blotter acid (which I fully support people doing, as long as they give it to each other and don't try to pull any of that gifting crap) at the time since neither of those things had been invented yet, it's proper to say that he gave Smith the book. --A Shortfall Of Gravitas (talk) 22:28, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

References