Quote:
Originally Posted by Solon
Well done. I don't really understand LDS (FARMS) obsession with this feature, as if it somehow proves the age of the Book of Mormon. If I were an anti-Mormon, and I were writing an anti-Mormon tract on the Book of Mormon, I would use the presence of chiasmus to show that the author of the book was Classically trained. There are far more allusions to the Classical world in the book than there are to the Hebrew world, in my opinion.
But, then again, I'm not an anti-Mormon writer of anti-Mormon literature.  |
I wanted to show that creating chiasmus is no big deal. In fact, if you google the word mostly you get Mormon apologetics grasping at straws. I had a guy at FARMS admit over on the FAIR boards that chiasmus proved nothing because they basically just involved repeating a phrase.
With respect to your Classical allusions point, again, what's Classical, and what's modern is often inseparable conceptually. We allude to Classical thought all the time without realizing it. In JS's time there was a lot of enthusiasm about rediscovering this part of our past (as well as ancient Egypt, etc., essentially all of antiquity) and much Classical thought was in the air and absorbable by osmosis.