Meditation on Dan Vogel's Response of 5/15/2020

Meditation on Dan Vogel's Response of May 15, 2020

Thank you, Dan, for your response. Below is a picture of your response, followed by my reply.

First, I agree with you that Parrish and Williams usually were writing at the same time. But we need to account for the fact I drew attention to in my last meditation, that Williams did not write the word "was" and did not write the word "Egyptians," both of which Parrish did write, in the corresponding part of his text, and both of which Parrish had to cross out.

Joseph Smith apparently dictated the words, then stopped and corrected them. I believe we agree up to that point. You propose that the reason Williams did not write down those words is that he may have been writing slower and thus he had fallen far enough behind that he did not get to that point until after the correction had been made and so he therefore knew not to write the words.

However, the word "was" came just three syllables before the word "Egyptians," which means when Joseph stopped to correct the word "was," if Williams was still writing then he should have had time to catch up and to be on the same "starting line" as Parrish, so to speak, before writing "Egyptians" - unless Williams was not only behind but was very far behind.

So it seems that our two competing explanations for why Williams, unlike Parrish, did not write the word "was" and did not write "Egyptians," are that Williams had either stopped writing briefly, or that he was very far behind (again, merely being slightly behind is not enough to account for the evidence, as explained in the above paragraph).

However, if Williams was that far behind, then he would need to be remembering multiple words while writing words down and still keeping track of new words being spoken. This would actually work well with my explanation, because a person can only get so far behind before they lose track and have to stop.

Confirming my theory, we can see exactly where Williams stopped:

He stopped writing right at the exact point where he would have otherwise written the text which my explanation proposes he added later. This fact vindicates my explanation, which means the text at the top of page 2 was added under special circumstances, and therefore does not discredit my explanation for page four.

You point out that "Frederick G. Williams didn't maintain a top margin," but he actually did maintain a small top margin on pages 3 and 4. We can see that the top of the second page is unique. My explanation accounts for this, because I am proposing he purposely left open the top margin on page 2, in order to create room for him to later copy the few lines that he had missed. When he went back to copy the text, he started at the very top, not even leaving a small margin like he left on pages 3 and 4, in order to ensure he would be able to fit all the text into the space he had reserved.

As we can see below, on pages 3 and 4 he did not start at the very top, but left a small top margin. On the first page, that space is occupied by a special note, yet it still does not start as high on the page as does the text in question on the second page. All of which validates my theory:

(The red rectangles were added by me)

You also point out that there is "no indication of an addition being made," but my theory answers this as well. Since Williams was able to make the lines fit into the margin area which he had reserved for them, there was no compelling need for him to indicate having done so. Moreover, we don't know when he ended up revisiting the manuscript to make the insertion; he could have done it at the same time he came back to add text to page 4.

You state: "there is clear evidence of simultaneous writing at the beginnings of these documents, and then again ten lines after the four lines in question. Your argument is that somewhere between these two passages FGW switched to copying WP’s document, that he happened to leave a blank just where he later needed it. The problem is that we are talking about the second passage to mention Fac. 1 and it WP’s document it is in the middle of a page. So how did FGW not have it in his document?"

First, I am not suggesting Williams just "happened to leave a blank." He may have seen the new page as a good time to get caught up without interrupting the dictation. He left the margin area blank and then waited for Joseph Smith to start a new sentence, which Williams then started writing down, underneath the top margin area which he had intentionally left empty.

Second, the reason the passage ended up where it did on Parrish's page is because of the size and spacing of Parrish's words - in the same way that typing with different fonts, text size and spacing changes where the text appears on a page - and this has no bearing on the Williams situation.

You go on to state: "The first reference to Fac. 1 is at the bottom of WP’s page, but imbedded in the middle of FGW’s page 1, and both are emended. Here, again, it is easier to explain that FGW was slower than WP. If FGW had started copying WP at this first instance, instead of writing simultaneously with WP as you maintain, then it is far more difficult to explain why FGW missed the second reference to Fac. 1 just a few lines down."

There seems to be some confusion about what I was suggesting, but this is just evidence that Williams was very far behind and it helps explain why he would feel a need to catch up to the live dictation and later fill in the part he had missed.

Moreover, Parrish left a small bottom margin on all the other pages of this manuscript, but not this page. So, it is likely that Parrish also added the words "at the commencement of this record" at a later time, as we already know Williams seems to have done:

You then state: "It seems to me that your explanations are going to get very convoluted just to escape evidence that FGW wrote so as to accommodate the characters in the left margin."

If you feel my above explanation is convoluted, then please explain.

You go on to say: "You have also struggled to escape the awkward division of paragraphs, which challenge the view that the characters were afterthoughts. The characters on the FGW and WP documents are different, as expected under my scenario. Finally, you have given no persuasive rationale for how your imagined person(s) filled in the characters, how they decided to divide them, and how they invented characters to fill in missing portions of the papyrus. You have suggested that they used the GAEL, but the characters in the margins are not in the volume, except for the third character of WWP’s transcription and bits of the invented characters."

Let's back up for a minute. The underlying claim you seek to establish is that Joseph Smith misidentified the text of the Hor Book of Breathings as the text of the Book of Abraham. You are not merely asserting that as one plausible scenario, but are insisting it is the only plausible scenario. The burden is on you to prove that your claim, and your claim alone, can be maintained - yet you are relying on shaky circumstantial evidence. There is nothing for me to "escape" from, here.

Yes, some paragraphs were awkwardly divided, but Joseph Smith's personal punctuation/paragraphing was often awkward, as we can see in the limited samples we have of his own handwriting. The fact characters were placed next to the start of these paragraphs doesn't imply anything, because characters were placed next to the start of pretty much all the paragraphs. There's no evidence they were singled out in any way, with respect to the characters in the margins.

Yes, the Parrish and Williams characters are not identical, but I never said they were.

And no, you have not accounted for how Joseph Smith supposedly filled in the characters, how he supposedly decided to divide them, and how he supposedly invented characters, except to point to some correspondences with the GAEL, yet you now say to me, "but the characters in the margins are not in the volume," as though I had claimed they were. You claim Joseph Smith is the only one who could have plausibly done something like that, but the Plates of Voree prove otherwise.

The fact these manuscripts passed through various hands after Joseph Smith died means we should be more careful, not less careful, in the assumptions we make. Neither Joseph Smith nor his scribes ever showed any knowledge of the existence of those characters, let alone claimed any responsibility for them.

When I see an old set of scriptures that has passed through an unknown number of hands, and someone has gone through and marked some of the verses, I don't just presume to know that the original owner was the one who marked them. Likewise, when I see writing in the margins of very old manuscripts, I don't assume the people who wrote the manuscripts are the same people who wrote in the margin.

The fact is that only Phelps labeled his margin, "character." His legitimate efforts evidently roused imitators who came along, but it would be a mistake to think their additions are somehow legitimized by his demonstration.

We don't know the story behind the characters in the Parrish and Williams manuscripts. The story you invented for them is interesting, but you don't have any real evidence.