A serialized response to John Hamer - Part 5

Critical claim: Joseph Smith is "dumb when only needed to be apologetically"

Argument 1: "And yet somehow the same Joseph Smith at age 24 is imagined to be illiterate and unable to compose stories orally"

Straw-man again. He is not illiterate, but he is poorly educated as were most farmers in 19^th century America compared with today. He can read of course, but we have no personal writings from Joseph Smith prior to the age of 26. His personal writings are not exactly literal masterpieces and they are very different from the Book of Mormon language. This is demonstrated in the links below (one of them already shared in part 3):

·         https://knowhy.bookofmormoncentral.org/knowhy/what-can-stylometry-tell-us-about-book-of-mormon-authorship

·         https://www.mormoninterpreter.com/how-joseph-smiths-grammar-differed-from-book-of-mormon-grammar-evidence-from-the-1832-history/

I don’t know of anyone who says he was unable to compose stories orally. But there is a huge difference between just a story and the Book of Mormon, as demonstrated in part 2b of my response.

Argument 2: "In fact, his background was neither especially educated and uneducated – he could read, he’d studied the Bible, he’d been tutored by Hyrum, etc."

True. For his time and social class he seems to have been pretty average. He could read and he had studied the Bible. According to his mom, he was the least inclined to reading among the siblings and had never read the Bible from cover to cover at age 18. But he could read. I don’t know of anyone who has claimed otherwise.

But I think dictating the Book of Mormon takes a lot more than being able to read and be tutored by another farmer. I don’t think Hyrum or his parents had the education or knowledge to help him with Arabian geography, Hebraisms, ancient Jewish customs, etc.

Hamer is also contradicting himself at this point. He’s going quite far in the first claim (see part 1a of my response) saying that the Book of Mormon knows almost nothing about the Bible. But when he’s making the case of Joseph Smith being smarter than people tend to think, the argument is that he has “better than average, if not gifted knowledge of the Bible” (John Dehlin’s words in the interview, but Hamer agrees). If Joseph Smith had such good knowledge of the Bible, then what is the point of the first claim? Perhaps Joseph Smith is dumb when only needed to be, critically?