[soc.religion.christian] Isaiah quotes in Book of Mormon

hall@vice.ico.tek.com (Hal Lillywhite) (09/02/90)

In response to an exchange about the Isaiah quotes in the Book of
Mormon the moderator comments:

>[Right.  Citing second Isaiah is an argument that I suspect would not
>be convincing to a majority of Christians.  A criterion that would be
>more widely acknowledged would be to look at the textual history of
>passages quoted in the BoM.  E.g. does it quote any passages later
>modified on the basis of Dead Sea material?  If so, does it contain
>the KJV version or the Dead Sea version?  This is not a perfect test,
>because there's no guarantee that we now have perfect texts, and texts
>brought to the New World may not have been perfect either.  But you'd
>expect to see BoM quotations of the OT showing at least some
>improvements over the text used in the KJV.  I've heard some allusions
>to tests like this having been done, but don't know any details.
>--clh]

As far as I know, no specific study has compared the BoM Isaiah to
the Qumran version in any detail.  There is a study put out by FARMS
(Foundation for Ancient and Mormon Studies, located in Provo, Utah)
done by John Tevdnes (SP?).  This study, entitled "The Isaiah
Variants in the Book of Mormon," looks at all the places where the
BoM wording differs from KJV and the possible reasons for the
differences.  In those cases where there is a difference and 1QIs
differs from KJV, all 3 are given.  BoM comes out quite well but
there are few such cases.  It's been a while since I read it so I
don't remember any specifics.  This is a long study and of course is
organized by the order of the text so you would have to search
through the whole thing to find the 1QIs references.

NB:  1QIs refers to the first (and better) of the 2 Qumran (Dead Sea
Scrolls) Isaiah manuscripts.