Well, it was a translation from something written in an entirely different language; there are a huge number of writing styles that could have been used. Even if Joseph Smith chose the writing style in which it was translated, that doesn't mean it wasn't a translation. So it's not a matter of God liking 17th-century whatever English the best, but of that being the one that people would be most familiar with. And yes, it was intended to be for later generations as well, but later generations have been as used to that particular writing style as in Joseph Smith's day. It isn't unintelligible to us at all despite being written in a style we never use in everyday life, because it is a style that we use when reading scripture.
It's a style that only
some people use when reading scripture, though (and those people are mainly American). Certainly most non-English speakers and probably most English speakers do not use such archaic translations and would be baffled by them. If the choice to present the Book of Mormon in this style really was a divine one, then it seems that God wanted to restrict the readability of the book unnecessarily. Compare the New Testament, which was written in Koine Greek and therefore comprehensible to anyone at the time. It wasn't written in a deliberately archaic Homeric Greek in order to restrict it to those people familiar with reading that sort of thing.
I'm also a bit confused about the status of the translation. I understand that the English text of the Book of Mormon is supposed to be a translation that Joseph Smith made of the original, which was written in a mysterious language. And that he required divine aid to make this translation (I take it that he was miraculously given the ability to translate from this language, rather as the Virgin Mary was miraculously given the ability to conceive a child). But am I right in thinking that the translation he produced was not simply the way he happened to translate it, using this divine gift? What I mean is: whatever special status the original text had, isn't it the case that Smith's translation has that special status too? There isn't the chance that he mistranslated anything; his miraculous ability to translate did not simply
enable him to translate, but
guaranteed that his translation was faithful. In which case, presumably the style in which he translated was or is significant, and it's not simply that Smith happened to translate in an AV sort of style but he could just as easily have used contemporary English.
My point is that if the choice of AV-style were Smith's alone, then that would make sense; I could understand why someone like him would instinctively translate a new revealed set of scriptures in that way. But if the choice of AV-style were divinely inspired, and Smith were merely the conduit by which the translation was given, then I find it much harder to make any sense of. Yes, this style of English is intelligible to us today and no doubt will remain so for another century or two, but it is not readily intelligible and comprehensible to most people, or at least, not
as readily intelligible and comprehensible as contemporary English is. And speaking just for myself, I may understand seventeenth-century English perfectly well, but I am enormously put off the prospect of reading the Book of Mormon because of its style. I don't like reading the AV as it is, and that at least is an authentically early-seventeenth-century use of early-seventeenth-century English. To find a nineteenth-century book written in the same style just seems dreadfully pseudish, rather like Ossian, and with the same overtones of insincerity: it seems to be trying to make itself seem more epic, more important, and basically more scriptural by imitating the style of previous centuries. And that raises the obvious suspicion that its actual content does not live up to this promise, because if it did, there would be no need for the fancy language. That may be an entirely unfair and unfounded suspicion, but until such time as there's a version of the Book of Mormon in NRSV-style, I probably won't find out!
(I don't mean to sound rude there, but that really is my reaction to it.)
As far as the Bible - we can't really be inerrantist or literalist as that contradicts the view of the Bible that our other scriptures have, but we can't take it to the other extreme and say it isn't inspired in any meaningful way, either. We generally say the Bible is true "as far as it is translated correctly" but don't always have anything specific to point to; so individual members can have a pretty broad range of opinions on the matter, just not at the extremes; since we don't claim authority, or derive much doctrine, from the Bible alone, it kind of doesn't matter.
Thanks, but I might have been unclear - I did mean the Book of Mormon rather than the Bible. Is the range of attitudes you mention here applied to the Book of Mormon as well, within Mormonism? Or is only a much narrower range of attitudes to that book possible if one is to remain a Mormon?
I looked up the tract on his website, and it brought up two big questions:
