Another round of Jonathan Neville vs. Royal Skousen

On February 8, 2021, Jonathan Neville lobbed another dreadful volley in opposition to the work that Royal Skousen has done on Early Modern English in the Book of Mormon. This time, his remarks were in response to something written by Daniel Peterson about Skousen’s research and the supposed “arrogance” of the very name of the Interpreter, the foundation Peterson created and heads.

Neville opines:

We assume that members of the credentialed class of LDS scholars have the qualifications and expertise they claim. But none of us have voted to sustain them in any capacity related to their credentials. Deferring to them on these issues is as foolish as deferring to non-LDS scholars. We have the right and responsibility to think for ourselves.

Candidly, it’s hard for me to conceive of anything more obtuse or asinine that Neville could have possibly written. No one has ever even so much as suggested that scholars should be “sustained” or “deferred to” on any matter whatsoever, whether those scholars are at Brigham Young University or the Interpreter Foundation or any other private organization. Of course every person has “the right and responsibility to think for” for himself or herself; the point of scholarship is to introduce new evidence and stimulate new ways of thinking.

Even the pseudoscholarship done by Heartlanders benefits us by prompting responses from more competent and responsible researchers who clarify and correct the false information and erroneous conclusions they sell to unsuspecting Latter-day Saints.

And I should add that no one has voted to sustain Jonathan Neville as a corrector of living prophets, neither has Letter VII been sustained as part of the standard works.

As far as Neville’s critique of Royal Skousen’s work and theories, the comments I made on January 19, 2020, still apply:

Professor Skousen’s credentials and achievements do not automatically guarantee that his hypotheses on the origins of the Book of Mormon text are correct. He could be the world’s most educated and experienced scholar and still come to incorrect conclusions. But the length and breadth of his scholarly work on the text of the Book of Mormon simply require one to take him seriously, engage his arguments in good faith, and—if one disagrees with his conclusions—come up with alternative hypotheses that fit the mountain of evidence that Skousen has assembled.

Has Jonathan Neville done any of that? No. Instead, he’s simply dismissed Skousen’s arguments by falsely implying that Skousen is just another intellectual who rejects Joseph Smith’s prophetic gifts and Oliver Cowdery’s witness.

—Peter Pan