{"id":20250,"date":"2015-05-11T13:06:16","date_gmt":"2015-05-11T19:06:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=20250"},"modified":"2015-05-11T13:06:16","modified_gmt":"2015-05-11T19:06:16","slug":"troy-the-book-of-mormon-and-scholarly-peer-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2015\/05\/troy-the-book-of-mormon-and-scholarly-peer-review.html","title":{"rendered":"Troy, the Book of Mormon, and Scholarly Peer Review"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_20251\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-20251\" style=\"width: 210px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2015\/05\/421px-Heinrich_Schliemann.jpg\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-20251\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2015\/05\/421px-Heinrich_Schliemann-210x300.jpg\" alt=\"The discoverer of Troy\" width=\"210\" height=\"300\"><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-20251\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Heinrich Schliemann<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I was just reading a piece of anti-Mormon writing in which the author claims that, if the Book of Mormon were really historically authentic and if its geography actually existed in the real world, Mormon scholars should be able to prove it in a peer-reviewed non-Mormon publication. \u00a0This, the author declares, is the very scientific process that was used to find the ancient city of Troy, so famous from Homer\u2019s <em>Iliad<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a very na\u00efve and simplistic view of how such scholarship works, but I\u2019ve pretty much despaired of convincing determined non-scholars of that fact.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ll just say this: \u00a0The \u201cscientific process\u201d described above is precisely <em>not<\/em> how Troy was located. \u00a0Anybody who actually knows the story of Heinrich Schliemann knows that it bears little resemblance at all to the idealized utopia of objective, peer-reviewed scholarship sketched above.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0 \u00a0 I was just reading a piece of anti-Mormon writing in which the author claims that, if the Book of Mormon were really historically authentic and if its geography actually existed in the real world, Mormon scholars should be able to prove it in a peer-reviewed non-Mormon publication. \u00a0This, the author declares, is the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Troy, the Book of Mormon, and Scholarly Peer Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"&nbsp; 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