Skousen's Part VII and John Clark on Cumorah

I posted the first half of my review of Royal Skousen's Part VII here:

https://interpreterpeerreviews.blogspot.com/2024/12/review-of-royal-skousens-part-vii-first.html

I'll post the second half in a few days. 

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Meanwhile, I was reminded of an article from 1994 in the FARMS Review of Books on the Book of Mormon. It was written by John Clark and titled "The Final Battle for Cumorah."

Here's the link:

https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1211&context=msr

The abstract reads:

Review of Christ in North America (1993), by Delbert W. Curtis. Clark examines the scholarship and logic involved in assuming a one-Cumorah theory for Book of Mormon geography.

It was fun reading the type of rhetoric characteristic of FARMS. For example, the title itself. It implies that John was solving the Cumorah question with finality, once and for all, but in retrospect that title was obviously much too ambitious, if not overly arrogant.

John is a great guy and a careful scholar, but when we read this article we can see how John's views were driven not by the text or any facts, but by his own interpretations and assumptions. 

Someday I'll get around to interlinear comments on this article, but anyone interested can read it and see for themselves why FARMS was so widely discredited for its demeaning rhetoric.

Not that John did not make some good points. I happen to agree with much of his criticism of the Curtis book, for many of the same reasons. But this article is a good example for what passed at FARMS as "peer-reviewed," when it was actually merely "peer-approved."

We see the same practice today at the Interpreter. Which makes sense, since it's basically the same leadership and editorial bias at work.