Faithful Historian Deceives Mormons - Keith Erekson | Ep. 1990 | LDS Discussions Ep. 61

Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast, LDS Discussions Edition. I am one of your hosts for today, John Dehlin. It's February 6th, 2025, and today we are going to be, uh, discussing, or the title is, "History Director Tries to Defend Mormonism." Uh, and we're gonna be talking about Dr. Keith Erickson. Um, for those of you who don't know, the LDS Discussion series is, I don't know, 55, 60 episodes in. Julia, do you remember how many episodes we're in now?

This is episode 60. Okay. Yeah. So, uh, a couple years ago, um, a guy named Mike, that's his code name, put together a website called LDS Discussions, where he did a really in-depth, thorough analysis of Mormon church truth claims, borrowing heavily from the works of people like the Sandras. Hey, Sandra, hi. Thanks for joining us. And, um, so we did several deep dives into Mormon church truth claims, doing our best to be as thoughtful and as fair and as objective as possible. Of course, we sometimes failed in our objectivity, um, but we've, we've done this extensive review of Mormon church truth claims, all the way from Joseph Smith's treasure digging, to the priesthood restoration, to alleged priesthood restoration, to changes in the Doctrine and Covenants, to Book of Mormon translation, all the way through to modern-day issues. And, uh, you know, this series, we highly recommend it. It's probably the most valuable thing I've done, uh, on Mormon Stories in, in a long time, at least according to many of our viewers and listeners. You can check it out on Spotify in audio and video format. You can check it out on Apple Podcast as audio only, and you can check it out on YouTube under its own playlist, under the Mormon Stories Podcast channel called LDS Discussions. We highly recommend that you watch it from start to finish. It is episodes now, but we, um, even though Mike had to retire and he's on to bigger and better things, uh, and we miss him dearly, we like to continue the LDS Discussion series for a couple of reasons, even though it's without Mike. One is we have amazing, uh, replacements for Mike, like the Sandra Tanner. Hello, Sandra. Welcome again. I, I'll just, I'll show you as much as I can. It's like more cowboy, more cowbell, more Sandra Tanner. Thanks for joining us. We also have Herard joining us. Hey, Herard. Hey, John. Um, and of course, as always, we have Nemo joining us from, uh, the UK. Hey, Nemo. You're muted, but, uh, we imagine you said hello. Thanks for joining us. And, uh, Julia is gonna be, uh, helping out with production today, but she'll jump on as well. Um, and the only other thing I'll just say is that we, we're continuing this series because one, there's a lot of topics we didn't cover, but two, every time we do a new LDS Discussions episode, we're going to be reminding people about the series and plugging it, and we think this is a timeless series, and, uh, and so we want to just keep promoting it. And so for all those reasons, plus so many of you love it, um, we're doing it now.

I want to just have Herard explain to us why he had the idea for today's episode and what we're going to be doing today. So, Herard?

Yeah, so, um, I came up on these, on the video or the recording of this fireside, uh, on the YouTube channel 132 Problems, and they did a response, you know, based on their understanding or their belief that Joseph Smith did not practice polygamy. Um, so on the polygamy part, and she posted the entire video, so that's kind of where I watched it. And I thought, what was interesting about it is, well, first of all, is it's kind of, um, not very, what's 132 Problems? So it's a YouTube channel from, um, my goodness, what's, what's her name? Michelle. Michelle. Michelle Stone. Is this the polygamy denier? Michelle Stone? Yes. Okay. All right. So, so she posts this video of Keith Erickson. Yes. Okay. And then you, yeah, and I, and I watched the fireside. Okay. And, you know, it's, it's kind of hard these days to find recordings like this of firesides when, uh, someone that works at Church Headquarters is going to an entire stake and talking about difficult problems with church history. So that's why I thought it would be interesting to cover it because, you know, he's being, he's speaking in his official capacity as a church employee, someone who has, um, uh, been working in the church history department, and also to an entire stake with the stake president behind him. So it's kind of like endorsed, right? And, um, I thought it would be interesting to point out how the church is defending itself these days.

Okay, that's fascinating. Um, and, uh, we, we, I think I did this once with Patrick Mason when I got a copy of a sort of an apologetic fireside he did, but I think that's really, really useful. Okay. So we're going to be reviewing a formerly church-approved fireside where church employee and history PhD Keith Erickson tries to explain a lot of the problems with Mormon church history and truth claims. Is that right?

That's right. Okay. And he covers, I should say, he covers tons of different topics. He goes through them super quickly. I picked just a few. Um, maybe we could do a part two, depends on how people like this one. Okay. So we're not doing the whole, but we're not doing the whole. Yeah, it's just too long. He went like, and spoke for two hours.

Stop. Okay. And like, he was literally going through topics like so fast. So which topics are we covering today?

So, uh, Mountain Meadows Massacre, mostly polygamy, because that's the one he spent the longest on, and then if we have time, a little bit of Book of Abraham.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. Sandra, tell our viewers and listeners, just really quickly, who you are, because every generation needs to know who Sandra and Gerald Tanner were.

Well, my husband and I, Gerald, were raised fifth-generation Mormon. And when we were in our late teens, we were confronted with contradictions in LDS church history that caused us to start researching. And we ended up spending our whole life writing and researching on the problems of Mormon history. Uh, we formally left the church, and in order to leave, we had to be excommunicated because, back in 1960, you didn't get to resign, you only got excommunicated. So, um, anyways, I've spent my whole adult life writing and researching on the problems of Mormon history. And, uh, if people want to check out the many, many books and publications you and Gerald have published, how do they find them?

On our website, UTlm.org. We have digitally put up all our, well, almost almost all of our research books and writings through 60 years of research. So almost any topic these guys are going to touch on is probably in something we wrote.

Yeah, absolutely. If you value Mormon Think or the CES Letter or basically any modern, uh, work of Mormon history, in some way or another, you have Gerald, you're standing on the shoulders of, of the Tanners. Is that fair?

I hope so. Okay. All right. Um, and, uh, and of course, just to, to do the plug, Nemo, you are the, uh, you're the chief dog at Nemo the Mormon YouTube channel, right?

Yeah, UK's leading commentator on the church. And this episode actually has a bit of a European, uh, perspective because Jessica Frankl in the chat telling us that this was in Germany to answer questions. It was quite an empty sort of building. And I was aware that he was making his way to Europe to do some of these. Keith has done these firesides in the UK, okay, similar ones where he takes questions from people and answers them. He did sort of a Q&A around the time that the three Apostles came to the UK as well. It was that kind of British rescue thing going on. He was, Keith was part of that, and he went around the UK doing, uh, sort of an AMA firesides on church history.

Yeah, I should also say that, um, the reason why he's going through a lot of topics really fast is because he's literally responding to questions that people sent, uh, the stake presidency before he arrived. So he filtered through different questions that people were asking, and, and he's responding to them as best as he can. That's a format that's actually pioneered, I think, certainly in Europe, as far as I'm aware, in the UK, Centry Stakes, the first one I certainly heard about doing it where the stake presidency set up an open forum where people can submit their questions to ask about difficult things about the church, and then they have, you know, the stake presidency and others try and answer the questions for them in a sort of open, uh, style. I've certainly not heard of that anywhere else.

Excellent. And Nemo, you were particularly excited to appear on an episode with Sandra Tanner. Can you tell us why?

Oh, don't make me, uh, be, be a sycophant. Um, it is a great honor to be on the show with, uh, Sandra. Um, I met Sandra, uh, I've had the pleasure of meeting Sandra in person, and, uh, yeah, it's just nice to, to be on a show with her, and to try not to embarrass myself in front of her.

To do, Sandra, are you a Nemo the Mormon fan?

Of course, everybody loves Nemo.

Oh, look at that. Nemo, everyone loves Nemo. We love to hear his voice. All right, well, let's begin. I, well, I put together a quick slide, um, just about, uh, just a little background on Keith. So let me just tell you all, uh, who Keith is, um, from his, uh, he has his own webpage. It says, Keith A. Erickson, Sensible History for Everybody. And it says, Keith A. Erickson is an award-winning author, teacher, and public historian who currently serves as the Director of Historical Research and Outreach for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He also sits on the editorial board of the Church Historians Press. Erickson has authored numerous books and articles on topics including politics, hoaxes, Abraham Lincoln, Elvis Presley, and Latter-day Saint history. His work has been published in various scholarly journals, including the Journal of American History, The History Teacher, The Journal of Abraham Lincoln Association, The Oral History Review, and Latter-day Saint history journals. Erickson is a talented public speaker with a passion for helping history makes sense. He speaks often to public audiences and the media, directs workshops with social studies teachers and history professionals, and consults with leaders of historical sites and commemorations. He enjoys speaking at Latter-day Saint conferences and events, including BYU Education Week and RootsTech. For seven years, he directed the Church History Library, overseeing expanded online research access and enriched public exhibits. Before leading the Church History Library, he was a tenured associate professor of history and founding director of the Center for History Teaching and Learning at the University of Texas at El Paso, or UTEP. Um, I'll stop there. It says he grew up near Baltimore, Maryland, and now lives near Salt Lake City with his wife and children. And then the only other thing I will add is that we looked up to see what degrees he had. He has a bachelor's in sociology from BYU, a master's in history from BYU, a PhD in history from, uh, Indiana University Bloomington, and then finally, for some reason, six years after he got his PhD, he got an MBA, a Master's in Business Administration from UTEP.

It's because you can't be successful in the Mormon Church without an MBA. John, didn't you know that?

Oh, oh, I thought it was a law degree. I thought all, I thought all historians were lawyers.

H, it's a law degree or an MBA. You need one of those two things to get ahead.

Anyone have a comment about his background?

At least we're not arguing with the lawyer who's pretending to be a historian, right?

Right. He knows his topic, and that's what makes his comments all the more problematic.

Oh, because he should know better. Is that what you're saying? He knows better.

Okay. All right. Any other, any other comments about, uh, Erickson?

It is quite astonishing how confident he says a lot of these things and data, and he has, you know, several dozen members there watching this and believing everything he's saying. So with the authority, you know, of being in the standing up the pulpit, and then with a stake president behind him. So, yeah, I agree with it. It's, it's, it's kind of problematic, and we'll, we'll figure out why in a sec.

Okay. All right. Nemo, were you saying something?

Having listened to him speak and address these kind of firesides, I can see why the church would pick him for this kind of role. Um, he's definitely what they want to try and make happen, and he's certainly trying to say the things that the church wants him to say, and he's quite effective in that sense, until you stop and take a pause into what he's actually saying.

All right, well, that's, I guess that's going to be kind of our focus today is kind of grading Erickson on his honesty and integrity as he, as he educates people about the church's history. Is he deceptive? Um, and, uh, and of course, the church is accountable because they're utilizing him globally. So we do want to welcome all our live stream viewers and listeners. Sometimes we like to do, um, these episodes as live streams, if for no other reason than that we can incorporate your comments and feedback. So y'all can kind of be, uh, the judges here, and y'all can let us know if you, uh, like the stuff he's dishing or if you don't. We also want to thank everyone, uh, who is in the position to show us support. We just got a live chat from, uh, a super chat from Lady Brat Face. She writes, "This is the full dream team. Love you all." And the only thing I would argue is that we, we miss Mike. But other than that, thanks, Lady Brat Face, for the super chat. And Mike, we love and miss you.

Okay, now I'm gonna admit, I haven't seen any of these clips yet, so this is a cold viewing for me.

Oh, dear. Sandra, you've seen him?

Yeah, I don't know if I got quite to the end of this thing, but, oh, it's a long one, but, but I watched most of it.

Okay. And Herard, you've seen them?

Yeah, yeah. Okay. And Julia, you, you did the slides, right?

Yeah. Well, he, Herard did the clips, but I've seen all the clips.

Yeah. How about you, Nemo?

I'm half cold into this. I've seen bits of it.

Okay. All right. Well, we, we welcome feedback from the audience, and we'll, we'll, uh, we'll ask Maven to star really good comments or questions. And specifically, Maven, if our viewers or listeners either have good questions or really have strong opinions about either Keith Erickson doing a super good, honest job or being really, really deceptive, we want to hear feedback, and we're going to let our viewers and listeners sort of grade Erickson along with us. All right, so without any further ado, should we go ahead and go to the first clip?

Let's do it. Is there anything Herard you want to say before we start?

Um, there's a lot of introduction, um, that I think, I mean, we already did, so we skip through it a lot of that. So he's gonna write, he's gonna get right to the first topic, Mountain Meadows Massacre.

Okay. All right. Well, let's go ahead and, uh, check out the first thing he has to say about, uh, the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

Um, I'm not seeing the, there we go. Go. Okay, let's go and play it.

So, um, people are always encountering things from church history they didn't know, and then they get upset. They're like, why didn't I know that? And, um, sometimes people have taught that thing before, and then once you're teaching it, you get kind of invested in it. Maybe you got in a fight with someone about it on your mission with your mission companion, and for years you've known you were right and your companion was an idiot. Um, and so when we encounter things that we didn't know in the kind of conspiracy culture war model, the mindset is to think, well, the only way I couldn't know that is if someone was hiding it from me because clearly I know everything. Isn't I mean, you can hear the the hubris in there, right? Uh, here's another example from the Messenger. God Called on the Earth Today. Few years ago, at General Conference, President Nelson got up and he said, I have been studying the Gathering of Israel for 40 years, and he had all the footnotes. You go back, he's been talking about the Gathering and Abrahamic Covenant since the 1980s. And then he said, imagine my surprise when I was studying with some Jewish scholars and I learned another meaning for the word Israel. Let God Prevail. You remember this talk? And he talked about it. But you notice how he said it? He didn't say, I can't believe the Jews have been hiding this from me all this time. He stood up in front of the entire world and said, I'm 90 something, because a few years ago, back when he was a baby in the 90s, he said, I'm 90s something years old, I am the President of the Church, and I didn't know something. That's the model. If I don't know something, if only there was a word for "I don't know a thing," and then now I know it. Oh, someone was hiding. No, no, learn. That's the word. That's the word. Sorry. So I guess there was an intro, but like, basically he's talking about, um, if the church is hiding history, which I think it would be something to start with. Yeah. So, like, it sounds like he's basically making the argument that the church has never really hid its history.

What did you hear that, Sandra?

Well, yes, and that's a bit of a surprise to me because, uh, my experience was certainly that they were hiding church history. They, they were hiding the different accounts of the First Vision. Who knew about the 1832 First Vision in 1960? When Gerald and I were researching the First Vision, we asked about that. Nobody was publishing it. It wasn't until after we made an issue of First Vision stuff that finally it comes out, and Joseph Fielding Smith had been hiding that account and finally let Dr. Chess chesman at BYU have it for a thesis. But they do hide church history. And he's going to go on and talk about Mountain Meadows. Uh, that was certainly hidden from my family. I mean, my great-grandpa, uh, participated in the massacre. I didn't grow up knowing anything about that. They were all sworn to secrecy.

Yeah, yeah. Um, Julia has a slight, pretty, pretty good slide right there, right after that one where he just lists. She, she lists.

Can I jump something in there real quick? I don't know. Put my hand up, but I don't know if you can see me. So no, just jump in, Nemo.

Okay, just jump in. I think his point about the Jews, I find particularly problematic. He makes this point as though like President Nelson had a right to expect, um, or rather that President Nelson was saying, well, look, they weren't hiding anything from me, I just learned something. But he had no right to expect the Jewish scholars would teach him something, whereas we had every right to expect that the leaders of the church would teach us honestly about the history of the church. It's just a bad comparison.

Yeah, it's a terrible comparison. Like, what does the Jews have anything to do with? I, I mean, I guess, yeah, they know more than President Nelson about the Bible, but, uh, yeah, what responsibility, I guess, does do the Jews have to President Nelson to talk, exactly, knowledge of the Bible?

Well, let's check out this, uh, slide that that Julie put together. I'll just go and read it. Um, so Julia, how would you title this slide?

Oh, just "The Church Hiding History," I guess.

Okay. All right. So you've got that Joseph Smith had up to 40 wives. This is something you're saying the church hid.

The church hid from its members and the world because that was first published in 2014. You're saying that's with the Gospel Topics Polygamy essay?

Julia, yeah, but it was also all over like the New York Times. Like it was a bunch of, there was a bunch of, uh, news articles that were releasing about this too, because 2014 was when it became worldwide news.

Yeah, and I'm going to say that is deceptive. I, I did not know about Joseph Smith's 30-plus wives throughout all my time as a member. I'm 45. Never once in any church setting up until I was excommunicated at age 45, did I ever hear any discussion of Joseph Smith's plural wives in any of my church Sunday school, Elders Quorum, Priesthood, etc. I had to learn that on my own, mostly from scholars the church excommunicated.

And they excommunicated the scholars. Why, Sandra?

Why did the church excommunicate scholars?

Generally, because they speak too forthrightly, right? They don't do a good PR job.

And but also, what happens when the church excommunicates a scholar in terms of members' trust?

Well, a lot of them get excommunicated, and do, and do members want want to listen to what the excommunicated?

Yes. Once you're out of the church, then you're, uh, disreputable. No one can believe what you say. And so, and so part of the way the church hides information from its members is to excommunicate the truth tellers to tell you to take you off the reading list. Yeah, you now are tainted. Oh, well, you can't read him. Yeah, because he was excommunicated.

Absolutely. Which makes me surprised that they haven't excommunicated Richard Bushman, if I'm honest, just because you read Rough Stone Rolling and you think, well, hang on, I wasn't told any of this. I'm not sure how he got away with it, but that's because he keeps saying Joseph's a prophet. And as long as you keep saluting the flag, they keep you on the roll.

Yeah. Okay. I should have done that. There you are. Where were you, Sandra?

Know, you clearly saluted the wrong flag.

Oh, well, I always have from my, my birth.

Expecting you to pull out your Union Jack and wave it around.

I don't have it with me.

Don't it. Okay. All right. Okay, let's go to the next bullet.

The church has hid, according to Julia, the fact, um, that the church has physically owned a seer stone.

Well, also, like, we've talked about it. Hang on. We've talked about this on LDS Discussions episodes before where, like, none of the manuals or none of the church materials were they even publishing about the seer stone, and we've we've tracked that before. So, yeah, that, like, in my take, the church is hiding that.

Yeah. And I remember it was a big deal that, uh, in 2015, the church released, as far as I know, its first official formal photo of one of the many Joseph Smith seer stones that it had in its vault for what, a hundred plus years?

Sandra? Yes. Yeah. Okay. Sandra mentioned the 1832 account of the First Vision. Uh, it wasn't published until 1970, and it was only published six years after the Tanners published about its existence. So you were instrumental in the church coming clean on that one.

Yes, but their hands were forced, right? It wasn't, they were forced to come out with the discussion of the different accounts.

Yeah. Okay. Um, the next one is that the Book of Abraham was not a literal translation. Again, the church first admits that, according to Julia, in 2014. Again, I'm assuming with its Gospel Topics essay.

Sandra, you spent several decades trying to get the church to own up to the translation problem.

Right. Right. We were writing about this in the late 60s. Gerald did an article in Dialogue where he showed the papyri have nothing to do with the Book of Abraham. It's all a hodgepodge of how Joseph reconstructed the fact similes that. So it takes them what, 50 years to get around to saying, well, okay, yeah, he didn't really translate the papyri.

Yeah, but it took 50 years.

Yeah, that's right.

Uh, Julie has a few more things she lists as possible things the church has hidden. Post-Manifesto polygamy, the origins of the Word of Wisdom, the Adam-God Theory. I mean, the church has kind of acknowledged Adam-God Theory, right?

Not really. There's actually, so in, you know how they've made like now dozens of little Gospel Topics essays, Adam-God Theory is not there. It's the only one. The one of the probably only ones that they have not. There's also not one on like Book of Mormon historicity, like like anachronisms and that, that sort of thing. Archaeology.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Um, Sandra, and I know that one of the reasons Michael Quinn was excommunicated was because he was publishing on post-Manifesto polygamy. Is that right?

Right. He did a big article in Dialogue that, uh, really, uh, put out, uh, a ream of facts on polygamy in early Utah and in early Joseph Smith period that nobody knew. So that it was very startling to people to read his articles on this.

Yeah. Any other big omissions, Sandra, that you can, I don't mean to put you on the spot, that that the church continues to hide from its members?

Well, those are probably some of the classic ones.

Yeah. So I guess how do we grade Keith Erickson in terms of sort of communicating to the membership that the church has never hid its history?

Well, it's gaslighting us. Yeah. It's victim blaming. He's like, why are you guys assuming that you would know everything? That sounds a little hubristic, doesn't it? For you to think that you should know everything? If you discover something you didn't know, but that's it's, it's a straw man because that's not the argument people are making. The argument people are making is, we were taught something that wasn't true, or we weren't taught the things that were true by the people we would expect to teach those things to us.

Right. Okay. Well, um, so, so far, out of the gate, Keith Erickson's not doing so great. Let's go ahead and go to the next clip.

Mountain Meadows.

Massacre.

Yeah. Sorry. And we should mention, Sandra, do you remember how the church treated Wanita Brooks when she finally came out with her historic book on the Mountain Meadows Massacre as a faithful member? Do you remember?

I'm not sure what you're getting at.

She didn't get excommunicated, was kind of intimidated. Yes. And excommunication was on the table, right?

Well, and she didn't get to see all the documents she wanted to see, yeah. They held back from her things that she asked for in her research, yeah. She definitely wasn't celebrated as a truth teller. Um, and I think if an AO, if if a prophet hadn't have intervened, she was set to be excommunicated.

Yeah. Just, and it's, it's a book that's largely stood up to scrutiny over time.

Oh, yeah. Yes, yes. It was, uh, it was an amazing book, especially for the time period that she did it. What was that, in the 40s? I don't remember when she first came out with it. Pretty early, but back in that time frame, amazing research that she did.

Yeah. What's even more, um, preposterous about what he's about to say is that the church has now come clean under the Mountain Meadows Massacre. You know, we Barbara Jones, co-author a book with one of the most important historians, you know, official church historians, Turley, about a Mountain Meadows Massacre. So the fact that he, the way that he's going to talk about it, it's kind of alarming to me, but let's listen to it.

Okay. And really quickly, just because we always love, uh, we always love when Dan Vogel is, uh, here and contributing. Dan Vogel reminds us that the church is still hiding the William Clayton journals.

Yes. But he goes on in this fireside to say, oh, the church is going to publish them finally this year. We're going to publish them.

Why are you laughing, Herard?

And Julia, just funny that he says that. We're not hiding anything. It only took them a hundred years to get around to this.

But all right. Okay. Well, let's go ahead and go to the next clip. I, I wonder how much is going to be redacted. But, oh, right. From, yeah, from the that's fine. Okay. Let's go to the next clip.

But the question behind it is, well, uh, this was about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. So if you go in the John the Baptist one, there is a little brief summary of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Uh, yes. Uh, about 20 Latter-day Saints in 1857 murdered 120 people from Arkansas. It was done in cold blood. There is no justification. They will stand before God to be held accountable for the sin of murder. There's nothing we can say, uh, about that now. Some of the rumors around it were that Brigham Young authorized it or ordered it. That's false. Here's the way it played out. The people were in Cedar City, got together and had a stake council. I've been to a couple of stake council meetings. Sometimes they're boring. This one was kind of interesting. They were trying to decide what to do about the people, and they talk through in the council meeting. The council says, don't do anything, let them pass. Well, people leave that council and say, we don't like the answer of the council. We're gonna go do something. And so, yes, they're Latter-day Saints. Here's a spoiler alert. There's like millions of Latter-day Saints on the earth tonight, and some of them commit crimes. There are prisons in Utah filled with them. When I, in Texas, uh, we had the state prison in our ward boundaries, and Latter-day Saints get shipped there. There is nothing in our teachings that say you become a church member, you don't commit crimes. Uh, so yes, it's a terrible thing that happened, but no, uh, it's not representative of the church or organized by the church or perpetrated by the church.

Now, to show these work together. Okay. So credit to him, he acknowledges that it happened. He acknowledges that in his 20 church members were involved. He says there's no justification, they'll be judged by God. But he says Brigham Young didn't authorize and by the way, people commit crimes in and out of the church, but that doesn't mean Mormons are bad people.

Any, any reactions, panel?

I have thoughts. His tone at the beginning was like, yes, I ate your sandwich, but, you know what, you just left it out on the counter, so of course I was going to eat a sandwich. Like it was borderline dismissive. Yes, 20 Latter-day Saints did go murders, some people. It's, it's actually a lie. It's not 20, it's way more than that.

Well, I'll talk about it. Yeah, yeah. But like his tone is just like incredibly dismissive of what is a horrific event. Um, so there, that's, that's the first point. And then the second point is this idea, who said there's nothing in Latter-day Saint teachings that stops you committing crimes? No, but there are a lot of Latter-day Saint teachings that should make you the sort of person that doesn't. And if, if people are at any, any sort of increased rate committing crimes as members of the church, we have to look at, are there any failings in our institution that, or anything within our institution that may cause them to commit crimes at all? Because there is a level of responsibility. You can't just completely absolve the church of any responsibility because the church's teachings are deeply embroiled in people's lives. So you can't just absolve the church of any responsibility for people's further actions. There's always a place of, was there anything about their membership of the church that may have caused them to participate in X action or Y? It's not always going to be the case that it did, but it should always be a question that's asked, I would think, because of how like pervasive the church is in people's lives and their worldview.

I thought it was amazing that he was so dismissive of that. Oh, they committed a crime and they'll have to pay for it and they'll stand before God as murderers. Well, wait a minute. John D. Lee was the guy that got executed for this. They later, the church later reinstated him and restored all his temple ceilings. So in effect, he was pardoned by the church. So the church pardoned him. They aren't holding him accountable for murder because in Mormonism, murder is the unforgivable sin. So how could they later restore John D. Lee to membership and give him back all his plural wives? That says to me the church did not see him as committing murder. So I guess, uh, either Keith Erickson doesn't know that John D. Lee was pardoned, or he, I think he has to know. And I mean, where is he getting this 20 number? Like, other than trying to intentionally say a lie that like to, to feel, make people feel okay about this. The number of the perpetrators was significantly larger. Historians estimate that was over between 50 to 60 armed Mormon militia men who directly participated in it, along with 30 to 40 local Native Americans who were recruited and manipulated by the Mormons to assist in the attack. And like that would be, you know, like we were talking, we were texting a little bit with Brent Madkov, who brought up a good point, like, if we apply the same percentage today, you know, of 17 million members, it would be the equivalent of 18,000 Mormons committing a similar act. And these were all the church leaders in the area. This this wasn't just some rogue Mormon elders out there in the boondocks. This was the stake president, this was the bishops, this was the priesthood leaders, these were the men planning this. This this was not just some hole in the wall thing by a few elders. This was the church leadership in southern Utah.

Yeah, this story that he tells about the Cedar Council about how it was like some rogue members who ended up committing the crime because the council decided not to do anything, that is completely a misrepresentation of what actually happened. The, so it was Isaac High, the local militia leader, and remember this is like the Nauvoo Legion, who is like officially approved by the church, he wanted to attack the immigrants. And after the council delayed the action, High met with William Day, a higher-ranking leader who approved the attack. So the decision was not just a few rogue individuals ignoring leadership, like he makes it sound. So that's pretty problematic. And if you add what Nemo said, you know, this was the reason why this happened was not because, oh, they just all of a sudden wanted to commit murder. It was all surrounded all this rhetoric of violence and blood atonement that Brigham Young was preaching and that that the church was sanctioning.

Let's jump to the slides because Julie, I think you prepared a few slides to address that.

Yeah, so I just want to read. So during the Mormon Reformation period, which was 1856 through 1857, men from the church were sent out to ask these questions to the members. This was a precursor to the Mormon, the temple recommend questions that we ask today. So if you skip to the next slide, Nemo, can you read number one? The number one question that is asked to Latter-day Saints.

So the first question asked to Latter-day Saints in this period before they can enter the temple is, "Have you committed murder by shedding innocent blood or consenting thereto?"

Thanks. Yeah. So that's, yeah, that's the number one question. So like, it's not fair of him to, it's not fair of Keith Erickson to say, like, these are just some rogue people or like, oh, everyone, there's just going to be crime when you have a lot of, you know, population of Mormons. Like this was, this was the culture that the Mormons were in right now. There was a lot of violence. Like if you go to the next slide, John, I talk a little bit about the blood atonement and things like that.

Yeah. So the very first question, have you committed murder? Brigham Young's teachings, as well as Joseph Smith's, because I think those are, there's the roots of the blood atonement are in Joseph Smith's teachings also, concerning the blood atonement, created a certain mindset in many of the early saints that would lead them to destroy the lives of many individuals. The blood atonement is the doctrine that there are some sins so severe that Jesus Christ's sacrifice alone cannot atone for them, and so the blood of the sinner must be shed. So this is just how there, this is just how Mormonism is right now. And so like, it doesn't surprise me at all that there's that this whole thing is happening with the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

And, you know, I just say from everything I've read from objective historians, Brigham Young, and Brigham Young is your great-great-grandfather, right?

Yes. And from everything I've read, whether or not he actually commanded it, number one, he did command at least one genocide, which was of the, as I understand it, were they Paiutes in kind of Utah County area? Oh, I remember the Ute people. The Ute tribe, where he literally signs an extermination order of, uh, Ute Native Americans. And even if we can't find evidence that he ordered the Mountain Meadows Massacre, with the Utah Reformation, he certainly used a lot of violent rhetoric, including blood atonement rhetoric, that would agitate and stoke animosity towards non-Mormons, that that at least at a minimum contributed to what ultimately became violent acts. Is that fair?

Have to understand that the Mormons at the time were worried about the federal troops coming into Utah to take over things and fearing that there was going to be a, uh, war with the United States. There was a lot of tension. So, and there were reasons to want the wagon train supplies because of if they're going to go to war with the United States, uh, they needed the supplies in that wagon. So there were many reasons coming into why this particular wagon train would have been picked. But it was the rhetoric that was going around, stirring up the people with hate towards the outside world, hate towards the Gentiles, fear of the outside world, that all played into this.

Am I also, am I wrong in thinking that the oath of vengeance for the death of Joseph Smith played a part in some of this?

Absolutely. Where the, where the wagon train was coming from, and the people that they thought were involved in the mob that killed him.

Tell us about that, Sandra.

Well, so the main body of the wagon train were people from Arkansas that were just simply transferring to California to start a new life. But Parley P. Pratt, Apostle, had been killed in Arkansas, uh, just months before this happened. And the Mormons had taken an oath in the temple of vengeance against anyone that kills the prophets, stemming from the death of Joseph and Hyrum. And so when news reached them of Parley Pratt being killed in Arkansas, that marked Arkansas as on the enemy list. So right off the bat, these people were in danger coming into Utah at this particular time.

Yeah. Julie, did you have anything you wanted to add about that?

No, I think those were great comments.

Okay. I think in some, Brigham Young didn't have to directly order the Mountain Meadows Massacre in order to be responsible for it by teaching things like blood atonement and creating an environment in which something like that could happen, right?

Yeah. So, so I guess I want to say, so far on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, what grade are we giving Erickson for his truthfulness? And is it fair to say he's not trying to give an extensive coverage, he's just trying, when you say 20 people, like, when, and with like random members who were rogue, like he's making up like stuff.

Yeah. Downplay. Happy with him, Herard?

No, he's downplaying the importance and significance of the massacre and and the horror of it, and he's not providing important context for the violence, right? For the violent, yeah, circumstances that Brigham Young helped foster.

I could give him a pass for the, for the, for not providing context, you know, but like, literally making up stuff like the number of people and the fact that this was like just random Mormons who were bloodthirsty, like that's deceptive. That's just deceptive.

Okay. All right. So far, Keith Erickson's not doing so great. Um, for his honesty, half? We should give him half. I, I, if he keeps going, Julia, I'm gonna have you rename this episode, "History Director Deceives Mormons About History," and then name him in the title, because if he's, it gets worse. It gets worse. Yeah. Until we get to believe me. Okay. All right. All right. All right. Well, let's keep going. Let's go to the next clip.

In early Latter-day Saint history, the Word of Wisdom is given when Brigham Young is president of the church. They try really hard, but people don't follow it. And, uh, because frankly, all the people are addicted to it. They were addicted to it long before the 1830s. And so during Brigham Young's presidency, they basically say, well, let's stop really teaching it to the old people, and we'll teach it to the rising generations. They're not addicted yet. Let's teach them to do this. And so the first people for whom living the Word of Wisdom was a requirement for a temple recommend were full-time missionaries, young people, 19, 18, 20-year-olds, as they go out in the field. Uh, and so that happened in 1918, and that was in the 1920s when it became a requirement for every church member. Few years ago, they raised the bar on missions.

Okay. Um, what's the problem with that? Um, this was not a terrible one, but like it was, uh, kind of interesting, just this story about the Word of Wisdom. And I think it's a lot more complex, the story. It, it also was a little hard to hear about, um, the reason why it was not implemented outright was because people were addicted to it. Like this idea that Mormons have like, if you drink one sip of coffee, you're gonna become addicted to it. So like, never do it. Um, so playing into that idea. But, but Julia, I, I, I'm curious to what, what you thought about it because, you know, a little bit more about the history on the Word of Wisdom. You did some research on it.

Yeah, so I have, I haven't made a slide. Is it, is it up there? We go. Uh, there we go. Yeah. So there's a slide that I made. So the first nine prophets did not strictly abide by the Word of Wisdom. And how many are there? What is Nelson? Is he like 15 or what is he? Is he, what number is he? What number? 17th? Okay. So like half of them, like, right? Anyway, I just think that's interesting. And if you go to the next slide, I can, I'll give a little bit more information.

Okay. Yeah. So like Joseph Smith, he regularly partook of tea, coffee, and wine, and he smoked a pipe. Brigham Young, he said once, if a person is weary, worn out, cast down, fainting, or dying, a brandy sling, a little wine, or a cup of tea is good to revive them. Do not throw these things away. In fact, he was instructing the Saints to carry them across the plains, which Nemo and I were talking about before the episode aired. Yeah. John Taylor drank tea, coffee, wine, and he smoked a pipe, smoked a pipe, and tobacco. Wilfred Woodruff drank brandy, as well as, uh, wine and coffee. You can see all these in their journals too. Lorenzo Snow, he drank wine. Joseph F. Smith also drank wine, and he had a history of physical abuse that some theorized might have been enhanced by the alcohol. He, there's stories of him abusing, um, his neighbor, his sister's teacher at school, things like that. I think his, even his wife, uh, Heber J. Grant struggled with alcohol drinking, as many as six glasses of beer every day. And in 1921, he made adherence to the Word of Wisdom a prerequisite for temple admission. But George Albert Smith, he took brandy for medical reasons. And one of the funniest stories to me is David O. McKay, um, once to everyone's surprise, he ate a rum cake. And we're like, whoa, why are you eating this? This is remnant. And he says, the Word of Wisdom forbade drinking alcohol, not eating it. Anyway. Just that, I thought this was a fun, like, just a little overview of like, not all the prophets strictly adhered to the Word of Wisdom. And Keith is just not, not mischaracterizing it, I guess. But anyway, what are your guys' thoughts on that clip?

Well, we were all raised on this faith-promoting story of how Joseph Smith refused to take, was it whiskey or whatever that was offered to him on his leg surgery as a boy? And this was our wonderful example of why we should keep the Word of Wisdom. And yet now he's.

Going to say, "Oh well, the early guys, no, none of them kept it. It's okay. It didn't become law until the 1920s."

Well, then why were we never told that? We were told, "Oh no, from day one, Joseph was this great example of refusing alcohol." Which, how many of us knew that he had wine the night that he was in the Carthage Jail before he was killed? We didn't get that in seminary. I didn't, anyways.

Yeah, no. And you've got John Taylor saying, "Some have said, you know, it was for this reason or that reason." No, it was just to lift our spirits because we were down. It's, you know, it's very clear why they were drinking it. And, and I think it's interesting when you read DNC 89, that it's sent not by way of commandment, but by way of a word of wisdom. So it's in the Revelation that, "Hey, you don't have to do this. This is just, this is, um, you know, advisory almost."

Well, that was never the narrative we were given. Sorry. Well, you have, uh, I don't remember what year it was, the book came out of Brigham Young's letters to his sons. Wow, when was that? In the '80s or something. And that caused quite a stir because in it, Brigham writes to my great-grandpa, Brigham Young Jr., who was on a mission, I think, in England at the time, that he hoped he'd been able to give up tobacco because Brigham hadn't used it for the last year or two. And that caused a big surprise in the community when that book came out because no one understood that the Brethren didn't keep the Word of Wisdom in those time periods.

And, uh, my memory as I'm thinking back to Leonard Arrington's memoir, he was church historian, official church historian from 1972 to 1982. It was that type of uncovering that came through the historians that he worked with that made the General Authorities get so mad that they shut down, eventually, the Church History Department because he was informing members of things like the Word of Wisdom habits of past Apostles and Prophets that they didn't know about in the 1970s and '80s.

Absolutely. I mean, I remember when that book came out and someone called me on the phone, "Oh, you've got to get this volume because it tells about Brigham and Brigham Jr. and whether or not they were still using tobacco as adults." When you, they're talking about the President of the Church and an Apostle. Yeah. And we were all surprised by that.

I want to make a point about because this is really important too, and it's from what you're saying, Sandra. Keith Erikson is participating in that deception. If you listen really carefully to what he's saying, he's saying that the Brethren tried really hard for members to follow it, but the members were all addicted to it. So then they had to have the new missionaries, the new, the new members, the younger people be the commandment for them because the Brethren just couldn't deal with the old people.

So you're saying he's deceiving people by not admitting that the leaders themselves were also addicted? Yeah. Well, not addicted, they just, they just didn't see it the way that they want to enforce it today. But also, also, I had a thought too, because he's talking about missionaries in the early days. And missionaries in the early days were usually like, they were more well-established, they were older men with wives and children. I don't think they were really sending 18-year-olds on missions. I could be, I could be mistaken.

I picked up on that as well. I really don't think he's sending the young people out. I think he's sending these, they're sending out like my great-grandpa left his two plural wives with multiple children, some of the wives pregnant. She sent those people right on missions to Europe while their children and wives sometimes literally starved. Yeah.

And so this, this all speaks to the temple recommend interview and how temple recommend worthiness is so important in Mormonism more broadly because the moment it becomes a temple recommend requirement, that's when it starts to get really strict. That's when people are really monitoring it because up until that point, where you could still go to the temple, you could still do this stuff because it was advisory. It was something people were sort of doing, sort of not. Um, the moment Heber J. Grant makes it part of the temple recommend requirements, in part, I've heard some fact-check me, because of his own struggles with sort of substances, he essentially went, "Right, no, I'm going cold turkey. Everyone else is going to have to go cold turkey too. We're going to make this part of the temple recommend requirement. We're just going to make this a blanket ban."

Now, all of a sudden, this becomes a commandment. This becomes something really serious. This becomes, "One cup of coffee keeps you out of heaven," whereas you've got these leaders running around in the early days. It's just about it. That that shows the power of the temple recommend and temple attendance in defining Mormon worthiness, right? Yeah. And that's exactly the reason why he implemented it.

Nemo, all right. So really quickly, is, is I'm trying to be a tiny bit technical now with these slides. Tell me if we can give Erikson the benefit of the doubt. Technically, you know, this slide presentation you put together, Julia, a lot of these instances technically aren't violations of the Word of Wisdom because, like Nemo said, at the time, these prophets and revelators were drinking wine, um, and beer. At least it wasn't forbidden, right? The Word of Wisdom technically didn't forbid, tell me if I'm wrong, it didn't forbid beer. It doesn't. If you read even the Book of Mormon now. Yeah. The, the Word of Wisdom now as it's in the Doctrine and Covenants, it allows beer. Is that right, Sandra? Yes. I don't think most Mormons realize that, but yes, that's mild drinks of barley. Is that what it's called? And then it doesn't forbid wine as long as you make it yourself, right? Yeah. You have to make it. Yes. Homebrew is okay. Okay. So home-brewed wine, mild drinks of barley, which is beer, and then it allows it. It only forbids hot drinks. So that's where, I guess, if they're drinking coffee, I'm assuming that these prophets and revelators are drinking hot coffee, not Starbucks cold brew or iced coffee. So I guess there's no way that they are violating the Word of Wisdom with coffee, is that right?

But again, violating is the wrong word because at that point, it wasn't a commandment to be violated. Okay. That's kind of that's because that's not how it originally was was brought about. But the problem is there, it's a technicality of how you word things. Yes, they weren't violating the Word of Wisdom in, uh, Brigham Young's day and, uh, later apostles up through the turn of the century because it wasn't a commandment. But we were told that they were keeping it. It was presented to us. I remember them, the story they had of Brigham Young always carrying a plug of tobacco in his vest pocket to show how God had given him the power to withstand using tobacco, that he always had this plug there, unused, that he carried around to show that he had ability to withstand this habit. And I look back on those stories that I was taught as a young person and I think, "Wait a minute. Then why is he writing to his son in England about, 'Hope you've been able to give up your tobacco habit. I've given up mine for the last year or two'?" And so, yeah, I'll agree that he probably had the plug of tobacco in his vest pocket. My question is, uh, how often was he getting it out of his vest?

So it's the way they frame things. We were given a picture of the early Saints keeping the Word of Wisdom, which the historians have had to have known all along was not the way it was really being lived. But we were taught that in seminary. That was the world we grew up in. That they had to do that, do this. They had to tell it that way because they now have to, they now have to keep this commandment as it is now upheld by members. And one of the ways to do that is to appeal to the very first prophets of the church and see, "Look, they did it." So therefore, that's why we need to do it now because it's harder to try and explain now why it wasn't a commandment once upon a time and now it is. And why, and the influence the prohibition may have played on that and all the other influences. It's much neater and cleaner just to tell people, "Yep, from the moment it was revealed, all the prophets and apostles followed it, so you should too."

Yeah, and I think, I think the biggest issue they have, they want members to believe that the church doctrine has never changed and that the church's rules have never changed. But if they admit that it was like, at first it was okay, then when the revelation came, we were kind of advised against it, but then later it was made more formal and lots of prophet series of revelators were doing all the wrong things over time, then it makes the church look loosey-goosey and like, you know, things get changed and updated.

I just saw recently a photo from the BYU Idaho soda machine on campus, and it shows like 11 sodas, uh, available now to BYU Idaho students. And like, nine out of 11 of the sodas now available on BYU Idaho campus are caffeinated. Does that surprise you, Harard? No. Based on when you were at BYU Idaho, does that surprise you? It does. I guess if I, if I think about how I was raised with like this idea that caffeine was bad. Well, you went to BYU Idaho where nine of the 11 soda options was no caffeine, caffeinated drinks on the, on the fountain. When they, right, when they started carrying Coke products at BYU and there was newspaper articles about this. Dear, what let's see, when was this that happened? I can't remember the time frame. But when they made this switch, the newspapers asked someone at BYU why they hadn't had Coke there before. And some guy makes the statement, "Well, no one asked for it before." And you know, jaw drop. What do you mean, no one asked for it before? They're all sneaking it on campus because they can't buy it there. Yeah. It's just pressure comes up that they finally gave in and put Coke on campus. But it, it's just amazing how they can finesse their history.

Well, it's just, um, yeah, it's just amazing how they can change the narrative from what we all experienced as children, as teenagers, and then make it sound like, "Oh, well, it was all your problem. Yeah, it's your perception that's wrong, not that we were hiding anything." The Mormon history memory hole is real. Is that, is that right, Sandra? Okay, let's go and go to the next clip. Um, and let's see what else. Brother about President Nelson. And we're about to get into polygamy after this one. But yeah, okay. All right. So let's play, uh, next clip.

"We're not in a church that's trying to stay true to what we did in 1830. That's a fundamentalist strain that runs through our culture. This isn't the Church of 1830. This is the Church of the Living Christ. He is alive. He is guiding President Nelson right now." That's so, so that kind of framework that says, "Oh, and the good old days, it was true, and now we're soft," is the, is the backwards framework. "It's an ongoing restoration. That's the exciting part."

Well, I mean, ongoing revelation is one of the main selling points of Mormonism. What's wrong with what he said? Well, it's backward revelation. He said ongoing restoration, which is not the ongoing restoration seems to be taking away things that were revealed earlier. Restoring, the rest, un-restoring. It's working backwards. Oh, we're going to have polygamy. Oh, no, we're going to take that away. Uh, blacks can't have the priesthood. Oh, well, yeah, they can have it now. Uh, I mean, yes, they are changing their doctrines.

Which all brings up this whole issue of, I was raised with this idea that we are the restored church because the dirty Catholics changed everything and set us all on a road to corruption. They corrupted it and changed the doctrines. That was what made the Catholics so bad. They changed the doctrines and the ordinances and the ordinances. They changed the ordinances. Well, the Brethren can change the ordinance all the time, and it doesn't seem to count. So let's revise the temple ceremony again. I can't tell you how many times it's been revised just in my lifetime, and it gets to be a kinder, gentler ceremony. They're taking away parts of the temple ceremony. God isn't revealing more stuff to them. He's taking away the things that he did reveal. Yeah. Yeah. That's the problem.

But, um, and there have been people that have raised this issue, and some historians have pointed out that this idea of the ongoing restoration is actually a pretty new concept. Like, if you go back just a few decades ago, in fact, people were saying that the restoration had already been completed. You know, I think Joseph Smith said that the restoration had been completed. So, um, this is pretty new, and I think it came with President Nelson, this idea of an ongoing restoration that the church has been talking about more recently, because if you keep talking about something that keeps being restored, as Sandra said, then you can make it okay to be changing stuff because now we have more light that before we didn't have. You know, uh, instead of like, yeah, but that's kind of interesting.

All right, so we've got a, we've got a slide here, and this is like, it's a slide of Elder Holland. All right, let's, uh, let's see how, how, how God he's explaining to us how God is guiding President Nelson today. Okay. And culturally, here's kind of what happens. The world is here, and we're more, we're more conservative here. And we, we, we, we're not going to do what the world does, you know, live together or or or never get married or whatever. But as, as the world progresses, cultures change, they go here, and then we go here. And then they go here, and we go here. And before long, you look up and we're perilously close where, where, where we would never have thought to be before. So let's stay fixed on gospel principles and not cultural, uh, issues and not the societal, uh, commitments of the time. I've said too much, sister.

Yeah, yeah. He said too much. Nemo, thoughts? Oh, he definitely said too much. Right. He, he essentially said the quiet part out loud and acknowledged that the church essentially has this habit of staying 10 paces behind societal progress. Yeah. What I just, what I just heard is him saying that the church follows social progress. Did I, did I misunderstand him? Yes, they follow way behind. Just slow. Yes. Like, like on the racial issue, a little slow on that one. Yeah. Yeah. Whether it's women, whether it's, you know, people of color, LGBT, um, you know, so many issues. Accepting what the historians have revealed about the history of the church, science, right? The validity of science, DNA, DNA, yeah, Egyptology. Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of weird that he would, he would earlier, Sandra gave some examples of where it's taken the church 50 years to admit what she and Gerald figured out in the '60s, right? Yes. Yeah. It's kind of silly for them to pretend they don't, they don't succumb to the whims of social pressure, right, Sandra? Like, in your, in your experience, like, I'll just list some things. You tell me if you can think of a precursor. So the church's changing of the temple ceremony, were there any social pressures that led to that?

Yes, people were doing exposes and showing how ridiculous the ceremony was, how it related to masonry, how the ceremony was just copying Masonic wording. And so gradually the church has taken those parts out. And Harard, we did a long, extensive series with Dr. Matt Harris called "Second Class Saints," which I highly recommend, which talked about the priesthood ban. Do you remember any precursory social precursors to the lifting of the priesthood ban?

Yeah, I mean, just so much. Just even just the, the church was pro-segregation. The church was against, um, interracial marriage. All of those things have like changed as, as society has changed. Not just giving and what black people the priesthood. What are a couple of things that caused the church to change, uh, on the priesthood ban? Social pressure, or the church looking like they were like bigots, basically? I mean, yeah, lots of it. Also went into the expansion desire of the church. They wanted to expand into bigger markets. And so if you're going to go into Brazil, for instance, where you have a society that's very much mixed, you had the problem of blacks, half black people joining Mormonism. And so the church could see they're going to have to change the racial stance. There were people of mixed heritage joining the church and being given the priesthood. And so it all was an obvious change that was going to have to be made. It was an unsupportable position.

And I'll just add, when I started my PhD in Psychology in 2009, the church was still a member of Evergreen, which was a conversion therapy, you know, organization for LGBT members. The church taught that being gay, that having same-sex attraction was a perversion, that it was an influence of the devil, that, that you should pray the gay away, that you should, if you're a gay man, you should just marry a woman and it'll go away. If you're a lesbian, you should just marry a man and it'll go away. Um, and they would send a General Authority every year to the Evergreen conference to speak and support conversion therapy. Now, if you fast forward, the church has changed all those things. Why? Because of the internet, because of lawsuits against, you know, this church and other churches, because of the brutality and the lack of scientific basis of conversion therapy, um, and just because of the suicide epidemics that movies like "Believer" with Dan Reynolds and Tyler Glenn, you know, just beat the church into submission about the LGBT suicide epidemic. That's why the church has softened its rhetoric against LGBT people. Not to mention the, the rolling back of the November 2015 policy in 2019, right? You know, what was the precursor for that, Hero? What made the church change and roll back the 2015?

People were leaving the church like it didn't make any sense. Yeah. People were resigning in mass. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And so the church, what, what guides the church, Sandra? If it's not revelation, pressure, public pressure, is that your opinion? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Nemo, you agree? Uh, yeah, I think it's that mixed with power. If the church feels like it's losing its power or its control, then it will shift to try and keep that control. It's kind of, it's kind of money, power, and influence, PR, public perception. I call those like the most sacred things in Mormonism. Yeah. I think they're the true, that's the true threefold mission of the church. Yeah. Yeah.

All right, well, let's go and go to the next clip. Okay, now another part of this question was, since he publicly denied that he did this, is one of the things we talk about in the essay, but let's talk about it in detail right here. So there are about a half a dozen sources that are published in Nauvoo, and some, one is by Joseph, well, one is Joseph in his sermon that's actually minutes in his journal, but he and Hyrum published one in a newspaper. Hyrum publishes another one, uh, the year before. There's a group of women and a group of men. So we've got about a half a dozen of these, uh, denials. Now, now here's what you need to do as a, as a good historian, as a good disciple of Jesus Christ. Let me, I'll start with the bad way to do it. The bad way to do it is to just take a couple of words that you want to make your point, pluck them out, and then throw them at people and say, "See, here's this. Let me show you how to do it." We already talked about the Vision of the Kingdoms of Glory, right? One of the things it says there that, that the Celestial Kingdom is for, and here's the whole phrase, "just men who are made perfect in, in the, in the blood of the Savior." Now, I could just take those words, "just men," and say, "The Celestial Kingdom is for just men." Do you see how I did that? One of my favorite little memes says, "I can do all things," with the verse taken out of context. And so, so when we look at these denials, what we need to do is read the whole thing in context. So let me show you what to read for. Every one of them refers to a specific other false teaching about sex. So here's a little backstory, quick as possible. There's a guy in Nauvoo, he's in the First Presidency, he commits sins, he seduces women, rapes them. His name is John C. Bennett. He's excommunicated. Then he gets angry and he starts going out publishing and saying the Mormons have invented a thing called spiritual wifery. And John C. Bennett gives all, he gives all the details. It's an expose. And so he says, "This is how spiritual wifery works. Anybody who wants can have sex. If you get pregnant, there's no problem, you just have an abortion, and you get free food if you do it. That's spiritual wifery." That John C. Bennett is talking about. So now when you go and read the denials, read them, uh, and George A. Smith was later an Apostle, young man in Nauvoo, he said, "Anybody who reads these can see that they were carefully worded denials." So what does he mean by carefully worded? What they say is, "We do not teach John C. Bennett's spiritual wifery. He made that up, and we don't do that." Whoa.

All right, Sandra, we're going to give you first shot. Well, okay. So he's, he's trying to say that when they do the, when Joseph Smith prints denials of polygamy, it's this fine wording that Joseph Smith is saying, "We don't do John C. Bennett's type of spiritual wifery." He doesn't then go on to explain the way we do plural marriage is this way. That it's just a flat denial. And so, well, let's look at Joseph Smith's last denial when he gives his in his sermon. He says, "What a thing it is for a man to be accused of having seven wives when I can only find one." Now, the Mormons want to say, "Well, he was right. He only had one wife because the others weren't legal." And it's this parsing of phrases that just drives you nuts in church history apologetics, that the denials were there purposely to put down that they were practicing polygamy, whatever way you want to give the label to it. Joseph had many wives. He was lying to his wife, not just the church. He lied to his wife. He had at least 20 wives before he talks to her about his revelation on polygamy. Me, I mean, that he's, she's not giving her permission for all of this. It's all a big lie kept from the people of Nauvoo, kept from his wife. There are rumors of it out there, yes. John C. Bennett blows the lid on Joseph living polygamy. Emma has to be aware that something's afoot, but she's trying to hang on to belief, evidently, that Joseph's telling her, "Oh, well, yeah, that's just Bennett, that's not me." But Emma realizes there's something going on, and it's obvious when this guy, later in his, uh, talk, he talks about they, uh, what all was known in Nauvoo. But Emma is aware that things are going on, and it shows up in Clayton's diary. And in this fireside, he talks later about the Clayton diaries going to come out next year. In his diary, he talks about Joseph's polygamy. This idea that you can just put a different label on what Joseph's doing and then be able to say, "Oh, well, his denial of John C. Bennett was all honest and true, and he wasn't hiding anything. He was just saying we don't do John C. Bennett's type of thing." But he never explains Joseph's kind of polygamy. Yeah.

So, just to fact-check him, let me see if I understand what you're saying, Harard. What I just heard, well, what I heard Erikson say is there's about six published denials. Yeah. And that what I heard him say is that they're, all, all six of them are, are denials of John C. Bennett style spiritual wifery. But then that quote you just told me is at least one example of a denial that wasn't about John C. Bennett style spiritual wifery, which means, in my mind, Keith Erikson is deceiving his audience. Cherry-picking? He's cherry-picking. Yes. So did he just deceive the audience with that stat? He did. Totally 100%. And he has to know better, right? I think so.

Can I throw something out? Hey, John, please. Yes. So I think you could sum up what he just said in a very simple way. Hey, guys, Joseph Smith didn't lie by commission. He lied by omission. Completely different. He lied because he left stuff out, not because he said something that wasn't true. And I want to go to chapter 31 of, uh, Gospel Principles, the chapter on honesty. Okay, lying is intentionally deceiving others. Bearing false witness is one form of lying. And then it goes on to say, "Thou shalt not bear false witness," etc. There are many other forms of lying. When we speak untruths, we are guilty of lying. We can also intentionally deceive others by a gesture or a look, by silence, or by telling only part of the truth. Whenever we lead people in any way to believe something that is not true, we are not being honest. So no matter what way Keith Erikson wants to frame it, by the church's own standard of honesty, as it's laid out in Gospel Principles, Joseph wasn't being honest. He's still lying. Yeah. And Keith Erikson is lying here. He's not being fully honest. Yeah. As he's, you know, it, I think it's, it's worth mentioning the stakes here. These youth or adults, is this mostly youth or adults? Both. They're both. Yeah. They're making really important decisions. Do I want to give 10% of my income to the church? Do I want to commit my life to the church through covenants? Do I want to give my children to the church mission? Do I want to go on missions? Do I want to give all this service? They deserve to know the truth. And so if Keith, if they're coming, and as I, as I read here, somebody said that at least in some of these firesides, maybe it's the one in Germany. Let me read a comment. Jessica Frankle writes, "The fireside in Germany was only for questioning members." And you, so first of all, they're filtering out these firesides. They don't give it to all members. Just like the Gospel Topics Essays are not made aware to all members. Most Bishop, Bishop's, Stake Presidents, Stake Presidencies that I've interviewed on Mormon Stories as recently as last week, were not aware of the Gospel Topics Essays as recently as this very year or last year. So the church continues to hide this information from both the leadership and the membership. But then when they do these firesides, as Jessica writes, it's only for questioning members, and you had to go with your bishop, and the chapels were relatively empty. So, so not only is Keith Erikson deceiving, continuing the deception when he goes on on these firesides, but the church continues to withhold this information from the general membership. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, I had a question about John C. Bennett. Because he did, you want to say something? Yo, Julia has a slide about John C. Bennett. Oh, okay. Ju, but just like this, this claim that he, he's a rapist. Is, oh, yeah. My understanding is like, he was not accused of anything that Joseph was not equally as guilty of, like coercing women into into relationships. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. If, if Keith Erikson wants to describe what John C. Bennett was doing as rape, then we have to look at whether Joseph Smith was guilty of the same thing. Is that what you're saying, Harard? Yeah. Yeah. Julie, do you want to tell us about your slide on John C. Bennett?

Yeah, so we've done episodes on this in the past through FAIR discussions, and this is just one of the slides that I had used then. So many apologists brush off Bennett's spiritual wifery and say that it had nothing to do with Joseph Smith's polygamy or that they are over-the-top accusations. And while his expose had a lot of misinformation, like we've talked about, like the cloistered sisters or the the Sisters of the Black Veil or whatever, Bennett successfully named at least six of Joseph Smith's plural wives. And then I've listed some of them out. So like, he knew to some degree what was happening with Joseph Smith. Like, so I still don't have a good idea, and I think Dan Vogel's in the comments. I still don't have a good idea of how apologists want to separate this is what spiritual wifery is, and this is what Joseph Smith polygamy is, because to me, they look the same. Like, and I think that's why Bennett, they look the same to Bennett too. And so, like, I don't understand the difference. I think the one, the one I've heard from apologists is like, Joseph had to authorize it, and John C. Bennett was just picking whatever woman he found on the street. And isn't that true? Isn't that true of the church still today, right? If, if, if I go out, or, or let's pick Sandra, if Sandra goes out and talks about these things, she gets excommunicated, or in order to remove herself from the church, she has to be excommunicated, and people will throw victory all at her. But if you're authorized to go out and talk about the problems of early church history now that the church wants to admit to it, all of a sudden it's fine. Mormon moral standards don't seem to be about whether something is inherently right or wrong. They seem to be about whether you are authorized correctly to do it by a church leader. Yeah. You know, you can go out and Mormon apologists today will go out and give wild theories about what Mormonism is, you know, they give present a version of Mormonism that just doesn't exist in most people's lives and paint it as this is what Mormonism can be for you. And yet they're allowed to, and they're not excommunicated for apostasy or for teaching false doctrine because they are authorized to do so by the right leader. It's, it's not about whether what they're doing is right or wrong. It's about whether they're authorized or not. And you see the same here with polygamy. The only difference between what John C. Bennett was doing and what Joseph Smith was doing, it seems, is that Joseph Smith was allowed to by his own rules, and John C. Bennett wasn't.

I want to add a comment that Dan Vogel has added in the chat. Dan, we love you. You're with us. He writes, he writes, "The term spiritual wifery was used by Mormons too." And so I guess what he's saying there is Joseph Smith was trying to distinguish between his righteous polygamy, which would not have been called spiritual wifery according to Keith Erikson, and John C. Bennett's immoral polygamy, which Joseph Smith is laboring to label his spiritual wifery. But Dan Vogel is saying that term spiritual wifery was used interchangeably to describe both types of polygamy. Do we have any verification of that on the panel? I, I believe that's my understanding as well. Yeah. I wouldn't want to disagree with Dan Vogel, would you, Sandra? No. It all just comes down to Joseph wants to be in control of all of the dispersement of women. Yeah.

The other thing I just wanted to add is that who called John C. Bennett? Like, by the time John C. Bennett was in power, wasn't he mayor of Nauvoo? Well, he was second in command to Joseph. Co-president. Co-president of the church. Like, if Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, why did he put a rapist, abuser of women, as his co-president? Right. He had left his wife and kids in another state. I mean, that Bennett didn't come into the church as some wonderful Christian leader. He already was tainted. But what Erikson is trying to say is that he was just some rogue rapist, sort of abortionist, yeah, guy in the community. But he was Joseph Smith's right-hand man. Am I wrong? Joseph did not have a very good sense of, uh, discernment on the men he picked. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, well, I guess we've made the point with John C. Bennett. Should we go on to the next slide? Yeah. All right. And John Bennett did make that up, and they don't do that. Plural marriage was not, anybody who wants to do whatever they want. Plural marriage was a, a priesthood ordinance, and it had responsibilities and obligations. And so it was a different thing. So you see what they're saying? So the person who says, "Lookie, lookie, I found this word, deny," and Joseph is the author. Your answer is, "Thanks for taking deny out of context. Please, you need to read the full text of the statement, and then you need to understand what's going on." Another one, there's a guy in Wisconsin who says that, uh, whatever priesthood you get, you can get as many wives as you want. And so Joseph and Hyrum published the denial saying, "We are not preaching what this guy in Wisconsin is preaching." And so, so there we go with some evidence.

All right, I'm really bothered as well because Joseph Smith's destruction of the printing press is the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor, which was again, his other right-hand man, William Law, exposing Joseph Smith's polygamy. So wouldn't it be honest for Keith Erikson to admit that Joseph Smith destroying the Nauvoo Expositor and the printing press and what excommunicating William Law, isn't that also a denial or an attempt to hide his behavior? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. But no, Keith just wants to limit it to these moments where he's saying, "Well, hang on, Joseph was actually just denying something that wasn't totally accurate so he could deny that and then not have to address the underlying accusation, which is understood to be an accusation of polygamy, which he totally was doing."

Well, I think it was funny that, uh, Erikson makes the point, "Oh, well, it wasn't like Bennett's polygamy because Joseph was done with certain requirements and standards and all of this." And I'm thinking, like, what, what were the standards? Well, there, there was the age standard, right? He wouldn't have have wives above 13 or below 14, right? Well, yes, we didn't, we didn't take children for women who were already married. But the, what are the standards that Joseph's using? It's not like these are acknowledged wives set up as accepted wives in the community. There are no standards here. He marries married women that go on living with their own husbands. He marries single girls that go on living with their parents. He marries domestic help. He marries foster children entrusted to his care. He marries mother-daughter pairs. He marries sister pairs. And he marries girls as young as 14. Like, what were Joseph's standards? He didn't.

Hey, I, um, yeah, he really bothered me. I don't know, Julia, do you know anything about that Wisconsin polygamy denial? Because I found something that felt like a red herring. I want to read about it really quickly. So in early 1844, by this point, Joseph had over 30 wives. This affected Mormons, including William Law, a former member of the First Presidency, began exposing Joseph Smith's secret polygamy. And Joseph and Hyrum issued a public denial of polygamy in response to growing accusations. The Wisconsin Saints wrote a letter to Joseph Smith asking for clarification on whether polygamy was being taught. Joseph and Hyrum responded with an with an absolute denial, which were published in the Times and Seasons. Joseph Smith in a letter to the Wisconsin Mormon stated, "We are charged with advocating a plurality of wives. Now, this is as false as the many other ridiculous charges we are brought against us." Hyrum issued a similar denial, saying, "There is no such doctrine taught here, neither is there any such thing practiced here." And can I, like, almost want to be fair to them in a weird way and say, I understand why they would deny it. There was a lot of pressure for them to deny it. You know, bigamy was illegal in Illinois from 1833, I think onwards. It, it was not a legal thing they were doing. I would understand why they would want to be covert about it. And that's where Keith Arish should go if he wants to make any sort of defense of Joseph Smith and polygamy and lying about it. He would have to try and make some sort of argument about it being expedient to do so for the safety of the Saints or whatever. Like, I could, I would have more time for that kind of argument rather than saying, "Oh, it's okay because what Joseph did was very cleverly word his denials that he was denying something while avoiding the underlying question." And we can't forget to mention that he was sealed to 22 women by my count before he ever admitted to Emma that he was even practicing plural marriage, correct? Right. And, and DNC 132, the, the polygamy revelation mandates the Law of Sarah, which is that the first wife gets to choose subsequent spouses. And Joseph did not honor the scriptural requirement that he vet his first 22 wives with Emma. He just violated that.

Well, do go ahead, Julia. Sorry. Doesn't it say in there though, if she refuses, he can just bypass her anyway? So don't, don't they like bring in the Law of Sarah and then toss it out immediately? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He has an escape clause. It's the best heads I win, tails you lose, ever. Yeah. But how, how can she deny the first 22 wives if she doesn't even know about them, right? Right. And again, so Keith is, you know, what was, what was offensive to me is Keith's trying to say there's no denial here, right? Joseph's not denying polygamy when people say that. He's denying people are taking it out of context. Yeah. Yeah. Seeing that he's denying something and saying, "Ah, look, see, he's lying," whereas to Harard's point, what Harard just read, you know, it's almost like he's going to start getting into that Jordan Peterson territory. "Oh, it depends what you mean by wives." You know what I mean? Like, yeah, we all have to get to a point where we, we, even with the presentism argument, wives means the same thing then as it does now. It's not that long ago. Yeah. Yeah. This is outrageously deceptive so far on Keith Erikson's part. Let's go and go to the next clip.

All right, so now let's go to the next question here. What was the purpose of polygamy? I was raised to believe it was to procreate and help the imbalance of women to men. Okay, let's stop there. That's wrong. We have census data. We know how many men and women there were. There were actually slightly more men in Latter-day Saint, uh, communities. So I think people tell that one because it feels like a friendly way to talk about polygamy, but it's just wrong. So don't say that. There's not an imbalance. Why does he use the term "friendly"? Why does he just say "deceptive"? We were all raised with that explanation that this idea that, "Oh, well, we need to quit saying that rumor or something." No, no, this is what was officially taught to us. That the whole, that was the whole reason was that. Yeah. Yeah. It's what DNC 132 says, right, Sandra? Yes. Yes. "If I will say the Lord, I will command my people what to raise up seed." And this is where this whole section with Erikson gets so confusing on his verbiage because he, on the one hand, he says, "Well, yeah, it was to raise up seed." And then on the other hand, he says, "Yes, but it wasn't needed to raise up seed because there wasn't an imbalance." And yet he wants to circle back around again to the whole reason for polygamy was to raise up seed. Joseph didn't raise up seed through polygamy. Me, so he didn't ultimately answer the question why. Why did Joseph Smith live polygamy? It had nothing to do with raising up a righteous seed. And isn't it true that they've compared number of children, uh, by polygamous wives to number of children by non-polygamous wives? And non-polygamous wives were actually more fertile, produced more babies than polygamous wives. So they're actually reducing the number of righteous seed unless you believe that only children of anointed polygamists are more righteous somehow than the general membership in Utah. They had a higher number of men, which is conceding there. So that without polygamy, the Mormons could have had all the same number of children. They didn't need or more. Or they could have had more children if the women had had their own homes, their own husbands, living their own lives, they would have had more children. I mean, these polygamous husbands made the rounds periodically to these different homes. The women didn't have as many children as they would have had with a husband who is in the home full-time. Yeah. It would have been more successful if Joseph had gone with Emma's idea of one wife, two men. That's how the roosters and chickens do it, right? What Julia had said previously, what it actually does is it raises the number of children per man, right? So one man has more children. So it's, it's a dynastic thing. It creates these big families that are all centered around these individuals that want power and influence. Do you want to add anything to that, Julia?

Uh, well, yeah, so like with Brigham Young, he had like 50, I can never remember the number, if it's 56 wives and 57 children or whatever, but like he only had, he only procreated with a few of them. So yeah, if you would have left those other women alone and given them their own husband, yeah, they would have had more children. But yeah, like, um, that's a really interesting thing that you're were saying, Nemo, because like they thought that the more kids you had, the more wives you had, the greater your exaltation would be. In fact, Brigham Young, I think at one point, he tells Zina, who is sealed to Joseph and has her own husband who's a member of the church, but he says, "If you marry me, then you'll have a higher exaltation than if you just stayed with Joseph." Which doesn't make sense unless you think of it as like, oh, an increase or like he had more wives and more children than Joseph did. Like, I wonder if that's what's going on there. But like, yeah, so that, so yeah, absolutely. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Um, so again, Keith Erikson is just not acknowledging that church leaders misled members for 150, 200 years, right? Right. Right. And, and non-members, right? And none of their excuses give us a reason for Joseph having plural wives, right? Right. All right, let's go to the next clip.

So, uh, now the church says many of the marriages were only spiritual and not physical. Who got it wrong? Got that great binary in there, right? You, we're sharpening our elbows. So let's just go to the, the real question. What is the purpose of polygamy? I like to think about this question in a kind of like a bullseye or a target. There's right at the center, and then there's a little ring around it. Right at the center is scripture. So let's ask the question that way. What, what scripture gives a purpose? States a purpose for plural marriage? If you go through all the scriptures, there is only one. Okay. The Old Testament tells stories. These people took a different wife and had children and whatever. Tells the stories. There's not a single verse in the Old Testament that gives a reason, a statement. The one is in the Book of Mormon. It's in Jacob chapter 2. This is another wonderful verse to take things out of context. So we need to read the whole thing. And, and, uh, in the 21st century, we hate reading the whole thing. We want to scroll fast, click, like, move on. So we gotta pause, stop scrolling, and pay attention here. In, uh, Jacob chapter 2, this, he's giving a sermon, and it's kind of long, and he's a little nervous. Nephi has just died. He's the new leader. It's his first big address, and he has to address some major sins. The people.

We're committing whoredoms, and they were trying to justify it by saying, "Oh yeah, all those people in Old Testament times had wives and concubines, so we can too." So, over several verses in Jacob chapter 2, from like verse 22 to like 35, you've got to read all of those. But Jacob starts in, and he says, "Uh, those are whoredoms. That is wrong. Uh, I, the Lord, delight in the chastity of women. The law of chastity is right in there." Then it says, "Uh, marriage is to be between a man and a woman, and man should have one wife. Uh, no concubines." Jacob says.

Then it gets to a phrase that I, that, uh, is touched on here. Says, "Nevertheless," and Jacob is presenting this in the first person, "Word of the Lord, if I will raise up seed unto myself, I will command my people. Otherwise." Okay, so we've got this kind of a couple of ideas connected into in there. When we were writing the Saints history, volume one, we're just people, historian people. We tried to synthesize that whole long passage into this sentence: Monogamy is the rule, plurality is the exception. And that's the way we wrote it. We gave it to the First Presidency in the Quorum of the Twelve. They said, "Yes, that's the way to say it." And that's the way Jacob says it. A man and a wife, uh, they should be married. That's the rule. Live the law of chastity. Nevertheless, there was an exception in Jacob chapter 2.

Okay, now if you actually try and read all of Section 132, it's structured the same way. You can't just dive in and find little quotes from Section 132 that you like or hate because they're all there. But, um, you have to read the whole thing. So, and but Section 132 follows that same arc. It begins with Joseph asking a question, "What the heck's going on with wives and concubines?" Whatever. Joseph asked the question. The answer is what matters. And so the answer is, the first like 18 verses is the Lord talking about, he doesn't use this word because it's a modern word, but I'll use our modern word because you're all modern people, you're not 1840s people. Civil marriage, that's the word. And it has, it says, you know, whatever contracts, bonds, blah, big, all these legal terms. That's what they're saying. They're talking about a civil marriage. Whatever you do to organize yourself that ends when you die. That's the first 18 verses.

Then it gets to verse, the next, uh, like 19 and into the 20s. It says, makes a contrast. There's a different marriage, an eternal marriage. And it gives a whole, all in the whole passage, uh, the people have to be righteous. It has to be sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise. It has to be undertaken with proper authority. Um, then eternal marriage. And we're not talking about plural marriage yet. We haven't seen that word. Eternal marriage between a man and woman is the contrast to civil marriage. So the first 25 verses of Section 132 are saying, whatever you do with civil authority ends. Whatever you do with my authority survives. That's the first thing that Section 132 does. That's one of the teachings that we as Latter-day Saints share most frequently. It's one of the things that brings us comfort and peace and solace, that our family will, will be perpetuated beyond the grave. Beautiful teachings in the first 25 verses.

Then you get into the 30s. It says, "Okay, so there's this guy Abraham." And then it talks, in the 30s verses, it talks about plural marriage and it talks about Abraham. And then here's what it says. It says, "It was counted unto Abraham for righteousness." Okay, that is not a ringing endorsement. If I try and go to heaven and and tell the Lord, "I took care of my wife and children," I don't want him to say, "Yeah, we'll count that." So we've got the same arc. The eternal marriage is the ideal. It's the, it's the standard. It's the pattern. And that one counter, that one worked. It was an exception. So, so Jacob has the same framework. Section 132 has the frame, same framework. And that's the way we tried to write it. Monogamy is the rule, plurality is the exception.

So, um, back to this. Right at the center of the bullseye, we have only one scripture that gives a reason, uh, to raise up seed. Now, this question used the word "procreate," which I will say because I've got the microphone. Phone is a little different than "raise up seed." We talked about rising, rising generation a little bit earlier. Uh, it isn't just a baby factory that God is after with plural. It's raising a people. Uh, and so that's what they, uh, do. Man, some of that was some word, word sality. But before we, uh, before we have the panelists opine, everyone remember your comments. Let me just have Julia sort of clear the slide she prepared because, Julia, these are responses, right? What do you mean, the, which slides? In the slides after? Yeah, so those ones are just the verses because he only, he points out only one. He says there's only one verse, but I, but he's missing out on DNC 132. Yeah. So do you want to explain these slides really quick?

Oh, yeah, yeah, sorry. Yeah. Um, so, yeah, so in Jacob 2, he talks, he's quoting that one, "For I the Lord, I, if I will raise up seed, I will command my people." And then the next one, I don't know why he's saying there's only one because in the next one, DC 132, these verses on polygamy, "For they, these wives, these plural wives are given unto him to multiply and replenish the Earth." And so that's, so I don't understand why he's leaving that off. I do. What do you want? Yeah, yeah, I know exactly why he is. Do you know? Did you, did everyone pick up on it when he said, "We don't like to read to the end because we're impatient and we're modern and we just want to grab the bit we want"? Guess who then gave an entire diatribe about DNC 132 and ended in the verses of 30? Because there's over 60 verses in DNC 132. He stops around the 30s and goes, "Right, okay, I'm done talking about this now." Keith, I'm looking at you. Go ahead and keep going, Julia.

Okay, so, yeah, and then there's another, if you skip to the next slide, I'm pretty sure he talks about this too because he talks about how, um, the new and everlasting covenant is the rule and stuff like that, or the everlasting covenant. So, yeah, so I want to talk about that because, um, he does not mention the new and everlasting covenant. And I think that's the reason. I mean, I think he's doing it purposely because the whole, he's trying to say, he's trying to separate polygamy from normal marriage, right? And saying like, uh, monogamy is a rule, plural marriage is the exception. And that's not like the entire reason why DNC 132 is given is to reveal this new and everlasting covenant, which new and everlasting covenant at that time, it meant polygamy. So the reason why 132 was revealed was to reveal polygamy, not to reveal monogamy. So that, that's why I wanted you to create this slide and talk to us about it. Yeah. So, so yeah, this is now becoming the rule, like the new and everlasting covenant, polygamy is supposed to be the rule anyway. So I'll just read this. The church admits that the new and everlasting covenant took on different meanings during Joseph Smith's lifetime. And you can see the little clipping from Joseph Smith papers. One of the main meanings was polygamy. When Prudence Huntington married Joseph Smith in 1841, she referred to it as the new and everlasting covenant. And this is from Todd Compton's book, and I put a ref, put the references in. When discussing polygamy with Sarah and Whitney, Joseph Smith called it the new and everlasting covenant. Another wife, Emily Partridge, referred to it as the new and everlasting covenant of polygamy. Likewise, DNC 132 speaks of the new and everlasting covenant as polygamy. So this is becoming the rule. Polygamy is becoming the rule, not, not the exception. Yeah. And it says in DNC 132, and it's verse 6, "And as pertaining to the new and everlasting covenant, it was instituted for the fullness of my glory. And he that receiveth the fullness thereof must and shall abide the law, or he shall be damned, saith the Lord God." So this isn't just like an optional thing. It's like, if you've received the command to engage in polygamy, if you've received this from God, then you better do it, or you'll be damned.

So, so have we given our best response for the argument that the new and everlasting covenant is not about polygamy? What he's saying is, new and everlasting is about eternal marriage and eternal families. And the polygamy stuff, it comes after and is separate. That's his argument. Sandra, are you buying that? I don't buy that, but that's what he's arguing. Do we have good evidence for why that's not accurate? Well, the documents that we've just gone over show that the terms were used interchangeably. Polygamy and everlasting covenant, it was all the same thing. Okay, well, is it possible that those who did that did it in error? That they were confusing the two? Is his own wives doing it in error? Well, you have, going into the Utah period, everyone's talking about plural marriage as an essential element that they had to practice for top exaltation. Yeah. And that's why they don't want to give it up in 1890 because they understood it to be essential for their exaltation. That's why, uh, John Taylor, the son, goes on living polygamy after the manifesto and gets excommunicated for it because he felt it was essential. Yeah. And and again, the header of DNC 132, sorry, I'm just going to keep going back to the scriptures because they undermine Keith Erikson. The church's official explainer for C 132 is that it was Revelation given through Joseph Smith the Prophet in Nauvoo, Illinois, recorded July 12th, 1843, relating to the new and everlasting covenant, including the eternity of the marriage covenant and the principle of plural marriage. So the eternity of the marriage covenant and the principle of plural marriage, both form the new and everlasting covenant. Yeah, it's there. The church has explained it. Yeah. And if, if it was this like beautiful thing about revealing, um, the, the power to seal people together and just the way the Mormons see it today, why did Joseph keep this revelation hidden from the membership? Why'd he keep it hidden from Emma? Right, right. If, if it was just for eternal sealing and polygamy was a side factor, he could have told her all of that stuff already, right? Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's the way he acted around it shows what it was. Because if it was just as innocent as this religious ceremony whereby he's sealed eternally to these women, but it has no bearing on what he does with them in real life, then everyone could know about it. Yes.

Well, let me just review some of the comments that have been made so far because again, I'm going to be changing the title of this episode to "History Director Deceives Mormons." You know, Keith, Keith Erikson, because it, it just seems like it's already horrible. But just to kind of share how the audience is feeling so far. Dan Vogel writes, "This guy doesn't know what is going on." Uh, Jennifer Hallman-Weight says, "Does this guy even believe what he's saying?" I think that's a fair question. Jim Bridge writes, "He's just waffling, utter gibberish." That's Jim Bridge's feedback. And if, if there are believers out there that really like or want to defend Keith Erikson, we want to hear that too, or non-believers. Person of Interest writes, "This is a painful man. I really can't stand to watch him. Cringy." Okay, so that's kind of how people are feeling. Mormon Civil War, that's Peter, I think. Yeah. Pick. Good grief. Changing the meaning of words like Bednar and Oaks do as the great solution to the problems. Pathetic. Tell us how you really feel, Peter. Ble. Um, and then, and then Dan Vogel shares, "Sandra's right, it was a requirement." And basically, what he's saying there is polygamy wasn't just like this limited, optional, secondary sort of thing. It was literally all Mormons wanted to go to the Celestial Kingdom and be exalted. It was a requirement for exaltation for what, a hundred years? Right? Yeah. I have a question, and you might not know the answer to that, uh, the topic we had to Sandra or Julia, but do we know at all if Joseph, when he was marrying those 22 women before Emma, before 13, before the NC 132 was even revealed, was he approaching them and telling them about this beautiful priesthood authority that would allow them to be together forever? Like, is this something Joseph was teaching already while he was marrying those, those women? Or is this something that he came up with to appease Emma, to be like, "Well, if I come up with this doctrine of being able to be together forever and sealing and all that, Emma's going to feel, feel really good because she's lost all these children and she'll feel really good about it and maybe she'll be okay with polygamy?" Like, do we know?

Oh, I don't know that we know exactly what all Joseph used as a selling point. But, uh, the thing we seem to see in his selling point to these different women is that an angel appeared and was going to destroy him if he didn't live polygamy. That seems to be the narrative that worked the best on these different women he marries. So I'm not sure how much he focused on the eternal sealing aspect with them, right? But, but there was a threat, you know, "Hey, this angel's gonna kill me if I don't do this, so I've just got to ask you, uh, if you'll marry me." But with Emma, he, he goes the route of, "Oh, yes, it's going to be this wonderful sealing for all eternity." So I think that pitch changes depending on what one he thinks works the best, yeah. Because with Helen Mar Kimball, wasn't it like her whole family would be saved? Yeah, or condemned whether she accepted or not, right? And I, that's how you convince a 14-year-old girl to do with like, "Oh, let's live together forever and the power of the priesthood and beautiful sealing ceremony being revealed." In my opinion. Well, yeah, and I, as you're speaking, I was, I think it's Mary Elizabeth Lightner where he told that all the, like, she was his before the world began and all the devils in hell couldn't, couldn't take her from him. Like, there's that rhetoric where he seems to believe in soulmates or whatever, but I don't think he ever frames that like, "We're gonna have kids forever, we're going to be together forever," or this beautiful sealing or whatever. I don't think he's doing that. I think it's just that was the selling point for Mary Elizabeth Rollins or whoever, rather than like this beautiful thing like with, like Emma and like how she was losing her children and she could be with them forever. I don't, I think that's what he was doing, right?

Really quickly, uh, I just want to thank all of the people that are joining us now on the live stream or joining us later. And I just want to ask you really quickly, please subscribe to the Mormon Stories Podcast YouTube channel. Please like this episode and, please share it because that's the only way that kind of we grow and that encourages YouTube and Facebook as well. Subscribe to us there. Those subscriptions just really help the algorithms prioritize these videos. So please take a minute to subscribe on YouTube and Facebook. And as well, Instagram and TikTok. Also, we want to just acknowledge that the only way we're able to do these episodes is from the generous donations of our monthly and annual donors. If you want to, um, help keep this type of programming alive, including the LDS discussion series, and you're not a donor, please go to mormonstories.org, click on the Donate button, become a monthly donor, and that way we'll be able to keep providing this LDS discussion series and other.

Okay, uh, one more comment that I'll quickly share, um, and I don't know if this is fair or not, but Rosemary Bennett writes, "This guy lies every time he moves his mouth." I mean, we are cherry-picking things that we think are lies. Well, there's a lot more, but like, it's just too much. Okay, well, let's keep going. Let's keep going. Let's hear the next clip.

Okay, uh, so that's the bullseye. Oh, oh, let's, let's, uh, name another one that's not there that doesn't have a scripture. We say this all the time in Latter-day Saint culture, and there's no scripture for it. It's actually, again, contrary to scripture. So let's talk about it. The, the, the idea is, well, why did we do it? It was part of the restoration of all things. Have you heard that? Have you said that? Uh, it's okay if you said it, you're wrong, but, but we're humble together tonight. So here's, here's why. Was everything from the Old Testament restored? Do we not eat pigs? Do we not eat shellfish? Do we stone people who break the Sabbath? Boy, I hope not, especially if the Chiefs were in the Super Bowl on a certain Sunday. So we have hardened this idea that the restoration of all things meant every single thing had to come back, and it didn't. It's been, been selective. So that's not enough. That's context. It's in the air. There's a restoration. Things are coming back. But having a restoration, that's the, that's the faulty leap that says plural marriage had to come back because it hadn't been. It came back because, as the Lord says through Jacob in Jacob chapter 2, "Nevertheless, if I will raise up seed unto myself, I will command my people, otherwise." And so he commanded otherwise for about 40 years. Uh, and so if you look at the history of the world, I don't even have all the data. So let's just look at the Latter-day Saints. If you count all the dead ones since 1830, they're about 26 million Latter-day Saints. They're not all on the earth now, obviously, but we're going to talk about all of them, 26 million of them. How many practiced plural marriage? A couple thousand in those first years. So do you see the same pattern here? Monogamy is the rule. 25.9, whatever. I can't do math on the fly. You know, a lot of million Latter-day Saints didn't. And then, yeah, there's an exception for a time, uh, where it happened.

Okay, so now, all right, so really quickly, panelists, remember your response. Julia, you've got a slide because you want to address this notion of a restoration of all things. Yeah, I'm really confused. I feel like maybe I don't understand what he's saying, but I'm really confused why he said there's no verse on this, like it's the opposite of scripture. And maybe this is, I don't know, but in, in DNC 27, which, um, in the 1830 edition, it doesn't say this because a lot of the, a lot of Joseph Smith added a bunch of things. But in DNC 27, the 1835 edition, and what's on the, what's in our edition right now in 2025, it says, um, that that there's going to be restoration. "I have committed the keys of bringing to pass the restoration of all things." And so like, there is, it is in scripture. I don't understand why Erikson's saying it's not. Am I misunderstanding what he's trying to say? Do, do, no, I think he's very confused. He, yeah, he's basically trying to say that we've all erred whenever we've, uh, given the impression that all things needed to be restored. But I would just ask, where did we get that? It's not like we made that up. Like, didn't prophets, seers, and revelators from the beginning? Is it Mormon doctrine that like Adam and Eve baptized people with Christian baptisms? That Adam and Eve and their posterity did Christian rites and rituals, including the temple ceremony? And that every dispensation, all the, all the ordinances of the gospel had to be restored each dispensation? That's what I was taught growing up. Yes, that's what I was taught. Well, also Joseph Smith, in some of the Journal of Discourses, they talk about how Joseph even taught that Adam was a polygamist because of this, of Lilith, of her presence in the Garden of Eden as well. So I just thought that was interesting where he was trying to justify, I think, the restoration of all things, saying that polygamy was there at the beginning and it needs to be restored. And isn't that why we claim that the Masonic Lodge temple ceremony originally was similar or identical to the, the temple ceremony that Joseph Smith implemented? Because they need to be the same? Whatever the, whatever the temple cere, Temple ceremony would have had that same ring of Masonic elements to the Jewish, you know, pre-Christ temple ceremony, according to Mormons, needed to be like the Masonic ceremony because then the Masonic ceremony leading to Joseph Smith's restoration of the temple ceremony would be a restoration of all things. Am I making that up?

Yeah, because the Masons guarded the secrets of Solomon's Temple over the generations and brought them along, right? But what people have have now discovered is that's actually just their own sort of origin myth and it's sort of medieval stone masons and, you know, yeah, it's a bit less about. So you're ready for. So he's saying that, saying that that polygamy, the reason why Joseph practiced polygamy, it is incorrect to say it's because of the restoration of all things. He hasn't read Doctrine and Covenants 132 because I'm going to read to you verse 40, and it's really short, and it's talking about David and Solomon and Abraham and their concubines and wives. And it says, um, verse 40, "I am the Lord thy God, and I gave unto thee my servant Joseph an appointment and restore all things." Whoa. This is why he stopped at the verses that begin with 30. This is why they don't go further into DNC 132. But remember, Keith, we have to read it all. We shouldn't be impatient to read the whole thing. Yeah. And I'll just, I'll just also make the point that he's not acknowledging that prophets, seers, and revelators deceived or mistaught, deceived worst-case scenario, or mistaught best-case scenario, erred, misled, led astray the membership for 150 to 200 years because he's acting like it's just the membership that sort of just made up this idea of a restoration of all things when we all know it's the prophets, seers, and revelators. It's in the scripture, and it's in the scriptures, right? Like, how is he, how is he sleeping at night? He has selective memory. Yeah, yeah. Also, also, he gets some of his numbers wrong again because, uh, Harard, you pointed out about the 20 men, but it was really a lot more. He's like, "Oh, we only lived polygamy for 40 years." But I think if you think of polygamy as starting in the 30s, early 30s, because he's telling women or he's commanding it to live with the, the Native Americans as polygamy, and then I think it ended in the 1920s with post-manifesto polygamy. And anyway, I think it was closer to 90 years. To make the numbers as small, right, as possible. Yeah. You are absolutely right, Julia. There was, there was Apostle-sanctioned polygamy. Mormon Apostle-sanctioned polygamy at least in the 19th. Right. The last Mormon prophet was, uh, Heber J. Grant, 1945. He was a polygamist, was he not? Yeah. Talking about marriages, plural wives after the manifesto. Yeah. For at least a dozen years. Yeah. Right. More. Yeah. So you're right, Julia. That's at least 70, 80. Right. So he's getting his numbers wrong again. Yeah. And it's always airing on the side of minimizing, like you said, right? So that's just, that's just as honest. Also, can somebody answer me this? They've changed, like in the LDS Discussions episode, one of the most important episodes we ever did was on changes to the Doctrine of Covenants, which is based on the groundbreaking work largely of Sandra and Gerald Tanner. We know that the church can change the Doctrine of Covenants. Yes. Well, there's a really easy answer to the, to the temporary and non-restorative teachings of plural marriage found in DNC 132. What's the answer, Sandra? I, I've, I've lost where you were going. Change it, right? Why doesn't the Brethren, why don't the Brethren just cut in half DNC 132? Issue new scriptures and have it end in verse 35? It could be really easy, right? Nemo, absolutely. Why don't, why don't we just go back to using Section 101 that they had, 35 Doctrine and Covenants, which prohibited polygamy? Right? Which said, "Inasmuch as we have been accused of the crime and of fornication and polygamy, we declare one man should have one wife." That was the order of the church. That was what was in the Doctrine of Covenants when Joseph was going to these teenage girls to convince them to go into polygamy. There was a section in the Doctrine of Covenants that said they didn't believe in it. When he went to these married women, the DNC said they didn't believe in polygamy. I mean, the deception the church perpetrated through this whole period is just astounding, wasn't it? Like the 1870s when they finally added DNC 132 to the scriptures. The Section 101 denouncing polygamy was in every edition of the Doctrine of Covenants till 1876. Yeah. So I mean, when he wants to talk about, "Oh, well, those denials don't count because that was just referring to Bennett's polygamy or something." The denial was in the Doctrine of Covenants that said they didn't believe polygamy. Harard, you got a shout out from Dan. Dan, Dan Vogel writes, "Harard, bam. So you must have thrown a truth bomb that D endorsed. Good job, Harard. Nice, nice." All right, well, let's keep going. The deceptions continue. This guy literally can't open his mouth without without deceiving people. All right, let's play the next clip.

Okay, uh, what was the purpose? We'll stay purpose here. Of Joseph Smith marrying women who were already married? Where is this taught in scripture? That had to be restored. All right, so we are kind of ignore the second half of the question because that's a false one. There isn't. So, but let's go to this one. Uh, so let's start with data. Yes, Joseph Smith was sealed to 12 women who were previously married, and at the time of their sealing, Joseph continued to be married to other men. Uh, and so, um, none of these left us an explanation of why. So this is one of those places where we say, "That was one of the pieces of the past I wish survived." We've got evidence, uh, from these women, uh, but not evidence of why. So a couple of patterns emerge. So we're going to talk about specific people in general patterns, and I don't have a link between them. But here's some patterns. One pattern that we find in early plural marriage is families wanting to be connected to each other. Now, this is different than the way Latter-day Saints think about sealing today for one very good reason. We changed how we do sealing in April 1894. Did you know that? We hid it in the church history topics. There's one called sealing. Wilford Woodruff is president of the church. He gets up in General Conference and he says, "All right, we've been doing sealing not the way the Lord wants it. Here's how we're going to do it. We're going to seal a person to their parents, their grandparents, their children, and we're going to create a chain of the human family back to Adam and Eve." And you're sit there saying, "Wait, that's what, that's what sealing is?" But so what were they doing before 1894? Well, turns out they were doing a lot of things and different things. And so part of what happened in 1894 was saying, "This is how sealing, how the Lord wants sealing to work." So Wilford Woodruff doesn't use these words, but I'm going to use again, 21st century words because I think they help us. If, if we talk about Wilford Woodruff's great chain of the human family, let's call that vertical. Me to my parents, to my grandparents, and my children. I've got a vertical chain. He didn't call that. But I am. So then what's happening before 1894? I'm going to call horizontal because it's going to help us think about it. They, they, if we go back and say, "Joseph and the people in Nauvoo, you weren't, weren't thinking about sealing the same way I do." That's correct. They weren't. So how are they thinking about it? One of the ways is they're thinking about it horizontal. They're thinking about, "How do I be connected to the people that I know?" Now, this isn't plural marriage, but it's another temple ordinance, baptism for the dead. When that began in Nauvoo in the Mississippi River in 1841, you couldn't be baptized for somebody you didn't know. You had to give up proof, uh, this person was dead, and then you also had to say to the, to the witness, "I knew this person in life, and they were a good person, and they just died right before the restoration came." And if they were still alive, I'm convinced they would have accepted it. And so the first temple work was for, they would, if they time-traveled now and found some of you in the genealogy library tracking people down from 800 years ago, they'd be like, "What on earth are you thinking? You're supposed to do people that you know." And that's the way they're thinking about temple ordinances and these connections.

All right, really quickly, be, oh, Sandra, you, you're jumping out of your chair. Go ahead. This is such a confusing conglomeration he's making. He's confusing issues. Baptism for the dead has got nothing to do with this issue of ceilings. The ceilings that he's talking about, the change that was made was originally they were sealing men to men. You, a man could be sealed to a higher priesthood authority guy, like you could get sealed to Brigham Young or to Joseph Smith to be a part of his family conglomeration. And then they changed it. No, we're going to just seal father to grandfather to great-grandfather in a family chain instead of man to man trying to get his own great big kingdom. But that has nothing to do with the sealing of married, his marrying married women, right? Because this did not involve sealing the man in this marriage to Joseph Smith. So it doesn't even qualify in the sealing of men to men. This was sealing women to Joseph Smith. It excluded the husband from the deal entirely. He wasn't part of the eternal family. I'm also confused as to why he's calling pre-1894 dynastic ceilings horizontal. Because isn't isn't a dynastic ceiling all about being in like the, the equivalent of the Mormon Celestial MLM upline? Like you want to get sealed to someone upline who's royal, who's a royal lineage, who's like a big name. And so isn't that vertical? You're trying a different vertical track than the person you're related to, Dad to Grandpa to Great-Grandpa, but it's, it's dynastic. It's totally vertical. Yes, it is in that sense. Well, but he didn't explain the way you did, John. He's trying to make it sound like, "Oh, John, I know you and I want to be." No, but wasn't it like, "I want to be in Joseph's upline. I want to be in Brigham's upline." Nemo, but what, what you're going there with, John, is is vertical in terms of hierarchy, in terms of power structures, in terms of who is above who in the pecking order. I think what he means by horizontal is more that it's not direct lineage as you would image it in a family tree. Grandparents are placed above, grandchildren are placed below. It's to someone on the side who's of your same generation, right, in a different family or this or that. That's what I think he means by horizontal. But then you're into Joseph's horizontal. Yeah. CH, but Nemo, as our resident monarchist, you know, dynasties, dynastic, all about lineage, right? It, it is all about lineage, but it's also about spreading out. This is why all the royal families of Europe are all intermarried, right? Because within that generation, you got to link them all together, and then so then their kids are all not going to invade each other because, "Oh, my cousin's actually the king of, you know, Spain or whatever." I understand what he's trying to do, but it's just kind of misleading. It's not like friends were getting sealed to friends because what's the point? What, how does that any of that explain the same sociality that exists here will exist there other than, yeah, other than making the members dizzy about all these changes. Doesn't explain why Joseph Smith was is marrying other men's wives. Yeah, that's right. It's kind of a red herring. It's kind of misleading. Back to your point, Sandra. Yeah, yeah. What, um, so any other, any other, oh, Julia, you had some slides. Do you want to just take us through the law of adoption? Yeah, so Sandra already kind of talked about this, but I kind of want to go through it a little bit anyway. So one of the earliest aspects of the Mormon church was the law of adoption. And as she mentioned, that is sealing men to men who were not related to each other. And in 1847, Brigham was visited by Joseph Smith in a dream. And in the dream, he asked Joseph more about the law of adoption. And, uh, in my opinion, because he knew what it was called, this, it's, it seems to make more sense that Joseph Smith was the one who first taught this law of adoption because otherwise, why would Brigham be inquiring him about learning more about it? Um, because it was recently, right after he passed away, right after he was killed. So in 1862, Brigham Young even called the law of adoption a great and glorious doctrine. And in 1873, Brigham Young even emphasized that men could seal, they could seal men to women outside of the Mormon temple, but a temple was absolutely, absolutely necessary for the law of adoption and sealing men to men. And so he says, "But we can seal women to men, but not men to men without a temple." And, and, and as he says, it wasn't until Wilford Woodruff, the fourth Mormon prophet, that the law of adoption was done away in the 1890s. Wilford quote, "Had a peculiar feeling," unquote, about sealing men together who were not related, and charged the members of the church to be sealed only to their relatives, their fathers, and grandfathers. In explaining the law of adoption, historian Wanita Brooks explained the idea behind it was that in establishing the kingdom of God on Earth, there should also be a celestial relationship. If the Prophet Joseph were to become a God over a minor planet, he must not only have a large posterity but also assistance of practical skills. And so it's like, again, like you're saying, the dynastic, like he's trying to make himself, uh, bigger because he's having people, um, um, sealed to him through the law of adoption. So, yeah, so, but none of that relates to why he's marrying married women, right? He's just diverted the whole discussion into a side topic that doesn't relate, right? So like one of the things that I think about too, a lot, is when people say, "Oh, he was just trying to connect the families. He was just trying to connect Helen Mar Kimball, she was 14. He was just, he wasn't going to sleep with her. He was just connecting the families." If that's the case, why didn't he just marry Heber? Or like, if he was trying to connect himself to the Huntingtons, why did he marry Zina, who's already married to Henry? Why not just marry himself to like Dimick, her brother? Like, none of that makes any sense because the law of adoption already existed. And so if you jump to the next slide, John. So, yeah. Oh, sorry. So if the true reason for Joseph Smith marrying women who were already married was simply to connect the families, or even women who weren't married, why wouldn't he simply seal himself to their husbands or brothers? The fact that evidence exists for sexual relationships with at least 12 of these 14 women might lead one to conclude that Joseph's reasoning for sealing himself to women who were already married was for more than simply familial connection. So he, yes, building a celestial harem, right? Yeah. So we, we can't forget what the original question was, right? The original question was, why is Joseph marrying and having sex with women already married to other men? Oh, he's gonna say that didn't happen. So he goes off and then starts talking about the law of adoption, which has nothing to do with Joseph marrying women married to other. Did you, did you hear the way he started to talk about it as well? It's like, Joseph was, was married to women who were married and continued to be married during that time. It's like, it's like he wanted to say, "Yeah, he wanted to say they were married," as though and thought he could maybe leave it there to imply that they weren't when they married Joseph. And then realize, no, I do have to actually admit that at least. And he totally bypasses the question, why in the world are prophets and revelators for 40 or 50 years having this weird ordinance of men being sealed to men, and then all of a sudden it's erased? Don't they talk to God? Like, wouldn't they have implemented that because God wanted it? If God wanted it, then why are they taking it away? And by the way, Sandra or Julia, are either of you offended that like marriages of women to men, oh, they don't really need a temple, but but ceilings of men to men, well, they, they require a temple ceiling, bros, right? Why are women, why are women's ceilings not as important as men's ceilings to men? Mormons would really like that, right? Right. But I've never heard any stories of women being sealed to women without a man involved. So that, that just didn't happen. But women, se, but again, women being sealed to men, ah, do really need men being sealed to men? Get that temple about that priesthood, yeah. So that's all kind of, kind of weird.

Okay, uh, all right, but just notice, we, we still have not answered the question, why was he marrying these women? He started by saying, "We don't know." But, yeah, no. And he made us dizzy with like, he's trying to end up saying, "Well, the reason is because of Jacob, was it chapter 2 or whatever?" No, that isn't the reason because he's already said they didn't have kids. Yeah, so that wasn't the reason, is it fair to say a red herring is deception? Nemo, you're our resident, uh, logic expert. Like, if he, if it's, it's kind of like Obi-Wan Kenobi or whoever saying, "These are not the droids you're looking for." By bringing up a red herring, has nothing to do with what we're talking about. But is it fair to say that's a form of deception? Yeah, because what you're, what you're doing is you're deceiving someone by drawing their attention away from the thing that they desire to know. And I guess it, we don't know if that's intentional. Yeah, or if, you know, it's, well, because he was asking a question so he could give a simple answer. Yeah, he doesn't need to give this complex answer to try and distract away from the answer he doesn't want to give or the accuracy he can't give. Because, because if he was being completely honest, if he doesn't know, he could just say, "I don't know," and then move on, right? He's, he feels this pressure because of his position and because of his need to bolster the church. He feels this pressure to provide an answer. And that's why he has to give this long, convoluted thing about the law of adoption. Yeah, it's like he's, um, yeah, it's just, it's kind of like he's standing in front of a dead body waving his hands and saying, "Don't look over here, look over there," you know? Yeah, yeah. And, and still most members have never heard of Joseph Smith's polygamy, let alone the word polyandry, let alone this notion of dynastic ceilings. So part of the meta-framework for all of this is that these issues we're discussing are still withheld from the general membership today. In 2025, the church is still deceiving the membership by withholding these facts from them. Yeah, right. People are not, day aware of all these different types of strains of thought in Mormonism, of sealing to married women, sealing to men, uh, changing to sealing to grandpas, yeah. A Mormon today thinks they understand temple ceilings, but temple ceilings are very complicated. Uh, there's a very deep history of different strains of thought in this that he's just, uh, glossing over. Yeah. The only way you learn this stuff is if you are lucky to stumble on the Gospel Topics Essays because the church has intentionally made them hard to find and you have to piece it together, right? Or, or if you get to go to one of these super special firesides that are limited to only people who are already doubting or questioning, and you're going to be deceived, but you still wouldn't understand it because you would have been given this convoluted string of different things that you don't know how to piece them together or what they all mean, because certainly Mormons aren't taught critical thinking skills. Yeah, right, right. Well, who would understand what this guy's even referring to? Yeah, because the average doesn't know about the law of adoption. So this feels, that's a good point, Sandra. This feels almost like a new revelation to these people. So it feels like an answer, even if it isn't one, because they're learning something they were never taught about before. So he can then pass that off as an answer to the question by revealing something they didn't know. Um, but it doesn't really answer that question, right?

All right, let's go to the next slide. So that helps us with one idea, uh, that comes out of plural marriage that seems weird. People who are sealed to Joseph when he dies, they get sealed again to other people. Brigham, hey, Kimball. Wait, pause there. He, he just makes it sound like he just helped us with something. I don't think so. But this is even worse. This is even worse. Like, I just answered your question, you know, when he says like, like, yeah, they were just all trying to seal to each other because Joseph's wives, when he died, they all got sealed to Brigham. Like, no, they got sealed to Brigham because Brigham was writing to their husbands like Zina and saying, like, "She's mine now." Like, is it was not because, "Oh, we just want to be all sealed to each other." So now all of his wives go to him. Yeah. Once Joseph, once Joseph had been sealed to his 30, whatever, 40 wives, why did they need to get resealed to somebody else? Yeah. And, well, he's saying like, "Oh, it's because they're all trying to be a big family." Dan Vogel put in the comments, "Sealed for time only." And what is that? Where is that teaching today? For time only? Well, that happens actually today. Sealed. Yeah. So in the temple, women, um, women who have been already sealed to other men, oh, yeah, there was. And their husbands die, they can get se, they can get sealed, sealed for time only. Yeah. Oh, that's ridiculous. That's called marriage. Is that called marriage? That's just, just marriage. Make him feel good. We'll call it sealing. Well, I mean, as a Brit, as an outsider, could it be? So here in the UK, I have to get married, married in a building that anyone can come into, which means I can't get married in a temple. So we have a civil ceremony, and then we have a temple ceremony. But in the states, particularly in Utah, your wedding ceremony is also your legal ceremony, right? Your, your temple ceremony is also your legal ceremony, right? So the phrase sealing, as it refers to a, a Mormon wedding in a temple, that could be just, as an outsider's view, is that how you could end up with ceilings for time? That concept? Because, well, that's just the name for getting married in a Mormon temple. No, I think that by putting sealing on it, they're trying to give some extra special feeling to the couple that there was some special ordinance before God when it was just a marriage. Okay, yeah. It's like permanently artificial or permanently temporary. Why do you need a temporary ceiling? Does the ceiling imply forever? Yeah, it's, it's like oxymoron. Yes, two words that don't belong. Temporary ceiling. Yeah, it's like permanently temporary. Yeah, it doesn't make sense. Yeah, yeah.

All right, let's keep going. In a vertical model, that makes no sense because you're saying, "Well, hey, you got a vertical chain all the way back to Adam. You don't need another one." In a horizontal model, we can see that it makes a certain kind of sense. Oh, no, my link, Joseph, is gone. I need a link to another, uh, person. And so people do repeat ceilings in the 1850s, 60s, and 70s. There's a whole bunch.

Of people, uh, in the 18, uh, 60s and 70s, who Joseph has been dead for 20 years, and they come in and they say, "Well, I knew Joseph back in Nauvoo. I want to be sealed to him." There's like 200 people that get sealed to Joseph after he's dead, 20 years after he's dead. They're just doing it different. And that's part of, uh, Wilford Woodruff is saying, "All of these different things aren't the thing. Here's the way where it will be organized."

So back to the question about women who were married to other men, uh, the evidence we have from them is there were no sexual relations. They are married to a man, they come and get sealed to Joseph, they go back home to their home and they live with their husband. They raise their children. There's no marital interaction with Joseph again. But if we look down the list of women who are sealed and are married to someone else, we see several prominent families. Uh, we see the Whitney Family, new, uh, New Whitney, uh, we. And so, so that's one pattern. We see patterns going on. We don't have, uh, the Whitneys saying, "This is why we did it," but we've got kind of the pattern.

All right, Julia, you've got a slide for us. That was me. Uh, someone has a slide for us. Yeah, about her, uh, about whether, so basically, uh, Q on me, Julia, the video. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Um, so, uh, so basically he's claiming that, yes, Joseph married women who were already married to other men, but he's claiming there's no evidence of sex. And that's how he's explaining, what's the purpose? Cuz remember, the question was, what's the purpose? And then his answer is like, "Well, there was no sex." All right. So you got a slide you want to, you want to discuss the slide? Yeah. Okay, go for it. Sorry, I interrupted. No, it's good.

Okay, so, um, the, so this one, um, it's just a screenshot from a vid, uh, from the series of three videos that Dan Vogel has on his YouTube channel, called, uh, "Joseph Smith and Other Men's Wives." And he has three pretty long videos where he goes through every single one of the wives and he explains, he basically is just contesting church apologists and showing why he believes, and there's evidence, that Joseph did indeed have sexual relations with most of these women who were already married to other men. So this is his table, um, that he po, uh, that that he has on that video. So you have on the left side, he lists the 14 women that were married to Joseph in polygamous marriages. On the second column, we have their, the names of their legal husbands, the 14 of them. And then the third column says, "Time and Eternity Ceiling." Um, and the reason why he's, uh, addressing the Time and Eternity ceiling is because there's this idea, uh, that was actually, um, initiated by, I believe, Emma Smith, but then has been really, um, beefed up by apologists like Brian Hales, that Joseph, when he came up with the doctrine of ceilings, there was like, "Time and Eternity ceilings" and "Time only ceilings." And the idea is that, well, what Brian Hales is that the polyandrous marriages were all for time only, um, or sorry, for eternity only, not for time. Meaning that, um, he could not have sex with them during this life because they were not his wife during this life. And what Jo, what Dan Vogel shows is that there is strong evidence for most of these that they were both time and eternity, because that directly contesting what apologists Brian Hales says. And then he has the fourth column, "Evidence of Sexuality." And he has 11 for them, he, he says, "Yes, that that we have evidence that there was sexual relations with 11 of the 14 women." And for only three of them, Elizabeth David, Sarah Kingsley, and Ruth Vose, we, he says, Dan Vogel says, "We do not have evidence of sexual relations." But for, uh, for 11 of them, we do.

One thing that I'm really confused about, didn't we spend the first 10 or 15 minutes of this episode explaining why God says polygamy is necessary? Sandra, do you remember? Oh, in the Book of Mormon, why does God say polygamy might be necessary to raise up seed? So why are we even having this question of whether or not Joseph had sex with his polyandrous wives? If, if the Book of Mormon is telling us what the purpose of that polyandry would be, what would it be?

Well, the problem is, the Mormons are embarrassed by the fact of Joseph having sex with women who were currently living with a husband. And to the outsiders, the rest of us look at that and say, "Well, that kind of looks like adultery." And so, or swinging, or, you know. So, so they have to try to put a religious spin on this. How do we save Joseph from being accused of adultery? Well, you can't. He did have sex with many of the women. And we have Sylvia Sessions as an example where you're going to go on with something else on that. Keep going. I talk Sylvia Sessions, uh, in her old age, tells her daughter Josephine that she was named Josephine because she was Joseph's child. But then DNA shows that Josephine really was the daughter of the husband. Okay, so that takes her out of Joseph having a child in polygamy. But it shows that Sylvia was sleeping with the husband and Joseph at the same time. Otherwise, you don't confuse who's the husband of your child, right? So that's, so we have absolutely from the mother, the statement that she was having sex with Joseph while she was married. And the affidavits that we have that the, that the Reorganized Church put together on Joseph's polygamous wives, were any of those polyandrous wives that you know, women who basically swore affidavits attesting to, uh, them marrying Joseph in, in every deed, in other words, sexually? I don't remember the, I, I don't think from my memory, because we're working on an episode about this of gathering all the information of, of the evidence of sexuality between all the wives, I don't, I don't recall off the top of my head any of them being polyandrous. You have like Eliza R. Snow, you have the Partridge sisters, you have, I think Louisa, they talk about Louisa Bean through Joseph Bates Noble. I don't think any of them are polyandrous, but I could be wrong. Yeah. Well, we do know Sylvia, right? Yeah. And certainly, again, the question of this episode is, is Keith Erikson deceiving people? Does he not know about, he has to know about Sylvia. All the historians know about Sylvia's story. And he's going to, he's going to talk about one of them. And then I have a rebuttal by Dan Vogel that directly contradicts what he's about to say about one of the wives. But yeah, yeah. And, and if he doesn't know for some weird reason, he knows now. People need to let him know. I'm gonna just ask everybody, I want everybody, if you feel like Keith Erikson is deceiving members, will you get Keith Erikson's email address? Email him and tell him to watch this episode and to change his road show, uh, to stop deceiving members. Julie, I'm going to have you look up, or Maven, I'm going to have you look up his email address. We're going to put it on screen. And I'm gonna ask all of you to email him to put him on notice. If he doesn't know all the instances where he's deceiving people, don't be mean though. What? No, no, no. Be nice. Yeah, be friendly, be kind. Don't harass him. Don't call him, don't call him a lying liar. Say, "We assume that you just aren't aware, even though you're, uh, PhD in history and official church historian, we just assume you're not aware of like 20 or 30 really important things that you're deceiving members about. So here's the episode. Please fix your deceiving history." We're gonna, I'm gonna just ask that of everybody. And then maybe we'll do a follow-up episode on what your experiences were. You can read to us or share with us his responses to you. Maybe we'll do a whole LDS, uh, episode. That's one way to get him to not respond. Well, he believes in honesty, right? So maybe he will. All right, should we go to the next clip? Let's go.

Okay, here's another pattern. This is one that we tell in Saints, Volume One. Uh, there's a young woman, uh, her name is Mary Elizabeth Rollins. Uh, she has a wonderful story. Right here in Independence, we meet her. Well, most people meet her in Independence. So we'll start there. Uh, the printing press is destroyed, and a couple of teenage girls grab the pages, take them out into the field. Mary Elizabeth Rollins is one of those teenage girls. Uh, she had been baptized a couple years earlier when she was 12. She read the Book of Mormon straight through in one sitting, has a powerful testimony, one of the earliest converts. And then again, the story here, but she grows up and she moves to Nauvoo. And in Nauvoo, she marries a man named Adam Lightner. And Adam is a great guy. Uh, he owns a store. People go there. He gets voted onto the city council. People work with him. They love him. She loves him. They're happily married. There's only one problem. Adam is not a member of the church. It's not a problem for being on the city council. Joseph is, is the mayor. Adam's on the city council. They work together. They're friends there. He's a good person, but he just hasn't joined the church. And so when temple ordinances are revealed and when people can be connected to each other and they're excited, Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner is one of the people who gets sealed to Joseph. She's already married to Adam. Uh, and it's a, this one looks like, again, we don't have Mary saying, "This is why we did it," but it looks like that's the way for Mary to be connected in the way they're working with ceilings. If Adam's not a member, then Mary gets, all right.

Yeah, I mean, it's pretty disturbing. Uh, tell us what's dist, this idea that, oh, eternal marriage was revealed, everyone was getting sealed, so then Mary Elizabeth was left alone because she didn't have a husband who was a Mormon, so she had to get married to Joseph. But so I just want you to play the video, uh, then from the next slide, John, where Dan Vogel has a, a clip regarding Mary Elizabeth Rollins.

Okay, so this is a, a clip from Dan Vogel's very awesome and important YouTube channel. The day after she and her husband arrived in Nauvoo in early February 1842, Joseph Smith visited Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner with Brigham Young and proposed marriage to her in a most unusual way. As she recalled, "Brother Joseph told me that the, the angel had appeared to him three times, the last time with a drawn sword commanding him to take me as his wife. He told me in 1834 he saw me standing by his side while preaching in Kirtland, Ohio. I was a thousand miles away from him at that time. The angel appeared to him and told him what it meant, but he became afraid and did not dare to write me. But after seven years, the angel appeared the third time and threatened his life unless he done what he, the angel told him." Mary was naturally skeptical and wondered why Smith waited so long to tell her, but he assured her that she would receive a testimony that the principle of plural marriage was true. She said, "An angel appeared to her one night, but she was so afraid she couldn't speak, but neither did the angel. Nevertheless, she believed it was a sign and that her prayers had been answered." When Smith married Mary Elizabeth later that same month, she had been married to non-Mormon Adam Lightner since 1835 and was eight months pregnant. Eight months pregnant.

Okay, yeah. Tell us what that just said. Just this idea that he's, he's trying to advance that, oh, poor Mary Elizabeth Lightner, she was gonna get, she was gonna be left alone, so Joseph came to so she could be sealed and connected that way. And he's leaving out this, this pretty disturbing story of an angel coming three times to, to coerce Joseph into supposedly marrying her. And interestingly, right, uh, Keith Erikson wants to talk about patterns that keep emerging. The pattern of Joseph Smith being visited by someone after seven years. Right, seven years seems to be one of those numbers he gravitates towards. Um, it's, I noticed that he propositioned her after the angel had come to him seven years later, which means that the last time the angel had come to him was the year in which Mary got married, which means then before that she was single. If he is telling the truth about these, you know, uh, times that he wanted to marry her, and I just thought that timeline is quite interesting. I wonder how old she was. Um, you know, she's, she's aged during this time, so maybe initially he fancied her when she was younger, and then she's a bit older now. I don't know. The timeline just sticks out to me for some reason. But yeah, she's only a young teenager. Uh, I think she's only about 15 or so or 16 when she marries Lightner. I mean, she just, she's a young person. But this idea that Joseph can go to these women and give them this line about, "This angel came with a drawn sword that said I had to enter into polygamy or I was going to be destroyed." I mean, it is such a manipulative approach to young girls or to married women to come to him with this kind of a sales pitch that, "You are going to be responsible for my death because I have to go into polygamy, and if you turn me down, that could be my undoing." It's such, um, spiritual pressure and manipulation. I mean, it's just reprehensible to go to these people with these kinds of pressure points on them. Yeah. And, and more reprehensible that Keith Erikson is talking about her and spinning, well, not just spinning, like completely leaving that out, that out, and creating a new story for her. Maybe he's never heard of the angel with the flaming sword. This man has studied church history enough that I will not give him a pass on not knowing these things. Anyone that has read superficially on polygamy and who entered into polygamy with Joseph Smith would know these stories. Julia, why are you laughing? Oh, I just thought it was funny because like, yeah, these stories, everyone, like Brian Hales talks about these stories. Like these stories are very, very well known. There's no way he doesn't know this.

All right, so I haven't yet been able to find his email address. If any of you can find it, please share it in the comments. I think that might be a reason that it's not publicly available. John, absolutely. Well, here's a link I could find. So if you go to KeithErikson.com/contact, that's K-E-I-T-H-E-R-I-K-S-O-N dot com slash contact, you can fill out a form, email Keith Erikson, let him know that he has put him on notice that he's intentionally or unintentionally deceiving the world. Be kind, be nice, give him the benefit of the doubt, and let's see if he issues an apology or retraction or, uh, worst case, let's see if he changes deceptions or corrects his deceptions in future episodes. I also want to add, Dan Vogel writes, "I haven't seen that video for years, so glad we're re, reintroducing you to your own content, Dan Vogel." And then Dan also says, "Marrying pregnant women was one way to control birth. She was eight months pregnant when married." Yeah, you missed the comment, John, where he said, "I think Nemo is right." I don't even know what he was saying about. I just think, you know, it doesn't matter really on my behalf. I think Nemo is right. Dan Vogel, you know, that's the sort of endorsements I need right now. You need a tattoo, Nemo, that's like Dan Vogel's face and then like a little BB cartoon bubble. "I think Nemo was right." I think Dan's now gonna take out a restraining order. John, thanks for that. Cool. All right, um, well, he keeps lying. This is really, really, um, this is really, really deceptive. Let's keep going. Let's go to the next clip.

Okay, here's one. Uh, will you expound on what historians and Elder Cook said at Nauvoo regarding the status of marriage in exaltation? Okay, this is a really specific one. If you don't remember that event, it was back when Volume One of Saints was released. We did an event at the Nauvoo Temple, a Q&A like this. People submitted questions. Elder Quentin Cook responded. Uh, and so one of the questions, uh, that was asked is a question that haunts people. So the church stops practicing plural marriage in 1890. In 1904, we begin excommunicating people who practice it. And they're serious about it. There are three members of the Quorum of the Twelve who get excommunicated after 1904 because they refuse to, uh, stop. So this is difficult for people. And so, but, but one of the things that haunts people today, I grew up with four sisters, I have four daughters, um, is this thing in the back of my head like, "Well, well, am I gonna have to do that?" Because there was an exception and a couple of thousand people did it. Am I gonna have to do it? Uh, and so that was the question that came through. And now, the answer depends on what you hope for. If, if you're one of those who who's like, because there are these today, maybe you've met some who really want to do plural marriage and wanted to come back. This answer is not going to help you. Um, but here's the answer. Elder Cook said, he actually took the question to the Quorum of the Twelve, and they talked it over. And you can see this, uh, online. But this is the way Elder Cook, uh, talked about it. He said, "We, I talked with my brethren and we agreed that plural marriage had served its purpose." That was his language. So when we attach that to that big framework that, that monogamy is the rule, plurality is the exception. And, uh, this was in 2018, the Quorum of the Twelve saying, through Elder Cook, "It served its purpose." We don't know, uh, any purpose for it, uh, now, uh, in the 21st century. And so, um, they did it in the past. We don't do it now. Now, since 1890, church leaders have taught that plural marriage is absolutely not required for salvation or exaltation or Celestial Kingdom or highest degree of Celestial, however you want to frame it. They have repeated it over and over and over. Wilford Woodruff taught it in 1890, Joseph F. Smith in 1904, Heber J. Grant in the 1920s, and they repeated it in the 1930s. We have church leaders saying that that this is not required over and over and over again. And yet it still haunts people in the back of your, our minds. And so, Alma had a sinful wish. So I have a sinful wish. His sinful wish was that he could speak with the voice of an angel and convince everybody of one fact. Here's my sinful wish: I wish I could let every woman in the church today know that you will not be required to practice plural marriage. That should be gone. Church leaders have repeated this so many times, but we cling to it in our culture and our folktales. And so please, if you're carrying that burden, please, please let it go. It is, um, it is not, uh, what is being taught.

So, so folktale. Let's address that right off. There's the, the very next slide. Address, he used that word folktale. Who wants to address this slide? Julia. Yeah. So I should have put the dates on there because he was talking about certain dates, but I, I left those off, but I left the references behind it. So, so Brigham Young taught that if you deny polygamy, you will be damned. He also taught that if you reject polygamy, you will lose your spouse in the Celestial Kingdom. Joseph F. Smith taught that those who have the ability to live polygamy and don't shall be damned. He also taught, "Without polygamy, there is no exaltation." John Taylor, pretty, that's pretty bold, right? John Taylor taught that you cannot reject polygamy and be, and be allowed to enter God's glory. Heber C. Kimball taught that if you oppose polygamy, you commit apostasy. He also taught that if you go against polygamy, you will be damned. Wilford Woodruff taught that if you do away with polygamy, you might as well do away with prophets, apostles, and revelation. Now, how in the world does he get away saying that it's just folktales? I can tell you how, because according to Allan Hales, the words of prophets do not gain value with age, and you shouldn't use the words of past prophets to negate the words of living prophets. He said that in General Conference. That is the position of the church, is that a living prophet is more important than a dead prophet. But the problem is, this is still in D&C 132, right? Like I read to you earlier, it's in verse six. If you are, if, like, like Joseph F. Smith said, if you are given the opportunity to practice polygamy and you don't take it, you will be damned. The person who doesn't do it will be damned. Part of the new and everlasting covenant, which is required for eternal exaltation. Sorry, yeah. Forget about the scriptures. They're sealing man to multiple women's for eternity today. Both of our highest officers in the church, the president of the church and his first counselor, are both sealed for eternity to women. Yeah. And they don't talk about, pick, do they? If polygamy has, if polygamy has served its purpose, why did Russell M. Nelson get sealed to his second wife after his first wife died? Is there a sealing for time only? No, no, it's eternal sealing. And if polygamy has served its purpose, why did D. H. Oaks get sealed to his second wife as well? Yeah. Are their first wives gonna get a choice? According to D&C 132, they won't. It's the polygamous sealing. Sandra, okay. He's trying to help the women of the church not worry that they may have to live polygamy. So he says in his talk that no one will be forced to live polygamy. What he's not saying is there'll be no polygamy in, in heaven. He's saying the women will not be forced to live it. You have a choice. What does that mean? It means if you die before your husband, and he then later marries another woman in the temple, you will not be forced to live polygamy with that second woman. But what does that mean? It means you are the one out. He is still going to be eternally married to her. Your kids will be part of that family unit. You will be out in the cold. So what they're saying is, no, you won't be forced to live polygamy, but it'll mean you will not have exaltation because you're then exiting your eternal sealing. I also, brilliant. Yeah, brilliant. Sandra. And, and I'll just add, how the freak does he know? He's not an authority. How can he say definitively? How can you, uh, top professor, former professor, MBA, uh, Keith Erikson, how in the world can he say definitively that women won't be required, Mormon women, exalted Mormon women won't be required to practice polygamy? Can you, a choice? Emma didn't have a choice. Yeah, like, like, go ahead. Yeah. So he can't say that. He's not a prophet, seer, revelator. What we do have is lots of prophets, seers, revelators saying that they will be forced or they won't go to exaltation. But then secondly, again, it's like, yeah, those women that were told the story that an angel with the flaming sword told Joseph that he'd be killed if they didn't practice polygamy, like, how much consent would it be if you're a sealed woman in the afterlife and you're told, "Okay, you don't have to practice polygamy. It's just, you won't be exalted with your children and your husband." Like, is that consent? Is consent even possible if eternal salvation and exaltation are tied to plural marriage, like so many prophets and revelators have already testified? This doesn't make sense. Well, these ceilings are still going on. Well, like was mentioned about the two top leaders of the church having plural wives on the books, yeah. They, they could just stop it. They could just, the church could say, "No more ceilings." Right. Well, it doesn't solve the problem of all the people that already got sealed. No, but, but even then, if, if as Erikson is claiming polygamy has served its purpose, why are men in 2025 still allowed to get sealed to plural wives if their previous wife has died? Why, why not just have it be civil marriages? Right. And we know they can change it because we, we know they can change, uh, the way ceilings are done because Keith Erikson has said that they changed it in the 80s. Right. And we know that they just recently changed it so that when you're doing work for deceased ancestors, they don't have to have been married, they can have just been cohabitating, and you can still seal them together as husband and wife in the temple. Which, I mean, that didn't get a lot of press. And I thought maybe it should have. But these, they're still making changes to the way ceilings are done now. So there's no reason they couldn't just change this. It's also confusing. It's that the everlasting gospel gets changed every other year. Absolutely. And Nemo, I just want to, I want to flex back. I just got a comment from Dan. He says, "Excellent point, John." Oh, Dan, how could you betray me like this? Oh, wow. I actually got a Dan Vogel. Well, and then he says, "The polygamy, the reason for polygamy has been fulfilled." What was fulfilled? I, he still never answers why Joseph was practicing it. Oh, dear. This is too fun. This is like shooting fish in a barrel. We're having too much fun. See, this easy. This man is, he is the head of his history and outreach for the church. It's so bad. Be this easy to look at what he's saying and go, "That's just not honest." At least use Patrick Mason or Spencer Fluhman because they're not gonna lie like this. Yeah, even, even like Anthony Sweat, I think would do. Why they don't use them? That's why they don't use them for this type of, um, because they're too honest. Because they're too honest. Yeah, that's why Spencer Fluhman's out in the cold. Right. Yeah, yeah. He's too good faith. Yeah. All right, let's keep going. That was it.

And so here's kind of the way the, the, the, the false logic goes. Talk about false. Well, I hear these old folktales about plural marriage that a man is righteous and he gets a bunch of wives. Well, am I just a gift? Am I just a prize? Am I not a person? Do I not even have any value? What kind of God would see his daughters that way? How can I have faith in a God like that? How can I pray to a God like that? And I can tell you that's not who God is. That's, I'm gonna disagree. That's the Mormon God. What kind of God would do that to a woman? The Mormon God is the correct answer. Keith Erikson, I just had to, had to clarify that. Sorry. Okay, we'll keep going. Wrong God loves you. You're an individual person. He will not give you away as a prize. He will not require you, uh, to do a thing. And that is really, really clear. He will not require you to do a thing. Is this guy read D&C 132? What, where God literally is distributing women like cattle, saying they'll be taken away from this guy, given unto this guy? What, destroy? They don't consent. Like, what, what does he mean, "God doesn't award women as prizes"? What does he mean? Well, and it goes back to this whole problem of, if she doesn't consent to the plural marriage, she's out of the picture of the marriage. She's leaving the, the exaltation track. Julie, you've got a, do you want to talk about this slide? Yeah. So this just popped into my head, but there's other ones like Kimball comparing women. He says, "I think no more of taking a woman than I do buying a cow." So like, anyway. But this is also Heber C. Kimball in 1857. He stated, "In the spirit world, there is an increase of males and females. There are millions of them. And if I'm faithful all the time and continue right along with Brother Brigham, who will go to Brother Joseph and say, 'Here are, here we are, Brother Joseph. We are here ourselves. And we are here ourselves. Are we not with none of the prosperity, property we possess in our probationary state? Not even the rings on our fingers.' He will say to us, 'Come along, my boys. We will give you a good suit of clothes. Where are your wives?' 'They are back yonder. They would not follow us.' 'Never mind,' says Joseph, 'here are thousands. Have all you want.' Perhaps some do not believe that, but I am just simple enough to believe it." And like to me, that's just, that's just screams women are prizes. Like, "Have all you want." There's just thousands of them. Like, they're not asking the women whether they want to marry Kimball or or Brigham or whoever. Like, there's, I don't know, this just, it's just gross how Mormonism does this. What's the quote from, I forget who it's from, where they basically talk about, "Stop taking all the good-looking ones for yourself. Bring her back here so we can," I believe the phrase is, "have a fair shake." Yeah, I think it is Heber C. Kimball. Yeah, yeah. We should do an event, uh, at Heber C. Kimball's house. Uh, did you know that it exists? Like, that they have like a recreation of his house? Oh, Heber C. Kimball's house in Salt Lake City, and you can do like a, you, you can rent it for like events. Sold. All right, we'll think about that. It's a good idea. Sandra, you can be, you can be the main speaker. Yeah. No, I mean, just listen. Homework assignment for any viewer or listener, go read D&C 132. And I'll tell you all of it. Not just, in fact, you can skip, you can skip verses one through 25, right? Just start around 30, read to the end, and you tell me if God doesn't distribute women like property or cattle. Yeah. Is that fair? Julia? Yeah, that's totally fair. Sandra, do you approve? Yeah. All right, so where the, and then return and report. What about destroying Emma if she doesn't accept? Then Emma will be destroyed. Like, what, what is all this talk about they'll have a choice? He hasn't read the scriptures. Emma sure didn't have a choice, right? Yeah, because she was told she'd be destroyed. I, a good, this is a good point to recommend a really good book called "The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy" by Carolyn Pearson, our dear friend. We've also done an episode on Mormon Stories where she talks about that book. Both are excellent. Check out that book just so you can understand how polygamy continues to haunt women, uh, today, even in 2025. All right, let's go to the next clip.

1967, there's a researcher from the University of Utah who is not a Latter-day Saint, and, uh, he's studying old papyrus. And so he goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and they have a big collection of just random old papyrus that they don't know where it came from. Remember, everybody was looting everything out of Egypt. So the Met has this big collection. So this guy from the University of Utah, not a church member, is going through, and then he realizes that 10 of the little pieces of papyrus are from the Joseph Smith era. And you know how he did it? Okay, for another reason why I would fire people. Why, why are you laughing? Herard and S. Well, be, this is, this is so false. The Metropolitan Museum knew what they had. They knew they had bought the fragments of the Joseph Smith collection. And when Dr. Atiya comes from the University of Utah out to the Metropolitan Museum, the museum decides to show him part of the Joseph Smith collection. It's not that Atiya stumbles across these. The museum shows him the facsimile number one, and Atiya immediately recognizes and, "Oh my goodness, this is Joseph Smith papy." You know, but the museum knew all along what it was. Was it a discovery made by Atiya? Now, Dr. Atiya was a real nice guy, but the church was using him, ended up using him to try and build this story that, this miraculous finding of the, uh, Book of Abraham scriptures by an Egyptologist who happens to not be Mormon, right? Yes. And, and he wasn't Mormon. He was, uh, Egyptian. He was a member of the Coptic Church, I believe. But he was the one that became the intermediary between the museum and the church in orchestrating the, uh, acquiring of the papy by the church. Which gets into a real funny story because the church acquires them not by purchase for sale, say, but through a gift. They, the church got a Mormon member to make a donation of a couple of statues to the Metropolitan Museum to make it worth the museum's time to give the papy to the church. Why wouldn't the church just buy them? Because they, the church never buys anything. The church doesn't buy things. They get people to donate them. Oh, it's cheaper. It's cheaper. Oh, okay. Because the church doesn't have enough money. So is Keith Erikson a bad historian or a lying historian? Both. I don't know. On this, I, if he, it means he's a shoddy historian. If he's been honest, he's then shoddy, because anyone that has read very deeply on the Book of Abraham would know this story of how the Metropolitan presented that papy to Dr. Atiya. This, they interviewed, in Dialogue, a Journal of Mormon Thought, has interviews with these men at the museum where where they tell this about how this transaction took place. Sandra, he's not allowed to read Dialogue because it's not an approved source. I, I forgot that. Dialogue is an anti-Mormon source. Don't make up a story then. Yeah, if you.

Okay, so just as a segue, yeah, this is, we're now switching to the Book of Abraham. Yeah, yeah. Which we've covered extensively with M, Dr. Michael Cole on Mormon Stories, but let's just, Robert Ritner. What did I say? Michael Cole. Robert Ritner. And LDS Discussions did, uh, some Book of Abraham stuff. All right, so let's go ahead and, and roll that clip.

And so all kinds of things are being taken out. And so some mummies get excavated, and they go to Europe, they go to England, they go to New York City. And in 1835, they end up, uh, in Kirtland. And all of the sources that we have from Kirtland talk about the mummies. That's the buzz. There are mummies from Egypt, and people are looking at them and they're excited. And then people put all their money together and they buy them. It was like an early Restoration Group, uh, GoFundMe or something. They, uh, but people pull their money and they buy them. And then they start look, now they own them, they start looking at them closely, and they realize there are scrolls with the mummies. And, uh, nobody ever tells us how many scrolls. That would have been nice. They count how many mummies there are, but they just say, "Oh yeah, they're a bunch of scrolls." Uh, and then they're looking at the scrolls. And we have one source that says Joseph's looking at them. And among the scrolls are the writings of Abraham and Joseph. Now, we never hear another peep about Joseph. There's nothing, no other evidence that that Joseph Smith started translating something from Joseph of Egypt. But he does work on the Abraham part. I didn't know. We didn't know how many scrolls there were. He's lying. We do know. Oh my gosh, the missing scroll again. I just can't, like, I can't count how many lies there was or inaccuracies. We know there were two scrolls, like for sure. Like, uh, I have all the people right here that mention two scrolls, like W.W. Phelps and, uh, Oliver Cowdery. Everyone said, "We have two scrolls and some other scraps of papy." He's saying that, uh, the mummies was the big thing. No, no, the big buzz was around the papy. He is later, or he's, because he's the way he's going to frame this is to say, "Well, oh, like the, the, the, uh, the Mormons brought this like they collectively decided to buy this because it was interesting." And then Joseph discovered that, uh, there were some ancient writings. Like, that, that's a lie as well. But I mean, the main one is about the scrolls. We know for sure there were two scrolls, and Joseph identified them as one to be the scroll of Abraham, and the other scroll to be the scroll of Joseph. We know that for sure. And we know that there were some other scraps among those other scraps is the hypocephalus that we have in our scriptures today. Uh, but, but yeah, we, we can, which is placed under the head of the mummy, is it not? Right, that's where that goes. Exactly. Uh, yeah. Um, but yeah, so, um, anyway, there are multiple sources indicating that Joseph identified the writings as Abraham in the papy. Uh, and, and then, and then the other one was Joseph again. So what's the second? So we've got two visuals. We just, just to make reference to them. Yeah. Here I have a visual I created this a while ago for an episode with this with the back here professor. But basically, so you can visualize it. So at the top, you would see on, on the left side, I have the two scrolls. So the, so the top one will be, uh, the scroll of Abraham, uh, what he identified as the scroll of Abraham. The bottom would be the scroll of Joseph, and then the other scraps and fragments that that the witnesses that were there, uh, described as well. Here's what's important about these two scrolls. And go, go and show it again in the next slide. The next slide. Yeah. Okay, so we again, at the top is the scroll of, of Abraham. Uh, if you look, because the way Joseph, by this point, he had started learning Hebrew, so he kind of like already put together that Egyptian must be read the same as Hebrew from left to, uh, to, sorry, from from right to left. So when he starts translating the Book of Abraham, he will start with the, um, with the, uh, with the image that we have in our scriptures as, uh, Facsimile Number One. And it's right there on the square in the, in the screen with the red, uh, with the red square. And then if you start reading the Book of Abraham, he even references it. He, the Book of Abraham starts by saying, you know, that the, that the image at, at the commencement of of this, uh, account, or something like that. And Joseph is going to start translating right there from, from the right side. Um, and, and then we know ex, we, we have because we, we're going to talk about how we have these today. But, uh, there's a piece and I have it right there around the, the size of what it's missing from the Book of Abraham. So that's represent, that black section is representative of what has been lost from that scroll. What Egyptologists tell us today, that's the section around that size would be the, the amount of scroll that we are missing today. He's gonna make it sound like we're missing tons of scrolls. Like that, that's that's not true. That's why he's trying to say we don't know how many scrolls there were. But we do know. S. you and Gerald were were instrumental in the groundbreaking of this entire Book of Abraham issue. Do you want to talk about that at all? Well, yes, we had heard rumors of the scrolls being out there. We didn't know what library, but we knew they were somewhere out there, and we were on the track of locating them at the time the church negotiated to get the papy back from the Metropolitan Museum. And so that's how, uh, Gerald got involved in that early article in Dialogue about the papy showing that, uh, Joseph Smith was, uh, filling in parts of the scroll with, uh, texts from other pieces of papyri that didn't make any sense because they didn't fit in the text. It's like adding words in upside down and backwards into a manuscript of something. And, uh, so clear back in the late 60s, we were challenging the church on this, and the Mormon scholars were trying to defend the Book of Abraham as somehow being proven by these papy, that this supported the Book of Abraham. And we're saying, "No, sorry, these don't translate anything you're talking about." Well, it's taken the church all these years to finally get around to admitting, well, yeah, they don't really talk about Abraham. So then they have to go to some sort of, uh, mystical way of, uh, having them inspire the Book of Abraham. But the original thought, I think the church really thought that this was going to prove the Book of Abraham for them. Unfortunately, they don't translate anything about Abraham. And is it true that it really wasn't until the Gospel Topics essay on the Book of Abraham where the church admits that the word Abraham doesn't even appear anywhere on any of the scrolls or fragments? Right. Well, we knew that clear back in 1970, but the church didn't. Church wouldn't admit it. I think as early as 1912, isn't like one Egyptologist, the New York Times published like a front-page article basically saying, "Book of Abraham's a fraud." Yeah, they were making that judgment on the papy illustrations. They didn't have the text to make a definitive statement like we can now, but the illustrations, the facsimiles, the pictures were enough for Egyptologists in 1912 to say, "The Mormons don't have any idea what they're talking about or what they even have. These have nothing to do with their religious, uh, views or scriptures. This is just standard funerary text of the Egyptian religion." And Joseph did translate those, the, the images, yeah, the facsimiles. And they say nothing that he said. Yeah, the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language document proves that he believed it to be a translation, not just some sort of inspired apologist. Want to separate the facsimile from the text today, but you have to remember the Book of Abraham itself references the facsimiles. Like the, the first, uh, one of the first chapters and the first chapter of the Book of Abraham, it says, you know, if you go back and look, "the commencement of of these, uh, of this text for, for, you know, an image of of what I'm talking about." Yeah, Abraham says, "I've given you an illustration of this at the front of the record." Exactly. And so that refers, the text refers you to Facsimile Number One. And Facsimile Number One has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham. It's just a standard burial scene from the Egyptian religion, Osiris and Anubis. Not to mention that the church included the facsimiles, yeah, in the scriptures. Yes, they still do. They still do. They're still there. Yeah. This is what's like, even the craziest thing, Joseph Smith in his personal history in, uh, 1840s, 1840s history, he referred to the two scrolls of papyrus. Like he's saying, "We don't know how many scrolls." Joseph Smith himself said there were two scrolls. And but we only listen to Joseph when it helps with our narrative, right? We can ignore Joseph. Well, ignore Oliver and W.W. Phelps. I don't know. Yeah. And again, if we have to come up with the motive for why Erikson is deceiving people, it's because he, because the translations are so incredibly obviously false and incorrect that he wants to create the perception that possibly there are other scrolls that got lost or destroyed that would have the original text that would correspond with what Joseph produced as the translations. It's an act of deception right there. There is no reason to assume that no matter how many other scrolls you had that they would say anything different from what we have. Yeah. Why would we assume the missing pieces would have some strange religion on it? We're trying to create the possibility of belief when really some say the Book of Abraham is one of the, the biggest smoking guns showing Joseph Smith as a false translator, right? We don't have plates for the Book of Mormon to test on his translation. We do have the papyri to test Joseph Smith's work on the Book of Abraham, and he fails miserably. There is absolutely no connection between the papyri and the text, which the scholars seem to be conceding today when they talk about, "As he looked at the papy, he, the Book of Abraham was revealed to him." They no longer talk about it being a translation. It's a revealed text. A revelation. Yeah.

All right, let's go to the next clip.

Okay, so just as a segue, yeah, this is, we're now switching to the Book of Abraham. Yeah, yeah. Which we've covered extensively with M, Dr. Michael Co on Mormon Stories, but let's just, Robert Ritner. What did I say? Michael Cole. Robert Ritner. And LDS Discussions did, uh, some Book of Abraham stuff. All right, so let's go ahead and, and roll that clip.

And so all kinds of things are being taken out. And so some mummies get excavated, and they go to Europe, they go to England, they go to New York City. And in 1835, they end up, uh, in Kirtland. And all of the sources that we have from Kirtland talk about the mummies. That's the buzz. There are mummies from Egypt, and people are looking at them and they're excited. And then people put all their money together and they buy them. It was like an early Restoration Group, uh, GoFundMe or something. They, uh, but people pull their money and they buy them. And then they start look, now they own them, they start looking at them closely, and they realize there are scrolls with the mummies. And, uh, nobody ever tells us how many scrolls. That would have been nice. They count how many mummies there are, but they just say, "Oh yeah, they're a bunch of scrolls." Uh, and then they're looking at the scrolls. And we have one source that says Joseph's looking at them. And among the scrolls are the writings of Abraham and Joseph. Now, we never hear another peep about Joseph. There's nothing, no other evidence that that Joseph Smith started translating something from Joseph of Egypt. But he does work on the Abraham part. I didn't know. We didn't know how many scrolls there were. He's lying. We do know. Oh my gosh, the missing scroll again. I just can't, like, I can't count how many lies there was or inaccuracies. We know there were two scrolls, like for sure. Like, uh, I have all the people right here that mention two scrolls, like W.W. Phelps and, uh, Oliver Cowdery. Everyone said, "We have two scrolls and some other scraps of papy." He's saying that, uh, the mummies was the big thing. No, no, the big buzz was around the papy. He is later, or he's, because he's the way he's going to frame this is to say, "Well, oh, like the, the, the, uh, the Mormons brought this like they collectively decided to buy this because it was interesting." And then Joseph discovered that, uh, there were some ancient writings. Like, that, that's a lie as well. But I mean, the main one is about the scrolls. We know for sure there were two scrolls, and Joseph identified them as one to be the scroll of Abraham, and the other scroll to be the scroll of Joseph. We know that for sure. And we know that there were some other scraps among those other scraps is the hypocephalus that we have in our scriptures today. Uh, but, but yeah, we, we can, which is placed under the head of the mummy, is it not? Right, that's where that goes. Exactly. Uh, yeah. Um, but yeah, so, um, anyway, there are multiple sources indicating that Joseph identified the writings as Abraham in the papy. Uh, and, and then, and then the other one was Joseph again. So what's the second? So we've got two visuals. We just, just to make reference to them. Yeah. Here I have a visual I created this a while ago for an episode with this with the back here professor. But basically, so you can visualize it. So at the top, you would see on, on the left side, I have the two scrolls. So the, so the top one will be, uh, the scroll of Abraham, uh, what he identified as the scroll of Abraham. The bottom would be the scroll of Joseph, and then the other scraps and fragments that that the witnesses that were there, uh, described as well. Here's what's important about these two scrolls. And go, go and show it again in the next slide. The next slide. Yeah. Okay, so we again, at the top is the scroll of, of Abraham. Uh, if you look, because the way Joseph, by this point, he had started learning Hebrew, so he kind of like already put together that Egyptian must be read the same as Hebrew from left to, uh, to, sorry, from from right to left. So when he starts translating the Book of Abraham, he will start with the, um, with the, uh, with the image that we have in our scriptures as, uh, Facsimile Number One. And it's right there on the square in the, in the screen with the red, uh, with the red square. And then if you start reading the Book of Abraham, he even references it. He, the Book of Abraham starts by saying, you know, that the, that the image at, at the commencement of of this, uh, account, or something like that. And Joseph is going to start translating right there from, from the right side. Um, and, and then we know ex, we, we have because we, we're going to talk about how we have these today. But, uh, there's a piece and I have it right there around the, the size of what it's missing from the Book of Abraham. So that's represent, that black section is representative of what has been lost from that scroll. What Egyptologists tell us today, that's the section around that size would be the, the amount of scroll that we are missing today. He's gonna make it sound like we're missing tons of scrolls. Like that, that's that's not true. That's why he's trying to say we don't know how many scrolls there were. But we do know. S. you and Gerald were were instrumental in the groundbreaking of this entire Book of Abraham issue. Do you want to talk about that at all? Well, yes, we had heard rumors of the scrolls being out there. We didn't know what library, but we knew they were somewhere out there, and we were on the track of locating them at the time the church negotiated to get the papy back from the Metropolitan Museum. And so that's how, uh, Gerald got involved in that early article in Dialogue about the papy showing that, uh, Joseph Smith was, uh, filling in parts of the scroll with, uh, texts from other pieces of papyri that didn't make any sense because they didn't fit in the text. It's like adding words in upside down and backwards into a manuscript of something. And, uh, so clear back in the late 60s, we were challenging the church on this, and the Mormon scholars were trying to defend the Book of Abraham as somehow being proven by these papy, that this supported the Book of Abraham. And we're saying, "No, sorry, these don't translate anything you're talking about." Well, it's taken the church all these years to finally get around to admitting, well, yeah, they don't really talk about Abraham. So then they have to go to some sort of, uh, mystical way of, uh, having them inspire the Book of Abraham. But the original thought, I think the church really thought that this was going to prove the Book of Abraham for them. Unfortunately, they don't translate anything about Abraham. And is it true that it really wasn't until the Gospel Topics essay on the Book of Abraham where the church admits that the word Abraham doesn't even appear anywhere on any of the scrolls or fragments? Right. Well, we knew that clear back in 1970, but the church didn't. Church wouldn't admit it. I think as early as 1912, isn't like one Egyptologist, the New York Times published like a front-page article basically saying, "Book of Abraham's a fraud." Yeah, they were making that judgment on the papy illustrations. They didn't have the text to make a definitive statement like we can now, but the illustrations, the facsimiles, the pictures were enough for Egyptologists in 1912 to say, "The Mormons don't have any idea what they're talking about or what they even have. These have nothing to do with their religious, uh, views or scriptures. This is just standard funerary text of the Egyptian religion." And Joseph did translate those, the, the images, yeah, the facsimiles. And they say nothing that he said. Yeah, the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language document proves that he believed it to be a translation, not just some sort of inspired apologist. Want to separate the facsimile from the text today, but you have to remember the Book of Abraham itself references the facsimiles. Like the, the first, uh, one of the first chapters and the first chapter of the Book of Abraham, it says, you know, if you go back and look, "the commencement of of these, uh, of this text for, for, you know, an image of of what I'm talking about." Yeah, Abraham says, "I've given you an illustration of this at the front of the record." Exactly. And so that refers, the text refers you to Facsimile Number One. And Facsimile Number One has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham. It's just a standard burial scene from the Egyptian religion, Osiris and Anubis. Not to mention that the church included the facsimiles, yeah, in the scriptures. Yes, they still do. They still do. They're still there. Yeah. This is what's like, even the craziest thing, Joseph Smith in his personal history in, uh, 1840s, 1840s history, he referred to the two scrolls of papyrus. Like he's saying, "We don't know how many scrolls." Joseph Smith himself said there were two scrolls. And but we only listen to Joseph when it helps with our narrative, right? We can ignore Joseph. Well, ignore Oliver and W.W. Phelps. I don't know. Yeah. And again, if we have to come up with the motive for why Erikson is deceiving people, it's because he, because the translations are so incredibly obviously false and incorrect that he wants to create the perception that possibly there are other scrolls that got lost or destroyed that would have the original text that would correspond with what Joseph produced as the translations. It's an act of deception right there. There is no reason to assume that no matter how many other scrolls you had that they would say anything different from what we have. Yeah. Why would we assume the missing pieces would have some strange religion on it? We're trying to create the possibility of belief when really some say the Book of Abraham is one of the, the biggest smoking guns showing Joseph Smith as a false translator, right? We don't have plates for the Book of Mormon to test on his translation. We do have the papyri to test Joseph Smith's work on the Book of Abraham, and he fails miserably. There is absolutely no connection between the papyri and the text, which the scholars seem to be conceding today when they talk about, "As he looked at the papy, he, the Book of Abraham was revealed to him." They no longer talk about it being a translation. It's a revealed text. A revelation. Yeah.

All right, let's go to the next clip.

1967, there's a researcher from the University of Utah who is not a Latter-day Saint, and, uh, he's studying old papyrus. And so he goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and they have a big collection of just random old papyrus that they don't know where it came from. Remember, everybody was looting everything out of Egypt. So the Met has this big collection. So this guy from the University of Utah, not a church member, is going through, and then he realizes that 10 of the little pieces of papyrus are from the Joseph Smith era. And you know how he did it? Okay, for another reason why I would fire people. Why, why are you laughing? Herard and S. Well, be, this is, this is so false. The Metropolitan Museum knew what they had. They knew they had bought the fragments of the Joseph Smith collection. And when Dr. Atiya comes from the University of Utah out to the Metropolitan Museum, the museum decides to show him part of the Joseph Smith collection. It's not that Atiya stumbles across these. The museum shows him the facsimile number one, and Atiya immediately recognizes and, "Oh my goodness, this is Joseph Smith papy." You know, but the museum knew all along what it was. Was it a discovery made by Atiya? Now, Dr. Atiya was a real nice guy, but the church was using him, ended up using him to try and build this story that, this miraculous finding of the, uh, Book of Abraham scriptures by an Egyptologist who happens to not be Mormon, right? Yes. And, and he wasn't Mormon. He was, uh, Egyptian. He was a member of the Coptic Church, I believe. But he was the one that became the intermediary between the museum and the church in orchestrating the, uh, acquiring of the papy by the church. Which gets into a real funny story because the church acquires them not by purchase for sale, say, but through a gift. They, the church got a Mormon member to make a donation of a couple of statues to the Metropolitan Museum to make it worth the museum's time to give the papy to the church. Why wouldn't the church just buy them? Because they, the church never buys anything. The church doesn't buy things. They get people to donate them. Oh, it's cheaper. It's cheaper. Oh, okay. Because the church doesn't have enough money. So is Keith Erikson a bad historian or a lying historian? Both. I don't know. On this, I, if he, it means he's a shoddy historian. If he's been honest, he's then shoddy, because anyone that has read very deeply on the Book of Abraham would know this story of how the Metropolitan presented that papy to Dr. Atiya. This, they interviewed, in Dialogue, a Journal of Mormon Thought, has interviews with these men at the museum where where they tell this about how this transaction took place. Sandra, he's not allowed to read Dialogue because it's not an approved source. I, I forgot that. Dialogue is an anti-Mormon source. Don't make up a story then. Yeah, if you.

Okay, so just as a segue, yeah, this is, we're now switching to the Book of Abraham. Yeah, yeah. Which we've covered extensively with M, Dr. Michael Co on Mormon Stories, but let's just, Robert Ritner. What did I say? Michael Cole. Robert Ritner. And LDS Discussions did, uh, some Book of Abraham stuff. All right, so let's go ahead and, and roll that clip.

And so all kinds of things are being taken out. And so some mummies get excavated, and they go to Europe, they go to England, they go to New York City. And in 1835, they end up, uh, in Kirtland. And all of the sources that we have from Kirtland talk about the mummies. That's the buzz. There are mummies from Egypt, and people are looking at them and they're excited. And then people put all their money together and they buy them. It was like an early Restoration Group, uh, GoFundMe or something. They, uh, but people pull their money and they buy them. And then they start look, now they own them, they start looking at them closely, and they realize there are scrolls with the mummies. And, uh, nobody ever tells us how many scrolls. That would have been nice. They count how many mummies there are, but they just say, "Oh yeah, they're a bunch of scrolls." Uh, and then they're looking at the scrolls. And we have one source that says Joseph's looking at them. And among the scrolls are the writings of Abraham and Joseph. Now, we never hear another peep about Joseph. There's nothing, no other evidence that that Joseph Smith started translating something from Joseph of Egypt. But he does work on the Abraham part. I didn't know. We didn't know how many scrolls there were. He's lying. We do know. Oh my gosh, the missing scroll again. I just can't, like, I can't count how many lies there was or inaccuracies. We know there were two scrolls, like for sure. Like, uh, I have all the people right here that mention two scrolls, like W.W. Phelps and, uh, Oliver Cowdery. Everyone said, "We have two scrolls and some other scraps of papy." He's saying that, uh, the mummies was the big thing. No, no, the big buzz was around the papy. He is later, or he's, because he's the way he's going to frame this is to say, "Well, oh, like the, the, the, uh, the Mormons brought this like they collectively decided to buy this because it was interesting." And then Joseph discovered that, uh, there were some ancient writings. Like, that, that's a lie as well. But I mean, the main one is about the scrolls. We know for sure there were two scrolls, and Joseph identified them as one to be the scroll of Abraham, and the other scroll to be the scroll of Joseph. We know that for sure. And we know that there were some other scraps among those other scraps is the hypocephalus that we have in our scriptures today. Uh, but, but yeah, we, we can, which is placed under the head of the mummy, is it not? Right, that's where that goes. Exactly. Uh, yeah. Um, but yeah, so, um, anyway, there are multiple sources indicating that Joseph identified the writings as Abraham in the papy. Uh, and, and then, and then the other one was Joseph again. So what's the second? So we've got two visuals. We just, just to make reference to them. Yeah. Here I have a visual I created this a while ago for an episode with this with the back here professor. But basically, so you can visualize it. So at the top, you would see on, on the left side, I have the two scrolls. So the, so the top one will be, uh, the scroll of Abraham, uh, what he identified as the scroll of Abraham. The bottom would be the scroll of Joseph, and then the other scraps and fragments that that the witnesses that were there, uh, described as well. Here's what's important about these two scrolls. And go, go and show it again in the next slide. The next slide. Yeah. Okay, so we again, at the top is the scroll of, of Abraham. Uh, if you look, because the way Joseph, by this point, he had started learning Hebrew, so he kind of like already put together that Egyptian must be read the same as Hebrew from left to, uh, to, sorry, from from right to left. So when he starts translating the Book of Abraham, he will start with the, um, with the, uh, with the image that we have in our scriptures as, uh, Facsimile Number One. And it's right there on the square in the, in the screen with the red, uh, with the red square. And then if you start reading the Book of Abraham, he even references it. He, the Book of Abraham starts by saying, you know, that the, that the image at, at the commencement of of this, uh, account, or something like that. And Joseph is going to start translating right there from, from the right side. Um, and, and then we know ex, we, we have because we, we're going to talk about how we have these today. But, uh, there's a piece and I have it right there around the, the size of what it's missing from the Book of Abraham. So that's represent, that black section is representative of what has been lost from that scroll. What Egyptologists tell us today, that's the section around that size would be the, the amount of scroll that we are missing today. He's gonna make it sound like we're missing tons of scrolls. Like that, that's that's not true. That's why he's trying to say we don't know how many scrolls there were. But we do know. S. you and Gerald were were instrumental in the groundbreaking of this entire Book of Abraham issue. Do you want to talk about that at all? Well, yes, we had heard rumors of the scrolls being out there. We didn't know what library, but we knew they were somewhere out there, and we were on the track of locating them at the time the church negotiated to get the papy back from the Metropolitan Museum. And so that's how, uh, Gerald got involved in that early article in Dialogue about the papy showing that, uh, Joseph Smith was, uh, filling in parts of the scroll with, uh, texts from other pieces of papyri that didn't make any sense because they didn't fit in the text. It's like adding words in upside down and backwards into a manuscript of something. And, uh, so clear back in the late 60s, we were challenging the church on this, and the Mormon scholars were trying to defend the Book of Abraham as somehow being proven by these papy, that this supported the Book of Abraham. And we're saying, "No, sorry, these don't translate anything you're talking about." Well, it's taken the church all these years to finally get around to admitting, well, yeah, they don't really talk about Abraham. So then they have to go to some sort of, uh, mystical way of, uh, having them inspire the Book of Abraham. But the original thought, I think the church really thought that this was going to prove the Book of Abraham for them. Unfortunately, they don't translate anything about Abraham. And is it true that it really wasn't until the Gospel Topics essay on the Book of Abraham where the church admits that the word Abraham doesn't even appear anywhere on any of the scrolls or fragments? Right. Well, we knew that clear back in 1970, but the church didn't. Church wouldn't admit it. I think as early as 1912, isn't like one Egyptologist, the New York Times published like a front-page article basically saying, "Book of Abraham's a fraud." Yeah, they were making that judgment on the papy illustrations. They didn't have the text to make a definitive statement like we can now, but the illustrations, the facsimiles, the pictures were enough for Egyptologists in 1912 to say, "The Mormons don't have any idea what they're talking about or what they even have. These have nothing to do with their religious, uh, views or scriptures. This is just standard funerary text of the Egyptian religion." And Joseph did translate those, the, the images, yeah, the facsimiles. And they say nothing that he said. Yeah, the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language document proves that he believed it to be a translation, not just some sort of inspired apologist. Want to separate the facsimile from the text today, but you have to remember the Book of Abraham itself references the facsimiles. Like the, the first, uh, one of the first chapters and the first chapter of the Book of Abraham, it says, you know, if you go back and look, "the commencement of of these, uh, of this text for, for, you know, an image of of what I'm talking about." Yeah, Abraham says, "I've given you an illustration of this at the front of the record." Exactly. And so that refers, the text refers you to Facsimile Number One. And Facsimile Number One has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham. It's just a standard burial scene from the Egyptian religion, Osiris and Anubis. Not to mention that the church included the facsimiles, yeah, in the scriptures. Yes, they still do. They still do. They're still there. Yeah. This is what's like, even the craziest thing, Joseph Smith in his personal history in, uh, 1840s, 1840s history, he referred to the two scrolls of papyrus. Like he's saying, "We don't know how many scrolls." Joseph Smith himself said there were two scrolls. And but we only listen to Joseph when it helps with our narrative, right? We can ignore Joseph. Well, ignore Oliver and W.W. Phelps. I don't know. Yeah. And again, if we have to come up with the motive for why Erikson is deceiving people, it's because he, because the translations are so incredibly obviously false and incorrect that he wants to create the perception that possibly there are other scrolls that got lost or destroyed that would have the original text that would correspond with what Joseph produced as the translations. It's an act of deception right there. There is no reason to assume that no matter how many other scrolls you had that they would say anything different from what we have. Yeah. Why would we assume the missing pieces would have some strange religion on it? We're trying to create the possibility of belief when really some say the Book of Abraham is one of the, the biggest smoking guns showing Joseph Smith as a false translator, right? We don't have plates for the Book of Mormon to test on his translation. We do have the papyri to test Joseph Smith's work on the Book of Abraham, and he fails miserably. There is absolutely no connection between the papyri and the text, which the scholars seem to be conceding today when they talk about, "As he looked at the papy, he, the Book of Abraham was revealed to him." They no longer talk about it being a translation. It's a revealed text. A revelation. Yeah.

All right, let's go to the next clip.

1967, there's a researcher from the University of Utah who is not a Latter-day Saint, and, uh, he's studying old papyrus. And so he goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and they have a big collection of just random old papyrus that they don't know where it came from. Remember, everybody was looting everything out of Egypt. So the Met has this big collection. So this guy from the University of Utah, not a church member, is going through, and then he realizes that 10 of the little pieces of papyrus are from the Joseph Smith era. And you know how he did it? Okay, for another reason why I would fire people. Why, why are you laughing? Herard and S. Well, be, this is, this is so false. The Metropolitan Museum knew what they had. They knew they had bought the fragments of the Joseph Smith collection. And when Dr. Atiya comes from the University of Utah out to the Metropolitan Museum, the museum decides to show him part of the Joseph Smith collection. It's not that Atiya stumbles across these. The museum shows him the facsimile number one, and Atiya immediately recognizes and, "Oh my goodness, this is Joseph Smith papy." You know, but the museum knew all along what it was. Was it a discovery made by Atiya? Now, Dr. Atiya was a real nice guy, but the church was using him, ended up using him to try and build this story that, this miraculous finding of the, uh, Book of Abraham scriptures by an Egyptologist who happens to not be Mormon, right? Yes. And, and he wasn't Mormon. He was, uh, Egyptian. He was a member of the Coptic Church, I believe. But he was the one that became the intermediary between the museum and the church in orchestrating the, uh, acquiring of the papy by the church. Which gets into a real funny story because the church acquires them not by purchase for sale, say, but through a gift. They, the church got a Mormon member to make a donation of a couple of statues to the Metropolitan Museum to make it worth the museum's time to give the papy to the church. Why wouldn't the church just buy them? Because they, the church never buys anything. The church doesn't buy things. They get people to donate them. Oh, it's cheaper. It's cheaper. Oh, okay. Because the church doesn't have enough money. So is Keith Erikson a bad historian or a lying historian? Both. I don't know. On this, I, if he, it means he's a shoddy historian. If he's been honest, he's then shoddy, because anyone that has read very deeply on the Book of Abraham would know this story of how the Metropolitan presented that papy to Dr. Atiya. This, they interviewed, in Dialogue, a Journal of Mormon Thought, has interviews with these men at the museum where where they tell this about how this transaction took place. Sandra, he's not allowed to read Dialogue because it's not an approved source. I, I forgot that. Dialogue is an anti-Mormon source. Don't make up a story then. Yeah, if you.

Okay, so just as a segue, yeah, this is, we're now switching to the Book of Abraham. Yeah, yeah. Which we've covered extensively with M, Dr. Michael Co on Mormon Stories, but let's just, Robert Ritner. What did I say? Michael Cole. Robert Ritner. And LDS Discussions did, uh, some Book of Abraham stuff. All right, so let's go ahead and, and roll that clip.

And so all kinds of things are being taken out. And so some mummies get excavated, and they go to Europe, they go to England, they go to New York City. And in 1835, they end up, uh, in Kirtland. And all of the sources that we have from Kirtland talk about the mummies. That's the buzz. There are mummies from Egypt, and people are looking at them and they're excited. And then people put all their money together and they buy them. It was like an early Restoration Group, uh, GoFundMe or something. They, uh, but people pull their money and they buy them. And then they start look, now they own them, they start looking at them closely, and they realize there are scrolls with the mummies. And, uh, nobody ever tells us how many scrolls. That would have been nice. They count how many mummies there are, but they just say, "Oh yeah, they're a bunch of scrolls." Uh, and then they're looking at the scrolls. And we have one source that says Joseph's looking at them. And among the scrolls are the writings of Abraham and Joseph. Now, we never hear another peep about Joseph. There's nothing, no other evidence that that Joseph Smith started translating something from Joseph of Egypt. But he does work on the Abraham part. I didn't know. We didn't know how many scrolls there were. He's lying. We do know. Oh my gosh, the missing scroll again. I just can't, like, I can't count how many lies there was or inaccuracies. We know there were two scrolls, like for sure. Like, uh, I have all the people right here that mention two scrolls, like W.W. Phelps and, uh, Oliver Cowdery. Everyone said, "We have two scrolls and some other scraps of papy." He's saying that, uh, the mummies was the big thing. No, no, the big buzz was around the papy. He is later, or he's, because he's the way he's going to frame this is to say, "Well, oh, like the, the, the, uh, the Mormons brought this like they collectively decided to buy this because it was interesting." And then Joseph discovered that, uh, there were some ancient writings. Like, that, that's a lie as well. But I mean, the main one is about the scrolls. We know for sure there were two scrolls, and Joseph identified them as one to be the scroll of Abraham, and the other scroll to be the scroll of Joseph. We know that for sure. And we know that there were some other scraps among those other scraps is the hypocephalus that we have in our scriptures today. Uh, but, but yeah, we, we can, which is placed under the head of the mummy, is it not? Right, that's where that goes. Exactly. Uh, yeah. Um, but yeah, so, um, anyway, there are multiple sources indicating that Joseph identified the writings as Abraham in the papy. Uh, and, and then, and then the other one was Joseph again. So what's the second? So we've got two visuals. We just, just to make reference to them. Yeah. Here I have a visual I created this a while ago for an episode with this with the back here professor. But basically, so you can visualize it. So at the top, you would see on, on the left side, I have the two scrolls. So the, so the top one will be, uh, the scroll of Abraham, uh, what he identified as the scroll of Abraham. The bottom would be the scroll of Joseph, and then the other scraps and fragments that that the witnesses that were there, uh, described as well. Here's what's important about these two scrolls. And go, go and show it again in the next slide. The next slide. Yeah. Okay, so we again, at the top is the scroll of, of Abraham. Uh, if you look, because the way Joseph, by this point, he had started learning Hebrew, so he kind of like already put together that Egyptian must be read the same as Hebrew from left to, uh, to, sorry, from from right to left. So when he starts translating the Book of Abraham, he will start with the, um, with the, uh, with the image that we have in our scriptures as, uh, Facsimile Number One. And it's right there on the square in the, in the screen with the red, uh, with the red square. And then if you start reading the Book of Abraham, he even references it. He, the Book of Abraham starts by saying, you know, that the, that the image at, at the commencement of of this, uh, account, or something like that. And Joseph is going to start translating right there from, from the right side. Um, and, and then we know ex, we, we have because we, we're going to talk about how we have these today. But, uh, there's a piece and I have it right there around the, the size of what it's missing from the Book of Abraham. So that's represent, that black section is representative of what has been lost from that scroll. What Egyptologists tell us today, that's the section around that size would be the, the amount of scroll that we are missing today. He's gonna make it sound like we're missing tons of scrolls. Like that, that's that's not true. That's why he's trying to say we don't know how many scrolls there were. But we do know. S. you and Gerald were were instrumental in the groundbreaking of this entire Book of Abraham issue. Do you want to talk about that at all? Well, yes, we had heard rumors of the scrolls being out there. We didn't know what library, but we knew they were somewhere out there, and we were on the track of locating them at the time the church negotiated to get the papy back from the Metropolitan Museum. And so that's how, uh, Gerald got involved in that early article in Dialogue about the papy showing that, uh, Joseph Smith was, uh, filling in parts of the scroll with, uh, texts from other pieces of papyri that didn't make any sense because they didn't fit in the text. It's like adding words in upside down and backwards into a manuscript of something. And, uh, so clear back in the late 60s, we were challenging the church on this, and the Mormon scholars were trying to defend the Book of Abraham as somehow being proven by these papy, that this supported the Book of Abraham. And we're saying, "No, sorry, these don't translate anything you're talking about." Well, it's taken the church all these years to finally get around to admitting, well, yeah, they don't really talk about Abraham. So then they have to go to some sort of, uh, mystical way of, uh, having them inspire the Book of Abraham. But the original thought, I think the church really thought that this was going to prove the Book of Abraham for them. Unfortunately, they don't translate anything about Abraham. And is it true that it really wasn't until the Gospel Topics essay on the Book of Abraham where the church admits that the word Abraham doesn't even appear anywhere on any of the scrolls or fragments? Right. Well, we knew that clear back in 1970, but the church didn't. Church wouldn't admit it. I think as early as 1912, isn't like one Egyptologist, the New York Times published like a front-page article basically saying, "Book of Abraham's a fraud." Yeah, they were making that judgment on the papy illustrations. They didn't have the text to make a definitive statement like we can now, but the illustrations, the facsimiles, the pictures were enough for Egyptologists in 1912 to say, "The Mormons don't have any idea what they're talking about or what they even have. These have nothing to do with their religious, uh, views or scriptures. This is just standard funerary text of the Egyptian religion." And Joseph did translate those, the, the images, yeah, the facsimiles. And they say nothing that he said. Yeah, the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language document proves that he believed it to be a translation, not just some sort of inspired apologist. Want to separate the facsimile from the text today, but you have to remember the Book of Abraham itself references the facsimiles. Like the, the first, uh, one of the first chapters and the first chapter of the Book of Abraham, it says, you know, if you go back and look, "the commencement of of these, uh, of this text for, for, you know, an image of of what I'm talking about." Yeah, Abraham says, "I've given you an illustration of this at the front of the record." Exactly. And so that refers, the text refers you to Facsimile Number One. And Facsimile Number One has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham. It's just a standard burial scene from the Egyptian religion, Osiris and Anubis. Not to mention that the church included the facsimiles, yeah, in the scriptures. Yes, they still do. They still do. They're still there. Yeah. This is what's like, even the craziest thing, Joseph Smith in his personal history in, uh, 1840s, 1840s history, he referred to the two scrolls of papyrus. Like he's saying, "We don't know how many scrolls." Joseph Smith himself said there were two scrolls. And but we only listen to Joseph when it helps with our narrative, right? We can ignore Joseph. Well, ignore Oliver and W.W. Phelps. I don't know. Yeah. And again, if we have to come up with the motive for why Erikson is deceiving people, it's because he, because the translations are so incredibly obviously false and incorrect that he wants to create the perception that possibly there are other scrolls that got lost or destroyed that would have the original text that would correspond with what Joseph produced as the translations. It's an act of deception right there. There is no reason to assume that no matter how many other scrolls you had that they would say anything different from what we have. Yeah. Why would we assume the missing pieces would have some strange religion on it? We're trying to create the possibility of belief when really some say the Book of Abraham is one of the, the biggest smoking guns showing Joseph Smith as a false translator, right? We don't have plates for the Book of Mormon to test on his translation. We do have the papyri to test Joseph Smith's work on the Book of Abraham, and he fails miserably. There is absolutely no connection between the papyri and the text, which the scholars seem to be conceding today when they talk about, "As he looked at the papy, he, the Book of Abraham was revealed to him." They no longer talk about it being a translation. It's a revealed text. A revelation. Yeah.

All right, let's go to the next clip.

1967, there's a researcher from the University of Utah who is not a Latter-day Saint, and, uh, he's studying old papyrus. And so he goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and they have a big collection of just random old papyrus that they don't know where it came from. Remember, everybody was looting everything out of Egypt. So the Met has this big collection. So this guy from the University of Utah, not a church member, is going through, and then he realizes that 10 of the little pieces of papyrus are from the Joseph Smith era. And you know how he did it? Okay, for another reason why I would fire people. Why, why are you laughing? Herard and S. Well, be, this is, this is so false. The Metropolitan Museum knew what they had. They knew they had bought the fragments of the Joseph Smith collection. And when Dr. Atiya comes from the University of Utah out to the Metropolitan Museum, the museum decides to show him part of the Joseph Smith collection. It's not that Atiya stumbles across these. The museum shows him the facsimile number one, and Atiya immediately recognizes and, "Oh my goodness, this is Joseph Smith papy." You know, but the museum knew all along what it was. Was it a discovery made by Atiya? Now, Dr. Atiya was a real nice guy, but the church was using him, ended up using him to try and build this story that, this miraculous finding of the, uh, Book of Abraham scriptures by an Egyptologist who happens to not be Mormon, right? Yes. And, and he wasn't Mormon. He was, uh, Egyptian. He was a member of the Coptic Church, I believe. But he was the one that became the intermediary between the museum and the church in orchestrating the, uh, acquiring of the papy by the church. Which gets into a real funny story because the church acquires them not by purchase for sale, say, but through a gift. They, the church got a Mormon member to make a donation of a couple of statues to the Metropolitan Museum to make it worth the museum's time to give the papy to the church. Why wouldn't the church just buy them? Because they, the church never buys anything. The church doesn't buy things. They get people to donate them. Oh, it's cheaper. It's cheaper. Oh, okay. Because the church doesn't have enough money. So is Keith Erikson a bad historian or a lying historian? Both. I don't know. On this, I, if he, it means he's a shoddy historian. If he's been honest, he's then shoddy, because anyone that has read very deeply on the Book of Abraham would know this story of how the Metropolitan presented that papy to Dr. Atiya. This, they interviewed, in Dialogue, a Journal of Mormon Thought, has interviews with these men at the museum where where they tell this about how this transaction took place. Sandra, he's not allowed to read Dialogue because it's not an approved source. I, I forgot that. Dialogue is an anti-Mormon source. Don't make up a story then. Yeah, if you.

Okay, so just as a segue, yeah, this is, we're now switching to the Book of Abraham. Yeah, yeah. Which we've covered extensively with M, Dr. Michael Co on Mormon Stories, but let's just, Robert Ritner. What did I say? Michael Cole. Robert Ritner. And LDS Discussions did, uh, some Book of Abraham stuff. All right, so let's go ahead and, and roll that clip.

And so all kinds of things are being taken out. And so some mummies get excavated, and they go to Europe, they go to England, they go to New York City. And in 1835, they end up, uh, in Kirtland. And all of the sources that we have from Kirtland talk about the mummies. That's the buzz. There are mummies from Egypt, and people are looking at them and they're excited. And then people put all their money together and they buy them. It was like an early Restoration Group, uh, GoFundMe or something. They, uh, but people pull their money and they buy them. And then they start look, now they own them, they start looking at them closely, and they realize there are scrolls with the mummies. And, uh, nobody ever tells us how many scrolls. That would have been nice. They count how many mummies there are, but they just say, "Oh yeah, they're a bunch of scrolls." Uh, and then they're looking at the scrolls. And we have one source that says Joseph's looking at them. And among the scrolls are the writings of Abraham and Joseph. Now, we never hear another peep about Joseph. There's nothing, no other evidence that that Joseph Smith started translating something from Joseph of Egypt. But he does work on the Abraham part. I didn't know. We didn't know how many scrolls there were. He's lying. We do know. Oh my gosh, the missing scroll again. I just can't, like, I can't count how many lies there was or inaccuracies. We know there were two scrolls, like for sure. Like, uh, I have all the people right here that mention two scrolls, like W.W. Phelps and, uh, Oliver Cowdery. Everyone said, "We have two scrolls and some other scraps of papy." He's saying that, uh, the mummies was the big thing. No, no, the big buzz was around the papy. He is later, or he's, because he's the way he's going to frame this is to say, "Well, oh, like the, the, the, uh, the Mormons brought this like they collectively decided to buy this because it was interesting." And then Joseph discovered that, uh, there were some ancient writings. Like, that, that's a lie as well. But I mean, the main one is about the scrolls. We know for sure there were two scrolls, and Joseph identified them as one to be the scroll of Abraham, and the other scroll to be the scroll of Joseph. We know that for sure. And we know that there were some other scraps among those other scraps is the hypocephalus that we have in our scriptures today. Uh, but, but yeah, we, we can, which is placed under the head of the mummy, is it not? Right, that's where that goes. Exactly. Uh, yeah. Um, but yeah, so, um, anyway, there are multiple sources indicating that Joseph identified the writings as Abraham in the papy. Uh, and, and then, and then the other one was Joseph again. So what's the second? So we've got two visuals. We just, just to make reference to them. Yeah. Here I have a visual I created this a while ago for an episode with this with the back here professor. But basically, so you can visualize it. So at the top, you would see on, on the left side, I have the two scrolls. So the, so the top one will be, uh, the scroll of Abraham, uh, what he identified as the scroll of Abraham. The bottom would be the scroll of Joseph, and then the other scraps and fragments that that the witnesses that were there, uh, described as well. Here's what's important about these two scrolls. And go, go and show it again in the next slide. The next slide. Yeah. Okay, so we again, at the top is the scroll of, of Abraham. Uh, if you look, because the way Joseph, by this point, he had started learning Hebrew, so he kind of like already put together that Egyptian must be read the same as Hebrew from left to, uh, to, sorry, from from right to left. So when he starts translating the Book of Abraham, he will start with the, um, with the, uh, with the image that we have in our scriptures as, uh, Facsimile Number One. And it's right there on the square in the, in the screen with the red, uh, with the red square. And then if you start reading the Book of Abraham, he even references it. He, the Book of Abraham starts by saying, you know, that the, that the image at, at the commencement of of this, uh, account, or something like that. And Joseph is going to start translating right there from, from the right side. Um, and, and then we know ex, we, we have because we, we're going to talk about how we have these today. But, uh, there's a piece and I have it right there around the, the size of what it's missing from the Book of Abraham. So that's represent, that black section is representative of what has been lost from that scroll. What Egyptologists tell us today, that's the section around that size would be the, the amount of scroll that we are missing today. He's gonna make it sound like we're missing tons of scrolls. Like that, that's that's not true. That's why he's trying to say we don't know how many scrolls there were. But we do know. S. you and Gerald were were instrumental in the groundbreaking of this entire Book of Abraham issue. Do you want to talk about that at all? Well, yes, we had heard rumors of the scrolls being out there. We didn't know what library, but we knew they were somewhere out there, and we were on the track of locating them at the time the church negotiated to get the papy back from the Metropolitan Museum. And so that's how, uh, Gerald got involved in that early article in Dialogue about the papy showing that, uh, Joseph Smith was, uh, filling in parts of the scroll with, uh, texts from other pieces of papyri that didn't make any sense because they didn't fit in the text. It's like adding words in upside down and backwards into a manuscript of something. And, uh, so clear back in the late 60s, we were challenging the church on this, and the Mormon scholars were trying to defend the Book of Abraham as somehow being proven by these papy, that this supported the Book of Abraham. And we're saying, "No, sorry, these don't translate anything you're talking about." Well, it's taken the church all these years to finally get around to admitting, well, yeah, they don't really talk about Abraham. So then they have to go to some sort of, uh, mystical way of, uh, having them inspire the Book of Abraham. But the original thought, I think the church really thought that this was going to prove the Book of Abraham for them. Unfortunately, they don't translate anything about Abraham. And is it true that it really wasn't until the Gospel Topics essay on the Book of Abraham where the church admits that the word Abraham doesn't even appear anywhere on any of the scrolls or fragments? Right. Well, we knew that clear back in 1970, but the church didn't. Church wouldn't admit it. I think as early as 1912, isn't like one Egyptologist, the New York Times published like a front-page article basically saying, "Book of Abraham's a fraud." Yeah, they were making that judgment on the papy illustrations. They didn't have the text to make a definitive statement like we can now, but the illustrations, the facsimiles, the pictures were enough for Egyptologists in 1912 to say, "The Mormons don't have any idea what they're talking about or what they even have. These have nothing to do with their religious, uh, views or scriptures. This is just standard funerary text of the Egyptian religion." And Joseph did translate those, the, the images, yeah, the facsimiles. And they say nothing that he said. Yeah, the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language document proves that he believed it to be a translation, not just some sort of inspired apologist. Want to separate the facsimile from the text today, but you have to remember the Book of Abraham itself references the facsimiles. Like the, the first, uh, one of the first chapters and the first chapter of the Book of Abraham, it says, you know, if you go back and look, "the commencement of of these, uh, of this text for, for, you know, an image of of what I'm talking about." Yeah, Abraham says, "I've given you an illustration of this at the front of the record." Exactly. And so that refers, the text refers you to Facsimile Number One. And Facsimile Number One has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham. It's just a standard burial scene from the Egyptian religion, Osiris and Anubis. Not to mention that the church included the facsimiles, yeah, in the scriptures. Yes, they still do. They still do. They're still there. Yeah. This is what's like, even the craziest thing, Joseph Smith in his personal history in, uh, 1840s, 1840s history, he referred to the two scrolls of papyrus. Like he's saying, "We don't know how many scrolls." Joseph Smith himself said there were two scrolls. And but we only listen to Joseph when it helps with our narrative, right? We can ignore Joseph. Well, ignore Oliver and W.W. Phelps. I don't know. Yeah. And again, if we have to come up with the motive for why Erikson is deceiving people, it's because he, because the translations are so incredibly obviously false and incorrect that he wants to create the perception that possibly there are other scrolls that got lost or destroyed that would have the original text that would correspond with what Joseph produced as the translations. It's an act of deception right there. There is no reason to assume that no matter how many other scrolls you had that they would say anything different from what we have. Yeah. Why would we assume the missing pieces would have some strange religion on it? We're trying to create the possibility of belief when really some say the Book of Abraham is one of the, the biggest smoking guns showing Joseph Smith as a false translator, right? We don't have plates for the Book of Mormon to test on his translation. We do have the papyri to test Joseph Smith's work on the Book of Abraham, and he fails miserably. There is absolutely no connection between the papyri and the text, which the scholars seem to be conceding today when they talk about, "As he looked at the papy, he, the Book of Abraham was revealed to him." They no longer talk about it being a translation. It's a revealed text. A revelation. Yeah.

All right, let's go to the next clip.

1967, there's a researcher from the University of Utah who is not a Latter-day Saint, and, uh, he's studying old papyrus. And so he goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and they have a big collection of just random old papyrus that they don't know where it came from. Remember, everybody was looting everything out of Egypt. So the Met has this big collection. So this guy from the University of Utah, not a church member, is going through, and then he realizes that 10 of the little pieces of papyrus are from the Joseph Smith era. And you know how he did it? Okay, for another reason why I would fire people. Why, why are you laughing? Herard and S. Well, be, this is, this is so false. The Metropolitan Museum knew what they had. They knew they had bought the fragments of the Joseph Smith collection. And when Dr. Atiya comes from the University of Utah out to the Metropolitan Museum, the museum decides to show him part of the Joseph Smith collection. It's not that Atiya stumbles across these. The museum shows him the facsimile number one, and Atiya immediately recognizes and, "Oh my goodness, this is Joseph Smith papy." You know, but the museum knew all along what it was. Was it a discovery made by Atiya? Now, Dr. Atiya was a real nice guy, but the church was using him, ended up using him to try and build this story that, this miraculous finding of the, uh, Book of Abraham scriptures by an Egyptologist who happens to not be Mormon, right? Yes. And, and he wasn't Mormon. He was, uh, Egyptian. He was a member of the Coptic Church, I believe. But he was the one that became the intermediary between the museum and the church in orchestrating the, uh, acquiring of the papy by the church. Which gets into a real funny story because the church acquires them not by purchase for sale, say, but through a gift. They, the church got a Mormon member to make a donation of a couple of statues to the Metropolitan Museum to make it worth the museum's time to give the papy to the church. Why wouldn't the church just buy them? Because they, the church never buys anything. The church doesn't buy things. They get people to donate them. Oh, it's cheaper. It's cheaper. Oh, okay. Because the church doesn't have enough money. So is Keith Erikson a bad historian or a lying historian? Both. I don't know. On this, I, if he, it means he's a shoddy historian. If he's been honest, he's then shoddy, because anyone that has read very deeply on the Book of Abraham would know this story of how the Metropolitan presented that papy to Dr. Atiya. This, they interviewed, in Dialogue, a Journal of Mormon Thought, has interviews with these men at the museum where where they tell this about how this transaction took place. Sandra, he's not allowed to read Dialogue because it's not an approved source. I, I forgot that. Dialogue is an anti-Mormon source. Don't make up a story then. Yeah, if you.

Okay, so just as a segue, yeah, this is, we're now switching to the Book of Abraham. Yeah, yeah. Which we've covered extensively with M, Dr. Michael Co on Mormon Stories, but let's just, Robert Ritner. What did I say? Michael Cole. Robert Ritner. And LDS Discussions did, uh, some Book of Abraham stuff. All right, so let's go ahead and, and roll that clip.

And so all kinds of things are being taken out. And so some mummies get excavated, and they go to Europe, they go to England, they go to New York City. And in 1835, they end up, uh, in Kirtland. And all of the sources that we have from Kirtland talk about the mummies. That's the buzz. There are mummies from Egypt, and people are looking at them and they're excited. And then people put all their money together and they buy them. It was like an early Restoration Group, uh, GoFundMe or something. They, uh, but people pull their money and they buy them. And then they start look, now they own them, they start looking at them closely, and they realize there are scrolls with the mummies. And, uh, nobody ever tells us how many scrolls. That would have been nice. They count how many mummies there are, but they just say, "Oh yeah, they're a bunch of scrolls." Uh, and then they're looking at the scrolls. And we have one source that says Joseph's looking at them. And among the scrolls are the writings of Abraham and Joseph. Now, we never hear another peep about Joseph. There's nothing, no other evidence that that Joseph Smith started translating something from Joseph of Egypt. But he does work on the Abraham part. I didn't know. We didn't know how many scrolls there were. He's lying. We do know. Oh my gosh, the missing scroll again. I just can't, like, I can't count how many lies there was or inaccuracies. We know there were two scrolls, like for sure. Like, uh, I have all the people right here that mention two scrolls, like W.W. Phelps and, uh, Oliver Cowdery. Everyone said, "We have two scrolls and some other scraps of papy." He's saying that, uh, the mummies was the big thing. No, no, the big buzz was around the papy. He is later, or he's, because he's the way he's going to frame this is to say, "Well, oh, like the, the, the, uh, the Mormons brought this like they collectively decided to buy this because it was interesting." And then Joseph discovered that, uh, there were some ancient writings. Like, that, that's a lie as well. But I mean, the main one is about the scrolls. We know for sure there were two scrolls, and Joseph identified them as one to be the scroll of Abraham, and the other scroll to be the scroll of Joseph. We know that for sure. And we know that there were some other scraps among those other scraps is the hypocephalus that we have in our scriptures today. Uh, but, but yeah, we, we can, which is placed under the head of the mummy, is it not? Right, that's where that goes. Exactly. Uh, yeah. Um, but yeah, so, um, anyway, there are multiple sources indicating that Joseph identified the writings as Abraham in the papy. Uh, and, and then, and then the other one was Joseph again. So what's the second? So we've got two visuals. We just, just to make reference to them. Yeah. Here I have a visual I created this a while ago for an episode with this with the back here professor. But basically, so you can visualize it. So at the top, you would see on, on the left side, I have the two scrolls. So the, so the top one will be, uh, the scroll of Abraham, uh, what he identified as the scroll of Abraham. The bottom would be the scroll of Joseph, and then the other scraps and fragments that that the witnesses that were there, uh, described as well. Here's what's important about these two scrolls. And go, go and show it again in the next slide. The next slide. Yeah. Okay, so we again, at the top is the scroll of, of Abraham. Uh, if you look, because the way Joseph, by this point, he had started learning Hebrew, so he kind of like already put together that Egyptian must be read the same as Hebrew from left to, uh, to, sorry, from from right to left. So when he starts translating the Book of Abraham, he will start with the, um, with the, uh, with the image that we have in our scriptures as, uh, Facsimile Number One. And it's right there on the square in the, in the screen with the red, uh, with the red square. And then if you start reading the Book of Abraham, he even references it. He, the Book of Abraham starts by saying, you know, that the, that the image at, at the commencement of of this, uh, account, or something like that. And Joseph is going to start translating right there from, from the right side. Um, and, and then we know ex, we, we have because we, we're going to talk about how we have these today. But, uh, there's a piece and I have it right there around the, the size of what it's missing from the Book of Abraham. So that's represent, that black section is representative of what has been lost from that scroll. What Egyptologists tell us today, that's the section around that size would be the, the amount of scroll that we are missing today. He's gonna make it sound like we're missing tons of scrolls. Like that, that's that's not true. That's why he's trying to say we don't know how many scrolls there were. But we do know. S. you and Gerald were were instrumental in the groundbreaking of this entire Book of Abraham issue. Do you want to talk about that at all? Well, yes, we had heard rumors of the scrolls being out there. We didn't know what library, but we knew they were somewhere out there, and we were on the track of locating them at the time the church negotiated to get the papy back from the Metropolitan Museum. And so that's how, uh, Gerald got involved in that early article in Dialogue about the papy showing that, uh, Joseph Smith was, uh, filling in parts of the scroll with, uh, texts from other pieces of papyri that didn't make any sense because they didn't fit in the text. It's like adding words in upside down and backwards into a manuscript of something. And, uh, so clear back in the late 60s, we were challenging the church on this, and the Mormon scholars were trying to defend the Book of Abraham as somehow being proven by these papy, that this supported the Book of Abraham. And we're saying, "No, sorry, these don't translate anything you're talking about." Well, it's taken the church all these years to finally get around to admitting, well, yeah, they don't really talk about Abraham. So then they have to go to some sort of, uh, mystical way of, uh, having them inspire the Book of Abraham. But the original thought, I think the church really thought that this was going to prove the Book of Abraham for them. Unfortunately, they don't translate anything about Abraham. And is it true that it really wasn't until the Gospel Topics essay on the Book of Abraham where the church admits that the word Abraham doesn't even appear anywhere on any of the scrolls or fragments? Right. Well, we knew that clear back in 1970, but the church didn't. Church wouldn't admit it. I think as early as 1912, isn't like one Egyptologist, the New York Times published like a front-page article basically saying, "Book of Abraham's a fraud." Yeah, they were making that judgment on the papy illustrations. They didn't have the text to make a definitive statement like we can now, but the illustrations, the facsimiles, the pictures were enough for Egyptologists in 1912 to say, "The Mormons don't have any idea what they're talking about or what they even have. These have nothing to do with their religious, uh, views or scriptures. This is just standard funerary text of the Egyptian religion." And Joseph did translate those, the, the images, yeah, the facsimiles. And they say nothing that he said. Yeah, the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language document proves that he believed it to be a translation, not just some sort of inspired apologist. Want to separate the facsimile from the text today, but you have to remember the Book of Abraham itself references the facsimiles. Like the, the first, uh, one of the first chapters and the first chapter of the Book of Abraham, it says, you know, if you go back and look, "the commencement of of these, uh, of this text for, for, you know, an image of of what I'm talking about." Yeah, Abraham says, "I've given you an illustration of this at the front of the record." Exactly. And so that refers, the text refers you to Facsimile Number One. And Facsimile Number One has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham. It's just a standard burial scene from the Egyptian religion, Osiris and Anubis. Not to mention that the church included the facsimiles, yeah, in the scriptures. Yes, they still do. They still do. They're still there. Yeah. This is what's like, even the craziest thing, Joseph Smith in his personal history in, uh, 1840s, 1840s history, he referred to the two scrolls of papyrus. Like he's saying, "We don't know how many scrolls." Joseph Smith himself said there were two scrolls. And but we only listen to Joseph when it helps with our narrative, right? We can ignore Joseph. Well, ignore Oliver and W.W. Phelps. I don't know. Yeah. And again, if we have to come up with the motive for why Erikson is deceiving people, it's because he, because the translations are so incredibly obviously false and incorrect that he wants to create the perception that possibly there are other scrolls that got lost or destroyed that would have the original text that would correspond with what Joseph produced as the translations. It's an act of deception right there. There is no reason to assume that no matter how many other scrolls you had that they would say anything different from what we have. Yeah. Why would we assume the missing pieces would have some strange religion on it? We're trying to create the possibility of belief when really some say the Book of Abraham is one of the, the biggest smoking guns showing Joseph Smith as a false translator, right? We don't have plates for the Book of Mormon to test on his translation. We do have the papyri to test Joseph Smith's work on the Book of Abraham, and he fails miserably. There is absolutely no connection between the papyri and the text, which the scholars seem to be conceding today when they talk about, "As he looked at the papy, he, the Book of Abraham was revealed to him." They no longer talk about it being a translation. It's a revealed text. A revelation. Yeah.

All right, let's go to the next clip.

1967, there's a researcher from the University of Utah who is not a Latter-day Saint, and, uh, he's studying old papyrus. And so he goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and they have a big collection of just random old papyrus that they don't know where it came from. Remember, everybody was looting everything out of Egypt. So the Met has this big collection. So this guy from the University of Utah, not a church member, is going through, and then he realizes that 10 of the little pieces of papyrus are from the Joseph Smith era. And you know how he did it? Okay, for another reason why I would fire people. Why, why are you laughing? Herard and S. Well, be, this is, this is so false. The Metropolitan Museum knew what they had. They knew they had bought the fragments of the Joseph Smith collection. And when Dr. Atiya comes from the University of Utah out to the Metropolitan Museum, the museum decides to show him part of the Joseph Smith collection. It's not that Atiya stumbles across these. The museum shows him the facsimile number one, and Atiya immediately recognizes and, "Oh my goodness, this is Joseph Smith papy." You know, but the museum knew all along what it was. Was it a discovery made by Atiya? Now, Dr. Atiya was a real nice guy, but the church was using him, ended up using him to try and build this story that, this miraculous finding of the, uh, Book of Abraham scriptures by an Egyptologist who happens to not be Mormon, right? Yes. And, and he wasn't Mormon. He was, uh, Egyptian. He was a member of the Coptic Church, I believe. But he was the one that became the intermediary between the museum and the church in orchestrating the, uh, acquiring of the papy by the church. Which gets into a real funny story because the church acquires them not by purchase for sale, say, but through a gift. They, the church got a Mormon member to make a donation of a couple of statues to the Metropolitan Museum to make it worth the museum's time to give the papy to the church. Why wouldn't the church just buy them? Because they, the church never buys anything. The church doesn't buy things. They get people to donate them. Oh, it's cheaper. It's cheaper. Oh, okay. Because the church doesn't have enough money. So is Keith Erikson a bad historian or a lying historian? Both. I don't know. On this, I, if he, it means he's a shoddy historian. If he's been honest, he's then shoddy, because anyone that has read very deeply on the Book of Abraham would know this story of how the Metropolitan presented that papy to Dr. Atiya. This, they interviewed, in Dialogue, a Journal of Mormon Thought, has interviews with these men at the museum where where they tell this about how this transaction took place. Sandra, he's not allowed to read Dialogue because it's not an approved source. I, I forgot that. Dialogue is an anti-Mormon source. Don't make up a story then. Yeah, if you.

Okay, so just as a segue, yeah, this is, we're now switching to the Book of Abraham. Yeah, yeah. Which we've covered extensively with M, Dr. Michael Co on Mormon Stories, but let's just, Robert Ritner. What did I say? Michael Cole. Robert Ritner. And LDS Discussions did, uh, some Book of Abraham stuff. All right, so let's go ahead and, and roll that clip.

And so all kinds of things are being taken out. And so some mummies get excavated, and they go to Europe, they go to England, they go to New York City. And in 1835, they end up, uh, in Kirtland. And all of the sources that we have from Kirtland talk about the mummies. That's the buzz. There are mummies from Egypt, and people are looking at them and they're excited. And then people put all their money together and they buy them. It was like an early Restoration Group, uh, GoFundMe or something. They, uh, but people pull their money and they buy them. And then they start look, now they own them, they start looking at them closely, and they realize there are scrolls with the mummies. And, uh, nobody ever tells us how many scrolls. That would have been nice. They count how many mummies there are, but they just say, "Oh yeah, they're a bunch of scrolls." Uh, and then they're looking at the scrolls. And we have one source that says Joseph's looking at them. And among the scrolls are the writings of Abraham and Joseph. Now, we never hear another peep about Joseph. There's nothing, no other evidence that that Joseph Smith started translating something from Joseph of Egypt. But he does work on the Abraham part. I didn't know. We didn't know how many scrolls there were. He's lying. We do know. Oh my gosh, the missing scroll again. I just can't, like, I can't count how many lies there was or inaccuracies. We know there were two scrolls, like for sure. Like, uh, I have all the people right here that mention two scrolls, like W.W. Phelps and, uh, Oliver Cowdery. Everyone said, "We have two scrolls and some other scraps of papy." He's saying that, uh, the mummies was the big thing. No, no, the big buzz was around the papy. He is later, or he's, because he's the way he's going to frame this is to say, "Well, oh, like the, the, the, uh, the Mormons brought this like they collectively decided to buy this because it was interesting." And then Joseph discovered that, uh, there were some ancient writings. Like, that, that's a lie as well. But I mean, the main one is about the scrolls. We know for sure there were two scrolls, and Joseph identified them as one to be the scroll of Abraham, and the other scroll to be the scroll of Joseph. We know that for sure. And we know that there were some other scraps among those other scraps is the hypocephalus that we have in our scriptures today. Uh, but, but yeah, we, we can, which is placed under the head of the mummy, is it not? Right, that's where that goes. Exactly. Uh, yeah. Um, but yeah, so, um, anyway, there are multiple sources indicating that Joseph identified the writings as Abraham in the papy. Uh, and, and then, and then the other one was Joseph again. So what's the second? So we've got two visuals. We just, just to make reference to them. Yeah. Here I have a visual I created this a while ago for an episode with this with the back here professor. But basically, so you can visualize it. So at the top, you would see on, on the left side, I have the two scrolls. So the, so the top one will be, uh, the scroll of Abraham, uh, what he identified as the scroll of Abraham. The bottom would be the scroll of Joseph, and then the other scraps and fragments that that the witnesses that were there, uh, described as well. Here's what's important about these two scrolls. And go, go and show it again in the next slide. The next slide. Yeah. Okay, so we again, at the top is the scroll of, of Abraham. Uh, if you look, because the way Joseph, by this point, he had started learning Hebrew, so he kind of like already put together that Egyptian must be read the same as Hebrew from left to, uh, to, sorry, from from right to left. So when he starts translating the Book of Abraham, he will start with the, um, with the, uh, with the image that we have in our scriptures as, uh, Facsimile Number One. And it's right there on the square in the, in the screen with the red, uh, with the red square. And then if you start reading the Book of Abraham, he even references it. He, the Book of Abraham starts by saying, you know, that the, that the image at, at the commencement of of this, uh, account, or something like that. And Joseph is going to start translating right there from, from the right side. Um, and, and then we know ex, we, we have because we, we're going to talk about how we have these today. But, uh, there's a piece and I have it right there around the, the size of what it's missing from the Book of Abraham. So that's represent, that black section is representative of what has been lost from that scroll. What Egyptologists tell us today, that's the section around that size would be the, the amount of scroll that we are missing today. He's gonna make it sound like we're missing tons of scrolls. Like that, that's that's not true. That's why he's trying to say we don't know how many scrolls there were. But we do know. S. you and Gerald were were instrumental in the groundbreaking of this entire Book of Abraham issue. Do you want to talk about that at all? Well, yes, we had heard rumors of the scrolls being out there. We didn't know what library, but we knew they were somewhere out there, and we were on the track of locating them at the time the church negotiated to get the papy back from the Metropolitan Museum. And so that's how, uh, Gerald got involved in that early article in Dialogue about the papy showing that, uh, Joseph Smith was, uh, filling in parts of the scroll with, uh, texts from other pieces of papyri that didn't make any sense because they didn't fit in the text. It's like adding words in upside down and backwards into a manuscript of something. And, uh, so clear back in the late 60s, we were challenging the church on this, and the Mormon scholars were trying to defend the Book of Abraham as somehow being proven by these papy, that this supported the Book of Abraham. And we're saying, "No, sorry, these don't translate anything you're talking about." Well, it's taken the church all these years to finally get around to admitting, well, yeah, they don't really talk about Abraham. So then they have to go to some sort of, uh, mystical way of, uh, having them inspire the Book of Abraham. But the original thought, I think the church really thought that this was going to prove the Book of Abraham for them. Unfortunately, they don't translate anything about Abraham. And is it true that it really wasn't until the Gospel Topics essay on the Book of Abraham where the church admits that the word Abraham doesn't even appear anywhere on any of the scrolls or fragments? Right. Well, we knew that clear back in 1970, but the church didn't. Church wouldn't admit it. I think as early as 1912, isn't like one Egyptologist, the New York Times published like a front-page article basically saying, "Book of Abraham's a fraud." Yeah, they were making that judgment on the papy illustrations. They didn't have the text to make a definitive statement like we can now, but the illustrations, the facsimiles, the pictures were enough for Egyptologists in 1912 to say, "The Mormons don't have any idea what they're talking about or what they even have. These have nothing to do with their religious, uh, views or scriptures. This is just standard funerary text of the Egyptian religion." And Joseph did translate those, the, the images, yeah, the facsimiles. And they say nothing that he said. Yeah, the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language document proves that he believed it to be a translation, not just some sort of inspired apologist. Want to separate the facsimile from the text today, but you have to remember the Book of Abraham itself references the facsimiles. Like the, the first, uh, one of the first chapters and the first chapter of the Book of Abraham, it says, you know, if you go back and look, "the commencement of of these, uh, of this text for, for, you know, an image of of what I'm talking about." Yeah, Abraham says, "I've given you an illustration of this at the front of the record." Exactly. And so that refers, the text refers you to Facsimile Number One. And Facsimile Number One has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham. It's just a standard burial scene from the Egyptian religion, Osiris and Anubis. Not to mention that the church included the facsimiles, yeah, in the scriptures. Yes, they still do. They still do. They're still there. Yeah. This is what's like, even the craziest thing, Joseph Smith in his personal history in, uh, 1840s, 1840s history, he referred to the two scrolls of papyrus. Like he's saying, "We don't know how many scrolls." Joseph Smith himself said there were two scrolls. And but we only listen to Joseph when it helps with our narrative, right? We can ignore Joseph. Well, ignore Oliver and W.W. Phelps. I don't know. Yeah. And again, if we have to come up with the motive for why Erikson is deceiving people, it's because he, because the translations are so incredibly obviously false and incorrect that he wants to create the perception that possibly there are other scrolls that got lost or destroyed that would have the original text that would correspond with what Joseph produced as the translations. It's an act of deception right there. There is no reason to assume that no matter how many other scrolls you had that they would say anything different from what we have. Yeah. Why would we assume the missing pieces would have some strange religion on it? We're trying to create the possibility of belief when really some say the Book of Abraham is one of the, the biggest smoking guns showing Joseph Smith as a false translator, right? We don't have plates for the Book of Mormon to test on his translation. We do have the papyri to test Joseph Smith's work on the Book of Abraham, and he fails miserably. There is absolutely no connection between the papyri and the text, which the scholars seem to be conceding today when they talk about, "As he looked at the papy, he, the Book of Abraham was revealed to him." They no longer talk about it being a translation. It's a revealed text. A revelation. Yeah.

All right, let's go to the next clip.

1967, there's a researcher from the University of Utah who is not a Latter-day Saint, and, uh, he's studying old papyrus. And so he goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and they have a big collection of just random old papyrus that they don't know where it came from. Remember, everybody was looting everything out of Egypt. So the Met has this big collection. So this guy from the University of Utah, not a church member, is going through, and then he realizes that 10 of the little pieces of papyrus are from the Joseph Smith era. And you know how he did it? Okay, for another reason why I would fire people. Why, why are you laughing? Herard and S. Well, be, this is, this is so false. The Metropolitan Museum knew what they had. They knew they had bought the fragments of the Joseph Smith collection. And when Dr. Atiya comes from the University of Utah out to the Metropolitan Museum, the museum decides to show him part of the Joseph Smith collection. It's not that Atiya stumbles across these. The museum shows him the facsimile number one, and Atiya immediately recognizes and, "Oh my goodness, this is Joseph Smith papy." You know, but the museum knew all along what it was. Was it a discovery made by Atiya? Now, Dr. Atiya was a real nice guy, but the church was using him, ended up using him to try and build this story that, this miraculous finding of the, uh, Book of Abraham scriptures by an Egyptologist who happens to not be Mormon, right? Yes. And, and he wasn't Mormon. He was, uh, Egyptian. He was a member of the Coptic Church, I believe. But he was the one that became the intermediary between the museum and the church in orchestrating the, uh, acquiring of the papy by the church. Which gets into a real funny story because the church acquires them not by purchase for sale, say, but through a gift. They, the church got a Mormon member to make a donation of a couple of statues to the Metropolitan Museum to make it worth the museum's time to give the papy to the church. Why wouldn't the church just buy them? Because they, the church never buys anything. The church doesn't buy things. They get people to donate them. Oh, it's cheaper. It's cheaper. Oh, okay. Because the church doesn't have enough money. So is Keith Erikson a bad historian or a lying historian? Both. I don't know. On this, I, if he, it means he's a shoddy historian. If he's been honest, he's then shoddy, because anyone that has read very deeply on the Book of Abraham would know this story of how the Metropolitan presented that papy to Dr. Atiya. This, they interviewed, in Dialogue, a Journal of Mormon Thought, has interviews with these men at the museum where where they tell this about how this transaction took place. Sandra, he's not allowed to read Dialogue because it's not an approved source. I, I forgot that. Dialogue is an anti-Mormon source. Don't make up a story then. Yeah, if you.

Okay, so just as a segue, yeah, this is, we're now switching to the Book of Abraham. Yeah, yeah. Which we've covered extensively with M, Dr. Michael Co on Mormon Stories, but let's just, Robert Ritner. What did I say? Michael Cole. Robert Ritner. And LDS Discussions did, uh, some Book of Abraham stuff. All right, so let's go ahead and, and roll that clip.

And so all kinds of things are being taken out. And so some mummies get excavated, and they go to Europe, they go to England, they go to New York City. And in 1835, they end up, uh, in Kirtland. And all of the sources that we have from Kirtland talk about the mummies. That's the buzz. There are mummies from Egypt, and people are looking at them and they're excited. And then people put all their money together and they buy them. It was like an early Restoration Group, uh, GoFundMe or something. They, uh, but people pull their money and they buy them. And then they start look, now they own them, they start looking at them closely, and they realize there are scrolls with the mummies. And, uh, nobody ever tells us how many scrolls. That would have been nice. They count how many mummies there are, but they just say, "Oh yeah, they're a bunch of scrolls." Uh, and then they're looking at the scrolls. And we have one source that says Joseph's looking at them. And among the scrolls are the writings of Abraham and Joseph. Now, we never hear another peep about Joseph. There's nothing, no other evidence that that Joseph Smith started translating something from Joseph of Egypt. But he does work on the Abraham part. I didn't know. We didn't know how many scrolls there were. He's lying. We do know. Oh my gosh, the missing scroll again. I just can't, like, I can't count how many lies there was or inaccuracies. We know there were two scrolls, like for sure. Like, uh, I have all the people right here that mention two scrolls, like W.W. Phelps and, uh, Oliver Cowdery. Everyone said, "We have two scrolls and some other scraps of papy." He's saying that, uh, the mummies was the big thing. No, no, the big buzz was around the papy. He is later, or he's, because he's the way he's going to frame this is to say, "Well, oh, like the, the, the, uh, the Mormons brought this like they collectively decided to buy this because it was interesting." And then Joseph discovered that, uh, there were some ancient writings. Like, that, that's a lie as well. But I mean, the main one is about the scrolls. We know for sure there were two scrolls, and Joseph identified them as one to be the scroll of Abraham, and the other scroll to be the scroll of Joseph. We know that for sure. And we know that there were some other scraps among those other scraps is the hypocephalus that we have in our scriptures today. Uh, but, but yeah, we, we can, which is placed under the head of the mummy, is it not? Right, that's where that goes. Exactly. Uh, yeah. Um, but yeah, so, um, anyway, there are multiple sources indicating that Joseph identified the writings as Abraham in the papy. Uh, and, and then, and then the other one was Joseph again. So what's the second? So we've got two visuals. We just, just to make reference to them. Yeah. Here I have a visual I created this a while ago for an episode with this with the back here professor. But basically, so you can visualize it. So at the top, you would see on, on the left side, I have the two scrolls. So the, so the top one will be, uh, the scroll of Abraham, uh, what he identified as the scroll of Abraham. The bottom would be the scroll of Joseph, and then the other scraps and fragments that that the witnesses that were there, uh, described as well. Here's what's important about these two scrolls. And go, go and show it again in the next slide. The next slide. Yeah. Okay, so we again, at the top is the scroll of, of Abraham. Uh, if you look, because the way Joseph, by this point, he had started learning Hebrew, so he kind of like already put together that Egyptian must be read the same as Hebrew from left to, uh, to, sorry, from from right to left. So when he starts translating the Book of Abraham, he will start with the, um, with the, uh, with the image that we have in our scriptures as, uh, Facsimile Number One. And it's right there on the square in the, in the screen with the red, uh, with the red square. And then if you start reading the Book of Abraham, he even references it. He, the Book of Abraham starts by saying, you know, that the, that the image at, at the commencement of of this, uh, account, or something like that. And Joseph is going to start translating right there from, from the right side. Um, and, and then we know ex, we, we have because we, we're going to talk about how we have these today. But, uh, there's a piece and I have it right there around the, the size of what it's missing from the Book of Abraham. So that's represent, that black section is representative of what has been lost from that scroll. What Egyptologists tell us today, that's the section around that size would be the, the amount of scroll that we are missing today. He's gonna make it sound like we're missing tons of scrolls. Like that, that's that's not true. That's why he's trying to say we don't know how many scrolls there were. But we do know. S. you and Gerald were were instrumental in the groundbreaking of this entire Book of Abraham issue. Do you want to talk about that at all? Well, yes, we had heard rumors of the scrolls being out there. We didn't know what library, but we knew they were somewhere out there, and we were on the track of locating them at the time the church negotiated to get the papy back from the Metropolitan Museum. And so that's how, uh, Gerald got involved in that early article in Dialogue about the papy showing that, uh, Joseph Smith was, uh, filling in parts of the scroll with, uh, texts from other pieces of papyri that didn't make any sense because they didn't fit in the text. It's like adding words in upside down and backwards into a manuscript of something. And, uh, so clear back in the late 60s, we were challenging the church on this, and the Mormon scholars were trying to defend the Book of Abraham as somehow being proven by these papy, that this supported the Book of Abraham. And we're saying, "No, sorry, these don't translate anything you're talking about." Well, it's taken the church all these years to finally get around to admitting, well, yeah, they don't really talk about Abraham. So then they have to go to some sort of, uh, mystical way of, uh, having them inspire the Book of Abraham. But the original thought, I think the church really thought that this was going to prove the Book of Abraham for them. Unfortunately, they don't translate anything about Abraham. And is it true that it really wasn't until the Gospel Topics essay on the Book of Abraham where the church admits that the word Abraham doesn't even appear anywhere on any of the scrolls or fragments? Right. Well, we knew that clear back in 1970, but the church didn't. Church wouldn't admit it. I think as early as 1912, isn't like one Egyptologist, the New York Times published like a front-page article basically saying, "Book of Abraham's a fraud." Yeah, they were making that judgment on the papy illustrations. They didn't have the text to make a definitive statement like we can now, but the illustrations, the facsimiles, the pictures were enough for Egyptologists in 1912 to say, "The Mormons don't have any idea what they're talking about or what they even have. These have nothing to do with their religious, uh, views or scriptures. This is just standard funerary text of the Egyptian religion." And Joseph did translate those, the, the images, yeah, the facsimiles. And they say nothing that he said. Yeah, the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language document proves that he believed it to be a translation, not just some sort of inspired apologist. Want to separate the facsimile from the text today, but you have to remember the Book of Abraham itself references the facsimiles. Like the, the first, uh, one of the first chapters and the first chapter of the Book of Abraham, it says, you know, if you go back and look, "the commencement of of these, uh, of this text for, for, you know, an image of of what I'm talking about." Yeah, Abraham says, "I've given you an illustration of this at the front of the record." Exactly. And so that refers, the text refers you to Facsimile Number One. And Facsimile Number One has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham. It's just a standard burial scene from the Egyptian religion, Osiris and Anubis. Not to mention that the church included the facsimiles, yeah, in the scriptures. Yes, they still do. They still do. They're still there. Yeah. This is what's like, even the craziest thing, Joseph Smith in his personal history in, uh, 1840s, 1840s history, he referred to the two scrolls of papyrus. Like he's saying, "We don't know how many scrolls." Joseph Smith himself said there were two scrolls. And but we only listen to Joseph when it helps with our narrative, right? We can ignore Joseph. Well, ignore Oliver and W.W. Phelps. I don't know. Yeah. And again, if we have to come up with the motive for why Erikson is deceiving people, it's because he, because the translations are so incredibly obviously false and incorrect that he wants to create the perception that possibly there are other scrolls that got lost or destroyed that would have the original text that would correspond with what Joseph produced as the translations. It's an act of deception right there. There is no reason to assume that no matter how many other scrolls you had that they would say anything different from what we have. Yeah. Why would we assume the missing pieces would have some strange religion on it? We're trying to create the possibility of belief when really some say the Book of Abraham is one of the, the biggest smoking guns showing Joseph Smith as a false translator, right? We don't have plates for the Book of Mormon to test on his translation. We do have the papyri to test Joseph Smith's work on the Book of Abraham, and he fails miserably. There is absolutely no connection between the papyri and the text, which the scholars seem to be conceding today when they talk about, "As he looked at the papy, he, the Book of Abraham was revealed to him." They no longer talk about it being a translation. It's a revealed text. A revelation. Yeah.

All right, let's go to the next clip.

1967, there's a researcher from the University of Utah who is not a Latter-day Saint, and, uh, he's studying old papyrus. And so he goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and they have a big collection of just random old papyrus that they don't know where it came from. Remember, everybody was looting everything out of Egypt. So the Met has this big collection. So this guy from the University of Utah, not a church member, is going through, and then he realizes that 10 of the little pieces of papyrus are from the Joseph Smith era. And you know how he did it? Okay, for another reason why I would fire people. Why, why are you laughing? Herard and S. Well, be, this is, this is so false. The Metropolitan Museum knew what they had. They knew they had bought the fragments of the Joseph Smith collection. And when Dr. Atiya comes from the University of Utah out to the Metropolitan Museum, the museum decides to show him part of the Joseph Smith collection. It's not that Atiya stumbles across these. The museum shows him the facsimile number one, and Atiya immediately recognizes and, "Oh my goodness, this is Joseph Smith papy." You know, but the museum knew all along what it was. Was it a discovery made by Atiya? Now, Dr. Atiya was a real nice guy, but the church was using him, ended up using him to try and build this story that, this miraculous finding of the, uh, Book of Abraham scriptures by an Egyptologist who happens to not be Mormon, right? Yes. And, and he wasn't Mormon. He was, uh, Egyptian. He was a member of the Coptic Church, I believe. But he was the one that became the intermediary between the museum and the church in orchestrating the, uh, acquiring of the papy by the church. Which gets into a real funny story because the church acquires them not by purchase for sale, say, but through a gift. They, the church got a Mormon member to make a donation of a couple of statues to the Metropolitan Museum to make it worth the museum's time to give the papy to the church. Why wouldn't the church just buy them? Because they, the church never buys anything. The church doesn't buy things. They get people to donate them. Oh, it's cheaper. It's cheaper. Oh, okay. Because the church doesn't have enough money. So is Keith Erikson a bad historian or a lying historian? Both. I don't know. On this, I, if he, it means he's a shoddy historian. If he's been honest, he's then shoddy, because anyone that has read very deeply on the Book of Abraham would know this story of how the Metropolitan presented that papy to Dr. Atiya. This, they interviewed, in Dialogue, a Journal of Mormon Thought, has interviews with these men at the museum where where they tell this about how this transaction took place. Sandra, he's not allowed to read Dialogue because it's not an approved source. I, I forgot that. Dialogue is an anti-Mormon source. Don't make up a story then. Yeah, if you.

Okay, so just as a segue, yeah, this is, we're now switching to the Book of Abraham. Yeah, yeah. Which we've covered extensively with M, Dr. Michael Co on Mormon Stories, but let's just, Robert Ritner. What did I say? Michael Cole. Robert Ritner. And LDS Discussions did, uh, some Book of Abraham stuff. All right, so let's go ahead and, and roll that clip.

And so all kinds of things are being taken out. And so some mummies get excavated, and they go to Europe, they go to England, they go to New York City. And in 1835, they end up, uh, in Kirtland. And all of the sources that we have from Kirtland talk about the mummies. That's the buzz. There are mummies from Egypt, and people are looking at them and they're excited. And then people put all their money together and they buy them. It was like an early Restoration Group, uh, GoFundMe or something. They, uh, but people pull their money and they buy them. And then they start look, now they own them, they start looking at them closely, and they realize there are scrolls with the mummies. And, uh, nobody ever tells us how many scrolls. That would have been nice. They count how many mummies there are, but they just say, "Oh yeah, they're a bunch of scrolls." Uh, and then they're looking at the scrolls. And we have one source that says Joseph's looking at them. And among the scrolls are the writings of Abraham and Joseph. Now, we never hear another peep about Joseph. There's nothing, no other evidence that that Joseph Smith started translating something from Joseph of Egypt. But he does work on the Abraham part. I didn't know. We didn't know how many scrolls there were. He's lying. We do know. Oh my gosh, the missing scroll again. I just can't, like, I can't count how many lies there was or inaccuracies. We know there were two scrolls, like for sure. Like, uh, I have all the people right here that mention two scrolls, like W.W. Phelps and, uh, Oliver Cowdery. Everyone said, "We have two scrolls and some other scraps of papy." He's saying that, uh, the mummies was the big thing. No, no, the big buzz was around the papy. He is later, or he's, because he's the way he's going to frame this is to say, "Well, oh, like the, the, the, uh, the Mormons brought this like they collectively decided to buy this because it was interesting." And then Joseph discovered that, uh, there were some ancient writings. Like, that, that's a lie as well. But I mean, the main one is about the scrolls. We know for sure there were two scrolls, and Joseph identified them as one to be the scroll of Abraham, and the other scroll to be the scroll of Joseph. We know that for sure. And we know that there were some other scraps among those other scraps is the hypocephalus that we have in our scriptures today. Uh, but, but yeah, we, we can, which is placed under the head of the mummy, is it not? Right, that's where that goes. Exactly. Uh, yeah. Um, but yeah, so, um, anyway, there are multiple sources indicating that Joseph identified the writings as Abraham in the papy. Uh, and, and then, and then the other one was Joseph again. So what's the second? So we've got two visuals. We just, just to make reference to them. Yeah. Here I have a visual I created this a while ago for an episode with this with the back here professor. But basically, so you can visualize it. So at the top, you would see on, on the left side, I have the two scrolls. So the, so the top one will be, uh, the scroll of Abraham, uh, what he identified as the scroll of Abraham. The bottom would be the scroll of Joseph, and then the other scraps and fragments that that the witnesses that were there, uh, described as well. Here's what's important about these two scrolls. And go, go and show it again in the next slide. The next slide. Yeah. Okay, so we again, at the top is the scroll of, of Abraham. Uh, if you look, because the way Joseph, by this point, he had started learning Hebrew, so he kind of like already put together that Egyptian must be read the same as Hebrew from left to, uh, to, sorry, from from right to left. So when he starts translating the Book of Abraham, he will start with the, um, with the, uh, with the image that we have in our scriptures as, uh, Facsimile Number One. And it's right there on the square in the, in the screen with the red, uh, with the red square. And then if you start reading the Book of Abraham, he even references it. He, the Book of Abraham starts by saying, you know, that the, that the image at, at the commencement of of this, uh, account, or something like that. And Joseph is going to start translating right there from, from the right side. Um, and, and then we know ex, we, we have because we, we're going to talk about how we have these today. But, uh, there's a piece and I have it right there around the, the size of what it's missing from the Book of Abraham. So that's represent, that black section is representative of what has been lost from that scroll. What Egyptologists tell us today, that's the section around that size would be the, the amount of scroll that we are missing today. He's gonna make it sound like we're missing tons of scrolls. Like that, that's that's not true. That's why he's trying to say we don't know how many scrolls there were. But we do know. S. you and Gerald were were instrumental in the groundbreaking of this entire Book of Abraham issue. Do you want to talk about that at all? Well, yes, we had heard rumors of the scrolls being out there. We didn't know what library, but we knew they were somewhere out there, and we were on the track of locating them at the time the church negotiated to get the papy back from the Metropolitan Museum. And so that's how, uh, Gerald got involved in that early article in Dialogue about the papy showing that, uh, Joseph Smith was, uh, filling in parts of the scroll with, uh, texts from other pieces of papyri that didn't make any sense because they didn't fit in the text. It's like adding words in upside down and backwards into a manuscript of something. And, uh, so clear back in the late 60s, we were challenging the church on this, and the Mormon scholars were trying to defend the Book of Abraham as somehow being proven by these papy, that this supported the Book of Abraham. And we're saying, "No, sorry, these don't translate anything you're talking about." Well, it's taken the church all these years to finally get around to admitting, well, yeah, they don't really talk about Abraham. So then they have to go to some sort of, uh, mystical way of, uh, having them inspire the Book of Abraham. But the original thought, I think the church really thought that this was going to prove the Book of Abraham for them. Unfortunately, they don't translate anything about Abraham. And is it true that it really wasn't until the Gospel Topics essay on the Book of Abraham where the church admits that the word Abraham doesn't even appear anywhere on any of the scrolls or fragments? Right. Well, we knew that clear back in 1970, but the church didn't. Church wouldn't admit it. I think as early as 1912, isn't like one Egyptologist, the New York Times published like a front-page article basically saying, "Book of Abraham's a fraud." Yeah, they were making that judgment on the papy illustrations. They didn't have the text to make a definitive statement like we can now, but the illustrations, the facsimiles, the pictures were enough for Egyptologists in 1912 to say, "The Mormons don't have any idea what they're talking about or what they even have. These have nothing to do with their religious, uh, views or scriptures. This is just standard funerary text of the Egyptian religion." And Joseph did translate those, the, the images, yeah, the facsimiles. And they say nothing that he said. Yeah, the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language document proves that he believed it to be a translation, not just some sort of inspired apologist. Want to separate the facsimile from the text today, but you have to remember the Book of Abraham itself references the facsimiles. Like the, the first, uh, one of the first chapters and the first chapter of the Book of Abraham, it says, you know, if you go back and look, "the commencement of of these, uh, of this text for, for, you know, an image of of what I'm talking about." Yeah, Abraham says, "I've given you an illustration of this at the front of the record." Exactly. And so that refers, the text refers you to Facsimile Number One. And Facsimile Number One has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham. It's just a standard burial scene from the Egyptian religion, Osiris and Anubis. Not to mention that the church included the facsimiles, yeah, in the scriptures. Yes, they still do. They still do. They're still there. Yeah. This is what's like, even the craziest thing, Joseph Smith in his personal history in, uh, 1840s, 1840s history, he referred to the two scrolls of papyrus. Like he's saying, "We don't know how many scrolls." Joseph Smith himself said there were two scrolls. And but we only listen to Joseph when it helps with our narrative, right? We can ignore Joseph. Well, ignore Oliver and W.W. Phelps. I don't know. Yeah. And again, if we have to come up with the motive for why Erikson is deceiving people, it's because he, because the translations are so incredibly obviously false and incorrect that he wants to create the perception that possibly there are other scrolls that got lost or destroyed that would have the original text that would correspond with what Joseph produced as the translations. It's an act of deception right there. There is no reason to assume that no matter how many other scrolls you had that they would say anything different from what we have. Yeah. Why would we assume the missing pieces would have some strange religion on it? We're trying to create the possibility of belief when really some say the Book of Abraham is one of the, the biggest smoking guns showing Joseph Smith as a false translator, right? We don't have plates for the Book of Mormon to test on his translation. We do have the papyri to test Joseph Smith's work on the Book of Abraham, and he fails miserably. There is absolutely no connection between the papyri and the text, which the scholars seem to be conceding today when they talk about, "As he looked at the papy, he, the Book of Abraham was revealed to him." They no longer talk about it being a translation. It's a revealed text. A revelation. Yeah.

All right, let's go to the next clip.

1967, there's a researcher from the University of Utah who is not a Latter-day Saint, and, uh, he's studying old papyrus. And so he goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and they have a big collection of just random old papyrus that they don't know where it came from. Remember, everybody was looting everything out of Egypt. So the Met has this big collection. So this guy from the University of Utah, not a church member, is going through, and then he realizes that 10 of the little pieces of papyrus are from the Joseph Smith era. And you know how he did it? Okay, for another reason why I would fire people. Why, why are you laughing? Herard and S. Well, be, this is, this is so false. The Metropolitan Museum knew what they had. They knew they had bought the fragments of the Joseph Smith collection. And when Dr. Atiya comes from the University of Utah out to the Metropolitan Museum, the museum decides to show him part of the Joseph Smith collection. It's not that Atiya stumbles across these. The museum shows him the facsimile number one, and Atiya immediately recognizes and, "Oh my goodness, this is Joseph Smith papy." You know, but the museum knew all along what it was. Was it a discovery made by Atiya? Now, Dr. Atiya was a real nice guy, but the church was using him, ended up using him to try and build this story that, this miraculous finding of the, uh, Book of Abraham scriptures by an Egyptologist who happens to not be Mormon, right? Yes. And, and he wasn't Mormon. He was, uh, Egyptian. He was a member of the Coptic Church, I believe. But he was the one that became the intermediary between the museum and the church in orchestrating the, uh, acquiring of the papy by the church. Which gets into a real funny story because the church acquires them not by purchase for sale, say, but through a gift. They, the church got a Mormon member to make a donation of a couple of statues to the Metropolitan Museum to make it worth the museum's time to give the papy to the church. Why wouldn't the church just buy them? Because they, the church never buys anything. The church doesn't buy things. They get people to donate them. Oh, it's cheaper. It's cheaper. Oh, okay. Because the church doesn't have enough money. So is Keith Erikson a bad historian or a lying historian? Both. I don't know. On this, I, if he, it means he's a shoddy historian. If he's been honest, he's then shoddy, because anyone that has read very deeply on the Book of Abraham would know this story of how the Metropolitan presented that papy to Dr. Atiya. This, they interviewed, in Dialogue, a Journal of Mormon Thought, has interviews with these men at the museum where where they tell this about how this transaction took place. Sandra, he's not allowed to read Dialogue because it's not an approved source. I, I forgot that. Dialogue is an anti-Mormon source. Don't make up a story then. Yeah, if you.

Okay, so just as a segue, yeah, this is, we're now switching to the Book of Abraham. Yeah, yeah. Which we've covered extensively with M, Dr. Michael Co on Mormon Stories, but let's just, Robert Ritner. What did I say? Michael Cole. Robert Ritner. And LDS Discussions did, uh, some Book of Abraham stuff. All right, so let's go ahead and, and roll that clip.

And so all kinds of things are being taken out. And so some mummies get excavated, and they go to Europe, they go to England, they go to New York City. And in 1835, they end up, uh, in Kirtland. And all of the sources that we have from Kirtland talk about the mummies. That's the buzz. There are mummies from Egypt, and people are looking at them and they're excited. And then people put all their money together and they buy them. It was like an early Restoration Group, uh, GoFundMe or something. They, uh, but people pull their money and they buy them. And then they start look, now they own them, they start looking at them closely, and they realize there are scrolls with the mummies. And, uh, nobody ever tells us how many scrolls. That would have been nice. They count how many mummies there are, but they just say, "Oh yeah, they're a bunch of scrolls." Uh, and then they're looking at the scrolls. And we have one source that says Joseph's looking at them. And among the scrolls are the writings of Abraham and Joseph. Now, we never hear another peep about Joseph. There's nothing, no other evidence that that Joseph Smith started translating something from Joseph of Egypt. But he does work on the Abraham part. I didn't know. We didn't know how many scrolls there were. He's lying. We do know. Oh my gosh, the missing scroll again. I just can't, like, I can't count how many lies there was or inaccuracies. We know there were two scrolls, like for sure. Like, uh, I have all the people right here that mention two scrolls, like W.W. Phelps and, uh, Oliver Cowdery. Everyone said, "We have two scrolls and some other scraps of papy." He's saying that, uh, the mummies was the big thing. No, no, the big buzz was around the papy. He is later, or he's, because he's the way he's going to frame this is to say, "Well, oh, like the, the, the, uh, the Mormons brought this like they collectively decided to buy this because it was interesting." And then Joseph discovered that, uh, there were some ancient writings. Like, that, that's a lie as well. But I mean, the main one is about the scrolls. We know for sure there were two scrolls, and Joseph identified them as one to be the scroll of Abraham, and the other scroll to be the scroll of Joseph. We know that for sure. And we know that there were some other scraps among those other scraps is the hypocephalus that we have in our scriptures today. Uh, but, but yeah, we, we can, which is placed under the head of the mummy, is it not? Right, that's where that goes. Exactly. Uh, yeah. Um, but yeah, so, um, anyway, there are multiple sources indicating that Joseph identified the writings as Abraham in the papy. Uh, and, and then, and then the other one was Joseph again. So what's the second? So we've got two visuals. We just, just to make reference to them. Yeah. Here I have a visual I created this a while ago for an episode with this with the back here professor. But basically, so you can visualize it. So at the top, you would see on, on the left side, I have the two scrolls. So the, so the top one will be, uh, the scroll of Abraham, uh, what he identified as the scroll of Abraham. The bottom would be the scroll of Joseph, and then the other scraps and fragments that that the witnesses that were there, uh, described as well. Here's what's important about these two scrolls. And go, go and show it again in the next slide. The next slide. Yeah. Okay, so we again, at the top is the scroll of, of Abraham. Uh, if you look, because the way Joseph, by this point, he had started learning Hebrew, so he kind of like already put together that Egyptian must be read the same as Hebrew from left to, uh, to, sorry, from from right to left. So when he starts translating the Book of Abraham, he will start with the, um, with the, uh, with the image that we have in our scriptures as, uh, Facsimile Number One. And it's right there on the square in the, in the screen with the red, uh, with the red square. And then if you start reading the Book of Abraham, he even references it. He, the Book of Abraham starts by saying, you know, that the, that the image at, at the commencement of of this, uh, account, or something like that. And Joseph is going to start translating right there from, from the right side. Um, and, and then we know ex, we, we have because we, we're going to talk about how we have these today. But, uh, there's a piece and I have it right there around the, the size of what it's missing from the Book of Abraham. So that's represent, that black section is representative of what has been lost from that scroll. What Egyptologists tell us today, that's the section around that size would be the, the amount of scroll that we are missing today. He's gonna make it sound like we're missing tons of scrolls. Like that, that's that's not true. That's why he's trying to say we don't know how many scrolls there were. But we do know. S. you and Gerald were were instrumental in the groundbreaking of this entire Book of Abraham issue. Do you want to talk about that at all? Well, yes, we had heard rumors of the scrolls being out there. We didn't know what library, but we knew they were somewhere out there, and we were on the track of locating them at the time the church negotiated to get the papy back from the Metropolitan Museum. And so that's how, uh, Gerald got involved in that early article in Dialogue about the papy showing that, uh, Joseph Smith was, uh, filling in parts of the scroll with, uh, texts from other pieces of papyri that didn't make any sense because they didn't fit in the text. It's like adding words in upside down and backwards into a manuscript of something. And, uh, so clear back in the late 60s, we were challenging the church on this, and the Mormon scholars were trying to defend the Book of Abraham as somehow being proven by these papy, that this supported the Book of Abraham. And we're saying, "No, sorry, these don't translate anything you're talking about." Well, it's taken the church all these years to finally get around to admitting, well, yeah, they don't really talk about Abraham. So then they have to go to some sort of, uh, mystical way of, uh, having them inspire the Book of Abraham. But the original thought, I think the church really thought that this was going to prove the Book of Abraham for them. Unfortunately, they don't translate anything about Abraham. And is it true that it really wasn't until the Gospel Topics essay on the Book of Abraham where the church admits that the word Abraham doesn't even appear anywhere on any of the scrolls or fragments? Right. Well, we knew that clear back in 1970, but the church didn't. Church wouldn't admit it. I think as early as 1912, isn't like one Egyptologist, the New York Times published like a front-page article basically saying, "Book of Abraham's a fraud." Yeah, they were making that judgment on the papy illustrations. They didn't have the text to make a definitive statement like we can now, but the illustrations, the facsimiles, the pictures were enough for Egyptologists in 1912 to say, "The Mormons don't have any idea what they're talking about or what they even have. These have nothing to do with their religious, uh, views or scriptures. This is just standard funerary text of the Egyptian religion." And Joseph did translate those, the, the images, yeah, the facsimiles. And they say nothing that he said. Yeah, the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language document proves that he believed it to be a translation, not just some sort of inspired apologist. Want to separate the facsimile from the text today, but you have to remember the Book of Abraham itself references the facsimiles. Like the, the first, uh, one of the first chapters and the first chapter of the Book of Abraham, it says, you know, if you go back and look, "the commencement of of these, uh, of this text for, for, you know, an image of of what I'm talking about." Yeah, Abraham says, "I've given you an illustration of this at the front of the record." Exactly. And so that refers, the text refers you to Facsimile Number One. And Facsimile Number One has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham. It's just a standard burial scene from the Egyptian religion, Osiris and Anubis. Not to mention that the church included the facsimiles, yeah, in the scriptures. Yes, they still do. They still do. They're still there. Yeah. This is what's like, even the craziest thing, Joseph Smith in his personal history in, uh, 1840s, 1840s history, he referred to the two scrolls of papyrus. Like he's saying, "We don't know how many scrolls." Joseph Smith himself said there were two scrolls. And but we only listen to Joseph when it helps with our narrative, right? We can ignore Joseph. Well, ignore Oliver and W.W. Phelps. I don't know. Yeah. And again, if we have to come up with the motive for why Erikson is deceiving people, it's because he, because the translations are so incredibly obviously false and incorrect that he wants to create the perception that possibly there are other scrolls that got lost or destroyed that would have the original text that would correspond with what Joseph produced as the translations. It's an act of deception right there. There is no reason to assume that no matter how many other scrolls you had that they would say anything different from what we have. Yeah. Why would we assume the missing pieces would have some strange religion on it? We're trying to create the possibility of belief when really some say the Book of Abraham is one of the, the biggest smoking guns showing Joseph Smith as a false translator, right? We don't have plates for the Book of Mormon to test on his translation. We do have the papyri to test Joseph Smith's work on the Book of Abraham, and he fails miserably. There is absolutely no connection between the papyri and the text, which the scholars seem to be conceding today when they talk about, "As he looked at the papy, he, the Book of Abraham was revealed to him." They no longer talk about it being a translation. It's a revealed text. A revelation. Yeah.

All right, let's go to the next clip.

1967, there's a researcher from the University of Utah who is not a Latter-day Saint, and, uh, he's studying old papyrus. And so he goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and they have a big collection of just random old papyrus that they don't know where it came from. Remember, everybody was looting everything out of Egypt. So the Met has this big collection. So this guy from the University of Utah, not a church member, is going through, and then he realizes that 10 of the little pieces of papyrus are from the Joseph Smith era. And you know how he did it? Okay, for another reason why I would fire people. Why, why are you laughing? Herard and S. Well, be, this is, this is so false. The Metropolitan Museum knew what they had. They knew they had bought the fragments of the Joseph Smith collection. And when Dr. Atiya comes from the University of Utah out to the Metropolitan Museum, the museum decides to show him part of the Joseph Smith collection. It's not that Atiya stumbles across these. The museum shows him the facsimile number one, and Atiya immediately recognizes and, "Oh my goodness, this is Joseph Smith papy." You know, but the museum knew all along what it was. Was it a discovery made by Atiya? Now, Dr. Atiya was a real nice guy, but the church was using him, ended up using him to try and build this story that, this miraculous finding of the, uh, Book of Abraham scriptures by an Egyptologist who happens to not be Mormon, right? Yes. And, and he wasn't Mormon. He was, uh, Egyptian. He was a member of the Coptic Church, I believe. But he was the one that became the intermediary between the museum and the church in orchestrating the, uh, acquiring of the papy by the church. Which gets into a real funny story because the church acquires them not by purchase for sale, say, but through a gift. They, the church got a Mormon member to make a donation of a couple of statues to the Metropolitan Museum to make it worth the museum's time to give the papy to the church. Why wouldn't the church just buy them? Because they, the church never buys anything. The church doesn't buy things. They get people to donate them. Oh, it's cheaper. It's cheaper. Oh, okay. Because the church doesn't have enough money. So is Keith Erikson a bad historian or a lying historian? Both. I don't know. On this, I, if he, it means he's a shoddy historian. If he's been honest, he's then shoddy, because anyone that has read very deeply on the Book of Abraham would know this story of how the Metropolitan presented that papy to Dr. Atiya. This, they interviewed, in Dialogue, a Journal of Mormon Thought, has interviews with these men at the museum where where they tell this about how this transaction took place. Sandra, he's not allowed to read Dialogue because it's not an approved source. I, I forgot that. Dialogue is an anti-Mormon source. Don't make up a story then. Yeah, if you.

Okay, so just as a segue, yeah, this is, we're now switching to the Book of Abraham. Yeah, yeah. Which we've covered extensively with M, Dr. Michael Co on Mormon Stories, but let's just, Robert Ritner. What did I say? Michael Cole. Robert Ritner. And LDS Discussions did, uh, some Book of Abraham stuff. All right, so let's go ahead and, and roll that clip.

And so all kinds of things are being taken out. And so some mummies get excavated, and they go to Europe, they go to England, they go to New York City. And in 1835, they end up, uh, in Kirtland. And all of the sources that we have from Kirtland talk about the mummies. That's the buzz. There are mummies from Egypt, and people are looking at them and they're excited. And then people put all their money together and they buy them. It was like an early Restoration Group, uh, GoFundMe or something. They, uh, but people pull their money and they buy them. And then they start look, now they own them, they start looking at them closely, and they realize there are scrolls with the mummies. And, uh, nobody ever tells us how many scrolls. That would have been nice. They count how many mummies there are, but they just say, "Oh yeah, they're a bunch of scrolls." Uh, and then they're looking at the scrolls. And we have one source that says Joseph's looking at them. And among the scrolls are the writings of Abraham and Joseph. Now, we never hear another peep about Joseph. There's nothing, no other evidence that that Joseph Smith started translating something from Joseph of Egypt. But he does work on the Abraham part. I didn't know. We didn't know how many scrolls there were. He's lying. We do know. Oh my gosh, the missing scroll again. I just can't, like, I can't count how many lies there was or inaccuracies. We know there were two scrolls, like for sure. Like, uh, I have all the people right here that mention two scrolls, like W.W. Phelps and, uh, Oliver Cowdery. Everyone said, "We have two scrolls and some other scraps of papy." He's saying that, uh, the mummies was the big thing. No, no, the big buzz was around the papy. He is later, or he's, because he's the way he's going to frame this is to say, "Well, oh, like the, the, the, uh, the Mormons brought this like they collectively decided to buy this because it was interesting." And then Joseph discovered that, uh, there were some ancient writings. Like, that, that's a lie as well. But I mean, the main one is about the scrolls. We know for sure there were two scrolls, and Joseph identified them as one to be the scroll of Abraham, and the other scroll to be the scroll of Joseph. We know that for sure. And we know that there were some other scraps among those other scraps is the hypocephalus that we have in our scriptures today. Uh, but, but yeah, we, we can, which is placed under the head of the mummy, is it not? Right, that's where that goes. Exactly. Uh, yeah. Um, but yeah, so, um, anyway, there are multiple sources indicating that Joseph identified the writings as Abraham in the papy. Uh, and, and then, and then the other one was Joseph again. So what's the second? So we've got two visuals. We just, just to make reference to them. Yeah. Here I have a visual I created this a while ago for an episode with this with the back here professor. But basically, so you can visualize it. So at the top, you would see on, on the left side, I have the two scrolls. So the, so the top one will be, uh, the scroll of Abraham, uh, what he identified as the scroll of Abraham. The bottom would be the scroll of Joseph, and then the other scraps and fragments that that the witnesses that were there, uh, described as well. Here's what's important about these two scrolls. And go, go and show it again in the next slide. The next slide. Yeah. Okay, so we again, at the top is the scroll of, of Abraham. Uh, if you look, because the way Joseph, by this point, he had started learning Hebrew, so he kind of like already put together that Egyptian must be read the same as Hebrew from left to, uh, to, sorry, from from right to left. So when he starts translating the Book of Abraham, he will start with the, um, with the, uh, with the image that we have in our scriptures as, uh, Facsimile Number One. And it's right there on the square in the, in the screen with the red, uh, with the red square. And then if you start reading the Book of Abraham, he even references it. He, the Book of Abraham starts by saying, you know, that the, that the image at, at the commencement of of this, uh, account, or something like that. And Joseph is going to start translating right there from, from the right side. Um, and, and then we know ex, we, we have because we, we're going to talk about how we have these today. But, uh, there's a piece and I have it right there around the, the size of what it's missing from the Book of Abraham. So that's represent, that black section is representative of what has been lost from that scroll. What Egyptologists tell us today, that's the section around that size would be the, the amount of scroll that we are missing today. He's gonna make it sound like we're missing tons of scrolls. Like that, that's that's not true. That's why he's trying to say we don't know how many scrolls there were. But we do know. S. you and Gerald were were instrumental in the groundbreaking of this entire Book of Abraham issue. Do you want to talk about that at all? Well, yes, we had heard rumors of the scrolls being out there. We didn't know what library, but we knew they were somewhere out there, and we were on the track of locating them at the time the church negotiated to get the papy back from the Metropolitan Museum. And so that's how, uh, Gerald got involved in that early article in Dialogue about the papy showing that, uh, Joseph Smith was, uh, filling in parts of the scroll with, uh, texts from other pieces of papyri that didn't make any sense because they didn't fit in the text. It's like adding words in upside down and backwards into a manuscript of something. And, uh, so clear back in the late 60s, we were challenging the church on this, and the Mormon scholars were trying to defend the Book of Abraham as somehow being proven by these papy, that this supported the Book of Abraham. And we're saying, "No, sorry, these don't translate anything you're talking about." Well, it's taken the church all these years to finally get around to admitting, well, yeah, they don't really talk about Abraham. So then they have to go to some sort of, uh, mystical way of, uh, having them inspire the Book of Abraham. But the original thought, I think the church really thought that this was going to prove the Book of Abraham for them. Unfortunately, they don't translate anything about Abraham. And is it true that it really wasn't until the Gospel Topics essay on the Book of Abraham where the church admits that the word Abraham doesn't even appear anywhere on any of the scrolls or fragments? Right. Well, we knew that clear back in 1970, but the church didn't. Church wouldn't admit it. I think as early as 1912, isn't like one Egyptologist, the New York Times published like a front-page article basically saying, "Book of Abraham's a fraud." Yeah, they were making that judgment on the papy illustrations. They didn't have the text to make a definitive statement like we can now, but the illustrations, the facsimiles, the pictures were enough for Egyptologists in 1912 to say, "The Mormons don't have any idea what they're talking about or what they even have. These have nothing to do with their religious, uh, views or scriptures. This is just standard funerary text of the Egyptian religion." And Joseph did translate those, the, the images, yeah, the facsimiles. And they say nothing that he said. Yeah, the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language document proves that he believed it to be a translation, not just some sort of inspired apologist. Want to separate the facsimile from the text today, but you have to remember the Book of Abraham itself references the facsimiles. Like the, the first, uh, one of the first chapters and the first chapter of the Book of Abraham, it says, you know, if you go back and look, "the commencement of of these, uh, of this text for, for, you know, an image of of what I'm talking about." Yeah, Abraham says, "I've given you an illustration of this at the front of the record." Exactly. And so that refers, the text refers you to Facsimile Number One. And Facsimile Number One has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham. It's just a standard burial scene from the Egyptian religion, Osiris and Anubis. Not to mention that the church included the facsimiles, yeah, in the scriptures. Yes, they still do. They still do. They're still there. Yeah. This is what's like, even the craziest thing, Joseph Smith in his personal history in, uh, 1840s, 1840s history, he referred to the two scrolls of papyrus. Like he's saying, "We don't know how many scrolls." Joseph Smith himself said there were two scrolls. And but we only listen to Joseph when it helps with our narrative, right? We can ignore Joseph. Well, ignore Oliver and W.W. Phelps. I don't know. Yeah. And again, if we have to come up with the motive for why Erikson is deceiving people, it's because he, because the translations are so incredibly obviously false and incorrect that he wants to create the perception that possibly there are other scrolls that got lost or destroyed that would have the original text that would correspond with what Joseph produced as the translations. It's an act of deception right there. There is no reason to assume that no matter how many other scrolls you had that they would say anything different from what we have. Yeah. Why would we assume the missing pieces would have some strange religion on it? We're trying to create the possibility of belief when really some say the Book of Abraham is one of the, the biggest smoking guns showing Joseph Smith as a false translator, right? We don't have plates for the Book of Mormon to test on his translation. We do have the papyri to test Joseph Smith's work on the Book of Abraham, and he fails miserably. There is absolutely no connection between the papyri and the text, which the scholars seem to be conceding today when they talk about, "As he looked at the papy, he, the Book of Abraham was revealed to him." They no longer talk about it being a translation. It's a revealed text. A revelation. Yeah.

All right, let's go to the next clip.

1967, there's a researcher from the University of Utah who is not a Latter-day Saint, and, uh, he's studying old papyrus. And so he goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and they have a big collection of just random old papyrus that they don't know where it came from. Remember, everybody was looting everything out of Egypt. So the Met has this big collection. So this guy from the University of Utah, not a church member, is going through, and then he realizes that 10 of the little pieces of papyrus are from the Joseph Smith era. And you know how he did it? Okay, for another reason why I would fire people. Why, why are you laughing? Herard and S. Well, be, this is, this is so false. The Metropolitan Museum knew what they had. They knew they had bought the fragments of the Joseph Smith collection. And when Dr. Atiya comes from the University of Utah out to the Metropolitan Museum, the museum decides to show him part of the Joseph Smith collection. It's not that Atiya stumbles across these. The museum shows him the facsimile number one, and Atiya immediately recognizes and, "Oh my goodness, this is Joseph Smith papy." You know, but the museum knew all along what it was. Was it a discovery made by Atiya? Now, Dr. Atiya was a real nice guy, but the church was using him, ended up using him to try and build this story that, this miraculous finding of the, uh, Book of Abraham scriptures by an Egyptologist who happens to not be Mormon, right? Yes. And, and he wasn't Mormon. He was, uh, Egyptian. He was a member of the Coptic Church, I believe. But he was the one that became the intermediary between the museum and the church in orchestrating the, uh, acquiring of the papy by the church. Which gets into a real funny story because the church acquires them not by purchase for sale, say, but through a gift. They, the church got a Mormon member to make a donation of a couple of statues to the Metropolitan Museum to make it worth the museum's time to give the papy to the church. Why wouldn't the church just buy them? Because they, the church never buys anything. The church doesn't buy things. They get people to donate them. Oh, it's cheaper. It's cheaper. Oh, okay. Because the church doesn't have enough money. So is Keith Erikson a bad historian or a lying historian? Both. I don't know. On this, I, if he, it means he's a shoddy historian. If he's been honest, he's then shoddy, because anyone that has read very deeply on the Book of Abraham would know this story of how the Metropolitan presented that papy to Dr. Atiya. This, they interviewed, in Dialogue, a Journal of Mormon Thought, has interviews with these men at the museum where where they tell this about how this transaction took place. Sandra, he's not allowed to read Dialogue because it's not an approved source. I, I forgot that. Dialogue is an anti-Mormon source. Don't make up a story then. Yeah, if you.

Okay, so just as a segue, yeah, this is, we're now switching to the Book of Abraham. Yeah, yeah. Which we've covered extensively with M, Dr. Michael Co on Mormon Stories, but let's just, Robert Ritner. What did I say? Michael Cole. Robert Ritner. And LDS Discussions did, uh, some Book of Abraham stuff. All right, so let's go ahead and, and roll that clip.

And so all kinds of things are being taken out. And so some mummies get excavated, and they go to Europe, they go to England, they go to New York City. And in 1835, they end up, uh, in Kirtland. And all of the sources that we have from Kirtland talk about the mummies. That's the buzz. There are mummies from Egypt, and people are looking at them and they're excited. And then people put all their money together and they buy them. It was like an early Restoration Group, uh, GoFundMe or something. They, uh, but people pull their money and they buy them. And then they start look, now they own them, they start looking at them closely, and they realize there are scrolls with the mummies. And, uh, nobody ever tells us how many scrolls. That would have been nice. They count how many mummies there are, but they just say, "Oh yeah, they're a bunch of scrolls." Uh, and then they're looking at the scrolls. And we have one source that says Joseph's looking at them. And among the scrolls are the writings of Abraham and Joseph. Now, we never hear another peep about Joseph. There's nothing, no other evidence that that Joseph Smith started translating something from Joseph of Egypt. But he does work on the Abraham part. I didn't know. We didn't know how many scrolls there were. He's lying. We do know. Oh my gosh, the missing scroll again. I just can't, like, I can't count how many lies there was or inaccuracies. We know there were two scrolls, like for sure. Like, uh, I have all the people right here that mention two scrolls, like W.W. Phelps and, uh, Oliver Cowdery. Everyone said, "We have two scrolls and some other scraps of papy." He's saying that, uh, the mummies was the big thing. No, no, the big buzz was around the papy. He is later, or he's, because he's the way he's going to frame this is to say, "Well, oh, like the, the, the, uh, the Mormons brought this like they collectively decided to buy this because it was interesting." And then Joseph discovered that, uh, there were some ancient writings. Like, that, that's a lie as well. But I mean, the main one is about the scrolls. We know for sure there were two scrolls, and Joseph identified them as one to be the scroll of Abraham, and the other scroll to be the scroll of Joseph. We know that for sure. And we know that there were some other scraps among those other scraps is the hypocephalus that we have in our scriptures today. Uh, but, but yeah, we, we can, which is placed under the head of the mummy, is it not? Right, that's where that goes. Exactly. Uh, yeah. Um, but yeah, so, um, anyway, there are multiple sources indicating that Joseph identified the writings as Abraham in the papy. Uh, and, and then, and then the other one was Joseph again. So what's the second? So we've got two visuals. We just, just to make reference to them. Yeah. Here I have a visual I created this a while ago for an episode with this with the back here professor. But basically, so you can visualize it. So at the top, you would see on, on the left side, I have the two scrolls. So the, so the top one will be, uh, the scroll of Abraham, uh, what he identified as the scroll of Abraham. The bottom would be the scroll of Joseph, and then the other scraps and fragments that that the witnesses that were there, uh, described as well. Here's what's important about these two scrolls. And go, go and show it again in the next slide. The next slide. Yeah. Okay, so we again, at the top is the scroll of, of Abraham. Uh, if you look, because the way Joseph, by this point, he had started learning Hebrew, so he kind of like already put together that Egyptian must be read the same as Hebrew from left to, uh, to, sorry, from from right to left. So when he starts translating the Book of Abraham, he will start with the, um, with the, uh, with the image that we have in our scriptures as, uh, Facsimile Number One. And it's right there on the square in the, in the screen with the red, uh, with the red square. And then if you start reading the Book of Abraham, he even references it. He, the Book of Abraham starts by saying, you know, that the, that the image at, at the commencement of of this, uh, account, or something like that. And Joseph is going to start translating right there from, from the right side. Um, and, and then we know ex, we, we have because we, we're going to talk about how we have these today. But, uh, there's a piece and I have it right there around the, the size of what it's missing from the Book of Abraham. So that's represent, that black section is representative of what has been lost from that scroll. What Egyptologists tell us today, that's the section around that size would be the, the amount of scroll that we are missing today. He's gonna make it sound like we're missing tons of scrolls. Like that, that's that's not true. That's why he's trying to say we don't know how many scrolls there were. But we do know. S. you and Gerald were were instrumental in the groundbreaking of this entire Book of Abraham issue. Do you want to talk about that at all? Well, yes, we had heard rumors of the scrolls being out there. We didn't know what library, but we knew they were somewhere out there, and we were on the track of locating them at the time the church negotiated to get the papy back from the Metropolitan Museum. And so that's how, uh, Gerald got involved in that early article in Dialogue about the papy showing that, uh, Joseph Smith was, uh, filling in parts of the scroll with, uh, texts from other pieces of papyri that didn't make any sense because they didn't fit in the text. It's like adding words in upside down and backwards into a manuscript of something. And, uh, so clear back in the late 60s, we were challenging the church on this, and the Mormon scholars were trying to defend the Book of Abraham as somehow being proven by these papy, that this supported the Book of Abraham. And we're saying, "No, sorry, these don't translate anything you're talking about." Well, it's taken the church all these years to finally get around to admitting, well, yeah, they don't really talk about Abraham. So then they have to go to some sort of, uh, mystical way of, uh, having them inspire the Book of Abraham. But the original thought, I think the church really thought that this was going to prove the Book of Abraham for them. Unfortunately, they don't translate anything about Abraham. And is it true that it really wasn't until the Gospel Topics essay on the Book of Abraham where the church admits that the word Abraham doesn't even appear anywhere on any of the scrolls or fragments? Right. Well, we knew that clear back in 1970, but the church didn't. Church wouldn't admit it. I think as early as 1912, isn't like one Egyptologist, the New York Times published like a front-page article basically saying, "Book of Abraham's a fraud." Yeah, they were making that judgment on the papy illustrations. They didn't have the text to make a definitive statement like we can now, but the illustrations, the facsimiles, the pictures were enough for Egyptologists in 1912 to say, "The Mormons don't have any idea what they're talking about or what they even have. These have nothing to do with their religious, uh, views or scriptures. This is just standard funerary text of the Egyptian religion." And Joseph did translate those, the, the images, yeah, the facsimiles. And they say nothing that he said. Yeah, the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language document proves that he believed it to be a translation, not just some sort of inspired apologist. Want to separate the facsimile from the text today, but you have to remember the Book of Abraham itself references the facsimiles. Like the, the first, uh, one of the first chapters and the first chapter of the Book of Abraham, it says, you know, if you go back and look, "the commencement of of these, uh, of this text for, for, you know, an image of of what I'm talking about." Yeah, Abraham says, "I've given you an illustration of this at the front of the record." Exactly. And so that refers, the text refers you to Facsimile Number One. And Facsimile Number One has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham. It's just a standard burial scene from the Egyptian religion, Osiris and Anubis. Not to mention that the church included the facsimiles, yeah, in the scriptures. Yes, they still do. They still do. They're still there. Yeah. This is what's like, even the craziest thing, Joseph Smith in his personal history in, uh, 1840s, 1840s history, he referred to the two scrolls of papyrus. Like he's saying, "We don't know how many scrolls." Joseph Smith himself said there were two scrolls. And but we only listen to Joseph when it helps with our narrative, right? We can ignore Joseph. Well, ignore Oliver and W.W. Phelps. I don't know. Yeah. And again, if we have to come up with the motive for why Erikson is deceiving people, it's because he, because the translations are so incredibly obviously false and incorrect that he wants to create the perception that possibly there are other scrolls that got lost or destroyed that would have the original text that would correspond with what Joseph produced as the translations. It's an act of deception right there. There is no reason to assume that no matter how many other scrolls you had that they would say anything different from what we have. Yeah. Why would we assume the missing pieces would have some strange religion on it? We're trying to create the possibility of belief when really some say the Book of Abraham is one of the, the biggest smoking guns showing Joseph Smith as a false translator, right? We don't have plates for the Book of Mormon to test on his translation. We do have the papyri to test Joseph Smith's work on the Book of Abraham, and he fails miserably. There is absolutely no connection between the papyri and the text, which the scholars seem to be conceding today when they talk about, "As he looked at the papy, he, the Book of Abraham was revealed to him." They no longer talk about it being a translation. It's a revealed text. A revelation. Yeah.

All right, let's go to the next clip.

1967, there's a researcher from the University of Utah who is not a Latter-day Saint, and, uh, he's studying old papyrus. And so he goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and they have a big collection of just random old papyrus that they don't know where it came from. Remember, everybody was looting everything out of Egypt. So the Met has this big collection. So this guy from the University of Utah, not a church member, is going through, and then he realizes that 10 of the little pieces of papyrus are from the Joseph Smith era. And you know how he did it? Okay, for another reason why I would fire people. Why, why are you laughing? Herard and S. Well, be, this is, this is so false. The Metropolitan Museum knew what they had. They knew they had bought the fragments of the Joseph Smith collection. And when Dr. Atiya comes from the University of Utah out to the Metropolitan Museum, the museum decides to show him part of the Joseph Smith collection. It's not that Atiya stumbles across these. The museum shows him the facsimile number one, and Atiya immediately recognizes and, "Oh my goodness, this is Joseph Smith papy." You know, but the museum knew all along what it was. Was it a discovery made by Atiya? Now, Dr. Atiya was a real nice guy, but the church was using him, ended up using him to try and build this story that, this miraculous finding of the, uh, Book of Abraham scriptures by an Egyptologist who happens to not be Mormon, right? Yes. And, and he wasn't Mormon. He was, uh, Egyptian. He was a member of the Coptic Church, I believe. But he was the one that became the intermediary between the museum and the church in orchestrating the, uh, acquiring of the papy by the church. Which gets into a real funny story because the church acquires them not by purchase for sale, say, but through a gift. They, the church got a Mormon member to make a donation of a couple of statues to the Metropolitan Museum to make it worth the museum's time to give the papy to the church. Why wouldn't the church just buy them? Because they, the church never buys anything. The church doesn't buy things. They get people to donate them. Oh, it's cheaper. It's cheaper. Oh, okay. Because the church doesn't have enough money. So is Keith Erikson a bad historian or a lying historian? Both. I don't know. On this, I, if he, it means he's a shoddy historian. If he's been honest, he's then shoddy, because anyone that has read very deeply on the Book of Abraham would know this story of how the Metropolitan presented that papy to Dr. Atiya. This, they interviewed, in Dialogue, a Journal of Mormon Thought, has interviews with these men at the museum where where they tell this about how this transaction took place. Sandra, he's not allowed to read Dialogue because it's not an approved source. I, I forgot that. Dialogue is an anti-Mormon source. Don't make up a story then. Yeah, if you.

Okay, so just as a segue, yeah, this is, we're now switching to the Book of Abraham. Yeah, yeah. Which we've covered extensively with M, Dr. Michael Co on Mormon Stories, but let's just, Robert Ritner. What did I say? Michael Cole. Robert Ritner. And LDS Discussions did, uh, some Book of Abraham stuff. All right, so let's go ahead and, and roll that clip.

And so all kinds of things are being taken out. And so some mummies get excavated, and they go to Europe, they go to England, they go to New York City. And in 1835, they end up, uh, in Kirtland. And all of the sources that we have from Kirtland talk about the mummies. That's the buzz. There are mummies from Egypt, and people are looking at them and they're excited. And then people put all their money together and they buy them. It was like an early Restoration Group, uh, GoFundMe or something. They, uh, but people pull their money and they buy them. And then they start look, now they own them, they start looking at them closely, and they realize there are scrolls with the mummies. And, uh, nobody ever tells us how many scrolls. That would have been nice. They count how many mummies there are, but they just say, "Oh yeah, they're a bunch of scrolls." Uh, and then they're looking at the scrolls. And we have one source that says Joseph's looking at them. And among the scrolls are the writings of Abraham and Joseph. Now, we never hear another peep about Joseph. There's nothing, no other evidence that that Joseph Smith started translating something from Joseph of Egypt. But he does work on the Abraham part. I didn't know. We didn't know how many scrolls there were. He's lying. We do know. Oh my gosh, the missing scroll again. I just can't, like, I can't count how many lies there was or inaccuracies. We know there were two scrolls, like for sure. Like, uh, I have all the people right here that mention two scrolls, like W.W. Phelps and, uh, Oliver Cowdery. Everyone said, "We have two scrolls and some other scraps of papy." He's saying that, uh, the mummies was the big thing. No, no, the big buzz was around the papy. He is later, or he's, because he's the way he's going to frame this is to say, "Well, oh, like the, the, the, uh, the Mormons brought this like they collectively decided to buy this because it was interesting." And then Joseph discovered that, uh, there were some ancient writings. Like, that, that's a lie as well. But I mean, the main one is about the scrolls. We know for sure there were two scrolls, and Joseph identified them as one to be the scroll of Abraham, and the other scroll to be the scroll of Joseph. We know that for sure. And we know that there were some other scraps among those other scraps is the hypocephalus that we have in our scriptures today. Uh, but, but yeah, we, we can, which is placed under the head of the mummy, is it not? Right, that's where that goes. Exactly. Uh, yeah. Um, but yeah, so, um, anyway, there are multiple sources indicating that Joseph identified the writings as Abraham in the papy. Uh, and, and then, and then the other one was Joseph again. So what's the second? So we've got two visuals. We just, just to make reference to them. Yeah. Here I have a visual I created this a while ago for an episode with this with the back here professor. But basically, so you can visualize it. So at the top, you would see on, on the left side, I have the two scrolls. So the, so the top one will be, uh, the scroll of Abraham, uh, what he identified as the scroll of Abraham. The bottom would be the scroll of Joseph, and then the other scraps and fragments that that the witnesses that were there, uh, described as well. Here's what's important about these two scrolls. And go, go and show it again in the next slide. The next slide. Yeah. Okay, so we again, at the top is the scroll of, of Abraham. Uh, if you look, because the way Joseph, by this point, he had started learning Hebrew, so he kind of like already put together that Egyptian must be read the same as Hebrew from left to, uh, to, sorry, from from right to left. So when he starts translating the Book of Abraham, he will start with the, um, with the, uh, with the image that we have in our scriptures as, uh, Facsimile Number One. And it's right there on the square in the, in the screen with the red, uh, with the red square. And then if you start reading the Book of Abraham, he even references it. He, the Book of Abraham starts by saying, you know, that the, that the image at, at the commencement of of this, uh, account, or something like that. And Joseph is going to start translating right there from, from the right side. Um, and, and then we know ex, we, we have because we, we're going to talk about how we have these today. But, uh, there's a piece and I have it right there around the, the size of what it's missing from the Book of Abraham. So that's represent, that black section is representative of what has been lost from that scroll. What Egyptologists tell us today, that's the section around that size would be the, the amount of scroll that we are missing today. He's gonna make it sound like we're missing tons of scrolls. Like that, that's that's not true. That's why he's trying to say we don't know how many scrolls there were. But we do know. S. you and Gerald were were instrumental in the groundbreaking of this entire Book of Abraham issue. Do you want to talk about that at all? Well, yes, we had heard rumors of the scrolls being out there. We didn't know what library, but we knew they were somewhere out there, and we were on the track of locating them at the time the church negotiated to get the papy back from the Metropolitan Museum. And so that's how, uh, Gerald got involved in that early article in Dialogue about the papy showing that, uh, Joseph Smith was, uh, filling in parts of the scroll with, uh, texts from other pieces of papyri that didn't make any sense because they didn't fit in the text. It's like adding words in upside down and backwards into a manuscript of something. And, uh, so clear back in the late 60s, we were challenging the church on this, and the Mormon scholars were trying to defend the Book of Abraham as somehow being proven by these papy, that this supported the Book of Abraham. And we're saying, "No, sorry, these don't translate anything you're talking about." Well, it's taken the church all these years to finally get around to admitting, well, yeah, they don't really talk about Abraham. So then they have to go to some sort of, uh, mystical way of, uh, having them inspire the Book of Abraham. But the original thought, I think the church really thought that this was going to prove the Book of Abraham for them. Unfortunately, they don't translate anything about Abraham. And is it true that it really wasn't until the Gospel Topics essay on the Book of Abraham where the church admits that the word Abraham doesn't even appear anywhere on any of the scrolls or fragments? Right. Well, we knew that clear back in 1970, but the church didn't. Church wouldn't admit it. I think as early as 1912, isn't like one Egyptologist, the New York Times published like a front-page article basically saying, "Book of Abraham's a fraud." Yeah, they were making that judgment on the papy illustrations. They didn't have the text to make a definitive statement like we can now, but the illustrations, the facsimiles, the pictures were enough for Egyptologists in 1912 to say, "The Mormons don't have any idea what they're talking about or what they even have. These have nothing to do with their religious, uh, views or scriptures. This is just standard funerary text of the Egyptian religion." And Joseph did translate those, the, the images, yeah, the facsimiles. And they say nothing that he said. Yeah, the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language document proves that he believed it to be a translation, not just some sort of inspired apologist. Want to separate the facsimile from the text today, but you have to remember the Book of Abraham itself references the facsimiles. Like the, the first, uh, one of the first chapters and the first chapter of the Book of Abraham, it says, you know, if you go back and look, "the commencement of of these, uh, of this text for, for, you know, an image of of what I'm talking about." Yeah, Abraham says, "I've given you an illustration of this at the front of the record." Exactly. And so that refers, the text refers you to Facsimile Number One. And Facsimile Number One has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham. It's just a standard burial scene from the Egyptian religion, Osiris and Anubis. Not to mention that the church included the facsimiles, yeah, in the scriptures. Yes, they still do. They still do. They're still there. Yeah. This is what's like, even the craziest thing, Joseph Smith in his personal history in, uh, 1840s, 1840s history, he referred to the two scrolls of papyrus. Like he's saying, "We don't know how many scrolls." Joseph Smith himself said there were two scrolls. And but we only listen to Joseph when it helps with our narrative, right? We can ignore Joseph. Well, ignore Oliver and W.W. Phelps. I don't know. Yeah. And again, if we have to come up with the motive for why Erikson is deceiving people, it's because he, because the translations are so incredibly obviously false and incorrect that he wants to create the perception that possibly there are other scrolls that got lost or destroyed that would have the original text that would correspond with what Joseph produced as the translations. It's an act of deception right there. There is no reason to assume that no matter how many other scrolls you had that they would say anything different from what we have. Yeah. Why would we assume the missing pieces would have some strange religion on it? We're trying to create the possibility of belief when really some say the Book of Abraham is one of the, the biggest smoking guns showing Joseph Smith as a false translator, right? We don't have plates for the Book of Mormon to test on his translation. We do have the papyri to test Joseph Smith's work on the Book of Abraham, and he fails miserably. There is absolutely no connection between the papyri and the text, which the scholars seem to be conceding today when they talk about, "As he looked at the papy, he, the Book of Abraham was revealed to him." They no longer talk about it being a translation. It's a revealed text. A revelation. Yeah.

All right, let's go to the next clip.

1967, there's a researcher from the University of Utah who is not a Latter-day Saint, and, uh, he's studying old papyrus. And so he goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and they have a big collection of just random old papyrus that they don't know where it came from. Remember, everybody was looting everything out of Egypt. So the Met has this big collection. So this guy from the University of Utah, not a church member, is going through, and then he realizes that 10 of the little pieces of papyrus are from the Joseph Smith era. And you know how he did it? Okay, for another reason why I would fire people. Why, why are you laughing? Herard and S. Well, be, this is, this is so false. The Metropolitan Museum knew what they had. They knew they had bought the fragments of the Joseph Smith collection. And when Dr. Atiya comes from the University of Utah out to the Metropolitan Museum, the museum decides to show him part of the Joseph Smith collection. It's not that Atiya stumbles across these. The museum shows him the facsimile number one, and Atiya immediately recognizes and, "Oh my goodness, this is Joseph Smith papy." You know, but the museum knew all along what it was. Was it a discovery made by Atiya? Now, Dr. Atiya was a real nice guy, but the church was using him, ended up using him to try and build this story that, this miraculous finding of the, uh, Book of Abraham scriptures by an Egyptologist who happens to not be Mormon, right? Yes. And, and he wasn't Mormon. He was, uh, Egyptian. He was a member of the Coptic Church, I believe. But he was the one that became the intermediary between the museum and the church in orchestrating the, uh, acquiring of the papy by the church. Which gets into a real funny story because the church acquires them not by purchase for sale, say, but through a gift. They, the church got a Mormon member to make a donation of a couple of statues to the Metropolitan Museum to make it worth the museum's time to give the papy to the church. Why wouldn't the church just buy them? Because they, the church never buys anything. The church doesn't buy things. They get people to donate them. Oh, it's cheaper. It's cheaper. Oh, okay. Because the church doesn't have enough money. So is Keith Erikson a bad historian or a lying historian? Both. I don't know. On this, I, if he, it means he's a shoddy historian. If he's been honest, he's then shoddy, because anyone that has read very deeply on the Book of Abraham would know this story of how the Metropolitan presented that papy to Dr. Atiya. This, they interviewed, in Dialogue, a Journal of Mormon Thought, has interviews with these men at the museum where where they tell this about how this transaction took place. Sandra, he's not allowed to read Dialogue because it's not an approved source. I, I forgot that. Dialogue is an anti-Mormon source. Don't make up a story then. Yeah, if you.

Okay, so just as a segue, yeah, this is, we're now switching to the Book of Abraham. Yeah, yeah. Which we've covered extensively with M, Dr. Michael Co on Mormon Stories, but let's just, Robert Ritner. What did I say? Michael Cole. Robert Ritner. And LDS Discussions did, uh, some Book of Abraham stuff. All right, so let's go ahead and, and roll that clip.

And so all kinds of things are being taken out. And so some mummies get excavated, and they go to Europe, they go to England, they go to New York City. And in 1835, they end up, uh, in Kirtland. And all of the sources that we have from Kirtland talk about the mummies. That's the buzz. There are mummies from Egypt, and people are looking at them and they're excited. And then people put all their money together and they buy them. It was like an early Restoration Group, uh, GoFundMe or something. They, uh, but people pull their money and they buy them. And then they start look, now they own them, they start looking at them closely, and they realize there are scrolls with the mummies. And, uh, nobody ever tells us how many scrolls. That would have been nice. They count how many mummies there are, but they just say, "Oh yeah, they're a bunch of scrolls." Uh, and then they're looking at the scrolls. And we have one source that says Joseph's looking at them. And among the scrolls are the writings of Abraham and Joseph. Now, we never hear another peep about Joseph. There's nothing, no other evidence that that Joseph Smith started translating something from Joseph of Egypt. But he does work on the Abraham part. I didn't know. We didn't know how many scrolls there were. He's lying. We do know. Oh my gosh, the missing scroll again. I just can't, like, I can't count how many lies there was or inaccuracies. We know there were two scrolls, like for sure. Like, uh, I have all the people right here that mention two scrolls, like W.W. Phelps and, uh, Oliver Cowdery. Everyone said, "We have two scrolls and some other scraps of papy." He's saying that, uh, the mummies was the big thing. No, no, the big buzz was around the papy. He is later, or he's, because he's the way he's going to frame this is to say, "Well, oh, like the, the, the, uh, the Mormons brought this like they collectively decided to buy this because it was interesting." And then Joseph discovered that, uh, there were some ancient writings. Like, that, that's a lie as well. But I mean, the main one is about the scrolls. We know for sure there were two scrolls, and Joseph identified them as one to be the scroll of Abraham, and the other scroll to be the scroll of Joseph. We know that for sure. And we know that there were some other scraps among those other scraps is the hypocephalus that we have in our scriptures today. Uh, but, but yeah, we, we can, which is placed under the head of the mummy, is it not? Right, that's where that goes. Exactly. Uh, yeah. Um, but yeah, so, um, anyway, there are multiple sources indicating that Joseph identified the writings as Abraham in the papy. Uh, and, and then, and then the other one was Joseph again. So what's the second? So we've got two visuals. We just, just to make reference to them. Yeah. Here I have a visual I created this a while ago for an episode with this with the back here professor. But basically, so you can visualize it. So at the top, you would see on, on the left side, I have the two scrolls. So the, so the top one will be, uh, the scroll of Abraham, uh, what he identified as the scroll of Abraham. The bottom would be the scroll of Joseph, and then the other scraps and fragments that that the witnesses that were there, uh, described as well. Here's what's important about these two scrolls. And go, go and show it again in the next slide. The next slide. Yeah. Okay, so we again, at the top is the scroll of, of Abraham. Uh, if you look, because the way Joseph, by this point, he had started learning Hebrew, so he kind of like already put together that Egyptian must be read the same as Hebrew from left to, uh, to, sorry, from from right to left. So when he starts translating the Book of Abraham, he will start with the, um, with the, uh, with the image that we have in our scriptures as, uh, Facsimile Number One. And it's right there on the square in the, in the screen with the red, uh, with the red square. And then if you start reading the Book of Abraham, he even references it. He, the Book of Abraham starts by saying, you know, that the, that the image at, at the commencement of of this, uh, account, or something like that. And Joseph is going to start translating right there from, from the right side. Um, and, and then we know ex, we, we have because we, we're going to talk about how we have these today. But, uh, there's a piece and I have it right there around the, the size of what it's missing from the Book of Abraham. So that's represent, that black section is representative of what has been lost from that scroll. What Egyptologists tell us today, that's the section around that size would be the, the amount of scroll that we are missing today. He's gonna make it sound like we're missing tons of scrolls. Like that, that's that's not true. That's why he's trying to say we don't know how many scrolls there were. But we do know. S. you and Gerald were were instrumental in the groundbreaking of this entire Book of Abraham issue. Do you want to talk about that at all? Well, yes, we had heard rumors of the scrolls being out there. We didn't know what library, but we knew they were somewhere out there, and we were on the track of locating them at the time the church negotiated to get the papy back from the Metropolitan Museum. And so that's how, uh, Gerald got involved in that early article in Dialogue about the papy showing that, uh, Joseph Smith was, uh, filling in parts of the scroll with, uh, texts from other pieces of papyri that didn't make any sense because they didn't fit in the text. It's like adding words in upside down and backwards into a manuscript of something. And, uh, so clear back in the late 60s, we were challenging the church on this, and the Mormon scholars were trying to defend the Book of Abraham as somehow being proven by these papy, that this supported the Book of Abraham. And we're saying, "No, sorry, these don't translate anything you're talking about." Well, it's taken the church all these years to finally get around to admitting, well, yeah, they don't really talk about Abraham. So then they have to go to some sort of, uh, mystical way of, uh, having them inspire the Book of Abraham. But the original thought, I think the church really thought that this was going to prove the Book of Abraham for them. Unfortunately, they don't translate anything about Abraham. And is it true that it really wasn't until the Gospel Topics essay on the Book of Abraham where the church admits that the word Abraham doesn't even appear anywhere on any of the scrolls or fragments? Right. Well, we knew that clear back in 1970, but the church didn't. Church wouldn't admit it. I think as early as 1912, isn't like one Egyptologist, the New York Times published like a front-page article basically saying, "Book of Abraham's a fraud." Yeah, they were making that judgment on the papy illustrations. They didn't have the text to make a definitive statement like we can now, but the illustrations, the facsimiles, the pictures were enough for Egyptologists in 1912 to say, "The Mormons don't have any idea what they're talking about or what they even have. These have nothing to do with their religious, uh, views or scriptures. This is just standard funerary text of the Egyptian religion." And Joseph did translate those, the, the images, yeah, the facsimiles. And they say nothing that he said. Yeah, the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language document proves that he believed it to be a translation, not just some sort of inspired apologist. Want to separate the facsimile from the text today, but you have to remember the Book of Abraham itself references the facsimiles. Like the, the first, uh, one of the first chapters and the first chapter of the Book of Abraham, it says, you know, if you go back and look, "the commencement of of these, uh, of this text for, for, you know, an image of of what I'm talking about." Yeah, Abraham says, "I've given you an illustration of this at the front of the record." Exactly. And so that refers, the text refers you to Facsimile Number One. And Facsimile Number One has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham. It's just a standard burial scene from the Egyptian religion, Osiris and Anubis. Not to mention that the church included the facsimiles, yeah, in the scriptures. Yes, they still do. They still do. They're still there. Yeah. This is what's like, even the craziest thing, Joseph Smith in his personal history in, uh, 1840s, 1840s history, he referred to the two scrolls of papyrus. Like he's saying, "We don't know how many scrolls." Joseph Smith himself said there were two scrolls. And but we only listen to Joseph when it helps with our narrative, right? We can ignore Joseph. Well, ignore Oliver and W.W. Phelps. I don't know. Yeah. And again, if we have to come up with the motive for why Erikson is deceiving people, it's because he, because the translations are so incredibly obviously false and incorrect that he wants to create the perception that possibly there are other scrolls that got lost or destroyed that would have the original text that would correspond with what Joseph produced as the translations. It's an act of deception right there. There is no reason to assume that no matter how many other scrolls you had that they would say anything different from what we have. Yeah. Why would we assume the missing pieces would have some strange religion on it? We're trying to create the possibility of belief when really some say the Book of Abraham is one of the, the biggest smoking guns showing Joseph Smith as a false translator, right? We don't have plates for the Book of Mormon to test on his translation. We do have the papyri to test Joseph Smith's work on the Book of Abraham, and he fails miserably. There is absolutely no connection between the papyri and the text, which the scholars seem to be conceding today when they talk about, "As he looked at the papy, he, the Book of Abraham was revealed to him." They no longer talk about it being a translation. It's a revealed text. A revelation. Yeah.

All right, let's go to the next clip.

1967, there's a researcher from the University of Utah who is not a Latter-day Saint, and, uh, he's studying old papyrus. And so he goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and they have a big collection of just random old papyrus that they don't know where it came from. Remember, everybody was looting everything out of Egypt. So the Met has this big collection. So this guy from the University of Utah, not a church member, is going through, and then he realizes that 10 of the little pieces of papyrus are from the Joseph Smith era. And you know how he did it? Okay, for another reason why I would fire people. Why, why are you laughing? Herard and S. Well, be, this is, this is so false. The Metropolitan Museum knew what they had. They knew they had bought the fragments of the Joseph Smith collection. And when Dr. Atiya comes from the University of Utah out to the Metropolitan Museum, the museum decides to show him part of the Joseph Smith collection. It's not that Atiya stumbles across these. The museum shows him the facsimile number one, and Atiya immediately recognizes and, "Oh my goodness, this is Joseph Smith papy." You know, but the museum knew all along what it was. Was it a discovery made by Atiya? Now, Dr. Atiya was a real nice guy, but the church was using him, ended up using him to try and build this story that, this miraculous finding of the, uh, Book of Abraham scriptures by an Egyptologist who happens to not be Mormon, right? Yes. And, and he wasn't Mormon. He was, uh, Egyptian. He was a member of the Coptic Church, I believe. But he was the one that became the intermediary between the museum and the church in orchestrating the, uh, acquiring of the papy by the church. Which gets into a real funny story because the church acquires them not by purchase for sale, say, but through a gift. They, the church got a Mormon member to make a donation of a couple of statues to the Metropolitan Museum to make it worth the museum's time to give the papy to the church. Why wouldn't the church just buy them? Because they, the church never buys anything. The church doesn't buy things. They get people to donate them. Oh, it's cheaper. It's cheaper. Oh, okay. Because the church doesn't have enough money. So is Keith Erikson a bad historian or a lying historian? Both. I don't know. On this, I, if he, it means he's a shoddy historian. If he's been honest, he's then shoddy, because anyone that has read very deeply on the Book of Abraham would know this story of how the Metropolitan presented that papy to Dr. Atiya. This, they interviewed, in Dialogue, a Journal of Mormon Thought, has interviews with these men at the museum where where they tell this about how this transaction took place. Sandra, he's not allowed to read Dialogue because it's not an approved source. I, I forgot that. Dialogue is an anti-Mormon source. Don't make up a story then. Yeah, if you.

Okay, so just as a segue, yeah, this is, we're now switching to the Book of Abraham. Yeah, yeah. Which we've covered extensively with M, Dr. Michael Co on Mormon Stories, but let's just, Robert Ritner. What did I say? Michael Cole. Robert Ritner. And LDS Discussions did, uh, some Book of Abraham stuff. All right, so let's go ahead and, and roll that clip.

And so all kinds of things are being taken out. And so some mummies get excavated, and they go to Europe, they go to England, they go to New York City. And in 1835, they end up, uh, in Kirtland. And all of the sources that we have from Kirtland talk about the mummies. That's the buzz. There are mummies from Egypt, and people are looking at them and they're excited. And then people put all their money together and they buy them. It was like an early Restoration Group, uh, GoFundMe or something. They, uh, but people pull their money and they buy them. And then they start look, now they own them, they start looking at them closely, and they realize there are scrolls with the mummies. And, uh, nobody ever tells us how many scrolls. That would have been nice. They count how many mummies there are, but they just say, "Oh yeah, they're a bunch of scrolls." Uh, and then they're looking at the scrolls. And we have one source that says Joseph's looking at them. And among the scrolls are the writings of Abraham and Joseph. Now, we never hear another peep about Joseph. There's nothing, no other evidence that that Joseph Smith started translating something from Joseph of Egypt. But he does work on the Abraham part. I didn't know. We didn't know how many scrolls there were. He's lying. We do know. Oh my gosh, the missing scroll again. I just can't, like, I can't count how many lies there was or inaccuracies. We know there were two scrolls, like for sure. Like, uh, I have all the people right here that mention two scrolls, like W.W. Phelps and, uh, Oliver Cowdery. Everyone said, "We have two scrolls and some other scraps of papy." He's saying that, uh, the mummies was the big thing. No, no, the big buzz was around the papy. He is later, or he's, because he's the way he's going to frame this is to say, "Well, oh, like the, the, the, uh, the Mormons brought this like they collectively decided to buy this because it was interesting." And then Joseph discovered that, uh, there were some ancient writings. Like, that, that's a lie as well. But I mean, the main one is about the scrolls. We know for sure there were two scrolls, and Joseph identified them as one to be the scroll of Abraham, and the other scroll to be the scroll of Joseph. We know that for sure. And we know that there were some other scraps among those other scraps is the hypocephalus that we have in our scriptures today. Uh, but, but yeah, we, we can, which is placed under the head of the mummy, is it not? Right, that's where that goes. Exactly. Uh, yeah. Um, but yeah, so, um, anyway, there are multiple sources indicating that Joseph identified the writings as Abraham in the papy. Uh, and, and then, and then the other one was Joseph again. So what's the second? So we've got two visuals. We just, just to make reference to them. Yeah. Here I have a visual I created this a while ago for an episode with this with the back here professor. But basically, so you can visualize it. So at the top, you would see on, on the left side, I have the two scrolls. So the, so the top one will be, uh, the scroll of Abraham, uh, what he identified as the scroll of Abraham. The bottom would be the scroll of Joseph, and then the other scraps and fragments that that the witnesses that were there, uh, described as well. Here's what's important about these two scrolls. And go, go and show it again in the next slide. The next slide. Yeah. Okay, so we again, at the top is the scroll of, of Abraham. Uh, if you look, because the way Joseph, by this point, he had started learning Hebrew, so he kind of like already put together that Egyptian must be read the same as Hebrew from left to, uh, to, sorry, from from right to left. So when he starts translating the Book of Abraham, he will start with the, um, with the, uh, with the image that we have in our scriptures as, uh, Facsimile Number One. And it's right there on the square in the, in the screen with the red, uh, with the red square. And then if you start reading the Book of Abraham, he even references it. He, the Book of Abraham starts by saying, you know, that the, that the image at, at the commencement of of this, uh, account, or something like that. And Joseph is going to start translating right there from, from the right side. Um, and, and then we know ex, we, we have because we, we're going to talk about how we have these today. But, uh, there's a piece and I have it right there around the, the size of what it's missing from the Book of Abraham. So that's represent, that black section is representative of what has been lost from that scroll. What Egyptologists tell us today, that's the section around that size would be the, the amount of scroll that we are missing today. He's gonna make it sound like we're missing tons of scrolls. Like that, that's that's not true. That's why he's trying to say we don't know how many scrolls there were. But we do know. S. you and Gerald were were instrumental in the groundbreaking of this entire Book of Abraham issue. Do you want to talk about that at all? Well, yes, we had heard rumors of the scrolls being out there. We didn't know what library, but we knew they were somewhere out there, and we were on the track of locating them at the time the church negotiated to get the papy back from the Metropolitan Museum. And so that's how, uh, Gerald got involved in that early article in Dialogue about the papy showing that, uh, Joseph Smith was, uh, filling in parts of the scroll with, uh, texts from other pieces of papyri that didn't make any sense because they didn't fit in the text. It's like adding words in upside down and backwards into a manuscript of something. And, uh, so clear back in the late 60s, we were challenging the church on this, and the Mormon scholars were trying to defend the Book of Abraham as somehow being proven by these papy, that this supported the Book of Abraham. And we're saying, "No, sorry, these don't translate anything you're talking about." Well, it's taken the church all these years to finally get around to admitting, well, yeah, they don't really talk about Abraham. So then they have to go to some sort of, uh, mystical way of, uh, having them inspire the Book of Abraham. But the original thought, I think the church really thought that this was going to prove the Book of Abraham for them. Unfortunately, they don't translate anything about Abraham. And is it true that it really wasn't until the Gospel Topics essay on the Book of Abraham where the church admits that the word Abraham doesn't even appear anywhere on any of the scrolls or fragments? Right. Well, we knew that clear back in 1970, but the church didn't. Church wouldn't admit it. I think as early as 1912, isn't like one Egyptologist, the New York Times published like a front-page article basically saying, "Book of Abraham's a fraud." Yeah, they were making that judgment on the papy illustrations. They didn't have the text to make a definitive statement like we can now, but the illustrations, the facsimiles, the pictures were enough for Egyptologists in 1912 to say, "The Mormons don't have any idea what they're talking about or what they even have. These have nothing to do with their religious, uh, views or scriptures. This is just standard funerary text of the Egyptian religion." And Joseph did translate those, the, the images, yeah, the facsimiles. And they say nothing that he said. Yeah, the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language document proves that he believed it to be a translation, not just some sort of inspired apologist. Want to separate the facsimile from the text today, but you have to remember the Book of Abraham itself references the facsimiles. Like the, the first, uh, one of the first chapters and the first chapter of the Book of Abraham, it says, you know, if you go back and look, "the commencement of of these, uh, of this text for, for, you know, an image of of what I'm talking about." Yeah, Abraham says, "I've given you an illustration of this at the front of the record." Exactly. And so that refers, the text refers you to Facsimile Number One. And Facsimile Number One has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham. It's just a standard burial scene from the Egyptian religion, Osiris and Anubis. Not to mention that the church included the facsimiles, yeah, in the scriptures. Yes, they still do. They still do. They're still there. Yeah. This is what's like, even the craziest thing, Joseph Smith in his personal history in, uh, 1840s, 1840s history, he referred to the two scrolls of papyrus. Like he's saying, "We don't know how many scrolls." Joseph Smith himself said there were two scrolls. And but we only listen to Joseph when it helps with our narrative, right? We can ignore Joseph. Well, ignore Oliver and W.W. Phelps. I don't know. Yeah. And again, if we have to come up with the motive for why Erikson is deceiving people, it's because he, because the translations are so incredibly obviously false and incorrect that he wants to create the perception that possibly there are other scrolls that got lost or destroyed that would have the original text that would correspond with what Joseph produced as the translations. It's an act of deception right there. There is no reason to assume that no matter how many other scrolls you had that they would say anything different from what we have. Yeah. Why would we assume the missing pieces would have some strange religion on it? We're trying to create the possibility of belief when really some say the Book of Abraham is one of the, the biggest smoking guns showing Joseph Smith as a false translator, right? We don't have plates for the Book of Mormon to test on his translation. We do have the papyri to test Joseph Smith's work on the Book of Abraham, and he fails miserably. There is absolutely no connection between the papyri and the text, which the scholars seem to be conceding today when they talk about, "As he looked at the papy, he, the Book of Abraham was revealed to him." They no longer talk about it being a translation. It's a revealed text. A revelation. Yeah.

All right, let's go to the next clip.

1967, there's a researcher from the University of Utah who is not a Latter-day Saint, and, uh, he's studying old papyrus. And so he goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and they have a big collection of just random old papyrus that they don't know where it came from. Remember, everybody was looting everything out of Egypt. So the Met has this big collection. So this guy from the University of Utah, not a church member, is going through, and then he realizes that 10 of the little pieces of papyrus are from the Joseph Smith era. And you know how he did it? Okay, for another reason why I would fire people. Why, why are you laughing? Herard and S. Well, be, this is, this is so false. The Metropolitan Museum knew what they had. They knew they had bought the fragments of the Joseph Smith collection. And when Dr. Atiya comes from the University of Utah out to the Metropolitan Museum, the museum decides to show him part of the Joseph Smith collection. It's not that Atiya stumbles across these. The museum shows him the facsimile number one, and Atiya immediately recognizes and, "Oh my goodness, this is Joseph Smith papy." You know, but the museum knew all along what it was. Was it a discovery made by Atiya? Now, Dr. Atiya was a real nice guy, but the church was using him, ended up using him to try and build this story that, this miraculous finding of the, uh, Book of Abraham scriptures by an Egyptologist who happens to not be Mormon, right? Yes. And, and he wasn't Mormon. He was, uh, Egyptian. He was a member of the Coptic Church, I believe. But he was the one that became the intermediary between the museum and the church in orchestrating the, uh, acquiring of the papy by the church. Which gets into a real funny story because the church acquires them not by purchase for sale, say, but through a gift. They, the church got a Mormon member to make a donation of a couple of statues to the Metropolitan Museum to make it worth the museum's time to give the papy to the church. Why wouldn't the church just buy them? Because they, the church never buys anything. The church doesn't buy things. They get people to donate them. Oh, it's cheaper. It's cheaper. Oh, okay. Because the church doesn't have enough money. So is Keith Erikson a bad historian or a lying historian? Both. I don't know. On this, I, if he, it means he's a shoddy historian. If he's been honest, he's then shoddy, because anyone that has read very deeply on the Book of Abraham would know this story of how the Metropolitan presented that papy to Dr. Atiya. This, they interviewed, in Dialogue, a Journal of Mormon Thought, has interviews with these men at the museum where where they tell this about how this transaction took place. Sandra, he's not allowed to read Dialogue because it's not an approved source. I, I forgot that. Dialogue is an anti-Mormon source. Don't make up a story then. Yeah, if you.

Okay, so just as a segue, yeah, this is, we're now switching to the Book of Abraham. Yeah, yeah. Which we've covered extensively with M, Dr. Michael Co on Mormon Stories, but let's just, Robert Ritner. What did I say? Michael Cole. Robert Ritner. And LDS Discussions did, uh, some Book of Abraham stuff. All right, so let's go ahead and, and roll that clip.

And so all kinds of things are being taken out. And so some mummies get excavated, and they go to Europe, they go to England, they go to New York City. And in 1835, they end up, uh, in Kirtland. And all of the sources that we have from Kirtland talk about the mummies. That's the buzz. There are mummies from Egypt, and people are looking at them and they're excited. And then people put all their money together and they buy them. It was like an early Restoration Group, uh, GoFundMe or something. They, uh, but people pull their money and they buy them. And then they start look, now they own them, they start looking at them closely, and they realize there are scrolls with the mummies. And, uh, nobody ever tells us how many scrolls. That would have been nice. They count how many mummies there are, but they just say, "Oh yeah, they're a bunch of scrolls." Uh, and then they're looking at the scrolls. And we have one source that says Joseph's looking at them. And among the scrolls are the writings of Abraham and Joseph. Now, we never hear another peep about Joseph. There's nothing, no other evidence that that Joseph Smith started translating something from Joseph of Egypt. But he does work on the Abraham part. I didn't know. We didn't know how many scrolls there were. He's lying. We do know. Oh my gosh, the missing scroll again. I just can't, like, I can't count how many lies there was or inaccuracies. We know there were two scrolls, like for sure. Like, uh, I have all the people right here that mention two scrolls, like W.W. Phelps and, uh, Oliver Cowdery. Everyone said, "We have two scrolls and some other scraps of papy." He's saying that, uh, the mummies was the big thing. No, no, the big buzz was around the papy. He is later, or he's, because he's the way he's going to frame this is to say, "Well, oh, like the, the, the, uh, the Mormons brought this like they collectively decided to buy this because it was interesting." And then Joseph discovered that, uh, there were some ancient writings. Like, that, that's a lie as well. But I mean, the main one is about the scrolls. We know for sure there were two scrolls, and Joseph identified them as one to be the scroll of Abraham, and the other scroll to be the scroll of Joseph. We know that for sure. And we know that there were some other scraps among those other scraps is the hypocephalus that we have in our scriptures today. Uh, but, but yeah, we, we can, which is placed under the head of the mummy, is it not? Right, that's where that goes. Exactly. Uh, yeah. Um, but yeah, so, um, anyway, there are multiple sources indicating that Joseph identified the writings as Abraham in the papy. Uh, and, and then, and then the other one was Joseph again. So what's the second? So we've got two visuals. We just, just to make reference to them. Yeah. Here I have a visual I created this a while ago for an episode with this with the back here professor. But basically, so you can visualize it. So at the top, you would see on, on the left side, I have the two scrolls. So the, so the top one will be, uh, the scroll of Abraham, uh, what he identified as the scroll of Abraham. The bottom would be the scroll of Joseph, and then the other scraps and fragments that that the witnesses that were there, uh, described as well. Here's what's important about these two scrolls. And go, go and show it again in the next slide. The next slide. Yeah. Okay, so we again, at the top is the scroll of, of Abraham. Uh, if you look, because the way Joseph, by this point, he had started learning Hebrew, so he kind of like already put together that Egyptian must be read the same as Hebrew from left to, uh, to, sorry, from from right to left. So when he starts translating the Book of Abraham, he will start with the, um, with the, uh, with the image that we have in our scriptures as, uh, Facsimile Number One. And it's right there on the square in the, in the screen with the red, uh, with the red square. And then if you start reading the Book of Abraham, he even references it. He, the Book of Abraham starts by saying, you know, that the, that the image at, at the commencement of of this, uh, account, or something like that. And Joseph is going to start translating right there from, from the right side. Um, and, and then we know ex, we, we have because we, we're going to talk about how we have these today. But, uh, there's a piece and I have it right there around the, the size of what it's missing from the Book of Abraham. So that's represent, that black section is representative of what has been lost from that scroll. What Egyptologists tell us today, that's the section around that size would be the, the amount of scroll that we are missing today. He's gonna make it sound like we're missing tons of scrolls. Like that, that's that's not true. That's why he's trying to say we don't know how many scrolls there were. But we do know. S. you and Gerald were were instrumental in the groundbreaking of this entire Book of Abraham issue. Do you want to talk about that at all? Well, yes, we had heard rumors of the scrolls being out there. We didn't know what library, but we knew they were somewhere out there, and we were on the track of locating them at the time the church negotiated to get the papy back from the Metropolitan Museum. And so that's how, uh, Gerald got involved in that early article in Dialogue about the papy showing that, uh, Joseph Smith was, uh, filling in parts of the scroll with, uh, texts from other pieces of papyri that didn't make any sense because they didn't fit in the text. It's like adding words in upside down and backwards into a manuscript of something. And, uh, so clear back in the late 60s, we were challenging the church on this, and the Mormon scholars were trying to defend the Book of Abraham as somehow being proven by these papy, that this supported the Book of Abraham. And we're saying, "No, sorry, these don't translate anything you're talking about." Well, it's taken the church all these years to finally get around to admitting, well, yeah, they don't really talk about Abraham. So then they have to go to some sort of, uh, mystical way of, uh, having them inspire the Book of Abraham. But the original thought, I think the church really thought that this was going to prove the Book of Abraham for them. Unfortunately, they don't translate anything about Abraham. And is it true that it really wasn't until the Gospel Topics essay on the Book of Abraham where the church admits that the word Abraham doesn't even appear anywhere on any of the scrolls or fragments? Right. Well, we knew that clear back in 1970, but the church didn't. Church wouldn't admit it. I think as early as 1912, isn't like one Egyptologist, the New York Times published like a front-page article basically saying, "Book of Abraham's a fraud." Yeah, they were making that judgment on the papy illustrations. They didn't have the text to make a definitive statement like we can now, but the illustrations, the facsimiles, the pictures were enough for Egyptologists in 1912 to say, "The Mormons don't have any idea what they're talking about or what they even have. These have nothing to do with their religious, uh, views or scriptures. This is just standard funerary text of the Egyptian religion." And Joseph did translate those, the, the images, yeah, the facsimiles. And they say nothing that he said. Yeah, the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language document proves that he believed it to be a translation, not just some sort of inspired apologist. Want to separate the facsimile from the text today, but you have to remember the Book of Abraham itself references the facsimiles. Like the, the first, uh, one of the first chapters and the first chapter of the Book of Abraham, it says, you know, if you go back and look, "the commencement of of these, uh, of this text for, for, you know, an image of of what I'm talking about." Yeah, Abraham says, "I've given you an illustration of this at the front of the record." Exactly. And so that refers, the text refers you to Facsimile Number One. And Facsimile Number One has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham. It's just a standard burial scene from the Egyptian religion, Osiris and Anubis. Not to mention that the church included the facsimiles, yeah, in the scriptures. Yes, they still do. They still do. They're still there. Yeah. This is what's like, even the craziest thing, Joseph Smith in his personal history in, uh, 1840s, 1840s history, he referred to the two scrolls of papyrus. Like he's saying, "We don't know how many scrolls." Joseph Smith himself said there were two scrolls. And but we only listen to Joseph when it helps with our narrative, right? We can ignore Joseph. Well, ignore Oliver and W.W. Phelps. I don't know. Yeah. And again, if we have to come up with the motive for why Erikson is deceiving people, it's because he, because the translations are so incredibly obviously false and incorrect that he wants to create the perception that possibly there are other scrolls that got lost or destroyed that would have the original text that would correspond with what Joseph produced as the translations. It's an act of deception right there. There is no reason to assume that no matter how many other scrolls you had that they would say anything different from what we have. Yeah. Why would we assume the missing pieces would have some strange religion on it? We're trying to create the possibility of belief when really some say the Book of Abraham is one of the, the biggest smoking guns showing Joseph Smith as a false translator, right? We don't have plates for the Book of Mormon to test on his translation. We do have the papyri to test Joseph Smith's work on the Book of Abraham, and he fails miserably. There is absolutely no connection between the papyri and the text, which the scholars seem to be conceding today when they talk about, "As he looked at the papy, he, the Book of Abraham was revealed to him." They no longer talk about it being a translation. It's a revealed text. A revelation. Yeah.

All right, let's go to the next clip.

1967, there's a researcher from the University of Utah who is not a Latter-day Saint, and, uh, he's studying old papyrus. And so he goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and they have a big collection of just random old papyrus that they don't know where it came from. Remember, everybody was looting everything out of Egypt. So the Met has this big collection. So this guy from the University of Utah, not a church member, is going through, and then he realizes that 10 of the little pieces of papyrus are from the Joseph Smith era. And you know how he did it? Okay, for another reason why I would fire people. Why, why are you laughing? Herard and S. Well, be, this is, this is so false. The Metropolitan Museum knew what they had. They knew they had bought the fragments of the Joseph Smith collection. And when Dr. Atiya comes from the University of Utah out to the Metropolitan Museum, the museum decides to show him part of the Joseph Smith collection. It's not that Atiya stumbles across these. The museum shows him the facsimile number one, and Atiya immediately recognizes and, "Oh my goodness, this is Joseph Smith papy." You know, but the museum knew all along what it was. Was it a discovery made by Atiya? Now, Dr. Atiya was a real nice guy, but the church was using him, ended up using him to try and build this story that, this miraculous finding of the, uh, Book of Abraham scriptures by an Egyptologist who happens to not be Mormon, right? Yes. And, and he wasn't Mormon. He was, uh, Egyptian. He was a member of the Coptic Church, I believe. But he was the one that became the intermediary between the museum and the church in orchestrating the, uh, acquiring of the papy by the church. Which gets into a real funny story because the church acquires them not by purchase for sale, say, but through a gift. They, the church got a Mormon member to make a donation of a couple of statues to the Metropolitan Museum to make it worth the museum's time to give the papy to the church. Why wouldn't the church just buy them? Because they, the church never buys anything. The church doesn't buy things. They get people to donate them. Oh, it's cheaper. It's cheaper. Oh, okay. Because the church doesn't have enough money. So is Keith Erikson a bad historian or a lying historian? Both. I don't know. On this, I, if he, it means he's a shoddy historian. If he's been honest, he's then shoddy, because anyone that has read very deeply on the Book of Abraham would know this story of how the Metropolitan presented that papy to Dr. Atiya. This, they interviewed, in Dialogue, a Journal of Mormon Thought, has interviews with these men at the museum where where they tell this about how this transaction took place. Sandra, he's not allowed to read Dialogue because it's not an approved source. I, I forgot that. Dialogue is an anti-Mormon source. Don't make up a story then. Yeah, if you.

Okay, so just as a segue, yeah, this is, we're now switching to the Book of Abraham. Yeah, yeah. Which we've covered extensively with M, Dr. Michael Co on Mormon Stories, but let's just, Robert Ritner. What did I say? Michael Cole. Robert Ritner. And LDS Discussions did, uh, some Book of Abraham stuff. All right, so let's go ahead and, and roll that clip.

And so all kinds of things are being taken out. And so some mummies get excavated, and they go to Europe, they go to England, they go to New York City. And in 1835, they end up, uh, in Kirtland. And all of the sources that we have from Kirtland talk about the mummies. That's the buzz. There are mummies from Egypt, and people are looking at them and they're excited. And then people put all their money together and they buy them. It was like an early Restoration Group, uh, GoFundMe or something. They, uh, but people pull their money and they buy them. And then they start look, now they own them, they start looking at them closely, and they realize there are scrolls with the mummies. And, uh, nobody ever tells us how many scrolls. That would have been nice. They count how many mummies there are, but they just say, "Oh yeah, they're a bunch of scrolls." Uh, and then they're looking at the scrolls. And we have one source that says Joseph's looking at them. And among the scrolls are the writings of Abraham and Joseph. Now, we never hear another peep about Joseph. There's nothing, no other evidence that that Joseph Smith started translating something from Joseph of Egypt. But he does work on the Abraham part. I didn't know. We didn't know how many scrolls there were. He's lying. We do know. Oh my gosh, the missing scroll again. I just can't, like, I can't count how many lies there was or inaccuracies. We know there were two scrolls, like for sure. Like, uh, I have all the people right here that mention two scrolls, like W.W. Phelps and, uh, Oliver Cowdery. Everyone said, "We have two scrolls and some other scraps of papy." He's saying that, uh, the mummies was the big thing. No, no, the big buzz was around the papy. He is later, or he's, because he's the way he's going to frame this is to say, "Well, oh, like the, the, the, uh, the Mormons brought this like they collectively decided to buy this because it was interesting." And then Joseph discovered that, uh, there were some ancient writings. Like, that, that's a lie as well. But I mean, the main one is about the scrolls. We know for sure there were two scrolls, and Joseph identified them as one to be the scroll of Abraham, and the other scroll to be the scroll of Joseph. We know that for sure. And we know that there were some other scraps among those other scraps is the hypocephalus that we have in our scriptures today. Uh, but, but yeah, we, we can, which is placed under the head of the mummy, is it not? Right, that's where that goes. Exactly. Uh, yeah. Um, but yeah, so, um, anyway, there are multiple sources indicating that Joseph identified the writings as Abraham in the papy. Uh, and, and then, and then the other one was Joseph again. So what's the second? So we've got two visuals. We just, just to make reference to them. Yeah. Here I have a visual I created this a while ago for an episode with this with the back here professor. But basically, so you can visualize it. So at the top, you would see on, on the left side, I have the two scrolls. So the, so the top one will be, uh, the scroll of Abraham, uh, what he identified as the scroll of Abraham. The bottom would be the scroll of Joseph, and then the other scraps and fragments that that the witnesses that were there, uh, described as well. Here's what's important about these two scrolls. And go, go and show it again in the next slide. The next slide. Yeah. Okay, so we again, at the top is the scroll of, of Abraham. Uh, if you look, because the way Joseph, by this point, he had started learning Hebrew, so he kind of like already put together that Egyptian must be read the same as Hebrew from left to, uh, to, sorry, from from right to left. So when he starts translating the Book of Abraham, he will start with the, um, with the, uh, with the image that we have in our scriptures as, uh, Facsimile Number One. And it's right there on the square in the, in the screen with the red, uh, with the red square. And then if you start reading the Book of Abraham, he even references it. He, the Book of Abraham starts by saying, you know, that the, that the image at, at the commencement of of this, uh, account, or something like that. And Joseph is going to start translating right there from, from the right side. Um, and, and then we know ex, we, we have because we, we're going to talk about how we have these today. But, uh, there's a piece and I have it right there around the, the size of what it's missing from the Book of Abraham. So that's represent, that black section is representative of what has been lost from that scroll. What Egyptologists tell us today, that's the section around that size would be the, the amount of scroll that we are missing today. He's gonna make it sound like we're missing tons of scrolls. Like that, that's that's not true. That's why he's trying to say we don't know how many scrolls there were. But we do know. S. you and Gerald were were instrumental in the groundbreaking of this entire Book of Abraham issue. Do you want to talk about that at all? Well, yes, we had heard rumors of the scrolls being out there. We didn't know what library, but we knew they were somewhere out there, and we were on the track of locating them at the time the church negotiated to get the papy back from the Metropolitan Museum. And so that's how, uh, Gerald got involved in that early article in Dialogue about the papy showing that, uh, Joseph Smith was, uh, filling in parts of the scroll with, uh, texts from other pieces of papyri that didn't make any sense because they didn't fit in the text. It's like adding words in upside down and backwards into a manuscript of something. And, uh, so clear back in the late 60s, we were challenging the church on this, and the Mormon scholars were trying to defend the Book of Abraham as somehow being proven by these papy, that this supported the Book of Abraham. And we're saying, "No, sorry, these don't translate anything you're talking about." Well, it's taken the church all these years to finally get around to admitting, well, yeah, they don't really talk about Abraham. So then they have to go to some sort of, uh, mystical way of, uh, having them inspire the Book of Abraham. But the original thought, I think the church really thought that this was going to prove the Book of Abraham for them. Unfortunately, they don't translate anything about Abraham. And is it true that it really wasn't until the Gospel Topics essay on the Book of Abraham where the church admits that the word Abraham doesn't even appear anywhere on any of the scrolls or fragments? Right. Well, we knew that clear back in 1970, but the church didn't. Church wouldn't admit it. I think as early as 1912, isn't like one Egyptologist, the New York Times published like a front-page article basically saying, "Book of Abraham's a fraud." Yeah, they were making that judgment on the papy illustrations. They didn't have the text to make a definitive statement like we can now, but the illustrations, the facsimiles, the pictures were enough for Egyptologists in 1912 to say, "The Mormons don't have any idea what they're talking about or what they even have. These have nothing to do with their religious, uh, views or scriptures. This is just standard funerary text of the Egyptian religion." And Joseph did translate those, the, the images, yeah, the facsimiles. And they say nothing that he said. Yeah, the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language document proves that he believed it to be a translation, not just some sort of inspired apologist. Want to separate the facsimile from the text today, but you have to remember the Book of Abraham itself references the facsimiles. Like the, the first, uh, one of the first chapters and the first chapter of the Book of Abraham, it says, you know, if you go back and look, "the commencement of of these, uh, of this text for, for, you know, an image of of what I'm talking about." Yeah, Abraham says, "I've given you an illustration of this at the front of the record." Exactly. And so that refers, the text refers you to Facsimile Number One. And Facsimile Number One has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham. It's just a standard burial scene from the Egyptian religion, Osiris and Anubis. Not to mention that the church included the facsimiles, yeah, in the scriptures. Yes, they still do. They still do. They're still there. Yeah. This is what's like, even the craziest thing, Joseph Smith in his personal history in, uh, 1840s, 1840s history, he referred to the two scrolls of papyrus. Like he's saying, "We don't know how many scrolls." Joseph Smith himself said there were two scrolls. And but we only listen to Joseph when it helps with our narrative, right? We can ignore Joseph. Well, ignore Oliver and W.W. Phelps. I don't know. Yeah. And again, if we have to come up with the motive for why Erikson is deceiving people, it's because he, because the translations are so incredibly obviously false and incorrect that he wants to create the perception that possibly there are other scrolls that got lost or destroyed that would have the original text that would correspond with what Joseph produced as the translations. It's an act of deception right there. There is no reason to assume that no matter how many other scrolls you had that they would say anything different from what we have. Yeah. Why would we assume the missing pieces would have some strange religion on it? We're trying to create the possibility of belief when really some say the Book of Abraham is one of the, the biggest smoking guns showing Joseph Smith as a false translator, right? We don't have plates for the Book of Mormon to test on his translation. We do have the papyri to test Joseph Smith's work on the Book of Abraham, and he fails miserably. There is absolutely no connection between the papyri and the text, which the scholars seem to be conceding today when they talk about, "As he looked at the papy, he, the Book of Abraham was revealed to him." They no longer talk about it being a translation. It's a revealed text. A revelation. Yeah.

All right, let's go to the next clip.

1967, there's a researcher from the University of Utah who is not a Latter-day Saint, and, uh, he's studying old papyrus. And so he goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and they have a big collection of just random old papyrus that they don't know where it came from. Remember, everybody was looting everything out of Egypt. So the Met has this big collection. So this guy from the University of Utah, not a church member, is going through, and then he realizes that 10 of the little pieces of papyrus are from the Joseph Smith era. And you know how he did it? Okay, for another reason why I would fire people. Why, why are you laughing? Herard and S. Well, be, this is, this is so false. The Metropolitan Museum knew what they had. They knew they had bought the fragments of the Joseph Smith collection. And when Dr. Atiya comes from the University of Utah out to the Metropolitan Museum, the museum decides to show him part of the Joseph Smith collection. It's not that Atiya stumbles across these. The museum shows him the facsimile number one, and Atiya immediately recognizes and, "Oh my goodness, this is Joseph Smith papy." You know, but the museum knew all along what it was. Was it a discovery made by Atiya? Now, Dr. Atiya was a real nice guy, but the church was using him, ended up using him to try and build this story that, this miraculous finding of the, uh, Book of Abraham scriptures by an Egyptologist who happens to not be Mormon, right? Yes. And, and he wasn't Mormon. He was, uh, Egyptian. He was a member of the Coptic Church, I believe. But he was the one that became the intermediary between the museum and the church in orchestrating the, uh, acquiring of the papy by the church. Which gets into a real funny story because the church acquires them not by purchase for sale, say, but through a gift. They, the church got a Mormon member to make a donation of a couple of statues to the Metropolitan Museum to make it worth the museum's time to give the papy to the church. Why wouldn't the church just buy them? Because they, the church never buys anything. The church doesn't buy things. They get people to donate them. Oh, it's cheaper. It's cheaper. Oh, okay. Because the church doesn't have enough money. So is Keith Erikson a bad historian or a lying historian? Both. I don't know. On this, I, if he, it means he's a shoddy historian. If he's been honest, he's then shoddy, because anyone that has read very deeply on the Book of Abraham would know this story of how the Metropolitan presented that papy to Dr. Atiya. This, they interviewed, in Dialogue, a Journal of Mormon Thought, has interviews with these men at the museum where where they tell this about how this transaction took place. Sandra, he's not allowed to read Dialogue because it's not an approved source. I, I forgot that. Dialogue is an anti-Mormon source. Don't make up a story then. Yeah, if you.

Okay, so just as a segue, yeah, this is, we're now switching to the Book of Abraham. Yeah, yeah. Which we've covered extensively with M, Dr. Michael Co on Mormon Stories, but let's just, Robert Ritner. What did I say? Michael Cole. Robert Ritner. And LDS Discussions did, uh, some Book of Abraham stuff. All right, so let's go ahead and, and roll that clip.

And so all kinds of things are being taken out. And so some mummies get excavated, and they go to Europe, they go to England, they go to New York City. And in 1835, they end up, uh, in Kirtland. And all of the sources that we have from Kirtland talk about the mummies. That's the buzz. There are mummies from Egypt, and people are looking at them and they're excited. And then people put all their money together and they buy them. It was like an early Restoration Group, uh, GoFundMe or something. They, uh, but people pull their money and they buy them. And then they start look, now they own them, they start looking at them closely, and they realize there are scrolls with the mummies. And, uh, nobody ever tells us how many scrolls. That would have been nice. They count how many mummies there are, but they just say, "Oh yeah, they're a bunch of scrolls." Uh, and then they're looking at the scrolls. And we have one source that says Joseph's looking at them. And among the scrolls are the writings of Abraham and Joseph. Now, we never hear another peep about Joseph. There's nothing, no other evidence that that Joseph Smith started translating something from Joseph of Egypt. But he does work on the Abraham part. I didn't know. We didn't know how many scrolls there were. He's lying. We do know. Oh my gosh, the missing scroll again. I just can't, like, I can't count how many lies there was or inaccuracies. We know there were two scrolls, like for sure. Like, uh, I have all the people right here that mention two scrolls, like W.W. Phelps and, uh, Oliver Cowdery. Everyone said, "We have two scrolls and some other scraps of papy." He's saying that, uh, the mummies was the big thing. No, no, the big buzz was around the papy. He is later, or he's, because he's the way he's going to frame this is to say, "Well, oh, like the, the, the, uh, the Mormons brought this like they collectively decided to buy this because it was interesting." And then Joseph discovered that, uh, there were some ancient writings. Like, that, that's a lie as well. But I mean, the main one is about the scrolls. We know for sure there were two scrolls, and Joseph identified them as one to be the scroll of Abraham, and the other scroll to be the scroll of Joseph. We know that for sure. And we know that there were some other scraps among those other scraps is the hypocephalus that we have in our scriptures today. Uh, but, but yeah, we, we can, which is placed under the head of the mummy, is it not? Right, that's where that goes. Exactly. Uh, yeah. Um, but yeah, so, um, anyway, there are multiple sources indicating that Joseph identified the writings as Abraham in the papy. Uh, and, and then, and then the other one was Joseph again. So what's the second? So we've got two visuals. We just, just to make reference to them. Yeah. Here I have a visual I created this a while ago for an episode with this with the back here professor. But basically, so you can visualize it. So at the top, you would see on, on the left side, I have the two scrolls. So the, so the top one will be, uh, the scroll of Abraham, uh, what he identified as the scroll of Abraham. The bottom would be the scroll of Joseph, and then the other scraps and fragments that that the witnesses that were there, uh, described as well. Here's what's important about these two scrolls. And go, go and show it again in the next slide. The next slide. Yeah. Okay, so we again, at the top is the scroll of, of Abraham. Uh, if you look, because the way Joseph, by this point, he had started learning Hebrew, so he kind of like already put together that Egyptian must be read the same as Hebrew from left to, uh, to, sorry, from from right to left. So when he starts translating the Book of Abraham, he will start with the, um, with the, uh, with the image that we have in our scriptures as, uh, Facsimile Number One. And it's right there on the square in the, in the screen with the red, uh, with the red square. And then if you start reading the Book of Abraham, he even references it. He, the Book of Abraham starts by saying, you know, that the, that the image at, at the commencement of of this, uh, account, or something like that. And Joseph is going to start translating right there from, from the right side. Um, and, and then we know ex, we, we have because we, we're going to talk about how we have these today. But, uh, there's a piece and I have it right there around the, the size of what it's missing from the Book of Abraham. So that's represent, that black section is representative of what has been lost from that scroll. What Egyptologists tell us today, that's the section around that size would be the, the amount of scroll that we are missing today. He's gonna make it sound like we're missing tons of scrolls. Like that, that's that's not true. That's why he's trying to say we don't know how many scrolls there were. But we do know. S. you and Gerald were were instrumental in the groundbreaking of this entire Book of Abraham issue. Do you want to talk about that at all? Well, yes, we had heard rumors of the scrolls being out there. We didn't know what library, but we knew they were somewhere out there, and we were on the track of locating them at the time the church negotiated to get the papy back from the Metropolitan Museum. And so that's how, uh, Gerald got involved in that early article in Dialogue about the papy showing that, uh, Joseph Smith was, uh, filling in parts of the scroll with, uh, texts from other pieces of papyri that didn't make any sense because they didn't fit in the text. It's like adding words in upside down and backwards into a manuscript of something. And, uh, so clear back in the late 60s, we were challenging the church on this, and the Mormon scholars were trying to defend the Book of Abraham as somehow being proven by these papy, that this supported the Book of Abraham. And we're saying, "No, sorry, these don't translate anything you're talking about." Well, it's taken the church all these years to finally get around to admitting, well, yeah, they don't really talk about Abraham. So then they have to go to some sort of, uh, mystical way of, uh, having them inspire the Book of Abraham. But the original thought, I think the church really thought that this was going to prove the Book of Abraham for them. Unfortunately, they don't translate anything about Abraham. And is it true that it really wasn't until the Gospel Topics essay on the Book of Abraham where the church admits that the word Abraham doesn't even appear anywhere on any of the scrolls or fragments? Right. Well, we knew that clear back in 1970, but the church didn't. Church wouldn't admit it. I think as early as 1912, isn't like one Egyptologist, the New York Times published like a front-page article basically saying, "Book of Abraham's a fraud." Yeah, they were making that judgment on the papy illustrations. They didn't have the text to make a definitive statement like we can now, but the illustrations, the facsimiles, the pictures were enough for Egyptologists in 1912 to say, "The Mormons don't have any idea what they're talking about or what they even have. These have nothing to do with their religious, uh, views or scriptures. This is just standard funerary text of the Egyptian religion." And Joseph did translate those, the, the images, yeah, the facsimiles. And they say nothing that he said. Yeah, the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language document proves that he believed it to be a translation, not just some sort of inspired apologist. Want to separate the facsimile from the text today, but you have to remember the Book of Abraham itself references the facsimiles. Like the, the first, uh, one of the first chapters and the first chapter of the Book of Abraham, it says, you know, if you go back and look, "the commencement of of these, uh, of this text for, for, you know, an image of of what I'm talking about." Yeah, Abraham says, "I've given you an illustration of this at the front of the record." Exactly. And so that refers, the text refers you to Facsimile Number One. And Facsimile Number One has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham. It's just a standard burial scene from the Egyptian religion, Osiris and Anubis. Not to mention that the church included the facsimiles, yeah, in the scriptures. Yes, they still do. They still do. They're still there. Yeah. This is what's like, even the craziest thing, Joseph Smith in his personal history in, uh, 1840s, 1840s history, he referred to the two scrolls of papyrus. Like he's saying, "We don't know how many scrolls." Joseph Smith himself said there were two scrolls. And but we only listen to Joseph when it helps with our narrative, right? We can ignore Joseph. Well, ignore Oliver and W.W. Phelps. I don't know. Yeah. And again, if we have to come up with the motive for why Erikson is deceiving people, it's because he, because the translations are so incredibly obviously false and incorrect that he wants to create the perception that possibly there are other scrolls that got lost or destroyed that would have the original text that would correspond with what Joseph produced as the translations. It's an act of deception right there. There is no reason to assume that no matter how many other scrolls you had that they would say anything different from what we have. Yeah. Why would we assume the missing pieces would have some strange religion on it? We're trying to create the possibility of belief when really some say the Book of Abraham is one of the, the biggest smoking guns showing Joseph Smith as a false translator, right? We don't have plates for the Book of Mormon to test on his translation. We do have the papyri to test Joseph Smith's work on the Book of Abraham, and he fails miserably. There is absolutely no connection between the papyri and the text, which the scholars seem to be conceding today when they talk about, "As he looked at the papy, he, the Book of Abraham was revealed to him." They no longer talk about it being a translation. It's a revealed text. A revelation. Yeah.

All right, let's go to the next clip.

1967, there's a researcher from the University of Utah who is not a Latter-day Saint, and, uh, he's studying old papyrus. And so he goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and they have a big collection of just random old papyrus that they don't know where it came from. Remember, everybody was looting everything out of Egypt. So the Met has this big collection. So this guy from the University of Utah, not a church member, is going through, and then he realizes that 10 of the little pieces of papyrus are from the Joseph Smith era. And you know how he did it? Okay, for another reason why I would fire people. Why, why are you laughing? Herard and S. Well, be, this is, this is so false. The Metropolitan Museum knew what they had. They knew they had bought the fragments of the Joseph Smith collection. And when Dr. Atiya comes from the University of Utah out to the Metropolitan Museum, the museum decides to show him part of the Joseph Smith collection. It's not that Atiya stumbles across these. The museum shows him the facsimile number one, and Atiya immediately recognizes and, "Oh my goodness, this is Joseph Smith papy." You know, but the museum knew all along what it was. Was it a discovery made by Atiya? Now, Dr. Atiya was a real nice guy, but the church was using him, ended up using him to try and build this story that, this miraculous finding of the, uh, Book of Abraham scriptures by an Egyptologist who happens to not be Mormon, right? Yes. And, and he wasn't Mormon. He was, uh, Egyptian. He was a member of the Coptic Church, I believe. But he was the one that became the intermediary between the museum and the church in orchestrating the, uh, acquiring of the papy by the church. Which gets into a real funny story because the church acquires them not by purchase for sale, say, but through a gift. They, the church got a Mormon member to make a donation of a couple of statues to the Metropolitan Museum to make it worth the museum's time to give the papy to the church. Why wouldn't the church just buy them? Because they, the church never buys anything. The church doesn't buy things. They get people to donate them. Oh, it's cheaper. It's cheaper. Oh, okay. Because the church doesn't have enough money. So is Keith Erikson a bad historian or a lying historian? Both. I don't know. On this, I, if he, it means he's a shoddy historian. If he's been honest, he's then shoddy, because anyone that has read very deeply on the Book of Abraham would know this story of how the Metropolitan presented that papy to Dr. Atiya. This, they interviewed, in Dialogue, a Journal of Mormon Thought, has interviews with these men at the museum where where they tell this about how this transaction took place. Sandra, he's not allowed to read Dialogue because it's not

Can don't make it up. Can I just share a quick thought about this? Because you're muted. So, um, am I? No, I can hear you. I don't hear you. Oh, right. Well, sorry. Nemo got. Can you talk? Make sure I can hear. Yeah, I, I can, I can talk. I can hear. I think we're disconnected. Let me see. Okay, talk now. Okay, right. I hear you. That was my fault. You were the audience could hear you. I couldn't. That's my. Okay, right. So Kyle S McKay, right, is a lawyer and he's currently the church historian. Um, and I made the point before that the, the difference between historians and lawyers is that they both, both deal with facts and try and work out things. But lawyers have a motive to do what's best for their client and present the facts in a way that helps the person that's hired them. And a historian has an interest in the truth and what the facts actually tell us. The problem is Keith Ericson is trying to be both. He's, he's having to be a historian, he's having to act like a lawyer. He's having to look at these facts and they go, how can I present them in such a way that makes my team win? And that means he can't be a good historian because he's having to act like a lawyer. Yeah, that's fair. All right, let's go to the next clip. Almost done. 1967, there's a researcher from the University of Utah who is not. Right. Yeah. Oh, we didn't finish it. Didn't finish it. I, oh, did you? B it? Yeah, but I just lost it. Should we play the rest of it? No, let's, uh, think Sandra told the story well enough. Okay. All right, let's go to the next. Okay, so now here's the next way you can play gotcha on the internet with this one. You can say the Egyptologist looked at those and they said they're all funerary texts. That's the word you'll see it over and over. Funerary texts, Book of Breathings, Book of Whatever, funerary texts. Little smirk. Yeah, they were buried with mummies. We've been telling that story since 1835. That is not the shocker story. Of course, they're funerary texts. They're things that people buried with them because they thought they were important. So that is not the dagger that says, oh no, they're funerary texts. Thank you for telling me what we've known since 1835. Um, so, so one way people think about this is they'll say, you know what, this doesn't bother me. I got 10 pieces, a whole bunch of scrolls. The one source we have didn't say all the scrolls from Abraham. You remember I, I gave you the quote? It was among them are the writings of Abraham and Joseph. So the one source we have says there's a whole bunch of stuff and Abraham and Joseph are in there somewhere. So, oh my gosh. I'll let you go first, Sandra. Well, this is, so he is just throwing in words to confuse everyone. Joseph tells us, I unrolled this scroll and here's the writings of Abraham, and this other one's the writing of Joseph. I don't understand how he gets this idea that there's just a, just boatloads of papyri out here and somewhere in this was Abraham and somewhere there was Joseph's stuff and we just don't know anything. It's just a ridiculous puffing up of words to avoid dealing with the real issue. Let Dan Fogel, honorary panelist, put, uh, that on screen where he says, the Book of Abraham is not a funerary text. Yeah, that makes no sense why he would say that. Yeah. Well, and then if you, if you make his, uh, story true that there was boatloads of papyri and among them, like there was Book of Abraham and then an entire Book of Joseph, you would need rooms full of papyri to fit all that text in there. Because one of the problems that we have with the papyri that we have today is that you cannot fit the Book of Abraham in the length of of what the papy. If even if he was written in Egyptian based on how Hieroglyphic, right, based on how in Joseph Smith's time they, or Joseph believed that one hieroglyphic could be translated to multiple words, sentences, or paragraphs, a whole paragraph. So with that idea, yes. But with what we know today, if he wants to fit the Book of Abraham and Book of Joseph among a ton of other stuff, he would, like, I mean, whoa, you would need like so much papy. Yeah. That's why the missing long scroll thing is like, is a way to try and get around that. It's like, oh, there's this missing papyri that's long enough to contain all of it. It's like, yeah, no, there wasn't. It just feels really deceptive where he's like, oh, from the 1830s or whatever, we've been saying it's funerary text. Never at any point did Joseph say this is funerary text. Like that's not at all what the rhetoric is. I don't know why he's spinning it that way. Yeah. Like that, that was just mind-blowing. He, he has this smarmy smirk and he's mocking. He says it's just internet trolls. But Sandra, I think you've been doing this work long before the internet, right? Yes. Well, yes, we were trolls long before, but yes, the claim that Joseph is making for what he has are at odds with the actual description of what he had. Yes, they're funerary texts. That's the problem. They have nothing about Abraham. It's, there's nothing about the, uh, biblical text on the, any of the scrolls, any of the pieces of papyri that Joseph Smith had in his possession. None of them had anything to do with the Hebrew religion. None of them had to do with Abraham. They all were Egyptian deities. Anyone can look up in on Wikipedia, look it up, Egyptian deities, and you will see the same gods depicted on the papyri as in the Egyptian religion. You've got Anubis, you've got Osiris, Isis. Uh, can't remember them all right now, but the, they're all represented on those papyri that are easily discernable as Egyptian deities. Yeah. And not just, not just the, yeah, not just the, um, the gods are represented in the story, but the pictures themselves are common. Uh, like you can find the same exact pictures in other places in Egypt and in other papyri. They're not, um, like something new that Abraham drew to tell us about his story when he was being sacrificed. Yes. Yeah, the fact that they appear in lots of scrolls, right? It's like me taking a picture of the Statue of Liberty and trying to tell you that it's really Jesus. Yeah. I mean, once you've seen the Statue of Liberty, you know what it represents and it doesn't represent Jesus. But the Mormons are trying to tell us, well, that statue of Osiris doesn't mean Osiris, that's really Abraham sitting on that throne. No, it's Osiris. Well, what's particularly disturbing about this is that Erikson is mocking, you know, critics for saying truth tellers. Yeah, he's mocking truth tellers for saying that Joseph Smith's translation was erroneous because while the scrolls are funerary texts, Joseph didn't produce funerary text. He produced the Book of Abraham, which is not funerary text, which is manufactured revelation that's false in a historical. But Erikson is being very deceptive by saying, oh, the church has always told people the scrolls are funerary text. They've said that since 1835. It's an overt, egregious, outrageous, smirky, mocking, deceptive misrepresentation. Right. Two things. Um, the, I think when we talk about funerary text, people need to understand funerary text in Egyptian or for Egyptians, it would mean texts that would help the person that died have, um, information needed to like pass to the to the other side. And so that's why it's called funerary text, and that's why they were buried with, uh, the person. Um, so just that, that's something important to understand. It's not about the Book of Abraham doesn't have anything to do with that, but right. Yeah. All right. Uh, let's go ahead and play the next clip. We've only got two more clips to go. Okay, so now here's the next way you can play gotcha on the internet with this one. You can say the Egyptologist looked at those and they said they all funerary. Oh, oh, okay. I'm sorry. So did we talk about the slide that came after Julia? No, that one. Haros, I think he kind of referenced it, but he can go ahead and talk about that if he wants. Did, did we already cover it? Harard? Yeah. Um, yeah, just basically two scrolls, the story of the two scrolls. Okay. Okay. So then, then we're on to the last clip. Yeah. For many people, they say that, okay, great, that's fine. Okay, now there's one piece that doesn't, that that doesn't work for. And this is the piece, one of those 10 pieces is the little diagram that's reproduced in the Book of Abraham, and it's the one where there's a person laying on a table and being sacrificed. And so if you've ever been bored as a teenager in Sunday school and flipped to the only pictures in scripture, you went to that one and you saw there's a little description about what's going on in the photograph about, you know, the gods and people and whatever. Okay. So we have that, that image is one of the papyrus fragments and Egyptologists look at that and they say, yeah, that doesn't say the thing that that it says right underneath there. Okay. So, um, now we take a step back. Uh, we don't have any idea what's going on in Joseph's mind as he translates things. He doesn't tell us. Every time Joseph is asked, how did you translate the Book of Mormon? He says, I did it by the gift and power of God. Uh, we, we don't even have an account from Joseph about the Book of Abraham. All the accounts are more. This is crazy that we don't have an account of what Joseph was thinking when he was translating the Book of Abraham. Like that's to grammar enough. Yeah. Yeah. We have the grammar alphabet written by multiple people simultaneously were like, they were literally telling us exactly how they were thinking the papyri must be translated. They were writing the characters on the left side and telling us the meaning of the characters. Yeah. Just crazy. And again, check out the Robert Ritner series on Mormon Stories where he goes into depth. He was the world's most foremost Egyptologist and authority on Egyptology in the Book of Mormon and he shows Book of Abraham. What did I say? Book of Abraham. What we. Thank you. And if, if, if Keith Erikson wants to, uh, try and shift and say, oh, it was only scribes that wrote down what Joseph was doing and all this sort of stuff, well, those same scribes that wrote the grammar and alphabet of the Egyptian language were trusted to write sections of the Doctrine and Covenants. So at what point do we stop trusting the scribes that write things down for Joseph? Because that's going to start to undermine a lot more things than just the Book of Abraham. At that, we have a version of it in Joseph Smith's own handwriting. So like we can't pin it on the scribes on that one either. It's just, uh, it's kind of crazy, right? Let's, oh, sorry, one more thing. The church has officially admitted that those things, what those things are, in the Joseph Smith Papers Project. Um, so like there's not, we, we can't skirt around it. Like the is not even agreeing with the Joseph Smith Papers Project at this point. Exactly, which he's supposedly in charge of. Yeah. All right, well, let's go ahead and finish the clip. Practical. It's like I spent the day working on the Abraham manuscripts. So like, really high level, his journal is with those. Spent the day working on Abraham. What was he work? How did it work? Like, we don't know anything, uh, about that. So again, this is people in the gap saying, oh no, we don't know how it worked. Sometimes people look for patterns and here's an interesting pattern. We'll go back to the Joseph Smith Bible translation. Um, when Joseph sat down to translate the Bible, he opens up to Genesis chapter 1, verse one, and the first thing that happens is he has a vision. All kinds of stuff about Moses and God and all the worlds that were created. And Moses asks why. And, uh, Jehovah says, well, this is my work and my glory to bring to pass the immortality, eternal life. All of that stuff that we have in Moses chapter 1 today is a vision that Joseph had before he even looked at the words in the beginning. That's why in the Book of Moses, in the beginning comes in Moses chapter 2, and Moses chapter 2 lines up with Genesis chapter 1, because that whole vision is received just by opening the Bible and and starting to do the work. And so people use a word called catalyst. Clearly none of those words in that vision are in Genesis chapter 1, but doing the work of translation was a catalyst for Joseph to receive more revelation. This happens all the time. Uh, about a, oh, eight or nine revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants come while Joseph is translating the Bible. And they are, and you'll see it in the heading, he was translating the Bible. They ask about this, and this revelation comes. So we know that that's a. So, so some people will say, well, Joseph could have sat down and looked at the thing and it could have been a catalyst to learn more. I don't know. You make peace with it however you want. It's not a temple recommend question of which one it, it was. So, uh, if you ask me which one it was, I say, I don't know. I think missing manuscript is helpful. Catalyst is interesting, but I remember filling gaps. I don't know what Joseph was doing. I'm not going to tell you that I know what Joseph was doing when he does it because he didn't, um, tell us that. So there's a quick version of it. Did we get all the issues? All right. I'm not even sure the guy on the stand believes him. He's president. Yeah. Well, um, and, uh, and Julia, at any point if you need to go, you could totally go. I just want to make sure you don't stay beyond when you can. But Julie, I just want to thank before we wrap up. Uh, I'm gonna ask everyone to kind of grade Keith Erikson on his scholarship and on his honesty from A to F. So Julia, before you go, what grade are you giving Keith Erikson? First on his scholarship, A to F. What's your, what's your, what's your grade? Um, scholarship as in like the things that he's presenting because like he's presenting accuracy, his knowledge, you know, um, because he's missing a, like we've been having slides about the things that he's been missing. So I don't, I don't like his scholarship either. G to C? Is that a D? D. Okay. How about his honesty? Uh, no, I don't like it at all. He's like, he's like holding things back and he's like telling you false numbers, he's telling you false things. Like, I don't know, a grade because you're too. I don't want to give a grade. All right. Any final thoughts, Julie, before you have to go? Uh, no, this is really good. And like, I like when people go to these. If, if this is true that you had to go see your bishop to go to this meeting to have your questions resolved, he is doing a really bad job of resolving anything. Like, in fact, like he didn't even answer the question of like, why did Joseph practice polygamy to begin with? Or why was he marrying women who were already married? Like, those were never answered. And like he's again, he's like, oh, this isn't a temple recommend question, just make peace with it however you want. Like, no, but hang on, this is can be a question that breaks somebody's faith. It doesn't have to be a temple recommend question. Like, it's still a really hard thing that we need to have answered or figure out. And he's just sort of brushing it off. So I don't, I don't like what he's doing and I think he needs to do a better job. Well, Julia, thanks for all the part you played in helping bring today's episode to us. Thank you. Yeah, of course. Uh, Nemo, are you too, are Brits too polite to give grades if they're not nice grades? Well, I mean, I want to add a third category, his ability to answer questions that are put to him. And I'd give him a square F for that one. Uh, oh, just answering questions directly. He just, he just can't answer the questions. Like Sandra keeps having to go, he's still not answered it. Um, what grade you on honesty, A to F? On honesty, an E. Oh, wow. Is there an E? Wait, is that, is that worse? Is that worse or better? Uh, it's better than an F. Okay. It just goes the alphabet down, doesn't it? Do Brits give the grade E? I think so. We don't have E. We don't have E in the United States. It's A B C D and what, what you guys got against E? It's a perfectly legitimate part of the alphabet. Grade system doesn't include E. We that one A B C D and then F. Man, the E is getting some serious underrepresentation in the states. We need to fix this. Okay, right, fine. He qualifies for E. Yeah, I'll give him an F plus. Okay. All right. And then, yeah, for his scholarship, like the problem is with scholarship, it's how well you have a handle on the, the, the subject matter, I would think. And to Sandra's point, I feel as though he has got a pretty good handle on it, which is why his honesty score is so low, because I refuse to believe that he doesn't have a good handle on this stuff because it's not difficult to have a good handle on this stuff. So his, his scholarship's up there. He must know his stuff. He's probably like a C or a D. But, um, his honesty lets him down because he can't present it all because there's motivations that won't let him. Yeah. All right. Hararo, what's, what's the grade? Grade on honesty? F. F on honesty. And on scholarship? Uh, yeah, probably a D. I don't know. A D on honesty and on scholarship. On scholarship. Okay. Sandra, I give a D straight across. D straight across. Well, I'll, I'll just say I'm gonna give him an F for empathy because what he never does, he never admits any wrongdoing by Joseph Smith. He never admits any wrongdoing by any church leader, including by the modern Mormon church. So basically, there's no point where he just says, yeah, critics or people who lose their faith have legitimate reasons to be concerned. He basically either gaslights or mocks people who have genuine legitimate either criticisms or concerns. And I think that's the biggest disservice here of all is that none of these people are going to leave this meeting, uh, feeling like the church has ever erred on anything and that any of their, if they are struggling, or if any of their loved ones or friends or family are struggling, they're not going to leave with any sense of like, yeah, there are problems. The church has made mistakes. Joseph did things wrong. It's, it's as if, uh, Joseph has been perfect, the church has been per, been perfect. And again, gaslighting. These are not the droids you're looking for. And I think that's a huge problem. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, uh, Nemo, you are coming to the United States. Do you want to give a quick plug for Thrive and for your get together? Yeah, so I am coming to the United States of America, the last week in February. I'll be at Thrive St. George. You can get your tickets. I think there are a certain sold. It's sold out, unfortunately. Yeah, sorry, folks. And the other event I'm doing is also selling out fast. So, uh, get your tickets for that. I'm doing an event Friday the 8th. Is it? Do you want to paste the link in the comments for those who want to see readily available? I'll find that and we'll paste it in the. You can paste it in the comments and we'll have Maven hopefully add it to the show notes. Oh, I've got it here. Hang on. Let me put that in the comments. It's stories.org. I think it's Nemo Das event, right? Yeah, I put the donor box link in the in the comments. But yeah, the VIP dinner sold out, but there's still general admission tickets. It's an evening with John and Nemo will be chatting and I believe Sam Shell will turn up and cause carnage as well. So it's gonna be a great night. Uh, just to, to kind of me and John to talk about the recent events with my communication and all that sort of good stuff. Uh, but yeah, I'll be, I'll be in, um, lovely Deseret for a couple of weeks. Mon, that'll be great. Well, Nemo, thanks so much for joining us. And also please everybody, in addition to subscribing to, you know, subscribing to Mormon Stories podcast on YouTube, the channel, and on Facebook, make sure and also subscribe to Nemo the Mormon YouTube channel. He does great work. Check out his work. And, um, while you're becoming a monthly donor to the OPA Story Foundation or Mormon Stories, you can also support Nemo as well. Is that through donor box or Venmo or what? Yes, through through donor box. My my donations are down so much. I'm having to eat off-brand Jammy Dodgers. It's, it's, it's not good times over here, John, I tell you. Okay, so how do they support you? How, where do they go? Donorbox.org is the moment, I think it is. All right, well, thanks for joining us today, Nemo. It's been great to have you. Pleasure, pleasure. Any final words? Um, no, thank, thank you. Thanks for having us. It was a good episode. Well, thanks to you as well. You and Julia together made this happen. So thanks Gerardo for making this happen. All right, Sandra, because you're the GOAT, and when I say GOAT, I mean the greatest of all time, we give you the final word. Oh, wow. All right, I just want to point out that the one answer that could have solved everything is that Joseph made it all up. But they can't come to that conclusion. Yeah, that's a bridge too far, as they say. A bridge too far. Well, Sandra, we're so honored that you're able to join us, uh, here occasionally on Mormon Stories. You've retired? Yes, but trying, but people love you. Like any episode with you gets like over 100,000 views like almost automatically. I'm helping the cause. What's it like to be 83 or 84 and still have star power? Star power, wow. Well, it's really fun when I go on to dinner and someone comes up and gives me a hug and says, oh, you helped me. So thank you to my public. All right. And again, if you want to check out, uh, Sandra's A+ scholarship, go to UT lm.org. Yes. And they can get PDFs. Yes. For, for all eternity, you can read everything you want to know. All right, well, thanks, Sandra, for making this happen. And again, thanks to everyone who made comments today. Thanks to Dan Vogel for his great scholarship and for his comments today. Thanks to everyone who joined us on the live stream. Thanks to, uh, to Maven for helping out, as well as Brooklyn and our board of directors. There's so much behind the scenes that goes on to make this stuff possible. So we just want to thank everyone for that. Thanks to our donors. We couldn't do this without you. Monthly donors, uh, if you are not a donor and you value this content, please become a monthly donor. Go to mormonstories.org, click on the donate button, become a monthly donor, and we'll keep doing this stuff. Again, please subscribe and like. Please comment. Please share these episodes with others. Please email us at mormonstories@gmail.com with any of your feedback. And again, we're always looking for guests on Mormon Stories or panelists. So if you've got something to say and you want to come on Mormon Stories, go to mormonstories.org, apply to be, um, a guest on Mormon Stories, and we'd love to consider you. Again, thanks to everyone for joining us. I think that's all for today. Be good to each other. Be kind to each other. And we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care, everybody.