The Tower of Babel and Mormon Scripture I Ep. 1626 | LDS Discussions Ep. 13

Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dulin, and we are, uh, you know, 10 or so, a dozen or so episodes into this amazing series with, uh, Mike from LDS Discussions, on an analysis of, uh, Mormon truth claims. We're gonna maybe have 40 or 50 or more of these when we're all done, but we're super happy and proud of what we've done so far.

Today, we're going to be tackling the Tower of Babel and Mormon scripture. And of course, we have back with us, Mike of LDSDiscussions.com. Hey, Mike.

Hey, everybody. You ready for another one?

Mike, let's do it. All right. This is so good. So we've talked all about, you know, Book of Mormon, and we've started talking about the Bible. Uh, I, you know, we just finished an episode about the problems with Adam and Eve, where we basically showed that Adam and Eve couldn't have been historical, literal figures. And yet, the entire, all of Mormon scripture and prophetic utterances from Joseph Smith to present, um, you know, and the Articles of Faith, they all rely on a literal Adam and Eve. And if that weren't enough, we've, we've got the Tower of Babel that we now have to deal with. So where should we begin?

So we can just begin right, go dive right in. So, yeah, now that we've kind of moved into the biblical scholarship, we've done Adam and Eve, I'm showing why that's not a historical story and why that impacts Mormonism. We've talked about the global flood. And so that leads us to the Tower of Babel. And so, um, again, anyone who's watching this or listening, probably is aware of the story. But the Tower of Babel is the story in Genesis 11 that explains why different civilizations and communities in the ancient world spoke different languages. And so, um, the story is estimated to have happened, you know, depending on who you're asking, about 2400 to 2200 BCE. And that's about 100 years after the global flood would have occurred. And again, we talked about this with Adam and Eve, but in global flood, secular scholars, and I would say most non-secular scholars, would consider the Tower of Babel to be another ideological myth. But the Book of Mormon, again, is going to tie this directly into literal history because it ties not just the Jaredites coming to the Americas, but to the records in the Book of Ether, the Nephite interpreters, and the truth claims of the Mormon Church and Joseph Smith as well, all tell us that this must be a literal event. Again, that most scholars today would argue without question is just simply not historical in the way it's presented in Genesis.

And if we just want to kind of back up, um, you know, you can imagine, you can imagine people sitting around, maybe these people don't even know that there are people living in the Americas. Maybe they don't even know that the Americas exist yet. And they're realizing that there are other civilizations and they're starting to have a language and they're starting to tell stories and write stories down, thousands of years ago. And they're like, wow, oh, we bumped into these other people. They speak differently than we do. How do we, oh, and now that we've bumped into another group and they have a totally different language, like, where are all these languages and people's coming from?

Yep. And so you come up with a story, is that right? I mean, yeah. And again, you know, we tied this with Adam and Eve. I know where to mount this where you look at the Adam and Eve story to the Bible is similar to how Joseph Smith is creating origin stories in the Book of Mormon. And this is no different. So in the Book of Mormon, you're trying to answer that question of why, when the white settlers arrived in America, did they find these Native Americans who had dark skin, who behaved differently than them, who did agriculture different, who lived differently than them? And you're trying to create, the Book of Mormon creates an origin story for them because the white settlers are trying to figure out why these dark-skinned Indians are in this land and how they got there and why they're different. And the Tower of Babel is the same thing. Like, you know, my kid, as he's growing up, he used to ask, like, you know, if we saw someone in a store that was speaking a different language, they might say, you know, why, why couldn't I understand that? And then you just explain, well, they speak Spanish, or, you know, they speak Polish, or they speak, you know, Arabic, whatever, you know, I'm trying to think of a different, Urdu, some languages we, you know, we've heard around here. And in biblical times, when you come across new civilizations, you just assume everyone has this, this language, right? That's just evolved from every person. And so you're creating an origin story to explain why there are different people speaking different languages. And just with Adam and Eve and the global flood, these stories are mythical. They're added into, um, Genesis at the beginning, but later, so that they, um, give the communities that these books are being written for, that these, these texts are being written for, um, their, their origin and their understanding. And well, um, they might not take them as literal history, it's a way for them to kind of understand a little bit better and to put it in the mindset of how it frames within a religious, uh, standpoint.

Yeah. And so solidify, listeners and viewers, in your mind, around 2200 to 2400 BCE, if the Mormon, you know, scriptural timeline is accurate, it's got to be around 2200 to 2400 BCE, right? 100 years after the flood. And out of the gate, we're already starting with, with the acknowledgement that that scholars and scientists say this event didn't happen. But let's, let's suspend judgment and look at the evidence.

Yeah. And so this is another one where we just, you know, if you go into it, um, you could kind of point out the problems really easily today. Um, but again, like I said, most biblical scholars agree that the stories of Genesis are not historical and were written later. Um, but with the Tower of Babel, we can clearly point to reasons, just like we did Adam and Eve and the global flood, why it simply cannot be a historical event because there were already a diversity of languages that are established before the Tower of Babel would have taken place in that 2200 to 2400 BCE range. So, um, written records of the Sumerian language exist as early as 3500 BCE, Egyptian as early as 3300, Akkadian as early as 2800, um, Canaanite and Ebla, I'm not sure if I'm saying that right, around 2400 BCE. So we're already seeing that there's not one universal language before this time frame anyways. And so, um, written languages evolved after they were spoken for a long time in their community, meaning that the languages were developed long before we have written dates. And so, um, being able to find those written examples above, um, tell you that they were probably developed a lot earlier as far as oral languages go. And, um, Genesis itself confirms that there were other languages before the Tower, available in Genesis chapter 10. Um, they say, "By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands, every one after his tongue; after their families, in their nations." These are the sons of Ham after their families, after their tongues. These are the sons of Shem after their families, after their tongues. And so, you know, the Tower of Babel being this event that's going to confound a single, Adam-endemic language into others is, is just problematic from the start.

And a viewer, listener, without having, without knowing anything about biblical criticism or historical criticism, or without having watched the David Bokovoy episodes of Mormon Stories, they're like, wait a minute, how could the Bible simultaneously talk about, you know, let's just say Adamites or descendants of Adam speaking multiple languages, and then simultaneously have the Tower of Babel story, which would not allow for languages before the Tower of Babel? But then you have to understand that the Bible has Genesis has two creation stories that are actually different. Like, the Bible is full of self-contradictions. And, and that's just, you have to understand how the Bible came to be, both the Old Testament and the New Testament, to understand that the Bible is contradicting itself all the time.

Yeah. And that's just, that, I mean, again, and this is one of those things we mentioned, I mentioned the Adam and Eve story because I think when you get into biblical criticism and in biblical topics, it is a little bit different than talking about like Mormonism, especially for a lot of people. If you, if you're a believer, and then you start to question some of the unique Mormonism stuff, and then all of a sudden you get to hear, you're like, oh crap, because this has problems too. Um, but again, you're using the same skills you use to, to evaluate the truth claims in Mormonism. But now we're going, and I would argue, now we have more to work with, because at least with the biblical stories, we actually do have more of a history of how these developed. And, um, it helps us to get a better understanding of what the initial intentions were when they wrote them.

Yeah. And, and we should just make this more explicit. All of this is in an essay you wrote, maybe with some help of others, at LDSDiscussions.com. Babel, B-A-B-E-L. Yeah. People can kind of look at the footnotes and, yeah. And there's gonna be more there. There's obviously more in there. This is, obviously, a shortened version of it. But yeah, I mean, and this is just, you know, this is a really important thing because again, I mentioned in the Adam and Eve episode that Anthony Miller is one who kind of turned me on to this. But the Tower of Babel is, this will be a shorter episode because it's not as involved as Adam and Eve and the global flood, but it's just as important because of the, the way that Joseph Smith puts it directly into the timeline of the Book of Mormon. And so you can't have a figurative or a mythical Tower of Babel story and still have the Book of Mormon be historical. And that is just where this stuff gets really problematic. Because, as I said earlier, with these other topics, most churches can find meaning in these stories and still acknowledge and give space for the fact that they might not be like, perfect little history. With Mormonism, you just can't do that.

Yeah. Okay. So, uh, I guess we go to the next slide. Yep. And so, actually, go back one more. Um, so we've kind of, we've kind of hinted on this with some of our topics overall, but math is a really big problem when you get into some of these topics. And so, as we mentioned earlier, um, with Adam and Eve and the global flood, uh, most, most biblical scholars agree that the Pentateuch was not likely created until somewhere around the sixth and fifth century BCE, at least composed, composed in a way that we have it today.

By books of the Bible, right? Yeah. So, so for the Book of Mormon's purpose would be the first five books of the Bible. It should be on the brass plates. And, um, you know, one of the things about when we get into this a little bit, you know, Moses is, you know, believed to have been written this or, you know, scribe to have written this. And he would have lived between like 1391 and 1271 BCE. But, you know, again, that's so far before these texts are being created that tells you that these were not being written by Moses, which is another issue with regards to how Joseph Smith puts that and cements that as his historical, um, data point. Um, but the point is, these are written late. And the belief was that the global flood wiped out all human life on Earth about a hundred years before this happens, outside of those on the ark. So we have eight people, and that all life descended from Noah's family with one single endemic language. I mean, every, remember, under the biblical history, every single person on Earth is dead except for like these eight people. So just imagine, you're, you're, say, you're at a holiday event, you're at Christmas dinner with your family, and every person on Earth dies except for that thing. You're gonna have one language. That's just how it goes, right? And so, um, using the Bible's accounting of the children that came from Noah's sons after the flood in Genesis 10, by the time of the Tower of Babel, there were about 70 men born from the lines of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. And, um, even if we were going to assume half of them were women, just for ease of doing this, there'd be 150 people on the entire Earth that would have been told are creating this, the Tower of Babel. And again, it's a math thing. 150 people would have to then gather all the supplies, mold all of, you know, the bricks or what, you know, the cement, however they built it. And that is impossible.

And then when we look at the estimates of the world population based on archaeology, they believe that the around 3000 BC, either between 14 and 45 million, growing to between 27 and 72 million by 2000 BCE. So, in addition to what we talked about before about the global flood not being a historical event, there's a lot of evidence that the world was actually thriving with the diversity of civilizations and languages. And yet, in the Bible, we're being told there's about 150 people on the Earth at that time. And, um, in the show notes, we'll include links to our global flood episode with Simon Sutherton, a scientist, and we'll be covering that as well, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, and so there's, there's, there's gonna be a lot about the flood that you can find on Mormon Stories and elsewhere. And like I said, it's all of these things tied together. So you've got Adam and Eve, then the global flood, and the Tower of Babel. And all three of these stories with the scriptures of Mormonism are going to fit together in a way that you have to acknowledge, even as a believer. And if you do that, then yeah, like I've said before, it's about, for me, just being intellectually consistent. Or if you don't want to be intellectually consistent, just say, I don't care. But don't argue, you know, I mean, like, don't, don't try to push that it's history to kids on a Sunday when you know it's not. And if you're going to tell the kids on, in, you know, in Sunday school that it's not history, then you're going to have that, you're going to have to have the difficult conversation as to how to make sense of that going forward. But again, um, you know, the numbers tell us one, that way so many more people lived here than the Bible would tell us. I mean, that's, that's not in dispute by any real scientific study. And then on the flip side, if you want to believe a Tower of Babel was really built, you're dealing with 150 people, half, half men and half women, who are going to have to build this thing. And that also just is not going to happen in this time frame.

Yeah. And then all the languages that we have today are going to be, yeah, exactly. And so we, it just doesn't make sense. But, um, you know, we talked about this before, a lot of these stories are influenced by earlier myths. And so, um, a Sumerian, Sumerian myth written about 2100 BCE, called Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, discusses calling upon the Lord to unite the languages again among the people. And in an Assyrian myth dating from the 8th century BC, and this will be a lot closer to when this is going to be created, which I think is important, um, they discussed the confounding of tongues. So I just want to read this to you. This is from an Assyrian myth, 8th century BCE. "Of him, his heart was evil against the father of all the gods. Was wicked of him, his heart was evil. Babylon brought to subjection and great. He confounded their speech. Babylon brought to subjection and great. He confounded their speech. Their strong place, tower, all the day they founded. To their strong place in the night, entirely he made an end. In his anger also a word thus he poured out to scatter abroad. He said, his face he gave this command. Their counsel was confused. The course he broke. Fixed the sanctuary." So again, this is going to be written before the Tower of Babel story is going to be compiled into Genesis. And it's basically giving this Babylonian myth, or, you know, that there was, um, a confounding of tongues because the people were evil and that they get scattered. And so we're going to see this in the Tower of Babel story in Genesis, which again, shows us that just like the Book of Mormon is pulling from 19th century ideas, these early, uh, stories in Genesis are pulling from Babylonian myths. And that's why I mentioned before, as David Bokovoy says, "Without Babel, there'd be no Bible." That's why. Because they're pulling so heavily from these stories because these are the stories being told from generation to generation, um, in these communities, and then they're actualizing them to themselves. As again, Dave Bachman would say, um, they're actualizing them to their own communities to give purpose, to give meaning, to give origin, um, to them so that they can learn from them and, you know, grow as a community. And again, a Mormon's going to go, wait a minute, 2400 comes before 2100, right? The, the Tower of Babel people would have written down the Tower of Babel stuff at 2400, right? BCE. And that, that's earlier. But again, you, you just made the point previously that those, there's no evidence that those stories were written down until over a thousand years later, that then the Tower of Babel would have allegedly taken place. And, and, uh, again, if we've got Sumerian myths literally written around the time the Tower of Babel should have happened, those are going to trump his, you know, if you're going to use, if you're going to rely on historical methods at all, you're going to, you're going to conclude that it's much more likely that these Sumerians make their way into something written, you know, six or eight hundred years, uh, BCE, that then make it into the Bible. It's just, it, it's, that's what makes sense.

Yeah. And not only that, but again, we've talked about before, and the episodes that with David Bokovoy, I think illustrated a lot better than obviously I could, but yeah. So like we were talking about, there's a lot of evidence that was written later. There's a lot of evidence, uh, as I think David Bokovoy said, Hebrew is the origin of the original text of Genesis for the, the different sources. And so because of that, they know Hebrew is not a written text, I want to say, like 1300 BCE, a written language. And so the Tower of Babel was not written until probably the earliest, I mean, I'm possible earliest would be like a thousand to 1200 BCE, something like that. And so while I guess you can make the argument that it would have predated the Assyrian myth, we have evidence of the Assyrian myth being in the 8th century because we have it. There is no evidence of the Tower of Babel story being compiled before that, and a lot of evidence to say it was compiled after. And so again, it's, it's kind of like one of those things where we're piling problems on top of problems. And so if you want to make that claim, it's just, you've got a lot of other things you have to answer for in order to make it work. And that's where it gets messy. But at the same time, this follows the pattern that we see with Adam and Eve and the global flood of borrowing from earlier myths to create an origin story for the people this is being written for.

Okay. So, uh, so what, what's next? So this was, um, something that David Bokovoy actually mentioned on Mormon Stories when he was with you, is which is to say, um, that the story is likely a Babylonian polemic against ziggurat worship. And when he had said that, I remember thinking that was a pretty cool thing because it kind of shows that it was a story that was being written for a purpose, which was to tell people, you know, not to view these, these ziggurats as like these important things. And, um, so, you know, I started looking into it and I found out that a lot of scholars believe, and I'm not sure if I'm saying this right, but Etemenanki was a ziggurat which was dedicated to Marduk in the city of Babylon and was likely an influence in the Tower of Babel story. And they said it was famously rebuilt by the sixth century BCE Neo-Babylonian dynasty rulers Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II. Second, according to modern scholars such as Stephen L. Harris, the biblical story of the Tower of Babel was likely influenced by Etemenanki during the Babylonian captivity of the Hebrews. And the cool thing about this is not only does this match the story of the Tower of Babel, but it also again, kind of confirms the dating of Genesis because this was famously rebuilt by the 6th century, which is around when they think the story is being written. And this would be a story that'd be told during the Babylonian captivity, which is a lot where a lot of the scholars believe these materials are being kind of compiled and finished. And so, kind of like we talk about how DNA is being, is confirming what we know about archaeology, this is kind of cool because this story is kind of confirming what they believe about the dating, which is why this is a really important data point in trying to understand how the story evolved and why it was written in the first place.

Okay. And the ziggurat, I just looked up that term. In ancient Mesopotamia, a rectangular stepped tower, yeah, sometimes surmounted by a temple. Um, ziggurats are first attested in the late third millennium BCE and probably inspired the biblical story of the Tower of Babel.

Yep. So it's really important. And, you know, when you see the pictures now, I should have included when I feel like an idiot for not doing that, but yeah, when you look at the picture, like, yeah, that would make sense. Now, to be fair, I think the pictures are also based on the, you know, artist's artist's picturing, uh, what that would look like. But yeah, you know, so David Bokovoy's point is just awesome because it led to me looking that up, which obviously he would have known that, but it's just cool because it helps to date it, helps to give you, um, clues on the dating of the text, why the text was written, and it makes sense, it fits. And so that's what we talked about earlier about when you talk about history versus kind of having straight faith, these are giving you historical data points that again, point to the clues as to why they are being written and probably were better understood by the people at that time as to why it was being written. You know, there's, um, that's going to tangent, but I don't know if it was David Bokovoy or if it was someone else, um, I was listening to and they were saying that, you know, the story of Abraham, you know, sacrificing his firstborn, in a lot of ways was, was because back then, people, some people did sacrifice their firstborn kids in religion. And that story is not historical, but it was being used as a way to tell people, guys, stop doing this, you don't need to do this. And, um, and that's why I find this stuff like truly fascinating because you're learning a lot, not just about the text, but about why it was written and how it's serving a purpose in that community at its time. And that helps us to understand why it was done. But it's also really cool because it helps us to be able to understand what Joseph Smith is doing, um, with, you know, his, his scriptures as well, even though unfortunately, they're not going to hold up well from a historical standpoint. Which takes us to the next slide.

Yeah. How about that for a transition? And the Tower of Babel. Yeah. And so, you know, for the Book of Mormon, um, a non-historical Tower of Babel presents a huge problem. And it's because in the Book of Mormon, um, they have the Book of Ether, which is a literal recounting of the Tower of Babel. And so, it says, "Which Jared came forth with his brother and their families, with some well, with some others in their families from the great tower at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people and swore in his wrath that they should be scattered upon all the face of the earth. And according to the word of the Lord, the people were scattered. And the brother of Jared, being a large and mighty man and a man highly favored of the Lord, Jared his brother said unto him, 'Cry unto the Lord that he will not confound us, that we may not understand our words.' And it came to pass that the brother of Jared did cry unto the Lord, and the Lord had compassion upon Jared, therefore he did not confound the language of Jared, and Jared and his brother were not confounded." And so this right here is taking what is an ideological myth and just solidifying it as a historical story. There's no way around it. And again, um, you know, we'll have, um, some apologists who will say, well, you know, they, the early prophets believed these stories to be true, and so they spoke them as true. And that, that would make sense. But this is putting it as a materialistic, physical, tangible story that, without it, creates huge problems. It's a lot like Adam and Eve.

Yeah. It's exactly like that. Um, and, and we're going to talk about this in the very next slide, but I'm just going to kind of make the point beforehand about anachronisms. If, if you were to stumble upon a document, a writ, you know, um, that that alleged to to have been a document written by Abraham Lincoln, and Abraham Lincoln mentions in the document, in his own handwriting, that he grabbed his iPhone and used it to call General Lee or whatever, General Grant, you immediately know it's false, that it's a fraudulent document because it's got an impossibility in the text. And I'm not trying to like be ham-fisted here, but just like with Adam and Eve, if the Tower of Babel doesn't happen, isn't real, if it's just a Sumerian myth that got incorporated into the Old Testament, it immediately then calls into question whether the Book of Mormon from the beginning is a historical document.

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, that's the problem. We're just like, these overviews are just one after the other. It's like, you need all of these things to work, and it just doesn't. And so, I'm with the Tower of Babel, um, if it's a mythical event, as the evidence tells us, and then Jared's story immediately becomes non-historical. But it gets more problematic because if the Tower of Babel did not happen, then the 16 stones that the Lord touched were non-historical. Which means that the two stones that were sealed up to translate the plates of Jared were also non-historical. Those two, those same two seer stones were later used as the Nephite interpreters, which were buried with the gold plates of the Book of Mormon. If the Tower of Babel is mythical, as both history and linguistics tell us, then the Nephite interpreters are also mythical because they rely on a literal Tower of Babel. And if the Nephite interpreters are derived from a mythical story, then the entire Book of Mormon story is derived from a mythical story because the gold plates were buried with the interpreters. Moroni claimed to translate the records from the brother of Jared of a vision of all things from the foundation of the world until the end thereof, using these Nephite interpreters, which he included with the steel plates to be revealed in my own due time.

And so, long story short, I have to ask you, yeah, did you just say that according to Joseph Smith, the Urim and Thummim, the two stones for the Urim and Thummim in Joseph Smith's, uh, accounting, went all the way back to the Jaredites coming to America?

Well, so, Jaredites, as I understand, and I will correct myself if I'm wrong here, as I understand this kind of thing, we talked with Anthony Miller about was, though the Lord touches those 16 stones, right? And those stones are used for, um, to translate the plates of Jared. And then they're passed along and they're used as Nephite interpreters. And we're told in Joseph Smith's own words that he gets Nephite interpreters with the plates because, remember, he doesn't use the term Urim and Thummim. And so I guess it's possible they're different, but the, the phrasing leads you to believe that they have to be the same because he's calling them Nephite interpreters, just as they're used in the Book of Mormon as interpreters for the Nephites. Um, so again, if I'm wrong, I will correct that. But everything that I could see tells us that there's this line. And now, not only that, but there kind of needs to be because that line of, you know, being passed down throughout as with a special purpose gives again more credibility to Joseph Smith when he claims to have them. And also, you know, backdates itself into the text as well to give it a little bit more authority within, um, the translation process, which Joseph Smith is going to claim, as we spoke about, you know, many episodes, it feels like a go now, um, the spectacles that he, uh, basically is forced to, um, agree to because of Samuel Lawrence going with him to the hill and claiming to see them. So all of those things kind of get tied together. But again, I'll correct myself if I'm wrong and I will double check that. But when I was doing it the first time, I was trying to go through that because of Anthony Miller's presentation talked about it, and it made sense that unless they're going to kind of conflate the terms, it would match the line of, you know, the, the interpreters going from all the way from there to being used by the Nephites to Joseph Smith.

Yeah. And again, this all, all these stories affect and infect each other. Because if we know, if we know that the spectacles were just an idea that just was forced to acknowledge, and then, and then we know that that no one ever saw them really, and that he didn't use them, right? That, that combined with the fact that, um, we know the Tower of Babel never happened, so the Jaredites never happened, so the interpreters never happened. That would make sense that that interpreters, there's no evidence of the interpreters ever being used or witnessed by anyone. Like, all it's like all these different, it's like a crime scene where we've got all these different kind of lanes of evidence converging to invalidate each other, almost, right?

Well, yeah. And again, we're talking about 16 stones, um, that are touched by God for the Jaredites. And remember, excuse me, um, in treasure digging, we, they use stones to, to claim to see and to claim all that. And so again, that again, you can make the argument that's also tying back into treasure digging. And it also again, by saying that God used stones to allow for interpretation, gives Joseph Smith credibility when he's using his own peep/seer stone and a hat to translate the Book of Mormon. It sounds more biblical because in the Book of Mormon, they're using stones as well. And I think that's also why that story goes through where you have the Nephite interpreters, which are then buried with the, with the, with the plates of the Book of Mormon.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Yeah. And so it's just like I said, it's probably, it's problem on top of problem. And it's hard to, to really deal with. Um, and so I think we're on the next level, right?

Okay. Yeah. So, yeah. So basically, if the Tower of Babel is not historical, then Joseph Smith claiming to obtain the Nephite interpreters and use them before obviously switching to his own stone to have becomes impossible. In other words, if the Tower of Babel is not historical, as the evidence indicates, then those Nephite interpreters cannot be historical. Which means Joseph Smith created the story of the stones as he was familiar with the idea of using stones to see objects and messages from the past with treasure digging. And as we mentioned a few minutes ago, he also was forced to kind of create the story of the spectacles with the two stones because Samuel Lawrence went with him to the hill and said he saw them and forced Joseph Smith to admit he saw them. And as we've noted with Adam and Eve and the global flood, the Book of Mormon's dependence on a literal Bible is why we know the Book of Mormon is not historical before we even get into the issues that you usually see with the CES letter or even the Gospel Topics Essays. Because all of those, the horses and the steel and the barley.

Yeah. And it's kind of like, we'll get into it down the road, but one of the coolest things about your interview with David Bokovoy was when you talk about the Book of Abraham. Because his whole point is like, don't even look at the translation, don't worry about the facsimiles, don't worry about Joseph Smith getting it all wrong. If you look at the text of the Book of Abraham, the text itself tells you it's not an ancient text. You don't even have to do that. And so it's the same thing here. It's like, before you even get into the unique Mormon stuff, you can already tell that this book cannot be historical. And once you do that, everything else makes a lot more sense. Like, it makes more sense once you understand this to read the Book of Mormon because when you see all the errors, you're like, of course there's errors because he's writing this trying to basically backdate a lot of the stuff into ancient times. So of course he's gonna have errors, just as he made errors with the Bible. And that's why I think it's really fascinating, even though it's also really uncomfortable as a believer, to go through it.

Right. And so, you know, we kind of talked about this with the previous, uh, biblical scholarship areas, but to look at the Mormon Church's stance on the Tower of Babel. This is an article written in 1998 in Ensign by, um, by BYU professor Donald Perry, who I think might have been a General Authority, but I'm not sure. But he notes that, "Because of the prophet Joseph Smith, Latter-day Saints have additional knowledge that comes from the reality of these world-changing historical events. For some in the modern world, the historicity of the Tower of Babel story, as with the flood, is often discounted. One modern school of thought considers the account to be nothing more than an artful parable or an old tale. The Latter-day Saints accept the story as it is presented in Genesis. Further, we have the second witness of the Book of Mormon. The title page of the Book of Mormon explains that the Book of Ether is a record of the people of Jared, who were scattered at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people when they were while they were building a tower to get to heaven. The Book of Ether itself tells that then tells of when Jared came forth with his brother and their families with some others and their families from the great tower at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people and swore in his wrath that they should be scattered upon all the face of the earth." And so, I mean, he's not, this is a good way to look at it because this is basically how the church teaches this. That this cannot be just a parable, a mythical origin story. This has to be literal for the Book of Mormon. Now, he's using circular logic to say the Book of Mormon proves it to be true. And I'm just arguing the other side of it, which is to say, if it's not true, you know, he, to take his own argument, if it's not true, the Book of Mormon can't be either.

And I went ahead and looked up Donald Perry. He's a professor of Hebrew Bible, okay, in the department of Near Eastern Languages at BYU. It doesn't say anything about him being a General Authority. He might not be. I might be just remembering that. But, you know, again, this is published in the church's, yeah, it's in the Ensign, right? Yep. Prophetesses and revelators oversee the publication of the Ensign. Yeah. So I don't think this, and again, if you said this to, um, you know, a Gospel Doctrine class or whatever, no one's going to argue with you. This is, or Joseph Smith, you, you would not find any prophet, seer, revelator from Joseph Smith to now saying that the Tower of Babel isn't real. You wouldn't. That's just it. I mean, this, you know, I don't think I'm saying that's nothing controversial. So we'll look at some apologetic responses. And this is from, uh, FairMormon. It's written by Michael Ash. And he writes in his introduction, "There are historical indicators, however, that suggest that the story is a myth in the scholarly sense." And then he goes on to present the possibility that the Book of Mormon is not actually citing the Tower of Babel with the following statement, "When we shine the light of science and scholarship on the Tower of Babel, we find some interesting things. First, the word Babel comes from an Assyrian Babylonian word that means 'gate of God' and is related to a Hebrew word that means 'confusion.' It appears that the author of the Bible account are engaging in some wordplay to make a particular point about their story. It's also interesting to note that the Book of Ether never mentions Babel, but simply 'the great tower.'" And let's just go straight to the next slide actually, because that'll kind of do it.

And so if we look at Genesis 11, it says, "And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city." That's Genesis. Now let's look at Ether. "Jared came forth with his brother and their families, with some others and their families from the great tower at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people and swore in his wrath that they should be scattered upon all the face of the earth. And according to the word of the Lord, the people were scattered. And the brother of Jared, being a large and mighty man and a man highly favored of the Lord, Jared his brother said unto him, crying to the Lord that he will not confound us, that we may not understand our words." And so if you look at these two quotes, they're too similar. I mean, to say that there's another tower that's doing the exact same thing, it just doesn't make sense. And it really doesn't make sense given the fact that we've got the, you know, the Book of Mormon introduction stating this. This is just something that is coming out of, as I've said before, these apologetics come out of necessity. And so when you throw these out there, you got to have some textual evidence for it. And the textual evidence here is pretty clear that they're referring to the same event.

Yeah. And, and this is kind of a meta point, but who is Michael Ash? Who are these apologists? They're, until a prophet, seer, revelator kind of comes down, these are just, uh, these are just sort of professionals paid by the church to come up with theories to pacify people who have doubts or questions. But until it's incorporated, we know the line of authority. We know that prophecies and revelators are the voices of God, allegedly, in Mormonism. Just because some apologist writes something on a website or in a book, until it's, it's brought into, uh, the top church leadership and acknowledged, it's just, as the Mormon temple, temple ceremony says, the, the philosophies of men mingled with scripture. Why should we even care?

Well, yeah, says, well. I mean, and, you know, on the flip side, why should everyone care what I say? And so I, you know, I, I get that because you're right, like the thing is, what I'm saying here and what Michael Ash is saying, Michael Ash is not speaking for the church in an official way. Although I do think that the church is very, very good at sending people to apologists when they run into people with trouble. Um, and like, you know, I've mentioned my clash before because he's a really nice guy, and so I'm not trying to beat up on him in any way. He's always been awesome. It's just, um, this argument, it doesn't work. And so, um, one of his big arguments in his latest book is that Joseph Smith is a co-author. And, you know, that's the same type of problem. To your point, like the church is going to kind of send you these people, basically, when, when only when people are losing faith, you know, and then they'll send them to people as like a last-ditch effort to get them to stay, even if it's not maybe with the same belief they had before. Um, but yeah, you know, these are the apologetics that are given. But the church is not going to come up on a General Conference talk and say, maybe it's, you know, they're not going to get into it because it's an area that they just don't want to talk about. They do not want to talk about, um, the historicity of these things with regards to Book of Mormon because it's not going to work. Um, so yeah, I guess that's a long way, a long-winded way of saying, a lot of the apologetics are are used by the church as a last-ditch effort. They're always kind of an arm's length away, and they're not official. And so until the church really incorporates them in an official way, like, or a Gospel Topics Essay, it's not as important. But I do like to cover them just because of the fact that I think it, it does show where the church's, um, I don't know how to phrase it, like the, the, the brains inside the church, I think that see the writing on the wall. They're going, and so when you see like Michael Ash or Richard Bushman or Patrick Mason, when they start going, Terrell Gibbons, when they start going a certain way, you know that in a lot of ways, the church knows that the writing is on the wall and they're going to have to slowly go there, even if it won't go there as fast. And so it's important to know what they're saying. Um, but yeah, I mean, until, you know, we, the earlier slide is, is the, the church's true stance, and this is more like the secondary, softer approach. And so obviously, we got to cover both. But yeah, I mean, this is not the official church stance at all.

Yeah. And the Book of Mormon, more importantly, the Book of Mormon, the keystone of our religion, is just very clear. Correct.

Yeah. And so now, if we look at the Book of Mormon, just to kind of go through this about potentially having another tower, not only does the author of the Book of Mormon use the same language as the Bible, as we showed in the previous slide, but the timing lines up. So, it would be hard to claim there's another tower because the timing lines up in both of them. So you'd have to have, you would think some time elapsed to even claim that there'd be a second tower that would have the same exact, you know, result from God. And more conclusively, Ether chapter two makes clear that the Jaredites went down into the valley which was northward in the valley, and the name of the valley was Nimrod, being called after the mighty hunter. Nimrod's kingdom is where the Tower of Babel was built. And in Hebrew and Christian tradition, Nimrod is considered the leader of those who built the Tower of Babel in the land of Shinar. So even the Book of Mormon's heading for Ether chapter 1 makes it clear. It says, "Moroni abridges the writings of Ether. Ether's genealogy is set forth. Language of the Jaredites is not confounded at the Tower of Babel. The Lord promises to lead them to a choice land and to make them and make them a great nation." So it's just to say the Book of Mormon is telling us exactly what we'd expect, which is this is the Tower of Babel. Um, the heading is telling us that. I know the headings and a lot of these were written long after, but the point is, in no possible way is there textual.

Evidence to suggest there's some second tower. This is the one. And so, if the Tower of Babel is, is myth, goes which Michael Ash kind of admits at the start, where, you know, he says, um, "There are historical indicators, however, that suggests that the story is a myth," and the scholarly consensus. So, if he's willing to say that, and then you get to a point where there really is no other way to make a second tower work, I mean, he's being honest in that, in that first statement. I'm, you know, so I applaud him for that.

But it just shows the problems that this creates for the, the text of Mormonism. When you have mythical events being written into the Book of Mormon as historical, because it tells you that whoever wrote the Book of Mormon was detached from the time that they claimed to be in, if they're writing something down that we know didn't happen. Yeah. And for those of us raised Mormon, was there ever a question that the Tower of Babel, uh, was literal? No. I mean, I was 45 years in the church, never once was there any question that literally any story in the Old or New Testament was anything other than literal. Yeah. There's no way. It's just, it's just how it is.

And so, um, just to, you know, again, kind of cover apologetics a little bit, I really want to try to do that in these overviews. But, um, there's not a Gospel Topics essay or entry on the church's website, nor is there much in the way of apologetics, um, online, like on the church's site, about the Tower of Babel. So that's why, you know, we kind of went to to Fair on that. Um, and then, like I said, well, there are apologetics about the historicity in general, um, because, of course, this, this affects more religions than just Mormonism. Most scholars will readily acknowledge the story as an etiological myth, um, that was designed to give, you know, meaning and origins to this community. And as I've said for the other ones, this is not nearly as big a problem for other religions as it is for Mormonism.

Yeah, and honestly, the only reason there's no Gospel Topics essay on this is because we haven't made a big deal about it. Like, you know, whether it's Mormon things or Mormon stories or CES Letter. If we were to really, if we were to create a billboard in Salt Lake City on the Tower of Babel, pulling people to an essay, pointing people to enough of these discussions about it, voila, we would see a Gospel Topics essay. Exactly. And that's, I mean, it's true. And it's like, even for me, when I started diving into this stuff, it took a long time before I got here. And so I think most people that lose faith in the church are not going to stick around and keep reading this stuff. Like, for me, like I said, it's fascinating, and I was really trying to figure it out. And so I came across it by talking to Anthony Miller. But yeah, I think you're right. Like, this just isn't a problem that reaches a lot of people. But it's so important. So it's like, it's kind of one of those things that's weird because a lot of times, I think you talk about Tower of Babel and Book of Mormon, I think people's eyes are going to glaze over because at this point, it's not as juicy as polygamy or the First Vision or, you know, anachronisms. But it's, to me, it's just as important because it actually, in a lot of ways, it's not, I don't know if anachronism is the right word, but it's, it's out of place. It shouldn't be there. And yet it appears. And so, um, yeah, building up, you can't build a castle on a cloud.

Yeah. And if, if Adam and Eve and the Tower of Babel and the global flood are all clouds, if they're all a myth, Joseph Smith makes it all literal. He's, he's referring, he's building an entire Book of Mormon historical narrative, alleged historical narrative, on these events being literal. Yeah. Which then means the Book of Mormon isn't literal. And of course, if you now add that to the archaeological, anthropological, geological, linguistic, and genetic evidences, yeah, all of that's telling us the Book of Mormon isn't literal. And we, we could have known that just by knowing that Adam, global flood, and Tower of Babel never happened. Yeah. I mean, that's just it. And again, it's like, I know it feels oversimplified, but it's true. Like, once you understand that, and like I said earlier, I think it actually helps in a lot of ways because once you understand that, then I think it's easier to start looking at the other problems and understanding where they came from, because all of a sudden, you can really start to understand that the foundation is based off of just a misunderstanding of biblical history.

Yeah. And so, we've, we actually have a few slides kind of concluding this. But, you know, like I said earlier, you can approach this from multiple areas of study, just like with Adam and Eve. Just put the global flood to know it's not a historical event. So, you know, we can look at the diversity of languages that began long before the Tower of Babel, which we talked about earlier, um, which tells us that there was not some united, endemic language leading up to this. Um, furthermore, Genesis, Genesis 10 talks about, you know, all of the different, you know, lines speaking in the manner of their tongues, um, which tells us, you know, that it probably wasn't even at that point understood that way. Um, and then we can look at the fact that we have other mythical stories that have the same exact thing, where you've got the confounding languages, the scattering of people. Um, and so, like I said, the study of linguistics tells us that the idea of a singular language that becomes confused, it just doesn't exist. And it's like, just like the global flood, you know, with the flood, we have all these civilizations that carry on completely undeterred throughout the time of the global flood. With linguistics, we have languages that continue on completely undeterred. Un, you know, you would, you would technically see this, you would expect to see these huge disruptions where you'd see writings on cave walls or some of these writings we have that were before the Tower of Babel would have happened, and then you would, you would see no continuation ever after a certain point. But none of that happens. And so it tells you that there's not some worldwide event where God is scattering people around the world, um, you know, again, there's only about 150 people at that time, scattering them around the world, giving them different languages. It's just, there's, there's no, I mean, just they, like, pick them up and like, move them. Yeah. That's like a tornado come and carry them to America.

And that's another problem because I'm sure from a biblical, I think from us, I think I think I heard once they said that the scattering was done by like creating, creating environmental situations that forced people away from each other, and the fact that they can't understand each other, they kind of split. So you'd spread out that way. But yeah, I mean, that's the problem. And that's the problem where, you know, we talk about the Adam and Eve episode, where there are all of these elements of these stories that you can look at and go, yep, that's mythical. You know what I mean? Like, it just, you look at it now, if you look at it with a blank slate, and you didn't know it was obviously, it's hard to not know it's from the Bible. But you look and you go, yeah, it reads like a story that you would tell, you know, like a, a, a tall, tall tale or a fable that you read to a kid to give you an embark, a lesson on them. It just, it doesn't read like history. And it's because it's not.

You know, and again, yeah, go ahead. It'd be cool to have an episode with a linguist just to talk about how languages develop and how, how long it takes and how that ties to population and, you know, chronologies, because I, I think you could probably find that language evolves a lot like genetics. There's a code, there's a pattern, and there's a timeline, and there are population numbers that all correspond to the evolution of a language. Yeah. And if you just go to, like, I don't know, like, uh, Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales, and you look at what year that was, and then you look at how the English language develops, you can kind of see how long it takes for a language to develop, right? Yeah.

That's just it. And, you know, and that's, and that's, yeah, the comp, you're hit on a good point because that's one of the things that people point to a lot when you talk to, um, scholars about, when you read scholars who write about this stuff, they'll say the complexity is what's missing here. You know, the Book of Mormon, everyone will say it's such a complex book. And when you read it and you look at the different characters, they're all very wooden, they're all very one-sided, they're all very similar. Nothing advances. You know, I think John Larson made a point in a Mormon Expressions podcast, he's like, if you read the Book of Mormon and you look, you remember how many years it covers, there's no like huge change. Like if you look at the history of mankind as we have it, you, you would know it from a 1,000 year, you know, time frame, the advancements would just be, you know, innumerable. And in the Book of Mormon, they're just, it's not really there. And it just shows you that the author, while he was good at kind of weaving stories together, was not good at evolving characters and evolving what they were dealing with. It's, it's very kind of one-dimensional. And that's really hard for a believer to hear. But that is why when people from church talk about how complex the Book of Mormon is, if it was truly that complex, you would have people who are not Mormon in literature classes teaching it. Maybe they don't believe it's just to be historical, but they'd be teaching about how amazing it was that somebody could create such a complex book. You don't see that anywhere because it just isn't that complex unless you're raised to think it is. And, and that's, we've talked about that in a previous episode, but it's, it's a big pro, it's a big problem. And, and you hit it on the head with the languages. It's so complex, and none of that complexity is in here. And that tells you it's not historical. It's a really good way to kind of note that this is being written from the perspective of someone who's trying to create an origin story and not thinking about all the things that would have to happen.

Yeah, just like we've had Michael Coen to talk about our archaeology and anthropology, Robert Ritner to talk about Egyptology, and then the scientists that Simon Sutherton's brought on to talk about, you know, genetics and the global flood and Adam and Eve. We need to have a linguist on Mormon Stories to talk about both, yeah, Tower of Babel and the Book of Mormon from a linguist point of view. Yeah, I would definitely like to see that, just to see their perspective. But yeah, and then, you know, just to kind of conclude, we've kind of covered some of the stuff. But, you know, the Book of Mormon states that the Jaredites come from the Tower of Babel and are only able to maintain the original endemic language after pleading with God. And so it cements it as a historical story. And they come from the Valley of Nimrod, which is a nod to the Bible, the similar, very similar language with phrasing from Genesis. And, you know, just kind of going back to the apologetics, is the only reason you would even want to consider a second Tower of Babel is just because, you know, the Tower of Babel is not a historical story. And if it's not, it creates a massive problem for the Book of Mormon's historicity. It reminds me of when they had to create a second Kitora because the first, yeah, doesn't work. It's the exact same thing. And the second Kitora, and then you've got to make the geography really small. Yeah. And all of a sudden, you're saying, how could we, of course, genetics disappear, and of course, genetics get bottlenecked. Apologists have to make the target smaller and smaller and smaller so that they build expectations so low. Yeah. It's like, of course, we, of course, the Tower of Babel didn't exist. You know?

Yeah. And, you know, it's one of those things where it's like, I, I've said this a lot, and for me, the most important thing to do is to say, let's take this stuff at face value. And if we take it at face value, what does it tell us about the, what Joseph Smith claimed? First is what we have today. And I think that's the important thing. I want to read your quote real quick because I love this one. And, um, it makes me make a fine request. We'll do it at the end because it'll be a good way to summarize apologetics at the end. Um, okay. But, but anyway, so, um, this is a great slide. The Book of Mormon tells us that the Jared story comes from 24 plates of records that were translated with Nephite interpreters that were touched by the Lord, following the Tower of Babel. And those same interpreters were claimed by Joseph Smith to be with the gold plates of the Book of Mormon. The Tower of Babel is a myth, as the evidence tells us. And every story that comes from what comes from it cannot be historical. And I know, um, one of the things that a lot of people are going to tell us is that that's too black and white of an approach. And I get that. So the black and white approach is a tricky one. But if the Tower of Babel is not historical, the Nephite interpreters that Joseph Smith claimed to physically possess were never created at any point. And that is the point that is of such massive importance because, as we've mentioned in some of these episodes, Joseph Smith is making these things material to give meaning to the people around us in the Americas, right? Because in America, that's where all this is taking place. But if he's making something physical, you can no longer say that the early prophets believed it was a, you know, or something. Like I said earlier, they'll say, well, the early prophets believed it to be a story, but, you know, it was mythical, but they believed it because it was told over generations. But this makes it physical. This is where you start to lose that ability to just say, well, they believed it, but it was metaphorical. And that's why it's written into the records. This, this unfortunately, just, it ties it down in a way that you can't get away from that.

Yeah. Without the Tower of Babel, you don't have, uh, the Jaredites. You don't have the 24 plates. Uh, you don't have the interpreters. Uh, which means you don't have the Book of Mormon, basically. Which then calls into question Joseph Smith and calls into question the entire foundations of Mormonism. Yeah. Unless, I mean, that's just it. I know it seems overly simple, but I think for, it's just like, that'd be, it's like somebody who were to try to argue, I know you've got a document that's got Abraham Lincoln using an iPhone. Yeah. It's overly simplistic to say that that makes the document fraudulent. No, certain, certain historical proofs invalidate documents. They just do. You know? Yeah.

Well, and again, yeah, and that's the thing. And I know, I know I've mentioned this a few times and I don't want to beat a dead horse here, but it's like one of the things you'll hear is like, well, you, you have to have faith. You have to have faith that these stories were either literal or that these prophets believed they were literal, and so they wrote them in. And again, for me, and I've said this before on the website, I don't know if I said it here, but, you know, this idea, and I don't know how to phrase this, but faith to me is the belief in things we cannot know, we cannot see. So Tower of Babel, you can have faith in it from a standpoint if you don't look into it, because you just can't know, right? We can't know there wasn't a tower. But the problem is, for me, faith is not the belief in spite of what we can see. So to say that you should still have faith in the Tower of Babel, even though we can show from both a textual standpoint and from a historical standpoint, didn't happen, I don't think that's still having faith. And so I think when that, when when you hear people say, just put on the shelf and have faith, it'll all work out in the end, I think that's where you, you take that leap from faith to, I don't want to say blind obedience, but just to ignoring problems that you would not give space to if it was another religion. And I think that's where we all have to look within ourselves and say, do we really want to know this stuff? Do we really want to get into it? And if we do, we're going to have to acknowledge this in some way, because you can't just ignore it because it is so importantly foundational to Mormonism.

Yeah. So here, that brings us to your final slide. Yeah, this is the final slide. So it's just, as we see with, um, Adam and Eve and the flood, the Book of Mormon ties itself directly to a literal historical Bible, which was the predominant belief of the 19th century. And so again, we've mentioned this before, but the 19th century people really believe the Bible is a history book. And this helps give us a window into the worldview that fueled the ideas of the Book of Mormon. But unfortunately for Joseph Smith, it also creates a lot of testable truth claims that we can evaluate its historicity by, such like DNA and the Native Americans, Adam, Eve, Tower of Babel, global flood. And so if any of these events are not historical, then nothing that comes from them is going to be historical. It's, you know, it's, it's like the phrase, you know, like, no, this isn't, I'm not saying the Book of Mormon is garbage. I'm just saying, like, when you create, like a computer program, they'll say it's garbage in, garbage out. You know? Or, you know, if good goes in, good's gonna come out. If bad goes in, bad goes out. And so it's like, if non-historical stuff is going in, you're not gonna get historical stuff out. It just doesn't work that way. And so to me, that, that really is, like, the biggest part of the, these first three, the, the Adam and Eve, global flood, Tower of Babel. All three of them are just linked as historical events. And all three of them are not true in a historical sense. That's it. Like, everything that comes from that is not going to be true. And in the Bible, you can make the argument, I think it's a fair one to say that they, in those times, and not necessarily believe that they were writing perfect history. They knew these were, were stories. They viewed history differently then. But the 19th century, they did view history like we do today. And so that's the problem. Joseph Smith is taking what he thought was a literal history and then basically building off of it with basically a sequel to the Bible in the Book of Mormon. But because it wasn't historical, that entire book is now just, it, it, it's not historical, like it's over from that standpoint. And that's, like I said, not even getting into some of the other areas, um, such as in the anachronisms and, um, the DNA and the Lamanites. You don't even need to get there to know this isn't a historical book. But we'll be covering them as well.

Yeah. Yeah, we've covered DNA already, and we're going to cover some more of these things, just because again, like, like I said, it's like, it's layer upon layer upon layer upon layer. And I don't, you know, it's like, there, there was this thing where people were saying, like, there's about red flags, and in Mormonism, and it was on Twitter. And I remember I said, like, how many red flags do you need before you go, this is a problem? Because it is. You know, there are going to be times where you're going to come across something and go, that doesn't make sense. But everything else does. But what I'm saying is, every single one of these topics we've done, you can show that they're not going to make, they're not going to add up to what we were told they were. And we're now like, 12 or 13 episodes in, and we've already got that. And then we've got all these other ones on the other side. It's just, there's too many to where you would ever give the same space to any other religion, um, especially when you're talking about one that is so modern, that gives us so many tangible claims to test. I mean, these are not, Joseph Smith didn't do this a thousand years ago. He did this 200 years ago. It gives us so much room to be able to test it. And unfortunately, they're just not coming back. And again, if you were reading this about Scientology, Jehovah's Witness, Seventh-day Adventist, and you're a Mormon, you'd be like, oh yeah, those guys got it wrong because look, you can see it. It's just because we're so invested, it's hard for us to be willing to say, yeah, you know what, this, this probably is not what I thought it was. And I saw it somewhere on the internet the other day, that if you're wearing rose-colored glasses, all red flags just look like flags. Yeah. And it's true. I mean, and again, it's just, it's so tough because I remember being there. I remember, oh my goodness, I remember like in 2012 when Romney ran, and I would hear things on the news, I would just, I'm like, I'm not even going near it. And at that point, I had already lost the literal belief. And so even then, I was still too afraid to look. And so I have, I totally understand why it's so hard as a member to trust someone like me. I totally get it. I'm just saying that I'm coming at people and saying, here's what it is, here's a face value, I'm not redefining anything, do with it what you will. Whereas apologists are telling you what you're looking at isn't really what you're looking at.

And, and that's what's going to leave me this last quote, which I wanted to read, is from John Hamer, who I love and mentioned a few times. And he was asked about how Fair Mormon operates with apologetics. And he said, "Generally, you can avoid saying, well, this is a forest, if you spend all your time staring at bark through a microscope and telling yourself that the pattern in the bark is similar to the pattern in an elephant's hide." And I know it's maybe not the most eloquent, but what he's saying is, from an apologetic standpoint, they will drill down so far that they just completely ignore all the problems around it, just to tell you that this one point is something that it's not. And he's obviously oversimplifying. I just, I love that quote because it really does show that sometimes, if you, as an apologist, can get a member to just keep digging down and digging down, digging down, you'll kind of forget the, the bigger picture. And, and that's why I mentioned needing to look at this in totality. And we've done something that we probably thought was impossible. We've concluded a Mormon Stories episode in less than an hour. I know, give us a round of applause for that one.

Well, great job, Mike. This is a really important one. Uh, in the show notes, we'll have a link to all the episodes we referenced, including, uh, the Tower of Babel episode or essay on the LDSdiscussions.com website. And what, what other, what other topics, uh, should, should, uh, viewers and listeners look forward to coming up?

Well, we've got a few more on the Bible and how it impacts Mormonism. So we've got, um, Deutero-Isaiah, which is, I would argue, the most important, um, as far as kind of, you know, being a smoking gun as far as using material that wouldn't have been available. Um, we've got the long ending of Mark, which is a really good one. That'll probably be a shorter one, too, for those who enjoy these shorter ones. The one I'm kind of excited about is the Sermon on the Mount and how it's used in the Bible, and how that gives us a lot of clues as to the historicity of the Book of Mormon, because that's one I never thought of as a member, never thought of even until long after I left, as to how important this, the Sermon on the Mount being used as a sermon on the temple. So that one's going to be a really fun one that's going to come up in the upcoming weeks as well.

All right. Well, Mike, you're a gift to us all. I can't thank you enough for your time and your willingness to create this series. When we're done, if we, if we all live over the next 12 months, we'll have 40 to 50 of these episodes, and we'll probably share them not only as a playlist on YouTube, but maybe as its own podcast, so that people can just kind of from A to Z go through the top 50 or so issues with Mormon truth claims and get a really solid, integrated, contextualized education. So thank you, Mike. Thanks, guys.

All right, we'll see you soon. Bye. And, uh, viewers and listeners, thanks so much again for joining us today on Mormon Stories Podcast. Again, I'm John. Uh, check out all these essays at LDSdiscussions.com. Uh, we are so, uh, grateful for all the donors that make Mormon Stories possible. We couldn't do this without your financial support. Unfortunately, we lose donors every month, and less than one out of a thousand of our donors and listeners actually donates. And so we're always having to scramble to keep the revenue coming in so that we can pay Gerardo and Jen and Brooklyn and Jennifer and me, and everything else. So if you value this content, please join with our, uh, with our honored small group of donors and become a monthly donor. You can go to mormonstories.org, click on the donate button. $10 a month, $20 a month, $50 a month, $100 a month, whatever you can afford. It's tax deductible in the United States. We're, we're, we've been financially transparent since day one, like all 501c3s are required to do. We've done our best to provide even more information than we're required to do financially. But most importantly, our mission is not to destroy Mormonism, not to tear down faith of the Mormon Church. It's simply to provide people with informed consent so that they can know, uh, what it is that they're a part of or might be joining or considering. And then in addition to informed consent, we are all about, uh, supporting Mormons in the faith crisis or transition. And then for those who need to leave Mormonism, to help them end up in a healthy, happy place. And we're here to help improve the Mormon Church. So the Mormon Church can just fundamentally be more honest and open with its members. So thanks for joining us. Thanks for your support. Support us if you don't. And, uh, come back, uh, soon this week or next or in your feed for just more episodes of Mormon Stories Podcast. Thanks, everybody.