Transcription
Is it possible that Joseph Smith just fabricated the gold plates? In fact, could you even make them in your garage? This guy seems to think so.
"Golden plates are not a miracle. I can make golden plates in my garage."
A lot of people seem to think that Joseph Smith could have fabricated the Book of Mormon gold plates based on the resources he had. So, what do we think of that? Well, that's like it's a nice like pathy response in a public debate setting or whatever that situation was there where he's talking, but like it's a whole different ballgame when you try to actually look at what the historical record tells us and say, "Hey, is this actually plausible?"
Okay, so when I think like, "Can I make gold plates in my garage?" I'm like, "Okay, that's like a metal sheet that I'd have to punch holes in and then tie it together and maybe scribble some stuff on." Like, okay, that sounds reasonable. Like, what's the problem with that? Well, we have the the problem with that is we have historical descriptions, right? We have the witnesses. We can actually put up a table on screen that shows people like this is what how the witnesses describe the plates. These are the parameters. These are the dimensions. These are the physical properties that it had.
Um, and in people who have like, okay, he says he can make gold plates in the garage and makes it sound super easy. Why hasn't he done it?
"Why why doesn't he just do it?"
We actually know people there are people who have made themselves uh replica sets of gold plates. And there have been people like David Baird who have made replicas who have been trying to be as authentic as possible but even he can't afford to use real gold and real metals. And so so there's the first thing right is like before we even get into like the actual skills and the process required to do it it's a prohibitively expensive endeavor, okay?
And you know, we have it's it's kind of an infamous statement from Martin Harris in an interview he had with Joel Tiffany where he talks about hefting the box that had the plates in it and saying he could tell from the heft that it was either lead or gold and he knew Joseph didn't have so much credit to to buy or didn't have enough credit to buy so much lead.
Yeah. "Right. And gold you would need more credit to get the gold. Right."
So maybe Joseph Smith found the gold while he was treasure digging and that's what he used to that would throw a monkey wrench in the whole narrative. Right. "Joseph Smith says it was gold but like you can make metal that look goldish. Well, I don't know."
"Brass is brass. How cheap is brass? In 1830 or or the late getting it from nobody noticing. Joseph Smith came home with a bunch of brass one day."
It's interesting that nobody none of his contemporaries accuse Joseph Smith of being able to make plates. As far as I'm aware, we don't have any of the neighbors in Palmyra or uh former, you know, friends or acquaintances that later sort of give these damning uh affidavits against the Smith family and Joseph Smith, right? Oh, he was a lazy swindler that he get that kind of stuff. But you never get anybody saying, "Oh, and he had like, you know, this hoorde of metal that was really weird and he was like trying to make gold plates. Like he came with a giant cast uh brass kettle one day and I thought that's kind of weird that Joseph Smith is doing that." You don't get any of that kind of stuff from the affidavit.
"He seemed to really believe that he had that. valuable. That's why they try to like rob him."
"Yes, exactly. They they think it's all like either superstitious or or a conj job or something or they think it's just fake. He stole it from Solomon Spalding, but nobody is like able to think that, oh, he just like fabricated the plates."
"He just fabricated his own plates and and Yeah. And and so we're talking about getting the metal, but let's Okay, sure. Let's say he found a cheaper way to make replica gold plates, but you've got to make them in a way that's that's going to be consistent with what the witnesses say. Okay, there's a reason uh the most serious uh historian who doesn't believe in Joseph's narrative uh his hypothesis is that they were tin plates. Okay, because that's something that I guess I don't know. I haven't looked into the economics of it, but he obviously thinks that there would have it would have been affordable to get enough tin and uh and those kinds of materials, but tin doesn't look like gold. Okay. And it clearly fooled the witnesses.
"And and the eight witnesses in particular because uh well this guy Frank, he wants to he wants Frank Turk, he wants everyone to think it's not a miracle. Well, you've got to deal with the three witnesses, my friend, uh who said they saw an angel. But on the flip side, people like Dan Vogle, who are more secular in their thinking, uh they uh he discounts the three witnesses anyway. But the eight witnesses who do have by all accounts contrary to what Dan Vogel and others have argued have a pretty natural ordinary experience with the place. Very tangible. Tangible. They describe them as having the appearance of gold. Okay. And so you've got to have if you're going to hypothesize tin plates or some other material, you've got to have a way to make them look gold."
"Well, that's easy. Just go down to like Hobby Lobby and get some of that gold paint or get some like gold leaf or something craft store. Maybe now's a moment that was available to Joseph Smith. May maybe now's the time to mention the theory that was recently promoted by Sonia Hazard in her article that perhaps uh Joseph Smith did not fabricate plates but he found plates and she has this theory that um that the gold plates the descriptions given including they were engraved in mysterious characters and things like that right that these fit uh like printing uh stereotype printing plates right uh and that's and literally her theory I don't want to straw man it correct me if I'm wrong Neil But her theory literally is like maybe a wagon going past the hill into Palmyra bumped on the road and some of the plates fell off near the hill Kamora the these printing plates and Joseph Smith found them and he concocted this religious you know imagine imaginary idea of an angel whatever and he showed them to people and those are the gold plates am I am I misrepresenting you."
"I mean, I I don't know. I I don't know about the wagon the but like I I don't even know if she tries to explain how a a collection of printing plates just like somehow ended up in the hill or whatever. Yeah, that's her basic Joseph Smith came across some of."
"Maybe he just found them."
"He came up with this idea. I mean, I think that's just so remarkable that we're at a point where like, hate to use the word, but mental gymnastics the critics have to go through in order to account for the witnesses instead of just taking the narrative at face value or at least taking seriously what the witnesses actually say happened. So, so that's a that is I think absolutely a fair point and it's it's something that I think is uh I think indicative here with people like Frank Turk and others like you're when you say something like well gold plates aren't a miracle. I could make those in my garage. You are conceding at this point that the evidence that there were gold plates right is persuasive and uh you just aren't persuaded that it was somehow miraculous. Okay. Um but uh but getting back to this idea that uh Joseph Smith could have just made the gold plates in his garage, right? Once you got the materials, it's not really that easy to make a a set of plates that's consistent with what the witnesses describe. And it's not that easy to say Joseph Smith just found them either because this printing plate theory that Sonia Hazard has, well, printing plates, uh they don't really fit the description of the pl of the Book of Mormon plates very well. They wouldn't have been bound by rings and they wouldn't have naturally had punch holes in them that that would have like allowed you to bind them by rings. Uh that would have required Joseph Smith maybe to make some effort. And if they were maybe lead, they might might have been soft enough to to punch. But if they're copper, which is what you need to actually maybe have perhaps a golden looking color there, they're a lot harder to punch holes in. But they're also thicker. They're a lot thicker than how the the witnesses described the plates. So I I I did find the quote from her which we can read."
"Okay. Sure."
"Um the third and final scenario is the most straightforward though less probable. Okay. Smith really could have found printing plates not in a printing shop but rather on in or near the hill in 1823 or 1827 much as he said he did. Stereotype or copper plates might have been in the midst of being transported to a smaller printing office. And then she gives an example and then lost on route near the hill. As mentioned previously, a postal road linked the town of Kennedua to south to the town of Palmyra about the about 13 miles north. That postal route hugged the western base of the hill about four miles south of Palmyra and nine north of Kennedu. So she seems to think that's the okay."
"Straightforward but less probable that they fell off a wagon. At least she admits it's less probable."
"I stand corrected. That is her that's that's one of her theories at least. Uh um"
"So you talked about Okay. Okay. What are the requirements for what the plates actually what the witnesses say the plates looked like? You mentioned color, the appearance of gold. You mentioned that there has to be holes. There has to be rings that bind them. And you've just mentioned like thickness. What are the other requirements that the witnesses say?"
"So, like I said, we can maybe put a table up on here that shows like all the physical description. Uh, and I I think Stephen has an you you did an article on Mormoner which collects all the witness statements. So,"
"We'll throw that up there. We we can put that in the link if people want to go check that out. But they've got to have the appearance of gold. They've got to have rings. Those rings are D-shaped, by the way. Uh pretty consistent with We don't have a lot of statements, but we have a few statements from witnesses that describe them being as D-shaped. Um they have you you have to have a portion of it sealed. And there is some inconsistency as to what the ratio the sealed ratio is, but you've got a third or a half. A third or a half uh 2/3 maybe even uh in one source. But you've got to have a portion that's sealed. And so you've got to you've got to have, you know, a seal of some kind and and whatever kind of mechanism you're going to do to to seal that. Um the plates have to be about 6 by 8 in. Uh um basically the size of a book, more or less. A book is 6 by9, your average book size. Um that you've got to have a stack of them that's almost six inches tall. Uh we witnesses stack that up six times. Most most witnesses have, you know, have a 6 in describe a 6 in stack. There's a few that say four or 5 in. Uh but you've got to have a pretty substantive stack and you've got to you've they've got to weigh between 40 and 60 pounds. Um probably closer to the upper end of that that weight uh scale. Um"
"So taking a suitcase to the airport."
"Yeah. Yeah. You're going to go flying uh Delta or Southwest and you've got to have your 50 pounds. Your bag's got to be 50 pounds or so. Um, and then they've got to be the the witnesses are clear that they have characters on them. So, he didn't just have like blank sheets. And this is a big problem for the tin plate theory. It's hard to engrave tin. Um, in fact, that was"
"You can't puncture through it with your little stylus or whatever you"
"It's not It's not very easy to to engrave tin. Um, and but you've got to have characters on there. Those characters uh were described as being small and fine. Uh, so you've got to have a lot of pages with a lot of small characters on them. The the pages are described as being covered with characters. So it's not like there's just like a few characters on on each page or whatever. You've got fine engravings across however many pages."
"And in addition to engravings, and shout out to our Martin Harris, Charles Anthony episode, which we can link to, they have to be convincing enough to resemble actual ancient scripts. Other people are going to be like, "Yeah, this looks like it could be this language or that language." Right? It can't just be squiggles."
"And you know, I I actually find it kind of instructive uh that like Oliver Cowry when when the when the papyri come into town in Kirtland and and Joseph Smith buys the papyri. Oliver Cowry, someone who saw the plates says, "Hey, the characters on these papyri, he wrote a letter to I think it was his brother, maybe Stephen knows the sources on this better, but he wrote a letter and basically said, "Yeah, they resembled the reformed Egyptian characters on the gold plates." And so they they had a passing enough resemblance. I'm not saying they were they were totally you've got to have"
"They're not exactly the same."
"But they had a passing enough resemblance that an eyewitness who saw both uh the har the hieratic characters on the papyrus and the characters on the plates could say, "Hey, these kind of resemble each other." Right? So, um, so those are and and then, uh, some of the witnesses, uh, there are some accounts that mention black stain or cement that filled each character, uh, which helped those characters kind of stand out against the golden background, right? And so, uh, there are a lot of steps you've got to take if you're going to manufacture something that's going to be consistent with those statements. There's a lot of steps you've got to take and you've got to figure out, okay, if you can't afford the gold, how do you make something that's going to look golden? And by the way, you have to do this according to uh 1820s technology. By the way, you can't >> you can't manufacture this in your garage with your machines and and"
"Gold paint from Hobby Lobby from Hobby Lobby or whatever, right? According to 1820s technology, how are you going to make them look golden? How are you going to get the engraving on there? How are you going to make those engravings have a blackened stain? Uh how are you going to make them thin and pliable like thick paper? That's how parchment uh the same thickness uh you know thickness of of about common tin. That's part of why some people say, "Oh, it was tin because it's but that's how thick it was." They describe it."
"That's one of the problems with the printing plates theory is printing plates are actually much thicker than uh than common tin of the time. They are not pliable. They are they they don't make a metallic rustling sound. They make a clanking sound when when you um when you flip if you stack them up and then flip the edges or whatever. don't really work very well as an explanation for what the witnesses said they encountered."
"I I've actually quick detour I've seen printing plates uh some years ago when I was in Cairo uh doing some uh work with the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology uh great Egyptological publisher of uh you know texts uh critical editions of text and so forth. and they showed us a tour of their little facility there in Cairo and they have an old an old school printing establishment right like where they would uh handcarve these printing plates hieroglyphs and uh you know Egyptian art and things like that and so yes uh printing we kind of don't have any sense of like oh books just magically appear from Amazon on our doorstep we don't know how they how they're made like old school printing it's a really laborious thing and yes those plates are big they're clunky they're cumbersome they're not the fine little thin sort of things that our witnesses describe but not just like making a new artifact. But doesn't Josiah Stole talk about how they have like a greenish cast? Like there's almost like an antiqueness or to it that you would have to fabricate somehow."
"So So yeah, Josiah Stole described uh that's a really strange account in some ways, right? But he described um having the plates handed to him while covered and a corner of the covering slipping off. And so he just saw a corner. He didn't see a whole like the whole plates, but he said he saw a corner and he described them as having a greenish cast or looking like a stone of greenish cast. And what's compelling to me is if you were making up seeing gold plates, that's probably not how you would describe seeing them, right? And so he's probably authentically describing something he actually saw and encountered."
"And we think that's what the oxidation of the copper in the tumbaga in the"
"Copper, right? So the leading theory for what the plates are in order to fit the dimensions we all we just talked about and have a golden color is you have this alloy that's gold and copper maybe with a little silver in there. And um and when the copper underneath the gold it would have been uh it would have been treated they ancient Americans did this depletion gilding process where they treated it so that the gold would cover the whole surface. Um, but if the copper got exposed on a corner for instance or along an edge, uh, it could have oxidized and uh, and it would have had this greenish almost stony looking color. I mean, if you've seen the if you've seen the uh, the Statue of Liberty, uh, when I was a kid, I thought it was made of like greenish stone because that's what it looks like, right? It wasn't until in school or something I learned, oh, it's actually made of copper and the maintenance to just keep it from uh from oxidizing. It was just absurdly expensive. So, we stopped or whatever. I don't know what the reason was."
"Josh Co estimates that the plates likely contained less than 20% gold content. Right. And as I understand from both his experiments he's done in his workshop and from his calculations in his paper, you need like uh 70% silver and then 10% copper or something, right? Or maybe I have those two."
"I think you have those mixed up. I think it's 70% copper."
"And 10% silver."
"10% silver or so and then and then 20% gold."
"But this being saying there's there's copper in these plates. So that could account for the green oxidation of those edges."
"And for people who might be like, "Oh, but tumbaga isn't gold." We can actually put some images on screen that actually like Josh actually has a great image in his paper where he shows you a pure gold sheet, a tumbaga sheet that's been treated by this uh this acid, this depletion gilding process, and then an untreated one. And if you don't think that depletion gilded uh sheet of tumbaga looks like gold, if that's not how you would describe it if you weren't told the alloy, this you're not a reasonable person. I'm sorry."
"Let's do this. Let's put up on the screen, but we won't tell people which one is which. And let's see in the comments if they can actually guess left or right which one is Tumbaga, which one is gold based on Josh Coat's reproduction here. But there there are also there are some interesting artifacts uh again we can put some images on screen for this uh that actually show like it it's got the golden sheen on it but you can see some corrosion on parts where you can see the uh the green oxidation and stuff as well. Uh and these are you know artifacts right from ancient America. And so I if we're going to take all of these accounts seriously, all of this information seriously, not only does Joseph Smith have to have made plates and had them be golden looking and have them be thin and pliable and all this stuff, but he must have somehow like aged them or or treated them to to have this oxidation and and aging on the on the surface."
"Yeah. Throw some tarpentine on it. You'll be fine, right? That's always got to be It's that easy."
"I'm not saying that's an impossible thing. I haven't looked into the chemistry that you would have to do and and I know like with the >> there's the there's the Kinder Hook plates and and they did like like acid treatment."
"Yeah. The people who forged those did some treatment on it to make it look aged and stuff. And so again, I'm not saying it's impossible, but we like look at how complex the whole process would have been. And by the way, with the Kinderhook plates, much smaller, far less material."
"Oh yeah, those things are tiny. People like to compare it, but look at the actual They're like this big."
"We're talking about a book this big. It's not nearly as comprehensive and large a project as we're talking. And so to to just kind of off-handedly quib like, oh well, you know, gold plates aren't a miracle. You can make them in the garage. It's it's not really grappling with the historical realities of that claim."
"I I again come back to my point made earlier, which I'll just reiterate. Um, we have a deafening silence of contemporary accusations against Joseph Smith that any of his skeptics or critics believe he was capable of fabricating gold plates. If if it's just that easy and if you want to discredit Joseph Smith and the Smith family, you're their disgruntled skeptical neighbors in Palmyra, right? Three, four years later and uh, Philastrobe comes riding into town wanting to get these affidavits from you. It's, oh well, you know, it's really easy. One day I spotted Joseph Smith in the barn and he was hammering out some sheet metal and you know I mean like they could come up. They're already making up certain stories about the Smith family."
"Do you have any evidence that Joseph Smith had any metal working skills at all? I mean, he was a farmer."
"I I know some point of the fact that his dad is a cooper which would have included like the little barrels the bands the copper bands. Come on. Is that I mean, is that nearly enough? I just I I'm highly dubious at this idea that like yes, maybe some rudimentary I can hammer sheet metal into a ring to put on a barrel kind of stuff, but that's nowhere near accounting for what we're describing here. So look at the contemporary my my point is here and then I'll leave it alone. Look at the contemporary accusations. You can learn a lot from them and it's predominantly either uh this guy was he just wrote it himself. That's Alexander Campbell, right? And there were no gold plates. This is silly talk about gold plates, right? He just wrote this book and made up the stupid story. That's Alexander Campbell. or it's well, you know, he stole it from Solomon Spalding and made up the stupid story with the help of Sydney Rigdon right um it's only much later that people well maybe he fabricated gold plates uh he look if he avoided detection he did a pretty good job of it right that none of the neighbors of all the accusations they can bring against him they don't even think it's within the realm of plausibility to accuse him of being able to fabricate gold plates."
"Yeah, no, absolutely. And and again, uh, it's like it's not just us saying wow, this would have been really hard. The people who have tried to make replicas. Uh, Interpreter did an interview with David Baird and uh, and in that interview uh, they did that interview for their witnesses documentary. Um, and I don't think they've published the full interview. I don't know if this quote made the the documentary or not, but I have a transcript. And so in in that he was asked um what the process would take to make believable plates. And and he talked about how he would need to make pages of gold plates regardless of whatever the metal was to make it thin consistently to cut it and shape it and to engrave and etch on it would have been extremely difficult. If Joseph Smith was to make his gold plates, it would have taken him quite a while. I don't think there's any evidence that he had any of the skills required to do that. This is someone who's who's done it. He he literally he's a metallurgist and he's done it. He he he did this himself. He's he's got a replica. We've actually seen his replica."
"Um, which is I think he his plates are made of brass technically because he he didn't use gold."
"But it's hard. It's not"
"I mean, think of just like the time involved with that. I mean, we know people who have done this essentially part-time and it's taken them several years to do it. Joseph Smith as a farmer either would have had to have sequestered himself away for maybe several months full-time to do this and we would have seen something in the historical record to say, "Hey, Joseph Smith like wasn't doing his farmwork and was hiding out for all this time or was doing it like secretly at night or in spare time for years and years and years in order to have made this possible." And yet we don't see that. What we do know is when he translates the Book of Mormon, we have tons of documentation about how much time that took him to do."
"Yeah. Oh, but Jasmine, he was going to the hill once a year every September to meet with the angel. Surely he had a kiln in the hill tomorrow where he was factory pressing out, you know, gold plates. I think I've actually kind of heard that somebody, just some random people on Reddit or whatever said he was going to the hill to secretly make his gold plates in the cave. In the cave in the hill cave."
"Well, the the theory that I've heard is that like there's another hill nearby. Uh, I think it's called Miner's Hill. Uh, and there is there's a little cave there and like Joseph Smith was going there secretly once a year and working on this project."
"Once a year apparently."
"Once a year. Nobody nobody finds it. Uh also the other factor that we just need to mention here very briefly, ladies and gentlemen, um the Smith family is dirt poor in the 1920s. They are so poor that Lucy Maxmith says they're like selling like little pieces of cloth, scraps of cloth that she can like do little paintings on or whatever to try to get extra income for the family, right? So, where's he getting the money? Oh, Martin Harris gave him the money. Surely surely Martin Harris put up all the money to give him to get all the all the gold he needed. Like, come on. Like, the the compounding factors here make this so vanishingly unlikely."
"Yeah."
"Interesting. Absolutely. Well, one other thing that people talk about when it comes to the plates is that there's like a lower bound and an upper bound. like, okay, it's got to be 6 in tallish, and it's got to be less than 60ish pounds. But the Book of Mormon itself is pages and pages and pages long. How on earth does it fit within that? In fact, um, this one creator, Trent Horn, has made a video kind of critiquing that thing, and I'd love to see guys what your reaction is here."
"The Book of Mormon is about 270,000 words long, but there were allegedly only 40 6x8 in golden plates. How could that much information have fit onto such a small space? If you tore out every page of the modern, finely printed 531page Book of Mormon and placed it on the ground, it would cover over a 100 square feet of space. But if you place the golden plates on the ground, they'd only cover 27 square feet. The question then becomes, how could all of that information have fit onto the much smaller alleged plates? My answer is there is no plausible natural way for this to have happened. If the text doesn't fit, then you must acquit the Book of Mormon. That is, of the charge of being an authentic translation of ancient texts. Okay. So, what's our reaction there? He says that okay, there's over 500 Book of Mormon pages and it would have fit on 40 gold plates."
"Alleged by who? He said alleged pages. Alleged by who?"
"Question alleged. Yeah, that's"
"Do we have record that it was 40 big?"
"So, so witness statements, eyewitness statements never gave a number for the total number of plates. I think there's a few statements and if I if we find them, we can"
"Doesn't like the second hand come from Sydney Rigdon giving a few. So, so there's one there's Sydney Rigdon who says like there's a couple accounts that tie back organ."
"Come on. He's not involved in this. Sydney Rig is not a good actual witness statements. I think there's a couple that say there were many and that's that's as far as they go is there were many. If there were only"
"I I mean, I that makes it sound like there there wasn't enough for like there was more than what they were going to count, right? uh in in the time that they had to engage with with the artifact. But um there's no there's no specific number given by any witness statements. But we have parameters. We have numbers here that we can use to figure out well, how many plates would fit there. Right? We have a we have a certain weight requirement which is uh going to prohibit how much gold, how much copper, and how much silver we can actually have. Right? We have a certain height that they've got to be. And we've got statements about how thin the plates are, right? And"
"How small the characters are."
"And how the small the characters are. And so we've got that kind of data and different people have put up uh who have used those numbers uh to make estimates for the plates. Josh Coats who we talked about earlier uh and he published a paper in interpreter last year. He presented this stuff at fair last year. Um, and his estimate uh off the top of my head in fact actually let's just pull it up here. His estimate for the number of plates comes in at between 187 and 259."
"That's a lot more than 40."
"And that's based on that's based on, you know, he he he did the research to figure out, okay, what's the thickness of common tin? That's the most common description. What's the thickness of common tin in the 19th century? Um, I actually did in the in the paper I have in this book, Defending the Book of Mormon. I did a little bit of research along those lines as well. He and I came to pretty similar conclusions on that. Um, but you get the thickness of common tin, right? And then you you have the the weight and the height of the stack. He actually did an experiment in his garage. Thank you, Frank. Uh, for to to determine how much void space there would be in between individual plates. He just he stacked up some copper discs that were about the thickness of common tin in the 19th century. And then he literally measured how much space is in between those those discs, right? And so, um, to determine how much void space there was. And that's how he came up with his numbers. uh Jerry Grover uh who did a book earlier about I think it came out in 2015 on the gold plates and he's he's a geologist and an engineer. So he he approached this very scientifically as well. Um, he argues that they potentially could be thinner uh than uh than the range that Josh Coat assumes for the plates and uh and he does some experimentation with with copper plates that are very very thin as well. Um, and he comes up with estimates between 300 and 600 plates for the stack. Okay. Wow. And so when you when you take what the witnesses actually describe seriously and you try to you try to determine based on those um parameters how many plates would have to be there really if you're going to fill a 6-in stack, it's in the hundreds. You know, we can we can confidently say the number of plates is in the hundreds, not around 40."
"So that's all fine and good, but the Book of Mormon is 500 pages of English text. That still leaves kind of a large number to scale down to. How could all of that English text fit down onto let's say 200 plates being generous?"
"Yeah. So, basically there's been two methods that have been used to try and determine this. Uh Josh Coats in his paper, what he does is he he he tries to calculate what he calls translation density. Um, and basically what that means is he determined how many total English characters are in a like instead of counting by words, which is what Trent Horn does here, he counts by characters because words can be different sizes, different lengths, right? Your average character though, even though some different letters are are going to be different shapes and sizes a little bit, your average character size isn't going to vary nearly as much. So, he determined how many characters are actually in the English translation. Oh, and by the way, Trent Horn does not take into account the 116 pages. Josh Coats, uh, he does."
"Uh, he does. I also do in in the in the stuff I do I I do a different method in my paper here, but I actually think Josh Coat's method is better, but we can talk about that. Um, he uses translation density. So, he determined, okay, there's this many characters in the English Book of Mormon. Uh, what is the ratio of characters, uh, English characters to Hebrew characters when you translate a Hebrew text? And so, he just took English translation of Genesis, compared the number of Hebrew characters to the number of English characters, and he found that it's like uh, I don't know, we can put his numbers up. I think it's 2.4 2.4 English characters to one Hebrew character. He then did the same thing with a demonic text. Demonic being an Egyptian uh language and a heratic text. And those two came out to be I think 2.6 and 3.1."
"And then to just kind of get an upper bound, an idea of what the upper bound might be, he looked at Chinese. And Chinese was like 3.9 English characters per Chinese character. And so he assumed uh a range of a translation density range of between uh like 2.4 being your kind of low lower bound because we know like they say at the very least that their at the very least their translation that their their original writing their reformed Egyptian would have been as dense as Hebrew but Moroni actually says it's more dense than Hebrew. So theoretically you need to bump it up a little bit. You're going to have a a translation density higher than 2.4."
"Yeah, he has it right here. Each character represented about three to four English characters similar to demonic to English translations."
"And so and so he assumed translation density around three to four characters. Uh I think he actually did go as high as five, but he uses a mathematical model to determine like uh how many different like literally millions of possible combinations are possible. And there are many that are within the translation density of three to four characters uh per uh English character where you could fit the entire text including the last 116 pages on the you know roughly 200 plates that he estimated uh the Book of Mormon would have required. In terms also we should mention the size of the characters. This is one of my pet peeves when I see replicas of the gold plates. Um either real ones in life or like uh digital artwork replicas of them. These characters are giant, right? Like"
"Even uses an example of the plates of Das to talk about the size of the characters."
"They're big and they're spaced out, right? And there's lots of space. Um Josh was looking at it. So, first of all, we have lots of ancient inscriptions and I know both Neil and Josh have touched on this. We can actually measure um the size of the characters on these ancient inscriptions, including metallic inscriptions, and some of them come out to as small as like 2 millimeters. Like they get really small."
"I actually I have examples uh that are as small as 1.6 millime."
"Okay. How big are these characters in like a regular English?"
"So I if that is 12point font, and I don't know, we'd have to ask Jared, I guess. But if that is 12point font, the average size of characters in 12point font is 2 to three millimeters."
"It's about it's about that. But this is to say um it is attested in antiquity that you can write that small these characters. So they're not these giant, you know, swirling sweeping things like you see in replicas, right? They're going to be very small. They're going to be very compact. Uh they're going to be difficult to read and be legible, which could also explain why they have to do that little blackening, right? To make them really stand out. Um, this also actually accounts for within the Book of Mormon itself, why Book of Mormon authors, both like Jacob and Moroni both complain about how hard it is to write this thing, especially Jacob, right? The and then Moroni, the awkwardness of our hands and things like that. They are complaining and it is like you look at these, it's a marvel that they're able to get these uh characters that small by hand, right? So, we're looking at uh about 2 to four millimeters, which is about font size 12. So, um, you know, I have had the benefit of a computer to use font size 12 for Egyptian hieroglyphs in my dissertation, which was kind of fun. And those are I have to kind of squint to make sure I'm getting them right. So, you can appreciate the amount of labor that this went into. Let's going back to our earlier point. Joseph Smith has to engrave that and he has to pack that in a plate to make them fine. You know, they're very fine characters, right? Very expertly wrought, very small. Uh, so that's what we're looking at. So, we're looking two to sorry, three to four English characters per Book of Mormon reformed Egyptian character if we use demonic as kind of our attested uh counterpoint or sort of reference point to it. And we're looking at about 2 to 4 millimeters about font size 12 for how big they are. And we'll show up on the screen here. Josh uh I actually helped him with this cuz I got examples of hieratic and demonic Egyptian. And we like did a little computer mockup of what it would look like uh on the dimensions of the plates that Josh has, which is just shy of like 6 by8, right? So we can show right here what that would look like. In your mind's eye, this is what you should be thinking about when you imagine the Book of Mormon plates, what we're looking at."
"Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, Josh's work, I think, pretty compellingly shows uh yes, the whole Book of Mormon could have fit on the plates. The other method that I mentioned that that has been used to say whether or not the whole text could fit. And it's what Trent Horn is using and it's what uh other critics have used is translated words per square inch. Basically, you say, "Okay, there's 270,000 words in the English Book of Mormon." And they'll take one or two examples of ancient metal plates, and I I mean it. They'll take one or two and no more than that."
"Destates, uh,"
"The destas plates, uh, you know, and they'll say, "Okay, here's how many English words this translates to, and this thing is, you know, x number of inches."
"So, you know, at that rate, you couldn't fit the whole Book of Mormon on on the plates that we have, and so I guess it doesn't fit. Okay. We should immediately recognize what they're doing. Look, there are there are thousands upon thousands, maybe even tens of thousands. I don't know, there might even be hundreds of thousands. I haven't done I haven't like added up how many examples we have of ancient writing on metal plates, but there are thousands of examples of it. You cannot take one or two examples and make a sweeping generalization about what is actually possible or doable by ancient scribes uh based on that little sample. Um so in my paper uh that's in this book uh written upon gold plates comparing witness descriptions with artifacts from the premodern world um I have a section in here where I go through 24 still a small sample. A small sample but uh I felt like it was sufficient to demonstrate that the kinds of the small kinds of writing that we were just talking about is quite possible like I mentioned I found some examples where the writing was as small as 1.6 6 millime uh you know uh was the size of the characters. Others that I found going up to like five or six millimeters um all and this is all just engravings on metal. Um I tried to stick with Semitic or Egyptian or other ancient Neareastern languages. Stick as closely to Book of Mormon languages as I could um based on the samples I could find. But I had to find samples that had the dimensions and information I needed to you know do the math right. But I I came up with 24 different examples where the writing was small and I was able to determine based on the surface area and the number of words on the text what the you know words per square inch in translation because we're only comparing we only have an English translation to compare what the words per square inch was uh in translation and uh and then determine okay if we extrapolated that across the size of the Book of Mormon including the last 116 pages And you can go look at my math for how many words that adds. I'm not we're not gonna waste time here."
"How, you know, how many plates would it require? And to just like highlight a few examples uh of what I did, the Kfanome inscriptions from the um which are from Jerusalem. They're 600 BC. They're written in Hebrew. They're on silver. They're very small. Um one of them uh has would has about 17 1.5 words per square inch, which would require 199 plates. Okay. So, right within our"
"That's what Josh is kind of"
"You know, our 200 range. Yeah."
"Uh the other one has a transl total words per square inch translated into English about 61 per square inch which would require about 57 plates. Okay. So, uh that gives you two different kind of poles there. Um there are several more actually. if that 50 plates or 57 plates seems extreme. There are several other examples where I got similar numbers and so it's it's not with outside the realm of possibility, but we really don't need it to be quite that compact because, you know, we're probably talking a number of plates a number of total plates in the hundreds. So, across the 24 examples that I found, the average uh would be about 40 words per square inch and would require about 86 plates for the entire Book of Mormon text."
"Wow. So that's the average across the and and I did I I will admit I specifically was looking for texts that had small compact writing on them and were densely written because that's what the witnesses describe. If you know taking a plate that's like you know an example where it's really loosely written or there's lots of gaps in the writ you know empty space on the plate that's not how the witnesses described what they saw. So I was trying to conform to what the witnesses described. So I went looking for stuff that was compactly written. But across these 24 samples, like I said, you get uh you you maybe need about 86 plates to to make the text fit based on that kind of calculation."
"So, while I'm sure Trent Horn was doing his honest best work, he ended up being mistaken about the number of gold plates that would have been required, the number of English pages even that's required, the size of the characters, the translation density. And so really like when you actually use the correct parameters and the correct data set, it sounds like the gold plates are entirely plausible from what the witnesses describe. And that's important to note. We're not saying this proves Joseph Smith had gold plates, right? We're we're trying to address the the claim that it would have been impossible. He said there's no natural way that this could have occurred, right? So therefore, it can't be a translation of ancient documents. We're here to say that that criticism just doesn't hold any water. Now, it can Book of Mormon can still be made up, right? It can still be fake. We don't believe it is, but maybe it is, right? You don't have So, in other words, you can for the critics, here's your free advice, critics. you can just drop this talking point and the Book of Mormon can still be fake and you can just drop this. It's just a silly thing to try to criticize it for. So, we're just showing that yes, uh, within the parameters described by the witnesses, it's plausible and or possible that he could have made this. So, this criticism is just kind of dumb."
"So, it's one thing for the plates to be plausible, but since we know certain people who have tried to make the plates in their garage, what do we think? Could Joseph Smith have made the plates in his garage?"
"I I mean, I I'm reluctant to say no. It's a like like"
"Impossible like of course within the realm of like what's conceivably possible he could have."
"We don't we don't want to make the same mistake Trent Horn made in the opposite direction, right?"
"Is it like hypothetically possible? Yes. But I don't find it remotely likely."
"Plausible. Plausible or or the best explanation for the data?"
"You're right. I don't I don't find it the best explanation for the data. And and in in my paper, I do way more than I'm not just trying to prove the plates that the text could fit on the plates. My paper is taking all of those dimensions of the plates that we talked about and comparing it to what we have in antiquity in metal plates and and other metal artifacts in some cases to determine like, okay, are are these dimensions are they consistent with what we know ancient American and ancient Neareastern metal smiths and scribes were could do with metal plates? And the answer I found is yes. uh all of those dimensions are consistent with actual ancient artifacts that we have. And I I would even go so far as to argue that it's within it's specifically within the purview of a pre-Colombian metal smith within the middle of the first century AD, which is the artifact Joseph Smith held in his hands. That's when it was made, right? The middle of the first century AD, right? Um, so yeah, I think I think it's plausible within those I I think that's a plausible explanation for the data is it's an ancient American artifact made according to those specs. I don't find it very plausible that Joseph made him in his garage."
"I'll just add to that point. Um, there's an axiom that the Scottish philosopher David Hume came up with that's kind of famous, right? He's a enlightenment skeptic of religion, specifically miracles. And David Hume basically says, and I'm paraphrasing here, that you should only believe a miracle if the counter explanation is more miraculous. Right? Uh that's how I feel with this idea that you can make gold plates in your garage. Yes, you can conceivably, but I think having Joseph Smith make gold plates in his garage is more miraculous than in getting it from an angel. And in order to be consistent with the data that we've laid out here, right?"
"Yeah."
"That is a fair point. Well, if you want to learn more about gold plates and the artifacts we have for them and the plausibility of the Book of Mormon, you can read Neil Rapley's paper in the volume defending the Book of Mormon published by Fair. And we'll also link in the description the paper that Josh Coats wrote all about the combinatorial approach to uh the plates math. So remember, you can believe in the Book of Mormon and you can study deeply and the church is true. We'll see you next time."