How the Book of Mormon was Composed | Ep. 1615 | LDS Discussions Ep. 10

Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I am one of your co-hosts for today, John Delin. We are here in this amazing series that we've dubbed LDS Discussions, where we're drawing from the amazing content that can be found at ldsdiscussions.com with the original author of most of the LDS Discussions content. He's going by Mike.

Um, in in the series, hey Mike, thanks for joining us again.

Hey everybody, good to be here. And we're also, uh, super excited to have joining us, uh, today as a co-host, uh, Nemo from the UK.

Hey Nemo.

Hi everyone, how you doing?

All right. Well, uh, well, Mike, today we are, um, if I'm, if I've got this right, um, where are we in the sequence with this episode? Where this is number 10, right?

How the book sounds, right? Yeah, it sounds great. So we're building on our episodes about treasure digging, gold plates, Book of Mormon translation, tight versus loose DNA, um, surrounding influences in the Book of Mormon, anachronisms, King James version, all that stuff, uh, is kind of building to, uh, this episode, which I think is really important because for me, one of the most important things Grant Palmer did in his book, An Insider's View of Mormon Origins, is he put forward a plausible hypothesis for how the Book of Mormon was put together. And whether or not you think he did a good job on that, it, it's one of very few attempts at credibly explaining what for many of us was this sort of, um, this sort of challenge put forth by, uh, Mormon leaders and Mormon apologists, which is, "Oh, the Book of Mormon's just so freaking amazing. How did a dumb yokel, uneducated farm boy create it in three months?" And that's kind of the gauntlet that's been thrown down, is that right, Mike?

Yeah, and I think this episode is going to be a bit of a culmination of the first, you know, nine, which is to say that we've gone through treasure digging, the story of the gold plates, the translation issues within the Book of Mormon, the King James, but all of that stuff is going to play into this. Which is to say, we cannot tell you how Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon because we weren't there. And so, all we could do is say, "This is what we know happened," and "This is how we know Joseph Smith was doing certain parts of it." And that allows you then to make a very educated guess as to how he did it, and how he did it within the timeline. And to kind of answer what you said as far as the church's kind of, um, equations that they put forth. And and once you can kind of do that using all the info we've done in the previous episodes, it becomes easy to understand how he could have done it without having to worry about the actual specific mechanics of what he was doing with, with regards to like, what was in the room, what notes or notes he may or may not have had. That kind of stuff is is important, but we will never know that. But we can tell you where he is pulling from and how it fits into the Book of Mormon, and why those fingerprints and why those clues tell us how he did it.

I love it. Really quickly, Mike, is there an, is there an essay that informs this episode? I'm not seeing it on the slides, and all the other, oh, yeah, I forgot to, yeah, there is one. It's, um, ldsdiscussions.com/authorship. And that will basically be this section with a little bit more, you know, detail, just because, you know, we don't have to, uh, kind of cover every bit of it. But this, this will cover the main points. And then if you want more, you can go to ldsdiscussions.com/authorship and then read the longer, kind of overview with links and all of that.

Okay, we'll include that in the show notes. A couple of other quick things. I'll, I'll add. We're trying to respond to feedback. Some are saying they like the panel discussion and they like, uh, slowing things down and summarizing major points. Others are saying they just want to hear Mike go fast. Um, and so we're going to just try and balance that. We've got Nemo here. We are going to try and only contribute when we feel like it's really adding to the conversation. But we also are going to make it, um, hopefully digestible and and valuable to people who are newer, uh, to these questions, not just the experienced people that want to zip through it. We want to encourage you to use speeding up to go faster, either in video or audio form. Your your apps, including YouTube, will allow you to do that. Please speed this up if we're going too slow. Please slow it down if we're going too fast. And feel free to go to YouTube and use the jump codes where we're trying to give you time codes to jump to sections of this episode or to jump back as you need it. And then finally, we plan on releasing all of this as a standalone podcast under the brand LDS Discussions for people that don't want to wade through all the other Mormon Stories content in between. So look for that LDS Discussions as its own standalone episode. And on YouTube, under the Mormon Stories channel, we, um, we are making a playlist. So if you want to just watch the YouTube videos in succession, there's an LDS Discussions playlist in the Mormon Stories channel that you can use to just kind of binge watch these episodes. Now, having said all that, Nemo, we, we know you've done some work in this regard. Is there anything you want to say in the opener before we jump in?

Well, in regards to this topic, yeah, yeah. I did a video rebutting the church when they did a video about, "How can it not be true?" And they made a series of claims about, you know, how long it should take to write it, how many pages it should be, how many words it should contain, all of which falls down under scrutiny. And, um, I'll do my best to remember some of that. I've got my old notes here and I'll try and add that to the discussion.

Okay. Um, all right. Well, we're super excited to to kind of jump in. Yeah. So Mike, our first slide, um, is about putting the pieces all together. Yeah.

And so this actually, I probably kind of just said this a few minutes ago, but, you know, this is the 10th episode. So the first nine was basically taking us from Joseph's, uh, treasure digging all the way through the Book of Mormon. And so now we're kind of taking those first nine episodes and looking at all of the clues and fingerprints that we have from those first nine to kind of give us a better understanding, not of the how, how the mechanics of how Joseph Smith produced it, but how we can show that Joseph Smith did it, um, and give us a roadmap as to like, where he was pulling from and the techniques he was using. Because we'll never be able to say with 100% certainty how he did it because we weren't there. But we can show you that no one else but Joseph Smith could have written it, and we can show you where he was pulling from. And that alone will give us a really good indication as to where the Book of Mormon came from and what that says about its claims to being an ancient authentic text.

And I'll just say, as someone who's been doing this for 20 years, I highly recommend people, if you're just joining us now and you haven't watched the prior nine episodes, it, this episode will be much, much, much more valuable if you pause this, go watch the other nine in sequence because this is building, and it's building in really important ways that someone who's been studying this stuff for 20 years is finding super valuable. So I just want to add my, my experience to what you're saying.

Yeah, thanks. Okay. Uh, so how the Mormon Church imbalances the equation. What do you mean by that, Mike?

Yeah, and this is one of those things that we'll talk about as we go through this episode, which is to say that if the, within Mormonism, and and I can say this as a convert, you know, I'm still a member, but not active, but when you listen to talks, when you go to Sunday school, uh, you know, Gospel Doctrine, whatever, they're going to start with an equation where the conclusion is already set, which is to say, no matter what variables, variables you put into the equation, the conclusion has to be that it's an ancient historical record. And one of the things I've talked about in a lot of these earlier episodes is to say that you have to start with a clean slate if you really want to know whether or not the church's truth claims hold up. And if you don't do that, you're always going to get to the conclusion that you're being led to. And so within Mormonism, we have a lot of elements of this where members and leaders will will basically imbalance the equation. In this particular one, we are looking at three quotes. I wanted to do before we get too far into the, um, actual parts of the Book of Mormon. And so the first one is Tad Callister, who, um, I believe was a, a General Authority for the church, and he had wrote the book, A Case for the Book of Mormon. And so he said, "The current argument being made is that Joseph Smith was a creative genius who read numerous books such as *View of the Hebrews* and *The Late War* between the United States and Great Britain and then copied ideas and stories from them. This, of course, is a total flip-flop, a 180-degree reversal from the original argument that Joseph Smith was incapable, too ignorant to write such a book. Now, all of a sudden, Joseph is a skilled creative writer with genius intellect. Why the flip-flop? Because all the previous explanations for a man-made book had failed." And so that is what Ted Callister will tell members. And it's just, it's a, that is setting the equation that no matter what info you find, it ultimately has to lead to the church is true. There's no way around it.

I mean, the real reason. Gasping. You're normally really reserved, and I'm hearing audible gasps. Sorry, it's a new, sensitive microphone. I think, uh, I want to hear it. It's so frustrating because the reason for the flip-flop is actually because we've now discovered that the church's narrative that Joseph Smith was a poor and uneducated farm boy doesn't stand up to scrutiny. He was actually quite a curious young man who did have some schooling. At least this idea that he was just completely stupid was something the church tried to push, not, not critics. And that doesn't stand to scrutiny anymore.

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. It, I think, I don't know if, if "poisoning the well" or "stacking the deck" are the right analogies here, or some combination of the two, but, but you really do get the sense that the church wants to try and control the narrative from the beginning so that people don't just take an objective, scientific view.

Yeah, I mean, like I said, I just, I think by, by calling it a flip-flop, you're basically, you are, you're poisoning the well. You're saying the critics of the church are basically just rolling around on the ground in circles because they can't figure this out. And the truth is, you know, you, as we'll see in this episode, you can absolutely line up why critics can say that this is not an ancient text. And there is no, um, you know, all of these different areas we've talked about, whether it's, you know, DNA, migration, linguistics, archaeology, biblical scholarship, all of those things are pointing to the same conclusion. And so that's why, from the church's perspective, you start with the conclusion, then you have to fill the variables to to make that stay. But again, what he's saying is really, it's just a straw man argument. And we'll talk about Tad more as we go because he is very good at making these kinds of arguments that he knows full well are not at all the position of people who are critical of the Book of Mormon. But he does it in a way that to the members is basically telling them, "Hey, smarter people than you have looked at this. They're fine. You know, don't worry about these people who can't figure it out for themselves." Because he doesn't want to tell you what their arguments are, because once you tell the real arguments, the game is over. And so this is just how it works, and how it's, how it worked when I was an active member as well. It's every road has to lead to the church is true.

Just a real quick point there, if I may. The only institution in this situation, or the only kind of party that values a linear, undisrupted, unchanging narrative is the LDS Church. So they try and paint people who criticize the church as flip-flopping, i.e., their opinions change, or they've moved from one position to another. But they've moved from one position to another because the evidence has led them there. The church is the one that's demonizing those people, or representatives of the church to demonizing those people, because from that perspective, from the church's perspective, they don't want the things to change. They don't want to accept new evidence. They don't want to have to change the narrative because they have one very standardized narrative that they like to tell.

Yeah, absolutely. I love it. All right. So the next slide is "Starting with the Conclusion and Working Backwards." Yeah.

So this is effectively picking up from the last slide. And just, there's two more quotes I want to read just because I think it illustrates, um, where the leaders have been with regards to how they, uh, I guess, discuss the Book of Mormon's historicity. And so Jeffrey R. Holland said, and this is a quote you'll probably be able to hear him say in your head, but, "If anyone is foolish enough or misled enough to reject 531 pages of a heretofore unknown text teeming with literary and Semitic complexity without honestly attempting to account for the origin of those pages, especially without accounting for the powerful witness of Jesus Christ and the profound spiritual impact that witness has had on what is now tens of millions of readers, if that is the case, since such a person, let alone otherwise, has been deceived. If he or she leaves this church, it must be done by crawling over or under or around the Book of Mormon to make that exit." And then Russell Nelson said in 1999, "This appeal to all people must involve many languages and the work of skilled translators. The King James version of the Bible, for example, was produced by 50 English scholars who accomplished their work in seven years, translating at the rate of one page per day. Expert translators today do well if they can also translate scripture at the rate of one page per day. In contrast, Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon at the rate of about 10 pages per day, completing the task in about 85 days. Many of us feel good if we can read the book in that time."

[Music]

And, yeah, these are just, they're setting up an equation that just is not supported by the evidence. And they're setting it from the, from the, the answer and then trying to work the information into that answer. And it's just, that's not how it works.

Nemo, why are you smiling? Can you bring, yeah, Jeffrey Holland on the screen again? Where he says, "Essentially a hater for unknown text." Well, we're going to pull that apart, I'm sure. And then he says, he says, "Without honestly attempting." So there's a loaded statement right there, because you'll question your honesty if he doesn't think you've done it the way he thinks you should do it. "Attempting to account for the origin of those pages." Well, critics of course attempt to account for the origin. He's trying to make an argument for ignorance. He's saying, "Well, if you can't prove how it was done, then it must have been done the way I said it was." It's not the case. And then he switches, "Especially without accounting for their powerful witness of Jesus Christ." Well, powerful witness of Jesus Christ is purely subjective to him. He feels they're a powerful witness of Jesus Christ. Others may disagree. So he's take, he's trying to make objective statements that, or objective tasks that people have to live up to, that are purely subjective in nature. And then I'll just, I'll just add my massive objection to Russell Nelson's quote. He's talking about how long it takes to do actual, genuine, authentic translation. But none of us are arguing that Joseph Smith was translating.

Yeah. And so for him to put some standard of one page a day as kind of like as the standard, and then Joseph was 10 times as fast as that, that's by, it's just, just face value disingenuous. Because we're saying that he had, and we'll talk about this, six or however many years to write, you know, creative fan fiction, basically. And then all he had to do was find a way to dictate that in a way where his scribes wouldn't catch on that he was dictating something pre-written. We are saying the last thing Joseph actually did was do authentic translation of ancient, you know, languages that either didn't exist, in the case of Reformed Egyptian, or that Joseph Smith didn't know, in the case of Hebrew, or, you know, um, you know, Greek. And even if he did, even if he did, they always make this claim, "He did it by the gift and power of God." Right, right. So all of a sudden then, appealing to secular translators who were in, you know, we were there the other day, John, who are in a small college in Oxford, they're translating a book at a rate of a page a day, which, you know, a page is an arbitrary measure. How large of a page? How big is the font? All that sort of stuff. They're translating by secular means, doing the best they can, right? Some say they were inspired men. Joseph's claim is that God gave this to him out of a hat, and he said it out loud, and it was written down. Of course, it's going to be quicker.

Yep. I mean, it should have been. He should have been able to finish it in the weekend. Yeah. Right. Yeah. What's he playing now? Taking 85 days? That's just that. Even, even if you want to claim Joseph was translating, he wasn't actually translating. Joseph Smith, at best, was reading off of a rock in a hat. So you can't even make, like you said, you can't make the claim that it's even. And if you want to make that claim, if Russell Nelson wants to make that claim, look at how fast Joseph Smith dictates the Book of Mormon versus how slowly he translates the Book of Abraham. Where he's actually trying to, and now, again, we know the Book of Abraham translation is wrong. I'm not arguing that. I'm just saying when Joseph Smith is forced to use a source material in front of other people, he works way slower than if he is claiming to be reading, um, off of a, you know, a stone in a hat. And so that alone is a completely disingenuous argument that Russell Nelson knows he's making. Because he's actually spoken about, you know, the stone more so than other leaders have. So he knows full well the process. And so to make this argument is like basically an appeal to authority to the members to say, "Listen, this is too miraculous for you. Stop questioning it."

Yeah, it's almost a form of thought-stopping, um, and, and to say, kind of, "These are not the droids you're looking for. Just kind of move on." Okay. So the next slide is "Revisiting the Book of Mormon Production Timeline." Yeah.

And just to say, like, as, as Russell Nelson's quote illustrates, one of the areas where the church proclaims the Book of Mormon is just too miraculous is the timeline. And so Nelson states in the above, or the earlier quote, um, that the Book of Mormon was completed in just 85 days. Which on the surface, obviously, seems pretty amazing for a book that's 270,000 words. We've covered this in the translation episode we did, but when you get below the surface, it's not nearly as miraculous, and it actually becomes very explainable, and to a certain extent, somewhat ordinary. Um, because remember that while Joseph Smith is claimed to have only taken 85 days to develop the Book of Mormon, he's going to have over five years to develop the stories, to test them out with his family. And that is ultimately going to allow him to write a faster book, or to dictate a faster book, because he's already working out the material to the point where he has this outer shell that he's been working with for years. This is not something that Joseph Smith just one day starts doing and finishes in 85 days. This is a very long process.

Yeah, and and that's why also, you, you have to add, you have to watch the previous nine episodes because also there are so many errors and rookie problems and mistakes and glaring anachronisms and fingerprints that that these statements from these glowing statements from Holland and Nelson and Gibbons and others about how miraculous the book is, it's, it's, um, it's a straw man, or it's, it's, uh, deceptive because it's not taking into account all the many problems that we discussed in in episodes one through nine.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's pretty much the way to look at it. I think, you know, we'll get to it later too, but you gotta remember that when you talk about, we'll talk about this more as we go because there's a slide on it, but the Book of Mormon that Joseph Smith wrote is not the Book of Mormon you read on Sundays, ends, or I guess any day. And so if you read the Book of Mormon original manuscripts, and someone put that in front of you, you would not find it nearly as miraculous as you might find the Book of Mormon as it is. And I think that's another thing that the church doesn't want to talk about. You know, they talk about presentism and all that, they always throw that out there. But at the same time, they're constantly referring to a translation or a dictation process, um, that led to a manuscript that is very, very, very much folksy and unreadable compared to what has been edited and shaped into the Book of Mormon as we have it today. Not to mention the actual changes to the substance in the, yes.

Oh, yeah, that's kind of getting into the content of it. Just a real interesting point, uh, if I can make it really quick, is that the Welsh edition of the Book of Mormon, right here, is, um, the translation of which was done in 1852 and has not been updated. So actually, this is a book still in production by the church that has the text of the Book of Mormon looking like this, block paragraphs.

That's right. Very similar to some of the early transcripts that Joseph Smith put together. So you can still get produced by the church a copy of the Book of Mormon that looks a lot like it did back then. A lot less miraculous.

Yeah. Okay. Um, let's, let's move on to Lucy Mack Smith on Joseph's development of Book of Mormon stories. Yeah.

And this, this is kind of where it all begins, right? Yes. And this is from Lucy Mack Smith's, um, autobiography. And she's talking about basically after Joseph Smith claims the first visitation about the gold plates, which would be in 1823. And so she says, "From this time forth, Joseph continued to receive instruction from time to time, and every evening we gathered our children together and gave our time up to the discussion of those things which he instructed to us. In the course of our evening conversations, Joseph gave us some of the most amusing recitals which could be imagined. He would describe the ancient inhabitants of this continent, their dress, their manner of traveling, the animals which they rode, they didn't ride animals back then, the cities that they built, and the structure of their buildings with every particular, their mode of warfare, and their religious worship, as specifically as though he had spent his life with them. The angel informed him at one time that he might make an effort to obtain the plates on the 22nd of the ensuing September." Which is obviously a folk magic date, which we covered in the translation and the, um, episodes. But this quote is telling us Joseph Smith wasn't just talking about these stories, he was talking about them in such amazing detail night after night to his family. And that is how you can work through ideas in your head about these stories for years before you write them down. And it's, um, I've said it before in a previous episode, but comedians do this all the time. When they come up with a new set of material, they'll do them at small clubs where people don't know who they are, or they don't know they're going to be there. And so they could tell these jokes, and they keep changing the wording, they keep changing the content until they get a 60-minute comedy set that they know is going to, you know, kill at the clubs, or, you know, bigger stadiums, whatever. This is Joseph Smith working through a lot of the kinks early on because you can read the room, you can tell from your family what stories gravitate, they gravitate to, which ones resonate, which ones they, they appeal to them. And so Joseph Smith is for a long time telling stories before he even has the plates about every particular of these people. And that should give us a very good indication that he is working with these stories long before he even tries to dictate them to Martin Harris or Oliver Cowdery.

Yeah, we're talking eight years of storytelling, character development, plot preparation that Callister and Holland and others and Nelson are not being honest about.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, it's, it's like, it, you cannot just say it's 85 days when you know, our next slide will go, we'll have a better timeline, but it, this is a process that has a lot of very important events, and also shows you how wide it goes. And I think that's one of the things that they're never going, you know, if you go to the next slide, because this is something they're never going to put in the manuals. But remember, in 1823, Joseph is claiming the visitation regarding the gold plates, and he's beginning to tell these stories, according to his own mother. So I don't think anyone can argue she's a bad witness here. In 1827, he claims to retrieve the gold plates. In 1828, he begins the dictation with Martin Harris, but they lose 116 pages. And then in 1829, now five and a half years later, the Book of Mormon as we have it today, dictation begins with Oliver Cowdery. So not only does Joseph Smith spend five and a half years developing these stories by telling them to his family, but the 116 pages are a really good dress rehearsal for him to figure out the dictation process, to figure out how to, um, best use his time, to maybe, you know, give a chunk and then take a break. All of those things are going to give him, as unfortunate as losing those pages were, it gives him effectively a do-over to start fresh and learn from that experience. So not only does he have five and a half years, but he also got effectively a do-over so he could fix or, you know, be more efficient with his dictation, and also get a better feel for how he needs to, um, come up with the ideas, you know, maybe in the morning versus breaks, all that. So all of these things are to his benefit to being able to create this, this book. And this is something that the church never puts in their manuals because it really takes away a lot of the miraculousness of that 85-day timeline. And I can't recommend the 116 pages episode that we did highly enough because it, it, it's so sketchy that, uh, as soon as the 116 pages gets lost, he just miraculously loses his ability to translate. But really, what what makes more sense is he's got the story that he's already pretty much written out, that he's been dictating, that, you know, because he's been working on it for years, and he's got to figure out two things, you know, one is, is the manuscript going to come back? Yes or no? Two, how's the loss of the manuscript going to affect the rest of the story that he's already written? And then how's he going to go back and rewrite the beginning? And that, that is the most plausible explanation for why he, quote, lost his power to translate. What he really had to do is figure out how to, um, to, how to work with the fact that that his long, long, uh, developed plan was now disrupted by Lucy. You know,

Nemo, anything you want to add?

Not particularly, other than it's, you know, along with the other contemporary sources around him, which I'm sure we probably get to later on in this, um, there's no reason that the, the video that the church put out said there must be no research of any kind. And there's no reason for that. Even, even if you're claiming divine inspiration, you know, I like to play devil's advocate sometimes. Even if you're claiming he was divinely inspired, there's no reason that when he got the plates in '27, he wasn't meditating on them and thinking on them and gaining inspiration from God pre-translation, right? Because it happened the next year. He, click, he got them in September, and it took him until at least January. I'm not sure when it started, but, you know, he had a few months at least where he just had the plates. And then so there's no reason for him not to have been developing the story beforehand. If I want, if I want viewers and listeners to remember anything is that the 85 days, the 90 days is a red herring. We're talking six to 10 years, not handy days. I mean, it would be like, you know, I love music and so it'd be like a band that's writing an album, and they're going to spend months in the studio or just in the rehearsal space writing songs and coming up with lyrics and getting the, you know, I like, I like rock music, so the guitar solos, a lot. And they might only be in the studio for two weeks, but they'll never sit there and tell you, "I wrote that entire album. We did that whole album in two weeks." We're going to say, "We spent months in, you know, writing it by ourselves. We got together." I mean, all of those things go into it. But the church only wants to to lob off that 85 days because if they do that, it seems miraculous. But they're ignoring intentionally the timeline that is well documented that Joseph Smith had years to develop these stories, and in fact was doing so, as per his own mother. And so, you know, to your point, it's just, it's, it's dishonest in the sense of, they know better. This is not something where there's any debate whether or not he was, you know, I guess people could say Lucy Mack was was lying, but she was writing that autobiography to privilege her own son. She's not going to put him in a hole, um, and, you know, what I mean? Like that, that just goes against what a loving mom would do for her son. So there is absolutely no reason to use that 85-day timeline, um, when you know there's more involved years before it. It just, it, it's a very, like you said, it's just a deceptive, uh, way to frame it.

It's the most expensive way to practice your music is in a recording studio. Exactly. You can't do it there. The most difficult thing for Joseph to practice his storytelling is in front of the scribe that he has wants to keep on the side. Yeah, because, yeah, and that, that's a perfect point because you want to, you have to have the story in as good of shape as you can before you do the dictation. Because I do believe Oliver Cowdery believed Joseph Smith was was getting this through another divine means. So if Joseph Smith is practicing the story in front of Oliver, the gig is up. And so to your point, Nemo, like he has to make sure the practice is done before he does that so that he avoids what could be some landmines, um, that maybe he had worked out by telling these stories elsewhere. And so, yeah, that's exactly the same process as he's getting it all set up so that when he gets into the dictation process with Oliver or Martin, um, he's able to do it in a way that isn't going to, um, basically screw himself over. He's going to do it in a way where at least he's comfortable enough that he can get through chunks at a time, take a break, and then regather his thoughts. And that's a really good, like what you just said, is a really good way to frame it.

So the next slide is "No one could produce the Book of Mormon in 90 days." That's the canard, right?

Yeah, and we discussed this in the translation episodes. We don't need to do too much. But, you know, the Book of Mormon is 273,000 words long. And that includes all the material that was brought in from the King James Bible, which is a lot. It's from the Isaiah, the Sermon on the Mount, all that stuff. So, but even including that, just for sake of argument, if you give an estimate of 85 days, that requires 3,200 words a day being written down. And John Hamer, he did an episode with you about how the Book of Mormon was composed. And he talks about how the average dictation time is about 1,200 words per hour to remain clear, clean, legible handwriting. So if you take 3,200 words and divide it by 1,200, that means that they only needed to be spending a little bit under three hours a day in that actual process. Which means that Joseph Smith actually had a ton of time during each day to do a chunk, say, "You know what? Let's eat. Let's have lunch." Or do a chunk and say, "I need to use, you know, use the bathroom, take a walk along the river, throw some, skip some rocks, whatever." And as he's doing that, he can come up with that next section. You know, you, in your head, say you have five or six major, main, main concepts you want to do. You do them. You see, "I'm gonna, let's go get something to eat." Then he takes a walk, and as he's walking, he, you know, he thinks about what he said. He can then plan the next section. When you only are doing it for two hours and 40 minutes a day, that gives you a lot of time to do other things. And it also gives you a lot of time to be away from the people you're working with so you can gather your thoughts, you can look at things. I'm not saying he's working off of a manuscript. I'm saying he probably has a story in his head. And every time he takes a break, he may look at where he where he finished off and say, "Okay, this is where I got to start, and this is what I wanted to do next." It just, it gives him so much time to plan. Yet when we think about it from like the church's narrative, it feels like he's in a room just doing this continuously for 85 days, and then it's just done. But he has a lot of free time within this process, within, and that's staying within a fair, uh, time for dictation. We're not pushing, like John Hamer said, they could actually go a lot faster if you aren't worried about being as clean. This is a pretty reasonable, um, measurement of what would be required.

Part of me wonders, uh, the real kind of analyst in me wonders whether if you took the Book of Mormon and you say they took a break every hour, I wonder if you can find a pattern through the Book of Mormon where there's just, where you find Joseph uses particular filler words that he would use when he starts off an oral dictation again. I wonder whether you could find that pattern every thousand or so words, you know, where it starts with a big "Yay, and it came to pass" or something. I mean, that's everywhere. But, you know, whether, whether there was, I wonder, would there be an identifier that you could actually use to kind of pin down where he starts his oral dictation sessions? The other thing is, do you want those facts and figures for, for the amount of Isaiah there are in the Book of Mormon? Is that useful?

Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah. So I did the math on that, um, 14,767 words of Isaiah across 21 chapters of Isaiah are quoted in the Book of Mormon directly. So that's 5.3% of the Book of Mormon. If you take 1,709 more words, which are paraphrased, so they're not exact quotes, but they're paraphrased, that gives you 6% of the Book of Mormon is Isaiah. The phrase "it came to pass" accounts for 5,904 words of the Book of Mormon, or 2.15%. So you're getting close to 10% of the Book of Mormon that is hilarious, 10% of the Book of Mormon almost is "and it came to pass" and direct quotes from Isaiah. I haven't even counted Matthew or other biblical parts, King James New Testament, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I haven't counted any of that yet. It's just that alone is almost a tenth of the entire book.

Yeah, and that, that's a lot. I mean, that's just it. And so all of a sudden now, you would require even less words to be, I mean, they have still to be dictated because Joseph could read out the Bible. But it'll be less taxing, it'll be quicker because he's not having to sit there and think every sentence. He's just reading and making small changes. And so, like Nemo said, the more you drill down, you would expect it to become more and more impossible. But the reality is, the more you drill down, the more and more ordinary it starts to feel, um, because of the fact that we can start to see these clues as to where he's pulling from.

Yeah, and I will make sure and include in the show notes links to the John Hamer episode on Mormon Stories, which is a really important episode. And by the way, John Hamer is not anti-Mormon. He is a high-level leader in the Community of Christ, who still respects the tradition of Joseph Smith. So he's a very credible witness.

He is, and he's amazing at his knowledge about not just Book of Mormon stuff, but biblical scholarship. And and he does it in a way that is absolutely kind and gentle, and he's not, you know, going out there and just saying it's all garbage. He's just trying to say, "This is what historically would have happened." And that's the same conclusion that other scholars are going to come to. Because we're again, when you talk about the equation, if you, if you start with a clean equation, you say, "Look at the variables. What do the variables tell us?" That's where you're going to end up. It's not because we're trying to say the Book of Mormon is garbage. We're not even saying the Book of Mormon is bad. We're just saying it's explainable.

Yeah. Okay. Next slide, "Setting the Equation While Ignoring the Evidence." Yeah.

And this is just, you know, I mentioned this earlier, but when people talk about how the Book of Mormon feels so miraculous today, just mention that the original manuscript would read so much more folksy, run-on sentences, no chapters, no verses. And so this little image is part of the original manuscript that survived, that is basically a bunch of run-on sentences. And again, when you talk about how could the Book of Mormon have been written in such a short time frame, I wish members when they heard that question from leaders were given the original manuscript to read, because the original manuscript would be a lot less impressive than what we have today. And that is another area where the church is really good at kind of controlling the narrative. Of they say, "Oh, you can't talk about the past for some things, and some things you can't." And this is a case where they're like, "We don't even want to talk about the, what it originally read as," because as we talked about in our earlier episodes, there's there's stuff we'll say like, "And he was a run," and stuff like that, where if you read it today, you'd be like, "Oh my goodness, that is not great." Um, and so they try to make the most polished equation they can to keep you from getting to a different conclusion. But again, they're giving you a book that's been through so many edits and and made so much more readable. And and even then, we're not even getting into the content. I'm just talking about the readability of it.

Am I right in saying that the, it was the typesetters and the, um, printers that put the grammar in the original Pokemon? I, I think I remember hearing once that when they were printing the Book of Mormon, they were like, literally, the original Book of Mormons all have changes because they were fixing things as they were printing. And so they were changing the whole way through. And I think they were trying to make it more grammatically good. I don't know if the chapters and verses were done then or not. I'm not sure.

Chapters, I and I. What I'm going to do is I'm going to include a link to, to the Joseph, and I've got it here, shown on the screen, the Joseph Smith Papers Project, which I think for many of us is a, is a good thing overall. Yeah, it's a great thing. Um, it shows on the left-hand side, the, um, the Book of Mormon manuscript as it was, you know, written down by scribes, the, the, you know, the, the parts that we still have in our possession, right? And then in the right-hand side, it shows how scholars have converted into, you know, computer electronic text. Yeah. Um, and it, yeah, there's no chapters, uh, there's there's no section headers, right? There's there's no verses. It's just run-on sentences. But it's not just run-on sentences, there's awful spelling errors, awful grammar errors, um, and it's run-on sentences, and there's there's all this folksy language, yeah, that, um, you know, just makes it far, far less impressive. And it's something that that the church leaders would never, you know, it's the type of thing where they want it, they now want it available so that people can't claim that they're hiding things or, you know, misleading anyone. They can claim to be transparent. But I can just promise you, they do not want the average member looking at at this document, right? Because it is so obviously less impressive, um, you know, once you look at the actual, you know, scribes manuscript.

Yeah, I mean, that's just, and yeah, that's that's just it. Yeah.

Yep. So, so we'll include a link to that in the show notes so that you can judge for yourself. Don't believe us. Yeah, go try and read it and you'll see how unimpressive it is.

Yeah, it becomes a lot less impressive. And and it's just, you know, um, and so one of the things that I mentioned earlier, I think we all are in agreement, we cannot tell you exactly how he did it. We can't tell you if he had the King James Bible open on the table. We can't tell you if, you know, he was in, you know, any any of the actual mechanics because we weren't there. But what we can tell you is the reasons why we can show from like a scholarly perspective why scholars can look at it and say, "It's not an ancient text," and "Joseph Smith absolutely could have written it." And it's because, as we've covered in our previous overviews, there are surrounding influences from Joseph Smith's life and place that make their way into the Book of Mormon. Um, the King James Bible's language and passages are in the Book of Mormon. It tells you right there that at the earliest that book could have been written in 1611, or in Joseph Smith's case, 1769 is the version we think he had. Um, there were specific revelations in the Book of Mormon that happen up until the Book of Mormon's production and then completely fade away. So you've got like Columbus, Revolutionary War, it predicts the Charles Anthony visit, it predicts the Book of Mormon coming forth, and then it just gets into very generic revelations. Um, personal events in Joseph Smith's life end up in the Book of Mormon. We met, we have a reference to the 116 pages being lost. About we mentioned in that episode about borrowing and causing sin for you and the person you borrowed from. We have Joseph's, um, father's dream, which appears is Lehi's dream. We have the, um, anti-Masonic feelings, the mound builder myth, a 19th-century Christology that predates Jesus. All of these things are giving us a very good idea of when the book is written. And then the personal events.

And the surrounding influences help us narrow down the author to Joseph Smith, beyond just the time it would have been written. Yeah, yep. And so this is kind of like the overview of what we're going to be talking about for the rest of this episode, and it's summarizing the previous nine episodes that exactly we've already been, uh, discussing so far.

Yes. Nemo, anything that here? No, not particularly. Uh, I'm just very excited. I don't know if we get to view the Hebrews in here. Uh, no, not really. View of the Hebrews, we, you know, view the Hebrews, we did that more, um, in the episode on surrounding influences. And I think, um, yeah, that one, that one's not in this.

There's just, there's just one thing I want to say about that. Yes, please do. If you go to Joseph Smith Papers, go to Times and Seasons, June 1842, Joseph Smith quotes, "View of the Hebrews." We have Joseph Smith quoting "View of the Hebrews." So it's, it's just in case you didn't cover that last time, I think it's really important that people know not only was this just a book that was around in Joseph Smith's time, he was aware of it and directly referenced it in church-approved sources. And I think what's cool about that is, if I remember correctly, when they reference it in the Times and Seasons, they're almost referencing it as a way to say, "See, the Book of Mormon is true because we have other sources that are saying similar ideas." And that, that, you know, to me, I really know about the ten tribes. Yeah, he was trying to try ten tribes. Yep. And so I think that's really important to show that these, these ideas that are all around them, um, end up in the Book of Mormon. And, um, again, I think that's why it's so easy to date it to the 19th century because that's when these things were of great concern to these, to the people.

And for those who, who are newer to these questions, who don't know what we're talking about, "View of the Hebrews" is a book that was written by Oliver Cowdery's pastor, you know, in the congregation that Oliver Cowdery attended years before he became Joseph Smith's scribe. And it's, it's a book that is, is well known to be something that was so troublesome to B.H. Roberts, a Mormon historian and General Authority, that, you know, you can go to the Shannon Caldwell, Montez episodes about the secret Mormon meetings of 1922. And the book that Nemo's holding up, which is called, Nemo, uh, "Studies of the Book of Mormon" by B.H. Roberts. Great book. These are legitimate, uh, challenges, uh, to the Book of Mormon authenticity by mentioning 19th-century sources that we know Joseph Smith had access to. Yes. Yeah. Okay.

So, the next slide is the Parable of the Olive Tree. We're getting specific now. Now, this one is one, um, I want to give a shout out because this is an article, and I couldn't find out who wrote the original article, but I believe it was Anthony Miller, who's been on Mormon, um, Stories, and he had did a, uh, overview on, I think, Facebook about it. And then Bill Reel had done a podcast on the Facebook post. And this story was one when I listened to it, it blew me away because this is the perfect way to illustrate how Joseph Smith was taking multiple sources and then trying to weave it into the Book of Mormon and making mistakes in the process. And so these next few slides will be reading a lot, but I promise you, this is a really great example of how Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon.

And so, um, this is from the parable, allegory of the olive tree, which is in Jacob 5. And in this story, Jacob retells an allegory from, excuse me, Zenos, uh, that was recorded on the brass plates retrieved from Laban. And so, um, this chapter is referenced all the time as evidence for the Book of Mormon because they say, "There's no way Joseph Smith could have known this specific information, olive horticulture, and there's just no way he could have guessed it." And so Daniel C. Peterson, who was the writer of a book, I believe called like "Offenders for a Word: How Critics Deceive and Play Word Games," or something like that, is going to do that exact same thing here. So he says, um, "One of the single most famous chapters in the Book of Mormon is Jacob 5, which recounts a lengthy olive tree allegory that it credits to a pre-Lehi old world prophet unknown to the Bible that identifies as Zenos. According to an article by several professional botanists, nearly all of the allegory and Jacob 5 corresponds exceptionally well with both ancient and modern botanical principles and horticulture practices. It is hard to imagine that its author was not personally familiar with the minute details and practices involved in raising good olives in a Mediterranean climate. Moreover, although some very limited information about olive cultivation might be derived through careful, focused study of the Bible and a few other books that were available during Joseph Smith's early years, though likely not anywhere near where he lived, they contain only sparse details. And here's another problem: Joseph Smith probably had little knowledge of olive trees in New York, as they will not grow in the northeastern United States."

Okay, so like, I, I remember reading Jacob 5 in the Book of Mormon and all that grafting and, you know, grafting olive tree language, thinking, "Wow, this is a lot of specificity. How could an uneducated, yoko farm boy in his late teens, early 20s, have come up with it?" I think that's a fair, you know, I'm, Daniel C. Peterson's making a good point here. Yeah. Well, we'll get into it in the next slides, but yeah, I'm setting it up. Yeah, you are. And that's just it because that is one of the ways that apologists are so good at playing word games, where they'll throw a little bit in there so that if someone calls them out, they can say, "See, I did mention that he might have known if he really studied the Bible." When he knows full well that, as we'll go in the next few slides, all of that information was available to him. And, um, so this is from the write-up I mentioned. It's linked on the, um, overview page and we'll have it in there. But they say, "There are two major biblical passages that provided structural material for this parable and a number of shorter passages that supplied secondary ideas. The primary passages are Isaiah's parable of the vineyard contained in Isaiah 5:1-7 and Paul's discussion of the relationship of Israel to the Gentiles in Romans 11:16-24, in which he is the metaphor of an olive tree."

And so, right off the bat, you could see here that Joseph Smith is not only pulling from the King James Bible, but he's pulling both from the Old Testament, Isaiah, and the New Testament, which would not have been on the brass plates or noble to anyone in the Book of Mormon. So right off the bat, we have issues because we could see that Joseph Smith is pulling from the New Testament, which they would not have had access to.

Okay, Nemo, do you want to do you want to add anything there? Just something snarky. It's almost as though he took no concern for the chronology of his own book compared to the sources he was ripping from because it, it, to me, my kind of personal view is that it had to be a good story. Had to be a compelling story. Joseph Smith was about storytelling. Yeah. It was from a storytelling tradition. So as long as these things sounded good, and these things evoked good emotion and good feeling, and they were, I think one of the reasons he personally, he copied heavily from the King James version of the Bible was because that is the language that would speak to the religiosity of the time. Yes. So as long as it all sounded correct and like that, he didn't care whether it was from before the events that technically happened in his book or after the events that happened in his book. It was about the narrative for him. Exactly. Yeah, I think so too.

And so let's continue on because it's going to be like, like I said, this is a lot of reading, but I promise this will be a good payoff. So back to the write-up that we, we referenced on our website, which is, um, that these two passages provided the framework upon which Joseph Smith built his parable is evident from several sources. First, both passages were quoted by Joseph Smith earlier in the Book of Mormon narrative. Isaiah's song of the vineyard is found in Second Nephi 15. Paul was alluded to in First Nephi 10:12-14 and other passages. Secondly, several ideas presented in Zenos's parable can be found in these two passages. The theme of a well-tended vineyard which failed to produce good fruit is also a major theme of Isaiah's passage. Likewise, the contrast between wild and tame or natural fruit is found in Isaiah. From Paul's discourse, Joseph Smith obtained the idea of wild and natural branches, as well as one of his other major themes, that of cross-grafting branches between trees. We even find a few verbatim quotes from Isaiah, specifically the landowner's lament, "What could I have done more for my vineyard?" that is this has echoed in Isaiah's parable, "What could have been done more to my vineyard that I have not done in it?" The most telling piece of evidence, however, is the fact that the two passages are built on slightly different metaphors. Isaiah used a vineyard to represent Israel, while Paul used an olive tree. In light of this, it is significant that the prophet Zenos appears to display some confusion about his own metaphor. The parable of the vineyard begins with Israel as an olive tree located in a vineyard. However, halfway through the narrative, the metaphor suddenly switches to the vineyard itself. Significantly, just at the point that the Book of Mormon quotes from Isaiah. From this point on, the author repeatedly refers to the trees of the vineyard, apparently forgetting that the parable started out with the olive trees as the primary metaphor and not grapevines.

So in one attack, can you summarize that? Okay, so basically, uh, Joseph Smith had been quoting this stuff before Jacob. He was already quoting it in Nephi. Um, we have some, the olive tree stuff, the olive tree stuff, the vineyard allegory, the olive tree allegory. That's all. So this whole Dan Peterson argument of where would he have got it from? Well, he got it from Isaiah, and he got it from other parts of the Bible. So it's all in there, and he was using it earlier as well. So it's kind of reflexive within, within his own text. Then you've got some very almost direct quotes of the, uh, keeper of the vineyard, or "What more could I have done?" And then finally, the bit that I'm clapping Mike for because I'm so grateful. Someone asked, "Like, you've explained this to me as a seminary student, I was so confused by Jacob, so confused because it just seemed to lose itself halfway through." And so many people talk about this as being a really confusing and deep and difficult allegory, but now we see it's because Joseph was stealing two different allegories, throwing them together. And so you've got halfway from the beginning, he's talking about a specific olive tree, and then halfway through, as he starts then quoting Isaiah, the text from Isaiah was talking about the vineyard as a whole. So then Joseph Smith loses the specificity and starts talking about the whole vineyard. And lots of people will be thinking, "Hang on, wasn't he just talking about an individual tree? Why are we now talking about the whole vineyard? What's going on?" So thank you, Mike. My 14-year-old self thanks you. I guess viewers and listeners, this is like the, the, the long ending of Mark. It wasn't until I actually read that chapter and saw how it, like, the story completely reboots. What is it, verse nine? Until you actually read it, you don't realize how jarring it is. Yeah. And so viewers and listeners may want to pause and just go read Jake, um, Jacob 5, right? Yeah. Go read it. Yeah. See what Nemo and Mike are talking about in terms of the, the metaphors just completely changing midstream. Yeah.

And, and to say, you know, apologists are always saying, "Oh, different voices have to appear through the Book of Mormon." This is an example of how that happens. And this is an example of also why that's not always a good thing for the veracity of the Book of Mormon. It's not always a good thing that there's multiple voices because if there's multiple voices halfway through a story supposedly being told or relayed by the same person, yep, that actually doesn't help. That hinders. Yeah. And we, I think we covered one of those in another topic too. So, I mean, this is something where Joseph Smith is, I think we talked about the start of this episode, he might have taken a break in the middle of this and then just kind of lost track of where he was because clearly he's pulling from these two sources because he realizes they're kind of similar. But then all of a sudden, you see the transition from one source to another. And so when you look at it, uh, like from an overhead view, and you look at the start and the finish, like they're on two different planes. And it's because he was using two sources and just kind of got con, almost like he got tripped up and then just went a different direction. But when you're like, like you, you said, you know, when you study it, if you actually think about this stuff, you're like, "Why is, why is this kind of clunky?" And it's because he was, he was basically riffing off of two biblical sources, one of which is anachronistic in the New Testament. But because of that, it trips him up as he's orally dictating. And that's another reason why I don't think he had some manuscript because if he had a manuscript, I think he would have done a better job of keeping it, keeping it straight. But because he's orally dictating it, allows him to kind of get tripped up. And then he probably didn't even realize he was tripped up because he's doing it off the top of his head. And it leaves this huge mistake that is a really good indicator not just that Joseph Smith is riffing off of ideas, but where he's pulling from and exactly when he loses track of what he's pulling from. It's a really big, I think it's a huge one to me. Yeah.

And in addition to it being a great example of illustrating what we're talking about, it's also a great example of the dishonesty of Mormon apologetics because Daniel C. Peterson knows better, and Book of Mormon Central knows better. And this is a really, really insulting, bad argument. Um, but also, Nemo, you've really brought to me kind of an aha moment because so often when we read the Book of Mormon, we didn't get stuff, or when we went to the temple, we didn't understand stuff, it seemed confusing. And because we were primed to believe it was a sacred, miraculous text, any time something seemed off, we just immediately went to, "Wow, well, it's so advanced and so profound, my, my primitive, un-spiritual mind just can't get the sophistication." But if you take off those rose-colored glasses and just go, "Wait a minute, what if it's confusing and disjointed because it was written by an uneducated farm boy that was just bricolaging a bunch of disjointed sources into some, some, you know, some Bible fan fiction?" Then all of a sudden, that makes a lot, a lot more sense to somebody. You're like, "Why does a Masonic ceremony not make any sense to try and teach me about the creation of the earth?" Ah, maybe because that's what it was never intended for, but Joseph took it and tried to make it work for that. Yeah. It's just, it, yeah, yeah.

And so, okay, going back to the, the write-up. So this kind of, go, continues what we're talking about with, with this parable. Is there are at least three shorter passages that provide structural material for Zenos's parable? The concept of the Lord at the vineyard, of the Lord of the vineyard and his servant, for example, is found in one of Jesus's parables recorded in Luke 13. From this passage, we find the source of Smith's repeated reference to useless branches cumbering the ground and the trees. It is from this passage too that Smith obtained the references to digging and dumping. We also here find the servant counseling his master against the wholesale destruction of the vineyard, a scene which is repeated in Zenos's parable. The concept of unfruitful branches being hewn down, hund down, hewn down, and burned is found in Matthew 3:10 and John 15:6. Matthew 3:10 was quoted verbatim in Alma 5:52, which was dictated before the book of Jacob, according to the, the, what we talked about before, of with the replacement text. Um, verse 8 of Matthew 3, "Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance," is quoted several times in the Book of Mormon, and Book of Mormon in Alma as well. Thus, we see that rather than representing an actual ancient parable, Zenos's story of the vineyard is actually a conflation of several sources, some of which would not even be written for several hundred years. And so that's just putting a bow and we talked about earlier because Joseph Smith here is not just using those two main sources, but he's got a couple of other sources that are kind of providing the backbone that he is referencing in other parts of the Book of Mormon, some of which before Jacob was written. And so to your point about bricolage, this is Joseph Smith weaving a bunch of stuff that's available to him as a new story to push his own theology. And we can see his fingerprints all over it because as it shows here, we know exactly where he's pulling from. We know he's pulling from the King James Bible, and that dates the text and tells us how it was created. Yeah.

And, and what do we know about Joseph Smith? He knew the Bible really well. So it fits the, the, the, um, alleged author, right? It completely fits his profile. So not only do we now know for sure what Danish Peterson was trying to deceive us about, we know the source of Jacob 5. It's the King James version of the Bible. And we know that the author of the King James version of the Bible had the command of the King James version of the Bible well enough to do the bricolage needed to come up with Jacob 5. Yeah.

And, and keep this in mind when you hear the quote from Emma Smith where she says, "They're doing the dictation and Joseph looks up, pale as a ghost, and says, 'Emma, where were, were there walls around Jerusalem?'" And she's like, "Yeah." And he's like, "Oh, I thought I was being deceived." That is how you know Joseph Smith knew the Bible. He spoke the Bible. He read the Bible all the time. And those are the little things you do if you are trying to convince people you are speaking to a divine source. Those are the things you do to keep people believing that you have that power. So I'm not saying that Emma's making the story up. I'm saying it's very possible Joseph Smith throws that in there because he knows that's a really good opportunity to get Emma to believe further that he's not basically making this up. And it shows you that Joseph Smith would have absolute, or put a different way, if Joseph Smith really didn't know, Emma probably didn't know either because Joseph was that familiar with the Bible to be able to pull all of these sources into this allegory that many of these sources would not have been available to the Book of Mormon people. So they would not have had access to it. It just shows you how adept he was both as a storyteller and how well he knew the Bible to be able to pull these things out almost on the fly in the dictation. Does show that he was a gifted at being able to weave surrounding materials together to fit what he was trying to accomplish. All right.

So the next slide is revisiting Daniel C. Peterson's quotes on Jacob. Yeah. And so we just, you know, kind of to kind of, you know, do a little chasmus and get back to the beginning here. Um, what's great about this, this piece is that when Daniel Peterson originally starts off, he's setting up that familiar concept of, "How could Joseph Smith have known?" While he also tucks in that little detail that says, "Although some very limited information about olive cultivation might be derivable through careful, focused study of the Bible." Um, so basically, what I'm saying is, Daniel Peterson knew what he was doing. And the fact that he writes a book called "Offenders for a Word: How Anti-Mormons Play Word Games to Attack the Latter-day Saints," just look at what he does here with this Jacob 5 argument, and then tell me how he can have any self of sense of dignity and write the title of a book called "Offenders for a Word: How Anti-Mormons Play Word Games to Attack the Latter-day Saints." And again, I try really hard not to bash like specific apologies, but Daniel C. Peterson is really bad at being very antagonistic towards critics, and he does it in the most dishonest ways. And this is one where he knows full well that every single detail Joseph Smith put in there is from the Bible. And that's why he tucks that little thing in there for plausible deniability. And he is, he does this over and over and over again. And to write that title is just so offensive because he is such a bad, um, example of how to portray the true history of Mormonism in any way that's honest, while still trying to be faith-promoting. Sorry.

What are you holding? I am incensed. For the audio listeners, I'm holding my tape here. His name is Daniel for a reason, right? Daniel Peterson is the man that gave us Nephite loan words. The word horse actually means tapia. You want to talk about a man that plays word games? He is the man that brought us this as the thing that was strung up with chariots and charged against armies and summoned at a moment's notice for great haste. This. So yeah, yeah. He has no right to call people out on playing word games. No. This is not a two-koku fallacy because word games are not acceptable from anyone. But my point is, he does it. And so for him to say it is not an acceptable act is hypocritical. Yes. Yep. Thank you, Nemo. And thank you. It's Daniel, right? Yeah. Daniel C. Peterson. Yeah. And, yeah. Okay.

So that leads us into another, I think, really great example of how Joseph Smith is pulling into the Book of Mormon, and that is the use of Malachi in the Book of Mormon. And so Malachi was written in the first half of the 5th century BCE. For it clearly presupposes the reconstructed temple, which was dedicated in 57, 516 BCE, but does not reflect the reconstitution of the religious community that took place under Nehemiah and Ezra about 450 BC. So that's how scholars can kind of date the composition of Malachi. And this is important because Malachi is then written after Lehi leaves with the brass plates. And in the Book of Mormon, they are aware of this issue. And we know this because when Jesus visits the Nephites, he says the following in 3:35, 26:2. He says, "These scriptures which he had not with you, the Father commanded thy should give unto you, for it was wisdom in him that they should be given unto future generations." And this verse is referencing the extensive use of Malachi in Third Nephi 24 and 25. And a key verse in the copying of Malachi comes in Third Nephi 25:1, where it says, "For behold, the day cometh that shall burn as an oven, and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly shall be stubble, and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of Hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch." And so this is just showing that Malachi is really heavily used in Third Nephi, and that in the Book of Mormon, they're actually kind of going making sure to say, "You didn't have this, but we're going to cite it." So that is a hit for Joseph Smith in that regard, but obviously it's going to turn in a second.

Okay. And so I think it's a free lunch with Mike. Yeah. And, um, so as the Book of Mormon tells us, this is a verse that was unavailable to the Nephites until Jesus revealed it to him. So Jesus in the Book of Mormon says, "You did not have this, right?" However, this verse is going to work its way both into First and Second Nephi. So First Nephi 22:15, "For behold, saith the prophet, the time cometh speedily that Satan shall have no more power over the hearts of the children of men. For the day soon cometh that all the proud and they who do wickedly shall be as stubble, and the day cometh that they must be burned." Verse Nephi 22:23, "They are those who must be consumed as stubble." And this is according to the words of the prophet. Second Nephi 26:4, "Wherefore, all those who are proud and those that do wickedly, the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of Hosts, for they shall be as stubble." And Second Nephi 26:6, "For the fire of the anger of the Lord shall be kindled against them, and they shall be as stubble, and the day that cometh shall consume them, saith the Lord of Hosts."

And so what I would like to ask is, you guys probably could look at the next slide and see, but why is this so problematic for the Book of Mormon? I mean, I, I want to posit something. Okay, you've got Jesus. Jesus, there, the arbiter of all truth, like a massive religious figurehead, the one they've all been waiting for, looking for signs of the coming of. And he says, "I'm revealing scripture to you, scripture that you didn't have before because I think it's important for you." Yeah. All these people that have been waiting for Jesus, they know their scripture. We see throughout the Book of Mormon that they've been preserving this scripture, passing it online. Didn't know them go, "Uh, Jesus, we, we already had that." Yeah. It's already, it's already here. Sorry. Well, we're going to say that. No, them call out Jesus. I'm going, "Shouldn't you know? We already had this here." Yeah. You would think, right? I mean, like, and, and that's just it. And, and, and that is the, this is one of those things where this is why if you, if you watch the previous nine episodes, this is a problem. And it's a problem because the verses are used in the replacement text of the 116 pages, which are written after Third Nephi. So Joseph Smith is aware of it. And Third Nephi. So Jesus says, "You guys didn't have it." But then Joseph Smith forgets that when he writes the replacement text, which takes place before it. So First Nephi and Second Nephi are written after Third Nephi. So that's why they include that text because Joseph Smith likes those verses. But chronologically in the Book of Mormon, they take place first. And so Joseph Smith, in his replacement text, again, as we talked about in that last 116 pages episode, is going to put material in there that has no place being there because, as Nemo said, if that's truly part of the original text, when Jesus comes, someone might be like, "This is awkward, Jesus, but we already had that." And, and so this is why when we talked at the beginning of the episode of how all those previous episodes we did are going to kind of come into play here, this is why this example is so great because not only should they not have access to this material, but it also further gives us indication that Joseph Smith kind of lost track when doing the replacement text that the bookmark people wouldn't have had access to it. And so it's just, it's like a, it encompasses a lot of problems in one example. And I think it's so powerful to show this is why, you know, Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon because if he was really translating some secondary set of small plates, they wouldn't have it because it would, they wouldn't, it just wouldn't be there because they don't have access to it, as per Jesus in the Book of Mormon, yet it's there.

And I, I want to give Brother Joseph a break, as they say that we ought to, um, you know, I do, I do want to say that it is understandable that while orally dictating such a like a reasonably sized text, it's understandable these sorts of mistakes would be made if you had no divine help or intervention, right? But if these words, as we've discussed in the tight translation episode, if these words are being revealed directly to you onto a stone in a hat, and then you're reading them out, and they are not, you don't move on until it has been correctly written down, as all the translators, or most the translators, witness to, if that is the case, these mistakes shouldn't be present. Yeah.

I mean, and that's just it. And like, you know, sometimes they'll say, "Well, you guys expect too much if you expect this kind of stuff." It's like, "No, no, this is claimed to be directly from God through a stone and a hat." And yet, there are all of these continuity errors, there are all these late additions from the Bible that work, all of these things. And it's like, um, you know, there are different ways to illustrate this, but, you know, um, recently I had a family member pass away, and what happened at the end was they had a lot of different medical issues. And so we talked to the doctors, and they said, "Basically, we can fix two of them, but the other four we cannot fix because by fixing the two, you're going to make them more vulnerable on the other parts." And I know it's a grim way to say it, but when you talk about the Book of Mormon, there are all of these different things that are coming into play. And so from an apologetic standpoint, you're like, "Well, let's pluck this one out and try to find a way that works." But you still have so many things on that are left behind that tell you this is not an ancient text. And to Nemo's point, this is supposed to be directly unfiltered from God, um, through, through the medium of the, the peep stone in the hat. And yet we have these problems that tell you the person who dictated or wrote the Book of Mormon is just completely losing track of what they're doing. And that would not happen if these were written down on plates in, in a chronological order, as we were told they were. It just, it just wouldn't happen. And so at that point, to make space for that, it really becomes indistinguishable from fraud because you're making so much space to try to account for these errors that you're now basically indistinguishable from anyone else who's ever claimed, um, to receive revelation from God. It's just, these, these problems are too numerous, and they're too deep to be able to kind of explain away with kind of superficial, um, rational, rationalities. It just doesn't work.

But what apologists will try and convince you of is that issues with the Book of Mormon exist in a vacuum. Yep. And that's, and that's just it. And they'll, they'll draw your attention to one specific one and try and answer that. And as we prove time and time again, and we'll keep proving, often in solving one issue, you actually make another worse. Yep. Exactly. And that happened. And we've tried to illustrate that throughout these overviews because to your point, it's like, you fix one thing, but then all of a sudden another issue, all of a sudden becomes worse or insolvable because you've now taken their that apologetic away on another issue. And, and so that's why they always try to play this game. I, I, I hesitate to use it because I think it was the Redlands and their youth devotional where they cut, they, yeah, they said the critics play the whack-a-mole, right? You go, but the reality is the apologists do because they only want to focus on one thing at a time. Whereas I want to say, "Let's focus on all of it at once." Because then you're getting a proper context, you're getting proper background, and you're getting the proper use of apologetics because you cannot arbitrarily apply it to one and then say, "But I don't want to use that for this because I got to go a different route." You can't do that. And that's where this whack-a-mole idea comes into play because they're doing different things for each one and ignoring the problems you're creating on the other side. And you cannot do that if you want to be intellectually honest about this stuff. Yeah. It's seeing the forest instead of focusing on the bark of the tree. Exactly.

All right. Well, the next slide is the 116 pages problem striking again. And then, yeah, just know it. Yep. And so we kind of, we kind of covered this a little bit, but just to give another shout out to Brent Metcalfe, um, in his write-up about this, he says, "Mosiah through Third Nephi 23 betrays no knowledge of Malachi 3 or 4. Subsequent to Jesus's Third Nephi recital of Malachi's prophecies, as the dictation proceeded, Malachi's language is appropriated by other Book of Mormon prophets in Ether, First Nephi, and Second Nephi. Some Book of Mormon students argue that narrative patterns similar to the above can be explained by acknowledging the intervention of Nephite redactors. Mormon and Moroni, interpreters could thus hypothesize that post-Christ advent Nephi editors embellished the replacement text with high Christology or projected later prophecies back onto their progenitors. Such a theory can only be maintained at the expense of the redactor's integrity. Mormon expressly states that the sole reason for inclusion of, uh, First Nephi to Omni was because they contained pleasing prophecies of the coming of Christ. In this context, could the Christology, Christological prophecies be the creation of Mormon? Also, why would Mormon or Moroni have inserted later, more developed elements into the narrative in some cases, but neglected to do so in the homilies of Benjamin, Mosiah, Abinadi, or in both Almas? And why would such inconsistencies of ancient redactors be so easily explained by Smith's dictation sequence?" And so that was a lot of that was a lot of words. It was the language.

Does someone want to summarize that for many people who are newer to this kind of, uh, uh, you're, you're muted, Nemo. Oh, yeah. Nemo's muted. Muted myself. Uh, if you want to keep it on screen there, uh, so yeah, keep it on screen so people can see it. Essentially, what they're saying is, "Oh, well, maybe those that compiled the Book of Mormon, the people that abridged these things, the people that, you know, put it all onto the plates, spent hours engraving, those people, maybe took some of these words and put them back." But those people, Christian stuff back. Yeah. So Mormon wrote Jesus into his abridgements. Yeah. He took Malachi and put it back into First and Second Nephi. Yes. Yeah. So they're saying he did that. But then, uh, Mormon was saying, "Well, the only reason I included that, or one of the reasons certainly, was because it contained verses that were pleasing to me and it contained prophecies of the coming of Christ." So why would he then go back into those words that changed them? Yeah. And pseudopigrapher and just like wrote his own fictitious authors, right? But the overarching point is, why this conflated and weird explanation when the simplest explanation is explained by Joseph Smith's own timeline for writing the Book of Mormon, when he was writing things, and therefore what he would have known in his mind didn't match up with what the people in the book would have known his chronological lifetime. And when he was writing the books meant that he had information that the people in the books wouldn't have had. So he put it in accidentally. That explains it just as well as attributing some weird motive and editorial role to Mormon and Moroni that there's no scriptural backup for. Well, not just as well, it explains it much, much better. It's Occam's Razor, right? Yeah. Yeah.

I'll just say this is an aside. I don't know why I didn't bring this up elsewhere. Isn't it a really glaring omission that Joseph Smith puts so much Protestant Christianity into, you know, Native Americans between 600 BC and the birth of Christ? Like, I would, you know, we may have different opinions about Joseph Smith, some say he's brilliant, some say he's, he's uneducated. Like, I do not get how Joseph is having al, you know, Nephites baptizing each other in the name of Jesus and Protestant sermons. Like, if Joseph is gonna take out, um, if Joseph's gonna take out, uh, um, what's the currency? The British currency. Oh, farthing. Thanks. If Joseph's gonna take out farthing and replace it with shekel or whatever, why is he giving pre-Christian Nephites who are supposed to be Hebrews, why is he giving them Protestant Christianity, including baptism and confirmation? Because he knows his audience. Yeah. And that's all he knew. That was his worldview. What do you mean? I mean, so like, I was kind of saying earlier, he knows who is going to be reading this book. He knows who he wants converted to this, and it's the people around him that exist within this Protestant America. So, it's in my mind, again, this is just conjecture, I can't be in Joseph Smith's head, but I would imagine if he is, if he is fabricating a book, if he is creating what he believes is a religious text that he wants to be impactful, then for the same reason he includes his King James English because it's going to speak to the people at the time, it's what they're used to religiously, he is going to have the mechanics of their religiosity present within that book because that will then be familiar to them and it will ring true to them. And because it will ring true to them from their own lived experience, they won't feel a million miles away from then being able to join this. Yeah. Right. If it was completely alien, they might just dismiss it.

But why, why wouldn't he be worried that his contemporaries would say, "Joseph, why are, why are ostensible Jews in in Central America 500 years before Christ baptizing and confirming people in the name of Christ and holding Protestant sermons?" Why wasn't Joseph worried that people would notice that? Now, the interesting thing is, I don't think a lot of them did. But I'm just wondering why Joseph wasn't worried that that would be a massive red flag. It's a good point. Yeah. I mean, I, I think Joseph could only write with what he knew. I don't think he knew, you know, we talked about that in the episode on anachronisms, how it's kind of like a reverse anachronism that they don't talk about Jewish customs once they get to America. And I think it's because Joseph didn't know him. And so because that was not his, the world he lived in, he just didn't even think to put him in. And then, to Nemo's point, you know, writing in the beliefs of the 19th century and then putting your own theology into what people already believed, it's like giving people comfort food and serving it with a side of your own theology, which is a lot more, you know, consumable than if he had just wrote a book that was completely not like what people had expected, putting his own theology out there. And so, yeah, I think that's, to Nemo's point, I think it's because he knew his audience. He knew what they would, would be willing to take. And he also, I think, had at that point a lot of confidence that he was a good enough storyteller to where he could pull this off. I guess, I guess the Native Americans would have been a big enough mystery or a big enough question mark that 19th-century, you know, New Englanders or whatever would have been excited to believe that they were all basically Christians in effect, baptizing each other. Yeah. Yeah. Protestant sermons. Maybe that was a feature, not a bug, because from what I understand of the Mound Builders myth and and those sorts of things, the need to explain away these large structures and civilizations as it were was because they couldn't believe that the Native Americans they'd spent time oppressing and removing were actually capable of such things. Yeah. And so if you could, that's why they all, in a lot of these stories, like "View of the Hebrews" and such, they're all Jews, they're all actually Caucasians, because then we can believe them capable of this stuff, right? Right. That's the kind of thinking. So to have them actually be good old Christians, that makes it more palatable as a history. Yeah. Patients are Christian, you know? Right. Yeah. Yeah. In their mind. In their mind. Yeah. Okay. Exactly.

All right. So the next slide is corrected mistakes from an orally dictated text. Yeah. And so we've talked before about how we believe the Book of Mormon was dictated orally, and this is just these are the offshoots of that, which is you're going to have mistakes that you realize as you say it, then you correct it quickly. So Mosiah 16:6 says, "And now if Christ had not come into the world," which is a mistake. Then he says, corrects it by saying, "speaking of things to come as though they had already come, there could be no redemption." And so it's like he realized all of a sudden that Christ wasn't there yet, so then he has to correct it on the fly because he can't tell Oliver, "Oh crap, I screwed up." And then Helaman 12:15, "And thus according to his word the earth goeth back, and it appeareth unto man that the sons stand the still." And then he has to say and correct and say, "Yea, and behold, this is so, for surely it is the earth that moveth and not the sun." Mosiah 7:8, it says, "And it came to pass when they had been imprisoned two days, they were again brought before the king, and their bands were loosed, and they stood before the king, and were permitted mistake or rather commanded correction that they should be that they should answer the questions which he should ask them." Alma 43:38, "they being shielded from the more vital parts of the body," mistake corrected to say, "or the more vital parts of the body being shielded from the strokes of the Lamanite." And then Alma 24:19, "And thus we see they buried their weapons of peace," mistake, "or they buried their weapons of war for peace." And, and those are just again, they're just fingerprints that tell us this is an orally dictated text, and Joseph Smith at times is going to say something and then realize, "Oh crap, that's not what I meant to say." But he can't tell Oliver, "Cross it out. I, I screwed that up." So he just has to correct it on the fly because of the tight translation, um, right, you know, expectation, which is that the stone was magic and that it was giving him the words verbatim. Yeah. That made Joseph have to stick with whatever he said. Yes. But then make corrections. But if, if the stone really was being as powerful, doing the tight translation as Joseph set himself up to set us up to have that expectation, then there would be no, there would be no trace of these signs of on-the-fly verbal corrections. Yes. Previously dictated immediately. Dick, previously dictated mistakes, right? Yeah. If you want to talk about what Moroni and Mormon should have been up to, what they should have been up to when they were taking the, the image that I see in church artwork and things is the idea they were taking parchments and scrolls that have been handed down plus these smaller plates of brass that were brought, and they compiled it all into the gold plates. And they painstakingly etched out these things. One of their jobs as an abridger should have been to take the part where it says "buried their weapons of peace" or to say "their weapons of war for peace" to take that and just put "buried their weapons of war for peace." That's their job. That's what they should have been doing. If anything, if they're making any alterations to the text, those, the sorts of alterations and abridger would make, they would take out what are clearly errors instead of painstakingly etching those errors into gold. Yeah.

And that's just that, I mean, that is what happens when you have an orally dictated text because you're going to misspeak. I mean, I've done it in these episodes where I'll say something, I'm like, "Oh, sorry, what I meant to say is that," or, you know. But Joseph Smith has to, as John said, because of the tight translation, because that's what all the witnesses believed, he can't be like, "Oh, sorry, I screwed that up. Oliver, let me restart." Because according to the witnesses, the rock will not continue with words until he fixes it, which

Is a whole other issue too, because then, why, you know? I mean, so then the argument to Nemo's point would be, well, then they probably wrote on the plates wrong, which just gets into this like spiral of issues. Because then all of a sudden it's like, well, then why did they go through the work to correct that one verse there, but then they have all these other errors that were left on the plates? I mean, you just, that's like what Nemo said, you can't pull one thing out because it just opens all these other problems. And you see that in every little thing we're doing where we'll, we'll sit here and go, well, the apologist will say this. That's like, but then you have this, this, and this, and it just never ends.

Yeah, Nemo, you may like this or not, but it's reminding me of, uh, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, yeah, where they're in the castle of Arg, yes, and, and they're supposedly reading from, from the cave, what was dictated. And it's, it's something about, you know, "Here, beyond this cave, lies the castle of Ah." They're like, "What do they mean, hard?" And he's like, "He must have died while, he must have died while carving it. If he's dying, he's not gonna bother to carve the word 'Arg.' He's just gonna say it and die." Yeah, that's, that's kind of, uh, what this is reminding me of. You're not, absolutely. It's writing things that you just wouldn't write, especially when it comes to carving it in stone or metal. I mean, because we know that there's, what did we say? There's 10 university dissertations worth of text missing from each plate, if we look at the PG tablets, if we do a throwback to that episode. So why not make a little bit more room by not including these mistakes? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

All right, um, anytime I can make a Monty Python and the Holy Grail reference, please do. I'm gonna make it. Yeah. Okay, so the next slide is "Clumsy mistakes from an orally dictated text." And this is similar to the last one. It just shows sometimes that when you're doing it, and you know, what we talked about earlier is he might be doing a chunk of text, taking a break, whatever the case might be. And sometimes when you're doing that, you kind of forget what you just said. And so Alma 19:16 introduces a Lamanite woman named Abish and informs that she ran forth from house to house, making it known unto the people that the power of God had come unto the king and queen. A mere 12 verses later, the narrator forgets her name and clumsily refers instead to "the woman servant who had caused a multitude to be gathered together." And again, you might sit there and go, well, you know, maybe then, you know, the, the writer just forgot. But it just shows you that sometimes when you're making up these names on the fly, it's really easy to forget them a short period later, especially, you know, when you're doing this, you know, in more of a slower dictation pattern.

Um, and then in Alma 1, they introduce an antichrist, Nehor, who teaches false doctrine, kills a war hero named Gideon, and finally recants his unbelief before his execution for murder. In the very next chapter, the author appears to momentarily forget Nehor's name and introduces a new character, Amlici. I hope I'm saying that. Amlici, I think, is "as he being after the order of the man that slew Gideon by the sword," who is executed according to law. Later, in Alma 24, the, the author uses a much simpler description, "after the order of Nehor." And then, um, you know, there's kind of where you get the reverse of it, which is, um, in Alma 17:36, um, they're narrating how Ammon defended, um, like this group of sheep from thieves, right? And so Joseph Smith dictates, "With mighty power, he did sling stones amongst them, and thus he slew a certain number of them," which is vague. And then two verses later, he's, he changes to, "Six of them have fallen by the sling, but he slew none save it were their leader with the sword." And so you just get like these weird inconsistencies that come from working with text and not really necessarily always knowing exactly where you are in it. And again, these are small things, but all of these small things add up to bigger problems. Again, this, this speaks to the, you know, the perception that apologists and church leaders want us to have, that this is the most elegant, sophisticated text ever. But they're not accounting for these sorts of clumsy mistakes or correct mistakes they're leaving. They're not telling us about those, right? To be fully honest, they would acknowledge these, these problems. You know, yes, I think so.

And then we go on to "Unique names in the Book of Mormon." Yeah, so this is a big one, I think, because this is one you hear all the time. And so this is, we, I mentioned Tad Callister at the beginning. And so this is another quote from Tad Callister. And he says, "First, the critics must explain how Joseph Smith, a 23-year-old farm boy with limited education, created a book with hundreds of unique names and places, as well as detailed stories and events." Accordingly, many critics proposed that he was a creative genius who relied upon numerous books and other local resources to create the historical content of the Book of Mormon. But contrary to their assertion, there is not a solitary witness who claims to have seen Joseph with any of these alleged resources before the translation began." And one, I would say, there's really no witnesses that talk about what Joseph had before the translation began, anyways, because there's just not a lot there. But I just wanted to focus on the hundreds of unique names and places because that's something you hear all the time. Like, how could someone create all of these names and keep them consistent and keep them, um, keep track of them if it was not from an ancient record that was on metal plates? And, um, this is the next slide addresses that.

Yeah, and so there is a website, and it's linked from our overview, um, and it has a word frequency count for the Book of Mormon. So every single word, names, places, items, you know, paths, whatever, any word, they give you a word frequency. And if you look at this, I just pulled a few, and I did, I honestly did this randomly, um, as I was going through. I started from the most frequent to the to the lowest. And what you see, if you look at it, is that Seven Nephi has mentioned eight times, Helaman in 59, um, Tencum 43, Benjamin 34, Gideon 10, 30, Jerom 20. But then as you get lower, you'll notice that they drop quite a bit. And what's more important than that is if you look at, if you're, if you're reading this, you can look at the middle, if you're, if you're listening to this, um, when you look at Jerom, for example, he's only mentioned 20 times, but he's only mentioned in Jeremiah 1:1. Which means in the Book of Mormon, when, when most of these names are mentioned, they can be mentioned once or a handful of times, and then they're forgotten forever. And so the idea that it's so complex because of the names really falls short once you realize how many of the names, most of the names, are going to be mentioned all in the same spot of the Book of Mormon, and then forgotten forever. And so, um, this is where, to me, looking at the complexity of names requires you to look at both the word frequency and also how many times are used beyond their introduction. Because for the most part, outside of the main characters, the names and locations are brought up and then just forgotten immediately. And so there's no complexity to just making up names and then forgetting them. And, and this really shows how many of the names are mentioned once or twice, and always in the same spot, and then gone forever. Got it.

And the fact that if you, if you accept the theory that a lot, that a significant portion of the Book of Mormon is kind of Joseph Smith's own history or narrative, right? And we know that people kind of theorize that he writes himself in as the Nephi character. Yes. The tiny bit suspicious that the character that is most associated with Joseph Smith's birth order and personality is the one that's mentioned 2700 plus times. Yeah, Nephi. I mean, Joseph, I mean, Nephi. Yeah, being noble and strong and better than my brothers. No, I mean, it is true. It's just, you know, it just goes to show that when you, when people throw out the number of names, you have to remember that most, this is not like, you know, I, I hate referencing Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, but there, there are two series of books that people are familiar with. Those books will call back to characters, they'll call back to locations all the time. The Book of Mormon rarely does it. And so when you have 200 names, how many of those names are actually called back? Because it's very few. Because the Book of Mormon works on a timeline, and once that timeline is passed, outside of the main people, it's forgotten. And that is another area where, like, the Tad Callister knows full well how many of those names are actually brought up again, but the using the total number just sounds so powerful.

So just to summarize what you're saying here is, when Joseph Smith uses some of these more complex names, he'll use them in the same verse or in the same chapter. But, but, uh, most of the time, the unique names and, and names that he uses are, are very much local, not global. Using global names throughout the text, especially more advanced or sophisticated ones, it's just very rare that he does that. Is that what you're saying? Well, yeah, I'm just saying that when he riffs off names, a lot of the times are used in that, that verse or that chapter. Sometimes they're just used once, as you can see at the bottom, and then they're just forgotten. And so it's like, is it really complex if I can, you know, I can riff off a story to you right now and I can give you a hundred names if I don't have to remember to use them later, right? It's really easy to do. Yeah.

And so you look at this, right? And we talked earlier about say, three hours a day, 12,000 words an hour. So if some of these names are used within the same 3600 words of the Book of Mormon, then essentially all he's had to do is remember him for a day. Yep. Exactly. That's it. He, they are his name of the day, and then the next day he gets to come up with a different name. Yeah, exactly. So that's, that's how the locals remember last week's name. Yeah, exactly. Because they're already forgotten. They're already past. And, um, there are parts of the Book of Mormon where they'll riff off a bunch of names at once, and then they're gone. And so, yeah. Okay. It makes it seem a lot more complex than it is. And, you know, one thing I want to point out, and again, I've been clear, I don't think Joseph Smith is blatantly plagiarizing off other texts. But we know he's familiar with Charles Anthon, because he sends Martin Harris to see him. And in 1827, Charles Anthon publishes a dictionary that has ancient names and ideas. And these are just some examples, but Moroni, uh, is like Moroni. Um, Gadatanum is like Gadianton. Mar, Marion is like Morianton. Zamora, Zerahemla. Nephites, Nephites. Aegyptus, Aegyptus in the Book of Abraham. Uh, Corintium, Coriantumer. Tiankum, Tiankum. Memnon, Mormon. Uh, Cremera, Kimora. And, and what I'm trying to point out here isn't to say that Joseph Smith is like looking through his dictionary as he's doing the Book of Mormon, but to say, we know he's familiar with Charles Anthon. And there are, I think, 32 names that are very similar in the Book of Mormon that also have similar concepts in Charles Anthon's dictionary. It's just to say that, isn't it, it's another one of those areas where, from the flip side, if you were an apologist and there was something like a hit that was close, you'd point it out. So I'm just pointing out that there are a lot of surrounding ideas of names that Joseph Smith seems to have access to or familiar with the authors of that make their way into the Book of Mormon. And it's worth pointing out when you're talking about how much of a sponge he is at pulling outside information and then repurposing it for his needs. I, I was looking at a, and that suspect as well, uh, the, the fact that he's borrowing at least some names from Charles Anthon's published book. Potentially, how many of the names used in the Book of Mormon come straight out of the Bible? A lot. Mm-hmm.

I'm gonna have a slide on that, right? I don't, for the Bible. No, like that. I think that's also that deserves its own slide at some point, yeah. Because I, I think a very large percentage of Book of Mormon names are literally biblical names. Yeah. And that, and that's another, it's like, sometimes we look at these, you know, maybe maybe that's a story we can do or an episode we could do down the road, like of trying to fill in some of the questions people have that we didn't cover or something. But that is an area where not just the, the names, but there are a lot of stories in the Book of Mormon that that have a lot of parallels to the Bible, or even some to the Apocrypha. And, and, um, all of a sudden, it's like the story of Judith is like the story of, um, of, uh, getting the brass plates and all that with, you know, cutting off in the head and all that. And so, yeah, Laban. So Laban, getting the brass plates is like Judith and the Apocrypha, I believe. And, um, and so you see a lot of these things that that shouldn't be there that are. And, um, it really, once you start seeing them, it makes the Book of Mormon less complex because you're starting to see how all the pieces are fitting together to make it what it is. And all of a sudden, once you realize a lot of them are being lifted from surrounding sources, it's not that hard to understand how it's a 19th century composition. And once you get to that point, the complexity fades because the complexity is usually one that we give it by setting up the equation to say, this couldn't be done outside of the power of God. And that, to your point earlier, is why it's so important to look at all these together and to understand all the moving pieces inside of it and how well they fit the patterns of Joseph Smith being able to, um, weave surrounding ideas into his own theology. Yeah.

And I, I thought, uh, these, um, these Book of Mormon names regarding, you know, Lumen and Layman was also significant. So the next slide is "More connections to Book of Mormon names." Yeah, and this one's just kind of a fun one because, um, Lumen Walters is a name that you hear a lot when you look into Joseph Smith's treasure digging days. And what I didn't know until, I think it was like a year or two ago, someone had sent me this, this link. And Lumen Walters actually went by the name Layman Walters. And he had an uncle named Lemuel Walters, who founded the town Burke, Vermont. And Lemuel had a son named Samuel. And again, these are connections. It's not to say that Joseph Smith knew Layman, he knew Layman Walters. It's not to say he was like, oh, I'm gonna name a character after him. It just shows that these names are in his worldview. So it's not like these names are ancient names he never heard of. These are names that were all around him, his immediate worldview, immediate worldview. This is not like some, this is not some like, you know, cousin of a cousin of a cousin's friend. This is someone he worked with in treasure digging who went by the name of his mentors. Yes. Potentially one of his treasure digging mentors, yes, went by the name Layman. Had an uncle named Lemuel. Yeah. Like, what's the chances that that happened? And that it just so happened that, that two of Lehi's sons from thousands of years prior shared the same name as two dudes that were in his immediate treasure-digging surroundings? It was the same thing. Um, I didn't do a slide on this, but the whole idea, one of the things they say about Alma is that there's no way Joseph Smith could have known Alma was a male name. I'm sure you guys have heard that. And, um, Bill Reel and Radio Free Mormon did an episode on that, I think, on Mormonism Live, a long time ago. There are so many sources that can tell you that Joseph Smith had people all around him that were named Alma that were male. And so those are the things that just completely take away the complexity. And once you realize that the, the supposed hits that apologists will continue to throw out are very explainable, then all of a sudden everything else becomes explainable. And that's why they work so hard to keep that equation in balance, which is to say, no one could have done this but an ancient divine source.

This next slide actually does a little bit of dress names from the Bible. Yeah, I guess it's a little bit. Yeah. So, you know, we talked about, uh, Anthon's dictionary earlier. And there's also sections on Egyptian culture and Egyptian theology. And so Joseph Smith, in that regard, would have known that Nephi was of Egyptian origin. But it also shows, uh, you know, Nephi is a name that comes directly out of the Apocrypha, which was not only known in Joseph's time, but I believe was part of his 1769 King James Bible. So in Second Maccabees, it says, "And Ananias called this thing Naftar, Naphthar, which is as much to say a cleansing. But many men call it Nephi." And then in Second Nephi, have, "And my people would that we shall call the name of the place Nephi, wherefore we did call it Nephi." So those aren't quite exactly the same, but it's just to say that, you know, we have in both the Book of Mormon and the Apocrypha saying that, you know, "We call it Nephi." And and that's where the, you know, that name was known to Joseph because he knew the Apocrypha. And the Apocrypha at that time was much more widespread than it is now. And so there, I mean, that's, that's the main character in the Book of Mormon, and it's readily available. I just grabbed my little Apocrypha here. Okay, there you go. Nice. Yeah. And so that, I mean, that, once you start to see it, it's hard to unsee it. And some people don't like this reference. I even think Dan Vogel doesn't really like it. But there are a lot who who find it really interesting that, I guess in one of Captain Kidd, you know, the Captain Kidd who, you know, was a, was a pirate. Joseph Smith liked pirate stories. We know he had a fascination with Captain Kidd. And in one of the maps, I guess in one of the Captain Kidd books, it mentions an island, Comoros, which is Kimura. And then there's a city named Moroni on that same map of the Comoros Islands. And again, some people don't like that reference. But I think for, for many, it just seems really suspicious that a, a pirate book and story that Joseph Smith had access to and would have probably read has the name Moroni and something a lot like Kimura right there in the book.

It's not a false binary though. Like it's not an either or option. It's a compounding thing. If Joseph's got the Charles Anthon little dictionary and he's got Captain Kidd available, there's two ways in which he could have come up with those names. So all it does is it makes that claim that he couldn't have come up with them less, uh, it stands up less because, exactly. It doesn't matter which of them are used. He's now got two options, not just one. Yeah. And, and I would argue, just as a quick aside on that, I don't like the Captain Kidd stuff just because it's harder to draw like a chain of custody to Joseph Smith. That being said, if you're going to cite Nahom as an apologetic, knowing how completely out of place Nahom is to the Book of Mormon's description, then you, then cannot say, well, how dare you use the Captain Kidd reference? So if, to me, I will say, I will forgo the Captain Kidd because I don't think it's a solid enough one. But you can't use Nahom because the Nahom one is completely explainable and not at all what the apologists claim. So it's one of those areas where it's like, if you, where do you want to set the rules on how we choose what evidence or documentation, whatever, is solid enough versus, uh, trying to make it fit? And I think that's an area where, for me, I would not use Captain Kidd stuff, but I also would use that apply that same critical evaluation and say, that's why the Nahom apologetics don't work because it falls under the same problems where once you dig in, you're like, this is not at all what what they're claiming it is. So I think it's just, you know, you can't have it both ways. You can't be mad that people make these these, um, these, these, uh, parallels to Captain Kidd and then also say, but oh, by the way, did you see Joseph Smith nailed it on Nahom? Because those are two similar cherry-picked data. So that's kind of where I'm at.

All right, so the next slide is "19th century Methodist sermons appearing in pre-Christian, you know, Latin America." And, you know, so Grant Palmer spent a lot of time looking at the similarities between the Methodist revival, uh, teachings and sermons, and the ones that appear in the Book of Mormon. And other people have too. I know, I think Dan Vogel's done some work on it. And it's just to say, there are a ton of similarities between the sermons that were being given in Joseph Smith's time and place, and the ones that end up in the Book of Mormon, which were supposedly written, you know, uh, hundreds and thousands of years earlier. And so, um, this image is one I kind of hate using infographics because I know sometimes they're a little bit too, um, they maybe draw too many conclusions. But, you know, basically, in the 1820s, we have Methodist preachers, um, who are going and giving these massive, um, revivalist meetings where you've got thousands of people. And so they have to, you know, in this particular one, this is, um, Benjamin Paddock, I believe. And he was talking with, um, there was a farewell address from another, uh, reverend. Um, and basically, they have this like speaking upon this big stage or tower. Um, they have tents all around 'cause people are staying there and staying all day. In the Book of Mormon, you have King Benjamin, which matches the name Reverend Benjamin, speaking about a tower with tents all around. Um, in the 1826 one, it was the guy's farewell speech. Was in a feeble condition. Book of Mormon mentions feeble condition. They both talk about a powerful farewell discourse expressing love for the people. And the one I think is actually kind of an interesting one is that they both mention how people fall to the ground to commit to Christ. That is something that is very unique, um, or at least very, uh, important to the Methodist revivals because obviously expressing love for people is very generic. Feeble condition, you could pull. But the fainting to the ground, of falling to the ground, and then committing, that is something that Joseph Smith saw all around him in the 1820s that just happens to make its way into the Book of Mormon. And all of these little things, people might go, well, they're kind of generic parallels, or they're weak parallels. But again, they add up. And they also add up and they're important because of the fact that they were happening in the years leading up to the Book of Mormon. Like, these are directly happening as Joseph Smith is preparing to write this. So to have them appear in a text that's supposed to be written, you know, so many hundreds of years earlier, it raises, it has some red flags that you have to address if you want to claim this as an ancient authentic text when it has so many elements of Methodist revivals that would not have happened, obviously, until Joseph Smith's lifetime. Yeah.

It's one thing to claim that Native American Jews that we know didn't exist by all the DNA and all the other other evidences, linguistic or anthropological, archaeological. It's one thing to claim that these non-existent Native American white Jews, you know, uh, were basically in effect Christians before Jesus was even born. But then to have them literally, um, listening to Methodist sermons, super similar to the Methodist sermons that we know Joseph Smith would have been exposed to in 1826, that just stretches this beyond any possible credulity.

Can I throw something out there? Yeah. Sure. I didn't view the people in the Old Testament as Jews. I viewed them as Christians in my time as a Mormon. Yeah. I mean, I think that's what we do. Certainly growing up. Like, we, we, we appropriate them, essentially. We view them as pre-Christ Christians, Christians who are looking forward to Christ. And then the Christians that came after Christ are Christians that just came after Christ. That's all. The children of Israel were, they were Christians looking forward to Christ. Yeah. That's kind of how I certainly viewed them. Yeah. No, I mean, I think it's a good point. I think that's, to, that's a really good way to explain sometimes why Joseph Smith, when writing the Book of Mormon, we talked about earlier, why he would portray them that way. Because it is how the European settlers in America were kind of viewing the Bible. Because you're right, because it was about spreading Christianity. And so in that regard, you're, you're putting, you're imposing that New Testament, um, Christology almost onto the Old Testament because you need the Old Testament to be basically foreshadowing Jesus. And, and so it all does, in that regard, fit together really well and create a worldview that you're going to not only see yourself in the Old Testament as a Christian, but also give you the, um, the way that you're going to portray it to others that you're trying to convert as well. So that's actually a really good point. That gives justification to keeping the Ten Commandments from the Old Testament. Yeah. Because if you play this line that Christ fulfilled the law and therefore the Old Testament is done away with, well, then why do we keep the Ten Commandments? Yep. Yeah, it works. You view it as, well, they were all just Christians. Yeah. It's true. And it's kind of this relatively modern restorationist impulse that needs to have Adam baptizing and confirming people and everyone practicing polygamy, including Jesus. Like, it's this, it's this relatively modern restoration of principles that is trying to write Christianity into all dispensations. You know, that's a very modern thing. Right. It is definitely. It's another fingerprint, uh, I think. Yeah. Uh, you know, Grant Palmer is a legend. I'll put a link to "An Insider's View of Mormon Origins" in the show notes, and also to my original interview with Grant Palmer on Mormon Stories. He's passed away. He's a, he's a game changer. And I really, really recommend, uh, people checking out his stuff. Yeah, definitely.

Just the slide in and of itself, to me, is a, is a huge smoking gun. Um, but, but, but you'll need to check out Grant Palmer to really understand it more. Yeah. And so now we go on to the, the slide about "Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, and the laying down of heads," which is also, um, explained more in our Mormon Stories interview with William Davis, which we'll include a link to as well. But tell us what this is about. Yeah. And so Dr. William Davis, he did a book, I think, in 2020, called "Visions in a Seer Stone." And he discusses how Joseph Smith likely used the Methodist preaching techniques of "laying down heads" while creating long sermons from a small selection of notes. Um, and so, effectively, what, what William Davis was saying is that in this time, it's almost like you go up with one page of notes and, you know, like the bullet points of what you want to talk about, and then as you preach, you could preach for hours just expanding off of these notes that you had. And so, what this would mean for the Book of Mormon is that Joseph Smith, who would be familiar with this entire way of speaking, could basically, you know, walk down the path, skip some rocks, think of five or six things he wanted to make sure he covered, and then as he sits down to do the dictation, he can weave those five or six bullet points through the story, through the characters he's talking about, that time. And you can produce a lot of material from just those five or six bullet points that you thought up in your head. And so that would allow Joseph to do chunks of the Book of Mormon without actually having a manuscript or even having notes. I know some people think he might have had notes in his hat, he might have, we don't know. But either way, this would allow him to create a lot of material with a small amount of, um, kind of outline in his head. And again, as we talked about earlier, if he takes breaks, this gives him a chance to kind of get those done. Then when he finishes where he was at, he could say, okay, let's take a break to do whatever. Then he comes up with the next part. And so "laying down heads," um, I know this is an area that a lot of apologists are really attacking William Davis over. It's a technique that was used all around Joseph Smith, so of course he would be familiar with it. And so it's a really cool way of looking at how he could have produced the Book of Mormon by orally dictating it off of short ideas in his head that he expands on. And not only does William Davis provide us with a technique that, that was known, that was used at the time of Joseph Smith, and that would have been known to Joseph Smith as an as a Methodist exhorter, but he shows us where these heads appear in the Book of Mormon. He shows us examples of chapters where they basically tell us what they're going to tell us, which is the laying, which is the heads. Yeah, then he tells us, which is the laying down of heads. It's a brilliant book. Everyone needs to buy, uh, "Visions in the Seer Stone," and or watch the Mormon Stories episode with William Davis, because it feels that an important part of the puzzle of how he just could have dictated for a few hours a day. It shows us, and it doesn't have to be even the way he did it, it just provides us with one plausible example of how he very well could have. Yes, I think that's a fair way to say it, for sure.

And, um, and so the next slide kind of piggybacks off of that first one about "Visions in a Seer Stone" because, as, as we just said, we don't know exactly which revival events Joseph Smith attended. But we do know that, you know, he talked about favoring the Methodists, he studied with them, and that's all leading up to the Book of Mormon, which tells us that he would have been exposed to their styles of preaching, the revival meetings, and to what you just said, you know, one of the areas where the Book of Mormon explicitly talks about basically laying down heads is in Jacob 1:4. Nephi gives Jacob explicit instructions on preaching that, other than references to plates, could have easily been inserted into the pages of a 19th century sermon composition manual. It says, "If there were preaching which was sacred, or revelation which was great, or prophesying, that I, Jacob, should engrave the heads of them upon these plates, and touch upon them as much as it were possible." That's exactly how they did it. They would have the heads of these these sermons, and then touch upon the heads of the sermons as much as it were possible. And so this is basically saying in the Book of Mormon itself that they're, they're basically making sure in the Book of Mormon they get the bullet points of the of the the sermons, and that they'll expand upon them as much as they can within within the plates and within the text of the Book of Mormon. So they're telling you that they're working with this, um, speaking technique that was very, very common in Joseph Smith's time and place. Wow. Yeah. And that's just reminding me, just like Joseph Smith mentions the slippery treasures in the Book of Mormon, that that codifies, um, you know, the, the slippery treasure treasure digging that he, in fact, was involved with. He's writing into the actual text of the Book of Mormon this Methodist technique of using heads to preach. Exactly. You know how they call it the unabomber? Idiolect. They looked at his manifesto and they looked at the words he used and then went, well, that's this guy. And it's this like, Joseph Smith's idiolect, Joseph Smith's own personal set of words is appearing all throughout the Book of Mormon. Yeah. That's just, that's in there. There are little clues everywhere. And when you read it as a believer, you would never think about it. I would have never thought about it either. And if, if William Davis had written that book, I would have never thought of that. When I listened to his interview with you and I got his book on the Kindle, um, it's just, it's amazing how looking at it through the lens of somebody who studied that kind of technique of preaching in, in the sermons, he's picking up on all these things I never would. But once you see it, then you start seeing it for yourself. And it's like, oh my goodness, this makes so much more sense than the questions I had before about how it was done. And that's why I think, as we said at the beginning, you can't say exactly 100% how he did it, but you can say, these are the techniques we can see in the Book of Mormon. And once you see those, then you can get a roadmap of how it could be done. And you can know Joseph Smith was capable of it. And I think that's really the most important question. Because once you know he's capable of it, and you know where he's pulling from, Occam's Razor tells you this is not an ancient text. And that's really as far as you can get. Um, because we weren't there. I mean, but, but we have so, there's so many examples. They're overwhelming. And I think that's why, as Nemo mentioned earlier, you have to look at them in totality. You can't take one at a time. You got to take them all together. And then all of a sudden, the puzzle fits. And it's like, super satisfying that it fits, even if it's really crushing that it doesn't fit in the way you were kind of raised to believe. Yeah.

So, so Mike, the next slide is "How could Joseph Smith write the Book of Mormon?" And I'm going to call a bit of an audible because I want to say something before you actually start clearing these slides. Is that that's fine. Yeah, of course, that's fine. Okay. So what you're going to list here are some of the main theories that we've already laid out about how Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon. I'm going to begin with kind of the, well, that gets poisoned beforehand. Okay. And these are, this is this is repeating what we've already stated. So number one, you know, how could Joseph Smith have written the Book of Mormon? That's such an amazing book. You have to begin with the fact that all of us, number one, have been, have been conditioned from birth to believe that it's an amazing, sophisticated book. And it was John Hamer who first sort of like said something that felt blasphemous at the time, but that as I've sat with it, really rings true, which is that it starts as a not impressive book. The Book of Mormon, Mark Twain called it "chloroform in print." If you read the dictated manuscript, it reads like a lot of folksy gibberish that's been corrected much later. And, and if you just think about your experiences reading the book, it's actually not a great book unless you've been taught from age zero that it's an amazing book and you've had all these emotional experiences with your parents, with your grandparents, with your church leaders, in your ward situations, all of that colors and, and kind of, I don't want to say poisons the well, but it sets you up to start by believing that it's this amazing, inspiring book. But then when you realize that a kid growing up reading the Quran is going to believe the Quran's an amazing book, and cry when he talks about it, when Tevye talks about reading the Holy Book, he cries and says it's an amazing book. Anyone who grows up with a scriptural text from childhood, being told that it's an amazing, miraculous book, and having spiritual, familial, and social experiences with it, they're going to be primed to believe that it's an amazing book. So you have to start by like, by lowering the bar, knowing that we've all been biased in that regard. You have to start there. Then you have to throw away this idea that it was written in 90 days. We've already covered this. You have to think this book was written in six to 10 years, not in 90 days. And I had, I had to just start with recapping that.

Mike, no, it's fine. And that's, and that's good because, you know, these next couple slides will go quick because it's more or less just kind of recapping some of the stuff. Because when you look at what we do know about the composition of the Book of Mormon, we can say it was an orally dictated text. I don't think anyone would argue with that. The King James Bible is a foundational source text. We've covered that throughout so many of these overviews. It is absolutely undeniable. Um, the Book of Mormon contains 19th century material throughout the text. We've covered that again. We've even have quotes from Richard Bushman, Terrell Gibbons, they all will concede that. Um, it includes elements of Joseph Smith's life events, whether we're talking about treasure digging, his father's dream being in the Book of Mormon. Um, the 19th century ideas are literally the backbone of the story, which is the mound builder myth. We've got the anti-Masonic feelings, and the Book of Mormon treats the Bible like a history book, which they did in the 19th century. And so when you have all of those elements, all of a sudden you can see the ingredients that would be used to bake the cake, which would be the Book of Mormon. And so we've covered those ad nauseam at this point, but those are the elements you have to look at if you want to see how could someone write it. Well, when you have all of those ingredients, and a lot of them are specific to Joseph Smith, it's really not that hard to explain how he could have done it. Yeah.

And that's something that an email, no, I couldn't possibly. Okay. No. And then, you know, again, we've said this before, we can't know exactly how it's produced. We, no one was in the room that was writing it down. All we know is that from the witness accounts, it was an orally composed text with a tight translation. Um, but we do know, as Nemo mentioned earlier, he's pulling large chunks of text from the King James Bible, including errors, mistranslations, even late editions to the Bible that none of those should be in there. Um, we talked about the complexity of the names and locations and the currencies, how they fall apart when you realize the Book of Mormon is continually moving through the history and leaving the past almost entirely behind. Even the currencies are mentioned in Alma and then not really again, outside of the one mention in the Sermon on the Mount when they change, change farthing to c9. So the currency is mentioned literally in one book and never again. So to say it's complex really neglects the fact that it's not used at all within it. Um, and then when we talk about the production timeline, when we realize Joseph Smith only needs a little under three hours a day to actually dictate the text on average, you realize how much time he has to take breaks to prepare for the next day, to prepare for the next chunk of text. And again, that takes away a lot of the miraculous elements when you realize he actually has way more time during the day than the church wants you to think. And all of those elements start to pile up to say this is actually entirely explainable.

Yeah, and then when you add to it the fact that DNA evidence shows that it's not valid, archaeological, anthropological, geological, all the stuff with, with, with the Tower of Babel and Adam and Eve and the global flood, all the errors, eating due to Isaiah and the anachronisms, like how much evidence does one need? Yeah. That's just, I mean, it's not only could he have written it, but because of all those errors, we could show he did write it. Because a lot of the errors are due to the fact that they're coming from a 19th century state of mind. And so your errors only attributable to Joseph Smith. Yeah. Some of them are in the surroundings that's just sitting. So a lot of these errors are coming from Joseph Smith's time and place. And then when you factor in he's got his own life story kind of weaving throughout it throughout the text, it's just no one else but Joseph Smith could have written it. And that he has a history of fraud before the Book of Mormon, right? And that he, the Book of Abraham doesn't translate from the papyrus, and the Kinderhook plates were shown to be a fraud, and the Joseph translation was shown to be, uh, a plagiarism of the Adam Clarke Commentary. And the fact that he married 14-year-olds and other men's wives and married over 30 women and lied to his wife about it. Like, you, if you put all of that in context, it's overwhelming. Yeah.

I mean, it's just, it's about looking at the patterns. And, and again, I know people get really upset. There's a line in the CS that I hear apologists cite all the time, and it is a very antagonistic one. It says something like, "If someone sold you two clunkers, would you buy a third?" Something like that. And I obviously don't want to use that phrasing because I know that is offensive to people. But the point is, how many times do you need to give special pleading before you go, you know what, this is, this is not what I thought it was? Because, you know, and we'll get to it in a second, but it's all about the equation you start with. And once you get to an equation where you're willing to start from scratch, everything is going to point to this being a 19th century text. And that no one else but Joseph could have written it. And then all of a sudden, the mechanics of how he did it won't matter, because you can show where he's pulling from, the ideas he's pulling from, the material he's pulling from. And once you do that, like how he did it, like as far as if he used notes or not, it doesn't really matter, because we know what he produced. And once you get to that point, all of these things here from Tad Callister and Russell Nelson and Jeffrey Holland, they don't really matter, because we can show what the evidence tells us, as opposed to what we want it to tell us.

I mean, I think I have an answer to what was possibly a rhetorical question there from you, Mike, which is, how many times do we have to give him a break? How much special pleading do we have to do? I think it has to become equal to, and then greater than, the amount of confirmation bias and personal loss and vested interest and all those sorts of things we have in this being true. Because the LDS religious experience creates a necessity for these things to be true, because your worldview and your social life and everything else are all built around it. So it's understandable that people will go to great lengths to ensure that this rings true to their mind, still, even against huge odds. And it's only once it becomes so insurmountable, the evidence becomes so much, that then it outweighs those things. It outweighs that. And it, it comes from an emotional place, a lot, I would imagine, that, you know, you're not going to reason someone out of this. It's a case of, okay, all these things come up, and they start to believe they're true, and emotionally they're not okay with them. Like some of the things that Joseph did that

Were morally dubious, yeah, put it mildly. I think that's the answer to that, personally. No, I think you're right, and it is. I think the special pleading ends when something makes that snap inside you, and everyone has a different trigger. And, um, and I think that's one of those things where, again, we're talking about, you know, the equation changes once you get to a point where you're willing to accept outside information. And that's not to, to, to, to say anything bad about believers, because most believers aren't aware of this stuff, and a lot of believers are conditioned to distrust this stuff. So, I'm not, my whole point of being here is, if you're ready for it, I'm here for you. If you're not ready for it, I will be when you are. And, um, and to your point, Nemo, until they're ready, there's nothing I can say that's going to convince them. So why am I going to? I'm not going to waste my time upsetting somebody who doesn't want to be upset, who I have nothing to do with. But when they're ready, then, you know, I'm here to, to try to give them information and talk to them and be as helpful as I can in a way that hopefully, uh, is somewhat as gentle as possible, given how hard it is to find this information out. That was my mission statement when I started. I was like, I want to be as, as non-emotional as possible in what is a very emotional space.

Exactly. I think that's all you can do, because, you know, I can get up here and scream and yell and be super angry all the time. And let's be honest, when you first find out, you are angry. But now I can talk through this without being angry, and I can talk to people without getting upset. And when other people are upset, I can talk to them in a way that hopefully will be at least a little calming for them, because it is. I remember how I felt. And if I was talking to myself from a few years ago, try, I'm trying to think of how I would calm myself down, because it is, it's hard to get, it's like information overload, and you're just struggling to, to breathe, um, because of all the implications of family and in your community and in your, your core beliefs. And so, to your point, yeah, until that snaps in someone, you can't reason them out of it. But when it does happen, you want to be able to be there to be able to say, hey, I can try to hold your hand through it a little bit, and I can hopefully be gentle enough that maybe it calms a little of your anger so we can get to the bottom of this and get you in a place where you can then be able to have better relationships with your believing family, because that's also tricky, and that goes both ways too. So, you know, there's a lot of things that happen when you find this stuff out. And I hope that these episodes, and obviously you have a very good demeanor about doing it, can help people who are ready to kind of get past that initial anger stage and try to make more sense of it. And then also, uh, use that to help other people around them.

So, I don't want to listen to an Alexander Campbell quote in our summation because I worry that people think we're ending. But this Alexander Campbell quote, for me, is almost a silver bullet. Can you play? Can you explain who Alexander Campbell is and why this quote, uh, is, is so meaningful, given the historical context of who he was and, and, you know, when it was that he, that he made this quote? Yeah, so Alexander Campbell was, uh, like a pretty big religious leader in, in, he was around when the Book of Mormon was coming up. And so obviously, um, the Campbellites is where Sydney Rigdon comes from. And so it's a movement and it's got a lot of people. And so he's obviously very attuned to what Joseph Smith is doing. And so this is what he said when he was asked about the Book of Mormon. He said, "This Prophet Smith, through his stone spectacles, wrote on the plates of Nephi in this Book of Mormon, every error in almost every truth discussed in New York for the last 10 years. He decided all the great controversies: infant baptism, ordination, the Trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the atonement, transubstantiation, fasting, penance, church government, religious experience, the call to the ministry, the general resurrection, eternal punishment, who may baptize, and even the question of Freemasonry, republican government, and the rights of man." All these topics are repeatedly alluded to. And so what he's saying is, the Book of Mormon is literally a time capsule of the 1820s, and Joseph Smith is literally hitting every single thing that is being discussed around him and answering it in a way that dates it so specifically to the 19th century, because of course, in the ancient Americas, they would not be as concerned with all of the topics that they are in Joseph Smith's day. And yet, the Book of Mormon repeatedly answers the questions that people are asking in 1829, as opposed to, you know, 500 BC. So Alexander Campbell, and this is a contemporary account to the Book of Mormon, sees all of these.

Gains. For those who don't know what that big word means, this isn't some anti-Mormon in 1995 reflecting on whether or not the Book of Mormon feels more 19th century than than ancient. This is someone that Oliver Cowdery knew. This is a contemporary of Joseph Smith saying, when I read the Book of Mormon, it sounds like somebody living in my time period wrote it with the explicit intent of trying to resolve all the problems during that decade, basically. Right. Yeah, I, I, I think it's, it's one of those quotes I love just because sometimes people will say, oh, the, the anti-Mormon critics have come up with all this recently. And it's like, no, no, people realized that at the time. It's just that obviously there weren't, you know, there wasn't Google, so people couldn't look it up and put it together. But Alexander Campbell, they were all demonized and dismissed as anti-Mormon. Exactly. Raised these objections back then. Exactly. And these were all, you know, brought up at the time, but just dismissed. And and now that we have all the biblical scholarship, we have all the archaeology and DNA, we can show that the things that Alexander Campbell's mentioning and other people are mentioning prove true that this is not a historical text. And they saw it at the time. They just didn't have all of the info we have to back it up with evidence. And again, why didn't the Book of Mormon fix the problem of racism? Why didn't it fix the problem of slavery? Why did it fix the problem of misogyny, of women's rights, of LGBT issues? Like, if it's really going to be this document for our day, yeah, like transformational. And not to mention, it it neglects all of Nauvoo theology, which we've already covered. Why is it only resolving the things Joseph Smith was thinking about in the 1820s and nothing that society has been concerned about? Yeah, that's just it. And after 1830, it just, it really is, it's a time capsule. It takes that phrase, "The Book of Mormon's written for our day," to a whole new level. It does, specifically for that point in time. Yeah, it wasn't even written for the 1804. That's just it. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It was not written for people in the 1840s. It was written for people in 1829. And and that's why, as you said, everything in the church that's unique is developed long after or after the Book of Mormon, and the Book of Mormon makes no reference back to it. That's so powerful. It's so true. It is. It's a great point, Nemo.

All right, final slide. Yeah. And so, you know, basically, I mentioned this earlier, but the, the point of this episode is not to bash the Book of Mormon. It's just to say that it's very explainable, as long as you do not start with the conclusion. As long as you start with a clean equation and you let the evidence be the variables that guide you to the answer. Every single way you do this is going to point to being a 19th century text. And we can go all the way back to his own mother talking about how great of a storyteller he was over five years before dictating the Book of Mormon, to know that he's working with these stories all the way back in 1823. And so when we look at that combined with the fact that the complexities that we, we're, we're talking about that are cited become very explainable once you realize that they're very quickly used and discarded in the Book of Mormon. All of those things start to tell you that this is a book that could be written by a, by a man who is a good storyteller, especially because you don't have to be as educated to orally dictate a story. And, you know, we mentioned the tight versus loose so many times in these episodes, but that's another area where when you come with apologetics saying, well, he used Hebraisms, then you have a lot of other problems you have to answer. And we've also shown that Hebraisms are used by other books in his time. And it's just to say, when you take all of this together at face value, the pieces start to fit together naturally for the puzzle. And you no longer have to, again, do what the church did, what we talked about at the beginning with those quotes, which is to say that you put the puzzle together and it has to match the picture the church shows you on the box. If you don't do that, they're going to fit together really well. And it's like, I said, it's a very satisfying feeling to see them fit together because you found the evidence that makes it work, even if it is painful to have to deal with what that implies about our core beliefs within the church. But I really do think these first 10 episodes, I hope, have done a good job of explaining why you can show that Joseph Smith absolutely could have written the Book of Mormon, and that no one else but him could have done it. And and just my summary, I know you got to go, Mike. My summary is that yes, we've got dozens of of episodes still to come in this series. Yeah, but we really could stop right now. Yeah, you could. By the Mormon Church's own claim, by Gordon B. Hinckley's own assertion, the Book of Mormon is the keystone of our religion. It's either exactly what it claims, what the church claims, or what Joseph Smith claims. Or, in, I think, Hinckley's own words, it's the biggest fraud perpetrated on mankind. Yeah. And we've just shown, just in 10 episodes, how it fails almost every rational modern test. And that's not even talking about the Book of Abraham, Kinderhook Plates, yeah. This is Smith's version of the Bible, polygamy, masonry, and all the other things, priesthood restoration, First Vision, a gazillion other things that you still haven't even covered. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Mike, you're amazing. Uh, we've got much more to come. Nemo, thanks for joining us. Brother, thank you. Nemo, any final words? No final words from me. Just, uh, hopefully we can put it in the show notes. I did a video on, you know, rebutting the church's attempts to prove how the Book of Mormon couldn't possibly be untrue, and it's not that simple at all. So go check that out. It's like a 10-minute video. Um, other than that, yeah, you know where to find me, folks. And then coming forward, we've got, uh, Old Testament stuff. We're gonna be talking about Global Flood, Tower of Babel, very exciting. And then some New Testament stuff as well. Um, so a lot of cool things to come on this series with with Mike in LDS Discussions. Again, check out LDSdiscussions.com for all of Mike's amazing work. Mike, you're, uh, you're a legend. You're a living legend. I don't know about that, but thank you guys both for being here. And thanks, Nemo, from across the pond, for being here. Thanks, Michael. Take care. Thank you. Take care, guys. Bye, everybody. Thanks to everyone for joining us today on Mormon Stories Podcast. Uh, we really hope you've been enjoying this series. Again, we're going to be providing this, uh, as its own podcast. You can also go to our YouTube channel on Mormon Stories, and there's a playlist that you can just watch these videos in sequence. Um, we really appreciate your feedback. Um, please keep it coming at mormonstories@gmail.com, or you can comment here on YouTube, or on the Facebook video stream, or you can leave us comments on the blog at mormonstories.org. We always read and appreciate and do our best to incorporate your feedback. Uh, check out the show notes for links. Check out the time codes if you want to jump back and forward to different parts of this episode. And most importantly, uh, as it is every year, less than one of a thousand of our listeners actually donate. We lose donors every month, usually almost always these days, it's because people either fall on financial hard times or they move on. It's never because they stop believing in the importance of what we're doing or on our mission. So if you can, please, um, we would love you to become a monthly donor so that we can pay for Nemo, so that we can pay for Gerardo, myself, uh, Brooklyn, Jennifer, Jen, all the, uh, staff and equipment and, uh, network and storage systems. All this stuff we need your financial support for to keep it going. It's tax deductible in the United States. Um, we're fully transparent in our finances. 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