Priesthood Restoration

hello everyone and welcome to another edition of mormon stories podcast i'm your host john dillin it's august 24th 2022 and we are super excited to be continuing our series uh the lds discussions series and today the episode the focus is going to be the lds priesthood restoration as far as i'm concerned this is the one of the most important topics that we can cover when someone is trying to objectively look at mormon church truth claims before we jump in for today i will just kind of let you know that all of this series is based on an amazing website called ldsdiscussions.com and this is where my good friend mike uh has painstakingly written you know over i would say over 100 essays and much much more just doing a real critical thoughtful neutral objective but evidence-based look at mormon church truth claims check out ldsdiscussions.com um th this series has become so popular where you know almost two we're getting close to two dozen episodes in people love it so much that they've asked us to make it its own standalone podcaster series we want to just remind everyone that this is available on anchor this is also available on spotify and lds discussions um and it's there's a youtube playlist uh where you can play this as well and even spotify these days is allowing video so um so that is cool for those of you who like to do video through spotify instead of video through youtube but this series is uh really having a huge impact and uh mike it's so great to have you back for uh this series thanks for what you do hey everybody it's good to be back all right so mike i wanted you know there's going to be a few people a bunch of people half our audience that have never been mormon before and they're not going to even understand what we mean when we talk about priesthood or why it's important so is it okay if i just kind of set that up in one slide yeah of course in the mormon church we are taught that our church is true and all other churches are false and when when we say false one of the things you know the two things that we basically claim that was kind of the narrative we were sold from the beginning that that we actually when missionaries meet with investigators uh you know what's sold is that um when joseph smith was called to start the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints that um god said all other creeds are abomination all of the religious creeds of abomination and all the other churches lack god's stamp of approval or authority which means that all non-mormon baptisms do not count in heaven as getting you to heaven all non-mormon marriages and weddings don't count in heaven your your marriage and your family dissolves when you go to heaven if you don't get a mormon marriage um and uh and so that's kind of the authority part and all other churches are based it's like a mcdonald's that that doesn't have franchise rights you might claim to be mcdonald's but you're not really the mcdonald's unless you have the piece of paper saying you are a certified franchise and in a very real and literal sense i was taught growing up that the mormon church views all other churches as illegitimate in the eyes of god and that god only approves one church and it is the priesthood authority that that is is god's stamp or seal of approval and as the pictures show um the story is that before the church was ever founded in 1830 that joseph smith and oliver caldery were visited by john the baptist who gave the aaronic priesthood which is the lower priesthood and then um and then later peter james and john showed up and gave joseph smith and oliver cowdery the higher priesthood or the melchizedek priesthood and that sort of set joseph and oliver and the church up to kind of then function with god's franchise approval or authority and then the only other thing i'll add is that the other the other thing is power and mormons literally believe that like we can heal the sick through like uh you know anointings where you put oil sacred oil that you've blessed with priesthood authority on a sick person's head and then you lay your hands on their heads say a prayer and god's gonna give you special power to heal the sick that someone without the priesthood even a mother who doesn't have the priest a mormon mother who doesn't have the priesthood it's not going to be as powerful as if it's a male priesthood holder within the mormon church giving that blessing with the oil there are other sorts of power you you actually have the power within mormonism to raise your right arm to the square if you have the priesthood and you can cast out devils or evil spirits in god's name and again it's the priesthood power that you get through the laying on of hands that gives you that power and so when you're 12 years old as a mormon boy you receive the aaronic priesthood laying out of hands that makes you a deacon when you're 14 you become a teacher when you're 16 you become a priest and then when you serve a mission you get ordained to the melchizedek priesthood with the laying on of hands which is the higher priesthood that's when you become an elder and then there's high priest which is the highest office in the normal higher melchized priesthood within the church what am i leaving out mike in terms of priesthood and authority within mormonism no i mean i think if like being speaking of someone who was a convert i mean it was taught to me that there was a priesthood in ancient days which you know you see in in the bible there's there's you know obviously there's concerns about the priesthood and um i know david bakavoy and his episodes with with you had talked about you know how that drove the priestly source of the bible and all that um and so for me i was taught like okay there was this priesthood that was in ancient times and they apostatized so it was just gone from the earth and joseph smith by being visited by john the baptist and peter james john restored what was lost so that all no other church had the authority to speak for god on earth because they had all been corrupted they were all as you know the first vision states you know abominations and that because the priesthood was restored within the mormon church through joseph smith we are the only ones on earth that can perform true miracles because we have um that power bestowed upon us and you know it to me it plays a lot into the folk magic which we talked about in our early episodes was just this belief that you can channel this power um like you said to heal people to um you know really create miracles um and more importantly to speak on behalf of god with proper authority so it is power to do things um but that power also gives you authority it's kind of i mean i guess in a lot of ways it's almost circular like you know having authority gives you power and having power gives you authority and in the priesthood i think in a lot of ways closes that gap within mormonism to say this is how you know we are the one true church because we're the only church that has that authority that's been restored and gives us the credibility and the power to speak for god yeah and i i don't think the importance of this topic can be overstated because this is this is the whole enchilada in mormonism what drives it its power its money its influence its its whole value proposition is that it's god's sanctioned one true church its ordinances count its priesthood authority counts its power counts so this i mean this really might be the whole enchilada in some ways i mean some would say it's the first vision some would say it's the book of mormon i would almost say it's it's priesthood and authority that really is the whole enchilada you know what i mean is the book of mormon be true but the church be false right the current modern latter-day saint church i think this is the whole enchilada yeah i mean the first vision last week is going to play into this one because there's so many similar issues that happened in the first vision when you talk about late creations of stories and retrofitting but the first vision in a lot of ways if joseph smith had never told that story it wouldn't really alter the church today outside of the fact that it takes away a foundational story that they use to convert people to the church but the priesthood restoration if it's not true it's like if you have no true authority if that authority is a story that is is created late um and is not true then yeah it's like so what do we have uh left in the church if the first vision didn't happen which i think last week we showed it the story is a late creation if joseph smith had some born-again experience it was not the first vision as told in the church and it certainly has so many errors and changes and then if the priesthood restoration is also a story that didn't happen as stated you now have two foundational stories in the church that we can show joseph smith um created to bolster himself and to establish his changing theology and at that point to what you're saying it's like what are you left with if you now see that the priesthood authority is is kind of fictional um and that joseph smith was willing to create this uh long after the fact in order to um really put himself above others but also to put the church above others and and once you take that away it's like what are you left with especially when you look at what the church demands um from you to either get that or to be married to someone who has it and i think you know that's what these episodes are trying to show is all of these things build upon each other so today we're going to see how the first vision builds into this we're going to see how treasure digging builds into this in a way how folk magic all of the things we've talked about are going to play into this and and that's why it's so important because this has implications in our daily lives as members this is something that you are going to see people talk about time and time again in church like you said they do blessings um this ties into the temple this ties into everything so if this is a very central topic um and that's why we're going to go through this in a lot of detail to illustrate how it evolved and why we can show kind of we said the first vision that we have the receipts to show this is just not the way the church talks about it today or even talked about it 10 years later this is a slow evolution and it comes out of necessity for joseph smith and it impacts everything we do today yeah and not to poison the well but this was a huge shocker for me even after i'd become a progressive liberal mormon i didn't know about this and it was really shocking like treasure digging was shocking the book of mormon was shocking and this priesthood restoration uh almost invention after the fact just blew me away and again like you said all three of these things happen before the church is ever even founded so right let's jump in so um now that we've covered what it is let's talk about the timeline as the church argues it yeah and this is just the most simple way to put it and i remember when i was doing this overview i looked at the church's website and they give you this timeline of the priesthood restoration and it is super simple on may 15 1829 um john the baptist conferred the aaronic priesthood on joseph smith in oliver cowdery in harmony pennsylvania then they'll say in may of 1829 basically sometime shortly after joseph smith and oliver caldery received the melchizedek priesthood from peter james and john near the susquehanna river behind harmony between harmony pennsylvania and colesville new york and in april 6 1830 the church is going to be organized and that's important because you need to have the priesthood restored before the church is restored um so that you have the church has the correct authority and so this is the church's timeline super simple super clean uh much like you see with the first vision you know this is just how i was taught as a as a convert as a member you know just very clean and i'll just validate that every year you celebrate the restoration of the aaronic priesthood because we always had a date for it i never thought to ask about the date for the melchizedek priesthood but we'll get there yeah but like these are stories you hear every year as a mormon yep there's nothing ambiguous it's very simple and elegant and there's there's nothing even question about this if if you don't scratch the surface okay all right so last week we talked about the first vision and i kept hammering how important timelines are and this is going to be the same thing which is to say all of this is about looking at the timeline to see if it adds up if it's um kind of linear if it builds in the way it should build or if it's created in the way that the church you know says it happened and so we're going to cover the timeline using historical documents statements revelations and it's just so important because if you look at the timeline and you ignore the way the church portrays it and i mentioned this in the first episode but you know picture this like a puzzle and the the picture on the box is the correlated version of joseph and oliver being ordained by john the baptist and then peter james and john and that's what the church tells you the box is and then you open it up and all the pieces are what we're going to talk about today it's about not using the church's correlated pictures to put that puzzle together but to use the historical documents to see where the pieces fit together and once you do that then you look at the puzzle and say what does the puzzle actually show compared to what the church tells us it will show and um so i think that is something to keep in mind as we go and you know just one of the things i want to point out you know as we get going is you know the church cites um dnc 13 as the revelation that led to the restoration of the aaronic priesthood in 1829 but that that revelation or that excerpt that's used for the dnc was not written until 1838 and so one of the things we're going to kind of point out is that the church uses a lot of entries in the dnc that were written long after as if they happened almost at the time and sometimes they'll say this is an excerpt from joseph smith's history that doesn't really tell you the fact that this is being written nine years later in a completely different um area of need for joseph smith so keep those things in mind because we're gonna go through the timeline in a linear way we're gonna start from the beginning and work our way up as opposed to starting with the conclusion that this happened working our back as you'll see the the church often do in their materials that's that's already a tiny bit shocking to me and here's why joseph smith received revelations prior to the april 6 1830 founding of mormonism not like the dnc the the revelations that make up the doctrine and covenants come after the church's founding right so if joseph is going to receive revelations by god prior to 1830 why the fetch aren't some of those revelations behold joseph smith i shall give unto you the priesthood of aaron which is the lower priesthood and then behold i will send peter james and john and they will give you the mechasic priesthood that those revelations never came and you you have to wonder that's that's already a problem it is yeah it is i mean and just as a real brief spoiler alert he does get revelation or at least he claims revelation about getting baptized and has no mention of the priesthood and um those we'll get into it later of course but those revelations those early revelations are coming through the rock and a hat so they're tight translation so again why are we using an 1838 source for these revelations when these things would have been documented because joseph smith has a scribe who's writing down these early revelations coming through the rock and a hat and yet as we'll see there's no mention of it and so they're going to use an 1838 source which should be a red flag except for the fact that i think for them for most members and this was true for me you just don't really understand when you see it from joseph smith's history that it's a late edition that the story has changed because why would you look unless you kind of get that jolt internally that says i need to figure this out which for most people just it takes a long time to get to that point really quickly you're making me now think of the first vision discussion that we just had last week where where we realized that his first entry the first vision reflected his view on the theology in 1832 right and then obviously his 1838 version reflected his evolving theology later the book of mormon since it came before 1830 would show us his view on priesthood and authority pri you're right at the founding of the church i don't i didn't see in the slides you talking about this what what does the book of mormon have to say about aaronic versus melchizedek and the need for a higher and a lower priesthood and authority to do ordinances and baptize the church because that would show what joseph's actual view was of priesthood at the time of the founding of the church am i stealing your thunder do you talk about that later we do talk about it later more when we get to the apologetics but yeah i think um one of the things because i think it's important in the timeline you want to get to it now really okay yeah so high level super i think you know one of the ways i look at it and i've heard other people say it is that joseph smith in the early days talked about more authority than priesthood so it was about having the authority to baptize just by having the authority to perform miracles healings all that stuff it wasn't really referred to as priesthood and one of the things about the book of mormon and we'll get to it with the apologetics is that it does not mention um or discuss really these separate priesthoods and i think there's two references to a high priesthood um the the references to the melchizedek priesthood come they're joseph smith is not really aware of a melchizedek priesthood at this point and it's just it shows um as we get into because that comes from sidney rigdon we'll get into all that with the timeline but i think the book of mormon is more concerned about authority um than the actual like idea of priesthood and i'm probably oversimplifying that a bit um but that but that's why you start to see priesthood use years later whereas early on it was more about authority well i just want to make one point and that's that part of the selling proposition of the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints is that it's a restoration of all things right we're all taught that jesus set up his true church and he did everything right but then the catholics and the protestants came along and ruined christ's true church because he set up apostles and he set up you know the church and then it all got ruined so joseph was called to restore everything and so if that's true in the book of mormon represents christ setting up his true church in america and if the way that the church now is the true order of things then it i think for me logically the book of mormon in its purity would have said and behold there's a lower priesthood called the aaronic priesthood and then there's a higher priesthood called the melchizedek priesthood and deacon's teachers and priests do this with the lower and elders and high priests do this with the higher and none of that's in the book of mormon and i think that's important yeah well we talked about it in one of our earlier episodes about the book of mormon which is the book of mormon is framed as the fullness of the gospel and yet the book of mormon doesn't include the melchizedek priesthood doesn't include the endowment ceremony doesn't include baptisms for the dead um it doesn't include i'm trying to think of the other ones there's all these you know wearing you know garments with masonic symbols on it you know um trying to think of all the later innovations but none of that and so none of that's in the book of mormon and so you do have to go why are we restoring this book of mormon that's supposed to restore the fullness of the gospel when it's basically giving us nothing that is really uniquely mormon the only thing that really mentions is polygamy and even then it condemns it so i mean it really is um one of those things that you don't think about as a member like the book of mormon and again i'll speak as a convert when i read it it didn't stick out as being anything weird it just felt like you're reading the bible because you basically were reading somebody who was trying to write in the language of the bible use the ideas of the bible and make them more of a 19th century context which to a modern reader doesn't feel that weird and at some point my my head should have been saying why are none of the things that you hear about with mormonism in here but you just don't because you're you're told it's a pr you're privileging the book and so um yeah to your to your question there's no real mention of a melchizedek priesthood or the need for two priesthoods um they do reference a high priesthood but as we'll see in the apologetics even then like fair mormon really stretches to redefine what the what the book of mormon is saying um and and that's a problem because these things should be in there if joseph smith and oliver country are truly dealing with them in at that time before the church is founded and it's it's just not okay what was the episode we did that would have mentioned all the things not in the book of mormon i can't remember because we did we did the surrounding influences one um which kind of covered some of that you know and um anachronisms we kind of covered like what's not in there um so it's one of those i'd have to look at it i'm not sure which one that was uh they had that one included in the show notes if we remember yeah all right let's jump uh let's jump to the melchizedek priesthood thought up in 1827 so that's your question is was the melchizedek priesthood thought up in 1827 right yeah and this this is kind of like foreshadowing like if you're watching a movie and you see some little scene with it with a character that you don't understand who it is and you're like why are they doing that we're doing this because this is really important in 1827 the disciples of christ this has nothing to do with mormonism the disciples of christ from which many early members of the church converted um had developed its own priesthood doctrines which were influenced by alexander crawford who was a scottish minister living in canada in 1827 crawford had delineated the existence of three distinct priesthoods a patriarchal priesthood which he also called a priesthood of the order of melchizedek an ironical priesthood originally held by aaron and a priesthood held by jesus christ crawford regarded melchizedek as a greater priest in abraham citing the fact that abraham paid ties to him indeed according to crawford melchizedek was one of the key players in the order of the patriarchal priesthood crawford also considered the patriarchal priesthood and the ironical priesthoods as branches of the levitical priesthood regardless as one historian claimed alexander campbell who was influenced by alexander crawford taught his understanding of the priesthood to many of his followers who became part of the mormonite community and continued to believe the same doctrine this is from byu studies and it's basically saying that in 1827 the idea of the melchizedek priesthood was being taught by alexander crawford who taught alexander campbell who led the campbell lights who just happened to be um where sydney rigdon was a part of and that is really important to keep in mind that sydney rigdon would have heard about the melchizedek priesthood from alexander campbell before the mormon church or the book of mormon was created in any way okay so are you saying that there's a high probability that three years before the book of mormon was created some dude in another church named alexander crawford comes up with the idea this is the thesis comes up with the idea of a melchizedek priesthood maybe sydney rigdon was exposed to it and then in the mid 1830s joseph smith learns about it and then incorporates it after the fact is that yeah it's in the yeah and you can see we'll as we go through the timeline you'll see it i mean it's all there and it's yeah and then but it's like that if you're going through a linear timeline that's the first thing because this is happening before joseph smith and as we've talked about in previous episodes this is another area where you have these surrounding ideas that are more unique to joseph smith's time and place that just happened to make their way into the theology and if you ask bible scholars and i'm sure there's not 100 consensus on this but the idea that there would be a melchizedek priesthood that like people like you and me could hold um it's kind of a misreading of hebrews hebrews is more or less saying melchizedek is not like a person it's not like john you know it's a title it's the king of righteousness right so it's not about um you know giving it to john or to mike or to you know anyone it's it's about this is a priesthood that is the king of righteousness that would be equated with jesus not one that is going to be given to a ton of people in a church you know because they turned a certain age and so um those ideas were coming in you know this kind of second great awakening but a lot of scholars would argue that's a misreading of the bible in the first place even before we get to all this other stuff and so this is another area where you can make a strong case that joseph smith is misreading or misinterpreting the bible putting it concretely into the theology of the mormon church in a way that again tells us it's not really being restored from god it's being restored by a guy using 19th century ideas wow and and that's i'm reading this slide now and i'm just kind of blown away that the book of commandments comes out a couple what what year the book of commandments come out 1833 so three years after the church is founded the book of mormon book of commandments comes out and there's no mention of either the aaronic or the melchizedek priesthood and it doesn't mention the visitation from peter james and john that's kind of mind-blowing yeah i mean it should be a red flag and i think it's one of those things where you can look at it and go you can find all this stuff online but nobody's going to tell it to you and i think in a lot of ways um you know you hear the story about how the uh they were printing the book of commandments and they were attacked by the mob and only a few survived in a lot of ways that's probably a good thing for joseph smith because it allowed him to change it with very few people having access to what he originally wrote um and we'll get to that as we go but yeah i mean this is a big deal in the sense of when you look at the timeline it does not line up yeah with the correlated material in any way also you know we've already talked about uh the first vision problem of no mention of the first vision until 12 years after it happens like there's this pattern of like why are these stories appearing five to ten laters after they happen at a convenient moment and i'm just noticing that pattern here because i five years after the event was supposed to happen is the first time the the yeah there's a mention of john the baptist or peter james and john delivering these priesthoods that's mind-blowing that should have been there before the church was started in the in the revelations and it's not even in the book of commandments three years after the church was founded that's a problem that's a huge yeah and it's a huge problem just because of the fact that you know people will say oh it's too sacred to speak about but if you're claiming to have a priesthood now it's a brag right well yeah that's the thing and at some point i think it was a brag because you well we'll get you as we go through the timeline but it became a brag because joseph smith needed to be able to say listen guys i got this directly from them and oliver also would say that too and because of that it elevated their status in the church and so uh but more importantly not only would it be a brag which which it was you know to that degree but if you get your priesthood restored through a specific person you would want to tell the church that so they understood that there was authority behind it as opposed to the joseph smith's earlier belief was that he could get authority by divine divine command through the rock and a hat the problem is when you do that um dan vogel talks about this a lot and i'm going to be a huge shout out now to dan vogel because a lot of what we're going to talk about with the timeline comes from him because he puts so much work into looking up all these documents and all of these changes um so dan vogel is just so good at this and um we'll put in the show notes some of the stuff he's done um but he talked about early on when you're our charismatic leader as joseph smith was divine command as a charismatic leader is kind of one of those things that people can replicate a little easier because you could say well i was told by god that i was supposed to do this well when you make it concrete with the story about peter james and john it takes it a little bit further away from just being a divine commandment to it's being restored by specific figures from biblical times which gives joseph smith a more concrete authority to kind of rest on with it being harder for somebody to challenge his authority got it okay so the next slide is the second half of 1829 articles of the church yeah and so um actually go back one slide real quick okay because i don't think oh yeah so basically you know as per the official timeline joseph smith claims he was called by the spirit to restore the priesthood did we not do this slide yet we did that one we didn't do this next one yeah you mentioned but we didn't i don't think we actually went through it real quick and we don't have to go through it too much oh no this no you're fine so all right so go to the yeah that one right there so there the church basically says very cleanly on may 15th 1829 joseph and oliver were called to restore the priesthood and it's cited in the church's narrative it's it's in all the videos i mean it's it's what you're gonna hear everywhere you go within the church i mean i as a convert this was just drilled into me um and it was given uh restored through john the baptist um because he had the authority to baptize and as we'll show um this story is so anachronistic to 1829 because joseph smith does not mention the aaronic or melchizedek priesthoods for years to come and there's going to be no mention of peter uh james and john or john the baptist until about 1835. and you know the original revelation i talked about this earlier in this episode um the original revelation that discusses the baptism for joseph and oliver in the book of commandments which is um now dnc 18 there's no mention of of either priesthood nor does it mention any visitation from peter james or john and so it's completely absent from the the revelation entry in the book of commandments that should cover this event and yet it's just completely missing and are you going to show us later that they changed the revelation oh yeah yeah we'll go yeah we'll go through all that freak okay yeah those are those that was a big one for me when i saw the the visual of that which we'll show oh that's that's awful okay and so to continue the timeline so now we're going into the second half of 1829 and the articles and covenants of the church of christ is released in the second half and it's written down by oliver cowdery and it's chapter 24 of the book of commandments and again there's no mention of priesthood divisions in fact in this revelation apostles were elders which waters down the authority and the church there's no quorum of the twelve here and this is not going to be changed until the revelation is altered in 1835 and it's now known as dnc 20. so in these articles joseph smith dictates the following god visited him by a holy angel whose countenance was as lightning and whose garments were pure and white above all whiteness and gave unto him commandments which inspired him from on high and gave unto him power by the means of which was before prepared that he should translate a book so again there's no mention of angelic ordinations priesthood restoration or peter james and john anywhere in the initial articles of the church that's put in the book of commandments to try to you know illustrate um how the church came to be and how it has authority if i'm just being honest and honestly objective that fits the pattern that all the most important things happen are never recorded at the time and they show up years later contradicting what was actually said and believed at the time that miraculous events supposedly happened that totally fits the pattern yeah and that's and that's why you know we keep hammering i keep hammering on this idea of these episodes are not in isolation these these problems continue and they compile and they compound and that's why we're trying that's why when i did this overview project i wanted to do it in this kind of order of the subjects was just to say that as you look at this this ties into the first vision it ties into how he spoke about the you know restoration of like you know the gold plate stories how all of these things have these details that just keep getting bigger and bigger as we go in order to backfill the story to give him self-authority and when you look at the actual timeline it's telling us this just did not happen at least as stated if it happened in any way at all yeah and we just did the first vision episode but again call your attention to that i don't even know that we included this in the first vision episode but they're like writing down the articles and covenants of the church and they're not saying pay attention they're not saying god and jesus visited joseph smith they're saying an angel right yeah yeah like that's that's that should that almost should go in the first vision episode right yeah i mean and like i said these things when you when you see the way these stories develop and then you kind of especially for the like the first vision the priesthood restoration are really like sibling episodes because they're going to kind of cover a lot of the same ground because they're they're basically having the same issues um of you know late creations of stories that need to be backfitted into the history yeah and again they had the chance to mention both priesthoods and they didn't yep yeah okay that's important um okay so in june 1830 the articles and covenants of the church um are um released and so the articles and covenants of the church outline the duties of the various church offices and ordinances and it was drafted by joseph smith and that's um from the you know the doctrine and covenants header and the document begins by stating the authority upon the church was organized including a summary of the miraculous events preceding that organization yet it is completely silent about the angelic ordinations that smith and cadre later claimed instead it mentions only divine and angelic commandments as a source of authority for example this document reads god ministered unto him by a and holy angel and gave unto unto him him commandments which inspired him from on high and gave him the power by the means which were before prepared that he should write translate a book as we talk on the last slide um which book was given by inspiration and is called the book of mormon and is confirmed to the others by the ministering of angels and declared unto the world by them and so this is from dan vogel's uh presentation about the evolution of these claims and what he says is if you look at the the phrase ministering of angels um it's a very generic phrasing and that is referring um to the vision that the three and eight witnesses would have had to the book of mormon that is not talking about a priesthood restoration that's talking about because if you read it in in context here it's saying um the book is called the book of mormon and the book of mormon is confirmed to others by the ministering of angels and declared unto the world by them so again there's no mention of the priesthood there's no mention of um you know the melchizedek or the ironic or anything in here it says just straight up what you would expect to be said in 1830 given how joseph smith's timeline on the first vision and priesthood restoration goes but this matches completely nothing from 1835 as the church would state today i'm also going to note that that in terms of like a bait and switch when when i it's my feeling that when the church was first founded joseph's authority primarily came from a perception that he had the power as a seer and as a translator in the doctrine of covenants it literally calls him a seer and a translator and that was like whoa this guy this guy has power from god to translate ancient records that none of us can read we should pay attention to him and that's that's a problem for two main reasons for me one one is that we now know that the book of mormon is not a translation because of all the episodes we've already talked about with the anachronisms and the plagiarisms and then if you add to that the book of abraham which is a false translation we now know and the um the joseph smith translation of the bible those are like three fails ad kinderhook plates like he's debunked as a translator which is his primary source of authority when he starts and then you have that being replaced by these later claims of priesthood authority and then in the modern times you have the church backing away even from the term translator and they're even trying to redefine the word translation to mean other things or change the description of both the book of abraham and the book of mormon away from a translation to inspiration or revelation and that's that's like again building a house claiming you're building a house on cement and then trying to remove the foundation and wanting the house to still stand that's a bait and switch and it's a problem for me well i mean yeah and you're not going to hear this talk like you know we'll get into it later it's just you're not going to hear the stuff taught on sundays because again once you start going through this as we said at the beginning all of everything that comes from these stories falls apart when you're finding out it's a late creation and so you can't teach it and so this is why you keep getting these kind of like coral you know like the saints book where they kind of try to correlate some of this material to give you just a little bit of info but not actually tell you um the full story and so yeah with the timeline yeah and the results are so important yeah they really are especially with joseph smith and the way he kind of creates stuff so yeah all right so if we go to the next slide this is what i kind of talked about earlier so november 1830 um sidney rigdon is going to be baptized into the church and he is baptized he's ordained as an elder in the church and this is important because rigden as i mentioned earlier has been teaching the ideas of the aaronic and melchizedek priesthood as a candlelight and this is really important cause remember 1830 november is after the book of mormon this is after they um you know have been operating the church for a while he's going to come in and this is going to begin to show us how joseph smith is going to use these ideas to change his own theology and i'm just going to take a minute to say there are a lot of people when they're trying to figure out how the book of mormon got written they want to include sydney rigdon as a co-conspirator co-conspirator as a co-author secretly of the book of mormon and of course john hamer and others say that's not necessary for the book to have been created but if if sidney rigdon is teaching uh aaronic melchizedek priesthood as a candlelight before he joins the church and he was a coke and spirit in writing the book of mormon then he probably would have written that into the book of mormon but he but but that didn't happen so maybe this is an evidence that cindy rigdon wasn't a co-conspiracy co-conspirator in writing the book of mormon is that a valid conclusion yeah i mean i have no no belief whatsoever that he was a co-conspirator to the book of mormon so i and i agree that if he had been you would see these ideas in the book of mormon as opposed to waiting until you know a year after which makes no sense if he were to have been involved and i think your point is i think your point is so good that no one else could have written the book of mormon yeah i mean if if sydney rigged and wrote written the book of mormon it wouldn't have had joseph smith's own life experiences his father's dream i mean you just wouldn't have that stuff in there you'd have stuff that was more familiar to sydney and not joseph it's it's pretty clear when you read it nobody else could have written it there would have been prophecies about cindy rigdon being an amazing human when he yeah exactly and i you know that there's just when you talk about the way the power struggles go in the church you would have that stuff would have been more uh evident i think early on yeah okay all right so sydney comes on the scene yep and then so june of 1831 the high priesthood is introduced for the first time in the church and so um according to byu studies the authority of the melchizedek priesthood was manifested and conferred for the first time upon several of the elders at this conference this further clarifies that until 1831 the title elder in the church did not equate to priesthood as we kind of mentioned earlier in the articles and covenants of the church of christ and the really interesting thing about this is that the journals for this conference refer only to the high priesthood there's no mention of the word melchizedek it's not this is just not created yet so this further adds to the con the idea we're talking about that the aaronic and melchizedek priesthoods were retrofitted into history and are not thought of yet and so um ezra booth this is from the journal of discourses so it says ezra booth was present when the elders first received the ordination of the high priesthood they met together in june of 1831 while they were there the manifestation of the power of god being on joseph he set apart some of the elders to the high priesthood the priesthood was confirmed on a number of elders and so this is just telling us that until 1831 there was no upper priesthood in the mormon church it was non-existent and even now it's still going to be called the high priesthood i think some people refer to as the high and holy priesthood but is not the melchizedek priesthood even now so okay so there's two questions i'm asking so first and foremost i think it's important so in the early first five years of the church there's no there's no sense of like oh you're 12 let me aaronic priesthood ordination now you're a deacon now you're teacher now a priest oh you're 18 or 19. now we're going to make you an elder and give you the melchizedek priesthood you're saying that did not happen for the first several years of the church i don't think that they looked i mean i i'm not positive on that i don't think that they had like the organization to kind of have it by age i think it was more like when you joined i'm sure it was by like you're an adult you you know and then um this high priesthood was given in 1831 i don't think it was given to all of the men so i think that was a way of saying you've been in the church long enough now you've earned this as opposed to just giving it to anybody but i'm not 100 sure on that okay well that's what that was going to be my second question so like a bunch of people joined the church like right now if you join the church in 2022 and you're an adult male you're kind of almost immediately ordained into the priesthood right yeah i can't remember how long i had to wait before i got the melchizedek because i think you're immediately into the ironic i feel like there's there is a period where you wait i've just heard of people like an adult man being baptized yeah might have been gay being ordained as a priest in the aaronic priesthood and then he's able to actually perform the baptism of a loved one same day right yeah and then i think that makes sense because i think you get once you're baptized you can get the erotic priesthood then i i can't remember though if i had to wait if i had to wait at all for the melchizedek i don't remember but um i think you do but this is my question my question is so in 1830 31 someone joins the church a male joins the church what i hear you say is there's no immediate giving of any priesthood in 1830 i don't think so because i think in 1830 they still just referred to when you got baptized as having the authority there's no real mention of priesthood in that first year this is really when the idea of priesthood starts getting going as far as i know i mean there's certainly not in the way we talk about it today so when ezra booth receives a high priesthood is it without ever having received a lower priesthood well there's no aaronic priesthood then so if there was a priesthood i think they were ordained as elders and then i think they went from elders to the high priest but i'm not i'm not 100 sure on if there was any kind of consistency or confusion on that either so that because i think they're still figuring it out at this point so when someone when in 1831 someone receives the high priesthood so that sounds like there's an idea of a higher priesthood but you're just saying it wasn't named melchizedek yet yeah so in 1831 that's like actually go to the next like the next slide is like the best slide i think because it just illustrates how this is completely i'm just trying to make i'm trying to make sense of this no no this is why this is so important though so this meeting in 1831 joseph smith himself is first ordained to the higher priesthood so there is no high priesthood until 1831 and so this is from rough stone rolling during the turbulent meeting joseph ordained five men to the high priesthood and lyman white ordained 18 others including joseph the ordinations of the high priest had marked a milestone in mormon ecclesiology until that time the word priesthood although it appeared in the book of mormon had not been used in mormon sermonizing or modern revelations later accounts applied the term retroactively but the june 1831 conference marked its first appearance in contemporary records the melchizedek priesthood mormons now believe had been bestowed a year or two earlier with the visitation of peter james and john if so why did contemporaries say the high priesthood was given for the first time in june 1831 joseph smith himself was ordained to this high priesthood by lyman white if joseph was already an elder and apostle what was the necessity of being ordained again okay so that makes no sense because i'll just repeat it as i understand it joseph smith has given the melchizedek priesthood in 1829 by peter james and john why the fetch is he being ordained to a high priesthood not named melchizedek in june of 1831. that makes zero sense yep and so that's the thing like you cannot have peter james and john restoring this in 1829 if joseph smith is going to get it for the first time in 1831 and that tells you the contemporary records tell us that joseph smith first got in 1831 those are going to be the most reliable because that was happening at the time it happened that they have journals from this meeting explaining that joseph smith was ordained at this meeting so this is the this is the introduction of the high priesthood in the mormon church it wasn't called melchizedek it functioned similarly it just didn't have that title and joseph smith was ordained and even richard bushman is admitting if he already had it two years earlier what in the world is he doing getting it now this is this one event to me is the biggest smoking gun that the priesthood restoration is a late edition because here you can see joseph smith evolving it and he himself is taking part in the ordination which tells you without any any doubt that this did not happen in 1829 as the church would tell you today so that question if joseph was already an elder and apostle what was the necessity of being ordained again that's richard bushman asking the question yeah he asked it in the book i wonder what his answer is i think we'll get to it a little more at the end but yeah i think his argument is effectively that you know this gives off the i mean he uses the phrase we'll get to it later where he says you know this this basically feels like a late edition um but he also says that joseph smith as he changed the revelations um changed him as he got a better understanding and so i think what he's trying to say is joseph didn't really understand in 1829 what was really happening which is horribly problematic when you again are bringing in very well-known figures into your stories as we talked about with the first vision this idea that you remember it better later is just completely contradicted by like literally everything we know about memory so for if we're trying to follow what we think is the real timeline no peter james and john visited in 1829 no idea about a melchizedek or aaronic priesthood but then by 1831 there's this idea of a higher priesthood yeah and so a bunch of people including joseph start getting ordained to a higher priesthood in 1831 yep even then the the actual name melchizedek priesthood isn't coming for many years later correct the thesis of the timeline is where yeah so basically 1831 is the first time that they give us a high priesthood in the church there's no use of melchizedek still no mention of the of the visitations okay this is really really important i can see why that's such a critical criticism yeah that one that one i think is the most important one but so in 1831 joseph smith is going to missouri and he's engaging with this ongoing dispute with bishop edward partridge over which land to purchase in order to establish the new city of zion in missouri and i mentioned this last week this is um where you've got this ohio branch and the missouri branch and the missouri branch is starting to question joseph's misleadership and so according to ezra booth who did leave the church later um partridge claimed that the land which um smith and oliver had selected was an inferior in point of quality to other lands that were adjoining and so what was happening was um joseph smith was coming to missouri and telling partridge that he had a revelation from god telling him this is the land you need to buy and edward partridge is saying this land is not nearly as good as this other land why are we not buying that and joseph is saying basically because i have the authority this is what it's going to be and so partridge being ordained as a bishop believed that he had the authority to run the church in missouri because at that time churches were run by the bishops so he thought that was his decision and not joseph's and this led to a bit of a conflict okay so so we're starting to develop a theory on what forced the need for a priesthood hierarchy to be developed and it starts with contention like how power struggles between joseph and some of the leaders including ezra booth and bishop bishop partridge yes yeah i mean yep all right all right so there's a power struggle going on yep and so this is where we're gonna start to see and this one's a really cool one um and this is a letter that ezra booth wrote to edward partridge in november of 1831 and in the letter he says when you intimated to joseph that the land which he and oliver had selected was inferior in point of quality to other lands adjoining had you seen the same spirit manifested in me which you saw in him would you not have concluded me to be under the influence of violent passion bordering on madness rather than the meek and gentle spirit which the gospel inc inculcates when you complain that he had abused you and you observed to him i wish you not to tell us any more that you know that you know these by the spirit when you do not you told us that oliver had raised up a large church here and there is no such thing he replied i see it and it will be so this appeared to me to be a shift better suited to an imposter than a true prophet of the lord okay so what do you what do you interpret that is going on here well i think what's happening here is is the the people that are in the missouri church are seeing joseph smith come in and he does not seem to take criticism well and so i think he here ezra booth is telling edward parcher basically if you saw me act the same way that joseph did would you say that was the spirit of god coming down on me no because joseph smith was acting i think he says bordering on madness and um also the fact that you know joseph smith promised that the church was just gonna flourish and it doesn't all of these things are getting the people of missouri to start to question him because you have these all of these prophecies he's making all these promises he's making they're not coming true and then he's telling him by revelation to build in this one area that apparently is inferior to this other one that they had picked and when he's challenged apparently just throws down you know at least some uh a little bit of anger towards bishop partridge and and it just kind of i think shows that this is leading the missouri church to really start to question joseph smith which is creating a lot of problems for him and and this is what's going to lead to the first vision and priesthood restoration stories uh start to get recorded down and tell me if i'm understanding this right so basically joseph is saying hey buy this parcel of land because the gift and power of god has told me that it's the one god wants yeah the dudes actually go there and they're like this land is a piece of garbage there's this other land that's way better so as if you're not really a prophet you're god clearly can't be leading you or he wouldn't tell you to buy a piece of garbage land and then that's where joseph has to move to authority as as what's behind him instead of his ability to make really great decisions because god's clearly telling him what to do is that am i yeah no i mean that's pretty much what it is so you know and so joseph goes down there basically to try to straighten them out and it doesn't really work because you know when he leaves people are still mad that basically he's going down they're yelling at them and then leaving and and you know i remember doing the saints book when i was doing that chapter by chapter stuff when i first started the website and i remember i didn't know as a member i didn't really realize how many of these revelations that joseph smith has that are basically admonishing the church and blaming them when things don't go right and um and this is another area where joseph smith is going to kind of use the voice of god to tell him this is how it has to be and then he's also going to use these revelations from god to you know admonish these these people you know and we'll get to in a second he has a revelation which basically goes after partridge um and it's just it's quite convenient and and i think that's part of what dan vogel was saying that i mentioned earlier which is when you're just giving revelations it's more of charismatic that people have to believe the revelations and but when you go into that more concrete visitation from from biblical figures it gives a lot more credibility it's kind of like we talk about with pseudopigrapha like people believe it a lot more if it's written in the name of someone else like say the book of abraham whereas if it was just joseph smith's thoughts about the priesthood which the book abraham is very focused on the priesthood um then it would not be nearly as well received because it's just like well it's just joseph smith you know writing down his thoughts and so in this case joseph smith often uses these revelations from god to get people to do what he needs them to do because they believe they're from god um but that only works so long and so that's i think what's going to lead to joseph smith needing to kind of make his story more grand and concrete so it's not just hey this is what god's telling me it's by the way peter james and john came to me did they come to you didn't think so um and i think i think there's a lot of that going on if you can't rely on superior decision making then you got to just pull pull authority as your trump card yeah well i mean you know sometimes it happens when you're a parent right it's like it ends up being because i said so and if your kid doesn't view you as the authority they're not going to listen to you but as long as they as long as they view you as the authority they're going to and in this case it's a similar thing where i think the missouri church uh is starting to go you know you're not my dad and joseph's like okay i got i got to up the game here because it's you know i i mean i know we're over over simplifying it but it's it is similar to that where now all of a sudden you need to to play a trump card that gives you more authority than you had like in the military you need to have rank so you can pour it exactly that's that and that's what this is going to do and and yeah that's awesome yeah so and so we're going to go gotta have rank to pull rank i'm gonna write that down all right no it's true and so um this is uh where we're going to go actually go back uh one more slide yeah go back one slide so um following so we finished this we did this one he has to go to the next one okay okay yeah so following the visit to edward partridge joseph dictates a revelation that states that partridge hath sinned and satan seeketh to destroy his soul says dnc 64. so as soon as he gets back he got he dictates the revelation basically going after partridge and trying to use that to get him to basically fall in line um and then in november um escalating the altercation with edward partridge in the months prior joseph dictates a revelation that calls for joseph to be the president of the high priesthood which makes clear in the revelation that the office of a bishop is not equal so he's basically now writing into a concrete revelation that edward partridge is now below him which is again making sure you know what i said earlier it's like all of a sudden he's like you know you're not my dad he's like yes i am and here's a revelation proving it and so that that's just a few months after so we're already starting to see joseph smith using revelation um to establish his authority above people that might question him um and this one's kind of a side note but in 1831 lucy mack smith writes a letter to her brother to discuss all of the beginnings of the new church no mentions of angelic visits for the priesthood restoration dimensions of the first vision i'm just putting that in there in the timeline just to show that there's still no real discussion or knowledge of these these issues even within his own family um and then in 1832 so now we're a couple months later in january sydney rigdon ordains joseph as the president of the high priesthood in ohio and joseph was sustained in april in missouri so within just a few months of being challenged in missouri joseph smith has now created this new presidency which as a small side note we're told this is the restoration of the way things were in um ancient times there's no presidency in ancient times that is a completely modern term that joseph smith is now using in the voice of god so that's just a small tangent but you can't respond so also like right now is there in in 2022 is there a president of the high priesthood i mean i don't think so you would never hear that phrase ever being used in mormonism yeah why was it important back then for joseph to be ordained as the president of the high priesthood when today you would never hear that mentioned you would never hear like russell m nelson is the president of the high priesthood i think he basically is though i think because if i i might be off a bit on this because i haven't read this stuff in a while but i think the president of the high priesthood joseph had two counselors so it basically is the first presidency and then later they're going to do the the the you know the quorum of the 12 and the 70s and all that maybe in some charter documents somewhere but like never in mormon oh yeah orlon's he's referred to as the prophet and president of the church not of the high priesthood so all i'm saying is it makes total sense that this idea of a higher priesthood that evolves into melchizedek is literally just a power grab of joseph trying to solidify his authority so that people will obey him and do what he says yeah this is basically just him creating a position above everybody else and remember he ordained i think like they said like he ordained five people and lyman white ordained 18. so now all of a sudden you got 23 people at least in the high priesthood um and then you've got people that are bishops like edward partridge questioning well this now puts him above everybody so now there's nobody that can touch his authority the other thing it challenges the idea that this is a restoration because if there's alterations god's going to just set all this up with the commandments at the beginning but if it's if it's emerging practically out of conflicts on the ground that joseph needs to resolve that defies the idea that it's like a restoration of the old and everlasting church but instead this slowly creeping evolving power grab that evolves out of practical issues on the ground yeah well i mean look at it this way so think about this i always look at it we are told in in the church that god knew thousands of years ago that joseph smith was going to lose the 116 pages so he created the second set of plates so joseph smith would have perfect replacement text for this lost this these lost uh pages of the book of mormon yet god didn't know that joseph smith was going to have his authority challenge in missouri to tell him which offices to create right off the bat so you'd avoid all these issues i mean it's just that's those are the inconsistencies that come from you know uh a guy who is basically trying to i'm not i'm not saying wing it but he's he's kind of making it up as he goes and so on one hand you've got this representation of god that knows every single thing that's going to happen to the point where he's making the secondary record then you also have this god who has no idea that there's going to be all these challenges to authority that could be easily avoided with the revelation in 1829. yeah god could have just set all this up with the revelation before the truth ever started especially if it was identical to the way jesus started his church two millennia ago right yeah well i mean if you get into a lot of the scholarship there i don't think well yeah the book of he had the book of mormon these are the chances god had to set this up right he had the book of mormon he had revelations joseph received before he started the church and then he had the book of commandments and in none of those opportunities did god set it up right yeah i mean that's the thing it's like we're told this is the fullness of the gospel and the complete restoration and yet if you actually look at it it's always changing until it gets solidified down the road with stories that just don't add up to being there in the beginning yeah okay all right so uh next slide yep so now this is the summer of 1832 this is about what nine months after the missouri conflict begins or at least where he visits and this is where joseph smith is first going to mention angels being a part of a priesthood restoration in his 1832 history which also includes his first account of the first vision that only has one personage appearing um with regards to the priesthood joseph writes among his miraculous experiences thirdly the reception of the holy priesthood by the ministering of angels with two a's i'm not sure why this is important because this does not mention john the baptist but it is consistent with his early generic accounts of angels as that john the baptist story had not evolved yet and so joseph is using the plural of angels instead of a singular angel uh meaning this cannot be referencing john the baptist for the aaronic priesthood as the story would later evolve into and when he continues he says fourthly a confirmation reception of the high priesthood after the holy order of the son of the living god power and ordinance from on high to preach the gospel in the administration and demonstration of the spirit and so this is referring to the 1831 uh conference where they where he was ordained to the higher priesthood but again there's no mention of the terms of ironic or melchizedek nor does it mention peter james and john and so it's really clear this 1832 history was almost certainly written to address the growing infighting from the missouri branch and to kind of re to get the church on better footing and to get joseph smith's authority on more solid ground and it also explains the first vision account appearing at the same time because joseph smith here is trying to get these miraculous experiences um that are singular to him in order to tell the rest of the church again this did not happen to you this happened to me and that's why i am the one authority to speak for the church wow so this is really starting to come together for me and i just want to make sure i understand this so first of all there's conflict arising in the church people are starting to question his authority that's why the 1832 version emerges first and foremost but in addition he's now for the first time claiming angela angelic because he can't again he can't just say i have the authority right it's gonna be from god and so he's burning an angelic visitor without a name right as a way to say this is the source of my authority but he has the chance there of saying it's john the baptist and peter james and john but he doesn't do either he doesn't call the he doesn't name the angel and then he doesn't mention peter james and john and he doesn't mention a division in priesthoods of a lower and higher priesthood again this is a massively obvious failed opportunity to like tell it all like okay it's late it's super late but i'll like now get it right you know what i mean well yeah that's just it i mean right and this is this is joseph smith writing in his own hand he has nobody next to him that's going to question him as he's writing it and it just doesn't have anything with the you know with the the way that we're told the first vision happened with two personages not there and then the way that we're told the priesthood restoration happened is just not there so i mean both of these are missing and we're you know it's just it's so generic and as we'll see it just gets more and more grand yeah and i mean the only thing that i'm hearing apologists say later and i haven't read your slides is that they're gonna say that oh he never mentioned peter james john because it was so sacred and so special yeah that's got to be what they end up arguing later because it's just so obvious but yeah i mean it's just yeah it doesn't work but yeah i mean that's what you have to do if we brag about it now joseph would have bragged about it then he wouldn't have been scared to tell people no there's no reason he would have been scared to tell people within the church of these i mean there's just there's no reason to think that it makes no sense and again it's not just this vision that's telling us it didn't happen it's all of those things we've already covered all the things we're going to cover that don't mention so he's not it's not just like we talked last week where the church will say oh the first vision in 1832 is an outlier and i kept saying no it's the starting point of the first vision story well this is another incident this is not an outlier this is consistent with everything else he's been saying up until this point and still for some time to come before that story begins to evolve yeah well that's that's a huge deal and uh it's just making it really obvious why this why the omissions and why this is slowly creepy and evolving yep you know that this is totally making sense this is bringing a lot of things together for me okay yeah no stay we'll keep going it's gonna it'll just keep going that way and so this is in september of 1832 um joseph smith writes what is now dnc 84 which is going to structure the lower and the higher priesthoods for the first time and so what's interesting is this one section where it says and this greater priesthood administereth the gospel and holdeth the keys the key of the mysteries of the kingdom even the key of the knowledge of god therefore in the ordinances thereof the power of godliness is manifest and without the ordinances thereof and the authority of the priesthood the power of godliness is not manifest unto man in the flesh for without this no man can see the face of god even the father and live and the reason this is so interesting is because joseph smith is going to claim later in 1820 he saw god and jesus in the first vision which is clearly before he had received either priesthood as we've shown already in the timeline and so by joseph smith's own revelation dnc 184 he couldn't have done that and lived to tell about it and you know the apologists argue very much like kind of that loyally thing where they'll say the word this is the power of godliness so they'll say and without this not meaning the melchizedek priesthood but the the power of godliness but the power of godliness cannot be manifest until you receive the priesthood as stated above they say without the ordinances thereof meaning the priesthood and the authority of the priesthood the power of godliness is not manifest so one way or the other you still need the priesthood in order to get the power of godliness to see god and live and yet joseph smith will later claim to have seen god in jesus and lived so either way joseph could not have seen god and lived in the first vision if that happened by his own revelation which is also from the words of god and this is where you start to twist yourself into a pretzel if you want to try to make sense of this um in a way that maintains faith yeah so i mean let's just assume that joseph smith isn't dumb for a second what's he doing coming out with an 1832 account of the first vision claiming that he was that the lord visited him not god and jesus but the lord visited him and we talked about the trinity to him the lord would have meant god because there was no god and jesus being separate right he's not dumb why is he writing down and publishing um a claim to have seen the lord when he was you know when he was 14 in 1820 and at the same time saying you have to have the higher priesthood to not die when you see the face of god what in the world he's not that dumb no but you know again remember the summer of 1832 um account that joseph smith wrote he never did anything with it so he may have written it down scrapped it which just appears to be what he did he wrote it down and just never did anything with it and so he might not be thinking about that in september he might not be thinking about that because he's not telling anyone about that story he's talking about the priesthood at this point but he's not talking about the first vision and so it could very well be that it's not that he's dumb he just he scrapped that that whole idea and just put it to the side and just forgot about it and then all of a sudden now he writes this revelation and basically puts himself in a corner with regard to the first vision because now all of a sudden the first vision would would basically lead to his death because he was not ordained and this is something i think it's partly predator orson pratt later said that the way to get around this is to say that joseph smith was actually ordained to the melchizedek priesthood before he even came to the earth so he was ordained to the highest priesthood before he was here in the from the pre-existence which if you really want to get into that one it's it's ridiculous because it doesn't match the you know the timeline we have here but two that also puts joseph on more of a divine uh footing which the church really tries to avoid saying we worship joseph and if you start to go that route that he was given these ordinations before he got here it starts to put him on that kind of footing which early leaders did do but yeah it's it's just it's a mess yeah and it's talking about and i'm just trying to process this the greater priesthood holdeth the key of the mysteries of the kingdom so it's something about like learning deeper doctrine right right somehow getting this melchizedek priesthood you learn things from angels and god about the mysteries of the kingdom and the key of the knowledge of god that almost sounds like denver snuffer stuff where it's preparatory to you actually seeing god and i can already see where denver snuffer stuff is going to start er arising where in 2022 there's a bunch of orthodox mormons who are trying to actually get a witness of jesus or god directly that's because they're reading that that's the whole purpose of the priesthood to begin with whereas in the modern orthodox lds church that's never something you're taught you should try and seek right these days i mean you know it's kind of one of the things where it's like the the the longer the church exists the less and less we're really we know you know what i mean i think it's one of those things where back then they did have this idea of being able to have all of these visionary experiences and and being able to commune with with angels and today they don't talk about it because i think we all kind of live in a world view that says that just doesn't happen whereas back then a lot of the early members absolutely believed in folk magic and uh visitations and all that so yeah i think it's just more of a you know a change in what the audience of the church will accept today versus what they would have accepted back then one more question it says that that final little phrase for without this no man can see the face of god even the father and live does this show the development of joseph's theology around the godhead because now he's saying god the father which which suggests god the son the existence of a god the son is this an emergence of his evolution about about god and jesus becoming separate i don't think so just because i i don't know if you've ever noticed this but a lot of times in church they'll do that thing where they'll say something and they'll say even so they'll say you know even the church of jesus christ the liberty saying so they just say the church i i don't know if it's a wording issue and you could also make the argument that if you believe in that modalistic trinitarian view that god and jesus are kind of part of one you could say well you know you could see jesus in the flesh because obviously people saw jesus when he was alive but you can't see god so i i mean okay yeah i don't know i mean it's just the wording is it'll be trinitarian yeah you could you could kind of do with it you could take it either way i guess depending on how you wanted to but i i wouldn't necessarily read too much into that that's right that's right okay all right i just wanted to no that's fine okay next slide yeah so we already talked about this we don't need to go into this too much but in 1833 they released the book of commandments and this has all of the revelations that have been written up until this point because they basically wanted to have a book of all the revelations that members could understand all of the different commandments and organizations that god had restored through through joseph smith there's no mention of the aaronic priesthood or the melchizedek priesthood at all in the book of commands whatever whatsoever and there's no mention of the the visitations of john the baptist or peter james or john in anywhere in the book and that's super ridiculous for at least two reasons one is because it's the whole foundation of our claims of authority two it's it's it's it's allegedly angelic visitors you know bestowing that authority and then number three this is your chance to codify it all and it's completely left out and then four what you're going to show later is that it's then written back in afterwards yep it's just ridiculous right yeah i mean it's just it it's a red flag that should be really really obvious to anyone who is not a member that this is this is a late creation that now has to be put back into the history so that it lines up that's super duper sketchy yeah super sketchy both that it's not there when it should be again and that it gets written in later as if it was always there yeah and as members when you read the doctrinal covenants it's not like oh by the way this verse you're reading it was totally different when they first wrote it and now they added a bunch of stuff you're never ever told that as a mormon no it would be nice if they had little like if they put low foot notes like when you read online there's footnotes on like every other word it would be nice if on the doctrine covenants they had footnotes to tell you what it originally said because i think that would be something members should should have access to yeah that's a problem okay that's a great slide it's a great slide and so now we're in 1834 we're in april and this is more from um dan vogel and it says at a meeting held in norton ohio smith gave a relation of obtaining and translating the book of mormon the revelation of the priesthood of aaron the organization of the church in 1830 the revelation of the high priesthood and the gift of the holy ghost poured out upon the church and dan vogel makes a point of saying there's no indication in this brief entry that the revelation of the priesthood of aaron was different than the revelation of the high priesthood or that it was anything more than a reference to the revealed command for smith and country to baptize one another so what he's saying is the notes here are just super limited so it's hard to really pull too much out of this but he also notes that these notes while they're limited have no mention of peter james and john or john the baptist at all so even in 1834 um there's no there's no kind of conceptualizing uh this this visitation yet so it's still now just focusing on the priesthood restoration um and not at all um the visitations so are you saying here that it's it's not until 1834 where the idea of an aaronic priesthood first emerges within the church it seems like it's the first time it's being labeled that way because erotic priesthood is something that comes from the bible so that would be more um it would make more sense to to frame it that way um but like i don't think there's any real mention of it being the aaronic priesthood up until this point even here um you know as dan vogel mentions it's really limited so it's hard to see if he's really um expanding on that at all because it's just like meeting notes um but yeah this seems to be the first time he's really equating the lower one with aaron even though the high priesthood is still not the melchizedek priesthood yeah that's super late yeah concern that's that's yeah we're five years basically five years now so we're just now starting to evolve it into the name so it's important yeah that's a that's a problem okay all right so now uh yes and now zion's camp is going to happen and this is another area where joseph smith is going to have his leadership questions so for those who are unfamiliar joseph launches zion's camp to regain the land that was lost in zion missouri and he's trying to assemble this basically this like army or militia to go down there and get the land by force if necessary uh when he gets there he realizes they're outnumbered and he's not able to get the help he wants and so it just turns out to be a failure joseph turns around and leaves missouri basically on their own and so um joseph records a revelation to not help the church of missouri once he realizes he can't secure enough help which shakes confidence in his authority as a prophet and leader and so i mentioned this earlier but this leads to dnc 105 which puts the blame on the missouri church for not being faithful enough he says but behold they have not learned to be obedient to the things which i required at their hands but are full of all manner of evil and do not impart of their substance as become a saints to the poor and afflicted among them and the revelation then calls for no further action to be taken to help them and you know one final notice just say that the revelation dnc 105 gives joseph and the top leaders an out which is to say that same revelation says i speak not concerning those who are appointed to lead my people who are the first elders of my church for they are not all under this condemnation so basically joseph smith says he's going to get the land back he doesn't get the amount of people he claims he's going to get doesn't get the help he thinks he's going to get turns around and then when the missouri church gets mad that that he left him behind records of revelation beings being basically saying they're full of evil and that um you know whatever uh we're not you know we're not going to do anything more and by the way all the people who who lead my church are not being condemned for this it's just you guys in missouri which i think is one of those um you know it's another one of those signs that tells you that joseph smith is writing these revelations because it they're very concerned with the needs of joseph smith and not necessarily um giving the people of missouri the power you're supposed to get to defend you know to be protected by god or any real revelation on what you're supposed to do next yeah zion's camp is really important and mormons you're never taught really about zion's camp in the core curriculum because you know this is something that's really lost in in many ways to the modern church joseph not only says you know missouri is where the garden of eden happens he says this is where jesus is going to come in the second coming any day now yep and he sets up the church he calls it zion like this is the place right and yeah you know he's he's doing the kirtland ohio thing but like independence missouri is gonna be that place but then and so that's like his alleged prophetic power really being specific and saying you guys go do this then he sends them there they they experience all these problems then he gets the revelation about zion's camp he sends them it's a failure i mean that's a really obvious point where the members are like i think you're just making this up yeah you're i don't think you're really a prophet because like none of this stuff that you're prophesying is going to come true is actually coming true instead the opposite's happening and so i can see why that would cause a huge problem for members down there because they're the ones sacrificing and toiling and getting yeah we beat up yep and so i could see joseph having to do two things number one the blame reversal yeah which is so common in high demand religions or cults where it's like i know i made a prophecy warren jeffs does this or rule on jeff's i know i prophesied the world would end when the 2002 olympics come oh but now the olympics have come and gone and the world didn't end well it's either because the members were so righteous that i gave them more time or the members were so wicked yeah that god you know the gods you know delaying it now joseph's doing the same thing here he's blaming the missouri people which i think is cruel because they're busting their tails yeah joseph prophecies come true it's just so cruel to then blame them for the prophecies not coming true but then there's the second part which is the power grab which is hey now that there's trouble in the ranks let me extend my authority and power through the scriptures even more because otherwise we're going to have we're going to have a fracture we're going to have a schism yeah that's basically what i mean it is we'll do i think an episode down the road about we're gonna do a few on revelations but you know one of the things that that's one of the things i was reading the saints book and i mentioned already but just how a lot of the revelations when things go wrong blame the members yet you know and then sometimes they'll do like this little like off-handed kind of swipe at joseph in the revelation but then get right back to blaming the church and so it just feel like his revelations are awfully convenient when you read them all together especially in the context of what they're written in they do seem awfully concerned with with elevating joseph and not nearly as concerned uh with taking care of the problems for the people beneath him and this is an area where that does lead to people questioning his authority this reminds me of his revelation to emma that she's under condemnation if she doesn't practice polygamy it's so convenient for joseph and here again god is saying oh you know when we talk about you know people who are under condemnation i don't mean the people leading my church i mean all the rest of you right yep so it's just it's just you know gross it's kind of great it is it's it's and it's frustrating just because you i read this now and i'm like man you know like if i had read this before i joined the church i'd be like this this guy is making it up because you can kind of see all these little fingerprints where he's you know doing making these errors and and then you know blaming people and it doesn't go right because everything in when you're a convert is present presented as if joseph smith knew all these things and and we'll get into those as we do these episodes but yeah it's just it's not how the history shows it yeah so this is where we're going to really start to see this story kind of move into the the way we're seeing it today and this is more from dan vogel and he talks about how in september of 1834 oliver cowdery is writing this series of letters to ww phelps in missouri and in these letters he tells him for the first time about an angel ordaining him and joseph smith in may of 1829 the purpose of the letter as country explained was to strengthen the missouri church in their faith according to coundry the angel said in the name of the name of messiah confirm uh confer this priesthood and this authority which shall remain remain upon the earth that the sons of levi may yet offer an offering unto the lord in righteousness however the word priesthood did not appear in any church writings until june of 1831 and connecting the lesser priesthood to the levites until 8 september 1832 um this review this letter is going to as we'll talk about is going to almost raise oliver cowdery instantly to equal status with joseph smith and so when we talk about how these different stories put joseph smith above everyone else oliver cowdrey here is writing these letters to wwe phelps try to calm tensions oliver cadre pulls a pretty slick move here because by tying this event not just to joseph but to him it puts oliver now as number two and you gotta remember at this point sydney rigdon is right there as a number two it's not oliver cowdery and guess what oliver cadre's making a little bit of a power move here as well in these letters by saying yeah it wasn't just joseph it was me as well i'm just gonna say and maybe this doesn't make sense but there's always this idea that was oliver a co-conspirator in the fabrication of the book of mormon or was he sort of if the book of mormon was authored by joseph smith was oliver just duped or was he a co-conspirator and if oliver is riding into the history of visitation from john the baptist and then peter james and john if he's knowingly writing that into the history four or five years after it happened it makes you wonder whether he was in on the book of mormon potential fraud as well does that make sense or does that not make sense i mean it makes sense it's just it's hard because we don't have any real like good way to show that but you know we'll we'll see it here as we go this is an area where oliver cowdery is absolutely engaging in lying for the lord or however you want to phrase it because he's creating a story that we know was not talked about the time and did not happen in that way but more importantly we can look at um joseph smith got arrested and we'll talk about this a little bit later in 1830 he's arrested basically for treasure digging and what the try to do on the trial is to say that joseph smith is using the same technique for translating the book of mormon as he does for treasure digging which means he's still engaging in this practice that is illegal and oliver cowdery testifies that no joseph did not use the seer stone he was using these foot nephite interpreters which we know from all of the accounts from all the people involved in the book of mormon joseph smith was using the seer stone so oliver cowdery in 1830 shows that he's willing to lie for joseph smith and now in this particular instance he shows he's willing to lie not just for joseph but for his own sake as well and so it does show that oliver cowdery is willing to lie the question of whether or not he's a co-conspirator in the book of mormon that's a little bit dicier because that's that's early on and we don't really have any like we could show it with the trial we could show it with this with the book of mormon it's just more like speculation and we don't really need it to show how the book of mormon was done so for me it's not really a huge issue but yeah it does show oliver cowdery was willing to lie to protect joseph himself and the church okay and and so coming back to the point of this slide it's not until 1834 when the powers really the missouri problems and the power problems are really coming to a head that oliver caldery starts mentioning an angel and what a a lower priesthood yeah yes years after a lower priesthood gets claimed yeah so basically we've got oliver writing a series of letters to missouri basically trying to build back up faith in joseph smith in the church and in to do so he again he's trying to to create this event that elevates joseph smith as yes this is the guy and is there a date yet for the aaronic priesthood you know by 1834. well i think there is just because they're tying it to the the may 15th day which is the i think the day they got baptized so i think that okay is is has always been kind of like they've always been tied together at least at this point they certainly are um but i don't think i don't know if they're really referring to the dates or not this day doesn't have a date yeah because it's also very suspicious it is because there's no documentation of it which again you'd expect and to be honest there's no documentation of this they just tie it back to the baptism day and that's and that's how they get around that but yeah for the melchizedek there's just no way to make that work because there's yeah that's fascinating yep and and before we go the next slide just one note that he's not mentioning john the baptist so he is introducing the idea of an angel he is not introducing john the baptist yet okay so we still don't have jonathan yes you still don't have john the baptist we just have the answer before we have an angel and a lower priesthood of the baptism and again you gotta you gotta know why would he not mention john the best that's what i'm saying like if you know who you know it's john the baptist why are you not saying we're ordained by john the baptist like it's again it's it's another tell this is a developing story the city grows over time yep yeah that's suspect okay all right so now we go september to december and guess what oliver country gets a big promotion and so this is more from dan vogel only a few months later on the 5th of december 1834 oliver country was ordained and assistant president or co-president to joseph smith by joseph smith about this time country made a suspicious entry in joseph smith's large journal which tried to explain his sudden rise to the top the angel in may 1829 commanded it to be done according to cowdery but things got in the way and delayed it for five years the idea that joseph smith and oliver cadre knew about the president and assistant president of the high priesthood in 1829 is not believable the office of the president of the high priesthood came about because partridge had challenged joseph smith in november of 1831 and assistants were not even added until 1832 and they were not oliver cowdery cadre's excuse for the delay is also unbelievable since there were several opportunities before december of 1834 to ordain country cadre even assisted joseph smith on the 19th of april 1834 before joseph smith left with zion's camp and confirmed upon sidney rigdon the authority is the first counselor to preside over the church in the absence of brother joseph so i'm gonna for just tangent here what dan vogel is saying is that not only did joseph smith have tons of opportunities to put this um to confer oliver into this position over the previous five years but when joseph is with oliver and is getting ready to leave with zion's camp he does not put oliver in charge of the church puts sydney rigging in charge of the church which makes no sense given that we're told now that the angel you know basically ordained joseph as number one and oliver is number two so anyways back to dan vogel then he says when the quorum of the twelve apostles was organized in february of 1835 oliver coudrey did not mention peter james and john restoring the keys of the apostleship instead he said you have been ordained to this holy priesthood you have received it from those who have the power and authority from an angel by this he was referring to moroni it was the duty of the three witnesses to ordain the twelve apostles the three witnesses received their commission from the angel moroni so this is again showing that in december of 1834 the story is still talking about an angel it's not mentioning john the baptist and in the context of what he's saying it would actually be referring to the fact that the three witnesses were the ones that were told to basically choose the twelve apostles um which again kept joseph smith as number one but it's not john the baptist and the story is still evolving and because of oliver cowdery creating the story in the letter to wwe phelps joseph smith makes him the number two person in the church just a few months after okay this is a lot for me to try and absorb and i'm right now focusing on the third paragraph okay so he's ordaining apostles he's ordaining 12 apostles um claiming that they were that that this authority came from a single angel not from peter james and john so he but at minimum if apostles are functioning number one they have to have the melchizedek priesthood and number two it has to be known that the melchizedek priesthood came from peter james and john which at a minimum would be angels if not named but they're ordaining apostles based on the authority of a single angel right that is unnamed and that's really sketchy to me yeah i mean like this is you could tell this is a story that's developing and it's developing kind of quick now but at the same time you can tell it's not fleshed out and oliver gets a promotion for basically creating this story in september now in december he gets that promotion of being second in the church but they still have not fleshed out the idea of it being peter james and john or john the baptist it's still just an angel okay um summarize that middle paragraph really quickly for me because i um yeah so this is from dan vogel what he's just basically saying is now if you will we need to include in the show notice dan vogel has two youtube videos on this oliver cowdery is going to create this story in september as we mentioned and then joseph smith is going to make him the number two but now there's this huge problem which is that the whole story would make oliver country the number two person in the church since the church was formed right but joseph smith instead goes over oliver and chooses other people to be his counselors so now oliver has to go back and say well if the angel commanded this in 1829 why did it not happen until 1834 and so oliver is basically saying oh you know what there's just so much stuff going on we'd have a chance to do it and what dave vogel saying is no there were tons of opportunities where they were together that joseph could have done it and he chose not to and then right before the story is invented joseph leaves for zion's camp and has to leave somebody in charge of the church which should be oliver cowdery right because he's the number two but instead he chooses sidney rigdon even though oliver was with joseph and so what he's saying is oliver cowdery's excuse for why this didn't happen for five years is just blatantly a lie i mean it's just it's dishonest and again we have so much documentation to show that if they wanted to have done this over the previous five years they had so many opportunities and yet it never happened because the story was not created until september okay so cadry's inserting a suspicious entry in joseph's journal trying to is he kind of postdating it yeah i mean they're kind of trying to to basically backfill how this story happened and yet oliver was not made the number two person in the church until december of 1834 and so he's making this entry to try to explain why did this not happen and that's when he's saying basically it was just there was no chance to do it which is just not true so he's basically trying to jimmy with the history to show evidence of of what they're inventing after the fact yeah i mean in a lot of ways this is like uh inserting apologetics into it because he he realizes this is an issue and he's trying to put in the apologetics to say it's not really a big deal because we just couldn't get it done but when you have all of the different documentations of the times they were together it's just simply not true i mean this is just outright dishonest to claim that you know they couldn't get it done and things got in the way and delayed it that's just not true yeah and again they could have mentioned all this in the in the book of commandments right in 1833 yep if this was so important i i would think that a president and assistant president leading the church that's something worth mentioning before the church is formed and if not within three years of it being yeah not four or five years later yeah absolutely okay all right and so now we're getting to the stuff that we know in the church today which is so between march and august um joseph smith and oliver cowdery changed the wording of earlier revelations when they compiled the 1835 doctrine and covenants adding verses about the appearances of john the baptist along with peter james and john the book of commandments which later basically is turned into the doctrine and covenants says nothing about these appearances nor is there any explanation for the incredibly consequential additions into existing revelation um they appear in the doctrine of covenants with no justification for the change nor are they backed up by historical records as we've shown through this timeline and this is another this is from um a sunstone history podcast which is awesome about the priesthood restoration and dan vogel notes between about march and august 1835 joseph smith added mention of the coming of john the baptist and peter james and john to his early revelations to section 27 dated september 1830 he added john the baptist i have said unto you my servants joseph smith jr and oliver cowdery to ordain you unto this first priesthood which you have received that you might be called and ordained even as aaron and also peter james and john whom i have set unto you by whom i have ordained you and confirmed you to be apostles and special witnesses of my name note that the first public mention of the three ancient apostles ordaining smith and cowdery associated this visitation with the apostleship rather than the eldership as commonly assumed one might therefore conclude that the story of peter james and john was invented after february of 1835 when the quorum of the 12 was organized and calgary did not mention it but before it was published in the dnc in september of 1835. huh are are you kind of saying that the that originally maybe i'm misunderstanding this that originally the higher priesthood was more associated with becoming a 12 apostle than it was some general priesthood office that all mid-aged mormon men are going to possess well so yeah kind of because so the thing is when you look at the original revelation joseph is ordained as the first elder of the church oliver is ordained as the second elder of the church right and so he's just saying even if there's no melchizedek priesthood yeah and so now he's saying that the fact that they've kind of changed that focus to apostleship tells you that this has changed and then obviously there's all the implications like you said as to what does that mean as far as why did it change did they have authority before the story has changed if not you know i mean like all of those things come into play because we're now seeing how joseph smith is changing the revelation why is changing the revelation and then what those implications are which are huge as we talked about the beginning of the episode because if this story is made up then what power does the church have like all of these things are are so incredibly important and you hear about them i mean my goodness i can't tell you many times i heard and i feel horrible um since i've lost faith in the church even though i'm still a member when you're in a mixed faith marriage i have a wife who constantly hears about how important it is to have a priesthood holder in the home and when you're a believer in the church that is something that weighs on you because obviously i still have the priesthood because i'm a member even though i'm not active but it's to me it's not real and obviously um this message is so cr critical and just fundamental to the church and so if joseph smith is making it up as he goes what does that tell you about what you hear on sunday about the priesthood because it's just it's simply not real and um and this is really starting to show you how you can piece together what joseph smith was doing but it doesn't lead to good conclusions yeah and i okay so one question that emerges for me from this and i don't expect you to be able to answer this but if he's telling the apostles a year earlier this this higher priesthood i'm giving you came from an angel and then a year later he's writing in in the doctrine and covenants that this melchizedek priesthood power came from peter james and john why aren't the 12 apostles saying wait a minute you didn't tell us about peter james and john last year you just said it was an angel maybe moroni now you're saying peter james and john like i'm curious why that didn't cause more of a stir or questions or did it or do you even know it did among some of them and we'll get to those quotes as we go i mean there are people that will say like i never heard about this so you know i don't know where it came from but obviously to your point and i think at the time i i don't know i don't know if it's that they knew and they just didn't want to make a fuss or if they didn't weren't aware of what was in the dnc or or what because you know obviously a lot of these early members of the church are not going to be involved in the church for much longer so um i don't know yeah i don't know exactly what might have been said people leave the church yes a lot of the early witnesses are gone so or will be gone yeah okay all right well this is fascinating so it's basically 1835 1835 is where we finally get yeah aaronic a lower priesthood of higher priesthood you know john the baptist peter james and jonas the first time six years after the fact yep where finally we we get the details yeah six years after the fact that a whole lot of changes yeah really yeah and a bunch of changes in between yeah yes all right and so this is more from dan vogel and kind of going over because we just talked about i think section 20. so this is um to section 107 which was originally given in november 1831 about joseph smith being president of the high priesthood joseph smith added a genealogy of high priest from adam to enoch and then stated that the details of this are given in the book of enoch which was to be testified of in due time this never happened the book abraham appeared in july 1835 joseph smith procured two egyptian scrolls one he identified as the book of abraham and the other is the book of joseph the first thing joseph smith did was to translate an alphabet of the egyptian language which contained a mixture of the pure language and egyptian um part of its content with dealt with the lineage of high priests um about this time joseph smith dictated the first three verses of the book of abraham to ww phelps the remainder of the first two chapters of abraham won't be dictated until november of 1835 these verses mention abraham's seeking the right to be a high priest from his fathers here is in dnc 107 joseph smith is attempting to establish a lineage for the high priesthood this was a problem no doubt for some members of the church as well as those outside the church who believe that the high priests were associated with the aaronic priesthood and that jesus was the only melchizedek high priest and so what dan vogel's saying here and we'll get more into this when we do our book of abraham overviews the book of abraham in a lot of ways is going to serve as a vehicle for joseph smith of evolution evolution on priesthood it's very concerned about priesthood whereas the book of mormon is not and so what he's saying right here is he's trying to establish a lineage of the high priest because as i mentioned at the beginning a lot of bible scholars will tell you that the mormon church's whole idea of melchizedek priesthood is a misreading of hebrews and that jesus is the you know in the melchizedek priesthood which means we are not because jesus obviously is above us and so this is joseph smith now trying as he learns more about kind of the bible writings and he's you know i don't know if he's taking the um hebrew lessons yet but he's obviously learning more about the bible i think he's now trying to see um how to fix some of the problems he might have created with some of his earlier um innovations and and this is a way where joseph smith now is trying to make sure he can give some sort of historical lineage for the melchizedek priesthood to give it legitimacy within the church and i i apologize because this should be obvious to me but i'm not getting what the book of abraham has to do with this priesthood respiration thing can you just summarize that really quickly one more time so okay so i haven't read the book abraham stuff in a while just because we haven't done those yet but uh effectively the joseph smith says in dnc 107 that he's going to give the lineage of the um basically the the high priesthood in the book of enoch and that never happens and so what happens instead is joseph smith is going to start writing the book of abraham shortly after when they get the scrolls and he's going to use that opportunity to establish the lineage for the high priesthood in order to try to give legitimacy to the idea that there was a high priesthood that was passed down as opposed to it just being the melchizedek priesthood just being jesus because as i mentioned melchizedek is a title for a king of righteousness which is jesus so a lot of people think thought that it meant that jesus didn't really need a priest that was just a way of saying that was like a you know a title of a priesthood for jesus because he was by himself he wasn't equals with us um and here joseph smith is trying to okay yes he's trying to find a way to to make it ancient so that it lines up and that's a huge red flag because you know like i heard one several years ago that that that terrell givens has recommended privately to top church leaders that they need to remove the book of abraham even from the canon yeah both because it's gibberish but also because it's now been shown to be a fraudulent translation so if joseph smith if now we see a motive a partial motive for him of creating the book of abraham which is to then do the pseudopigraphis stuff where he can show ancient prophets who are using this priesthood and then using that to bolster his his claims about this six year after the fact invented lower and higher priesthood that's problematic because now we know the book of abraham is a fraud from start to finish and so that the book of abraham itself and its its false translation completely undermines the priesthood as well as the book of abraham right well yeah i mean obviously the apologetic to that is going to be that it was the book of abraham is a revelation translation which we will get into i know i know we'll get into that but yeah it's it's it's translation the word all over this history six years jefferson's translator he's a prophet seer revelator and translator none of this garbage about uh you know um what is the the inspiration thesis of the book of april oh the oh yeah it's about the catalyst theory you can't put that back in in 18 no 29 18 35 he is a translator not a revelator in that way yeah but no i mean i would just say that would be the response would be to say well that was a revelation from god that was establishing it but that gets into so many issues too because again we talked about in our six or seven episodes on biblical scholarship i mean i would argue most biblical scholars that are not like fundamentalists would argue that abraham probably was not a real person so to establish a melchizedek priesthood through a fictional or a mythical character doesn't work and so that creates more problems where you can show that joseph smith is basically trying to backfit a story by using something that's not historical and trying to cement it down as historical and then all of a sudden you're screwed because if that's not true everything above it is not true and so you know it this is where things get messy because it's like everywhere you go you're going to run into more problems with the way joseph smith is piecing together theology and he's using these different um scripture productions as vehicles for this theology like the book of abraham like the first vision like the doctrine and covenants um book of moses does the same thing all of these are vehicles for his ideas but the problem is when you show those ideas are not based in a historical setting then everything that comes from them is not true and and this is a problem when you're trying to establish a higher priesthood in a set of scriptures that we know is just historically and historically wrong and the translation is completely wrong again it's like what are you left with because of the fact that he is tying the priesthood into the book of abraham yeah so yeah it's a problem i mean it's a huge one if joseph is creating a fake translation in the book of abraham as a way to justify his manufactured priesthood that comes six years after it allegedly was given yeah that's like that's a house of cards falling right there to me yeah and you know and and you remember the the first three verses that joseph smith is going to do in the book of abraham which he does and then kind of pauses is those first three verses are trying to establish the priesthood that he is also establishing in 1835 so he's doing both of these at the same time which is a huge tell that this is a late a late innovation that he's now trying to figure out a way to give authenticity to by trying to put it in the name of an ancient you know prophet he's making this stuff up as he goes along yeah and he's making it up as he goes along and now he's trying to find a way to solidify it on solid ground so he can't be questioned but again as we've talked about with the book abraham there's just there's so many issues and we will do that and i think we're gonna be doing those like in a few episodes or something but yeah those will be okay going through that some more so thanks for explaining that to me i'm sure the listeners and viewers get it all but i i sometimes need a little expertise no this stuff is so this stuff is so in the weeds and um it is essential it is and and like i said if you want to know more watch the dan vogel videos because he goes into even more depth and you're you go cross-eyed at some point but man is it it's just so damning how many data points there are and this is we're not going to read it but if you're watching this this is a look at the tanner's put together a image of the changes made to the book of commandments and these are the two main revelations on the priesthood and if you if you can look at it um it's just there these are not small changes these are massive block changes being made to these revelations from god that we can show um that he's making it's just just to be able to see it i think kind of illustrates just how vast the changes are that are being made with no no um you know header in the the dnc saying he changed it this is being done with no announcement walking that is shocking because look was the book of commandments revelation or not if it was revelation it should stand but if it requires almost half of it to be written as this visualization shows then it wasn't revelation yep you don't go back and rewrite revelation years later and change it all that is a that is a huge smoking gun that i mean i'm i'm sorry people are gonna go john you know you this is too anti this is too negative i'm just i'm giving a genuine reaction because i've never seen this visual before that is shocking to see how much they're changing what was in alleged revelation how much they're altering it to an updated revelation after the fact that's how revelation works revelation works god tells joseph what the revelation is and it's revelation it's not god tells joseph what the revelation is and then three years later god says joseph completely rewrite the revelation and change it based on stuff you've made up between then and now that's not how revelation is supposed to work yeah i mean it's just like it's i i yeah because our next episode is going to be on uh changes to the revelations and it's going to go into some more depth but yeah i mean the moment that you start to say joseph had the ability to change him as he saw fit you're just you're indistinguishable from outright fraud because even if you believe they're originally correct now joseph smith has corrupted him it's like no matter how you go here it's going to end in a bad way because we've already shown he's willing to deceive in order to better his own situation and this is another instance where he's creating uh these changes in order to bolster his authority and now he has to backfit it into the text and again i'm wondering like how did how did he get away with this with all the members and all the leaders like him literally rewriting the revelations within two or three years of them being printed but then i think warren jeffs and roland jeffs and how you know like freaking warren jeffs goes to prison and starts telling people they can't get married and have sex and everybody's okay with it like once you once people perceive that you're god's spokesperson you can almost do whatever you want and people are going to just let it slide so i mean yeah that's where you get the more people are willing to let stuff like this slide well yeah you know we talked about in the treasure digging episodes too it's like once you get someone to believe that you have that authority they'll let you get away with a lot of stuff until they don't and we we do have a lot of the early members and a lot of the early witnesses who leave because and they mentioned this as being a reason they leave so it definitely does resonate it's just like you said you would expect more widespread but remember very few members have a book of commandments to compare to it there are only a few you know there weren't a lot of copies that survived so it's not like they all had that like as a quad back then that was a very rare thing to have so it could just be that most early members just didn't know any better yeah and we're gonna get to david whitmer yeah so we'll get to all that as well so so yeah so that's just a good visual look and you know going back to oliver cowdery this is more from dan vogel which is really interesting um late in september of 1835 oliver cowdery was copying the 1833 blessings of joseph smith senior into the patriarchal blessing book uh country wrote an introduction that explained the authority by which joseph smith senior gave blessings and uses the same language as abraham um chapter one verse two about the right of the priesthood which means he has access to that at that point he then tried to claim that the visitation of john the baptist was predict predicted by ancient joseph evidently alluding to one of the egyptian papyri that oliver cadre identified in the december 1835 issue of the messenger and advocate this is what he wrote we repaired to the woods even as our father joseph said we should that is to the bush the angel came down and bestowed upon us this priesthood that is he explains they were ordained by the angel john unto the lesser or aaronic priesthood um i'm gonna take a quick pause on that one just to say that again when you realize the book of abraham and what they claimed for the book of joseph those two scrolls were funerary scrolls the fact that oliver coundry is now saying that they include um this prediction that they're gonna get the priesthood restored tells you that the story is completely made up because we know those scrolls don't say that in any way so i just want to throw it out there real quick we'll get back to it but then dan vogel continues and says still writing in the patriarchal blessing book in early october 1835 oliver cowdery altered and expanded a blessing that joseph smith gave him in 1833 deleting some negative comments and adding a reference to the priesthood restoration he wrote these blessings shall come upon him oliver according to the blessings of the prophecy of joseph in ancient days which he said should come upon the seer of the last days and the scribe that should sit with him and that should be ordained with him he then mentions the ordination by john the baptist and then states and after received the holy priesthood under the hands of those who had been held in reserve for a long season even those who received it under the hand of the messiah while he should dwell in the flesh the expansion of the 1833 blessings without notice kowdry even claimed that he was copying faithfully creates a highly suspicious situation which oliver inserts ancient joseph's prophecy about priesthood restoration joseph smith and oliver cadre were apparently planning to use the papyri to support priesthood restoration to put authority claims and their leadership on a firmer foundation and so this is saying that i i just want to say that like if i'm reading this correctly there's a patriarchal blessing that's been given in 1833 that doesn't mention any of this priesthood stuff in detail that's not the way patriarchal blessings are supposed to work number one that they're changed two years later but what's even worse and this this is like joseph fielding smith level fraud but worse he's adding two years later details that weren't given in the original um in the in the original revelation and then claiming claiming that they're that they're a prophecy yeah that's amazing right outright fraud that's ridiculous yeah and and that's why you can't wait to be a bad dude well and that's why you can't rely on him because now we've got all these instances where you can show he's willing to use fraud and in this case he deletes um i think in the original blessing it talks about how um oliver has to overcome his temptations of evil or something like that there's like this little ad you know little jab at him in the original blessing and then two years later not only does he remove that so that it's not in the record but then he also adds these ideas that were not even invented until 1835 and puts them back into 1833 which shows he is willing to to lie i mean he he lied here he he lied and he intentionally covered up information deleted and added there if you read this about any other religious leader to a mormon to a true believing member of the church and said do you believe this person is acting in good faith they'd say no but then when you say it's oliver cowdery you know or joseph smith you know it's it's all about consistency but yeah this this shows he was willing to lie for joseph he was willing to lie for himself and he was also willing to alter change delete edit as needed to make it happen yeah there's no mormon that should feel good just imagine you have a patriarchal blessing that you've received and then two years later somebody else comes and adds a bunch of stuff to it it's not even the original patriarch and then and then claims it was a faithful you know rewriting of the original blessing that's that's just outrageous fraud and i'm i'm i'm livid well yeah this one this one's a bad one and this one i obviously didn't know about it i didn't know this and you know this would be the equivalent of like and this one hits home for me a little bit um i hear a lot of people who say this is they'll say i received my patriarchal blessing and it said i was going to have a bunch of kids and then they have infertility issues right and then all of a sudden um someone takes up that patriarchal blessing and they they delete the part about having a bunch of kids and they write and you will have great challenges having children in this life but be sure you'll have them in the next life and then they sign that as if it happened years earlier i mean that's what this is this is taking something that was created years later and putting it back into a previous text and remember patriarchal blessings are supposed to be revelations directly from god these are not just people randomly spouting off their ideas so this is you know this is a really damning piece of evidence that oliver cowdery was willing to lie and did lie to put the story back in and this is the story that the church tells us every week on sunday is what happened and we know it's a late edition and that they're having to cover their tracks to make it fit the history and um i don't know what more to say outside the fact that every person who knows this like apologists and who don't teach it this way are being intentionally deceptive and that's why we've talked in previous weeks i can't stand it when people who know better still tell the correlated material when this is clearly not what happened yeah that's outrageous all right next slide yep so next slide and i think a lot of people who might be listening or watching will be aware of this but in the 1836 vision at the kirtland temple um joseph smith and oliver cowdery claim a vision where they receive additional priesthood keys from moses elias and elijah this claim gives them the ultimate authority in the church but does not come without problems elias and elijah are actually the same person even though joseph treats them as separate visions elias is a hebrew translation and elijah is the greek nonetheless this effectively finishes the priesthood restoration by confirming an authority to joseph smith that can never be challenged by anyone else in the church and so this is just i'm just going to say three huge problems here number one joseph and oliver have already been shown to to be liars or to be willing to lie number two they're not even getting they're they're calling two historical figures that were actually one and number three this is just a huge transparent power grab they realized a couple years prior that they they need to keep keep hold of their power and the only way that they can do it is to claim angelic visitations and so this is like a triple this is tripoli problematic they're not credible to begin with they're getting the actual historical figures wrong as if it's two people existed when it was only one and it's clearly a blatant power grab that they're making up to keep their power yeah i mean it's just it's one of those things where once you realize that oliver is willing to effectively lie for joseph and you know joseph's been willing to make up stories to bolster his authority this then all of a sudden it's like why should i believe it because we have in the previous year oliver changing the blessing book to to reflect the story and joseph changing the revelation and you know we don't need to get into this too deep but a lot of the apologetics would say that elias is the title of a forerunner which most people would say would be john but then remember a year earlier they're saying how they were visited by john so you would never call them elias in this vision so that's um one area where i kind of laugh because they'll say oh elias was just a forerunner title it's actually john it's like well then he would say after this john appeared because he had already seen him it would be silly for me to call someone buy a title if i had already interacted with them in a vision so i just want to note that because that's probably what a lot of people will respond to that section or this section of the episode by saying is well elias was a title they really were two different people it's like no this is i remember when you had david bacavoy and i think you had asked him and he just kind of said yeah that's it's it's really just that simple you know they're just different translations and that's why one is in the old testament ones in the new testament because the new testament's in greek old testament is in hebrew and so um yeah it's just joseph smith didn't know that and so here he's creating a vision to effectively solidify his authority in the church by citing two different people who are actually the same person with different translations so it's it's just it's you're saying you're saying biblical scholars kind of universally acknowledge that now i think so i mean it's funny if a lot of people will argue that elias is the term of a forerunner or front runner or whatever and if you google it almost every response you see is is uh affiliated with like an lds apologetic because it really is not a big deal for anyone else but because joseph smith you know we've i've said this so many times in these episodes that because joseph smith cemented this as a real historical thing um that's where the apologetics come from and like i said if you want to claim it's john you got problems because they just claimed to see john so why wouldn't they just name him as it was it'd be like if i said you know uh and then a president appeared to me and then um presidente appeared to me and then you go oh they meant they meant it was uh you know george washington and i said a year later i had visited with george washington i would just be like oh and then george washington came i would be like oh and then president came it's just i i realize people might think i'm being facetious and i'm not i'm saying like that's what you have to deal with if you want to use that apologetic because it's a transparent argument out of necessity facts yeah and even even that argument out of necessity runs into the problem that joseph smith already claimed to see john so why would he then call elias when the overwhelming consensus is that they're the same person anyways it's just you can't use that argument given that they're making that story up a year earlier so anyways yeah it's a big deal so now as we talked about with the first vision joseph smith is going to write kind of a new version of the history in 1838 this is what's canonized this is what's now in dnc um 13. and this entry matches the official church narrative includes the aaronic and melchizedek priesthoods along with the visitations this is where we mentioned this earlier where it says upon my fellow servants in the name of messiah i john the baptist confer the priesthood of aaron which holds the keys of the ministering of angels and of the gospel of repentance and of baptism by immersion for the remission of sins and this shall never be taken again from the earth until the sons of levi do offer again an offering unto the lord in righteousness and you know like i said on the surface it sounds like a miraculous visit by john the baptist but it's just this entire thing is it's an it's an anachronism to everything we have about what happened in these preceding years and so i'm super livid about this because it's very personal for me i remember memorizing the scripture when i was in the in aaronic priesthood holder when i was a young teenage boy and i'm being told this priesthood is so important and it's so important that i received it and it gives me all this power and authority never was i told that this was invented nine years after the alleged event ever happened and that it was retrofitted into the dnc and put as section 13 right as if it as if it came early when in reality it came so much after many of the sections of the dnc that are placed after in subsequent versions does that make sense yeah no i mean like i said this is you know as a convert you know when i when i first came across this information it was just like where's oliver getting these words yeah like i mean where did do these words ever appear before 1838 anywhere they might appear after 1835 but they're anachronistic between 1829 and 1835 for sure there's no like this is like literally what john the baptist is saying when he gives oliver and joseph these are the literal words he's saying when he gives joseph and oliver the priesthood yeah and yet they were never written down until eight years six to nine years later yeah it was the first time they were actually written down with this amazing level of specificity yep that that just appears literally out of nowhere six to eight years later yeah ridiculous and and so i'm just looking at the uh section heading on dnc 13 online it says an extra an extract from joseph smith's history recounting the ordination of the prophet prophet and oliver cadre to the aaronic priesthood near harmony pennsylvania may 15 1829 this ordination was done by the hands of an angel who announced himself as john the same that is called john the baptist in the new testament the angel explained that he was acting under the direction of peter james and john the ancient apostles who held the keys of the higher priesthood which was called the priesthood of melchizedek the promise was given to joseph and oliver that in due time the higher priesthood would be conferred upon them the keys and power of the aaronic priesthood are set forth and so this heading makes no mention of the fact that this is a recounting nine years later that it completely um was changed from the original setting and i realize the church isn't going to announce the fact that joseph and oliver created this story long after the fact but just reading this heading would not give the impression to a reader that this is a late edition or even nine years after the fact it just makes it look like joseph smith's history was written contemporaneously and that they just pulled this little bit out because they don't have a direct revelation and yet none of this happened this is just we can show this did not happen because we could show the evolution of the story and yet we're still getting this as the heading of dnc 13 which is just it's dishonest by the church's own definition of honesty this is dishonest yeah and p people are going to criticize me for being a little bit too angry or harsh or emotional because we're trying to be objective here but i'm just this is my authentic reaction i haven't studied this stuff before and as someone who's raised a lifelong mormon this is outraging me and my outrage is authentic and it's all new information to me honestly yeah i mean like i said i when i started going through this it's like holy crap like every time you see something like that makes so much sense but it also is pretty angry to see so yeah yeah so anyways um this one i mentioned because lucy mac smith who's joseph smith's mom writes about the formation of the church again in 1845 and she recounts the introduction of baptism but she does not mention john the baptist or any angelic visitations which were ha to have taken place on that same day so she writes one morning joseph and oliver were translating in third nephi in the book of mormon the first thing that presented itself to joseph was a commandment from god threw the stone in a hat that he and oliver should repair to the water and each of them be baptized they immediately went down to the susquehanna river and obeyed the mandate given them they had now received the authority to baptize and so much like the first vision the story just isn't really well known because it wasn't talked about in the first six years so i think a lot of people you know they have the dnc but they don't probably know these stories as well because they weren't foundational then and i know um some people will say that by lucy mack saying they now had received authority to baptize that that was a a reference to the visitation but it's not it's a reference to the fact that at this point early in the history joseph smith believed he received divine commandment through the rock and a hat not through the visitation that would happen years later so lucy mack smith is not saying they receive the authority to baptize by getting the priesthood she's saying they received the authority to baptize by translating the book of mormon and then getting the commandment through the stone and the hat to go and baptize each other but but is wait is so is john the baptist anywhere there no i'm just saying this is even in 1845 and lucy mac smith still seems to be not mentioning it when she recounts history of the church so this is just one of those stories i think that wasn't foundational yeah so why is joseph's own mom when she writes about joseph and oliver kind of baptizing each other why is she not mentioning john the baptist now just should i get the 1838 memo let's just say like because she doesn't mention i don't think she really mentions the first vision either so i don't think she's aware of i mean to be honest she's probably recalling what she experienced in these early days and this matches that matches the 1829 uh timeline that they were translating the book and believe they need to baptize each other as they're starting this church that makes sense but it's com this is completely out of line with the correlated version that you know we've gone over now from the official dnc the other thing is tell me if i'm remembering this right but but the first instance of like bad christian baptism in the book of mormon is when alma goes to the waters of mormon and starts baptizing people i think so yeah and there's no mention of anyone ever ordaining him right in the priesthood yep it almost gives the impression that like the holy spirit if i'm remembering right it's almost like the holy spirit descends on him yeah where he gets his authority from yeah so the book of mormon had this amazing chance to say and behold alma some angel appears to alma and ordains on him the aaronic priesthood which gives him the authority to baptize in the waters of mormon the book of mormon had that chance and it never it never does that yeah because it wasn't thought up yet yeah i mean that's and that's just it that's that's what that's why it's always when we mention these things it's like yeah it's not there because joseph hadn't thought it up yet and when you look at it today as a member you think he had because it seems so clean and and correlated but no he had the story is not in his idea in his mindset yet and so of course it's not going to show up in the book of mormon okay all right but the point is the fact that the prophet's own mother who was a firsthand witness all along never mentions john the baptist even as late as 1845 that should be sketchy at minimum to people yeah i mean it's noteworthy you know it's one of those things where you look at that and that's another data point that shows people just were not aware of it because it didn't happen and yeah and then here's and there's all over caldery sorry sorry i had the wrong slide there and then here's oliver cowdery yeah we're hurting you say back to another recollection and this is a good one this is um from the sunstone history podcast on the priesthood restoration this was a really cool one that christopher c smith mentioned which is oliver country gets excommunicated from the church because he's upset about um joseph smith having an affair with fanny alger and he goes back to the church later and when he goes back he's talking to the church and this is what he says i was also present with joseph when the higher or melchizedek priesthood was conferred by the holy angel on higher yeah and so he's going backwards to the story he told in 1834 so he says just outrageous no something like it's just it's amazing i was also present with joseph when the higher or melchizedek priesthood was conferred by the holy angel on high this priesthood we then conferred on each other by the will and commandment of god and it's just like i said this is interesting because here's oliver kadri who's the one that kind of introduced the angel story in 1834 which leads to peter james and john but here even knowing that that story was was done rewriting stuff into the blessing books all that stuff when he goes back to the church in 1848 he reverts back to his original 1834 story and um also makes clear to say i was present with joseph which in a lot of ways is kind of more of a passive language so in 1834 and 35 oliver couch was like i was there i was a part of this you know this is when it all happened and then all of a sudden now he's kind of fallen back to that kind of more generic angelic visitation which obviously makes no sense given the fact that he's well aware of the story in 1835 because him and joseph rewrote it into the dnc and he rewrote some of it into the blessings book so this is significant it's almost like in mid to late 1830s their their their authority is being challenged they're they're needing to pull rank so they're making up all these stories about specific angelic physics that granted them the authority but maybe by 1848 well not only is joseph dead so the the authority is kind of a matter of the past but also the authority is kind of well established by then and at that point it's less important for oliver to be making such specific claims of authority well that and i think oliver at this point is coming back to the church this church is not going to let oliver take control of it anyways so i think at this point he doesn't have any real need to lie because it's not like you know brigham young and then we're going to like put him in charge so i think at this point they view him i think kind of suspiciously a bit and um because he'd been next communicated he'd be excommunicated so he's coming back for accusing joseph of adultery yeah and so he comes back that you know i think there's a lot of bad feelings and so it's just interesting that he's now reverting back to the story it's almost like now that it doesn't suit him he's not going to tell the full story but he's still giving um this other story to certainly to elevate himself but yeah it's just amazing that he reverts backwards instead of just sticking with what the evolution of the story was yeah that's crazy okay and then this is a real quick data point it's a late reminiscence but it's a journal of oliver huntington and it's a um reminiscence from oh my gosh addison everett i believe and he says that basically um joseph had told people in nauvoo that in colville he and oliver cowdrew are under arrest on charges of deceiving the people and in court he stated that the first miracle done was to create this earth brother joseph said that at the very time peter james and john came to them and ordained them to the apostleship and this incarceration is mid to late june of 1830 and wesley walters has located the court bill for this trial it's dated july 1st 1830 and that if if this is true and this actually lines up a little more with um the history as far as joseph and oliver being together um that would put the priesthood restoration weeks after the church was founded which is another problem so this is a late roman instance it's just another data point but it's just to say that even in now joseph smith is telling a story about the priesthood restoration that doesn't line up with what he wrote in the doctrine of covenants which would have i believe been about seven years earlier because i think that this was supposed to be in like 1842 in nauvoo so even here we're seeing just all sorts of inconsistencies with how joseph is framing this experience and i wonder if that's just a confused memory because if joseph wasn't even talking about peter james and john until 1834 1835 why would he have mentioned that in 1831 he did no he didn't this is um this is joseph smith telling the story in navoo so like say around 1842 he's telling people about the restoration oh yeah so this is only important in trying to try to date when they're saying it was so it just shows that it couldn't have happened in may of 1829 because this trial happened about a year later and and the church was the church was founded in april 6 i think right april 6 i think so so it just shows that even if you go with what joseph smith was teaching in nauvoo this would happen after which it just has all sorts of problems as well so okay yeah maybe joseph was talking about it in an inconsistent manner yes yeah so i mean like i said it's just one data point it's a late remnants it's just more or less to say here's another data point which does line up with regard to the trial yeah um but it would be bad for the timing because it would be after the well after it was supposed to have happened so super sketchy so many instances of sketchiness yep so now we're going to get to some of the quotes that i found to be very impactful to me about the priesthood restoration some from faithful some from non-faithful so richard bushman a faithful source would say yeah church's foremost scholar on joseph smith uh former stake president which is higher than a bishop former state patriarch like this is the guy yeah he writes in his book rough stone rolling the late appearances of these priesthood restoration accounts raises the possibility of later fabrication and then bushman goes on to add did joseph smith add the stories of angels to embellish his early history and make himself more of a visionary if so he made little of the occurrence caldra was the first to recount the story of john's appearance not joseph himself so this is i think bushman trying to say the later appearance of these accounts certainly looks like a late addition to joseph's history he tries to give a little bit of an apologetic spin to say if he was doing it to bolster his authority he made little of it but i think that neglects the fact that he does create the story of john's appearance because oliver mentions an angel joseph links him to john and that's in 1835 at a time after zion's camp when things are happening so yeah i mean i would say that joseph did embellish his history to make himself more of a visionary and he made little of the occurrence before 1835 because he hadn't developed the story yet and i think the timeline kind of i think shows that um and i also think like i said calgary did introduce the idea of an angel and then they kind of solidified that to john uh like right before they did the dnc entry so between um was a february may of 1835 i think so i think that's it i'm still confused as to how bushman can be an orthodox believer and know this stuff but at least he's acknowledging that that it's a real problem yeah which robert said about the view of the hebrews right yeah i think that to me that's the takeaway it's just he even even even he's saying basically this looks like later fabrication and even if he does give apologetic spin to it yeah um bh roberts who was an apol was he a general authority for the church he was an apostle so he writes in his footnote in the history of the church um there is no definite account of the melchizedek priesthood restoration event in the history of the prophet joseph or for that matter in any of our annals um which is to say there's there's no there's no contemporary record of this happening anywhere in the church's records and then they're in in i've already made this point but mormons should realize we celebrate the date of the aaronic priesthood every year we never celebrate the date of the melchizedek priesthood because we we don't there's no evidence that it ever happened yeah so i mean it's just it's another way of saying this this story just does not exist um david whitmer said i never heard that an angel had ordained joseph and oliver to the aaronic priesthood until the year 1835 or 1834 35 or 36 in ohio i do not believe that john the baptist ever ordained joseph and oliver and william mcclellan along those same lines said i joined the church in 1831 for years i never heard of john the baptist ordaining joseph and oliver i had heard not of james peter and john doing so as to the story of john the baptist ordaining joseph and oliver on the day they were baptized i never heard of it in the church for years although i carefully noticed the things um that were said and so these are two people that are in the early church david whitmer one of the three witnesses both saying this story just was never talked about it's a late creation and that they don't believe it because again they were there they were around they heard joseph smith talk about this stuff and it's just a late edition that was simply not developed at this time that's why they didn't hear about it and and okay so yeah that should be very significant because the the church wants us all to really you know the book of mormon stands on on the witnesses of the three and the eight witnesses and david whitmer is one of the eight witnesses to the book of mormon like a super crucial um you know witness right wait he's one of the three witnesses right yeah yeah he's one of the three witnesses of the book of mormon early founders of the church and here he's saying i never heard anything about an aaronic priesthood or an angel or on the baptist so that's a huge problem and then will it william mcclellan you'll hear the church reference him all the time about his important role in the early church and here you've got early founders saying we never heard anything about this yeah now didn't david whitmer say also he knew nothing about a melchizedek priesthood yeah i think so um and the next the next one actually is going to be pretty important for that actually it's from from from whitmer so yeah this is really important because i mentioned at the beginning sydney rigdon so dave whitmer says in august 1829 we began to preach the gospel of christ the following six elders had then been ordained joseph oliver peter whitmer samuel smith hiram smith and myself we preached baptized and confirmed members into the church of christ from august 1829 until april 6 1830 being eight months in which time we had proceeded rightly the offices in the church being elders priests and teachers in no place in the word of god does it say that an elder is after the order of melchizedek or after the order of the melchizedek priesthood and elders after the order of christ this matter of priesthood since the days of sidney rigdon has been the great hobby and stumbling block of the latter-day saints priesthood means authority and authority is the word we should use i do not think the word priesthoods mentioned in the new covenant of the book of mormon authority is the word we used for the first two years in the church until sydney reagan's days in ohio this matter of the two orders of the priesthood in the church of christ in lineal priesthood of the old law being in the church all originated in the mind of sidney rigdon he explained these things to brother joseph in his way out of the old scriptures and got brother joseph to inquire etc he would inquire and as mouthpiece speak out the revelations just as they had fixed up in their hearts this is the way the high priest and the priesthood as you have it was introduced into the church of christ almost two years after its beginning and after we had baptized and confirmed about 2 000 souls into the church so yeah i mean that speaks for itself this is what i was saying at the beginning of this episode memorize this summarize this for us yeah he's just basically sydney rigdon came from the campbell eight movement the campbell movement spoke about the melchizedek priesthood sidney rigdon joined in uh 1830 and up until that time joseph had no idea of this idea of two priesthoods sydney reagan taught him about the multiple priesthoods and after then joseph smith started layering in these details about the high priest in 1831 then they bring up the the the name melchizedek in 1835 the visitations none of that happened in the early church and so david whitmer was there and they baptized people they ordained people this stuff was never mentioned in any way until sydney reagan came and everything lines up the timeline lines up cindy rigdon's background confirms what dave whitmer are saying about this belief about the melchizedek priesthood all of this stuff lines up and that's why it's so cool because as i mentioned the start of the episode you got this puzzle and now these pieces are fitting together really well now it's telling us the priesthood restoration didn't happen um in the way that the church tells you if it happened at all but this is what the historical records are telling us and they're all confirming each other so here david whitmer is confirming what we talked about earlier about the campbell lights in the melchizedek priesthood and it's also confirming the timeline which is to say this was never even developed until years after the church was formed which is a huge problem because they're telling us it happened before now i'm i'm i'm pulling up mormon think really quick and i'm just going to read to you what i'm reading and this might be repetitive but this is david whitmer in an address to all believers in christ this might be repetitive but i'm going to read it anyway this is this is one of the three witnesses early founder of the mormon church david whitmer he says this matter of the two orders of the priesthood in the church of christ they didn't even get the church's name right at first and lineal priesthood of the old law being in the church all originated in the mind of sidney rigdon he explained these things to brother joseph in his way out of the old scriptures and got brother joseph to inquire so that is sidney rigdon saying this this stuff about peter james and john aaronic melchizedek priesthood did not happen in 1829 something sydney rigged and introduced and that joseph and oliver adopted later and if you're how can the church wants us to believe david whitner as a credible witness to the book of mormon well then can he also be a credible witness to the invalid invalidity of the priesthood restoration yeah and that's the problem with the inconsistency kind of apologetics because i'm willing to say david whitmer absolutely may have believed or probably believed that the book of mormon was was from god and he may have believed he saw a vision i mean i have no problem with that but i will also say that the other things he says also i think you have to take account of it and the fact is he's telling us the story is created long after the fact and then retrofitted back in the church which is also confirmed by everything else we have so to to try to vilify him in that regard i think is is it's just dishonest because we can show it it's this is not this is not a matter of opinion this is a matter of fact and it's just it's all over the place we've we've like i said go watch down volgos videos because he has so many more data points tonight that we brought up here it gets worse it does not get better when you go deeper into this stuff it's so disingenuous to say believe david whitmer when he testified in the book of mormon don't believe him when he testified as to the invalidity of the priesthood of registration believe all over calgary when he's a witness of the book of mormon don't believe him when he calls joseph an adulterer right you can't rely on witnesses but only the witness only the testimonies that are convenient and then ignore the ones that are inconvenient and apologists bushmen all of them should should know that they know this yeah they do yeah i mean they do yeah okay so now we're gonna get to the apologetics and um i for this one i use the the the fair mormon response to the ces letter because there's no official church essay to kind of use to to pull the main apologetics so fair mormons responds to the cs letters to say records indicate that visits of peter james and john for the purpose of ordination was being discussed in 1830 and when you read their reply they're going to give no sources and yet they make this statement as just a complete statement of fact and then they follow it up by saying the author of the ces letter has no idea whatsoever joseph may have told his family about the priesthood restoration because there are no historical documents that support his position one way or the other which only further proves our point that the event was not spoken of to anyone on record so they're saying basically no one no one was told about this and then fair mormon calls this idea a logical fallacy an argument from silence the author has formed a conclusion that is based on the absence of statements in historical documents rather than on their actual presence and again this is just simply not true because of the fact that we can actually show all of the different ways that they talk about this it it's just not mentioned and so fair mormon here is being intentionally um disingenuous because they are trying to use this idea of you can't prove a negative so of course it's true or could be true so keep believing except for the fact that we can show all of these different areas where joseph and oliver and other people are talking about the priesthood and it's just not there because it's not created and last the fact that joseph smith was not even ordained into the high priesthood until 1831 which tells us that this vis visitation did not happen in 1829 and so this is just the first kind of area where apologetics are going to say well joseph smith didn't write a lot of stuff down so we can't really say anything's wrong jim bennett does that in his cs let her reply to i think he has a page where it's just like an open page and says this is what joseph wrote up until 1832 so basically saying you know how dare you judge it's like no there's a lot of documentation as to what he was teaching this isn't there because it's just not created and we could show when it's created because it starts showing up in greater numbers all of a sudden out of nowhere i don't know what more to say on that one yeah i i mean it's interesting what the church chose to do gospel topics essays on versus what they chose not to do gospel topics essays on so as an example there's no gospel topics essays on um historicity in the book of mormon anachronisms in the book of mormon and and i've always wondered why not you know what i mean yeah i wondered if that's such a it's such a problematic apologetic argument and it's so central to the church's truth claims the church just said it's too important and we don't have a good enough case and i wonder if that's what they did with the priesthood restoration i think what the priesthood wanted is because it's just it like there's no good way around this and you know obviously we'll get to the night these the rest of them but it's just these apologetics are terrible and they're really misleading if you're willing to look at what they're saying so you you've got this phrase we just read which is that the fair mormon says that records indicate there was discussion of peter james and john in the 1830s yeah are you going to tell us their evidence for that are you saying they're saying that out of whole cloth well so if you go to this response to the ces letter and you do it there are no sources to show us i don't really have anything to show they just tell you that and then they go on to basically say you know i mean it's a really bad one and um okay they just make basically just make that up yeah it's good like no support not to date this episode too much but it's a lot like the um the current church statements on the sexual abuse case in arizona and they say the ap got all the stuff wrong and then you're like would they get wrong and they don't actually put it in the statement it's just similar where they're just stating this as fact and then just moving on and obviously baseless assertions basically yeah they're just making the assertion and then hoping you don't actually need to see the sources so um fair mormon responds a cs letter about whether or not the priesthood restoration was backdated and they say when all circumstantial evidence is studied the approximate time of the melchizedek priesthood restoration can be plausibly narrowed down although historical documents do not give an exact date for the restoration of the melchizedek priesthood we can pinpoint its occurrence to a seven-day window between 15 and 31st of may 1829 the window that is known is small enough to preclude a labor later fabrication of events by the prophet to increase his authority fair continues some have claimed that joseph only began to mention um apostolic ordination to the priesthood um several years after the church's organization contrary to this claim there are clear references to joseph smith stating he had seen jesus christ joseph's conversations with the apostles could be a reference to having seen spoken to and been ordained to the priesthood by the early apostles peter james and john having received that priesthood joseph smith was now qualified to perform healings and other miracles and um so what's this saying they're basically saying that joseph smith mentions that he saw apostles so clearly during that time he could have been ordained without actually mentioning it and so if we can go to the next slide the two slides kind of work together fair mormon here is basically going to make a claim that it's not a late edition by using a late edition to back up their their answers so what i said earlier fair gives no sources beyond this because joseph smith never made the conclusion that he was ordained of the priesthood that pharaoh is doing here but then fair attempts to lump the first vision into the priesthood restoration as proof that joseph smith could have been talking to peter james and john but then the question is why it was never mentioned in the early forms of the revelation so fair mormon then says joseph learned from moroni in 1823 that when the golden plates are interpreted the lord will give the holy priesthood to some and they shall begin to proclaim this gospel and baptize by water and after that they shall have the power to give the holy ghost by laying on laying on of hands the problem is this footnote from fair mormon leads to a letter written by oliver cowdery in 1835 which only further adds to the idea that we're that we're talking about that this was a backdated story so they're trying to show that the problem of back date and revelation isn't really a problem by citing a letter that is a retrofitting of the story and they have to know this because it's a footnote but they're counting on people who are reading it not to look at the source and below the surface of what they're saying i it's absurd by mentioning the date 1823 they're trying to establish some things happening seven years before that bolstered the idea that um the priesthood was given by peter james and john and yet it's actually an account written five six years after the fact that's that's trying to fill in history um you know in a post-dated way that's actually disingenuous yeah super disingenuous of them to quote 1835 writings to bolster an 1829 event yeah i mean if anything else they're actually making making the point i'm trying to make here which is to say that this story is evolving and by 1835 this is a story that they're now retrofitting back into their history but they don't tell you that letters from 1835 i just think that's so misleading it's super sketchy but they have no credibility anyway so i just fair mormon is ridiculous yeah it's not it's not great and um you know that that's a simple way to look at it and just say that should not be there um it's also not worth responding to well i just i think they're the best way to do it just for this because there is no essay i think they're a good place because this is going to be the most common responses you're going to hear but yeah it's it's dude what fair mormon shows is how how awful the church's case is for responding to any of these arguments yeah in this particular one too because they're going to use a lot of deflection and kind of misdirection but it if you look at the sources it's not saying what they're telling you so they're they're now going to kind of describe how the melchizedek priesthood was restored and so they say between april and june of 1829 the book of mormon records information about the high priesthood after the order of melchizedek in verses such as mosiah 18 17 alma 420 53 3rd nephi 11 25 and third nephi 12 1. and so i went through and i looked at these verses and this is really an incredible story here because they cite five verses as proof that the book of mormon is discussing the high priesthood after the order of melchizedek that's their words read the five verses and tell me what word is not in any of them and just i mean i was being facetious here but it rhymes i know the word melchizedek appears nowhere in the book of mormon yeah there's nowhere in there so they're now making this they're trying to make this claim that the word high priesthood equals melchizedek which it does not and furthermore of those five verses only one of them mentions a high priest the other four are really talking about baptism and so this is just incredibly misleading to say that those five verses talk about the order of melchizedek they do not mention melchizedek at all and only one mentions a high priesthood it's just that's silly and um and then their second data point says apparently in april 29 during the translation of the book of mormon joseph smith and oliver cadre had a dispute as to what happened with the with john the apostle that they settled by revelation um c john 21 20. the revelation is canonized as dnc 7. and you know my point is i don't really know how to respond to this because it has nothing to do with the priesthood so i'm not sure why they're including this here as proof that the priesthood restoration was not refitted so i just i'm mentioning it because they do but i don't know why it's in there um okay yeah and yeah i did see that the other day when i mentioned somewhere on the internet that there's no melchizedek priesthood in the book of mormon and then somebody responds ah but it mentions the high it mentions high priesthood one time yeah and that one one of those verses has it yeah i mean someone would say well that's significant there it is checkmate mike of lds discussions that mentions high priesthood i mean i guess except for the fact that you know it's it's not identified in a way and i you know it i don't know what to say because they're taking a term that is kind of not common in the book of mormon and then saying this backs us up except it doesn't because we have all the other stuff that goes with it they're i mean i just mean priest it could just mean good priesthood or power priesthood or elevated or divine priesthood high in that context right doesn't immediately mean oh there's structure and there's a lot and aaronic and there's a higher and the melchizedek you're you're in you're you're adding way too much in there exactly claim that the text is actually referring to that yeah you're writing stuff in there that's not there i mean that's just what it is and if you look at when when 18 30 18 31 when joseph's working with the founders of the church they do reference high priesthood yep but it's in no way it's a reflection of how vague it is in the book of mormon versus any sort of validation of some sort of formal structure that evolves much later right to me yeah i think that's fair yeah so here's more of how their steps go so their third point is in august 1830 the lord spoke to the prophet joseph smith of peter james and john whom i have sent unto you by whom i have ordained you and confirmed you to be apostles and a special witness or and special witnesses in my name and bear the keys of your ministry and of the same things which i revealed unto them again this is from 1835. so they're now using an 1835 revelation to claim it wasn't retrofitted which is a problem number four it says april 18 30 and to oliver country who is also called of god an apostle of jesus christ to be the second elder of this church and ordain under his hand and you know as a you know this this is from the dnc 20 which was heavily altered after the fact which is the point we're making here so fair mormon is saying it wasn't retrofitted by giving us a bunch of retrofitted source text i just i don't i don't know what they're trying to do here for them to put the 1830 date on that as if it was revealed in 1830 when we know it was written in 1835 once it was all manufactured is high it's as deceptive as oliver cowdery it's bad or deceptive and disingenuous yep i mean it's just it's like one of those things i'm like i don't know what to say you're using late editions to prove that it wasn't a retrofitted story you're making my point and so but it's super deceptive it's very and it's very effective on people who want to believe and i guess that's what makes me mad because i know people who have read this and go they'll come to me and they'll say you're lying look a fair woman i'm like i'm looking at it i've responded to it and then they kind of don't want to go any further but it's like this is effective for people and that's what makes me mad because they're they're being dishonest intentionally and they know what they're doing they know this material and so not not only because is there no 1830 document that has says any of these words yeah you know that the actual 1833 book of commandments that had to change these words didn't say these words yeah well that's just triply deceptive yep and they know that i mean these are things they know so i'll go the next slide so number five they say joseph smith and oliver cowdery sought after this higher authority and the lord gave it to them before the rise of this church sending that ascending to them peter james and john what for to bestow upon them the apostleship that quotes from the 1870s so now they're using a quote from out from parley pratt to say that the restoration was like legitimate and not a retrofit except it's from the 1870s long after the story was kind of solidified and this in no possible way is proof that it happened it's just proof that they're now teaching a correlated story um number six hiram page a son-in-law of peter whitman whitmer senior and one who was present on the day of the churches 6th of april 1830 organization later confirmed that peter james and john had come and bestowed the holy priesthood before the 6th of april 1830. this is from 1848 13 years after joseph smith changed the priesthood restoration to add in peter james and john furthermore hiram page would not have been there in the first place which means this recollection recollection is entirely upon what hear from other people and he never mentioned this before 1835 which tells you that this clearly was not something he found important if they actually mentioned it which clearly they did not and so they're using all these late editions to say oh see these people that were around at the time and said it happened but it doesn't line up with the historical record but it does line up with the later correlated record and that that's a pretty big tell that these are not people writing contemporary thoughts yeah yeah quoting you know citing 1848 and 1870 quotes to justify in 1829 event it's bad it's super bad and i know sometimes you have to because that's all you have but in this case we have a lot and so that that's they're picking ones and they're they're picking them in a way that doesn't let you know that these are late reminiscents and so anyway so the next one is kind of more the same no you're good there you go and so number seven it says from brigham young i know that joseph received his apostleship from peter james and john before revelation on the subject was printed and he never had a right to organize a church before he was an apostle same thing late edition and i just again point out compare the book of commandments versus the doctrine and covenants to see just how vast the changes they are how much the story changes we put the images up again here i mean they're making this sound like this revelation was given before the church was organized as it is today and it's it's simply not i mean these these revelations are vastly changed so that's brigham young contributing his complicity i mean he may misremember it he might he wasn't there i don't think at first but he's misremembering it but at worst he's just flat out yeah i forgot when he came but he wasn't there at the very beginning but yeah i mean it's just this is the story being solidified in the church and so now they're going to do what they can to kind of privilege it because they need to i mean brigham young has no power if people don't believe there's a he is the you know the leader of the priesthood so um all right so more from fair so um fair explains that the priesthood story was indeed talked about before 1834 and they say it should be noted that many critics ignore verses in the book of mormon that refer explicitly to the high priesthood of melchizedek such as alma 13 18. allah was confined to the high priesthood of the holy order of god alma 4 20. it is therefore unlikely that these accounts are a pure fabrication since we know that these verses and verses of mosiah would prompt joseph and oliver to inquire about the proper mode of baptism under his authority under this authority and again i'm just going to note this is a major assumption being there we don't know when oliver first mentioned the priesthood restoration to anyone we only know when he first put it in print but consider this if oliver was covering up a fraud on the part of joseph smith when he talked of receiving the aaronic and melchizedek priesthoods then why didn't he expose the fraud after he fell into disagreement with joseph smith it was excommunicated from the church why in fact did oliver continue to insist that the events related to the restoration of the priesthood actually happened and you know even if you have a falling out with joseph you're not going to discredit yourself that's the problem i i think that you know i you know we i go on the next slide but it's like we this argument is is one that's used often by the church well if the witnesses that you know were lying why didn't well because if you admit that you're admitting that you lied to the world your family's name is mud you know your reputation is just destroyed so they have very good reason to not want to basically implicate themselves in a con and i'm not saying that the three witnesses believe they were lying i don't know but i do know that oliver kadri was intentionally changing the history so he knows he was lying and um and so i can't speak to why he didn't do it but we know he didn't we know he changed it and then we know when he went back to the church he changed the story kind of reverted back to an earlier version of it too so i mean the inconsistencies if this was from if fair mormon was was looking at warren jeffs and warren jess had this thing they wouldn't be like well warren jeff didn't really write it down wrong so you can't they'd be like yeah he lied i mean that's because he did and oliver cowdery lied because we can show it and you know i just i get frustrated with that you know falling out with the other guy you're gonna show her the other guy was a bad actor and a liar but you're not gonna show yeah you were a bad actor and a liar yeah you just won't i mean that's how human nature is so so yeah so you know as we said there are many reasons why the witnesses did not deny their testimony after leaving the church and many that who left the church did so for reasons other than the book of mormon or the priesthood restoration as we mentioned he left because of joseph smith having a nasty dirty affair with fannie alger before joseph smith had even developed the idea of sealing keys we'll get into that in the polygamy episodes but if you know as we said if he admitted the church was a lie he'd be admitting that he willfully led people into a lie that he changed blessing books that he changed stories which brought people into the church which brought people into a situation where they were giving up their lives or property to a church so you know i i think there's a lot of reasons why you wouldn't want to tell that because there's a lot of damage that came from people who joined the church not everybody but some and if you told people that you lied that's that's pretty damning to yourself and you know the last point i'm kind of reiterating here but the mention of melchizedek is from hebrews 7 it's not from the book of mormon so the fair keeps saying that the book of mormon mentions the priesthood after the order of melchizedek they don't it's not in the book of mormon because it wasn't a term joseph was using until after 1834 because it came from sydney reagan yeah according to david whitmer yeah according david whitmer according to the timeline he was something joseph smith was not familiar with or teaching before sydney rigdon came and even then it wasn't something being taught for even what three years after three four years after reagan joined so it's just it's not in the book of mormon because joseph smith wasn't thinking about it so yeah um so yeah so okay so fair again is going to use a late edition to say it's not a late edition and he says many ignore that joseph smith mentioned that the holy priesthood in the first 1832 first vision account and that they soften their stance by ignoring that fact and um the thing i want to mention is this is after the 1831 elder meeting when the priesthood was first conferred it again does not mention the erotica malchezic priesthood doesn't mention john the baptist peter james and john and so to use the the 1832 first vision is a late addition to the priesthood story and it still is not getting it to what they would later teach it was and so fair mormon is using what is a late edition um to mention the holy priesthood after the holy priesthood was developed in 1831 this is just not helpful to their case and again we point out why is the story going to get more specific and grand as it goes on and how could joseph smith forget that god visited him in the first vision with jesus or that john the baptist was there to confer the aaronic priesthood to him we have two now areas where joseph smith is forgetting very prominent people coming to visit him and ferris citing this as actual proof that he wasn't making it up i i'm just i don't know what more to say it's just hard to take them seriously yeah this is just it's a problem and so there's this is one i've gotten a lot of pushback on over the years where they say the priesthood was mentioned in newspapers how dare you say this and i just want to read these really quick this is what fair mentions there's a few of them we'll go over quickly and it says the priesthood is mentioned before in 1834 in newspapers panesville telegraph december eighteen thirty mister oliver cowdery has has his commission directly from the god of heaven and that he has credentials written and signed by the hand of jesus christ with whom he has personally conversed and as such said country claims that he and his associates are the only persons on earth who are qualified to administer in his name by this authority they proclaim to the world that all who do not believe their testimony and be baptized by them for the remission of sins must be forever miserable again no mention of the priesthood no mention of the aaronic or melchizedek priesthoods no mention of john the baptist peter james and john this quote is about having the authority to baptize and to form a church but fair is now trying to insert into it the priesthood restoration where where it's not and it's just not there red herring yeah country never makes any references to the restoration just authority as we discussed earlier authority was the word they used in the first few years not priesthood and this is a good evidence of that yeah yeah that is a red herring that that reference that alleged evidence is a total red hearing yep so we'll go to a few more these newspaper quotes this is from painesville telegraph november 1830 about two weeks since some persons came along here with the book one of whom pretends to have seen angels and assisted in translating the plates he proclaims the destruction upon the world within a few years holds forth that the ordinance of the of the gospel have not been regularly administered since the days of the apostles till the said smith and himself commence the work the name of this person here who pretends to have a divine mission and to have seen and converse with angels is country same thing as before no mention of the priesthood restoration peter james and john john the baptist they're just conflating the translation of the book of mormon and seeing the angels with the plates with the priesthood restoration it's not there it's just i mean you can read it it's not there and they're absolutely referencing other events which fair mormon knows and they're trying to insert well it could have been this too it's not what this reminds me of is i think it's elder oaks who once said it's not that we need good answers we just need answers yeah almost like they're just providing answers and as long as that's what it is number goes oh wait fair said blah blah blah fair just wrote a bunch of words oh well that solves the problem even if the words actually don't address the problem well yeah and if you're motivated to believe like i've had i've had multiple people come to me on these this specific part of the newspaper if you're motivated to believe you'll read that and go where are you lying i'm like they're included in the overview i include i've had these on the website since the beginning and i explain exactly why these are not good evidences especially against the fact that we have very specific references to the priests so that don't mention these stories and you're right this fair mormon here is trying to throw anything out that they have in the hopes that if you want to believe you can take this and be inoculated to the problem in the future but it's not true i mean it's not an honest way to do it but that's what they're doing and you know we got a few more to cover but yeah this is just this is this is a horrible apologetic response so i almost i'm wondering why we even keep mentioning them so we've got another newspaper yeah i'm just doing it because like i said i've gotten this from multiple people before so this one's from 1831 from the palmyra reflector they then proclaimed that there had been no religion in the world for 1500 years that no one had been authorized to preach and converse i don't know for that period that joe smith had now received a commission from god for that purpose smith they affirmed had seen god frequently and personally kadri and his friends had frequent interviews with angels reverend richard taggart to reverend jonathan goings in cleveland ohio of 1833 said the following curious occurrence occurred last week in newburgh about six miles from this place joe smith the great mormonosity was there and held forth and among other things he told them he had seen jesus christ and the apostles and converse with them and that he could perform miracles again there's no mention of aaronic or melchizedek no mention of john the baptist no mention of a priesthood restoration and this is again this this is years after the fact this is joseph smith trying to grow the church by saying he had conversed with god um it is obviously early references to the fact that joseph smith was having visions but we knew that from other writings so this is just again fair giving us something that we kind of already know joseph smith was was boasting about and then just trying to impose the priesthood restoration in there which is which is just not in in the text in either of these yeah yep they're just like if they can find any any newspaper article that talks about authority or visits from god or jesus somehow that proves the point yeah it's just it's it's just it's bad logic they would never do it for someone like another religion it wouldn't accept it if somebody else used this type no way and we're going to do more about the changes of the doctrine and covenants in our epis our next episode about that but just to go over it quickly because it does impact this so much richard bushman said he revised his own revelations adding new material and splicing one to another altering the words as he saw fit he felt authorized to expand the revelations as his understanding expanded and we'll go over that but again once you start to say joseph smith was able to change them as he saw fit you're really becoming indistinguishable from outright fraud and you know as i mentioned earlier if joseph smith did not understand that he saw god in jesus in the first vision or that he did not understand that john the baptist peter james and john were there with the priesthood restoration how reliable is anything else he recorded that he claimed to see her experience because if he didn't understand that why should we think he understood what else he wrote down i just you know it's you get into this really bad area when you start making these arguments and it leads to a lot more problems than it solves yeah it reminds me of this apologetic argument that's necessary for the catalyst theory to be true that that somehow joseph thought you know somehow the doctrine of covenants proclaims joseph a prophet revelator and translator he thinks he's translating the egyptian papyrus he's using a stone in a hat reading the characters doing the alphabet the egyptian grammar he thinks he's translating there's all the evidence in the world including his own testimony that he claims to be translating but somehow he didn't realize he wasn't translating and he was doing something else totally totally entirely different how can we rely and we know that the text is gibberish how can we rely on joseph as a credible you know instrument of god when he doesn't even know what he's doing yeah fundamentally he thinks he's swimming he's walking but he thinks he's swimming and he's telling everybody he's swimming but he's actually walking but somehow his walking is still of god yeah well within this argument it's basically stating that joseph smith doesn't even understand what he's doing it's not even he doesn't you know i mean in that point it's just like what are we doing yeah what are we doing so yeah and then yeah so that brings us to our conclusion of this little bit longer episode but yeah i think this one was an important one for so many reasons and you know absolutely so we got our final slide and um oh that's here yeah yeah there you go so just you know to wrap up you know the just like we said last week at the first vision the priesthood restoration story can be shown to be a late edition just by looking at the timeline of joseph smith's teachings accounts revelations and the accounts of those around him the simple fact that joseph was ordained to the high priesthood in 1831 with the first ordinations makes very clear that the priesthood melchizedek priesthood was a late creation that just like the first vision had to then be retrofitted back into history and just like we said last week joseph smith was using elements of treasure digging to keep members eternally looking i should say not last week as we said in our first episode this is an area where you could show joseph smith in my opinion using some of those elements of treasure digging to keep members kind of eternally digging for treasure because as i said in that first episode joseph smith needed to produce a physical reward for treasure digging or else he had to stop the dig by creating a religion he can constantly keep people allowing him to to do the digging because the promises he's making do not have to be delivered until after we die in this case priesthood as a very powerful magical vehicle to keep people believing that they're uncovering this treasure even though it's something that is not tangible and joseph smith as the seer and the prophet could keep providing them these new priests the new priesthood the second priesthood and all of these ordinations as rewards that aren't really being given but the member believes they are and as such they stick with joseph smith and i think in a lot of ways there is some outgrowth of treasure digging in the way he structures the way he kind of gives out rewards and you know bonuses in the church and and i think the priesthood is is a reward for being loyal to him and the church yeah and if i had to summarize this i would just say this if we were to look at how joseph worked before the the priesthood narrative and after the priesthood narrative it's basically you know whatever he ends up claiming happens number one never happens number two there's no contemporary evidence of it ever happening number three you know he he starts it's always a response to some sort of threat to his authority or power and then he starts to trickle out what actually happened and then you can just guarantee it's going to change substantively over several years until he finally settles in something official which always is a power grab and it's always a late addition and it's always growing in magnificence and importance over time that's the pattern that he shows before and after these priesthood claims that you would sort of anticipate you know that he would have done with this if you were looking at this in isolation and it's exactly what he did yeah i mean i think i think it's just it's a pattern that shows that when he was confronted with challenges he was able to use his status to elevate himself and to you know push the other people back into their place and and the fact that we could show it's a late edition from the timeline really at the end of the day that's the end of the that's the end of it because once you can show that they're willing to create a story long after the fact that completely um comes out of thin air and contradicts a lot of your early stuff it's impossible then to try to say that you should still trust them anyways because we can show it with multiple foundational events yeah all right well mike this was a really of all the episodes we've done to me this is absolutely one of the most important one we've done so thank you so much and i'll just say you know listeners and viewers make sure if you want to watch these in isolation you can do it on anchor you can do it on spotify and you can use the youtube playlist please share this with other people give us your feedback it's always valuable and then you know make sure and check out ldsdiscussions.com for the text version of these and we've got more to come so you know coming up we've got word of wisdom changes to the doctrine and covenants race in the scriptures temple endowment polygamy book of abraham kinderhook plates so much more coolness to come i got a lot to go all right mike well thanks for doing this you're the best thanks everybody uh thanks everyone for joining us we couldn't do this without your support and uh you know be good to each other be kind to each other share this with everyone give us your feedback and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of mormon stories podcast take care everybody