Book of Abraham Pt. 3 - A Look at the Text Itself

hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon stories podcast LDS discussions Edition I'm your host John delin it is December 8th 2022 and we are here uh for another LDS discussions episode this is I I believe if I'm counting right uh episode number 32 in a I don't know 50 plus segment series analyzing Mormon church truth claims uh the topic for today is a very exciting and important one we are in a part three of our coverage of book of Abraham today we're going to be looking at the actual text of the book of Abraham um for those of you who are just joining this series in the middle uh my friend Mike uh has put together an amazing website called ldsdiscussions.com where he uh thoughtfully and carefully ended an evidence-based way tries to dispassionately analyze more mature truth claims and we have been doing a very popular and successful series of um his his essays and again the essay that we're going to be covering today can be found at ldsdiscussions.com Abraham Dash text but to just remind everyone you can always watch or listen to these LDS discussions episodes integrated into the Mormon stories YouTube feed or the Mormon stories podcast feeds on Spotify or on Apple podcast if you're watching us through YouTube We would ask you to please subscribe to our YouTube channel we're pushing hard to try and get a hundred thousand subscribers and your um you're taking the time to subscribe not only notifies you when the next amazing LDS discussions episode comes online but it also helps with the algorithms it helps get uh these videos out to people that need them and uh and it helps us so please please take a moment to subscribe to our YouTube channel while you're at it subscribe to Nemo the Mormon YouTube channel as well just because Nemo's with us today um and uh of course if you want to watch these videos in sequence on YouTube there's a playlist a YouTube playlist and on Spotify and on Apple podcast there's the entire LDS discussion series uh included as its own podcast and even in Spotify they allow us to upload the video in addition to the audio so we're trying to provide you with as many ways you and or your family and friends with as many ways as possible to consume this really important content so joining us today as always is the amazing um the amazing mic hey Mike hey everybody how's it going almost Merry Christmas yeah we're getting there it's crazy how fast this year has gone yeah are you excited are you excited for today's episode I am this will be one that I think will be interesting for people that follow a lot of Mormon history podcasts just because we always Focus so much on the translation uh and the Papyrus and and all that and this one's going to focus more on like putting that aside and saying even if we didn't have any of that what does the book Abraham text tell us about its authenticity and so um I'm excited about it and I also for anyone who listens to it and says why'd you have to do this I just want to throw out that this is David bakavoy's fault um he did a series with you and um for those who don't know we'll mention him a lot this episode um Dr bakavoy is a Biblical scholar um he used to teach within CES and he um understands kind of the biblical scholarship Behind these texts better than most people do because he was in the church and this was his field of study he's got a doctorate and when he did his episodes with you he mentioned this very idea of you can look at the book of Abraham by its text and get a better idea of its authenticity without even looking at the trans translation and so that sent me down that rabbit hole and so this episode is his fault but I think it's a really interesting one and will be a good one especially uh for those who haven't uh you know dove into the book Abraham too much already I love it um all right and uh of course Nemo uh we're really super excited to have Nemo from Nemo the Mormon YouTube channel all the way from the UK joining us as well representing officially the British museum is that right Nemo uh yeah sure let's go with that ish and of course I'm just gonna I want to enshrine in the LDS discussions episode the fact that you just did a really important uh episode on Mormon stories and on LDS discussions and on your own channel about a really important interaction you have with Elder Oaks and I'm just throwing that out there check it out everybody professional agitator what's that I said I'm a professional agitator yeah how's that how's the response how's the response been to that episode Nemo uh the response has been really positive a lot of people reaching out um really grateful that I've put that in place and uh and you've not seen the last of it yet either so there's more to come all right that's just a teaser go check out on any of these podcasts we've mentioned just type in Nemo and you'll find Nemo's interaction with Donald jokes okay so before we actually jump into the content for today I have to give a shout out to a couple uh important people you've already mentioned one Dr David bakavoy in the show notes will have a link to my Mormon stories episodes with Dr David bakavoy they are definitely top 50 classic Mormon stories episodes where where David bakavoy talks about ancient scripture and historicity and Truth claims and then of course we always are going to acknowledge Dr Robert Ridner the Mormon stories episodes like 13 hours long where a legit egyptologist uh may he rest in peace discusses the book of Abraham the Papyrus Joseph Smith and Mormonism in a very detailed and intensive way and and of course Robert Ritter passed recently and so we always want to give him a shout out and uh and honor him for his great work and Nemo you've got a book you wanna you wanna also maybe mention really quick yeah so this is the Joseph Smith Egyptian papyri a complete edition by Robert K Ritner available through signature books I believe but it is a great explanation of what exactly is on the Papyrus should you be unclear because the book of Abraham did you believe it was something else so that's worth checking out really well researched and um it just supports Robert Ridner I think that's signature book so shout out to Signature books as well we'll include a link to that in the show notes and I think my Mormon stories interview with Robert rittner covers a lot of the detail in that book all right well welcome again Nemo and Mike let's turn it over to you we've got we've got some slides and some videos to go through today yeah so today we actually have a lot of videos which hopefully will be a nice break from hearing us uh speak and it'll also allow viewers to kind of understand both what some of the critics like Dr rittner uh would say about these uh problems and also what the apologists say so we have clips from both uh that I think hopefully will give a little more context to looking at the text without trying to focus as much on how it came to be which which is what we're going to try to do in this episode as opposed to the first two I love it all right let's jump in yeah and so you know if you are following along and you're caught up the last two episodes we looked at the book of Abraham um looking at it through the lens of how Joseph Smith translated it and what he told us it was so we looked at what Joseph Smith claimed the Papyrus fragment said and we looked at what they actually do say and then we kind of looked in episode two about how the church attempts to kind of reconcile um the problem that they agree with which is that the Papyrus fragments and facsimiles have absolutely nothing to do with Abraham and that they date to about a thousand years after Abraham would have lived If Abraham was a real figure and um so today we're going to look at the text of the book Abraham kind of how we evaluated The Book of Mormon because the Book of Mormon obviously doesn't have a source text that we can kind of compare it to and we want to see if we can date the book of Abraham as an ancient text or a modern uh you know kind of ancient scripture or modern text just by looking at the text alone and you know as I said earlier most of us especially as you're first getting into Mormon truth claims you're going to come across the book Abraham because it is a massive problem but most of that you most what you're going to see like say in the Cs letter or letter for my wife you're going to come across the the translation problem because let's be honest that's a Smoking Gun to show Joseph Smith couldn't translate Egyptian um but the question is can you tell if the book of Abraham is what it claims to be just by looking at the actual text and that's what we're going to do today I love it so if I could just summarize in my you know kind of like simplified way for someone who struggles to understand all this stuff regardless of whether Joseph Smith translated the Papyrus right we can just understand from the text that he produces sometimes you know what whether what he produced is accurate or valid or not based on the textual clues in the actual document itself is that is that right yeah I mean it's just like you know with the book Abraham I don't know how many episodes we did I think there were six or seven episodes we looked at like anachronisms and we looked at kind of the the use of the King James Bible and all of those things tell us the Book of Mormon is not an ancient text because of the fact that there's so much 19th century material there's 19th century ideas and of course the King James Bible which wasn't written until uh I think 1711 1611. either way it's obviously way longer than the Book of Mormon times and so when you have all of these fingerprints on the text that tell you this is coming from a modern a lens a modern perspective then you know it's not an ancient text and with the book of Abraham today we're going to do the exact same thing and look at the text and see what Clues Joseph Smith is leaving on the text um that can tell us guess this is ancient or no it's not and obviously we're going to focus on the Apologetics we didn't cover in the last episode um because if you've read the book of Abraham essay on the church's website they do offer these suggestions of evidences that show it's got an ancient core and we'll address those as we go as well because obviously that is where we're going to kind of as you said like even if you didn't have the source material can we tell if this is ancient or modern got it Nemo anything you want to add so far no I think let's Jump Right In all right let's Jump Right In so biblical scholarship in the book of Abraham yeah and so this is going to be um an area where if you've followed us from the beginning we've done episodes talking about biblical scholarship in the Book of Mormon and all of that is going to tie into this episode um we covered this extensively back in that section of episodes but one of the problems we see with the book of Abraham is similar to The Book of Mormon which is that it relies extensively on the King James Bible which means that any problem you have with the King James Bible is going to end up being a problem for the book of Abraham and so as a quick example the book of Abraham chapters 2 4 and 5 are basically retelling Genesis chapters 1 2 11 and 12 from the King James Bible and as we talked about in those episodes before and we'll talk about today that creates a problem right off the bat for The credibility of the book of Abraham being an ancient text and um we covered this in our episodes about like the story of Adam and Eve the global flood Genesis was not written until at the very earliest 1000 BCE and so most Scholars today would argue that it was compiled sometime between the 6th in the 5th Century BCE which is obviously extremely notable with Abraham so with the Book of Mormon they leave I want to say in what 5 5 41 or something like that uh BC um but the book of Abraham is going to go way earlier than that because Abraham is is much older than the Book of Mormon and so that compounds this problem and so um we can look at the Bible and we can look at the book of Abraham and see that it's including many stories and elements and ideas that were simply not written or even created until long after Abraham would have lived and so even if we want to set aside the argument as to whether or not Abraham is a historical character we can see that the book of Abraham is a 19 or at least a modern work likely a 19th century work based on the materials it pulls from and so without even dealing with the translation issues that Joseph Smith creates by you know translating the facsimiles in the Egyptian characters we could tell right off the bat that this cannot be from Abraham's time based on the text that it's using as a foundation okay so if I'm understanding this right Abraham according to the text Abraham would be writing about things it's by his own hand he would be writing about events allegedly that were happening while he was alive but we know we know that the actual biblical text uh that that recounts events related to Abraham would have been written long long after Abraham would have been alive if he even lived at all that's one thing that I think I just heard and the other is that because you know there are problems with just the existence of Adam and Eve and the existence of a global flood and the existence of a Tower of Babel which we've already you know those sorts of things to the extent to which the book of Abraham Imports those events as historical events you know you know in from the from the Old Testament into the book of Abraham it's just importing all the historical problems that the Old Testament already starts with did I get that summary right yeah and Abraham would have been I believe about 1800 BCE would have been when he would have lived if he was a historical figure and and so if he's 1800 BCE and Hebrew is not a written language until I believe 1300 BCE or so and this material in the Bible is not compiled until centuries after that then how in the world is Abraham using material that's not going to be compiled for over a thousand years after he would have lived as if it's his autobiographical story and and so that really is the problem and um we will go over this a little bit in our episode that kind of Recaps Joseph Smith's different translations but to think about it you know we have the Old Testament uh Joseph Smith's going to revise as the Joseph Smith translation of the Bible and he's going to put the uh the creation the early Genesis story Into the Book of Moses right and so Moses is going to receive a lot of this via Revelation from God well Moses lived after Abraham so how is Abraham now getting the information that's given to Moses via Revelation like if these records were passed down wouldn't Moses have it and those are the wrinkles you start to see because of the the kind of like um almost like when you're watching a TV show and they have like these continuity errors and so so long story short Hebrew was not in Lego was not a written language that Abraham would have lived so how is Abraham pulling in texts that originated in Hebrew as if he lived them and that's just basically in a very quick way to say that Abraham could never have written this okay so we're looking for 19th century Clues go go ahead Nemo the the important part of that is that in the um in the header of the book of Abraham it says written by his own hand upon Papyrus so there's no wiggle room to say that it wasn't really him or it was someone else later down the line this was the man Abraham if he existed writing this down according to Joseph Smith himself according to Joseph Smith himself yeah and he told other people in the church that at the time so I think there's one from I want to say wwfl3 mentioned something he says this was written by Abraham's own hand you know it's not part of the book Abraham but he's telling other people like when he's teaching these ideas from book Abraham that it was written by Abraham so like this idea that maybe it wasn't really written by him but Joseph Smith just misunderstood it it's everywhere and so and so to Nemo's Point yeah so Joseph is saying Abraham wrote this down by his own hand upon papyrus in its material that's not even going to be compiled for over a thousand years after he would have lived and we already know the Papyrus dates too long after Abraham would have lived so there's no way he would have written on the papyrus in his own hand because the Papyrus dated to like a thousand years later is that right yeah yeah and that's just it so you know if you look at it from that standpoint there's no way Abraham could have written it and if you look at it from the standpoint of just say for example the Papyrus had all burned up in the in the Chicago Fire we didn't have the source material which we do or at least we have some of it um even if you don't even have that you can look at the text and say there's no way in the world Abraham wrote this because it wasn't even created until a thousand years later so how could he have written it you know and that in the King James Bible style there's no way got it okay this is good I think we have a good foundation let's jump to the global flood and the Book of Abraham yep and so you know we discussed this in our episode on the global flood but the book of Abraham has founded on a literal historical flood which we know just didn't happen and so from the book Abraham it says the land of Egypt being first discovered by a woman who was a daughter of ham and the daughter of egyptus which in Chaldean signifies Egypt which signifies that which is forbidden when this woman discovered the land it was underwater who afterwards settled her sons in it and thus from Ham spring that race which preserved the curse in the land so that's Abraham 1 23-24 and so just to say as we said in the Book of Mormon and the global flood episode if there's no Global flood the entire premise of the book Abraham is immediately false because of the fact that they're finding it underwater After the flood which is why they mentioned that it's spring you know from ham and just as the church could see is that the papyri has nothing to do with Abraham and that the papyri date is almost 200 or 2000 years after Abraham would have lived uh or I think a thousand years between one and two thousand I believe this is a clear example where we could say that the book of Abraham is not historical because the entire introduction to the idea of Egypt is not historical and is also based on a kind of a more modern retelling of This Global flood which is a story that was basically inserted when they redacted Genesis you know again between 800 and 1200 years after Abraham would have lived and and as a side note Egypt does not mean that which is forbidden which is another issue with the text where you could say that that's not correct and I'll just say we'll we'll include a link in the show notes both to our Global flood episode and I did an episode with Simon sutherton in His science versus more mature truth claims about the global flood where we actually Bear on scientists to talk about the global flood and um yeah there's there was never a global flood Nemo unless you talk to Rod Meldrum and Rod Meldrum would say there was because the water receded into the core of the earth and became kind of crystallized ice as the Earth Nemo do you want to add anything about the global flood I always I always struggle because I put my apologist hat on and I'm instantly looking at that text and thinking right okay how can I justify this how can I justify this like for example the River Nile floods and part of Egypt is at the Nile Delta so that land could be described as underwater right so there's all those sorts of things that you know that people are going to go for with this to try and make it make sense but in reality is we're going to see through doing suing slides you can pick at each of those little things and you can try and make each of them work but the overwhelming weight of it all is that it's not historical yeah okay so that's big problem uh let's just say big problem number one the next one is the book of Abraham and the documentary hypothesis that sounds sophisticated yeah and so this we talked about in our episodes about biblical scholarship in the Book of Mormon um but Genesis as we have it today was compiled from multiple sources that were woven together by a redactor into a single uh Book of Genesis so we talked about this before because it's clear if you look at the differing creation stories as well as the two flood stories they have contradictions within them and those come from the fact that they have two different or two depending on who you ask there could be between I believe two and four or five different sources that are pulled into Genesis and so um this leads to contradictions because they're pulling these different sources together but these sources contradict each other and they don't smooth all of those out as you can see just by reading Genesis and looking at the differences and this is a problem for the book of Abraham because of the fact that Joseph Smith is pulling and relying so heavily on the King James Bible Bible and grabbing from Genesis material into the book of Abraham not understanding that the book is using two separate sources to have contradictions with each other and so using the text of Genesis as a writing of Abraham himself is anachronistic because Abraham as we talked about already would have lived around 2000 I believe 1800 BCE as I think the more you know somewhere in that range but they're pulling from two separate sources that both are created long after Abraham would have lived which complicates this whole problem and so um as I mentioned earlier Joseph Smith is calling these the Books of Moses in the Book of Mormon and yet we're told that Abraham who would have lived 700 years earlier than Moses is going to have access to this material which has not been written which even the Book of Mormon States and that's why you have these continuity errors and if you want to say Abraham is a true historical figure and I would say most Scholars would argue that if he was a historical figure it was nothing like he's written in the Bible because of the fact that the stories weren't written down for so long after he would have lived about a thousand years before Genesis was compiled maybe even longer and this becomes even more problematic because of the book of Abraham stating that these records have come into my hands so Abraham is making it explicit that he's working from these records that are like literally coming into his hand uh they're not that are not gonna be written for a thousand years later all right Nemo well I think there's a couple of points here to make Mormons are used to such a tight chain of custody when it comes to ancient scriptures so for example there a lot of people view the Book of Mormon as passed down past down past down past down compiled at the end boom Book of Mormon right the Bible is a lot less neat than that and I think a lot of members almost hold the view that the Bible's just some solidly revealed book of scripture that just came into being one one time you know and and there's not a lot of focus certainly in things like Seminary Institute as far as I'm aware on the actual origins of the Bible and we tend to put it to one side because we have that old scripture about we believe the Bible through the word of God as far as it is translated correctly and so it actually serves the apologist and those who want to defend the church to not refocus on how the Bible came to be because the muddier you can leave that the more you can just play into ah well it's probably not translated correctly or ah well you know we can ignore that because so all that is to say that when we're looking at we're talking about Source materials here we're talking about how did the Book of Genesis actually come to be we know what source materials the modern Book of Genesis we have now came from and that's what Mike is talking about that those are way after this man who supposedly wrote this down Abraham would have lived so that's that is the problem so that we have to remember that the Bible is made from Source texts and it's not got the tight chain of custody the book a Mormon claims to have love it and if you really want to understand this that's why we started by talking about David bakavoy's episode we're also going to show some clips from that in a second but to really dig into this the episode with David bakavoy will help quite a bit yeah and it the documentary hypothesis is very confusing the first time you listen to like even Dr vacavoy talk about it or any other scholar because you know you have um differences in opinion as to how many sources it were so some will say there's complete sources uh like there's the J Source the E Source there's the Priestly Source there's another source that I can't remember off top my head and so there are most Scholars agreed to at least two sources and then some have arguments as to whether or not there's a third Full Source or fragments the point is that really no scholar at this point disagrees with the very simple fact that the books uh the early books of the Bible in in Genesis especially are coming from multiple sources that are being you know basically pieced together and anyone who disagrees with that would then have to address why there are so many contradictions in the two flood stories in the two creation stories uh because those tell you immediately that there are uh two sources with differing um kind of themes and needs that's why like the Priestly sources is you know focused on you know the priesthood and all that stuff and so um that that kind of leads into the clips from from Dr vacoy because they are a little confusing so as you listen to him talk about this it's kind of important just to understand that from a scholarly perspective it's not really even in question now if there's multiple sources it's more or less trying to figure out exactly how thorough the all like three or four or five sources are and if you go back and listen to the episode we did uh on the Book of Mormon um from this sort of angle you'll see that when the parable of the vineyard has a very clear delineation in it where Joseph Smith was drawing from two sources so it's not just the people that put the Bible together they've got this problem Joseph Smith himself when he was compiling The Book of Mormon when he's created in the Book of Mormon Drew from two sources and those contradictions to make that evident yep so go check that out yeah and that and that was one of my favorite things and that was from I think Bill real was the one that first Elise uh or Anthony Miller and Bill real I think were the two that introduced that to me and that's in that episode that we did about you know how was the Book of Mormon composed and it's a great Nemo's making a great point because Joseph Smith is doing the same thing because he's shaking now Joseph Smith is doing it in a way that leaves his fingerprints on it um so you could see where these two sources he's pulling from me kind of understand how halfway through forgets where he's pulling from and pulls from a different area um but this is also something you would expect to see when men are creating these texts because they're trying to you know bring all of these different sources and ideas together into one book and it's really hard to do that without having some contradictions and some wrinkles and so that's why it's confusing but it's really important to understanding the book Abraham all right well let's jump to the Mormon stories clip that comes in two parts where Dr bakavoy uh helps to explain the documentary hypothesis anything you want to say to set this up or should we just roll it no just you know again this is if you're confused by this because it is a little bit confusing we talk about you know the way that these sources are pieced together um I would just say listen to it through and then go back I mean between the two clips it's like three or four minutes um but it will go over it at the end but it makes a lot of sense and it's really important um obviously to the book Abraham all right let's roll it let's roll clip one of David Dr David Bakula explaining the documentary hypothesis problem on Mormon stories podcast beginning with Genesis chapter 11 where Abraham is introduced in a lengthy genealogical list we then jump to the narrative portion and that's I'm looking at it it's in um verses 28 so basically 28 through the end of the chapter verse 32. I'll read that haran died before his father Tara in the land of his Nativity in ore of the chaldees and Abram and nehor took them wives the name of Abram's wife with Sarai and the name of nehor's wife milka the daughter of haran the father of milka and the father of iska but Sarai was Barren she had no child and Tara took Abram his son and lot the son of haran his son's son and Sariah's daughters and daughter-in-law and his son Abram's wife and they went forth with them from Ur of the chaldees to go into the land of Canaan and they came unto haran and dwelt there and the days of Tara were 205 years and Tara died in haran okay so far that just sounds like traditional Old Testament stories that are hard to understand yeah and that's why you know it's just it's important to do the first cup because when you play the second clip it's going to make a lot more sense because they tie together okay so we just roll the next clip yeah just go right in the next one all right um because what I just read to you in that introduction going back to our previous discussion that all stems from the Priestly document notice what happens here Abraham's father takes him out of the land of UR and it already identifies and says Abraham's father is going to take him into the land of Canaan then if we ignore the chapter Division and just move from Genesis chapter 11 right into 12 then we read now the Lord said unto Abram get thee out of thy country and from thy Kindred and from thy Father's House unto a land that I will show thee it's repetition and it's inconsistent because in the Priestly narrative which stems before this in chapter 11 that we just read Abram leaves the land of the Chaldeans he leaves or with his dad who's very much alive and they're leaving and they're going on a journey to Canaan then this next story it tells God speaks to him and says hey get out of the land of UR and leave your dad behind see there's there's inconsistency there but it makes sense when we recognize that the second narrative in Genesis 12 1-2 is from an entirely different historical document edited and compiled together in the Book of Genesis as Genesis 11 and Genesis chapter 12. Genesis 11 stems from the Priestly narrative and this first part of 12 where we have Yahweh mentioned is J or the J Source right now if we jump then to the actual book of Abraham that Joseph Smith produces in Kirtland Ohio Watch What Happens it not only is the story all presented in first person as if Abraham himself is now telling the account Moses yeah unlike the what we see look Moses is not first person right yeah we have chapter two of Abram now the Lord God caused the famine to act sore in the land of ore and so much that haran my brother died and Tara my father yet lived in the land of UR of the chaldees and it came to pass that I Abram ham took Sarai to wife and nahor my brother took milka to wife and was the who was the daughter of haran all of that information right there is a reflection of the Priestly Source in Genesis 11. it's a revision of that but then now here's the J material verse 3 now the Lord had said unto me Abraham get thee out of thy country and from thy Kindred and from my father's house and unto a lamb that I will show thee so notice how those are two different historical documents that contradict one another that have been brought together in the book of Abraham as if it is one single harmonious narrative put into the words of Abraham and that is an illustration of how Source criticism presents direct challenges to the claims traditional claims and assumptions regarding the book of Abraham how could this come from Abraham when we know that these are two separate historical sources written years many centuries after he would have supposedly lived and that's just one illustration of many including the end of the book of Abraham which is going to again present a retelling of the opening chapters of Genesis with the Priestly creation story and then the J creation story as if it's one harmonious text all presented as if it's divine revelation from Abraham all right well that um you know some are going to find that to be kind of Technical and scholarly so Mike and Nemo you guys want to take a stab at explaining to us what we just heard yeah I think it's just saying beginning with that basically Joseph Smith is unaware that Genesis is two different sources and so he's now going to take this redacted text out of Genesis that contains two sources and put it into Abraham as if Abraham is the creator of both sources and I think it shows uh that Joseph Smith is using material that wouldn't be written until I think 1200 years after Abraham would have lived as if it's Abraham's own words even though they are originally written by two different people it just yeah it's very technical and that's why it could be a little confusing but it just shows Abraham could not have written this because he is writing something that we know was written by two different sources and he's writing it as if you know he was the writer of both it's like one of those things where it's just kind of like an impossibility uh to have had happened you know in 1800 BCE when it's not going to be compiled you know for another 1200 years okay Nemo you want anything Joseph Smith took two second-hand sources tried to make them into one first-hand looking source and created a contradiction that proves what he did yes that's a that's a better way of saying what I was trying to say Nemo is way better at being efficient than I am Nemo drops the mic do you want to drop the mic okay all right well let's jump to the next slide which is the first verse of the book of Abraham contains an anachronism so this is the third this is the third sort of problem that we're listing today is that right yeah and this is just you know it it feels a lot like this episode is going to mirror our series on the Book of Mormon you talk about anachronisms in the documentary hypothesis and some other stuff we're going to get into and for the book of Abraham It suffers from all of those problems that the Book of Mormon does or or even the Bible uh as we'll get into but the fact is these things tell us these problems tell us when a text was written or when it wasn't written and so as we talked about earlier one anachronism tells you that a text is not what it claims to be with regards to time and place and so we're gonna get an example for those who don't remember no no God you could go ahead yeah so like if you if someone says oh I found a document written by Abraham Lincoln in 1860 when he was president and it mentions that iPhone you know that it's not uh you know that it's not an authentic document written by by you know Abraham Lincoln because iPhones didn't exist is that an okay example of anachronism yeah I mean basically with the Book of Mormon we have all of the ones we talked about but you know from a Biblical scholarships um standpoint this Isaiah so the Book of Mormon is deuteron Isaiah which isn't going to be written until after Lehi leaves and yet it's in the Book of Mormon on the brass place as if it was written beforehand and that one thing tells you that any material that stems from that is not coming from the time that the source claims it to be coming from and so uh obviously the more obvious example to your point would be like if yeah if there's a a book about the Civil War and how Abraham Lincoln was using uh radio to to um you know go back and forth with the generals or something like that you'd say well that didn't happen it's the same thing here it's just it's harder because we have such an emotional attachment to it to kind of acknowledge that this should not be in there all right should we uh should we read what the anachronism is yeah all right uh let's do it and so this is you know as we talked about Joseph Smith is borrowing so heavily from Genesis which is not going to be written until Abraham's time so really any use of Genesis or the King James Bible in the book of Abraham is already an anachronism um but this is the very first verse of the book Abraham it says in the land of the Chaldeans at the residence of my father's I Abraham saw that it was needful for me to obtain another place of residence and this is you know one of those things we're talking about you know the book is written in the first person just like the Book of Mormon not like the book of Moses I messed that up um which leaves no space for this to be a writing that was done after Abraham would have lived as Nemo would point out earlier when you say it's written by his hand upon Papyrus and now you have it written in the first person you're not leaving space that this could have been written um in Abraham's name you know um 1200 years later when they were compiling Genesis and so it really doesn't allow for the Reliance on the King James Bible but more importantly uh the book Abraham begins with an anachronism that dates the timing of this text of well after Abraham's life because they use the land of the Chaldeans the term Chaldeans is pulled from Genesis chapter 11 verse 28 which states and haran died before his father Tara in the land of his Nativity in or of the chaldees as we talked about before Genesis was not compiled until at the very earliest 1000 BCE because Hebrew was not a written language until this time and Scholars can tell that Genesis was originally compiled and written in Hebrew and this is another quote um from an interview that Dr bakavoy did with radio free Mormon he says caldia was a submit speaking country that existed between the late 10th and early 9th and mid 6th centuries BC after which this country and its people were absorbed and simply assimilated into Babylonia and the description that we find they're both in the book of Abraham and in the Book of Genesis Ur of the chaldees designates ER with southern Mesopotamia and the time in which the Semitic speaking Chaldeans controlled the city-state that city-state and the Chaldeans controlled Mesopotamia and specifically ER and this is interesting but the dates are 626 through 539 BCE and this means that the text from the Bible that refer to this area as Chaldean ultimately derived from that time period so what that tells us is that this part of the text the very first verse of the book of Abraham has to date between 626 and 539 BCE yet historically if it is an actual credible document would have had to been you know well over a thousand years earlier all right Nemo what do you want to add well it's it's just like finding a document that calls India part of the British Empire where you know that it has to be from a certain time because otherwise it would just be India or it'd be whatever else it was called yes it dates it yeah it's the very first verse of the book Abraham tells us the very first verse tells you this is not what it claims to be because it's using a designation that would not come to be for over a thousand years and so right off the bat you already know this is not what it claims to be got it okay all right let's go to uh the um 1834 patriarchal blessing ending up in the second verse can you go back one slide oh there we go even fair yeah even fair admits this is a problem for the book of Abraham yeah and this is just as we said you know when you have a dating issue like this um that comes into play it creates a huge problem that you know it's like you said it's technical it's a little bit more confusing than looking at say the Papyrus translation but the first verse tells you this is not what it claims to be and so um Stephen Smoot had written an article for fair Mormon and he talks about this he says unlike the vague and contradictory details provided in Genesis the book of Abraham appears to ground Abraham's ER in Syria um they added geographical um olashem UL assume we'll talk about that later and cultural details in Egyptian Presence at Abraham's Homeland in the book of Abraham make a northern location for ER essentially inescapable at the same time however problems persist for the book of Abraham for one thing it's text mentioning of the Chaldeans as with Genesis is according to our presently available evidence probably anachronistic perhaps future findings will overturn this but as things stand at the moment this remains a problem for the book Abraham's historicity although not a fatal one Latter-Day Saints approaching the historicity of the book of Abraham should therefore be cautious and nuanced in how they evaluate the text historical claims and just to know um Dr bakavoy theobokoi talked about this and there's no probly about it um the you know the word he's using the word probably here to give a little bit of wiggle room but there simply is none when you look at the use of Chaldeans in a text that needs to be created around 2000 BCE there's no probably this is an anachronism and you know you can argue if it's a fatal one or not from a you know a faith promoting standpoint but from the standpoint of is this text coming from the time of Abraham no it's not because of the fact that the very first verse tells us that yeah if this is if this is only a a pro if this is only probably anachronistic I would love to see what Fair Mormon considers definitely anachronistic yeah yeah for sure yeah okay so fair basically to summarize Fair Mormon which is the Mormon Church's apologetic uh non-profit uh admits the anachronistic problem of uh childhood Chaldeans or of the Chaldeans in the first verse yeah I mean so that's the thing like this is one of those issues where the only way that you can address it and that's what Fair Mormon does is to say perhaps something down the road it's always you always hear that apologetic where it's like well we don't know everything so we can't know anything and and I that drives me insane because of course we we base Our Lives we base decisions all the time not just about church based on what we do know and so this idea that we have to throw all that away to preserve an error in the book of Abraham is to me nonsense but um yeah they're basically saying unless something overturns it it's an it is an anachronism and and so for them to have to concede that I think is important to confirm um what David Bok boy was saying which is that this first verse States the book of Abraham specifically to the time when the Bible was being when Genesis was being compiled which tells you that there's absolutely no chance that this is authentic to Abraham's time yeah okay um all right let's go on now to the next slide which is an 1834 patriarchal blessing ending up in the second verse of what chapter one of book of Abraham this is the very second verse we have the first verse that we just read and now we're now we're just into the second verse which is you know obviously kind of crazy and now the second verse is going to tell us that again this is being pulled from a modern Source um this very uh the second verse is going to take language from a patriarchal blessing that was given by Joseph Smith Senior and compiled by Oliver cowdery um and so I'm going to read you from the book of Abraham first it says um this is verse two and finding there were greater happiness and peace and rest for me I sought for the blessings of the fathers and the right where unto I should be ordained to administer the same having having been myself a follower of righteousness Desiring also to be one who possess great knowledge and to be a great follower of righteousness and to possess a greater knowledge it's a little redundant there and to be a father of many nations a prince of peace and Desiring to receive instructions and to commit keep the Commandments of God I became a rightful Heir a high priest holding the right belonging to the fathers and so now this is uh from a patriarchal blessing that would be given a year earlier we diligently sought for the right of the fathers and the authority of the Holy priesthood and the power to administer the same for we desire to be followers of righteousness and possessors or of Greater possesses or greater knowledge after this we received the high and holy priesthood and so you see all of these similar phrasings um basically where you're you're seeking for the rights of the fathers the blessings of the fathers are you going to be followers of righteousness um Desiring a greater knowledge you see that in both the book Abraham and the patriarchal blessing and so again this is being compiled by Oliver cowdery a year earlier and so um again even fair Mormon concedes in their article about this they say at the outset we'll assume that there is an authorial relationship between the two since a language doesn't appear to be similar Fair Mormon does go on to say that it's unlikely that Joseph had access to this blessing but I would just say the language speaks for itself okay and I guess somebody if they're trying to think up reasons they could say well God just revealed the same sort of text to Joseph Smith or or to the patriarchal blessing that he revealed to Abraham way back in the day I mean that's but I guess Mike you always refer to special pleading as a problem as a sign of a likely problem is that right yeah I mean yeah you could like again it's you know I'm not trying to be facetious here but once you start doing that you are indistinguishable from from fraud to say well it's yeah it's a coincidence that Joseph is pulling into a text that was supposed to be written to you know what 3 800 years earlier or 3 500 years earlier from Abraham a language that his dad wrote down in a book that Joseph's you know secondhand man just happened to compile a year earlier I mean you could say that's a coincidence but I think you know once you start doing that you're just you're in a whole different reality um that really this kind of episode just has no place for because at that point you you obviously and I don't mean to sound uh kind of like I'm not being fair to that standpoint but at that point you don't care about the evidence because you're just going to move it to a place that still can work for you and that's okay if you want to do it I just I there's no way you would apply that same you would give that same room to anything else and so as we talk about that that's engaging in a special plating that I think really stretches um you know any possible amount of you know charity and Common Sense we could have okay Nemo anything you want to add nah that pretty much sums it up if you have to get to that place then you know we've got bigger problems okay yeah all right well let's go ahead and jump to the next issue uh with the text of the book of Abraham which is the use of Hebrew learned from Joshua sexiest is that how you pronounce it I I wish it was I think it's Asia sexually sounds cooler but I think it's Joshua um sorry yeah and and this is a really cool one because this is we talked about in our first episode how most Scholars now date the book of Abraham in two distinct time frames um and Brian hoglet who worked on the Joseph Smith paper project for the book Abraham and he's recently come out kind of against the Appellate the Apologetics that kind of come from that he says I agree with Dan vogel's assessment that only Abraham won uh chapter one through two chapter 18 were produced in 1835 and that Abraham 2 chapter 19 through 521 were produced in Nauvoo and this is really important because this is um going to show us kind of how we can show looking at the text that they're written in two separate time frames because Joseph Smith in 1836 which is between these two Productions began taking uh lessons on Hebrew from Joshua satius and so um Dr Matthew Gray who's a professor at BYU who says the book Abraham translation began in 1835 but as far as we can tell he only finished the first two chapters in that early period then as he studied Hebrew he gleaned insights into additional Abraham material it was then in early 1842 having studied Hebrew that he Revisited the Abraham translation and picked up where he left off it is the later Abraham materials Abraham three four and five and in the facsimile explanations all of which were finalized in Nauvoo that we begin to see Joseph as a translator incorporating the material he had learned in his Hebrew class into his final publication of the book of Abraham and so to put this another way Joseph Smith Begins the first two chapters of the book Abraham in 1835 he's then going to take Hebrew lessons in 1836 and then he's going to complete the book Abraham in 1842. and the reason this is important is because the 1835 chapters and material does not include any of the Hebrew translations that he's going to learn in these lessons but in the 1842 production it's going to be littered with it and so that tells us you know when these materials are produced and that's why when you hear like apologists for the church like John John Gee constantly wants everything to be done in 1835 and I think Karen milstein also kind of has that approach but they need everything in 1835 because they want the um the Gale the Egyptian alphabet and grammar to be basically a retrofitting of the book Abraham text and we'll get into that actually more in the Kinderhook episode on the Kinderhook plates but the text itself is telling us these are being written in two separate uh time frames and that also gives us Clues as to basically um who's writing the text because again if you're going to go Catalyst Theory why do you have material in um 1842 that's not in 1835 because it's what Abraham's taught now what Joseph knows and so these are all fingerprints as to who's the author Behind these texts maybe I misunderstanding things but it just would occur to me very simply that what Joseph Smith's learning you know between let's just 1835 and 1840 whatever should not impact the text of his translation of Egyptian Papyrus into English if he's translating Egyptian you know uh Papyrus into English using the gift and power of God through the gift of you know power as a translator uh yeah whatever he's studying if he's studying math if he's studying sociology if he's studying Linguistics it's shouldn't matter the translation should be a translation what do you think Nemo I I think you're quite right I think we we can't start allowing for Joseph Smith's kind of external influences his secular influences to come into what essentially should be God revealing words to him yeah yeah well exactly well said Nemo okay all right so tell us why uh the use of Hebrew matters in the book of Abraham yeah and so you know this as we've been talking about this is going to tell us that the book of Abraham is written by a modern Source obviously I believe that to be Joseph Smith just because who else would write for it um and can you pull up that slide absolutely read off my phone too sorry yeah there we go um just because like as you both just said Abraham's writings and Abraham's autobiography should not be impacted by Joseph Smith's use of Hebrew that matches Joshua station's exact transliterations especially given that Abraham would have lived before Hebrew was a written language and so um to continue the interview Laura Hales was interviewing um Dr Gray and she says these all included sexiest um sorry satious transliterations and Dr Gray says they did yeah so when Joseph used these Hebrew words he spelled them in ways that he was taught by his Hebrew instructor back in Kirtland with that distinct I'm not sure if I'm saying a Sephardic spelling um and so that tells us that the book Abraham material completed in 1842 contains Hebrew language that Joseph Smith learned after the initial materials written in 1835 but he's using it with the exact transliteration that Joshua satius had used and taught which means it's a form of Hebrew that you know again might not go all the way back to when it was first a written language and so it was kind of like um we you know we talk about we know the Papyrus and the translation is wrong in that sense but this further tells us that the book Abraham had to have been written by Joseph Smith because we can pinpoint now a patriarchal blessing written in 1834 and now we can pinpoint Hebrew transliterations that Joseph learned from a very specific teacher that he had access to in 1836 when the text was being produced so now we have all of these fingerprints that are telling us absolutely this is coming from the 19th century and is in no way an ancient source and maybe I'm misunderstanding it again but I just Googled when did the Hebrew language emerge 10th Century BCE which means that even if Abraham had written you know this stuff on a papyrus he's doing it at a time when the Hebrew language hadn't yet been invented am I am I getting that wrong Mike no that and that's the problem I mean you know that's what I think Dr bakavoy was saying it there is no Hebrew written language record of it until about 1000 BCE and I want to say that there's some evidence that there's um that they believe that it was spoken earlier I think typically language I mean I know this is true languages are spoken before they're written but the point is there is no way that something in 1800 BCE in Hebrew is going to survive 800 years and be written down because obviously we can talk about how a story that's orally dictated uh changes over a few decades like we talked about with the New Testament um and so that's why this just becomes a massive problem when you're trying to make this an autobiographical text when this is not even a language for another 800 years which I don't think Joseph Smith would have known in the 19th century and kind of makes the assumption that it could have been yeah and just for those who are incredulous and Nemo I want to bring you in here I'll just take you to Google the Fountain of all wisdom um you know you type into Google when did Hebrew language emerge 10th Century BCE and then you type in you know when would Abraham have lived it would have been between 1852 and 18 um 72 BCE so this is like a major oversight um Nemo what would you add well I mean there's two points first at that point if you're gonna try and defend that again I'd like to put my apologist hat on you're gonna have to get into the Realms of people like methusa are living for 900 years right that's that's a solution to this just say Abraham lived for 800 years you know apparently everyone else in their dog was living for centuries back then so that's maybe an answer but the other thing is this was this sort of thing was good enough to put Ted Kaczynski away the unibomber right they found him in part because of the way he spoke in his letters his brother recognized it and then they were able to use that to determine who the likely author of these letters were so sorry this isn't just some nonsense where oh well Joseph Smith wrote this way so that why does it matter well it matters because it's been used forensically to deal with uh matters of law what is the well-established way of working out who wrote something why do you have to pick on an American serial killer why don't you do Jack the Ripper or something like that Nemo oh because they never caught you at the Ripper oh okay got it we do it better okay yeah yeah so again Hebrew didn't exist yet when Abraham was writing this and why is stuff Joseph Smith's learning why is stuff that Joseph Smith is learning all of a sudden appearing in this text when the link when the language hadn't even been invented yet as per Abraham's life okay I think we covered that pretty thoroughly yeah yeah I mean it's it's important though because obviously if you're you know if you're going to make the claim that someone's you know alive in a real historical figure writing in an autobiographical sense in a certain language that wasn't even exist it's just it yeah like this is we talk about this with the book Mormon it's like there's problem on top of problem on top of problem yeah yeah and so and I guess and I guess the final point is that Laura Hales one of the you know um I think she passed away recently actually is that right I think she might have yeah so I wanted to speak respectfully of her but Laurel Hales who you know is one of the most prominent Mormon apologists of the past 20 years 30 years she's acknowledging in her conversations with Dr Gray that the church acknowledges everything we're saying okay let's go ahead and jump to the next slide which is Joseph's Evolution on the godhead in the book of Abraham yeah and this is a cool one um just because as we as I've said throughout these episodes that you know to try to tie back in we talked about in our first Vision episode how Joseph Smith is evolving his view of the godhead well this actually factors into the book of Abraham and so um Dr Gray says then finally I think the most profound impact that his Hebrew studies had on the translation of Abraham was in the abrahamic creation account in Abraham chapters four and five Joseph knew before studying Hebrew that the book Abraham would contain creation material in early 1842 when he Revisited or at least finalized the abrahamic creation account it seems that he drew heavily upon the King James version of Genesis 1 and 2. then a key moments he altered the KJV wording and added insights he received in his Hebrew class such as the plurality of gods as a reflection of his translation of the Hebrew word Elohim and this is so much really important because we talked about in the first Vision episode how In 1832 Joseph believed it was just one God and then all of a sudden up I think up until about 1830 536 he was always teaching you know that he was just visited by one one being right well now he's learning through his Hebrew lessons that Elohim means the plurality of gods and and Dr Bok boy talks about this a lot lot in his episodes with you that you know there is this this like counsel of the Gods in Genesis and so all of a sudden Joseph's learning this through his teaching and it's going to be reflected in the book of Abraham and so um just as Joseph Smith changes his first Vision account in 1838 um you can also see in the book of Abraham because you know the first part of the book of Abraham does not have any of this idea of the plurality of gods but the second part written in 1842 does have the plurality of gods and so that is a huge thing that ties in not just to the book Abraham but to the first vision and to all of these things that Joseph Smith is teaching um and then one final paragraph from from Dr Gray says that's category number one in his use of Hebrew his use of Hebrew vocabulary such as the Hebrew word for Heavens I'm not going to try to say that which is and I'm sure or the Hebrew word for the expanse of the firmament or the Hebrew word for stars which is Coco beam I think these are words that Joseph borrowed from his Hebrew studies and used to explain the Egyptian images and so all of the stuff that comes from the plurality of gods and then from explaining these facsimiles is going to come from him learning Hebrew which also to me kind of harms this idea of a catalyst Theory because the Catalyst theory is being impacted greatly by Joseph Smith's you know uh as Russell M Nelson would say in general conference worldly studies yeah and again the Catalyst theory is the idea that Joseph that the Papyrus were given to Joseph Smith to inspire him to channel this scripture as direct Revelation from God Nemo why don't you weigh in here yeah the idea that you know it's it's like what I said um I keep going first down the jokes but it's like what I said to do uh what I say about apologists in that when I asked Stanley jokes for an answer I asked him because he claims to speak to God if what I get back from him is the words of an apologist which is what I got back then that's not acceptable in the same way that if what we get out of a supposed inspired translation a direct translation from God to Joseph Smith if what we get out of that is Joseph Smith's education from some secular man who teaches Hebrew again that's not acceptable because that man wasn't put in a position to reveal those things in the same way that Scott Gordon and fair aren't in the LDS structure the people that should be providing the words from God yeah yep well said Nemo Nemo does a great job of summarizing doesn't he Mike he does he's quick he's efficient and he just cuts right to it which is something I wish I could do better so all right he's got a skill Mike we're fired basically yeah pretty much Nemo you could take over at this point all right okay so yeah um all right so so the Joseph's Evolution on the godhead is definitely uh a problem that's also a problem with the Book of Mormon uh as we discussed earlier because the Book of Mormon of course reflects Joseph Smith's view of the godhead at the time he wrote it and of course his first and of course his first Vision accounts change also with his changing account of the godhead so this yeah just remember oh sorry well you're gonna say Joseph takes these lessons in 1836 and I think he changes the Book of Mormon in 1837 or 38 to make those changes we talked about back in that episode to do mother of the Son of God you know because at that point he is changing his his idea of the godhead so these lessons from Joshua stations impact the book of Abraham but as I've said in these episodes these problems are all tied together so First Vision Book of Mormon all kind of have um issues that stem from the same thing and as Nemo said it's like well is Joshua says just the prophet or is Joseph Smith a prophet because he's basically taking these ideas um and incorporating them and retrofitting them back into the church's scriptures which seems like a problem um and we talked about this a ton in those those earlier episodes because of the fact that he's changing Revelations he's changing scriptures in order to fit his more modern evolution of Theology and we see it here as well and I think you know modern Mormon apologist Terrell Givens would call this you know bricolage or they would say Joseph was an inspired syncretist let's maybe address that at the end of today's episode let's go ahead and jump to the yerman thumb I'm in the book of Abraham what's wrong with that yeah and so this is one you know we've talked about in previous episodes because the earmontheum is a term that's retrofitted um to basically take away the folk magic of the peeps last year stone that Joseph uses to translate The Book of Mormon and so Chapter 3 of The Book of Mormon Begins by stating that and I Abraham had the yerman which the Lord my God had given unto me in or of the chaldees and so as we mentioned already or the chaldese is already anachronistic but the use of urim and thumbum is attempting to make Abraham a seer in the way Joseph Smith claimed to be through his treasure digging days as well as how he translated The Book of Mormon so I don't think this is an accident that he's trying to put this in here to give more credibility to what he's doing and also to allow um the Herman Thermo to be a method in which you can receive revelation but the problem is that the urban thumum is a device in the Bible that is not used to see Visions or Revelations it's a way to get a yes or no response to a question and so to use the air and thumb from the Bible that was never used in this way nor could it ever be um in the book Abraham is an incorrect and it's anachronistic because the urban thumb does not appear in the Bible until Exodus which is written much later and believed to have taken place in the 13th century BCE so the urban thumb is not created or invented yet so from an apologetic standpoint you could say well yerman could be different you know obviously a different uh material device but it just shows that he's using these terms that would not be conceptualized for a long time and not used in that way in until Joseph Smith's time and again if it's one thing you know if it's one problem you can start to say well maybe you know something is an error okay too I mean we're up to five or six and they're all major ones Nemo what do you want to add well you could give him you could give him that I guess that always has to be something that comes along that is the earliest mention of something right so you could give him that actually if if everything else fit you could say oh wow okay before that we'd only ever heard about the Roman Thurman in Exodus which the events of which took place in the 13th century maybe they were around before and we'd never there was no record of them before and now there is because the book of Abraham shows that they're there but the problem is the reason they're in there is because Joseph Smith is seeking to justify his position as a Seer he's seeking to essentially create scriptural precedent for the way he then went about translating ancient records and the way he describes using the urima Thurman is not what the Uma Thurman ever were so that's that means that it is very unlikely that they're there in any sort of genuine way yeah and that's just it so it's almost like in the book of Abraham it's being written as if to bolster Joseph Smith's own use of a peeps Shear Stone to translate records just as Abraham is supposed to be doing to receive Revelation and it just basically is in my opinion uh it's a way for Joseph Smith to both retrofit the terminal and thumb them deeper into the um the scriptures and deeper into the Biblical history but it's also a way to bolster his own credibility it's very self-serving and it's very transparent when you're looking at it from the outside looking in but obviously as a Believer you're just gonna say oh my goodness isn't it amazing that Abraham received Revelation the same way that Joseph Smith did but like you said from Nemo's perspective it's like yeah it's really amazing because of the fact that they're both doing something that we could show at least in Joseph's time you know didn't work because Joseph claimed to see treasure doing the same method that obviously he never found all right okay well if that weren't enough we've got the lovely curse of ham in the book of Abraham which I'm going to guess is super racist because I think it's based on the curse of Cain which we've already covered in our race race and Mormonism episodes but take it away Mike yeah so we won't beat this um Horse Too Much in this episode because we did cover this a lot in the race and the priest that we did two episodes but the curse of ham was used by many and Joseph Smith day to defend the internationalized slavery and um basically this is this idea that dark skin uh was a curse and that God had cursed them and then people then would say well then because of that we're allowed to hold them as slaves and so Joseph Smith kind of uses this idea in the book of Moses which is written in the 19th century worldview which is to say that black skin is a curse and so the curse is basically the the Kane was cursed with black skin and that ham was a descendant of Cain so that the black curse could survive the flood is that that right and continue on there or there's egyptus I mean it's something like that right I think they're different like I think the curse of Kane and the curse of ham are kind of different kind of theories and there's a good Sunstone History podcast on this where uh Christopher C Smith talks about the two of them and Joseph Smith kind of just Blends the two together or at least he kind of kind of jumps between the two I mean for Joseph for Joseph oh for Joseph yeah curse of Kane is the black skin that's in the book of Moses he writes into the Bible that black skin is a curse and then the curse of ham is to say because uh the people of Egypt descend from ham after the global flood they can now hold the priesthood because their Skin's dark which is because they know that people in Egypt have darker skin so it's kind of like trying to address why people in Egypt have dark skin just as we addressed uh why the people in Native America you know and the Native Americans had dark skin so the Book of Mormon says well it's because her ancestors were Wicked and cursed well now for Egypt they're kind of doing the same thing and they're tying it into um the the curse of black skin because in Egypt their Skin's not quite the same as obviously these Native Americans yeah did you already read this slide no okay uh but we'll go through it quick because okay we've talked about a lot it's just to say you know that the curse of ham is a modern idea it's a modern interpretation of these biblical ideas and Joseph Smith is putting it into the book of Abraham which is supposedly written in 1800 BCE and so um you know basically it's it's uh chapter 1 verse 24 and they talk about you know from Ham spring that race which preserved the curse in the land and then uh verse 27 says now Pharaoh being of that lineage by which he could not hold have the right of priesthood and so those are modern concepts of you know dark skin being a curse your curse of ham cursive Kane that's being written into a text obviously what almost 4 000 years earlier yeah so I'm counting at least four problems number one you know that God is running around cursing people that's just not a God I'm super interested in you know worshiping the second that God curses people with dark skin that's obviously a horrendous and a racist teaching um number three uh that that Joseph's blending to separate sort of events or curses into a single one which is actually consistent for the type of um you know activities that Joseph Smith interpretations Joseph Smith would make but then the fourth is that you know this curse of Cain is not actually in the Bible um and so Mormonism is unique in as a Christian sect in that it it writes explicit cursive cane interpreted racism into its sacred books when it's not actually in the Bible so the book of Abraham book of Moses are are writing this curse of King garbage into Holy Scripture and attributing it to God in Jesus and then of course the Book of Mormon has lamanite dark skin as a curse to make Native Americans dark and loathsome to their white counterparts Nemo rescue Joseph Smith we need your help here oh you're muted Nemo unmute yourself sorry I can't rescue Joseph Smith you can't rescue someone that seems just determined at every turn to make their life difficult he he's uh it's a great point about the rest of Christianity because they must just look at us like what are you doing we already have enough bad PR problems with you know with the Crusades and all that sort of stuff um why are you making it worse why are you trying to codify racism it makes no sense and when we talk about anachronisms you know Joseph Smith there was slavery going on and we've talked about this in previous episodes there was slavery going on in the early 19th century uh 19th century Frontier Americans or whoever Southern Americans needed a justification cursive Kane emerges as a way to justify the subjugation of black people who came from Africa and so of course it's swimming in Joseph's mind so of course he's going to be writing in it's a clear tell just like in poker someone has to tell the fact that that this is a issue that Joseph Smith would have been swimming in and all of a sudden he writes it in the Scripture it Mike it's kind of a tell isn't it it's kind of tell of when this is all written no I mean that's the problem we talked about that with the Book of Mormon episodes like there are so many ideas that are uniquely 19th century that make it into these ancient texts and it anyone who's reading this without the predetermined conclusion that this is like from God is going to look at this and go why are there 19th century ideas in these writings that are supposedly written thousands of years earlier and the Book of Abraham is going to take something that is a very modern idea of the curse of ham I mean we're talking 4 000 years earlier it just it makes no sense they didn't have the same concepts of race and of of all of that that we do today you know and and even a thousand years ago so four thousand years ago it's just like like Nemo said you can't rescue Joseph Smith on this because he's every time he's incorporating these these ideas that are are Hot Topic issues of his day um it leaves a giant fingerprint that says this was written in the 19th century yeah and it's you even go back to like you look at the church's position on slaves and on slavery and it flip-flops depending on where they're living at the time and who the people are around them you know they're in a they're in a a more pro slavery area all of a sudden the church will start to push towards slavery they're in a anti-savory anti-savory area all of a sudden they'll start to become more liberal so and as I understand it it's it's factual the Brigham Young received slaves as tithing is that right he did at least once yeah yeah yeah yeah okay so uh man this is this is the book of Abraham is not looking great and we're not even talking Egyptian right now okay so let's uh let's go to the slide that says apologetic hits the quote hits close quote in the book of Abraham Human Sacrifice uh what I'm guessing you're going to say here is that there are some things that Mormon apologists have interpreted as being tells of of ancient um you know of hints of ancient writings that they've sort of uh interpreted from the text of the book of Abraham is that right yeah and so basically we're going to go through what the essay gives us their best evidences and it this is one of those things that drives me a bit insane because the church in their essay will constantly say we don't really rely on worldly evidence we don't really rely on secular uh facts but then they try to then give them to you anyways and I I just find the whole process like we talked about in the last episode with the Apologetics on the translation it's just this will go through these are very bad arguments that are being stated as if they're you know more solid and so this first one is one and and this is a really important one because this is uh from Carrie molstein's kind of um writings and he said and the church's essay says the book of Abraham speaks disapprovingly of human sacrifice offered on an altar in chaldea some victims were placed on the altar as sacrifices because they rejected the idols worshiped by their leaders recent scholarship has found instances of such punishment dating to Abraham's time uh people who challenged the standing religious order either than Egypt or in the regions over which it had influence such as uh Canaan uh could and did suffer execution for their offenses and so this is an argument from Kerry molstein and as we talked about earlier in our last episode you know he he admits to starting out with the assumption is true and then basically fitting any evidence into it and in this case he's basically going to use his own the essay is going to use his scholarship to say that this is some sort of of a consensus argument that there really was human sacrifice in the way that the book of Abraham portrays it in Abraham's time I'm hearing audible gasps from Nemo so Nemo there's a blatant like conflation of terms there he starts by saying oh Human Sacrifice is legit because some people were executed for crimes but that's not human sacrifice nope that's execution that's capital punishment like every time someone's given a lethal injection on death row is that a human sacrifice no it's it's capital punishment do different things yeah yep and I'm glad you said that because our next our next slide is gonna be Dr uh Robert rittner addressing this very point and uh channeling his inner Nemo the same side as Robert written yeah well you do represent the British museum after all exactly I uh I was gonna say I do remember this exchange with doctor with the late and great Dr Robert Ridner yeah so let's go ahead and I'm glad we get to include him in this episode me too bear Kerry wrote his dissertation on this very topic and he was very careful to describe these as political executions rather than human sacrifices so he walked a careful line that passed muster with egyptologists he did not prove that there was Human Sacrifice he in fact just pointed these out as being human as as being political execution you have examples of a text which John Gee also references in this podcast of a Sila of King nephrotep of the Middle Kingdom in which it is which boundaries are being set up for a temple Precinct and it is said that anyone who trespasses any any uh bureaucrat who priests who trespasses into this estate and would tend to take away some of its assets would be burnt now that is a statement of what would happen for committing a crime if you invade the temple Precinct and plunder its resources you will be burned it's a death penalty for committing a crime this is not for failing to worship the gods or failing to respect what a deity or a ritual it's if you commit a crime there will be capital punishment that is not sacrifice and yet this is the kind of example they want to choose this is like saying if you kill someone and we hang you for it it's a human sacrifice if that's the way you want to under understand it fine any execution could be taken in a religious way and given a connotation like we execute people now is that human sacrifice for some you would say yes but it's a question of is this how the Egyptians are understanding it and the answer is certainly not they're putting to be they're putting to death for criminal purposes there is also a recently excavated area in the Delta the northern part of Egypt during the time of political turmoil where a large number of bodies have turned up that are again probably the result of Warfare it's been argued to be Mao Massacre a Slaughter of captives but that's in Warfare is that human sacrifice I don't think so during the course of War people are killed yes you can say that's to the benefit of a deity or the or the country but that is not what is typically understood as human sacrifice it's military activity so all of the examples that they like to point to that are so-called recent recent ones are in fact either criminal public punishment or military activity it's not a question of human sacrifice on an altar there's no altar that's been found at this site in the Delta there's no altar that is found in mirgisa there is no altar found adjacent to the nephrotep Stila so all of that is smoke and mirrors and confusion of terms and attempting to juggle anything in order to make it all make sense but the bigger question is so what if the Egyptians practiced Human Sacrifice would the Egyptians have practiced human sacrifice in North Syria where they didn't have any physical control would they have looked like that on that illustration which we know is doctored and therefore cannot be an illustration of it so it's not a question of finding one little thing that might work you have to make all the pieces fit and that is the continual problem with the apologists is they find one small aspect which if you squint your eyes and look you know slightly to the left you can say Well it sort of looks like this but then it doesn't fit the entire picture because you're asked to ignore all of that and you can't ignore all of it if it's if the story is true then all parts of it have to be true not just one aspect of one picture or or two lines an attack and the trail to do is present a complete picture if you don't show all your work and explain all the details then you cannot have a defense and they never do that and the reason is they don't have the facts and no amount of no amount of apologetics until the end of the universe will produce facts that never were don't exist he's such a legend Nemo what's it like to have Robert redner quoting you he basically quoted you I am not worthy to stand in that Man's Shoes um I think something he did say though that was really interesting was what is commonly understood and that is an area your apologists will twist and bend to their hearts content they will take what everyone else understands and what Joseph Smith would have understood at the time human sacrifice to mean and they'll change it they'll change it to mean something else well actually what does this really mean and they'll take you down that little rabbit hole away from the main issue into the definition in the minutia of the definition of words and that's the problem Mike no I just you know we we talked in our last episode about how Kerry molstein and John Gee and the church they use their academic credentials to push them as if what they're telling members about the Theology of the book Abraham and the history of the Mormon church is somehow backed by their scholarship and what Dr Ridner laid out so well is that Kerry milstein did do research showing um these executions in Egypt but in his dissertation he never mentions any tie to Abraham he never mentions that it's a religious thing he's trying to write this article to show I have found these instances where people were executed and then he turns around he takes that and turns it into the church and says oh by the way this proves book Abraham when they're completely separate and it's a word game um that's being used here as Nemo said earlier to say execution equals uh you know sacrifice trying to sacrifice Abraham no possible way and so this is an area where I and I know a lot of people get upset if we say that that people are lying because it has like a loaded kind of intention to it but I really feel like this is an area where apologists know what they're doing they know the games they're playing and they are willing to do it and the church is willing to push it to their members in order to maintain maintain faith in something that has been proven incorrect by every field of studies we're showing in these episodes it's just it really just is insulting to the intelligence of the members to not present them with the information and say Here's what really is going on do with it what you want we still find Value in it we hope you do too but then the the apologists are doing essential Joseph Smith did with the urim and Thurman the Joseph Smith had a position that he had to try and defend his position was I translates the Pokemon with Europe and so what he did was he created a document where the urman thumb in featured and he was using that as justification then for his position the apologies do the same thing Kerry milstein creates a dissertation which he which includes events that he then uses to justify the position of the book of Abraham in saying that that there was Human Sacrifice it's it's the same pattern again yep that's a good point yeah and I think we also need to just uh highlight what's going on here when you see a true Egyptian scholar just kind of look at this everything he says just drips of the Ridiculousness of this entire conversation from a scholarly academic perspective but what the church has done since you Nibley is hire these PhD level egyptologists who who are told you don't necessarily have to provide good answers you just need to provide answers and because you have a PhD in egyptology and because you speak gobbledygookt that the average Mormon won't be able to understand or have the time or the training to be able to understand they're just going to see oh Carrie molstein PhD egyptologist mouth is moving words are coming out uh he's faithful he knows Egyptian therefore I don't need to worry about um you know this book of Abraham problem because Kerry molstein says that he found a hit and I can kind of not worry about this anymore and that is the that I don't want to call it a game but that's the I don't want to call it on but that's the I mean that's that's what's going on here how's that I mean that that's what members have been taught to do members are taught to defer their critical thinking to an an outer source and so the church is creating and setting up these sources and telling people or implying to people that you can just defer your critical think it's them because they're smart men and they've worked it out yep and that's just it because then you'll go to the church and you'll say I'm having a problem with the book Abraham they'll say have you read Karen molstein's work and they'll say because he's an egyptologist he studied all this so you don't have to worry about it and here's what he came up with and the problem is like in this particular instance and Dr rittner called it out exactly for what it is he's using I'm going to call it word games because he knows by saying execution that does not mean religious sacrifice but he's going to present it to the scholarly Community as execution which is what it was but then he's gonna turn around take that same scholarship and put it in the church's essay to say recent scholarship has shown that during Abraham's time they were doing these kind of sacrifice and that's not at all um what we're seeing and so they're trying to um you know they're they're trying to have it both ways by by telling the members these people like you said John these people have degrees and they know way more about this than you ever will and they have faith in it so why don't you and it's just it's it's a really um disingenuous approach and I I just this is these are the things that drive me nuts because it's it's all the more painful uh for believing members once you finally cut through all this nonsense and realize not only is the church been misrepresenting what the book Abraham is but the people the church is sending out in 2022 are misrepresenting it and the church knows that on some level they are using their scholarship to push you know bad um historicity of of these topics yeah and we always have to keep going back to calling attention to that molstein quote where he admits secretly in a secret meeting basically in a private meeting that that they begin with the assumption that the church is true and then cherry pick and gather evidence to to to prove their you know their original assumption and um you know it's just like cigarettes come with a big warning label saying warning you know cigarette smoking can cause cancer every little literally every word that comes out of John Gee or Carrie molstein's mouth regarding the book of Abraham should have a big warning saying warning these dudes are using scholarship to justify beliefs um counter counter to the prevailing uh consensus of the science that they pretend to represent yeah what he said was I start out with an assumption that the book of Abraham and the Book of Mormon and anything else that we get from the restored gospel is true therefore any evidence I find I will try and fit into that Paradigm yeah and that's just not science that's nuts and that's a Deseret News article I'll get that to you you know what I'm description I've got the I've got the video in two slides so we'll see that in this oh okay cool yeah I want to throw we did in the last episode but I want to put in here again just because I think it's such an important quote to understanding as we look through these apologetic hits that the essay produces kind of the approach that the people behind the essay are putting into it as you know as they're coming up with them all right well let's jump to the next slide which is another source for the idea of the sacrifice of Abraham yeah and this one is one that kind of blew my mind because one of the things that's interesting about uh you know recent kind of scholarship Into the Book of Mormon is that the um link between the Adam Clark Bible commentary in the Book of Mormon or I'm sorry in the Joseph Smith translation of the Bible was found which shows that Joseph Smith was leaning heavily upon Adam Clark's Bible commentary when he was making revisions to the Bible and that was being done about 1831 which is like three like four years before the book of Abraham and this is a really interesting um thing from the Adam Clark Bible commentary it says be cast into the midst of a burning fiery furnace this was an ancient mode of punishment among the Chaldeans and if we may credit the tradition that Abram was cast into such a fire by this idolterous people because he would not worship their idols I mean does that sound does that sound familiar and so the essay is going to try to make it sound like oh yeah there's this recent scholarship showing that this was done well where do you think Joseph Smith might have learned this because we now know from recent scholarships that Joseph Smith leaned heavily on the Adam Clark Bible commentary so now four years later we're gonna have this idea that Abraham was was cast Into the Fire you know for not uh worshiping their idols and we find out it's in a commentary that Joseph Smith used heavily a few years earlier and so when the church says this idea was unknown to Joseph Smith and to be fair when the essay was written this this link wasn't really well known but right there you have exactly where the idea would have come in the Joseph Smith's head um because Adam Clark is telling him this was an ancient traditional belief about Abraham so not only do we have Joseph Smith again getting it wrong with the book of Abraham based on true Egyptian Scholars we we know the source and we know the Adam Clark commentary and we know that Joseph Smith had access to that but because he used it in his Joseph Smith translation of the Bible Nemo what do you want to add nothing to add really other than the Adam Clarke commentary is the single biggest like nail in the coffin to a lot of what Joseph Smith did and I will uh I will include my my interview with Haley right isn't that her name yeah the BYU student that is the one who who came up along with her professor uh kind of the source for Joseph Smith's uh translation all right well this is uh this is actually the next clip we're going to show is actually a conference that I attended it was this conference at Utah State University where all these faithful Progressive Mormon Scholars uh realize that they have a pickle uh where Joseph Smith is called a translator given the power of translation in the Doctrine and Covenants he he tells everyone he has the power to translate gift and power to translate and yet they can't find an accurate translation in any of the scriptural texts that he allegedly translated and so what they have to do is figure out new meanings for the word translation but in that conference uh Richard Bushman I believe makes the quote that you're about to read is that right yeah and so this is just you know I know we're kind of in the middle of the or just kind of starting the Apologetics but I want to cover this because this is where Richard Bushman who is one of the prominent uh historians in the Mormon Church um obviously he wrote rough Stone Rolling um he's going to concede that what Joseph Smith is doing with the book of Moses with the book of Abraham is creating pseudopigrapha and um that is basically in a really simplified way it's writing in someone else's name to give credibility to it so it's like if I wanted to um write something today about American history and I know nobody would read it I'd say this is the Lost writing of George Washington that I found to present uh an idea about the founding of America that I wanted to get pushed to the public but that they wouldn't read if it was in my name so pseudopigrapha is doing the same thing in in Joseph Smith in this case is going to use Moses for the book of Moses and Abraham for the book of Abraham because it gives it a much more um scriptural Foundation that people will more readily believe as opposed to Joseph Smith saying hey I just received this Revelation about Abraham's life and um I think it's really important because this is the conclusion that I think most Scholars are coming to today where they say Joseph was a co-author in a lot of ways it's kind of confirming Richard Bushman here saying that Joseph Smith is engaging in pseudopigrapha all right let's uh let's roll the clip this is again this is Richard Bushman Harvard graduate Columbia professor of History very well respected also Mormon church stake president and patriarch author of rough Stone Rolling that the church sold at Deseret Books admitting that I mean I I almost like to think of pseudopigrapha as as plagiarism or fraud just injected back into a historical figure that's already died basically claiming it's it you know it's not plagiarism but it's basically writing like you said Mike claiming something is is the writing of a well-respected historical figure when it's really just your own fan fiction that you write today let's hear let's hear Richard Bushman kind of acknowledge that in in the case of Joseph Smith in the book of Abraham from a modern scholarly perspective Moses along with a later translation of the book of Abraham looks less like a translation of the Bible than a major variant on the second major translation project in the 19th century the recovery and Analysis of pseudopigraphy these scripture-like texts now numbering in the hundreds were taken seriously during the first centuries of the Christian era when they jostle for inclusion in the Christian and Jewish canons there will want to be scriptures didn't quite make the grade but still hung around in various forms these are writings that had a Biblical ring echoed and echoed biblical themes but for reasons both theological and political did not make it into the Canon the Bible as we know it they were called to the pigrafa because they often contended to be authored by a Biblical figure and spoke in that's prophet's voice so the actual author of the writing was unknown they had names like the apocryphan of Seth the inquiry of Abraham The Testament of job the apocryphon of Ezekiel Joseph Smith's book books of Moses and Abraham and the writings of Enoch in the book of Moses bear a resemblance to this large Corpus of scriptures in that they came in the form of writings in another person's name Joseph was producing pseudopigraphoot in the very time when Scholars were taking these writings seriously again in the third and fourth centuries of the Christian era after the Canon settled in and revived in the Renaissance as part of the turn to Antiquity for wisdom and science over the course of the 19th century translation and study of pseudopigrapha became a major scholarly in endeavored and I just I'm just gonna say like first of all the sign on that table says New Perspectives on Joseph Smith in Translation I mean that's just that speaks volumes that they're having an academic conference with that title but I'm just I'm sitting there at that table I remember seeing Rosalind Welch and Jenna Rhys and Terrell Givens and Sam Brown and I think that was Jared Hickman really smart people that are smarter than me super well respected and I'm I'm hearing Richard Bushman basically say that Joseph Smith was making stuff up and just attributed to Abraham he's basically admitting this and they just like look like they're sleeping and I I look around and I'm like you know news flash world dude Richard Dr Richard Bushman just called the book of Abraham pseudopigrapha and everybody was basically asleep I remember when it came out on Reddit and everybody was talking about it but I guess because suda pikova is a fancy word and because all these academics are sort of cloaking everything they're saying in this in this fancy academic language and none of it's ever going to penetrate Mormon consciousness yeah but I I mean I have a I hear something slightly different when I hear him saying that what I hear him saying is that it is his contention is that the book of Abraham is a genuine ancient text or the writings thereof but they weren't written by Abraham uh it's an authentic text it wasn't written by Abram but because the author is unknown therefore Joseph Smith called it the book of Abraham and said Abraham was the author because that's who it was about that's what I'm hearing as his justification and his comparison to other texts but that doesn't work because Joseph Smith said at the beginning that it was written by the hand of Abraham upon Papyrus while he was in land of Egypt so that then is Joseph Smith not telling the truth or making things up as you said if that isn't actually true if that's just him creating false attribution to Abraham yeah I guess I guess Nemo first of all thank you for that clarification I'm I I know I'm technically technically getting it wrong there but as we've shown there's so many anachronisms in 19th century artifacts that it's it's it's got to be Joseph Smith that's writing this this Revelation not some unnamed uh mysterious historical figure and to the point Richard Bushman has to know this right if if we know it Richard Bushman knows it Am I Wrong of course yeah yeah no and and so like I said we know it and and that's the next step is then to go okay well then is it a genuine answer text and that's what we're doing now um but I think that's where he's trying to push the argument I guess but like you said he then knows that that doesn't have legs because all you then have to do is look at all the other anachronisms all the other problems it falls apart anyway and even if it wasn't written by Abraham it's just not an ancient text and disappointingly this is just transparently motivated reasoning it's it's literally early Richard Bushman doing what Kerry molstein tells us he does it's basically saying well this book has to be true it can't be that Joseph just got it wrong it can't be that he said it was a translation but it's not a translation so we're gonna have to redefine the word translation but also clearly Abraham couldn't have written it so some other mysterious character must have written it that's all motivated reasoning and it's just shoddy poor scholarship and Richard Bushman is more of a man smarter a man better scholar than I'll ever be but I just can't help but see this as very disappointing uh Mike am I being too harsh people don't like it when I'm harsh because Richard Bushman is so loved and he's so brilliant right well I I mean I I think it really falls under the same quote that we're going to hear in the next slide but I think Richard Bushman to what Nemo was saying is he's saying these are clearly not written by Abraham but I also believe they're inspired and so he I mean I can't put words into his mouth but I think was right and then he would probably say something along the lines of this is an ancient core that God is giving to Joseph through Revelation that's being attributed to Abraham even though Abraham didn't write it and and to your point John I I just I don't think anyone would give that kind of space to anyone else and so to give that space to Joseph Smith because it is so uncomfortable to come to the conclusion the other way and say if he's making up the book of Abraham and the book Abraham has the same problems as the Book of Mormon then I don't think he's a prophet of God I mean obviously that's the road you go down once you start to realize that this isn't what it claims to be you either have to say well Joseph Smith wasn't a prophet and oh my goodness I've been believing in a church that's not true by its own truth claims or you have to say how do I make this okay and I think that that Richard Bushman in a way is is doing uh what he probably thinks is is the best way for him to reconcile in his head how Joseph Smith could get it wrong but also get it right which obviously the three of us are not doing because we're not going to engage in that kind of special pleading to bridge the gap between Joseph Smith getting it wrong and how do we make it plausible yeah to put another way if John Delan or Nemo or Mike of LDS discussions were to claim to have produced scripture based on translation of an ancient text and it was problematic for all the same reasons there's no way Richard Bushman and Kerry most team would be making these arguments to rescue us from from the and I literally an identical scenario they would never be making these arguments and that's a special pleading right yeah and I've told the story before I think in some of these episodes but I ran into this with some believing members um we were talking about politics and it's not important who it was or what it was it was the same thing where they were saying they can date when this particular politician was making these claims and now they can date earlier when they were making different claims we now know they were lying and I was like you're right that's true and the next thing I want to say is now apply that to to your own church because if you do that you'll realize within about five seconds that everything falls apart um but the the difference is they're willing to engage in special pleading for for Mormonism because they've been raised in it they would never agree to it for that particular politician because they didn't like them and so it really does come down to how much how much do you really need this to be true and and that's going to tell you how much you're willing to kind of bend the rules of reality to make it work and I think Richard Bushman is well-intentioned by all accounts he's a really nice guy but yeah I mean he's he's putting a spin on this that he would not put on literally anyone else who's making a claim that is so easily falsified as Joseph Smith Nemo uh should we get you in here anything you want to add I mean Richard Bushman wouldn't come to my defense you know like he he just wouldn't dive in uh this is the problem you have like with all these the meetings of you know BH Roberts and all that sort of stuff where even when one of their own even when someone that they all respect and someone that they would like in other ways step up to defend when he is challenged in their fundamental beliefs they they can't get past the need for the the a priority position that Book of Mormon is true gospel is true yeah that like so I'm just what I'm saying about ba Roberts is even take us out of the equation if it's someone like him we know that even when he came to the other church leaders his contemporaries his peers and said here's the problems they couldn't they couldn't special plead on his behalf yeah all right yeah and that takes us to that takes us to the quote that we've been referencing now several times that we referenced in a previous episode The Kerry molstein admission do you want to talk about this set it up so we we showed this in the last episode and since we're kind of getting into all these apologetic hits now I just wanted to play this again for anyone who missed it or if you kind of forgot kind of what he's saying because you need to think about this quote as we talk about these apologetic hits because when you listen to this quote think about what we talk about with human sacrifice and how Kerry molstein is basically jamming whatever evidence he can find in his kind of academic background into the conclusion the theological conclusion that the church is true and I think as John said this this clip should be should be posted at the beginning of every article he writes for church uh magazines or you know I think he wrote a book for Desert books called like so let's talk about the book of Abraham because most members are not going to understand that karamulson is using his academics to push theology which is not how scholarship should ever be done and yet he's going to admit this in a conference a fair Mormon conference well yeah and my point is this shouldn't be included in everything Terry Kerry molstein says but the Richard Bushman says that you know Rosalind Welch uh you know Spencer fluman and and you know of course they they may say different things at different times but I just think this is this applies to the whole lot of faithful Progressive uh Mormon Scholars so let's uh even the ones we love so let's go ahead and play it and so I start out with an assumption that the book of Abraham and the Book of Mormon and anything else excuse me that we get from uh the restored gospel is true therefore any evidence I find I will sorry there's a little bit of caching there Brian fit into that Paradigm I don't feel that I need to defend that Paradigm I feel that I want to understand the evidence that I find within that Paradigm because to me it's a given that it's true yeah and that's just not how science and scholarship work seems legit yeah yeah I mean it's just it yeah we we covered it last episode it's just so in and the truth is what he's saying here is actually a really good thing because it is giving people that are listening to them that knowledge at the beginning but that's the point is the essay doesn't start out with this quote the church's book Abraham actually just stood out with the you know and obviously we assume that the Mormon church when they put out an essay is going to write it what the assumption is true but when they start to cite research and they start to start to cite egyptologists they need to say egyptologists that start with the conclusion the book of Abraham is true trust us on this as opposed to you know all of the other egyptologists and I'll tell you this is absolute nonsense and so it's just it's such a disingenuous um approach to take when you're using your academic background to push theology yeah all right I think we I think we successfully made the point yeah so um let's go on to uh more apologetic hits for the book of Abraham this is one of our FM's favorite I think uh olashem yeah this is this is one you hear all the time to to say the book of Abraham has an ancient core and we know that because they describe holishem so from the church's essay they say the book of Abraham contains other details that are consistent with modern discoveries about the ancient world the book speaks of the plane of olishim a name not mentioned in the bible an ancient inscription not discovered and translated until the 20th century mentions a town called ulisum located in Northwestern Syria and so this is often cited by um John Gee who's an egyptologist who works for the church as a bullseye for the book of Abraham but it is not only problematic but it's impossible for it to be a true connection between the book of Abraham and the ancient world because as we talked about in our earlier slides Joseph Smith puts Abraham in a Southern location but the UL assume referenced as ancient proof is in Northwestern Syria so right off the bat the location is going to tell us that these two are not connected um that that's that's it in the argument right there but the language is a bigger problem and this is something again from from Dr David bachvoy because he says the word ulisum is Acadian and this presents very basic problems for the this connection that church apologists would absolutely be aware of when they're presenting it as a bullseye and what Dr bakavoy says is that the transliteration of ulisum from the original cuneiform tablets would read as ulisium there's no sh sound in there there's no sh and furthermore there's no o sign in Acadian making it impossible that olishim would be represented by the Acadian word ulisum and so basically the location tells you it's not it'd be like you know if someone said I found this ancient text and they foretold us of a place called uh non-knock something and someone says oh that sounds like New York City and then all of a sudden you realize that the ancient text puts you know is located in Florida and you're like well that doesn't work because you're thousand you know over a thousand miles away and this is an instance where the location's bad and the um word in no way could could work to only shim it just it doesn't work okay um should we go to the next slide or demo do you want to wait wait in here that's fine okay yeah so let's hear so this next slide is talking about even John Gee knowing that the old old Hashem connection is weak at best should we just yeah and so just to intro you know this is like the entire premise of including only Shem um to ulisum is um from John Gee um this was confirmed by Brian hoglet in his interview with rfm that this is something that John Gee pushed to be in the essay and so when you dig into John Gee's own statements about this connection he's way more tentative than the essay would what would like to tell you and so John Gee at one point says at present given the many uncertainties we can regard this identification of ulisum being the actual only shim as promising but not proven which obviously is a way of saying it's not what it is but you know it's out there but this clip that we're going to show you is from another interview um that he gave in response to some recent scholarship by Brian hoglet and Dr rittner about the book of Abraham and so he did they kind of got this out I think this is Book of Mormon Central um and they got this out pretty quick after all of the Dr rittner interviews and the Brian hogler that all kind of happened around the same time in 2020 and so they kind of rushed this interview out to try to answer some of this and so this is the clip of Dr uh of John Gee talking about um the olisham ulyssum connection I just want you to listen to kind of how he how he parses this all right let's roll the tape geared up and there's been uh if you look at this place in the in the scholarly literature among the cuneiform Specialists there's a lot written on it and but this is an actual place name and we they debate about exactly where you're going to find it and archaeologists debate and so someone of them said yeah I think I've discovered and another one says no I don't think you did and these are both archaeologists on the same deck their their teammates but they don't agree on that interpretation they literally don't even agree on where they're digging on on the name of it the name well that's because they haven't found the name they know the they know the site they're digging and one of them says I think it's this place and the audience is no I think it's this place it's mentioned in the literature and um and but if they do find the place and you've actually got an archaeological site what does this tell you about um about the book of Abraham so while I was cautiously optimistic when this first came out and although I don't think that they've I think it's unlikely that it that that's the correct location the mere fact that you've got a location and learning about that particular location let me see certain things about the text of the book of Abraham that I hadn't seen before okay so Mike what do you want us to glean from that okay this one I don't I this one blows my mind because he's basically saying I don't think they're digging in the right place we don't actually have a place but the idea that there might be a place gives me more insight into the book of Abraham it's the most ridiculous argument especially when you then turn around and look at how the book of Abraham essay makes it sound like this is a hit and John Gee when he's pressed about his disc is saying I don't think they're digging in the right place we don't even have a place nobody can agree on where it might be but the fact that we might have a place is it makes me think it's like that's like the most like it'd be like if you're a believer in unicorns and you've read about some people looking for unicorns out in uh Washington uh the Seattle area and then it turns out that they were just full of crap and then your response is look they're not looking in the right place for the unicorns but the fact that there are people talking about there might be unicorns out there gives me more faith in unicorns and I realized how facetious that sounds but that is the approach he's taking which is to say I'm calling this evidence in the essay but now I'm going to say it's not really in the right place they don't even know where they're looking but just the fact that they're looking gives me more it's so disingenuous and so I guess for me the takeaway is look at that listen to that clip compared to how the essay frames it as such a more solid ground and then ask yourself why is the essay making it sound so solid when when they're pressed in an interview they can't really give you um anything that that even comes close to that same kind of um surety that the essay does if you want to add Nemo just that his tie even his tie is dishonest um if you look at his tie it has got the same symbols on that they use the church uses in the now you know videos to represent the writing on the Book of Mormon even though we have the characters document even though we supposedly know what the symbols in the Book of Mormon look like the church has now got to the point where they're trying to hide that because the uh the Tanners just pulled that apart so they've invented this new little set of scratchy looking symbols and that's what's all over his tie so I'm sorry that kind of distracted me I'm almost that's a great catch because that was one we talked about in one of the episodes of show um we talked about the characters document that the church knows how ridiculous Joseph Smith's uh reformed Egyptian characters are that when they produce the video uh in 20 2019 I think um in two different videos yeah they changed the they changed the characters that they actually had to fake ones to make it look more realistic which again tells you the church knows that these cannot pass the smell test with like literally anybody and so when they present these videos now on on YouTube that are produced by the church not by some apologists they change it so that's actually a really good catch I know it's not quite book Abraham but yeah that's a good catch there yeah it's just that no no swearing yeah I would never never notice that so that's a good catch all right uh let's let's go to the next slide where we're going to hear Dr Robert Ridner addressing uh the olashun problem a little bit Yeah and this is an interesting one because um just to set this up you know John and other apologists like as I said they keep clinging to this uh ulyssum word to try and find something but um to make olishen possible and then therefore give an ancient connection but as we talked about it doesn't work for the language it doesn't work for the location but additionally only Shem has mentioned in Abraham 110 and it says even the think offering of a child did the priest of pharaoh offer upon the altar which stood by the hill called Potiphar's Hill if the head of the plane at olishim and so not only is only made up word but its inclusion and the Book of Abraham connects it with Potter's first Potiphar's Hill which is a massive anachronism and as we've been talking about throughout this episode Scholars State the writing of the pentateuch to the sixth and fifth centuries BCE but they note that it could not have been written before the 10th Century BC as we talked about because Hebrew was not a language then Potiphar's Hill is another example of why Scholars can date this material to those centuries and from that point I'll let Dr rittner explain why that is all right let's roll the tape of course you've got to understand that according to the basic fundamentalist worldview that Joseph Smith had it was Moses who wrote Genesis and therefore Abraham coming after Moses would be able to reference it chronologically it's only when uh Studies have developed to the point that they have now that we can see that that doesn't really make sense on a regular timeline yeah that was the same argument is applicable to the Book of Exodus and for phrases and terms that are in the book of Abraham specifically the name potiphar which comes out of the book of Exodus and is in the Joseph story you have in the book of Abraham a reference to the so-called Hill of bookfar potiphar is an Egyptian name that is only occurring in the later period Post New Kingdom what year is that Post New Kingdom 800s 600s somewhere in there what I'm telling you now is that Scholars have to date The Book of Exodus it had to have been composed no earlier than 700 BC because it has anachronisms in there that couldn't have existed no egyptian would have been named potiphar before though what we call the Libyan period in Egypt which is one of my periods of specialization the Berber period in Egyptian uh pot potifar is the one whom puree has given and that has a grammatical construction that wasn't possible and wasn't used as a personal name until around 700 BC and so it's a distinctly Egyptian name it's in the distinctly Egyptian place and it's grammatically only possible at this time period like the script which means there is not a chance same level of absolutely wrong that the book of Exodus can date from a patriarch who lived at the time it claims okay yeah it's always not great to have Dr Robert Ritter on the opposing side um Nemo anything you want to say about that it's just it's pretty unequivocal isn't it that like that when you get the etymology of a word and you understand how a name came to be and you can point out that that name could not have come to be before a certain time because of the way the language worked like that's irrefutable at that point I don't know how you argue against that yeah yeah and this is like literally his expertise right yeah I mean just it you know it's funny because they have all the we talked earlier about how we have all this uh influence from Joseph Smith's um Hebrew lessons in 1836 and uh maybe if they had had Egyptian lessons when he wrote this he would not have put potiphar in there because he would have realized it was an anachronism but he wasn't aware of it and so he did and so it just shows that Joseph Smith's ability to create scripture is limited by Joseph Smith not by God not by Abraham it's it's limited to what Joseph knows and what he doesn't know and that's why as we talk about the Book of Mormon and now at the book Abraham you have all of these errors that stem not just from 19th century incorrect World Views but from Biblical scholarship he didn't know but that we know today and it is what it is and Robert rittner I think explains why there is zero chance that this could have been material from Abraham's time there's no possible way and this is just one problem of many it's not like it's just the only thing that we're dealing with here I always have to say that these responses to Mormon apologists they're necessary and they're always my least favorite Parts because we're responding to really really dumb arguments but let's do it anyway let's now talk about elkina as another apologetic quote hit in the book yes yeah so this one's from the church's essay and it says Joseph Smith's explanations of the facsimiles of the book of Abraham contain additional earmarks of the ancient world facsimile one in Abraham 117 mentioned the idolatrous god elkana this deity is not mentioned in the bible yet modern Scholars have identified it as being a being among the gods worshiped by ancient ancient Mesopotamians and this is some stuff I took from on the LDS discussions website our annotated essay who is this one was done by a guy named Kellen who's way smarter than I am and you know he mentions that this detail runs into the same problem that you see with only shim and ulisum these modern Scholars all of whom happen to be employed by the the LDS church and all of whom seem to be named or referencing Daniel C Peterson make the unfounded assumption that elkanah is a reference to the Canaanite god l or possibly the use of the generic word L to signify any um of a number ancient near Eastern gods and so elkanah is simply not a recognized name from anywhere in Antiquity and is only mentioned in the book of Abraham a very quick Google search will confirm this if you Google elkana it's all Mormons links because it's just not anywhere else and so the church's essay seeks to give the impression that Scholars outside of the church have found elkana to be an ancient evidence which is just not there which again a quick search will tell you and this claim is disingenuous and it's made on very shaky ground because if they want to tell the whole story they might also point out that Yahweh Jehovah made his first appearance as a pagan God in the pantheon of the same L and so they're they're trying to say there's this generic L that can reference any number of gods and therefore it has an ancient core which is really dis deceiving especially if you understand um what L could also mean it's just you know I don't know what more to say okay um Nemo not much more to say to be honest okay your audio's gone a little bit soft Nemo I'm not sure sorry not too much to say get close to the mic okay okay so should we go to the next slide yeah so let's go this one is kind of piggybacking off the last one and so this is from John Gee again and he's writing about the historicity of elkanine he declares the following the odds of winning the Powerball Lottery by buying a single ticket are merely one in 292 million the odds of winning the Powerball lottery two weeks in a row Are One in 8.52 times 1016. the odds of winning three weeks in a row Are One in 2.49 times 10 25. um though only a crude calculation of the odds gives some idea how difficult it would be for Joseph Smith to Simply guess correctly about the four adulterous gods in the book of Abraham and just you know again it's like just a quick read tell us I said elkana just like Ole shim is a name created by Joseph Smith for the book of Abraham with no use validity outside of Mormon Scholars um the name elkana is in the Bible which is simply uh elkana from the book Abraham with the first a swapped out for an e um and then furthermore what what janki neglects to tell his readers in the article is that John is at Joseph Smith uh which Joseph Smith actually translated as elkana actually means and I can't even read this but yeah there you go thank you Nemo in Egyptian uh and so what John Gee and Daniel Peterson have done by manufacturing these ancient connections might be comforting comforting the members who want to find a reason to believe and when you apply these kind of Powerball statistics which is just uh the world's the whole Joseph Smith world's greatest guesser uh thing is one of the most ridiculous um uh articles and they wrote that in The Interpreter and there was a long thread on the uh Mormon discuss Mormonism board before the board kind of fell apart and they had to redo it and it was just reading it it just shows the the lengths that and I I know John doesn't like to use the word game I'm going to say the word the games they play to try to make it seem impossible when we're ignoring all of the the misses and we're trying to say oh well there might be this one hit um and and so to to give this idea that like Joseph Smith guessing the gods when he translated them wrong in the first place is it's like one of those like it's like a chef's kiss thing for apologetics it's just still how kind of ridiculous it gets and it just doesn't work it it just doesn't work because they're making the Assumption they're manufacturing a scenario in which correctly guessing the name of an ancient Egyptian god is exactly statistically equivalent to winning the lottery and there's no reason to believe that's the case a person of their own mind may be able to create correctly a guess at an ancient Egyptian god with better odds than winning the lottery maybe with worse odds but they've not given any of justification for why someone's ability to correctly guess the name of an Egyptian god is somehow equivalent to winning the Powerball lottery it makes no sense and it's not even correct because obviously as we just said the actual translation after Papyrus is not what he what he said it was so it's just it's amazing it's one of those things right you read it and I remember reading that article in The Interpreter was called Joseph Smith the world's greatest guesser and you're reading it and you're like I think that article actually uh piggybacked a lot off of your Michael Cohen review um and they talked about a lot of the things that Joseph Smith dressed correctly from The Book of Mormon about Mesopotamian uh Mesoamerican culture and uh and I just remember people just just kind of going through uh they were using the Bayesian Theory and stuff and and I don't want to get on tangrics obviously we want to keep going here but it just shows the links that we go to in order to manufacture um hits for Joseph Smith while ignoring the mountains of Misses that are just to the side of you and um I I just sometimes you you just want to scream because as John said I sometimes I hate doing these sections because like doing this one slide makes me want to scream because it's so ridiculous but I want to present it's the people who are listening can understand that I'm trying to give the best arguments that the church makes and that their apologist makes so you can make that decision obviously I'm presenting it from the standpoint of what I think the the answer is at face value um but yeah I just I think this is a nonsensical argument and just to summarize if I'm understanding it right we've just disproven three or more uh you know quote hits that that fair Mormon ghee and molstein are claiming we've disproven them all and yet what they do is try and string them up as three consecutive completely improbable um uh you know Lottery like improbabilities trying to say that that it's beyond beyond miraculous that Joseph Smith was able to be such a a prophetic Sage when in reality it's it's three complete hits Mary sorry it's three complete misses instead of three miraculous hits is that is that right yeah I mean look let's just take a step back let's just say Joseph Smith really guessed the name of the four adulterous gods in the book Abraham correctly let's just let's just make that assumption do you think the only place you could read about that is an article by John Gita about Powerball that would be the beginning every General Conference would start with just so just before we start the you know this weekend's proceedings I want to read these four adulterous gods and Joseph Smith getting it right it would end with Booyah and then they would start because that would be a proof that Joseph Smith could translate the fact that you're seeing it in this really obscure article tells you that nobody really accepts that as truth outside of zhangi and if the church believed it was was a solid evidence they'd be they'd be telling that to everybody to say see Joseph Smith could get it right and so they don't and and that's why I get so frustrated with some of this stuff because again if Joe if Joseph Smith translated the Papyrus right it would be hung behind Russell Nelson at every General Conference and every once in a while he just slammed the table and point back if you know he'd say oh those people who left the church in doubt bam look at that but instead we're being told oh I forgot what the word well Nemo I can't even pronounce anyways but Nemo said the name and then yeah and then we're like oh no it's elkana it's like no no it's not and so I just it it's angering to me because I know a lot of people who are in the church who will read that and find comfort in even though it's absolute nonsense and I guess that's where it drives me enough because a lot of people writing this know better I would say most of them know better or all of them but most of them certainly do one thing I really one thing we have yet to hear is Elder Holland make a uh you know argumentative General Conference that to leave the Mormon Church you have to crawl under over or around the book of Abraham we haven't heard that we haven't heard that talk yet no you'll never hear that you know and we can we can do a whole episode on that that quote about crawling all around the book of you know up was it up and over and the book The Book of Mormon I mean we did that in the the six episodes I mean it's not hard to look at the book Abraham and show you why it's not what it claims to be it's actually ridiculously easy because Joseph Smith leaves very um distinguishable fingerprints on him in the book Abraham to your point you don't hear anyone in the church talk about the book Abraham outside of saying we don't worry about the translation because it's wrong we just look at the the gifts it gives us spiritually and at that point as we've said you're indistinguishable from fraud and in Warren Jeff's or David koresh or anybody else who says how do you feel when I tell you these things they're now just on the exact same level playing uh the same level that Joseph Smith is and the church would never ground that because they're invoking special pleading for themselves while telling everyone else no we're going to rely on your claims and that's really the difference yeah it makes me wonder whether I'll ever be removed from the standard Works to be honest I can't though because it's got the pre-existence and and I really we talked about this in the last episode um but the moment you remove it you're basically acknowledging that Joseph Smith got it wrong and then at that point it's like why like why would you trust the Book of Mormon if you know the book Abraham is made up why would you know and and so at that point you can't it's like you know it's wrong and you know it's like the most easy Smoking Gun to look at and say Joseph Smith couldn't do what he claimed he could do but the second you pull that thread you're done and so I they're in the they're in the most you know between a rock and a hard place in the worst way with this and um you know it it's because Joseph Smith I think on some level got a little bit too arrogant we could read the quotes he did um we would tell people uh you know read say this gibberish line and say oh in Egyptian it means this and this and this and it's just complete gibberish like the guy um I think to some degree got a little too confident at the end of his life because I think at the beginning he never would have made such easily falsifiable claims and at the end he was doing it and um yeah yeah it's just you know we could keep going it's just this stuff just drives me insane we're starting to get ranty but but I Blame You yeah I believe it on Joseph Smith okay but but to just to Sure up that point so it doesn't sound completely ranty Joseph Smith made the end of his life got to the point where he said even Disciples of Jesus Christ left him but none of the members of the church have left me yet so like he was at the point of comparing himself to Jesus so like it is yeah you know it's ranty but it's also true Joseph Smith's ego was at that point yeah yeah I mean we with the political the polygamy episodes are a great example of showing Joseph Smith's confidence in his own ability to get people to believe that what he was saying was from God and um the book Abraham is around that same time frame so it just shows how Joseph Smith you know in his later life is doing things in a much more I would argue a most casual way than he did earlier which is why you don't have accounts of him just putting his head in a hat I know there's one account of that um him using the sear stone with the book Abraham but most people I think just say they sat next to him as he translated the you know I think there's that one quote from Willard Chase maybe or someone and um it's it's a negative quote and that's another one we could do in a future episode because the church and the essay presents it as like this awesome quote but the actual letter is talking about what a scan you know a scoundrel Joseph Smith is so um yeah that was something that uh that a viewer commented on on YouTube that I just never thought of if Joseph Smith was able to just pull out a Seer Stone in the Hat you know and and read reformed Egyptian which is a language that didn't exist and to translate word for word character for character The Book of Mormon from the stone in the Hat why was he doing the grammar why was he trying to decipher Egyptian when he would have started with the power to just use that from the beginning that's a that's a problem I didn't even think to ask in the previous episodes yeah I mean it's you know it's I think the problem for Joseph Smith is with the Book of Mormon he never showed the plates to anyone with the book of Abraham they could all see the scroll and so I think at that point it would be really difficult for him to say I'm gonna just put my head in the Hat because everyone can look at the source material and I think that's the scenario which just didn't allow for Joseph to do it that way that's just you know a quick guess but and that's what I put out there right near the beginning when I was pointing problems to the book of Abraham in some of my early Facebook posts that started to walk my channel off and everything was that you know this idea the catholicist theory and um all that sort of stuff the idea that God put it straight into his brain and then he spoke it out the problem with that is the grammar and alphabet of the Egyptian language that is the core issues that Joseph fundamentally believed he was doing a traditional translation of that text and that's evidenced more than it is in the case of the Book of Mormon where it's very much Divine sent to him through the rock in the Hat and then he speaks it this is a you you can't play around with the definition of the word translation here because Joseph Smith's actions and the materials he produced shows that he believed it was truly a traditional translation absolutely all right let's go to the next slide apologetic hits Joseph Smith knew this is apologetic claim the Joseph Smith knew non-biblical Abraham stories yes and so it's from the essay it says the book of Abraham is consistent with various details found in non-biblical stories about Abraham that circulated in the ancient world around the time the papyri were likely created in the book of Abraham God teaches Abraham about the Sun the moon and the stars and we covered this in our annotated gospel topics essay these non-biblical stories about Abraham were in materials that Joseph Smith had access to and so we mentioned this earlier in the the episode but the story of Abraham's attempted sacrifice was in the Adam Clark Bible commentary which we know Joseph Smith used a few years before the you know because of the revision of the Bible and this is right around their footnote 46 and it says the following some of these extra biblical elements were available to Joseph Smith through the books of Joshua and Joseph Josephus Joseph Smith was aware of these books but it is unknown whether he utilized them so they're presenting in the actual essay this idea that Joseph Smith knew all got all these details right that he couldn't possibly have known and then the footnote says well Joseph Smith actually knew these books but we don't know if he used them it's just it's one of those things where you kind of laugh because of course if he if he was aware of me was using him in the material we could show that from the Adam Clark Bible commentary it's not you know it's just to put it in a footnote it just seems crazy to me yeah Nemo I'm just looking through my Apocrypha seeing if I can finally mention but I can't find anything at the moment I've got an old copy of the Apocrypha here oh nice I can't find anything all right all right well um let's go to the next slide which is sources that Joseph Smith had access to that influenced the book of Abraham that's a great question where do you get the content then yeah and this is another thing from our annotated essay that was done by Kellan and it says um two sources that Joseph appears to have borrowed from are Thomas Dick's philosophy of a future State uh from 1830 and Thomas Taylor's the six books of proclus on the Theology of Plato that was from 1816. we now know that Joseph owned both of these books um and that's from a note on the navu library in literary Institute that was in BYU studies and these are sources that go beyond the more commonly cited uh Joshua and Josephus um and the Adam Clark comment commentary and they have a lot of connections that Joseph could have drawn from and certainly seems to have done so um Kloss Hansen who is an LDS scholar observed that there are many striking similarities between Concepts in the book of Abraham in Dick's book including including the idea that the universe is made of indestructible matter that gets reorganized in new ways that the universe is filled with living entity is called intelligences that these intelligences are Eternal beings that are always progressing towards Perfection that all of the stars revolve around a central point which is the Throne of God and that time is reckoned based according to the distance from that point and so all of those are in the book of Abraham they're all in a book that we know Joseph Smith owned and those are the kinds of things the church is going to cite as if Joseph Smith couldn't have known that those were kind of talked about in ancient times yet we have books showing exactly that Nemo it's it's incredible that for so long I thought that Joseph Smith the the astronomy uh part of the book of Abraham was one of the strongest things for me and it's one of the things that a lot of people would latch onto and then he realized it was just in contemporary literature I don't think I I would wonder whether there's anything Joseph Smith ever wrote down that wasn't just containing contemporary literature around him view of the Hebrews the late War um this stuff Adam Clark's commentary on the Bible I I'm genuinely I'm not sure anymore whether there is anything that Joseph Smith wrote that wasn't also just contained within contemporary literature yeah I've wanted to do an episode and and I have on the website one of the first things I ever did was just a summary and it's not great but in the summary one of the sections was called Joseph Smith's mixtape Theory and it's just this idea that every single unique element of Mormonism comes from somewhere else that Joseph Smith was aware of and so the Nemo's point he listed all those and then you've got the Three Tears Of Heaven Come From Emmanuel swedenborg um you've got the Masonic ceremony being the temple ceremony and so all of these things that Joseph Smith is introducing all have um foundations that Joseph Smith is aware of and it's just amazing how he repurposes all of this and then we have apologies saying how could he have known this was an ancient idea and it's like no it's right around where he's it's all around his his time and place and yet when you point that out you know people don't won't accept that they won't accept that Joseph Smith could have pulled it from contemporary sources yet they're all there for us to see with our own eyes all right well uh yeah this is just this isn't just one Smoking Gun this is like 20 50 smoking guns um it's a real problem because we're dealing with the Almond Mormon scripture here so are we done with this slide yeah we could go to the next one okay so this one is um you know again I know I know John doesn't like using the word games this this is me saying the games apologists play and this is kind of referencing back to earlier about the sacrifice of Abraham so in the church's essay they say a later Egyptian text discovered in the 20th century tell us how the Pharaoh tried to sacrifice Abraham only to be foiled when Abraham was delivered by an Angel later according to this text Abraham Top members of the pharaoh's Court um I think it's or taught them through astronomy all these details are found in the book Abraham so they're saying look we've got this Egyptian text that was discovered after the book Abraham was written with a bunch of details that are in the book of Abraham how could Joseph have known and um this is again from our annotated essay that Kellen had done he says this is a misdirection because as the Egyptian text this Egyptian texts are citing is a document from apocryphal Coptic texts which date to almost 400 years after Jesus Christ so it actually supports the idea that the book of Abraham is borrowing from later apocryphal sources um which again the church admits in footnote 46 by saying Joseph was aware of those sources and so that they're trying to tell you there's this Egyptian text that kind of confirms some what's in the book Abraham that Joseph couldn't have known but what they don't tell you is that that text is an apocryphal text from 400 years after Jesus not from Abraham's time it just shows that these Traditions that we mentioned from the Adam Clark bomb Bible commentary about Abraham uh being sacrificed and obviously you know surviving um were out there in different different ways and so um one final kind of nagging problem is that the book of Abraham marks repeated references to the word Pharaoh a title that was not adopted until over 1 thousand years after Abraham's time and as we talked about and I think our first episode you know Joseph Smith also uses Pharaoh as a personal name unaware that it was actually a title and so it'd be like calling Abraham Lincoln um President Lincoln thinking that his first name was actually president and it's just all these little things you know when you try to make these claims that Joseph couldn't have known and I think Dr rittner made this point one of our earlier Clips it's like you try to make this one little data point work unaware of all the problems you're creating around it with other areas of apologetics and we see that in every episode we do that you try to do this game where you're trying to cherry pick something but not aware that it's creating problems around it and this is another example of that yeah I remember Dr rittner addressing uh that feral point in in his my interview with him Nemo what would you like to have just the Pharaoh point the Pharaoh point is um is what gets me every time is that it just shows such a basic misunderstanding of ancient Egypt Yeah by Joseph Smith yeah and again if it was the Catalyst Theory and it was a revelation then God apparently doesn't know that Pharaoh is a title either and that's why when you use these apologetics all of a sudden you're opening up these other issues and this is another area where that Pharaoh might seem like a small nitpick it's not because it really shows why the Catalyst Theory can't work because then you have to believe that the Mormon version of God is unaware of this problem um and then obviously if you're doing a translation it's wrong and so you can't go anywhere with that to make it work so you just try to expand the universe of what we're looking for and you can't do that either because that's entirely um special pleading because now you're trying to get to a point where you're creating a scenario that can't be um falsifiable because it you know obviously everything else that Joseph produced is being shown to not be what it claims to and um yeah the Pharaoh things is is a big issue because it illustrates the problems with all of the different theories apologists make regarding the the production of the book Abraham all right well let's go to uh the next slide which is Dr David bakavoy explains the problems with Joseph's cosmology what does that word mean Mike so this is just kind of like the book Abraham has this whole thing about astronomy and the cosmos and all this other stuff and so um Radio free Mormon did a three-part interview with Dr bakavoy and the third part is all about like the astronomy and the cosmology and um David bachvoy has a lot of experience and expertise in the way the Ancient World Views kind of viewed astronomy versus how we view it today and how we viewed it in different periods throughout history and so this is a really cool audio clip from this interview because he's explaining why the book of Abraham actually contradicts itself between the different chapters um and then more importantly it doesn't reflect the reality of what we know about Cosmic cosmology today and so you know the point is if Abraham was receiving this via Revelation why is God not giving him the understanding that would hold up through the test of time and it's the same issue we have like with the translation of the Papyrus fragments where it's just it's it's contradictory it's not holding up and it doesn't match what we know today and that's a good way to lead into the clip all right let's roll the clip is that the cosmology that is presented in Genesis chapter 1 is the ancient one that we find commonly articulated throughout the near East the world of Abraham if you will where we have a flat Earth and that the Sun the moon the stars are um kind of it's in suspended animation above of the Earth on the firmament and the idea of a geocentric model where the Earth is the center where things revolve around the earth which the apologists want to present as the model being presented in Abraham chapter three there are major problems with that number one you have a different cosmological account being presented in Abraham chapter 4 which is derivative of Genesis chapter one that's a problem for their argument and that they've never considered um but number two it's a Hellenistic model and and so why in the world would God through the urum and thumbem reveal to Abraham um a later model that the apologists argue is not is not reflective of contemporary astronomy but it's based upon what ancients would understand when that model derives from the Hellenistic time period and does not appear in the Hebrew Bible that makes no sense from my perspective if God is going to reveal something through the Airman thumb he would do it in one of two ways either he would use the perspective that Abraham already held which is going to be much more reflective of the cosmology that appears in Genesis chapter 1 or the book of Abraham chapter four and they use that to teach spiritual truths which is kind of the way that Carrie milstein would go or he's going to go um with the model that it is actually a true reflection of the universe that Abraham was going to receive that reflects what we know to be true through contemporary scientific analysis the idea why in the world would he ever then through yerman and by placing his hands upon Abraham's eyes revealed to him an ancient model that derives many centuries after Abraham's lifetime but is actually not a reflection of historical reality so what I'm trying to say here and I hope I've articulated it well is that there are from my perspective two very significant problems with that the the main apologetic reading of Abraham chapter three number one you have a different cosmology presented in Abraham chapter four that reflects Genesis 1 and number two it's a later Hellenistic model that Abraham wouldn't have known and that I can see no reason that God would have revealed since it's not an actual reflection of reality all right yeah so so the wrong cosmology is offered Nemo anything you want to say about I can sum that up yeah if you'd like please basically you've got a good argument to say that God sometimes would reveal to people something that reflects their own understanding in an ancient world where they didn't really understand the you know the way the universe actually works that we will revolve around the sun that's fine and they would say that God would use that trivial truth the problem is the model that God revealed to him isn't one that was contemporary to Abraham's time period And so there's no reason for him to have revealed that over the true model of the universe which also wasn't revealed to him yeah yeah problem yeah it makes no sense it and David does such a good job of illustrating that because it you know it's like if you have like a like a a linear time frame and Abraham's here you'd expect God to either give you this one or the real modern one but instead it's it's in the middle which wouldn't make sense to Abraham and it doesn't reflect what we know today so it just shows that it yeah it just it just shows how out of place um the cosmology is in the book of Abraham compared to what we know today and compared to what we know about what they believed in anciently yeah um and in some sense the fact that it makes no sense makes perfect sense because that's that's the entire book of Abraham analysis right well yeah I mean it just it just shows that Joseph Smith's pulling from all these sources to write this book and he doesn't have this the knowledge we have in 2022 and so he's writing it probably not thinking that they're going to understand that it's out of place because you know again they probably didn't even know they're going to crack Egyptians so it it just shows that Joseph Smith um is pulling from sources that don't hold up we see that over and over again throughout the Book of Mormon and the book Abraham just to be clear yeah no go ahead let's just say what we're not saying is and Joseph should have known better because that would be to cry what the apologies left school presentism judging him by our standards in what he ought to have known right not true but it is to say that there's clearly no God with omnipotence ruling the show because that God will omnipotence would know what we do know now and would have been able to give him the correct information from the off yep yeah you know I'm going to make a criticism of this whole cosmology thing that's totally out of left field but my biggest problem with this whole cosmology thing in the book of Abraham is like and I made this point before you've got precious precious real estate here there's a limited fixed number of scriptural chapters and books and verses and words that you're going to give you know your children as God to govern humanity and to govern the church and to govern to govern individual lives and instead of talking about germ Theory and preventing Mass death and disease instead of talking about LGBT rights to avoid the disaster of LGBT suicides that we have now instead of uh you know talking about slavery and and saying hey hey Mormons and hey you know people in the United States don't don't do that slavery thing instead of any of the possible Revelations that could have been given God's going to give a failed cosmology and that's how he's going to fill up the bullet you know fill up the the billboard he's going to fill up with the broken false cosmology I just come on God we need we need you're going to give a scripture give us something useful not something not only not useful but actually erroneous it's like the same as as uh of all the times someone put something up on Reddit recently it's like a list of all the times since the Garden of Eden God has sent an angel with a flaming sword to do anything yeah and the only thing on the list is getting Joseph Smith to marry people no no of all the things not genocide it's it's most if you've got to marry this 14 year old yeah yeah of all the things yeah that God could have sent it to do all right and let's let's finish up this conversation about cosmology yeah this is another one from our annotated essay and it just says you know many of the astronomical Concepts and phrases in the book of Abraham text and facsimile translations appear to come directly from Thomas Taylor's book Taylor calls the planet's Governors and uses the terms fixed stars and planets and Grand key both Works refer to the Sun as a planet receiving its light and power from a higher sphere rather than generating its own light through nuclear fusion LDS scholar R Grant athe a research astronomer and director of the University of Colorado Observatory observed at the time that the book of Abraham was translated the energy source of the sun was unknown and the concept of one star influencing another was also a common concept of the time Athey explains that Taylor also describes the same kind of progression of time among the universal bodies as Abraham chapter 3 verses 16 through 19 some people of Joseph Smith's day also believed in the Progressive orders of orbs and the intelligences that inhabited them and so it's just you know our current understanding of astronomy and astrophysics tells us that the book of Abraham's astronomical descriptions are wildly inaccurate and they do not match the beliefs of Abraham's own time kind of like David bakoy said why is it that they are uncannily similar to the theories that were popular in Joseph Smith's day in the 19th century yeah so again if I'm understanding this right not only is Joseph Smith getting it wrong again we know the source from which he's getting his erroneous information it certainly seems like I mean we can't know for sure it's the exact Source but we could show that in his time frame there is a source he's aware of that they owned in the library that use the same terms and that he is using 19th century beliefs in an ancient text that obviously does not pan out to be true because they didn't know in the 19th century what we know today Nemo nothing to add to that okay yeah we're kind of like we've got 50 Nails in this coffin um but we've got one more we've got shineeja shineeja yeah it's so funny too because I always used to read this as shine Hall when I was uh when I was you know more active in the church just because for some reason that's just how it always popped to me and I always thought it was interesting that like shinha was like the sun like you know shining Sun ha Like An Egyptian ending but regardless uh one of the more uh recent apologetics that have been referenced by many of them uh is a bullseye for the book of Abraham is the use of shineeja from Abraham 3 uh 13. it says and he said unto me this is shaneja which is the Sun and he said unto me kolob which is star and he said unto me Olea which is the Moon um and then he and he said unto me Coco beam which signifies stars or all the great lights which were in the firmament of Heaven and the problem again is that this is another example of parallel Mania which is where apologists try to find anything that could possibly connect uh the book of Abraham to being an ancient source but it's just not there and so um we're gonna play the clip from Dr rittner but the problem is um shineeja is not a single word as the book of Abraham sorry I shouldn't say Book of Mormon but it's actually two words and so it's Shen uh and when you put them together it means the circle of Eternity in Egyptian and I'll let Dr rittner explain why that is a problem for kind of connecting it to the book Abraham all right let's roll the tape and he said unto me this is which is the Sun now there are discussions by John Gee who has referred to this today in well I heard it today in his recent podcast from last week saying that this is a hit as an example of an Egyptian term which represents the ecliptic of the Sun that is referred to in certain specific time periods and it's a technical Egyptian term and I discovered that shineeja even has its own web page on Wikipedia saying basically the same thing and I assume it was an apologist who represented that now the problem with that is that there is a collection of Egyptian words that could come out sounding like shineka it would actually be Shin neh which would mean if you put them together the circuit of Eternity and that would seem to be a real hit versus Neha now the problem with that is does this term actually exist so okay we've thrown some sounds together and if you throw enough sounds together you could get accidental sounds that sounds like something Egyptian so the question is not as the apologists opposed it if we make this sound could it sound like something cobbled together in Egyptian the question is does such an Egyptian term even exist you know where is the proof they don't go there because they don't and so I asked one of my colleagues to search in the thesaurus linguigiptei will or otherwise known as the TLA our our reference work that includes all of the published Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions so he did a global search for the number of times that the words Shin circuit and neche are put next to each other then he did a search to see the number of times that they are closer than 10 words apart the number of hits he got was Zero what I'm saying is there is not a single case of where Shin occurs as a combination not one there's not even a case where sin is ten words next to yeah so the combination of shin Nasha to represent the Sun or anything else is a total fabrication it's an accidental Coincidence of sounds but is unsupported by any evidence whatsoever and so the work being done to say look look what we can come up with is where you take something and you want to find an answer for it it's not where you actually go to the evidence and then create an answer saying ah the evidence shows you this because the evidence shows just the opposite and that's the way apologists work is the way they always I'm sure he was going to say that's the way they always work yeah zero zero is kind of an overwhelming finding right yeah you know I mean I'm not saying that John Gee had access to the same database that Robert Ridner does but the fact is you're trying to to manufacture this hit by saying that these you know two words together could mean I put Circle I meant circuit of Eternity and what Robert Ridner saying is you need those two words to be together somewhere to say that it would also be in this ancient text otherwise it's an unfounded uh parallel that you're trying to create and um obviously it there's no evidence there's nothing in any possible way when you have zero references in their entire database that would show that this is a common way to refer to it Nemo I think it comes back to what we were saying earlier about that sort of idiotic argument of looking at what language was being used by certain peoples and then if that language is you know is not existent in the language of that those peoples then but it is in the book of Abraham then the book of Abraham can't be from that time and it's this same thing that I think I think looking for it being 10 words close as well is really important because not only were they not putting those two words together a circuit of Eternity they weren't putting that together as a as a word in the same way as in German you would have compound nouns and you'd put together long words like you just take words and string them together they weren't doing that in Egypt they weren't just taking words and putting them together like that um in this instance not only that but conceptually those two words never went together that concept wasn't even being discussed because they were never within 10 words of each other so it's not only did the word not exist in the ancient Egyptian language and therefore isn't a hit but also conceptually it wasn't a concept within the ancient Egyptian psyche it wasn't something they were thinking of yeah yeah absolutely um Mike I guess I guess this takes us to the final I mean you know what we we say at the beginning of each of these episodes we're trying to be fair we're trying to be neutral we're trying to be objective it is hard to maintain a temperament of non-hostility or of non-frustration um and of just calm peaceful objectivity given how just overwhelmingly uh ridiculous um defenses for the book of Abraham uh you know seem to be to me you guys just need to be more British yeah just look at him like it's all right and then you're fine yeah yeah no I mean you know it's it's it's true it's hard you know I think when we did uh the earlier episodes it was a little easier for me not to like feel annoyed by it and then when you get to like something like this wait except for polygamy well yeah polygamy wasn't that I don't consider that one the earlier episodes and polygamy is the same thing because it's like you're making these apologetics that don't fit in any historical way and so to do so and to use like like I said to use credentials to do so it with the book of Abraham yeah is where I get frustrated because they know better and so if you're going to use um if you're going to tell people to stay in a church that requires so much of us um and not give them the full information and then not only not getting the full information but to distort their own academic background in order to keep them in the church I feel like that is where you cross a line that goes beyond like good intention apologetics to manipulating members into believing something that is not true and um I you know I don't know if I'm if people feel like that's too unkind or not but that's how I feel because if you're asking someone just who's having problems with the book of Abraham that there are these ancient hits um and you're using your your credentials to keep them in the church where they're going to continue to you know obviously pay tithing where underwear with Masonic symbols um be obedient to leaders a lot of time um you have the uh the constant hovering threats of your Eternal um salvation with your family all of those things and you're doing so with scholarship that you cannot even put in a peer-reviewed journal I feel like that is when you know yourself that your stuff doesn't hold up and and so presenting that to a member with questions I feel like is is a very uh bad thing to do and I know this is personal for you Mike because you converted to Mormonism without all the information and you might have made a few different decisions if you had been given all the information yeah and I think that before you get baptized if you're an eight-year-old I mean we can get into that in our future episode about you know what an eight-year-old can and can't do but yeah as a convert if someone had said here's the book of Abraham here's the source material here's what egyptologists say we still feel there's value in it I feel like kind of doing the side eye like guys this is not at all what he said it was he claimed to do it through God I mean so yeah I mean it's personal because of that because I was only given the sanitized version of their history which they obviously knew was not true whether you talk about the translation um they didn't talk about polygamy um obviously when I converted they didn't mention that whatsoever so I did not know much about that but you know the ban on members with black skin a lot of those things were given um answers that just don't hold up and so I do feel like I was misled not by the missionaries because they were doing what they were supposed to do um but by the people that were instructing the missionaries on what to say and um and you know like I said we've said in previous episodes if somebody wants to look at to watch this episode and say yeah Joseph Smith absolutely was created the book Abraham but I still get a good feeling from it therefore I'm gonna stay uh more power to you uh but I hope that people just would be willing to say that in church and say look the book of Abraham Joseph clearly wrote it but I still find Value in it but they never will do that they'll keep telling members the People Like Us who are talking about it are the people who have been deceived by worldly secular knowledge and I just I feel like that is such a uh it's a tactic used by high demand religions who can't back up their own truth claims and we're seeing that over and over again by the top leaders of the church and I guess that's just how it kind of uh finished that little um rant about about why this stuff bothers me all right Nemo we're about to hit the concluding slides so Final Cut yes oh no nothing I just I I wish I could run more I'm glad you're so good at being succinct I'm glad you can't because it's a great counterbalance and I try not to to rant I try not to be visibly annoyed with this stuff and usually I'm not it's just sometimes when you're reading these these like I said it in our first episode on the book Abraham it's like I'm we're we spent like probably about seven hours talking about it and at the end of the day Joseph Smith made claims is what the Papyrus said it doesn't say that that should be the end of it and yet we're spending all this time because the church has created all these new universes of reality um to try to make sense of why Joseph Smith got it wrong and I just I feel like on some level I'm annoyed that we have to do that even though we do because obviously if you don't address it then then from an apologetic standpoint they'll see see they'll say see they don't have answers to it and you do it's just it's just frustrating it just feels like a game where you're just trying to you know constantly catch the the latest um response that you know doesn't match up with the others I don't know well so here is my my succinct final thought I just I love these men are smarter than I will ever be a lot of these men are very intelligent men as John was saying earlier these are really intelligent people so why do they say such stupid things I don't get it and that is what is frustrating because nominally you're dealing with intelligent well-educated men and then they come out with stuff that is so nonsensical it causes you to to take a step back and go well hang on what did he really just say that and that is why that is what is frustrating about it to me yeah I agree yeah all right well this I I think we have uh I think we've thoroughly addressed the truth claims in the book of Abraham and if you need more go-to rubber there's 13 hour uh response but Mike let's let's let's take it home with the conclusion yeah and just to say um you know and and if you want to dive in more if you don't feel like you've gotten quite enough uh Robert rittner's 13 hours is amazing to listen to um the David Bach boy interviews with with John and with rfm or gray and Dan Vogel has a whole video series I mean you could go under this for 50 hours of podcasts and you'll continually learn stuff it's just not going to make it better it's just going to continually tell you this is not ancient but anyways as a conclusion um you know whether you want to look at this through the translation method or the you know the papyri fragments or you want to look at the text of the book of Abraham it's demonstrably a 19th century text a critical look at the text confirms the problems that we see from the translation that this is not an ancient text that would reflect an autobiographical story of Abraham um and we talked about this earlier a little bit but the church cannot disavow the book of Abraham because obviously that would probably give too big of a message that they know Joseph Smith was making stuff up but they'd be better off just ending the Apologetics that go against the field of Egyptian studies and biblical scholarship and just basically you know um say to just look at the words and if it makes you feel good stay there because until the egyptologists of the Mormon Church are willing to submit these arguments to peer-reviewed journals you know that they know that they do not hold up I mean the moment that they release these essays with all of these different possibilities and they've refused to submit them to a peer-reviewed journal on egyptology you can be sure that they know deep down their crap arguments I mean just to put it bluntly and Joseph Smith claimed the book Abraham was written by Abraham with his own hand upon Papyrus he got it wrong this is a testable truth claim that Joseph made and he got it wrong and that's why to me the book Abraham is a Smoking Gun against his claims to being a prophet of God yeah I've actually heard um Richard I think it was Greg Prince who's quoted as saying if you want to understand uh you know how the Book of Mormon was translated or the problems of the Book of Mormon you just need to look at the book of Abraham like the book of Abraham is is a Smoking Gun in and of itself but it it completely then logically undermines The Book of Mormon as as a translation as well they you don't you don't get to sort of say well maybe okay maybe Joseph got one of the four you know scriptures that he translated uh wrong but the other three are good um this to me this infects it implicates the Book of Mormon as a false translation as well Nemo anything you want to kind of yeah it it implicates this other translation work particularly um as you know it was so clearly a translation it was there's no excuses to be made for this so um as we'll get onto the Kindle hook plates yeah if that doesn't make it better either yeah no all right so I think we've come to the end uh uh yeah do you wanna any final statements Nemo or Mike and and do we want to tell listeners and viewers what's coming up uh just uh next episode will be the Kinderhook plates which is not you would think of it as not being associated with the book of Abraham but it actually has a lot of direct ties and so I think that episode's gonna be really fun because it's not going to be necessarily about the fact that Joseph got the little bit of translation he did wrong because we know that it's gonna be about the implications for the leaders from that point on as well as it has very direct implications to the book of Abraham that I think also put a hole in some of these apologetic arguments so I'm actually really excited to do that one and I know Nemo is going to do it which I'm also excited about because any episode with Nemo is a good episode so I'm looking forward to it wait I thought you'd like to pick on Nemo and here you are complimenting him that feels weird I I bash Nemo in private when when it's not going to be recorded and then when we're in public I give him lots of praises and I feel like that's a good good strategy so that I can't get caught uh you know bashing him in public so so new again are you gonna bash or praise Mike publicly that's the question uh Mike's brilliant uh yeah that's weird might be the worst thing to ever the worst way I thought I thought it was muted he called you a thing Nemo I thought I was muted he called you a thing mimo no I've been called worse believing members of the church now Nemo Nemo is great and um we're so lucky to have him on these episodes and and uh I do give him a hard time but but but to be fair I told him at one point I'm like I'm not really trying to give you a hard time I just was joking around and he said that's a British thing and he enjoyed it so I'm like well if that's the case I'll keep doing it so but no it's it's been so much fun doing these episodes with you and the Kinderhook plates one I really think um will be a fun one and I think we're going to present it in a way that a lot of people that listen won't have heard it before so I think it'll give some new info at least some new insights to people all right and Beyond and even Beyond kinderhard plates we've got you know a few dozen a few dozen episodes to go right we got a while to go so so if you're if you're still with us I'm shocked and thank you and uh like I said looking forward to it and uh again huge thanks to Nemo I do give them a hard time but um he's obviously um just so much fun and he's just so gifted at putting the stuff in a more concise way than I could ever do so so thank you Nemo and uh we'll we'll be seeing you guys next week how do I get Mike to to praise me so so yeah we'll have to work on that yeah not today we'll do another time all right well thanks Mike you're also brilliant and uh you're you're scary brilliant and you're providing such an incredible service I'm going to just remind everyone please subscribe to our YouTube channel we really need uh those subscribe subscriptions we want to reach the hundred thousand Mark please also subscribe to Nemo's Nemo the Mormon YouTube channel and uh of course you can always check out LDS discussions.com for the essays that support all of this check us out on Spotify check us out on Apple podcast on YouTube we've got a playlist and um thanks to everyone who supports more stories in the open stories Foundation you make all of this possible um and uh yeah be good to each other be kind to each other and we will see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon stories podcast take care everyone