What are the Kinderhook Plates?
Original Air Date: 2023-01-09
This detailed summary covers the history, controversy, and implications of the Kinderhook Plates as presented in the video by Mormon Stories Podcast and LDS Discussions.
The Discovery and Joseph Smith’s TranslationThe episode focuses on the Kinderhook Plates as a critical test of Joseph Smith's claim to be a divinely appointed translator 1, 2. In April 1843, Robert Wiley began digging in Kinderhook, Illinois, claiming he had seen the location in dreams, a detail reminiscent of treasure digging folklore 3. Wiley and his team discovered six bell-shaped brass plates covered in symbols alongside skeletal remains 4. Because a Mormon was present during the excavation, the plates were brought to Joseph Smith, who had already established himself as a translator of ancient records 4, 5.
Joseph Smith translated a portion of the characters, declaring that the plates contained the history of a person who was a descendant of Ham through the lineage of Pharaoh, King of Egypt 5. His scribe, William Clayton, recorded this translation in his journal, noting that Joseph said the person received his kingdom from the ruler of heaven and earth 5, 6. The discovery generated significant excitement among early Latter-day Saints, with Church publications like the Times and Seasons and Nauvoo Neighbor publishing facsimiles of the plates and asserting they would prove the authenticity of the Book of Mormon 7, 8. Apostle Parley P. Pratt also endorsed the plates, comparing their characters to the Egyptian papyri used for the Book of Abraham 9.
The Hoax Revealed and Church DefensesIn 1879, Wilbur Fugate, one of the original diggers, confessed that the plates were a hoax designed to trick Joseph Smith 10. Fugate explained that they forged the plates using acid to etch the characters 10. Despite this confession, Church leaders and apologists defended the authenticity of the plates for over a century 11. B.H. Roberts, a prominent Church historian, argued in the early 20th century that Fugate was lying and that the plates were genuine because Joseph Smith—a prophet—had translated them 12. As late as 1979, Apostle Mark E. Peterson wrote that "most experts" agreed the plates were of ancient vintage 13.
Scientific Proof and the Apologetic PivotIn 1980, the Chicago Historical Society performed destructive testing on one of the surviving plates 14. The tests confirmed Fugate's story: the plates were made of a modern brass alloy not available in ancient times and the characters had indeed been etched with acid 15. Consequently, the LDS Church was forced to change its narrative in an August 1981 Ensign article, admitting the plates were a 19th-century fraud 16.
However, the hosts highlight that the Church simultaneously shifted its defense to claim Joseph Smith never actually translated the plates, despite 140 years of teaching otherwise 17, 18. The Church attempted to discredit William Clayton’s journal entry, suggesting the source of the translation claim was "unknown," even though Clayton was Joseph's trusted scribe and was with him the day the plates were examined 19, 20.
Implications for Mormon Truth ClaimsThe video argues that the Kinderhook Plates present several major problems for Joseph Smith's credibility:
ConclusionThe episode concludes that the Kinderhook Plates offered Joseph Smith a clear opportunity to prove his prophetic ability by exposing the hoax, yet he instead validated it as ancient history 26. The hosts argue that because this is the one instance where we possess the physical plates Joseph claimed to translate, and they are proven fakes, it serves as a "smoking gun" against his claims of being a seer 27, 28.
To use an analogy referenced in the discussion: relying on Joseph Smith's translation abilities after the failures of the Book of Abraham and the Kinderhook Plates is like returning to a car salesman who has already sold you three "clunkers"—at some point, the pattern of failure suggests the claims are not reliable 25.
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hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon stories podcast LDS discussions Edition I am one of your hosts for today John delin it's December 20th 2022 and we have uh another episode in our amazing series with LDS discussions today uh the episode is the Kinder hug plates um really quickly I need to plug this every time for those who don't know um the the LDS discussion series is based on an amazing website at ldsdiscussions.com created by our friend Mike and it's basically an attempt to address to explore and to evaluate Mormon church truth claims dispassionately evidence-based neutrally objectively as as much as that is possible um based on the evidence and so we are by my count uh this this will be the 33rd episode in the uh LDS discussion series it builds all these episodes build on each other so we really recommend that you start at the beginning with episode one and uh and that will help you understand today's episode uh much much better um and uh of course I just want to make sure people understand that you can get the entire Series in cereal either at Spotify in both audio and video format or on the I uh the Apple podcast app or you can go to the Mormon stories podcast YouTube channel and there's a playlist there where you can either watch them all or or listen to them all in succession or refer them to a friend or a family member and of course ldsdiscussions.com is the website where you can see it all and uh just so that I can give a little bit of context for today's episode and why it's so important uh you know one of the main claims that Joseph Smith made uh was that that um he was a translator and if you look at I as I understand it the original version of the Doctrine and Covenants God or Jesus themselves declared Joseph Smith a prophet Seer Revelator and translator and so if God and Jesus are introducing Joseph Smith as a translator it's really important that Joseph Smith show himself to be an accurate translator we have already covered the Book of Mormon translation in the LDS discussion series we have also talked about the book of Moses and the Book of Abraham and I you know not to in any way try and persuade people one way or the other but I think we've already conclusively showed that uh by any stretch along with the Joseph Smith translation of the King James Bible those are all problematic translations by any objective account and the reason why today's episode is important is because the Kinderhook plates is sort of the final or one of the final major ways that we can evaluate Mormon God or Jesus and or Joseph Smith's claim to be a translator and so that's what we're covering today we're covering the Kinderhook plates and this is definitely in my estimation one of the top five or ten most important topics to study if you really want to understand uh Joseph Smith's credibility and his truth claims and so without any further Ado I welcome Mike back from LDS discussions hey Mike hey everybody thanks so much for joining us it's good to be back and I you know this one for me is going to be one of the you know if I look at the project on the website like all the overview topics this is one uh that I was excited to talk about um more so than some others kind of like the Lost 116 Pages because this episode to me the kidney hook plates by themselves are not to me the biggest issue it's everything around the Kinderhook plates that we learn about Joseph Smith and uh Pro prophets and and the church from from his point all the way up until our our time and I think that it's like the plates are what we all focus on we all focus on the partial translation that Joseph Smith gives and we're going to cover that in a lot of detail but to me the really important part is how that meshes with all of the other episodes we've done thus far and when I talk about um how when you look at apologetics you have to take it in totality this is this episode is the perfect illustration of that and so this episode is going to have a lot of tie-ins into earlier episodes and kind of to show why um these are not one-off problem problems and that these are common threads so I'm really excited about this one just because I think it's going to give a different spin or a different angle on the Kinder hook plates than you might get just from looking at like the CES letter or a letter for my wife or something like that so I'm excited about this one I love it all right Mike well thanks again for all you do and for this amazing series and if having mic on weren't enough we are thrilled to have back with us Nema the Mormon from the Nemo the Mormon YouTube channel hey Nemo hi everyone how you been doing Christmas Merry Christmas I'm all right yeah all right you doing all right okay well excited yeah any any initial thoughts on uh Kinderhook plates Kendo plates are a very strange tale and I feel like they really deserve a deep dive so I'm really excited to kind of get stuck in and investigate the the twists and terms of this story all right yeah all right well without any further Ado uh Mike let's jump in should we start with the slides yeah let's just jump in because we're gonna kind of give you a quick overview of the Kinder plates and then we'll kind of pull back and then do more of a deep dive into the whole timeline which we've done a lot on this series all right so Mike what are the Kinder hook plates so this is kind of how the story was known at the time so on April 16th 1843 a man named Robert Wiley began an excavation in Kinderhook Illinois and he claimed that he had the same dream three nights in a row uh to dig for artifacts and if that sounds familiar it's because that's a common treasure digging uh idea that you'd have these Visions to tell you where to dig right and so right away we've got treasure digging elements power of three as well three Knights power three we've talked about how in Magic it's so common to have three times we talked about how like with the Lost 116 Pages Joseph had to ask God three times before um God would allow Martin Harris to take the pages and those little details are important for the story um and so because the Dig was so exhaustive he asked for additional help and then ultimately as soon as he got that additional help and Witnesses um he found what are now known as the Kinderhook plates along with skeletal remains and other artifacts about 10 feet deep into the ground and so so um if you'll remember I'm just kind of giving a little foreshadowing here um Joseph Smith when he was doing the treasure digging for Josiah still had claimed that there was the treasure that he could see with The Rock in the Hat and he actually said that the treasure was buried with a feather and then all of a sudden the next day uh when he's got you know all Josiah stolenir he digs up the feather and says oh my goodness the treasure sank into the ground but we found the feather so we know that there was Treasure there and um Josiah still who is a a witness for Joseph who actually supports him tell us a story is proof that you could find these ancient remains and as we talked about in that episode it's completely made up it's planted evidence because feathers can only last in the ground I want to say 60 days before they disintegrate and so um the idea that they could be buried with the treasure is is impossible and so in the same um story we're already going to get this element of planting evidence into the ground to basically show that you've backed up your your Visionary experience in those three dreams um the Kinder hook plates were a group of six bell-shaped brass plates they were covered in unknown symbols and then among the group that was digging with Wiley on that last day was a member of the LDS church and so word spreads quickly of this discovery it's very similar to the book Abraham Papyrus where all of a sudden Michael Chandler is in the area and once members of the church start hearing about like oh my goodness guys this is amazing we have a prophet who can decipher this and so because uh Wiley was smart enough to put someone from the church near him he knew that they would bring it to Joseph Smith and ultimately these plates do reach Joseph Smith and soon after Joseph Smith is going to translate a portion of the plates um according to his scribe William Clayton and this is what the history of the tree history of the church reads with regards to this it says I insert facsimiles of the six brass plates found near Kinderhook I have translated a portion of them and they in fine they contain the history of the person with whom they were found he was a descendant of ham through the lines of pharaoh king of Egypt and that he received his kingdom from the ruler of Heaven and Earth all right so immediately man this is explosive because Joseph's basically doing the same thing he did with the Papyrus he's seeing something that looks ancient to him he thinks about his you know existing knowledge of the Bible and specifically the Old Testament and then he's just like on the Spot Not only declaring them as being ancient but declaring them as being associated with Egypt and with Abraham and then and then he's uh publishing it in a church publication so like this is important because if if this if you know if Joseph's TR if the if the kinderg plates turn out to be authentic and Joseph Smith's translation of them turn out to be authentic then thumbs up to Joseph and his claimed to be a translator but if it turns out to be fraudulent then that's gonna poison you know the book of Abraham and with that potentially The Book of Mormon and the Book of Moses as well I mean that's that's what my objective mind does Mike and Nemo Nemo you tell me if that makes sense to you and then Mike you can you can also that makes sense a couple of things that jump out to me from that PowerPoint slide uh that um where there was a member of the church digging with them so if anyone tries to tell you members of the church wouldn't go treasure digging air go Joseph Smith wouldn't have possibly gone treasure digging just well by the churchstone ambition members of their Church would go treasure digging and then the other thing is that he's done the same thing here that he did with the book of Abraham where he's confused Pharaoh as being like a personal like a like a name essentially rather than a title because he talks about Pharaoh king of Egypt yeah yeah and Robert Ritter made it really clear Pharaoh is not a historical figure it's a title is that right Mike yeah yeah yeah so I mean you know right off the bat you could see that this idea of the translation even if you kind of ignore like if we pretended we didn't have the Kinder plates to compare to you would know right off the bat it doesn't work just because of that error um but yeah that's obviously um a carryover from the book Abraham because this will get into later um there's a lot of ties to the book of Abraham within this episode of the Kinderhook plates but Mike am I am I overstating the stakes here just in my framing of what I've heard so far in your view it it depends the height like for me um when I started doing the Deep dive the Kinderhook plates never stuck out to me if for at the very first they did the more I read into it the the less important the Kinderhook plates became and then I started to do the deeper dive and then I started seeing the ties to the other problems and that's when it became more explosive and more important to me um so I think to your point um this is an area well we actually will talk about this near the end of the presentation but this is an area where Joseph Smith is given a very testable moment where he can prove himself a prophet or prove that he doesn't have that connection to God to know to discern truth from from fiction and so to me it's it's a really important episode even though as we'll talk about from an apologetic standpoint they'll say well he's just copying from the uh from the Gale from the Egyptian alphabet um and we'll get into all of that later but yeah it a lot of times we try um from an apology standpoint to water down what happened so that you can make it you know as um as little to nothing as you can but but the reality is and as we get go through the Apologetics this will be more understanding animal every time you try to fix one problem with apologetics you're creating another and the Kinderhook plates that's why to me they're so important and explosive in a way is because they have ties to different areas as Nemo said right off the bat you've got taisa treasure taking and the fact that we have members of the church who are going with this person um believing that he's going to find this ancient record and it also shows a little bit of how gullible people in this time frame were to see these plates come out of the earth and immediately think this ties to the Book of Mormon this ties to the book Abraham and it just shows that Joseph Smith had a chance here to be able to discern truth from fiction and he failed okay well you just gave the ending away Mike yeah I know but trust me the twist like I I know this sounds weird to say but the twists and turns of the story I think are more important than the plates themselves and so that's the area where like as I started kind of researching this more and you start to see all these connections to me as like a total like a nerd like I had this dorky like wow this is really cool like we talk talked about in the early episodes about the puzzle and the puzzle pieces fitting together the Kinderhook plates help you to to put the pieces together of Mormonism in a really cool way because you start to see the connections you start to see how Joseph Smith is doing things and how he's not doing things um and to me it helps a lot of other areas which we'll get into and that's why I think the Kinderhook plates in a lot of ways by themselves I don't think they're as big of a deal as a lot of other people do but I think they bolster the problems of these other issues and that's why no matter what you do here if you want to water them down you still are left with all of these other issues which we'll get into which are really problematic once you get into that second layer of like truth claims of Mormonism all right well let's jump to the next Slide the generic plates generated excitement among early Mormons yeah and so after you know these kind of hook plates are found in word is spreading and of course everybody especially after the book of Abraham Discovery is thinking this is amazing and so the times and season which um obviously is a church-owned newspaper I believe at this time it was being edited by John Taylor I'm not positive but I think it is um they wrote an article about it and it says we learn there was a Mormon present when the plates were found who it is said left for Joy at the discovery and remarked that it would go to prove the authenticity of the Book of Mormon which it undoubtedly will um and then this was followed up by a publication of a broadside in the navu neighbor that included uh that time times and Seasons editorial along with the fact similes of all 12 plates because there's six plates with with two sides um and then the note that the contents of the plates will be published in the times and Seasons as soon as a translation is completed and so at least at this point there's an expectation that Joseph Smith is going to be translating them and there's also this belief among early members of the church that this is going to prove the Book of Mormon true because of course finding plates with with Egyptian characters would would obviously correlate to the Book of Mormon claiming to have reformed Egyptian characters on on gold plates so there's a lot of excitement and obviously everybody is thinking these are authentic right off the bat Nemo do you know what's mad about this is that Joseph Smith went through so much effort to hide the gold plates from people and now he's just sticking whatever he's translating in the newspaper it shows a real progression of his in his confidence and in his in his uh feeling that he has control over the situation that you know he was a little farm boy trying to produce the Book of Mormon and he was having to hide these gold plates from everyone so they couldn't see them um but these six 12 plates uh these these 12 you know plates come about and all of a sudden they can go in the newspaper and the papyri you can charge people money to come and see them you know yeah no it's it's an element of this too that's amazing because this idea with the Book of Mormon is that these plates are being buried and Joseph Smith is the only one who can dig them out and as we talked about in all those episodes early on nobody can really look at him right I know the witnesses claim to have seen them but nobody sees them physically during the time of the translation but as Nemo said that's because at that point that was the control Joseph Smith had with the Kinderhook plates he doesn't have control over he cannot really stop members from seeing it so I don't think he can really tell them you can't publish it because the person that found them is already showing them to everybody and it just shows how and this is a theme throughout these slides as we'll get into when Joseph Smith is not in control of a situation um he acts much differently than when he is because the whole power that you hold as a treasure Digger or as a prophet is that you need people to believe that you were in control of the situation if you want to be believed and have that charismatic leadership and as Nemo pointed out right off the bat here Joseph Smith has really no control over this and that is going to put him in a situation that is just extremely difficult and uh and for those who are listening we just want to let you know that we're showing on the screen visuals not only of the times and Seasons article but uh you know representations visual representations of the plates themselves and and again what what what's important to me about this is I'm trying to you know assess this uh objectively is that clearly Joseph Smith and the church felt like these were authentic and that this was an important Discovery or they would have never uh published them in the times and Seasons so that's to me that's a really significant endorsement and I'm guessing later the church is going to try and dismiss and downplay the Kinder hook plates but but there's no way they can credibly do that if they're taking the time and effort and expense to be visually representing them in the church's official publication the times and seasons does that sound right Mike yeah I think the times and seasons did not put the facsimiles in that was in the navu neighbor which I don't think the church owned um but yeah the thing we're looking at right now is not the times and Seasons so the times and Seasons article is quoted and then the navu neighbor is going to take the times and Seasons article reproduce it into theirs and then okay the fact similes so they're combining the navu neighbor combines the times and Seasons article and then puts their own puts the facts okay images sorry but who's who is in control of the navu neighbor I don't know for sure actually I'm not sure who who was in charge of who okay okay okay I mean but it's okay thank you for the historical accuracy and the clarification to me if I'm just trying to analyze it objectively it's still having the Ring of church sanction sort of the advertising and discussion of this topic is that fair Mike I think yeah I think it's I mean it's fair I mean the article itself is telling you that this is going to prove the Book of Mormon truth so obviously okay the people in charge of the times and season who are going to be I don't know if Joseph Smith was still the editor at this point I know at the very end he handed off that that kind of um control of the the times and season I think it might have been John Taylor but regardless top leaders of the church are publishing this and telling members this is going to prove the book woman truth so there is no indication in any way that there is any skepticism or doubt towards the authenticity of these plates okay and other important things that were published in the times and Seasons include sections of Doctrine and Covenants like DNC one was published in times of seasons and the Book of Abraham was published as a serial in the times and Seasons before we have DNC together as it is today um a lot of it was published in the church's newspaper okay yeah and just to clarify all right so I looked this up the navo neighbor was uh published and edited by John Taylor so that eventually the third he's the third prophet of the church right yeah so so he the third prophet of the church is going to publish the facsimiles with the times and Seasons article and basically tell members that there's an expectation within the church that there is going to be a full translation coming soon um which again that's really important so this is not some Outsider who's like trying to paraphrase or misquote a leader this is John Taylor the third prophet of the church who is very very much involved in all of the um kind of things with Joseph Smith is this point telling us yes this is he was he was in Carthage wasn't he in Carthage Jail when Joseph was murdered saved by his pocket watch yep and Nemo you were laughing did you want to add anything just I was just laughing at the fact that we were trying to work out who this was and it turns out it is absolutely from the church's Playbook not only is it someone adjacent to Joseph so they could possibly try and work political deniability in this because they didn't publish it in their main newspaper they published it in like John Taylor's paper the same way that they got members of the church to by Mark Hoffman's forgeries rather than buying them directly themselves this pattern's been there since the beginning of the church using people that are very clearly associated with them are very clearly acting for them but there's just that one step removed yeah okay got it okay well let's go ahead and go to the next slide uh which is the problem for the Kinderhook plates yeah and this is going to be kind of where the turn happens and so until 1980 you know 40 years ago the church claimed that the Kinderhook plates were authentic and proof of Joseph Smith's abilities and truthfulness as a prophet um and but the problem is in 1981 the church was forced to change their narrative on the Kinder plates because testing proved that the plates were a hoax as the creators had claims and we'll get into all that as we go through the timeline and this is from the 1981 enzyme a recent electronic and chemical analysis of a metal plate one of the six original Kindred plates uh brought in 1843 to the Prophet Joseph Smith in Nauvoo Illinois appears to solve a previously unanswered question in church history helping to further evidence that the plate is what its producers later said it was a 19th century attempt to lure Joseph Smith into making a translation of ancient looking characters that had been etched into the plates so slimy yeah that is that they said a trap that they said a trap for Joseph or what what's slimy Nemo keep that up on screen okay okay what is really slimy about this is the way that they say it appears to solve a previously unanswered question in church history as though they've been asking this question which they weren't because they were making an affirmative statement that they were true helping to further evidence that the plate is what its producers later said it was a 19th century attempt to LOD Joseph Smith into make a translation Etc further Evidence again as though it's furthering their purpose as though it's furthering what they were trying to do in finding evidence that it was a hoax all along and that weren't these people trying to trick Joseph when actually they were maintaining that these things were real and they were trying to deny the testimony of those that said it was a hoax so it's just it's really slimy wordplay to try and act as though all along this is what the church does they'll change the narrative they'll change something they'll change for the strength of Youth they'll change whatever and then rather than admit that they were wrong they'll try and act as though that's the way things always were and if you thought differently that's your fault so that's just textbook gaslighting is that what you're saying anymore translating absolutely textbook because the church wanted everyone to think it was authentic and that it bolstered Joseph's credibility up until 1980 and then all of a sudden they're saying we know we know it was a fraud all along right yeah getting ahead of the story because they know this is going to come out they know that like the Tanners are gonna pick this up other people are going to pick this up so they've got to get ahead of it got it yeah they're very lucky this didn't happen in 2022 because they would not be able to stop the you know kind of Internet age of just like completely destroying the fact that they had as we'll get into claim that these were authentic so this statement that's made in 1981 it would never fly in 2022 I mean I guess it would with members who don't look beyond what the church is telling them but yeah it to Nemo's point this is they're trying to get out ahead of it and they're still doing it in a time frame where they can control information a lot better than they can today all right let's go to the next Slide the timeline of the kinderg plates yeah and so this is just um you know we've done timelines on our previous episodes because the timelines to me are so important to understanding um how these stories change and evolve and how the church's perspectives change and evolve so we did this on the first Vision the book and Mormon translation the priesthood restoration polygamy and by doing it it really helps you to understand uh not just what actually happened but how the church has completely redefined what happened and so we're going to try to go through this in the best you know the Kinder plates don't have a ton of documents to really pull from but just to this will give you a good picture of what happens and so as we mentioned earlier this starts in on April 16 1843 um Robert Wiley begins his dig in Kinderhook Illinois which leads to the discovery of the Kinderhook plates on May 1st 1843 so two weeks later um William Clayton is going to make a journal entry about the Kinderhook plates with Joseph's partial translation included in his notes we read this earlier I'm just going to read it real quick it says I have seen six brass plates which were found in Adams County Adams County but it's probably okay wait wait can I ask you a question Mike yeah so when when William Clayton writes I is he writing as if he's Joseph Smith is he writing Joseph Smith's dictation or is this William Clayton saying he's seen six breastplates so William Clayton typically writes like Joseph did this President Joseph did this so I think this is him saying it and if when we get by halfway through the quote you're going to see him kind of turn to saying what Joseph Smith is doing got it and so I think that might be him it's a little tricky just because he is recording the day-to-day events of Joseph Smith along with being his scribe and so okay you're going to get a little bit of that where it's a little confusing but I think that could be him saying it and then saying what Joseph Smith okay you know said they were okay got it please so it says I have seen six brass plates which were found in Adams Pike County by some persons who were digging in a mound they found a skeleton about six feet from the surface of the Earth which was nine foot high um which is of course you know that's a lot of people believe that ancient people were ridiculously tall and lived hundreds of years um and then it says at this point there's a tracing of a plate in the journal uh the plates were on the breast of the skeleton this diagram shows the size of the plates being drawn on the edge of one of them they are covered with ancient characters of language containing from 30 to 40 on each side of the plates President Joseph has translated a portion and says they contain the history of the person with whom they were found and he was a descendant of ham through the loins of pharaoh king of Egypt and that he received his kingdom from the ruler of Heaven on Heaven and Earth and so that's just setting up that and that's that's from the original Journal that's not in the history of the church when they do change it to the first person and so that just shows because we'll get into it later but a lot of people want to say William Clayton just made that up and so we're reading it now so you can kind of understand that he's not making it up because he's with Joseph um and that is his original entry I just have to say that I've made this point in previous episodes but this curse of Kane thing you know Christians who love the Bible like to always remind us that there's no curse of Cain dark skin in in in the New Testament or in the Old Testament um and it took a prophet like Joseph Smith to insert dark skin as a curse into scripture and we've already talked about how the Book of Mormon has not the curse of Cain but the curse of the lamanites with dark skin and that he injects the curse of cane into the book of Abraham and the Book of Moses so he sort of codifies scriptural racism into you know those books and now we have him codifying again the curse of Cain because of course you know the way I understand it um this ham you know if if you're basically talking about ham and you're Joseph Smith you're talking about the curse of Cain um you know uh descending through the through the loins of Noah and his descendants through egyptus or whatever and you you guys may or may not agree with me but to me this sort of makes it uh sort of like a grand slam Joseph can't help but codify curse of Cain racism into every scripture he touches and Nemo and Mike you guys can tell me if I've got that wrong yeah it's it's like he's got these beats that he's gonna hit when he's translating these things he's gotta he's gotta make sure he shoehorns hamim he's got to get Pharaoh in there as a proper noun because it's a person you know that's what he's got to do every time uh that's his idea of consistency I think Mike are you gonna are gonna tell me I'm wrong on that one well it's just I think it's one of those things where I don't I don't know if Joseph Smith is thinking in terms of like I need to tie this into the curse of ham I think he's trying to find a way to tie it into the book of Abraham to give it credibility through what he's done um and I think as we'll go through it creates problems but yeah I I think that he's trying to in his head he's thinking I've made the book Abraham all about Egypt and now I have these Kinder plates and I I need to tie them into Egyptian because the characters look like they might be Egyptian and so I think it's just he doesn't really he's I don't want to say he's a one-trick pony on this but I think he's got like Nemo said he's got a Playbook like these are the things I'm trying to emphasize about um where my theology is with regard to ancient Egypt and so I think he just goes to it and as we'll get to um as we go uh through the Apologetics obviously that is because he's trying to tie the Kinderhook plates to the Egyptian alphabet in order to um you know kind of make it work with what he's done with the book Abraham okay so I can't blame him because you know in his in his um cultural milieu as people like to say in the in the waters in which he was swimming language made up of symbols rather than traditional sort of latinized characters or even Hebrew um that is Egyptian to those people in their heads so any anything they come across where there's a language written out in pictograms they're going to think it's something to do with Egyptian that's why Joseph Smith went for reformed Egyptian when he was talking about the characters on The Book of Mormon plates that's why you know he he looked at the Egyptian language and felt like he could get all these vast paragraphs out of each symbol because you know that's the way he made the Book of Mormon plates work uh and so that's what he's doing again so you can't blame him for for pushing on the Egypt idea so heavily because that's the waters he was swimming in yeah yeah absolutely and and I guess the other thing that's really crucial to me about this quote is that you know Joseph's main scribe or one of his main scribes at the time is writing in his journal that Joseph he's just confirming the the as a first-hand witness that Joseph Smith uh you know claimed the origins of these plates and commenced um you know translating them and that's really important eyewitness testimony as far as far as I'm concerned yeah it is he's um yeah sorry he's also uh he if you pull that quote up he's also essentially saying that Lehigh and Nephi are descendants of pharaoh king of Egypt because how else are like how else is a is a skeleton buried with these plates being found in North America if you didn't even come if you didn't either come with Lehigh and Co or with uh the Jared eyes that's weird I didn't even think so he's got to tie either of those groups directly to the royalty of Egypt and Ham yeah it's just weird interesting yeah you're right because it's weird in two slides we're gonna have a quote from parley parley Pratt that kind of actually does what you're doing Nemo which is all of a sudden now you got to figure out why are these people in the Americas when the Book of Mormon is saying that there was no one here and that's actually a really good point that's going to be addressed and I didn't think about it either just because I just wasn't thinking that way but yeah that's a big problem when you're trying to tie the book Abraham to America really quickly Mike are you going to be covering kind of who Robert Wiley is and what his motives might have been later or are you not covering that yeah so later in the timeline we're going to talk about Robert Wiley and kind of what he says his motivations were we don't go into a ton of detail just because you know the we don't have I don't even know if there is a ton of detail in his background but yeah we will definitely cover kind of why he did it okay all right well let's go ahead and go uh to the next slide yep yeah and so the next slide this is what we already talked about so we don't have to spend much time on it but the same day that Joseph Smith is going to write or have William Clayton write down his journal the partial translation um the times and Seasons prints a letter to the editor um discusses the Kinderhook plates their history and the hope it would go to prove the authenticity of the Book of Mormon which should undoubtedly will um and so you know it just says like this little paragraph here says by whom these plates were deposited there must ever remain a secret unless someone skilled in deciphering hieroglyphics may be found to unravel the mystery some pretend to say that Smith the Mormon leader has the ability to read them if he has he will confer a great favor on the public by removing the mystery which hangs over them we learned there was a Mormon present when the plates were found who it has said left for Joy at the discovery and remarked that it would go to prove the authenticity of the Book of Mormon which it undoubtedly will and so it just shows that they're almost setting up Joseph Smith here to be the person that that brings forth this mysterious translation and obviously operating under the assumption that these plates are authentic I mean the logic there isn't outstanding because you know Joseph would have a motive to quote translate the kinderg plates in a way that would would validate the authenticity of the Book of Mormon right yeah like that wouldn't so that wouldn't necessarily be an independent validation right no no but yeah that and that's what where he's at right now and you know you have like Nemo mentioned earlier like you have to tie it to the Book of Mormon but he already tied it to the book of Abraham so now you have to that then you would have to to kind of you know what's I don't know what the phrase is square that Circle or Circle that square you'd have to then try to triangulate these three things and so I do feel like this is what happens we talked about this um in previous episodes this is what happens when you're I used to say when you're orally dictating like DNC 132 or the Book of Mormon but when you're just kind of making it up as you go along you create these problems like Nemo said all of a sudden if you're tying into the book of Abraham how did it get to America and so had he done any more translation on this yeah that would have been something he would have had to have done to find a way to bolster The Book of Mormon while also confirming the book of Abraham and trying to avoid those contradictions and so yeah they're they've already created a problem for Joseph Smith before he even began Nemo anything you want to add well this throws the Catalyst Theory like under the bus when it comes to the book of Abraham so if you go back to the previous episodes we've done the book of Abram a lot of people say that the way the book of Abraham actually works is that the proprietary was just a thing to inspire Joseph but this quote here shows that there were people around in Joseph Smith's time who believed he could translate hieroglyphics they believed that's what he was doing and along with all the other mountains of evidence that that's what Joseph Joseph Smith himself believed he was doing this just adds another nail to that coffin that the the culture around him the people around him also thought that he could literally translate hieroglyphics all right thanks Nemo that's great all right well let's go to the next slide which is apostle parley Pratt compares the king Eric plates to the book of Abraham yeah and this one's an important one and actually it's even more important now that Nemo mentioned the Book of Mormon connection to the Kindle hook plates but so this is May 7th so now we're six days after the Joseph Smith's partial translation Apostle parley Pratt comments on the Kinderhook plates comparing their look to the book of Abraham Papyrus and he says six plates having the appearance of brass have lately been dug out of a mound by a gentleman in Pike County Illinois they are small and filled with Engravings in Egyptian language and contain the genealogy of one of the ancient jaredites back to ham the son of Noah his bones were found in the same vase made of cement part of the bones were 15 feet underground a large number of citizens have seen them and compared the characters with those on the Egyptian Papyrus which is now in the city so this is an important quote to show that everyone around Joseph Smith is under the assumption they're true which is only going to happen if Joseph Smith is telling him about the fact that this has to do with um the you know the genealogy of ancient jaredites and so to Nemo's point it does seem like that's how he's going to tie this both to the book of Abraham and also to the Book of Mormon by saying that this is actually one of the jaredites that came out of out of the loins of ham and so it just seems like he's he's already kind of weaving a very complicated web here but obviously this quote to me is important because parley press not going to just make this up so he's getting this from Joseph Smith all right so that's the second witness so to speak an Apostolic witness that that Joseph has declared these authentic and that he's um that he's pursuing to translate them right yeah even and the thing is like you'll hear we'll get into it later people say oh it's a partial translation and that's fine it is a partial translation but it's still a translation you know it's like if you do a partial test and you fail that you can't then say well I only took you know a quarter of the test you still failed what you took and so I mean the book of Abraham the book of Abraham was a partial translation until it was finished in Nauvoo right it's like yeah it was still scripture yeah and that's just it you know it's partial until it's not and the fact is he started it and he never yeah and well again he never says I'm not doing this because it's fake or I'm not doing this because I don't believe it's true so all we have is what he did and so yeah if you if you want to from a politics standpoint say it's partial that's fine it is partial but we could still assess what he did yeah all right Nemo anything you want to add no it's just looking into the timeline of the Tower of Babel uh which is what causes the jaredites to kind of come over to the ancient Americans and how that lines up with because the church says that happened in 22 to 2300 BC I just wanted I was just looking into what the Egyptians were up to at that time um you know seeing if the Pharaoh was even a title in use then but I'll I'll get back to you all and let you know okay all right that's a good point yeah and that's a good point too because that's again when you start creating this stuff and you're not thinking about all the things that you're going to affect by creating it it creates a lot of problems and that's how we can assess it that's how Scholars can look at the Book of Mormon and say those things are anachronistic or that biblical scholarship didn't happen and yet it's in the Book of Mormon and we're going to see the same things here even with just that partial translation he's creating problems that we can assess and so as I said that's why I think this episode is really cool because it does tie into all of these different episodes we've already done I think in a way that will help it make a lot more sense to someone who's trying to kind of put the pieces back together all right well let's go to the next Slide the navu neighbor publishes the facsimiles yep so three days after the parley Pratt quote um the navo neighbor which we just mentioned is run by John Taylor is going to republish the times and seasons letter along with facsimiles of all 12 sides of the Kinderhook plates then they include the note at the end which we mentioned which says the contents of the plates will be published in the times and Seasons as soon as the translation is completed which implies that members were given the impression and John Taylor was given the impression that a full translation was going to come from Joseph Smith yeah yeah and I mean I can already predict that Joseph Smith's death is probably the only thing that predicts that prevents this sort of prediction or Prophecy from coming true right I I you know honestly I don't know I mean I we'll get into this as we go further along but I do think on some level Joseph Smith is like very skeptical of the plates because it's kind of like one of those things where he's doing this magic uh treasure digging with the rock and a hat right and all of a sudden someone comes up to you and like hey I just did that same thing and I actually found these plates and Joseph Smith knows it doesn't work but he's also in that position we can't say that because that's his background and so you know we'll get into it you're saying he has second thoughts Joseph eventually a second thoughts I I think he's skeptical because I think it's one of those things we talk about the beginning of the episode when you're not in control of a situation you are very very much on thin ice because you know that you don't know the Providence of these these plates and you also know uh the I believe Joseph Smith knew that he created the prop set of the Book of Mormon plates because there were no there were no plates with with reformed Egyptian that that's not a thing well if he develops if he develops skepticism uh it's it's problematic because he he declares early on you know their authenticity and Origins you know I think that also comes from the fact that I think on some level he can't help himself yeah it's the same thing obviously with the Egyptian Scrolls he knows those are Egyptian Scrolls they're with mummies you know they're they're more established items but brass plates with uh Engravings that kind of parallel The Book of Mormon I think he's like I made up The Book of Mormon plates but yet here this dude is and I don't think they're real but I also can't say that because if I say there's no such thing as brass plates I'm with writing you know I mean so yeah if it puts them in a real tight spot so I I kind of wonder if he kind of didn't want to be I I kind of Wonder we'll get into it later but I think he was in that position where he didn't want to say I don't know what these are because he had to have answers for everything in order to have that charismatic leadership but he also knows that if he goes too far he's going to be exposed and so he was in a no-win situation it also reminds me of his self the lamanite Declaration of him coming up on the bones and then the result the white laminate were you not anything Nemo I was just going to say that from my look at that list we know a lot about what was going on in the world in the 23rd Century BC so the fact that there's some remains that don't really add up to the archaeological evidence that exists within North America um yeah it's just problematic for Joseph Smith because it puts the time in it if you start to say that they're descendants of the jaredites that puts a time on him he's at least that old um he's maybe a little bit younger yeah okay all right let's go to the next Slide the times and Seasons connects the Book of Mormon and kinderg plates okay so now we're jumping to December 1st 1843 and the times and season is going to make this reference to the Kinderhook plates it says why does the circumstance of the plates recently found in a mound in Pike County Illinois by Mr Wiley together with the ethnology and a thousand other things go to prove the Book of Mormon true answer because it is true all right to church sorry guys I mean that sounds a little bit circular to me it's extremely circulated just it it's one of those ones it's hard to read without having some sarcasm because it's just like why is it true because it is true and it's just it's the whole like Joseph Smith was a prophet because it's true it's true because Joseph Smith is a prophet and circle and circle and circle and so it just the fact that this is in the times and seasons in December of 1843 tells you that the church is still having discussions about this members of the church are very excited about it and at this point there's no skepticism that they're not true all right well let's go to the next slide Wilbur Fugate claims the Kendrick plates are a fraud yeah so now we're jumping all the way to 1879 because obviously Joseph Smith is going to be killed in 1844 and that effectively just sends the entire church into chaos um so in June of 1879 uh Wilbert Fugate writes to James Cobb in Salt Lake City he tells them that the Kinderhook played through a hoax that were intended to trick Joseph Smith into translating the plates um in the letter it describes how the plates were faked using acid to etch the the characters and the process of how they were uncovered and brought to Joseph Smith um and on the website we have a citation to the full text of the affidavit but effectively he's saying exactly how they did it and how they used the lore of treasure digging to get one of the people from the church to be there to bring it to Joseph Smith like they knew what they were doing and so that happens in June of 1879. now in December of 1890 in the Overland monthly they report about the discovery of the Kinderhook plates and it says Charlotte Haven said that when Joshua Moore showed them to Joseph the latter said that the figures or writing on them was similar to that in which the Book of Mormon was written and if Mr Moore could leave them he thought that by the help of Revelation he would be able to translate them and I find this interesting because here is Charlotte Haven and the reason I put her name in uh in yellow is because that is a reference that John Gee uses all the time to claim that there was this long scroll for the book Abraham they love the Charlotte Haven quote yet they will never use the Charlotte Haven quote that says that Joseph Smith was going to translate the Kinder who played by Revelation because later now they're going to want to tell us heeda wasn't interested and so um so selective use selective use of evidence when it's convenient for your argument you're saying yeah it's just one of those inconsistent yeah it's inconsistencies and how they approach evidence and whereas I would go from the standpoint of yeah Charlotte Haven probably thought she saw a long scroll because as we talked about in that episode you know a two foot long piece of paper to anyone who isn't used to that is going to be like that's a long scroll it's not doesn't be 30 feet um but anyways the point is um we have this quote and I think she means book of Abraham and not Book of Mormon because they're comparing the the characters on the Papyrus obviously we don't have gold plates to compare to from The Book of Mormon but the fact is in December of 1890 we have this this quote saying that Joseph Smith was saying if you leave the plates with me I will translate them um I think it's a questionable quote it is very long after but it also um kind of puts a light on why using Charlotte Haven's quote in the book of Abraham for John Gee about the loss missing long scroll that is problematic just the same it's a leg quote but at the same time it's it's it's a lot more credible than the idea that these were actually authentic plates stemming back from the time of Noah and ham I mean it's better than anything else we have in terms of their authenticity isn't that right no and it lines up too I mean it is we'll go through this timeline and kind of the Apologetics she is saying that she's there and Joseph Smith saw the saw the plates asked to hold on to him um so he could help by the power of Revelation which is what he would claim obviously for the Book of Mormon and the book Abraham because even though he's translating him he's translating them through God's revelation of what the characters are so it it matches what we have it's just one of those things where um we don't have a lot to go with it so I just find this quote to be interesting because it does show um that they're comparing to the book Abraham papyri and that Joseph Smith at least is showing interest in translating which would make sense given the journal entry okay really quickly I just want to make sure I understand so you've got Wilbur Fugate who's saying that they were a fraud in 1879 but originally your story had Robert Wiley digging and so who are these who are these characters so this is a group of people that are doing this and so it's not just one person so Robert Wiley is the one who's going to dig him up Wilbur Fugate is part of that group that's trying to trick Joseph Smith and he's the only one that's coming out to tell everybody what happened and so so Wilbur would have been a co-conspirator yes with in the in the conspiracy to show Joseph Smith the fraud along with Robert Wiley correct okay Nemo do you want to add anything to this slide particularly not particularly other than I hate it when they cherry pick sources okay yes point that out whenever they do it okay well the one thing I just want to say about you know this slide is I'm dying to know how the Mormon Church handles sort of uh you know this eruption of evidence that would otherwise disclaim disprove or add weight against Joseph's misclaim to be a translator like this is this should be a bombshell for for the Mormon church so I'm just dying to know how they respond to the potential bombshell right yeah and the next slide is is a great one okay it just shows how we're spinning our Wheels here to try to make this work so let's jump to the next slide which is BH Roberts our good friend BH Roberts reappears Apollo early apologist Beach Roberts declares the hoaxers are the real hoax yeah and so this is from his book new Witnesses for God and it says of this presentation of the matter it is only necessary to say that it is a little singular that Mr Fugate alone out of the three said to be in collusion and perpetrating the fraud should disclose it and that he should wait from 1843 to 1879 a period of 36 years before doing so when he and those said to be associated with them had such an excellent opportunity to expose the vain pretensions of the Prophet if fugate's tail be true and this is really the big part says for while the statement in the text of the prophet's journal to the effect that the find was genuine and that he had translated some of the characters and learned certain historical facts concerning the person with whose Remains the plates were found may not have been known at the time to the alleged conspirators to deceive him still the editor of the times and Seasons John Taylor the close personal friend of the Prophet took the fine seriously and expressed it once explicit confidence in an editorial in the times and season on May 1st 1843 that the prophet could give a translation of the plates and this attitude the church continued to maintain for in the prophet a Mormon weekly periodical published in New York on the 15th of February 1845 there was published effects Emily of the Kinderhook plates together with the times and Seasons editorial and all the above matter of the text how easy to have covered Joseph Smith and his followers with ridicule by proclaiming The hoax as soon as they accepted the Kinderhook plates is genuine why was it not done the fact that fugate's story was not told until 36 years after the event and that he alone of all those who were connected with the event gives that version of it it is rather strong evidence that his story is the hoax not the discovery of the plates nor the Engravings upon them and so BH Roberts is saying that because William Fugate waited so long to to Proclaim that they were trying to trick Joseph Smith that clearly his lie is the real hoax in that Joseph Smith his translations are are completely legitimate and so BH Roberts is admitting that Joseph Smith translated part of it and that the church believed it to be true and therefore the real hoax is the people claiming it was a hoax which I think this was a really important one to illustrating how the church is going to stick with preserving Joseph Smith as a prophet against this story from William Fugate because there's no way really to know one way or the other at this moment um if he's telling the truth so to me what's important about this quote if I'm just summarizing is we've got BH Roberts you know apologists for the church not an apostle but but church historian and you know I think he's a member of the presidency of the Quorum of the 70. he's validating Joseph's authentication of the Kinder hook plates uh you know John Taylor's involvement the times and Seasons he's just sort of like connecting the dots and doubling doubling down and saying man if Joseph said it and John Taylor said it and if it published in the times and Seasons I'm sticking I'm sticking with the authenticity of Joseph's Declaration of the Kinderhook place that that's what I'm reading there um Nemo anything you want to add just that what we're seeing there is him saying well he wouldn't have he wouldn't have tried to hurt the church the way I would have if I were in his position therefore he's not telling the truth but there's loads of reasons why he wouldn't have revealed the fact it was a hoax part of it might have been shock and disbelief so Joseph fell for it in the first place yeah yeah like BH Roberts is the defender of the faith and so he is he knows he needs what this shows is Beach Roberts knows that he needs to not go with evidence but but to bolster the prophet's credibility doesn't this show that the Kinder hook plates is a is a threat to Joseph Smith's credibility that wiles would be it's Robert's spring to Joseph's defense yeah I mean if if the Kindle plates are what we're going to be told today that they are then BH Roberts would have said it really doesn't matter because he only made a partial translation using the book Abraham papyri so who cares and yet what you're gonna see is that the church is going to go the other route and say oh no these are authentic Joseph Smith is a prophet therefore whoever's saying that he made it they made it up is a liar uh because Joseph Smith already partially translated it so they're going to stick with this just as they stuck with um and we talk about this with the DNA in the Book of Mormon episode he had all these initial DNA studies saying Native Americans did not come from Jerusalem and the church is like yeah screw that they don't know and then when it got too definitive then they changed the introduction to the Book of Mormon to say to change it from um primarily are they primary ancestors to among them I care about the exact wording so it just shows that the church is going to privilege Joseph Smith over whatever they need to until they have no other choice okay all right well let's go to the next slide which is the Improvement era affirms uh the church's stance on the Kendrick plates yeah so this is from 1904 and so this is an article in the Improvement era which is like you know the liahona or the enzyme um and it's going to confirm that the church believes the Kinder plates are authentic so it says um certain bell-shaped plates are said to have been discovered in a mound in the vicinity of Kinderhook Pike County Illinois by Robert Wiley in 1843 and taken to Joseph Smith now I wish to ask one were those plates translated by Joseph Smith two if so what were their contents three where are they four are they considered of any value in confirming the Book of Mormon and five is there anything about them in the in any of the church works and so their answer to one and two is near Kinderhook and Pi County Illinois between 50 and 60 miles south and east of Nauvoo on April 23 1843 a Mr Robert Wiley while Excavating a large Mound took from said Mound six brass plates of bell shape fastened by a ring passing through the small end and fastened with two clasps and covered with ancient characters human bones together with charcoal on ashes were found in the mound in connection with the plates which evidently had been buried with the person whose bones were discovered the plates were submitted to the prophet and speaking of them in his journal under the date of May 1st 1843 he says I have translated a portion of them and finally contain the history of the person with whom they were found he was was a descendant of ham through the lines of pharaoh king of Egypt and that he received his kingdom from the ruler of Heaven and Earth and if you want we could just go to the next slide and do both those together um and so the next slide is going to have the answer to question three it says uh the plates were later placed in a museum in St Louis known as McDowell's which was afterwards destroyed by fire and the plates were lost question four was about would this confirm the Book of Mormon they said the event would go very far towards confirming the idea that in very ancient times there was intercourse between the eastern and western hemispheres and the statement of the Prophet would mean that the remains were Egyptian the fair implication also from The Prophet's words is that the descendant of the Pharaohs possessed a kingdom in the new world and this civil is in this circumstance May account for the evidence of a dash of Egyptian civilization in our American Antiquities and then fifth it says the whole account of finding the plates together with the testimony of eight Witnesses besides Mr Wiley who were acquainted with the finding of the relics as also the statement from The Prophet's history is found in the millennial star volume 21 pages 40 through 44. all right so Mike what's significant if you had to summarize uh just that in a church published magazine they're again affirming the Kinder plates are real they're affirming that Joseph Smith translated a portion of them uh they're putting a lot of emphasis on the fact that there's eight witnesses to the Kinder plates being real which as you know there's eight Witnesses the eight and the three to the Book of Mormon um and just that this is proof of the Book of Mormon having people that came here and had a dash of Egyptian which would give us the reformed Egyptians so they are using the Kinderhook plates in 1906 or 1904 to establish the Book of Mormons authenticity and that Joseph Smith was a prophet who could translate them and and they're they're not holding back they're they're going full out to say that this is what happened interesting Nemo anything you want to add is an observation I had a thought and it has now escaped me so we'll see oh no that's okay yeah like like already and if if they're using the Kinderhook plates to bolster The credibility of the book of Abraham and the Book of Mormon and then later it's all turned out to be bullet like says Nemo might want to say you know is it fair to say than the Book of Mormon then then is up for question as to its validity if things that they provided as evidence to the Book of Mormons or the book of Arabs of validity ultimately fall I mean that to me that's something that just immediately jumps out oh I remember what I wanted to say oh good I installed a good litmus test for those who are still in the church or you know still attend the church would be if you want to decide whether this was the church really pushing this narrative the church often includes enzyme article quotes and leahona quotes in Sunday school manuals imagine yourself in Sunday school this being presented to you in a Sunday school manual now imagine yourself putting up your hand and disagreeing with it what reaction would you get and that reaction will tell you just how sincerely people held this belief because if it's been if it's included in the church magazines if it could be included in a church manual then to go against that that feeling you would get will tell you everything you need to know yeah all right yeah and that article is not going to be written in the in the Improvement era unless there's people talking about it and they're talking about it because William Fugate said he made it up and so the church is doubling down and they're putting in their own Publications to their members to say that guy's a liar this is real Joseph Smith is a prophet because he translated part of them I mean they're not mincing words here and that's why I think that article is really important because it shows that the church in 1904 after William Fugate said they were a hoax was doubling down um instead of maybe you know praying to God to ask if they're real or not they're just going to go straight up and say nope they're real because Joseph Smith translated part of them so I I you can't get around that like Nemo said this isn't a church publication this isn't just some random quote this is something that was sent to every member so that they could know Joseph Smith was not fooled all right well let's go ahead and go to the next slide which is BH Roberts converts Joseph's account to the first person yeah so we talked about this earlier in the episode and this is something that kind of happens um with the Apologetics for this so I wanted to bring this up which is in 1930 um BH Roberts is putting together the history of the church and what they do is they take these journals um from Joseph scribes and they convert them from third person to first person and so we mentioned earlier about how the initial uh entry from William Clayton said you know President Joseph translated a portion of them and so now it says I have translated a portion of them and so this really isn't that important it's just to say that the church itself is going to be the one that is going to change the journals from like a third person to a first person and it's only important because we'll get into this with the Apologetics but I just want to note that 1930 the church is going to change this from third person to first person and the fact that they're including it in the history of the church tells you that they believe that what Joseph Smith translates here is authentic and being done through Joseph Smith as part of his prophetic gift all right Nemo anything you want to add I just love it when they change the history of these things and then as we're going to get to later they'll start trying to throw into question um certain people that write things down of Joseph Smith while completely ignoring the fact that they will take the words of those scribes and just alter them to suit their purpose yep yeah it's problematic all right yeah and that's I don't know is that shady or deceptive on BH Roberts's part like I tend to want to honor him especially because of the Shannon Caldwell Montez you know secret Mormon meetings in 1922 his conscientious objection to the potential invalidity of the Book of Mormon is a translation along with pretty clear evidence that by the end of his life he lost his faith in the history Studio Book of Mormon I tend to want to view Beach Roberts is more of a white hat than a black hat is this evidence of deception or not Mike I think it hurt anymore what I mean if you read this book The Man's a hero right right studies of the Book of Mormon by b.h Roberts and you start to see okay he got it he understood but at the same time he's still trying to make these things work and I I can't blame him for it but it is it is deceptive there's no getting around that you can't mince words in the same way that they didn't mince words about just what they thought these translations were okay Mike anything you want to add no well like changing Joseph's scribes journals from third person to first person doesn't bother me just because I think they're just trying to make it more readable but we've talked about in previous episodes that they'll change for example there's one part where Joseph Smith talks about going to get a beer uh it's like going for a pint at Mosers or something like that and in the history of the church they just scrub that out so that members don't realize Joseph Smith was drinking after the word of wisdom because they want members to obey the word of wisdom that's shady I don't think changing it from the third person to the first person is a huge deal just because I think you're trying to make it more readable for for members and the fact is the scribes are writing it down as Joseph Smith is telling it to him so it's not like they're writing like from a from a distance and then having it converted into Joseph's words they're writing down what Joseph's telling them and then BH Roberts is going to say since they're writing down what Joseph's saying we're just going to convert it as if Joseph said it himself because it's a lot more meaningful but I don't find that shitty as much I think they change things I think the reason I find it shady is because of the word games and the games that the the I know John's Like the Way games but the what apologists will do and Defenders of the faith will do around when they will say well this was Joseph Smith's scribe it wasn't actually him so in in in that background to then change the words of Joseph Smith's scribe to the first person as though they are the words of Joseph Smith himself because we know that they muddy the waters in that area and they will cherry pick in that area anyway that's why I tend to say that it's Shady because it it's all part of that same process yeah oh I agree with that because it's Shady the way that the church and apologetics try to use what they know was done uh commonly in changing it to first person to then say that what what the problems with the church don't really matter because it was it was changed like they know why it was changed they know what was changed but they tried to make members think that it was something bigger than that in order to keep them from looking that part is is really dishonest and Shady um and I agree with you 100 because they do play games with the fact that they know full and well why BH Roberts made the changes he did but they're going to weaponize that to then try to neutralize the problems while still privileging all of the other things that the scribes wrote down that they want us to obey whether it's DNC 132 any of the revelations I mean my goodness that you know scribes wrote down the Book of Mormon yet we're supposed to believe that's Flawless you know it's just you can't have it both ways and so you either trust Joseph Smith scribes or you don't and and you cannot just kind of waver between the two it's like the tight versus loose translation except it's like good scribe bad scribe so it's like well Joseph Smith was wrong here so that scribe went rogue Joseph Smith hasn't been proven wrong on this so that's from God you can't do that that is super Shady okay all right let's jump to the next slide commentary on the Book of Mormon confirms the Kinderhook plates yeah so this is a book written in 1961 and it's um it's edited and arranged by George Phillips and um Jane John uh I can't pronounce that word and I I know I know it's published I think it's published through the church I'm not sure exactly like how this was like distributed but this is from 1961 and it's written for people who are trying to get more depth to the Book of Mormon and it says but on the other hand we have the fact before us that the skeleton of the Pharaoh found in Kinderhook Illinois referred to previously was dug out of a large Mound after penetrating about 11 feet the workers came to a bed of limestone that have been subjected to the action of fire They removed the stones which were small and easy to handle to the depth of two feet more when they found the skeleton this was evidently a burial chamber as with the bones which appeared to have been burned was found plenty of charcoal and Ashes from the fact from this fact that is evidence that some of the Mounds were very ancient date as it is not supposed that this man would be the only one of his race and Nation to be buried in this manner we also suggest that this colony of Egyptians may have originated the style of architecture in this country in which so many find resemblances to the Egyptian and which is especially characterized by the erection of vast truncated pyramids and so some of that text earlier we read in one of the other quotes so obviously this commentary is relying on some earlier quotes but it's just showing that they are using the Kendrick plates all the way up until this point to try to bolster The Book of Mormon and also cling to the fact that this is true and using it to basically tell us that's why the country is the way it is and obviously as we're going to get to it's completely made up and it just shows how easily fooled people are when you're trying to defend Joseph Smith and make him a prophet so one quick question I have that that's not necessarily enough you know George Reynolds and Jan sojal that's not necessarily an official Church source is it or is it I don't know if it's an official Church Source or if it's like a book that's published to be like kind of a you know you know they have all those books that you're supposed to buy to um to get more depth into like um the come follow manuals or Book of Mormon or general conference talks so I'm assuming it's one of those I don't think it's like being put out by the first presidency but it is a commentary that's being distributed for people to use to understand the books probably Deseret Book right okay yeah that would be that would be my guess what it is so I'm not saying that this is like a first presidency thing as much as you're saying the mainstream belief of the church in 1961 is that the Kendrick plates are real Joseph Smith translated portion of them and that is confirming the Book of Mormon as well as why you know there's certain things happening in America such as the Mounds which we talked about uh in our Book of Mormon surrounding influences episode um that he was using the mound builder myth to formulate kind of the themes of the Book of Mormon and this is also showing okay that idea coming back okay yeah I just Googled it and definitely commentary on the Book of Mormon was published by Deseret Book according to what I'm looking at and so that's the church imprimatur if that's the right word yeah so this is a this is not like coming from the first presidency but this is something the church isn't going to print something that is off the walls basically so Nemo anything else you want to add yeah there's a sleight of hand at play here they call him Pharaoh they call him a pharaoh rather than being a descendant of pharaoh king of Egypt and I wonder whether that's because they now know that Pharaoh is a title not a name and so they've they've shifted that so that it gives more credibility to it they also now are playing to the um hemispheric or the the kind of the broad spread Book of Mormon model uh I forget the exact name for it but they can no longer go for the upstate New York Book of Mormon geography model because in the early 1920s BH Roberts brought a lot of attention to the problems with that so we're now in the 60s when this is being published and so the the archaeological digs and all that sort of stuff is also come forward so they've realized they've got to go to a broad Continental model which is why they can now start bringing in you know essential American pyramids as evidence of Egyptian president in America personally yep all right thanks Nemo all right well let's go to the next slide which is the BYU archaeological Society doubles down so now we're in September of 1962 so obviously we're getting you know further and further away from when William Fugate declared these a hoax and so the president of the BYU archaeological Society will be W Ricks wrote The Following in the Improvement era magazine after one of the kinderhooks plates was found and so to give a little context these plates were all believed to have been lost it's very similar to The Book of Abraham Papyrus um and then all of a sudden the Chicago historical society found one of the six plates and this obviously just like with the book of Abraham they thought oh my goodness this is so great it's going to prove everything is true and as you find out with with church history typically the more you find the more that it goes to show that Joseph Smith was not a prophet um and so they find this plate and the leader the president of the archaeological Society writes and again a church produced magazine it says a recent discovery of one of the Kinderhook plates was examined by Joe which was examined by Joseph Smith uh junior reaffirms his prophetic calling and reveals the false statements made by one of the finders the fines solved a 74 year old controversy and put the plates back into the category of genuine which Joseph Smith Jr had said they were in the first place what Scholars May learn from this ancient record in future years or what may be translated by divine power is an exciting thought to contemplate this much remains Joseph Smith Jr stands as a true prophet and translator of ancient records by Divine means and all the world is invited to investigate the truth which is sprung out of the earth not only of the Kinderhook plates but of the Book of Mormon as well and all you know name on any reaction to that Nemo no not really okay other than yeah the only thing I'm going to say is tell me if logic if my logic makes sense here if they're gonna say that the office authenticity of the Kinderhook plates um sort of like bolsters the legitimacy or The credibility of Joseph's prophetic calling is is it is it consistent or logical that then if the Kinderhook plates are shown to be a fraud that by by pure logic alone that would uh that would challenge or question Joseph's prophetic calling come on John you know that's not how the game works you know that's not how they play that game but you are right the logic absolutely holds if they're going to use this to bolster The credibility then those same reasons by which it would bolster that credibility if it's proven false would also reduce the credibility of the Book of Mormon yep and I love how much confidence there is in this article because you know it's almost like they're spiking the football on people who are saying Joseph Smith made it up and it just goes to show just again when we have those blinders on that the church is true um and we're trying to find ways to defend it you've got these these claims that are being made even though they found the plate that doesn't authenticate anything Joseph Smith died and yet they run to the Improvement era to tell members haha we found a plate Joseph Smith absolutely translated he's absolute prophet and this is why I mean they literally say um we uh the truth which is sprung out of the earth not only of the Kinderhook plates and they're literally telling you to study the Kinderhook plates because there's a lot of Truth coming out of it those are their words so it's not only are they saying yeah we found one and it shows are not a hoax they're like not only is it a hoax but it's a freaking Masterpiece and I might sound like I'm coming off too strong read these quotes they are spiking the football here and I I just find that overconfidence just to be so ridiculous because of the fact as Nemo said and if you said John when you make the the more you bolster that claim that it's true the more that when it's proven false that you're you're screwed and so I just I'm surprised that they went so hard at this John you say that 50 of your audience have never been Mormon right and so you take the time to explain some of the Mormon lingo absolutely one of you please explain to me one Earth spiking the football is oh Nema I forgot haven't you been watching the World Cup Nemo don't you know what happens you know you expect the foot deflate the ball if you spiked it surely yeah yeah so so so Nemo in America we have football which is awesome uh I know you have you have football um and uh when you score it when you score a touchdown you celebrate and usually you spike the football on the ground as like a celebration okay so yeah so the phrase is basically saying that they're celebrating a score here okay A little prematurely so yeah in this case it's more like um there's a really fun video of a football player and he's running and he celebrates too early and he lets go with the football like at the half yard line that's kind of what the church is doing here more so than than spiking it but yeah sorry that is an unfair uh reference that's all right thank you and tell this to be Nemo was trying to make a joke more than he was trying to get for that who says this podcast isn't informative huh yeah oh yeah no it's still fun though yeah and but yeah that I I think that quote is really damning I know it's from the BYU archaeological president and not from like you know the first presidency but I think the fact is that they're putting it in a church published magazine and they're going so hard at it that it really makes the bounce back when it's proven false just to be that much stronger than if they had just kind of maybe quietly said we found a plate or you know conf it's just they're they're like going straight into it and I think that's really obviously it proves to be a really bad idea but I I just think even at the time I'm surprised someone wasn't like maybe take a little bit of your foot off the gas here because we don't really know what these are yet but but they don't at the same time like by the same token Emerson Ballard will hold up the 1970 um James B Allen article from the Improvement era and say we were always talking about multiple accounts of the first Vision so if it's in the Improvement era it's like like Apostles will use it to defend themselves they'll use it to they will use it to say we as a church were talking about this so you can't get much more clear than if it's in there regardless of who the author is because James B Allen was a BYU professor he wasn't an apostle regardless who the author is Apostles modern Apostles now are saying if it was written in that magazine that was us the church talking about it yep yeah and that's another thing like to your point earlier about cherry picking you can't have it both ways if you're going to cite the Improvement error is proof that we're talking about it being straightforward you can't then say well it's in the proven era but you know it didn't really matter because it was from someone else I mean that's that's the whole problem with cherry picking and kind of selectively deciding in in 2022 what we're allowed to talk about from 1970 and what were 1962 or whatever versus today you have to have it both ways either the Improvement error speaks for the church or doesn't you gotta pick yeah and I'm just gonna you know I remember this famous quote from Hugh Nibley where they were talking about the glass liquor trial and and Joseph's you know peepstone Shenanigans back when church apologists and humibly and everyone else were all claiming that Joseph Smith was never a treasure Digger and that he was never you know uh you know he never faced trial for his Shenanigans I remember that quote something to the effect of of humidity saying if this stuff that were actually true it would be the most damning and you know the most damning evidence that that could ever be provided against Joseph Smith and I and and we're kind of being repetitive here but it's just really important to note these techniques of church apologists because that there's never a it's just pure motivated reasoning there's never a point where they're even making an attempt to be fair and objective because just like with Hugh nibley's claim that you know the the glass liquor trial evidence would then be damning to Joseph Smith there's never a point where he then circles back and says hey you know what I said that before now it turns out that Joseph in fact was you know uh you know did did was faced from from an actual trial and a judge for us crying or peeping or doing this folk magic stuff there's never a point where Hugh nibbly sort of like is called to account and acknowledges that that this does in fact uh damage Joseph's credibility the same with these apologists there's Mormon apologists that are that are spiking the football around the Kinder Egg plates I'm I'm predicting we're never going to see an instance where they Circle back and say yeah okay it turns out the kinderg plate stuff was false and and um and so that does challenge Joseph's credibility I just predict we're never going to see that you know no and I'll I know we're beating a dead horse here but like you know every time we do these topics especially like polygamy um in the Book of Mormon like treasure digging all that apologists will scream presentism presentism you're looking at that through the lens of 2022 and you're viewing 1830s or 40s through that lens and in this case they are viewing the Kinderhook plates through 2022 and ignoring what everybody said at the time that Kinderhook plates were and what they were to Joseph Smith and so again it's like what Nemo said you have you know it goes both ways you can't say presentism to uh say that Joseph Smith marrying 14 year old girls was normal which it wasn't uh and then say Oh but by the way we're going to view the Kinder Place through the fact that we now know they're fake and then work backwards and so you know it's just it's just to me and I know John you don't like the word games it just shows that one apologetics play these games where they're just jumping around and it doesn't there's no logical consistency because it the only objective is to neutralize these problems it doesn't matter what problems you create elsewhere and that's why as I said earlier in the episode that's why I think the kinderk plates are so amazing because the plates by themselves is one thing but it's what it impacts everywhere else and that's what we're going to kind of get into soon um in this episode because it really does solidify problems elsewhere um that happen when the apologist okay claims are gonna make and we'll get into all that just a quick a quick point is that the reason they can do that the reason that apologists can jump all around and it doesn't have to make any logical sense is because the church the the key to the social experiment that is the church is that they have taught people to think emotionally not logically and so as long as emotionally it makes you feel good about Joseph Smith and it makes you feel good about your testimony then it doesn't matter if logically it works or not so that's how they get away with it oh 100 yeah and I mean I can't tell you and obviously both of you have probably had more experiences with it than I am where you start like someone will come up to me and they'll say you're wrong about this and I'll say um here's some sources where I'm explaining you know what I'm saying this backs it up and they'll reply with some form of like this doesn't this makes me feel like it's coming from Satan or this makes me feel uncomfortable and I don't want to read it and to your point that is how we're conditioned to think is if we get uncomfortable we need to get out and so um apologetics is about you know it's almost like a drug it's like you put that drug you put the needle in your arm of a politics like oh that feels so good it doesn't solve anything but it'll get you through to the next time you need you need to fix it and it really has no need to be consist or intellectually honest because that's not the goal yeah and obviously we'll talk about more about that as we get we have an episode all about apologetics later but yeah it just shows the Kinder plates is a good example of how apologetics just completely slam the brakes do a 180 and then just start dramming over all their old uh old uh apologetics to make sure that it it erases uh their history of of Defending these as authentic all right so if if if the problems weren't enough for the church as as you know related to the Kinder eggplates now we have a puzzle Marky Peterson affirming the Kinder hook please yeah so now we're in 1979 uh we have Mormon Apostle Marky Peterson he publishes a book called those gold plates and he offers the following on the Kinderhook plates he says there are the Kinderhook plates too found in America and now in the possession of the Chicago historical society controversy has surrounded these plates and their Engravings but most experts agree they are of ancient vintage and so it just shows like 1979 that's not that long ago an apostle for the church is writing in a book that they are authentic and that Joseph Smith Prophet you know and so 1979 just keep that in mind because we're about to see the turn here and and for our non-mormon listeners we just have to re-emphasize the point that Mormons are taught that they're all of all of their first presidency in Quorum of The Twelve those 15 men they're sworn in they're sustained as prophet seers and revelators and as special Witnesses of Christ that's what we're all led to believe that's how we sustain them that's how they sell themselves to us and so there's a it's not just some guy this is a guy that's supposedly talking to Jesus that we we give him that respect and power um and and that's why it's especially problematic when Apostles are uh are are publishing this stuff Nemo anything you want to add yeah that that line about like most experts agree they are of ancient vintage is very much a 90 of dentists agree yeah and you look at the figures and it's like we asked three dentists and like yeah you know you know what I mean it's yeah it's ridiculous that he's gonna make such an outlandish claim No One's Gonna pick him up on it no one's gonna say okay which experts can I see the papers they wrote kind of like Define an expert because if he's talking about Hugh Nibley which he probably is then I would argue that he's not necessarily an expert in the true sort of um unbiased sense of the word well yeah and that and it also the the very next slide is going to show you what the value of the church's experts are because in the very next slide we're going to see that those experts who agreed they were anciently vintage were wrong so yeah in a lot of ways it's almost worse that he says that because he's basically saying all of the experts I rely on have no idea what they're doing you know and so that just shows you know just as we tell with the book of Abraham we got John G and Kerry molstein who are putting these theories out and they're so easily falsified uh just by looking at the documents and the same thing here the church is like no no the experts agree then you find out they're wrong and it's like oh that's awkward but you know again it's all right most members are not gonna know all right let's jump to them next slide science proves the Kendrick plates are indeed a hoax yep so 1980 now the next year after the Mark E Peterson quote the Chicago historical society who possesses the one plate uh they commenced on testing the plate in order to understand its Origins and thus proved once and for all it was a 19th century creation and this leads to the August 1981 enzyme article which finally concedes the Kinderhook plates are a hoax after scientific testing determines that fugate's story of creating the hoax was actually correct and so the enzyme says as a result of these tests we concluded that the plate owned by the Chicago historical society Society is not of ancient origin we concluded that the plate was etched with acid and as Paul Chespin and other Scholars have pointed out ancient inhabitants would have probably have engraved the plates rather than etch them with acid secondly we concluded that the plate was made from a true brass Ally copper and zinc typical of the mid-19th century whereas the brass of ancient times was actually bronze an alloy of copper and Tin furthermore one would expect an ancient alloy to contain larger amounts of impurities and inclusions than did the alloy tested and so they're just straight up saying like yeah science is telling us there's no Wayans are ancient and I'm going to guess that that the Tanners probably uh published um you know first that these Kinder hook plates were shown to be a fraud I was gonna ask if you knew that I I don't know it for sure but that's what my memory you know I was just watching a short you know we've been releasing video shorts from all our Mormon stories podcast interviews and I was just watching one from Sandra Tanner that was released recently where she basically said that over the 30 plus years that her and Gerald were publishing stuff there was always this pattern of Gerald and Sandra 10 her first publishing a super problematic event related to more mature truth claims and then miraculously the Mormon Church you know six months or a year later would would publish the same thing giving no credit to the Tanners but then acting how you know none of this was a problem to begin with yeah I can't I can't tell from a quick Google search when the Tanners published about it but I mean obviously they have I just don't know if it was in between when the testing was done or not yeah and I'm just wondering go ahead go ahead Nemo I was gonna say regardless it's a case of this is about as close as you'll get to the church saying oh yeah we got it wrong but they won't say they got it wrong they're just stating the scientific fact yeah because they can't be seen to not acknowledge it right yeah because the the you know I was raised Mormon 45 years in the church I know what the Mormon Church taught me and and fellow members about what honesty is you know we all know the steps of repentance are you know acknowledge the sin confess the sin make restitution for the sin and then never commit the sin again so if the Mormon you know if the Mormon church from Joseph Smith and you know William Clayton and parley Pratt and BH Roberts and you know you know all the way up to uh um Apostle Marquis Peterson if they got it wrong if they systematically misled the Mormon people for a century and a half or more the honest thing to do according to the Mormon Church's own standards of truth would be not just to say hey these plates were proven to be false they would say hey these plates have been proven to be false we've been misleading you for 150 years and by the way we attached um you know our testimony of the Kinder hook plates to the authenticity or the veracity or to The credibility of Joseph Smith's translation and now all this has been shown to be false and so that calls into question Joseph Smith's veracity as a translator I'm guessing that did not appear in the August 1981 Ensign article is that fair to say Mike it's fair and actually why don't you go the next slide because that's a perfect transition to what they actually do say all right let's read it so in the same article they say a recent electronic and chemical analysis of a metal plate one of the six original plates brought in 1843 to the Prophet Joseph Smith in Nauvoo Illinois appears to solve a previously unanswered question in church history helping to further evidence that the plate is what its producers later said it was a 19th century attempt to lure Joseph Smith into making a translation of ancient looking characters that have been etched into the plates then they say Joseph Smith did not make the hoped for translation in fact no evidence exists that he manifested any further interest in the plates after early examination of them although some members of the church hoped that they would prove to be they would proved to be significant so they're basically immediately saying uh you know what they're fake and it's kind of funny because Joseph never tried to do it anyways which is completely at odds with what they used to say and so I agree that there's no evidence that Joseph had interest in the plates beyond the partial translation because we have no quotes of them one way or the other after that but the apologetic is just so disingenuous it is completely rewriting the history of the church which we just spent the last what 30 40 minutes doing they thought this event was so valuable that they defended the partial translation for 140 years they defended it for a good um a hundred years after William Fugate said it was a hoax they included in the history of the church and so all you have to do is re-read the timeline just to know how ridiculous this instantaneous flip on the kinderhut plates is Nemo what do you want to add it's just if you if you were doing a 180 this quickly in a car you'd get Whiplash it's it's crazy just how quickly they turned and just how quickly like you said they start to remove Joseph and try and protect it's like they try and protect Joseph from the implications of this story by by trying to give him some distance that just doesn't actually exist in the historical record the trick the church missed the thing that they should have worked out right near the beginning that Joseph Smith should have given them an example of is how to give a sure spiritual witness of something being true and then what to do when that thing is proven to not be true that that is something the church needs to survive and it doesn't have it now yeah their answers oh go ahead well I'm just gonna say that like this is for me this is Smoking Gun material regarding fraud like what I'm always looking for you know there people are always going to believe strange things without evidence it's just baked Into The Human Experience and you were never going to Stamp Out people wanting to exercise Faith to believe there's an afterlife to believe that there's meaning and purpose in the world to believe that there's a God but what I am all was on the lookout for are like these moments in Mormon church history where like knowing fraud is committed and you know whether it's the the the revelation of the book of Abraham in the New York Times as being problematic the the facsimiles in you know 1912 or whatever that was the the secret Mormon meetings uh of 1922 when BH Roberts put the general authorities on notice uh that that the Book of Mormon was deeply problematic from a historical perspective whether it's the excommunication or Von Brody whether it's Joseph Fielding Smith yanking you know the 1832 First Vision account out of you know Joseph Smith's own journal there are these moments in Mormon church history where the church knew that it had his hand in the cookie jar where it knew that that the account that the church was teaching its members in the world was not true this seems to be now 1981 yet another instance where the church you know morally had an obligation to say we screwed up we got it wrong we miseducated everyone we taught things that weren't true and instead like you said Whiplash they completely fail to be honest and they and they got and they instead Gaslight the world and basically say yeah this proves what we were saying all along right do I have that wrong no I mean that's just it it's like you know it kind of reminds me like you're you're a salesperson and you've been trying for six months to land this account and after six months the the place you're trying to get they go with someone else and you walk out the door and you're like I didn't want that anyways that's what it feels like they're they spent a hundred plus years telling us that this was a proof of him being a prophet and then the second science forces them to admit it's a hoax like he didn't try anyways it's just so bad and it's one of those things where you to your point they should just be like yeah he made a partial translation we don't know the means of it but he did show an interest um but we don't know why he didn't do any further but instead they just tried to play this game where it's like well he didn't really well he didn't really do anything with it anyways and that's incomplete Mike because they would also need to say and multiple Apostles and church historians for over a century and a half bolstered this claim which which in in church Publications which now turns out to be false and Joseph Smith himself bolstered it which now you know turns out to be false and so Joseph and a bunch of prophets and revelators all got it wrong right yeah oh yeah I mean it's just it's it's okay and it's one of those things you don't need to say it but yeah how do you say to a group of people Everyone that we taught you to believe was being truthful honest and speaking for a deity was wrong yeah how do how do you sell that to a group of people you can't that's what we talked about last the episode about book Abraham where it's like can you decanonize the book Abraham it's like no because the moment you do that you're signaling to the membership of the church Joseph Smith got it wrong so the moment you realize even the church is willing to say yeah Joseph Smith could not translate the language he claimed to be able to translate then to Nemo's point it's gone because every thing else crumbles and so then if you say uh our prophet seers and revelators through the church Publications also can't tell discern between fact and fiction why in the world am I going to believe Russell Nelson when he's already been wrong on a lot of stuff himself so it just goes you immediately will start seeing that Russell Nelson in down Oaks they've all been wrong on big issues in their lifetimes and then if you realize they have no power of discernment why are we following them and so the church requires a lot out of us and so they cannot be seen as infallible they'll say past profits were fallible but they're not going to say yeah Russell Nelson is going to only get maybe 40 of what he says correct they're just going to say Russell Nelson's not a perfect person but you better obey what he says and so yeah you you have to maintain that it's the whole problem with a structure that's built on charismatic leadership is that the moment you don't trust that they know what they're doing it's over yeah so uh this next slide is entitled questioning William Clayton's journal and I'm guessing this begins an analysis of Mormon church apologetics you know regarding how they they sort of backtrack is that right yeah so yeah so now we're going to kind of transition into the Apologetics of this episode all right so now we're going to questioning William Clayton's Journal yep and so now remember as we've already talked about they've defended this translation for 140 years to saying it's proof of him being a prophet and so the same enzyme article in 1981 is now going to say the following although this account appears to be the writing of Joseph Smith it is actually an excerpt from a journal of William Clayton it has been well known that the serialized history of Joseph Smith consists largely of items from other person's personal journals and other sources collected during Joseph Smith's Lifetime and continued after the Saints were in Utah then edited and pieced together to form a history of the prophet's life in his own words it was not uncommon in the 19th century for biographers to put the narrative in the first person when compiling a biographical work even though the subject of the biography did not actually say or write all the words attributed to him thus the narrative would represent a faithful report of what others felt would be helpful to print the Clayton Journal excerpt was one item used this way for example the words I have translated apportion originally read president Jay has changed translated apportion and you know let's just go to the next slide because the two slides work together okay and so um and then the article continues where the ideas written by William Clayton originated is unknown I want to repeat that again the enzyme article which is published by the church is going to say where the idea is written by William Clayton originated is unknown uh however as it will be pointed out later speculation about the plates and their possible content was apparently quite unrestrained in Nauvoo when the plates first appeared in any case this altered version of the extract from William Clayton's Journal was reprinted in the millennial star of 15th of January 1859 and unfortunately was finally carried over into the original church history when the history of Joseph Smith was edited into book form as the history of the church in 1909 William Clayton evidently had access to the plates at some point for in his journal entry on Monday May 1st he included a tracing of one of the plates whether or not he was present when Joseph Smith saw the plates is unknown two days later on Wednesday Brigham Young also Drew an outline of one of the Kinderhook plates in a small notebook diary that he kept inside the drawing he wrote May 3 May 3rd 1843 I had this at Joseph Smith's house found near Quincy so Nemo what's your thoughts to the quote where the ideas written by William Clayton originated is unknown they know exactly where that originated um it's good old Mr Roberts so uh no we demonstrated that Joseph Smith it came from Joseph Smith right we've demonstrated that this is yeah this is what I was talking about earlier is that when they start to muddy the waters about who wrote it and so was it just dismissed ideas or was it just described going rogue it creates these sorts of problems but it does show the other thing the church is willing to do is throw previous people doing secular things like compiling a history under the bus they're willing to admit technical errors as long as they don't implicate the Prophecies of revelators and their prophetic fallibility yeah yep we're stealing the Thunder from the next slide but I I just want to say you know water the problem with Watergate wasn't just the break-in this is a U.S you know reference political reference to the next I know this one Watergate scandal yeah the problem with Watergate wasn't so much the break-in it was the cover-up and this just feels like a cover-up to me um a very significant one so so Mike why don't we just go to the next slide yeah no and like you said the idea that it's unknown where Clayton got Joseph's parcel translation is just it's ridiculous um William Clayton was Joseph's personal scribe and he was with Joseph Smith on the day that they were introduced to the Kindred plates and we know that Clayton was with Joseph Smith because not only was he at Joseph's home he officiated a marriage that same day between 37 year old Joseph Smith and his 17 year old polygamous wife Lucy Walker ouch we covered her story in a previous episode that I highly recommend if you have not listened to that you do because Lucy Walker's story is horrific but the fact is William Clayton was there when Joseph Smith married Lucy walker uh so he was with him that day this idea that he was not there or they don't know where it originated from is ridiculous and so you know the bottom line is William Clayton was one of Joseph's most trusted men in the Nauvoo era and that Clayton was with Joseph during the day and officiated one of his polygamous marriages is further proof of how trusted William Clayton was and so everyone in the church lauded the Kinderhook plates until they recruiting me a fraud and so blaming Clayton's Journal as being incorrect just seems it's it's just beyond dishonest and so when you want to talk about you know lying to your members or um you know this wouldn't pass their own definition of honesty this is just straight up making crap up to try AI to privilege the image of Joseph Smith and that's there's no way if you're gonna and I would also like if maybe in that end that article they had said we don't know where William Clayton's uh ideas originated from but he was there when Joseph married a 17 year old girl early in the day I mean they're completely leaving that out and there's a good reason but it's just don't give a partial picture and then pretend you don't know because they know a lot more than they tell them then they're telling the members yeah go ahead so the other thing they won't tell you is that he was entrusted for example to tr to write down as a scribe DNC 124 and DNC 125 he wrote both of those sections down so if you're going to start questioning his ability to write things down accurately the Joseph Smith tells him we then have to start examining very closely just how true sections of Doctrine and Covenants are yeah yeah that's the thing you cannot say that William Clayton is making crap up in his journal and then say Oh but obey those Revelations that he's transcribed for Joseph Smith you can't do that I think he also wrote DNC 132 right uh Clayton so I mean it's like you know is the church would rather forget they would rather forget obviously just for the same reason they're not going to mention that he married Lucy Walker in the morning after telling her if she didn't uh marry him that the gates would be closed forever against her after her well you can watch the episode for that story but yeah it just shows that they are willing to throw anyone under the bus but to Nemo's point you can't do this with William Clayton unless you're also going to throw out everything else he produced for Joseph Smith and they're not going to do that and so if you're not willing to do that then you cannot question his journal entry here because it goes against everything we know and it's just it's so badly dishonest that they would do this and they're only doing it because science finally put them in a position where they can't defend it anymore and and tell me if I'm wrong Mike and Nemo but my understanding is of all the documents that the Joseph Smith papers project uh and the church church archives of the LDS church archives had been willing to now release William Clayton's journals are are you know one one example of documents that the Mormon church has yet to release it's one of those like final holdouts of potential scandalous documents that are so problematic the church is still not as of 2022 I've been willing to release them publicly is that right yeah I mean I think a lot of them have leaked out over the years but but obviously they have not published them in a formal setting which of course I think a lot of people are excited to see what's in them but yeah they're they're not out there yet okay yeah and and so what the church has done with things like Wilford woodruff's Journal that are problematic is they've just censored it so if you look at Wilford woodruff's journal on the church's website you'll see big thick black marks because we don't have any mentions of the second anointing so they've tried that but I don't think you could publish William Clayton's Journal because it would all just be covered in black marks it'd be like a redacted mission statement from like some spec ops soldiers or something yeah it just you unreadable yeah yeah yeah okay yeah I mean there's there's a reason like you know again if they really wanted to be honest here they would publish the whole day of William Clayton's journal and then say this is what he said that day we don't know where it came from but again they can't because they don't want to get into the fact that he was trusted enough to be marrying Joseph to Lucy Walker that same day and then pretend that he wasn't with him later it's just so it's bad all right well uh our loyal viewers will know that we talked about the Gale or the grammar uh in Egyptian language um grammar and alphabet of the Egyptian language set of documents or you know from the book of Abraham episode so let's talk about now the connections between the kinderg plates and the Gale yeah and this is one of the coolest kind of things that people don't typically talk about with the kinderhood plates and so this is directly from Fair Mormon they say Joseph Smith and they put in quotes translated a portion of those plates not by claiming inspiration but by comparing characters on the plates to those on his grammar in alphabet of the Egyptian language the Gale the Gale is composed in Kirtland about the time of the translation of the book of Abraham we'll get into that in a second then they say Joseph found one of the most prominent characters on the plates to match a character on the second page of the characters in the Gale both were boat shaped the Gale interpretation of this boat-shaped character included everything that William Clayton said Joseph said and so if you're watching this you could see it if you're listening there's a the top figure is from the Kendrick plates it's a boat with some extra lines and then the bottom one is from the Egyptian Papyrus and it's just like almost looks like a mouth with no teeth and so it's a boat shape with like nothing inside so they're not really that similar but they are the same outer shape and so this this slide is significant why am I uh let's just go to the next slide because that'll go over it because this is to me this is one of the this is a huge one and so uh John Gee we talked about him a lot in the episodes on the Apologetics he is one of the most well-known Egyptian Scholars that's employed by the the Mormon church and he follows Hugh nibley's argument that the Gale was effectively reverse engineered by the scribes and so what they are trying to say is that the entirety of the book Abraham was written in 1835 on the manuscript pages and then the scribes later went back and then attempted to match up the symbols from the Egyptian papyri to the alphabet on their own and without Joseph Smith because the translations are completely wrong and so John Gee needs the Gale to be written after the book of Abraham because the Gale is complete gibberish um because if it's written um in the in between it shows that Joseph Smith was part of the Gale and could not translate Egyptian and so ghee and Nibley make this argument because the only other approach and the one we talked about and were the evidence points is that Joseph Smith couldn't translate Egyptian um and that we do have the extant Papyrus fragment that the book of Abraham at least the early part was translated from we covered this in our previous episodes we're not going to go over to that into detail but the reason this is important is that the Apologetics about the Kinder hook plates are saying that Joseph Smith got the Kinderhook plates and compared him to the Gale to match a corresponding symbol and and it does match up so fair is correct that most of the points line up but the problem is this means that janki's assertion that the scribes reverse engineered the symbols is completely contradicted by the evidence and the Kinder hook plates actually kills off the missing scroll Theory uh before it even begins because Joseph Smith believes that the Gale is authentic and that he is the one that produced it meaning the scribes couldn't have reversed engineered it or else why would Joseph Smith be referring to it wow that's kind of intense but uh it's compelling Nemo what do you think well I remember when I many many moons ago when I tried to take on that this is the show videos that kwaku put together they did one about the Kinder hook plates um and they had a woman dressed up in an outfit as though she was the conduct plates with a terrible accent um and they were they were trying to in they were trying to imply that because Joseph Smith looked at the grammar alphabet at the Egyptian language and compared the um the symbols that meant that he wasn't attempting a Divine translation but they use that in the same breath to try and say that he wasn't trying to translate them at all which you can't do you can't say even if it wasn't a Divine translation like the Book of Mormon or the book of Abraham as he claimed he was still attempting a secular translation so he still attempted to translate them so when they try and tell you that he didn't try and translate them at all and he just had a brief glance at them their own apologetics proved that point that he still tried to translate them yeah yeah he can't get around it anymore and that's and that's the problem you just you cannot escape the fact that Joseph Smith believed in the Gale enough to where he referenced to it so even if he's not trying to divinely translate the Kinder hook plates he is the person who produces the Gale and if the Gale's wrong that means Joseph Smith cannot translate it also means the missing scroll through for the book Abraham is gone you cannot use it wow all right yeah that's that that's that's that's just how it goes all right well let's go we'll go ahead yeah sorry let's just say not me oh okay we're good okay all right so the so the next slide is the kinderg plates cement Joseph Smith's incorrect translations yeah and so again if the scribes reverse engineered the Gale as apologists and the Mormon Church want you to believe Joseph Smith would have looked at the Gale said what the crap is this realized somebody was writing uh translations in his name and then he would have either fixed the Gale himself not made the translation to him Clayton at all and they probably would have had some really interesting conversations with the scribes who were screwing around with his Egyptian translations like the fact that he's referring to the Gale and has no problem with it tells you Joseph Smith is the one who authored and approves of the Gale and so it's a long way of saying that this sample of translation from Joseph Smith on the Kinderhook plates further shows that he's responsible for the symbols and translations of the Gale which tells us that Joseph Smith not only could not translate Egyptian but that as I mentioned earlier we have the extent Papyrus fragment from the book of Abraham as we discussed in the book of uh Abraham episodes and so this is one of those areas where when you try try to use apologetics to cover one problem and in this case they're using the Gale to try to cover up the Kinderhook plate they're ultimately blowing up any chance of the missing scroll or Catalyst theory for the book of Abraham and so you have to evaluate these problems in totality because of the fact that now we can look at the Kendrick plates and say maybe they're not on their own the smoking gum but it tells you without any question that the book of Abraham translation was wrong and that we have the the symbols and that Joseph Smith couldn't do it and so that's why the Kendrick plates become so important because they tie into the book Abraham in really big ways and I'm going to ask you a question I don't think you probably know the answer to but in this slide that says Fair Mormon you know that Joseph's been translated portion of the plates um but compared the characters on the plates to those on the Gale what's the source for that I mean I guess it's it's sufficient decisions for that what's that there is a quote and I don't know if I have it in here yeah I didn't expect you to have it you're basically saying that a fair Mormon if Fair Mormons makes that claim then then the sources you know need to be viewed as legitimate is that what you're saying I think the source is legitimate I think what the source says and I don't know if it's in these final slides or not but the source basically says that Joseph Smith got the plates and compared them to the Egyptian Papyrus and so there is a source saying that he did do that and so that's a legitimate Source it's just the fact that he's doing that tells you that he believes the gala is his own production not some like secret project done by the scribes and so fair Mormons right to use that Source they're not using a bad Source it's just that by using that Source or creating problems elsewhere that they're probably not realizing at the time Nemo I'm shocked at this point of anyone's expecting Church apologetics to be internally logically consistent yeah yeah that's all I can say all right well let's go to the next slide why didn't Joseph Smith translate the rest of the kinderg plates it's a good question we talked about yeah we talked about this earlier a little bit but you know a lot of people will say you know why didn't Joseph translate more the kinderk plates and I would argue the main reason is likely he suspected the plates were not real but lacked the power of discernment to confirm it from God and um as we talked about Joseph Smith's prophetic powers only work when he is in complete control of the situation and in this case he did not have any control over the situation of the kinderk plates and so um in a later a letter dated April 8 1878 Wilbert Fugate recalled we understood Joe Smith said the plates would make a book of 1200 pages but he would not agree to translate them until they were sent to antiquarian Society at Philadelphia France and England and I don't think I bet you that quote is real because I think Joseph Smith there is realizing that by the time you sent it to all three of those antiquarian societies it would take probably months if not years and that gets it off of his play and it also allows someone else to tell him M these are real before Joseph Smith jumps full in Joseph Smith was also very busy at this point so it's hard to imagine that he would have the time or need to create new scripture in at the middle of 1843 he's tied up in dozens of marriages he's on the run from the law he's a you know he's parading around with his General and and the last point is keep in mind that it took Joseph Smith eight years to write the book of Abraham which had just been released around the time the Kindle plates were discovered so if it takes him eight years to do the book of Abraham the idea that he would have been able to translate the entirety of the Kinderhook plates in those few months after it's just absurd anyways and so I think that Joseph Smith started to realize that he was up against something that he was very skeptical of and was trying to buy Time by telling him to send it off to antiquarian societies oh I'm just gonna I'm gonna offer either competing or a supplemental Theory to yours in addition to Joseph being super busy by 1843 1844 he was killed by 1844 and I mean you could argue that he was super busy getting cast out of Missouri you know the you know why didn't he why did it take him another several years to finish his translation the book of Abraham between the mid-1830s and the you know the early 1840s he was also very busy getting kicked out of Kirtland getting kicked out of Missouri and then re-establishing him and his people in Nauvoo and so there's a there's a decent argument to say that if he had lived if Joseph had lived until 1850 or 1855 yeah he would have gotten kicked out of Naboo maybe he would have re-established in Texas maybe he would have reestablished in Utah but the you know there there might have been enough hubbub of people uh saying hey whatever happened to those kinderg plates and why didn't you finish that translation that if he had he had been able to resurface yet again he might have finished the translation yeah I mean absolutely and that's the thing we'll never know I mean I just I think the fact that it took him eight years to do the Kinder The Book of Abraham tells you that between the time that they were found in his death there was no way it was going to get done but to your point he would have needed a period of basically like some peace where he had time to do it and the book of Abraham especially that Nauvoo portion is heavily used as a vehicle for the his Evolution on the priesthood I don't know what he would have used the Kinderhook plates for to to have you know kind of push a new kind of idea into because he liked to use those scriptures those Revelations the book of Abraham to push new theology new ideas he had yeah you know he probably would have at some point if if he had lived long enough but at the same time I also I really do think that at some point he's like you see someone doing the same tricks you've been doing and you're just like I know what you're doing but I can't say it because it also implicates myself so I do feel like there had to have been some element of him going I am stuck here with a lot of people who think I could do this and then knowing himself that this is probably someone doing the same crap he was doing yeah Nemo anything you want to add I I've got a little replica a 1830 Book of Mormon here 500 odd Pages something like that yeah 12 00 pages is that is that what he said in that quote 1200 pages from six bell-shaped plates yeah and that's hard too because that's for William Fugate but yeah I mean it it does indicate that at least on some level he was telling people it was going to be a pretty long story off the just that small amount of plates which is just it shows again his deep misunderstanding of how engraving on plates work on how pictographic languages work uh which we went over that in in earlier episodes and I would encourage people to go back and watch that in our um I know was it composition of the Book of Mormon well the gold plates when we talked about the The Purge tablets and how that compares and I think that's a good way to look at it to show the symbols on the Purity tablets was 200 words on three plates so this is it is six two-sided plates you've got 12 plates you're probably talking you know a thousand two thousand words total obviously no nowhere near 1200 you're not even gonna get you know a couple you have to get 100 Pages let alone you know twelve hundred so yeah it just shows he had no idea of how symbols translated to actual language at least to our language right all right well let's go to the next slide we're we're uh we're coming to the important conclusion but the next slide is the Kendrick plates exposed Joseph Smith's lack of discernment yeah and so as I've been kind of talking about in this episode his prophetic abilities were severely impacted if he did not control the situation and that was the case of treasure digging it's also the case of the Lost 116 pages and and I highly recommend if you haven't listened to our lost 116 Pages episode uh you do that because this is a lot of those same elements and so in this case Joseph Smith can see these diggers using treasure digging techniques they talk about a vision and a dream three nights in a row planting the plates overnight before the Dig resumed I do believe on some level he probably likely suspected the results given that they mirrored some of the claims of the Book of Mormon plates that Joseph Smith would have never would have known never existed in the way he portrayed it with reformed Egyptian and all that um but Joseph Smith would have encountered massive risks by declaring the plates fake he was truly in the most delicate spot and appears at least from the quote from Webber Fugate in a very careful manner which is to give a partial translation but then to tell him I need to have this verified by three different antiquarian societies and this is similar how Joseph Smith was so careful when he was replacing the the text of the Lost 116 pages and the point here is that Joseph Smith could not get a revelation from God if these plates were real or fake and yet he was able to describe a random set of Bones as Zelf the white lamanite via claimed Revelation uh during the Zion's Camp Expedition oh and that was when he was in control of the situation because it was just bones nobody could know and that's a pattern that we've tried to point out in these episodes where Joseph Smith is able to produce Revelation whenever he needs to as long as he's in control of what's happening the moment he loses control those Revelations the discernment it's just immediately gone yeah I'm going to add not only you know does this does the generic plates expose Joseph Smith's lack of discernment as we've already talked about in this episode it also condemns you know William Clayton John Taylor Brigham Young uh Joseph Fielding Smith Marky Peterson BH Roberts and like well over half dozen if not a dozen of other prophet seers and revelators that the Mormon Church you know would have sustained you know it condemns a lot more than just Joseph Smith yeah yeah absolutely Nemo yeah everyone that put their trust in him he's kind of made a fool of and it shows that they weren't able to tell when he was if you're approaching from a believing perspective you can't tell when Joseph Smith was speaking for God and when he was just making stuff up yeah yeah all right so the next slide is Joseph Smith got yet another chance to prove himself a prophet yeah and so we're going to look at this in some more detail and uh we've got some future episodes coming up on like Revelations and stuff but Joseph Smith has already received a good number of chances to prove he was a prophet of God and every situation he's either punted one given the opportunity or been proven a failed profit or you know a liar or however you want to frame it uh when Joseph Smith had to replace the Lost 116 pages of the Book of Mormon he refused to retranslate the original material and instead claimed a completely new set of plates to make sure that he couldn't be exposed for not being able to produce a retranslation in the same way and I realized from a believing perspective you're going to say no God told him to do that but I'm saying that the actions here were to completely skirt redoing the the exact text because he knew he couldn't do it the word of wisdom lacked any knowledge beyond the 1830s which could have saved a lot of lives if God had just told Joseph Smith to boil their water including a bunch of early church members um Joseph Smith translated the book of Abraham papyri which was the perfect chance to prove himself a prophet and yet he got the translation completely wrong and then when the Kinderhook plates were presented to Joseph how cool would it have been if he had exposed the hoaxers and told them what they had done but instead he lacked any power of discernment to know they were fake so he gave a partial translation so that he didn't look like he couldn't translate them mm-hmm yeah yeah Robert wants to talk about like what he would have done you know BH Roberts is like oh how come this hoaxster didn't admit to it earlier how come he didn't do this how come he didn't do that a more Salient question how come Joseph Smith didn't expose The hoax yeah at the time why did it take scientists gears like years and years and years later to work it out yeah that's just it it's like how many chances do you do you need for Joseph Smith to get it wrong before you just go yeah he didn't know what he was doing and and then if you really want to do it from a believing standpoint it's like why is God setting his profit up to look like a fraud over and over again um and I know from a believing standpoint you'll say if Joseph Smith told the the Kinder plates people that they were hoaxers there'd be no need for Faith because we would know he's a prophet and it's like I don't I I don't know if they even understand how ridiculous that that concept is to say that God wants Joseph Smith to look like a failure to embolden Faith in his members it's just if that's really what the Mormon version of God is doing the Mormon version of God is a really bad manager at trying to save people he's actually trying to screw people over because of the fact that he's making Joseph Smith out to look like a fraud over and over and at some point you know if you look at that logic the same you would look at any other person other religion other organization he would never give them that much space because this is enough time to know they have no idea what they're doing and and yet in the Mormon Church they're going to keep telling you that Joseph Smith actually did get it right if you just look at it in a completely different way and then I'm just going to reiterate kind of how I started if you've now followed us kind of 33 episodes into the LDS discussions series we've given a credible evidence and reasoning that the Book of Mormon is a failed translation that the book of Moses is a failed translation that the book of Abraham is a failed translation that to Doctrine and Covenants are the monster be demonstrably problematic translations and that Joseph Smith's translation of uh the um you know the King James Bible is deeply problematic so that's five out of five failed translations and and then if you had Kinder plates that's six out of six failed translations with zero successful translations did am I overreaching Mike or Nemo no no if I was hiring a translator we wouldn't hire him based on his resume I mean this is why you know when we talk about uh there's a line from the Cs letter I think it says something like if someone sold you three Clunkers would you buy another one and people get really offended by that but the reality is if somebody gets like four or five translations wrong are you really gonna believe not only Joseph Smith but the leaders today that they speak to God when everything we have that can evaluate the truth claims of the Mormon church is telling us it is absolutely wrong and you know one of the things being a convert I guess maybe it was easier for me to kind of look at it a little differently because I didn't have a childhood that was told this is the only way but I never needed anyone to prove Mormonism true I never needed anyone to prove the Book of Mormon true but what I needed was that you could not prove the Book of Mormon false that you could not prove that the Book of Mormon is not history and so when people say you have to have faith I say faith is the belief in what you can't see what you can't know it is not believe in spite of what you can see and so this is an area where you can see with your own eyes with your own ears you can look at these things and understand Joseph Smith and all of the people after until 1980 told us that this was a prophetic translation partial as it may be by Joseph Smith it's wrong and so not only did Joseph Smith got it wrong but every leader after got it wrong as well all right well that takes us to the final slide which is the conclusion of today's presentation yeah and so kind of like I talked about the beginning the reason I like the kinderk plates is because it goes beyond um just the headline that Joseph Smith claimed a partial translation of a fraudulent set of plates that by itself is a bombshell I do believe sometimes as a Critic we overstated a little bit but the fact is he did make a partial translation of a set of plates that were fraudulent but for me the takeaways beyond that are really important uh one is that as we talk about Joseph Smith lacked the power of discernment to know he's being conned and that was a perfect opportunity for Joseph Smith to to Really unleash his prophetic calling and yet he failed the Gale for the Egyptian alphabet for the book of Abraham was 100 done by Joseph Smith and was not reverse engineered as apologists want to claim in order to excuse the completely incorrect translations so the Kinderhook plates make the missing slash long scroll theory of the book of Abraham Dead on Arrival it was quite possible in the 19th century to create a set of prop plates and metal that were intricate and bound just like Joseph Smith could have done with the book a Mormon I realize an apologist might say that Fugate and them had a group and they had a blacksmith the point is Joseph Smith did not show anyone the Engravings on the plate so it'd be very easy for him just take sheets of tin and bound them in the 18th 20s Dan vogels talked about that in great length and shown how it would have been very easy for him to do and the Kinder hook plates show the absurdity of treasure digging which is something to me that shows Joseph Smith recognized when being asked about the plates when he said he wanted to send it to multiple antiquarian societies to be verified instead of just asking God considering that Joseph Smith could get Revelation on just about anything and yet on the Kinder hook plates he tells them I want to send them off to a bunch of these antiquarian societies um wouldn't you think he would just pray to God and so I think it just shows the weakness of Joseph Smith's ability to get Revelation again when he's not controlling the situation yeah amen um Nemo anything you want to add it's just yeah it's an old Trope but uh Joseph Smith gets an angel with a drawn sword coming to make it very clear to him that he has to marry underage girls but he has to send off to an antiquarian Society to do his one main job which is to translate ancient scripture and bring it forth that was what he was called to do he wasn't called to establish polygamy uh at least not initially that wasn't his mandate his mandate was to translate ancient words and bring them forth and bring forth the fullness of the Gospel that way so you know God's priorities are rescue Joe Smith's priorities and what he asks for and what he sends off to antiquarian societies are rescue and as a translator I don't rate him yeah yeah yeah I mean and your point about the angel of the John sword I feel like we could do that in a lot of episodes but yeah it's perfect because again you have to remember the Mormon version of God's priority to send an angel down with a drawn sword is to make Joseph Smith Marion have sex with um followers that tend to be young and attractive or I should just say young we don't know if they were attractive um and yet when we have issues like um the Kindle plates the angel is just apparently not going to come down and tell Joseph don't do that or when he's translating the book of Abraham wrong no angel and so over and over again we see this pattern where the things that God seems to want are the things Joseph Smith wants and is in control of and when Joseph Smith loses control God kind of the Mormon version of God disappears completely and that should be a pretty good sign that Joseph Smith is the one that's in control of these Revelations and of these claimed you know decrees from God and I'm just gonna I'm just gonna share a a scripture that I've already referenced but I'm just going to share it one more time and make a final point if we're looking at the Modern doctrine of covenants section 21 verse 1 it says behold there shall be a record kept among you and in it Thou shalt be called This is Jesus Christ himself according to the Doctrine and Covenants talking about Joseph Smith and thou shall be called a Seer a translator a prophet an apostle of Jesus Christ and Elder of the church through the will of God the father and the grace of your lord Jesus Christ and so there we've got the Doctrine and Covenants and Jesus himself Mormon Jesus himself declaring Joseph Smith as a translator and the reason why that's a problem number one is We have basically another example of the scriptures being wrong clearly Joseph wasn't a translator but for me why this is really crucial is that we all can remember how we started this whole LDS discussions episode which is with Joseph Smith as a treasure Digger and what we know is is that even though he was never able to find any treasure he was still able to convince people that he had the power to find Buried Treasure and the power to use a Seer Stone in a hat to to do magic basically he was a magical person who had magical artifacts that he could either find treasure with or later with the Book of Mormon the pivot with the Book of Mormon was to Pivot from using a Seer Stone in a hat to find buried treasure pivoting to using the Book of Mormon Seer Stone and sorry using the sear Stone and the hat to translate alleged Golden Plates by the gift and power of God into scripture so this translator claim is a really important Bridge from his fraudulent folk magic treasure digging days to his claim to be a man of God a prophet Sarah and Revelator a a leader of a new religious movement and so if if that claim of being a translator fails it fails on the back of his claims to be able to find buried treasure also failing those two dominoes fall then where is The credibility of him being a prophet of the restoration and and it's a it's an important bait and switch because you would not have Brigham Young and and and all of the people in Kirtland and and uh Missouri and in Abu you probably wouldn't have them following and believing in Joseph Smith if they had known that Not only was his treasure digging attempts proven to be fraudible Island but that his translation attempts were also proven to be fraudulent you probably wouldn't have a bunch of people being being willing to testify that he was a prophet of Jesus and being willing to follow him to me it's it's just a really important Domino it is and that's why we talk about watching all these episodes in order to try to understand when we try to call back to earlier ones because yeah if church members knew the book Abraham is considered a bad translation by literally everyone that's not employed by the church and the Kendrick plates uh what they claim they were what all the leaders claim they were I mean you're not going to have members who are going to go oh that's that's a profit I can depend on they're going to go what what the crap is going on here because now we're seeing that Joseph Smith is getting it wrong every time we can assess his claims and that is why I think the Kinder hook plates are really important because it's just another way to verify not just the Kinder plates but the book of Abraham and treasure digging those are all tied into this and all of them are telling us that this is not something that's coming from God but it's coming from Joseph Smith all right well I think we made the case today um Mike normally you have to run a run at this point I think um but I just want to say you know check out the LDS discussions essay on the Kinderhook plates uh we'll provide a link to it in the show notes and then Mike we still have at least another 10 or 12 episodes to go including an overview of Joseph Smith's translations where I think we're going to be summarizing kind of how we concluded today but we've got spiritual Witnesses and testimonies of the Book of Mormon how the church handles doubt several episodes on Revelations um the trigger Transfiguration of Brigham Young Mormonism and apologetics uh some summaries about Joseph Smith but you know we're down to the last 10 or 12 episodes of as we've currently envisioned the LDS discussion series that's kind of well it's kind of sad but also exciting yeah and you know there's a lot of good stuff left and then I think when we get near the end we'll try to see what we can maybe add in because there's a lot of topics that I think people have asked where we haven't done so we're not we still got a while to go and and and um looking forward to picking back up with you and um it like I said there's a lot of fun stuff left and and a lot of what's left is going to tie back to what we've already done I think that's what makes this valuable because of the fact it can tie these things together in a way that I think undercuts this idea that they're all one-off problems but they're more patterns and they're more themes that help us to understand it better but even if it kind of sucks to go through it in the first place all right um I'm gonna quickly ask anyone who is uh watching us on YouTube or who has a YouTube account I'm going to just ask you explicitly we just we we passed 90 000 YouTube subscribers while this interview was being recorded that's a huge accomplishment because once you hit a hundred thousand YouTube actually send you a plaque and it and why all that's important number one if you subscribe to YouTube it it allows you to be notified when another important cool new episode releases but it also really helps the algorithms in the sense that the the more popular a YouTube channel is the more YouTube is willing to advertise and promote your episodes so please take the time right now to go subscribe to the Mormon stories podcast YouTube channel if you haven't that's really important for us but I also want to say as we thank Nemo for coming on today please also go to the Nemo the Mormon YouTube channel And subscribe there error because Nemo does brilliant work and he deserves our support So Nemo any final words Mike already had to bail any final words you have for us just thank you for that it's been a pleasure and an honor being here I am almost at a much smaller Milestone I'm almost at 10 000. uh that's great you know I'm I'm thrilled with so I can't really be self-deprecating like that as I normally am um and just thanks to everyone that supports what I do and supports what I do here as well um yeah I love being part of this and I'm just grateful to be here all right Nemo well we adore you and we're grateful for your friendship and for your uh participation uh and for your your work independently and Mormon stories so keep up the good work Nemo thank you all right and thanks everyone for joining us today our Mormon stories I want to thank everyone who's helped us have such a wonderful year in 2022 that's Gerardo that's Anthony that's Brooklyn that's Maven that's uh you know so many people uh Margie and Samantha and Cara and John Larson and uh I'm sure I'm forgetting people so many people who have been super helpful Justin and others thanks to everyone who's helped make Mormon story successful thanks to all the donors that have donated to Mormon stories podcast we couldn't do this without your donations and if you do value this LDS discussion series or Mormon stories in general we need your support to keep paying everybody and to uh to keep this all financially sustainable so if you haven't yet please go to mormonstorage.org click on the Donate button at the top of the page become a monthly donor your it's tax deductible in the U.S we're transparent in our finances and we we do our best to make sure that every dollar you spend or donate to Mormon stories in the open storage Foundation is used to further the mission I also want to thank Clint Martin and uh and Carrie Whitbeck as our board members for all that they do to make all this possible as well so uh thanks everyone for joining us today please share this with anyone you want to be good to each other be kind to each other and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon stories podcast and of the LDS discussion series which is available on Spotify and audio and video format in the Apple podcasting app and on YouTube in the playlist on the Mormon stories podcast page thanks everybody take care and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon stories podcast bye-bye