Overview of Joseph Smith's Translations
Original Air Date: 2023-01-16
This video, episode 34 of the "LDS Discussions" series on the Mormon Stories Podcast, features host John Dehlin, Mike from LDS Discussions, and Nemo the Mormon. The episode, titled "Joseph Smith’s Translations - Review and Analysis," evaluates Joseph Smith's credibility as a translator by examining six specific instances where he claimed to translate ancient records or receive revealed text, and where source materials exist to verify his claims 1, 2, 3.
Here is a detailed summary of the six translation projects covered in the video:
The hosts examine a document containing characters Joseph Smith reportedly copied from the Gold Plates to show to Martin Harris 4.
Joseph Smith undertook a project to revise the King James Bible, claiming to restore "plain and precious truths" via revelation 9.
In 1832, Joseph Smith produced a sample of the "pure language" spoken by Adam 14.
4. The Book of Abraham
This section reviews Smith's claim to translate Egyptian papyri into the Book of Abraham.
5. The Kinderhook Plates
In 1843, a group of men forged brass plates to trick Joseph Smith.
6. The Lost Writings of John (D&C 93)
In Doctrine and Covenants section 93, Joseph Smith claims to reveal a lost record written by the Apostle John 26.
Conclusion
The hosts summarize that Joseph Smith is "0 for 6" on translation claims where source material is available for verification 30, 31.
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hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon stories podcast LDS discussions Edition it is January 12 2023 and I'm super excited to have you all join us today for another episode um today's episode is an overview of Joseph Smith's translations and just very very quickly we are about 34 episodes into our LDS discussion series which is a series on Mormon stories where we do a deep dive into LDS or Mormon church truth claims uh trying to base all of our discussion on facts and evidence we try to be as dispassionate as possible we try to be neutral and objective and we just try and look at the claims that the church makes and then look at the evidence and science where we can and then allow you our viewers and listeners to make your own informed choice we try and not do ad hominem not do snark not do negativity but just help you get the information you need to make informed decisions about your life as it relates to more mature truth claims and of course this is based on the work of Mike from ldsdiscussions.com hey Mike thanks for joining us hey everybody how's it going good um if you go to ldsdiscussions.com you'll see essays on all of these topics that we have again we've done 33 episodes prior to this I strongly recommend that you start from the beginning because they're literally made to build on each other every time we reference previous episodes after the first episode so you'll do better to start from the beginning and I'll just end by saying um you can watch this integrated into the Mormon stories podcast or YouTube feed but also you can binge watch these episodes either on Spotify under the LDS discussions brand or on Apple podcasts under the LDS discussions brand or you can go to the Mormon stories podcast YouTube channel and there's a playlist for all the LDS discussions videos in a row and of course all the essays for these episodes can be found at LDS discussions.com if you don't want to hear you know Mike and me and Nemo yap on you can just go read the text and and find the source material that Mike uses for these very important episodes so Mike anything you want to add no this this episode's gonna be I think hopefully for anyone who's been following from the beginning I think this will be a useful episode because we're going to be calling back to a lot of earlier episodes so as you said a few minutes ago um if you didn't start from the beginning you can watch this episode but you're probably going to hear part three Michael oh I should probably probably listen to that episode because it's going to have a lot more context but I think this episode will be one of those episodes that kind of helps to summarize a lot of what we've been trying to kind of lay the foundation for over the last 30 something episodes so I think it'll be an important one and hopefully for those of you who have been following all along the whole time it'll um give a little more context into what we've been talking about so far yeah if I were to if I were to summarize the purpose of today's episodes we're going to look at six or eight claims that the church and Joseph Smith made over the years about his ability to translate and then we're just going to give a high level evaluation of how credible of a translator Joseph Smith was is that is that kind of what we're doing today yeah so this is going to be um we'll talk about on our first slide but yeah it's just literally just saying here's what Joseph Smith said he was translating and here is what the historical record whether it's um you know as we talk about the book Abraham Egyptian scholarship or biblical scholarship and then saying which ones is it a hit which ones is a Miss which one can we not draw any conclusions from and then see you know kind of as I talked about in the very first episode when you look at this as a puzzle now we're starting to put the pieces together with all of the previous episodes and they're fitting together really well and so now we can evaluate what those true claims how they hold up you know basically with the last 200 years of scholarship beautiful and joining us today is a much beloved member of our LDS discussions team and of the Mormon stories podcast family but also his own um doing his own amazing work as a YouTuber and as a part of the britvengers which is a British group of Mormon and ex-mormon uh YouTubers and podcasters we have Nemo the Mormon hey everyone hey love your love your new studio Nemo thank you looking good today myself can you can you explain to us why a taper is wearing a British flag basically um a horse uh this yeah this horse here uh is wearing a little British flag because when I hit 5 000 subscribers I did a little competition and he traveled around all the britvengers his name's Daniel after Tapia Dan he traveled around all the britvengers and um Peter Bleakley put a Union Flag sock on him and that's been his coat ever since I love it well um congratulations Nemo for hitting 10 000 on your channel thank you please subscribe to the Mormon stories podcast YouTube channel right now if you can we're about to hit a hundred thousand which for us is a huge milestone um it helps us with the algorithm it helps us get better guests and uh it helps you stay informed when new episodes come up but also make sure and uh Mash mash the button uh subscribe button for Nemo Nemo the Mormon as well okay Mike um and Mike uh we don't have this first as the first slide but that um oh I'll go ahead and I'll go ahead and kick off the first slide Mike and then I wanna I wanna add something so take it away Mike let's go ahead and jump into this episode okay yeah so you know the first slide um basically is just trying to kind of look at the scope of what we're doing um and so in these episodes we've done so far we've been highlighting um the issues with Joseph Smith's prophetic Works we've been looking at all of the different ways Scholars can assess um the authenticity of the translations whether it's biblical scholarship historical analysis um and the fact that we now have the ability to translate ancient languages that Joseph Smith was unaware could be happening such as the book of Abraham um but the scope of this episode is basically to focus entirely on the translations that Joseph Smith made during his time um of being a prophet that we either have the source material for or we have the original accounts um in order to assess the accuracy of what he was doing in these translation projects um and so you're not going to hear us go um on about say Book of Mormon anachronisms because we don't have the source material of the gold plates but we are going to talk about the reformed Egyptian character so this scope of this episode is more what can we actually evaluate because we have Source material for and for me it's a worthwhile exercise because it gives us a more detailed picture of Joseph Smith's ability as a prophet with tangible Source material that makes very very testable truth claims and and that's something I mentioned in a lot of these episodes which is that in Mormonism unlike say the Bible itself they're very modern truth claims that we can now test because of the fact as I mentioned earlier that we have so much more um scholarship and ability to translate ancient languages to basically compared to what Joseph Smith was saying and so some of the episode will feel like a bit of a recap some of it's going to feel like we haven't really discussed it before and so it's going to be a mix of kind of a lot of the foundation we've done in the past but then also adding some new context to it to try to show how these are all kind of connected um and there's a reason that they're connected and we'll get into that as we go through it okay um Nemo is there anything you want to add in terms of uh kind of setting up today's episode from your perspective no let's just dive in okay one thing one thing that I want to do Mike that I uh I I'm scrambling to do kind of on the Fly Just because I think it's really important and I didn't see this in your slides is I want to set up why this question of um why this uh question of translator is is so foundational and so I just added a slide and now I'm going to show it what I'm going to do is I'm going to read Doctrine and Covenants section one of section 107 verse 92 for our never Mormon viewers and listeners Doctrine and Covenants is one of the four major um members of the Mormon Church scriptural King we believe in the doctrine the the Bible the Book of Mormon What's called the doctrine of covenants which was Joseph Smith's Revelations and then the pearl of great price and so what I'm about to read you is Mormon scripture and it's foundational and so I'm going to read really quickly from uh DNC 107 verse 92 and it says behold here's wisdom yay to be a Seer a Revelator a translator and a prophet having all the gifts of God which he bestows upon the head of the church and that's interesting for two reasons it sort of throws Down The Gauntlet in my mind for Joseph Smith where where he's either gotta he's gotta show up and translate accurately because in Mormon scripture God and Jesus themselves have declared it so one thing that I actually haven't ever thought of before it says bestows upon the head of the church that would mean every Prophet after Joseph Smith as well which I don't think we have any any record of any Mormon prophet after Joseph Smith attempting to be a Seer or a translator but um but that's kind of that's beside the point but I guess I just wanted to start by saying you know God and Jesus say in Mormon Doctrine and Mormon scripture that Joseph Smith needs to be able to translate so that's that's important right Mike right Nemo what do you guys what do you guys have to say about that yeah well for me and and this is kind of I've mentioned this in previous podcasts I look at what Joseph Smith is saying at face value and and that's why when you get into that whole argument of like um as I had tip to brother Jake's YouTube videos is this a translation or translation uh I don't really think that that's a fair argument because as you show in DNC as we've shown in a lot of these other episodes like the book Abraham we talked about it they're making very clear that they are translating one language to another the Translating reformed Egyptian to English or translating Egyptian to English and so if you take it at face value what does the result how does it hold up throughout history and so for me um I I think that's really it's just about taking a face value and the church is the one making this claim we are not making a claim 200 years later that Joseph didn't make this is what he gives us as a testable claim to his um credibility as a profit and now we're testing it yeah okay so I didn't overstate I didn't overstate the importance of this this issue of translation Joseph Smith said he'd be out to do it so he should be able to do it oh God I guess my point is God's God and Mormon Jesus said that Joseph Smith should be able to do it too right right yeah yeah okay let's let's go to the next slide which is the translations of Joseph Smith we will be covering yeah and so just kind of you know piggyback on on our first slide about what the scope is we're going to look at the the characters that Joseph Smith is going to copy from the gold plates of the Book of Mormon uh we're going to look at the translation that Joseph does of the Bible after he finishes The Book of Mormon um Joseph Smith's pureedemic language uh the book of Abraham papyri the Kinderhook plates and then we're gonna do one at the end of the Lost writings of John and as we're saying this is all based on where we have some Source material to compare to uh the one example we don't really have a direct source material is going to be the bonus one which is the Lost writings of John but we do have what are the writings of the author of The Gospel of John that we can compare to and that's why that one is so important as well and this gives us um something to basically assess what Joseph Smith is claiming um these translations mean against what we now know through like I said all sorts of studies biblical scholarship Linguistics being able to translate languages all of that is going to play a role into what we're going to look at today okay and each one we're just going to basically say pass or fail is that right yeah effectively I mean and that's the thing so we've got six and we're going to say at the end how many of these six can hold up how many are kind of on you know we don't know and so um I think this is important because you know again when you're when you're putting the puzzle back together of all of these claims that you're told throughout your life in in the in the church and now you're you're doing it by data and by what you could see with your own eyes it gives you a much different finished product of that puzzle yeah but they're gonna these pieces are gonna start fitting really well especially because of all of the episodes we've done up until now to give more context to these issues okay so Nemo I'm gonna I'm gonna ask you for a pass or fail for each one you ready you ready for this please okay I'm ready all right Mike you're going to lead off on the on the vote okay so the next slide so the first uh I'll say translation in air quotes because we'll see maybe it is a translation is the Book of Mormon characters and I'm immediately knowing I'm immediately noticing that characters is spelled funny but but let's let's go to the Book of Mormon characters yeah and so we we covered this in our earlier episodes about the gold plates and in the translation process but we do not have and I'm going to make this clear because there is always going to be this pushback that this is not the anthem transcript and this doesn't explain explain to our listeners what we're seeing right now yeah and so what we're looking at if you're if you're watching this is this is a set of characters that Joseph Smith claims to copy directly from the gold plates of the Book of Mormon um that represents the reformed Egyptian um that the Book of Mormon was recorded in and so this is a copy of one of the this is one of the copies that Joseph Smith made um Scholars have gone through and I think they've identified a handful of them now um of different copies but there is no real argument about these being authentic so this is a copy I believe in John whitmer's handwriting um off of what Joseph Smith had originally um copied as the reformed Egyptian characters so is this the is this a the piece of paper or something like the piece of paper that Joseph would have given Martin to take the professor anthon to validate whether or not these were were you know whether this was Egyptian whether there were valid ancient characters is that do I have that right or not well this doesn't appear to be the actual one that was brought to Charles Anthony I like it um like it yeah so this would have been the same characters uh probably you know once Joseph Smith did it they probably made multiple copies so they could show other people I mean um they published some of these in a broadside I think for the Book of Mormon so so these characters are not just fabricated by some random person um the church printed a book of Mormon I think in the 1980s with these characters on it so there's really no yeah I remember that it's not it's not like you could say well these are fraudulent characters trying to make Joseph Smith look bad these are um either a copy of a copy or you know something that Joseph Smith copied down and then John Whitmore was next to him and made his own copy but these are are as authentic as we know okay Nemo we're gonna add something yeah just for listeners if you're now furiously Googling book and Mormon characters document it's the one with the characters arranged in horizontal rows because the one that Mark Hoffman did had vertical columns oh that's a distinction that he used to try and build the authenticity of his copy was that there were some rumors that it was actually the original was to Mark Anthem was in columns rather than Rose got it yeah yeah and what I just did really quickly is I just uh I just added to the slide Deck The Book of Mormon that the church put out there it is this is a gold Book of Mormon and I remember this when I was little with the actual characters on the cover these are the same characters right Mike yeah so those are the same characters that you would see on the the image that we have and so the idea that these are not authentic uh because it's not the actual Anthem transcript really is not a argument that's giving the full picture because these these characters are one way or the other what the church has believed to be authentic and there's really no reason to think that these are you know kind of talk about the book Abraham this idea that like scribes are going behind Joseph's back and just inventing him is just it's a nonsensical argument so while this probably is not the anthem transcript it is going to be a copy of the authentic characters okay okay so let's go back to the slide I'm sorry I interrupted you I just no no you're fine um and so the reason that we're focusing on this for this episode is because this is something we can evaluate we don't have the Book of Mormon plates Joseph Smith never let anyone I'm not getting into the witness stuff but Joseph Smith never let anyone see the gold plates that could copy them down themselves um so this is all we have to work with and you know this is the only example we have of uh Book of Mormon text and reformed Egyptian um and so this is what we can evaluate now to look at and say does this hold up as an ancient Egyptian language you know I just thought of a point that uh that's kind of really interesting if you know one of the you know it's it's obviously I think the South Park episode just makes fun of the fact and the Book of Mormon musical it's like of course of course Joseph wasn't allowed to show anyone the plates the gold plates because they didn't exist now of course Joseph claims that it's because God wanted people to have faith so he didn't allow the plates to be available but anyone who's looking at it objectively is like well that's a con right from the start all he had to do was show everyone the gold plates and that would be you know that would be proof uh isn't it interesting that while God felt like it was crucial to take the Golden Plates away God allowed the Egyptian Papyrus to be seen by and shown to everybody why why was God against against the the plates being shown but for the Papyrus being shown and available because Joseph Smith knew the plates would not pass visual inspection yeah the easiest way to put it I mean yeah Ballard from a few years ago talking about when you met up with a group of other religious leaders and they said oh if you just let us see the plates and he was like you know better than that to ask God to show you this you need to and he started just going on about faith and how faith is required and it says it's deeply entrenched this idea that it's somehow positive that we don't have the original evidence yeah yeah and in that case Joseph wouldn't have ever needed the Papyrus or any any Source he should have just always been channeling revelation without ever needing a source right yeah I mean in theory because this is idea that these are records being written on plates but if nobody else could translate it by Joseph there's no harm in showing anyone that really is the thing to me that is the one of those like intuitive things where you're like if no one else can translate but Joseph what harm is there in showing it's not like someone else can say oh you're translating it wrong because no one this is a a language that has been lost right so the fact that you could show the Egyptian Papyrus which of course is because Joseph hands are tied there because this guy's been touring with this with these uh Egyptian Papyrus fragments so of course he's going to show them to people but it does show to your point he knows those are authentic but you know the goal plays if if Dan Vogel um does a really good video and he talks a lot about how easy it would have been for Joseph Smith to make a prop set of plates using tin that they used like to to tie the barrels together um and obviously we talked in our episode about how you know one of the damn Vogel series is that the reason Joseph Smith comes back home with his thumb busted up is because if you're trying to get that d-ring um to finish the props that of plates that's very easy to hurt your thumb because you're pushing with all that Force but once you wrap that in a cloth you know that it can't pass a visual inspection because he doesn't have all these characters on the plates and so it just shows to me that Joseph won't show those plates because he knows if he unwraps the cloth there's nothing there and so the papyri he knows is authentic so of course you're going to show people as evidence of Abraham and Joseph whereas with the plates it's like no sorry God won't let me do it it really doesn't make a lot of sense when you think about it from like an outsider perspective and I'll put in the show notes there's a Mormon stories episode where we have a guy come in and show us tin plates that he made um that could have easily with materials that would have been available in in the 18 you know 20s and that's that's a interesting episode 17th century hand tools I think right right right right using that you said your hand tools yeah okay well let's go to the next slide which is the story behind The Book of Mormon characters which I think we told a little bit yeah yeah that's okay um and so basically for this um the purposes of this um you know Joseph Smith is going to command um via Revelation that Martin Harris is going to help fund the The Book of Mormon we talk about this um I don't know if you could put that slide up I'm just reading off my phone here we go here we go yeah sorry yeah and so you know Joseph Smith gets this Revelation that Martin Harris has to help fund the publishing of the Book of Mormon of course Martin Harris um wants to have the language verified by Scholars um Lucy Harris of course as we've talked about in the previous episode she is more skeptical of Joseph Smith um and so Joseph Smith is going to copy a group of characters um from what he claims to be are the gold plates and that is the famous story of Martin Harris taking them to Charles anthon to examine um and the problem here is is the same thing we're going to have with the book Abraham which is no one at the time could read Egyptian um the Rosetta Stone was only being discovered reformed Egyptian was not considered an authentic language then it's not considered an authentic language now and so compounding the problem is that when you take a closer look at the characters that Joseph Smith copy for Martin Harris it becomes clear immediately that they are strikingly similar to the English alphabet that Joseph Smith was writing in Reading at the time of this you know translating The Book of Mormon and so if you go to the next slide this is the easiest way to understand how to evaluate the characters which is that every single letter in the in our alphabet and every number is in the characters whether it's twisted turned upside down and the Tanners put in one of their newsletters a message using Joseph Smith's reformed Egyptian characters and turning it into a font which says Joseph Smith claimed these characters are reformed Egyptian some critics however feel they are deformed English and when you look at that it becomes really clear that this is not an ancient Egyptian language unless we're to believe that you know thousands of years ago they had our alphabet long before it was developed in a crude form that was lost forever and then immediately you know re-created by completely different people you say that as though that's like yeah not plosable and I get it but to Joseph Smith and to the entire culture around this uh the entire culture around him which was that the ancient Americans can't have been the brown people that are there now because why why people are better that was the prevailing sentiment and that's why they all sought to have this justification for you know Jewish and Asian Americans and this sort of thing that they came from the old world uh and so it makes sense in that respect that they'll be like oh well this language that we use now this alphabet that we use now which is amazing and Brilliant and wonderful they probably would have used that too but it got lost yeah it's not a million miles away from believable in that context no that's a good point and I think you know Joseph Smith as I I do believe he's a creative person obviously since I believe he wrote the Book of Mormon and we've talked about why I think that um but the fact is you know unless you're like and we're talking in the 1820s but you know unless you even today like unless you're like a graphic designer or someone who's super crazy it's hard to create a set of characters that aren't going to resemble what you're already familiar with and so to me what we're seeing is kind of to Nemo's point is you're trying to find this language that matches some sophistication and Joseph Smith is needing to create the set of characters quickly um and you know he only knows what he knows I I don't think Joseph Smith had um all these books of of different languages that he could kind of pull from like whether it's you know some you know ancient uh you know trying to think of the different languages he he would have even had access to and so um you know it's just to me um I know apologists have gone through I think Hugh nibley's gone through and he's found like oh there's this one character on the character's document matches this one Egyptian language but the problem is if you're going to start going that route you can find similarities and characters no matter what language you do that's just how it works because there's only so many ways you could draw a letter but when you have every single Egyptian or every single English letter and number in this little document to me that's a pretty clear sign that the person who's writing it is not writing from an ancient text but from something they're familiar with so just to restate for those who are listing mostly in that character's document that we talked about there's a bunch of these Gobbledy good characters that Joseph Smith produced uh every letter in the in the English alphabet plus every number can be created if you if you pivot them appropriately you can pretty much create every every letter and number in the English alphabet which suggests that he basically just made this up from from letters and numbers that he was already familiar with and just kind of was was doodling characters yeah is that right okay yeah and and if if anyone's interested uh Dan Vogel has some videos on YouTube where he goes through like line by line and he shows where they're coming from some of them are coming from Magic the family's magic parchments I mean the he can tell you where these symbols are coming from this is not like where the characters are a mystery but they just kind of look like English it's really clear okay when you actually look at them for what they are and so I guess in some way to Nemo's point this is probably what they thought at the time that these ancient people would have been more sophisticated and I'm sure from a church standpoint you could say you can't prove this isn't a hit because we don't have reformed Egyptian to compare to it's kind of the DNA argument right like we don't have Lehigh's DNA so you can't compare well I mean again you can look at this with your own eyes and and look at how they mirror the English language Joseph Smith was working with and draw your own conclusions but to me this tells you that this is not some ancient Egyptian language because there's no connection to any Egyptian script yet there's perfect connection to what Joseph Smith was familiar with the question then to ask would be you would have to go back and you'd have to go to the point and I don't even know if this point exists where Egyptian separates off from whatever proto-language there was and these two stems go one goes to the Latin alphabet one goes to Egyptian hieroglyphics right I don't even know if that point exists that sort of like Missing Link I don't think it does but I could be proven wrong but that's how you that's how you'd have to do it to then follow those arguments yeah and and I've and we obviously could do more on this but I know like from people who have studied Linguistics who have talked about this they're just no one takes us seriously because as to your point you need to find that line where it's coming from and it just doesn't exist because of the fact that there is no language like this before um or after Joseph Smith claims to have found it and so because there's no evidence for the Book of Mormon archaeologically archaeologically where we're seeing like maybe tablets or plates that are written that got lost in the ground we have nothing to compare to but since you can compare to the English language and it matches up so well to me that's a pretty good indicator that fits in with this kind of ongoing pattern of Joseph Smith being the person that is creating these translations and not you know um God providing him with these ancient languages that you know another way to put it is if Joseph Smith's Seer Stone was really channeling the Egyptian characters which is what the witnesses or the people close to Joseph Smith during the translation will tell you at least one of the accounts says that the character appeared on the Rock then above it the English language does well if those characters looked Egyptian Joseph could have written those down but instead we're you know I mean all of these things are pointing very clearly to the author of these characters being Joseph Smith because it just doesn't line up linguistically it just doesn't line up in any way outside of just saying well we just don't know so we so we're just going to assume it's true and also it's worth mentioning we've had one of the world's experts you know in in egyptology Dr Robert ridmer from the University of Chicago on Mormon stories podcast I ask him point blank is there such a thing as reformed Egyptian and he says no it doesn't exist yeah and that that should matter for people who care about evidence yeah I mean that's the thing if you're looking at this from an Evidence lens this is an immediate no there's no one that's going to tell you this makes sense because as Nemo said there's no line to it yeah there's nothing else that resembles it there's there's nothing to work with here except for looking at what we have and saying why do all the characters line up with English it's just that's pretty simple you could say sorry yeah maybe I didn't make my point clear was that essentially what I'm saying is in order for it to be reformed Egyptian there has to be some way in which Egyptian was reformed so it then looks just like the Latin alphabet right yeah but that's the thing like that yeah that's what I'm saying so languages evolve right and so you would be able to find something that would get you to that point and there's nothing it's just you know it's just one of those things where as we'll get into with the adamic language it's amazing how these ancient people are speaking in writing in a language that won't be creative for a lot longer and yet Joseph Smith knows it it would be more impressive maybe if it was in a language um that Joseph Smith wouldn't have known even if it resembled something else but it's just it's immediately in his milieu so yeah if he'd gotten hold of Hebrew at that time in his life yeah which he will he will come across later but if he'd gotten hold of Hebrew at that time of his life then deformed that and changed that up yeah it would it would have been a better Con in many it'd be more impressive for sure yeah yeah yeah all right well let's go to the next Slide the church and this is a picture that we've shown in previous uh episodes yeah and this is just one of those ones um Nemo and I have pointed this out in I think multiple areas but the church has the characters we showed you on the previous slide and yet um I think they made this about two years ago maybe three years ago and they have the series of YouTube videos called now you know and they're about five minutes long and they explain a kind of a controversial topic and they tell you why with apologetic reasons why it's okay the church has the actual characters Joseph Smith copied from The Book of Mormon plates and yet in these videos they create an entirely new set of characters to look more authentically Egyptian and that tells me that the church knows full well that Joseph Smith characters are crap because if they trusted that those characters were authentic in any way they would use them here and yet they're creating a whole different set of characters to make it look more authentic and not showing both members and prospective members what Joseph Smith actually copied I think that's extremely telling it's a little bit bothering I wonder if linguists and specifically egyptologists are just a little bit offended that the Mormon Church would perpetuate the idea of the existence of a language that we have no evidence having ever existed like that that's a little bit problematic it yeah it's a little bit problematic to me that the church would be advancing the the idea of of this language I don't know yeah no I mean it's true but what's sneaky about that if you see that on screen what's sneaky about it is you can read the word yo in it right just above this gold plates y-o-u-r then there's a zed then there's an X then there's another kind of Zed there's a double using that there's M's in there there's V's there's a number four when you say Zed you mean z right Nemo sorry yes apologies I'm just joking so but like they they can't stray too far from what Joseph Smith did they've got to like they've got to try and make it look a bit more ancient so they've made it a bit more angular yeah um but it's still there's still English letters and numbers in there I think I think what you're saying Mike you're saying that Joseph Smith's Anton characters were so bad that even though the church has them they didn't want to use them in their in their public uh you know educational videos because they did put them on the front of that book a Mormon John yeah so they used to put them on public displays now hiding them that's a good point all right you can't make this up all right let's go to the next Slide the Mormon Church creates a new set of characters oh did we already cover this we pretty much did yeah we can it's just basically to say that the the Mormon church has the characters and yet they created a new set of characters for these videos and these are videos that are going out to the World on YouTube so to me it's an interesting thing that they're I mean in my opinion I don't know if the word embarrass is good but they're too uncomfortable using Joseph Smith's actual characters um which I think is a big red flag so it's the same way they were uncomfortable with showing images of Joseph Smith putting his head in a hat for a long time right they knew that for a very long time but the narrative the thing they portrayed to the public was Joseph Smith looking at the place with his Spectacles on whichever version that you've seen they put that in chapels meeting houses on the front of church magazines and it wasn't until they were essentially forced to start doing it otherwise that they then did yeah yeah that's so simple okay all right well let's uh let's jump to um let's jump to the next slide which is the Book of Mormon characters and reformed Egyptian yeah and so just you know to basically summarize this this first part is just to say there's no evidence that reformed Egyptian was ever language um and I personally believe that Joseph Smith created this because he knew there was no one else who could translate it because again you know as Nemo said earlier um if he had said the book was in Hebrew a lot of people could translate it so then he would have to say well no it's a Hebrew that you can't know which which gets into a whole lot of issues because people could probably understand that it's not at all Hebrew you know so um I think that for for Joseph Smith this made the most sense in order to create something that no one else but him could touch and that allows him to keep himself elevated against anyone else who could kind of question what he's doing um and so I think that's why he creates Egyptian but the problem obviously is that now we can look at it with all of the vast amount of Egyptian I think Robert redner talks in his interviews with you about all the books they have of all of these different scripts and there is nothing in any of them that would correlate to reformed Egyptian in any statistically significant way and as we've talked about in our previous episodes um you know people were really fascinated by Egyptian relics at the time so it also feeds into that kind of egyptomania that's going on at the time and Joseph Smith believed that every character in Egyptian held sentence is worth a meaning which allowed for him to create a book that was 273 000 plus words with just a small set of plates and as we talked about in our episodes on the book Abraham this is just the hell the Egyptian language Works um and as the world would learn after Joseph Smith death the math just simply doesn't add up and so not only are the gold plates engraved with fast records anachronistic which we talked about in the gold um the uh episode on the plates um Joseph Smith's understanding of the Egyptian language which he used to craft the Book of Mormon is just wrong and so these characters have no connection to the ancient world but our Point are screaming to us that they're a 19th century creation um okay so uh if we have to give Joseph Smith a grade for the Book of Mormon characters for our first uh our first grade for today Mike what are you giving Joseph Smith on this one I mean to me it's it's it's just an obvious fraud I mean it's not it's not an ancient record so if it were going past fail I'd say it's it's a clear fail all right so so for for Mike it's a fail Nemo what is it for you it's a fail the thing I remember most is that when we covered the amount of like text you could get on gold plates in terms of Engraving that we worked out an entire University dissertations worth of words were missing from every plate yeah yeah it's a fail yeah yeah and I'm gonna say it's worse I'm gonna say it's not only a fail and this isn't me trying to pile on or be negative it's just me being sincere for me it's it's worse than a fail because not only is it is it clearly not a translation but but it's potentially fraud he's making up a language so that then he can claim to translate it so that's that's a fail on top of a fraud and this is the type of thing that that you know sometimes people like to have a good faith um kind of um assumption with Joseph Smith that maybe as Dan Vogel says he was a Pious fraud he really believed in God and Jesus but sometimes he fooled people because he felt like it's okay to fool people if it helps them believe in Christ um but then there's always the question of was he just making it all up when you start making up characters and inventing a language that doesn't exist and then claiming you can translate from it that's when you start for me really getting into fraud territory so I hope I'm not coming to down too hard on him um I mean it's just it's it's not what it claims to be and so for me yeah you're you these characters were copied in part to get Martin Harris to to fund the publishing in the Book of Mormon so if you're creating fake characters to get someone to sell their property to help you fund a book and you're doing this in the name of God yeah I mean it's a fraud and Fraud's a very fighting words you know it's a pejorative right but at the same time how else would you describe this if they're not what Joseph Smith claims them to be yeah and I was just thinking about this recently like when Bernie Madoff you know creates a a Ponzi scheme and builds billions of people we're okay using the word fraud because fraud frauds exist so if the word fraud can be used in other contexts I don't think it's fair to say we can't use it in a religious context it's off limits because people hold these beliefs sacred I think if the word fraud exists and if the word fraud applies even if it's offensive we need to be able to use it in my opinion yeah I mean it's just it's if we're like for the purposes of these episodes it's it's about approaching it from a face value standpoint it's not about approaching it from a faith-based standpoint so if you want to make the argument that Joseph Smith met well and therefore creating a set of of characters is okay that's an argument you have to make in a different realm because we're looking at it from a perspective of what can we see with our own eyes and does that match and if it doesn't match then by definition what would that be if you're using that to get someone to help you fund a a project which is a financially motivated reasoning which would fit fraud perfectly and so yeah it's it's a very loaded term but from a you know definition standpoint it fits especially in this particular case because Martin Harris is going to sell property to give money to Joseph Smith to fund The Book of Mormon yeah and and and we all know Joseph Smith was super poor and got sick of doing farm work and this was literally his way to feed and support himself and his family and we've talked about that in the previous episodes I think good way to a good way to explain it maybe is is to say that if Joseph if Joseph Smith were asked in court did you invent a language in order to get Martin Harris to mortgage his farm so that you could get that money and he said yes if he admitted to it then you would call it fraud Joseph Smith's denial of it it shouldn't really factor in if you're looking at it from an evidence-based perspective you would just if and if you want to get into that headspace you just ask okay well what if he admitted the things we were saying then you would call it right right you'd find it very easy to that's great yeah that's a great Point Nemo you know uh what do we call it evidence number two or or uh specimen number two what are we gonna call it yeah I guess uh subject number two number two is the Joseph Smith translation of the Bible or the jst yeah and so this is a project that Joseph Smith is going to basically undertake pretty much as soon as he finishes The Book of Mormon and um just to kind of give a brief overview of Joseph Smith is going to look at the Bible he's going to start with the King James Bible so that's why we have the foundational text for it and he's going to try to add to it change it to restore some of the plain and precious truths that were lost through the errors of man re-translating it and Bruce R McConkey describes it uh this project the following way says the Joseph Smith translation or inspired version is a thousand times over the best Bible now existing on Earth it can it contains all that the King James version does plus pages of editions and Corrections and an occasional deletion it was made by the spirit of Revelation and the changes and additions are the equivalent of the revealed words in the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants reference to this section and to the footnotes themselves will give anyone who has spiritual Insight a deep appreciation of this revelatory work of the Prophet Joseph Smith it is one of the great evidences of his prophetic call and so Bruce R McConkey is making no no qualms about it this is a work of Revelation Joseph Smith is able to read the King James Bible version and God is going to channel through him through Revelation uh what he needs to change and so while you might not call this a translation from language to language it is taking a text and translating it back to what was um considered by early members and and members today to be a more original form of the Bible that was lost through the heiress of man man if anyone was a gauntlet thrower gotten the thrower down it was Brazil McConkey because those are some pretty strong words and and I do think you know I think it might be helpful just to explain a tiny bit more which is why would Joseph Smith even want or need to translate the Bible and my you know the way I piece this together is some dude comes into Kirtland at some point who knows Hebrew Joseph's like oh the original Bible you know parts of it were written in Hebrew why do we learn Hebrew in the school of the prophets so that we can read from the original sources of the Bible and and have a more pure understanding of the Bible and then if you add to that the fact that sometimes the Bible said stuff maybe Joseph didn't like um or maybe sometimes Joseph wanted to add things so that it could justify his current beliefs for all those reasons Joseph thought it prudent to revise the Bible which in and of itself is a pretty bold it's a pretty ballsy bold move right and I I think most of it was done before he even established the school of the prophets I think and it's definitely before he would take the Hebrew lessons with um Joshua stations but I I assume it was a project that was done because Joseph Smith was creating a theology that he then had to um in certain instances he saw some of the contradictions in the Bible that we all see right and so you're trying to smooth it out and when you write the Book of Mormon The Book of Mormon has contradictions with the Bible and so revising the Bible allows you to fit the Bible more snugly with the Book of Mormon as well and so I I don't know exactly what the ultimate motivation was but Joseph Smith as we've talked about our previous episodes is very um aware sometimes of when he creates a contradiction when he changes say the first vision of the priesthood restoration and then he has to kind of retrofit Revelation back into it to make it seem like it was that way all along and that could be the case um with the the Bible itself because uh there is um and a paper written by Colby Townsend about Adam and Eve um in the Book of Mormon and I believe in that paper he goes into detail about how the Bible and the Book of Mormons Adam and Eve have to be kind of reconciled and so there are a lot of you know specific points here that Joseph's probably trying to accomplish but obviously when you do a project this big it's it's going to have other implications as well it's almost a form of pseudopigrapha um you know writing as if you are a dead person to give your writing more Authority but instead of trying to create new documents he's just revising the the original documents as if he's the author is not is that fair to say yeah I mean pseudopigraphish writing in someone else's name so if you're writing with the under the premise of it being the King James Bible then yeah I mean it's the same thing because doing that allows you to make changes where members are going to go oh wow that that actually enhances our meaning of it as opposed to if Joseph Smith was just like hey I received this Revelation that this is wrong you know I mean it's a much smoother way to do it so yeah I mean it's it's it's writing in in the name of an established book um in order to you know make some changes that you you feel would need to be made yeah yeah I think I think it's interesting the example that comes to mind is Genesis uh Joseph Smith's translation of Genesis chapter 50 verse 33 and you would ask well Genesis only has 26 verses in chapter 50 and you would be right but Joseph Smith added a load more in the jst um including 33 where he basically says the Lord raise a Persia and funnily enough his name will be Josephus too so he wrote himself into the Bible so that then there was some ancient prophecy that predicted he would come forward in the last days as a prophet and Seer yep okay yeah and and that is one of those things that was one of those early things I started doing the Deep dive and I saw someone mention that I'm like oh my goodness like yeah what a way to do it to write yourself into the Bible um because obviously the Book of Mormon prophesies of Joseph Smith translating The Book of Mormon but what better way than to write yourself into the Bible to put yourself all the way back so Joseph Smith was was chosen by God you know at the beginning of time which I mean it it shows a little bit of hubris and Joseph in those early days for sure but yeah it you know Joseph son of Joseph and you know it is a very interesting thing to me and we talked about this in the book Abraham episode but you know when he and I know we're straying a little bit from the scope here but you know he's going to write the curse of black skin into the Bible as well that was not in the Bible but Joseph Smith goes in with the book of Moses and writes in that that black skin is a curse from God and that is a 19th century racist idea of like a white supremacy um however you want to phrase it where white skin was favored by God that Joseph Smith is going to write back into the Bible and those are of the things that tell us that not only are they coming from the 19th century but with Nemo's case they're coming from Joseph because he's writing himself directly in there got it all right so what's so I guess this is all leading to the question what's wrong with the Joseph Smith translation of the Bible so let's jump to the next slide and this is a cool one because you know a lot of times people say oh you know all the scholarship on on mormonism's been done and yet this one came out I think about three years ago or that it or that it all comes from anti-mormons right always yeah and this is and this is funny too because this study came out of BYU and it came from somebody who lost their faith over it because when you start to find these things and you realize oh my goodness this is not what I thought it makes you re-evaluate what it is but this was something that came out after I had started doing the Deep dive and uh was an absolutely fascinating find because I don't think I know people knew the influence of this what we're going to talk about but I don't think people knew the depths of it and so it's pretty cool um that they found this because they were working on a project that was a faith-based project yeah yeah so let's let's dive into it yeah and so uh this BYU study that came out um it was written uh I think it was about three years ago but um what they found out was they uncovered evidence that Smith and his associates used a readily available Bible commentary while compiling a new Bible translation or more properly a revision of the King James Bible uh the commentary Adam Clark's famous Holy Bible containing the Old and New Testaments was a Mainstay for Methodist Theology theologians and biblical Scholars alike as and was one of the most widely available commentaries in the mid-1820s and 1830s in America direct borrowing from The Source has not been pre has not previously been connected to Smith's translation efforts and the fundamental question of what Smith meant by the term translation with respect to his efforts to rework the biblical text can now be reconsidered in light of this new evidence our research has revealed that the number of direct parallels between Smith's translation and Adam Clark's Bible commentary are simply too numerous and explicit deposit happenstance or coincidental overlap the parallels between the two texts number into the hundreds a number that is well beyond the limits of this paper to discuss a few two of them however demonstrates Smith's open Reliance upon Clark and established that he was inclined to lean on Clark's commentary for matters of History textual questions clarification of wording and Theological Nuance in presenting the evidence we have attempted to both establish that Smith Drew upon Clark likely at the urging of Rigdon and we present here a broad categorization of the types of changes that Smith made when he used Clark as a source and this is called a recently recovered Source rethinking Joseph Smith's Bible translation um and um it just shows that it's not to say that Joseph Smith plagiarized um the entire Adam Clark Bible Terry a commentary in Into His Rebel uh revision but that he heavily leaned on it to the point where it's not you can't make the argument that you know it's happenstance or coincidence yeah and um just for the benefit of of our uh of our viewers I'm adding uh an additional slide right now and basically what the slide is it's it's an actual picture of of the article so that people uh can see it and I'll add it in the show notes as well uh it's the BYU Journal of undergraduate research and the article is called a recently recovered Source rethinking Joseph Smith's Bible translation by Haley Wilson and Thomas weyman of ancient scripture and Mike Mike just kind of re you know communicated to us uh kind of a a red version of what happened but if I can kind of just restate what I think I just heard and Mike you and Nemo can tell me if I understand the story right basically there was a a BYU undergraduate woman named Haley Wilson who is just starting to study the text of the Book of Mormon trying to figure out some of the 19th century Inspirations for the Book of Mormon she says what books might Joseph have had access to she she figures huh maybe maybe he had access to this really popular book called The Adam Clark uh commentary on the Bible she starts thumbing through it she starts noticing a lot of language in uh in the Adam Clark commentary that Joseph Smith would have had in his possession or in local libraries that was in print at the time that was very popular she notices a ton of similarities between that and the Joseph Smith translation of the Bible and it's almost as if Joseph said well we need to revise the King James version of the Bible who who has studied the Hebrew and really understands it oh this Adam Clark guy did let me go see what he wrote about it oh wow that's really good stuff so I'm gonna claim to re-translate the original Greek and then I'm going to create my own version of the Bible and in a sense plagiarize Adam Clark's work as Joseph Smith's own Revelation when he creates um the Joseph Smith translation of the Bible now Mike that's just my attempt to restate what I think I just heard um is did I get it kind of right I think so I mean she I think she did she do an interview with you as well I know she didn't want Bill real and we're going to include that in the Mormon stories uh in the show notes as well our our interview with Haley Wilson I think Lamont is is her name yeah I think yeah I think her married name is and so Haley Wilson Leman and um and if I remember correctly she was doing trying to create a paper and trying to find if there were influences and I think it was one of those ones where all of a sudden she was doing textual analysis and with the Adam Clark Bible commentary just all of a sudden the alarm Bells start ringing because you're finding a bunch and then obviously once you once you get that that foothold then she started doing more and more and then you find more and more and so she certainly didn't go out there looking to disprove anything she was just trying to find where the influences are and then she started seeing that all of these like long phrases were being pulled directly from the commentary um into the Joseph Smith translation along with Joseph seeming on a lot of his changes to agree with Adam Clark's commentary so maybe he's not using um Adam Clark's exact language but he's making changes that defer to the commentary that Adam Clark provides for for the Bible and so at some point you go okay that's that's too much to be coincidence and and so as I mentioned it's not to say that Joseph Smith only use the animal Clark Bible commercial it's just that he used it enough to the point where we have a source that we could say without any question is heavily influencing something that is as Bruce R McConkey called a revelatory um experience that I forgot the phrasing but solidifies him as a prophet and that's a problem yeah Nemo well anything you want to add um just I seem to remember that um they talked about Adam Clark's theology also being fairly distinct as well and so some of the theological adjustments Joseph Smith made to the Bible are based yes Adam Clark's theology which at which point if you're meant to be again this Revelation from God why are you using not only another man's maybe understanding of an ancient language but another man's theology yeah and that's something that Joseph Smith seems to do a lot which is he's deferring these theological ideas to what's all around him and then repurposing them into Mormonism and as a small uh bonus nugget for the Adam Clark stuff we talked about this in our I think this might have been the the book Abraham maybe that's the third episode but um Adam Clark is in his commentary is the one who talks about the legend of Abraham being or attempted the attempted sacrifice of Abraham by fire which ends up in in the book of Abraham and a lot of apologists will be like oh my goodness how did Joseph Smith know and it's like it's in the Adam Clark Bible commentary which we know without any question Joseph was familiar with because a few years earlier he's going to use that to revise the Bible and so that is where you start to see you know as I've talked about this whole series about looking at it from an overhead view looking at the patterns you're starting to see the patterns Joseph Smith is using it here in the in the Joseph Smith translation of the Bible he's also going to use some of these ideas in the book of Abraham and because you have two different areas with being pulled from it it's a really good indication that yes he absolutely was using him which we could show through textual analysis this as well okay so now it's time to vote I'll set this up so if BYU can you go back one can you go back one slide I think the slide before the one you added we hadn't done that one yet oh so uh go next one oh no you go go forward a few oh um okay uh one more okay the next one there you go so I just wanted to point this one out um the next slide okay and it's because a lot of apologists when you talk about this they talk about a revelation that Joseph Smith gets what it says and as all it's from DNC 88 and it says and all and as all have not Faith seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom yay seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom seek learning even by studying also by faith and so this is a an apologetic response you're going to get about the Adam Clark thing because they'll say God tells Joseph Smith to look at the best books to get ideas and then of course the idea would be from an apologetic standpoint that Joseph Smith reads the Bible commentary praise to God God reveals yes Joseph this is correct you should go with this Joseph puts it in but I just want to point out that dnc88 is not going to be claimed to be a revelation until December 1832 or January 1833 at this point almost the entirety of the the Joseph Smith translation of the Bible is done and so to to cite this Revelation as an answer for the Adam Clark one is kind of retrofitting history as we've shown in other episodes but I just want to point that out because that is the most common response is to say of course Joseph Smith used it why wouldn't you if God told him to seek out uh the best books but that's a revelation that's going to come after when he's already done it and so it doesn't really in my opinion work as a um like a plausible apologetic response well it's post-hoc reasoning by Joseph Smith it's him adding in an excuse or him saying that God is given an excuse after he's already done something 100 it's kind of like how the Book of Mormon constantly talks about how if there's errors or The Heirs of man as a way it's almost like you're insecure and you're trying to uh kind of get ahead of the problem like oh yeah if there's errors it's just because it's The Heirs of man which is tricky because it's coming through a rock and a half so God you would think would correct them and so yeah it's it's it's it's one of those fingerprints that Joseph leaves uh almost because it's Nemo's Point you're almost trying to give reasoning for problems that you know are out there but yeah either way it's just it's after the fact and so to use it there in my opinion uh it doesn't work because he had already done it also it's a scripture that says um if you're looking for learning Joseph Smith shouldn't have been looking for learning he was looking for direct Revelation from God it was a revelatory process yeah so this isn't about Joseph Smith learning some interesting stuff which yeah you can seek from wherever he likes yep the source of his inspired uh theology that he's then presenting to people as the word of God that has to come from one source and one source only yep exactly all right so to tee this up uh if BYU's is publishing an academic article conceding the Joseph Smith uh almost certainly either heavily borrowed from if not plagiarized uh from a specific book The Adam Clark commentary that we know he either had in his possession or could have easily accessed uh um and that's that's you know our observations on the Joseph Smith translation Mike what what does that lead you what grade does that leave you to give Joseph Smith on this one I mean I'll give it a failing grade I don't think it's as bad as the characters document because it at least has the King James Bible as a foundation but yeah this obviously is not going to pass what Joseph Smith is claiming it to be okay all right uh Nemo that's the translation it fails as an attempt to make the Book of Mormon work with the Bible he did all right what does the translation it fails yeah well Adam Clark did all right basically well yeah exactly Adam Clark did fine yeah and so that's that's my point I'm going to say obviously this is a fail he's not translating anything um and I don't say that to be mean-spirited it's just that I'm trying to be neutral and unbiased but it's worse than a fail again this is maybe not quite as bad as the last one but like we all know what happens if you plagiarize in school if you plagiarize if you copy someone's work and claim it as your own in high school at a university you you not only fail you potentially get kicked out because it's it's deception it's it's it's fraud in some sense it's plagiarism and plagiarism will get you fired at a university and so that's why it's it's not just failed translation for me it's bordering again in the second instance on on knowing deception or fraud because Joseph if Joseph is getting these ideas from the Adam Clark commentary he's got to know he's doing it right yeah I think yep okay all right well let's go on to the third um you know zero for two so far uh let's go ahead and go on to the third which is the pure adamic language tell us what that is Mike yeah so on March 20th 1832 Joseph Smith is going to produce a sample of what they call the pure adamic language which was spoken by Adam and this is after the church is established and Joseph Smith was a great believer in being able to both translate English ancient languages as well as speaking in tongues and so basically in November of 1830 uh Joseph Smith had already produced the verse in the book of Moses that refers to a book created by Adam in the language of Adam along with further clarification that Adam's children were taught to read and write having a language which was pure and undefiled and so he has set up this idea and this is not I mean I'm pretty sure this is an idea that a lot of people had that there's this adamic language that was spoken in in the you know earliest days and so Joseph Smith is going to write that into the Bible um and because of that now has the ability as a prophet of God to channel that and so that is going to lead him to do basically a q a session where he is answering what certain words would be translated to and we actually have examples of that is that right yeah so this is um was written it was copied down by Brother Johnson uh again this is In 1832 and so they asked him what is the name of God in pure language and he says amen and then they say what is the name of the pure word um wait a minute Nemo is head down laughing Nemo why are you laughing well because my fellow Countryman Jr Tolkien managed to create actual functional languages that do not necessarily resemble other existent languages it can be done Joseph Smith with the help of deity should have been able to do something but no this is what we have the word are men spelled differently yeah that's what what is that are you saying he's just not original enough is that you're complete he's just like originality it just it tracks it tracks with the whole using English characters and deforming them he's like well maybe if I spell it differently people will think it's a pure and undefiled language it makes me cringe yeah this one this is one I obviously I never saw it as a member and it's one of those ones where if the missionaries had sat me down and said did you know Joseph Smith was able to speak the original language spoken by Adam and Eve and they showed me this I would have just I would have been like there is no way no way and it's not to be mean it's just as we go through it you'll understand this is like this is when you're you're you've got someone on the spot and they have no thought in their head of how to get out of it and they just give you something that is so it should be like and I don't mean to sound mean but this is like when you give when kids are speaking in a secret language you're creating your own language this is what you do you just scramble what you know and this is what Joseph Smith is doing and it gets worse as we go through it let's continue yep and so what is the name of God in pure language oh man what is the meaning of the pure word amen and he says and it's funny too because as Nemo points out in the actual writing they write uh amen with the w kind of bracket in there so they almost hear him say Amen as well which is I find interesting because as you guys said it's like isn't it interesting that God's name is amen um anyways ask them what the meaning of that is he says it is the being which made all things in all its parts which is you know that's what God means and then they say what is the name of the son of God in adamic language and they say the sun amen like Joseph Joseph says the sun amen yeah so it it's just they're not even adding like I'm trying to change the words and so then they say what is the sun amen and Joseph says it is the greatest of all parts all the parts of Amen which is the godhead the firstborn and then they say what are angels called in pure language he says amen engelsman and it's I mean it's just so bad Nemo your head is down it's just so cringe-worthy it's it he's a grown man just why why would he do this why I don't unders I think I can't get is what his reasoning behind this as a legitimate response to someone's request for like a language how he goes yeah this will do it I I don't I do not understand genuinely because everybody around him is going wow Joseph oh man oh wait angles men for Asian Angels oh wow yeah we're being a little bit rude and mocking but honestly the strains seriousness right it does it really does like you'd expect I mean again I I don't want to make fun of this and I started laughing because I blame Nemo but the point is you're reading this and it's so like I you almost expect brother Johnson to write in parentheses yes that's really what he said or are you kidding me because this is so bad it reminds me it'll be a lot it reminds me of pig Latin you know like okay let's say I'm gonna go with sports here Neiman I apologize because I know I do that a lot but it'd be like if someone said to me um can you give the endemic language for the game of football and I was like they're like what would the word football be in academic language I'd like ball of the foot you know I mean like it's just it's you're just scrambling what we know and I mean he should have at least tried to he does as he gets um more and more into his prophetic calling um there's that one talk he gives where he's like if I was speaking in Egyptian I'd say Zeon you know whatever and if I'm speaking in German I'd say this and he could at least try but he doesn't have the I I would argue he doesn't have probably the confidence and he doesn't have the knowledge to just throw out another language and so he's kind of stuck trying to make up something and this is just deflect why didn't I don't know oh it is too sacred to speak out loud I don't know why yeah I don't know let's go ahead and finish let's go and finish yeah we'll finish it yeah so it says what are angels called in pure language all men and man what are the meanings of these words almonds ministering servants Sanctified who are sent forth from Heaven to minister for or two sons amen the greatest part of Amen Sons Sans amen Sons amen amen I'm not sure why it's written like that but it's just it's just it's I mean it's this is one of those things that like again if a mission yeah like you can imagine Adam say hey Eve Sons amen son amen amen yeah I just thought I just I I just I I don't want to make fun of it but is this one of those ones where you look at like this is this is so bad like he didn't even try to like hide the fact that he's just using the English language and I it's it is it's so bad I'm really glad that like a lot of members don't know about this yeah because otherwise I'd feel like I'm I'm just mocking people's sincerely held beliefs but I I honestly believe that probably 80 90 of Mormons don't believe this because they don't know about it for Mormons that are older than 53 years old though they will know one adamic word very well oh yes that Joseph Smith also produced and this is just this will be something that actually does trigger emotion and belief and familiarity if any of you Mormons went through the Mormon Temple prior to 1990 and took out your endowment one of the most sacred culminating experiences um in the Mormon Temple when you learned like the second token of the Melchizedek priesthood or whatever it was you were told to say pay lay el pay lay ale and you would all be standing there in like a baker hat a white Baker hat and your white robes and your green apron and you're going to be in a circle in the in the in the true order of prayer like in a circle with all these other adult people and you're all chanting pay lay ill those words Pele which the temple told you meant oh God hear the words of my mouth is is Joseph Smith uh it comes from Joseph Smith's claim to know the language of Adam so that Pele ale chant that you did came from from Joseph's claim to know of the adamic language from the minds that brought you all men Ingles men brings you Pele ale and of course ale tell us Nemo that's a word you might be familiar with yeah it's a British type of beer in fact a pale ale is a type of alcoholic drink pale ale is really a thing yeah yeah oh my gosh so he's getting it literally from like commonly available yeah yeah yeah pale ale is just two English words to describe you could get yeah just a type of Ale type of idea gosh that's so crazy yeah so Joseph in the 1820s or 30s that might have been a term pale ale because we were just recently come from England right yeah I wouldn't want to say for certain yeah just in case it's a newer type of Ale perhaps but very possibly but if something but someone would say pale ale in the UK today oh yeah yeah you describe it like I like pale ales like they're a type of Ale that people like unbelievable all right Mike yeah I got nothing I mean it's just uh you know I think the pale ale I think probably would have been something he would have come up with in like the early 40s right because when he was creating the the ceremony so I don't know if you know I've seen people and I I was trying to look it up and it's I don't want to get it I I don't feel comfortable getting into because I don't know how solid it is but people have tried to compare Pele ale to like Hebrew and someone actually has come up with like how it's the the closest connection is wonderful Lucifer and obviously I don't think at all that that's what he was trying to do so I don't really know about that but I think there I don't know how to phrase this but we've talked in our Adam and Eve episode Adam and Eve are not historical figures and so to create this language this idea that they were speaking our language effectively uh six thousand years ago in Missouri uh and then everybody this is the next slide right should we just go to the next slide yeah okay I'll just go there yeah yeah so you know as we talked about you know they're not historical figures Adam and Eve we have it we have a whole episode on this Adam and Eve news flash sorry everyone I don't mean to be rude Adam and Eve never existed the six thousand seven thousand year Earth model the global flood model the Tower of Babel we've done episodes on all those things if you're just joining us in the middle and if this sounds shocking to you you really do need to pause go back and watch the the Adam and Eve episode the global flood episode and the Tower of Babel episodes so that you understand what Mike is saying so so so Mike you're saying that I just or Nemo yeah okay just before we go into this just before we go into this what has been around for a long time is the word pale ale it's been around since 1703 okay that's good to know okay it's also I I can't I know we're going off in tangents here there's also the story of zelph the white lamanite where like Joseph Smith is walking around with some people somewhere in Missouri and they come across some bones and and they're like hey Joseph who's that and he's like uh that's self the white labor night you know he just comes up with this stuff right it's a rod for his own back because once you've established a precedent like that people at any time can just come up to you and go Hey Joe what's this and you've got to come up with an answer because you've told people that you can just God will just tell you yeah so it is is a rod for his own back because then all of a sudden he's in this situation where people see some bones and he he's the one who knows all about the ancient inhabitants he's there like ah right now I've got to come up with the story yeah yeah that's yeah yeah okay Mike so so now that now that now we know Adam and Eve Tower of Babel Global flood they're they're all problematic right yeah and we talk about this in those episodes obviously we're not going to redo all that now but they're ideological myths that are taken from earlier narratives and earlier stories and so the moment that you want to say that you have a language from mythical characters you have a problem and and so um as Nemo already pointed out this follows into the same pattern of our first topic which was reformed Egyptian which is that Joseph Smith once again is just crudely modifying the language he's familiar with to produce ancient languages and so um as we talk about if the Tower of Babel is a literal story um and the pure language was lost and the inhabitants on the earth were all confused is it even possible that the language spoken in America during 1832 would still link up almost perfectly to a forever lost language 6000 years ago so even if we want to make some argument that yeah maybe Adam and Eve are true maybe the tower Babble happen maybe the global flood happened which from a historical standpoint they did not even then you're not going to have a long-lost language that just happens to fall on Joseph's lap in the 1830s in America match it it just it it strains any credulity to think that Adam and Eve are going to speak in the English language 6000 years ago in Missouri it just doesn't work yeah there's a ton of hubris in it that some of the hubris I was talking about earlier the idea that Joseph Smith thinks well you know uh sophisticated people use English because there's this white supremacy almost going on this Western Supremacy so the best people in the world speak English so therefore this exceptionism comes out and he's like well why wouldn't that have been the original and best language is like English so again there's if you look at it through that lens you can see why he might I'm pushing it straws to help him out but maybe yeah I mean there have been a few episodes we've done where there's like a a data point or an event we're talking about and you just go like he he's in a position where he just he doesn't know what to do because he's a creative guy but it's hard to come up with a language on the spot and to Nemo's point I can't believe he didn't just go uh you know God says he'll reveal it in the temple or something to get out of it because this is one of those things where you look at it and you could show this I mean I've shown it to a few people that aren't Mormon and they laugh at it because it's so clearly yeah it's just bad I I want to add something if I can and I'm going to butcher this but I'm going to add it anyway Mike I think we ought to consider an episode for LDS discussions where we find an expert linguist and bring them on because just like DNA you can look at like mitochondrial DNA or or just any old DNA and and be able to tie people through ancestry lines going all the way back thousands of years right um language has the same type of lineage as does DNA and so even though language isn't isn't biological it is an organic material if you read Jabberwocky if you read Old English you'll see what the parent of modern English is and you'll be able to see how along with mixing with other languages and even combining history with other languages and the way civilizations merge then with um more ancient languages you can actually study how languages and characters evolve and so to summarize what I think you're saying Mike is the number one adamic language can't exist because Adam and Eve didn't exist so it's Dead on Arrival but also there's it is it is demonstrably false that all languages that exist now share Joseph's adamic share any common language that would have existed six or seven thousand years ago because they all would have descended right and you would be able to read the languages and the previous languages and they would all point up in kind of like a pyramid to this starting language but that doesn't exist but it's even worse than that because we have writings from places like China characters and language and you know um um was a Sumerian what what is the predecessor to Egyptian writings we've got ancient writings that predate the time that Adam and Eve would have even existed and and they're Divergent there's Chinese Sumerian and Chinese films yeah we've got cuneiform Sumerian Chinese languages that are written as I understand it that are documents that predate 6 000 years ago so for all these reasons this is just it's literally silly gibberish you're speaking my language uh I love Linguistics etymology you know the way words come to be is something I'm really interesting I just pulled up the language tree actually from Old English which Old English goes to middle English which then goes to Modern English um pretty much but you go to Old English which is like the earliest form of the English language so that's the the earliest that things could look kind of like this that Joseph Smith's describing that was kind of kind of mid thousands so you know 600 400 500 those sorts of years but there goes Old English then to anglic anglo-frisian North C Germanic West Germanic Germanic and then Indo-European so German is older than English German Germanic languages have been going on a lot longer and that developed into like Dutch and Norwegian and danish and English and those sort of things um and then other language families that come off that are the romance languages like French and Italian and Spanish so you can like you said it is absolutely a family tree of languages and languages belong to certain families and what isn't in the Indo-European language family is the language of the Egyptians or Arabic or you know those languages um aren't aren't part of that family tree they're part of a different one but but they probably I mean maybe they converge at some point but maybe they don't right well that's the thing so people people developed speech uh a very long time ago and the problem is speech in itself is hard to track because it you can only track it once we started writing it so writing is actually the form of language that you can track more easily my understanding is that Mayan for example uh emerged completely independently of any of these other languages yeah because people speak independently and then these different cultures have independently kind of work out how to then write it down how to make record of it so kinea forms a one version old runes or another version you know Chinese characters are another version and those kind of are separate different because like like Mike said at the beginning there's only so many ways to make markings on a piece of material so and and given the crudity with which it was done things like depth weren't considered and that sort of thing so it's just how many lines and what arrangement can you put the lines in there's only so many ways to do that yeah now now my okay so I think I think I'd say we've really kind of laid out there no that was beautiful Nemo I really appreciate it you said that more way more thoughtfully and scientifically than I could have um now I'm gonna before we give our final grade Mike I'm gonna um I'm going to ask you a question if that's okay uh just to close this point why are we including this in the category of translations because did Joseph Smith ever claim to have seen any adamic language documents or speech or language that he would have translated how how does this qualify or fit under the translation category if there's no Source documents well this one's similar to the characters just because the characters document we obviously don't have the original meaning of it because obviously from from my perspective Joseph's fabricating him in this case we have the source material of what Joseph Smith claims to be translating through God and so Joseph Smith is claiming that he's channeling through God what these words meant in the original endemic language and what they would mean into you know 1830s English so it's not quite as easy as say like our next one which is the book Abraham papyri but we do have the source material of what Joseph originally wrote down in what he claimed he was translating from adamic to English okay I don't know if that makes sense yeah I mean if that is easy as a Papyrus but at least we have something to work from on that yeah so in his mind somehow in his revelatory in in what he would have wanted people to con to believe he would have had some sort of conversations with God or gotten exposed to if not written then verbal um right the exposure to the adamic language he would have remembered it and then he would have been translating it on the fly to these people asking him questions is that why yeah or for all we know he might have been you know sitting with his uh The Rock and the hat he might have been sitting in prayer and as they asked him he's sitting there and he goes it means this you know what I mean so it could have been okay I would guess that I personally that would be my guess would be that would have been similar to how he because there were there are stories of him um the revelations being recorded and he's deep in prayer or he's got the The Rock and the hat so um I would imagine it's similar to that and so he's claiming to be getting these translations from God as he's being asked what what these words mean and so um to me that's a translation even if we don't have even if it's not like from you know say Spanish to English it is from adamic to English through the means of divine method of translation which he's claiming to have as prophet all right uh we we have time on this one but it's kind of a fun one so Mike what what grade do you want to give Joseph on translating the pure adamic language and this one obviously is is a big big fail on this one because because why well because Adam and Eve aren't historical figures so to have a language from mythical characters as a problem as it is and then obviously when you see the fact that it's it's crudely modified uh English in yeah uh that was supposed to be spoken 6000 years ago it just tells you immediately that there's no way all right all right Nemo I I don't really want to answer It's upsetting uh no it's a fail it's a tiny bit insulting it almost feels kind of a little bit insulting I I'm I'm all for like Primacy of of England like I'm I'm all for putting England on a pedestal but this is ridiculous are you an angle file Nemo well I mean it's weird because yes I'm an angle file but also I contain within me a lot of the traditional British self-loathing so I also kind of don't like England as well yeah yeah and I'll and I'll say it's a fail and and if it loses points Beyond fail it's just for pure lack of of originality or creativity it is it's a little lazy right it's a little it's lazy it is it's like I said I and again I don't want to make fun of this stuff this one in particular though it it reminds me of like when I was at uh in elementary school or made middle school and you're with your friends and you're trying to come up with some secret language that you that your parents don't know or something this would be the kind of stuff you would do it's just it's so bad and even beyond that it's just as we talk about if if they're not historical characters then how are you channeling that language through God if they're not real characters and so you have all of these different areas converging on this problem to tell you not only is it not possible to have this language but it's comically bad what he's coming up with so as Nemo said to Simon like he's putting in a good effort here to kind of hide what he's doing I I really as Nemo said earlier I don't know why he did it uh but we have the source material so it's worth talking about because this is something he claims to be translating but at the same time it's it's bad and there's even just just really quickly there's even an argument that needs to be made there because Believers going to say well I believe Adam and Eve were real and then boom You've Lost That point because people are going to say they were real right figures you're not gonna go around that but then you're like okay well then the tower people did happen and the languages were confounded at which point their language was lost so why is it then appearing why did they speak English and why is English now here again that's just it that's the other point to make if you're going to deal with those who do who do believe that Adam and Eve are real and won't step on that yeah both Forks on the road are going to lead you to the same point that this is not in any way credible okay all right well I guess that makes Joseph vote for three he's already 50 fail and uh we still got what three to go um three to go yeah so the next one we're going to be covering is the is the uh book of Abraham and I do want to say that we've done several episodes on this just immediately prior yeah and so I don't we don't want to strain viewers and listeners patients having them spent multiple hours already talking about it but let's let's do the overview you know we'll go through this quick just because we just did three episodes really four with Kinder plates which we'll do next but um you know as we've talked about in those episodes of all the translations the book Abraham is Far and Away the most problematic um with the Book of Mormon we only have the characters that he wrote down um and then the text of the book itself so we have no way to judge the book of Mormon against any kind of source record um and so that leaves us with with only so much we could do with it um but the introduction to the book Abraham States the following a translation of some ancient records that have fallen into our hands from the catacombs of Egypt purporting to be the writings of Abraham while he was in Egypt called The Book of Abraham written by his own hand upon Papyrus so it's making clear that what he's translating from is the literal writings of Abraham from his own hands which makes this as clear a translation as you could possibly get okay um yeah so let's go to uh yeah so basically you know Joseph Smith gets these Egyptian Papyrus any any claims to translate them into the book of Abraham but now modern egyptologists tell us that uh the word Abraham doesn't even appear anywhere in the Papyrus and that they're common funerary funeral documents that you would expect to be buried with Egyptian mummies basically right yeah okay yeah exactly all right so so and what I just said may sound flippant but you know as the next slide acknowledges uh the church's own Gospel topics essay on the book of Abraham admits explicitly just in the past few years that the papyri the book of Abraham papyri don't even mention the word Abraham let let alone have anything to do with Abraham so let's talk about that yeah and so just you know the the easiest way to put this is that we know the Papyrus States about 2 000 years after when Abraham would have even lived they have nothing to do with Abraham whatsoever and they could not have possibly been written by Abraham because of the fact they're 2000 years later and have nothing to do with them um the church could seize those points in their own Gospel topics essay which says these fragments date to between third Century BCE and first century CE long after Abraham lived and they also say none of the characters on Iris fragments mentioned Abraham's name or any of the events recorded in the book of Abraham Mormon and now Mormon egyptologists agree that the characters on the fragments do not match the translation given in the book of Abraham though there is not unanimity even among non-mormon Scholars about the proper interpretation of the vignettes on these fragments we talked about this a long time in our episodes when they say there's not unanimity they are not saying that any non-mormon scholar thinks that the book Abraham is remotely credible it's just that there is tiny little differences here and there and they're using that to try to to you know throw a bigger web and basically the church itself is saying the Papyrus fragments have nothing to do with Abraham date long after them and so whatever Joseph Smith translates has nothing to do with the Papyrus basically I mean that's basically the church telling us that Joseph failed before we even grade Joseph Smith on the book of Abraham the church is already tapped out and said all right Joseph said he translated but now we agree he didn't translate late and so they try and move the move the game and say it was it was Revelation not translation right well they'll say it's Revelation or that the actual Papyrus was lost and this is just the other fragments that weren't part of what Joseph Smith translated which we'll get into but um yeah so I mean it up until then it was like yeah we got it right Joseph the prophet and then all of a sudden we found out through the Rosetta Stone that he got it wrong and we found out through covering the Lost fragments that they have nothing to Abraham and so the church then says well it's a good thing that we don't have the that the real fragments are lost or that it was a revelation anyways and he wasn't actually translating God was just making him think it so um yeah I mean obviously we've gone through all of those apologetics and in great detail in our earlier episodes but you know taking this at face value we can evaluate what's on the Papyrus and um as we'll look at we we could see where Joseph was translating from so just to quickly review that uh the first slide is yes we have the source material for the book of Abraham yeah and so this is if you're watching these are two manuscript sheets of the book of Abraham and on the right side are the um recovered Papyrus fragment that it just happens to be right next to facsimile one which the book of Abraham is telling us to look and it tells you that the The Source material for the book Abraham is right next to facsimile one when you look at the actual manuscripts wouldn't you know it uh the characters are right next to facsimile one so everything lines up to tell us that yes we have the source material for the book of Abraham it's just not it's just not credible as a translation so to use my my summary language we've got the Papyrus and the characters and then we have documents from Kirtland and or Nauvoo that Joseph Smith and the scribes were involved with that we can tie characters that are taken off of the Papyrus to the words that are written as as a clear attempt at translating each character that then go directly to the text of the book of Abraham am I right yeah I mean the there there's no way around this one and we obviously we did four episodes or I guess three on the book Abraham itself and no matter which way you go here um there's just no way around the fact that we can show as which we'll do in the next slide even if you want to claim a missing scroll which goes against all of the evidence the fact is we still have them publishing stuff contemporaneously with the symbols that Joseph Smith gets wrong so no matter what you do Joseph Smith could not translate um what he claimed he could translate okay um let's go ahead and jump on to fact somebody facsimiles one two and three and I think we're going to talk about three specifically because you call that yeah it's like you like to call facts only three of The Smoking Gun but let's yeah I do for sure um so for me I always kind of you know it's like it's easy as easy as one two three well in this case even if you want to contend that Joseph Smith was not translating the symbols that both scribes wrote in the margins we still have facsimile one two and three to assess his prophetic skills by um because they were produced contemporaneously and published contemporaneously we know what Joseph Smith was translating and what he claimed that these vignettes in fact similes say um and obviously as we just said the effects only three is is the most important because of the fact that it includes um Egyptian characters that Joseph Smith translated which absolutely kills any idea that a long or lost scroll would contain the correct translation because if you're if you're looking at this on if you're watching it you could see the Egyptian characters that are above the these different figures hands and Joseph Smith's going to translate them and so if these characters are wrong which they are then why would anyone think that some sort of recovered loss scroll is going to be any different when we already know he cannot translate Egyptian characters okay and so if we go to the next page um or the next slide sorry um it's going to be the same picture of facsimile three but I just wanted to point out two of the translations Joseph Smith makes versus what they actually say and so um figure two it says is king Pharaoh whose name is given in the characters above his head and so what Joseph Smith is saying if you look at the Egyptian characters those characters would read king Pharaoh but what it actually says is Isis the great the God's mother so it's actually a woman and obviously is not king Pharaoh so Joseph Smith not only got the Egyptian characters wrong but he failed to see this figure as a woman and as we mentioned in those episodes Pharaoh is is a title it's not a name um so what Joseph Smith is actually really doing is kind of calling this you know King King almost or president president um because he doesn't understand that Pharaoh is actually a title and not like a specific name and then in figure four Joseph Smith writes Prince of pharaoh king of Egypt is written above the hand so again very clear that he's translating characters but what it actually says is I don't know if I think it's Matt it could be ma not sure uh Mistress of the Gods so again it's a female not at all what he claims to be which tells us that Joseph Smith could not translate the Egyptian characters that he told as he could do and we've already made a reference to this today but I I've done like 13 hours with egyptologists the late great Dr Robert Ridner and in that and in that episode we have an actual egyptologist world famous world-renowned who literally translates these exact characters in this facsimile tells us what Joseph said they said tells us what they actually say and and verifies what the Mormon church has now told us all which is that Joseph did zero translating uh with the book of with either the with the Papyrus or with the facsimiles yeah Fair did I get it yep yeah yeah all right Nemo anything you want to add I I just want to say it's here in Mormon scriptures right this is my quad okay this is my quad that I studied from yes yeah yeah still in Mormon scripture it is still extant it exists the church has said okay Joseph Smith made two claims to translate what was on this Papyrus and that it was written by Abraham's hand the church has said it wasn't written by Abraham's hand because the Scrolls don't date from the time where Abraham may or may not have lived two then does it say what Joseph Smith said it says well our egyptologists or the non-mormon egyptologists say that what is on that Papyrus isn't what Joseph Smith said that's it that's all you need Joseph Smith's claimed to translate something written by a man who couldn't have written it because the Scrolls aren't old enough and it didn't say what he said it would say yeah yep done yeah move on and the church is already graded the church is already graded the church created him for us yeah yeah we don't even have to do the grade but Mike uh obviously what's your grade it's a this is this is the to me the biggest Smoking Gun of all of this stuff so the biggest why is this bigger than the other three that we just did because facsimile 3 is one of those ones where you have the source material you know what Joseph Smith claims it is it's canonized by the church and so to me all of that just it's the most important because the church has canonized this as scripture there's no way around it um and so to me that's why it's the most important one um the characters document of course they could say well you don't have reformed Egyptian to compare to um the adamic language you don't have the adamic language to compare to obviously you know we went over all that this one you have exactly what was written you know it's we know where the you know where this document's from you know what it says and you know what Joseph claimed it said they don't match he couldn't Translate yeah simple pretty clear email anything that just so simple and the church admits it yeah yeah yep so it's a fail for all of us and uh the church even agrees and it's particularly condemnatory if that's a word because when the church is has canonized uh a fraud then all of a sudden that that imp that that indicts potentially the entire church because what's your scripture be I mean and I've heard Terrell Gibbons BYU professor Chief apologist for the Mormon Church in 2023 when I've heard that tarot Givens himself has recommended to the church leaders that they remove the book of Abraham from the Canon when your own top faithful Scholars are saying take that book out it's a problem not to mention the again the the curse of Cain racist Doctrine Joseph Smith I can't create scripture without writing racism and dark skin is a curse into the scripture like for all those reasons and more this is just a massive a massive fail which puts us at oh for four um you know so this is looking really terrible this is looking bleak yeah I mean I know everyone who's watching this a surprise given our first 30 episodes but this is why this is why we did all those episodes because now all of a sudden you can look at them all in one episode put them all right there and look at him or her view and go yeah this is this is what this is what the results are you know in in we'll do our final two before I guess we make our final thoughts but yeah this is this is not really a surprise but yeah but it is the culmination of all of this background work we've been doing in the previous episodes yeah all right well never fear believing viewers and listeners because we still have two left you still have two chances to hold that Joseph Smith could translate and the next uh the next topic is another one that we just spent we just recently did a full episode on is that right yeah so I think our last episode so we'll go through it fairly quickly but yeah we need the Kendrick plates so Mike or Nemo who wants to just give us the high level summary of the story before we start reading which reading the words or you can combine the two but let's give people uh kind of a storytelling quick summary of what happened all right let's let Nemo do it okay okay so a group of people decided they wanted to try and you know trick Joseph Smith so they dug a big hole in the ground they buried some plates then they filled it over then they got some people around so that they could see them digging through that same hole they got hold of the place oh wow look we found these ancient plates buried let's take them to Joseph Smith he'll know what to do they took him over to him he reads them he goes oh yeah this is what they say and then it doesn't really do much more with them but those plates have survived they haven't disappeared unlike other plates that Joseph Smith had dealings with so we can look at them all right yeah yeah all right so go ahead Mike the Kendrick plates yeah and so as Nemo said uh Robert Wiley begins to stay in Kinderhook Illinois um uncovers the plates he makes sure that he's got a member of the church there um so that they could bring him to Joseph he kind of knew how to lure Joseph in I guess so to speak and a member of the church there would love for Joy at the discovery um the times and Seasons the the church newspaper noted that the Kinderhook plates would undoubtedly prove the authenticity of the Book of Mormon um and on May 1st uh two weeks after the you know the claim Discovery uh William Clayton makes a journal entry about the Kinderhook plates and it says um I have seen six plate six brass plates that 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 uh because remember back then they thought ancient people were giants um and the 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 and this is the key part uh President Joseph Smith 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 lines of pharaoh of Egypt and that he received his kingdom from the ruler of Heaven and Earth and so William Clayton as Joseph Smith's scribe Joseph doesn't write stuff down on his own and so he's writing down what Joseph Smith is telling him these plates are and as Nemo said he doesn't do anything else with them this is the partial translation this is all we get but that is a partial translation as written by William Clayton and what we covered in the Kinderhook plates episode is that up until I believe 1980 the Mormon church is on record for decades and decades and decades as bolstering the Kinderhook plate translations as evidence as additional further evidence that Joseph Smith could translate am I right Mike yeah I mean not only that but the the people who create the hoax do come out long after and say yeah we were trying to trick Joseph Smith and the church's like no the hoaxers are the hoax and they're actually authentic because now they're trying to hurt him down the road so I'm not saying that the prophets of the church were saying I put Scholars for the church BH Roberts who was a ga um were out there saying that these plates were authentic that Joseph Smith could translate and this is part of his prophetic work so they defended him all the way up until 1980 and then what happened what happened in 1980 in 1980 they finally did uh I think it's blast testing they call it on one the one the one plate that they found and the method of how the plates to create a match perfectly with how the person that claimed it was a hoax said it was which was to use I think acid to etch the characters and all of that lined up perfectly with what the test results were all right all right well it's not looking good so uh no this final slide on the Kinder plates yeah and so you know we talked about this um in our episode with kinderg plates we also talked about this with the adamic language a bit ago but Joseph Smith did not know these were a fraud and gave a partial translation of them and so I agree that we have no record that the partial was trans translation was claimed to have been the Revelation or not claimed to be done through Revelation that's a lot of people say well it wasn't a translation because it was just a scholarly look but Joseph Smith still gave a partial translation that we can now assess because it was done off a fraudulent plates and so just as the academic language can't be authentic because Adam and Eve are not historical figures you cannot have a correct translation off of a fraudulent item and so in this case whatever Joseph Smith says is incorrect because it's a fraudulent um production that he is not aware is fraudulent and so it just immediately tells you that this this partial translation that Joseph Smith does is incorrect yeah Nemo anything you want to add before we vote yeah well any the other way that people try and give Joseph A Break um is that they try and say that well William Clayton wrote it Joseph Smith right but William Clayton is a trusted source for what Joseph Smith was saying not not in the least because he was trusted to write down sections of Doctrine and Covenants such as 124 and 125 he authored them he wrote them down so yeah this is a man trusted to take down accurately what Joseph Smith says yeah and Joe and and to William Clayton the idea that he was just kind of making this up or putting his own words in there as we talked about in that episode William Clayton was with Joseph that entire day and was there when Joseph Smith married Lucy Walker which we talked about in the polygamy episode so there there is all the evidence in the world to say that William Clayton one was trusted by Joseph two there's no record he was making stuff up in three that he was with on that day so it's hard to get around that all right so uh so we don't belabor the points uh Mike what do you what do you vote here in Connecticut plates yeah this one obviously is a fail because any translation even if it's just partial off of a fraud is is going to be a fraud yep Nemo fail yeah all right that's not looking good so now we're over five and uh it's looking bad so but but don't lose hope there's one left um The Lost writings of John so give us the story on this not John yeah not this John yeah okay yeah and this one is kind of a bonus one and this one is one that um I don't think I would have ever known about except for your interview with with Dr David Bach boy and he talked about this and it really just stuck with me in showing how Joseph Smith's Revelations were limited to what he knew or what he didn't know and in this case um he is going to claim to get a revelation from the author of The Gospel of John um which is going to be able to be assessed because of the fact that we have the Gospel of John to kind of compare the writing to to see would this fit in with the writer of John or would it not and so this is a really interesting one to me all right so tell us the story I mean a lot of us won't be familiar with the Lost writings of John so what's the story yeah and so this is basically uh in DNC 93 Joseph Smith is going to reveal writings slash records of the author of The Gospel of John in this Revelation Joseph Smith refers to the writer as John in the first person which is another pattern we see in Joseph's Productions um even though biblical scholarship has shown that the authors of the gospels are Anonymous so the person who is attributed as John is not actually John same with Mark Matthew and Luke and regardless what's interesting here is that as Joseph Smith produces this this Revelation he's using language that the author of The Gospel of John would have never used which shows that it's not coming from John but from someone claiming to speak for him and um David bachvoy is going to explain this from his interview with you very well and I think it's just a really enlightening um kind of way to kind of cap off what we've been doing today okay all right so let's roll the tape of my conversation with Dr David bakavoy and we'll include a link in the show notes um to this episode so let's uh let's roll the tape I'll show this because this is so interesting I think so in section for our audience will probably remember that in DNC section 93 the LDS Doctrine and Covenants Joseph Smith restores lost writings from John the author of The Book of John well um I'll notice for example verse 8 I'm in DNC 93 verse 8 therefore in the beginning the word was and he was the word even the messenger of Salvation the light and the Redeemer of the world the spirit of Truth you'd think you were reading from the Gospel of John there it's all johanine language who came into the world because the world was made by him and in him was the life of men and the light of men worlds were made by him this is all johanine John's literature really wants to emphasize this idea of contrast between light and dark and then we read first person and I John bear record that I beheld his glory as the glory of the only begotten of the father and then move down to verses 12 and 13 in Joseph Smith's Revelation I John saw that he Jesus received not of the fullness at the first but received Grace for grace and he received not of the fullness at first but continued From Grace to Grace until he received a fullness and thus meaning therefore meaning because he did not receive a fullness at first but he received it a little bit but a little bit he'll hear in grew and grew he was called the Son of God and I underlined called the Son of God because he received an odd of the fullness at first that's very different than what Mormons are taught John it's alarming oh John there the fact of the matter is the author of The Gospel of John would have been so offended by this language right because that's the gospel where Jesus wasn't called the Son of God Jesus was the son of God from the beginning he didn't receive Grace for Grace it was all from the beginning what was that again what was that that was DNC section 93 verse 14 that's presented as if it's John's language but John would never have said that Mark could have said something like that that he was called the Son of God at his baptism but even Luke and Matthew would have struggled a little bit with that because he's born as the Son of God this idea here reflects a theology a christology that is completely antithetical to the to what the author of The Gospel of John would have written there's no way he could have been responsible for any of this material yet it's presented that way in Joseph Smith's revelation that presents a significant challenge for traditional Believers once they're exposed to higher criticism in the New Testament and to see how that affects Mormon scripture all right so for so that's pretty powerful but for those listeners that sometimes tune out when they start hearing academic buzzwords being used who wants to summarize what what David bakavoy just said in kind of common common language Nemo you want to give it a shot yeah sure okay I can give that a go yeah so what David bakavoy the legend was saying is that the author of John he's the word johannine meaning basically is in the words of the author of John a lot of what's in DNC at first sounds like the author of John but then the words change the sort of words that get used which are still Joseph Smith still claiming uh from that author they don't match all of a sudden and not only that but the theology the ideas the thoughts the views of Jesus the views of Jesus is Calling the time at which Jesus became the Son of God don't match up with what the author of the book of The Gospel of John had said they don't match up so it doesn't match so he couldn't have written that because that wasn't the the feeling or the um the ideas that the author of The Gospel of John was trying to get across got it yeah hope that uh makes sense got it all right Mike uh anything anything you want to add to that no I mean like I said that was kind of more of like a bonus to what we've done because obviously when we're talking about translation with Source material in this case we have the source material which is the Gospel of John and so we can compare what Joseph Smith is putting in the words um of the author of The Gospel of John 2 what the Gospel of John would say and as Nemo said they're incompatible and so that tells you that whoever is writing this is not speaking for John and it's not uh portraying an accurate record of what John would have said and so it just shows again this pattern of Joseph Smith putting his own theology into the the words of others in order to give it a greater importance to its followers but as we can look at it with textual analysis historical scholarship all that stuff it just doesn't work historically it doesn't work in this case theologically and so it's a very big fingerprint that Joseph is leaving um which tells us that these are not authentic writings or words from John bummer bummer bummer from the way go ahead Nemo so the way acts of Believers may try to get around that or certainly the way that Joseph Smith set them up to get around it is that pesky old Article of Faith says we believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly and that gives Joseph Smith almost caught lunch to try these sorts of things where he will then add a little bit like jst or he'll add a bit here like in DNC 93 but the problem is once you start to analyze what he added you see that it's his product not the product of the author right extra words he's meant to be bringing forward thanks to God who preserved them exactly all right so to not you know belabor it uh Mike what are you given what he given Joseph on the Lost writings of John yeah obviously this would would be a fail just because of the fact it's incompatible with the Gospel of John Nemo fail yeah and I'm just going to say if Joseph has the power to just like in his mind translate documents that are like on the other side of the world if he's got that power why did the Nephites need to to forge and shape and fashion gold plates and scribble on them and preserve and protect them for a thousand years or however long it was like why did he need to buy you know use precious tithing dollars to buy the book of Abraham and then why would God why would God lead all these Mormons for over a century and a half to believe that all these things were translations just to all then discover in the 2000s that it's all a fraud why did all that happen if Joseph could have just translated stuff in his brain he didn't even eat the urban dumbham he could just do it in his brain so this lost writing this this power that he has with the Lost writings of John and I'm saying that with air quotes like if he's got that power we we got put through the ringer unnecessarily and in a way that really ended up working to defeat Heavenly father's plan as far as I'm making sense of it yeah I mean it's one of the things we've talked about in a lot of these episodes which is to say from an apologetic standpoint they'll say Joseph Smith believed he was channeling God he believed he was revealing God's words and so in the book of Abraham for example he was thinking he was translating a Papyrus but God was just giving him the words but God needed Joseph to think he was translating forward to work and my response is always if that's the case one why wouldn't God just tell Joseph that because otherwise if if God's plan if the Mormons version of God's plan is to bring everybody back to Christ then why is the Mormon version of God setting up his Prophet to look like a fraud over and over again it doesn't make sense unless you want to say the Mormon version of God wants people to disbelieve which makes no sense so either the Mormon version of God is not very efficient at bringing people to Christ or Joseph Smith making it up there's really no middle ground there when you look at all of these translation products projects and none of them fit the historical record all right so let's go ahead and uh let's go ahead and go to the final slide because this kind of summarizes it so so so Mike you're you're a no on that Nemo Nemo did you vote oh yeah okay so I I'm kind of bummed I'm kind of bummed for believers and I don't mean that insincerely because nobody wants to have their beliefs ripped out from under them and this is an important one it looks I'm saying fail so it looks like we're Joseph zero for six yeah uh zero for six not even one and that's that's pretty powerful so um so Mike you've got a concluding slide yeah and so it's just to say we you know we looked at the Book of Mormon characters that were copied directly from the gold plates uh we looked at the Joseph Smith translation of the Bible the pureedemic language the book of Abraham papyri the Kinderhook plates and the lost writings or you know lost records of John I suppose the Lost writings would be the parchment but um just looking at these six projects Joseph Smith would not pass on any of these six when you look at it at face value using all of the scholarship we have that's not correlated into the Mormon church and as I've been trying to say throughout all of these episodes is that the problem with each of these all of these translation projects they tie well within each other when we talk about the cruelly modified English when we talk about uh biblical scholarship errors these are not one-off problems that have answers with apologetics but they're patterns in how Joseph Smith is creating scripture in the name of God and you know just to finish as I've been saying with some of these other episodes is would you trust any other religious leader politician organization anyone who went over six on their exclusive truth claims um that they are going to claim were receive by Divine means or would you say you were oh for six why in the world would anyone believe that you are speaking for God and um I think that just goes to this idea that within Mormonism we often engage in the special pleading which is to say we can evaluate these other churches whether it's Warren Jeffs or David koresh or even the Catholic Church they used to really hate the Catholic church and see all the flaws in them but then when it comes to all of the very clear um truth claims that are false within the Mormon church we go well that's okay because we know Joseph's a prophet and so it really boils down to if this was any other Church how would you react and what does that tell you about the truth claims of Mormonism in Joseph Smith yep Nemo anything you want to add no it's it's what else is there to say okay well I guess I I always have something else to say uh I'll say I'll say one last thing and this is the way I summarize it like someday we need to write a book on the on the the story of Mormon truth claims because here's the story as I understand it you know Joseph and his family got involved in Treasure digging based on belief in folk magic and mostly the gullibility of surrounding neighbors and Joseph Smith made money and got Fame and recognition for the ability to convince people that he had special powers to find hidden treasure in the earth using a stone and a hat but by 1826 1827 he's starting to run afoul of the law and he needs a new gig um and so what he does is he pivots he's got now the ability to convince people that he has special powers but he needs to Pivot so that he can continue to have a livelihood in this realm of being perceived as someone with special powers so the production of the Book of Mormon by claiming that he found hidden treasure that had ancient writings on it and that he was able to translate it it extends on his special power because it starts with his special alleged special power to find hidden things in the ground but then he one-upps it by saying not only do I have special powers to find hidden things in the ground I have special powers to translate ancient languages and so you should believe in me and see me as a man of God as a man of special powers so when he produces the Book of Mormon it's the beginnings of a new um You can call it an initiative or a fraud or a con or whatever you want to call it it's a new gig where Joseph is extending people's perception that he has special powers and that's crucial because not only is that what happened but he writes it into the Doctrine and Covenants and attributes his alleged power to translate he Ledges that it's it's it's written down and canonized by God and Jesus themselves and so this is the foundation in my view upon which Joseph has and acquires his early power and so if it if it was the foundation of his power and influence if it's canonized and then if it's shown to be outrageously thoroughly demonstrably false zero for six zero percent probably less than zero percent because we've been able to demonstrate intentional likely intentional knowing fraud this is this is a powerful condemnation of Joseph Smith's not having the power that he claimed but also as a as a obvious fraud or charlatan and I hate to use those words but those words apply if those words have any meaning at all was that too harsh oh man was I too ah man oh man engelsman right touche Nemo that was brilliant no I mean you know and to your point it's like those are harsh words to label him as a charlatan but the problem is to me and we we've done so many episodes now that these really do kind of blend together but these are the translation projects that are going to get Joseph Smith followers and those followers are going to view these translations as proof of him being Prophet to the point where they will give him their daughters a marriage teenage girls are going to marry and have sex with them because they believe he's a prophet because of these translations and then when you could show that when we have the source material that it's it's simply not true you you kind of think about like all of these people who gave their lives not just to the church today not just to the church or the last 200 years but people that gave their their their love life their their chance of romance to him um you know teenage girls that were like 17 18 year olds years old they're having sex with him because they believe he's a prophet and he's using that to leverage against him and so I realized from a apologetic standpoint or believing standpoint you might go that's really harsh to combine those two but you have to remember this is the vehicle that's going to get him followers that's going to get those followers to give them their property themselves and and so yeah it this just shows how he uses the voice of God to get what he needs and yet we have the source material saying what he was doing is simply not true and so you can't say the church itself isn't true I know that's a matter of Faith you can show that the demonstrable truth claims are not what they claim to be and once you have that then you have to say what are the implications of that and what did Joseph Smith do to other people under the guise that these are true knowing that they couldn't have been true I don't know if I'm being confusing here but I think there are implications Beyond just these translations that come from him using the voice of God to do this um and you know it goes all the way to today where you have leaders telling the youth don't you dare doubt because you're going to throw it all away when you can look at it with throwing knives and go this isn't what it claims to be and so I don't know if I'm rambling a bit but just to say that these are important not just for the translation but for what these translations lead other people to do yeah I think you're right John this is the behavior of a charlatan you know this is this is the this is the modus operandi of someone who makes things up for people to believe and when we can actually look at the thing that they claim was the thing they were translating it just turns out not to be um but people back then couldn't check that so they've they took his word for it and he relied on that trust and and the the fact that they took him at his word and the fact they would follow him and believe him to then get power and money and access to women yeah yep and I'll just say to summarize my view if if L Ron Hubbard did this if Keith Ranieri of Nexium did this Evron Hubbard of Scientology if the Jehovah's Witnesses did this if John delin did this there's no if if John did the things if I did the things that Joseph Smith did in 2023 and claimed to be a man of God and have the power of God and then all the evidence shows I was making it up plus I asked for your wives in marriage and I asked for your teenage daughters in marriage sometimes your 14 year old daughter's in marriage I wouldn't just be not believed I would be imprisoned and possibly executed and so why are we willing to extend um good faith to Joseph Warren Jeffs is in prison now yeah yeah yeah well I mean we start out saying we want to be neutral and I know we come down harsh at the end but in this case I really do think the evidence warrants that so thank you Mike and Nemo for today Mike do you quickly want to tell us what's in store next yeah we've got uh probably a dozen left and I think our next episode is going to be similar to this episode we're going to look at all of the unique um kind of doctrines and unique ideas of Mormonism and we're going to look at where they come from to see uh you know it's something I thought of a long time ago which is I'm old I'm old enough now to where I use cassette tapes when I was a teenager and we would record off the radio you'd make your own mixtape right or you'd get CDs and and make a mixtape and in a lot of ways Joseph Smith is going to pull from all these surrounding ideas whether it's the the endowment ceremony which we talked about in a previous episode uh The Three Degrees Of Heaven um The Book of Mormon the book of Abraham and so we're going to look at those kind of in the same way as today's episode to put them all in one episode to say here are all the unique ideas of Mormonism do any of them seem to come directly from Joseph Smith or do they seem to come from ideas around his worldview in the 19th century and I think it'll be a fun exercise and then after that we've got I believe four episodes um on Revelation and that's going to kind of Transit transition us from you know the founding of the church to kind of the modern day to get us to that last batch of episode so we've got a lot left and I think it'll be fun and I think for those of you who've been following along the whole time time this will be a good way to kind of finish up with the scriptures finish up with some of this unique Mormonism ideas from Joseph Smith's time and then start to work our way towards uh the modern day Church Revelation personal revelation um doubts apologetics all that stuff so we've got a lot left I think it'll be fun um and I think the next one will be a little like this except it'll probably have some more stuff we haven't talked about previously so I think it'll be a good exercise to kind of evaluating where all of these unique doctrines are coming from brilliant all right Mike as always your Genius check out LDS discussion ldsuccessions.com uh check out uh the LDS discussions podcast on Spotify and on Apple podcast or you can check it out on the Mormon stories podcast YouTube page under the playlist LDS discussions um Nemo check out Nemo the Mormon on YouTube subscribe to his channel donate donate to Nemo the Mormon as well Nemo any final words yeah just it's a pleasure to be here thank you very much everyone all right thank you thank you Nemo all right thanks Nemo thanks Mike thanks viewers and listeners we love you guys please donate to Mormon stories if you value this content you can go to mormonsstories.org click on the Donate button become a monthly donor and we'll keep the series going but uh without any further Ado we love you guys be kind to each other be good to each other please share this with everyone please hit the Subscribe button on YouTube and on Facebook and everywhere else and uh we'll see you all again soon on another episode of LDS discussions and on Mormon stories podcast take care everybody