The Lost 116 Pages

hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of mormon stories podcast i'm your host john dulin and we are super excited for our next part in our series with lds discussions or with mike from lds discussions uh lds discussions is this amazing website you can go to ldsdiscussions.com where my friend mike has written i don't know 50 or 60 essays on the mormon church's truth claims trying really hard to just focus on the facts and the evidence and to discuss uh you know issues or problems with the mormon church's truth claims we have done uh three episodes so far so if you are joining us for the first time on this series we did an episode on um on joseph smith's treasure digging that was part one then we did uh the golden plates as part two and then we did the book of mormon translation as part three today we are super excited for part four which is the last 116 pages uh to the book of mormon and uh mike it's so great to have you back on mormon stories podcast how's it going ready to do another one people people are loving this series i hope so i mean like i said i hope it you know the whole thing is to find it helpful and i think to to do it in a way that is you know um one of the one of the things and i know you've experienced this from people you've talked to is people when they read like say the ces letter it feels like you're being ambushed because it's just so much at once and i'm hoping by doing this doing topic by topic a little slower um we can go over in a way that if you're a believing member you might not be comfortable with it but at least you'll understand like it's not just us throwing out anti-mormon stuff and i've pointed out a few times already where you know i purposely avoid some of the the stuff that would be considered anti-mormon because i don't feel it's foundationally sturdy enough and and so the whole point is to do this in a way that i feel i'm hoping that even if you watch it as a believer you could say i don't agree with you but at least you're not you know i don't think you're making things up or intentionally trying to to misrepresent the positions both of the church and the evidence and so i'm hoping this is helpful to people because it like i said was for me i was asked to do this by a believing member and and so the whole time i was doing it in my head i was thinking this is how i want to present it to someone who's a believer because i don't want to sugarcoat it but i also want to make sure that the the evidence is is very sound before i present it to someone i love it one last thing we're going to ask for some feedback uh we've been having a few co-hosts each time we've had jen on we've had gerardo on we've had nemo on and we've gone back and forth some of the you know at times we feel like many of you are just going to want the facts they're going to want the history without any discussion or perspective or much analysis so kind of a leaner shorter abridged version and then we feel like others of you may really like the more extended versions where we're emotionally reacting where we're talking about broader issues we're trying to contextualize this and we're not sure which to do whether we should do shorter really lean in focused versions longer more expounding versions or if we should release two versions a short version and a long version so please email us or comment on your feedback because we'll do whatever the the overwhelming majority want we just don't know we're we're torn we want to keep it fun and interesting but also we don't want it to be super long and we want to keep it focused so today this episode we're doing we're only going to have just me as a co-host to reduce the insight and commentary and mike and i are going to try and just stay or keep our commentary focused on the 116 pages and not zoom out to the broader issues how's that mike does that sound all right yeah i mean i think it like you know we've tried to find that balance because the thing is these presentations by themselves are a little dry and if you read the overview project at ldsdiscussions.com the pages get a little long they get a little in the weeds and so if you're reading them i think the reason these videos might be more helpful than those in a lot of ways is because of the fact that you have other people who can interject their experience and also other people who when they have questions about what i'm saying can say what does this mean which when you're reading it you can't do that and so we're trying to find that balance because we want it to be worth your listen we want it to be something that you find valuable both in terms of the content and also in terms of the tone and that's why we've tried really hard to to keep this as tight as we can to um not going off about you know things that seem like you're being ambushed as a believer and at the same time we want to make sure that we're also being authentic to what we've learned in those experiences as well so we really just want to try to make it really the most valuable for people who are going through these questions because we've all been there ourselves but it's hard sometimes when we're recording these to know how they're being perceived because we're just kind of going through the slides and back and forth but we want to make sure obviously they're helpful to all of you out there all right well that um [Music] that with that let's go ahead and uh let's go ahead and dig in now uh this this 116 pages issue um you know you feel is super important and and mike i guess there's going to be a few people who don't even know what we mean when we talk about the 116 pages so why don't you give it an intro just like the 30-second version of what happened and and talk about why you think this is so important well we have the actually if we go to the first slide we can kind of do that because we're gonna um go over why they're important and like i said i said this i teased this in the last episode i feel like this is one of the most important overviews in part because of the window it gives us into joseph smith in the book of mormon but also because of the fact that you're not going to see this as much in some of the more common materials like the ces letter and i think it's because it is a it's a tricky one to talk about but it's so important and so there are three reasons that i think that this is just a really really impactful topic and one is we've talked about this in the first few overviews but joseph smith uses treasure digging techniques both through his treasure digging and through the gold plates and through the translation and as we've mentioned every time joseph smith loses control of the situation but he becomes powerless and so in this case not only does joseph smith lose his power with his peeps shear stone but god loses any power to help him in a physical manner and that's really important to know when you are tracking this um in a secular viewpoint where you're saying why is it that god loses his power at the same time as joseph smith and so we'll go through that as we go through the story but you got to keep that in mind because again it's not just joseph smith that loses his power it's god in the revelations who loses control of the situation and that's a really important thing that you have to acknowledge even as a believer with the 116 pages story okay all right that's one and that's one problem so um i'll go back real quick and then um the other the other two real quick um from the last slide are um just kind of let's see real quick can you go back one slide oh there we go sorry no no it's fine and so one of the things when i was like when i said when i joined i did not grow up in the church and so my understanding of these stories was a lot less because i didn't go through seminary um i joined after high school so um the idea of the small place was just told to me as if it was always in the churches documentation it was always thought of the whole time and so it was always told you like god had planned for this exact event and he created the idea or created a set of small plates because he knew this was going to happen and what's amazing is we're going to refer to the article that will be referenced heavily but there's this article that went through and you can actually show the small plates are not even thought of until joseph smith finishes the book of mormon and has to go back and write the beginning and that is so important to understand again into the window of the process and then the third one and this is kind of something we're going to hammer on now that we're going into the book of mormon text itself but joseph smith leaves his fingerprints all over the text and in the replacement text joseph smith has to recreate it in a way because he doesn't know if lucy harris has it and so he has to reply replace this text in a way that is so vague that if she does have it she cannot expose him and we're going to kind of show um through some of the work that tanner's did um where he's doing it and why it is so obvious now that joseph smith was trying to effectively cover his tracks in the replacement text okay and you had this as a summary slide but the reason why i wanted to pull it up front is because it's it helps people know what to pay attention to so what you're saying is pay attention to what extent god god's power seems to be magically limited by the 116 pages fiasco number one joseph's power and god's power it's like all of a sudden their power disappears does that remind you of the treasure digging um you know sort of a habit of all of a sudden treasures disappear they slip away blah blah blah does it fit that mold number two is um does the small plates kind of theory within the book of mormon end up seeming like an afterthought once you review it and then three do you find joseph smith's fingerprints all over the place kind of explaining and trying to explain away this problem that he's confronted is that what you're saying yeah those are the three big themes within this overview and so most of you if you're watching or listening um have heard the story before but just as a really quick look at the story of 116 pages joseph smith is working with martin harris he works with emma smith i believe there might be one or two more people that acted describes in that time for very short periods but mostly martin harris and emma smith and martin harris is told by joseph smith through revelation that he needs to finance the book of mormon and that is one of those things that we'll get into a little more later but because he's being told he needs to help fund the book of mormon his wife lucy is very suspicious of joseph and she wants to see proof martin wants to show the proof to her and um we won't show the south park clip on this but you know this is the whole thing where with lucy smith they say smart smart smart it's because she wants proof whereas martin harris is you know seemingly only looking for proof to help um appease lucy and so according to lucy harris and again this is from her which people would argue she's coming from an antagonistic source but they say that she even offers to help fund the book of mormon herself but she wants to see the plates before she does it and then she says that when joseph refuses to show um lucy the gold plates he actually tells her and and as to assistance i always prefer dealing with men rather than their wives and again that quote is from lavina fielding anderson's book um it's from you know an account from lucy harris but this is a way where we're seeing kind of seeing that lucy harris is trying um i think to interject herself into this um story of of martin and joseph and i think in a lot of ways again kind of like we saw in the last episode when we talk about the spectacles and you've got joseph smith kind of stuck with the spectacle because he's being put into a corner and i think here lucy harris is putting joseph in a corner i think joseph is trying to basically say i don't want any part of you um because he knows that she is not someone who is of the mindset to just go through the motions with them and in that quote i think again i know apologetically you'd probably say she's coming from an antagonistic standpoint um but there at least is that indication that lucy was even offering i'll even help you fund it but you got to show me something and joseph won't do it yeah yeah so martin is martin is neglecting his duties as a farmer he is investing all this money in joseph smith uh it's a fantastic claim to begin with and i think martin really i think the martin luther dichotomy really represents well the magical world view which is martin harris and the joseph joseph smith's family and kind of the skeptical world view which which is lucy harris saying hey if this is all true i'm all in but if it's if it's a charlatan i i want some evidence yeah you know and so it's it's a really great it's a really great story all right yeah and so this leads to the the version of the story we all kind of know which is basically martin continues to ask joseph um for some way to prove to lucy that the plates are correct and joseph smith rejects martin twice and um martin harris continues and on the third request god through joseph in revelation agrees to let martin take the pages and i just know it again we mentioned this in previous episodes that there's this i don't know if it's entirely magical but there's this thing about the power of three where a lot of times you'll see it's always on the third try that um something is allowed so you know with um the gold plates you know the first couple tries he did and on the third try which i know joseph says more but you know you have these power three it's not a huge deal but just to note it and so lucy locks the manuscript and martin reportedly shows it to anyone who comes across and this is something that what do you mean what do you mean locks the manuscript so according to the the story lucy gets the manuscript martin brings it home and lucy locks it into i think it's a drawer or um some sort of chest and martin wants to show it to everybody that comes by the house and so as the story goes and again there are some differing stories here but martin would actually pick the lock so he could get the manuscript out to show somebody and lucy was upset that he would pick the lock and not have her do it and so then according to the story that's when she moves it again and the manuscript's never seen again so again we don't know um if she burned it if she tore it up if she was holding on to it if she was buried at summer we just we don't know and i know there's there's a lot of theories about that and a lot of people think she destroyed it some people think she was holding it we just don't know but but at that point in the story once he picked the lock and she takes it away it's never seen again and that must have been devastating to joseph smith i mean yeah he's he's he's not really working a lot he's not making a lot of money he's living with emma's dad right isaac hale yep and isaac's already not super happy with joseph thinks he's a charlatan to begin with he you know he absconds with his daughter and so forth now he's been working on this manuscript and then all of a sudden they're 116 pages in which is a big deal that's that's sort of nephi the equivalent to nephi all the way through to what well it goes well it picks up mosiah so you got like first nephi's second nephi you got jacob um several books in yeah say like five books so there's like five books in and then all of a sudden their work is is gone i mean plus yeah and then plus there's the issue of and we're gonna get into this it's like well joseph if you're really translating from gold plates you should just be able to reproduce it yeah and that's the rub that's the rub right that's just it and so um so the manuscript's never seen again and then of course martin has to go home and uh or go back to joseph smith so and joseph's gonna be super pissed but he can't be too pissed because martin's freaking funding the whole deal right well he's funding it and again that's the whole thing when you have control it's a lot easier to be you know calm and collected and when you lose control then all of a sudden you're scrambling but you can't let people see your scrambling and that really is the whole thing when you're doing something and again you're saying it's a con i know is kind of a pejorative term but in treasure digging we know he wasn't seeing anything we know he used uh deception with the feather story um that we know came from josiah stoh who's a believer so when he's in control he can do things like put a feather in there and make you believe that the treasure slipped but the feather stayed at the same time with the manuscript you know this is you know one of those things where he loses control and all of a sudden in his head it's like what do i do to recreate this and that goes back and we'll get to it more but later but it really goes back into the translation methods as well it blows up those whole accounts um at the same time which is another problem that we'll have going forward as we look at these topics yeah yeah there's always this idea with with things like the the witnesses seeing the plates there's always this idea that that isn't explicit within mormonism of like your your spiritual eyes seeing things with your spiritual eyes but when you've got a hard manuscript with words you know it's a lot different than like seeing a vision in the ground of a spirit guarding an alleged treasure yeah as soon as you've got something physical and tangible then it's a lot it's a lot more difficult to fool people so that's the problem yeah that's and that's you know kind of we talk about the gold plates too yeah um all right so if you go to the next slide and this just we again this is very very well known to any members of the church but martin goes back tells joseph they lost the pages and joseph exclaims oh my god all is lost all is lost what shall i do i have sinned and basically at this point the production of the book of mormon just completely stops and joseph smith attributes this to god physically taking the plates away from him and and and the spectacles you know what would be the urum and thumb and this is really important because again we have an issue here where we're going to look and see that god has the ability to take away physical objects from joseph smith which would be the plates and the spe in the urim and thumb on which at the time was just known as the interpreters or the spectacles like like are you saying that there's there's a suggestion that they just disappear yes and so that's the the whole point is that joseph basically says they're gone joseph goes to the stump where uh and they're just gone yeah and they're just gone and so to me that's important because one you know to what we were just saying if you don't have a physical tangible place that you have on the table it's really easy to say they're gone and in this case if you bury them out in the woods or whatever whatever joseph was doing i know there were stories that he had him in a box of beans and all that stuff but wherever they were it's easy for him to say they're gone because he's in control of that that he's in control because they're not physical they're not around other people and again it shows right here that god has the ability to physically move so in the gold plates we have joseph smith needing to dig them up and we don't have necessarily god pulling him out of the hill in this case we have god being able to do physical work on earth to remove the plates and the spectacles and i just i'm kind of hammering on that because that's gonna be important as we get going in the story because it really shows again the difference between when joseph is in control of elements of a story and when he's not and what the limitations become not just on joseph but on god as well i mean if i'm lucy or just the skeptical thinker i'm thinking immediately to myself wait a minute if god can just make the plates and the spectacles appear and disappear why did he ever need an angel to like make joseph wait four years or however many years and why didn't he just make him appear to joseph smith visit joseph himself and just say hey here are the plates why this whole and why was joseph running to protect the plates beating off people if god could have just zoomed them away as soon as they were threatened yeah why why was there any of these shenanigans with joseph in the plates yeah and then like i said that's just the whole thing like it's it's the inconsistency in the story and the inconsistencies always tend to line up with again where joseph's in control and where he's not and so in this case he's not he is in control he's in control right now of the story of the plates even though he lost the pages so it's easy for him to tell martin i can't continue translating i need to take a break because god has told me you know i've sinned and because of that he's taken away my abilities at the same time you know with the pages well we'll get into it at the same time the limitation um comes when we have to then explore the part that of the story that he that you know god or joseph should be able to help yeah yeah go ahead and finish the slide and then i want to make a couple more observations yeah and so the last part is and this is kind of like branching off of our last episode on the translation but joseph smith saying all is lost to me is an indication that this was never a translation but an oral dictation because if joseph smith was truly translating as all of the witness accounts tell us which is to say he's reading word for word off of the rock and if he doesn't write it down correctly it will not move on to the next which tells you he can't possibly translate it wrong because the rock itself is an active participant in changing the words um every time they're written down and so joseph smith you would think if he had lost the manuscript would be obviously super upset but he wouldn't say all his loss because you would just have to redo it it would be like if i was working on a project at home and all of a sudden you're assembling an ikea furniture and all of a sudden you get three quarters of the way in and you realize you put one of the panels inside out and you're not gonna go all is lost i lost the ikea thing you're gonna go oh crap i gotta take this apart and put it back together and in this case joseph smith is indicating the entire project is blown up and that would only occur if he knows he can't replace it and that tells you he was not translating as the witnesses tell us but was orally dictating because if it was a translation he'd be able to redo it so again he might be mad but he wouldn't say all his loss he'd just say oh crap martin i gotta do this all over again yeah so there's three things there's you know there's why didn't god just make them appear and disappear whenever they needed to then there's why did they have to stop because if he's just like that seems too convenient to say god's punishing him by making him wait for a season and then why isn't this just an opportunity for god to show something miraculous right because he could have just number one replicated the exact text like before and immediately continued but the fact that he's worried that he can't replicate the text and the fact that he has to wait for a long time that's just super sus i mean the whole thing is ridiculous but this is like this this right here should be enough and for lucy it was right yeah and that's just it i mean and the thing is we're looking at this um and and i've done a when i first started ldsdiscussions.com and i was more in my you know to be fair i was more in that angry stage where i was just really upset of all the things i was learning i had put a a a summary page in there i think and one of the topic one of the small parts of that summary was to say that all of the revelations that joseph smith gets benefit joseph smith they always get him out of a jam and so you know it's one of those things where when you look at these stories it's like why do the revelations seem to always get joseph out of a jam instead of actually just addressing the problem which we're going to see obviously with this story but instead of just fixing it which god should be able to do if he could take the plates away he goes through all these hoops of telling joseph now you got to stop and i think that's a pretty good indication that you know god's power is limited to joseph because joseph is not being honest about where the power comes from yeah and and i guess there's the there's the the obvious question of like why didn't god just say hey joseph bring bring martin on he's going to help you but at some point he's gonna want the plates or he's gonna want the manuscript and either tell him no even after three times keep telling me no or if he takes it make sure he manages in a way because otherwise lucy's gonna lose it or steal it or destroy it like yeah why this is why we have prophets to see things ahead of time but then the church will fall back and and we'll get to this the church will fall back into well god lets humans make mistakes yeah but then why do we need prophets at all if god just lets humans make mistakes right well and that's the whole thing right so we're going to have you know in this particular um story we're going to have prophets we're going to have the church telling us that all this was foreseen yet at the same time you can tell when you actually dissect the story that it wasn't in and that is why in my opinion this is such an important topic because when you read it it really does seem not that it's a throwaway story because if you're if you're from a critical perspective you're going to say this shows joseph couldn't replace the text which shows he was making up and i agree with that but it shows you so much of a window of how joseph smith is creating the book of mormon and when he does it you could see how carefully is and he leaves these fingerprints all over the scene of the crime and i'm not calling a crime but just for the you know just for the analogy and when you start seeing all the fingerprints all over everything and they're all joseph's fingerprints then you really have problems if you want to claim this is a translation by the method that the the witnesses said or more importantly if you want to claim this as an ancient record because we can see the way that it's being reproduced in those pages it absolutely is being done in a way that is trying to basically it's almost like and we'll get to it later but there are parts of that almost are telling you that it no it's so aware of the fact that it's that it's having to be vague that it's telling the reader like wink wink this is why it's vague and it's almost it's almost like the phrase like he does protest too much basically okay so we'll get into that yeah so we'll get into that and then um you know again we've talked about this multiple times but joseph smith's power only works when he's in control and that is such a big part of treasure digging and magic you know magicians realized yeah absolutely and it's the same it's the reason why magic shows only work if you don't know the joke the trick if you know the trick magic shows are pretty boring because you're like oh i know what he's doing but also a magician's environment people are in front of you you know you you you control the environment to make the truck work right absolutely yeah absolutely and so that that's why to me it's so important because all of a sudden when he loses control of this situation and this is one of those ones where you can absolutely say he's losing control everything that he all of these supernatural powers just disappeared they just completely disintegrate instantly and um the best way to do this like and again we talked about this in the gold plates episode emma smith rides a horse to joseph and says joseph there are treasure diggers that are going to the hill kimura to find the place that you left there joseph smith pulls out the rock tosses it in his hat and says basically oh i knew emma that you were coming and i've actually i can look at the plates right now they're all safe all is well there's nothing to worry about so when joseph smith is in control of the of the situation he can tell emma oh i see the plates they're fine even though there's a band of people that are going to look for him and i left him in a hella log nothing to worry about which is so suspect alone but he loses the manuscript which we know is a real object like you said earlier that's a real tangible object and all of a sudden that seer stone can't locate anything and so yeah so so let me just let you drive that point home because i didn't think about that for a second so number one why couldn't joseph have just used the stone with lucy harris knew that they were in trouble and predicted this ahead of time yeah because if you're a skeptic and you don't believe there were plates because the plates weren't anywhere of course joseph can tell emma the plates are fine because they don't exist whereas the manuscript exists and all of a sudden joseph can't use the seer stone to tell emma or to to protect the manuscript at all is that right yeah and and the thing is you know you can make the argument of like well why didn't god warn joseph in the revelation like if you let martin take him you're gonna lose him that would be one thing that would show joseph was a prophet except it wouldn't because then in theory he wouldn't bring him but to your point even after lucy has them the seer stone should be able to tell him if lucy still has them or if she destroyed them if she still has them where they are and then he could just go get them he could send martin and say martin she put them uh in a little bit under a bench outside of uh uh you know outside of the house you know well these other ones all these other bad guys got them and yeah yeah it's in 401 downing street you know yeah i mean and again it sounds facetious but that's the thing this is joseph smith's claim powers that he can pull and we we covered that in our last few videos we showed videos from the church where they declared without any hesitation joseph smith could find lost objects with his peeps last year he's a sincere he's a sphere yep it's all of a sudden he loses something that is so important to i mean again going through the church's narrative this is literally the most important thing to happen since the bible and all of the sudden that stone can't do anything so can't tell them where they are or what happened to them so a skeptic would say he can only see things that don't exist when it's actually something that exists that's somewhere out there and he doesn't know all of a sudden his his seer powers disappear yeah i mean or he can see what he has control over so like you know there's a story where like someone loses a cow and joseph is able to find it and then the quote is something like oh joseph smith is able to locate things a little too easily so he's not really seeing it because of course he he moved it but yeah to your point if you can't see physical objects that are around you that are that important then how in the world are we supposed to believe any of the rest of the story and that's why these overview projects are laid out in a way to build on each other because we've already covered that the seer stone doesn't work but now we're showing why even if you want to use the church's apologetic to say like richard bushman said this was a preparation so the seer stone prepared joseph smith to be able to do this work it didn't because the magic didn't work then and it doesn't work now with the 116 pages it just it doesn't work in any at any point he only sees the undisprovable well yeah and that's just it so it's like now all of a sudden yeah you know he loses what again is like if you want to go with the church's narrative one of the most important things to come through the earth and nothing he can't even tell if they're if they're still there and yeah that's that's a big red flag i just i don't know what more to say that alone tells you what you need to know about joseph smith's ability as a seer yeah this should be i mean okay i'll i'll i'll reserve my commentary okay next slide um and so the next slide um is just you know again we kind of you know talked about this just now so we really don't need to go over too much more but this shows that as soon as joseph smith loses control he loses all of his power it also shows that if you believe god is channeling through the seer stone which is what is taught that god loses the power to show joseph's myth now the apologetic is that god takes away the power and so god's punishing joseph but that again has a lot of implications we'll get into as we go through it and then the last one is just to say this is the perfect opportunity for joseph smith to prove himself a prophet and there's no record of joseph smith even claiming to say he could see him or trying to locate him which shows me that joseph smith is well aware of the fact that he has no control and therefore no ability to do it he's not even there's no account that i've seen that indicates that joseph smith is telling those around him i can see him and she's trying to expose me or i can see him and she's altering him i mean it's kind of weird that emma's like joseph just look at your stone yeah go find him i mean she probably did but he probably didn't tell anybody or write that down right that's just it i mean and so you know it's like one of those things where it's like all of the signs are here where if you told a believing member of the church this story and you said it was scientology jehovah's witnesses david koresh warren jeffs and they obviously they're giving me john delaney or john dolan or or me i like i came and i said i found this ancient record uh every person is going to go off you'd laugh us out of the room they would and they'd be right to do so because if you're going to claim powers and every time you have the opportunity to prove yourself you fail claiming that the reason they fail is this god wants you to have faith it really becomes indistinguishable from outright fraud because you can make that claim again we've talked about in previous episodes as well you can make that claim for anything and so it's just going by the the evidence that face value it doesn't work and um that's important and so i i kind of referenced this a little bit ago but one of the themes you'll see with revelations in the church is that god is always helping joseph out of a jam and so this is going to be from doctrine covenants 10 which is going to be written long after the event happens so again just like we talked about with the book of mormon translation the gold plates these accounts are being written months later so they're being written with joseph smith kind of having a different perspective but the part i want to read just says now behold i say unto you that because you delivered up those writings into the hands of a wicked man you have lost them you also lost your gift at the same time and your mind became darkened and behold satan hath put into their hearts to alter the words which you have caused to be written or which you have translated behold i say unto you that you shall not translate again those words which have gone forth out of your hands for behold they shall not accomplish their evil designs in lying against those words for behold if you should bring forth the same words they will say that you have lied and that you have pretended to translate but that you have contradicted yourself and behold they will publish this and satan will harden the hearts of the people to stir them up to anger against you that they will not believe my words and you know it's one of those things where we um let me just go to the next slide actually because we can go through some of the issues with this one um first of all this revelation was not recorded until at least april um the joseph smith papers project actually says it was likely made just because of the different ways the phrase is being used and all that they think it was may which would be basically when joseph smith has already been working with oliver and he's probably getting to the point where he needs to know what to do with the uh replacement text and so this revelation is being written as a way to give joseph a springboard to set up how he's going to replace the text and that happens later and we'll get to that later as well um to note again that the current doctrine of covenants 10 that you'll find in your scriptures is going to be different they add a lot of stuff and they add the term urine and thummim which is not in the original we've mentioned that repeatedly and i just want to keep pointing that out because that is a retrofitted term that has nothing to do with the original translation because the urban thumb is an incorrect use of a translating tool anyways it just shows how the church is willing to uh i guess rename or rebrand biblical terms to take away the folk magic um because they don't want to say they're trying to hide the peepstone they're trying to yeah they don't want to say people or you know they'll say seerstone but you know i always say peep slash earstone because i know peepstone it's derogatory it's derogatory but that's how it was referred to at the time by everyone who wasn't in the church but seer stone i believe is also misleading because he never saw anything so for me so for for anyone listening if you're like why do you keep saying peep slash earstone it's because i'm trying to be respectful to believing members but also trying to mention the fact that that is peep stone is how it was referred um so anyway searstone's literally anachronistic to call it a seer stone yeah that's just it you know and and to call to call it iran thumb is anachronistic and so this whole the whole thing is he's using the same treasure digging techniques yeah we've covered that um so dnc 10 is entirely to the benefit of joseph smith because even though god is chastising joseph in this revelation he's really chastising martin he calls him a wicked man but then he kind of chastises joseph for letting the papers go out but again remember joseph smith asked god three times and the third time he was given permission to give to martin so to blame joseph is kind of silly because god on the third time could have just you know and again i realized from that's a good point why didn't god say no the third time yeah god could have said no third time and said no lucy harris is waiting to set a trap which is too important this is way too yeah this is too important to take away or you know if you want to really go this route you could say yes martin harris can take the manuscript back but i need you to make a second copy because we uh i believe lucy harris is hard as hardened and she's going to try to expose you but none of that happens and so my point is dnc 10 and joseph does this a lot where he'll chastise himself in these revelations while at the same time creating himself an opening when his leadership's being questioned or when some of his prophecies aren't coming to pass um you know it's a really great tool and you'll hear people in the church all the time say joseph smith was so humble and god humbled him a lot in these revelations by calling him out even though he was prophet god still went after him it's like except it was really self-serving you know it it's one of those things that is really an easy thing to do when you're in charge of a church to say god's upset with me because of this but he's also upset with you so you got to do your part too and dnc 10 really accomplishes that because joseph smith needs an out to make these replacement texts seem like they're not just being made up because he doesn't know how to do it and so this is going to give him a road map on how to replace it can i check in with you on the logic of dnc 10 just really quickly yeah go for it okay so um again it's weird that god's it's weird that this is written why this wasn't written when he was working with martin but instead this is written way later when he's trying to like wrap things up and tie things up i think that's a good point he's he's like realizing man this is all problematic i gotta have some sort of justification and then all of a sudden the revelation comes but i want to read this thing again behold i say to you that you shall not translate again those words which have gone forth out of your hands for behold they shall not accomplish their evil designs in lying against those words for behold if you should bring forth the same words they will say that you have lied and you that you're pretending to translate but that you have contradicted yourself now wait a minute why wouldn't they just go oh my gosh he really is translating because he was able to reproduce the identical words yeah can i just don't unexplain god's logic there well i mean again the logic is that god via joseph smith um is very insecure and very unconfident and and that really is the problem that we're going to have when you go through through this text which is to say that why is it that god who we believe again can go and just grab plates out of joseph's possession and who can strike people dumb when it comes to this cannot find a way to effectively stop people from lying and you know um well what's god's logic what's god's logic just help me understand god's logic if joseph reproduces an identical manuscript why is why does god think that that would that would cause problems okay so let's go to the next slide but yeah so the logic is that if he recreates it exactly that lucy harris is going to forge the original manuscript to say something different and then say joseph yeah and so that's the problem but then but then you could just look at lucy's handwriting oh forget it yep hmm that's the problem and so i remember that now yep interesting and so now all of a sudden you're in a position where you're looking at it but that but then those the forgeries would be like written in margins with little carrots if the ink would look different the handwriting would look different i'm kind of calling god i'm calling bs on god on that one well yeah i think it would be pretty obvious if all the differences were like little carrots in different ink with different handwriting i'm calling bs on guys and the thing is like you know and that's why when i when i did the earlier slides i kept saying god becomes powerless and so again for our conversation i don't believe this is god i believe this is joseph smith i know i know i know i know yeah so yeah i'm just trying to give god the benefit of the doubt here no no i know and and again it shows if you want and if you want to believe and let's go the next likes i think this is kind of on there but if you want to believe that god is this power this all-powerful being why in the world can he not stop someone as insignificant as lucy harris from doing that and so um you know we kind of covered this so um is it this slide or the next one well this one it just says you know basically it reveals not just the insecurity of joseph's abilities but of god's because like to your point god is basically in this revelation saying i can't control the situation so we're just going to completely we're going to pick up the football and go home and do something different and and that's a problem because you're you know you claim to have this this perfect translation from the accounts we have from the last episode we talked about all the witnesses saying it's perfect off the stone and then god's basically saying well if we do that they're going to forge it except there's no photoshop back then in master forgers were you know there were there were forgeries then please this the sound full-scale paper it's really long you know we have samples of martin harris's handwriting you would know it and it would just be so obvious and um and yeah that's the problem and so let's go to that i guess i'm just saying and i'll just summarize this i think this is important so there's there's two possible problems one is that problem number one is that is that joseph's gonna be able to create an identical manuscript which is gonna make a whole lot of people impressed but then lucy's gonna edit a few things and then god and joseph can just go hey everyone look every time there's a change it's in different handwriting with different ink and it's in the margins that's problem one how many i'm trying to think how many problems is that going to pose to the ongoing narrative versus joseph having to create an entirely different beginning to the book of mormon and then all of the pro all of the just the fact that he can't reproduce it and then all of the footprint fingerprint problems that we're going to discuss later if god's really worried about how this is going to affect people's beliefs it seems like the path that god chose is way more fraught than if he had just went ahead and let joseph plus the time that they lost it just seems like even even if you're giving god and joseph the benefit of the doubt it seems like god chose the way more fraught and problematic path for people's ultimate belief if that's god's logic he wants the the highest number of believers as possible and that he doesn't want a narrative that then causes a bunch of doubts it seems like god still went with the path that generated the most doubts am i wrong no i mean and that's the thing i think we actually i think in some of the slides i can't okay i'm sorry i'm sorry no no no it's fine it's just and that's and that's the thing because the fact is we're going through this and it's leading you to that point because that's where the evidence is well we can we can we can be more brief but i just for me it's helpful to look at this with fresh eyes and process and that's why it's good because i think if when we go through this overview if that's where it leads you yeah and and i think that's important because you're going there without me even getting to that side yet and so okay so when i do that we could just be briefer on the on the summary slides yeah no it's fine so yeah so and that's why this is the ultimate win-win scenario this is like the perfect opportunity for joseph and god through joseph smith if he translates it and it's the same as we told in the last episode would be the only option given that we are told it's a translation he proves himself a prophet if he re-translates it and lucy provides like an altered copy people are going to know because they didn't lack or they didn't have photoshop and it would be pretty obvious that she changed it and then that would also prove that someone is trying to take down joseph smith which is a win for him and then the last one is and and this is really important if lucy smith was going to produce altered text to embarrass joseph smith she could do it anyways even if joseph smith uh creates a completely separate thing so the idea that this somehow stops her from exposing him makes no sense because she could in theory just recreate another set of manuscripts and say i know he tried to change him with a different story but look you can see all the differences you could see where he made stuff up so it really doesn't fix the problem um because she could do it anyways if that's what she wanted to do it doesn't really yeah i mean it's a great point yeah all he's doing is i mean all this would be doing is going through all of this extra work to put a speed bump on on a highway you know what i mean like it's not gonna it would slow her down for a second yeah and then she would regroup just as joseph smith is if you really believe this is some sort of like chess game of trying to expose him and so all of this work that we're going to see with the replacement text is being done basically out of his own fear that she's going to expose him when she could do it anyways yeah you know it really is um showing that joseph smith i think is just so insecure about his abilities more so than anything else or that he's just it's not true what he's claiming well yeah and he knows it's not true and he knows that he can't reproduce it because of the fact that it's an early translated book again if it was uh truly a tight translation as just continues to continue yeah you just do it over it you know again it's like you know if you're it would be like if you're um you know your job is to to data processing and you're typing up like a um a transcript and you gotta type it into another sheet and then all of a sudden the file gets deleted on accident you just go okay go back to the first page just gonna retype it out into this this file this is so great yeah it's just it's so important anyways we'll keep going there's one last point i want to make which we all need to watch out for there's this idea that within mormon mormon history and mormon apologetics from the mormon churches standpoint the house always wins because on the one hand why do we even have plates at all why do we even why did joseph even claim to have plates claimed to translate why why didn't joseph just produce the book of mormon and say that he had plates and an angel but no one had to ever see them you know it's because the church joseph wanted everyone to think that this was all existing in the material world that it's an actual history with actual prophets and actual plates right yeah i mean that's just it but that but then at any point where like all of a sudden the story becomes problematic what is the church what do apologists always fall back on well we can't have too much evidence or else people wouldn't need faith and so you have to sort of recognize that tactic of of yes there's evidence but then when the evidence is problematic well we don't want to give too much faith it's like showing a little bit of lag but not enough leg like at some point why you know it the house always wins with with the mormon church in its history you can always fall back on an explanation when it doesn't make sense which is god didn't want to give you too much evidence or else you you'd have no reason to have faith well yeah and it's just again it's it's we'll get to it as we go but the whole point is if the whole if the purpose of the book of mormon is to convert as many people to it as he can why is god setting up joseph smith to look like a false prophet and it's not just here we'll get to this later on with the book of abraham yeah so again if you apply the logic of dnc 10 which is that it will not suffer my prophet to to fall why is god then allowing joseph smith to look like a frog with the book of abraham and i don't want to jump ahead i'm just saying the inconsistencies in the story is another area where you can show that joseph smith is the one that's kind of you know driving driving the car through it and um so anyway so joseph smith is going to resume dictating the book of mormon by continuing with mosiah which is what the revelation from god tells him to do which is to say start where you left off and then when you get to the end we're going to give you this new set and so okay wait this did he did he not stop for several months he did he stopped for i wanna say uh like well it was for i think the phrase was the season but i think he stopped for like nine months or something okay so he's pissed it off for a while he's pissed at martin and all of a sudden he quote loses the plates and loses his ability to translate and this is just for the people that don't know the story he basically fires martin as translator right and then as scribe and then all of a sudden he's going several months now presumably i think john hammer talked about this we probably talked about this he's probably having to figure out during that time how he's gonna yeah how he's gonna do this now now that he's lost the first 116 pages and knows that he has to completely rewrite them so what do you think joseph's doing during the season quote that he's not translating yeah i don't you know it's funny i don't know because it'd be on one hand he might have kind of been one of those things where you just kind of go i gotta do something else for now until i can figure it out and so maybe he's just going back to you know working on the farm or maybe he's depressed and just maybe he's depressed i mean that's the thing like you're not gonna in a lot of ways this is a an event that kind of stops you completely dead in your tracks and i think it forces him to try to find a way to come up with the beginning again or how to navigate and honestly i don't even think he does that before oliver cowdery come and i think you know oliver cowdery comes and they immediately start working very fast together and it would appear that when oliver cowdery comes maybe the fact that oliver was such a believer in all of this allowed him to work faster um and then as he gets going he finds his sea legs i guess and all of a sudden he's able to kind of to navigate it but yeah i don't know it's it's an interesting one i know um don bradley's written a book about 116 pages i haven't read the book i've listened to some of his interviews and this overview overview was written before that and i think he talks more about the actual event of the 116 pages story in his book but to me what's really important is how he replaces it but yeah it's it's all speculation because we don't have any real contemporary evidence to say that he was you know kind of doing notes or anything it just sounds like he just kind of sets it down and then picks it back up okay so he fires martin goes several months and doesn't do anything decides to start up again and he brings oliver as the new scribe isn't it a smoking gun or isn't it a red flag that he doesn't just start over but that he starts where he left off because you would think that if he just had the seer stone and was translating no matter what he was doing he would just start again from the beginning yeah but the fact that he starts where he left off sort of suggests to me that there was already a narrative like a script or an outline or a story that he was working from and he just said you know what i'm going to go ahead and just finish what i was already working on the story that i already had in my head or the outlines that i already had in my notes i'll just finish it and then go back and figure out what to do at the beginning right well i don't think he had a script and and as we when we go go through to the reason an outline an outline maybe but even then um one of the things that the replacement text tells us is that the people in the beginning of the book know the ending before the middle does so while i think he has an idea and said how he's going to do it he's not developed the ending at least at that point and so that i think is is an indication that he is working through the story in his head and i think that might also be why he works so hard to say that the replacement text is a different focus it's it's a more religious instead of you know more secular um and then it's your other question i think it's a red flag because i think personally okay so wait you don't think that joseph smith like you know how jk rowling would have had to write out the whole outline yeah you don't think that joseph when he started with martin at the very beginning had in his mind the the basic arc the basic characters the basic plot from start to finish and and i'm not i'm not trying to load the question no i mean it's surprising because okay so i'll give you two things one is i think sometimes you have an outline in your head and then as you start doing it you change it and so for me um i work i've mentioned before i run a small business and um before my kid was born i would be i worked a lot of hours because i did all of it myself and i would sit down on the couch and i was writing a book for fun not like one of those you know it's not a masterpiece but it's like it's a lot it's actually about the same length as the book of mormon and um it's one of those ones i want to get back to and edit but the point is when i started writing the book i had the idea in my head what i wanted to do so every night i would do part of a chapter or a chapter where the case might be and then all of a sudden i'd get further in and i'd go you know what i wanted to do this but i'm gonna change it because it actually i had thought of this better idea as i was doing this earlier part and i think with joseph smith because it's an orally dictated text i think he has the ideas in his head what he wants to do but i also think he's got and we're going to go and some of the future overviews are going to talk about this but he's got events that are happening around him that are going to all influence the text of the book of mormon and and he's also got emil you around him that's influencing the text and so i think to your point he probably has a rough outline in his head of like what the story is and i think a lot of that's built on like the mountain builder myth and all that other things but i also think that as he's doing it because it's orally dictated he is allowing himself the ability to make changes and you see that because of the replacement text replacement text tells us that joseph smith changes at least some of the the events mid to midway to the end of the book and then when it's replacement text he doesn't really realize that they're kind of late editions in the book and so when he writes them into the replacement text all of a sudden is a critical reader you can look and then say okay i know that the replacement text was written at the end because it knows the ending before before a lot of the people in the book do okay so we'll get it this is where it kind of gets into the weeds but it's really nice it's really important so yeah so viewers and listeners stick with us this is about to get technical but it's there's a big payoff um yeah i think it's important okay all right so go ahead thank you for helping me we actually we just kind of talked about this this will be good so um he basically joseph smith continues with mosiah finishes the book of mormon and then he's going to go back and replace the text at the end and this is what leads joseph smith who i presume to be the author of the book of mormon to leave fingerprints all over the text and clues that the characters early in the book of mormon know the ending before the characters in the middle of the book of mormon do which is an indication that it's being written by somebody as opposed to reading off a plate because if if these plates are being written uh engraved concurrently they wouldn't know the ending of the book um and so this again tells you that this is not going to be an ancient record tightly translated uh by the power of god because if so then god is basically allowing joseph smith to bring in i mean in a lot of ways we talk about anachronisms it's anachronistic to have some of these things early in the book because they're out of place um and so you know that that's a really important um element to keep in mind as we go and so if we go i'm just gonna summarize that because it took me a second to really get that so what everyone we need to watch for now is so joseph's gonna do mosiah to you know fourth nephi or whatever he's gonna finish out the book and then he's going to replace 116 pages yes this is a clear opportunity if we see that the characters in the the replacement text that replaces 116 pages if they magically know everything that comes after them you could always write that off as them just being profiteers and revelators and knowing the future but it's also a red flag if they all of a sudden have magic powers to know the ending okay that makes sense to me i just wanted to repeat it all right and i don't want to beat a dead horse here but picture you're watching the lord of the rings trilogy and you watch uh fellowship of the ring and the fellowship of the ring is talking about the final battle with sauron and all of the stuff that happens in that third movie and they're all aware of everything that's going to happen in that third movie and then you get to this the two towers the second movie and they're constantly like not sure what's going to happen next and you'd go why are they not sure what's going to happen next but in the previous movie and fellowship of the ring that first third they're already knowing and that is exactly what's going to happen that's what's going to happen here which is where you're gonna have the characters in the book of mormon making these prophecies that the people in the middle don't know so then you have to say well either they forgot them which makes no sense because they're so important or it's because we know the dictation order and that's why it's so important and this is um so if we go to the next slide i want to give a really really large shout out to brent mccaff and i've never met him in real life but he did an episode abunda a very long episode with you and it was one of the ones i listened to early on when i was trying to figure this stuff out and he was the one that did so much work on the process the order of the dictation and if you see here and this is a a really easy quick way to look at it and this is a chart he had done in his um in the new approaches to the book of mormon book and which is what got him excommunicated right yeah this is this is what i'm excited so i want you to look at the right yeah if someone gets excommunicated it's a sure sign that they're saying something true well yeah and it's just and this is work that is it should be harmless if the book of mormon is true and if it's not true people deserve to know it and so yeah um the the column on the left is going through the books of the book of mormon by the order of dictation which starts with mosiah goes to the end and then starts back with first nephi and if you look on the left it says therefore and wherefore and what's amazing as you can see that if you look using the linear order of the translation joseph smith switches from using primarily therefore to primarily wherefore around ether so all of a sudden in ether it goes way more wherefore and then in moroni it's 38-0 and then first nephi 9813 138 and the point is that we can tell the dictation order and we can tell that joseph smith there's a sole author because of the fact that they're using the same um instances or the same uh patterns of wherefore and therefore before the ending of the book of mormon so it it's he starts doing that before he finishes so otherwise you could say well this is because there are two sets of plates except that this starts before joseph would finish the translation and then um to kind of make the point even more clear if you look at dnc brent metcalf when did the counts here you see the same pattern in the dnc sections if you go in order and so what that's telling you is the person who wrote the dnc is the person who wrote the book of mormon and again if you want to make the case that joseph is a co-author to the book of mormon which a lot of apologists today are doing um you can do that that opens up a lot of other issues we'll have to get into down the road um but the point is for the just for the purposes of this chart um it's not so much that the wherefore and therefore the words themselves are significant it's about the fact that we can show that the person who wrote the book of mormon changes the writing style before the beginning before the ending of the book of mormon and so it carries through the end into the beginning and if you're reading the book of mormon in the order it's published you wouldn't notice this but looking at it from a linear from in the the order of dictation this is a really big clue to us as to the writing style okay and so just to make sure i understand what you're saying here you're saying that between mosiah and the end of the book of mormon joseph started falling in love with using the word wherefore yes and and that as he increasingly uses the word wherefore then all of a sudden when he picks back up into first nephi he's really using it a lot and it shows this increasing trend is that what you're saying is that what saying and again it's not so much the trend of the words but what it's showing is so joseph smith is gonna finish you know uh he's gonna do the title page and then you know moroni and then he said then he's gonna kick back to the beginning right and because he already makes this change in ether he's already changed his writing style in ether and then he carries that into first nephi which tells you that the replacement text is being written by the same person who wrote the book of mormon and not from some second set of plates that we're going to be told is created and so it just shows that you have the same author and because of those um tendencies with where therefore and wherefore we can show that that tendency started before the end of the book and then carries over back into the beginning well okay and i just want to make sure i understand it because these types of things can get lost it's very confusing so i hear you saying two things okay that the fact that the the use of the word wherefore increases shows that that number one joseph is falling more and more in love with using the word wherefore number two that because the trend increases once he starts over with first nephi that um it shows us the sequence that they're written and then the third thing is it shows that the book of mormon was written by a single author yes versus individual authors although i guess the apologetic is that because moroni's abridging this right that it's moroni that's falling in love you could theorize that it's moroni that's falling in love with the with the with the reformed egyptian equivalent to the word wherefore but that's that's kind of silly well yeah so basically and the first point doesn't matter the actual word wherefore and therefore doesn't matter but yeah it's to show that basically we're told these are on two different sets of plates and yet the writing style carries over from the first one directly into the second one which is a problem if you want to believe they're two distinctly different sets of plates and then it also is brent metcalf did such a great job of it just helps you to establish the order of production which i think every major like mainstream mormon scholar believing and not you know believing scholars that work for the church would all agree to the mosiah priority dictation order now yeah yeah yeah for sure and then and then someone would look at at the wherefore column with with the final enus jeremiah and words of mormon and see the dropping off but is that just because there's shorter chapters yeah i mean i that's just because you don't have as many times to to use the word so i think just you know and to be fair like i know it's six nothing three nothing those are small small things it's just showing that he basically um you know at that point there's just not a lot of words to kind of so it should be technically it should be kind of wherefores per total chapter words have a better way to look at it if you look at the chart it's pretty pretty clear you could see the shift and but also he's falling out of love with therefore as well yeah and the fact that you could see it that shift in the dnc as well i think is important because again it shows the author of the dnc is also the author and i know the apologetic would be say well god's channeling the words to them so that's why they're changing but then you'd have to say well why is god why is god changing his his writing style because that that again opens up a lot of problems and then finally to your point you could just say well of course this is where bushman is has reseeded to now it's like well joseph influenced the text it's right it's it's joseph's in there that's why we have inaccuracies and anachronisms but then at that point we've got the tight translation which you how do you accomplish the tight translation and that's just it so i mean like yeah like michael lash has a book that says the same thing where he's a co-author but again if you do that you have to account for the for the different parts so okay thank you for letting me talk through this but no this isn't the type of stuff where my eyes glaze over yeah and i never really learn it so if i don't slow down and think it through and i know there's smarter smarter people out there that immediately get it and i'm just asking everyone to please forgive us because there's some of us are slower thinkers no it's and when i did the overview it was the same thing it's just it's confusing because there's a lot of there's a lot of things you're going back and forth back and forth but once you that's pretty once you kind of establish it it's so good so anyway so i'm gonna um use a lot of material from brett matt caff because it's really important and so um he talks about how the early part of the book of mormon knows about jesus before literally anyone else in the world so brett metcalf is gonna say uh he says in his uh writing enveloping is particularly evident in discussion of the advent of jesus for example early in the narrative nephi relates that lehi an angel and the prophets had all predicted that jesus would be born 600 years from the time lehi left jerusalem however subsequent book of mormon prophets seem unaware of these extraordinary oracles in a nephite revival king benjamin comments that the time cometh and is not far distant that the lord shall come down from heaven and shall dwell in a tabernacle of clay and brett metcalf notes that this is surprising because the scriptures that he would possess on these plates already told him that this is not going to occur for another 100 over 120 years away and so why is king benjamin saying that the time is soon when he already would have if you know if we believe you know that there's a small set of plates he would already have the prophecy that it's still over 120 years away it really makes no sense so are you saying and i'm sorry again i'm just thinking this through are you saying that when joseph started with mosiah he's not sure what's going to happen right and how he's going to end the book and so the prophets like king benjamin also don't know how he's going to end the book but then by the time he ends the book jesus is coming and uh and so forth and then all of a sudden the earliest prophets like nephi and others now they know things that benjamin didn't know because now they know so it's more specificity with more specificity and that's the thing so when joseph's writing the replacement text he knows the ending so all of a sudden he can make these prophecies that are like it's almost like he's writing in a prophecy he knows is going to be fulfilled which is a really powerful thing in the book of mormon we hear that all the time that prophecies are fulfilled well they're fulfilled because the writer of the book of mormon knows what's going to happen again you know and i'm trying you know again i want to be as respectful as we can here but when you are writing a book and you are in control of the text you can then fulfill your own prophecies and in this case joseph's literally written the end and so he can be even more specific and give the 600 year date which is a problem because of the fact that the middle of the book is unaware of that and and that tells you um the dictation order and also makes you have to then address why is it yeah and and you can make you know and we'll get to the apologetics on this but the argument is basically that the middle prophets had so much material that this just got lost in the shuffle this is not a small thing this is one of the biggest this is the biggest yeah yeah and so you can't just say like oh you know you know it's a minor detail like oh i forgot to you know pick up my kid from an after school thing it's like no no this is like the biggest thing in the whole in your whole life so you would not forget that there's one other red flag that i've repeated a couple times but it's just really important why why did you know adam moses abraham isaac jacob david solomon isaiah all the old testament prophets not know when jesus was coming not know jesus's name not baptized not do the gift of the holy ghost not have protestant sermons why did none of the old testament contain any of this but somehow god was willing to be super specific not only be super specific about naming jesus and telling them exactly when he's coming in the book of mormon pre-jesus prophets but also they start baptizing in the name of jesus and conferring the holy ghost and preaching protestant sermons like that is a major throbbing sore thumb of an of a of a of a red flag yeah i mean it's just it's anachronistic in every way and again it's it you know we'll get into the 19th century stuff down the road in the other overviews but yeah i mean like even going away from the issues that come from the translation or the dictation the the anachronisms of having a 19th century christology in a book that's claimed to be you know thousands of years old it simply just doesn't work um yeah anyways more from from from the amazing brent mccaff um alma speaks of jesus's advent in similar uh similarly general terms the kingdom of heaven is soon as hand the time is not far distant not many days hence and the day of salvation draw draweth nigh alma sincerely hopes that it might be in his day his reticence or inability to disclose jesus's birthday is explicable in his admission we know not how soon thus alma benjamin and their audiences did not know what lehi nephi and angel anonymous old world prophets and their sacred literature had known with certainty that jesus would be born 600 years after the heights departed for the americas so again it's just circling this again to say there are so many examples where the early prophets know these things and then you get to the middle ones and the middle ones are just completely not just confused but they're you know they're contradicting the earlier prophets and that makes no sense considering that these plates are so important to be engraved have these records how could you forget the most important part of the story which is you're baptizing people in the name of jesus early you know and all of a sudden you don't know when he's coming even though it's just all of these things tell you that it's being and this is another reason why i don't think there was a manuscript because if there was a real manuscript i think you'd have a tighter story where you wouldn't have this many plot holes that are right um telling you that that it's being written by by someone in the 19th century and gerardo's messaging me privately to just drive this point home and i'm just going to summarize it lehigh knows the date that jesus is coming yeah and he says it in the scriptures presumably he he engraves it in plates and that subsequent prophets read the prior engravings and that's how the book of mormon is being written so why is it that lehi knows the date but then benjamin and mosiah and alma and others are like i wonder what he's coming i hope he's coming soon they should know because lehigh had already it had already been revealed to lehigh the actual date yeah there's just no way around it and again i know thanks for watching yeah that's a good point and it's just it's in again on the on lds discussions.com on this overview there's more examples i'm not going to go through everything just because we'd be here for hours but i just wanted to give two two slides on that because it's really important and so um more from from brent is to say um the enveloping is obvious lehigh and nephi explicitly preached the date of jesus birth benjamin and alma speak only in generalities samuel like nephi is explicit but when we analyze the passages in the order they were dictated the enveloping pattern is replaced with a linear pattern prophets in the earliest part of the dictation lack specific knowledge of jesus's birth date however with a samuel date of five years is given at the expiration of the allotted time the signs appear as prophesied in this context the narrative explains that father lehi nephi almost all of our fathers have testified of the coming of christ and that the year jesus was born with 600 years from the time that lehi left jerusalem passages such as these pave the way for the next stage of the thematic development what started as an editorial remark that 600 years had elapsed is transformed into a literal prophecy from the lips of lehi nephi and angel and unidentified prophets these prophecies were not dictated until the 600-year date had firmly had been firmly established in three nephi and so it's just again it's showing that when you look at the order of dictation as it is starting with mosiah everything actually works in a linear way but so basically if you read the beginning of the book of mormon you read it at the end all of this makes sense but if you read it in the order the book of mormon is published then you see the beginning is written by someone who had already written the end and knows how to effectively backdate the prophecies into the beginning did you read the actual quote where lehi says it's 600 years it's on the overview but i don't have it on here i don't think okay yeah cause that that would really drive the point home to actually read the verse where lehigh is saying the year but but we've driven it home yeah um i mean maybe gerardo if he's listening he can give us that verse and we can yeah if he's listening you know send it over we can we can add we can definitely go back to it um okay and so basically it's just making the point we're making over and over again which is to say the dictation order is established because of the fact that we can show that if you do it in that order everything makes sense from a textual standpoint yeah even though that's not the order it was published or claimed to have been written in and this is the whole this is all historical criticism or biblical criticism this is the technique that lots of scholars developed to deal with the bible and the historicity and the accuracy of the of the bible long before it was ever applied to the book of mormon jews jews were doing this sort of work in the 19th century or earlier and okay so so uh gerardo is saying it's first nephi first 1918 and just just because it's fun uh and just so that i just think this really drives it home uh first nephi chapter 19 verse 8 reads and this is first nephi 19. and behold he cometh according to the words of the angel in 600 years from the time my father left jerusalem so there it is it's actually nephi saying it right but he's basically saying yeah he's basically saying that my father you know it's 600 years from the date my father left jerusalem so that again we're beating a dead horse but i think that's going to just put a stake in the heart so to speak well yeah i mean again we're just we're trying to show that this is being written at the end and that you can show it is by by the text itself and so you know i know we are kind of you know this is a little bit more in the weeds than some of our first few uh episodes were but um it's yes i think i honestly think it's one of the most important topics because of the fact that a lot of these things for me certainly went over my head i never would have caught this on my own because of the fact that when you read these as a believer you don't think about it you actually think in a lot of ways you're like this bolsters my faith more because they're making these prophecies that get fulfilled at the end because you don't know the beginning was written at the end and so it really does um it really does read in a way that is powerful until you realize that the writer of the book of mormon was doing it at the end and then able to effectively retrofit and back their own prophecies you know to make it fit better yeah the problem is it leaves the middle hanging out to dry no it's it's a it's a smoking gun it is for sure and so it's another part from metcalf which is basically to say that and we talked about this earlier that when joseph smith writing the book um it appears jesus's visit is a late edition as well and so he says in the early part of mormon's abridged history prophecies about the coming of jesus say nothing about his resurrection advent in the americas benjamin evan and i both almas all of whom know my new details of jesus's life never mention that a glorified christ will appear to the lehighs not until alma 16 20 is as clearly stated many of the people did inquire concerning the place where the son of god should come and they were taught that he would appear unto them after his resurrection the people's uncertainty which alma himself shares implies that nothing had been taught about a promise that christ would visit america a promise nephi earlier described in detail when for the first time in mormon's abridgement priests teach that the nephites to the nephites that he would appear unto them after his resurrection absent any reference to nephi's prodigious vision the people did hear with great joy and gladness seemingly acknowledging the newness of the idea so not only are we told that the later prophets don't know about this but all of the people who would have also be you know be studying the earlier prophets none of them knew because the crowd's all excited no one's like guys guys we already knew this why are we all excited you know and it just shows that joseph smith is is kind of you know evolving the story as he dictates and then all of a sudden he gets to the beginning and because he knows it he's just i mean it's almost like he's too loose in how he's throwing out the details being a little too flashy it trying to make the replacement text fit the ending really well but then again as i said it leaves that middle out to dry because if you read that knowing um that the people didn't know jesus was coming that's a huge red flag that tells you that the book of mormon again is not an ancient record because we've got all of these inconsistencies that are coming from joseph smith having to write the beginning at the end or there's a joke joke alert or uh ancient book of mormon prophets weren't doing their daily scripture study well yeah but that's what it would be right it would be like if you're in a sunday and someone points out something from the book of mormon and you're like what are you talking about they're like don't you read your scriptures it's in there i mean that's effectively what we're dealing with here where you're like either you're not either you're your prophets are not aware and not only not not only they're not aware but again we're told and this kind of goes you know again i keep teasing future overviews but it kind of goes to revelation in the mormon church as well like the modern mormon church because we have all these prophets who are told one thing and then the next prophet prophet's not told anything and in the book of mormon you would think even if even if they were unaware of you know not reading every single one of the the records even though this is an insanely important issue that they're constantly getting revelation from god as we're told in the book of mormon yet no one's aware of this and it just shows you again how when you are writing something orally dick in in to back up one more step when people talk about joseph smith could not possibly have written the book of mormon because it's so complex these are areas where the the lack of complexity in the book of mormon shows that the person is not right that super educated well thought out person i'm not saying because i think joseph was brilliant in the sense of being a storyteller and charismatic you know much like you see um you know people who you know have talk shows on tv who are just amazing at conversing with people and telling stories and giving narratives but it also shows his lack of education hurts him here because he does not tie up the loose ends he is unaware that when he opens up when he tries to back date one prophecy then all of a sudden another problem opens up on the other end you know it does show his limitations as an author as well yeah that's a great point when when you're when general authorities or visiting 70s or state presidents or bishops say i'd explain how well written the book of mormon is these are a couple really big smoking guns that show that joseph didn't didn't think it all through or was scrambling and i'm just gonna i'm just gonna review what you just said for those who just got lost in the words not only is the date of jesus's arrival set at the beginning but then forgotten by the prophets in the middle the fact that jesus is going to come visit the americas is not known by the prophets in the middle but then somehow it's magically known by the prophets at the beginning and is isn't the explanation for that and i'm sure we're going to get into this that when joseph originally was going to write the book of mormon it was going to be less of a theological book right it was going to be more of a of like a fantasy action war novel talking about history but less about theology and religion and then joseph and so when he's writing the last 116 pages and then the middle section it it hasn't evolved in his mind yet into a really full theological treatise but then somewhere between the mid and the end he's like you know what why don't i have jesus actually come to the americas yeah and that's kind of how it evolves i mean again like it's one of those things where it's like i think there are probably like i think dan vogel excuse me could speculate better than i could but for me it's like i think it's just there's a lot of time that changes between losing the manuscript starting back up and then that's what like an 85 day process you've got like a couple of months where he's dictating dictating to the closer to the end he's doing he's giving revelations he's getting a following people are talking about him all of these things are going to change where he thinks the book of mormon might go so i don't know if he thought at first that it would be something similar to view of the hebrews where just be trying to explain the mountain builder myth i don't know if it was him from the beginning if he thought you know this is gonna be 100 like a theological thing because we do have like dan vogel points out that his parents were um having issues with mixed faith marriage basically and so his dad was a universalist and euterion his mom was a methodist and he was trying to find a way to basically settle the religious arguments we have all of those things working on and so i think because of all of those things are all moving at the same time joseph's story is trying to adapt to fulfilling all of these needs it's kind of like when you look at the new testament the different gospels are have contradictions and they have differences because they're being written for an audience that has specific needs and i think the book of mormon's needs change through the book of mormon process and we you know and we'll go through that in a couple overviews when we talk about how there are surrounding influences of joseph smith's time that directly impact the book of mormon that tell us why it's a 19th century text and why nobody else but joseph could have been the one to write it okay all right this is good let's continue and now we're going to take a hard turn and go away from the dictation order but now look at how the small plates themselves are a late addition to the book of mormon and this is something okay tell people what the small plates and the large plates are because it's always been that as as someone who has raised mormon who read the book of mormon i don't know eight or nine times cover to cover i was always like why are there brass plates and small plates and large plates and a bridge it just always seemed weird unless you think about it in terms of joseph smith losing 116 pages writing the rest of it and then having to figure out how to explain all those shenanigans right yeah and so basically when joseph smith um well let's just look at this real quick so keeping in mind the dictation or that they know the end before the middle um and this is because the small plates are carefully tucked into this problem to try to make to try to basically address why there are these discrepancies and so from a church narrative um it's we have both sets of plates we're prepared basically concurrently and so um the come follow me manual actually says um more than 2 400 years in advance the lord prepared to compensate for the lost pages of the book of mormon by creating this separate set of plates and so they're basically and this was a narrative i was taught as a member you know as a believing member still a member but not a believer but um the book of mormon dictation itself gives us clues that this again is a a story that is created afterwards to solve a problem that arose earlier and and so um if we go to the next slide this is going to be a little bit more in the weeds but this is really important um because this shows again how joseph smith is scrambling to backfill the replacement text because and this is one of the things we kind of touched on earlier i think that one of the reasons that joseph smith doesn't touch the replacement text until he's completely done is because i think he's hoping he might get the replacement pages back because if he gets those the the original manuscript back then he doesn't have to replace anything but if he sets up if he sets up the replacement text early in the book of mormon and then all of a sudden martin's like you know what me and lucy have reconciled and she gave me the manuscript then all of a sudden joseph's double screwed because now he created a second you know and so i think in a lot of ways he he knew in his head i have to hold out hope until the last second i don't get him because if he gets him and he already created the second exit ramp that's going to look bad and so um i really think that's the reason why he takes so long to get to it because he has to hope that he's going to get him back because and again this this goes again to show the lack of power in both the seer stone and god's revelations because joseph smith does not know if those pages exist still if they're burned if they're destroyed he doesn't know and so he has to hold that hope that he might get him or you know at least wait until the last second before he makes his move and so wow that's great that's great yeah it's really important and um there's a site and we link to it on on on our overview it's called lectures on doubt and the the guy that does it um he does some really amazing stuff in it i don't know a lot of people that know to it so so if you go to ldscussion.com and i'll send it to john so you can put in the show notes it's a really cool write-up and it's way more in the weeds than this is going to be but it just shows how when you really look at this stuff critically you can pull a lot of clues that give you that can give you the story that you won't get just kind of reading through the book of mormon on its own all right let's jump in so um this is from um dnc 10 and again we mentioned this earlier the joseph smith papers project believes this was likely written in april and so i want to read this because it's really important and it says and now verily i say unto you that an account of those things that you have written which have gone out of your hands is engraven upon the plates of nephi yey and you remember it was said in those writings that a more particular account was given of these things upon the plates of nephi and now because the account which is engraven upon the plates of nephi is more particular containing the things which in my wisdom i would bring to the knowledge of the people in this account therefore you shall translate the engravings which are on the plates of nephi down even till you come to the reign of king benjamin or until you come to that which you have translated which you have retained and behold you shall publish it as the record of nephi behold they have only got a part or an abridgement of the account of nephi behold there are many things engraven upon the plates of nephi which do throw greater views upon my gospel therefore it is wisdom in me that you should translate the first part of the engravings of nephi and send forth this work and so this is kind of confusing but if you re if you read dnc 10 and you look at it for without the pre um determined conclusion that there's a small set of plates god's actually saying the opposite what he's saying is that and this is one of those things if you read the book of mormon you know they kind of they'll keep referencing like there's so many more things to say but i only have so much room to embrace a bridge you know there's those like throwaways that kind of tell you like this is an abridgement it's an abridgement it's not everything what god is saying here is we're not going to give you a small plate set of plates we're going to give you the full abridgement to pull from so um so what he's saying is you're going to translate the engravings um on the plates of nephi which are like the massive plates down until you get to the king reign of king benjamin so god knows where joseph smith stops where the manuscript stops and then basically he says once you get there you're going to stop which is also to say that this larger set goes well beyond the 116 pages because he has to stop when he gets to the point when it meshes with what he's already translated and so this text and again this is getting confusing but this is not referencing small plates in any way it's referencing joseph smith using the unabridged massive large plates to replace the text with and again i know it's confusing and that's why this section does get a little bit more into the weeds but um so if you go to the next slide it kind of addresses this a little bit but just saying nowhere does the small plates appear and he's referencing a larger place to be translated and this is you know again i just mentioned but this is god telling joseph you are working with an abridgement we have so many more details for you to work from so we're going to give you the pure source to re-translate the missing pages and again it shows that when joseph smith goes to start the replacement text he has not thought of a small plates his right now his two sets of plates are the original plates and the abridgement plates he used for the book of mormon nothing else i don't know if you have anything you want jumping on that before we move on or not but okay so tell i i i i'm a slow thinker um not not the sharpest tool in the shed so so so you're saying that at the time he reveals dnc 10 joseph hasn't even thought of the idea of small plates yet right and what this what this scripture reveals is that he's still at this point working off one set of plates yeah i mean so effectively right so the the the the plates that are used to translate the book of mormon are an abridgement right and abridgement by mormon and moroni right and so what this revelation is saying is not that there was a second set of plates that were created but that there is the plates that were used to create the abridgement we're going to give you those so if you have like the cliffs notes version of a book it would be like god saying instead of reading the first part of the cliff notes i'm just going to give you the full book and you can read the full book for your for your own it's not saying i've got another smaller one it's actually going to a bigger one um and i think in a way that actually makes more sense for the text of the book of mormon if you're going to go that route because then you're not trying to create this idea that god knew he was going to lose the pages and created a second set of plates that were smaller just to you know what i mean like it because the church will tell you that basically as i mentioned the come follow the menu that god knew this was going to happen even though he didn't tell joseph it was going to happen even though he didn't have this ready right away you know again if god had prepared this long in advance why did he make joseph wait nine months to start up again all of those things are red flags but this is actually this revelation is not saying what the church would tell you today that it's saying it never mentions small plates and in fact it's telling them to go back to the larger plates the unabridged plates to to to pull the the replacement material from got it got it yeah it's confusing but um okay it's really important and and so um if we go so this is um so there's some there's basically there's some point in the story where there's small plates the idea of a small plates have not has not yet been generated i mean obviously yeah when joseph first tells everyone he's got these gold plates he's not saying there's small plates and big plates and brass plates and a bridge it's just the plates yeah it's just plates then all of a sudden there's this middle point where again small plates have not the idea for small plates have not yet really been introduced right and then all of a sudden later now we get to the point where it gets introduced right yeah and so now he's trying now he's writing the replacement text and he's trying to basically figure out how he's going to address where this replacement text come from and so this is from the article on lectures on doubt and it says so he's trying to okay so and sorry bear with me just one second so so now joseph is like okay i finished i'm done with fourth nephi or whatever i'm done with moroni and you know mormon and moroni now i've got to go back and write the 116 replace the 116 pages yep but if it was just one set of plates i need other plates that i can translate because the original story now those original plates are worthless because uh that's what that's what i translated into 116. so there needs to be additional plates in the story or else what am i translating yeah i mean there has to be a separate set of plates because he can't re-translate the same plates because according to the revelation right he's going to be exposed by lucy with altered text so he has to create a second set of plates and so what the story in the story and again before martin harris loses the 116 pages was there ever any suggestion that sort of a single timeline had multiple plates for the same timeline was that ever suggested anywhere prior to martin losing the plates so we yeah there's nothing mentioned prior to martin that there's a small set of plates and even in the book of mormon more than one set of plates for a given timeline right no i don't think so i mean there is um we'll get to it at the end there's there's a part where they say that the prophets basically have like a storehouse of records and so in that regard there are extra records in that time that are all on metal plates and highly anachronistic but there's no mention that these records are being kept on concurrently on two two separate places multiple sets of places yeah and then and so in the the reason that's important is yeah he doesn't even do that from mosiah to the end because he's still hoping to get the manuscript back and so he can't right because if he does and all of a sudden that's another loose end you know and so okay yeah this is naked says to me now yeah and so he's tiptoeing here and so okay this is from the article on lectures on doubt and it says the idea of a second smaller set of plates doesn't appear until one first nephi which comes after mosiah threw moroni in dictation order there nephi describes his records as an abridgement of his father's record later nephi describes the new record as not the place upon which i make a full account of the history of my people he goes on to say that the larger more complete volume he has given the name of nephi wherefore they are called the plates of nephi this is also the first time he describes the large plates as being more secular and compared in comparison to the small plates he does not give the small plates a name here reinforcing that the plates of nephi which are referenced in dnc 10 are not the small plates the secular versus spiritual nature of the plates is repeated in first nephi 19 there nephi reiterates the expectation that those plates are to be passed down from generation to generation he also mentions the smaller plates may have otherwise purposes which proportion which which purposes are known unto the lord which is a koi hint that these plates were prepared specifically to account for the future lost 116 page manuscript and so the point here is he's not he's actually here calling the plates of nephi the larger sets of plates so in dnc 10 which we think was written before he does replacement text he is saying the plates of nephi are the unabridged large thing and so here now he's kind of creating this secondary set of plates and then he talks he's basically telling the reader why they're different in in in to his point it is kind of like a koi hint where joseph smith is almost like i mentioned earlier it's like he does protest too much he's trying really hard to explain to the reader why there's going to be a difference between this and what the original text might have been and um it's a tiny bit suspicious because it is it's not until he's back writing the b he's if your theory is right he's hoping 116 pages show up they don't now he's started over at the beginning and he's got to figure out how to explain all this isn't it convenient that now in first nephi is where all the sudden he's starting to explain all these different versions of the plates when he had never ever mentioned those previously yes and i'm guessing that when if you were to if we were to have ever found 116 pages and actually read them i'm guessing there was no mention of lots of different versions of plates for the same timeline i'm just guessing yeah there's no way yeah there's no way just because the rest of the book of mormon doesn't mention it and so exactly if we go to the next slide the next slide it's kind of a tongue-in-cheek one but it's just to say it's like joseph smith is almost like a character in the office when with that last line about you know the purposes might be known until the lord it's almost like he's saying it in the book and then looking deadpanning to the camera like to the reader like you know what i'm talking about and i'm not trying to make fun of just saying like that is such an out of place thing um which is telling you that joseph smith not only is scrambling to figure out how to replace the text but he also knows he's insecure about it and he knows he needs to basically try to basically it's not that he's apologizing to the reader but he's trying to tell the reader as explicitly as he can why these differences are there and it's almost like you're drawing attention to it in a way that um shows that you you're he's aware it's a problem basically it's like a wink it's i mean it's it is it's not it's it it reminds me of when joseph smith writes into the book of mormon a prophecy of his own awesomeness in the future yeah it's like whoa that's so it is that's pretty bold what that's the thing it's like when you know the end you can write the beginning but the problem is when you when you know that when you know the end but you're also aware that you have to change the beginning you know that you're you have issues and again in the back of his head he might be thinking lucy might have that manuscript so i gotta make sure i explain why this is different because if she releases it and it's different i gotta the reader needs to know why it's different and so he's still covering his tracks here i think with that fear in the back of his head that she might expose him with with the with the manuscript got it and so basically the this is the same article from lectures on doubt and they they talk about how he continues to define this as he writes the replacement text and so they say um this second set of plates is first referred to as the small plates in jacob 1-1 but are still not described as the plates of nephi or the small plates of nephi in fact the first and only proper name to given to them is the plates of jacob it is unlikely that this could have been an error where book of jacob was intended since the description specifically alludes to the physical crafting of the plates in contrast to the singular nature of the plates of nephi from mosiah through moroni which are sometimes described in conjunction with the brass plates but never the small plates the large and small plates are nearly always differentiated from each other from first nephi through words of mormon this pattern spawns multiple authors including nephi jacob jerim uh ebinidum price and mormon when the text is read in mosiah priority order it is clear that the small plates were a late invention in the creation of the text and so what he's saying again kind of like what we're saying with brett metcalf's work is we see them constantly splitting up these plates until he finishes replacement text and then they're just an afterthought and forgotten and that shows you that again he is using he's developing the idea of the small plates in the small plate section because he has to but because he'd already written the rest of it he has no chance to go back there and smooth it out because if he does that obviously the witnesses are going to know he's editing the text and that's a big problem and so he's stuck with basically trying his best to basically apologize to the wrong word but it constantly explain why there's these plates and then all of a sudden they just it's an afterthought and let me if i can just summarize to make sure that i understand what you're saying and i think you've already said this probably multiple times from mosiah to to moroni in in the book of mormon there's no mention of the small plates lots of different plates multiple versions of the same plates correct correct that's just that's a problem that's a huge obvious glaring problem it is and it's one of those things again like it is a believer and again it's because he's just he's holding out thinking that the 116 pages might show up and so he has no need to manufacture this story of multiple plates until he's pretty sure that that the 160 pages aren't going to show up and then he needs to then come up with the story and then voila it appears first nephi yeah and i would even i would even take that a step further and i wouldn't even say that he has no need to do it i would say he's afraid to do it because if he does it if he creates that second set of plates and also the manuscript pops up yeah then all of a sudden he pops the manuscript in and people are like what happened to that second set of plates so he's forced by lucy just the fear of lucy exposing him forces him to change his plans in a way that then he has to address at the end but he can't address it until the beginning until he writes the beginning because of what you said he's holding out and so it's it's a big problem and again it's confusing but you know when you have multiple books of the book of mormon that are all referencing this this differentiating differentiation of plates and it's just forgotten for the rest of the book yeah that tells you that this is being written with that express purpose and it's being written at the end totally okay that's wow that's powerful and this is actually what we've been talking about a lot this episode which is just to say you know that he waited until the last second um so basically it's just saying it's a late edition which occurs only after he has to replace it and it fits in well with the translation process um and the dictation order just you know it's basically rendering that same thing so we don't have to go over that again we just did that so we can actually go to the next slide and we'll wrap up the small plates issue which again this is from the same article and he says the most obvious impetus for smith introducing the small plates rather than stick to his divinely revealed plan of translating the plates of nephi is time the 116 pages represented an abridgement of the place of nephi by promising the source material in place of the abridgement smith had unwittingly signed up to produce a manuscript much larger and more comprehensive than the original one a second smaller volume would be a very attractive alternative this theory elegantly explains the book of mormon's emphasis on the size difference between the two sets of plates one being smaller one being larger it can also explain the supposed difference in content as mentioned before the small plates are self-described as less interested in history and more interested in spiritual matters this description has long puzzled readers of the book of mormon who often note that both sections of the book of mormon are a blend of history and theological discourse the supposed difference in tone is difficult to detect however this explanation allows smith to breeze through hundreds of years of history once the origin story of the nephites and lamanites is adequately explained and this is really important because again it shows that dnc 10 is telling them you are not going to use the abridgement you're going to use the full source to fill in the details and then he gets to it and it's a much shorter section and so then all of a sudden it's like well he can't say i'm using the the main source that dnc told him to or dnc 10 told him to because if he says that then he can't say it's only supposed to focus on spiritual matters because why would it focus on spiritual matters when you're using the source that was the the source for the abridgement you know i mean like so he has to then create a small set of plates to explain why it's shorter and less focused on history because if he uses a set of plates that dnc 10 tells them to that's going to have more history than the original text would have had yeah that's powerful it's a big deal and it's it's again it's one of those things that gives you a window into how joseph smith is not just creating the book of mormon but dealing with situations where he loses control in how again we talked about this earlier but when we talk about how joseph smith was too unlearned to create the book of mormon he was able to create the book of mormon but he did leave clues because of the fact that he was not able to do this in a way that most authors would he was forced to constantly make changes and what you know it's like you have a grand scheme like in a movie they've got this grand scheme and then all of a sudden it's an action movie and then all of a sudden uh something goes wrong and once that thing goes wrong you start changing your plan all of a sudden there's the mad scramble in the movie well that's basically what happens here one thing goes wrong for joseph smith which is a big one and then he loses the manuscript and everything he had planned has to change and then once it changes he has to go back to the start and account for it and by doing so he's leaving his fingerprints everywhere yeah all right that's that's brilliant and then you know so now we're kind of out of the the issue of the actual dictation process but this is um some quick notes on some stuff that gerald and sandra tanner had done a long time ago and it's basically that the replacement text of the book of mormon is considered like the black hole of the book of mormon because what happens is joseph smith is afraid that lucy harris might have the original text because he's afraid she might have the text he has to be incredibly vague and careful in whatever he puts in the replacement text because if he puts specific information that is contradicted she could expose him and so he has to be very careful not putting anything in there that he might not remember correctly and this leads him to be intentionally vague for the entire um replacement text of the book of mormon so i'm i'm guessing you have examples of the vague yeah so we're gonna have just a few slides going through this and then and then we'll we'll be okay so just to be clear you're saying that from nephi first nephi to before mosiah joseph's super vague about certain things and you're going to give these examples okay and the tanners do such a good job here so um just as with the small plates you can see joseph smith is constantly giving the reader excuses as to why there's difference with the replacement text and so jacob writes that he should write upon these plates a few of the things which i considered to be most precious that i should not touch save it or lightly concerning the history of this people which are called the people of nephi he said that the history of his people should be engraven upon his other plates and so this is what we're talking about in the last section where jacob is really where the small plates story kind of really takes hold and it again just to point out that seems odd for a record of their people but it makes sense once you realize that joseph smith needs to accomplish telling the reader why the stories are not going to be the same because of the fact that he's got this fear over his head that lucy could release the original text which would have a much different history and a much different story than what he's going to release so tell me if i've if i'm understanding this right so if you look at post mosiah book of mormon he's getting into like commanders in the battle and where the battles are happening and how many people are fighting and movements of troops is just an example of like this level of detail um well that's sort of that level of detail you're saying doesn't appear prior to mosiah well that level of detail is even a few levels of detail from where we're going to go because he doesn't even he's he's afraid in the the replacement text to name the kings i mean we're not even talking like small details we're talking like he is really trying hard not to name anyone or like who the leaders are who the government leaders are so and so we'll go through some of those examples because again okay there's more okay there's more on the lds discussion site and then there's even more on the tanner's article but so this is the lack of names so this is from the tanner's article and it says only 11 people are named in the first book of nephi and no additional names are given at all in second nephi yet joseph names 10 old testament characters by name and even prophetically speaks of jesus some 600 years before his birth and claims that he knew the name of the apostle of the lamb of john so he can't name any of the characters that are with the people that they're writing the records for but he can prophesy not just of the specific year of jesus but of the lamb that the apostle of the lamb was john and those are details that tell you that joseph smith is working from being very careful with the contemporary stuff but he's throwing out a lot of old testament names because those can't be contradicted because those are already established in the bible um then it says joseph goes to great lengths to avoid giving out names of extended family members likely because he couldn't remember them and knew that those could easily be exposed and so in second nephi you have my father called the children of layman his sons and his daughters and said unto them behold my sons and my daughters of my firstborn after my father had made into speaking he caused the sons of and daughters of lemuel to be brought before him he spake unto them saying behold my sons and daughter and my daughters who are the sons and the daughters of my second son so like look at that it's almost like you're writing a book and you don't have the names of the characters and like so you can't even say like the name of your second son like it'd be one thing to be like they're the sons and daughters of so and so but he's even even then he can't say the name and so you have these long stretches of history with no new names because he only remembers certain names that he knows are going to line up and the rest of me is just like i can't because i don't want to be wrong so he's afraid to get specific he doesn't know any of the immediate things that should be really obviously known right and yet he knows things in the future because they were written in the later part of the book that he shouldn't know at all yeah and the things he's knowing about in the future are things that are established in the bible so he can't contradict himself there because he's working off of another obviously another text altogether okay um and so this is more from the tanners when we get uh when we get we then get just two new names in the book of jacob and two more new names in the book of jeremy so um at this point they state that 238 years have passed which means the book of mormon gives you only four new names in a 230 year window of history i mean that's just like there's only a thousand so that's basically a quarter of the yeah the timeline in the book and so they're giving you all of all of this filler in these pages and they're intentionally leaving out the details because again four new names you know in a realistic standpoint you're talking how many generations is that and you get four names um and then this is where i start with the king so um it says now nephi began to be old and he saw that he must soon die wherefore he anointed a man to be a king and a ruler over his people now according to the reign of reigns of the kings later in the chapter jacob says the people of nephi under the reign of the second king began to grow hard in their hearts and again no new names are given of the kings until we come out of the 116 pages and then joseph immediately starts naming the king she's got mosiah and benjamin and so again this is showing that he is calling all of the kings nephi and then not saying the name and all of a sudden he gets out of this replacement text and all of a sudden he's naming just like normal there's no problem and it tells you the insecurity that he has because he doesn't have the text to pull the names from hmm wow i mean it's just to me it's a pretty simple thing and again it this is way worse when you read read in more detail i tried just to pick a few examples for our presentation but if you go to lds discussions you know slash 116 pages you'll see it um and then the tanners talk about when they come out of the black hole so um while joseph goes to great lengths not to name any new characters locations and events in the replacement text the moment he exits this spot the names start kicking off and so they say for example just as we come out of the black hole we find this reference in mosiah 1 1. king benjamin had three sons and he called their names mosiah and hilaram and helaman so basically earlier remember we were talking about i just kept saying my sons and daughters and my second son here the moment you get into mosiah because the belief is that mosiah may have been partially written before martin left but that martin would have only taken up to mosiah and so immediately you have names and so so he couldn't he couldn't name layman and lemuel's children right but but it but he does refer to them by saying they're children yeah and then all of a sudden he's able to name mosiah or benjamin's children right yeah and and again we don't want to get off too much but you know one of the things that you hear a lot about the book of mormon being so incredible is to say how could joseph smith had so many people named in the book of mormon without contradicting himself and the reason is because we'll get to it more later but the book of mormon is a linear timeline right so most of the names that are used you use them and then that time passes and you never have to go back to them and the replacement text tells you that because replacement text tells you that all of those names that were throwaway names that joseph uses in the rest of the book in the replacement in the original 116 pages whatever names he used he knew he couldn't remember him and so when you say oh my goodness there's like was a 200 names that are all in the book of mormon well in this case it gives you a really good clue as to the reason why there's a lot of names because he's throwing out names here and there of the sons and daughters and well mostly the sons and the kings and all this and then the replacement text he's like just there's nothing and it tells you again the insecurity that he has when he's writing this text and it also lines up with the dictation order that brett metcalf lined up so well yeah right and um so i think where are we now we're um okay so now this one's a really cool one because this is from a book of mormon apologists and the tanners include it in their article so on the next slide this is a book of mormon apologist j n washburn and he talks about the last 19 verses of omni omni which is the last 19 verses provide a different kind of study altogether they constitute a unit quite unlike anything else in the book of mormon these last 19 verses give the account of the affairs of the nephite people between the approximate dates 175 and 124 bc few paragraphs go together chronologically we have now seen that at least seven important items of information some of them essential are first brought to our attention in the last 19 verses this however does not exhaust the possibilities of this interesting little chapter not only are a number of prominent men first named here not only are we first informed of movements of utmost significance not only are three are the three peoples of the book of mormon brought together not only is there vital material concerning records presented here not only are other valuable matters divulged but there are also numerous details of vast interest to be found within these three pages it must be readily seen that these 19 verses are unusual is it not surprising that so large a number of unrelated fragments are thrown together in this small space nowhere else in the entire book is such diverse material found in so crowded a setup and so this right here is from an apologist who's basically saying it is really weird that right when joseph smith is about to get um out of this section he's just throwing all sorts of stuff together almost like he's trying to basically bridge the gap of all of these different ideas and it just shows that you know again when you look at um the book of mormon dictation process you're going you know starting with first nephi and you're getting to to mosiah and this would tell you that by the time he gets to this part he feels like he is past anything that he's going to get called out for if lucy harris comes and then all of a sudden he realizes i'm just going to throw everything i need to throw it to try to tie this into where i started back up with in mosiah so but you're saying that by the time he writes omni and where does amnai appear in the sequence in the book of mormon well it's it's um so after jacob right it's it's it's so it would go jerem omni words of mormon and the mosiah so basically he's you know and we're already talking about there's not a lot of words in these chapters where we talk about the wherefore therefore so this is right before words of mormon and then it's going to jump into where the the text picks back up with where where it left off mosiah yeah so it's gonna be like two two books before mosiah but you know short books so we're not you know it's pretty close in time so basically so basically joseph knows now that that in the chronology here's here's the list yeah joseph knows that okay yeah so it's right at the very end yep he knows that he knows that he's out of the woods in terms of fearing yeah is it suspicious that once we know that joseph feels like he's out of the woods in terms of fearing to share details that that could also appear in the 116 pages there's this explosion of specificity yeah that happens which which could be easily explained as a writing device of trying to bridge and fill in details and bridge the the vague um unspecific first several replacement text uh you know replacement of you know books to what was the 116 pages uh to then go ahead and continue and and then plop down the the books that got written earlier but but but chronologically are supposed to appear later yeah i mean it's just it just shows that once he gets to a point where he feels comfortable enough that he is past contradicting himself for the the things he's just gonna throw all of the stuff in a really short window because he needs to effectively get the loose ends tied up between the replacement text and mosiah and so and and i don't know for sure when this apologist wrote this because this article from the tanners was from a long time ago it's pretty possible that this was written before the mosiah priority was really established by brent metcalf so it's even more fun it's kind of funny yeah to think that this is noticed and i would have to wonder what would be the response if you notice this and then realize that this is part of the replacement text the end of the replacement text because then all of a sudden it might set off those alarm bells of like oh now that he realizes he's safe he's just gonna throw the details out because now he can do it maybe it's with new names new directions but he's just throwing all sorts of stuff out whereas we talked about in a 238-year window he gives no names you know no kings all of a sudden here he's just you know they talk about just detail after detail and that's a red flag that tells you the author of the book of mormon at this point is done being careful because they're past the point of being potentially exposed and they're just going full out yeah it's a big deal i think and um that's funny so that that takes us pretty much to the end of of this part now we'll get to some apologetics the apologetics on the lost 116 pages are a little goofy cause there are not this just this topic is not covered as much as other ones but um matt roper uh had written an article i had used on the website it was one of the few ones i could find that really dove into it and he just says if the plot against the prophet had succeeded it could conceivably had undermined the faith of some of joseph's closest supporters who helped with whose help and devotion were crucial in the success of early mormonism early mormons already faced an uphill battle the prophet's enemies would hardly have needed to produce the original manuscript to harden the hearts and hinder the work from progressing all they would have had to have done was to print an altered version after that the manuscript might have been destroyed or lost but the effect would have been the same they would have claimed the corrupted version was the earlier one which is effectively saying what i said earlier like if you really believe that lucy smith had a her whole goal was to produce an altered text she would have done it anyway so yeah i don't and i just yeah that feels like motivated reasoning you're almost creating a conspiracy yeah to justify something that makes no sense because what would have led objectively to less people doubting in questioning um it clearly would have been joseph reproducing the text identically and then showing lucy's changes to be a fraud and that's that's what we've already discussed i mean the south park would have never needed to do that episode like if god could see 2 000 years ahead god would have saw the south park episode and how many people that alone took out of the church right those people matter too it's just right you know it's one of those things where it's like again you know and we have this this this ongoing theme with a lot of these historical issues with the scriptures well what kind of some people i mean i refer to too like this trickster god like god allows joseph smith to be tricked constantly or to be proven wrong constantly whether it's the book of abraham or talking about where the people of the americas came from all of these things that you know the revelation saying that the laments are at the borders of missouri even though those people have nothing to do with book of mormon times and so all of these times jo god is a lot was willing to let joseph smith be proven a fraud except in this one time where joseph smith is in control of the revelation and then all of a sudden his excuses he will not allow his his profit to fall but then on the other ones he does and so it's just to your point it's like you're you're creating you know you have a solution in search of a problem and in this case it's it's it's looking for a problem that never even materialized so it it would have been more maybe a little bit more reliable if if lucy had come out at the end and said i have the the original manuscript ah i got you and justice like sucker i did a whole whole separate but none of that ever happened so again it just shows you that god and joseph neither of them knew what happened to the manuscript and so the whole time they're tiptoeing yeah with this problem in mind and it never happened yeah so yeah it's it's a big issue and um yeah that's a great point why didn't if lucy ended up never we never really hear from lucy again about the manuscripts yeah then joseph could have just replicated them and and we would have been fine yeah i mean like i said this was a win-win situation for him and uh you know and so yeah we we covered this earlier and it's basically saying that we had you know if he had translated the text correctly he would have been proven a prophet um if lucy had altered it it would have been obvious because there's you know there is on full-scale paper it's very tight you we showed a picture of the manuscript in the last episode it's tightly written together um it'll be very difficult and to your point like um we had mentioned the charles anthony visit how joseph kind of altered the story and wrote in a line about it was obvious it was it's really obvious because the ink is different the writing is all of it's different it's in the margins it's like between words yeah and so and the only way they could have done it would have been to completely recreate the the manuscript but then at that point they could do it anyways and so um the final thing is we've talked about before but god had a lot of different tools at his disposal to deal with this he could have um had an angel go take the manuscript as he did the the plates if an angel can grab the physical gold plates and the angel should be able to get the manuscript and bring it back to joseph they could have struck lucy harris dumb as we see him you know the book of mormon the bible where all of a sudden they're struck dumb and they can't um or they could have shown joseph where they were in the stone which he claimed to be able to see any lost object or what happened to him and none of those things happened you know he could have he could have sent an angel with the flaming sword to lucy yeah threatening lucy that if she messed with the plans or doesn't give those 116 pages back she would be destroyed where was the where was the engine with the flaming sword and that's the thing like you know where's where's an angel with the flaming sword when you need it exactly and that's the thing like you know we i've done a thing on twitter a while back and people were really offended because i said things that the that god sent an angel with a flaming sword for joseph smith's sex life things that the angel didn't the lost manuscript yeah racism in the church exactly you know book of abraham being wrong and it's just again you know trying to make lgbt suicides right yeah and i'm not trying to make fun of it i'm just saying like again why is it that these things only happen when they either benefit bolster uh joseph smith and and that tells me why because joseph's one doing it why didn't the age of the flaming sword appear the third time that martin asked joseph for the manuscript and said martin cut out the asking for the yeah you know or i'm going to kill you like yeah that would have been a great thing it just would have saved all this problem right it would have and again we i don't want to go backwards too much but the whole thing in the come following manual is saying 2400 years earlier god knew and prepared the second set of plates because he knew oh my god the revelation the contemporary ones have no mention that that that they knew and again it tells you how much of the history of the church is backfitted into these these stories um yeah but anyways we'll keep going on this apologetic stuff so um so roper actually responds to uh the tanner's criticisms about the timeline of jesus and so he says the tanner's interpretation of this passage is not the only nor even the most reasonable explanation of it as i see it one may reach several different conclusions depending on how one interprets the references to christ's coming in verses 24-26 here i will suggest four possible interpretations alma's reference to christ's coming could refer to christ's birth christ's atonement christ post-resurrection appearance of the nephites in the new world or christ general coming including all aspects of his life in mission in the meridian of time his birth life teachings suffering death and resurrection culminating for the nephites in his appearance to the i'm not sure that i think i was talking about uh shortly after he rose uh oh appearance to them shortly after he rose from the dead so basically what um what roper is saying is that the tanner's criticism about knowing about jesus ahead of time and the specific specificity early versus late it really doesn't matter because if you read it redefine what they meant in the prophecy then it can mean anything he's literally saying in number four it could not just mean his birth or his death it could mean when his message got across the world when it you know when uh the resurrection when his teachings reach i mean it really just waters this down to nothing and it creates again more problems than in answers and that's one of the problems that i in these overview projects i want to continue to highlight these apologetics when they think they're answering one thing they're creating problems on another end that have to be addressed at the same time this feels like special pleading it is and motivated motivated reasoning it's just it's like okay when joseph said translate what he meant was reveal you know what i mean it's not a translation it's a revelation like when do words when do words get to just mean what they what they say yes i mean it's just it's the same this is the same stuff you're gonna see at the book of abram when they're like well when it says written by his own hand and pump papyri it could be that it's copies of copies of copies it's like no that's not what he said because he also writes that abraham's personal signature is on the facsimile but again this is what happens when you redefine the words at face value and so one of the things i always try to say with the overview is i take the evidence at face value i do not take it and redefine it because when you do that when you redefine words when you redefine the events as they happened then you're redefining them with a need for your community but in this case you can only take what joseph smith writes at face value because joseph's not here to say no no no i i totally did not mean i was translating i meant that you know i mean like go back in time and ask joseph smith he's apologetics and he would laugh at you there's no way joseph smith if you could time travel and say here's what the church in 2022 is saying you were actually doing he'd be like no no no that is not what i'm doing i am i got this straight from god this is the history of the americas because that's what he portrayed outside of the book of mormon as well i mean it's just it's it's pretty simple unless you're trying to redefine things to fit to solve a problem yeah absolutely um and so this is just to say why the tanners and brett metcalf got this right and it's just to say you know um the the verse that he's pointing to it says and now we only wait to hear the joyful news declared unto us by the mouth of angels of his coming for the time cometh we know not how soon would to god that it might be in my day but let it be sooner or later in it i will rejoice so that's alma 13 25 where alma's speaking very vaguely about the coming of christ yes and so that's why the tanners and brett metcalf both point out that because those prophecies were given at the beginning of the book there's no way they would say this and roper's saying well maybe he wasn't talking about christ's coming but his teachings and and so what i'm saying is the tanners and that can't have it right because nephi gives a very specific uh promise of the the coming and yet alma here says we know how soon no matter how you want to lay it out he would know by basic math how much time is left in that prophecy and that is the point that the tanners and metcalf is making is just how does nephi give such a specific number and then the middle of the story once you get out of that replacement text all of a sudden they just completely forget that it was ever said because it wasn't said because it wasn't said before that section and so yeah the reason they don't know is because they were never told and it's just it's really simple when you look at the text in the order of production yeah yeah it's it's just like so much with mormon truth claims things are so confusing or they require such incredible backbends and contortions and distortions or once you know the full history everything makes sense right that's just it once you and that's why i always talk about this as a puzzle because once you start putting these pieces together and they fit naturally when you look at it at face value it's actually pretty satisfying because they do fit and it makes so much sense but at the same time if you look at the apologetics they're just jamming a square you know a square peg in a circle hole and when you do that you create damage elsewhere that they just walk away from because they feel like they solve that one problem and they're okay and that to me is again where apologetics we'll we're gonna hammer this on every overview project because it really shows that apologetics not necessarily that the people writing them are intentionally trying to lie to you but just that the interest is in giving plausibility to that one point and not even considering the the damage it makes to another truth claim of the church yeah yep yeah it's powerful so this is another area where roper continues to kind of reinterpret the book of mormon to make this fit and so he says in responding to the tanners and mec this is actually from our ov project so this is i guess me but in responding to the tanners and metcalf's claim that this verse poses a serious problem for the book of mormon uh john twetness has argued that alma and perhaps other book of mormon prophets in the in mosiah through moroni may have been unfamiliar with the prophecies on the small plates of nephi the tanners argue that this explanation is unreasonable because alma had received all of the plates from mosiah before becoming chief judge and should therefore have been familiar with their contents including the 600 year prophecy the tanner's objections dissolve when we recall that alma had a a voluminous volume i don't know i say a voluminous library of scriptural records far beyond anything we have today not merely a few books in addition to the brass plates the account of ether and the voluminous record of the nephite history on the large plates alma also would have had the record of i don't know say that the zenith zen if it fight coffee the xenophobia a long time on that one colony the record kept by alma as he oh hilum helaman hilum from which mormon made pan of his abridgement of the book of mosiah i feel like there's some typos there but anyways and perhaps other records as well including the small plates this would be a fairly imposing corpus to read much less to master and remember so yeah sorry this is from roper but so what he's saying is that the tanners and the metcalfes are claiming us the problem but they're not understanding how many records they had it's like saying he's like saying basically i have a hole he has a whole like cave full of bookshelves and you're upset that he doesn't know this one prophecy but it probably got lost in the shuffle and so what he's doing is he's reinterpreting the book of mormon to basically say that that prophecy is so insignificant that they would forget about it after those first few books well he's saying that there's so many books to read right it would have been easy to miss it would have been except for the fact that if you read the book of mormon they are so aware of this prophecy in the early books that it's not something that's written in a book and then put on a bookshelf this is something that is followed very closely through the replacement text and so i guess his point is basically saying it gets lost in the shuffle my point would be to say how does something get lost in the shuffle when it's such an important part this is not you know um well actually let's go to the next next slide if you're okay with that well i i i don't know first i i don't know what what's that so i was just gonna say so this every time i see things like this it reminds me of the scene from office space in an office space if you haven't seen it um they create this scheme to steal money from from their boss and it goes awry because they make a miscalculation and if you play the clip it just this reminds me this every time when i hear this i must have put a decimal point in the wrong place or something i always do that i always mess up some mundane detail oh well this is not a mundane detail michael hey so again i i realize that's kind of you know yeah like here but what's what's a bigger deal than the date of the coming of the messiah right exactly i mean we're not talking about like saying how did they forget that such and such king might have died in a certain year or how did they forget that they were in some city or something this is like the overreaching when's jesus coming yeah this is the biggest deal in the book of mormon and so to say it's the biggest deal in all scripture like all of the old testament is like we're waiting for the messiah yep and then the messiah comes supposedly in the new testament and then all of a sudden it's like when is he coming again like that is the question of all judeo-christian scriptures right yeah and and it's just and then you know to you know again if you're talking about having this uh corpus of records the idea that this massively important prophecy would not make its way into other records again is they're trying to imply that it's on this one small page of this one small plate of this one small book in this gigantic cave and it's just you're redefining the importance of that prophecy in the book of mormon if you want to do that i just that's why i just i every time i hear that i always laugh because it's like that's not this is not a small detail it's not a mundane detail this is a huge problem and it it tracks perfectly if you look at the dictation order it's also a problem that he knew the date because doesn't jesus specifically state no man knoweth the day or the hour where i come like although i don't is that for the resurrection or is that for but you're right because yeah cause that would be very i guess you're right that would be for the second coming yeah but either way i mean it kind of applies because it would be you know the whole idea is that they know exactly when he's gonna come to the americas and it's just and they know his name all of these things are we'll descendants of alleged descendants of abraham isaac jacob you know david solomon they are literally on the ground in the holy land literal jesus's ancestors they don't get to know jesus's name they don't get to know when jesus is coming why why why are the nephites privileged and then when you add to that the fact that north american native americans didn't even have the ability to write didn't have a written language let alone there's no evidence that they ever wrote anything on plates or had the ability to make plates at that level during the time period of the book of mormon it's over it's swamping it's overwhelming evidence that this is just silliness and again you know not to beat the dead horse from our our last couple uh episodes about the gold plates but if you want to use the piergy tablets to look at how many plates you would need just for the book of mormon you would need a cave just for the book of mormon plates so to send say there's all these other you know corpus of records it just when you talk about anachronistic metal plates with records you're just you're in another area where those problems just keep stacking on each other if you really want to go that route it doesn't work and why haven't any explorers in central north central or south america found additional plates that are written in reformed egyptian that were in some caves somewhere because where did all those plates go where did all the other unabridged plates go yeah i mean that's and that's the whole problem with that you know people will say oh you know they haven't they haven't looked in the right spot yet but again it's one of those things where at some point if you want to make these claims that there's just so many records they got lost in the shuffle then it's like to your point where where is everything else then why is there no references to these other plates they only make references to the brass plates uh that they took with them and the plates of nephi and then later on this this set of plates and jacob there's just so many problems where when you look at it in context you just can't explain it all the way yeah and that's just it and so um so now we we end how we began can we go back one page really quick oh sure sure sure because i want to just hide just go this really quick so basically wait we missed it wait we missed the slide we did that one okay so so in roper's response by the 116 pages he talks about um how if you look at the similarities between the small plates and the large plates you'll actually see that the small plates were indeed known to the to the people after the replacement text and not an afterthought by joseph to retrofill in and one of the examples he gives i think is actually perfect because he in first nephi it says the compass which had been prepared of the lord then in second nephi it says the baller compass which was prepared for my father by the hand of the lord and then we get to alma it says and now my son i have somewhat to say concerning this thing which our fathers call a ball or director or our fathers called it liahona which is being interpreted a compass and the lord prepared it and it just shows because once he's out of the replacement text it's a lot more specific whereas when he's in the replacement text he's being very careful and just kind of you know calling it a ball or a compass and so is his basic argument there that see there's an object that that has continuity all the way through and he's saying that's what he's trying to say and it's just it uh his i think it's like nine pages of examples to basically say if i cherry pick these you could see that the large plate authors were familiar with the small plates and my point is one in this one example you could see what a difference there is in the description later but more importantly if you have the same author for the beginning of the book as the end there's going to be a lot of similarities it's not you know it's kind of like with anachronisms one anachronism tells you it's out of place even if you had even if you had a bunch of hits and in this case you're going to have a lot of similarities because it's 273 000 word in the book and i'm just pointing out that when he makes these claims it's like well you know look at how much this is his example look how much more specific it is once he's out of what we call the you know what the tanner's called the black hole um and so you know again we don't spend too much time there i just i thought that was a good example to show that he's trying to say they're exactly the same and i would just say it's not because he's naming it the liahona later that is so fascinating i did not realize that the word liahona wasn't used until alma yeah i think that i mean i think that's the case because i don't think it is i just googled it yeah the only place in the book of mormon where the word leona is used is in the book of alma yeah but but i i imagine joseph wouldn't have would have remembered the the word leahona yeah the only thing i could think of is maybe because the leona was only mentioned briefly and maybe by the time he gets back to the small plates and he's dictating he kind of forgets what he called it so he just keeps it vague in that regard because you know it's like the thing is i i do believe joseph would reference back to his to what they were working on but i don't believe he would be able to know like where to reference like i think he would probably look at where he left off and then know where to pick back up but i don't think he was going back a long way to look for one word because that would be really difficult with the manuscript that as we saw it so that's so funny yeah anyways it's just it's a quick reference and then so now we're kind of at the end of this one as we begin with this yeah we began so little chiasmus here for you but just basically once joseph lost control he became powerless to locate the manuscript god was able to physically remove the plates and the spectacles but apparently was unable to tell joseph where the manuscript was what happened to it or just to have an angel retrieve it for him um and then the small plates as we talked about was just a late invention that did not happen until after he had finished the book of mormon and this is really important when you look at dnc 10 which is actually telling him to translate or you know take off of the unabridged history as opposed to a smaller set the play fight yeah yeah the plates of nephi and then in the replacement text we can see the fingerprints everywhere that joseph smith is trying to be so intentionally vague so that if the replacement or if the original manuscript were to come back up lucy would not be able to expose him because at least even though the story would be different he wouldn't have names and places in there that would be directly contradicted by the text that lucy harris might still hold yeah wow and and again any one of these items might be able to be explained in isolation yeah but when you lay it out in the timeline and you get the understanding of what was going on with with lucy and martin and joseph all of a sudden everything makes perfect sense and it's way more plausible than than the apologetic narrative which is true about all of mormon history it is i mean like for me the 116 pages are really important because when you take those three things together it really shows you how joseph smith is dictating the book of mormon how he's adjusting to situations where he loses control and it shows you that the revelations from god lose power just as joseph's you know stone would lose power and those things are really important because when you read the book of mormon from start to finish you don't realize the dictation order is off and so you don't pick up on those clues but once you see it then all of a sudden you get this perfect window into joseph's um both his insecurities and the replacement text as well as the methods he was using to create the book of mormon and i think it's a the event of losing the manuscript is a really important one to the church but i think the replacement text is so important to being able to look at the text and critically see how joseph smith did it so when you hear there's no way joseph could write the book of mormon these are more areas where you could say this is how he did it this is how he did it and then obviously in our upcoming overviews we're going to have a lot more of looking at how he could have done it and where he was pulling from but it just shows in this particular instance he's doing this under a lot of stress a lot of threat from lucy and i just think it's really important to keep noting that um because when people say he couldn't have done it it's like no he could have because we have all of these fingerprints showing not just that he could but that he did yeah yeah that's powerful and and yeah i mean just you know as a really quick overview here to end this was we talked about earlier this is a golden opportunity if if joseph smith is truly a prophet of god god here is hanging joseph out to dry because god could let joseph retranslate on a tight translation he could strike lucy harris dumb he could he could i mean imagine what kind of uh prophetic skills it would have showed of joseph if god had told joseph through the peep slasher stone where the manuscript was and joseph shows up at lucy's door and says hey i want you to take me to the whole you dug behind the house a few weeks ago yeah i mean like all of those things would would show you this dude talks to god because he knows things that he shouldn't be able to know or what if lucy what if lucy had been converted because an angel with the flaming sword came to her and said stop it lucy and then lucy became a convert like why is it only why is joseph only seeing the angel with the flaming sword but then no one else who's a non-believer gets to have that witness and that's just it and so this is an area where lucy lucy harris is i think obviously suspicious and i think she realizes what joseph's doing it's kind of like you know if you go and you're at a faith healing convention in modern times and you can kind of see the things they're doing or if you go when you see those psychic readings and you can see how the psychic is constantly prodding you to give you give them clues so that they can can lead you along if you're looking for it and you see it and you call those back out to the person they're gonna they're gonna stop doing it because they realize what you're doing and so joseph appears to see that lucy knows what he's doing and that's why joseph says you know he doesn't want her help and in this case lucy then puts him to the test and he fails it and god says he won't allow his prophets to be taken down but in a lot of ways we could see here that god really did hang joseph out to dry because even though we're giving him the replacement text he's just basically skipping all of these really easy chances to prove that he's a prophet and if your goal is to convert as many people to the mormon church as possible why in the world is god not taking that opportunity why is he sitting out the chance to prove that his his prophet is a real prophet why is he doing almost the opposite and basically making him look like he's making it up well what's tough about that argument is this is the most successful religion ever formed in the united states and so yeah you know even even with these problems god and joseph were pretty effective unless you consider that in 2022 now that all this is really known and obvious and now that we have the internet and people like us and metcalfes and tanners and vogels and others to kind of lay it all out uh you know the church is starting to shriek yeah i mean that's just it it's like one of those things like we've talked about before but it's a successful religion and it is but at the same time i mean you're talking like what is that like one percent of the world not even one percent of the world's population less than one less than two less than two tenths of one percent intense and so and shrinking yeah it's successful but at the same time like this is one of those areas or translating the book of abraham correctly those are areas where there are testable ways to to test joseph's claims and every time we have like a tangible way to test it he fails and every time it's growing with with the church having to hide the very information that we're talking about today right the church has to hide this information from investigators and from its mainstream members to be able to sustain and grow and that's the other thing is the church has hit all this from the membership since the beginning you know and again you know i guess as a way to finish that up and i guess to and this is just again i'm still a member but i'm not a believing member and so if you had told me this story as an investigator it would have the alarm bells have been going off my head and so that is the thing like you the the fact that they still hold it is really difficult and and to your point most people don't know this and that's why i think this one's important because it gets in the weeds but when you get this it also it helps you to understand our previous few episodes about treasure digging and the gold plates but it's also going to help us to understand the next few episodes about um looking at the book of mormon the composition of it and why we can show it's a 19th century text because these things all yeah go perfectly together and i think that'll be very helpful so we go this slide is just you know we talked about it already a bit but dnc 10 almost makes it sound like satan is more powerful than god because satan is able to basically alter this text harden people's hearts to expose joseph smith all of these different things but that god is unable to tell joseph where the where the manuscript is god is unable to translate it the same way a second time so that he could stop satan's plan god is unable to like you said send an angel down to lucy harris to say hey i'm an angel of god we need the manuscript back all of these things god can do or to confound their thoughts confound their text god can't do any of that and yet satan apparently is so good at this that he can make lucy harris come up with this scheme that she never even goes through with to alter the sex it just you know it's it's it's a really insecure god that comes through some of the revelations of joseph smith and it just makes you seem like who's the one in charge here is it god that's that's running the show or is it satan i know that would sound very offensive to a believing member but again i'm just saying why is it that god can't do anything to overcome the plan of satan without going all the way around what satan wants to do it just seems like he's going through a lot of work because he can't overdo what he claims satan is going to do yeah all right last slide yeah last slide and this is going to kind of go into our next overview but it's just to say um that the replacement text leaves us fingerprints all over the scene of the book and it really shows why the people in the middle of the book know the end or don't know the end whereas the people in the beginning do and this is going to continue on as we go through the the next few overviews that really hammer the text of the book of mormon as opposed to the production of it and just saying again i've said this before but just these issues need to be taken together because of the fact that this is good this ties directly in still into the translation which goes into the treasure digging um and then now we're going to actually kind of transition away from the early part of the dictation and go into um the actual text of the book of mormon and some of the truth claims it makes and i think that this is going to be really helpful when we talk about um the dna in the book of hormones just gonna be our next overview all right so that's what i was going to ask so our next one's going to be dna in the book of mormon so we're going to step out of critic critical you know analysis uh textual analysis and we're going to talk about dna yes and then we'll come back to uh yeah we've got uh there's there's ty versus loose translation the surrounding influences and then once we get through the next few reviews there's gonna be one final overview on the book of mormon which is basically how could he have done it and i think that one's gonna be really cool because there's a couple of examples in there that show you how he was pulling sources into it and i again i think just like 116 pages or a little bit in the weeds but once you get it then you start to see it once you start to see it everything else becomes not just explainable but like explainable to the point where you could say only joseph could have done this and i think that's why when we talk about um you know apologetics and all that you have to take all of this together because when you answer those things you still have to answer the rest and that's what i'm trying to do on this to almost like you know put the put the buffers on both sides to say if you want to go here you got to still explain here and um you know i don't want to ramble on about this but i do hope that as we go further it will explain not just how we did it but like where he was pulling from and um the thoughts of his day that we don't talk about today that just happened to end up in a text that's supposed to be ancient all right well mike this was a fascinating and a really important episode so i'm just loving this series thank you thank you so much and everyone who uh you know everyone who wants to kind of read all this in detail who wants to check out the footnotes who wants to see more more explanations you can go to ldsdiscussions.com 116 pages we'll include that in the show notes and again um we we really would love your feedback on this series do you like having just me and mike do you want to have uh additional co-hosts do you want us to try and keep it tighter believe it or not we're we're two in two almost at two and a half hours and this was the shorter version but this could have been much longer if we had had more co-hosts so do you want it with additional calls do you like to keep it tighter do you want to keep it even tighter than it is do you want multiple versions we would love your feedback either in the comments or email us at mormonstories gmail.com or you can email mike at lds discussions right at gmail.com is that your email it's lds discussion singular so there's no s so ldsdiscussion gmail.com i should probably get a better email address oh even though the website is lds discussions plural yeah yeah gmail so that's right anyway send us your feedback let us know what you like we we hope to have 40 or 50 or 60 of these episodes before all is said and done we want it to be this series that you can binge watch kind of like a year of polygamy you can do a year of lds discussions a year of mormon truth claims and by the end really have a solid understanding of the problems that the mormon church's truth claims anyway thanks so much mike you're awesome we'll see you again soon see our viewers and listeners and i'll just end by saying if you value this content if you want to see it continue we would love your financial support go to mormonstories.org click on the donate button become a monthly donor 10 bucks a month 20 bucks a month 50 bucks a month 100 bucks a month whatever you can afford we're transparent in our finances we always have been uh every dollar that we spend is on advancing the mission of the open stories foundation and uh and we'll keep doing this until we no longer have support for it but um you know please support us if you value this so everyone thank you so much take care and we'll see you guys all again soon guys and gals on another episode of mormon stories podcast take care everybody