Tight vs Loose Translation of the Book of Mormon

hello everyone and welcome to another edition of mormon stories podcast i am one of your hosts our co-hosts for today john dolin and today we are continuing what is becoming a barn burner an epic historic series with uh mike the creator of the website lds discussions wherein we we are going to be covering hopefully 50 to 60 uh specific topics all relating to mormon church truth claims in a thoughtful respectful and accurate way and joining me today is of course mike from lds discussions and we've got nemo back okay so hey mike hey everybody thanks for joining us and hey nemo hi guys how are we hey um all right mike do you want to do you want to tell us kind of where we've been and what we're doing today yeah so we basically like i said in the first episode so now we're what five n so or six and whatever we are and um we've been trying to build off that puzzle it's like i said when you take the puzzle apart and you put it back together you start with treasure digging and then you work your way off of that so we got treasure digging then we went to the gold plates the book of mormon translation 116 pages dna and now we're starting to get into the book of mormon text a lot more and this is where you're going to start to see a lot of the stuff we talked about in those first episodes are going to make a lot more sense because it's going to show how those first episodes are going to impact directly into the book of mormon text and this is why from a secular scholarly perspective when you look at this text critically you can see that it's a 19th century composition and in this particular episode we're going to do today it's going to talk about a lot of it's going to be about the apologetics with the translation method so in a lot of ways this will branch off of the translation episode to look at the translation method joseph smith would have used and why that matters and um the one last thing i'll say before we move on is this to give a shout out to john larson um he had done a podcast in this i want to say about nine years ago on the tight versus loose trans translation theories and it was another one of those podcasts for me when i was trying to listen to as much as i could early on when i was trying to figure all this stuff out it was another one those aha moments because it really lets you into why apologetics don't work if you don't apply them equally to all sides of the issue and we've talked about this in every episode if you want to apply apologetics to one side you have to balance it on the other you cannot be inconsistent because then every time you apply the apologetics in one area you're going to create problems elsewhere and so a big shout out to john larson because of his work on this episode that led to me wanting to put it into the overview project i love it okay so we'll include uh in our show notes both that episode with john larson and uh the previous episode about book of mormon translation but to to your point listeners viewers if you haven't checked out our previous five episodes this stuff builds in in many ways so consider pausing going and watching those and then coming back right yeah i mean i i think you'll get more out of it if you go in order yeah i know that eventually at some point when we're 30 40 episodes in you're gonna be like this is a lot of stuff but this is why and again it's it's a lot of material and the overview project i know it is a lot of material and some of them can get pretty long but you need to give that length in order to give the context that is needed because one of the things you'll see like when you read the ces letter and you talk to people about it it'll say well he's being misleading because he's not including this this and this and then you go in you say okay but the apologetic response is also not giving you the context and that's why the ces letter a lot of the main points are perfectly valid but it's easy for apologists to poke holes in them because of the fact that jeremy intentionally kept it short because he was just looking for answers to the big picture and so what the overview project is really designed to do is to say when you get beneath those initial claims in the ces letter it doesn't get better for the church it gets worse and so you know we were talking about this before but i'll get responses all the time and they'll say you're just rehashing the same topics of the ces letter and i'll say no because i'm adding a lot more topics and more importantly we're fleshing them out more whereas in the ces letter he's really just introducing them because he's looking for answers to these questions whereas now i'm trying to take that and say if you go deeper what does the evidence tell you and what do the apologetics do for you do they actually solve it or do they leave it unanswered and so these episodes will build in that same manner where all of a sudden you might get 12 episodes into the series and go holy crap i remember he mentioned something in this third episode and now i understand why i mentioned it because it's still going to factor in down the road and we're going to mention a few of those today that are going to impact our our next handful of episodes the same way and if i can make a joke to some degree we're all just rehashing what gerald and sandra tanner did 40 years ago um so shout out and hats off to the tanners but i you know a second thing i want to say is there's nothing wrong with repetition there's a gazillion people that have never heard of the ces letter even if you were and then jeremy doesn't mind if we reuse his stuff and then again what we're doing is a comprehensive synthesis that provides more detail and more context but you know just just the more the better is my motto yeah and you know the thing is like you know we talked about in previous episodes we have to go through it all but for me this was how it made sense in the ces letter i think why it's so effective is you can sit down and you can read it in one night it's like hundred pages right and so you can read it you could go through it one night and then you could get a really good overview of what the problems are um and then for me when i did that i made that mistake that a lot of people make whereas you info dump on your loved ones which is a really bad idea for anyone out there if you read the cs letter you read ldsdiscussions.com you know we'll do an episode on this way down the road but the one piece of advice i would give anyone who does that is to be patient with yourself to not go to your loved ones and info dump everything you've learned until you are able to do it in a way that is not emotional and is more fleshed out than just like throwing out all the pejorative terms you might think of like when you read about some of the things that you first discovered um and and so you know the point to what you're saying john about repetition is you know it's not so much that we're trying to be repetitious to just hammer into your heads it's more like we're trying to cover these topics in a way that's going to build upon each other and give you the full picture so when you finish and again using that puzzle analogy when you take a step back after we do these you're going to look back and you're going to see the pieces fit you're going to see the whole picture together now you may choose to do different things with it than someone else might but at least you're going to have a more honest picture than the one that the church presents on the box when when you convert or when you're born into the church i love it well let's get started and i'll just say we're going to include a link to an episode or two from gift of the mormon faith crisis podcast about how to speak to believing family and friends after a faith crisis because those are good resources but let's let's jump in tight versus loose where should we start so we'll just start this again is going to be it's going to be a little more free flowing of a conversation than our first few episodes just because this isn't as account heavy so if we start into the slides um really what we need to do is to first define what a tight or loose translation would be for the book of mormon and this is actually um i think they removed i tried looking last night i could not find it but this was the entirety of fair mormon's response to was the book of mormon translated in a tight or loose translation and was what they said was this is all from fair mormon was joseph smith provided with the exact wording of every sentence in the book of mormon was he simply given impressions which then dictated within the context of his own understanding was it some combination of the two methods joseph's wife emma related her own experience when my husband was translating the book of mormon i wrote a part of it as he dictated each sentence word for word and when he came to proper names he could not pronounce or long words he spelled them out and when while i was writing them if i made a mistake in spelling he would stop me and correct my spelling although it was impossible for him to see how i was writing them down at the time when he stopped for any purpose it um when he stopped it for any purpose at any time he would when he commenced again begin where he left off without any hesitation and one time while he was translating he stopped suddenly pale as a sheet and said emma did jerusalem have walls around it when i answered yes he replied oh i was afraid i had been deceived he had such a limited knowledge of history at the time that he did not even know that jerusalem was surrounded by walls scholars have examined and debated the issue of a tight versus loose translation method for many years although it is an interesting intellectual exercise the exact process by which words and sentences were formed has no bearing upon the fact that the book was dictated by the gift and power of god all right so to summarize what does that tell us well you know it's funny because i don't know what you guys think but for me the fact is fair mormon is being very at least with this this entry this was literally i'm gonna copy the entire thing when i did the overview so this is literally everything it's not usually their entries are a lot longer and i think it's their way of saying we're not getting into it and and i think that the use of emma's quote um matches a tight translation without any question and i think um we've covered this in previous episodes and we're going to cover it a little bit more today but all of the early witnesses tell us that it was a tight translation um and i would also argue not to go off on too much of a tangent but emma's quote is um i think also being given as a way to promote faith emma's trying to pump joseph up as much as she can i'm not saying she's lying but i'm also saying that the idea that joseph smith did not know there were walls around jerusalem but that emma would um almost feels to me like someone that might be kind of trying to um get someone else to believe like that would be a really good trick to use if you were um trying to convince people that you were channeling the words of god and as we know in this comment from emma she's saying that literally the seer stone would know or would tell joseph hey emma wrote this wrong and we know that the seer stone peepstone could not help find the 116 pages it couldn't locate any lost objects so again these are the things that for me tell me there's there's some suspect parts of this quote and it also again implies without any question this is a super tight translation yeah and it's very it's ver it's it's it's also confirmed isn't it confirmed like you said with martin harris uh yeah even even emma's dad to some degree right yeah we're going to go through the quotes really quick again just because i want to make sure it's it's clear as day but yeah i mean there is no you know it's kind of one of those things where it's like if you're going to make a claim that it's a loose translation it's you need you need something but you certainly can't have evidence telling you it didn't happen and in this case the evidence is overwhelming saying there's no way that happened um which is more problematic than it just being kind of ambiguous anything you want to add anymore just to say it's really interesting that they end that quote with a unqualified statement they say well either way it has no bearing on the fact that it was translated by the gift and power of god okay and what's your evidence for that how about on by what are you qualifying that in saying that it has no bearing actually i think it's quite important the mechanics of how it happened is quite important as to determining for individuals in their own faith did this happen by the gift of power of god yep i agree and the one thing i'll add to that too is you know we talked in the previous episodes about how the um history that's being written by joseph smith and those around him they are doing everything they can to take the treasure digging and the folk magic out right so they interject the term yerman thumim which they literally will add to old revelations to make it sound more biblical so they're retrofitting this term back into early revelations they're retrofitting it back into the bookmore translation and so when people say that joseph they'll say all joseph smith said was a translated by the gift and power of god and my response would be well of course he did because he can't say how he translated because they're working to get rid of the folk magic they don't want to publicly like joseph smith is not going to get in front of a group of potential converts to say i translated it using a peep shear stone that i put in my hat that i used to look for treasure digging with so to say that's his only public statement is like saying you know that it's kind of like the when you get to polygamy when he denies it publicly it's like well of course he's not going to say that he used a peep slash shear stone because he knows that's folk magic and he knows that once you get outside of that circle that's already believing it's going to he's going to get killed for it and so i just think that that's a little disingenuous to say well this is all joseph said so it's all we can go with but we're going to ignore all of the evidence from the people that were in the process who are telling us the exactly how he did it yeah yeah makes sense yeah and so that like i said that's all fair mormons think so for the purposes of this overview to define um how i would define a tight translation or how i did in the overview is to say um is outlined by fair mormons use of emma smith's quote a tight translation is where joseph smith is directly translating the book of mormon via the seer slash peep stone in the hat word for word the translation of the plates would appear on joseph's stone and joseph would dictate them to a scribe and this method of translation is a very literal one it does not afford joseph smith the ability to change or alter the words because as we will hear from the quotes in a second the stone will not change um and give him further words until the words that are on the stone are written exactly as they are so joseph has no um authority as kind of a co-author in this situation the stone has superpowers too i love that i mean yeah this i mean and again it's like i don't want to be like facetious here but in this account the stone is effectively an active participant because it will not change until everything's written correctly it's like alexa or siri it's listed to you it's constantly listening to joseph and the scribe yeah yeah and it's waiting until the right exchanges happen before it it continues yeah but until he hears the scribe repeat it back correctly it does not move and that's as tight as it gets i mean the stone is literally an active participant and will not change until everything is done exactly as the stone portrays it yeah okay so if we go on we'll just again to define a loose translation this method would give joseph smith an inspiration through revelation which is really this is how the church is kind of going but it allows joseph smith the freedom to dictate the text of the book of mormon through his own milieu putting the text of the book of mormon into his own words into his own uh worldview and into his own understanding so effectively in this approach joseph is given the general lessons and concepts through revelation but then is left to him to weave them weave those ideas into a story that would be understood and accepted in his time um and some have argued this would be a revelation of pure intelligence where joseph is just literally flooded with the story um to the point where it's almost like automatic writing so there's just like um i know there's a meme and it's i think it's pink floyd where like there's like the it's like a black light going into someone's skull and then it comes out as colors or something like that and i wish i'd put it in because i forgot but it basically it's like they're channeling this this info into joseph smith directly from the plates uh through the stone or just through revelation and then joseph now has to describe it back to um describe in his own words and um can make changes as he sees fit as basically a co-author to the book of mormon yeah and and i guess implicit in this setup or framing is that it kind of needs to be one or the other because i can already hear apologists say well maybe it's both maybe sometimes it's tight sometimes it's loose but i mean i think for the sake of this argument we're saying only one or the other makes sense yeah and again it's like one of those things where it's like if you want to say it's both you have to have some textual or documented evidence to to explain why it would be both and i think the problem is that they never would have claimed this until we started coming across these problems that forces an apologetic response to say here's a problem how do i solve it and and so if you want to claim it's both you're going to have a lot of issues and we have a slide down down the road here that's going to make it clear that not only would you then be implying that he would be changing these methods as he saw fit but there's like literally one verse where it needs to be both tight and loose for a single verse so then you'd have to say that he's able to change it literally within a sentence and that is going to get really problematic if you want to take that approach i can't wait nemo well it's just like it's like the hemispheric model versus the um heartland model right yeah the hemispheric model is a reaction to people discovering lack of dna evidence lack of archaeological evidence things like that so like okay right so how do we fix it yeah and that's the whole thing with apologetics right because they're born out of necessity yeah and no one no one came in you know in the 1840s or 50s and was like you know what i'm actually thinking that joseph smith was just kind of a co-author but today in 2022 you can hear some of the most prominent mormon scholars who will use these they use different words like bricolage um like i said i've mentioned before fired syncretist yeah i mean and so you've got richard bushman michael ashe terrell gibbons they're all saying i mean jim bennett i think i think he said that too on your podcast where he's like yeah he's obviously putting in some of his own ideas into the book of mormon because he feels like he's inspired to do so but those are things you would not if again we talked about this i think on the dna episode but it's like if you went back in a time machine and told joseph smith hey you know what i've been reading the book of mormon and a lot of the apologists a lot of the people in the church that are historians are telling us that you're a co-author there's no way like there's no way he would have been like oh yeah i totally was a co-author he'd been like no this was like an ancient record because that's what he taught and so to say we're redefining joseph smith's words the accounts in order to fix a problem that is really stuck because of the fact that there's so many accounts that are telling us how it was done yeah i mean redefining is the key word and the fact that we're even having to start this podcast by defining what translation is is is a is just yeah is a symptom of the problem with apologetics that you have to redefine so much in order to make these things work that's just it and what's funny is sometimes people will say well you're taking out context i'm like i'm not taking out a context i'm taking it at face value and again would you ever take another religion's um apologetics and then say well they said that on the plate was an apple and a banana but then the church now is saying that because apples and bananas didn't exist in that area it was actually a couch cushion that that's okay and you'd be like no because you don't you're not invested in that other religion that's probably a bad example but you get what i'm saying like they're literally redefining these these super important early accounts contemporary accounts and so you'll have um for example you guys did some podcasts about um a polygamy podcast that kate holbrook who's a historian for the church did and in that podcast hank smith and kate holbrook are talking about how if you're a historian you always go for the most contemporaneous sources in this case we have some really good sources that were at the scene of the translation and now today we're like you know what guys uh we're going to ignore those because those actually create more problems than we need to solve and and that's where it just gets to be kind of like absurd because of the fact that we can see these accounts it's not like these accounts are are dismissed i mean they're pretty solid and they all back each other up and i think the more times you get accounts that back each other up you have to take them seriously yeah super super valid yeah yeah i'm thinking of the i'm thinking of the need to redefine the word virgin in dnc 132 because so many things like that yeah so many of the plural wives the dnc says they need to be virgins but so many of the wives weren't and that it's to bear the souls of men but bearing the souls of men apparently means having no children whatsoever right and that's and that's and that's just it it's like um we'll get into it a little later but there's um i don't know if you guys have ever seen the brother jake videos on youtube yeah he's great so he does a good one on this because his whole thing is like we don't mean translation we mean translation and so it's just like a different tone of voice but it's it's it's one of those things where when you hear it and when you when you watch his videos or when we go through this you're like there's no way you can have it both ways you cannot have your cake and eat it too because of the fact that this the one of the problems with mormonism is it made so many definitive definitive truth claims that are testable in the physical world in the physical world yeah and so when you test them in the physical world when you make claims about parts of the world the history of the world what's going to happen all these things and they don't they don't happen then all of a sudden you can't say well we didn't mean that we actually meant these different words it's like no no you you you have it written down and you have your the people that were there saying it you just can't back away from it just go no no no we're going to call it inspiration now because it just doesn't fit especially when a key reason people converted in those early years was because they believed that joseph smith had these special powers and even in the by the way you're probably going to mention this but in the doctrine and covenants at least the first version of it joseph smith is called prophet as a prophet seer revelator and translator and it says that in the doctrine of covenants if my memory is correct just a quick point just to do as i'm told by my church leaders and give brother joseph a quick break here i think it's important to recognize that a lot of the kind of testable physical claims that joseph smith made were based around a lack of understanding in his worldview at the time and of those around him you know he's looking at egyptian as a language that's untranslatable at that time rosetta stone hasn't been found yet right you're looking at the mound builders myths that surround him we don't know where these mounds have come from we don't know what's going on so i think a lot of this is born out of his desire to explain the world around him um and it's at that time he didn't think people would be able to prove it wrong yeah i mean that's that's totally what it is too and it's funny because when i've brought that up to people in the past they'll say well joseph smith was also a very boastful person he wanted to seem like the smartest guy in the room so in that case he was speaking as a man like when you talk about like zelf the white laminate right so you'll go how is it that joseph smith was able to know what it what a pile of bones was um even though we know that historically speaking that makes no sense and they'll say well he was just being kind of boastful as a man because he felt like he needed to to tell members answers when they didn't have them and but you look at that and you go if that's the case how do you distinguish when he's speaking as a man about that versus when he's saying the quotes we've used in previous episodes about how the americas were populated directly from the book of mormon people and no one else like that's the problem like you can't have it both ways you can't say every time when he's wrong oh it's you know i know this is a very cliche conversation about speaking as a man but that to your point everything is born out of the 19th century world view into you know with like egyptian i don't think he realized it would be cracked and so all of a sudden that's why the book of abraham comes back to bite him but as he's writing it i'm sure he's thinking i can say what i need to say here and push my theology because there's no one else who can tell me i'm wrong because no one can translate it and so when you get into the the type versus loose translation you have similar things where all of a sudden it's like this is what they said happened and it's because they believed that nobody was gonna be able to fit you know to prove otherwise and and now you can because we have so much more information and instead of the church saying yeah there's some messiness here we really don't know what the answer is they come up with all these convoluted reasons and every time you go down the path of those convoluted reasons it just opens up new problems and that's why this you know this overview project is 39 topics because every time you go to one thing it opens up these other problems and you got to cover that and cover that and cover that and at the end of it you're just like you look back and you're like this is not the church i was described by the missionaries yeah and we should and uh right before we go to the next slide i'll just say if you go to you know any discussion of a high demand religion including luna lindsey corbin's incredible book called recovering agency redefining commonly used terms is a classic technique of high demand religion so it it whether or not you believe in mormonism we want people to have uh understand the rules of undue influence and so just always be aware if somebody is redefining commonly used terms there's a good chance they're gaslighting you and that's just reality yeah all right okay so these next three slides we'll go through really quickly because i just want to read you we read these in the translation episode but these are the three um witnesses i gave effectively a translation statement and so this is emma smith and she said when my husband was translating the book of mormon i wrote a part of it as he dictated each sentence word for word and when he came to proper names he could not pronounce or long words he spelled them out and while i was writing them if i made a mistake in spelling he would stop and correct my spelling although it was impossible for him to see how i was writing them down at the time so that's one so let's just go let's just read all three at once so the next one is david david whitmer and so we read this lesson it says david whitmer said joseph smith would put the seer stone into a hat and put his hat in the face or put his face in the hat drawing it closely around his face to exclude the light and in the darkness the spiritual light would shine a piece of something resembling parchment would appear and on that appeared the writing one character at a time would appear and under it was the interpretation in english brother joseph would read off the english to oliver cowdery who was his principal scribe and when it was written down and repeated to brother joseph to see if it was correct then it would disappear and another character with the interpretation would appear so that's david whitmer and then the last one's martin harris and he's going to give this um i believe he gives us to edward stevenson who is a member of the first council of 70 and he says um that joseph uh wrote that portion of the uh translation of the book of mormon which he was favored to write direct from the mouth of the prophet joseph smith he said that the prophet possessed the seer stone by which he was unable to translate as well as from the yerman thummim and for convenience he then used the seer stone martin explained the translation as follows by the eight of the seer stone sentences would appear and were read by the prophet and written by martin and when he finished he would say written and if correctly written this that sentence would disappear in another appearance place but if not written correctly it remained until corrected so that the translation was just as it was engraven on the plates precisely in the language then used so those are three accounts and every single one of them is giving you the tightest possible translation method that is that could be done okay that hasn't aged well no i mean it's just there's you cannot read those three quotes and tell me that a loose translation is even possible unless you then want to say that joseph smith was lying to emma martin and david about what he was seeing because um the one thing i'll point out is martin harris is describing his um experience as joseph scribe for the 116 pages portion david whitmer is giving an account of what oliver cowdery would have experienced and so the fact is that they're both giving you the same basic translation process which tells you that joseph smith was one using a consistent method the whole way through which would be the rock and a hat and two that if joseph smith was doing a loose translation then he was definitely telling the scribes that he was getting it a different way so either joseph smith was lying to the people who were the scribes for the book of mormon or he was doing a tight translation you can't have it both ways without giving special pleading yeah and by special pleading you mean excuses yeah like it's super interesting to me that like dnc is essentially joseph smith having to have an answer to every time he's challenged right because the charismatic leader and founder of an organization like this is someone that has all the answers and that is something i find really interesting is reflected in current apologetics is that there's always a need to have an answer it's been that way since the start of the religion there's always a need to be able to answer something we can't just say we don't know because joseph never did yeah he always had an answer he did i really think if the church was not as like business-like and i mean i'm not trying to be pejorative i'm just saying like it's structured so steadily now i think if it was not as steadily structured and you really had more infighting i think the leaders of the church would probably be forced to make more stands on things because of the fact that they would have to kind of control that whereas with joseph smith like to your point every time his authority was questioned he had to get revelations to answer those questions so that people would say oh right he is the one person to do it and in this case i think this is just again this is you know however you can you can look at this a lot of ways but if you want to even pretend that joseph smith is doing a loose translation here you have to explain why all of the accounts are telling us the exact opposite yeah and that's what the next slide kind of summarizes right yeah and so basically yeah so we're just basically saying that you know not only is joseph claiming to have to read the exact words but the exact spelling as well um there's just no wiggle room here and and the fact is when you have three different people who are all who were acting as scribes for joseph at a certain point i guess david whitmer wasn't but he was getting that info from oliver calvary so you have three accounts of scribes for joseph giving you the same exact method to then claim there was some secondary method that was never mentioned i think is very deceptive and as nemo pointed out earlier it just it comes out of necessity because now there's a problem and now you have to address it even though you're working from um evidence that tells you it was done one way but now you're forced to at least try to find an opening to make plausibility for another and also it's not like this is hurl but or like isaac hale these are witnesses that are key to the credibility of the restoration yeah yeah the other three three witnesses or joseph's own wife right yeah and you just like i said it's just to me it's like you can read it for yourself i i don't even know why anybody would argue it and yet here we are doing an episode on it because of the fact that it's so important because yeah if it's a tight translation it's just going to open up a lot of problems which you know we'll get into but yeah it's yeah so you so they want to have it both ways and you just can't and and we'll say this again but but richard bushman agrees with this like yeah the joe smith papers project patrick mason pick any scholar who isn't dishonest they're going to all agree with with what we just conveyed yeah i think it's important that it was um that it was a tight translation because uh it would have actually helped joseph out a lot in the case of the 616 lost pages if he'd been able to claim a loose translation right because then he could have just re-translated it and any errors he could have put down to lose translation oh you know i i i used a different verb this time or i used a different sentence structure this time you know that would have been in his interest but i think it was so important to the foundational claims of the church the tight translation that that is the dominant narrative for that reason yeah because it's less of an impressive act if if if joseph and his thoughts and opinions and modern stuff are all kind of intermingled i'm thinking of the people at the time who are receiving the book they're just going to be a lot less impressed yeah if it's if it's joseph mixed in versus if it's the word of god right well yeah and just think about it this way like we talk about pseudopigrapha right and so we had talked about this in a previous episode richard bushman says the book of abraham and the book of moses are pseudepigrapha where joseph was writing in the name of a well-known prophet to basically give his works in his theology credibility to his to his um basically his followers and the book of mormon is suitable as well because we can show that he's using king james bible um foundational texts and we're gonna go through a lot of that in in the upcoming group of episodes um but the point is to what you're saying writing it and saying this is being directly uh handed down directly from god gives it such a higher amount of charisma and credibility than to say i saw a vision and i put it down into a narrative uh prose that like the difference in how people would receive it as far as credibility goes is just night and day and that's again why i think when you hear the um apologists will say all joseph smith said was it was translated by the gift and power of god i want to say of course he did because he's not going you're not going to joseph smith is smart enough not to give the account of the translation that emma martin and david do because if he's doing that to potential converts i'm pretty sure a lot of them are going to say you're making it up because of the fact that you can all of a sudden understand that he's basically got his face and a hat reading off words it becomes a lot less you know you're not even using the gold plates the story starts to get a lot muddier and a lot less um i would say clean the moment you do that and so of course he's going to say just gift and power of god and then just leave it at that yeah makes sense and so basically just to kind of go through why it matters and we've kind of gone through this a little bit but you know i keep saying this in these episodes but i really want people to view these these topics in totality so i don't want you to to watch our video on the dna or the 116 pages and then just kind of keep that separate because these all connect together they all have common threads they all have patterns and it's important to understand those because once you start to look for them you'll start to see why these problems kind of go throughout the foundational events and scriptures of mormonism and apologists like to kind of pluck one out try to answer it put it back pluck another problem i'll give it an entirely different answer and so um as we've said already if you apply an apologetic to one part of the church's truth claims you have to then apply it to all the other ones too so you can't you know say there's a loose translation in one area and say there's a titan another and as we've already said a number of times you know this whole apologetic line of a loose translation only comes about once the problems with the book of mormon are um credible enough that apologists can no longer just say well you're just spewing anti-mormon lies and so now you have to give plausibility to how it could still work as a believer knowing that these problems are real got it okay next slide okay so the next one we're going to go through is we've talked about this briefly we'll do a full overview on this in a couple episodes but the king james bible is the foundational text of the book of mormon the language um sections of it the wording the phrasing all of that appears in every page of the book of mormon and so if the king james bible was not written until 1611 the fact that you're going to have it throughout the entire book of mormon tells you right off the bat that either that it can't be a tight translation unless god is now translating the golden plates using a 1611 or in joseph's case a 1769 king james bible and including the heirs the italics and some of the stuff in the in the bible that we now know was either like late editions to the to the bible that weren't original to the text and so if you want to believe it's a tight translation that means god is putting errors directly into the book of mormon which is again very problematic and you need a loose translation to be able to say joseph smith was trying to use the language that he knew was familiar to his area and in doing so he was pulling in bible verses and pages and chapters otherwise you're going to have a lot of problems another way that i would kind of rephrase this is to say that the fact that the king james version of the bible and coincidentally the version of the king james bible that joseph smith likely or confirmedly had in his possession the fact that that appears gives evidence that it's either a loose translation or a a work of fiction it's right right yeah so it has to be yeah i mean not to put it too fine a point on it yeah that's just that's it anymore one of the arguments they put out there is about and you know you look at the ces letter and jeremy reynolds quite rightly points out the italics and those italics are what are very kindly given to us by the king james bible translators to show what words they've added to make things make sense i mean if you're happy for me to give my quick example about translation because i think it speaks to this you know fair mormon said in one of their this is the show videos they use the example of the german phrase it's mustache but in gaian i would like to go for a walk or i need to go for a walk um and they're saying oh well a four word sentence i would like to go for a walk then in english it's like eight words so you need to add the words and those are the ones that would be in italics so don't have a fuss um but firstly there's loads of different ways to say it right which is interesting because that means i have a goat on it to go for a walk um but there's loads of different ways to translate it essentially and the last two examples are seven words each so sometimes you don't you'd only need to add the one word and overall it's a complete straw man i wanted to highlight this straw man argument because you hear it a lot they get focused on the italics because that's the point of contention and then they misrepresent the reason those italics are a point of contention the reason those italics are a point of contention is because those are translation choices made by men in the seventeenth century they are you know the difference between saying ishvil laufengein and ish haberdust laufenzugen i want to go for a walk and i have the desire to go for a walk is those two sentences so those are just differences in the way you would phrase something and those italics speak to the 17th century men that did that why are they appearing in a book that was written 2 200 years before christ to about 600 years after christ why are they there if it is a direct tight translation of a historical document that is the actual issue that people are speaking of not that they're adding words to translate because that is what you would need to do to translate between one language and another even if you're god not to mention that nemo just flexed all over us with his uh knowledge and abilities yeah with his knowledge and abilities that sounded really cool nice work nemo yeah that was good no and and so yeah to nemo's point that's the whole point like a lot of times when you talk about the king james thing you know apologists will kind of kind of try to to drill down to the point where they're talking about this one little thing and you're like no no no the the whole over overarching problem is that you're making a choice to use a translation of ancient texts that was written long after the book of mormon times and not only that but i think every bit bible scholar today would argue the king james bible is by far not the best translation i know like john hamer actually says it's a really bad one and no one really uses it unless you're a church founded in it like the borman churches so there are a lot of issues because nemo said yes we're going to hear the apology later by how god speaks to his prophets in the manner of their own words and voice but at the same time you're still making a choice in giving a version of the bible that is riddled with errors including stuff that was added on by later scribes so then you're saying well then god is going to take what is a late addition to the bible that wasn't original and passing it through to joseph smith which again i know god's ways are not our ways but why would god be using something that's inauthentic to the text and giving it to joseph smith into a book that's supposed to basically correct the problems with the bible it you're just continuing the problems that you're not fixing anything right and so um the next slide kind of illustrates this and so if you look at um 35 14 6 it says give not that which is holy unto the dogs neither cast ye or pearls before swine lest they trample them under their feet and turn again and rend you then you look at matthew 7 6. so this is where joseph smith is pulling from give not that which is holy unto the dogs neither cast ye your pearls before swine lest they trample them under their feet and turn again and rend you so there's some really small changes here but for the most part joseph smith pulling directly in but now joseph smith is going to translate this again when he does the joseph smith translation of the bible and it says and the mysteries of the kingdom ye shall keep within yourselves for it is not meat to give that which is holy unto the dogs neither cassie or pearls under swine lest they trample them under their feet for the world cannot receive that which ye yourselves are not able to bear wherefore ye shall not give your pearls unto them lest they turn again and rend rendu and so what we're seeing here is joseph smith is taking the king james bible he's putting it directly into the book of mormon which is a problem because this is new testament material which would not have been available to the book of mormon people but the native americans right yes and then he's going to go and translate it again and when he translated again it's different so you go well if joseph smith is getting the pure translation from god why is he getting the king james version which has errors and then why when joseph smith translates it separately is he translating it into a different text again and this is where you get into problems because as joseph smith goes on um through his time as the the prophet of the church he's going to change his ideas he's going to change his methods and this leaves fingerprints as i mentioned in a previous episode he's leaving his fingerprints all over the text that if god is the one revealing all of this through revelation why are we seeing inconsistencies you shouldn't have new testament texts in the book of mormon regardless but then they have the errors come in and then to have it be something completely different when he retranslates it after creates another problem that the tight versus loose translation plays into tell me if i'm summarizing it so like first and foremost native americans shouldn't be knowing what's in the bible during you know during you know between zero and 100 a.d there's just no evidence that native americans had knowledge of jesus or the bible so that's a problem the second problem is why is the bible showing up in the book of mormon at all the third is why in king james english if joseph's going to translate whatever reformed egyptian into english why king james english and then even more problematic why the errors and the italics italicizing why is that making it through and then even worse why does he later do an inspired translation that actually differs from the allegedly um you know tightly translated version uh that that appears here in third d fight did i get all the problems there's probably more well no no there's one more i mean you have to ask why did god inspire adam clarke to write a book that joseph smith would then read from and use for the joseph translation because right now just give it directly to joseph because this little insertion that joseph uh puts here you know that's shown at the bottom of the slide likely comes from the adam clark commentary that we know joseph had access to so i mean it just stinks i don't mean to use a pejorative it just it it seems to be very clearly borrowed from and or plagiarized from a source that doesn't make any sense well and not only that but again like you know you'll hear the apologetics they'll say well the book of mormon prophets were getting the same messages from the angels and from god that the new testament writers were but again this goes in the whole problem of when you when you look at new testament scholarship these king james well the gospels in general they're being told orally for decades before they're written down right so they're not going to be written down um i think matthew is what's 60 to 70 years after jesus so these are not going to be like the direct thing that was happening at the time and so the book of mormon you would think would not have the exact same wording of something that's not written until six years after jesus in a part of the world that they don't have access to so yeah i mean that the the new testament material being in the book of mormon is anachronistic from start to finish and it gets even worse because of the fact that we can pinpoint the exact version they're using and as we'll get into in some of the biblical scholarship sections that joseph smith is pulling material and that wasn't authentic to the text and so why if it's a tight translation would god want to bring in text that wasn't inaccurate into the book of mormon intentionally if that if that's how god is choosing to translate and i think those are problems that apologetics get really messy with because then they'll say like i said earlier well they were just getting the same revelations that were being given to the the gospel writers but you got to ask why the errors are there because the errors they blame is the the translation heirs of man and yet yeah in the book of mormon it's direct from god so why are they there i just again it's confusing but it's important yeah if i'm trying to act as an impartial judge already to me this one slide completely shoots down any possibility that it's a tight translation and we it's just like one slide so we've got a long more way to go this speaks to another apologetic um argument towards the veracity of the book of mormon that it contains multiple authors voices right it's written in different ways by different people but you can very easily now start to explain where some of those voices are you've got the direct quotations from isaiah that's one voice you've got just smith's own voice if he were the one that were creating the the text you've got the voice of the biblical scholars that translated the king james version of the bible here in oxford right you've got flexing against nemo flexes again yeah i'm kidding i'm kidding you've got those three voices so there it's started to be explained already yeah yeah all right beautiful all right so that kind of covers the king james bible so the next one that requires a loose translation would be all the anachronisms and so if the book of mormon is an ancient record there should be no anachronisms in the text and yet we have all sorts of examples throughout the book excluding you know we just talked about you got elephants and cattle sheep goats pig honeybees horses chariots steel swords metal working silk wheat new testament material 19th century christology all of that stuff would require a loose translation because the book of mormon people wouldn't have had access to it so this would have to be a situation where joseph smith is getting maybe a visionary state where he's then saying okay i am picturing something that looks like a horse or i'm picturing something that looks like a sword and i'm familiar with steel sword so he's putting it in there and this would make him a co-author and this is the argument um that i was kind of referencing with the brother jake video which he talks about this about loan shifting and so what this is kind of the whole argument of like well horses weren't horses they were tapers but tapers look like horses or at least they're close to it so joseph smith might have seen a taper in a vision said i don't know what that is but it looks close enough to a horse said horse and um just the one quote from an apologist from brant gardner he says what we probably have in this case is joseph substituting a known animal for an animal which was also a big cat in other words the underlying text would have been jaguar but the translation would be lion and so it's just it's trying to show that we can basically you know translation doesn't mean translation horse doesn't mean horse and this would require a loose translation where joseph is getting the ideas in his head because otherwise if the real term being used with the nephites was um you know kumon it would show that but instead we get all of these these items and not just items but ideas that are completely anachronistic to book of mormon times i think nemo was just showing us something was that a taper oh yeah this is daniel this is daniel he's named after daniel peterson he's my mascot is he british yeah is he british british tapia yeah of course why not yeah you want them are tapers native to the uk they are now i don't know yeah yeah and and this this slide again is so important uh just to you know it's problematic because we could number one we could allow for loan shifting if every witness didn't tell us that that it was a tight translation but then secondly we could allow for loan shifting except for the book of mormon names animals like kuro alums and kuma moms and whatever and types of currency and people's specific names like the fact that original unique names appear precludes the possibility that joseph couldn't have just used a different name all the cities all the cities all the characters right yeah yeah why did god go oh well for some of these things i'm going to give you really familiar names just to help you out but for others i'm going to give you aunties and shepherms and yeah that's just it it's like in the face like um right yeah it's inconsis like it's inconsistent because you want to say well we'll get to it a little bit later but you want to say well look at all these specific terms that are in the book of mormon well okay but then why are there all the anachronisms and so then you want to jump between you know what i say well it was a loose translation for those but then it was a tight translation for the other because the other joseph had envisioned but he had no idea what it was so you know god then gave it to him on the stone but then it's like but then why wouldn't you do that for the other ones i mean how cool would it be to be able to point out more animals that were in the ancient americas that maybe we would have you know evidence for as opposed to pulling stuff that we now that was available in joseph's worldview but not available back then and and again that's to nemo's point he probably never thought when he's doing this they're gonna be able to test this in a hundred years because he can only work with you know like it'd be less it'd be like watching the jetsons you know 50 years ago whenever it was on and saying that's what it's going to be like you know in our day joseph smith can't picture the future just like when i was a kid i couldn't i wouldn't have known what cell phones were going to be like you know and so he can only do what is what his worldview allows him to and that unfortunately for him creates a lot of problems down the road that he won't be able to deal with because he's obviously you know long past but it it the problems don't go away plus what in the world would make us think that he could ever like see into the future why would we even expect that sorry sorry that was bad that was bad um uh i was just thinking these titles should say instead of just saying require loose they probably should say require loose or fiction right well yeah i mean i guess for the just for the sake of argument it's like we're trying to look at what apologetic would be required yeah but yeah i mean obviously to me to me loose to me implies that joseph smith is making it up because of the fact that the moment you have to to change your translation method to something that is directly against the accounts tells you that you're expanding beyond even even like i said i don't believe you obviously i don't believe he tightly translates just because of all the errors in there and the problems with gold plates that we've already gone over but once you go outside of the box that the church puts itself in with the accounts then all of a sudden you're like okay now we're indistinguishable from fraud because once you say that he doesn't have to do it by the way he told everyone he's doing it because you need to make you need to change it to make it work at that point again and i keep saying this through throughout these episodes but then you can literally make any religion true right because you cannot you can't say scientology is wrong because of evidence if you're willing to throw out the evidence here because you need to preserve joseph smith and redefine any word that is inconvenient because it goes against the entire meaning of the word translation what points do the plates serve at this point if he's not taking text that was on the plates and turning it into the text that was in the book of mormon if it's all coming from inspiration and looseness those plates that were dragged around for 25 years by moroni and and is folk you know no need for it yeah and that's just it's like the story just crumbles once you start to look at how it actually went down and and then not only does the story of the gold plates crumble but then once you start looking at the book of mormon text you start to see all these clues that joseph leaves to tell you how he did it and that's when these apologetics try to answer him but again the everyone says the book of mormon is so internally consistent and there is a lot of consistencies but a lot of the consistency comes from the fact that he's writing through through a linear time when you start to look at the writing styles and this stuff like with the anachronisms you can see there's a lot of inconsistencies because in some areas he'll put a new term some areas used as an anachronistic term and then all of a sudden you're like well you know you would think it would be all new terms or all anachronisms and that's where you just get into this muddied water yeah and all i'm saying is using the word loose implies that there was actually translation going on yeah i mean i'm just i mean again i guess in some way i'm kind of going into their narrative but um yeah it's fine it's fine no i know what you mean so yeah and so with the book of mormon you have literal biblical stories brought into the book of mormon as true history and this is a problem because i would say even most even most religious scholars will admit like adam nevis is a mythical ideological uh story that is trying to be put at the start of the pentateuch or the five books of moses um effectively is an origin story and so we can show and we're going to have overviews on on these big big stories but like with adam and eve you can show not just with science but with the bible itself that it's a late addition to the writings of the bible because the early prophets are unaware and so the tower of babel is obviously one that we can show through linguistics that there were multiple languages before it that went uninterrupted in the global flood where you could see all sorts of life that's uninterrupted and obviously there's no disruption into dna and all that and so all of those stories being mythical you would think in a uh direct tight translation would be able to pick up the fact that they could say like you know they wouldn't even mention them probably they wouldn't even mention because they didn't happen and yet they're brought in as these very literal stories that are much more known to the book of mormon people than they are to the ancient biblical prophets and so it tells you that the prophets in the book of mormon are operating with a 19th century biblical worldview and that is a problem especially when you talk about adam and eve not being known to the early bible um prophets and then being written in in the tower of babel is really problematic because that directly ties to the jaredite stories uh to the jared story so you can't even like um one of the apologetic responses will be to say that the tower of babel the global flood and adam and eve were stories that were told in those communities so when lehigh left they would have brought those stories with them of course right but the jaredite story is directly tied to the tower of babel being literal because they're actually being spared the confounding languages so you cannot have it for their story it's way too literal to be able to say well the jaredites just believed that the story happened so they carried it through and that's what i'm saying like with a tight translation you just you wouldn't have uh these stories that we now know were late additions to the bible and ideological myths yeah yeah it makes no sense that's a great point okay yeah nemo do you have anything on that one no i think you got it yeah sadly a lot of these are pretty straightforward and then um by the way we're gonna have two episodes of mormon stories over the next few weeks uh on on the tower babel so yeah so look for that in the show notes references to those episodes of here yeah we we're going to have one as well so i mean it it's really important for for the scriptures of mormonism um obviously for a number of reasons and um we'll go into a lot more detail there and then this one is one that we all talk about it's there have been over a hundred thousand changes to the book of mormon obviously most of them are grammatical and spelling and all that but there are significant changes that were made to the initial edition and so under a tight translation it would be impossible to change these words because we're told that the stone would not change unless it was written exactly right so you can't even blame a scribe error like you could you can't even say like joseph read it right oliver cadre wrote it wrong and so because he wrote it wrong they're going back and correcting it because under the the accounts we have if oliver wrote it wrong the stone would know and the stone would not change and so joseph would know because the new words would not appear so you cannot in any way have changes to the book of mormon if you believe in a tight translation because god is giving it to him so specifically and so perfectly not if you believe it not if you believe in a tight translation if you believe in the witnesses right right both really i mean if you believe what the witnesses are telling you which is i mean and one of the arguments you'll hear and this is big with the book of abraham is they'll say the um the scribes were the ones that created the egyptian alphabet and they were trying to retrofit the characters joseph smith was translating to get joseph off the hook for incorrect translations and so you kind of you'll have apologists who will go well joseph smith knows better than the scribes do but the scribes are not going to give an account of what joseph was doing that unless it's coming directly from what joseph was telling them like they're not going to make up the trans translation method then they're certainly not going to have three different people making up a translation method that just happens to match you know independently of each other and so again it's just it's one of those problems where to your point john yeah i mean it has to be like a tight translation slash what the account what all of the witnesses are saying there's no way around it i just i don't know what else to say yeah yeah do you talk about the significance of these particular changes in the next slide or uh i think it's the same slide you can yeah so i mean in terms of the significance of the timing of these changes yeah so these changes here about the uh the son of the mother the mother of the son of god and the mother of god should we read them first yeah sure okay hey nemo can you read them you've got such a good voice yeah yeah okay so the first one is first 25 11 18 from the 1830 edition and he said unto me behold the virgin which thou seest is the mother of god after the manner of the flesh and then the second one is the same chapter verse and book but it's the 1838 edition onwards and he said unto me behold the virgin whom thou seest is the mother of the son of god after the manner of the flesh so there is a change there um it is further clarifying you could say that uh christ is the son of god not just god right yeah what's interesting about that sorry it's the 1837 edition sorry not the 1838. um and that's significant because the 1830 edition then comes to the 1832 first vision account in which joseph doesn't specify seeing more than one personage and then when he goes to change that account in 1838 to more than one personage the year before the second edition of the book of mormon comes out and all of a sudden you've got a non-single individual a non-um kind of trinitarian view of the bible you've got these separate personages so these particular changes are very significant in joseph's evolving kind of view of deity yes so over time joseph started feeling like god and jesus were separate separate yes but accordingly so he changed the book of mormon accordingly with his changing theology yes which then begs the question of again fights against the tight translation why did god give him a poor theology to begin with yeah why did then his account of the first vision also change to match the changes the book of mormon did he get a word from god about the book of mormon to change you go oh i better change my account the first vision to match then yeah probably not yeah that's just it like again if you you know i didn't have a slide on that nemo it's a great point because if you have a tight translation why is the original book of mormon implying the trinitarian modalist viewpoint instead of having the separation of the godhead because again if this is god translating reformed egyptian onto a rock into joseph smith and i would also argue even under a loose translation if joseph smith is receiving this through a visionary standpoint he would still know that that god and jesus are separate beings either way but yeah i mean to your point like if you want to believe this is a tight translation why in the world is god leaving out what would be one of the most important theological advancements of that time frame out of that translation it makes no sense and it the problem with the first vision to what you were saying is it's not just that he changes his accounts it's that when he changes his accounts it tracks in a linear timeline with the changes that he's teaching outside of it and so the first vision changes to argue that joseph was just kind of expanding on his actual visionary experience ignores the fact that he was teaching a trinitarian modalist viewpoint early on and then was slowly switching um and we see that in the translation here where all of a sudden they have to go back and correct which should be a word for word translation that they were not allowed to change yeah and um the second one on here is just it's just an error with um in the original book it said king benjamin had a gift from god and amen king mosiah king benjamin had died um and yet they put in there and again you can make the argument that maybe the printer uh somehow screwed that up but that that's that's a really hard argument to make because of the fact that um the stone should have stopped him yeah there's something like like oliver cowdery writing it down wrong would have stopped it because the stone wouldn't have moved on and so then you would have to say well whoever is setting the um manuscript before printing must have screwed up but that is unlikely just because of the fact that when you're setting a a manuscript you're not going to be going like far back into the text to mix up names but either way it just shows that you know there are some errors in the book of mormon that were significant beyond just grammatical changes yeah all right that's important and then um this one is one that will again do another um podcast and it might be our next one but it's the surrounding influences around the book of mormon that just happen to make their way into the text and so joseph smith references treasure digging and multiple points throughout the book of mormon or i should say the author the book of mormon mentions uh treasure digging terms like slippery treasure and you know that is something that you know you would either have to believe that the people in the ancient americas were doing treasure digging in the exact same way that joseph smith was and unsuccessfully finding stuff or and that's what with spirits guarding treasure that's buried and then they go to dig it up and it gets carried away and i don't think there's any biblical accounts of slippery treasure right i don't think so i could be wrong but i don't think so yeah i mean that feels like a very uniquely 19th century 18th and 19th century yeah and um so the fact that he uses these terms in the book of mormon would tell you that he's writing it um in his own familiar terms and so because he comes from that that world view and that that background of course it's gonna make its way when he's trying to explain um you know how things can slip away from you and um you know there are other ones besides what we're commenting on here but so charles the charles anthony visit by martin harris uh we talked about that in some previous episodes but when that happens it works its way directly into the book of mormon um and so in the book of mormon it it feels like you're getting a fulfillment of prophecy because it's almost like the book of mormon is prophesying of martin harris visiting charles anthony except for the fact that when it's written into the book of mormon it's already happened in real life and so that would tell you that it would have to be a loose translation because if it was a tight translation um it wouldn't be i mean i guess in theory it could be a tight translation that is that specific and right but as we'll see as we go through these overviews the um book of mormon prophecies die off the moment that you hit the 1829 range there's no prophecies after that that are specific that's suspect and and we'll talk about this again but the fact that charles anthony his account of what happened between him and martin harris is is literally the opposite of what martin harris claims and what the book of mormon claims who do you go with the the guy who actually gives a first-hand account of what happened from his own point of view that's just it or what martin harris who was motivated to have an account that would please joseph and an account written in the scripture that would make joseph in the book of mormon look better or do you go with that one right yeah charles anthony's accounts do change too so i mean that's why it gets a little messy but again the fact that you can see the visit being written directly into the book of mormon as it's happening on the outside tells you that joseph smith is using it as a way to back to back data prophecy into an ancient writing so that he can claim it's fulfilled um by the production he is now going to use to convert people it's a really effective uh tool i would i would argue um because i've heard that um when i joined as a believer i heard that as as a fulfilled prophecy of the book of mormon and you don't think at the time like well of course it's in the book of mormon because it was literally happening at that time as he's writing it um but you know i didn't know that at the time and so when you once you start to pick up these pieces you know again as i mentioned fingerprints those are fingerprints he's leaving on the text that you don't really pick up unless you're kind of digging into this a little bit more and kind of seeing kind of how it's being composed and when it's being composed right and the last one here is just um joseph smith having um his father's dream as lehi's dream um which is uh going to have a ton of similarities we'll cover but you know again that's that's a dream that his father's going to have in the you know the 1820s or whatever 18 i think it's the 1820s early 1820s so that's going to be something that could not have been an ancient time um he's going to write in a lot of stuff about the translation of the book of mormon like who's going to translate it and you know he writes himself into there you know joseph son of joseph a choice here all that stuff and so he's writing in a lot of the a lot of the things that are happening to him personally uh directly into the text which tells you not only and i've mentioned this before but not only could the book of mormon not have been written before you know the 1820s but it's going to be couldn't be written by anyone but joseph right yeah all right what about the last 116 pages so we covered this um on our previous episode but you know again if joe and actually nemo covered this really well at the beginning but joseph smith was using a tight translation there would have been no issue at all with joseph smith re-translating the pages because the stone was so specific and so strict that it actually worked out quite well because you would actually when you read the accounts of the the tight translation it actually would be perfect it would if god truly planned for joseph to lose the pages the tight translation would have been the perfect plan because then god could have been like in his revelation joseph this is why i was so strict with the stone because i didn't want you to make any changes because you i knew you were going to have to redo it but instead we have the other end of it which is what nemo said which is now we have to require a loose translation so that joseph could basically replace the text without having to um make everything line up 100 equal and then this is why he says he's changing to the small plates because he needs a loose translation or else people would say just do it again and we covered this a lot in the last episode but this was one of those chances for joseph to prove himself a prophet and he couldn't do it because he knew that it wasn't a tight translation that he could not re replicate it 100 percent yeah yeah and then apologists are gonna say well uh god you know god didn't have him re-translate 116 pages because that would have taken away the need for faith and then i would say well then why did he have to provide the plates and show them to anybody at all right right yeah we covered this and plus if if he had reproduced identical uh transcripts people could have just said he had a copy somewhere like it just none of that makes sense yeah i mean there's it's just there's all sorts of problems and and you know i think nemo said at the beginning it's like these these apologetics only come because of the fact that there's these problems that now have to be solved these would not be issues nobody would be arguing the loose translation stuff if these problems were not all over the book of mormon yeah um and so we're kind of flipping here so now what we need to look at is what requires a tight translation and this is one where all the time you hear people say there's chiasmus in the book of mormon there's hebraisms it's in the book of mormon translation essay from the church and they're just saying this is evidence that joseph smith was translating the word of god and so it's true because if you want to claim chiasmus as a proof of the book of mormon being ancient you have to have a tight translation because if it's a loose translation then you're inadvertently admitting that joseph smith was capable of writing hebraisms into the text like the late war did at the same time and so this is why when i talk about how you have to be consistent if you want to say joseph was doing a loose translation when he was pulling all the king james material in the isaiah chapters all that other stuff and then you get to the the part where there's a chiasmus and you say oh nope here's where he was doing it tight and that's why that's why it's in there you can't have it both ways so either joseph smith was capable of being a co-author and therefore is capable of bringing hebraisms in from ancient texts like you know the late ward did or you know mimicking ancient texts or you have to say it was a tight translation that's why the chiasmus is there and we don't know how to solve all of the other problems that we've already covered in this episode it's just you can't you got to be consistent right and and again apologists want to always have it both ways yeah yeah okay so that and so then the next one is um when we talk about we talked about this earlier but you know when you look at the names of all the plants and animals and all the money that are unique to the book of mormon that has to come from a tight translation because if you're using a loose translation then it's just basically showing that joseph smith is trying to make up some words to make the book of mormon seem unique and so you know we've got the kerlom and kumam we've got all of the plants we got metal and the money is important because the money is mentioned i think like one time and then it's referenced in the sermon on the mount which is the sermon at the temple which is the sermon on the mount and then it never is mentioned again but he does introduce you know the c9 and all this money stuff into the text and so and then you also have the words we covered this in our other episode liahona deseret which have no ancient or modern connection so they're and they're both used prominently obviously in church materials and so if you have a loose translation the only way these appear in the text is if joseph smith is just making words up as he goes to try to make it sound more you know ancient and you know as we talked about earlier like the apologetic response is to say that joseph smith was given the specific names um during the visionary or relevant revelatory process but if you want to do that you have then have to say well then why was joseph smith not given the correct names for what what was accounted as horses elephants steel and all that and so you know it's again it's just about consistency because here you'd have to have a tight translation to have all of these specific names but if you want to claim that then you got to figure out the other side as well nemo anything you want to add there yeah i'm being encouraged to jump in i think i think the it links to the hebraisms quite well in that if you can't etymologically track any of these words back to the kind of hebrew origins of the peoples of the book of mormon you know language doesn't just appear right we don't know a lot about this was it reformed egyptian and why it was reformed egyptian and not hebrew and we've covered that but languages don't just appear out of nowhere they develop over time over hundreds and thousands of years so etymologically speaking you would be expecting these words to have hebrew origin and that would work for a loose translation because you know joseph would have just taken them from hebrew scripts or from hebrew texts or whatever right biblical sounding things instead he's had to make some words up or you know these words have come out of nowhere and so where else would they have come from but a tight translation yep yeah that's a problem yep and i look forward to that those episodes yeah i think they'll be i think they'll be really helpful because again we're we're kind of laying down the foundation here for the next few episodes on some of the stuff and i think when we get to those episodes if you've watched this one it'll it'll make a lot more sense especially when you're trying to figure out how it fits into the bigger picture yeah so this next one this is the one i kind of hinted at earlier and so here's a single uh verse in ether and it says and they also had horses and asses and there were elephants in keralams and kumons all of which were useful to man unto man and more especially the elephants and the kurlums and the kumons and so if you want to argue a tight translation or you want to argue a loose translation this verse has anachronisms at the beginning and then the very specific ones at the end and so you'd have to have before standpoint because we know there were no horses in mesoamerica or any of america during the book of mormon time period nor elephants yeah um if there were horses or elephants or anything like it it was like during the pleistocene era like 18 000 you know bce and this is this is acknowledged by like every archaeologist and anthropologist everywhere and we can refer people to the michael ko um episodes of mormon stories podcast where yale there's two of them actually where a yale anthropologist archaeologist will confirm these things and so on the one hand you've got the anachronistic animals and on the other hand he's coming up with whole cloth made up names right yeah i mean like and again you know i don't want to be facetious here but it would almost be like he's got his face in the hat and he's like i see a horse okay and horses he's like okay and donkey and asses and then he sees that what looks like an elephant and allison he sees something that would look like so like a dragon or unicorn yeah and he's like what the crap is that and then all of a sudden he has to go to the rock and then the rocks like it's a kerlom and he's like oh it's a kerlum and akumam and i'm not trying to be facetious i'm just saying like from an apologetic standpoint you have to have joseph smith literally switching mid-sentence to go to go to a different translation method and again this goes against all of the accounts we have but more importantly it just like it makes no logical sense that you would have mid-sentence a flip from anachronistic animals to animals no one's ever heard of throughout the history of mankind it just shows how when you try to have it both ways with these translation methods in this one verse you got to go both ways and that's just really difficult for me to get behind in any like intellectually consistent or logical way but then you've got joseph's worldview and this idea that we've spoken about before of him not thinking anyone's gonna be able to prove him wrong yeah through archaeological evidence or whatever yeah in his mind well we know what elephants are we know what horses are we know asses are they all existed but there were also these animals called cure alums and commons that people don't know what they are and they're this fantastical thing whatever they might be and they don't exist in the archaeological record anywhere and no one can identify what those things are but the the only sort of putting my apologist hat on way to explain it is that there are these animals that existed that no one knows anything about and that is what they were called modernly as well as anciently but no one can find them anywhere no one knows what they are no one knows what they did or what class phylum genus whatever they were no one knows any of that stuff that's the only sort of apologetic argument i can think of or that god is making it confusing intentionally so that we are required to have faith yeah yeah of course that's always one argument yeah it's just like i said it's just one of those things where it's like to what nemo said i think a lot of the times he in his head i don't think he's ever thinking like this is going to be fact check someday because back then you know they didn't they couldn't hop on google you know and it's one of those things and again i want to go off tangent but people will say what will my ancestors think if i were to read ldsdiscussions.com or watch mormon stories and because of that i learned that the truth claims of the mormon church are demonstrably false by the evidence what would my ancestors who walked across the plains and some of them died got injured whatever what would they think they'd be so ashamed if i gave up on the church after everything they gave and my argument always says i think if your ancestors are good people they would be like i am so glad that you have the information we did not have and that you could look up the information we could never have access to to learn that this stuff is not what we thought it was and we're so glad that you are able to now use your critical thinking use that brain that god gave you and use the evidence that you have access to to find this out and so you know i just i always hate that argument of like well you know it would make what would it say about your ancestors because to me i think your ancestors would be proud of you for being able to jump outside of the box look at the evidence that they didn't have and make better decisions than they could have because they didn't have it and this is just again non-stop examples that we do in these episodes to show that there's all of these problems that they would have had no idea existed because as nemo said at the time joseph smith was well aware that nobody was going to be able to fact check what he was doing especially from a textual standpoint yeah it reminds me of a thought-terminating cliche i hear regularly we see through a glass darkly yeah and the people in the 1830s 40s 50s did see through a glass darkly you know there's no denying that they had far less information at their fingertips than we do now we have so much information and so that phrase we see through a glass darkly does not apply to modern members of the church yeah because there is no reason for our glass to be dark we have access to so much information and so all it is at this point is a thought-terminating cliche designed for people looking into things yeah 100 yeah that's right and so um now to kind of circle back to the beginning this is a different fair mormon page and i didn't see this when i did the overview so i don't know if they added this because like i said that first page i didn't see this is the page now and it says um this is part of it so i think um i think this is the bulk of it but i think there might be a little bit extra but it says some readers of the book of mormon have become concerned with issues that might in their view preclude the view that the translation of the book of mormon was given word for word directly by god such as the presence of language from the king james bible in the text such a view that the translation was a tight one was expressed it was expressed by early witnesses to the translation but joseph's own view of revelation appears to be more nuanced and allow for some flexibility in this regard we read in dnc 124 behold i am god and have spoken it these commandments are of me and were given unto my servant in their weakness after the manner of their language that they might come to understanding thus joseph's model of revelation is one in which god could use things such as the king james language as the means to the end of establishing his everlasting covenant and calling his children to repentance this theology of translation may feel strange to some latter-day saints that might only accept the view that a translation provided by god can only be a formally equivalent word for word rendering of the reformed egyptian into english god using this instance as an example recognized the divine potential of joseph smith and chose to respect his agency he worked in cooperation with joseph instead of merely subjecting his mind to the revelation to get his message out to his children and this is just a mess why are nemo and eyeballs shaking our heads i i can say it perfectly in a sentence you want to talk about taking things out of context this is a massive taking something out of context that verse is talking about the commandments given in doctrine of covenants yep it's not talking about the book of mormon so that does not answer why the book of mormon has king james language and is in the language of joseph smith et cetera et cetera because he's talking about the revelations for the book of commandments as it was then yeah it's just such a straw man it's yeah i mean it's so dishonest and um so when i read that the first thing i did because i thought the same thing i'm like i don't think they were talking about the book of mormon in that verse so if you go to the next slide that was my first thought too it's like they're intentionally taking that verse and basically redefining what god is god is specifically saying he's giving the commandments to joseph in the language joseph understands in other words god is saying i'm giving the commandment my commandments to joseph in english so that he'll understand what i'm trying to get him to do he is not in any way talking about the translation of the book of mormon and so to claim that joseph's view is nuanced is deceptive because they're using an example that has nothing to do with the translation to say that joseph's own view is nuanced but joseph in no way is is giving any indication of any nuance or any exit ramp to a loose translation and i i just you know again to say that god respected joseph agency and allowed him to operate as a co-author of the book of mormon and also undercuts their claim that joseph was incapable of writing the book of mormon because they're basically saying joseph smith was capable so god let him do it right and so they're misusing the dnc verse and then they're also kind of inadvertently admitting that joseph smith was capable of of being a co-author and writing the book of mormon i think those are two really important things that that are noted and seeing you guys both shake your head may feel better because i thought the same thing i'm like this is just bad apologies mike in my in my anger and frustration almost i i stole your fun your thunder there no no no no actually i'm glad you did because i think the fact that you caught that it makes mike feel validated it does it makes me feel better because when i i had to think about it for a second i had to double check to make sure i wasn't thinking about it wrong so i saw that i'm like i don't think he's talking about the translation the book of mormon so for both of you to shake your head right away because you picked up on that it just shows that when you read apologetics so if you're a believing member and you read that page unfair you'll probably kind of nod your head and go cool because you're not going to think about like do i need to fact check what they're doing but from a critical standpoint you know they want you to critically look at everything i would write or that you would do on a podcast so john would do on a podcast or ces letter and yet they put up something here which is just so blatantly out of context and just misused and you know and if you call them out on it then of course they would say well some critics think you know it's just no this is misleading this is straight up misleading and it's just horrible to see them do it in a way that you know believing members are going to read and think is true and you know it's one of the reasons that you see people say um a lot of people say that the ces letter really puts stuff on the shelf but that fair mormon or apologetics broke it because you go to fair mormon and then they have to admit a lot of it's real and then the secondary part is when you go to fair mormon and you think okay they have answers i'm okay right now so you put on the shelf like i have some answers but then when you find out fair mormon's lying or being misleading your shelf comes crashing down because then not only do you know that the problems are there but you know that the apology apologists in the church are willing to deceive you to keep you from looking deeper and these are apologies at the church fund these are people that are on the payroll of the church they're on the payroll at byu or there's shadow donors that that uh you'll support the 501c3s or you know there's always dark money under the table money that we don't even know about so yeah for people that think that fair mormon isn't supported officially by the mormon church that's just the church wanting an arm's length plausible deniability but it's not uh it's not credible it's it's not honest you know yeah we just look at where the way they said on the last um side in their answer where they said that uh in their view phrases like that really wind me up because it basically it it's saying well in their opinion or yeah it's very dismissive of the legitimacy of the issues that people are bringing to light it's just saying oh well these this is just what these people think it's like no no these are the facts and i want you to address them please yeah yep yeah it's just it's one of those things where it's like the whole when you frame it and again i know we're framing these these episodes as here's where critics say here's apologists say i get that but it's like the way that they use those words like in the dna episode we did it's the same thing where it's like whenever it's about science they use these really these these words that aren't outright like fighting words but they're words that try to basically like kind of kind of kick you a little bit to make the reader know that you shouldn't trust these studies and it's like by doing so you're trying to poison the well just enough and so in this case it's like you know and some readers in their view have a problem with the book of mormon's translation almost like saying like if you're reading this page and you are a believing member and you have a problem with the book of mormon translation that problem is you not the book of mormon and it's just it's the way that i think sometimes when you bring up problems in church and you're shut down it's because nobody like you know i always think of like apologetics as like the last stand like um nemo this might be a little foreign to you but for football in america not not what you call it not that that that uh soccer stuff you call football over there it's like you've got this guy with the ball and apologists are like the last line to tackle you before you get in the end zone and then you kind of graduate from mormonism you know and so it's just like um it just feels like they're doing anything they can to keep you from crossing that line to looking beyond the correlated material or what they want to give you and into your point by by labeling it like in their view it's almost like telling you as a reader if you have a problem with this you got to look at yourself first because you now they're now putting you directly in the line with critics which as a reader if you're a believer you're going to read that and go oh crap yeah people who have that view are you know halfway out of the church or whatever i think that's intentional maybe it's not it just feels like it's intentional it's a little bit of a scare tactic it is yeah and i've i've been on record for many many years just with the only authority of having personally corresponded with tens of thousands of mormons who went through a faith crisis over the past 20 years so many people have left the church because the apologetics because of fair mormon because of the maxwell institute because of farms because if you nibbly uh because of uh saints unscripted uh you know midnight mormons their apologetics have been so insulting so disingenuous or the gospel topics essays themselves have been so disingenuous so dishonest or just insulting to people's intelligence that it it was just like this red flag that the church was was fraudulent and hiding something well and it's like you know i hate using analogies for all this stuff but it's like you know it's when you have a like a spouse and you're kind of suspicious your spouse is either cheating on you or they're hiding money issues whatever the case might be and you find a clue or two that you think they are and then they tell you like a lie and they're like no um you know that that that hotel receipt was not because i was with another woman it's because i actually had lunch with a business partner and you go in the back your head you're like okay i'm okay but then when you find the next one then all of a sudden you're like okay now i know that they're willing to deceive me in order to keep me in and i feel like with apologetics that's the thing because like when i like i've mentioned this before but when i read the ces letter and then i info dumped them on my wife and again i can't tell people enough that is the worst way to do it and and i regret doing it that way but um she asked me to read the fair mormon response when i read the fair mormon response i actually had a bunch of moments where i'm like you know what they're making really good points and the cs letter is wrong and i that was um kind of not enough to get me to believe again because there was still enough that they admitted to so i was like i don't believe it's true but i can see why a believer can read the ces letter and then refer mormon's response and stay involved because the apologetics were really effective in some areas when i read it but it was when i read through it a second time and then i read jeremy's response to them and then you start seeing what they're not telling you and that's when all of a sudden you go they're willing to deceive they're willing to cut out quotes they're willing to misuse footnotes to tell you something that is not honest and that's when all of a sudden you go from you know thinking that they're trying to and i'm not saying they're intentionally lying i think sometimes they just they're competitive they feel like they need to keep you in but regardless the tactics being used are just as bad as everything the accused critics are doing and once you realize that and you start to see how they're using quotes and footnotes and all that that's when it opens you up to being willing to go further out and as you go further out you realize it doesn't get better for church history it gets worse and i'm a couple years into this now and i'm still learning stuff we're like i had no idea that existed and it's because the further out you go you start coming across new new trails to go down and like i said i'm rambling of it but it's just it's the fact is they try to stop you from going down those paths and once you finally give yourself permission to do it it just it starts to fall apart fast do anything to that nemo yeah just that it seems the ends justify the means yeah from their leaders as well as apologists and they're that they're taking their lead from men that will lie if they believe that it will promote enough faith to keep people in you know they take their lead from people like balor who say we've never tried to hide anything from anybody they'll take their lead from rashem nelson who will tell a story about a plane crash that didn't happen because it promotes faith they'll take the lead from jeffrey r holland who will say that we've created x number of stakes that growth is the biggest problem we have and then you actually find out that over that time period no new stakes were created or that mitt romney you know never would have performed the blood oath in the temple right yeah yeah all that sort of right they're taking their lead from these men i believe it was down they jokes that said to them to church apologists at a dinner or a lunch that was paid for by the church he said not having an answer to these questions lets people leave having an answer even if it's not a good one will help people stay and that's the gist of what he said to them yeah so fair's job is to provide an answer they don't really it's not their prerogative for that answer to be consistent or logical or helpful or multiple one how about multiple contradictory answers yeah yeah you want you want to take the whack-a-mole analogy that renlund used right when he was saying that you know people that dig into church history are just playing spiritual whack-a-mole actually apologists generally are the ones that are playing whack-a-mole because this whenever a new issue pops up we have no regard for where the last one popped up they'll just deal with that one yeah and then that's just it then the next one and then the next one and i'll just say to reiterate something that we've mentioned a few times here for me personally when i came upon something like book of mormon translation uh i would realize that it was problematic and i would and i would always think well but you know maybe maybe in this case the apologist apologist arguments are credible or there's something that i don't understand but then when you add to it the fact that the book of abraham translation has now been shown to be a complete fraud when you and there's no no egyptologist alive who's credible or objective that would disagree with that reference to the robert rittner episode on mormon stories podcast and then when you add to that the anachronisms that michael coe or others would testify to and then when you add to that the kinderhook plates and the fact that joseph declared uh plates that we now know were made to fool joseph smith joseph smith actually tried to translate them believing that they were authentic and then you add to that the problems with the first vision story and you add to that the 100 you know and you start lining up and the treasure digging and then the polyandry and the peop you know um and the racism like it's not just any of these isolated issues it's adding them all up where it's just like how how many different problems do we need to see before we realize that you know there's a big problem bigger problem yeah and then that's the whole problem with the tight versus loose right like into your point from a second ago one thing i didn't add in here which i i was going to and i kind of was thinking maybe kind of trickier for this episode is we are told in the book of mormon that god changed the skin of the lamanites dark so they would be unenticing to the white and delight some nephites right and so do you believe it's a tight translation and god's telling that directly or do you believe it's a loose translation and joseph smith is putting a racist worldview into the book of mormon and that again creates more issues because if you want to believe it's a loose translation then you got to wonder you know to to fair mormon's point that god trusted joseph well then god still owns the racism in the book of mormon those things are all interconnected to these problems it's not like you know i keep saying this over and over but these problems apologists want to take them in isolation because it's a little easier if you do that to just apply what you know throw the spaghetti at the wall see what sticks and then you got another problem look at a different wall you throw more spaghetti you see what sticks but you have to be um reconcile these things with each other and it just shows that that's why the tight versus loose when i listened to the john larson's podcast like adrian well i listened to a few years ago he did eight or nine years ago he it just illustrates and we kind of cover that here you can't have it both ways and if you can't have it both ways the book of mormon cannot survive because you have to have it both ways and it just shows that the further you go into these these these topics that we're doing they just compound upon each other they're not all isolated they're just go they're stacking on each other and at some point the weight of all of these things being stacked boom boom boom it just falls you can't from an apologetic standpoint you can only carry that so far before people will look at it and go oh wait you you used one apologetic here but now you're trying to say that it's a completely different thing and if you do that then we got to go back to this first problem and now you've now you've unsolved that one it's a mess and it just it just keeps going and i did 39 topics and i had like five or six more i still want to do because every time you start to look at these things you see a new problem that really is rooted in these same issues and it just never ends and so to to claim that you can make it work both ways and in this final slide kind of just illustrates what we've said these are key issues these are not small complaints these are not nitpicking it's not the a lot of time apologists will say what is the phrase swatting at gnats and swallowing camels or whatever it is and um you know these are big issues and so you know if you want to claim a loose translation then all of a sudden you have to also admit joseph smith was capable of writing or dictating the book of mormon and if you want to claim a tight translation then you got to answer why all of these errors are in there that are very unique to joseph smith's time and so the whole point of this episode is to say from an apologetic standpoint you have to choose a lane stay in it and then you have to acknowledge what the implications are based on what lane you decide to go with or you're dishonest and misleading people yeah or you're playing playing games yeah or you're playing games and if you want to play games obviously they're going to do that and like i said earlier i think some people i i've met some people online who are a couple apologists that people know the name of and they've messaged me and you can tell that there is a competitive edge to them like they want to win they want to they want to win that argument as opposed to just being honest and i'm not saying that um they're horrible people i'm just saying that sometimes we all have our own we all have motivation some people might have motivations to raise and rise in the ranks of the church some might want to get book deals some might want to get a job doing firesides for the church some might just want to be able to say i am beating people down online that are criticizing the church but the point is whatever your motivation is if your apologetic responses are inconsistent or misleading then they deserve to be called out and members deserve to know what the evidence says whether it's good or bad and the thing i'll we'll end with because i think this is something that's super important is if the mormon church is true if the truth claims of the mormon church are true if the truth claims of the book of mormon are true no no one that believes has anything to fear in reading what i wrote or watching these episodes listening to more nemo's podcast if it's true you have nothing to fear if it's not true you deserve to know the only person that has any reason to fear the lds discussions overview or nemo or john is the church because if their truth claims can hold withstand scrutiny then literally it'll speak for itself and if they can't then that's their problem it's not my problem it's not nemo's problem it's not your problem yeah if we have what's the quote i'm gonna butcher it but yeah if we have the truth it cannot be harmed by investigation if we have not the truth it ought to be hard yeah that's the one yeah i think yeah i mean it's just it is what it is and the funny thing is those quotes used to be used what like 30 40 years ago they would use those quotes and then all of a sudden the internet comes out and the tanners get more more traction and all of a sudden they switch from telling members hey if we have the truth no worries to guys uh don't trust outside sources uh like you mentioned the redlands uh you know they had that redlands devotional to the youth and they're calling people who leave the church snake oil salesmen spiritually bankrupt you know weekend hacks all these things because they're trying to poison the well because now they know and again i don't want to go on a rant here i know we're trying to avoid those but it's just like when you talk about apologetics and in this case the type versus loose is so heavy and apologetics it just it really illustrates how they are willing to use whatever method they need to use for these individual problems and then when you when you you can never get them take that step back and say if you want to take that approach here what about here because they will not talk to people like us in a public setting and so it's just frustrating because you pointed out to believers and a lot of believers are being in this tug of war and it shouldn't be that it just shouldn't be like that it should be like here's what we have the church like you know you know to end with like a car claim you know if you went to a car dealership and you went to the dealer and the salesperson said i got this great car and you're like can i take it for a test drive he's like no just look at the outside how does it make you feel you'd never buy that car and that's what the church is it's like they always tell you like don't focus on the evidence focus on your feelings and at some point if you don't have the truth then you can't keep telling people to be afraid of it i it just that's what kind of bothers me because it's always uh shifting the blame onto the members who actually are willing to go out and research these things as opposed to looking inward and saying why have we been giving such an inaccurate depiction of our history for this long and if the answer is to why is because you know people won't join if that's the case you have to have a reckoning with that because you cannot keep doing this and then being upset when people like me who is you know nobody can put this together for a lot of people because the problem the reason i can put it together is because it's out there and they know about it and i will shut up now and it's worse than just providing inaccurate information it's providing inaccurate information when you know better and then excommunicating anybody that tells the truth about the problems right yeah yeah all right well that's why i think this lds discussion series and your work mike is so important i asked brooklyn today to create a playlist so that you could go onto youtube and just watch them in succession and binge watch them so that's going to be awesome we're also creating time codes uh in youtube so that if you want to jump to different parts of this episode you'll be able to do that while you're in youtube and mike i can't thank you enough for all your research and your passion and your willingness to spend time with us uh to teach us and thank you so much nemo it's always so much fun to talk to you and and uh glad you could come on today and nemo tell everybody really quickly what your channel is all about nemo the mormon is about fact-checking the church i've got a particular be in my bonnet at the moment about the leaders being dishonest uh there's a particular focus on that current living leaders we're not digging into the past we're looking at the men that your family and you if you're a believing member sit and listen to twice a year and if not more and you'd look to them for guidance and they claim to speak directly for god so big claim they need to be able to back that up so i look into it and it's nemo the mormon on instagram tiptop youtube and we'll provide a link to your youtube channel in our show notes yeah all right thanks gentlemen thank you so much yeah and thanks to all our listeners and viewers who support us today and every day on mormon stories podcast we could not do this with your without your support so if you value this program if you value this series uh with mike uh about lds discussions we need your support to keep it going if you go to mormonstories.org click on the donate button become a monthly donor uh 10 bucks a month 20 bucks a month hundred bucks a month whatever you can afford we're transparent in our finances uh it's tax deductible in the us and every dollar that we raise goes to supporting our costs our facilities our staff our labor and everything every month we lose donors that either lose interest or decide to switch their support to something else or they fall on financial hard times and if we don't replace the donors that we have each month then over time we have to start cutting services and eventually cut back so if you value this content if you want to see it continue if you want to help other people and join our our supporters please become a monthly donor today and we'll keep doing 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