Anachronisms in the Book of Mormon

hello everyone and welcome to another edition of mormon stories podcast i'm your host john dulin we are super excited for you to be joining us um in the middle of this really important series uh on mormon church truth claims with mike from lds discussions uh the main topic for today in our series is going to be anachronisms in the book of mormon this is a topic that's near and dear to my heart four reasons we'll go into in just a second but i just want to state at the outset uh again remind everyone what the series about the series is about informed consent it's basically people make really important decisions in their lives uh in terms of their relationship with the mormon church and we just believe that everyone deserves to really understand the evidence and the truth about the church so that they can make their own informed decisions we're not here to take people's faith away we're not here to tear down the church we're not here to attack the church we just want people to make informed decisions because we believe in truth and we love truth and our partner in this series is of course mike hey mike so glad you could join us yeah it's good to be back and um i think this will be a good one because we're gonna i think touch upon stuff people might have heard and going to some stuff that you might not have and um i think give more of a well-rounded kind of look at how anachronisms impact the book of mormon absolutely and for those who don't know mike is the founder and the main author on a really important website called lds discussions you can find him at ldsdiscussions.com he also has a tick tock channel i'm sure you do instagram as well right yeah just basically mostly like twitter and instagram and just you know we don't it's not nearly as active but i think um hopefully uh just trying to um get you know just some of these kind of info out in a way hopefully that's a little bit more um accessible to people especially when you're just starting to have questions sometimes it's nice to have some uh areas where you can go to up right my goal is to have it where you don't feel like you're being kind of ambushed with this stuff and and i know that's hard so i'm sure it's it's not maybe feeling that way for some people but that's the goal is to try to do it in a way i think that maybe you'll be more uh helpful in in and gentle even though it still is really difficult to go through all of this yeah beautiful all right well we've covered um we've covered a ton so far about joseph smith about the book of mormon and today this is kind of one of the most common and important concerns about the authenticity of the book of mormon we all know that the church has kind of really been explicit about the book of mormon they've called it the keystone of our religion and by saying that it means it's like referring to an architectural structure like an arch if the keystone falls then the arch falls and that's the church's framing not ours we've also heard like president gordon b hinckley say either the book of mormon is everything you know it claims to be or it's the biggest fraud perpetrated on the earth now there are progressive and liberal mormons that feel like you can still value scripture bible or book of mormon even if it's not historical or literal so we'll give room for that here but but it is important to sort of address the fact that that this is the way the mormon church leaders have framed it for a long time and that's that's why we think this is an important subject so yeah so mike uh what is an anachronism that's a that's a five dollar word can you can you set it up and give us the explanation for it yeah just basically for anyone who hasn't really come across this yet uh the idea of an anachronism is just something whether it's an item an idea a historical data point that is out of time or place and so um this picture here is basically supposed to be soldiers like in world war ii with a cell phone drinking diet coke they've got harry potter it's just pointing out that if you were to see this picture and someone said this was something from world war ii you could immediately know it's not a historical depiction because of the fact that they have multiple items here that we know did not come around until much later and so uh basically this is the same kind of idea we would use for the book of mormon which is to say when you look at the text of the book of mormon does it have clues on it on its pages that tell us that it is being written from the perspective of someone much later who would know about ideas and items uh that the book of mormon people would not have had access to yeah so as you're as you believing or questioning mormons or reading the book of mormon you need to ask yourself was it written anciently or was it written by a 19th century semi-educated farm boy and that's that's that's a question that church leaders ask and it's fair and uh the point that i wanted to just add this is kind of my own slide you've all heard me reference kind of this idea that if you found a photo of abraham lincoln where he's holding you know an iphone um you know where where it says that he's sharing his selfie on facebook you you would know that it's not an authentic photo um the point that i think is really important is we're going to be talking about literally dozens and dozens and dozens of really blatant anachronisms today in the book of mormon but the point i wanted to drive home with this abraham lincoln photo is just that it only takes one one anachronism to render a document uh you know a historical or inauthentic it just takes one so please remember that if everything else about the document is 100 authentic you know regarding abraham lincoln but it's got one iphone in it it's inauthentic and so um keep that in mind if people don't like that framing you know we'd love to understand more um all right so let's let's go and begin uh mike with sort of the big list which is the list of the most commonly known most blatant examples of anachronisms in the book of mormon yeah and so basically this is going to be um something that if you've researched this issue before you're going to see these kinds of lists and so um one of the things that we wanted to do with today is to kind of cover some of these and then cover some of the areas that maybe haven't been touched on in some of like the csl and all that but the point is that when you look at this and we're going to cover the apologetics at the end of the episode so you know don't think we're not going to um mention kind of the response apologetics would give but you know there are a lot of especially when you talk about physical things that are in the book of mormon that were believed to have been um here in the 19th century when it was composed and so you're going to see them throughout the book of mormon such as steel swords the brass plates the golden plates basically smelting the ability to do metal working which we know was there's no evidence of that in the americas and because it requires so many people requires so many materials it requires the blast furnaces all of these things have not been found and so it requires mines it requires mines that there's there would be evidence of the extraction of these heavy metals and then you can find um in the soil you can find tracings of the metal working that having been done and so all of that stuff is just not here and then you know we get into the animals you've got you know the horses which is obviously the big one you've got um you know chariots an elephant sheep the wheat and barley is is another area where it gets really muddy when you start talking about that but again when we and we'll get to this near the end these are things that we can test uh through for animals you can look at like their dna you can look at fossils for wheat and barley you can actually look at pollen pollen leaves a lot of traces to where it came from when it was planted um and then when you get into stuff like um you know the highways and the cement and the fortifications those get a little more generic and even in this particular list they're going to say yeah those happened but again in those instances you're going to notice that those are things that are going to be very common to most civilizations you know throughout the world that you're going to see um and then on on the right side for those who are watching you've got some of the stuff that we'll get into a little more which is just to say you know the book of mormon has a reformed egyptian script which is an act i don't know if i would call it anachronistic as much as there's just no evidence that ever happened um greek names that are in the book of mormon they have no access to greek um you know and then you get into some of the stuff like talking about um the different kinds of money that they would have used um the book of mormon creates a monetary system very briefly um and those so all of these things together are problematic and one of the things that i've talked about in these overviews is to say and from an apologetic standpoint they'll take each of these one by one and they'll try to explain how it could work or in some instances they will there are instances where even fair will say yeah there's no evidence for this and they'll call it kind of like indeterminate because you know we don't know um but what i would say is when you take these things in totality and you start looking at them all together it paints a picture that tells us that this the book of mormon's text is pointing to a 19th century origin because of the fact that includes so many things that were thought of in the 19th century that just simply um were not there um in the ancient americas and while we can always use the apologetic of the evidence is just around the corner um the fact is we have a lot of underlying things that we're going to get into that tell us that the material this these ideas are coming from is anachronistic and that is where i think it gets kind of like that second level below with anachronisms where it's not just the items it's the ideas it's the source material when you add all those things together it's it's really telling us strongly that whatever you want to say about whether or not the book of mormon maybe had an ancient core at some point as we have it today it is a 19th century text yeah and just to really put a fine point on it you know for those of you who are just brand new to this topic just to take the example of horses if you look at joseph smith's day in the early 1800s horses are everywhere horses are used to farm and to travel and pull pulled carriages and and it's the main form of transportation even native americans by the 1800s had gotten horses were riding around on them so joseph would have just assumed that horses had been in the americas for as long as as people had lived on the americas and even before but what joseph wasn't remembering is that prior to the conquistadors coming over in the 14 1500s 1600s to colonize and conquer the americas horses were never here so the aztecs the mayas mayans the incas they had no cows they had no horses they had no sheep none of this livestock and um they didn't have a lot of the european foods like wheat and barley and other things that would have been brought over by uh the you know by the colonists uh by the pilgrims and by those who traveled and so joseph is just basically saying what are the animals and food that i see all around me it must be that they've always been here and um and and that's why that's why when you see horses allegedly you know being ridden and used between 600 bc in the americas and 400 a.d in the americas that's a that is equivalent to abraham lincoln having an ipad and it's not there or an iphone and it's not just horses it's again like you said steel swords brass plates irons silk cows horses donkeys goats elephant sheep and and if you don't want to believe us and we we literally don't want you to believe us what i one of the most one of the things i'm most um proud of in my entire history of mormon stories was that we reached out to michael coe dr michael koh he is he was the late dr michael cohen he passed away i believe last year he was the world's expert on mesoamerican archaeology and anthropology at yale university there literally is no one in the world who knows more about the native american peoples during the book of mormon times in central america than michael coe and so what we did is we just brought him on a mormon story's podcast and we literally went through this list um and and we would say you know were there still swords he'd say no we're is there evidence of brass plates no golden plates no smelting no iron no silk no steel no and he validates every one of these points so please don't take our word for it go to the show notes click on the interview with dr michael ko it's absolutely one of the top three most important mormon stories interviews of all time and uh mike i really like that you caught um when you listened to this interview what for me was also one of the most profound um uh learnings from the episode because michael code doesn't just tell us about the things that are in the book of mormon that shouldn't be there he also talks to us about the things that existed during you know mesoamerican ancient times things that we know were in mesoamerica at the time that don't show up in the book of mormon do you want to talk about that really really quickly yeah and so just to kind of extend onto that you know i highly recommend those interviews if you haven't listened to them because for me that was um when i first started doing the deep dive just hearing some of the historical stuff helped me to try to kind of figure out some of these issues and so dr koh was really good because of the fact that not only was he one of the you know top experts in the world on the mayan civilization but he had had a lot of interactions with um the kind of historians and archaeologists and all that from the mormon church and because that it got him not just being able to use his own expertise but to use um kind of his interactions with that to understand kind of the book of mormon as well and what the problems would be and so he is someone who can give a lot of insight on that because he also not only has the the expertise but kind of the understanding of what the beliefs are within mormonism to try to explain those better than if he was just talking without understanding what the book of mormon was in any way and so one of the things he pointed out that i think was really cool was when you talk about anachronisms and we're obviously going to spend most of this episode on that but in a lot of ways there's kind of like this almost like a reverse anachronism which are things you should see in the book of mormon um that are not there and so with the case of kind of like the mayans which is where a lot of people would put the book of mormon um time you know place now because of the fact that we have so much evidence it didn't happen like in north america um he talks about how they had no coinage system so they would trade in cacao beans as their source of currency which is something that i think is pretty well established yet in the book of mormon there's no mention of cacao beans whatsoever um while there are 28 references to grains um there's reference a few references to a monetary system and so the fact that the book of mormon is mentioning all these things around the people in the book yet not mentioning the things that would be around them historically is kind of like you know again like a reverse anachronism things that should be that are not and then um beyond you know talking about like the agriculture we have um you know you kind of look at we talk about the horses and the elephants that are not in um the ancient americas like um in in to john's point earlier not only were the horses that were in america much earlier like there were horses in america way earlier than the book of mormon times that they have fossils of but not during the book of mormon time and you'd also need them to be domesticated but um the book of mormon does not mention animals that are indigenous to the americas like wild turkey so again wild turkeys have been here the whole time and they've been you know very populous in our you know the area the book of mormon should have taken place and yet there's no mention of them in the book of mormon which would be really difficult to believe unless you're looking at it through the lens of taking a clean slate and saying where do all the clues point us to and in this case if you understand um it's a 19th century text then you might understand why there'd be no turkeys because why would you know joseph smith you know if we're going to assume he's the author why would he think about turkeys because they wouldn't really fit into the story but they are very important to the mayan civilization and that's where you start to to not only have anachronisms but you look at what should be there and both of those are telling us this is a 19th century text or at least a text that was not written at the time that it you know declares that it took place exactly yeah um and so uh that's the big list um just go to the michael co interview and and that's what you need to get confirmation about that and then later you mentioned at the very end we're going to sort of address fair mormon's apologetic response to this big list of anachronisms i don't want to lead with their response because i don't think it's a credible response um so so we'll give you that we'll give you that michael co interview and then you you all just listen to it and decide for yourselves and we'll address some of those concerns at the end so that's that's the big list and by the way we should probably mention right here that you know it isn't just modern critics you know in the past 10 or 20 years you know this these concerns didn't start with the ces letter um you know mormon think brought up these issues before and and the 1960s 70s and 80s and 90s within mormonism whether it's you know dialogue journal journal dialogue or sunstone you know scholars were talking about these anachronisms and book of mormon historicity from you know mormon scholars post-mormon scholars from the 1960s through the 1980s and 90s so this is old territory but it even is more significant than that at some point i believe mike we're going to cover bh roberts uh as its own episode is that right uh he's in other episodes he's not he's not in like his own episode but we do talk about him just because of the fact that we have some of the um you know areas where bh roberts started to see problems and was trying to address them so you know he will be mentioned in other episodes for sure yeah and i'll just for those of you who who want additional validation about anachronisms uh i'll be you know sharing in in the show notes these episodes with shannon caldwell montez she talks about uh the secret mormon meetings of 1922 where uh to kind of say it briefly uh church historian bh roberts who was a general authority for the church a very important leader in the church learns about this book called view of the hebrews starts uh applying my modern scientific methods to the book of mormon and comes up with this huge list of anachronisms and problems in the book of mormon uh that he determines are potentially deadly for the mormon church he shares them with the top leaders and kind of puts the entire mormon church leadership on notice as early as 1922 first presidency quorum of the twelve all the quorum of the seventy they have at least like a three-day meeting where all the church leaders are notified that the book of mormon has major anachronistic problems this goes way back and i just wanted to introduce the name bh roberts and introduce those shannon caldwell montez episodes in there because they are also some of the most important episodes in the mormon stories library that cover this issue of anachronisms true true mike yeah i mean in in her episodes are great because um natalie can you listen to the episodes or watch them um you know she's reading uh working off of her thesis papers i mean she's done a ton of research into this so it's not just again it's not sometimes people will try to say well you know shannon calamontes is just somebody who had an extra grind it's like no she put a lot of research into it she backs up what she's saying and so the fact is bh roberts did put these documents together and everyone can read them and while we can draw different conclusions as to what they mean that you know as john said these things are there these anachronisms are real and you can't just basically brush them to the side and say they're not important because they are important when the book of mormon and joseph smith and the church today makes very tangible truth claims and now you know our our knowledge throughout you know the last 200 years is almost parabolic you know i mean we we've learned so much more in the last say 30 or 40 years compared to the you know maybe the first hundred years of the book of mormon and because we've gained so much knowledge whether it's archaeology dna um linguistics migrations biblical scholarship is a huge one all of those things are were unknown to joseph smith but they are telling us um so much more about the truth claims of the of the church and you know that's why we're doing these episodes to try to say here's what i found here's where the here's where i'm drawing the conclusions here's what the apologists are saying because we're trying to give as well-rounded pictures you can give while also not allowing for you know people to push some of these things aside with you know um apologetics that don't fit with the truth claims that are being presented yep okay so that's that's um that's kind of the classic anachronisms that we chose not to delve into deeply today but we felt like it was really important to start with those introductions and it honestly got so bad with bh roberts that there's a there's good evidence that bh roberts lost his testimony of book of mormon historicity at the end of his life and there's a whole episode with shannon caldwell montes called did bh roberts lose his testimony of book of mormon authenticity or historicity so check out all that to dive deeply now mike what i really love is the rest of today's episode is going to be so many other really important anachronisms that we don't really think about but that are also just as significant and again it only takes one so i think we start with kind of the old testament time frame yeah and so yeah yeah this is this is good because this is again one of the things i want to do with this episode is to go beyond kind of the more common physical things and so this is where we're going to look at some areas where there are parts of the book of mormon that should not be there and so while we don't always think of them as anachronistic they absolutely are and as john said once you have one of these you know the text couldn't have been written when it claims to be and that is again when you have truth claims that tell us this is an ancient historical record and you've got anachronism after anachronism that tells us it could not have been written when it claims to be that that's it as far as that goes but again learning where the anachronisms come from not only tell us how you can date the text but it also gives us a lot of indications as to who wrote it and what they were what the world view was they were coming from and that's why these uh the rest of the presentation i think will be so important because it's going to tell us a lot not just about the book of mormon as far as its credibility as being a historical record but maybe about the miliew of the person who wrote it and obviously as we've done these previous overviews it's you know i believe it was joseph smith and i'm going to explain as we go through this why these anachronisms are so important to to note today okay so let's uh start with one so we're gonna do some old testament stuff before we do new testament stuff before we do 19th century stuff and we're gonna start with the old testament we're gonna start with the big one called deutero isaiah and i i know we're gonna dive deep into this yeah but but but for those who don't even unders there's going to be people who listen that don't even understand lehigh and the brass plates to then understand why deutero isaiah is a problem so back up a tiny bit and and give kind of the lehigh context for the brass plates that then inform the deuter isaiah discussion yeah so we're and we're going to cover this a lot in this little area in the old testament but basically you know the idea is that lehigh is going to leave with a set of brass plates and the brass plates is going to have like the five books of moses and other records with it and this is like this is at the very beginning of the book of mormon like in the first book first couple chapters of the book of mormon lehi's the prophet okay keep going yeah and so he's gonna leave with these brass plates and they're going to claim in the book of mormon to be referencing these black brass plates throughout and so the idea is that when you see all of those long long um rehearsals of isaiah in in the especially in the the replacement text of 116 pages which we talked about in second nephi mostly right yeah and so you're going to have like word for word almost with some small changes to isaiah that's going to go in the book of mormon and the idea is that they're reading off the brass plates that were taken with before they left and that the brass plates were available in that time and um and so because of that and i'll just say this is really important i mean the book of mormon by chapter three has nephi finding this drunken man named laban and he chops off his head to get these brass plates because according to a modern world view these these nephites and you know needed scriptures to be able to study to stay righteous right so that's what the brass plates were okay yeah and so you're bringing the brass plate so you don't forget where you came from you know so you can give that history and they've i think there's histories of genealogy all these things they're bringing with them so that they don't forget who they are and where they came from and so because of that isaiah is obviously in the bible is a very important book to a lot of people and it's where obviously it's referenced a ton people look for prophecies of jesus and they're all these things and so the book of mormon is going to quote from it extensively and the problem is that scholars can now because of being able to do more textual analysis can look at isaiah and they can actually pull different sections of isaiah where they believe they are written by different authors and the problem with that is that the book of mormon is going to take isaiah as if it's one book written by one guy written in one time and because scholars can point and say no these there's actually three authors of isaiah there's a deutero isaiah and a trido or trito i've heard to say both ways isaiah and the problem is that joseph smith would not have known at that time that isaiah was written by different authors but scholars today because we are so much more advanced in textual analysis and they have a lot more original material to work from original scrolls to look at they can look at chapters 40 through 55 and say that they're written by a second isaiah who was effectively producing pseudopigrapha which we've mentioned in previous episodes which is writing in the name of a prophet to give your own writings credibility and again we're going to do a whole episode on this once we get in the biblical scholarship but the idea is that lehigh leaves with these plates and just to be clear just to be clear timeline wise lehigh is allegedly according to the church leaving jerusalem around 600 bc so joseph smith would have thought well isaiah would have been written long before 600 bc so when he brought the brass plates he got from laban it would have just contained all of the book of isaiah because all of the book of isaiah would have predated 600 bc exactly and what you're saying is that now we know that a bunch of isaiah was written before 600 bc but that some of isaiah was written after lehi would have left jerusalem yes and yet that part written after lehi would have left jerusalem is still somehow appearing in the book of mormon as if lehigh would have carried it with him but he couldn't have yeah because it wasn't written yet because it wasn't it wasn't written yet and by the way the mormon church acknowledges all of this mormon mormon scholars acknowledge the deutero-isaiah problem yeah yeah i would say um you know again like david baccavoy's interviews on mormon stories he talks about a lot and i know he's he's written two um blog posts about it um and dan mcclellan who is a translation supervisor for the church he's conceded that there's multiple isaiah authors i i don't i mean of course there are scholars who are going to argue that it was all written by one isaiah but i'm just saying the overwhelming majority of scholars will tell you it was written by multiple and the problem is in the book of mormon um they include a lot of material from these chapters between 40 and 55 of isaiah and what makes it worse is that isaiah 52 is not only quoted in the book but it's revisited multiple times throughout the book so that when they reference sermons and stuff they keep referencing these these deutero isaiah chapters and so these chapters would not have been available to lehigh when he left and so to have them um being brought in from the brass plates is anachronistic because they wouldn't have had access to him so that tells you that whoever's writing the book of mormon is not aware of the fact that there are multiple isaiahs and that is again it's a huge problem and we'll do a whole episode on it but it's worth noting here that any use of those chapters of isaiah and those themes are used throughout the book of mormon are should not be there and the fact that they are there tells us it was not written when it claims to be all right so that's a really big one yeah and then kind of going what we went into earlier when we talk about reverse anachronisms this is some of the problems with the book of mormon is that they leave and remember they're jewish right they're not christians when they leave and yet all of a sudden they get to america and they're immediately christian and so it makes you wonder why a book that is purportedly ancient and coming from a background of people who are jewish would basically completely abandon all of their customs and immediately convert to a version of christianity which won't exist for you know like probably a thousand years because remember christianity evolves after jesus dies so you know they are doing things in the ancient americas that in the 19th century would make total sense but in the timeline of the book of mormon it makes no sense that when they get to america they don't mention passover they don't mention circumcision they don't mention observing the sabbath religious rights such as burnt offerings all those things just disappear and replaced with a christianity that just wouldn't have existed at that time because at that time no one knew who jesus was i mean there is absolutely no way to say that they could have known who jesus was in the book of mormon before anyone in the old world knew about jesus and yet the book of mormon reads like something that would be 100 familiar to someone in the 19th century yeah and if you think about joseph smith writing this book as a late teen you know early 20s he probably didn't know a lot about judaism so he wouldn't have been able to write in an informed way about judaism and and so if he's the author that's exactly what you would expect he knew protestant christianity he didn't know ancient judaism um well and of course the book of mormon kind of reflects that i think you're probably going to get to this later but it's also you would expect that if if um if native americans were practicing judaism from 600 bc to 400 a.d including knowing hebrew including reading scriptures written in hebrew because that's what the brass plates would have been written in and you know there would be evidence all over the place that number one they had a written language and and there's no evidence of hebrew language that's ever been found from the tip of north america to the tip a southern tip of south america no evidence of any knowledge of hebrew or like you said ancient jewish customs and there would have been evidence of that and there's just not yeah i mean like i said you could come up with all sorts of examples but it's just the idea that you would leave your um your homeland and take these records with you to preserve the beliefs you have and then get to a new place and abandon them it just doesn't make sense and you know the idea that maybe i've heard some people say well you know they're bridging these plates and so they bridge the plates and they say these things aren't important because they're no longer jewish when they're being a bridge and it's like i guess but then that but then like at that point again you're just you're getting into this area where it just feels so detached from history like even if you want to say they are christians when it's being a bridge and so they don't need to talk about it it just doesn't make sense because that would still have been a huge part of their life it would be you know like you know to put it more into terms of like you know people maybe who are watching this if you grew up mormon and you then all of a sudden released your journals to your kid and you left the church when you were 30 or 40 and then the first 40 years of your life you never mentioned your time in the church it would be a huge chunk of your life that you would just completely whitewash from it from it and it just it's one of those things where it doesn't pass the sniff test and as you said the fact that it's being written from someone with a 19th century christian methodist background of beliefs they wouldn't know those things they wouldn't be thinking in the back of their head about them because they didn't live that and so it makes more sense to say the author isn't writing him in not because he's trying to whitewash him from the history but just because he doesn't even think about it because that's never been part of his life yeah yep and i'll just say one last thing about languages only the only the mayans as i understand it had a written language the incas didn't have a written language and you know north the aztecs didn't have a written language and none of the north american native americans had a written language and my understanding about the advancement of languages in you know um you know in linguistics is that once a civilization you know writing is a major major advancement in accomplishment that that is the beginning of the marker of of a major jump in civilization and i don't think we have any evidence of any civilization ever developing writing and then losing it and so it just makes no sense that none of the north american tribes that they all their ancestors were all studying brass plates writing gold plates studying their scriptures knowing reading writing and speaking language and then all of a sudden two-thirds of all native americans or more just completely forget how to write and read any language at all yeah it's that that's true yeah you're getting the problems quick and that yeah that's just that's that's the problem and you know we we talked in our episode about gold plates about how they are anachronistic and we talked about the piergy plates and so those are the pictures on the right so if you watch that episode um you'll recognize those and you know one of the things that we talk about um in that episode is the gold plates that joseph smith is going to translate and how you would need about 6 000 plates based on how many words are on these piergy plates but we did not talk about the brass plates in the book of mormon and the brass plates are absolutely 100 anachronistic for a number of reasons and so that kind of makes it even worse for it to have the gold plates that joseph smith claims to translate off of but now we got a chance to talk about the brass plates and why those are anachronistic to the book of mormon along with joseph smith's claimed plates that he's translating off of for what we have today so you're going to address the question of would would lehi in would laban in jerusalem have had brass plates 600 years before jesus is that what you're about to answer okay yeah okay and so what we want to look at is um kind of piggybacking off of our conversation about the piergy tablets um because that is the most commonly cited apologetic response to say yep here's evidence of of ancient records on metal we talked about how there's only 200 words on the three plates and so what i want to talk about here is what we are told is on the plates of brass that are in the book of mormon and so this is from a 1998 enzyme article and they say although the information is sparse concerning the origin of the plates of brass the book of mormon is quite detailed on what the plates contained according to nephi the plates of brass contain the book of the books of moses in the mosaic law tying the nephites to their old world kinsmen in both cultural practice and belief they contained in addition a listing of lehi's father's back through joseph of old linking the lehigh colony genealogically with abraham isaac and jacob thereby perpetuating the patriarch patriarchal covenant the promises made to the fathers in a new hemisphere finally these plates contained a more extensive account of old testament peoples and events than the bible although only a few precious remnants of this account are found in the book of mormon so what they're telling you is they contain the five books of moses and then a whole bunch of other stuff and that's and that's kind of the takeaway here is to say these plates in the book of mormon contain a whole lot of stuff in a whole lot of um words of record and that's why this is such an important thing to note before we go on yep totally okay and and so um if we go to the next one um it's okay yeah there you go and so we've talked about this in previous episodes um there are a number of reasons why this is anachronistic but one of which is that the five books of moses or the pentateuch was not written as we have it today until the 6th century or 5th century bce which means that when lehigh left in 587 bce these five books outside of deuteronomy were likely not even composed at this point in the way we have them and so the point is even if lehigh did leave with some records containing these stories they would not resemble the the text that we have in the five books of moses that is used by joseph smith in the book of mormon and so even if you want to argue there's some version of these stories that are that's still being worked out through these communities it wouldn't look like it looks in the book of mormon and the fact that it does it look exactly like it appears in the king james bible tells us that's a huge problem and then complicating that even further is the idea of a codex which is basically to say a number of records bound together into a book form was not something that was even practiced until the 4th century bce or 4th century ce so basically the idea that you would have books like in this case brass plates that are bound together in one book is 100 anachronistic and at this point the only way these records were kept were on separate scrolls and as uh david bockway pointed out you know when you get to a book in the bible where it's like first and second it's not because they were like you know separate books it's because they had to go on two different scrolls because it was long enough and so um you've got two right away um the fact that the first five books of moses wouldn't have been completed in their in this form before lehigh left and the fact that they're using a codex system of keeping these these these books bound together both of those are anachronistic to the story of the brass plates okay and then there's the issue of uh the language of the brain and this is kind of what you mentioned earlier and so then we've got this issue where are told the brass plates were written in egyptian and that's a problem because the scholars for a biblical scholarship are in i would i think it's of unanimous just about unanimous consensus that they were originally written in hebrew and they can tell that because as they've been translated over the years they can still see clues that tell you that the original language was hebrew and so um just the britannica kind of entry just says they were originally written almost entirely in hebrew with a few short elements in aramaic and so um the problem with that for the book of mormon is that if you want to believe the book of mormon's narrative to be true we would need the first five books of moses to have been compiled before lehigh left in 587 bce which again as we said is against the consensus of when these books were composed in the form we have them today then on top of that you then need these these books to be translated into egyptian which goes against all of the evidence because we're told they you know started in hebrew and then after that translation we need them to be engraved on plates of brass which tells us which the history tells us there's absolutely no evidence for there's no way that there'd be this length of a record on metal plates and then finally after you translate a book a set of books that was originally written into hebrew into egyptian on brass plates we would need the five books to be compiled into a codex which was not utilized until about a thousand years after lehigh left and so in the brass plates so we have four separate problems that tell us is anachronism which is just the compilation of books that weren't composed in that form yet the egyptian language translation um the length of brass plates that would contain this record in the codex form so now we've got four problems and this is as john said this is the beginning of the book of mormon and you've already got something that is just littered with problems that tell us in no way did this happen historically remind us and you may you've already addressed this but remind us what a codex is again in this so codex is just this idea that you're going to take multiple books and put them together into one volume like a triple combination or a quad like yeah it would just be like that or you know even even looking at something like um you know when you have well the bible would be one um and i know there's a bunch of literary ones like when you when you have a collection of poems or something and you put it together a collection of shakespeare plays and you put it together with a binding it's just basically the idea that you can bind a bunch of material into a book with the binding as opposed to being on scrolls or you know on loose papers yeah yeah and just to just to reiterate even if we've got the piergy tablets that did exist around you know a little bit after you know lehigh supposedly left jerusalem they were they're phoenician they're not hebrew right yeah and and is there any record of hebrew plates existing or you know around 600 bc or even soon thereafter well not and and certainly not like that i mean the thing is they have you'll find um evidences of metal that has engravings but usually it's pictures or it's a few words or it's like you know a phrase it's not records there's no there's no record of having metal plates that tell you like a journal entry book genesis place yeah it's nothing book of exodus plates book of leviticus plates yeah nothing like that never nothing so why are we all on scrolls wouldn't we if if jews were keeping records on metal plates in a codex yep yeah and that's the thing like we would know and and that's why you get into trouble because we do have scrolls and that we found throughout the years right and but never metal plates and um again it just it compounds not just the origin of the gold plate story for joseph smith but this is the beginning of the book of mormon that's built off of something that is entirely anachronistic yeah and then there's a problem of math which we've covered in past episodes but we've got to cover it so this is kind of running off of the same idea that we talked about in the gold plates episode but the again we mentioned all the things that are were claimed to be on the brass plates so it goes beyond the five books of moses but just focusing on that the five books of moses contain 156 9116 words and again that's not even getting into the material they talk about that would go beyond that um and remember in the old world and in the book of mormon there's no mention of reformed egyptian being there which means these engravings would likely be in demotic egyptian um which would be something that would be a language that would have been uh you know possible back then and um egyptologist dr robert rittner explained that demonic egyptian is a phonetic language which means the amount of brass plates needed to engrave the five books of moses would be incredibly large and so when we refer back to the piercing tablets that fair mormon cites is one of the greatest evidences they have three plates that hold about 200 words if the five books of moses contains over 156 000 words that would tell us that for just for the five books of moses you would need 800 metal plates just to cover that part before you get into all the genealogy all the extended bible stories um and again just think about how heavy and impractical and impossible it would be to cut off someone's head and steal a 800 plate um book it would be impossible and again i'm not trying to make fun of it i'm just saying it's so far out there that to picture it just becomes silly to to to picture 800 gold plates stacked up and then you're gonna you know kill someone and just walk away with them it's just it's impossible um you know and um let me ask you in your math i think i'm missing something because you're talking about the pentateuch or the first five books but we know that isaiah would have been in there too why aren't you adding isaiah to that and and whatever books are between the pentateuch and isaac i'm saying so i put at the top like i'm not even getting into the other material that would be in there yeah it's just basically to show that that alone is impossible and then you're going to add the genealogy you're going to add isaiah all these extended you know they talk about there's extended stories about what's in the bible all of those things so maybe that doubles it and but i mean you're not going to carry 800 metal plates right it just isn't going to happen um not to mention the fact that you're not going to have 800 metal plates in a codex form it would be silly it would just be it would be absolutely pointless and that's why they use scrolls um and so the the brass plates in the book of mormon is a massive red flag that tells us whoever's writing it is not thinking these things through because if you think these things through you're going to realize this is just not a believable story and it's why a scholar today could read it and say yeah there's no evidence of brass plates happening and furthermore even if you want to believe there was codex a thousand years before codex form was used for books the math issue is just we've mentioned math a few times math is a really problematic thing because it's a lot easier to kind of tell these stories off the top of your head than it is to sit there and really think about the implications of what you're implying that these stories would have and so joseph smith is orally dictating the book of mormon and he can tell the story about the brass plates and talk about all the things that are on there because he's going to keep referencing back to it but at no point i don't think is he thinking how many brass plates is that going to be um and it's just like i said the math is just a really big problem for that yeah i uh as a marvel fan i i like to make the joke or the reference to thor's hammer how thor's hammer was so heavy only thor could lift it yeah these whether it's the brass plates or the what what becomes the gold plates if if um you know if if it actually if if the word number of words engraved in the blast brass plates reflected the text that we have today it would be heavier than anyone could have carried back then and there would be evidence yeah of these plates still existing and no plates have ever been uncovered anywhere in all of north central or south america that's not a good point like just imagine if they're you know just say you know for example maybe it's a thousand plates being generous that the rest of the material make it a thousand plates you're not going to have a 1 000 plate book of brass records that would not be mentioned anywhere else in old records it you know that that would be such a big deal that it would be mentioned somewhere else and yet it's not and it's the same problem we run into it like you said with the gold plates in the book of mormon it's just sometimes we think of the gold plate story we don't think about the brass plate story because that's so anachronistic and it's going to have ramifications for the entire book of mormon because they're constantly referencing back to them to give us material and people should think about this because again if for a thousand years native americans were engraving in plates with language even if the nephites get snuffed out all the civilizations that remained that then would have grown into the native americans in north central and south america that we know today there would have been some of them that would have continued that practice unless you believe the mound builder myth which is that dark people can't do sophisticated things and that's a whole other episode we have on the mound builder myth yeah um and then the final thing is then of course a believer is going to say well god can just make the plates disappear right and all i can say is you can say that about all of this however that sounds a lot more like joseph smith's treasure digging folklore of disappearing treasure in the earth than any reality that that we see in in the physical realm for the history of human civilization yeah that's i mean that's really at the end of the day it's if you if you want to go that way you can but you can't do that and then ever say anyone else's claims are false because you then all of a sudden every claim by me every religious leader every politician every you know um well-known documented person is making up these hoaxes you can't prove them wrong and so that just gets into this area of like you're going you know for me it's like faith is the belief in what you can't see it but it's not the belief in spite of what you can and so i think this idea that we could say we just got to have faith even though the evidence is telling us it's wrong i think that just goes into a different area and that's certainly not an area we're trying to even uh touch in these episodes especially again when we know joseph smith started with this idea of buried treasure that disappears all of a sudden that gives a very plausible and direct and relevant explanation for the idea that buried treasure can disappear yeah if you're gonna like if you're gonna say that that's you know that god's doing that and that there's no tie to joseph smith misleading people that he could find buried treasure that disappears then then you know keep believing what you're going to believe the final thing i would say is that we always have to remember and you've been really good about reminding us of this that like terrell gibbons and other mormon scholars just like to go on and on and on about how sophisticated the book of mormon is and how a farm boy couldn't have written it and even general authorities like quentin cook will try and extend that narrative in their apologetics in general conference talks or in their firesides but this whole discussion of plates and anachronisms that just we've covered so far really smack that idea of a really sophisticated book in the face because if it was such a sophisticated book it wouldn't be mentioning all these plates and all these these languages would do to rosia that never existed in the first place it's it's a rookie these are rookie mistakes not a sign of an advanced sophisticated book and we haven't even gotten into the new testament yet not to mention the 19th century anachronisms which is next we have new testament anachronisms yeah and so this is another area where you can look at it and go these are things that should not be in the book of mormon and so for us you know it starts with the king james bible and we're going to have another episode on this as well that kind of just goes into more details of why the king james bible being in the book of mormon is so problematic but it really is the first and easiest way to know it's on ancient texts king james bible is not translated until 1611 and joseph smith was believed to have a 1769 version of that translation which means that the book of mormon could not have been written before that time now again i've mentioned this before and i know john hammer mentioned it in his episodes with you but if you want to believe there's an ancient core and that the king james bible kind of surrounds that you would then have to to really cite where that ancient core is because as we're showing here it's it's really not there um and that gets more complicated by the witnesses to the translation that tell us this is a word for word translation and that the the rock and a hat will not give joseph smith new words until they're written down exactly as they were engraved on ancient plates and that just it's completely anachronistic because we are bringing in stuff that wasn't translated until 1611 and we're told that these are plates written anciently that cannot change in joseph's hat until they're written exactly right and so no matter what apologetic you want to use at the end of the day the book of mormon could not have been written before 1611 and that ignores all of the other things we've covered previously about surrounding influences and all that there's just no way around it yeah and that's why this series is so important because you have to you have to go back and watch the tight versus loose translation episode to really understand why it makes no sense and i would even take it one level of abstraction higher it makes no sense that the book of mormon is written in king james english at all they if they're going to translate it why didn't god translate it into modern vernacular in other words 19th century english or even 20th or 21st century english why would he if joseph had a stone that he's reading from word for word why would god choose king james english just king james english is its own anachronism forgetting the fact that joseph is literally copying directly from a bible that's sitting on his lap probably yeah and i think that's just it i mean i think the reason it's in king james english is because joseph smith is using that as his foundational text and the easiest and it's it's also the way that is in his worldview viewed as the way to speak in a scriptural kind of vernacular and so for joseph smith it just makes sense but to to your point like it doesn't make sense that a book for the latter days is written in a language that is so completely unique to a very specific point in time and it dates it and the fact that it's also bringing with it errors that we're going to go into in the king james bible episode um it just shows that the foundational text for the book of mormon is the king james bible and it shouldn't be if it's an ancient text it should not need the king james bible if it's an ancient text yeah amen okay um next next yeah so this is just um from fair mormon we're just kind of doing some of the brief apologetics to the idea that the king james bible is kind of anachronistic and so from fair mormon they say when considering the data royal scousen proposes that instead of joseph or oliver looking at a bible god was simply able to provide the page of text from the king james bible to joseph's mind and then joseph was free to alter the text as he pleased in those cases where the book of mormon simply alludes to or echoes king james language perhaps the lord allowed these portions of the text to be revealed in such a way that they would be more comprehensible comfortable to his 19th century northeastern frontier audience this theology of translation may feel foreign and a bit strange to some latter-day saints but it seems to fit well with the lord's own words about the nature of revelations joseph smith the lord speaks to his servants after the manner of their language that they may come to understanding latter-day saints should take comfort in fact in fact that the lord accommodates his perfection to our own weaknesses and uses our own imperfect language and nature for the building up of zion on earth i'm just not i'm not buying that uh yeah and i know we've covered the you know this quote is gonna be one that we're gonna kind of cover a bit because it's just it's very misleading from fair and um i think it's just it really is why is it misleading why is it yes well we'll go to the next slide because i kind of have it on there and so it just doesn't work and so um you know again it goes without saying of course god is going to speak to us in our own language if god was was was speaking in egyptian to joseph smith it would have no value to him or to anyone else because of course no one would know what he's saying so that's a given right that he's going to speak in english if he's going to if he's going to reveal these words it's going to be in a language we can write down and communicate to others but why it's misleading is that fair mormon is using dnc 124 in saying that the reason god speaks to us in our own language is um to make the book of mormon more readable but dnc 124 is speaking only about the commandments that god is giving to joseph he does not talk about the book of mormon translation until verse 29 and he says after having received the records of the nephites yea even my servant joseph smith jr might have the power might have power to translate through the mercy of god by the power of god the book of mormon and so their response that we should be happy that god is allowing joseph smith to receive it in that language is using um a verse about commandments to deflect from the fact that we're told in verse 29 that he translated the book of mormon through the gift and power of god it's kind of like a bit of a deflection and again even with royal scouses apologetic if you want to use that and say that god is projecting the king james bible into joseph smith's head and joseph can do with it what he wants it still tells us that the book of mormon is a 19th century production even then because it still couldn't have been written in ancient times in the form we have it today so no matter how we want to do this at the end of the day the core of the book of mormon is a 19th century text yeah and that's a big problem and again yeah that surrounding influences episode we do where we talk about the the late war and the book of napoleon as examples of king james english being written into modern fictional works during joseph smith's time is a much more plausible explanation for why king james english is appearing in a modern fictional book yep exactly because that's what that's how many authors they read the bible all the time they thought about religious language as being in king james english religious discourse and so they would write fiction using that you know extending that king james english and uh so check out it's late warren ward napoleon book what are the two first book in napoleon the late war yeah and those have a lot of language that's just very similar and it just shows that they're all pulling from that same worldview and that's in my opinion that stuff's covered in in jeremy ronald's ces letter right yes yeah okay well we'll add a link to that as well okay what else and so our you know our next episode like i said is gonna be on the king james bible in the book of mormon but you know we've mentioned this before and we have to mention again because any new testament material in the book of mormon is anachronistic because we should not lehigh leaves with the brass plates there would obviously be no no new testament material whatsoever on those plates and so we're going to cover this in the next episode we're going to cover a little bit of it here which is to say that the two biggest examples um and they'll each have their own episode is the sermon on the mount and the long ending of mark both of which are going to appear in the book of mormon almost verbatim and so those two things will tell us right away that the book of mormon has to be written after it claims to be written because um they are going to have material um in the case of the sermon on the mount that a lot of scholars don't believe was ever a standalone sermon in the case of the long ending of mark that's a late edition by a scribe and so those two are huge issues that go beyond all of the um 19th century christology that is being brought into what's an ancient record that would have all happened um at least before like all of the the references to jesus before jesus comes is just entirely anachronistic and it comes from somebody who knows the end of the book at the beginning because it just those people would have no idea who jesus was when they left jerusalem yeah yeah and and by the way i just had this thought so you just read that that apologetic explanation from skousen that the lord speaks to people in their time in their way in their language well if jesus was going to appear to the nephites after his death and preach a sermon to them is he going to preach the identical sermon that he preached to the jews who were living in the ancient world or is he going to go oh wait new audience i'm speaking to native americans by the way that have been baptizing in my name and worshipping me and and conferring the holy priesthood for you know 600 a thousand years already you think jesus would come up with some new material that was written for the alleged nephites and lamanites but instead it's literally like copy and paste sermon of the mount from the from the king james bible that joseph had sitting on his lap why wouldn't there be a whole new jesus sermon that was tailored and customized to nephites and lamanites wouldn't that make more sense yeah and and to uh give a little tease to our episode which will come up in a little bit on the sermon on the mount what's even more important than that is just that you can tell joseph smith is aware when he's bringing the material in that there are instances that would have no meaning to the book of mormon people and he makes those superficial changes but then he leaves other things in not understanding what he's leaving in and so that's why the sermon on the mount is so important because he you could tell that he's thinking in his head um this won't make sense he changes it then other things he doesn't understand what he's what he's copying in and because he's copying in things would have no meaning to the book of mormon people it tells us that it's being written from the perspective of someone who kind of understands some of it but not all of it and certainly not being written at the time it would be said so yeah that's a huge problem that we'll definitely be uh diving into in that episode without question yeah i don't think um i i honestly don't think that we've had an episode yet that's made so many references back to previous episodes that we've recorded together like i feel like this anachronisms episode is like a place where so many things converge they do where where it's it's one thing to have these 15 episodes we've already recorded but they're they're converging in a way in this episode that's kind of blowing my mind a little bit yeah and that's why we talked about the start like try to watch these if you can in order because they they're gonna they're gonna merge and they're gonna build upon each other and that's why i think it's so important to do it that way because of the fact that once you start seeing it then you pick it up earlier on in future episodes and that's why i think apologetics is so much focused on looking at one issue at a time whereas i'm trying in this in this kind of format to look at them and just layer and layer and layer and layer and try to keep referencing back to say and this is why we covered this and this is why we covered this because it's important now and it's really coming together for me in this episode yeah and that's why i use that puzzle reference because these these are things where you're going to start to see the pieces start to fall together um in a way that's natural and not forced and um so with that said um so we talk about um the new testament the book of mormon we talked about those two examples and if we go to the next slide this is one um another one from brent metcalf who did such amazing work on kind of looking at some of these issues with especially with the replacement pages of the 116 uh lost pages and so the use of christ in messiah and the book of mormon is an area where it shows that the author doesn't quite understand the words he's using and this is another area where you kind of talk about how joseph was an uneducated farm boy and i think he was a gifted storyteller but he leaves a lot of these errors in there and this is one and so i'm going to just kind of read this it's a little bit wordy but it's necessary to kind of explain it so from brett mcafee says the book of mormon's use of the term christ is a perplexing feature of the book biblical scholars concur that the aramaic aramaic i don't know if i'm saying this right which is the messiah and its greek translation christos which is christ both mean anointed uh they further agree that christ became a proper name along with jesus only after non non-semites who did not have a hebrew conception of the title were converted and essentially judea christianity began to be hellenized in contrast the book of mormon hebrews do not use the term christ and messiah synonymously rather they employ the term christ most frequently as a type of messianic surname christ as a proper name poses linguistic problems that challenged early defenders of the book of mormon oliver cowdery chided a critic who raised the issue as being ignorant presumptuous and incompetent to handle the matter he has undertaken coundry argued that the words jesus and christ are radically neither english nor greek for both have hebrew roots this remains the apologetics chief line of defense yet the book of mormon does not accommodate this apologetic since it insists that many points on a clear distinction between messiah and christ the book of mormon ostensibly defines messiah as savior or redeemer christ coupled with the term jesus becomes the messiah's name because of the semantic distinction nephi can prophesy that jews at the end of the time shall believe in christ and worship the father in his name and look for look not forward any more for another messiah and he can also proclaim the messiah cometh in his name shall be jesus christ christ is even juxtaposed with other proper names such as nephi and moses and so this is one of those things and i know it's a that was a wordy entry but maybe we should just go right to the next slide just to kind of illustrate why this is a problem um you know again we've talked about this before uh but the book of mormon is going to name christ 600 years before jesus's arrival which is anachronistic on the surface because of the fact that no one in the old world knows of jesus so this is being written with a 19th century world view and as we talked about earlier it's even anachronistic in the book of mormon because the middle of the book of mormon doesn't know christ's name or about his arrival and then it's written into the beginning and the replacement text so those are all kind of layers of problems and i just want to like really emphasize this okay let's just say even though all the dna evidence and all the archaeological evidence says that native americans weren't descendants of jews yeah let's just say that some of them were they're still like offshoots of the actual original jews right and so you just have to ask yourself if none of the jews up until christ's birth knew that the the messiah was going to be jesus christ of nazareth if none of them were able to know that and we're talking about you know elijah a lot you know we're talking about david solomon um you know malachi like these are the old testament prophets none of them abraham isaac jacob none of them moses none of them knew that it was going to be jesus of nazareth or mary or any of that and yet somehow the the native american offshoots are are going to be able to be given that information and to practice christianity yeah how does that make any sense to to the jews who are the actual jews it just yeah it doesn't make sense yeah it doesn't make sense okay keep going no and just to say um you know it shows that the book of mormon's author does not understand the linguistics between messiah and christ and that leads to such a clear problem and so in second nephi we have this where it says for according to the words of the prophets the messiah cometh in 600 years from the time that my father left jerusalem and according to the words of the prophets and also the word of the angel of god his name shall be jesus christ the son of god and so because messiah and christ have the same meaning but a different translation what joseph smith has done here is like the modern equivalent of saying something like this and we will know that the sign of a good life is to be next to a dog which is the english word i have been told by an angel that the dog will be known as pera which is the spanish translation of dog and so i'm not trying to be flipping i'm just saying he's using these two words like they should be different but they're the same but he doesn't understand that and and we're going to see this issue um in a number of a number of places as we go because there are times when joseph smith just doesn't understand the words he's using and so he uses them as if they're different and because of that it's going to create problems down the road which of course he obviously wouldn't wouldn't have lived to see but this is a huge problem it's like in the temple where he claims to see elias and elijah even though they're the same person with a hebrew versus a greek translation he doesn't know that so he claims to see him both separately and this is the same problem here because he doesn't understand that these words are the same thing right from a different translation okay all right you've got a final note on the christ so just a final note on this you know um he you heard oliver cowder earlier say that the person who brought this up had you know no understanding and then um you know we talk about how messiah and christ are the same word with different translations um with christ being a greek you know greek word and joseph smith in the 1843 times in season says there was no greek or latin upon the place from which i through the grace of god translated the book of mormon let the language of that book speak for itself and so i just say if there's no greek upon the plates then there should be no christ upon the plates and i realize the apologetic response is going to be whatever word they used for christ just got tr you know was in reformed egyptian joseph brought back to christ i'm just saying christ is a greek word so for him to say there's no greek on the plate it just tells you that something is off there and the last note just like the elias elijah problem is that in the book of abraham joseph smith does the same problem with the with the term pharaoh and so um on facsimile 3 he um notates this person as pharaoh as if it's a personal name and so um dr robert rittner made the note and said in facsimile 3 smith also misunderstands pharaoh as a personal name rather than a title meaning king so he reads king king for a goddess name that he claims to have understood on the papyrus so basically he didn't get the agenda he didn't get the gender right yeah and you get the gender and all that now obviously it's a problem but even then using pharaoh as if it's a name you know so he calls it king pharaoh but pharaoh means king so it's like saying king king and it's just those are the little fingerprints that tell us that joseph smith is writing this book without understanding some of what he's doing and obviously in his time a lot of people probably didn't know that a lot of this stuff is going to come in the years after but now we can look back and say oh absolutely this is not an ancient text because the people then would not have greek at all in there anyways and they certainly wouldn't be misunderstanding a greek word in a hebrew word it just wouldn't happen and again it's also not a sophisticated text it's a rookie text by modern standards you know okay yeah writing in 1829 when you're late teens early 20s or whatever okay that's impressive for you know someone with joseph smith education to do at that time period but to kind of to kind of go beyond that and say that this is this ultra sophisticated book he's making really rookie unsophisticated mistakes by any modern understanding and you can't just go oh well he did good for his time and for his age and for his educational level no this is a magic stone telling joseph through divine power word for word what he's supposed to write down so he's making god look dumb basically well i mean it's just it's well it's one of those things where again it's like the the complexity issue and we'll cover this we're gonna have an episode i think in two two or three episodes which is just how i believed he composed it and when you look at it it's all about how you set the equation so the church sets the equation basically to tell members there's no way this could happen naturally no way and once you have that equation set the only data you fit into it is data that will at least make the equation seem realistic and what i'm what we're saying here in these episodes is when you start with a clean slate and you do not start with the predetermined conclusion that it's too complex for someone to create you can show how he did it you can show where he's pulling from and once you can start to see where he's pulling the info from and the mistakes he's making as he does it and in that episode that we're going to do on this there is uh the parable of the olive tree um for those who are not familiar is like you know it's dumb because i don't know if i'd call it a smoking gun as far as saying the book of mormon is what it claims but it's one of the most important elements to understanding how joseph smith is weaving material from the bible into a story that's purportedly from the ancient americas and so when we get to that episode um as long as you don't start with the equation that it's too complex for someone to do on their own and you just start from the standpoint of i'm gonna take all the pieces apart and see where they go then all of a sudden you can see oh yeah absolutely he was not only capable of doing it but no one else but him could have done it and then at that point the equation no longer is forced as it's too complex it's just this is where the evidence leads and so um that is i think why the church works so hard to say no one else could have done it because you have to not think about it as you're reading and you can't think about these little errors because these errors will tell you that yeah absolutely a human did this because otherwise to your point god is giving him mistakes through the stone and that does not make sense and so you get to these different difficult decisions as to how it can happen when in reality the easiest answer is just looking at the evidence and saying this is how joseph smith could have done it and this is why we know he did it all right and and we haven't even left you know we've we've only just covered old testament and new testament we haven't even talked about 19th century influences and if it's okay for me to set this up yeah the you know we covered this really well in our our episode what was the episode oh first question that episode about the olive tree metaphor which which episode is that going to be in again just that's going to be in our episode that kind of summarizes how i think the book of mormon okay how the pokemon was created yeah okay we won't we can't put a link to that now because it hasn't been recorded i think i think it's two away i think i think we have king james bible and then i think that's the next one okay so so check that out um all right so we've covered the base anachronisms and we've covered old testament and new testament the one thing that now we we need to kind of really get in our mindset about is if you just look at the book of mormon from you know what's the chances that it was written by ancient native americans in you know somewhere in mesoamerica based on what the actual text says versus um you know what are the chances that a you know uh in upstate new york a you know let's just say young 20 something um you know christian rural person wrote it you know is there is there more evidence for the former or the latter the way that you would sort of gather evidence for one versus the other would be to say does a lot of 19th century relics or influences appear there that shouldn't be there and that is why i think this is such an important point of of today's episode and you're going to start covering them and and again we're just going to be referencing now the list that we started with which is basically all the food all the livestock all the ideas um bows and arrows and swords and shields and thrones and palaces and and and horses and cows and brass and steel swords barley that was everything that joseph smith was swimming in whether it's from him reading the bible whether it's from his understanding of history whether it's from him just looking around in upstate new york and the and the livestock and the the food that he was eating the livestock that that was was being raised in the farms around him like that's all there in spades and we don't need to dig we don't need to dig into that again but we have to start there right yeah you know and so one of the things you know we talk about all these items right and so one of the things i mentioned in the beginning is that for me the items are really important and there are obviously so many of them and we have a lot of documentation they didn't happen uh but where i like to look at it then is to say beyond the physical beyond the swords and the the the plates which you know illustrate earlier why the brass plates and the gold plates are both entirely anachronistic the ideas that are swimming around joseph smith's milieu are going to work their way into the book of mormon but they shouldn't because those are a lot of i um ideas that are not going to develop until in some cases hundreds of years after jesus lives and then on top of that you know the idea of of christianity is evolving you know still i guess to a certain extent obviously today i mean mormonism has changed over the last 200 years to some degree and so those are ideas where when you see them put back into ancient texts you can tell that whoever wrote the text is not working from the time frame that they claim to be in and so when you see these 19th century christology christian ideas or even ideas that are written hundreds of years after jesus died um it's a really good indication and a big red flag that these are not being written at 600 you know 587 bc uh it just wouldn't work that way all right um so now we go beyond those well-known 19th century anachronisms to uh other really important ones yeah and so this one is just you know we've talked about this a little bit before i think in some of the earlier episodes but we have you know people being baptized in the name of christ over 150 years before jesus would be baptized and so messiah 18 13 says and when he had said these words the spirit of the lord came upon him then it goes i baptize thee having authority from the almighty god as a testimony that you have entered into a covenant to serve him until you are dead as to the mortal body and may the spirit of the lord be poured out upon you and may he grant to unto you eternal life through the redemption of christ whom he has prepared from the foundation of the world and then getting more to the point in second nephi which is part of the replacement text it says and now if the lamb of god he being holy should have need to be baptized by water to fulfill all righteousness oh then how much more need we need have we being unholy to be baptized yea even by water and also the voice of the sun came unto me saying he that is baptized in my name to him will the father give the holy ghost like unto me wherefore follow me and do the things which ye have seen me do and so what's wrong with that what's wrong with that verse yeah i mean so these are ideas that are things that in the 19th century oh yeah of course we baptize the name of jesus christ but at this point in history there's no record anywhere that jesus as a name is just even thought of and so when lehi leaves jerusalem there's no references to jesus there's no references to being baptized in the name of christ all of this is a modern or at least for book of mormon times it's modern because this is not going to happen until jesus and that's going to happen long after lehi leaves and so you know again this is just a very big problem to have uh practices you know and as we mentioned the start they're not doing the jewish practices but they're doing practices that are going to come much later and that tells you that they're working from a source material or a foundational you know theology that is going to you know develop long after this is supposed to have taken place yeah that is so i mean if you talk about the the claim that the book of mormon is a sophisticated text if you're joseph smith uh and you're trying to write what's going on with with lehi and nephi you're literally baptizing in the name of jesus with the gift of the holy ghost descending like 10 or 20 years after they leave jerusalem so we're talking we're talking like 550 bc they're they're basically performing not just not just christian acts that wouldn't have taken place 500 a d or a 100 a.d or you know 580 or 1000 a.d they probably wouldn't have even taken place 1500 a.d um these this sort of baptizing in the name of jesus language with the spirit of the lord descending that's protestant stuff that's stuff that probably wouldn't appear in anyone's vernacular until the 16th 17th 1800s correct yeah i'm not 100 sure on how proud of this protestants evolved baptism specifically but i do know just from like listening to people talk about like like i was saying earlier christology develops has developed constantly through you know since jesus died and so not like i said not only is he using you know these these concepts that would have been there anyways because there's no knowledge of jesus but he's using versions of him that would be familiar to him surrounding him so that's where you start to pick up on like you know when we talk we'll talk more in some of the episodes about how he composed it how a lot of this language is going to mirror some of the methodist revivals around him you're going to have these surrounding ideas to joseph that are just going to work their way into the book of mormon but they had no place to be there and so from a scholarly perspective to your point you can look at that and go not only were there no baptisms that not only would they have not known of jesus but they're using a form of it that develops later and that's when it just gets more you can pinpoint more and more when the book was written who was written and and that is why we've done all these episodes to try to pinpoint the fact that i've said multiple times not only could joseph smith have written it but no one else could have but him because this all points to his worldview it all points to his um you know time and place more so you know than anything else and so these are problems that are just so detrimental to the truth claims of being an ancient historical text because we know they couldn't have happened when they're claimed to have happened and i'm repeating myself here but it fits in this segment why would god you know so like lehigh and nephi are jews they're practicing jews they it's 600 years before jesus is even born they they leave jerusalem get on a boat sail to america and then all of a sudden god says hey here's the name of jesus and start baptizing to become christians start baptizing in the name of jesus and confer the gift of the holy ghost or whatever yeah but he wouldn't bother to do that with the original jews yeah it makes no sense back in the original old world why is he privileging the descendants of lehi with with full christianity when he wouldn't do that with his actual chosen people okay sorry yeah it's just it's out of place and um you know um one thing i want to note here is that when joseph smith writes this in a nephi he's also rewriting isaiah 48 to make it about baptism which is a problem because he is reinterpreting it to fit the book of mormon but this is also part of the deutero isaiah which would not have been available to him in the first place so these are why these problems compound on each other and so first nephi 20 says hearken and hear this o house of jacob who are called by the name of israel and are come forth out of the waters of judah or out of the waters of baptism who swear by the name of the lord and make mention the god of israel yet they swear not in truth nor in righteousness and if you look at isaiah it's pretty much the exact same thing but it says hear ye this o house of jacob which are called by the name of israel and are come forth out of the waters of judah which swear by the name of the lord and so if you'll notice in isaiah there's no mention of baptism because they weren't doing it then and so um biblical scholars believe that this is not an isaiah no reference to baptism it's about the jews coming forth out of a fountain that is going to spread in all directions so just picture you know a big fountain of water and then when it hits the ground it's going to branch off into different areas that's that's the imagery being presented here yet joseph smith is going to try to you know actualize this to the book of mormon in a way that was never intended and we see this over and over again because he is trying to find areas of the old testament to link back to the book of mormon and we're also going to see this in the new testament where the gospel writers do the same thing and they make really bad interpretations because they're needing to fit into the current narrative that they're teaching but in this case joseph smith is doing it incorrectly and out of place and out of time yeah okay so here joseph is referencing concept joseph smith through the book of mormon is referring to concepts that would have cut that would come through due to oral isaiah that we've already established uh lehigh wouldn't have been able to bring is that yeah did i summarize that right yeah so he's bringing material that was in deutero isaiah which would not have been available and then he's also misinterpreting isaiah in the process i mean it's just it's kind of like a twofer we've got multiple problems here that are just compounding to make this anachronism even worse it's really hard to get out of it when you've just got so many errors that are coming on top of each other and you know again it's just it's a really hard uh idea to kind of unscrew and say no this could actually work if you just look at it the right way yeah okay and so this is where you start to get some of the apologetic responses to the anachronism of baptisms in the book of mormon and so i'm apologists that i've read of tend to point to the i think you say a mikvah and it's a jewish font uh i don't know how i'm probably saying the shrama for the tevala which is a ritual cleansing by immersion and they use this as a proof of pre-christian baptism and i think in a lot of ways they're kind of getting this wrong because um it's not the same practice and the apologists know this and so in a lot of ways the mikvah is going to be almost what evolves into the christian practice of baptism because the christians are coming out of juda you know judaism so it makes sense that you'd have that but um this practice is um if you were already born in the covenant you don't have to do it and so um there's a write-up and i linked to it on on the overview project and it's a really good recap of why this is different and so this practice is used as a cleansing um way for people to go into their temple and so the reasons you would have to have it done would be for men after they ejaculate for women after their periods over uh anyone who's had abnormal bodily discharges weird skin conditions um unclean people someone who's being consecrated the ironic priesthood for the priest who sends away the scapegoat for someone who's touched a corpse or a grave and the point is this is not baptism and so for apologists to say well they were doing baptism then and if you look at this they'll show like this little mikvah it's like a little they'll show like this fond and they're like oh it's the same thing it's like no no the purposes are so different this is about cleaning people so that they can um go and do these rituals it's not about converting people in into believing in jesus christ in no possible way is that true and so when the apologists use this whether intentionally or unintentionally they're using um a idea that they know would not match what the book of mormon is claiming and so it's just not even a fair comparison to to claim they're on the same level yeah for me we're going to talk about loan shifting later for me this is as bad as the taper maybe when they said horse they meant taper kind of argument to try and say that they're talking about anything other than a christian baptism you know with with the holy spirit um you know being poured out upon them for them to try and shift and say that he's really talking about uh the the jewish ritual of a mikvah it almost feels insulting to jews frankly well yeah because you're misusing their their ritual to basically try to give yourself space for an error that joseph smith makes in the book of mormon and that's why it's annoying because it's it's kind of like appropriating their ritual and saying well see this was the forerunner and i i just again this would not be a problem for any other christian religion because you're not trying to date baptism before it was dated you know it the book of mormon creates problems that no other religion really has to deal with because they're cementing these ideas in as history when they're simply not and in this case it creates a massive anachronism that you're trying to get out of by finding something else you can cling to to say well this is similar but it's just they're not similar they're not the same thing the purposes are different and so they say this as if it's a matter of fact but then when you look at what that actually is you're like no this is not the same thing why are you using this to try to claim that joseph smith got it right when clearly they're not they're not the same and um and that leads us to our next slide because can i just ask one question yeah will you be covering because one of the things that i was one of the biggest uh lightning bolt moments to me was when i read in grant palmer's book an insider's view of mormon origins which um i'll include in the show notes along with my interviews with grant palmer where he lists the parallels between book of mormon sermons like king benjamin and uh you know mosiah their sermons the the substance of the content of those sermons as compared with protestant sermons of the day that joseph smith would have been a recipient of during this sort of second great awakening burned over district kind of stuff the kind of stuff that alexander campbell identified as as being very much 19th century protestant yeah is are we covering that today we're going to cover that in the episode on how he could have composed it it's going to be a part of just showing like where he's pulling from and how he's you know kind of weaving it together so we'll definitely cover that in i think two weeks okay well i i that's cool and i just want to say that is a major major major anachronism yeah it would be just because those ideas are not there yeah in america so we're not covered today we'll cover it later but if you go and read protestant 19th century sermons that joseph would have heard yeah they sound almost identical not just in content but in topics covered resolving the debates of the day and and are you are you going to bring up alexander campbell's reflections after he read the book of mormon are you going to bring that up we'll have that up just because i like that quote just because it kind of illustrates especially when you get into these things how everything is is our ideas that were being talked about at the time that just happened to make their way into a text that's supposed to be you know ancient to the americas and it just shows that joseph smith is using this his worldview to answer these questions that people have um in using the king james bible and the style of speaking to give credibility to his words and and once you again i know i um we'll talk more about the equation stuff later but once you set that equation at a blank slate and you just say a clean slate and you say let's start without any predetermined conclusions it is not that hard to illustrate why joseph smith could have written it or how he could have written it and where he's pulling from and once you can do that then that equation that is too complex for anyone else to have done it just falls apart because then all of a sudden the variables that would go into the equation don't work and that's why so often you'll hear leaders start with the conclusion then work your way back but i'm saying you start with a blank clean slate and then you work your way towards the conclusion and you get a much different result because the evidence tells you a much different story than the kind of correlated material way that we've been told that it's just too complex and it's too unique it's it's just it's really not and it that doesn't mean joseph smith wasn't brilliant i think he was brilliant at pulling this stuff together and weaving it it's just that he leaves his fingerprints in the process and that's what tells us it's not an ancient authentic text all right very very good okay so now you're going to address one another what i feel is not is a disingenuous apologetic response go ahead and address it yes the question is could the book of mormon prophets have received revelation right yeah and so this kind of goes along with the idea you know we talk about it's you know anachronistic to have done baptisms it's also anachronistic for them to have known jesus's name before anyone else it's anachronistic to have treasure digging in there but um speaking more to the the baptism question you know they'll say that john the baptist was performing baptisms before christ which means that revelation from god could have occurred before christ's arrival which means the book of mormon people could have had it just the same and it really misses the point because the book of mormon people are doing it hundreds of years early and one of the things that that um we've mentioned dr bart erman in other episodes but he's one of the prominent new testament scholars and what he talks about is that john the baptist was an apocalyptic preacher he believed the end of the world was imminent so this is just i wanted to read this this apart from because it fits really well with our earlier slide and it says um here is why it is significant that jesus was a follower of john the baptist for understanding why jesus himself was an apocalyptic apocalyptist because of what john stood for we get the clearest expression of john's views in our earliest account of his preaching in queue here john is shown to be a proclaimer of imminent apocalyptic destruction as he says in urging people to repent the axe is already laid at the root of the tree every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and cast into the fire that is important because john the baptist was jewish and he would have certainly been performing the cleansing ritual that we had mentioned in the previous one of the tevilla i'm not sure if i'm saying that right to make sure that our people were clean before the end times and so it's actually to me citing john is actually more evidence that this was a practice used to clean people expecting the world to end than it is to claim that there were pre-christian baptisms going on because there's no mention of these being done in the name of jesus before jesus and so to cite these things it's just kind of going kind of again it's starting with the conclusion working backwards and it just doesn't fit if you start from the beginning and kind of work our way towards what the evidence tells you and really really quickly you you're referencing is that an essay called the baptism of jesus as an apocalyptic event or or is that a no yeah that's an essay i don't think i think he uh i mentioned it before i think honestly he has a blog that he runs and so that's an essay on the blog so um he just kind of talks you know it's a specific entry just about um whether or not jesus and john were apocalyptic preachers and kind of why he believes they were and i just thought it was interesting when reading that because it really does fit well with why he would be doing you know baptisms before christ because he's not doing like the baptism as we think of it in christian terms he's doing it in terms of how jewish people thought of it which was a cleansing ritual to prepare you for the end times and because you don't want to be unclean when the world is ending and so it actually fits more with that and and yet we're going to hear it used as if it's proof of the book of mormon it's just it again you're talking hundreds of years difference and john the baptist is not a christian so he's doing this at this point as as someone who is jewish as opposed to someone who's doing it years after jesus would live and then you'd be expecting more christian baptisms got it and i guess i guess i'm going to just uh maybe really quickly just insert one more general apologetic argument or even kind of rational thought or appearingly rational thought that a believer might have which is hey god is all-powerful if god wants to reveal christianity to the nephites he can do it if god wants to use king james english he can do it if god wants to um you know uh advance civilization in ways and and or repeat the same sermon that that he gave you know that jesus gave as the sermon on the mount if he wants to repeat it god god is all-powerful god can do whatever he wants and so whatever god chooses to give to the nephites and the descendants of the nephites god can do it all yeah i mean and that's and that's the argument but again including isaiah god can know that that there's this other deutero isaiah thing that was written after lehi left jerusalem and god has the power to include that in whatever he tells nephi or lehi or his successors right yeah i mean and that would be the argument i just for me personally it doesn't work because of the fact that at that point you've already abandoned all the truth claims of the book of mormon already to effectively kind of move to another kind of area where you're safe from those claims but it just doesn't fit with the evidence and so if you want to take that claim you can it's just once you start doing that you are now away from the tangible truth claims and now you're kind of in an area that's you know i know it's kind of a phrase that might be offensive but you're now in an area that's indistinguishable from fraud because now you're just you're using the god and the gaps thing except it's not a gap it's it's evidence telling you it's not true so if it was and that's why i talk about faith earlier it's not that we don't know it's that we do know it doesn't match and so because it we know it doesn't match they're now kind of retreating to this new stance but like from an evidentiary standpoint it just doesn't work and once you do that you can no longer say any other religion or any other person throughout history that's created a hoax is wrong because we're now giving space that says even against the evidence we're choosing to believe which you can do it just doesn't work for me because it it puts you in a different realm from the claims of the book of mormon all right well this takes us to a whole section that i think is super super super important um and joseph smith's early theology appearing in the book of mormon his his beliefs at the time he wrote the book of mormon appearing but none of the important beliefs after and if it's okay mike i kind of want to set this one up yeah that's fine if you're if you if you're if you're if you're a fair investigator trying to figure out if the book of mormon is an ancient text versus a 19th century text written by joseph smith one of the things you would ask is you would just assume that joseph you would know that joseph smith's own personal theology evolved over time so you would know that in 1829 before the church was started that joseph smith would have been exposed to methodists he would have been exposed to the methodists maybe to the presbyterians to the baptists he would have been exposed to the unitarian universalists he would have had a general protestant worldview and a lot of doctrinal innovations were to come whether it's the word of wisdom whether it's the law of chastity whether it's three degrees of glory whether it's temple work baptisms for the dead sealing eternal marriage polygamy and then of course you know the idea of theosis or men becoming gods and so one surefire way you could test whether the book of mormon was authentic ancient record versus fiction from joseph smith would be to see if it reveals and sort of like brings in new theology a new doctrine that had never before been known by 1829 or on the other hand if it just conveniently leaves off every subsequent later revelation that joseph receives and doesn't include it that would be a really telltale sign that the book of mormon represents a snapshot of joseph's christian theology and beliefs at the time it was created and and and doesn't include anything afterwards and then when you add to that the fact that the mormon church has so often called the book of mormon referring to the book of mormon as containing the fullness of the gospel what now you're going to show us mike is that that that was very problematic to teach us that once we apply a critical lens to the theology in the book of mormon yep and so one of the things we look at is like in the book of mormon it teaches there's only one god and so this is something that is going to be later contradicted because he's going to learn hebrew in the mid-1830s and he's going to realize that the bible speaks of a council of gods that's going to change but in the book of mormon um in alma 11 they say is there more than one god and he answered no and as israel said again oh said unto him again how noah's though thou these things and he said an angel hath made them known unto me so basically what they're saying is that an angel is confirming through revelation that there's just one god and then later in mormonism joseph smith is going to teach there are multiple gods that we can become gods and that's going to be compounded by the book of mormon being unaware of a pre-mortal existence being unaware of multiple gods and in this case it's not even just that they don't mention it they're actually speaking out against it and so um this is just showing us that the theology is going to change and we're told the book of mormon is the fullness of the gospel but it's different than the way the mormon church teaches it today and so that contradiction you can't get rid of it because it's in the scriptures but it's really problematic given that we're told this is supposed to restore was lost in in the bible and yet it's really just rehashing what the bible said and then being corrected by joseph smith through later um theological developments and it put a fine point on it in 1829 did joseph believe there was a plurality of gods or just a single god yeah i mean just a single god i mean absolutely so and that's a problem and it's and that's reflected in his 1832 first vision which we'll get into down the road too but it's just kind of this next this next slide actually yeah and so um you know again you know to kind of show how this changes the dnc 130 which is written in 1843 says the father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man's the son also but the holy ghost has a body not of uh not a body of flesh and bones but as a personage of spirit so he's saying you know god and jesus are basically separate beings that are you know body of flesh but then you look at alma 11 again and it says now zezuma said sayeth again unto him is the son of god the very eternal father and amulek said unto him yea he is the very eternal father of heaven and of earth and if and all things which in them are he is the beginning and the end the first and the last i mean again the book of mormon here is saying that they're the same and yet joseph smith by 1843 is saying absolutely not you know and so that change makes the book of mormon i mean if you want to look at it that way it makes it anachronistic to the mormon church today because the book of mormon is telling us something that is out of place with what's being taught today i don't know if anachronisms may be the right word but it just shows the evolution makes the book mormon out of date and it just doesn't make sense when this is supposed to be a direct translation off of plates that are not being corrupted by men and yet here we are with joseph smith making massive changes um that obviously are going to contradict his earlier productions in the book of mormon yeah yeah yeah that that verse is really important dnc 1322 first of all it's 132 in the dnc because it's super late in joseph's development i'm guessing that dnc 132 was added well after brigham young was like in utah i'm guessing that wasn't in in the dnc until like the 1860s or 70s anyway but but it's just making it very clear god has his own body and then jesus has his own body it's right there in dnc 130 which contradicts alma 11. and i'm also going to say that it's not just alma 11 like we already know and we've talked about this previously that the book of the original book of mormon said that mary was the mother of who mother of god mother of god and then later the mormon church changed the book of mormon that was supposedly translated from a stone that was word for word translation they change it in later editions to say what mike the mother of the son of god mary was the mother of the son of god to change to adapt the book of mormon to reflect joseph smith's evolving theology about god right yeah yeah and that's and that's the problem and it just shows you know and that you know in the book of mormon we're you know kind of going to the next site we're told god is unchangeable and yet god himself at least the conceptualization of god changes and so you know um you know we're told in mormon 9 9 for do we not read that god is the same yesterday today and forever and in him there is no variableness neither shadow of changing moroni 8 18 for i know that god is not a partial god neither a changeable being but he is unchangeable from all eternity to all eternity it just says like if that is true why are so many of the mormon church's key doctrines going unmentioned in the book of mormon and then in some cases being mentioned such as you know the kind of state of the godhood only to evolve and change um under joseph smith and you know that just shows this list here how many key items that you think of when you think of unique mormon ideas that have nothing to do with the book of mormon that are all late editions and you got to say why in the world is a book that is the fullness of the gospel and the restoration of the gospel missing all of these key items that just happen to come as joseph smith develops his theology and learns more and all of a sudden comes up with these new concepts it just it really is so for people for people who are just listening and can't actually see this yeah well okay yeah so we have a slide called unique doctrines to mormonism that are that are i would say crucial elements of the plan of salvation within mormonism that are completely absent in any way from the book of mormon yeah you want to read those sure yeah so i mean these are the things that are not mentioned in the book of mormon that today you could not separate from mormonism which is a temple marriage being a requirement for exaltation baptism for the dead celestial marriage lasting for all time and eternity that salvation is the highest kingdom requires going through the endowment ceremony um in the book of mormon there is no mention of exaltation or an endowment ceremony or three degrees of glory or three degrees of glory yeah um you know but the idea of secret combinations requiring secret oaths are condemned which of course a lot of people would argue um was referring to the masons which is what is used in the temple ceremony which is a problem um multiple priesthoods or the melchizedek priesthood and let's just pause on that there's no melchizedek priesthood in the book of mormon at all it's a problem huge yeah and and um that the sacrament should include water um the word of wisdom uh that prophets are promoted to the office by the church leaders instead of god um the garden of eden being in missouri which you think would be a big deal because of the fact that they're living in the americas yeah the idea of a presidency is anachronistic and the book of mormon makes no mention of anything beyond the 12 disciples in there so all of these things and what's really interesting is when you look at all these points or if you're listening all of these points are going to come for the most part from another person's thought around joseph smith and so you know we'll get into this as we go into these different topics and maybe we'll do an episode that really highlights where joseph smith is pulling from all of these sources but um it just shows that the reason they're not in the book of mormon is because joseph smith hasn't learned them yet and so um just to go real quick like the temple ceremony is going to come from the masons joseph didn't know the masonic ceremony at the time of the book of mormon um the three degrees of heaven are going to come from emmanuel swedenberg and joseph smith is aware of him but not at the time of the book of mormon right melchizedek priesthood is going to come from sidney rigdon who is not there yet um the word of wisdom is going to come from the temperance movement joseph smith's not into that yet the garden of eden being in missouri isn't going to happen until joseph smith gets to missouri and so all of these different ideas um i referenced it once is like joseph smith creating a mixtape you know he's creating a mixtape of all these ideas he likes repurposes them into mormonism but all of these things that are now so central to mormon to mormonism in the mormon church are things that joseph smith is going to learn later and then actualize back into the church but they're not in the book of mormon which tells you that the book of mormon is not a fullness of the gospel and it's also being written with joseph smith's worldview as of 1829 and not as of 1843 and that again helps you to date when it's when it's composed from a perspective of scholars who are trying to look at all the clues he leaves as to how you can date it and this is another area that you can do that with yeah dude and you leave off of their uh plural marriage you know so see now plural marriage is kind of mentioned in there so in the book of mormon it's forbidden yeah it's forbidden but it's mentioned and so that's why it's not in there but yeah and that's and that's one of those things because that's ironically enough of all the later intervention innovations of joseph smith polygamy is really the only one that can't be tied back to someone else's ideas like you know we were talking about earlier with the three tiers of heaven and the melchizedek priesthood that one does seem to be mostly joseph smith who puts it in the book of mormon and then um is able to pull from that to justify it later and obviously we'll get into that with a bunch of overviews um but yeah so that is the one thing i didn't put in there because that's the one thing that the book of mormon does kind of leave open-ended even though it does condemn it yeah but then when you add to the fact that the doctrine of covenants the early book of commandments slash doctrine to covenants condemned polygamy and plural marriage oh yeah you know and we've got a whole episode with sandra tanner on dnc 132 that is is a must listen as well yeah it is and when we get to it i think we'll do three overviews on polygamy just because it's so hard to cover it in one so we'll have three separate overviews that really just it'll it'll really hammer down the timeline of the revelation how it was composed um the timeline of polygamy uh the the ways he was teaching it privately i mean all of those things are going to give you again a window in how he is able to i think speak so charismatically to people and also to weave the bible into his own needs and and that really is what the book of mormon is and it's it's but you know one of the cool things about learning this stuff one of the really cool things about learning about the new testament is how a lot of the contradictions and the gospels aren't necessarily because they're screwing up it's because they're trying to to tell these stories to their communities to make them valuable to the communities and to fulfill needs that they have and so um the the different contradictions are because they're telling stories to different people and trying to give them purpose in their own lives and the book of mormon in its own way is doing the same thing the problem is that with the book of mormon we can show that it's not historical through these clues but it's still cool to understand kind of how he did it like i still find it fascinating to look at how joseph did it even if i know it's not historical yeah one more one more i don't know if this really fits in anachronisms but it's it's it's an issue that i think is really problematic that i i think deserves mentioning somewhere um is the number of women mentioned in the book of mormon in women's names mentioned in the book of mormon versus men's names in the book of mormon as i understand it the book of mormon only names six women and only three of them are actually native to the to the narrative to the book of mormon the other three women i think are biblical names and then of course the book of mormon has hundreds of of male names that feels actually fitting for joseph smith's day or for the biblical times because of course you know this is prior to the feminist movement prior to the idea that women could vote women were humans women could own property women had rights and so of course women are deeply neglected or almost invisible in the book of mormon um and and the fact that the book of mormon is just still you know this is god's one shot to give us perfect scripture he's been he's been directing the plates from the from the beginning he's been handing him down he's been speaking directly to his prophets we can't blame it on the catholic priests or the medieval monks to have corrupted the book and god's gonna like mention three women in the book of mormon and and only three women and like one's a harlot like yeah um and the other one murmurs and and and then mentioned hundreds of men's names like is that is there is that a problem and and for some people that's a problem i mean it's tough because the bible doesn't exactly give a lot of nods to women either so i think from an apologetic standpoint they would just say it was the book of mormon times were just as patriot patriarchal as the bible was and because of that they didn't write down the women it wasn't joseph smith i mean that that gets into more like you know i would say more just the i would say from like it's a problem because it basically erases women from this history um but i would say with regards to this i wouldn't necessarily i wouldn't push too hard on it only because um the bible doesn't exactly give a huge amount of space to women so you can't really i wouldn't i wouldn't say it's unique from the bible in that regard but it definitely shows that it was written you know like you said prior to the last 50 years for sure um but you know i don't know that it would necessarily from like a standpoint of trying to draw too much from it i understand i understand your point yeah i just wanted a thought in there because i don't know if we cover it anywhere else no i don't think we do i mean it's one i think maybe we'll cover it a little bit in that um overview on how it was composed because i do go into the names a little bit but it's more like it just kind of shows that women are an afterthought in the book of mormon and again it's a problem in the sense of we see that continue through the modern church today where women are very much um you know i know they're second-class citizens you are because you can't hold the priesthood you can't you know make any decisions that aren't going to be supervised by a man but as far as like using that to analyze the book of mormon i don't think it would really provide too much okay so to close we we started off this episode with a big old list of anachronisms whether it's materials or technologies or or livestock and we promise you that we would kind of address um common modern mormon apologetic responses to to these kind of uh archaeological and anthropo anthropological um anachronism so what do you want to say about this you've got two for those who are just listening you've got two lists here a list of allegedly anachronisms that would have been you know knowable in 1842 or the original set of anachronisms yeah and then we've got as of 2005 which ones have now according to fair mormon or whoever farms or the maxwell institute i guess i guess this would be a list of anachronisms that mormon apologists would claim have been overturned yeah and so basically these are both from fair mormon and so this is their way of saying that when you talk about anachronisms and you're actually finding confirmation of a lot more of them with every passing year which means that the rest of them will eventually be found and for those who are listening a couple of the ones that fair mormon now claims are confirmed are like brass plates and as we talked about earlier if they want to confirm brass plates they have to address all of the other issues that come from the math um from the codex issues from the language issues and um and so that is when i talk talked to the beginning about how the thing about anachronisms is that there's a lot of markers that give you more specific information than just using generic terms such as brass plates because were there engravings on metal yes but in the same way as the book of mormon like not even remotely close and when you talk about things like um steel swords they'll say well there's they found metal swords but they're not the same as they're described in the book of mormon and you get these other issues like cement and highways and fortifications and those are all pulling from these kind of fragmentary discoveries and saying that they're similar enough now some of these are going to match because you're you're not you know the whole thing about like picking cherry picking is that you would expect in a list of i don't know how many this is like uh i would say 40 or 50. you'd expect to find some you're going to find some because we're talking about ideas that are going to carry through civilizations but just to point out that a lot of the ones even a lot of the ones that fair mormon kind of claims have happened i would argue are highly problematic and and um the ones that they determine as indeterminate are really important as well like reformed egyptian the fact that we found no egyptian in the ancient americas is a problem it's not indeterminate it's the fact that we do have history of some of these people and they're just showing us the opposite and so they're saying it's indeterminate i would argue you it best it's unconfirmed because it just does not have any factual basis and so a lot of these um kinds of of games where you're taking a ton of things it makes it easy to kind of show a bunch of them been found without having to go really deep into why even some of those are problematic to claim is being found and i know that's kind of confusing but it's just that's why these these kind of long lists are frustrating for me because as we said earlier you only need one anachronism to show it's not what it claims to be is with regards to the timing of it and we have gone through a bunch of them that aren't even on this list because the list is more focused on physical items and that's why i like focusing both on the physical and on the ideas and on the material because it's not just one prong there's all these different prongs that are pointing at this being a 19th century text and you only need one and so fair mormon is trying to find all these kind of outer easier ones like fortifications which are going to happen through a lot of civilizations but it's not answering the big ones such as brass plates with long records reformed egyptian having buried you know millions of people dying or hundreds of thousands dying in battles all of these things should be found and they're just not being found because the book of mormon historically has no place in the americas yeah um yeah and i'm just gonna say there's so many problems with this list you know they're they're leaving off but you know in this example that we're showing here on this slide they're leaving off a bunch of important anachronisms so for example i don't see silk anywhere i don't see honeybees anywhere so they're leaving off a bunch of check boxes that they know they should be including right they're adding a bunch of dumb ones you know like like large cities or highways anytime you have a civil relatively advanced civilization yeah you're you're gonna have just basic elements of civilization right um so they're kind of adding extra superfluous boxes so that they can fill up boxes with green yeah that feels like almost straw men but then they're also ignoring the preponderance of archaeology archaeologists and anthropologists like michael coe who are the real unbiased experts on these topics and they're checking boxes that have no business being checked there's no way michael coe would check steel's sword right to have anything to do with north central or south america during this time period there's no way he would check brass plates um you know there's there's no way he would check barley right like he would reject a ton of these green boxes that they have checked and that's disingenuous and then the final thing is they're not admitting their bias which is they're literally paid by byu and by the church to make these arguments so they're kind of like non-credible sources uh you know in my mind to begin with um really quickly let's also talk about loan shifting because i don't think we have a what is loan shifting and uh you know why is it dumb and why is it a problem because i don't think we've even talked about what loan shifting is and why people should look out for it i mean loan shifting is basically this idea that you could have um joseph smith is kind of given like more of a visionary experience and so he sees an animal it looks like a horse so he puts horse in the book of mormon and then you look as a archaeologist or historian or like a byu professor and you say okay and the most common one is the taper they'll see a taper and they'll say well there were tapers in ancient america it looks kind of like a horse so if we loan shift we can make a tape or a horse and use that to say that joseph smith saw something that looks like a horse he used the word horse because that's what he knew even though it was really a taper which he didn't know that word at the time and it's used a lot it's just it's one of those things where again we're told that this is a tight translation off of a rocking hat word for word and so we have all of these errors um with regards to these animals and these these items that were not there um maybe the same thing with a steel sword well they'll say well joseph smith looked like he was seeing a steel sword that's what he knew in his head but it was really some other or some other material that maybe wouldn't have been so durable or whatever the case might be it just it doesn't match and the problem is that is a position you're only going to take once your initial truth claim has been proven false and then you retreat to the second level and say okay maybe he actually saw something like it but used a different word for it and it's just again we talked about this earlier when we talked about like once you start to give space there for like loan shifting it just it immediately takes away the um truth claims of mormonism with regard to the book of mormon being in a historical text and kind of moves it to the second level where you could say joseph smith was a co-author he was trying to uh verbalize it in a way that made sense to him and it just it doesn't really it wouldn't stand up if you were to do a peer-reviewed paper because they'd say no these are not the same things but we're doing it because we need people who are reading the text and coming across these problems to feel like there's a solution however implausible it might be that could maybe explain it and i just i think it's just a it's it's a word game i think that is used to try to make these problems go away and for those who don't know the history we literally have byu professors you know writing documents for farms or for the maxwell institute or for fair mormon hypothesizing that when joseph smith wright horse wrote down horse in his mind what he meant is a taper and what we're showing here is kind of a comedic representation of a of a you know native american warrior riding on top of a taper like it is such a ridiculous um argument that it strains credulity and and a lot of these green check boxes that that fair mormon and others will um you know include on these checklists they're redefining what the word barley means they're redefining what the word sword means um and they're doing it all the way through and the the problem is number one they know they're doing it um but but number two that there's no uh there's no credible non-mormon archaeologist or anthropologist that would acknowledge these things but number three again and i'm repeating what not only you've said today but what we said in previous episodes but i'm trying to restate this in a way that new people to the discussion will understand is that if joseph if the if the seer stone worked like like the witnesses all told us it did which is that that joseph would would claim to see the seer stone read what was on it dictate it the the scribe would write down what the seer stone what joseph said from the steer tone seer stone and then the seer stone would could listen and hear and know that the scribe had finished writing what the words that joseph had dictated before it continued and we and we know from accounts that that's the power that the witnesses to the book of mormon ascribed to the seer stone if we know the seer stone has that power and if we know that joseph smith can produce names like like nephi like lehi like zarahemla like ramyemptem and then if we know that he can actually come up with names of objects and animals that we know never existed or that do not exist in present day or to any historical understanding like curling like coomum like the names of currencies and just proper names and cities that are used in the book of mormon if joseph smith can come up with all of those names then he could have come up with a name for a sword that was more accurate or he could have come up with the name of wheat or barley or cow or cattle um that was more accurate and so this whole loan shifting taper garbage is is really disingenuous and insulting and um this it's deceitful i think it's great it's grasping at straws and it's one of those things again like you know i think it's also a bit of a distraction because you can say oh there's a hundred anachronisms and we've we think we found 50 of them or something right and you don't have to go to a believing audience and go one by one i mean and again we don't i i didn't put slides on this stuff because like i said it to me it's missing the point that we can look through the source material we can look at the the theological ideas and show this is not an ancient book and that doesn't even get into all the problems with these individual items but even like barley um one of the things that's really interesting about that kind of stuff is they leave a pollen trail so you could tell like from a specific uh kind of barley where when it came here and where it came from and they've done a lot of uh i'd probably there's a term for like pollen cortez or some and the ones that are sometimes cited don't really match as if they came over you know when lehigh got here so it just doesn't necessarily um it's much more complicated they want to make it more oversimplified so they can say we found all these things and like the brass plates are great example because they say there's evidence of brass plates but we've shown you their evidence for brass plates is actually in my opinion the most evidence you could ever have against the idea that the book of mormon would be written on golden plates or that the five books of moses plus all the other records would be on brass plates because it would be to the point where you couldn't lift it up so if you want a site that is confirmed then you have to say okay if that's confirmed if that's my evidence of of records on brass plates then what does that mean for the book of mormon because then all of a sudden you need a 6500 plate set between the sealed and unsealed and you don't want to go down that road so it's like can you claim to find it as confirmed yet not tell what the implications of that confirmation are and that and that to me is where i'm trying in these overviews to really kind of illustrate why the apologetics a lot of times create other problems elsewhere that of course they don't mention and that's why these things just don't fit together well because once you dig into it you can see that they just don't they don't work in a way that the evidence leads you to it only works if you start with the conclusion and work your way back yeah and just to kind of summarize again what we've already said but like it only takes one anachronism to prove a document to be out inauthentic and we have deutero isaiah we have plates that don't make sense we have reformed egyptian a language that makes no sense we have you know livestock and food that doesn't make sense we have old testament teachings that make no sense we have new testament teachings along with king james bible stuff that make no sense all the way to 19th century protestant sermons masonic stuff joseph's father's own dreams protestant sermons uh and then a complete lack of all the stuff that should be there like jaguars like cocoa beans like turkeys and and like uh jewish rituals and um you know and the like and so again if it only takes one they're just and it's missing all of joseph's later theological developments if this is the fullness of the gospel why is it missing the melchizedek priesthood ceilings temple marriage temple work baptism for the dead three degrees of glory celestial marriage it's just it it is a this is a massive smoking gun and for apologists like skousen or terrell and fiona givens or patrick mason for any modern mormon apologist to claim that the book of mormon is just this incredibly sophisticated intricate magic work of sophistication it's not it's got thousands and thousands of anachronisms and and unsophisticated problems with it so anyway yeah and that's the thing like i think it you know one of the things we talk about throughout these overviews is to say that it's it's a really good story that weaves in a lot of stuff and he does a really good job weaving theologies that are all around him and so there is a lot where you can look at joseph and say he is a very creative genius and i know when you say that a lot apologists kind of smile because they go of course you'd say that because you have no other explanation and we'll get to that in a few weeks as to how we could have done it but the problem is being a creative genius still leaves you without the knowledge of biblical scholarship of the knowledge of not having uh knowing what's in the ancient americas and those are the testable claims that the book of mormon makes that we contest against and so once you find out that those tests show us that that's not true then it's really hard to make the argument that the book of mormon can still stand up as historical and that joseph smith is receiving us directly from god because it just doesn't match up and so whether or not joseph smith was smart or not it still shows that he's leaving a lot of fingerprints and that's really what the focus is in these overviews is to say there's too many there's just too many there's there's too many red flags to where you could sit there and go well maybe if we just look at it this way it's like no because even if you even if you you know turned onto a different street that street still got him then you turn into another street that street's still got all sorts of problems it's like no matter where you go you're going to run into these issues and so you know that kind of leads us to a good way to conclude it which is just to say just in this overview beyond that typical list that you see a lot that we talked about horses and steel and chariots is just look at where the material is coming from so you've got the king james bible which tells us it's not ancient because that was not written until 1611. using deutero isaiah shows us that he's working off of a mindset that all of isaiah was one author um so it couldn't have been on the brass plates the christ the messiah problem kind of tells us that the author of the book of mormon just didn't quite understand that there was a greek translation of a hebrew word in there and as you mentioned earlier in this episode this really does fall back on the type versus loose translation methods because these issues all require a loose translation to account for the errors in the text but the problem is all of the witness accounts are telling us without any hesitation it's a tight translation and so it really comes down to either all the witnesses were wrong and joseph smith was lying to them as to how he was translating it or joseph smith was the author of the book of mormon which is what all of these errors are pointing to yeah and again uh just to kind of bring it all together when you add to it the episode on the dna evidence when you add to it tower of babel global flood adam and eve when you add to it um just just all the different other problems it just it becomes significant so yeah that's why that's why this series and you add to a book of abraham and you add to it kinder plates kinder hook plates um if you add to it the joseph smith translation and the problems there it's it's just you can't you go from thinking there's no smoking gun to thinking that that you can only see smoking guns yeah i mean it's like i said it's i think i said it at one point early in our episodes but it's like you can look for smoking guns and then you can look for like death by a thousand cuts because the problem is you know the best way i could say it is every time you turn your direction you try to go somewhere else to get away from these problems you're just going to find more and that's really like you said you know it goes beyond the book of mormon we're just kind of getting towards the end of talking about the book of mormon and then we're getting a biblical scholarship and then we're going to get into the book of abraham and every one of these things is not just telling us that these aren't ancient texts but that the problems that are in the book of mormon in the book of abraham um you know in the doctrine of covenants all these things are very common threads that have to be coming from you know a single source which in this case is joseph smith and so we can show where he's pulling from we can show why he's evolving his beliefs and that is not a good thing if you want to believe that the truth claims of mormonism are true this is a good thing if you're trying to figure out how it happened which is why i find it to be really fascinating but yeah it's just everywhere you go there's a problem and there's no real way to escape it um unless you kind of like i said untether yourself from um that evidence-based reality it's only it only works if you just say i don't care about the evidence and i choose to believe and if that's the case you can do that it's just know that when you do that you are now in a realm that kind of goes beyond faith it's really going into a realm that's more you know faith that's not based on just what we know but faith in spite of what we know and i think that would be a space you would never grant to another religion and that's kind of one of those things we've tried to pull into these episodes which is to say if you solve these problems of scientology would you say i could totally understand why people still believe in it or would you say oh my goodness that's all you need to know is know that it's not true and i think we all know what the answer is because we would not give that space to someone else because the evidence is is just everywhere yeah yeah well this has been an amazing episode i know it's going to be an instant classic on mormon stories and according to the timeline i have we're only like uh eight episodes into the series we've got book of mormon king james version of the bible in detail we've got this awesome episode i can't wait for how the book of mormon was composed we've got several episodes speak about anachronistic we've got several episodes we've already recorded like adam and eve the global flood tower of babel then we're going to get into sermon on the mount which i'm excited for we've already recorded long ending of mark um due to isaiah i can't wait for and then we leave uh you know kind of book of mormon and we get into first vision and priesthood restoration and word of wisdom and so many other cool things like kindergarten mike you're just you're a genius you're brilliant and we love you and people are loving this series so we can't thank you enough well thank you so much and like i said it'll be fun to get back and we'll do the next one next week all right thanks everyone uh thanks mike uh you guys take care be good to each other be kind to each other please share these episodes far and wide um please give us your feedback mormon stories gmail.com feel free to comment on youtube or on facebook uh we love your feedback uh we're working hard to try and find a balance between um not going too fast where people that are newer to these topics can understand them and learn as we go but not going too slow for people that have been studying this stuff for a long time we're trying to find that good balance if you have feedback on that just realize that we're we're trying to have this relevant to everybody know that we do have time codes in the youtube version so you can actually go to the description of youtube and if you want to jump ahead if you find that we've made a point and we're still describing it and you just want to jump to the next slide or the next point you can go to the jump codes or the jump points in the time codes and jump to the next episodes you can also listen at you know one and a quarter speed or one and a half speed on youtube or on your podcast app if you want to go faster if we're going too fast for you you can slow it down to 0.8 speed some people say mike talks really fast if that's a problem for you slow it down that's why we have modern technology um finally we just want to thank everyone who makes this series possible and we just want to say we lose between 10 and 20 donors a month we need your financial support to make this possible so if you value this content if you want to see us finish this series and if you want to see this content be available to future generations and current generations please become a monthly donor go to mormonstorage.org click on the donate button sign up for whatever you can afford 10 bucks a month 20 bucks a month 100 bucks a month you can make big one-time donations small donations whatever works you can donate even through venmo if you want to we've got a mormon stories account there we would really appreciate it it's tax deductible in the united states we're fully transparent in our finances every every year we publish our our 990s once the irs publishes them uh we're transparent and all of the money you you donate goes uh to support the mission of the open storage foundation which is not to tear down the mormon church which is 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