The King James Bible Problem in the Book of Mormon

hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of mormon stories podcast i'm your host john dulin we are uh well into an amazing what i think is historic series uh on mormon stories about uh mormon church truth claims um based on the amazing work of of lay i'll call him a lay scholar mike um who has put together an amazing website uh called uh lds discussions that can be found at ldsdiscussions.com and we have covered so many cool topics so far on treasure digging in the book of mormon um and uh we are now just uh starting to also talk about anachronisms in the book of mormon which we just recorded an episode on and today we have an episode that kind of follows on that where we're going to be talking very specifically about the king james bible problem in the book of mormon and that's the episode for today and i think that a lot of mormons would never even think that the king james bible appearing in the book of mormon would in any way be problematic because hey they're both scriptures it's the stick of joseph it's the stick of judah they belong together so why wouldn't the king james virgin bible appear in the book of mormon right mike yeah i mean that's just it and so it's one of those things where like for me as a believer i never really thought about it just because you're just that's just it is what it is right you just use the king james bible language and all that um so you know it ends up being one of those things where the problem gets deeper the more you look into it and kind of as we've been doing all these episodes are building on each other and that's why um i think on this episode you're going to see a little overlap but it's because now all of these things we've been talking about are kind of colliding together in a way that i hope will not just make this episode more meaningful but maybe make those previous ones that you've listened to or watched a little more meaningful as well because it's starting to tie these things back together yeah yep so there'll be a tiny bit of overlap as there always will be but this is a really important episode um what what's the uh the link for this the essay for um the corresponds with this episode can be found at ldsdiscussions.com kjv will include a link um to that essay in the show notes along with other um essays and episodes and topics and and references that we make we also let people know at the outset that we're including if you just wait you know at least a few days to a week after these episodes are released um we have show notes and time codes where you can actually jump to portions of the interview that you want to hear we're trying to balance um not going too fast for people that are new to these episodes uh or to these issues but also not going slow to people that have been studying this stuff for a long time we hope we're striking a good balance we're doing our best uh to do so but also feel free to slow these down at 0.8 speed or 0.75 speed if you think me or mike talk too fast or if the topics are too advanced and if you've heard all this before and you just want to get to the meat feel free to speed it up to 1.25 speed or one and a half speed or even two speed or you can use the time codes to jump backwards and forwards as you wish but please in your feedback understand we're trying to make these uh these episodes meaningful and relevant to people no matter where they are on the spectrum so try to be kind in your in your feedback um all right well why don't you go ahead and give us oh oh and i'll just say one last thing as we try and say in all of our episodes we are not doing this to destroy faith we're not doing this to tear down the mormon church or to take people out of the mormon church we're doing this entire series under the in the spirit of informed consent we believe that everyone should know what the mormon church truth claims are and what the evidence is that support them because so many important decisions are made in people's lives based on these truth claims in the history and the context um that they're provided whether they're born in the church or an investigator or they're looking into the church now so it's the it's the spirit of informed consent and not any desire to destroy uh that hopefully informs these episodes and we promise to do our best to be as respectful as possible and sometimes we come off as critical but i think that's only when the evidence just really merits it but even when the evidence merits criticism we're still going to try and be as respectful as we can right mike yeah i mean and again it's just it's one of those things where i think for me um i look at it like we talk about you know it's not we're not going door-to-door telling people who are in the church like hey you're wrong this is for me uh my belief is that most people that come across ldsdiscussions.com are already having questions and so it's about giving uh what i feel the evidence leads us to and giving that's giving the sources for that and giving the apologetics that the church gives to try to explain why i don't think they necessarily work for these topics and so the real goal here was like i said at the beginning of these episodes i was asked to put this together as a way to show whether or not the truth claims of mormonism were true or not and um so everyone who watches these or listens this can do with with it what they want but i also think even if you disagree with the outcome of where i'm at at least you can hopefully acknowledge that this evidence is out there um and maybe it won't change the way you feel about certain things but maybe it will allow you to maybe be a little more nuanced with things or maybe it will help your relationships with family members who leave there's a lot of different i think hopefully outcomes that can come from this um from people having a better understanding of the the issues and the evidence um to kind of understand where other people are coming from as well so hopefully even if you disagree with the the ultimate outcomes of these overviews it'll at least give you some perspective that'll help you elsewhere you know at the same time and if you're a mormon bishop or more mistake president or mission president or a church education assistant seminary or institute instructor or even a sunday school teacher or an elders quorum instructor or relief society teacher or youth teacher it will help you teach an honest accurate view of our history and of our truth claims so you're not misleading future generations yep exactly all right so what is the problem with joseph smith using the king james bible give us that overview yeah and so basically um this particular episode is going to um be a sort of getting to a culmination of what we've been talking about in these other episodes which is why the book of mormon creates major problems for the truth claims of the book of mormon being an ancient historical text and we're going to look at some areas of the king james bible itself now looking more at the text and some of the errors that are in it um to better understand where this material is coming from that ends up in the book of mormon and just as you know we you know just kind of saying it again now that we're starting to kind of build to the you know sort of the climax of the book of mormon episodes um in this project uh there's going to be some overlap but i think it's going to be important it should hopefully give more context to some of the earlier episodes and also you know it's going to give more context to some of the biblical scholarship ones we're going to do once we get out of the book of mormon so i think that this episode is going to give a lot more kind of depth to some of the stuff we've already done and hopefully kind of set up some of the stuff we're going to do in future episodes as well all right so uh so the next slide um it asks the question why the king james bible presents problems for the book of mormon yeah and this is just again it looks at some of the areas we've kind of covered a little bit so there are certain things that the king james bible is going to do for the book of mormon that is really going to kind of present issues such as the bottom line is it's anachronistic to be in the book of mormon because of the fact that this translation was not done until 1611 which means that is not an ancient translation it's a modern more modern translation that is not going to be accessible to the book of mormon people and that becomes problematic when there are certain phrases and wordings that are unique to the king james bible that are going to work their way into the book of mormon um and one of the bigger things and this is one that is kind of was interesting to me when i when i kind of did kind of stopped privileging the king james bible is the translation of the king james bible is not considered to be one of the most accurate and is actually considered an inferior translation to the more commonly used translations today on the niv the nasb those are different translations that are more commonly used now because the king james bible obviously was was done you know by scholars um at the time um but you know it was again it was done without maybe some of the i don't think i think it was done before the dead sea scroll so it's not going to have as much um of the earlier text that some of them have and so that is you know the book of mormon mormon church in a lot of ways has dated because of the fact that we still use the king james bible in it but most churches today would not use it just because they don't consider it to be nearly as is good and is accurate the king james bible obviously includes the new testament i mean because it is the bible but that should not be in the book of mormon we've covered that in the anachronism episode but we'll cover that a little bit more here as to why that presents issues and um one final thing is just to say going back almost to the early episodes the use using the king james bible in the book of mormon goes directly against the witness accounts of the tight translation which is to say we are told that the rock in the hat gives exact words that will not change until they're written down yet here we're basically going to show that and we've shown in previous episodes too that the king james bible is used you know all over the place in the book of mormon which tells us that either god is presenting the king james bible through the rock and a hat or joseph smith is using the bible um to pull in phrases and even big chapters of isaiah and and that presents an issue when you look at the accounts that are given by the witnesses to the process all right that's a wonderful overview and are you saying that all of these bullets are going to be covered in today's episode yes okay all right well let's jump in yeah and so with uh miss translations of the king james version that end up in the book of mormon yeah and this is one we really haven't talked about too much and so the king james bible has errors in the translation which is going to happen anytime you're translating an ancient text into a different language especially one of this length but the problem is those errors should not appear in the book of mormon given that joseph smith is claiming to be receiving translation of a different source that is not the kgb through the gift and power of god these errors um being in the book of mormon are going to leave fingerprints as to how they got there and then that allows you to understand who brought them into it and so these are errors that maybe wouldn't seem like huge deals but they do allow us from a textual standpoint to understand how they got there and when they were put there and who would have put them in there okay so just to restate what i think i heard you say is that the king james bible um has errors in it and the version of the king james bible that joseph smith would have used would have contained some of those errors and magically those are appearing in the book of mormon okay so yeah this is some examples of that now yeah and so this is just a really quick one which is a good one because um if you look at isaiah 2 16 in the nrsv it says against all the ships of tarshish and against all the beautiful craft and then in isaiah and the king james bible it says and upon all the ships of tarshish and upon all the pleasant pictures and then in second nephi it says and upon all the ships of the sea and upon all the ships of tarshish and upon all pleasant pictures and we have a write-up on this overview page on lds discussions.com and we're borrowing from a write-up that explains this particular error and what they say is one of the reasons i like this example is because it's a twofer in the same verse we have the book of mormon preserving a kgv mistranslation while introducing a new redaction it's difficult to argue that god is simply simply transmitting the kgb to joseph errors and all when in the very same verse joseph is going to make another incorrect redaction and if you look at our overview overview page we have some links to kind of show why they consider this an incorrect redaction and then they say another reason i like it is because the source of the mistranslation is clear meaning that we know he's pulling directly from the kgv um and the implication would be that there was no egyptian loan word that could be shifted from it so really quickly for those who just heard a bunch of words but didn't actually detect the error so you've got an nrsv verse in isaiah and then a king james verse next to it yes what's the error so in the king james bible they're going to say um upon instead of against and then instead of saying pleasant pictures they say uh instead of saying beautiful craft they're saying pleasant pictures and so joseph smith is going to bring in those errors from the more pride and what's wrong um though this is something i don't think there's any real um real argument on today i don't know if it's because of the dead sea scrolls or if it's just because when you look at the original hebrew now they just know it's wrong but this is one i don't think anyone argues against that so the raw so when when the king james scholars made this translation and what the four well what 1611 when it came out so they translated a hebrew word to mean uh to be what in english uh so they they have it say pleasant pictures and the actual translation would be beautiful craft okay now more modern scholars who really can read hebrew will say that it should have been beautiful craft correct pictures correct and then um also upon all yep the in in the bad in the king james version that's been corrected to say against all instead of right okay yes okay sorry no it's and that's just it's and it's one of those things where it's like the actual wording isn't as important as just showing that not only is joseph smith pulling directly in from the kgb which is the incorrect translation but when he's making the little changes um and that's why if you go to the the lds discussion kgb we link to it of course these things have a ton of explanation but he's just to be clear for those listening in second nephi 12 16 it's carrying forth the king james errors yes because i'm seeing their um pleasant pictures instead of beautiful craft yeah and it's saying up oh but it's saying upon all oh it shouldn't be saying a apology it's just he's adding in all the ships in the sea in front of tarshish so yeah and so it's just it's an example of where you can show joseph smith pulling directly in from the kgb and you can't really argue he's pulling from some other source because the kgb has this unique error whereas the other translations don't and so you know it's coming from the kgv which is a problem and what's your reduction i think the redaction man i need to look up because i should i should have looked that up extra slide but yeah lots of things just let people know there's a reduction where joseph yeah take something out yeah that that uh you know okay yeah and has these tweaked things yeah so it's just it's showing that he's making these small tweaks and that's what we're going to get into in the next slide because this is where this is the pattern that's going to kind of pick up here as we go i know none of us are scholars so we're just yeah it's tough off top my head i can't remember exactly why i just i know that it's a very long article that explains it as these things tend to go when they're talking about the specific meanings of words from these these different texts but but as i know you'll admit to later all all biblical skull pretty much all biblical scholars across the world are going to agree with this these translation issues they're highlighting including the church's own biblical scholars like jim mcclellan like david bacavoy or brian howglood before they you know lost their faith et cetera right yeah i mean these these are not really controversial it's more again it's just a problem because of the fact that we're still relying on the king james bible otherwise this would not be a big issue okay all right that takes us to the next slide yeah this words in the james version that appear in the book of mormon and this is one of the areas a lot of people point to because obviously the italicized words in the king james bible are there to make it more readable and so the translators would insert words in italics that were not part of the original translation but they did it to make the text flow a little more naturally for the readers and this is something james's own scholars are including italicized words yes they're not in the original scrolls correct right they're just what the scholars felt would be helpful to emphasize certain words correct yeah and so earlier later versions of the king james bible not to mention other different translations are going to have probably either no italics or italicized different words is that right correct okay keep going and so the point is this is was well known during joseph's time and so w phelps um actually cites this in an 1833 um article in the morning and evening evening and morningstar and he says as to the errors in the bible any man possessed of common understanding knows that both the old and new testaments are filled with errors obscurities italics and contradictions which must be the work of men and then wwe phillips actually a few months earlier makes this a more distinctive um kind of claim where he says the book of mormon as a revelation from god possesses some advantage over the old scripture it has not been tinkered by the wisdom of man where he's not been tinctured by the wisdom of ma of man with here and there in italic word to supply deficiency so they're outright saying the italics are almost like a crutch to make it more readable and wwe phelps is saying that because the book of mormon is a direct translation it doesn't have that same problem and as we're going to see it it does have that same problem okay yeah so let's go ahead and uh see if the book of mormon really avoids the italics problem yeah and so this is um from david wright who is a pretty um i think respected scholar of of this stuff and so he wrote extensively on joseph's misuse of the kgv chapters of isaiah in the book of mormon and this is a good summary um from the problems we're mentioning when it comes to the italics and so it says depending on how conservatively you judge them between 22 and 38 percent of all differences between the book of mormon and kgb's isaiah parts text are associated with words italicizing the kgv skousen who's a scholar that we mentioned he's more of an apologetic scholar uh calculates it at 29 so just say 30 percentish the difference is that only 3.6 of the words in the relevant kgv passages are italicized so the correlation is significant so what it's saying is that only 3.6 percent of the words are italicized but they still account for about 30 percent of the differences that's that's a pretty telltale sign where the focus is um furthermore 40 of words italicized in the kgv are missing in their corresponding book of mormon passages of the other 60 many passages had environmental changes related to those italics the book of mormon seems to be particularly concerned with kgb italics which suggests that it's derivative of the english kgv text rather than an ancient common ancestor these revisions often cause problems for example isaiah 51 19 reads these two things are come unto thee the book of mormon changes the italicized words things to sons the revision doesn't work in hebrew since the phrase is formulated with the feminine whereas the word sun is masculine there are many more similar examples you can read and write's essay and so what this is saying is that joseph smith is clearly aware of the italics problem and so as he's bringing these these um chapters into the book of mormon his entire i shouldn't say his entire a large part of his focus is on figuring out how to make the italics work so when they say that only 3.6 of the words are italics in those isaiah chapters and yet about 30 of the changes are of the italics it's telling you that an overwhelming focus is on the italics as opposed to the rest of the text and even then joseph smith is trying to sometimes change the words around the italics to make it make more sense but in this case when he does it he makes an error and these are the like i said earlier the fingerprints that joseph smith is going to leave on this text that you can tell without any question is starting with the king james bible and not starting with um words appearing on a rock and a hat because again we know what version of the king james bible joseph smith had in his possession right and so we know the source material of where this would come from and so when you see these changes are uh completely dependent on the source text he had there's really no reason that you could logically say well he started with what the rock on it what the what the series peep stone was saying and then and then adapted it because that it doesn't matter when when your source material is something that we know you know joseph smith had in his possession i'm just going to say you mentioned david wright and i'm just going to share something that you know that may seem a bit jarring to some of you is my understanding is that david wright was a classics professor at byu when i was there and my understanding is not only was he kicked out of byu or he left byu because of pressure but eventually i believe he was excommunicated from the mormon church and some of you might go well well now that automatically discredits him if he's excommunicated then he's a bad guy and we shouldn't listen to him but if you go back into the 19 you know the 1990s and beyond even starting with fong brodie you find that when a scholar is excommunicated for apostasy be it fon brodie for her book no man knows my history be it michael quinn for his book um joseph smith you know folk magic in the in the early um magic in the earlier mormonism world view whatever the name of that book is whether it's grant palmer um whether it is uh others simon southerton david wright the church excommunicates scholars historically when they reveal truths about the church's truth claims that are problematic so if you if you look at the credibility of fon brodie scholarship who david who richard bushman himself acknowledges is one of our top joseph smith scholars when you look at how all of michael quinn's writings about folk magic have proven true along with his publications about post-manifesto polygamy and other things and when you look at david wright and even brett metcalf scholarship you'll find that all of them were spot on and that yesterday's apostate excommunications become today's gospel topics essays and apologetics david wright's excommunication becomes an endorsement of the validity of his work not a denunciation is that fair well yeah i mean i i just i think the fact is we've talked about this in other episodes with different topics but you know david wright is pulling these things out but he's not being contradicted he's being confirmed by other scholars and so it's not just one person and again you can look at the kgv and you can look at the book of mormon and you can do these these comparisons for yourself and so david wright's problem was the fact that he was coming up with articles that were telling us there's a problem here in making it public and obviously i think today the church operates a little differently obviously you know they're not going to come after someone like me for it because i think now it's just out there but back then david wright was doing something that hadn't been thought of and so i think for a long time they tried they did try you know september 6 and all that was an attempt to try to keep scholarship of the book of mormon faith promoting or else you know you would you would face discipline and i think now all of those people are being referenced in these gospel topics that say i know michael quinn has been i know other people have and so it's really hard um when you see that to not go you know why would they communicate for telling the truth but but the truth is in these cases um they were because these these things are true they're just not faith promoting and so again we've talked about this before if your goal is to maintain faith in your equation is that it must be true these episodes aren't for you but if you want to start with a clean slate and kind of get to where the evidence leads you're going to end up in the same places that these guys did i don't think you're going to be excommunicated for it obviously but but they were excommunicated in publishing these things which which i'm certainly getting a lot of use out of um to help me understand it so i'm thankful to them even though i know they went through problems for doing so and many of the church's own gospel topics essays reference excommunicated you know the scholarship i've excommunicated mormons and they do which validates you know all right so yeah so the next slide is joseph smith leaving fingerprints when dealing with the italics yeah so just as we said in the last slide obviously it seems like there's a huge focus on the italics and so he's aware of the problem and we know that this is something known because ww phelps mentions it twice obviously a few years later but it's it's something that was not like people obviously understood these italics had kind of stuck out a bit and so um as we mentioned in the last slide if joseph smith is reading the words off of a stone in the hat and the scribes can't write down the next part until it's written right why are the kgb words being pulled in all italicized or not and so that is something again where we get into the type versus loose you know we we have to acknowledge that joseph smith is using the king james bible and one of the best ways to illustrate how joseph smith is going to begin with the kgb text of isaiah and then revise it as he saw fit is this example that stan larsen was able to pull from the printer's manuscript of the book of mormon and he says in first nephi 2011 the words of isaiah 48 11 how should my name be polluted um and um the words my name are polluted or sorry the words my name are italicized um those words were initial it was initially revised to how should i suffer my name to be polluted um then the kg v words how should in the book of mormon i were crossed out in a super linear super linear revision gave the final book of mormon declaration i will not suffer my name to be polluted this revision shows that for a biblical quotation in the book of mormon joseph smith used the english kgv as a base text for the later revision and that's embodied in the book of mormon and this is one where he actually had access to parts of the surviving printer's manuscript and you can see those changes on the printer's manuscript which is showing that joseph smith is pulling the kgb into the text and then they made this kind of superficial change on the printer's manuscript so we know that he started with the kgv and then made the change and that tells you that joseph smith is trying to make sense of those italics and to make him work and so in this particular case he puts isuffer in front of the italicized my name um and then at the end he crosses out um the um [Music] the house or that he changes it from how should i suffer to i will not suffer and again this it just shows the progression is kgb to how it was dictated to oliver and then the printer's manuscript has that final change and that's a big deal because it shows us without any question where he's starting from in these isaiah chapters he's not starting from the seer slash peep stone and then working his way back to the kgb he's starting with the kgv and working his way to the finished product and you've already said this but i'm going to ask you again when the when the scholars are uh creating the king james version of the bible why are they including italics i think it's just because they're trying to translate this you know language right they're trying to translate like hebrew into english and when they're doing it i think the literal translation isn't readable it would come off kind of clunky you know so the italicized words it's almost like to put like a a filler in the middle so that it reads to you better so when you're reading it doesn't read super clunky and i don't know a good example but i'm thinking it'd be something like you know uh i went car drive home and you might put like to the or something like i went to the car so that you when you're reading and it's just it to uh someone who wants to read these stories at night to their family it's going to make sense it's going to feel comfortable as opposed to being a super clunky literal translation that's going to lose kind of that readability to an english audience okay so when joseph is is looking at the king james bible um you know behind the sheet or however he's doing it yeah when he's dictating out of his king james bible to the scribes these italics are kind of cues to him that he's at a part of the the verse that are that that are problematic or need further explanation or maybe could even be uh unclear in some way yeah and so just to make sure i understand he's we're seeing whenever there's a change maybe important changes between the king james version of the bible that he we know he has versus what ends up in the book of mormon it's almost all it's often times you know when joseph was cued first firsthand beforehand by the italics that are there yeah and then when he makes the changes oftentimes those changes don't reflect the original hebrew or the original sources right that we have in our possession correct yeah i mean a lot of the changes just don't make a lot of sense i'm sure there are some where you could say it made it closer but again i would say he's making a lot of changes and so they're saying in isaiah is changing you know like we were saying earlier 30 of the italics are being changed he's making a lot of changes because he's aware that they aren't original to the text and it just again leaves your fingerprint that who the author is because they're starting from the king james bible they're not starting with ancient records on gold plates okay all right the next uh next slide is new testament material in the book of mormon so have we left we've left the italics part now uh we've left the italics for now so now we're kind of looking at some of the errors that come into the new testament and kind of the different different examples of errors so now they're not all just like the same kind of error and so it just shows that there's different areas where different kinds of errors are coming into the book of mormon to kind of show you that it's not just like one thing it's it's a lot of things and so yeah this particular one we've mentioned this on previous episodes but any use of the new testament materials anachronistic because of the fact that it wouldn't have been available on the brass plates um but here's an example from stan larson's essay that we cited uh in the previous slide so matthew 5 27 in the nrsv which is considered a better translation says you have heard that it was said you shall not commit adultery matthew 5 27 in the kgv says you have heard it you have heard that it was said by them of old time thou shalt not commit adultery and then in third nephi 12 27 it says behold it is written by them of old time that thou shalt not commit adultery and so the phrase by them of old time is actually a late addition to the text of matthew which is a problem because if it's a late edition it's not authentic to the original text so that's a problem right there and furthering that problem is that it's still a mistranslation of later manuscripts that include this edition so it should instead of saying by them of all time it would read unto them of old times so it should have said it is written by them unto or is written un by that wait you who to say um you have heard that it was said unto them of old time thou shall not commit adultery so what we have is a late addition to this to the manuscripts that wouldn't be authentic to the original gospel and a mistranslation that both end up in the king james bible that both get pulled in the book of mormon so this is again showing that if the book of mormon is being translated off of ancient plates first of all you shouldn't have new testament material anyways but you certainly shouldn't have a late addition to the manuscript and a mistranslation so this one gives you kind of three three problems into one and that these are the issues where the king james bible is just giving us all of these clues as to where the foundational text is and you cannot argue that joseph smith is translating off of like directly off of ancient scrolls because it has something so unique to the king james bible got it okay that makes sense as to why uh that's a problem so uh now we're gonna address why these little phrases matter yeah and so when you look at it you would say well why does why does the phrase unto them a whole time matter it's such it's just a little throwaway phrase why do we care and just we've mentioned this in previous episodes but if jesus speak is truly speaking the same words to the americas as he did during his lifetime as many apologists would argue in order to give plausibility to the new testament material being in the book of mormon why is jesus speaking to the book of mormon people in words that were not even original to the um man to the earliest manuscripts as well as giving improper translations of the words and so these problems with using late editions they're not just isolated to one passage we've covered this in the anachronisms episode where we talk about deuter isaiah and those are going to have the same problem where you have material in there that wouldn't have been available until lehigh left but in this case it's just worse because not only is an anachronistic but it's a mistranslation so if you want to claim jesus is saying the same thing it just you have to then answer why jesus would speak the same thing that is also has a late addition and an error it's just you can't make this um you can't reconcile this problem unless you're willing to again as we we've talked about in earlier episodes give the space that kind of detaches it from the evidence and you would not give that same space to another religion i mean i don't think you would yeah and here's another way i'm thinking about it just as we're processing it like we all know that the whole reason we needed a book of mormon was because the bible was corrupt like mormons teach we believe in the bible as far as it is translated correctly right we all you know we believe in the book of mormon to be like the the most correct book ever i i just slaughtered the article of faith um but but basically mormons believe that the reason why we had the book of mormon is because it's pure god to native american prophets to joseph smith with the pure translation process most correct book ever and so that's the whole value proposition of the book of mormon and then if you think about it as well this is like god and jesus's chance to deliver the pure unadulterated gospel not just to you know nephites and lamanites and their descendants but to us right and so you think if ever it's going to be pure if ever it's going to be perfect this is it and so like you said why is this in king james english to begin with and then why is the king james bible in here and the exact addition that joseph had and then why are the italics are influencing it and then why are there inaccuracies and problems and the reason why that's all significant is because that's that's the whole value proposition to begin with you know we we are we are downgrading the bible because of its problems and so it makes no s and selling the book of mormon because of its purity so it makes no sense that the book of mormon is importing the impurities of the holy bible into the book of mormon when with a with a magic stone and god's pure revel revelatory power this would have been the chance to get the pure words of jesus you know straight from the god's mouth so to speak yeah and it would have been a win-win for joseph smith because if you're translating off of old brass plates and you're getting the translation that's different than the kgb which at the time would have been jarring to the people of joseph's time and then over the next couple of decades or century all of a sudden people like holy crap the book of mormon's translation of isaiah is actually closer to what we have with these better translations with the dead sea scrolls whatever the case might be then all of a sudden it's like joseph smith was a prophet because no one at the time would have known that but instead he's just rehashing the kgv and it goes against not just the translations we have today but it also goes against the accounts of the witnesses of the process and so all of these little things combined together to tell you that something is off and and that is where if you're going to make an apologetic response you have to explain how you get back to a place that can be reconciled by the evidence that doesn't put this as a 19th century text and so far i've not seen anyone do that in a way that's that doesn't create like a privilege like a special pleading for joseph smith and without kind of using god to fill in those gaps it just can't be done because the evidence is too overwhelming yeah and again if you want to learn more about deutero isaiah we talked briefly about deutero isaiah in the anachronisms episode but we're going to have deuteronomy is going to get its own yeah it's got its own episode because that's a really important one and um jesus yeah it's it's like up there with the book of abraham yeah as like one of the smoking guns of the book of mormon yeah it's a big one and um so now we're going to talk some about the new testament on the book mormon and i know we've talked about this before in a lot of episodes so what we want to do here is just kind of again restate that any use of the new testament is anachronistic because the book of mormon people would not have had access to this in any way uh but it's not so much in this particular episode that the new testament material is in there it's that it's bringing in translation errors um compiled text and late editions in the process kind of like the last era we just showed um so we're going to give a little bit of a teaser to two upcoming episodes because they illustrate this problem really well we're going to talk about them here yeah just we'll do one slide on a couple of them so first we're going to do um this one is just kind of giving a bit of a intro to it so here's a wait though we did this one so actually we're going to go um the next slide there we go so the long ending of mark is one that we're going to have an episode on but effectively the original ending of mark would end at chapter 16 verse 8 and almost all scholars now concede that verses 9 through 20 in mark 16 were written up to 200 years after the initial manuscripts likely attached from a scribe who is trying to give an ending to the book to the gospel mark that'll be more um liked by the community because they did not like how abrupt it was and so that is something again we're going to have a whole episode on this and go into that more detail but just understand that a lot of the newer translations even put notes in there saying verses 9 through 20 are not in the original and earliest manuscripts and so what i want to read is mark 15 mark chapter 16 verses 15 through 18 and then compare it to the book of mormon and so it says and he said unto them go ye in into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved but he that believeth shall not be damned and these signs shall follow that believe in my name they shall cast out devils they shall speak with new tongues they shall take up serpents and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them they shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover now compare that to mormon chapter 9 verses 20 through 24 for behold thus said jesus christ the son of god go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature and he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved but he that believeth not shall be damned and these signs shall follow them that believe in my name they shall cast out devils they shall speak with new tongues they shall take up serpents and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them they shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover and so this is just showing that joseph smith is pulling from the kgv and not understanding this is a late edition and so he's pulling it directly into the book of mormon and again it's an anachronism already right because it's new testament but this is also showing that he doesn't understand um that this is a late edition and again we're gonna have an episode on this so we'll go into this in a lot more detail but it's just to point out that we have the italics we mentioned earlier we have the translation errors and now we're having late editions that are being pulled into the book of mormon that should have no place there because they're not authentic to the original text yeah and and without listening to um you know the long ending of mark episode i i i had never heard of that before and so i struggled to understand it during that episode which we've already recorded um but yeah it just it it really does end abruptly in the middle it's like a reboot i call it all delete you're reading you're reading that last chapter of mark and then all of a sudden it it clearly ends and then it like starts over and then says a bunch more stuff it's obvious that that that made no sense and and so these verses that you're quoting here are are in the later part of that chapter that were added later and then again unless you go watch that full episode you might struggle to follow yeah but it is important to mention here in this episode yeah when we get there it'll make a lot more sense because we go into more detail but it's just just to show in this particular point that there are late editions being brought in in addition to all the other areas we mentioned and it's just really important because this is not an issue where the king james bible presents like one problem it's it's translation it's italics it's late editions all of these things joseph smith is assuming are close to what the original intent was because he doesn't have a lot of the biblical scholarship we have in 2022 but that also um leaves his fingerprints on the text and it also makes claims um that we can now test better and they're just not coming up as passing those tests as far as the evidence proving them to be incredible and ancient yeah and it's just hard not to say that those those verses in mark oh well the the those verses in mormon weren't weren't heavily inspired or empty yeah i mean they're they're pulling and phrases just identical so to say that you know that they don't belong it's a problem by the way this is totally just out of place but wouldn't it have been amazing if jesus gives us new teachings and new principles in the book of mormon that he didn't give us in the bible i know you've probably already said that a bunch of times but like it's just really sinking into my brain now wouldn't it have been cool if jesus taught new doctrine to the name and it's lamanites and nephites that we didn't hear the bible wouldn't that have been it were cool i mean that's just it and that's uh that's a good segue into our next one but for behold the three degrees of glory are real or for behold someday you know joseph smith you know some day mormons will be called to practice polygamy like come on jesus book of mormon jesus she could have given us more well i think that's just it and like you know again you know if we go we'll go to the next slide because the sermon on the mount to me is is the biggest uh illustration what you just said which is we're gonna have a separate episode on this as well so this is kind of just a really short kind of tease for that but when the writer of the book of mormon or actually i'll back up a second so the sermon on the mount is obviously a famous sermon in matthew and in the book of mormon they have the sermon at the temple which is effectively rehashing the sermon on the mount and so the problem is it relies on the reader of the book of mormon accepting the fact that jesus is going to give the exact same sermon in america that he would have given in you know in the old world and the problem is that by doing so it's going to have a lot of things that don't make sense to people in america just as if you're a presidential candidate and you're giving a stump speech in seattle washington you're going to want to give a different one if you want to say like you know georgia because they have different different needs of these states and in the book of mormon you can see where joseph smith just like mentioned with the italics he's very concerned with certain phrases that he knows won't make any sense to the people in america but because he doesn't know that some of the other ones are what exactly they are he leaves them in but then when now through the hindsight of having more scholarship we can show that those phrases would have no meaning either and so then you'd have to believe that jesus is going and telling people stuff they would just have absolutely no meaning to them and in fact be confusing because they're like what in the world are you talking about and these are the ways you can tell that joseph smith is starting with the king james bible and then just making some superficial changes to fit the book of mormon's um narrative as it goes and by doing so in the sermon on the mount um the best example of that is when you get to um this is good yeah so in matthew 5 26 there's a phrase that says thou hast paid the uttermost far thing and so joseph smith knows that farthing is english currency and would have absolutely no meaning in the americas so joseph smith in nephi 1226 is going to change that until thou has paid the most the uttermost c9 and that is um the nephite coinage that is mentioned in alma which is just two books earlier and then never mentioned again after this one passing mention it's almost like joseph smith knew he needed to set up currency for this exact moment i mean that's my kind of personal thought on that is he sets it up two books ahead so that he's ready for this because he knows that that means nothing um but the problem gets deeper because the sermon on the mountain is going away oh yeah go ahead using the word c9 again confirms the tight translation narrative that joseph can come up with words that aren't understood um in in modern parlance and of course that makes all the apologetic attempts to to um to do the loan shifting that we talked about in last episode to explain all the anachronistic words it just i just have to reiterate that invalidates all of those attempts to learn shift and to redefine words because we know joseph can call any person or any object whatever name it actually was because of the tight translation reading from the stone in that yeah yeah because yeah because he works in this entire monetary system which is basically used once and then thrown away which is another area that tells you when they talk about complexity and they'll say oh he's got a currency system it's like he's got a currency system that's mentioned like twice and then gone and that tells you he brought it up to to get through a specific problem which i believe is it might be this case to get through the sermon on the mount and then it's gone and then so he mentions that but then on the other hand in the sermon on the mount jesus refers to the roman law of going a mile in matthew 5 41. it says in whoever uh shall compel thee go to go a mile go with him twain and this ends up in in third nephi 12 41 and the problem is this is a roman law so by the time jesus is telling us to the people in the americas they would be like what are you talking about i have no idea what that means meaning the word mile yeah i think it's something like with um i don't know if it's slavery or something but if you um you have to wait away because mile is a british unit of measurement of distance right wouldn't have nephites wouldn't have used the word mile so why why couldn't he set dollar for you know when he said c9 or quarter he's going to use the nephite word for currency but then he's going to use a british word for distance in britain they use and britney is kilometers right so i i don't even know actually i don't know no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no they don't these smiles is like islam it would have to be right because it's in the kgb so yeah what yeah so again why would god use c9 in one verse but mile in like well yeah and that's the problem because mile he knew would be familiar to everybody and so he doesn't need to change it but he knows that farthing would be a red flag to say why in the world is jesus come on farthing whereas mile works in america so there's no need to change it but but the bigger problem is just this is a roman law that is about um going a mile i think with a slave or something like that and i should have will do more of this in the sermon on the mod episode because i have a lot more on that but it would have no meaning to the book of mormon people and that is really where it's a really easy way to know that joseph smith is seeing the superficial changes he thinks he needs to make but he doesn't understand some of the other things and so he leaves them in but those are just as problematic and it tells you where that he's starting from the king james bible before he makes these changes there's no way to work from the brass or the gold plates as a translation and make these changes um because they would already be changed because they would never be mentioned in the first place it just shows just like with the italics he's focused on these things that stand out and are out of place but then when he doesn't kind of understand what it is like with the the go go a mile um part for the roman law he he leaves it because he just doesn't know it's a problem yeah and again why are these you know british isms why are these romanisms why are these problems with the bible all being imported into the book of mormon which is supposed to be the most correct book ever and that's just it i mean we're just having these things just pile on and so you know it continues on and so um you know there are other examples of where the writer of the book of mormon brings in words from the kgb that hold different meanings as to how they were actually used and so a really cool example is in second nephi in isaiah 5 4 it says wherefore when i looked that it should bring forth grapes brought it forth wild grapes in 25 15 4 it says wherefore when i looked that it should bring forth grapes it brought forth wild grapes and from the write-up i mentioned earlier about some of these king james issues what they say is the distinction is subtle but important in the kgv wherefore means why so if you read it we didn't read it that way in the kgb it should say why when i looked that it should bring forth grapes brought it forth wild grapes it doesn't mean wherefore like is a transition but the nrsv which is a better translation actually changes it to when i expected it to yield grapes why did it yield wild grapes but the book of mormon changes it into a conjunction as like wherefore you know meaning like therefore this happened and so he says wherefore when i looked that it should bring grapes that brought forth wild grapes and this is a small thing again these are some of these problems are small problems but they tell you that he's working off of the king james text because of the fact that he's kind of misusing wherefore there and kind of interjecting the 19th century use of wherefore into the kgb translation except he got it incorrect and that kind of tells us that he misunderstood what the text was trying to say which tells us that he started with the kgb and not from you know a translation off of gold plates yeah because the the translators of the king james bible weren't they weren't you know they weren't god right it was just men doing their best to translate their understanding of hebrew or of greek yeah you know or whatever this was god's chance to give us the you know we know you know from saying pele in the temple ceremony we know that joseph smith could find out god's pure language the adamic language that joseph could receive that revelation why couldn't joseph have translated god's pure you know translation of the original intent of the bible yeah and that's just that i mean like we have so many instances where joseph smith has a chance to get it right and to show that what was around him was wrong and every time he tends to just go with what was already out there and that tells you that he doesn't make it worse or make it worse and that tells you that he's working from a 19th century um in this case source text and there's no way around it because all these problems pile up you can't just pull one at a time and and when you have all of them coming together at once it tells you there's no way around the fact that he used the kgb when when dictating the book of mormon yeah okay so now we're going to get to apologetic responses to the king james version problem for the book of mormon what did the apologists have to say about all this yeah so this is from the fair mormon response to the ces letter about their section on the kgb and it says the book of mormon incorporates text which seems to be taken from the bible including passages which are now considered to be mistranslations in the king james version we do not know the specific mechanism by which the biblical passages were included in the translation therefore we cannot answer this question definitively based upon current historical information the only description of the translation process that joseph smith ever gave was that it was performed by the gift and power of god in that the translation was performed using the urim and thumb and the one really nice thing about this particular quote is that fair is acknowledging that the book of mormon contains errors that are unique to the king james version of the bible so that's why this verse by this quote is helpful just because right off the bat they are acknowledging that this is a problem and that they don't have an answer for it yeah and this is a non-answer answer it is yeah um both because it's basically just saying we don't know anything so we can't we can't make observations or criticisms about the resulting text um because joseph smith didn't give us more detail except for the fact that the witnesses to the book of mormon made it very clear how the the dictation the translation the dictation was happening right so we really do know yeah that's just it and so we really do know and the apologists know that we know but they're trying to they want to make it vague when it suits them to make it vague and then they want to make it specific when it suits them to make it specific yeah exactly and so that kind of there's a good transition to our next one and so this is more from the fair mormon response um on the ces letter and they say witnesses to the translation process never reported that a bible or any other book was present during the translation given this evidence we could assume that the biblical passages were revealed to joseph during the translation process in a format format almost identical with similar passages in the king james bible joseph performed most of the translation in the open using the stone and the hat thus how do we get the language from the king james version of the bible and on this one i just point out the word assume is doing a lot because they're they're trying to make an assumption that kind of gives them plausibility here um and we know what the witnesses say happen we know that the witnesses say it was red and if it wasn't read correctly it wouldn't go to the next thing so that's what we do know um and we know that they would have gotten that information from joseph because obviously they're not putting their head in the hat they can't see it so they only know what joseph tells him in this case and what i would point out is we've said this in a lot of our overviews but once you start making these kind of assumptions that do not fit with the evidence we do have it just becomes indistinguishable from outright fraud and so to say we don't have evidence that joseph smith had the bible open that doesn't mean it didn't happen the fact that we have so much coming straight from the bible is evidence that he's using it so for them to say we don't know how he did it doesn't change the fact that we know he did do it yeah and it could be anything from they were co-conspirators and knowingly creating a fraudulent book to during the during the times when joseph smith was clearly quoting from the version of the king james bible we know he had that he had a sheet up that he was sitting in the stairwell um to he wrote stuff that he put in his hat like um you know there are lots of very plausible explanations for for you know how he may have used the king james bible and maybe even hidden it from the scribes but like you say what we know for sure is that he used it because there's a gazillion fingerprints that he did so the proof would be on the apologists to prove that he didn't use it yeah and when all the evidence points to the contrary yeah and you know the one thing too is like i really don't believe any of them are co-conspirators just because they do seem to be true believers there's no indication of any kind that they are in on it but i would argue that you know when they talk about joseph never having a book open that to me more refers to like the spalding manuscript theory but joseph smith having a bible open i don't think would raise any alarm bells for any of the witnesses it's you know so joseph smith could and one of the things we hear sometimes with um his treasure digging is sometimes he would say he needed to take a break because his eyes hurt and you could just as easily see joseph smith saying i recognize that they're referring to this chapter of isaiah my eyes hurt i'm going to read off of here and i'm gonna pray about it and see if god is okay with that i mean you there are a lot more plausible scenarios where joseph smith has the bible open and no one really thinks anything bad of that because it's not like a completely foreign manuscript like view of the hebrews and i think that is almost certainly what likely happened with those isaiah chapters where joseph could see my eyes hurt from looking at the rock but i'm recognizing that it's these chapters of isaiah and i'm gonna read them from the kgv because it's the same thing effectively and nobody would probably think anything of it from a witness standpoint and at that point remember only oliver is involved in the process anyway so you really only need one person he doesn't really talk a whole lot about the translation like ever so you know i i just think i think fair like you said is trying to kind of create this this alternate that's again that's the universe right but yeah when we talk about joseph smith using the stone in the hat and having nothing else there that's usually emma or martin harris yeah or david whitmer whitmer brothers yeah or isaac hale we can't forget isaac hale yeah so yes oliver was probably relatively silent and commanded to be silent there's all sorts of stuff oliver didn't tell us that we have no idea because he didn't we'll talk about it at all he didn't talk about it at all and so it's it's it's hard yeah i just i don't think that you can draw any conclusions there like i said because you can show he did use it then it really becomes irrelevant like if it was open on a table or if he said my eyes hurting take a break because we know he did it so that part is interesting but it's not important yeah and it reminds me of that saying that the um absence of evidence is not evidence for absence yep and in fact what the evidence shows is the presence of a king james version of the bible yeah that's that's you know and so the apologetic attempt to say we don't have any evidence of somebody saying you use the bible that's no evidence that's yeah it doesn't help literally nothing yeah i agree it's actually that argument is made in the face of factual evidence that that is hard to dispute yeah yeah and so we mentioned in our last episode the royal scousen kind of approach and so i want to kind of reference that here because it's important for this one as well and this is part of fair mormon's response and they talk about um when considering that the the data royal skeleton proposes that instead of joseph or oliver looking at a bible that 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 kgb language perhaps the lord would allow those 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 and okay so let me just for people that just heard a bunch of words but didn't really grasp what that just said so skousen which is a paid byu professor right who's literally paid to try and keep people from losing their faith right his theory is is that joseph smith is looking at the stone of the hat that joseph presents to him in his mind's eye a picture of the bible page that he would be familiar with and then joseph's doing doing remix on the fly but god just showed him the erroneous um you know version of the bible because that's what joseph would have felt most comfortable massaging yeah i mean that's basically it and it's a problem because just like we mentioned the last slide fair mormon talks about the witnesses to the process well the witnesses in the process tell you without any question joseph was not free to alter anything and so right because it's the the word appears on the stone joseph reads the stone to the scribe yep the scribe writes it down says i wrote it down the stone hears that and then the stone then erases the previous words and shows new ones yep none of that that tight versus loose translation theory just shoots down skousen's theory here it does why would he make such a disingenuous claim because most people tend to respect skousen's work as it relates to the to the manuscripts of the early book of mormon you know um printing process right yeah and i don't know particularly why he made like i don't know what context he made this theory and how fair mormon is using and if they're using it quite right or not but this is how they replied with their cell to reply to say why we would have it and you know just to point out that it goes against the witness accounts that they previously cite and it's only created a necessity because they would not be making this claim if the translation didn't have issues you're only making this claim to try to basically kind of retreat to a position that is plausible after your initial claims are proven false and you know i think that's really all that needs to be said there is just that these are just these are apologetics that just they come out of necessity they come out of out of trying to find a solution to a problem they don't have a solution for and by the way russell m nelson has a seer stone and he is you know ordained as a prophet syrian revelator he could freaking look into his seer stone or he could just pray to heavenly father and heavenly father could tell him how the book of mormon was translated he could tell him how how and why the king james version appears in the bible like why do we have modern-day prophets and revelators if all they're going to do is say hey you know eat healthy and be a good dad and be a good spouse and and pay your tithing and and read your scriptures yeah like why don't they use their their gifts as profiteers and revelators to answer some of these questions instead of relying on unofficial apologists who are not um ordained and they have no office yeah i mean why should we listen to scousing well i mean yeah and i'm sure they would say why should they listen to me but yeah it's just it's it goes to the point of you either have answers or you don't and or you know you've got like the apologetic answers but if you're going to do that then you have to answer the other the other side of it and um you know like i said so we we just kind of already touched on this but the tight versus loose translation episode we did is so important because it fits into all of these episodes so well and you know david whitmer said when it was written down and repeated to brother joseph to see if it was correct then it would disappear and another character with the interpretation would appear martin harris said if correctly written the sentence would disappear in another in its place but if not written correctly it remained until corrected so that the translation was just as it was engraven on the plates precisely in the language then used it is impossible to reconcile those two statements of the people who were there at the time with the fair mormon approach and the royal scales and apologetic that joseph smith was allowed to change the text on on the stone as he saw fit you just you cannot reconcile those two things and so for me i believe any historian would tell you go with the earlier one because the people that were there contemporaneously are going to be more correct than the people 200 years later who are trying to account for the errors that that came from that initial you know dictation yeah and if god can make like in the jared art bar if he can make like stones light up if he can make uh you know a vessel tied into a dish that can be submerged with animals and not leak and not blow up he can freaking give joseph an accurate translation of the bible when joseph's like reading from a magic stone like i can do this he's powerful enough to do it well i mean we and we we have to believe that that god gave him an accurate description of the rest of the book of mormon the stuff that isn't in the bible i mean so it's really hard and that's why the type versus loose is so important because it really implies that you have this tight translation for the stuff that's not in the bible the loose translation for the stuff that isn't the idea that you could jump between the two constantly it just doesn't work with what we know from the witnesses and so that's why that conversation was so important to have because now that we're doing these later episodes you can see for yourself like why those two translation methods can't be reconciled as a jump back and forth because it goes against everything we do have and only comes as a way to try to salvage um the text as being historical when the evidence is telling us overwhelmingly that it can't be got it all right so what does byu professor richard lloyd anderson have to say about all this yeah and so this was a an article in the 1977 enzyme which uh richard light anderson writes and he's going to um quote um a latter-day scholar named daniel h ludlow who is emphasizing the inherent variety of independent translations and he concludes there appears to be only one answer to explain the word for word similarities between the verses of isaiah in the bible and the same verses in the book of mormon that is simply that joseph must have opened isaiah and tested each mess each mentioned verse by the spirit if his translation was essentially the same as that of the king james bible uh version he apparently quoted the verse from the bible thus the old testament passages from isaiah display a particular choice of phraseology that suggests joseph smith's general freedom throughout the book of mormon for optional wording now what in the heck was that gobbledygook saying yeah so basically saying that joseph would open the bible and instead of reading like off of the rock and a hat he's going to read each verse to oliver and effectively god is going to answer him on each verse to tell him yes that's okay or no that's not okay so this would be more of like how he translated the joseph smith translation to the bible so you're reading it and getting impressions as to whether or not it is allowed to go straight through but like i said earlier this is a problem because of the fact that you're still bringing in errors so then you get into that whole area of like does that mean god was okay with some heirs but not others um does that mean god was okay with joseph basically kind of for convenience going to the bible as opposed to reading off of the stone it just opens a lot of other problems and this answer is only being given to try to solve other problems but when you try to solve this one then it opens up others and that's kind of what i've been mentioning in some of these overviews is just to say it's a loose translation right it's loose translation and it just it doesn't then you then have to address all the problems that come from a loose translation and they're not going to do that because they don't the the implications here go well beyond what he's saying but he's hoping you just read this and just kind of go yep that makes sense but it it goes so much deeper and that's why we've been spending so much time on these problems to try to illustrate that got it yeah you can't have it both ways you can't have yeah that god wanted a tight translation in these parts and then yeah just go get the book of mormon and read whatever or go get your king james bible read whatever and even if it's got errors in it i don't care you know yeah it's just yeah it's just it doesn't match with everything else we have within mormonism as a whole and with revelation as a whole it just doesn't work and it fits the purpose of having the most correct book right to be importing all the errors exactly i mean just why would you do that and so you know just kind of rehash what we just said um you know the apologetic spin here is that god is allowing joseph smith to copy directly from the kgb instead of simply dictating what appeared on the stone and it's just an argument that goes against common sense when you look at the witness accounts that are telling us that joseph had to read directly off the stone um and i just i can't understand how you could say that in some parts he's got his head in his hat that cannot change unless you read it perfectly and then he's allowed to sit it down go grab a bible read a few verses and then go back to the stone and the stone's just going to pick up you know the stones like catching up it doesn't it doesn't add up and so that is why i say if you start with a clean slate and you start with witness accounts and you use that as your kind of guide to look at the text this stuff is really clear that joseph smith is pulling this and he's pulling it improperly in cases and it just it opens up so many problems that all of them point to the author of the book of mormon being joseph smith and that's why we have those errors if it was an ancient text on gold plates um that's a tight translation as we're told you just wouldn't have the the 16 11 or 1769 errors in there it just it wouldn't happen yeah and so fair tells us uh don't worry the evidence is just around the corner yeah and we talked about this a little bit the anachronism episode where they always kind of tell you look we're getting there and it's going to keep going and so um this is one um from their response to cs letter about king james bible heirs being in the book of mormon and so what they say is um it is not the case that the great isaiah scroll is the original text of isaiah it is an earlier witness to the text than we previously had before the discovery of the dead sea scrolls but it's it itself is centuries removed from the originals and this is an argument that is true because even the gospel manuscripts earliest gospel manuscripts in the new testament i think are a hundred 200 years old so ideally or not ideally but they would have been written down over and over again see we've lost a lot in the gospels that we have from what they probably originally were written as but this doesn't help um the problem that we're talking about with the book of mormon because even though the original isaiah text would be different than what we have in the dead sea scrolls the fact is the king james bible is pulling from a very specific translation so whatever changes might have happened earlier has no impact on what ends up in the book of mormon if the book of mormon had isaiah different from the king james bible and it didn't match the dead sea scrolls you could make that argument because you could say look we don't know what to compare to but in this case we know exactly where it comes from so to say there might be an earlier text that's different it just doesn't help joseph smith in any way because we can pinpoint exactly what he's pulling from okay so just to try and make sense of this i guess the great isaiah scroll is is some a compendium of uh the writings of isaiah and yeah it would be the one that that deutero isaiah uh well i think um i think it would because it the not positive on this but the great isaiah scroll i think would be the one that was discovered with all these scrolls so it's just the the earliest scroll that we have and they're saying the earliest scroll we have is not going to be the very first isaiah scroll ever written so they're saying that we would have lost a lot of um or had changes throughout everyone from scribes and so they're saying because of that we can't judge what's in the book of mormon because we we know eventually we'll find earlier manuscripts that'll tell us this almost feels like the missing scroll theory in the book of abraham it is a little bit yeah you're trying to just shift your concern away from the deutero-isaiah problem to say well there's earlier versions more complete versions more accurate versions and so you can't trust the evidence that's right staring you in front of your face yeah and and just to reiterate the fact that even if you had an earlier isaiah scroll and maybe even someday find a scroll that you can tell was the very first one ever written and it's a lot different the wording is different some of the phrases are different it's not going to help joseph smith because the book of mormon tethers itself to the king james bible version so no matter what you see before it whatever changes might come they're not going to change the fact that the book of mormon is relying on the king james bible it doesn't really matter at that point because of the fact that joseph smith is pulling in errors from that exact version so i'm honestly not sure what their point is outside of telling members hey if you just keep eventually we'll find out these answers but don't worry about it because otherwise an earlier scroll is just not going to help because the earlier scroll however different it's going to be is still going to be irrelevant to the book of mormon tying itself to the king james bible got it okay um so the next slide is deflecting by saying the manuscripts are copies of copies this is similar yeah it's similar to what we just said and so fair says even the book of mormon texts would have been far removed from isaiah the brass plates would have been at least a century after the fact with many copies intervening and that was copied and recopied into the book of mormon records which was translated not in a scholarly fashion but instead by the gift and power of god through joseph smith therefore it is a fallacy to assume that the book of mormon text ought to be the exact equivalent to the original text and so to reiterate what i said in the last slide because this is important what they're saying is that it's our fault for expecting it to look like say the dead sea scrolls but that's not at all what we're arguing what we're saying is it matches a translation done in 1611. no one's saying the book of mormon should match the original text because no one can say what the original text looked like but what we're saying is that the book of mormon claims to have been written thousands of years earlier it shouldn't match a translation written in 1611 that just happened to be owned by joseph smith that's that's the problem it has nothing to do with what the original text might look like it has to do with joseph smith was copying from a 1611 translation so if joseph smith had said um my heart delighteth in isaiah in the book of mormon and then copy chapters and with all sorts of changes that we don't know what they are we'd be like we don't know it's because we do know where he pulled them from that we can judge them that so they're kind of trying to flip it on his head but again i don't know why because it it's kind of irrelevant um to me to claim that earlier copies of of the bible would somehow make joseph relying on a 1611 translation any better it wouldn't solve the problem it would just create a better earlier translation for scholars to look at but joseph smith in the in the mormon church is still tied to 19th century translations and ideas it doesn't really matter and this is where apologists want us to focus on the bark of the tree and never really look at the forest and so they make disingenuous arguments that may address a micro issue or at least create plausible deniability or reasonable doubt for an attack against a church claim in the specific when they know that that argument to deal with the specific criticism undermines their broader um rationalization for the truthfulness of what they teach yeah i agree and and you know like i said at some point it doesn't matter if they find it earlier when it won't matter for mormonism that's why i'm like why are we talking about this it won't it won't help you it's a red herring right it is it's just it's so irrelevant and yet it sounds good when you read it and that's what's kind of frustrating about it but yeah and um so instead of doing a conclusion slide i'm going to let richard bushman do the conclusion for us because this quote is a really honest and important quote it's from an interview he did on mormon discussions with bill reel really quickly for for those just to be clear richard what's that no no go ahead richard bushman is a former mormon uh stake president which is a higher than a bishop he's a former mormon church patriarch he's a harvard trained scholar who is a professor of of history at columbia university he is the church's foremost joseph smith scholar he wrote rough stone rolling that deseret that the church commissioned him to write and the deseret book published he is the church and he's still a faithful believer so in every way he's completely legitimate and the best faithful joseph smith scholar the church has yeah and so he had done an interview with bill reel on mormon discussions a while back and this is his quote and he says and then there is the fact that there is phrasing everywhere long phrases that if you google them you will find in 19th century writings the theology of the book of mormon is very much 19th century theology and it reads like a 19th century understanding of the hebrew bible as an old testament that is it has christ in it the way president protestants saw christ everywhere in the old testament that's why we now call it hebrew bible because the jews never quite never saw it quite that way so these are all problems we have to deal with and i just think this is a great way to conclude it because he's right everywhere even in the anachronisms episode yeah i know i probably should have like i figured i had to include it one of the other and i just think it's a good way as we start recapping this stuff to look at it because it just shows that everything in the book of mormon is 19th century and you can date it there and you can show the source materials there and so at some point it's really hard to keep this equation that joseph smith couldn't have written it because of the fact that everything in the book of mormon that we can kind of pinpoint and date is pointing right back to him and the fact that richard bushman is willing to kind of say it even though he ultimately is going to maintain kind of a more faith promoting position i think it just shows that the church can no longer escape these things um in the king james bible use it just encompasses all of the things that richard bushman just said and so that's why it was important enough for us to do this episode to show why scholars can can really outline without any question that joseph smith used the king james bible as a foundational text and what that says about the um kind of credibility of the book of mormon as an ancient historical text i love it okay well as again mike from ldsdiscussions.com a brilliant episode and dang we're only like nine episodes in i know we've still next episode's going to be how the book of mormon was composed then we're going to get into adam and eve global flood tower of babel sermon on the mount in detail long ending of mark deuter isaiah in detail and that's before we even get to first vision priesthood restoration word of wisdom kinderhook plates and polygamy and of abraham and so much more yeah but man what a what a powerful like if if you're gonna have like nine or ten episodes to kind of set the stage and to provide the framing we've we've done some i think you've done some really important work here yeah like i said i think one of the cool things i think about this is you know these this episode the anachronisms ones i think are really where you start to see everything we've done so far kind of tied together in a way that really shows why we did it the way we did it and i think going back to that puzzle metaphor now you're starting to see how the puzzle pieces are fitting together and then once we get out of the book of mormon and the bible stuff when you start looking at the church history stuff it's going to continue off of that and i think that's why it's so important to do it this way and i just hope as i've said before that people who watch it even if you ultimately don't agree that you can at least understand that this evidence is real these problems are real and hopefully even if you don't ultimately agree with me it'll help you a little more um when you do interact with family members who might have doubts or you know with your people in your community who have left because you know these are our real problems that scholars can point to and say without any doubt that it shows the truth claims don't hold up and um and i think just through our first you know nine episodes whatever we've illustrated how they they pile onto each other and not in isolation i think that's the really important thing is just showing the common threads and um and why they fit together naturally with the evidence in in in a way that is like i said earlier it's satisfying because it's really cool when you can kind of solve these little mysteries and then all of a sudden when they start kind of naturally fitting together it's it's a really cool thing even if it forces you to change your overall paradigm and honestly it was the mormon church that taught me the truth matters it was the mormon church that taught me that honesty matters and i want to live in reality and i want to base my decisions how i live how i raise my kids how i you know whatever time i have on this earth i want to spend it rooted in reality you know and if you know if there wasn't a nephi if there wasn't a layman if if jesus didn't come to the americas if native americans are native americans and they're not nephites and lamanites yeah i want to know that yeah i don't want to go to a guatemalan in mormon and say hey lamanita that's insulting you know we want to live in reality we do and you know the thing is um it's really it this happened for me and it still happens to a certain degree as i go through this stuff but it's really scary to question your beliefs and it's really scary to get to a point where you're like if this isn't true do i want to know um and to your point you do get to a point where you need to know and you because if you don't know then or if you know there's problems but you won't look into them then you're going to live the rest of your life kind of in the back your head going am i doing this for for the right reasons am i doing it because it's true because i need it to be here because i want it to be and and so doing these episodes i think will hopefully help some people who maybe are early in that process and just trying to figure it out and and maybe help them to kind of more of a gentle landing a better understanding so that it's not quite as emotional um as some of the things you'll come across online are that'll be a little more gentle a little bit more um you know consumable so that it helps you to get to that point of understanding or at least getting some answers to some questions you might have in a way that you maybe you could share with others and it won't be so um like feeling like you're being ambushed or feeling you're being attacked and um and i just hope as we keep going that that'll be kind of the spirit of it where it's it's about you know if you want to know this stuff here we're here for you and if you don't we'll be here when you are you know if you want to watch this in a year because you're not ready for it that's okay just know that this material is here when you're ready for it all right mike you're a treasure and we can't thank you enough for taking time out of your busy schedule to take us through this series and we've got 20 or 30 yeah we got a lot more to go 30 more episodes to go which is going to be amazing it will thanks everybody for checking it out and talk to you soon take care thanks so much bye everybody and again everybody um the essay that we were referring to today is at ldsdiscussions.com kjv we have other show notes in the show notes within a week of this being released hopefully you'll be able to find links to the other episodes like the tight versus loose translation episode the book of mormon anachronisms episode and the long ending of mark episode um and eventually the deutero isaiah episode um uh you know we'll we'll have links to all of those we'll also have time codes so that you can jump back and forth um to different parts of the um of this presentation as you so desire you can also always slow it down if we're going too fast at 0.7 speed or speed it up to two time speed if we're going too slow um we just want to make these episodes usable for everybody uh we love your feedback please give us feedback at mormon stories gmail.com we also love your 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