How Did Joseph Smith Know All This?

0:00Welcome everybody. It's Wednesday night September 2nd, 2026. Tonight's episode is Joseph Smith always had an answer. The pattern behind his claims, I don't know our FM if tonight's episode will last a half an hour, if it'll last an hour and a half. We'll see. There's a lot to go over, but they're all just little bullet points with the exception of a few. My guess is closer to an hour and a half. We'll see with us with the two of us doing it probably. How are you doing doing this evening? I'm doing great on these last dwindling days of summer. We are into September, but not yet the Labor Day. I dragged myself in from the beach to do tonight's show. Nice. Well, I love your beach shirt. It looks good. Your tan looks fantastic. I will put up on the screen. Let me grab that off. Put our names up there and add the slideshow. Here's our thumbnail for tonight. Joseph Smith always had an answer. The pattern behind his claims, we've got the cruise coming up here in less than like a week and a half from now. We'll, as we do, I got my tape your shirt. Nice.

1:03You'll wear that. I'll wear one. A lot of you folks out there will be on the ship and having your taper shirts. I, I hope I got the Heather blue color. Nice. Yeah. Pick a different color. Everybody will have their shirts that have got that wild horse on the front, but we'll be able to pick each other out in a crowd. So that'll be good. Looking forward to hanging out with a bunch of you tonight's conversation. This came from working on the Zelf episode. You know, Joseph Smith finds skeleton or at least the other people on science can't find it. And they come to him with a few of the bones and say, Hey, tell us about this guy. And Joseph is more than happy to do that. And it got me thinking that there is this pattern. We've kind of talked about it before, but only in part, just sort of when we come across an individual item that this happens in Mormon history and we'll make mention that this happens quite a bit. But we've never, I've never seen an episode that went out there and tried to find every single instance where Joseph Smith has an

2:06object turned over to him or something interesting about a geographic location. And in some of these instances, it works kind of in the opposite, but it's the same principle and in effect is that there's some void of information somewhere. And Joseph wants to go ahead and like, I can feel that void it. If no one else in the room knows anything, then I can supplant my narrative and information and I can go ahead and have everybody believing what I say. And so I just want to start by saying that this seems obvious that this starts off with Joseph Smith's treasure digging. Again, the earliest stories that we have is Joseph Smith as young as 13 years old, one year before the first vision. And you know, we get the story from, I think it's Mormonism unveiled by Flastras Herlbot and Eberdee Howe, the author, but Flastras went out and collected the affidavits. And there's the story of him going to Sally Chase and asking to borrow her green sear stone and looking in it. And then there's, he sees that

3:08there's a white white translucent stone, a sear stone of his own 150 miles away buried underneath the tree. So he goes and finds it. And it's, it's that early that Joseph Smith learns, I think, that he can fool people that if he picks, if he tells people things that are unfaulsifiable, by the way, we'll get to the end and we'll talk about how the church essentially turned this entire pattern on its head and does the opposite today to go in the other direction. But if he noticed that there was something that was unfaulsifiable, Joseph Smith saw that as a beautiful moment where he could insert himself as a sear and be able to claim things that he didn't know. And I think it's actually going to be surprising to the audience. I don't think any of these are new things. But when you line them up one after the other after the other, I think the audience is going to be a little surprised at just how many times Joseph Smith does this in his prophetic career. And any thoughts from me before we jump into these? Yeah. I went to get my copy of

4:13Refstone Rolling by Richard Bushman off the shelf, the original from 2005, you know, the good one. Anyway, I did it in order to get a couple of quotes for later on in tonight's show. But actually, what you say here reminds me of something else Richard Bushman said in here, remember, he is trying to grapple with, he's really in the first generation, I think, of historians who are faithful and trying to grapple with the money digging aspect of Joseph Smith's early career. And what he said was he felt that the money digging was a preparatory kind of school to train him up to become a prophet. You remember that argument, Bill? Yeah. And Mark Ashhurst McGee at least in part makes that argument. Okay. I think that's right. But I don't think it's faith promoting. I think that the as the child's father to the man that also the treasuredigger was father to the prophet in that he learned how

5:18to work people. Yeah. And in every instance that believers go, this is why Joseph Smith was a prophet, I think this pattern is at work. Joseph sees a void of information somewhere where he can put something in and there's no way to prove he's wrong and he gets the chance to do it. Now, what I would want the audience to pay attention to is that some of these we have enough evidence today to make a reasonable conclusion about whether Joseph was accurate or not. Some of the things are going to be not provable. There's not enough evidence. But others there are. And for the ones that are, notice where the conclusion ends up. And then all you have to do is ask yourself if all the ones in which there is evidence lend to a certain conclusion in what probably happens with the ones that we don't have enough evidence yet. Well, there's a logical answer to that and I know what that is. And there's

6:20a faithful answer to that and I used to know what that was. And now I'm rolling my eyes over it. Yeah. So this was this was a ton of fun to put together. We, you know, what is it? Uh, fool me once twice on you fool me twice. You know, shame on me. So you could become president. Yeah. Well, there you go. George Bush. There we are. All right. So in the treasure digging, I used a lot of AI to build the images. We won't be reading a bunch of stuff on the on the slides necessarily. But there are a few parts and some of the slides that we do need to point out. Uh, Joseph's necessarily treasure digging. He gets this confidence build up as you're pointing out, Bushman points to this, Mark Asher's, McGee points to this. Joseph is able to make absurd claims around treasure digging and with complete certainty to the people that he's digging with. And again, he's a kid at least in the early years of this. And he has grown ass adults who trust him to be a truth teller when he's lying through his teeth. And they believe him and he would have learned early

7:21on as just a young kid that I can get adults to believe me if I say the craziest things about stuff for which they cannot prove and they want to believe they will believe. And I just want to say lastly before I flip this slide, a treasure seeker or a seer to me, a seer in the treasure digging space is very much using the exact same principles that a profit is using inside the founding profit is using inside Mormonism. Any other things you want to say and then I'll jump right into it here. I suppose only that since I got baptized in 1978 when I was 18 years old and was introduced to Joseph Smith as a profit seeker and revelator. And every single profit since then, I hear them altogether and I never think how strange seer is outside of Mormon context and how they probably derives exclusively from the stone that made Joseph a seer. Yes, the Euroman thumbum is an after

8:24thought. The seer stone is the original place where those kinds of ideas start. Yeah, very much so. And then I just want to say to the audience, what examples can you think of as we go along? I really think I've got most, if not all of them, but I would love to find out that we're missing a couple. And I think that would be a ton of fun if you guys can find a few that I did not name. And any exceptions. I mean, I don't know of any, but maybe there's some out there where something got handed over to Joseph Smith and somebody said, Hey, what is that ask of God and Joseph Smith as I don't know? Immediately, right? Not after giving us a couple of sentences or changing his mind, but immediately going, I know what you guys are up to. He doesn't, as far as I know, he doesn't do that. So hopefully the audience will play along. Maybe they can give us some exceptions. That would be great. I'll just say here at the beginning, this section, section one has to do with items or objects. And there's some that fit into more than one category. I'll try to remember to mention that when we

9:28get to those, because there was some that I'm like, does it go here? Does it go there? I don't know. But section one, I wanted to do objects. And so the pattern begins when you show Joseph Smith an object, he gives it a story. And they're real objects, but he gives them extraordinary claims. Some of them are falsifiable. Some of them are not. But let's get to it and see what the audience thinks of all of these. And then of them were at the time he made them correct falsifiable. I mean, um, yeah, I don't know, because like the first one here is the gold plates. And it may not be a real object, but at least Bushman and some scholars think that he at least fabricated plates or had some plates on him. Dan Vogel, I think, has suggested that Smith fabricated plates. Yes. Bushman, of course, would take it that there was an angel who came down and gave him or gave but Joseph Smith, instead of plates and in other scholars like Brent MacCalf would hold that there were no plates at all. It was simply visionary. But whether there are plates or not, Joseph

10:35wants people to believe there is an object. And that object, he gives a story to and says these are gold plates. These were written on by Lamanites and Nephites. And this became our book of Mormon. And again, whether there are plates or not, I think as you see, we go along. There's way too many that are actual physical objects. But in this case, this is sort of a bridge in that if you take the disbelieving view, this object sort of sits between the treasure digging world and a religious narrative. And we've talked about Moroni, the fact that the plates were not an object that someone else found and brought to him, but they're an object that he claimed without showing them to at least most people, maybe allowing a few people to see them. There's debate about whether they were covered with a cloth or whether they were actually seen.

11:35But it's an object that Joseph Smith is imposing exist when it may in fact not exist at all. And then he gives his narrative to it. And this is one of those instances where you and I would go like this is falsifiable because there's so much evidence against the book of Mormon. But even if we grant to the audience that this particular one is unfalcifiable, we can go ahead and put these into certain categories. And if folks want to put it into the unfalcifiable category, they can, if they want to keep it in the falsifiable one, it doesn't matter to me. The whole point tonight was I wanted folks to just see the pattern. But anyway, the gold plates, anything you want to say here and I'll jump. I think the other ones sort of are more concrete examples. But I want to do at least put the gold plates in as we sort of start this journey. I just want to ask you a question and everybody else out there. Okay, we know all the stories about Joseph Smith and the gold plates and the strange and hinky way he played himself while saying that he had the plates, not letting other people look at them, etc. Okay. So the question I have is simply this is Joseph Smith acting like a guy who really has gold plates

12:41or is he acting like a guy who's trying to get people to think that he has gold plates. And of course, it's the latter. And when you have gold, let me say this way, when you don't have gold plates, but you want people to believe you do, you create supernatural punishments around people who would look at them who are unauthorized to do so. You wrap them up with a cloth, you claim that people came to find them, but you moved them just before they did. Mm-hmm. That was close. It was. It was really. I mean, can you imagine how many different ways Joseph Smith came up with to not show people the plates? A lot, right? They were in the barrel of beans in the shed. They were in the barrel of beans in the carriage getting going from Pell Myra to, I don't know, New Harmony or wherever he was heading to. They were underneath

13:43the fireplace hearth. Yes. When people, when he thought people figured out they were under the fireplace hearth and they came in to find them. Shoo. Lucky for you, I moved them an hour ago. If you were a teen, though, you would have died on the spot. God doesn't let people let's see his plates without dying. And if they die on the spot, why do you need to wrestle with people to get them home? Like, if they want to see them, let them see them. I know. Joseph Smith's like, perseus in the head of the, what, the Gorgon, right? Medusa. Yes, but no, it doesn't work. Yeah, no. It doesn't work. No one died from looking at the plates, including Josiah Stoll, who saw a green corner, which might have been just the oxidized copper, by the way. Which part of that gold plate is green? I don't see a corner of this green bill. Not on this picture, but the one that Josiah Stoll saw. By the way, I apologize. I've got an image of the plates there twice that look, I think like what Joseph and others described the plates looking like, but in the ones

14:44they're in the top left, AI sometimes really struggles with creating Mormonism's gold plates. It's got rings all over the place there. So, okay, I'm going to move on from this. Please. Yeah, yeah. No, for an hour and a half, I told you. Yeah, it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy on my part. The next one I've got here is Central American Ruins. The idea that Central America is Book of Mormon lands is not a new idea. This was talked about in the days of Joseph Smith. And so I want to at least mention here, you and I have these conversations about how many times Joseph limits himself to a heartland model or a North America model. And I want to at least, as we talk to the audience tonight, at least acknowledge there are moments in Church history where Joseph Smith is leaving room that possibly Central America is Book of Mormon lands. And this is one of those instances. And so we get two cases of this. Number one is

15:45Smith's documented connection. This was a letter from Joseph Smith to John Bernhysel. And I've got it on the next screen. And then the next one is a Times and Seasons, one October 1842. And I've got that on the next slides as well. But here's the first one. This is Bernhysel's letter. This is the letter from Joseph Smith to Mr. Bernhysel. RFM, do you mind reading that letter to that part on the left there? This is from the church. So from Navu, November 16th, 1841 from Joseph Smith, dear sir, I received your kind present by the hand of, I'm going to guess, E is elder, Wilford Woodruff, and feel myself under many obligations. For this mark of your esteem and friendship, which to me is the more interesting as it unfolds and develops many things that are of great importance to this generation and corresponds with and supports the testimony of the Book of Mormon. I have read the volumes with the greatest interest. So this is the book by Catherine Wood.

16:48I've read the volumes with the greatest interest and pleasure and must say that of all histories that have been written pertaining to the antiquities of this country. It is the most correct, luminous and comprehensive because of course Joseph Smith is like God. He knows it backward and forward inside and out. And he is in a position to say which of the histories this one I think of the Maya is the most correct and the closest to actually representing how the Maya really were. That's Joseph Smith for you. He goes on, in regards to the land referred to by you, I would simply state that I have lands both in and out of the city. Is this important, Bill? I don't think that bottom paragraph is, you can read, I mean, I was going to have you read the whole thing, but it don't, I don't think it pertains. Yeah, it's just about personal property, I think, or real property, but personal to Joseph Smith. But you make the important point that even if Joseph Smith's a prophet, what gives him some knowledge of the antiquities of central

17:48America and its totality that when this guy publishes a book, Joseph knows that it is the most luminous and most comprehensive. Well, you know what else it makes me think of. It makes me think it was famous statement about the book of Mormon, that it's the most correct book. But now it brings up to my mind, the obvious fact that Joseph Smith must be implying that he's familiar with every book ever written in order to make that judgment. Yeah, he's making claims of knowing more than he could possibly know in a brief moment of reading a book and writing a letter to Mr. Burton Heisel. So, this is just occurring to me right now. So let me go ahead and reframe this. Actually, let me ask you to reframe that thing about the book of Mormon, see, see how it goes. Yeah, Joseph Smith claims that the book of Mormon is the most correct book on earth. At the same time to be able to do that, you would have to be aware of all other books that were written. Joseph Smith read a lot more than most Mormons give him credit for, but he didn't read all the books that are out there.

18:49And I never took that statement from Joseph Smith, which we all know as members of the church. We've all heard many times. I never took it really literally until you are reading what Joseph Smith wrote to John Burn Heisel, where I've read the volumes that you sent me with the greatest interest and pleasure and must say that of all histories that have been written, retaining to the antiquities of this country, it is the most correct, luminous and comprehensive. Yeah. So, Joseph seems to know beyond just being a prophet, and again, the argument would be right with the book of Mormon that he's claiming that it's the most correct religious theology to ever be written. It's not the most correct spelling wise or grammatically, but it's the most correct in terms of having the true religious gospel theology. But again, here's another book that's outside his wheelhouse. He might know about Nephites and Lamanites, but he doesn't know everything about them. He doesn't know the other people,

19:54again, if we believe that in a limited population of Nephites and Lamanites and everyone else's Asian, then Joseph doesn't know about those people. Anyway, in other words, it's one of those moments where apologists would need to change the hill that they're going to rest on while they have that argument about an issue, because if we take what the apologists want us to due to the DNA issue, that book of Mormon people are mostly actually Asian, and then there's a small group of Nephites and Lamanites who come in. Joseph Smith is the prophet, wouldn't know about all of those Asian peoples. He only knows about the small band of Nephites and Lamanites that are intermixing. But here, Joseph Smith is making a really big claim to know a hell of a lot about Central America, and all the things that this scholar of Central America has written about the old cultures in the past.

20:58Yeah, I thought of another one, Bill. This is really bad. Please think about it, Discourse. Joseph Smith says that the German translation of the Bible is the most correct. How would he know that unless he knew every version in translation of the Bible? This is starting to look like a pattern. Yeah, a pattern within a pattern. So yes, Joseph Smith seems to have the pattern of declaring things the most correct books on earth when he hasn't read, but a small number of books that exist in the world. I think he had an inflated opinion of himself. Yeah, again, I think he likes to make people feel good. There's times where he's using sort of this as praise. He's using it here with Bernhaisel to tell him how wonderful his book is, but it also plays a role of him establishing credibility. Again, if he shows this letter to any of

21:58his followers, a copy of it, it sort of sits with them as evidence that the Book of Mormon is true. With a lot of the items that we talk about in tonight's show, that tends to be true. That Joseph uses his narratives as a way to build testimony in others. The second one here is the Times and Seasons. This is October 1st, 1842. Do you want to read this one as well? And this is Jeff the editorial note, and then we'll talk a little bit about the next slide, which has the text of this. If you'll read this, this will give us enough to go on. So this is from the people at the Joseph Smith Papers project. Yeah, yes. Yeah, this is their text next to the document. Sorry. Thank you. I thought it was. The first editorial item they write, the first editorial item titled Zera Himla continued the previous issues speculation on the location of lands described in the

23:00Book of Mormon based on published reports of archeological discoveries in Central America. The editors were particularly interested in the location of Zera Himla, one of the prominent cities of the Nephite civilization depicted in the Book of Mormon. In this election, the editors presented discoveries discussed in John Lloyd Stevens' incidents of travel in Central America, Chiapas and, excuse me, Yucatan, as evidence of the historical veracity and authenticity of the Book of Mormon, and they have it ever since. The editorial commentary was followed by several columns of text extracted from Stevens' book. So they quote from him a lot. Yeah, and then this is just more of it. We're not going to read this, but it's just saying more of the same that there's these books that are talking about Central America and Joseph Smith and the Times and Seasons are proposing that this is Book of Mormon lands. And so there's the text there. If you want to read that, you can buy all means, pause it and read it. So we end up there. We've got

24:03the gold plates. We've got the Book of Mormon Central American, sorry, the Central American ruins from Native Americans being the areas talked about in the Book of Mormon being the lands of the Book of Mormon people. Then we come to seer stones. And it's not just one. It's again the white trans Lucent one. It's the brown striped one. It's another one that he had in his life that had a hole in it or some holes in it that was believed to be a gorge, a gorge, a gorge ed. Is that how you say it? I think so. Yeah. Which was like a Native American talisman that Joseph then transinterpreted into being used as a seer stone. So this, I'll count this as one item, but really it's not. It's at least three in Joseph Smith may have very well had others. And I know there were other seer stones he used like the green one here that is depicted as the one that Sally Chase had. We also will talk later about Hiram Pages seer stone, but Joseph takes seer stones.

25:06All it is is a rock. And he finds a rock in the ground or someone else does. And he declares that it's got special powers and who's to say he's wrong. But it is more of the same pattern of taking an object and putting your own supernatural interpretation or narrative to it when it just seems to be an ordinary item. So there's that. The next one here is the Native Americans themselves. Joseph Smith, again, you put an object in front of Joseph. Does Joseph ever say I don't know what this is? And in this instance, there's tons of conversation going on in Joseph Smith's day about where the Native Americans came from. People have their opinions in a major opinion that's going around in his day is that these are people from Israel, that these are Jewish or Israelite people. And Joseph runs with that because again, it's not falsifiable in his day. Now today it's falsifiable,

26:12at least to an extent, I know apologists will insert the genetic drift idea, the concept that, you know, if you have a small enough band and enough time goes by and you have enough anomaly coincidences that sort of intervene into that group, then their DNA can be lost completely. But what we find, science tells us is that there is not the right DNA leading back to Israel at the right time. And so Mormon apologists for the last 20 years, 25 years, 30 years have been trying to deal with this DNA issue, trying to create room where we don't need to find Israelite DNA and the Native Americans can still go back to Israelites. But this is another instance where Joseph puts a story, and I don't want to call Native Americans an object, but they're a tangible thing. They're human beings. And Joseph applies a made up story to them. And if you don't believe it's made up, that's fine. But by the end, there will be several of these that are. And I think the conclusion is then that probably the rest of them are too. You know, Bill, I've been very judgmental of Joseph Smith

27:18about being kind of hugely egotistical in thinking that he knows the answer to everything. And there may be part of that that's true. It may be all true. I don't know. But I think there's a more charitable way to view this. And perhaps more illuminating for me, which is it is possible that Joseph Smith viewed his role as prophet as not really allowing him to approach God and come back with, I don't know. We're so used to it today. They don't know anything. Every day that goes by, there's more things that modern prophets don't know. And they tell us about it at every general conference. I think Joseph Smith was different. I think he felt like a prophet is a guy who gets answers. Yeah. And he's doing that all the way back. Again, so many sections of the DNC are members of the church coming to him with a question. And as far as I know, we don't ever get it. And if we do, we get very few instances similar to what you were pointing out earlier asking for exceptions. But we get very few instances. If any, where Joseph Smith is saying, look, you know, why bother me with these

28:24silly questions? He seems eager, especially early on eager to take any question he has asked and use it to establish, I am a prophet, you ask a question, I'll go find a thing. And it could be about the most mundane things in early church history. But Joseph Smith was eager to give anybody who asked an answer to a question. All right. The next one is the Zelf Skeleton. And so Joseph, the Zions Camp, they're digging up the bones. Again, we went over this a few weeks ago, a month ago, Zions Camp is on their trek heading from east to west. They encounter a hill, they dig in the hill, they find some bones. The bones on top, they sort of senses this tall skeleton with an arrow in its chest. And they take some of the bones back to Joseph Smith. And again, he's got full story. He doesn't just give a detail. And again, he's smart enough to know that no one can

29:26know who this skeleton was. So he gets to fill in the void and he names the skeleton itself. He gives its race and ethnicity, it's a white laminite. He gives its military affiliation. It's a soldier. He knows that it had an injury to its leg and had a broken leg and he limped around for a while and eventually he was killed in battle by an arrow to the chest. He knows that who he knew he knew who he hung out with. He was a soldier under Onan Dagas and a bunch of other Nephi warriors. And he gives the chronological timeline as well. He says it happened two thousand years ago. And that's a lot of details about a skeleton that once you and I dived into this story, it seems so such an absurd story that Joseph is clearly not knowing. This I would put in the bucket of things that is falsifiable and Joseph was clearly inaccurate about what he was naming here.

30:28And again, the reason I say that is because it counters at least the majority of Book of Mormon apologist in terms of Book of Mormon geography. It places certain Native American terms that Joseph seems to be borrowing from his backyard in locations far away from his backyard. And for those reasons, it seems to be a story that he's making up on the spot. Yes. And as I mentioned when you brought this up, the first time Bill and I want to repeat it here is does anybody here have any doubt that Joseph Smith could take this outline about self and come up with the Book of Self in the Book of Mormon if the order of sequence or the sequence that had happened differently. Obviously, this is in the 1830s. He is able, Joseph Smith is able to come up with an immediate outline of facts about this person that presumably look, unless God's really talking to him and telling him about this guy's backstory and he really was a white lady and all that stuff that Joseph Smith is making this up.

31:34It's coming to him on the spot. Okay. So let's put it that way. It's coming to him on the spot regardless of the source. And what he's effectively doing to use William Davis's expression is he's laying down heads of a story involving self that he could then as he has shown, as especially William Davis in his book, Visions in a Seerstone, could then give a sermonized narrative complete with sermons about this individual's self. And it would be at least half the Book of Alma if not the entire thing. Yeah. It wouldn't be that difficult. Every one of those as you point out is a trailhead that you can go down. And now all you have to do is give a little more context around each of those and that would fill up a page all on itself. Joseph doesn't have a problem making up stories.

32:36And those stories could be quite lengthy. The next one here is the facsimiles. And I know believing Mormons want to treat this sort of as one thing because in their mind, they're all connected to the Book of Abraham, the papyri, which will be the next slide, they also see as being connected to the Book of Abraham. But this is very different. For instance, these two facsimiles, you'll be smarter, you know, more intelligent about explaining these than me, but the facsimile one and facsimile three are parts of Egyptian funeral rituals that are included not always exactly the same, but very, very similar in lots of Egyptian burials with mummies and the like. The middle one, facsimile two, was kind of like a skull cap. It would sit, called a hyposophilus. It was

33:36sit underneath their head. And I could pull up pictures. I've shown them before when we've done conversations around it, but there are hundreds of these online pictures of them. There's nothing special about these Egyptologists. See these as just standard funerary text. Each one of these, though, is its own found in a different document. The hyposophilus found under a particular person's head. Mormon see this as like one document, but that's just not true. This is three different documents that we're looking at. Again, I think facsimile one and facsimile three are on the same document, on the same scroll, correct? Yes. facsimile two, Joseph Smith brought into the Abraham project for whatever inspired reasons he had. Yes, but it was with a completely different mummy, has nothing to do with the mummy with which this scroll was found. And yet Smith takes all of these

34:40things and puts them to put them together as if they're one thing when in reality they're not. And even the facsimile one and facsimile three, which are on the same papyri, different Egyptian funeral scrolls would use one or use the other or use something different. And the middle parts would be specific to the person. So it might be the same image, but there would be writings on these that would indicate the particular person who had died, correct? Yes. Yeah. And so each of these would be you they were personalized for the individual who's holding them and taking them into the afterlife in this case, Horus or Hor as it's abbreviated. So facsimile one and facsimile three are brought in from the Egyptian funeral culture around rituals that were done for people who died and then put into a specific person's scroll with their unique sort of name and descriptions of who they were as they were going through these rituals in the afterlife. And so for me anyway, even though one and three are on a same document, they are in fact in terms

35:45of their origination, there are two different things that have been pulled into in a a funerary document. Does that make sense? And you said one in three. One in three because two was the hyposephalus put under another mummy's head. Yeah. One is the resurrection scene and that begins the book of readings for Hor. And facsimile three is the presentation scene of Hor. So that's actually at the end, sorry, John Ghee, but that's the end of the the papyrus is where that would be. So facsimile one is the beginning of the same papyrus is the facsimile three I believe facsimile two is completely different. Yes. And so these are unique items not able to sort of be set as their one item. And then you get the full papyrus themselves in total there is three of them. One of them, Joseph Smith is saying is the writings of Abraham written by his own hand and it

36:46clearly isn't. This is another one that if you don't accept apologetics trying to create plausibility, you're stuck going this is not the book of Abraham. This is a falsifiable claim. It's not the book of Abraham, but it's worse than that for apologists because it's not just this one, but there are two other documents. And so these two papyrus Joseph Smith identified the one on the left as the book of Joseph the one on the right. We don't have that papyrus anymore. We have some of the inscriptions off of it, but we do have Joseph Smith saying that there was a third papyrus and that it was a description of Cataman, the princess daughter of O'Nightis, Farrell King of Egypt. And so when you have the book of Abraham papyrus, which isn't the book of Abraham, you have the book of Joseph papyrus, which isn't the book of Joseph. And you have some document Joseph alleges as the princess Cataman, which certainly isn't princess Cataman. At least we have enough symbols

37:48to know some of what's being said there and what document it goes back to. And it's not that. Please. Do you remember a week ago when we had Dr. Tom Murphy on the show? And he started off with our recent then mentioning of the terms O'Nightis. Sometimes when you make up names for a living, you fall into patterns and you repeat them. See Smith's Egyptian alphabet says Cataman or Catumine, princess daughter of O'Nightis. Yeah, he loves that word, doesn't he, O'Nightis? That becomes Farrell King of Egypt, O'Nightis. Yeah. And as you point out when you're constantly fabricating things, your brain is likely to go back to using similar terms over and over again. And O'Nightis seems to be one of those that he does

38:49that with. Amona ha. And so Arona ha. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see some of the Egyptian astrology later as that comes into play. But again, there are three documents here, Book of Abraham, Book of Joseph, Book of Cataman, whatever that is, whatever whoever she is. We get the kindergarten plates. This is one where somebody fabricates plates in order to fool Joseph Smith, brings him the plates and says, hey, look what we found. They got a they got a naive Mormon involved and the three of them go out and dig a hole in the ground, find these plates that were put there the night before, take them to Smith and Smith says, Smith translates these again, I don't think that's the translation there, but he gives a couple of sentences of translation recorded in William Clayton's journal. And now we know that these were fraudulent, modern fabricated plates made in the what 18 early 1840s, 1843 Kendra Huckelins.

39:55And this is part of the reason that I'm starting to think that maybe I'm onto something with the idea that Joseph Smith conceived of a prophet as somebody who had to give an answer because if you're Joseph Smith, either he is so completely off the scale, make a little maniacal that he thinks he smarter than everybody else. But honestly, if you had fooled everybody with your story about gold plates and bringing forth a translation of them, one that you don't even talk about anymore for some reason during the rest of your ministry, which Joseph Smith did not, would you not be on the lookout for strangers coming into town with some kind of old plates and old writing and asking you if you can translate them. I wouldn't translate anything that anybody brought to me if I was Joseph Smith on a bet I would have some kind of explanation. The explanation actually came to me last night as to what God would tell me if I were Joseph Smith and somebody brought these plates to me, I would say, look, here's the thing, okay, I'm not accusing you, Mr. Fugit of doing anything wrong here,

40:59that God has revealed to me that somewhere along the way these plates were forged. I'm not saying you did it, but I'm saying they're not real. And that way you don't have to make an accusation. And I think Joseph, I don't think Joseph Smith had any problem making accusations, false accusations against people. But you don't even have to do that here. You just say, God, tell me, somewhere back upstream, somebody forged something here. So then you don't have to. But he wants to, he's eager to, it seems like he feels compelled to step into every trap that stuck in front of him. Not everything you find has to be a religious narrative that God requires you to translate. Yeah, it can't be, I mean, I guess this narrative can't be of, I don't know, some guy who just lived a regular life out doing the corn and the squash and the hunting the deer and all this kind of stuff. No, it has to be self the white, lame, and I, and we can't forget to mention the prophet under whom he served. Yeah, and the same goes to this too, the translation of this has some

42:03deeper meaning of a connection to, was it Ham, I think? Yes, send of Noah. Yeah. So there's always this larger than life, religious narrative embedded in all of these documents, all of these items. And again, even if you were to find records buried in the land on the frontier of America, it doesn't mean that every one of them has to be something special, something worth your time and effort. But for Smith, they were all worth his time and effort. Can you hang on just a second here? An idea is occurring to me. It's a dangerous thing. I want to get the exact thing that Joseph Smith said. He translated, or at least what William Clayton said, Joseph Smith said about that kinder hook plate. Okay, you're looking for that. Many details, I'm sorry, recorded by Clayton state that the individual is a descendant of Ham through the loins of Pharaoh, King of Egypt, and they received

43:08this kingdom from the ruler of heaven and earth. Okay, so here's, I'm in Parli Piprat and early Apostles, similarly, similarly wrote that the artifacts held the genealogy of an ancient Jaredite tracing back to Ham. Okay, so Parli Prat puts the Jaredite part in their tracing back to Ham. That's really interesting to me. And the only reason I'm going to say this is because it's 1842, right? Why, no, it's 1843. Why is it in Joseph Smith's head that anybody in the Americas would be descended from Ham, which would mean, could it mean, does Joseph Smith think it means? Curst has to the priesthood. I know there's a lot of ambiguity. We don't know. Is this another data point that may tell us something about what Joseph Smith was thinking along these lines in 1843? What do you think, Bill? I mean, it's not the, it's not the Lamanites, right? Lamanites have their own on and off against skin color thing going. It's not something because of their

44:10descent. It's because of their righteousness. This is a different thing. This is the curse. This is the curse lineage that Joseph Smith apparently is putting in North America and inserting into the Book of Mormon retroactively. Where was he going with that? Do you think, Bill? Yeah, I think Joseph was open to keeping lots of threads possible. This would have been something interesting. Again, I don't know why he left the project, but this gives him another opportunity that if he wants to go down that path, he can now translate these to his people and provide a whole other set of storylines. Again, when you go Book of Abraham, Book of Moses, Book of Enic, you've got the Book of Mormon, you've got all the things that come with that. You've got comments, again, we'll get into the Greek Psalter here a little bit. You've got the Kindrehood plates. Joseph seemed open to leaving lots of possible threads that could be explored later. I'll also say too, notice by the way, anytime something's found in the Americas, it's either the

45:15Geridites, the Lamanites or the Nephites, for a landscape that is filled with people from Asia and just a small number of people who are the Lamanites and Nephites. Joseph never finds any Asian writings. They're all Geridites, Lamanites and Nephites. Which is what you would expect if indeed Joseph Smith conceived the Book of Mormon as teaching that nobody else was in the land, except for the people talked about in the Book of Mormon. Yep, 100%. So you've got the Kindrehood plates. Now you've got the Greek Psalter incidents. And I wondered if you could reiterate to the audience, we did an episode on this and this was a topic that you wanted to explore for years. If you can explain to the audience just a quick overview of what happened here. Yeah, basically you got a reverent who comes into, let me see here. It's got its own Wikipedia article. I think it was Navu, yeah, it's Navu. He wants to test Joseph's

46:18disability to translate. Everybody does. Why wouldn't you be anticipating this Joseph? Can't you see around Gornars? And he comes in with a Greek Psalter. This is the story that he tells. And nobody would believe it except it sounds like all these other stories that fool Joseph Smith. He comes in a town with a Greek Psalter claims he doesn't know what it is. Ask if Joseph Smith will figure it out. And his story is that Joseph Smith says he could read it. And actually it wasn't Greek at all, but it was Egyptian, it was Egyptian hieroglyphsic, hieroglyphics, and it was actually a dictionary. And the capital letters in the somewhat, I think it was an illuminated, mildly illuminated Greek Psalter, which is the Psalms, of course, in Greek. And Joseph Smith thought that that was Egyptian and an Egyptian dictionary. And it wasn't. This one was clearly falsifiable. Apologist would say, yeah, we get this second hand from Caswell. We don't know for sure, Joseph Smith said that.

47:18But again, if the pattern continues to show up over and over again, that Joseph likes to say he knows things about items brought to him, then why wouldn't this just be another instance? Why should I give the benefit of the doubt to Smith and Apologist rather than saying it probably happened as Caswell said it did? Yes. And when you've got another story that is the mirror image of it, which is the Kinderhook plate story, that is exactly the same thing. And that's something that's in Joseph Smith's own words. That is a story, the Kinderhook plate story, that the church bouts for the truth of up until I think it was the 1970s. The 1970s, the church maintained the truth of the Kinderhook plate story, i.e. that the Kinderhook plates really were real, and spider the fact that fugit, the guy who brought him to Joseph Smith later confessed that he had just made them out in his shed. Because apparently you can do that in the United States at that time. It's just cobbled together a bunch of plates out in your shed as a lark, which is what fugit did

48:25and what he admitted to. But the church says no, he's lying now. Now he's lying. He wasn't lying when he went to Joseph Smith with the plates and said, hey, I really found these in a burial mound. No, he's lying now when he says that he faked them. So the church contradicting fugit's retraction maintained the legitimacy of the Kinderhook plates up until the 1970s. When finally there were conclusive scientific tests done, I think they were finally able to get access to a small piece of one. They had to consume it in order to do the test and always that's a problem, of course, we're trying to get something from a museum. But I think they did it and it showed clearly that these things were cut and that these were acid, the marks on the plates were produced by acid etching, which presumably was not available to the Gerard X. As you said, half tongue and cheek was that it's obvious that people in Joseph Smith's day could fabricate metal plates and place rings

49:28through them. The other thing too is that even after a fugate came forward and the world was made aware that this was a fabrication, the church, I think, due to sunk cost fallacy and not really having profits actually went on for some time, still saying like we push back against that. That's just fugate not wanting to be embarrassed or feel shame. So he's saying they're a fabrication, but we still hold that this is evidence that Joseph Smith is a true translator. And I think it was Joseph Fielding Smith, perhaps who made comments about these in the past, still being true even after a fugate had said something. So even later on, the church was still maintaining that this was true evidence that Joseph Smith was a prophet. Yes, it was August of 1981, when the enzyme came out that finally retracted the church's support for the legitimacy of the

50:32Kinderhook plates due to scientific testing in 1980. Yeah, it took them a long time being ran by prophets, years, and revelators to acknowledge that this was a modern day fabrication. Yes, a really, really long time. Yeah, I want to make a joke about Elder Oaks and we've been hiding that for a long time, but I'll move on, lest I digress. So the next we talk about the Greek Psalter, we mentioned that already. How about Adam's altar? They go to Missouri, they find a couple of rocks that are sort of sitting on top of each other weird. Yes. And Joseph's like, oh, you know what I can do here. I can tell the people that this is Adam's altar, that this is the larger area around us is the Garden of Eden and these two rocks are the altar upon which Adam and Eve made their sacrifices. I recognize it from the temple. It's just missing a little purse. Okay, the temple roll, put your name down. Oh, you call it a purse.

51:41Yeah. How interesting. Hey, can you describe, I'm sorry, just for a little break here. Can you describe to the audience what the hell you're talking about? In the temple, one part of the endowment ceremony is that the officiator asked for a handful of couples to come up to the front. They need to have the best of feelings for everyone in the room. They can't have anything less than that. That's why I was always alone up there. So they would, they would go, so they would have people come up. They would all join in a circle, grip each other in I think the patriarchal grip with one hand and elbow on the shoulder raised to the square on another. I had no idea I was going to get this much detail. Please proceed. I will. No problem. And at that point, the circle of people would join in a prayer on the altar was a little handbag with a zipper and inside that bag was all of the temple names that had been submitted to be prayed upon on the altar put into the bag zip back up,

52:43set on the altar and part of the temple prayer. There were certain parts that were wrote and other parts in which the officiator would pray on behalf of the people whose names were in the bag. And did you ever hear, did you ever listen real closely and in the quiet moments in the temple, hear little little voices from the bag going, let me out of here, let me out of here. No. It was really creepy. Yeah. When you're in the temple, up there all alone. That, see, we can get off into a tangent, but so does anybody know what that's called? Bill called it a purse. I might, I never thought about what the hell it was called. It's just sort, it doesn't like to have straps or anything, I think. It just, but it does have a zipper, I think. I sort of remember a zipper and a pouch. I don't know. Does anybody here know what the technical term is for this container they use in the temple to hold the names of all the people who aren't in the temple, but their sad temple going relatives have written their names down.

53:48While you're looking for that, folks, I'll just say again, two rocks out in the middle of Missouri. And Joseph decides this is the altar of Adam and Eve. Now's the time. Now is the time to read from Professor Bushman. So here it is. Okay. He actually, this is a thought that shows up twice in his book. There's one on page the thought that I'm referring to. Let me go ahead and at least say that is the idea that generally speaking places and objects gain veneration through a long period of time. And they were used in, it's called the shame satchel. I like it. The shame satchel. Have you that shame satch satchel? We got some brand to do. We're the burning box. Faraday bag. That's why the blessings don't work. What an incredible audience we have to, it's a purse. It's a, it is not a purse. I thought it was a fanny pack. Okay. Now I get a feeling that people are not being serious. I'm going to go back to being serious because this is a serious show. So the idea

54:53is that generally places and objects need time and they were used in something special or sacred. To obtain this kind of veneration that people have for it. Instead, Joseph Smith just looks at something and names it and it requires instant veneration. All right. So this is something that Richard Bushman talks about three, four, is it three, four, five? It's hard to see it here, but I think it is one line here. This is talking about when he's in on the open prairies. They saw dear Turkey, partridge is Elk and a wolf that Joseph said is dog after, et cetera. Inspired by what he saw, Joseph invested the place with a history partly from the book of Mormon, partly from the Bible. And this is Adam and I am an and this is specifically that altar. He invested the place with a history just by naming it. And on pages 165 and 166, it says this and a little

55:54bit longer way, not too much so. During this is about New Jerusalem down there in Missouri. During his month in Missouri, Joseph transformed and bedraggled this is earlier, frontier village surrounded by vast stretches of empty prairie into a sacred space. The sacralization of space usually results from a succession of holy events like repeated miracles or from accumulated layers of worship and veneration over centuries in the way of lords and Jerusalem. Rather than growing from repeated sacred happenings, Joseph's Zion was created in a stroke. A few words from heaven declaring independence to be the site of the New Jerusalem inscribed indelible marks on the land forever. Yeah. So you've got Joseph, somebody said I didn't know, I never knew Joseph Smith found Adam's rock altar. And I believe Joseph Smith's somewhere makes the comment that Adam had offered

56:59sacrifices upon an altar which was built of stone and many altars which were built by Adam are yet to be found. That's what you got to watch this show so you can find out cool stuff like this. So a couple of rocks give it a story and next thing you know people travel there every year on their vacations to it and it's it's not really a great vacation if your mom and dad are taking you there you probably want to work out trying to get to Disneyland because it's not going to be that great. Didn't people keep taking stones you know little rocks and pebbles and chipping them off from the altar to take home. That sounds like a good Mormon visiting a church history site. Yes. I think they did and I think the other problem is some smart person looked at the rocks and the altar and found tiny little fossils. Yeah they go back a long way. More than 6000 years. Yeah. Well nothing stopping Adam from hefting these on top of each other and calling it I guess an altar. The fossils are there maybe you know those were from other planets that were put together into the

58:03rocks. I think that must be it because we know that it is a matter of doctrine that death did not enter the entire world until Adam, particularly the fruit and fell. Except for those pre-Adamites. Well those are not scriptural those are just unibly theoretical people I think. Yeah. You and Bruce are Maconkey. Okay and of course the pre-Adamites are created by unibly. I thought it was great when I found out about them because they thought oh my gosh now you don't have to worry about evolution anymore. Well of course that's why they were created. Evolution is happening outside the garden. Meanwhile in the garden is just human species, Adam and Eve and they are kept away from that evolutionary process. Yeah and this is the work around right the fossil work around because even though the book of Mormon I said in an earlier podcast I'm going to repeat it today which is that nobody does more abuse to the language of the book of Mormon and the scriptures in general than the apologists because they are there to make

59:05it say something that's defensible which is frequently not what it really says. Yeah so there we have that. Then we have the Masonic ceremony. Joseph decides to tell everyone that the Masonic ceremony is a shadow. What's the better word for this? It's corrupted version of. Yeah corrupted version of the endowment but that over the years it has deteriorated. It's been changed. It's been made into something that isn't completely useful so I'm going to be the one who restores it and so the Masonic ceremony. Joseph again lucky him getting involved in Masonry, free Masonry and goes through the rituals and goes you know what? I am sitting in the midst of the ancient corrupted endowment. God wants me to give this back to the people. Again falsifiable to the extent where today apologists say yeah Masonry doesn't go back far enough.

1:00:12Joseph Smith maybe just using Masonry as a presentation of the endowment and that would be a very separate thing from the endowment itself and again notice each and every instance where the church has to come up with some sort of work around. For instance on this they say yeah we don't really know where the Garden of Eden is anymore and it's not really an important thing to talk about and in church theology. There's primary questions and secondary questions and this is a secondary question so don't worry about it. This is tertiary. Yeah tertiary. So the Masonic rituals is another tangible thing that Joseph Smith gives a new interpretation to and comes up with some ancient story for and so there's that one. We get the Anton transcript. I put this in here because people could go no he's just taking characters from the book of Mormon and writing them down but not if we go off with Charles Anton said Joseph Smith seems to be creating a document that Anton said

1:01:17contained Greek and Hebrew letters crosses and flourishes Roman letters inverted or placed sideways arranged in perpendicular columns ending in a rude delineation of a circle divided into various compartments decked with various strange marks by the way this is Hoffman's rendition of the Anton transcript. We don't have the actual Anton transcript the piece of paper that often is referred to as the Anton transcript. We don't believe is actually it. It appears to be maybe like it's a copy of something. It wasn't Martin Harris but somebody else in early church history made a copy of that much later than the Anton experience had happened. There's a Wikipedia page for that too by the way R.F.M. and for those out there but this is the Hoffman depiction but Hoffman went off of what Anton said and then created a document that people would read Anton's description

1:02:17and go this looks like it's really it so that would at least give you an idea of what it might have looked like. Then we get Hiram Page's Sears Stone so Hiram Page comes along and he says you know what I can be a prophet too and he starts to use his black stone to translate and Joseph says I can't have any of that so he decides to give a new story to this stone which is those things which he has written from that stone are not of me and that Satan deceives him. What is Hiram Page thinking? It's a black stone. Of course it's going to be from Satan. My rock's good, your rock's bad. So there's that. No and literally in the text of the the revelation when I have a stone that I can see crazy stuff in it's a sear stone when you have a stone that you see crazy stuff in it's a peep stone. Right. Yeah. My stone God is talking. Your stone is the devil talking. So the Hiram Page sear stone Joseph needed to insert a supernatural new narrative about

1:03:25in order to get Hiram to stop doing that. I think if the story told his accurate they took that stone and broke it up into lots of pieces so that Hiram couldn't use it anymore. Can you imagine how sad he was that day? We had to ground it to powder. Yeah. Yeah to break that thing. He was like making small rocks out of big rocks. Yeah and you know if you make small rocks out of a big sear stone you could probably still just use the small rocks as a sear stone but if you break it up into powder that gets kind of difficult. Yes. Yes. You can't reassemble it. So we put an unknown object in front of Joseph and then we asked is Joseph ever say as you pointed out the exception of the rule. Does Joseph ever say I don't know what this is? Nope. He never does that. So he always comes up with an interpretation. The the second one and again there's some overlap here but the second one was geographic locations not necessarily an item but just an area and how many times Joseph

1:04:30sees an area and names it with some supernatural narrative some religious narrative of ancient things that no human being on earth could know naturally they would have to know by supernatural means and the first one is Kamora itself. Again this is falsifiable. Joseph clearly over multiple occasions even has an experience where he and David Whitmer and Oliver Cowdry are in Palmyra they're talking to Moroni who's walking down the road and he says he's heading to Kamora. There are so many instances in church history where Joseph Smith is clearly articulating that it's that hill in Palmyra, New York and as I guess John Sorenson who said that that's a clean hill and that we have to look elsewhere for the hill of Kamora and so Joseph takes this hill in his backyard lucky him it's right in his backyard it's always where he's traveling he's traveling in science camp he comes across some rocks he finds a skeleton he's got a hill in his backyard the plates of the

1:05:32kindergarten plates are brought to him a Greek solter is brought to him he uh uh uh uh what's the guy's name who came into Kirtland to sell the mummies. Chandler? Yeah Chandler comes in and has three mummies and some papyri for sale and it just so happens to be the book of Abraham and book of Joseph. By the way Bill, yes. My name is correct it's not John Sorenson it was John E. Clark who's the BYU archaeologist who said that the hill Kamora is a clean hill with no artifacts, walls, trenches or arrowheads basically saying the sky is blue. Yeah I always mixed those two up with them both having the first name John. I had to look it up. Yeah so the hill Kamora is another just a hill in Palmyra just a just a New York drumlin and Joseph gives it this supernatural narrative we get Jackson County. Again this is said to be Zion the New Jerusalem. We get Missouri which is the Garden of Eden. I mean we're just everywhere Joseph Smith goes

1:06:35is sacred land. It's to me it's just crazy when you start naming all the times that Joseph inserts a supernatural story around a person place or thing. So there's that when Missouri is the Garden of Eden, Zion's camp as they're walking along in Illinois these are the planes of the Nephites. He knows that as well. Maybe you could have found some sear stones there if they were the planes of the Nephites. Maybe I said that too fast the Nephites. Yeah I know you get it. Yeah you'd find some green rocks. Nephites isn't amazing how many words they were using that sound like Nephites. They got Nephites. Jade Nephite, green Nephites they've got neo-fights joining religions if you're a Native American becoming Christian you're in neo-fight. Yeah it happens over and over. So there's that and then I thought the moon that's a geographic location and you can make a song about Nephites with all the words that rhyme with it. I'm sorry

1:07:36Bill go ahead. Tell us some of the words that rhyme with Nephites. Well you've got Nephite. You got neo-fight. I mean get your guitar and start writing. All right so I thought the moon you know the moon's a geographic location. Yes it is. Joseph said the moon was inhabited by men and women. The same as this earth they lived generally near the age of a thousand years old. They were a little taller than six foot dressed in a very uniform dressed very uniformly in a style resembling the Quaker fashion. Yes Quaker Oats they're not just good for you they're the right thing to do. Nothing is better for the than me. Joseph Smith giving us the original man in black. There they are. So Joseph again at the time people are guessing about what's on the moon. He doesn't know we'll ever get there. In fact I don't think Joseph Fielding Smith knew he would either.

1:08:38But we're genetic. And there aren't any Quakers there living to a thousand years old a little over six foot tall. I don't think we have actually you know explored the entirety of the moon all at once together that we know and the interior at the same time we don't know that there are no Quaker dressing aliens up there. That's the same argument we use in Mesoamerica isn't it like we've only scored four percent of Mesoamerica the other 96 might contain Nephite things. Exactly. So you just got to keep an open mind on this and have faith Bill. They could still be up there. And I will try to make the apologist happy here by just noting that Joseph Smith doesn't give this a firsthand account of this. It is it goes through people who heard him speaking that day. Oliver B. Huntington I believe is the one who records it. It's got Philo Dibble there in the middle and I don't know that there actually was a middle man. I think it was okay. But I will just say

1:09:39for folks who want to believe the apologetic argument there that Joseph didn't say it. Oliver B. Huntington heard it incorrectly. Philo Dibble heard it incorrectly. Then we also have to deal with the fact that Brigham Young went right behind him and said that there were people living on the sun. You know I think the Quakers they were not into technology really so it's not like they'd be building anything up there on the moon that we could see and know that they were there if they were there. Kind of like the Amish and Menonites huh. I'm just lumping them all into the same group in order to make an apologetic argument. You might as well throw the FLDS up there too. They're all sort of wearing the same clothing. They're all up there but nobody knows it. And look they're just sitting there looking at the earth. They're not having any trouble breathing at all. The Joseph Smith mentioned like an aqua lung or something when he was talking about the Quakers on the moon. Uh, scuba. I don't I don't know. I'm trying to remember who it was. It was a baseball player

1:10:41in dinosaurs. I got to find this. This is a really cool. Oh, I know exactly what you're talking. I don't know the name of the baseball player. Oh yeah. Let's see here. People say they don't believe in baseball dinosaurs. Yeah. Let me put it up on the screen here. This is good. This is real. It's just a meme. A little of Joseph Smith. This was an actual uh, newspaper thing. It was a bunch of players and they all got asked to share like a little bit of wisdom with people. No. And uh, so it was Mookie Wilson. Because I think we can all learn something from Mookie. Mookie Wilson was a left filter back in the 70s played with the Mets. He said, when I'm in a slump, I comfort myself by saying, if I believe in dinosaurs, then somewhere they must be believing in me. And if they believe in me, then I can believe in me, then I bust out. Way to go, Mookie. I love that quote. Mookie Wilson. Uh, Mookie Wilson was not a great baseball player, but he played a lot of years.

1:11:43In spite of all the dinosaurs believing in him. In spite of all the dinosaurs believing in him. Good old Mookie Wilson. That's too bad. And then section three is these moments where Joseph Smith just has a gap. Someone presents him with a void in history, a void in scripture, a void in some narrative, a void in a story. And Joseph decides he can go ahead and fill the gap. So let's see here, when the record is silent, when the text is incomplete, when the language is unknown, or the question simply has no answer. Joseph supplies the missing information. And so we talked about this before, the lost 116 pages. And uh, this one to me, it's one of those moments that once I saw it, you and I were on the phone one day and it's what led to us doing the episode on the 116 pages. But it just struck me that when you read Joseph Smith's explanation again,

1:12:45as a believer, the church rushes to give us the faithful narrative of it. What is that? I think it's is it DNC section 10? It's somewhere right around there. I think it's DNC 10. Oh, look at it. And when the when the church tells you the story of the lost 116 pages, I know many of you have experienced this. I know I experienced this. I think you did to RFM where you hear the story told and it just doesn't sound right. Like you believe it because you're supposed to believe it. But the story doesn't exactly make sense from the faithful point of view. It's a story that telegraphs you shouldn't think too much about this story. Right. And in reality, when you step back and you go, okay, I'm not going to read this story from the believing lens. I'm going to set that aside. I'm going to read this story as if I know Joseph Smith is the one creating the Book of Mormon as a modern day fabrication. And then the story makes complete sense. Joseph Smith's story

1:13:50which becomes doctrine and covenant section 10, it is 10 is his alibi for why it's missing and why he can't reproduce it even though God is absolutely certain if he wanted Joseph to reproduce it, Joseph could reproduce it. And you see, that's part of the same thing. The prophets always got to have the answer. The prophets always got to be able to do what the prophets says he can do. Like translate this book word for word identical as he did the first time around. He can do that. He has the power. There's just a little problem and that's because the people who stole it are going to change it. So it will look like his word for word retranslation is actually off. And therefore, they'll be able to prove he's not a prophet. Yeah. If if there were bad actors, God seemed to think they were going to come forward and they never did. Joseph bought himself tons of time by finishing the translation of the Book of Mormon picking up there in Mosiah.

1:14:53Joseph seems reluctant to do the small plates of Nephi until it's absolutely towards the end of the translation. He was hoping that these had turned back up. But in the meantime, he needed a story for why he couldn't reproduce the original text. And therefore he does that. And again, notice it's a missing item. But it works in the same way that the earlier objects did. So you bring Joseph Smith, the kindergarten plates, nobody knows what's on them. Joseph gets to know the 116 pages go missing. Joseph needs to inform people why they're missing and why he can't reproduce. There's a void in the story and he needs to supply that to maintain his credibility and so he does. And that they have already changed the stolen manuscript. So it reads differently from the way it did originally. And none of us would notice that. Yeah, I'm just saying that's in the past tense

1:15:55in the revelation. Speaking from the point of view of someone who knows that it's already been done allegedly. Yeah, I still I'm still wondering how I believed it. And again, it's what stuck out to me at the time. I had this sense of like, yeah, but if they if they brought them forward and altered them, then either have to create new pages. White out somehow, parchment out somehow lines on the current manuscript or they have to cross things out or write over them. I spent a lot of time as a Mormon not thinking about that. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. But it makes perfect sense when you go, oh, Joseph knows that if he rewrote them, they would look completely different. He can't remember a lot of the facts on them. And so he needs an alibi for why he doesn't go back to doing it. He gives you a bogus sixth grader excuse and Mormons fall for it every time by definition,

1:16:56because if they don't, then they're going to leave. Yeah, they have to believe it. But it's an absurd story. The Bible being corrupted. This is very similar to the Masonic ceremony. Joseph has the Bible in front of him. He's already translated the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon articulates that there have been many things that have been lost or corrupted in the Bible. And so Joseph Smith gives us the inspired translation of the Bible. There are folks in early Church history who are talking about it being a restoration of the Bible to its perfect form. Even more significant is later people in Church history, leaders in the Church, scholars in the Church, but also apostles and members of the 70 are putting out lots of commentary about the Bible, inspired Bible translation by Joseph Smith being a restoring of the Bible from its corrupted form. And yet when he gets done doing it in the modern moment, folks like Thomas Wayman who claims to be a faithful believer

1:17:58notices that Joseph's inspired Bible actually gets us further away. If we use the Bible that Joseph seems to be working from as sort of the standard, Joseph's inspired Bible gets further away from the earliest manuscripts than that modern Bible does. So Joseph is adding in modern terms that no one in the original Bible would have used. He's creating additional errors that didn't exist. He's not fixing errors that were in there. And he essentially is doing something other than fixing the Bible. And then we come to find out that he's plagiarizing from Adam Clark's commentary. And what we're left with Brad Wilcox, Saints unscripted, and Thomas Wayman have all indicated at this point that this is a flawed Bible commentary by Joseph Smith.

1:19:00And at least those three sources, which is the new line of apologetics, no longer hold that Joseph Smith is actually doing a Bible restoration from a corrupted form into a perfect Bible. If you'll get in the way back machine with me for a moment, Bill, I'll take you back to the 1970s and 1980s when the presence in the Joseph Smith translation of two items, two specifically. I'm not going to go into what they were. It's not important for this show. The ships of Tariq, Tariq, yes, which they think is spain, but regardless, that's one of them right from Isaiah. Very good. Another one is whoever is angry with his brother without a cause, that the clause, the without a cause clause in that passage shall be in danger of the judgment should it be there should it not anyway, Joseph Smith translation back in the 1980s. This is when I'm reading books about it. And I know because I'm being taught this by professors of religion at BYU, including the

1:20:03guy who's the grandpapy of this stuff from the Mormon side. And that was Robert J. Matthews. And he was letting us know that the presence of those two, the way that Joseph Smith changed those in his Joseph Smith translation of the Bible, corresponded with earlier original versions of the Bible that were not available to Joseph Smith. Therefore, he was indeed restoring that which had been lost. Now, what has been found out since then and actually only relatively recently, is that those same corrections to the Bible manuscript to restore it to its earlier and more pristine versions were both available in the Adam Clark Bible commentary and or other commentaries of Joseph Smith's day. And then they appeared in the Joseph Smith translation. So it's one of those things where now when you get the rest of the story, first off, it looked like Joseph Smith is restoring things he couldn't have known about. Now we know how he knew about them. And so now we can see that the evidence itself, the source is showing us where we got the evidence.

1:21:09Let me put this this way. Okay, Robert J. Matthews in the 1980s is proving to me by his papers. Okay, Joseph Smith got this thing right. And he's I think in some places talking about these Bible commentaries. I could be wrong about that. Maybe he's not. But he's not drawing the connection. He's not putting the dates down that will allow me to draw the connection that these are not the proof that Joseph Smith restored what was lost. They're the source that he used to restore what was lost. That's what I mean by confusing the source with the evidence. And that's why Wilcox, the church affiliate podcast, St. St. St. scripted and Thomas Wayman, all in their head somewhere have come across the fact that what we used to say about the Bible being a inspired restoring of the corrupted Bible to its perfect form that that no longer held up. All three of those entities have moved to just

1:22:14acknowledging like this is just a Bible commentary like other Bible commentaries. It has its flaws. It's such a strange thing to go to that story because you and I were raised very adamantly to the point where we would often refer to Joseph's corrections down below in the footnotes in our scriptures to be able to go back and go like, whoa, well, let's slow down everybody. Let's see what the Joseph Smith translation says. Oh, yes, absolutely. Everybody always wanted to know what the Joseph Smith translation said because that was the truest most accurate original version. And sometimes you know, you'd be going through your Bible or whatever. And some student in the class would want to bring up the Joseph Smith translation and make sure that that was read into the record regardless of whether it made a difference. And today we recognize that there's very little use in sort of a official theology of going to Joseph Smith's translation because at best he is just another person

1:23:17doing Bible commentary in the same way that Adam Clark was doing Bible commentary. Can I just take a second to give the light of that whole allegation because it's ridiculous on its face. Commentaries do not change the words of the Bible. Joseph Smith changed, it's all he did. It's a Joseph Smith translation of the Bible. It's inspired version of the Bible, the IV. He's not writing a commentary about what the Bible says. He's changing the Bible itself. And I don't think that's the stuff of commentaries. I think that's the stuff of being a prophet and receiving revelation. Yeah. And when you take the work of other people and then put it forward as if it's your own and as if you got it through revelation, by the way, the community of Christ still calls it the inspired Bible translation. That's what their name is for it. The inspired Joseph Smith

1:24:21translation. When you don't give credit, when you don't want the people who you're delivering it to to know that you were taking it from other sources, there's just something really, again, maybe in the time that it's done and it wouldn't be under the legal sense of plagiarizing, but it essentially serves the same purpose. He's dressed in borrowed robes. Yeah. And as much as I get mad at people like Jonah Barnes for stealing the intellectual work of other people without giving them credit. And it does hack me off. I suppose to be fair, I have to have the same feelings about Joseph Smith because that's what he's doing. So Joseph Smith appears to have been a frontier Jonah Barnes. Yeah. He's doing the same thing. Then we get the book of Moses, right? So the Bible gives us some partial stories and Joseph decides to expound upon that to expand it. And so he creates the

1:25:26book of Moses to give us additional information. So there's a void in the story. There's things Joseph wants to say about Moses that isn't in the narrative. So then he just tells the people that I've been called to translate the book of Moses and I will add additional insights and scripture about Moses himself. And I think the main reason for that whole chapter one introduction to the book of Moses is just to answer the question, which was alive in Joseph Smith's day and it's still alive in ours in certain circles, which is how did Moses, obviously from faithful circles is where this question is alive. How did Moses know how God created the earth? Especially that question. Not to mention all the big stories that happen leading up to Moses, but how does he know how God created the earth because presumably he wasn't around there to see it and write it down. And the answer given in Moses chapter one is that he received everything he wrote down about the creation in a vision from God.

1:26:29Yep. And then we get a similar thing. We get the, oh, let me go back one. Wait a minute. That's skip one. Okay. Yeah. Well, just do this one next. So this is the book of Enic. What's that? I'm hands free. I didn't touch any. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's the next slide after this one. Okay. So this is the book of Enic. The Bible mentions him only briefly. We don't get a ton of detail about him. And Joseph wants to expound or expand on Enic's story. And so he comes up with this idea of a book of Enic. Now, this might be a thing where I'm a little limited on, but we don't actually have this in its entirety, correct? Now, what are you talking about this? The Enic, the revelation. Yes. Okay. There's very little mention about Enic as a patriarch in Genesis, assuming that's correct. I know it's in Genesis. Enic walked with God and he was not for God took him. That's basically all we know about Enic. He gets expanded upon a little bit in

1:27:34Hebrews 11, I think. And obviously some other literature had been growing up around Enic because this is something that's not just Joseph Smith, but people who are religious minded and fervent are drawn to wanting to know more about things that the scriptures don't tell them about Enic. He walks with God. And then he's, I mean, this is designed to fire the imagination and to want to create stories about this individual. So there are a number of stories that are created about Enic and a number of books in which he has featured first, Enic, second, Enic, third, Enic throughout the the ages. But the book of Enic here that you're talking about in the right of this thumbnail, and maybe that's what your question is really about is what is sometimes referred to as the book of Enic. It's not specifically referred to that way in the text of the book of Moses, but I think it's chapter 6 and 7 of the book of Moses end up comprising two rather large chapters devoted to Enic and expanding upon this bare mention of him in Genesis. Excellent. So we've got that. Then we've got section 7 of the

1:28:43doctrine and covenants. We get John the revelator and there's details that Joseph Smith would like to add into him. So he ends up receiving a revelation allegedly calls it doctrine and covenant section 7. And I'll just read the header to this revelation given that Joseph Smith the prophet and Oliver Cowdry in Harmony, Pennsylvania, April 1829 when they inquired through the Eurum and Thumum, which I'm going to guess is searstone, as to whether John the beloved disciple. By the way, it's the church that once is confused about which rocks he's using. You want the believer to think Nephite spectacles when in reality it's the searstone. And I'll just say one more thing to which is going back to the 116 pages, the lost 116 pages of the book of Lehigh, it is so clear now looking back that the church wanted to get to me first and tell that story from a faithful

1:29:43perspective so that I wouldn't naturally think about the story neutrally. Because if you're neutral, you can sense it doesn't make sense. The church seemed all too eager to tell the lost 116 pages story. Give it the faithful bent focus there in that doctrine and covenant section. When there are so many sections of the DNC that we never want to touch in the year of doctrine and covenant, every Mormon learns early on the faithful telling of that story. So it's harder to figure out later on to look at it from an outsider's point of view. But anyway, doctrine and covenant 7, you're in Thumum as to whether John the beloved disciple, Terry in the Flasher, had died. The revelation is a translated version of the record made on parchment by John and hidden up by himself. By the way, this also demonstrates RFM that Joseph is translating and adding to the

1:30:49Bible. The church treats us now as if we all should have went like, oh yeah, like he was just doing a commentary. I don't know why I thought it was an inspired redo, but it was just a commentary. I must have somehow gotten off track somewhere along the way. It's so clear that when you look at what Joseph Smith is doing with his translation productions of the Book of Mormon, the Book of Abraham, the Book of Moses, the Book of Enoch, the writings of John the beloved, that Joseph Smith is clearly wanting his followers around him to think that I am a prophet who is delving into the Bible, delving into biblical stories, delving into other materials that connect to the Bible, and I am setting the record straight. Yes. Yeah, so it's such a crazy thing. And he is in April 1829 while he is in the middle of dictating the text from Gold Plates without

1:31:52looking at the plates. He's also showing Oliver Cowdry that he can dictate from parchment that's on the other side of the world and was hidden two thousand years ago and may not even exist anymore. Take away the hat. Take away the stone. He's doing the same thing in both situations. He's just making up a story in his head. But the point that you make is very good that the nothing says Joseph Smith translation like doctrine and covenant section seven. It seems like an early version of the Joseph Smith translation. There are several places in the Book of Mormon that looked like early or incipient versions of the Joseph Smith translation. But doctrine and covenant seven looks very much like that where Joseph Smith is correcting the language at the end of the gospel of John to clarify this question that has dog the Christian world for. Well, ever since the gospel of John came off the presses. And that's about whether he's going to live forever

1:32:53until Jesus comes again. I don't think it was that big a thing when it was maybe originally written. But over time it became more and more because there was more and more time since it was written. So now he'd have to be 500 years and a thousand years old. There must be something special going on. And this being given in April of 1829 within a month or two, Joseph Smith is going to be dictating after he has this very idea on his mind, right? About John the beloved being allowed to Terry for as long as it takes 2000 years, 3000 a million until Jesus comes again. Joseph Smith is going to be dictating about how the same thing happened to three of the Nephite disciples that they were allowed to Terry as long as it takes for for Jesus to come again. Yeah, overlapping themes during the same time that he's thinking about both ideas. Yeah, and that happens more than once in church history too. And then we've got the Adamic language. Do you have any, again, I don't know the we probably ought to do an episode on this

1:33:56at some point. Maybe there's not enough there to do it. But what gets him wanting to tell his followers that he has found discovered through revelation the Adamic language? Is there, is there anything else going on around this that you're like, oh, this is why he took up this project? Yes. And I think you're right about a different show, maybe even with guests on, but my understanding and it is limited is that there was a general belief at the time that if you could go all the way back to the original language, which would have been spoken by Adam, right? Because we read about him talking Eve, he had to be saying some words and the serpent to them, right? So what language is it? It's Adamic. This is very closely associated with God's language. And these, this is the language God uses to speak the the creation into being in one of the two creation accounts. I think it's Genesis one where they have that account. These are words of power

1:35:01and to know them is to access that power. I believe is why Joseph Smith was on such a quest to figure out what the Adamic language was. And I think that there was a large group of people who felt that it was, it had come down into Egyptian. And some believing it also came down into Hebrew. And maybe Hebrew was the closest thing to the Adamic language. I'm not sure what to say about Joseph Smith's idea. His idea almost seems to be that English is the closest example to the Adamic language, at least from the words that he gave us. Yeah. And what I'll say here is that Joseph Smith seemed to put credibility in the story of the tower of Babel. Or at least he felt safe in perpetuating that as a true narrative to his followers. He uses it in the book of Mormon as one of the foundational stories for the Jaredites.

1:36:03And when you believe in that myth story that language was all the same before the tower of Babel and then at that event suddenly language is divided up into all the languages of the world, then it makes sense that the Adamic language could have some connection to English. But when you understand the reality of how languages are created, how slow it happens, how a language that is people go over here with that language and people go over there with that language and then you follow it for a couple of thousand years. And what kinds of changes are in there and how different dialects happen, it becomes completely irrational that the Adamic language could possibly have any connection to English. And yet as you said, when Joseph reveals the word son of God, son, Amen, holy ghost, Amen, man, aha, men, sons, Amen, yeah.

1:37:08And that's after he's already already defined God as AWME and Amen. And then son of God, like Jesus son, Amen. And we're sons in mankind, men, sons, Amen. So you can see where the Anglo factor is starting to weigh pretty heavy there. Are you talking? Yeah, I'm going to put this up on the screen. This is the Joseph Smith papers. Let's see here if it'll let me do this. And I think that my understanding is that when the Egyptian papyri fell into Joseph's hand, he saw this in large respect as forwarding his understanding of Adamic, even though he's studying Egyptian because it's so old and the older you get, the closer you get to the original language. Yeah, so this is the Joseph Smith papers project transcription of the document where

1:38:15the scribes for Joseph are writing down what he's dictating. But here's what he says, what is the name of God in pure language, Amen, which seems to be a play on, you know, Amen, aha, and would would be spelled I would think the same way or would be pronounced the same way, Amen, aha, and or in aha, and I think that there are places where it is spelled that way. Yeah, and so the meaning of the pure word, Amen, it is the being which made all things in all its parts. So that's God. What is the name of the Son of God, the Son, Amen, to English words and another time using Amen? It is the greatest of all parts of Amen, which is the God head, the first born. What is man? This and his answer, this signifies Son's Amen, the human family, the children of men, the greatest parts of Amen, Son's the Son, Amen, and it goes on. What are the angels

1:39:17called in the pure language? I know the answer to this one. Yeah, Angles, man. Is it or Angle, O man? Is it Angles, man? I think it's Angles, man. Oh, do you have that one there? Let me see if I can. I thought this was a pop quiz. So you got angels, man. I've got Angle, O man. It's angels. Okay. So what are angels called in the pure language? If it's anything that sounds like angels, I'm just going to throw up my hands and go home right now. So there it is on the screen. It's Amen, Angles, man. Ah, I'm out of here. Yeah. There it is. So obviously made up. He basically takes the English word angels, takes out the E and says, this is the pure Adamic language and he leaves men identical to the English word for men. He did put a hyphen in there. That was creative. What are the meaning of these words? All men's ministering servants, sanctified, were sent forth from heaven to by the way, this is so bad that even Jacob Hansen admitted

1:40:21that Joseph Smith doesn't know the Adamic language. And Jacob Hansen would know. Yeah. He said it was the most correct language. Okay. The most correct language has ever been languageed. So Angles, man. So there's another one that's falsifiable and Joseph is clearly not accurate. It's it's clearly not true. And it's not like we know what it really means. No, none of us know what the pure Adamic language is for these words, but it sure can't say it's clearly and true. It's clearly not English. It doesn't look likely. I'll say it's not Angles, man. And then we get the Abraham astronomy. Oh no. I tried to find there was a video. I was going to say something to begin the show because somebody out there might be able to find it. There was a tick-tock. I think it was out there that had like a like a Joseph Smith video. I don't want to say animated, but it was sort of wonky video footage of Joseph Smith pulling a

1:41:24fast one on his scribe saying all of these weird words and connecting them to words around him, you know, wagon and oxen, something, you know, waggo oxen. But anyway, he creates all of these astrology words. It's on there, I think. I got to see if I can find out. Oh, wayo, ox, Owen, and it seems like wagon and ox, but it's changed. But Joseph delivers, you know, there's so many words that in the book of Abraham and in the uh, Kirtland Egyptian alphabet, Joseph is laying out all of these new words for planets and star systems and uh, and stars and he, you know, Zool. That's my favorite. Yeah, Zool is a good one. Zip Zool is even better. Zip Zool. Is there an ohnida in there? I was going to look and see. There isn't it. They're everywhere. Ha ha ha. He's even practically got gollum in there, but it's no lown.

1:42:27Yeah. Oh, Anzali, Enish going dosh. You know, it does occur to me. It does occur to me that if the Lord of the Rings were not written in the 50s or 40s and 50s, whenever it was written, I apologize, the 19s, but if they had never been written then, but they were written, I don't know, 3000 years ago in Mesoamerica somewhere or Mesopotamia. And they got discovered and there was this name uh, in it, which is gollum, right? G-O-L-L-U-M. I have to think there would be some perspicacious Mormon apologists who would see the connection between that and the no-lown in the book of Abraham and say, we have a hit. Yeah, the apologists are a little slow sometimes to these things. Yeah, nollum. As you just mentioned, becly floss ISIS. Yes. Ah, ha-co-beam. Ha-co-beam is one of the good ones that we always talk about, especially on a cold winter's day. Kolob, Kokob. Goes on and on a cold day. All right, so there's that-

1:43:33The Kokob part, sorry. So there's the, there's that tons of words he's making up. Again, his ability to invent things on the fly is pretty incredible. I don't think he does much more than any of us could do if we just, you know, just let it rip. Yeah, well, yeah, we could make those up too. Isn't, isn't the word zool used somewhere in like modern science fiction, like Superman or something? There is no Dana. There is only Kolob. Okay, well, there's the one. Did you get it? No. Go Spasters. Oh, zool. That's what you're thinking. There is no Dana. There is only zool. Yeah. So do you think they picked it up because it was used in Mormonism? I think they picked it up because it was used in Ghost Busters. And I think that Ghost Busters actually ends up proving Joseph Smith to be a true prophet. If, if one had occurred before the other, it would definitely be brought out as evidence for sure. That would confuse me

1:44:37with chronology, Mr. Real. Yeah. Dan Vogel noted, and I was aware of this. It was used in the episode with him and Brent. But the problem is we, we use it in the, like, the send off at the end of the show. And you can't exactly hear everything and not all of it's in there. And so I didn't want to use that part. But thank you, Dan. If folks do want to go back, I think it's the earliest interview where you and I sat down in Mormonism live with both Brent and Dan Vogel. And we've sat down with both of them several times. If you go to the earliest one, we did that at the very end credits. It plays that video of Joseph Smith inventing these words. All right. There's that. The handshake test. I thought this kind of belonged. Joseph is trying to help his followers know how they can discern true spirits from those of Satan. There's a void of information. So Joseph Smith can say whatever he wants.

1:45:39And he invents a handshake test so that if, if a spirit tries to shake, if you try to shake a spirit's hand and it offers to shake your hand, but there's no hand there, it is of the devil. And if it is a spirit of God, an angel of God, it will refuse to shake your hand because it won't even attempt the deception. And then one has to wonder, Brian Hales, why Joseph didn't ask the angel with a drawn sword if he could test whether that angel was of God or not by shaking his hand. Can I just say something? It is so much easier to not have to always be making excuses for Joseph Smith, which is what an apologist has to do is what I did for over 10 years, okay, 20 years, whatever it was. It was a long, freaking time. It's exhausting. This is a dumbass test. It's stupid. And I apologize, Joseph Smith, but I'm done making excuses for you. If this test is a real thing,

1:46:40why does the devil offer you his hand so that you will feel he's a spirit and know that he's a devil? Why doesn't he just say, no, I'm not going to shake hands with you and make you think that he's really a spirit from God? This is the dumbest test ever. To go one step further, we also know that because what little instances we get in church history of anybody claiming that they've seen Jesus or seen a heavenly spirit, we never get anybody reporting back that they gave them the handshake test. It's like they don't even think to actually do that. Again, Elder Oak says they're not seeing people anyway and most of the stories we get are second or third hand, but nobody's telling us that they're actually utilizing this test. And we even get multiple instances of Joseph Smith. The three witnesses would be an example, the flaming, the angel of the drawn sword, commanding polygamy,

1:47:42John the Baptist shows up to give you the eronic priesthood, nowhere. Either A, the test hasn't been given yet, so Joseph could have easily been fooled or even after the test is given, Joseph gives no example of him actually using the test to discern that it's a true angel. Isn't this strange thing to have such a concrete and systematic test for discerning spirits as scripture in its own section in the doctrine and covenants and yet there's no mention anywhere in church history of it ever having been used or even as far as I know attempted to be used. I mean, at least Joseph Smith could ask to shake the sword. Yeah, not used at all. No, it's a very strange thing. It is. So I kind of thought that, you know, again, we're heading towards the end. Maybe this is a little looser example of this. But there's no one that seems like to me. I don't know the context, but it almost seems like to me. I know it comes from a context where these kinds of things were expected and dissipated, talked

1:48:45about happening. Spirits are showing up to everybody. So you got to have ways of knowing what your true spirits. You don't need anything like that today because spirits aren't showing up to anybody. So you don't have to know if they're true spirits or they're not true spirits. But here's Joseph Smith. And I wonder if this is sort of part of his explanation for why it is that somebody else is wrong about some revelation they got. Because Joseph Smith, as often as he agrees with people like Emma about the tobacco and the spitting and the chewing and we'll get a word of wisdom and God's word on this that you shouldn't be doing this guys. As often as he went along with people's ideas that he liked, he also argued with people's ideas that he didn't like. And when they claimed to have gotten them through a spiritual manifestation or revelation or visitation, he would find some reason to dispute with them like, oh, they don't wear that kind of clothing in heaven. So obviously, either you're lying or this is a fake angel or a sandy hair. Remember that? He said, what color is his hair? Well, it was a sandy hair angel. Well, there's no such thing as a sandy hair angel in heaven. So obviously, this is not a true revelation. It makes me wonder if the

1:49:49reason that sits in isolation in church history is because it's just another lame ass attempt by Joseph Smith to put down somebody else's revelation when he wanted to by saying, oh, you didn't follow the right rules. Yeah, that may have been the case. There may have been an instance running right alongside this where Joseph needs to be able to say like, hey, did you test him? Oh, you didn't? Well, might not be a real angel then. You might be careful, Hiram Page. Yeah, in the future, here's how it goes. Yeah. Yeah. And there are other examples, but they're smaller, you know, again, onondag is part of this elf story. You get the stories of the Nephites, the Lamanites, the Jaredites, Mulekites. So you could sort of separate them all out if you wanted. Jaredite migration from Babel, literal tower of Babel, a little bit of flood history, Egyptus, Pharaoh's genealogy, Egyptian priesthood lineage, government destruction predictions, second coming expectations, Abrahamic plural marriage,

1:50:56Melchizedic priesthood history, ancient priesthood structures, Adams final gathering, Adams life in Missouri. So we get other kinds of those. But the pattern is that the way the world works, if there's little evidence, historians will talk about like, you know, maybe but we don't have enough evidence. It's it's not something I'm going to interject. We have some evidence. It's plausible, strong evidence. It's very likely overwhelming evidence. We can express some degree of something close to certainty. But Joseph's pattern works in the opposite direction, little to no evidence. I will leave. Well, this might be the wrong. I actually asked it to did this the wrong way. It should be strong evidence. I'll leave that alone. I'm not going to say something contrary to that. Limited evidence. I don't want to say too much. Some evidence. I'll be careful about what I say. Very little evidence. This is mostly unknown. I can begin to interject some of my ideas. There's no evidence. There's historical silence. Here I can make an

1:52:01extraordinary claim. And so the less the world knows, the more Joseph feels safe to say and absurd, incredible claim. So there's the same thing that Jacob Hansen is doing and other apologists, which is they are trying to unlink and uncouple Mormonism with the falsifiable claims that has made historically changed them into unfalcifiable claims. And then once that has been completed, then they like Joseph Smith can now walk onto the stage and make absolutely crazy claims that they don't have to support because they are designed to be unfalcifiable. Yeah. Yeah. And in my mind, like there were three buckets, again, as we went along tonight, there were things that there, you know, there's two rocks in Missouri and there's just no way to know if that is Adam's altar or isn't. It almost certainly isn't, but it's possible. And there's no way we can prove

1:53:01that it's completely impossible. And so Joseph can say whatever he wants. But there were so many moments where there's some evidence, you can put it in bucket number two and it can be kind of tested. Then there's bucket number three. Again, you know, you can argue with me on, but the Adamic language, the Hill, Camora, the Egyptian papyri for the Book of Abraham, where the evidence is just so overwhelming that unless you really just want to believe that the evidence just, it leads to things not being what Joseph Smith said. They were the Greek Salters, a really good one. And if all the things in bucket three turn out to be not true, they all work against Joseph Smith. And the things in bucket two, like, yeah, it's a little weaker, but it also seems to work against Joseph Smith. And should we really give Joseph Smith the benefit of the doubter, should we assume that the things that go into the bucket where things just can't be tested, that those things are

1:54:04probably not true as well. And the thing I wanted to say here just at the end was again and again, Joseph Smith claimed extraordinary knowledge, precisely where ordinary knowledge ran out. Bones acquired names and biographies, landscapes acquired ancient histories, gaps in scripture, acquired missing revelations, unknown languages acquired translations, the inaccessible past and even the heavens from the moon on out, acquired astonishing detail. And there is the problem. And later evidence gave us a way to check Joseph. His confidence repeatedly proved more reliable than his claims. The claims we still cannot test should not receive a free pass, simply because Joseph placed them beyond our reach. If the same method repeatedly fails where we can check it, we have good reason to distrust it where we cannot check it. Joseph Smith's greatest prophetic advantage may have been the unknown, because the less anyone

1:55:10could verify, the more he was free to claim to know about the thing. Yes. The unknown is always the best friend of the prophet, I think. Yeah. And then one last slide here, the presentation I did at Sunstone again, based on episodes that you and I have done on the past, where we discuss this pattern of the church constantly stepping back from the rigid claims it used to make, watering its updated claims down, as you pointed out just a few minutes ago, and making Mormonism indesernable from a fraud, is actually the exact same pattern, but back in the other direction. So when things were not known, Joseph Smith inserted supernatural, fantastic stories about those things. And in the present day, the church realizes that there is too much evidence. The voids have been filled. The item has been

1:56:15explained. And so now the church wants to walk things back to we don't know what we used to know anymore. And we water the claims down. So instead of, instead of the item lacking a story in Joseph filling it with a big story, that he claimed to have by supernatural means, the church is facing on all of these issues, the coming forth of evidence that makes it clear that their old claims don't hold up and they've stepped back from those to create a more watered down, a less rigid claim, so that Mormonism could still be true in some weird way that accounts for the evidence that's come forward. And so the church is just doing what Joseph Smith did, but in the other direction. Back in the 1830s, I don't think that Joseph Smith could have conceived that planting the garden of Eden in Missouri in the United States, which effectively is saying this is where mankind started,

1:57:16that that would be a problematic statement to defend in 2026, if not much earlier than that. Right. He didn't plan on archaeologists finding Lucy and other fossils and skeletal remains of ancient inhabitants of this world who go back far enough to tell us that where the earliest human beings likely were gathered at. Yeah, 100%. Okay, folks, I'll put the link here in the show. I did it just a little bit earlier if anybody wants to come in, but so far nobody has. If you want to say anything about tonight's episode, feel free, but I just wanted folks to see the pattern so that you know it from now on when you see Joseph Smith doing things and saying things and giving explanations around items or missing scripture, you'll know that this is something he's done over and over and over again. I did want to go back one time here. Let me, let me do this. And I just want to count

1:58:22these really quick. So we've got gold plates, ancient ruins, sear stones, you can count those more than once. We'll just count them once three, four Native Americans, five is self, six and at least seven. Those are two different items. And then eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. I don't want to make sure that wasn't two things on them. That's right. 17. I know that's this is 17 here. 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 29 times. Joseph fills in a void of something he thought no one would know the real answer to. Supplied a narrative that has a supernatural explanation for how he

1:59:26got it. And in many of these where the evidence now is shine to light on being able to demonstrate whether Joseph Smith is a true prophet or not, it is shown in many instances that he's not and in others that his claims are deeply problematic. So what do you do with that? And I think it's just one more way to recognize that Joseph Smith was making everything up as he went along. All right. Any final thoughts from you? It's another good way of showing that Joseph Smith was a man of his times and the Book of Mormon was written for his day. It says it's written for our day. By our day it means his day because it's really not written for our day anymore. But it was very, very on point remarkably so in his detail for Joseph Smith's day. Yeah. He was a man of his times. As all as are we all like, expect. Yeah. All right. Folks, please hit like and subscribe. I hope you enjoyed tonight's episode. Sorry if I had a little trouble sort of getting all that across,

2:00:26but I think you saw the pattern and that was what was important to me. I think you did a great job, Bill. I got the pattern in spades. Thank you. All right. Hit like, subscribe. Please leave your comments down below. If you had any others that you could think of, I didn't see them in the chat, but please put them in there. And I'll be looking over the chat over the next few days and maybe we'll make mention of a few others that we come across if you make note of them. Otherwise, everybody have a great night. RFM. You have a great evening and you'll see everybody next Wednesday, 6 p.m. for the next episode of Mormonism Life. Good night.