Mormon Stories #1396: Visions in a Seer Stone: Joseph Smith and the Making of the Book of Mormon

hello everyone and welcome to another edition of mormon stories podcast i'm your host john dillin it's february 11 2021 and today we have in store for you what i think is going to be a really really important essential mormon stories interview that helps fill in the puzzle of how joseph smith created the book of mormon if you remember my interviews with grant palmer my interviews with dan vogel my interviews with john hamer my interviews with michael quinn uh many others uh sandra tanner you know terrell givens richard bushman one of the things we've been uh trying to cover over the years in mormon stories podcast is how in the world did joseph smith create the book of mormon whether you're a believer whether you're not a believer it's still a puzzle even for orthodox believers they're still trying to figure out how this happened even if you're spencer flewman or patrick mason or richard bushman you're still trying to understand what translation meant it's a really big problem for believers and unbelievers and i am so ecstatic that i have discovered um a a scholar uh who has something really important to contribute in addition to the contributions of brett metcalf and and uh all the others uh the author um the contributor the scholar is william l davis and the book is visions in a seer stone joseph smith and the making of the book of mormon published by the university of north carolina press and i promise you this book is as important as any book you've read to try and understand uh the puzzle pieces that go into how the book of mormon is authored william l davis uh is an independent scholar he holds a ps phd in theater and performance studies and has published in dialogue um uh john bunyan studies um uh and lots of other uh i'm sorry i'm having a hard time reading this because my eyes are getting bad uh textual culture culture and a lot of other important um journals i guess before i try and massacre any more your introduction william davis welcome to mormon stories first and foremost thank you for having me your book is super important do you want to just tell us really quickly uh well welcome to the show but also let's just jump right into kind of uh your your biography your background and uh you know any any other introduction or background that you want to share before we dive into this really important book uh just background i mean some of it i outline in the opening of the book in the preface where i talk about you know who i am how i come to it uh basically um i was born and raised in provo utah i grew up there spent some of my high school years most of my high school years in idaho um came home went on a mission uh went to the new zealand auckland mission but i spent most of my time in the cook islands i came home and in the years after my mission there were a lot of issues that started to crop up that i had questions about and things dealing with you know the history of the church blacks and the priesthood uh the role of women in the church the treatment of the lgbt community things like that that caused me to have some concerns and when i was in my 20s it's about half my lifetime ago now i'm 52. i drifted away and and just have haven't been an active member for quite a while even though for a little while i did you know continue to visit and go back occasionally but um it was in the course of doing turning my attention elsewhere i was working on shakespeare and looking into shakespeare's studies quite a bit when just things led me back to the book of mormon because i was interested in performance and i was interested in how performances and texts of performances relate to each other and the role of oral culture and how that's changed over time and so ultimately that's all what brought me back to uh doing a study on the book of mormon and the origins of the text or at least the mechanics behind how it was produced i love it okay um one of the and by the way uh the conditions of today's interview of course i like to do four or five hour interviews that's not possible today so for my listeners you're gonna you're gonna perceive a slightly different style for me we're gonna try and get right to the point we're gonna be super succinct and i'm gonna minimally participate in this discussion because of the constraints on time and so i'm just warning everyone of that ahead of time so william you're really good in the book about talking about why you're not why you didn't create the book and why you did the create the book and and especially it's an important discussion in terms of navigating believers and non-believers and all of the faith politics that sometimes infiltrate and affect mormon scholarships so can you address just right up front why you didn't and why you did create the book and how you think about this whole topic as it relates to both you know orthodox believers nuance believers and ex-mormon non-believers okay there's a couple of different things that um kind of brought me to that point and the first one is when i when i first started this project i had no intention of uh taking anything out public or anything this was a very much a personal project where i wanted to when i was discovering more seeing more things in the text of the book of mormon and what that meant in terms of world performance and the protection of performance then that also made me have questions about what exactly is the book of mormon how did the book of mormon come into being and why that was important to me is even though i had drifted away from active participation in the church i'd still grown up you know all of my formative years were inside the church and so what my identity is deeply connected to and locked in with that mormon heritage and so for me looking into the text of the book of mormon was really a way of trying to learn more about my own identity or the cultural forces that came together in order to create the lds culture out of which i was born so part of it was just a personal journey of just trying to understand my own identity and origins and in relation to mormonism and that in turn the book of mormon became a central feature of that because so much of it so much of the church and the culture of the church is based upon the book of mormon and then um there was two parts to that question i'm kind of drifted off i think well the other thing about this is because there are a lot of things about the creation of the book of mormon how it was done what that translation process entailed that for me part of discovering and my own journey of discovering my own identity also dealt with trying to discover exactly what was happening exactly what took place and so when i it became a study of the mechanics of the what are the things that contribute what does the text reveal about itself about the techniques that went into its production because i believe that when it comes to things like faith and belief or whether you're interested as a purely an academic or or as someone who is a believer that the more accurate information you have um ultimately means the more accurate your academic understanding of the text or i think if you have a more accurate understanding of how it was produced that that actually for people who believe in the stories can when you have accurate information your faith is based on a stronger foundation or for people who have other feelings just having accurate information ultimately is the goal and whether or not the devotional aspect of it whether or not that increases belief or for some people might decrease belief it's hard to say those are questions i don't deal with at all what i want to do is i just want to lay the information out there and let people decide the devotional issues for themselves but what i do is evidence-based research and that's it not really interested in the devotional stuff and so uh you know to put a really fine point on it and i think you do a great job with this in the book you basically i think you bend over backwards to basically say none of this is incompatible with maintaining a believing worldview this book can totally fit within an orthodox mormon standpoint i would even maybe add to that kind of the tight translation yep sort of uh notions around reading things in a stone that it can be this whole book can be compatible with that approach it can be compatible with kind of the progressive liberal mormon loose translation what is translation anyway it can be compatible with that and it can be compatible with ex mormon secular joseph you know made it all up kind of thing um and so i guess to put a fine point on it you're not here to take away faith or to add faith to excuse things or to you know attack joseph smith you just want to understand as best as you can what happened is that is that fair to say yeah in fact um in the process of going through the draft and publishing the book and i'll just keep this vague but there were voices um in that process who thought that i was trying too hard saying too much about how to help believing readers to accommodate this within their faith system because the book's an academic book it's not devotional but for me i have a lot of friends i have a lot of family both my immediate family my extended family who are very devout and this is the book is very sacred and very important to them and a big part of their um belief and what they hold on to and so i want the whole time i wanted to be really sensitive to that and so my way of being sensitive to that was showing people that wherever you are on the belief spectrum that there is a way to look at academic studies like this and to see it for what it is to see the information for what it is and to have an accurate understanding of that information but you can still incorporate it into a faith belief system and so i went further and i offered examples so if someone believes that the words appeared on the seer stone here's how to view it if someone believes it was loose translation here's how to think of that and and then the process also allows for someone who doesn't believe it someone who's just purely looking at it as a cultural 19th century phenomenon could also see how this would also make sense as well but i wanted people not to feel threatened even though i know that some of the information challenges traditions but traditions that are based on incomplete information so we're just trying to add more puzzle pieces to the puzzle and the devotional stuff will i leave that for the reader to decide on their own i love it okay some people are reporting there's an echo let me just ask you really quickly william to go into your cam mic settings and click on turn echo cancellation on and hopefully between both of us doing that um we we can make sure there's no more echo listeners please text if the echo is gone because i just made a couple changes so that there's no longer an echo so so just text that um listen do i uncheck echo cancellation make sure it's checked yeah um okay so so william one of the things that i that i wanted to do before we get into the meat of your book which is which is so important is i want to kind of set up the um a few of the claims or the framings that are often made biologists say well-intended general authorities or apologists because your book does a really good job of addressing um you know some of some of these contextual claims or problems or framings that maybe aren't helpful so the first one is and and i love um i love the term that you use in the book it's kind of this idea that joseph smith was just an uneducated farm boy yokel who you know could never have um you know remembered uh could could never have created such a book could never have produced such a book um would you would you mind starting with kind of with with what what you think about that that claim and the and the elegant term that you used to describe that type of claim i don't remember the term i used the asiatic uh the trope the trope yeah asiatic trope right yeah so what does asiatic trope mean for for those who okay so um and there's different ways to pronounce that word i say hey geography but that's right that's right you're right i'm wrong so hey no no hey there's multiple ways to pronounce it so you're not wrong it's just a different tomato tomato you know okay but um what happens is sometimes uh a hagiography or a trope a hegeographic trope would be um a situation where we try to set up um when you i'm over complicating it it's when you tell somebody's story but you use the something like a stereotype okay it's it's a simplified um description of a person that is used for quick understanding but it really ignores and evacuates the actual complexities that contribute to that understanding so when we're talking about joseph smith and uh when we say oh he's he's an illiterate farm boy what that does is that essentially categorizes and puts him in a little box that wipes out a lot of the historical record that gives us clues to say no he wasn't so dumb as we like to make him out to be he wasn't so ignorant or illiterate as we make him out to be and and the problem with it is in the time period um and it's not just the 19th century but this is an age-old trope when we're trying to oftentimes when you look into the past and you see how there were there were people who had special powers to prophetic powers or visionary powers what made the vision what made their utterances um just exceptional to them was what would make people they would say like if it was a child oh this child could know nothing about this information but look at all the wonderful things that came pouring out of this child's mouth it must have been inspired and so it's evidence of divine intervention um and i'm kind of wondering here because there's so much to it but any what i'm trying to say is when you look back in the historical record to joseph smith and you see the activities he was involved in you see references to where he was participating whether it's within common schools or in juvenile debate societies and when you look at what we have and also during the time which there's not much evidence during his life but later as you see the types of projects that he was engaged in this is someone who had a much more creative imaginative inquisitive mind and not someone who was just skipping school to go fishing and had no interest in reading books whatsoever the historical record just does not hold up to that that trope but it was a popular trope especially later with spiritualism where you would have people come and doing these trance lectures where they would get up and they would put out this huge lecture while they're seemingly asleep or in trance and people say oh it has to be divine because this person only had five months of schooling and didn't know any it didn't have any education and when they're conscious and awake they they're know nothings but when they go into trance the heavens open and out comes this pouring of divine utterances so that's something that was very common in order to kind of downplay the person to make them look as dumb as possible or as illiterate as possible in order to pump up and highlight how wonderful and uh incredible this divine utterance must be i love it okay so and you go you go into great detail in the book and i love this where you talk about number one the timeline uh because the second a second uh justification that some orthodox believers use that joseph smith could have never played a part in producing the book i'll say it that way is that the timeline is too short that he only had a few months because it had to have happened between i don't know 1828 and 1829 whatever constricted timeline they want to put but but one of the points you make really elegantly in the book is that it you you could actually have a timeline of five or six years yes uh of preparation can you talk about that a little bit yeah i mean when you look at it you know it's really common to look at lucy's description of joseph smith how after he had the visit from the angel moroni that that there were repeated family story recitals and where the family would gather around and and she said look it is such this amazing scene to see the entire family gathered around this young boy telling us these extraordinary stories and when you look at joseph smith's accounts and also accounts of people who were listening to joseph smith and describing what moroni told joseph moroni gave to joseph an outline basically a sketch outline of the book of mormon that's what joseph smith was saying and about the rise and fall of the people the righteousness that fell away into obscurity and so and just to be clear this would have been in 1823 right it was in 1823 so seven years before the book is produced joseph already has an outline given to him an outline given to him by moroni correct right and so and i put in the book a number of uh references to that where various people were either repeating what joseph smith said or telling it to other people but we have a lot of sources that basically say from the very beginning there was some sort of knowledge of a civilization in the americas that was righteous then fell away and we so we at least have a general broad stroke outline from the very beginning if what joseph smith said was true about the content of what moroni told him and then part of what i also address in that is when you look at what lucy said she's not actually describing some of the recognizable stories in the book of mormon but she is describing elements that do appear in the book of mormon and that's um you know like the clothing the mode of travel that uh some of these basic details that don't coalesce into a story in lucy's account but what i am arguing the book is that gives us evidence when she wrote that she could have included things from the book of mormon because when she wrote it the book of mormon had been out and available but she didn't and so that suggests the possibility that she was giving an accurate account of the types of things that joseph smith was talking about at that time and if that's true then it appears that these are were at the very beginnings and formulations of of ideas and thoughts um that would eventually coalesce into the stories of the book of mormon and and again whether people want what also and i'm going to throw this in there for the believing listeners i argue that that stage and the stages subsequent to that are part of the translation process because it can be or can be viewed as that way can be viewed as the translation process and the idea being that joseph smith after he received this information from moroni before he had the plates he still would have had access through his seer stone or through divine revelation to those narratives through listening to the spirit waiting for revelation and trying to think about the history of the this israelite community in the americas and trying to spiritually divine out what those stories were as part of the translation preparatory process i love it okay and so um and so basically what you do in this book is you say that he could have had five or six years to prepare we know that he had the outline or the structure of the book seven years before it's um actually produced we know that he's sitting with his family by the by the fire so to speak able to tell 30 minutes 40 minute hour keep his family captivated with extensive details about stories from what is likely the book of mormon years and years and years beforehand so that's practice that's that's i don't want to say rehearsal but that's evidence that he's got these stories early on and that he's able to speak or dictate for long periods of time from memory with great details about things that are probably if not related to the book of mormon stories the actual book of mormon stories that's all that's and and you have him he's going to the going to the hill yearly um you know to be instructed by moroni who's to say that that's not either of course receiving revelation or writing notes you know i guess if i could summarize in your book he could be making outlines for years and years in preparation for the actual right a transcribing or dictation of the book and he probably he probably is is your is your view right i i think that that period was a time of preparation to begin to formulate just outlines never writing out the book ever we'll get to the mechanics of that later i guess but just kind of doing really sketch brief outlines about how each of the stories would progress through the episodes of the book of mormon and that that would give him time to and that it was a process that again was looking for spiritual confirmation the you know he's studying it out in his mind pondering thinking about waiting for some sort of spiritual confirmation to say oh yes this is what happened. and that over those years just eventually putting together these episodes into a long epic narrative okay great the next the next thing i want to address really quickly is just how you basically provide an alternative view i don't want to say you kind of eviscerate the the tight translation theory but you you really do spend a significant amount of time i think calling into question or at least i i don't want to use the wrong words but i want to say casting some potential doubt on emma and david whitmer's sort of testimonies that have led some to have this expectation that like the words of the book of mormon were appearing on joseph stone and he was dictating as he read tell us why that and that's called the tight translation theory that basically joseph's just being given the words without any of his own interaction tell us just briefly why we we might not want to uh pin too much of our hopes on that tight translation you know uh approach yeah um when i look at the evidence that people use to support the type translation theory um and and it is a theory it's not a doctrine it's not a belief it's just one of several theories about how joseph smith did it but the evidence that's in the text the the manuscripts that evidence in every situation from my view is too ambiguous to assign a single interpretation um and i realize that other people would prefer to to see it that way but it's it's never it's just too ambiguous um let me give you an example like some people will say that oh uh the spelling of a name because we see that the scribe oliver cowdery wrote out a name but then corrected it that must mean that joseph smith was looking at the seer stone and somehow he had a connection or vision of what oliver cowdrew was writing and saw that it was incorrect and so he said stopped him and said no you know you need to correct that spelling but that's not the only possible scenario in which you could see a correction from oliver cowdery um you could have a scenario where joseph smith said coriantomer and oliver cowdery writes it down and then suddenly oliver has the moment of hesitation he says i'm not familiar with how to spell that joseph could you tell me how to spell that and then maybe joseph would say oh this is how you spell it or you could have a scenario where uh joseph smith says coriantomer oliver country writes it down and then joseph says how did you spell that oliver oh i spelt it this way no you need to spell it this other way and so those are different scenarios where if we look at the textual evidence the same exact textual evidence can support any one of those interpretations equally well and so when it comes to the the theory of tight control all the textual evidence that i've seen without exception is too ambiguous to assign a single interpretation saying oh it had to have been read off the stone i just don't see it and so i think i think that we need to be careful about trying to i just think that the idea of reading words off this ear stone just does not have enough support to to argue with it's the exclusive way that things happened yeah and and we can't cover it all in an hour or so can't cover it all in five but the book is amazing so so freaking buy this book and i i you i hope you don't hate me for saying this if you just buy it for chapter six right which is kind of uh your your summary of of maybe you know everything you kind of pull it all together into a chapter entitled constructing book of mormon historical narratives no no chapter seven sorry a theory of translation if you just buy this book for chapter seven it will be ten times worth it but you gotta read the whole book to to get the full value but the the point point being said is my takeaway is drop this idea of a tight translation even bushman and givens and mason and flumen have that ship has sailed for a long time blake osler that that ship has sailed drop that expectation it's either loose translation or something else uh i hope you don't mind i hope you don't mind me saying that okay okay so um uh so really quickly talk about uh as a way to there are a couple really important concepts that you introduce in this book that i think are important to set the context for your theory on dictation translation and i'm just going to have you talk about a few of them first of all can you talk about what you wrote in the book about sola scriptura and joseph's idea of you know what power you might have through the gift of the holy ghost and the bible and and all those things that would allow you to do things that that you wouldn't think otherwise someone might be able to do and that could help explain maybe what joseph was thinking when he said translation what trans real translation really meant to him because i just have to say when i was at utah state there was this huge seminar on what joseph smith meant by translation and again bushman and barlow and you know all the big names were there and i'm like this is ridiculous that we're spending two days in an academic conference trying to explain what the word is means but in reality what you argue is joseph smith under probably understood the word translation in a way that's very different from what we would expect so can you talk about that and i just loved what you wrote about solo scriptura okay uh you might need to pull me back because those are they're related but they're kind of different but just quickly on solo scriptura that was the idea i mean it's really kind of a protestant idea because before early on you would have the catholic clergy who was basically telling people this is what scripture means and then the protestants kind of broke away and said no we we can understand script and i'm this is oversimplifying it but it's kind of this concept of what they would call priesthood of believers for example it's related to that soul of scripture and what that meant is that people on their own could figure out what was true and what wasn't true by picking up the bible themselves reading it for themselves and allowing the holy ghost to prompt them to teach them what the doctrinal principle was in other words they had you sola scripture meaning you only need your bible and so you have that bible you read that and with the help of the holy ghost you can figure out what god's doctrine is and so that introduces this concept of verification of truth if the holy ghost is going to guide you to teach you something that is true in the scriptures then that is a way to discover truth so it's not a large leap to say well if the holy ghost is going to verify the truth of something in the text well then the holy ghost can verify any kind of truth even a truth outside of the text and so if you're ever curious to know whether or not something is true whether or not something is accurate just turn to the holy ghost and to pray and that it can verify truth regardless of the source and i think how that relates to translation then is when you're dealing with translation as joseph smith saw it it wasn't simply you know here's a text and i'm going to convert these words in one language over two words in another language it was a process that involved how do i understand the truthfulness of this text and the true things it's trying to express and this spiritual holy ghost process that allows you to convert that to another text so the revelation and the holy ghost suddenly is part of that process and so when you look at joseph smith and you and i i want to give a plug for a book by the way here it's it's the one that just came out producing ancient scripture where they dedicate almost the entire book to exploring what translation meant for joseph smith and it's fantastic and the reason why is because there's a really great exploration of how translation from joseph smith's viewpoint involved revelation it involved trying to connect to the ancient adamic language the language of garden in the garden of eden because that was a powerful language so it had layers of esotericism in it it of you know spiritual communication and where translate the word itself even in the 19th century carries a lot of baggage a lot of connotations that not simply the converting of words but the transformation of something uh the movement of something from one place to another and and so it the first time that i heard people trying to say that translation was more than just converting language from one to another i thought this is just rationalization this is trying to expand it the first time i heard i i frankly thought uh they're trying too hard to kind of fudge what joseph smith was doing but you know if you don't listen to what people are saying what they're trying to say then you'll miss out and so that was years ago and after studying and looking what people are saying and going into the historical record myself and looking at definitions looking at usages and whatnot and looking at the way joseph smith actually applied it you have to you have to come away from it saying that joseph smith's understanding of translation was really quite profound this kind of metaphysical cosmic thing similar to what sam brown well not similar to exactly what sam brown is describing and also jared hickman i mean it really is something way beyond the simplistic idea of just converting words from one language to another yeah and if we look at um if we look at what he was able to do where he talks in the doctrine covenants where he's able to read a papyrus that's in a cave somewhere across the globe and somehow channel information from it we know that he wasn't translating the book of abraham this whole catalyst theory is required because he clearly wasn't reading and translating egyptian and then the kinderhook plates of course were made up but in all cases he was able to channel some type of revelation i guess the point i'm trying to make is joseph had this belief um you know if you believe he was sincere that he did he was channeling revelation that text and and translation in in a technical sense just were not were not required is that fair to say yeah and and i just want to point out that when it comes to the book of abraham or the kinderhook plates or or but especially the book of abraham i think that that process he sincerely genuinely was trying to figure out what the text meant and that he was listening to his spiritual impressions to do i mean i i just i just can't believe that all you know the the egyptian papers the grammar and all of these things he created which really weren't intended for the public to see that he would go to such extraordinary lengths just to trick this small circle of people around him i i i don't see that i i don't see him as is you know trying to be conniving or fraudulent in that but i think he sincerely was genuinely working at it and listening to impressions listening to what he felt was divine inspiration in order to tease out the meanings of the hieroglyphs and and i think so when we talk about um revelatory translation which i use here which is not original to me other people have talked about that is um whatever joseph smith understood of translation what he was actually doing opened up just this world of imaginative creativity and it allowed a lot of things to be introduced into a texas that simply wasn't on the parchment in front of them and for a believer's perspective it's it's what then explains anachronisms and you know 19th century isms and you know the bible and and sometimes heirs from the king james bible if if joseph is required kind of the blake osler loose translation theory if joseph smith is an integral part of the revelation process that explains all the anachronisms for those who might be troubled by that okay really quickly a couple other foundational things before we jump to the main thing because i think these are just so crucial you talk about adam clark's commentary and dean kelly potentially introducing to joseph smith along with some folk music and folk songs of the day just the idea of scrying using a urim thumb or a peepstone to produce text just that meme that idea was in the air and probably occurred to joseph smith from sources that we know he likely had access to do you mind just addressing that really quickly and then i want to talk about one one other thing before we jump to your main thesis okay um just briefly um and it wasn't so much a fault music the dunky ad was uh or dunciad i'm i'm blanking on the but that was a long poem and a popular poem a poem sorry yeah and uh where it talked about uh how dee and kelly uh would look on the sierra stone and see all types of things but but the point of uh referring to that was one of and i didn't go heavily into this but because other people have have done that uh on the pervasiveness at least within the communities where they are looking at esotericism and looking at ways to try to find divine access to god through non-traditional means and um john d was one of these known figures within that community who had tried to gain that access and who was um apparently successful according to the lore uh and and so basically so people know john d was a polymath in the renaissance he was alive roughly the time of shakespeare his life overlapped with shakespeare's um prospero in the tempest is supposed to be based on john d so john d uh he really was a fantastic mathematician as what he's probably best known for um in terms of his actual work but he also he was he had the largest library in britain when he was alive and he essentially had read everything and he still was needing to have more knowledge and so he um because of the traditions of the esoteric traditions the the were were out there he had decided that if there was some way to bypass mortal learning and get your learning straight from the angels then you could gain this greater knowledge and greater power and he comes off as a bit skeptical himself actually in this process but there was this um kelly uh who uh edmund kelly who was a scryer who de-hired to work for him and kelly would look into the seer stone and then just start to describe what he was seeing and sometimes as part of that process kelly would also give signs and symbols of angelic uh power as well as um translating text or giving texts that could be translated um and to give this higher access of power so when when we tie that to adam clark and what adam clark is talking about the gift of tongues and of angels that uh is when adam clark has a footnote where he's talking about that scripture and what it means and he refers back to uh john d and saying that's one of the things that was prompting john deed to build a vocabulary of this angelic language and and the the term with the the language of angels the language of adam oftentimes they were virtually the same this idea that in ancient times there was this original um language that had power to um call down knowledge from heaven call down ministering angels that sort of thing and so if you if someone were reading adam clark's bible and they were reading about the tongue of angels and they looked at that footnote then they would see how translating through the process that john d was using with edmund kelly and the searstone was one way of gaining access to that angelic language and translating it into a way that we could understand that so the ability you know the possibility that that kind of information was available uh was out there and but you know it as far as like finding actual proof you know you'd practically need a journal entry saying oh i was reading adam clark's note today and this occurred to me that sort of thing is rarely happens in historical research but the point is is the the idea of translating with a seer stone was available and religious text angelic text that was available to someone who was interested in that and exploring that and i um yeah and i guess i just want to refer people to um haley osment i'm i'm spacing on the name but my interview with with her where she talks about her work at byu of demonstrating that at least with the joseph smith translation of the bible it appears that the adam clarke commentary is a clear source for likely source for that and and we've discussed on other episodes of mormon stories as well that there's a pretty good likelihood that joseph smith referenced told other people about and had access to this adam clarke commentary and yeah it does influence what he what he says and does two other things i want to make sure we we laid down as as foundational just because they're so important there is the idea that there's no way that joseph smith ever had any notes um you know that he never would have had any way to reference notes or to gather his thoughts that this was just sort of like translation straight from the stone or straight from heaven but there's no way that there would have ever been any references or notes or anything can you can you talk about that really quickly because i think it's it's important to dispel that or to give people um a framing for why it's possible that references or notes or or contemplative time could have been a part of his process okay um usually when people are claiming that what they're looking at and and it really boils down to emma smith's statement because david whitmer his statements came long after emma's and david whitmer actually is the first one who mentioned notes emma didn't mention notes when she said that you know he had no manuscripts or books to look at the the problem that um i go into detail about in the book is the interpretation of what emma is saying when if we pull that out of the context of her interview with her son joseph smith iii um [Music] then you can apply that to any kind of text anywhere but when you put it back into the context of the interview they were specifically talking about any influence that sidney rigdon had on joseph smith for the production of the text and that's specifically the spalding manuscript so when this interview took place the uh the spaulding manuscript theory was circulating wildly it was the most popular exploration for how joseph smith the illiterate farm boy could come up with a story and so they were saying well he just plagiarized it he just stole this story um the spaulding manuscript and he used he used that or uh sidney rigdon somehow got it to him and so the context of the interview is talking about the possibility of sidney rigdon coming into joseph smith's life with this manuscript and so emma is saying no there was no manuscript there was no book there was no romance there was no nothing that he was using to plagiarize to create the book of mormon but she's not at all talking about did he occasionally open up a bible and people have expanded her comment to include the bible or to include other possibilities but she's not talking she's specifically talking about a manuscript or a book either that sidney rigdon brought or that had been written by someone else that joseph smith was plagiarizing and that's it that's that's it and so it's an interpretation to go beyond that to say there wasn't anything else going on the other thing about emma's statement is in if we look at it as well uh we have to be under the assumption that joseph smith 100 of the time including when he went to the outhouse and sorry to be blunt but that's true that he was under surveillance by people and they were constantly watching him is he looking at any notes is he uh trying to figure things out is he meditating i mean and there are plenty of you can think of all kinds of situations where someone would be alone and have alone time and there are times too when people involved in the process after they went up and uh we're translating up in fayette for example david whitmer talks about times there's the well-known example that we hear about when emma and joseph had some kind of falling out so joseph had to walk out and go to the orchard and he was there for about an hour so to calm his thoughts and then he came back and started uh the translation work again okay well what was he doing out there for that hour we can make assumptions well maybe he was upset and he was just meditating trying to calm down had nothing to do with the book of mormon or maybe he was praying maybe he was receiving divine inspiration or right and then and then what i um now i i offered up some different ideas about the production of the book of mormon i mean we really underestimate the types of memory uh practices and techniques that people use then within this oral culture that we don't use now and so i really i left that open to say it's possible that after five years of preparation or six years or whatever that joseph smith had enough of this mental outline rehearsed and practiced in his mind that he wouldn't need any notes whatsoever what i i left that out there is a possibility but what i really do think is that i think he probably had a small notebook that had just some of these skeletal outlines that he kept in his private papers and i think that these times when he was by himself in preparation for one of the dictation sessions that he would have had a chance to just look at the skeletal outlines kind of refresh his memory just kind of go over it to think about it and then while he was in this while that was all fresh on his mind then he would go to the dictation sections but wouldn't bring his notes with him and just go ahead and perform yeah and if you think about the construction there's often a veil between him and the people that are that are acting ascribed correct um i think that was just early on um i think that was actually in the beginning joseph smith it's he's trying so many different methods of how to do the translation i think he hadn't worked things out yet and you know i i could be wrong about this but it seems to me the only times i hear references to joseph smith being behind a screen was at the very beginning with martin harris okay um but but also we don't know if he had you know rfm likes to say and others have probably wondered if there's something in the hat right but potentially you don't need it you don't you don't need it no okay but i mean that's that's a possibility but then also these these times when he goes off and asks for a break right yeah but i mean if something were in the hat let's say just a small because because what some preachers use and we'll maybe go into this a little bit later but this is a really really common technique for the preachers and how they would create these little short note skeletal outlines so this well let's jump to that let's jump to that i'm going to interrupt you but we're going right there so i think it would be helpful just to talk quickly about his history with the methodist church and and i'm curious about whether his potential role as being an exhorter if all of that was important background that then helps him learn the techniques that we're now going to dive into which is the meat of your of your book and your presentation today okay so give us that background and then lead us into your main thesis and we'll go to your slides as you want to use them okay so um joseph smith and and we know from not just his accounts but people around him that uh eventually he was partial how did he say i became partial to the methodist sect when he was recounting his history um now i'm going to backtrack just a little bit because the family they were seekers they were looking around they were testing out a lot of different you know looking at the presbyterians um we have one or two references where joseph smith participated in baptist revival or joint revivals especially and so you have the baptist the methodist the presbyterian and then you have the congregationalists and it's a little complicated because you had like traditionalist congregationalists and then congregationalists who were more open to the influences of the spirit and uh and that just went back for centuries to um jonathan edwards and and george whitefield and the beginnings of methodism but so what happened in the process of growing up both in the connecticut valley where there was a strong congregationalist influence the whole family the family was kind of even if they weren't actively participating in the congregationalist church there was this real strong network of the smith family and the relatives in that area who were dealing with this kind of uh which a century earlier would be called the new light congregationalists and and that's where morris charity school where hiram went to school it was run by new light that new light congregationalist philosophy and that was this form of preaching that that other that a lot of people were doing and that style of preaching that way even though each one of the denominations might focus on different uh doctrinal points the actual structure and the way they approach sermon making for this particular evangelical group um was this kind of semi-extemporaneous style where ahead of time they would kind of sketch an outline of what they wanted to preach about and then they might take that outline to the pulpit with them just to glance at just like a three by five card or a lot of them would sketch an outline kind of memorize the main points and they'd usually not be too many four or five and then they'd just put it in their pocket and then get up and preach and so that was a style of preaching that was around the smiths from the time joseph smith was born up until even when they moved over to the bernd over district in western new york and then when you have all these other revivals you also have the presbyterian uh preachers who were doing the same thing you have the baptist preachers who were doing the same thing and you have the methodist preachers who are doing the same thing and a lot of the reason why so much of this was going why there was so much overlap is because this really dynamic style of preaching they could all kind of trace it back to uh george whitefield who was called the grand itinerant and he had this enormous impact on preaching in this kind of extemporaneous or semi-extemporaneous style in the first great awakening which was in the early 1700s and then the second great awakening where joseph smith was being exposed to all of these um evangelical preachers uh was the the kind of the second major re-emergence of all of these awakening revivals that were taking place so jose joseph would have been exposed to this religiously all over the place and then he does he decided to connect with a methodist they resonated with him the most and apparently joined a class meeting and became uh proficient as an exhorter and the exhorters they were not allowed to preach um text and what that means is interpret a text interpreting a text you pretty much had to be a licensed preacher and they wanted to control you know the message they didn't want people you know being really enthusiastic and coming into methodism and then suddenly preaching a whole bunch of doctrines that conflicted with the methodist beliefs and so exhorters were kind of preparatory it was a preparatory stage for like a preacher in training and that is an environment where the techniques of preaching not only would have been shared and discussed and talked about but it would have been you know the hands-on application and uh and that requires quite a bit of extemporaneous improv improvisational skill because what uh what a um [Music] what an exhorter one of the ways that an exhorter would uh operate is that you would get up with the preacher the preacher then would go he would choose usually when they were following what's called a doctrine and use pattern they would start with a text and then they would interpret the text and then they would lay out the main points or the heads of the sermon they might tell the audience what those main points were they might not they might conceal it and not tell them but they'd say here's the text and here's what it means and so they would go through and talk about the text talk about its application to the people talk about how this was something that they needed to awaken from their sinful state and come to christ and then when that was done the exhorter would take over and the exhorter then would have to be listening to what the preacher was saying to follow up on it and so the exhorter was really the one who would start telling the audience now you get to you need to get on board with this you need to repent you need to change your life you need to come to christ and so it was part of it would be a generic come to christ exhortation but also connected to what the preacher was saying and so this was this was a training ground and because the exhorter couldn't prepare it's not like he's sitting on the side writing notes what the preacher's saying then getting up and trying to exhort you just had to perform it off the cuff and so it trained people into how to develop certain types of routines or sermon patterns and they were flexible and because they always had to adapt to the circumstances in which they were delivering it and that's the sort of thing that joseph smith was involved in with early methodism and that's that's exactly the same type of technique and uh where evidence emerges in the text of the book of mormon and so that's why that ultimate connection comes around to that oh i can't hear you so some who who haven't been thinking about this they're probably thinking why are we talking about methodism and and pastors and like now we're going to get to the heart of it all so i think what we're going to now be talking about is number you know a couple questions we're going to answer as we dive in is how did joseph smith what's a theory for how joseph smith was able to produce a lot of text without a lot of notes through dictation in an oral way and what other evidence is not just in the titles of the books in the book of mormon but even in the verses of the book of mormon itself and we can also say in the in the manuscript that was dictated what evidences do we have that that your theory kind of is super viable so i i think it might make sense to talk about laying down heads in written in oral composition and just kind of explain to us what that means should we jump to that william sure now i i have uh in those few slides i gave you the the very first one okay so this is jacob [Music] and one of the reasons why i went this direction with the research is because the book of mormon flat out tells us the technique that was used uh in the construction of preaching prophesying revelation and so right here we have jacob we'll just look at this and nephi gave me this is jacob chapter one verses two and four yeah okay yeah and so uh it says uh nephi gave me a commandment that i should write upon the plates these plates a few things which i considered to be most precious and here it is if there were preaching which was sacred or revelation which was great or prophesying that i should engraven the heads of them upon these plates and touch upon them as much as were possible for christ's sake for the sake of our people so i have to say if you're reading that and you don't know any better you're just thinking well that's some weird biblical language why are they talking about heads it doesn't make sense but then you just think oh it's flowery biblical language but what what this might be a really important discovery what you're thinking is that this might literally be the laying down heads approach encoded into the scripture is that right right right and and not even coded it's blatant it's overt right and it's something that even though today we'd look at it and we'd say i'm not sure exactly what that means for people back in the 19th century they know exactly what that means they've used those terms laying down heads yeah yeah but it's one of there are a lot of terms for it and i think uh the another slide shows that and uh we can look it in a second but um laying the heads of a sermon so what happens is you go to church on sunday right and and we have to really understand the mindset of this time period because people were really savvy to the sermon patterns you look at the notes of listeners and a lot of times they would go in and they would write down the text and even before they heard the sermon they would be writing down you know that we're going to cover this point this doctrine that doctrine that but they would just put doctrine and doctrine and leave an empty space because they knew that there was a certain pattern of um what was going to happen they knew that the preacher was going to get up was going to talk about a scriptural text i was going to talk about usually on average about three aspects it might be only two it might be four those were the most common and so they just put a little blank spot in for each one of those points those main points those were called the heads and so you're listening for the heads and so the heads of a sermon are the main points of the sermon and that pattern was so deeply internal for centuries i mean that sort of style of um preaching was here just as soon as the puritans came over in the early 1600s and and so even though there were developments in certain styles and approaches that basic structural component was there and so when people at that time would say what are the heads of the prophecy what are the heads of the sermon you know exactly they're talking about what are the main points it's almost like a tldr that's a term that's used today to kind of say okay you've written this big long blog post or reddit post what's the summary right ah yeah and so that's what it if you go back to that image so when it says engraving the heads up on the plates and touch upon them and touch upon means exactly what it means today to expand upon it to you know here's the main point now we're going to talk about the main point so you go off on a 10-minute you know sermon about the first main point that's touching upon it and we use it the exact same way today but down at the bottom now i included this the reason why i focused on laying down heads because that's the language that's used in the book of mormon but there are other ways that it was described so they would describe this in terms of dividing the text into heads or distributing the text into heads cutting dissecting into heads and then they would instead of just calling them heads they'd also call them points sometimes called them propositions very commonly they'd call them divisions and so those are some of the other terms that people use but all of it is referring back to the same process okay great should we do the next slide sure all right so here when we talk about heads um we might be jumping ahead a little bit in heads i might have had this out of order so in laying down heads whoop so this is the written part you can just tell me which slide to jump back up back up i may have accidentally not included so back up a little more uh so that's print culture let's stop here for a second um go back one more all right so when when we're talking about laying down heads here this is about laying down heads during sermons during oral performances and so there are two different ways that people might at least two different ways that people would experience laying down heads so we're talking about sermon culture but what i wanted to do is expand it out a little bit because this has more connection to the book of mormon and what laying down heads was something that would occur with preaching but laying down heads was also connected to the ways that you would format books uh formatting the bibles formatting uh reference books formatting novels and those two are really fundamentally connected and the reason why we want to talk about the print as well is because the same sort of notes that preachers would use to create these skeletal outlines were often done in the same exact style as the formatting for headings of chapters and headings of books and i and the reason why i say that is i think when we look at the book of mormon and you see for example that opening in front of first nephi where it's this long list of what's going to happen kind of an index of sorts summarizing what's going to happen in the chapter that is another form of laying down the heads and so i think that the reason why we have those i wanna i i think it's worth actually showing this yes yeah yeah because and and i actually pulled this up and i don't know that people are going to fully get it unless they see it because a lot of times something that people aren't clear about we have chapter headings right these little things here in italicis like first thing by chapter one nephi brings the record of his people lehi sees a vision a pillar of fire and reads from a book of prophecy those are not the heads you're talking about because as i understand it that's like bruce r mcconkie in some committee that puts puts these chapter headings right well some of them but some of them are original to the dictation and the one in person nephi was original to the dictation okay but it's this one it's it's what comes before that that was in the original manuscript right yeah that right there that was in the original manuscript and read or describe to our listeners what what we're showing here okay so you can even read from it if you want yeah in the first book of nephi you know we have the title and then the subtitle his reign in ministry and then it goes into this kind of summarizing uh heading that actually covers the book not just the chapter and it's the one an account of lehi and his wife soraya and his four sons being called beginning at the eldest lame and lemuel sam and nephi the lord warns lehi to depart out of the land of jerusalem and then you go through he taketh three days journey into the wilderness nephi taketh this brethren return to the land of jerusalem the account of their sufferings they take the daughters you know et cetera so i have this in uh the examples i provided but this section here joseph smith dictated that and he dictated it before then he dictated the actual narrative which shows that he had the outline you know that he presents the outline before he presents the content right right so i mean depending on how people want to look at it i mean one is that it does show that joseph smith knew where the story was going before from the very beginning but on the other hand people would say that he was simply translating and so he was just translating the words immediately in front of him and he had no idea but i addressed that i mean it would it's a little more complex but i address how joseph smith would certainly have to have had some sort of foreknowledge of the direction of the stories um if if his owner's statements are accurate so right right and later you're gonna tell us that this actual structure is anachronistic to mesoamerican time periods we'll get to that but where should do you want to talk more should we go to a certain slide for the next let's go to the slide that talked about the print and then maybe we could go through that quickly is that uh is that here a little earlier i just want to so here's print culture all right so laying down heads in print culture those are oftentimes the short summary summarizing phrases that identify the main points in a passage and when all of those heads are combined together into a series they form the outline of an ensuing text and it could be the chapter it could be a book and in many ways they function as an index for the material that follows it's just kind of a brief summary that helps you know where you're going and the in today's books we don't see a lot of these we might see something the closest thing is you'll see a table of contents that might have a little more detail in it but you hardly or or you might see a single line heading at the start of a chapter or maybe a single line that shows uh the change of a section in the middle of an essay or something like that but we don't see the really kind of long detailed stories and and so if we go back to those and this is what these are just some of the terms that people call them sketch plan outline heading summary or skeleton and skeleton was really popular but of course sketch and plan and outline word too so if we go to the next slide so this is an example that i use in the book and this is uh one of the publications of robinson caruso and so when you open up to the chapter and i believe even in the table of contents it had the same list but when you so you see the title the life and adventures robinson crusoe chapter one and then right there where the box is around that is the listing of heads and these heads read a bit of it just for our listeners they can't see so it starts out my birth and parentage at 19 years of age i determined to go to sea dissuaded by my parents elope with the school fellow and go onboard ship a storm arises ship founders and then it goes on to just kind of tell the rest of the channel so it's providing an outline of what the chapter is about to say at the beginning of the chapter right yeah and then most of the time those phrases are not full sentences sometimes they are in novels but more often than not you see how my birth impairment is it's not a full sentence where's where's the the verb there so it's an you'll have different phrases noun phrases verb phrases but they're so there's these quick truncated just enough to remember it's very succinct but just enough uh to give a summary of what's going to come but also when you're when this when they would do this with sermons it was just enough information to trigger the memory all right and so so having this little series in mind was just enough to trigger the memory to then expand upon the whole story so so here when you're looking at this uh this plan or summary of heads it's a series of short phrases that track uh the um the series that tracks the outline of the chapter that follows and uh and they appear in sequential order it works as an index and then each one of those short phrases is it's a queue it prompts the memory so those are mnemonic cues and so if you go to the next one and oh one quick thing back there so you see how at the beginning i've highlighted the first phrase the first head in the summary my birth and parentage so when you go to the opening of the narrative that's where you start seeing the expansion of that i was born in the year 1632 in the city of york of a good family though not of that country my father being a foreigner or a brand who settled first at all okay really quickly we have an apologist challenging you william davis dr william davis allen says those summary headings were added later by church leaders they were not part of the original text so he's schooling you yeah so yeah um now you want to look back at the original manuscript of the book of mormon because some of those headings were put in later the headings that i talk about in the book are all headings that joseph smith dictated when he first dictated the book in the original main issue yeah when you look at a modern book of mormon it doesn't say this was original this was later added so you have to so these are all going back to the original ones that joseph smith dictated okay and they're not ones that were added later right so so this is where that connection takes place and this is basically a happen so once he finishes with birth and heritage then the next head is at 19 years of age i determine to go to c so the story then will start picking up later where robin's crucial says okay now i'm done with that i'll start talking about why i went to see it 19 years of age and so these heads give you kind of track the development of the entire chapter ahead okay excellent and so here's what i wanted to do just to give an example so people could see how these appear so over here on the left you have adam clark's commentary and it's a series of heads the only difference here is they have numbers and those numbers are referring to the verses so when we start out this is genesis chapter one and it says the first day's work creation of the heaven and the earth one and two so it's saying below in verses one and two it's talking about the creation and then it just follows sequentially over here a view of universal history so here on the left you have scripture in the center you have a history book chapter one uh talking about england william and mary siege of londonderry battle of the boeing origin of the public funds and so it's just enough information to trigger you know a long a longer discussion on what that's just the main topic or subject but that's enough to trigger what's going on then finally at the end here here's um a travel narrative travels in america and here's letter one and so uh this is a collection of uh thomas asteroid it was a collection of letters um that we're trying to you know tell these stories and and he also outlines uh the content of the letter with these heads in the beginning so these were all over the place this was kind of considered a standard uh print convention and i just have to say uh you know and i'm not trying to go in this direction but i can't suppress the fact that immediately for me the skeptic jumps out and says isn't it convenient or weird or strange or deeply anachronistic that as joseph is translating plates he's translating it into the most common structure for books in the 19th century which is this format that we're exploring right now like isn't it weird that moroni or mormon or whoever it was that abridged the plates happens to abridge them in the structure that that would be the most common familiar structure for organizing chapters and headings now in your book you do a really good job of saying you can still be a believer and incorporate the fact that this is the structure that the book of mormon is laid out in but i just can't help but notice that that is a deep anachronism that this structure appears in the very book of mormon at least to me and i'm not trying to get you in trouble here this is just no no it's fine it is an anachronism and that's but i think that's the way we interpret the anachronism right if if we think of joseph smith as a an actual translator of an ancient text and if the ancient prophets were trying to get their message out to 19th century readers then it would make sense from that line of thinking that they would try to package the text in a familiar format so this isn't a type of anachronism that people need to feel is an attack of the faith all it does is cause us to think about the process of translation and what it meant to translate an ancient record into a record that 19th century readers would recognize and be familiar with but it would require one of two things either and i think you talk about this in the book moroni or mormon sort of saying okay i know how 19th century people or 20th century people actually it's really 19th century people are going to be used to consuming books with this certain structure so i'm going to do them the the courtesy a thousand years ahead of time or 1500 years ahead of time to organize my writing based on my prophetic understanding of how they're most comfortable understanding the structure of a book that's it's a very generous thing you do well that's what sort of to float that possibility right that's one way because you could say that there was some sort of intervention after moroni joseph maybe joseph being in the mix it could be joseph or if you say that joseph received everything through revelation was there a middle man was god somehow involved in uh inspiring joseph into a certain direction and so that even if moroni did not package the text with this particular uh formatting and framework there could have been some sort of divine intervention that kind of adjusted and repackaged that's another way to think of it and it's a legitimate way that that's that's what you know the type of thing that lds scholars some have argued and so it's it's something that believers can hold on to and i think the important thing to recognize here is i'm not interested like i said before in in trying to debunk the book of mormon or to prove that it's really true that's not the answer but what i am interested in is that when we look at the text we see it for what it is and not try to ignore it or push it aside because it doesn't fit some of our preconceived ideas and and so i think we need to look at this and say these headings these headings have a known history they're in the greco-roman textual tradition and these particular headings this style and this formatting did not develop until long after lehigh had left and come to the americas that's not to say oh now we get to attack the book of mormon and attack people that's not what i'm saying what i'm saying is that makes us stop and rethink what could this process be for belief what could this mean in terms of joseph smith's translation and that my message to everyone is at least for the believing reader so they don't feel threatened is to know that there are answers for how that happens that don't destroy faith and just to be open to it sure that's what i'm after yeah yeah absolutely and i think that's that i think that just adds a level of excellence to this book because it's not only groundbreaking scholarship it's also working really hard to be a book that's of use to everyone and that's respectful of everyone and i love that so if we go to the next one um i'm just this is where we see the first book of nephi and where i just put these up next to each other so you can kind of see how uh the formatting and the way it works now now in in when we see the first book of nephi where it says uh chapter one you just wanna know that uh royal scousen is saying that um he argues that chapter was not something that was in the original book of mormon text but in terms of this particular set of summaries this was part of the original dictation and joseph smith dictated this before and it's following the techniques you'll have these truncated phrases some of them are can be full sentences short sentences but some are truncated as well so it's following a very common standard uh format that was ubiquitous in 19th century america now i want to point something out here too um in reading the book there have been some critics who have misunderstood what i said when i'm calling these anachronistics anachronistic i'm talking about the specific style and specific formatting that appears here i'm i'm not talking about any sort of summarizing preface in general i'm talking about a very specific style that emerged in the greco-roman tradition and i know that um there have been some critics who say oh davis is saying that ancient writers never had any kind of summaries at all oh he's wrong but that is a that's a a misreading of my work and um because if we're looking for summaries opening summaries we can go clear back to gilgamesh and they have opening summaries but it's a very different format it's dealing these are short narratives that will sometimes tell you what's going to happen in the story but they're in a narrative setting so you have like a tiny mini narrative that tells you what's going to happen before it explodes out into the main narrative homer does that um and we're dealing with a separate textual device in that case and it um in greek uh and i'm gonna badly mispronounce this but uh the uh prohemian was what it was called and that was an introductory sort of preface and oftentimes it might just be a prayer to the gods or a prayer to the muses at the opening of a play or the opening of a an argument so there were summaries that would kind of give you an idea of what the following story was going to be about but it we're talking about a very different and distinct type of style with distinct formatting and the formatting in the book of mormon did not emerge until after i mean the earliest uh a quick diversion and i don't mean to do this but when you say laying down heads why are they called heads and the reason why they're called heads is because it's coming from the roman um the same word where we derive the word chapter from uh the capitulum uh or capitulum it it's um the origins of where we get these headphones in the greco-roman traditions some of the earliest ones we have go back to about 5th century or so bc and it was primarily in legal books in uh greek legal books and the and all it was at that time was um and the origins of all this is when you're looking at these manuscripts you know we don't have the modern paragraph breaks and punctuation and all that in a lot of these ancient manuscripts and so when someone was reading one of these old manuscripts and they wanted to um and in the law books for example and when they were dealing with separate issues within the law the way that they made it easy for the reader to be able to see when one topic switched to another topic is to put in what they what was the kaput the head and what that was is it's you know when we start a paragraph i'll tell you what go b if you go back to um okay look so now when when we start a paragraph down at the bottom say i nephi having been born of goodly parents and see how that eye nephi it's been indented yep so that's a modern uh one of the modern conventions we have to make separate paragraphs make it easier now but when you go back and look at the top see how it says an account of lehigh it's not indented yeah it's just the opposite it's kind of pushing out into the margin yeah that that is what the original heads were so it wasn't even a summarizing phrase it was just the first couple words of a section were pushing out into the margin interesting and then so that eventually developed over time and it's really messy it's really complicated but over time that is what eventually developed into chapters chapter breaks chapter headings chapter summaries and it was entwined with uh these other forms the prohemian which is actually more ancient so it's a really complex tradition and but what we have showing up in the book of mormon um is is a very specific style that developed long after lehi left to come to the americas so so that is definitely an anachronism um and i'm sure there'll be lots of debates and arguments about that too but uh the format it has a known history and it's very definite right and so i'm not saying oh the ancient people never use summaries at all that's yeah i don't even know how people could actually that's a straw man argument that's so big you can see it from outer space i don't know how people could come up with that interpretation of my work but you know you never know you talk a book out there and you don't know how people will read it and i'm going to say something so that you don't have to say it and i have no idea whether you'd want this to be said but but you know we've had we've had um brian hales on mormon stories in the past you know we know that for many many years polygamy was kind of all he wrote or thought about what i think is a testament to the effectiveness of the power of your book and your scholarship um taking out intent or even faith politics uh apparently it impacted brian hill so profoundly that he in many ways has stopped even doing work on polygamy stuff he's spent some extensive time trying to respond to your book even though your book wasn't trying to be an attack of the faith and now apparently he is even working on a book to try and address some of the things you discuss in your book because apparently this was so upsetting to brian hales i and i'm not asking you to respond to that this is just some stuff that i've heard from others and i just want to throw that in because um you know because that's the reality and and so for those of you who are interested in kind of that back and forth there's going to be some stuff you can pursue but i also want to say that what i love about you uh bill or dr davis is the easy you're you're not interested in that game you're not interested in faith politics you're interested in evidence and scholarship and i think that's to your credit yeah if i could just follow up on that real quick um i don't know brian hill's personally but i have i have quite a few friends who are friends of his and um and everything i've heard about him is positive and he sounds like a really good person human being i i mean he and i are doing different things he is doing devotional interpretations and reading and what i am doing is evidence-based um academic work and those do overlap but um i i have no doubt that brian is the church is clearly very important and he is doing what he feels is the very best thing he can do to defend the faith and to help people not lose their testimonies and i think that people who spend a lot of time and effort trying to help other people i think that's a noble pursuit and i think um even i don't know him personally but i believe his heart is in the right place um but that being said i mean i can't help but think about hunibly who gave a speech on you know being careful about being so zealous that we shortchange our research and preparation to step into certain arenas and make certain arguments and is that zeal before knowledge or something like that yeah zeo without knowledge or zeal before something like that yeah and and um [Music] brian did write a review of my work and and in some ways i thought you know the opening and the way he summarized all the chapters was really nice and i appreciated that but then he went off into areas that really uh distorted what i was actually saying and i i don't know that it was intentional i don't think it was intentional but um nevertheless it misrepresented my work and i thought about responding to that for a while but then i thought you know then i'm starting to do exactly what i did not want to do yeah and that is to start getting in debates with the devotional apologetics and so you know it's kind of hard to know that there are people who will read those reviews and get an inaccurate picture of my work um all i can say is i hope that people will read my book and go to the source directly to find out what i was saying but but i don't wanna i don't wanna attack anyone i mean yeah um i i think again i think brian is is doing what he feels is really important i believe that he feels that he's involved in saving people from losing faith and losing their testimony and um so you know that that that's really the gentle apologetics that tries to help people see and understand without trying to become brutalizing or dismissive of someone who's presenting new ideas i think that is the sort of noble profession that people can be proud of and being involved in so and i just also want to say that like uh this is always salvific for mormon apologetics but i just have to say this is your scholarly area am i right dr davis like it's one thing to have robert rittner who's an egyptologist talking about egyptology in the translation or michael coe talking about mesoamerican archaeology or anthropology or even i guess you could say john gee or john sorensen but like if someone's an anesthesiologist and then they've been doing mormon history on polygamy and then they're just going to jump into textual critic 19th century textual criticism uh you know we should respect if we're going to pretend to be playing in the academic realm we should give preference or deference or extra respect to people that are actually scholars in the field in which they're opining is that fair to say that's fair but i would add a um just a little revision to that and that i i know of people who were not trained in textual criticism or not formally trained in historiography um who decided because of personal reasons or financial reasons or what not to go off into the medical field or the law field uh and then they will turn around and write really incredibly fantastic scholarly works so even juanita brooks right yeah so it's not so much the formal training it's actually the quality of the work itself yeah you're right you're right and it's that quality of the work that you know we should judge works that's true that's true because i mentioned ghee and sorensen and yeah so anyway so so i would just because there are a lot of people who who um do not have formal training lds scholars as well as non-lds but some of them are just fantastic yeah yeah and so we just have to pay attention to the work and the quality of the work i love it okay well let's make sure we get your slides in um if we can what's the next slide okay so this is where i was just reviewing what these outlines were what touching on heads we've kind of talked about that so what i wanted to do is here is we're kind of switching back from the textual apparatus the way it text is formatted we're going back to how laying down heads what that looked like for a preacher and then also they had different types of notes preachers sometimes might write out their sermons with really long notes a single sermon might take up 12 pages and where they go into detail but in the crowd that were the evangelical preachers they often wrote out what were called short notes or short briefs and this is an example of a baptist preacher named abraham marshall and after he passed away um one of his sons uh put together a biography and in the back he had he he didn't really quite know what these were he thought that they were um sermon notes but but these are actually skeletal outlines of sermons and this is an example of how short they could be so on this one page that i took um we have uh five full sermons everything that uh abraham marshall would have needed to deliver a whole sermon that could last anywhere from a half an hour to three hours long everything he needed for five different sermons of that length was all on this single page and so when it came to these short notes sometimes uh five sermons could be how many total minutes of speaking oh usually at that time it might be half an hour to if you had someone who's kind of a wind bag up to three hours or more for a single sermon yeah so five sermons could be how long well if someone and there were some ministers who really could go on and on if you took say those five sermons there and then you just did it in three hours then that's could be 15 hours of sermons just from a page of notes right yeah a page of of heads so to speak yeah and so if you go back to that and i think i talk about the different ways sometimes preachers would take that little note kind of like a three by five card and take it to the pulpit and then every once in a while they'd glance down at it as they're preaching just to keep them on track a lot of preachers never took their notes to the pulpit and so they kind of had the outline memorized and they might have uh written it down somewhere and kind of looked at it refresh their memory in the week leading up to a sermon um but then they would put it away and then some of the preachers never use paper or pencil or quill or whatever at all and they would look at a verse that they found interesting and then they would think about it and then in their mind they would kind of organize um the main points that they wanted and the whole time it was always in their head and then they would use that and as they preached they would be going from town to town preaching and preaching and so what would happen is pretty soon someone who is an experienced preacher for example might have a whole series of sermons all of the outlines memorized and at the drop of a hat they could go on to any topic or any um verse that they had been working on and just spill out a sermon off the cuff and uh just by practice thought preparation so now if you go to the next and what just and again just summaries this explains potentially how joseph smith could dictate for 30 minutes or an hour just with just potentially either with a small outline or even with an outline that he had memorized and that's it's just right it fills in an important hole there okay yeah and and to be specific what would happen now i just have these notes here but what would happen with a lot of these preachers is um depending on the preacher they might have just a whole collection of separate little notes and things some people had a little note they would stick it like a bookmark in their bible so that they would have it at the location of the scripture they were preaching on sometimes there were just separate sheets of paper that they would hold in a saddle bag but a lot of times they would gather these together in notebooks and and they could be homemade notebooks where they just you know got 20 sheets of paper fool's cap paper folded at the end and sewed together a binder and then they would just write sermons down and um in the book i think i mentioned how there was a methodist preacher who was putting together something on the order of you know he while riding on passage on a ship he put together the notes for 50 sermons inside of this little notebook he had and other people had them so what for something like the book of mormon when you look in the book of mormon and you look at the the summarizing heads that we know were part of the original dictation now those i don't believe were all the ones that joseph smith had those are just simply the ones that he dictated but when you think about covering all of the book of mormon you could do that in a single notebook and probably within roughly 20 sides of pages where you could have the outlines to be able to to then use as these short ideas to then go ahead and refresh your memory at each one and then go put put the notes away and then go into the dictation room and then just dictate the next uh episode or series of episodes okay yeah yeah it would be very easy to have that in a notebook of about that size so if you're saying how many pages of of sort of heads because obviously it depends on the handwriting you know are you writing small or are you writing large but i think on the average size handwriting that you could use on 20 sides of a piece of paper yeah so 10 pages 20 sides joseph smith probably a fool's cap joseph could have reasonably sketched out these heads or these outlines that then would have given him plenty of material to dictate the number of hours that would have been required and you actually break this down in your book you break it down not just to hours of dictation that would have been required but also the the speediness of the transcriber being able to actually write down what's being dictated to them right and so when when people like quentin cook try and make the timeline impossible you you you've kind of worked out the math so to speak to kind of decide whether or not mathematically even if even if the transcription starts really late whether mathematically it's feasible for joseph to have remembered and dictated giving enough time for the pauses for the bathroom breaks and for the transcriber to actually write out what's being transcribed correct yeah and and i'll i'll go further on that point now i didn't i didn't talk about this aspect in the book but i did talk about it in my dissertation uh this is the first time joseph was actually doing this long process of dictating to a scribe so there's a learning curve going on and um i know that people like to point out that wow he did this so fast but from my point of view after studying oral traditions and oral compositions my question is why did joseph smith do it so slow and the reason why i say that is because we have instances of where there were people who in oral traditions who have dictated to scribes who were very familiar with the stories that they were doing and they were skilled and they had been doing it for a long time and so people studying them would then start to transcribe what they said and in my dissertation i'd uh talk about um people said nilman perry and albert lord were some of the first ones who were talking about oral formulaic uh composition that's kind of a different subject but they would study people who were telling these traditional stories um and they decided they were going to record some of these stories both using a recorder but also uh with scribes by hand and and all the details are back in the dissertation it's not fresh on my mind i haven't read it in a while but basically uh one of these skilled singers um i believe is how you pronounce the name but he um he was dictating at a speed twice as fast basically as joseph smith and um so i think if joseph smith had been doing this longer and had been more skilled i think we could have expected if he kept doing works you know if he kept um dictating works i i think after a few years of further practice that he probably could have dictated the equivalent of the book of mormon in half the amount of time that he did um the the first the book of mormon itself i mean that's super bold because we've all been conditioned to to just think wow how in the world this is such a miracle just so fast super human speed it really is it's the first time anyone has ever said to me what you just said which is why did it actually take so long that's yeah that's kind of groundbreaking i've never heard anyone suggest that before i'm not as plugged into the literature as you but that's that in of itself is kind of uh earth-shattering to me well one of the reasons why that can happen is because we're looking at something that is not a written production and that that's a huge mistake that people make when they say oh this happened in three months well when i wrote my book it took two years but that's a totally different process i mean it's comparing apples to oranges when when it's an oral production i mean you open your mouth and the stream comes out and it is what it is you you don't go back and you don't revise you don't stop and think oh i need to um i'm going to go out of order and do things non-linearly when you're writing something and you're revising something and there's another key in in in our modern conception of composition we're thinking about how can i be original right how can i have that new turn of a phrase that expresses some idea in a way that no one else has ever done and so we're spending a lot of time not just writing and drafting but rewriting rewriting rewriting to try to hone it down and if we try to use that framework of composition to understand what joseph smith did we will get it all wrong it is a totally different process if people want to compare the process to what it's really like what you'd want to do is um you know just compose something orally i mean what comes to my mind is how most books most memoirs are written these days you basically have a ghostwriter that sits down and tells the person just tell me your story they just go on and on and on verbally verbally they record it they transcribe it and then at the end there's a there's a ghostwriter that kind of cleans it all up and maybe adds a few things but if you really want to write the book fast you dictate it what you can remember orally first is that a fair comparison or not yeah and then the only other thing i would say in the case of joseph smith that this just wasn't stream of consciousness you know you have to remember that there was several years of preparation essentially five right potentially five and then also after he started the dictation they lost 116 pages there was still time to even go back and maybe make some additional changes and adjustments and again that's not to imply that joseph smith was faking it it could just say that he's waiting for inspiration to know how to compensate for the last 116 pages and that what came out after that was you know the development from what he thought was to find inspiration but but the the point of that is is there's a lot of preparation he's very familiar with the stories so when it comes time for the actual dictation it's a matter of a quick refresher looking at a note putting it away and then just telling the story but think of it this way if if you have a child or a niece or a nephew or someone they want you to tell them the story of snow white and the seven dwarfs and let's say that you haven't told that story for 10 years but we would know how to go ahead and start telling it and i bet you if we were to record someone telling that story that the the sentences will come out grammatically correct we're not going to go back and say oh wait wait wait what i meant to say was no cut that that verb i chose i meant this other verb but people would just tell it in a constant stream and a clear story that would go through and hit the main points and get to the end it wouldn't be the exact same as somebody's else's the words and vocabulary might be different we might choose to add little events or we might have forgotten events but eventually we get to the end of that and that is a totally different process than trying to write down a story it's a completely different process and so people are trying to understand joseph smith and the production of the book of mormon within literary constraints and that just doesn't work it doesn't work yeah i love it really quickly something that i think is really important here if you look at the original manuscript of the book of mormon because what we what we often are what we are always most familiar with is the not just the final product but it's not the first edition you know it's all it's all the you know we're most experienced with all the changes between the original manuscript and the actual printed first edition and all the changes that happened between that edition and the addition that we're most familiar with now if you go back to the original you know handwritten transcription can you tell us if the actual language or the syntax reflects more kind of a word for word translation style or if it supports this idea of a verbal oral dictation and if you can and this is asking you a lot to give us a couple examples either in the types of words or actual phrases and grant palmer i remember him talking about this that there's there's kind of words like and he was a go-in you know the any types of words or signals that confirm the idea that this in fact was an orally dictated text and not an actual written transcription oh my goodness to come up with examples off the top of my head um or even places to go to to learn about this question because it's an important question right well i i i mean i hate to send people to my dissertation but that's i do talk about some of it but i'm not the first to talk about that there are a lot of there are a lot of people who have talked about um oral creation in the book of mormon uh brent gardner i think has has been doing work he's a believer yeah yeah and i think he does a lot of great work um and we've had him on mormon stories by the way oh okay just for listeners just for listeners and he's someone who i think is really paying attention to the text and while i might disagree with some of his interpretations i think he's he's really working hard at what's there and so when he talks about um the oral aspects of the book of mormon i think that's a place to go there there have been some earlier and and i'll be forgetting some of their names so i feel feel bad about uh this but one one thing that's an aspect of orality or a couple i'll mention two things that come to mind one is that there seems to be and this is this is from and and i'm forgetting her name but there was there was a lady who first pointed this out and it was fantastic and she's lds scholar how there appears to be moments in the text when a dictation is occurring and then suddenly there's a correction uh the corrective or i think um what's that scripture about they buried their weapons of peace or rather they right their weapons of war for peace right and there's a lot of those um and and and and i feel bad that i can't remember the name of the scholar she was it's fantastic to point that out other people have looked at more recently i remember uh sam brown in his essay in producing ancient scripture he he brings that up and he goes into more examples so so that's one there are a lot of times when something happens where there seems to be like oh you know i said one thing but instead of just going and scratching it there's or rather and then a rephrasal of it and that's a suggestion of something being told in process as opposed to something you're reading another aspect would be there is an enormous amount of repetition and if you were i mean you got to think if you're etching engraving things on a plate um if there's a lot of unnecessary repetition that's a lot of work to keep engraving things that ultimately didn't really need to be there and it's kind of hard to explain that without showing examples but there's a there's an enormous amount of stylistically we would describe as tautology just too much unnecessary repetition taking place but sometimes that repetition is exactly what occurs in oral presentations because when you have a speaker and an audience the audience can't they don't have a text to look at again and again to read to get certain ideas really captured in the mind so the speaker might repeat things in order to help the listener to really grab hold of an idea also another more subtle aspect is when listing out sequences of events or describing how things progress in an episode is you'll have something that's called additive and and so what will happen is you'll see the beginnings of successive sentences begin with the word and for example i went to the store and i bought some butter and i found a toy and i decided to get some milk oh and then i went and bought it from the cashier and then i went home and so each each one of those ands it it's kind of like the idea is in the moment progressing and so someone is adding on to it with yet another phrase and that's something that's really really common in oral performances and you see that exact same thing all throughout the book of mormon and it came to pass and for behold those are all examples of things that can be additive elements and and it's just riddled throughout the text so there's a lot of evidence for orality being the mode of production and i just have to this is helpful it's illustrative but i also have to give a shout out to lds discussions because they're doing some great work right now on the internet he's giving us some examples and so shout out to lds discussions check out their website here he's got alma 2419 and thus we see that they buried their weapons of peace and then he writes a mistake and then he has the correction that that joseph smith would have given orally or they buried the weapons of war for peace which is the correction you mentioned that already there's a couple others uh alma 4338 they being shielded from the more vital parts of the body mistake now the correction or the more vital parts of the body being shielded from the strokes of the lamanites that's the correction helaman according to the word the earth goeth black and it appeareth unto man that the sun standeth still yea and behold this is so for surely it is the earth that moveth and not the sun are these are these good illustrations of what you're talking about yeah yeah and and i think that um you know a lot of lds scholars have explored those too and yeah that's why they're recognizing that you know the role of orality played a much much bigger role in in in the creation of the actual text the words the way that the stories were articulated were heavily dependent on an oral process not a literary process and even if even if we want to look at it from a believing point of view where there was a hard fixed um written artifact with a fixed text on it when it came to the translation that translation went through the means of translator an agent understanding it and then trying to articulate it through an oral mode of presenting the translation so it wasn't a text to text it was a text to this kind of oral mode and then dictation to a scribe um this is also great there's a there's something in your that we have to cover that's in your book that we have to cover before we before we end today if possible you talk about um revival sermons in the burnt over district that's your chapter three and these are it's kind of the methodist sermon culture but then mind-blowingly you also talk about how these types of sermons appear in the book of mormon so so you know something people need to think about that basically king benjamin or messiah or whoever it is that's given sermons in the book of mormon just mind-blowingly they're giving these methodist style sermons or in other words these structures that we're saying these methodist structures that joseph would have known about that inform the actual structure and flow of the book of mormon they also appear as methodist-like sermons in content and in structure within the book of mormon itself am i am i summarizing that right and what else would you want to say about that yeah and and that's not something that is original to me i mean there there are mark thomas comes to mind who talked about that grand palmer i believe talked about that too um and others have talked about that but what i wanted to point out is uh how like the example i gave a lot of times when we're reading the book of mormon we are reading a passage that sounds a lot like the bible right kind of biblical style language but then when we actually trace some of those things or try to trace them back to the bible they were not part of the king james version that was was so enormously influential on joseph smith's religious register but when we look at those same phrases and we look at them in the context of 19th century some of those kind of revival style sermons you find all of those the language the phrases the concepts are just littered throughout the 19th century part of um and they show up in sermons they show up in hymn books they show up in the religious literature and um the printed sermons and so regardless who we say was responsible for the translation of the work the translation clearly drew from 19th century vocabulary 19th century patterns of sermonizing and just a 19th century christology or belief or a certain set of package beliefs that were often presented in the articulation of the book of mormon and um so yeah and and again we can explain that through the translation process you know if smith was participating as a translator then we would expect him to draw upon his own experience his own vocabulary to try to articulate what he was experiencing with the text of the book of mormon for example but the the point that i would say is it's not about proving or disproving again whether or not the book of mormon is an authentic history it's about looking at the text and saying yes these are definitely linguistic artifacts from a specific time and a specific place and that is the second great awakening style sermons and exactly what's happening in joseph smith's environment and so however we want to believe how it got there what's important to me is that we recognize that it's there and it is and so that is important to our understanding of what it meant for translation what joseph smith's life and background might have been in order to produce that kind of language in a translation or any other questions that people might have that's related to that and and this is a point that i think you make in your book but if you don't other people have have made this point to me in reference to this interview with you it's you know for someone who's trying to really understand the creation of this book and this is a bit a bit summarizing you just have to wonder number one why are you know why are mesoamerican you know profits in you know from between 600 bc and 400 a.d or is it 400 bc to 600 a.d why are they giving methodists like sermons why are they structured like methodists or why are they giving sermons at all but then why is it coincidentally that the topics that they're discussing in their sermons happen to be the topics that that that joseph smith would have been thinking about alexander campbell sydney rigdon the burned over district why is it that it just so happens that mesoamerican ancient prophets in content are are discussing the topics that joseph smith would have been thinking about and that he would have been swimming in that also would resemble 19th century sermons in the burned over district during the time that joseph smith was alive and then of course you have to also add why is it also that none of those sermons were discussing lgbtq issues or organic evolution or any of the issues that would have been that have vexed the church since joseph smith's time let alone eternal marriage or eternal ceilings or the endowment ceremony why is it that all those sermons that alma and benjamin and mosiah and others are giving really reflect all the stuff that joseph smith would have been concerned about in 1830 and or the years leading up to 1830 that that is problematic for let's just say a rigid tight orthodox view of book of mormon translation is that fair to say yeah yeah well what what i mean this is i'm actually gonna dodge that question that's fine i love dodges the reason the reason why i'm going to do that because that that is a question that's really considered with devotional interpretations and devotional aspects of the book of mormon and and that really is moving in a direction that's that's outside of my area of interest but what i would say again is that something for people to consider and think about but also to remember that if we are dealing with a translator who saw a translation the way joseph smith did as a revelation that could tell us something about the types of major interventions that joseph smith could have introduced to the text in the process of bringing this ancient scripture or text and narrative to the modern world in other words we see a lot of joseph smith's fingerprints all over that so there are ways for believers to incorporate that into the system uh so that's my devotional you know response to that i love it but but it's not that's not really you know what i do totally totally i'll just share this one quote because i love lds discussions so much alexander campbell who was a contemporary of sydney rigdon a well-known preacher of the day he read the book of mormon reviewed it and the quote is quote this prophet smith through his stone spectacles wrote on the plates of nephi in this book of mormon every error and almost every truth discussed in new york for the last 10 years he decided all the great controversy he decided all the great controversies infant baptism ordination the trinity regeneration repentance justification the fall of man the atonement transubstantiation fasting penance church government religious experience they call the ministry the general resurrection eternal punishment who may baptize and even the question of free masonry uh republican government and the rights of man all these topics are repeatedly alluded to and i'm not meaning to mock i just i i think that's an interesting thing that we'll throw in there but i'm not going to ask you to comment it on it anymore well i i will say though that i i did pull that quote into the book and i did talk about it in terms of the type of training that early preachers went through and what was advised for them to learn about what to preach about or not to preach about and so i just so people know i do discuss all that and there's always the possibility that god put those ideas into the brain of nephi and mosiah and benjamin and moroni and mormon so that they could be addressed and and speak to the issues of the 1900s so i mean there's always an apologetic response you know i'm going to talk about that but just kind of back up a little bit um my first response to that and this is moving into devotional stuff yeah yeah but my spur my first response to that would be if that's what works for somebody then you know i i'm not gonna disturb that and the reason why is because the role of belief and the need for having um that a belief system set up in order for someone to have um comfort or or strength or peace of mind or whatever it is is is really important to someone um and just from my own experience when regardless what i think about how true or how not true or something might be yet when i see the lived on the ground religion that's when i see some real beauty in mormonism when my dad died for example and i saw how people turn to their beliefs in the afterlife to hold on um move that touched something but how belief is so important to navigating life and so that's why um when it comes to a lot of issues that's why i don't get involved in devotional apologetics or arguments because because i know anti-mormonism right yeah because in my life i know so many people who are devout mormons who i love dear dearly sorry and uh i don't want to i want to help people have accurate information but i'm not in the business of destroying um safety nets for people and and uh so that's why i just keep it in the academic realm um because regardless what people believe regardless what system that someone has a belief in inevitably people are holding to that and oftentimes holding desperately because there are challenges troubles pain sorrow loss where those belief systems give them comfort that they wouldn't otherwise have and so that's that's why when it comes to you know some of the the debates about you know how did ancient nephites know about 19th century problems that's why i avoid those yeah things because it ultimately comes down to a devotional thing about criticizing the authenticity of a sacred book for people right and i just i just don't that's not what i do and that's that's partly what makes this book so amazing um is that it's so respectful and so thoughtfully done i do have a couple quick questions i want to just get you on you've been so generous with your time before we give you a chance to wrap up can i ask you and this could be done in the light of almost helping believers still believe but i just want to ask you a few quick questions if that's okay sure why go to the trouble of preserving you know getting blasphe brass plates creating gold sheets of paper engraving the plates preserving the plates hiding the plates delivering the plates protecting the plates if the plates aren't going to end up being used maybe that's not in your that might be going into uh the realms you don't want to go into but do you have any thoughts on that because that's one question that comes up with if if the plates aren't even really being translated from and if they're not even in the room which we know they kind of weren't what do you say when people ask then why were the plates even kept or delivered at all um you can dodge if it's not your wheelhouse well i'm going to kind of dodge a little bit but i'm i'm really embarrassed because i'm mixing up first names with people and i'm going to get in serious trouble because this is someone who i like a lot and um and but i'm one of the editors of producing ancient scripture mckay and and i want to say mike or mark but i i'm blank i'm gonna look it up right now oh please because this is really embarrassing because i i think he wrote an essay where he talks about materiality so there's mike there's michael hubbard mckay mark ash hurst mcgee and brian huglett it's mike okay he's he will never let me live this down i do that all the time i always forget people that i know and love just because in the moment my brain just the names just leave so you're you're on you're a good company yeah so he's or i'm in good company i should say he he wrote this essay about how when we're talking about history we're often dealing with things that are just in the mind ideas and we forget the really important aspects of the embodied experience the materiality of plates why bother with that and um one of the things i took away from his essaying it's a really great essay that addresses all of these things and that is how that becomes a form of verification of authority it it plays a function that even if people can't see the plates themselves or hold the place um or they just heard about them the fact that they are treated as real and there and containing these ancient things in a real material embodied way that adds a layer of authority and authentication authentication um and weight to the reality of that situation that you don't get with simply sharing ideas or telling stories and so i think that um that's a really important aspect of essentially providing evidence and proof through not necessarily a reasoned way but actual physical tangible way where there's confirmation a double confirmation both with knowledge of the presence of materiality as well as the idea of the materiality i hope that thanks i'll accept that thank you and i'll refer people to that book because i because i having you tell me it's a great book makes me care more about it frankly there are a lot of great essays and and i know that um there's a lot of people it is a little bit of a mixed bag um i know that they were trying to make it you know an academic work but it's that's like trying to herd cats really it's almost impossible to get everybody kind of on the same page and there are some of the essays that are clearly more devotional um in their direction or with the topic that they deal with but the one thing that everybody shares though is that they're bringing to it some really high quality scholarship and it's got great it's got grant hardy in there it's got richard bushman and taves yeah brian how glit i mean don you know mark ashers mcgee and don bradley like these are these are names that people should respect right yeah yeah and it's a fantastic work jared hickman yeah yeah yeah and i think what it's doing not just because it's dealing with translation but that this isn't a situation where they're providing answers for everything what they do is by going back and tackling these issues and trying to figure out what joseph smith was actually doing and then instead of compartmentalizing all of his translation projects they're kind of bringing them all together side by side so you can kind of build a better picture of what the entire thing meant to joseph smith they they're opening lots of doors for further questions that are really important and this is i think it's a landmark study that will is really going to accelerate um fantastic new information and new developments in the study of what joel smith was you know trying to do as a prophet as well as producing new scripture so when you think about the uh catalyst theory in the book of abraham my understanding of that uh which is that joseph didn't translate the papyri that the papyr were just like inspirational to him and the catalyst to help him channel the revelation part of what requires in that adopting that theory is that it means that joseph smith in some sense didn't even understand what he was doing and or misrepresented to us uh what he was doing because the word translation was used he said it you know the papyrus was written by the very very hand of abraham and he said he was translating with the gift of power of god into english is it turns out none of that's true and so the the catalyst theory then can help resuscitate or resurrect joseph smith by saying he channeled it but but he wasn't translating but then that leaves us with the conclusion that joseph smith himself didn't even understand what he was doing and or that he uh misrepresented to us what he was doing how do people grasp that there's obviously a spectrum those who are frustrated with the church are angry are going to just say well it was a fraud so that's really simple there's also you know there's also other maybe more charitable ways to interpret that is there anything you would want to say about that because it's a reasonable concern is that true yeah yeah i think so the the way i would approach it and and i'm sure people who are angry at the church might be frustrated with what i have to say but i would not say that joseph smith misrepresented what he was doing um because i think when you look at all the texts he developed the egyptian vocabulary and grammar he invested a lot of time in genuinely trying to to tease out the meanings of these hieroglyphics and if someone was i just don't see someone who's a fraud or a con man doing that much work to impress such a small circle of insiders so i i would not say this is misrepresenting what i would say if i had to describe what i think was going on in joseph smith's mind is that he genuinely was trying to determine the meaning of the hieroglyphics and using a process of translation that he understood translation to be which meant just like the scripture saying dnc studying it out in your mind listening for confirmation of the spirit and then when you say is this what it means and there's this kind of good sensation of feeling that's like the spirit well that must be what this means and so i think he was constructing and uh those interpretations based upon that process and so i think that when he's trying to figure out what the papyri said he was genuinely trying to figure out what the papyri said and that he um was simply there was a difference between what he thought he was doing and what he was actually doing and that he probably frankly did not understand what was going on inside of him during that process i mean that's kind of how i ended the book joseph smith said no man knows my history but i think that you know he he can include himself among the people who don't know joseph smith that was so good you also make the point at the end that he lists himself as the author of the book of mormon which some apologists say that was just sort of a literary convention but but you you mentioned that for what purpose well i wan i wanted to bring that up because when we talk about authorship of scripture then we're talking about a process of inspiration and we're talking about where when you look in the new testament the way that you can you know interpret some of the new testament scriptures is regarding the construction of scripture that it's a situation where it's a collaboration between god and between an author uh author in the sense of co-author author in the sense of i'm gonna receive this inspiration from god and then and then what comes out of me is something that i'm it's god is making use of whatever's in my mind to communicate this certain message so i'm participating in the authorship of this text i might not be the original originator of all the ideas but there's the divine information coming in and it's being articulated out of me so the the the the writer is not just simply a filter but someone who is actively involved in the shaping of that text which is co-authorship and and i think that that is what joseph smith um thought of himself now when it comes to him describing himself as author i mean people have talked about how if you list yourself as author on the copyright registration page um that's not the part i was arguing with and i wasn't even describing where he had author on the title page what i was talking about is how after we have author there and on the title page and in the registration of the copyright joseph smith also refers to himself as author at the end of the preface but it's the same preface where he's talking about how he translated it with the gift and power of god and that preface to describe himself of author that the law the legal requirements for copyright registration did not require him to put author there and so that was a choice and it might have just been a convention but it was still a choice and that in combination with um other things he said and this will go off because then i have to go to some files that i don't have readily available but the idea being that that he saw himself as an active participant in the creation of new scripture and so when you say author it's if we think of it in the light of co-author i think we're getting closer to what joseph smith thought about his role in producing texts yeah i think that's important um one thing that i don't think that we brought up but that i just want to make sure and get in the record this is just something very micro but regarding the claims that joseph smith couldn't have had anything to help him with the dictation of the book of mormon other than the plates is the reality that he certainly had the holy bible the king james version of the bible as a source because actually the very text of the book of of the king james version of the bible not only appears in in what becomes the book of mormon but even the errors from the king james version that we know he had appears in uh you know ultimately becomes the book of mormon now you could say that an angel transmits the errors from that exact edition of the bible that he had but what's most likely is that when it came to the parts of isaiah he's got the bible there and he's reading that that isaiah to the to the scribe and if he can have the bible and be reading from the bible he can certainly have some notes that he might be referring to although it's not required as you've also highlighted is there anything you want to say about that i just want to make sure that gets in there yeah this kind of goes back to um emma's statement when uh her statement again is being pulled out of context where she's saying we're talking about sydney rigdon talking about how joseph smith was not using some purloined manuscript he was not you know plagiarizing some novel and and that's what she was talking about and not only do we know it from the context of that interview but the follow-up letter from her son who did the interview when he was clarifying um that same issue in about the possibility of joseph plagiarizing in his letter and again what's happened is people are it's a logical fallacy of over generalization and what they're doing is so emma was clearly from the context of the interview and the letter that followed she's talking about joseph smith never referenced uh the spaulding manuscript or any other novel or romance to create the book of mormon and so people are saying oh what she's saying is he did there was nothing of any other kind of material there whatsoever at all but that's not that's not the context of those quotes so they're being pulled out of context and saying oh a bible couldn't have been there because emma said this and that's not what emma was saying and so that's the first issue with that and the second issue with that is you have to think about the timing of the translation as well when you look at the major sections of the book of mormon that are clearly dependent on the king james version of the bible those are taking place toward the end of the translation process those would have been taking place after oliver calgary had taken over his scribe and then um and then especially the second nephi this is after they would have been in fayette where they were actually off in an upstairs room during the translation where a lot of people weren't even there participating and we have documentation of people saying that whitmer explicitly said when i said that the people were all watching the dictation i was not saying that they were there every single time watching every single moment and so when it came time in the process of dictation when they would have reached these passages where there would have been large-scale referencing and consulting of the bible there's a very good chance that emma wasn't even in the room when that happened and so that's another challenge with trying to use emma's account which was a very specific time in harmony pennsylvania and then trying to apply it to every other dictation session and and that's that's a mistake and that um we can't we really there is no historical account that definitively tells us yes or no of whether or not joseph smith used the bible and and when you look at the text and the alterations and what's happening i think it's i think it's abundantly clear that when he reached certain passages he opened up a bible and then on the fly made minor adjustments in the process in order to make it conform to the narrative that was unfolding in the book of mormon along that line of thought if if talking about whether or not the plates were necessary some people are asking why have a seer stone or the interpreters at all you know and i i think i know some of what you're going to say but i'd rather hear it from you so i'm just going to let you answer well again this this won't be original to me but what i think about it is you know joseph smith in his interest in gaining access to greater heavenly knowledge and one of the routes apart from religious pursuit was also this esoteric pursuit dealing with you know can't really call it folk magic folk magic's part of it but there's something deeper going on there this access to hidden knowledge and mysteries and so at that point of his life i think that he was still very much connected to the instruments and the practices that helped him connect with that mode of access to greater knowledge and so at that point in his life the seer stone was that point of access and and so it was something that for joseph smith was part of almost a ritual in a way where that object needed to be there as allowing him at that time and in his place of development access towards a divine and and uh if if we look at it outside of like a devotional type viewpoint you could say that you know it might merely been something as a concentration device it might merely been something that you know he could focus on and it would kind of get him to just clear out his mind of everything else and just to fixate his attention on one thing and then just to start letting the words flow but i think it was more than just concentration it's about what joseph smith believed that the stone was doing for him and so there was it wasn't just a way to you know focus but it was something that for joseph smith allowed him to focus and then get into a mindset where he felt more open to inspiration and so it was a help right absolutely um real really quickly uh one of the comments that i'm getting from a lot of people and i want to thank everyone on youtube and facebook that have been uh sharing comments there's kind of the dan vogel you know a lot of people are surprised that dan vogel who i don't think in any sense of the term is kind of a believer in orthodox mormonism or even a believer at all he came up with this term pious fraud meaning that yes yes people were in some sense fooled by joseph smith but you know dan vogel also believes that in many ways joseph's if not in always joseph smith believed that what he was saying or doing was at least true if not good or worthy you you began this podcast interview by by saying you share in the sentiment that that joseph smith in many senses if not in all senses was sincere and not of a blatant overt fraud i just want to sort of communicate to you a concern people have if they're saying man william just he seems to be giving joseph smith a little bit too much credit the the occam's razor sort of analysis of all this would be that joseph smith is literally perpetrating conscious fraud on people they would then turn to kind of polygamy and the kirtland bank scandal and all different things that would just sort of lead someone to think that there was just kind of blatant conscious fraud going on here what do you say to somebody that says you're being too kind to joseph smith you're being too lenient you're bending over backwards to just not call it like it should be seen which is just this is some you know person with bad intent trying to fool people pulling the wool over people's eyes what do you say to people that are saying you're just being too generous and kind to joseph smith okay um where i would start with that is first when you know you're laying out all the things joseph smith did over the course of his career right his prophetic career and what i'm talking about is not his whole prophetic career what i'm focusing in on is a very specific action and that is the production of a new scripture all right and so that's the limit of what i'm talking about which ends before the church even begins right yeah so so how joseph smith felt or thought about polygamy is totally off off the table with what i'm doing that's a that's a totally different issue and um i think there are real problematic things that need to be addressed there where regardless if you know how he felt about certain issues with polygamy even if you're a genuine sister that doesn't necessarily excuse all the behavior um but that's different than what i'm doing what i'm doing is saying when it comes to producing the book of mormon when it came to attempting to translate the papyri where was his focus and um i think that looking at the historical record looking at what he did how we approach things the documents are left behind that joseph smith genuinely believed that there was divine influence informing how he created those texts and um [Music] and then i'll say this i mean i don't know that i would ever use the word fraud to describe joseph smith um because that that for me that's that's uh it's a combative word it it it suggests that he knew exactly what he was doing all the time and he was intentionally trying to misrepresent him full people and and i don't think that's explains uh joseph smith as a whole human being i think there might have been moments when he did uh intentionally misrepresent a mislead for various reasons like for example classically i guess uh talking about how he was not involved in polygamy publicly stating that when in fact he was involved in several relationships so there are times when he's trying to clearly deflect attention but when it came to the text and when it came to his process of translation i think he genuinely believed that he was tapped in to something and so how do i think about joseph smith um i guess it's still kind of ongoing but what i would say is if we look back and we look at frankly all the prophets in the history of the bible and history of other people we're dealing with people who are very complex very contradictory and sometimes i would have to say that occasionally we might be dealing with someone who isn't always aware what the right hand and the left hand are doing there's a certain kind of a certain kind of fractured way of seeing the world and that's why they i think a lot of prophets get to where they are because there is a sort of vastly contradictory um inconsistent way of approaching and seeing things and i think for joseph smith um for whatever reasons growing up or in his psychology i think that he reached a point where this is just one i'm just speculating off the cuff here but i would think that this is someone who grew up under extremely difficult circumstances and one way of dealing with reality was not just to lay down and accept reality but to create a reality and impose that around him to to make the world better than than i think a very painful little world he was living in and so it's it's very complex and that's beyond me but uh i mean they're they're listeners that are like right now they're making comments like he was a con man he was a charlatan he was a narcissist and i just want to highlight how impressive your thoughtfulness your fairness your demeanor because i i strive to want to be like your being i fail all the time but i recognize not just the value and the the strategic intelligence but also just the good-hearted good-natured-ness of trying to really put aside the passions put aside the emotions and be as thoughtful and as accurate and as fair as you can possibly be that is really really hard to do and it's really laudable it's really notable and i just have to call it out and say even though a lot of my listeners are super angry because you're not validating a lot of their anger right now it it's really impressive what what you're doing from my perspective and i just want to i just want to call you out on that it's super cool well if i could just do a quick follow-up then because i can't see the comments i don't know what people are saying it's probably a good thing because i i'm uh didn't want to get sidetracked i don't absolutely do not want to invalidate the pain that people have um there are because of the nature of an organization that once you once especially something that started in the 19th century firmly grounded in this patriarchal structure and a patriarchal structure where people feel that whatever their opinion is is exactly coinciding with what god wants there is enormous potential for ecclesiastical abuse there's enormous potential for that culture to be severely judgmental of people who don't fit into the mold and that from what i've seen in my life experience has caused excruciating pain and and and it's even worse when people are going through such terrible pain and then to have it uh to have people tell them oh you're just having a problem because you're sinning or or oh you know if you if you just pray hard enough you'll you'll stop being gay and you'll become straight or um or oh you know yeah back then we did you know we were kind of racist and didn't let uh black people but but it's fine now and it never really was a policy i mean that those things do not acknowledge the the real severe pain life-altering pain that people have gone through where experiences that they had um totally changed the direct the trajectory of their lives and and not always in a good direction because of the way they were raised and taught and the messages they received and how that turned around and uh really broke apart their foundation and and so i when i'm looking at joseph smith and trying to figure him out and even i'm trying to describe what i genuinely see in this i see him as a very conflicted person who was very contradictory and a lot of times um just in many ways someone trying to pose his own reality and looking at life with a kind of fractured perspective [Music] but that is not in any way meant to invalidate the pain because if anything the work that i do is to bring accurate knowledge to the table about some of these sensitive questions in the hopes that ultimately if we build on accurate knowledge then we can build up to where things that are happening today in an institution if they're founded on inaccurate information that if we can correct our perspectives that it might eventually ripple up to the organization to where we can fix some of the problems that are still present so yeah and i would just add that that the smartest thing i believe to do if you want to help educate people who want to be educated is to be balanced and fair stick to the evidence to not be hyperbolic to not use polarizing extreme language this is the way to uh not turn off and to attract and to educate the most amount of people and to do the most amount of good and so i i actually i think it's a great approach and i love it and i wish i was better at it frankly well i'm a firm believer in you just present the information and let people use it interpret it and make their own decisions i don't want to tell people how to believe totally okay so for what this is my last question i promise and then i just want to give you a chance to say anything you haven't said yet and then we'll be done other than me promoting the book but there are there there's this new turn that i kind of referenced earlier whether spencer flewman or terrell givens or richard bushman where the the the neo i call him neo apologist kind of the newer branch of faithful scholars maxwell institute where for the past several years they've been doing this they've been moving away from calling the book of mormon a translation they've been moving towards calling it a revelation this may seem like a subtle or an unimportant distinction but it's it's probably very meaningful and i think your book reflects that um because that is to say let's stop calling it a translation that's going to get us in trouble let's call it a revelation and then it can maintain its divinity but also reflect what it really was which was more of a creative spiritual act in their mind than anything rel anything resembling an actual translation in any conventional sense of the meaning of the word so and then i think we even had an apostle in a recent general conference i believe it's the one from brazil who actually literally use this term revelation instead of translation almost as if to start testing those waters and priming the membership and the only reason i'm bringing all this up is to say there's a lot of people like me a lot of people who are listening a lot of people raised in the church that experienced that as like a bait and switch or as gaslighting or as kind of um uh you know a move that doesn't have any accountability because if we were all taught breastplate if we were all taught urim thummim if we were all taught arnold freeburg paintings if we were all taught plates in front of them if we were all taught translation and then without any real explicit education then the church just moves subtly and shifts to this idea of of an inspired revelation it leaves a lot of people feeling gaslit and or misled without any apology and without any correction i don't expect you to be able to talk much to this but i at least wanted to articulate the frustrations and even anger that a lot of people are feeling and give you a chance to say whatever you wanted to in response even if it's just to be empathetic for those who are frustrated um there are a few things that came to mind um one is when we get new information we do see the goal post shifting you know and part of that is a re-definition and i think there is as an institution there's an effort to kind of fix the little problems that come up and then just kind of you know hope things are better i mean when you look at the opening of the book of mormon how earlier on it said the um native americans are the principal descendants of the book of mormon people and then allison uh you know we've got dna studies that you know say that there are a lot of groups that have nothing to do with israelite background and so that there was this kind of shift changing the language and kind of moving and hoping it goes away so i i can't speak to the motives of why people would make that it does seem to be in response to more and more information coming but so there i think there is attempt to just kind of let things go and we'll just kind of forget about it in another generation or so and so that i do wish there were that you know the institution could just be a little bit more open about why they're making changes and but it could be just a fear of being seen as valuable which i think it would be better if if we could all acknowledge more of our fallibility and uh so yeah now there was another part of that did i answer all of that yeah no i mean that that's a great that's a great answer i yeah i mean i talked about the apostle i talked about flumen i talked about um you know gaslighting and people just feeling misled and and no accountability i'm just trying to say things to jog your memory in case there was something else you wanted to add yeah see i mean and another thing too is just to remember that everybody involved i mean regardless whether they're a scholar at the nelly masks will institute a church leader or average member or someone who's out of the church someone who has walked away every single person is going through their own personal journey of trying to make sense of everything trying to reconcile everything and so i i think when we hear people using different types of terminology i don't know how much of that is a reflection of an institution moving or a reflection of individuals who are working toward trying to come to a deeper understanding of what their faith is and so you know but i'm on the outside looking in i don't know what they're thinking their intentions or thoughts or anything but but it is hopeful when things start to move toward more accuracy in any situation and so i think that's a positive thing even though it it can be frustrating when people are changing the goal posts so and so kudos to bushman and to flumen and to you know mason and to the givens and and all the other scholars because even if some of us are frustrated that there hasn't been accountability or that we've been misled at least the conversation's moving towards more accuracy versus less accuracy right yeah and more truth versus less and more open discussion versus less open discussion we can't deny that we're moving in those directions right yeah and i think it's important and and just for everybody involved some of the some of the debates that occur to the generations coming up it just doesn't matter they don't care and so what happens is they're i think what's really important and what's really hard to do is to reassess and re-evaluate our positions on various issues and to recognize when we're digging in our heels because we don't want something to change because we like it the way it is regardless what's true or not true and and i think i think that's an important process for everyone involved to and it's hard because your ego is on the line your pride's on the line especially if you've been public about certain positions and all of a sudden they're not popular people get defensive but um to to just if people can just sit back and reflect and just say it's okay the world's not going to fall apart if we look at this problem from a different angle i think that opens the door for discussions and change and and in situations to fix things to make life better yeah well uh i'm just over the moon grateful for uh your time your generosity of time i think we went a little bit over what what we had planned yeah um i the book is visions in a seer stone by william l davis joseph smith and uh the making of the book of mormon before we end william is there anything else you want to say about this book about your efforts how people can support you how people can get in touch with you what you're doing next like i want to give you every chance to leave everything on the table that you wanted to share today you've been so generous and gracious one one thing i would say is that right now um interest in the book of mormon in the scholarly community the academic community has has been increasing and we're finding out there's a lot of really interesting things to learn from the book of mormon that can tell us a lot about early 19th century culture especially oral culture but in today's publishing world even the academic presses who are normally subsidizing they can publish whatever they want now the pressure is on them to start producing almost like a commercial house and so what i would say is for people who are interested in these things are interested in the academic pursuit that they those author the only way the press is going to know that people are interested and would like to see more studies done along those lines is whether or not people buy the book or not and i'm not just talking about my book but i'm talking about other academic books that are addressing important issues that are kind of trying to push the envelope or else to look at mormonism and culture in a different way and if if the presses don't see any kind of interest or support which they see from sales to be blunt then the opportunities for having those kinds of studies grows less and less and those voices um either won't be heard at all or else they'll have a small audience so i would just encourage people if the if there's a book out there it would be great if it were mine but if it's somebody else's book that one way to show the press that this type of work is appreciated and the people want more is is to to purchase those books so i hope that people will take that into mind and i'm going to take that even one step further and i'm going to put up on the screen right now um and i'm going to paste into this conversation a link to this book and i'm going to put up a screenshot of how to purchase it on amazon although amazon is there a preferred way to purchase this book that's beneficial to the publisher and to you william or is amazon okay um i think now i haven't looked recently at the university of north carolina press's website but they were running a 40 discount um and if it's still there yeah okay right at the top see this 40 on american history sale um you can get the book a little bit cheaper now you you have to if you have prime membership on amazon you get free shipping but you don't get free shipping through the unc but i think overall you still save a few dollars and then but one nice thing that people could do is there are several books published by unc press i'm thinking of spencer fluhmann for example uh he wrote a book on the history of anti-mormonism at least in the um through the 18th century 19th century uh there's taylor petries tabernacles of clay so if people purchased enough books that it came up to 75 then your shipping's for free and so then the books are essentially you were getting them for 40 off so that's another way to support and taylor's book by the way is fantastic yeah and spencer's no dummy i mean he's super smart so spence i i was just thinking i just the other day i was flipping through books um that i had on my shelves trying to reorganize some things and i remember the first time i read the introduction to spencer flewman's book i thought oh my gosh this is the sharpest most sophisticated introduction that um i have seen in mormon studies for a long time just superior and and the whole book is great but just the introduction i thought oh my goodness if if you want to compete with someone like spencer you really have to up your game so there there are some great scholar scholars and great scholarship coming out from lds scholars right now and i think um and also the people who are involved in and around uh mormonism and taves i think is fantastic um i better not start listening i'll get in trouble by missing some people but to look around because there's some great material yeah and i'm just going to be very explicit and i'll make this promise to my listeners if you will go buy william davis's book right now um either you're preferably at uncpressed.org but if not at amazon and or if you will go ahead and buy taylor petrie's book and spencer flume's book and this gets your discount buy this book support mormon scholarship i will hold a pizza party as soon as kovid's over if i can get william out i will if not we'll have him join virtually but just like i i said uh you know regarding rick uh jim bennett uh just like i said regarding uh matt harris who's doing great scholarship i will host a big party and thank all of you i'll pay for the pizza i'll host it and i will reward you for supporting mormon scholarships so please right now buy this book um uh visions in a seer one of my listeners victoria is is saying is it on kindle is is there an audio version of this book is there an electronic version of the book the kindle i think you can get on amazon okay so there is a kindle version but i don't think there's an audio so no okay so please buy this book please support mormon scholarship and most importantly please support william davis and unc press because this is a this is a very important book this is not just kind of a oh what a nice little edition this is a central book i believe and many people believe to understanding um how the book of mormon's put together and if you haven't you know if you don't believe me even joanna brooks uh you know has endorsed it along with as you say um you know many other reputable faithful scholars such as you said at the beginning who was it that endorsed a review just kind of bowman right now bowman came out with a really nice review yeah and that was published in the journal uh uh i'm forgetting it it's a religion new religion but in latin i think so but matt matt sits in the chair of the claremont yeah clermont college which patrick mason was in before he moved to utah state university all right william anything else you want to say before we close you're just a treasure you are literally a treasure that i'm so happy to have newly discovered what else do you want to share before we end oh this is way more than i thought we would do i thought we were going to do an hour and now it's three i'm sorry i swear i would never do anything this long i'm sorry i'm so sorry please forgive me it wasn't intentional it's all right well all right well people are gonna love that you did spend this time but i'm sorry that we went over i really am well i enjoyed it i appreciated it so it was fine and then and then just many of my listeners are saying please thank william so william on behalf of me on behalf of my listeners on behalf of on behalf of your readers and just on behalf of the broader mormon community thank you for for producing this book visions in a seer stone and thank you for coming on mormon stories podcast i owe you one so i am i'm in debt to you you you remember that if you ever have any need i i will repay you the favor in whatever way i can okay pizza yeah all right all right i love it that'll work okay well thank you very much i mean this was a great opportunity and and i hope people you know found something interesting oh this is going to be a great a top 100 episode for sure oh i hope so thanks william you take care and stay in touch all right all right thank you so much all right take care william all right bye-bye and all our listeners thank you so much for joining us today on mormon stories podcast thanks to everyone who donates your donations make this possible huge thanks to brooklyn alden that does my audio and video editing you're fantastic brooklyn if you value this type of programming and you want to see it continue please become a monthly donor to mormon stories podcast click on the go to mormonstories.org at the top of the page click on the donate button become a weekly or a monthly or an annual donor your donations keep this alive as long as you continue donating i will continue creating this type of content thanks to our board at the open storage foundation and our accountants and our lawyers that make everything legit and transparent and uh on the up and up uh but but thanks to you for listening thanks to your support if you want to support us other than donating which is huge you can give us a positive review on mormon stories podcast page we always have haters give us negative reviews so please counterbalance that with positive reviews please go to the apple podcast app and give us a positive review there again we always have haters that don't even listen to the podcast drag down our average review score so please donate please give us positive reviews there please share these episodes on twitter on instagram on facebook on youtube however you can share through email with family and friends and uh if you need support please join the mormon stories podcast facebook community um and to get the support that you need uh just uh keep supporting us thanks for everything you do word of mouth is great and just your your emails of encouragement of mormon stories gmail.com or your comments on youtube on facebook or on the mormonstories.org blog they are all helpful to encourage us to keep continuing thanks all your support i love you guys we've got an amazing episode tomorrow with with radio free mormon we're going to be talking about john gee and his battle against uh the joe smith papers project we're calling it civil war that's a little bit of artistic fun but but don't miss that episode as well as many great episodes we've also will be interviewing mark naugle of quit mormon tomorrow afternoon as well i'm addicted i can't stop as much as i want to slow down my mormon stories podcast episodes i'm an addict and i can't slow down so there's just much more good stuff coming in the days weeks months and years ahead so stay tuned thanks for your support i love you guys and we'll see you guys all again very soon on another episode of mormon stories podcast take care everybody

Channel: Mormon Stories Podcast

Views: 25,146

Rating: 4.7113404 out of 5

Keywords: church of jesus christ of latter-day saints, mormon, lds, book of mormon, joseph smith, mormon stories, john dehlin

Id: XOBgZgbm584

Length: 182min 28sec (10948 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021