The Other Isaiah Problem in the Book of Mormon w/ Kolby Reddish LDS Discussions

Introduction and Episode Overview

John Dehlin 0:00 Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I am one of your hosts for today, John Dehlin. It's December 5, 2025. This is an LDS Discussions Mormon Stories episode, which means it's part of a long 60 plus episode series where we attempt to review or research or discuss Mormon Church or LDS Church truth claims based on evidence with as an objective of an analysis as possible. This series is best consumed in sequence. So what we recommend you do is pause, go back to the beginning of the series and watch from the beginning. And all these subsequent episodes will mean a lot more. You can find the LDS Discussion Series on the Mormon Stories Podcast YouTube channel under the LDS Discussions playlist. You can just search on YouTube LDS Discussions, find the playlist, start from the beginning. You can also find the LDS Discussions podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcast and it's obviously integrated into the Mormon Stories podcast feed as well. This episode, this series started with a man named Mike, or at least he went by Mike. And he has a website called LDS discussions.com where as a convert to the church in a mixed or mixed faith marriage, he began investigating LDS Church truth claims and did like 50 or 60 episodes with us. And then he retired. And now we have an amazing panel to carry on the analysis. And the panel as it is currently constituted includes Idaho attorney Kolby Reddish. Hey, Kolby.

Kolby Reddish 1:44 Good morning, John. How are you?

John Dehlin 1:47 Great. You prepared. You did the primary research for today's episode, is that right?

Kolby Reddish 1:52 That's right.

John Dehlin 1:54 And then an LDS discussions episode wouldn't be complete without Nemo the Mormon. Hey, Nemo.

Nemo 2:00 Hi. This is the panel as presently constituted. That was a very Mormon way of phrasing that.

Guest 2:06 John

John Dehlin 2:09 and Julia. Everyone loves Julia. Welcome, Julia. Thanks for joining us. And Julia helps out with slides and pre and post production as well. So we've got the band together and the topic for today is the other Isaiah problem. And I'll just say that my role is to kind of come into this series blind. Kolby and Nemo and Julie have all reviewed the slides. I'm going to represent viewers and listeners that may have no idea what we're talking about to try and make sure this is accessible to the common viewer or listener, and especially someone who's new. Because my memory is so bad, it's as if I'm looking at all this stuff for the very first time, even though I've been doing this stuff for 30, 40 years. So that's my value. ADD is having no memory. So really quickly, Nemo, do you want to introduce yourself? Other than what I've already said not particularly. Okay.

Nemo 3:11 No, I'm Nemo. That's what you'll know me by on the Internet. And yeah, I do fact checking of church leaders quite often and analysis of the church.

John Dehlin 3:21 And you have a YouTube channel, so subscribe to Mormon Stories, subscribe to LDS discussions, subscribe to Nemo the Mormon. Is that all right?

Nemo 3:30 Yeah, that's about right.

John Dehlin 3:32 And it's giving week, so maybe donate to Nemo the Mormon Giving Week.

Nemo 3:36 Is that a thing? Okay.

John Dehlin 3:37 In the United States, it's kind of giving week, so.

Nemo 3:40 Right.

John Dehlin 3:41 Donate to Nemo the Mormon.

Nemo 3:43 That would explain a lot.

John Dehlin 3:45 What? You got some. You got some more donations?

Nemo 3:47 Donations come through this week. I was like, okay, this is not normal what's going on here?

Julia 3:51 So that's good.

John Dehlin 3:52 Yeah. Kind of the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas, New Year's, when people are shopping. They're also encouraged to not, not forget nonprofits and other worthy causes. So feel free to donate to Mormon Stories and the Open Stories foundation if you want. Also support Nemo. Julia, how do people support you? What's your channel and how do people support you?

Julia 4:14 So I, I'm analyzing Mormonism on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok. Also, I run the shorts for Mormon Stories and I just want to plug. So we're almost at 300,000 followers on TikTok and then almost 100,000 on Instagram. So if you guys haven't followed us on our for our shorts, go ahead and subscribe there so we can, like, hit those goals.

John Dehlin 4:32 So let's break a hundred thousand.

Julia 4:33 Yes, that'd be so nice.

John Dehlin 4:35 Absolutely.

Julia 4:36 Yeah.

Kolby Reddish 4:38 My podcast, John.

John Dehlin 4:40 What?

Kolby Reddish 4:40 You said ask me about my podcast.

John Dehlin 4:43 Kolby, you're a wealthy attorney, so you don't even need support.

Kolby Reddish 4:46 I. I am a public sector attorney, so I am not a wealthy attorney, but an attorney nonetheless.

Setting Up the Other Isaiah Problem

John Dehlin 4:54 All right, well, Kolby, why don't you. Do you want to introduce today's episode and tell us what it's all about?

Kolby Reddish 5:01 Yep. Let me give us kind of a high level overview of what we're going to look at today. So viewers who are familiar with the Book of Mormon know that the Book of Mormon is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints or the Mormon Church's foundational Book of Scripture. And one of the things that I've been working on, and we've kind of done a previous entry in the LDS discussion series. Looking at this is looking at ways we can test the Book of Mormon's claims about the world that it comes from and about the world that it's written in. Basically looking at the Book of Mormon like a text that we're trying to falsify. When I say falsify, I don't mean that we're going a field from the objective tone that we try and do here on the LDS discussion series. I mean, we're thinking about it like a testable hypothesis, and we're trying to see if the evidence matches for the test that we're running. So if you'll pull up the first slide, I'll explain what we're going to look at today in the context of the other Isaiah problem. So I called this presentation the other Isaiah problem because what we're going to look at is we're going to look at Isaiah verses that are captured in the Book of Mormon, and we're going to examine whether, basically we're going to examine whether the evidence we find is the evidence we would expect if the Book of Mormon's claims about itself were true. So let me do kind of my disclaimer and my meta point. When I'm talking about the Book of Mormon in this context, I'm only talking about the question of historicity. And the reason that I say that is because I recognize that the Book of Mormon has a lot of value, utility, depth to people. There's. I'm not speaking to any of those questions. I'm really trying to examine whether the Book of Mormon's historical claims hold up. One reason I called this the other Isaiah problem is because folks that are familiar with Mormon studies and studies of the Book of Mormon are going to know that there is a problem with Isaiah in the Book of Mormon, meaning the deutero Isaiah problem. So basically, biblical scholarship indicates that there were not just one, there was not just one author of Isaiah. There were actually three authors of Isaiah. So there was Deutero Isaiah written by the second author of Isaiah and Trito Isaiah written by the third author of Isaiah.

John Dehlin 7:11 Was Isaiah any of those authors, by the way? Well,

Kolby Reddish 7:17 we don't really know.

John Dehlin 7:18 Isaiah was written by three authors, none of them named Isaiah.

Kolby Reddish 7:23 That's very likely the case. The issue for the Book of Mormon containing deutero Isaiah in a very brief snapshot is that Deutero Isaiah would not have been written at the time that the Book of Mormon takes place. And so it, it should have been

John Dehlin 7:36 written after Lehi and his family left Jerusalem, right?

Kolby Reddish 7:40 Correct. Because it was written after the exile in 587. And so it should not exist in the Book of Mormon because they left before the exile.

Nemo 7:49 That's.

John Dehlin 7:49 It wouldn't have gone on the brass plates that Nephi got from Laban.

Kolby Reddish 7:54 Exactly. The other thing I'm not going to address is, aside from just mention that it kind of inspired me to look at this further, is Kolby Townsend recently. The Much better Kolby did a. Did a piece recently on looking at the use of Adam Clark's Bible commentary in the Book of Mormon. So he was expanding on work done by Tom Weymouth looking at the use of the Adam Clark Bible commentary in the Joseph Smith translation. And so I'm only just saying that's basically looking at that piece that Kolby Townsend wrote earlier this year is basically what inspired me to look at this issue a little bit further. But as far as I know, no one's actually looked at this, this particular issue. So luckily, John, I don't know that your memory, even if, even if you had heard this before, I don't think you would have had an opportunity to hear this before, I guess is what I'm saying. And so here's really the overall claim we'll look at today. If the Book of Mormon were historical, we would expect to see certain pieces of evidence. So this is an attempt to analyze whether the Book of Mormon matches by examining whether its claims about its world are likely historically true. And so while it is true that absence of evidence is not conclusive evidence of absence, the absence of evidence where it's expected, where we're expecting to find evidence, can be strong evidence that we need to consider. I have this snapshot from an episode I did with Radio Free Mormon on his channel. Do linguistics prove the Book of Mormon true? That's kind of what started my fascination with looking at the Book of Mormon in this way and really trying to measure whether it's historical claims hold up. So if people want a Lord of the Rings extended version length podcast, they can go listen to that, I guess.

John Dehlin 9:30 Wait, wait. RFM's doing longer episodes, the Mormon stories these days.

Kolby Reddish 9:34 Only when he invites me, I guess that's.

Nemo 9:37 Am I the only one whose episodes are getting shorter as I go?

John Dehlin 9:41 Yes.

Nemo 9:41 My last few have been like four or five minutes.

John Dehlin 9:43 Yes, you are. You are.

Timeline of Isaiah and the Book of Mormon

Kolby Reddish 9:47 Julia, if you'll move to the next slide, I think we've got our timeline. So we'll come back to this timeline a few times because there's a lot of information here. But here's basically what we're going to look at. So I'm going to start on the right hand side of this timeline. We're going to be looking at the Book of Mormon, right? So in 1829 is when the Book of Mormon is translated in 1611 is when the King James Version of the Bible is translated and assembled. And the King James Version draws from several different predecessor texts. One of those is the Masoretic text. The Masoretic text was put together in 1009 CE, and the. The most complete copy of that was the Leningrad Codex. And so what we're going to look at is we're going to look at the versions of Isaiah that are in the Book of Mormon and compare them to the, the King James version of the Bible, the Masoretic text, and then we're going to look at a text that predates either of those, an early version of Isaiah called the Great Isaiah scroll that was found as part of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And the reason we're going to look at that, people can see the next step to the left is because in 600 BC, when the book of Mormon records that Lehi and Nephi leave Jerusalem with the brass plates. There are certain things on those brass plates. And we'll talk about that in more detail in just a moment. But the idea here is that if the Book of Mormon is containing versions of Isaiah that were supposedly contained on the brass plates, what would we expect these brass plates to most resemble? I'm not going to claim that it should be an exact match, but we should expect that the brass plates version of Isaiah should more closely match this 125bc version of the earlier.

John Dehlin 11:29 The earlier, the better.

Kolby Reddish 11:31 Exactly. And so that's what we're going to examine basically in detail is as we look at the Book of Mormon's Isaiah chapters, which do they most carefully match or most closely match? Do they match the Great Isaiah scroll, which is what we would expect if the Book of Mormon's historical claims were true? Do they match the Masoretic text version from a thousand years later? Or do they most closely match the King James version of the Bible from 500 years after that, which Joseph had

John Dehlin 11:55 in his possession at the time.

Kolby Reddish 11:57 Exactly.

John Dehlin 11:59 Really quickly, do we know when the Great Isaiah scroll was found?

Kolby Reddish 12:03 1947.

John Dehlin 12:04 Okay.

Nemo 12:06 All right.

Kolby Reddish 12:06 And we will cover that in more depth also.

John Dehlin 12:08 Okay, cool, cool.

Kolby Reddish 12:10 Okay, if we can move to the next one. Before we talk about the details of all of these pieces, it's important to remind people, especially for the never Mormon audience, a brief explanation about the Book of Mormon. Basically, what the Book of Mormon is. So this actually is in current Book of. This comes from the Church itself, in current Book of Mormons Books of Mormon. I know, there's a joke there. And this, this is titled A Brief Explanation about the Book of Mormon. So this is right in Book of Mormons today. It says the Book of Mormon is a sacred record of peoples in ancient America and was engraved upon metal plates. Sources from which this record were compiled include the following. And then it's got the plates of Nephi with a longer explanation, the plates of Mormon with a longer explanation, the plates of ether, and then the plates of brass. These are the brass plates that were on the previous slide. And Nemo, would you mind reading that description of the brass plates?

The Brass Plates and Their Contents

Nemo 13:01 The plates of brass brought by the people of Lehi From Jerusalem in 600 B.C. these contained the Five Books of Moses and also a record of the Jews from the beginning down to the commencement of the reign of Zedekiah, King of Judah, and also the prophecies of the holy prophets. Many quotations from these plates, citing Isaiah and other biblical and non biblical prophets appear in the Book of Mormon.

Kolby Reddish 13:25 Okay, thanks, Nemo. And I think what that helps show is basically there were different plates involved in the Book of Mormon. We've got the plates of Nephi that basically contain the books of first and Second Nephi in the Book of Mormon today, the Plates of Mormon, where he basically abridged the rest of the record and tells the rest of the story, aside from the story of the Jaredites, which is in the Book of Ether. The plates of brass, then, as it says here at the bottom, have quotations that are used mostly through first and Second Nephi, but they come supposedly from these plates of brass that existed in 600 BC. And I think we've got more detail on this in the next couple slides as well. So this comes again from the Scriptures Today. There's a guide to the scriptures that the Church puts out that gives another description of the brass plates. Julia, do you want to read this one?

Julia 14:16 Yes. And this, you said it comes from the Church itself, Correct. Okay. A record of the Jews from the beginning to 600 B.C. containing many writings in the prophets. This record was kept by Laban, one of the Jewish elders in Jerusalem. While Lehi and his family were in the wilderness, Lehi sent his sons back to Jerusalem to obtain this record.

Kolby Reddish 14:37 And it's got a quotation there that I wanted to look at. So in First Nephi 5, this is where it actually talks about it in the Book of Mormon. So this is right from the book of Mormon, 1st Nephi 5, 11 and 1313, it says, and after they had given thanks unto the God of Israel, my father Lehi took the records which were engraven upon the plates of brass. And he did search them from the beginning and he beheld that they did contain the five books of Moses, which gave an account of the creation of the world, and also of Adam and Eve, who were our first parents. And also the prophecies of the holy prophets from the beginning, even down to the commencement of the reign of Zedekiah. And also many prophecies have, which have been spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah. Jeremiah is a book that comes after Isaiah. So what this is really clearly showing here is two things. The first is that the brass plates, or at least in the Book of Mormon's view, the brass plates are like a literal thing that existed, that contained the books of basically starting at the Book of Genesis until the the Book of Jeremiah, parts of the Book of Jeremiah. The first obvious problem there is that this idea that like a proto Bible like this existed, it just simply didn't. And we'll look at the. The church itself actually says this in its Bible dictionary here in just a minute. The second thing is that it's telling us, it's telling us very directly in the Book of Mormon what the brass plates contained. And so we know that when we're looking at these comparisons later, that this is the claim that the Book of Mormon makes about itself, that it contained this early version of Isaiah that would have existed in 600 BC.

John Dehlin 16:06 Kolby, if I could just jump in. And Nemo. And Julia, please also add. One of the reasons why we encourage people to start the LDS discussion series from the beginning is because even at this five, six slides in, we've already mentioned some things that we have entire episodes addressing. So for example, we're going to be talking about the problem with this idea of brass plates and a proto Bible and Isaiah. But past episodes talk about the fact that the earth isn't 6,000 years old as the Doctrine and Covenant says, that Adam and Eve weren't the first humans. As you know, LDS church leaders have taught that the Tower of Babel never happened, that the global flood never happened. And so we've already addressed several problems that in addition to the fact that this whole narrative in the Book of Mormon about large plates and small plates and religious records and war records is an outgrowth, if I remember right, of Martin Harris losing the 116 pages, Joseph Smith having to like pivot and replace the 116 pages, but then explain why what he end up ends up producing in the 116 pages was maybe not consistent with what he ends up writing from what Mosiah on and why it turns religious versus a secular history. Like, we've covered many, many episodes that address many of the problems that we've just kind of gleaned over. Is that. And Nemo and others. Please feel free to be more articulate about what I just said.

Julia 17:49 Yeah, no, that's great. Like when, as you're reading this, Kolby, I was thinking if I was going to write a book and trying to fill it up quickly, it's easiest to do that by basing off of something else. And so at the beginning of the Book of Mormon, he's just quoting a lot from the Bible. And then at the end, you have the character of Christ coming in and he's saying a lot of things that he says in the New Testament. And so it's just easy content for Joseph to just kind of fill in. To fill up the space of, of the, what, 500 pages of the Book of Mormon. So I was just thinking, like, this is very convenient for Joseph to have this be here in the text.

Nemo 18:19 And also from his perspective, this book is a book that he's creating to kind of draw people in to this religious movement. What's going to make it sound more authoritative is one, the use of King James language, and two, appeals to the Old Testament. Appeals to biblically authoritative texts at the time. Right. So saying that, okay, these records that the people in my book had access to means that they were drinking from the right water. Right. They were drawing from the Old Testament, just like Christ did, just like later biblical participants did. It places them within the Christian world by having the five books of Moses and things like that in.

Julia 18:55 Yeah, yeah.

Nemo 18:56 And it also legitimizes the claim that they were ancient Jews as. Right. It's this idea as well that, okay, they've got the books of the Torah in their records and that's, again, trying to lend more authority there.

Kolby Reddish 19:06 Right. I think the other earlier LDS discussions episode that comes to mind for me, too, John, is tight versus loose translation. I know Mike did a really good examination of that, and I think this goes hand in hand with that in the sense that you can look at the fact that the Book of, like, while apologists today want to claim that the Book of Mormon can still be true while being a looser, conceptual translation. If you look at what the Book of Mormon is actually saying about itself and what its author is saying, it is very clearly only contemplating this as, like, literal records that are being engraved upon brass plates. And I think that part is very important because we're going to analyze that claim Basically in depth. Like, is that what we see when we look at these earlier versions of Isaiah compared to what's in the Book of Mormon? So I think that literality of the translation project, or transcription project, whatever you want to call it, I think that's another important thing here to understand that this was always contemplated by Joseph and the scribes as a tight translation. And I think that's really important to keep in mind also.

Julia 20:11 Yeah.

Nemo 20:11 Because a lot of the arguments against this that we'll come to later on are rebutted by the fact that the tight translation model is the one that Joseph professed to and all the other witnesses did too.

Kolby Reddish 20:23 Right. So this next slide just shows that in the LDS Bible dictionary. So the, the. In your quad or in your set of scriptures, set of Mormon scriptures, there's a part of it known as the LDS Bible Dictionary, which has a lot of good informative notes. You can look up by word and just understand more about the world of the Bible and the Book of Mormon. And when you look up the word codex, which is what basically they're offering here as this proto Bible, what it's claiming that the brass plates would have been, I think it's very interesting to note that in the LDS Bible dictionary today, you have this. Julia, do you want to read this about codexes?

Julia 21:00 The whole thing or just the one part?

Kolby Reddish 21:03 I think the whole thing, actually.

Julia 21:04 Sure. A manuscript volume of ancient biblical text, a codex form of manuscript is somewhat like our present book style, with the pages piled on one another and joined on one side, generally with stitching. This is contrasted to a scroll in which the sheets are joined side by side in a series, making one long and continuous piece that is rolled from one or both ends. The codex is much easier to use than it is a long scroll. The general conclusion among scholars is that the Hebrews did not use codices until the 2nd or 3rd century AD. Thus, Old Testament documents are scrolls, although many New Testament documents are codices. The gold plates from which the Book of Mormon was translated were in codex form, joined with three rings on one side.

Kolby Reddish 21:54 Yeah. And the point here, I think is pretty obvious, is we're talking about these brass plates that supposedly existed in 600 BC. And in the LDS Bible Dictionary, you can see right there that the basic idea is that codices, like the technology of having a book in this form, didn't exist until several hundred years after we would have needed it for the brass plate story to be true. And you can kind of see that they almost, almost acknowledge this by talking about the Gold plates from which the Book of Mormon was translated. Because those would also be a problem because the gold plates started, you know, with Nephi and then with Mormon and Moroni continued. But they're also a problem for, for not having this technology in the right time period.

Nemo 22:39 Isn't that interesting because the famous piece of Church art that shows the gold plates being compiled, shows a bunch of scrolls and then things being engraven. So they're taking this narrative and going, right, he would have gone from scrolls to this new codex technology. But then in that all they have to do is say the general consensus among scholars, that's the only wiggle room they're able to give themselves here is to say, well, not all scholars, it's general consensus. It's the same thing with Egyptologists. They'll say most Egyptologists agree that to leave room for Kerry Muhlstein who is church broken, so therefore not acting as an impartial Egyptologist in that matter. So yeah, they tried to give themselves a little bit of wiggle room, but they've essentially admitted there that the technology of the brass plates wouldn't have existed at the time of the brass plates.

Julia 23:22 Well, and the gold plates too. Right. So aren't they just saying here that it's the brass plates and the gold plates are anachronistic? Is that what they're saying?

Kolby Reddish 23:31 That's exactly right.

Nemo 23:31 Church has admitted that. Yes.

Julia 23:33 Yeah, yeah.

Anachronism of Scrolls vs. Books on Plates

Kolby Reddish 23:34 So the, the very first problem, basically we could, we could actually end the episode here in the sense that the technology that is required for the story to be historical, the Church acknowledges did not exist in the time period it needed to exist for the story to be historical period.

John Dehlin 23:52 And let's put that in plain language. Like what I am wondering, just to summarize, is there any evidence that Jews in Israel in 600 BC were engraving on brass plates, Biblical books or passages? I, I think the answer is no. Correct.

Kolby Reddish 24:14 Well, there were forms of decorative plates and this is where apologists get really clever by arguing about things like the plates of Darius. But what you see in those types of plates isn't what we're talking about here. They weren't record keeping engravings on plates. They were like decorative, almost like something like a knickknack or something that we

John Dehlin 24:33 would put on poetry or something visual like the equivalent of what you'd hang on a wall, a quote or something or images. This idea of like books and then chapters and then verses. There's no record of that ever happening on brass plates by Israelis 600 years before Jesus is Born. Is that right?

Julia 25:01 And I do think Mike. I do think Mike has done episodes on this with you where he talks about these silver scrolls or the Darius scrolls or things like that, and he talks about the amount of text that was on them versus the amount of text that would have had to have existed on the gold plates and how it doesn't fit.

Nemo 25:15 And the Darius plates weren't a codex. They were a set of plates with inscriptions on them, but they weren't bound like a book, like a codex.

Kolby Reddish 25:22 Right. They're like decorative plates.

Nemo 25:25 Yeah.

John Dehlin 25:25 So the idea of books with chapters and verses, that wasn't a thing I'm

Nemo 25:30 binding down the spine. It's that idea of binding things down the spine and having leaves that you turn. That's a technology that wasn't being done.

Julia 25:38 Exactly.

John Dehlin 25:38 And we're calling that a technology, but it's not like AI. I mean, we're talking about ancient.

Nemo 25:45 The wheel is technology. Right, right. You know what I mean?

John Dehlin 25:48 Books with. Books with pages with some type of spine or binding did not exist 600 years before Christ. Certainly not in brass plate form.

Julia 26:01 Right, right. So this. So this next slide that we have is actually a clip that I pulled from David Bachavoy where he's discussing the same exact thing. And I felt it was worth sharing here because he is a Bible scholar and he studied this. And so if we. We can just show that clip to you.

John Dehlin 26:15 All right, let's do it.

▶ Video Clip 1

Video Clip 1 26:21 So Isaiah is a book. Well, let's. Let's talk about what that means for a second. Isaiah isn't a book. Isaiah is a scroll. Right. There was no such thing as a book in the ancient near east. At the time of Isaiah, sacred text or others were put. Were put on scrolls. And I think that's kind of important. It actually ties into one of the anachronisms in the Book of Mormon. The idea that there would have been brass plates that existed as a type of book where all of these scrolls would have been brought together. Like the contemporary Bible,

Video Clip 1 26:55 like that Laban would have these brass blades with the words of Isaiah and the words of.

Video Clip 1 27:00 Yeah. Not only a book, but then brought together and organized into that fashion and translated from Hebrew into or into an Egyptian script is just. It just.

Video Clip 1 27:13 It just doesn't work.

Video Clip 1 27:15 The idea of brass plates is anachronistic.

Video Clip 1 27:17 Well, the idea of a compilation of all these books, like starting with Moses and then ending with Isaiah.

Video Clip 1 27:23 The idea of several books compiled into a central text on plates in book form, that idea in and of itself is just totally. Books are Books are a medieval creation, meaning 1500. What? 1300?

Video Clip 1 27:41 Yeah. So. Well, I don't know exactly. We should off the top of my head, but it is medieval, their medieval creation. But it's.

Video Clip 1 27:48 And for those who don't know what that means, that's what, 1200.

Video Clip 1 27:51 Yeah. Somewhere along A.D. yeah. It's very late now. In Joseph Smith's day, the Bible is viewed as a book. In fact, the word Bible itself means books. It is a book where we've taken and brought everything together. And in fact, many readers today look at the Bible as if it's one unified source. But it is a compilation of diverse material written over a long period of time. So for example, the books of the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament were written over a thousand year period. So the earliest parts, the earliest sections of text in the Hebrew Bible date to about 1200 BCE or so. And then the most recent parts of that, about 200. So more or less a thousand year period that that material had been developed for the Old Testament.

Julia 28:37 And then I just wanted to add with that. So I think you said the isaiah scroll was 125bc correct. Okay. I wasn't sure if he was including that in there when he said about 200. So even later.

John Dehlin 28:50 And I just want to tell viewers and listeners my episodes of David Bacavoy are for sure some of the most important episodes I've ever done on Mormon stories. So please check those out if you're looking for really important Mormon stories, classic interviews. All right, go ahead, Kolby.

Kolby Reddish 29:09 Yeah, I think that was a great inclusion. Julia. I like that clip a lot because it helps really drive a point on this original anachronistic problem. But we're gonna just set that aside for a second and continue saying, okay, we're gonna pretend like that's not an anachronism. Let's continue on with what the book claims about itself. So in second Nephi 11, so the second book of the Book of Mormon, we have Nephi talking about this. This is again to make the point that he is incorporating this brass plates part into his narrative as a literal thing, where he's writing the literal words of Isaiah from the brass plates into the Book of Mormon. And he even gives the reason why. John, do you want to read this from second Nephi 11 quote, and now

John Dehlin 29:53 I, Nephi, write more of the words of Isaiah. For my soul delighteth in his words. For I will liken his words unto my people, and I will send them forth unto all my children. For he verily saw my redeemer even as I have seen him.

Kolby Reddish 30:13 Yeah. And so you can see with him talking about writing the words of Isaiah again, the point here is that if apologists want to shift to this looser conceptual translation, you really can't do that with these chapters that we're looking at with the Book of Mormon having these Isaiah quotes in it. Because Nephi is talking about writing these words directly.

Nemo 30:32 Right.

Kolby Reddish 30:32 So these, this is all contemplating literal, literally him, what's depicted in this adorable claymation to the right. Him literally sitting there and recording the words from one. One set of plates to the other set of plates because he sees so much value in the words of Isaiah.

Julia 30:47 Yeah. So you have Nephi saying these are exact. And then you have Joseph and all the, all the witnesses saying this is exact. And so there shouldn't be any variation or very little variation between all the texts.

Kolby Reddish 30:58 Exactly. And so the first, the verses of Isaiah that are in the Book of Mormon. To do my analysis, I borrowed from this table of direct quotations of the Book of Isaiah in the Book of Mormon that were compiled by. I think he's now deceased, but LDS apologist Jack Welch. And so this just shows the verses that I looked at and analyzed. You can see. Basically, it starts at Isaiah chapter two. That's the first chapter that we'll look at. And then it skips down to Isaiah chapter 11 and incorporates quotes from Isaiah 52, 53, 54. We'll show the entire table of what we. We looked at here in just a minute.

Julia 31:40 So I want to ask, though, too, because I think Deutero Isaiah is. Is it 45 to 55 or something like that? It's in the 40s.

Kolby Reddish 31:46 I think it starts at 41.

Julia 31:47 Yeah, 41. So you can see a lot of them on the side. This little picture, this little chart. You can see that a lot of this is Deutero Isaiah. But I think the examples that you're about to show don't come from Deutero Isaiah. Is that correct?

Kolby Reddish 31:59 Some of them do, because I have some quotes from 48 and some from 53. So.

Julia 32:04 Okay. Okay.

Kolby Reddish 32:05 Yep. So this is an introduction to the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Great Isaiah scroll in particular, because that's the scroll we're going to look at. So this information comes directly from the digital Dead Sea Scrolls Museum in Jerusalem. So this, this comes from their landing page where they talk about the Great Isaiah scroll that they have in their possession today. So the, the Great Isaiah scroll, which is known as 1Q Isaiah A, is one of the original seven Dead Sea Scrolls that was discovered in Qumran in 1947. It is the largest and best preserved of all the biblical scrolls and the only one that is almost complete. It's 24ft long. Just for context, for people to understand, that's how long this scroll is. So it has 54 columns that contain all 66 chapters of the Hebrew version of the biblical Book of Isaiah and it dates back to 125 BC. Julia, you asked about that a second ago. What that means is that that is one of the oldest of the Dead Sea Scrolls and it advanced our knowledge of what Isaiah looked like back a thousand years. So it's set, it's earlier than the previous earliest manuscript by a thousand years. And so it helped us understand what this earlier version of Isaiah would have looked like. And I think this continues on to the next slide. Julia Feel advance says so at the Same time, the 2000 year old scroll contains alternative spellings, scribal errors, corrections, and most fundamentally, many variant readings. Strictly speaking, the number of textual variants. So when it's talking about textual variants here, it's saying if we look at that version from 1009 in the Leningrad Codex, the Maseratic text version, and then we look at this earlier version, there are 2,600 variants between the two. Sometimes those variants range from a single letter to sometimes one or more words to complete variant verse or verses. And so those variants are what we're looking at today. Because if there's differences between this early version of Isaiah and a later version of Isaiah, again, if we keep our timeline slide in mind, what we should see is that the verses in the Book of Mormon that are quoting from Isaiah should more closely match this early version of Isaiah than it should the later version of Isaiah. And that's what I have here in red. Because of that, this great Isaiah scroll discovery in 1947 gives us a rare example to make a falsifiable prediction about Book of Mormon historicity. And I really sum it up this way. If the Book of Mormon's brass plates story were true, we would expect to see the Book of Mormon's Isaiah verses agree more with the Great Isaiah scroll than the Masoretic Text version or the King James Version, when we have these variants between the two.

Nemo 34:45 Yeah, because can I, can I just drill into something there real quick? Of course, is that languages are a living thing and they change and they evolve over time. Look at the way the English language has changed just in the past, you know, hundred years or so. The way we speak is different now. And what you've got here is a difference between the writings of Isaiah over a thousand years. So there's going to be differences. What they give us a glimpse into is something far more contemporary. Even though they're a couple of hundred years away from the time at which the Isaiah that was written onto the brass plates was written, it's far more contemporary than a thousand years away. I think that's really key, is how close they actually are because of the way language changes. So there would be key indicators there. Right.

Kolby Reddish 35:34 And especially when we're looking at religious narratives. So everything you said is absolutely accurate, Nima. We do see natural evolution in language. But. But the other thing we see with religious narratives in particular is we see the narratives get added to and changed over time by scribes, maybe potentially unintentionally. But the. The bottom line is when we're looking at these two different versions of this text, we should expect to see especially when we're dealing with like the variant verse or verses. Right. Like later added version verses that we know shouldn't exist. They shouldn't be in the Book of Mormon's version if they were added after the Book of Mormon supposedly drew from this brass plates narrative. So those are our most most compelling examples and are kind of separate from the natural evolution of language, although that's interesting also. Yep. So this is just again introducing people to the Masoretic text if they're not familiar with what the Masoretic text is. It was an authoritative and Aramaic. Authoritative Hebrew and Aramaic text of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible. And the oldest known copy, the Leningrad codex, dates to 1009 BC. I'm sorry, CE and so what we're looking at is the Masoretic text most often, but not always is what then makes it into the King James Version of the Bible. So sometimes the Masoretic text version was relied on, sometimes the Septuagint was. That's a little bit more complicated, kind of like history of where the Bible comes from. But the bottom line is here, when we're doing our comparison, I was doing the comparison to the Great Isaiah scroll and then to the Masoretic text version also.

Nemo 37:16 Because that's what the KJV draws from, correct?

Kolby Reddish 37:19 At least in part. Not entirely, but I'll note when the two diverge. Masoretic text versus King James Version. And so the Masoretic text comes from a group of Jews known as the Masoretes. And that's basically why it comes out of this time period much later in about A AD can we Move to the next.

Nemo 37:40 Yeah, this is important to note as well that 1440 was the invention of the printing press. So up until this point, religious texts were copied by scholars. And still in some traditions of Islam today and traditions of Judaism, I think hand copied scripture is still in use. There were people that will hand copy the Torah out. There are people that will hand copy the Quran out as a traditional thing.

Kolby Reddish 38:09 Interesting.

Nemo 38:09 So that's how these texts were then reproduced and passed along because the printed press hadn't been invented.

Kolby Reddish 38:17 So this timeline again is just for people to keep in mind as we move through these examples. Right. We have Isaiah actually doing his ministry supposedly in 740 BC, if a real person named Isaiah existed. To go back to John's question about different version or different potential authors for Isaiah. But in 740 BC is when Isaiah's ministry begins, then we've got the brass plates. So we should have the most close version in the, in the Book of Mormon. That's what we should find is that version should be the closest to what Isaiah actually wrote. Right after that, then we have the Great Isaiah scroll. And again that's what we're looking at should do we see that the brass plates version of Isaiah matches the great Isaiah scroll or do we see it matching the versions that Joseph Smith would have had available to him in the King James Version and the Masoretic text?

Julia 39:05 Yeah.

High-Level Conclusions About Isaiah in the Book of Mormon

Kolby Reddish 39:06 So with all of that framing now, I think we're ready to look at our high level conclusions. I think that framing is important though to help people contextualize because I know there's a lot of different moving pieces to this. But we're going to look at this analysis in a second. But I want to share the high level conclusions first. So I compared all of the Book of Mormon's Isaiah passages against these comparisons that we've talked about. The King James Version, the Masoretic text version and the Great Ice Zaya scroll version of Isaiah. And what we see is that almost always the Book of Mormon aligns word for word with the King James Version of the Bible, which would have been available to Joseph Smith or the Masoretic text version of Isaiah, which was again from a thousand ad, including late medieval editions, translation, quirks and even Latin loan words. That's important because a Jew in 600 BC or would not have had access to Latin at all. And so these Book of Mormon's Isaiah passages show no substantive agreement with any unique reading from the Great Isaiah scroll. There are five very, very small examples that we'll look at from an LDS apologist that they claim those and we'll just see how compelling people think those few examples are versus the rest of what we'll look at. What this demonstrates is that the Book of Mormon reflects a 17th century English Bible, not a pre exilic Hebrew source of Isaiah, which contradicts its claim to preserve Isaiah as it existed around 600 BC. So those are the high level conclusions. If anyone has any thoughts or questions before we move to the methodology, those. That's basically the takeaway. So I've illustrated Nephi here kind of disappearing because this is one of the interesting things about looking at the Book of Mormon this way is, and this is where I want to keep going with this series is as we look at things like this in the Book of Mormon where the Book of Mormon makes claims about itself. The reason I have Nephi disappearing like he just got Thanos snapped is because if the Book of Mormon's claims about the way the Book of Mormon was written and compiled are not literally historically true, the Book of Mormon cannot exist. It's almost like the back to the future problem, right? If the book's recording things about itself and its own existence that aren't true, aren't literally historically accurate, the book itself can't exist. And that's why this is, I think, the way I'm looking at the book going forward. So as I said methodology, I compared each Isaiah chapter that's quoted in the Book of Mormon, starting at Isaiah 2 and moving through with some, with some exceptions to verse or chapter 54, against the great Isaiah Scroll Version, the Masoretic text version and the King James Version. And I noted every single variant with the same type of notation. And then I compared this version against the 1830s Book of Mormon text. So that's another, I think, important part of this is I use the original version of the Book of Mormon, not the the current version of the Book of Mormon because they have been thousands and thousands of changes to the Book of Mormon, many of them very small. Apologists are right when they say that. But there have been many, many changes to the Book of Mormon over time. So the idea here again is we're seeing whether the Book of Mormon reflects any of these unique great Isaiah scroll view variants then new to our version of this. Looking at this idea, I also reviewed whether Joseph Smith introduced changes to these same chapters of Isaiah in his Joseph Smith translation of the Bible. And this comes from an introduction to what the Joseph Smith translation is from. I believe I pulled this from the Joseph Smith papers. Julia would you mind reading this introduction? And I'll. I'll probably remember where I pulled it from.

Book of Mormon Dependence on the King James Version

Julia 42:56 So the very bottom where it says in June.

Kolby Reddish 42:58 Yep, just that bottom paragraph.

Julia 43:00 Sure. In June of 1830, Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery began recording a revelation related to Moses and other prominent Old Testament figures. Over the next three years, this work expanded into what is now designated the Book of Moses and a complete revelatory rereading of the Bible, an endeavor that came to be known as the Joseph Smith's New translation or Bible revision.

Kolby Reddish 43:25 Yeah, and I did pull this from the actual manuscript of those changes being made from the Joseph Smith Papers. Now that I see that JS that's the way they always designate Joseph Smith at the Joseph Smith Papers. So the important part here is again, the reason Joseph Smith is doing the Joseph Smith translation is supposedly to restore these lost plain and precious parts to revert the Bible back to its original state. And so now we're adding that comparison as well as we look at each

Nemo 43:51 of these variants, because what's the article of faith? We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it's translated correctly. We also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God. So the idea is that the Bible is right so far as it has been translated correctly. So that gives Joseph Smith an end to say, well, I need to do some new translation or a revision of it. And that puts paid to an apologetic that I kind of raised with you when we were going over these slides the other day. I don't know whether it's a good time to bring it up now, but the idea that, okay, Nephi did preserve the words of Isaiah, but the reason that they more closely match the King James version is because God chose to reveal to Joseph Smith in the hat on the stone words that resemble the King James Version choices for the quotations of Isaiah, because that's more familiar or that's a more correct translation because that's God's preferred translation. The problem with that idea is that then why is Joseph Smith going through the Bible and going, no, this isn't right. We need to get revelatory insight to make the Bible more correct that wouldn't then match up.

Julia 44:52 I also have a question. So Joseph Smith is using to translate the gold plates. He's using the stone in the hat, this brown egg shaped seer stone here in 1830. I still think he has this brown seer stone. I think his mom has it in the 1840s. According to other viewers or people in contemporaneous to Joseph. But is Joseph using. How is Joseph translating the Bible? Is it just coming into his head? Is he using the stone? Do we know? Like, I don't even know if I know that process fully.

Kolby Reddish 45:24 I don't. I don't know that I know fully whether the seer stones were involved in the Joseph Smith translation. I actually would have to look at that. Julia. It's a great question. I think no matter what mechanism he used, the bottom line is that Joseph Smith claimed this was a revelatory experience where he's restoring the Bible back to its original state. So to Nemo's apologetic kind of argument. I think the problem with that apologetic argument, the reason I just think that's kind of ridiculous, is what that would require is basically that God is. Tell. God is somehow giving Joseph Smith the idea of that he's restoring the Bible back to its original version. But that's not actually what he's doing. He's basically adding to it, expanding upon it, using it as a catalyst, whatever you want to say with those kind of looser conceptual translation ideas. So the real question is, like, why is God punking Joseph Smith? Like, why is he making.

Nemo 46:18 We have a more correct version in the older.

Kolby Reddish 46:23 Why is he making him think that he's restoring it back to its original state when that's not what God is doing? That. That, to me, is why I would say that apologetic is. Doesn't work. Is.

Nemo 46:34 And that's because it requires you. JST stuff doesn't align with the great Isaiah scroll.

Kolby Reddish 46:39 Right, Exactly. And nor does the Book of Mormon version. So those are what we're going to compare to. We're going to look at this great Isaiah scroll version, treat that as our earliest text, because it is. And so we'll basically see does the Book of Mormon's Isaiah version most closely match great Isaiah scroll, Masoretic text Version, King James Version or the Joseph Smith translation? So we've got a lot of different comparisons here where Joseph can vindicate himself. And I've got unfortunate news for you. It doesn't go very well for. For Brother Joseph.

Nemo 47:10 But shouldn't we be giving Brother Joseph a break? Is that not.

Kolby Reddish 47:14 I really try.

John Dehlin 47:14 Let's see. Let's see the evidence.

Kolby Reddish 47:17 I really try.

John Dehlin 47:18 I'm skeptical, Kolby. I'm skeptical. I want to see the evidence.

Nemo 47:21 Perfect.

Kolby Reddish 47:22 Well, you, you're just. I've got just the collection for you here. So as far as methodology goes, here's where I pulled the different versions of the translation of Isaiah. I pulled this again from our Digital Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. You can see here this page where you can do this exact same analysis yourself by pulling these English translations of the Book of Isaiah. On the left you can see the. The great Isaiah scroll version, and on the right you can see the Masoretic text version. So that's what I pulled to start this analysis, then adding in the Book of Mormon, the King James Version, and the Joseph Smith translation as I continued on through the project.

Julia 48:00 And I just want to point out, because this Isaiah scroll, it can be translated by others. This one is translated by Professor Peter W. Flint and Professor Eugene Ulrich. And so I just wanted to point that too, because I guess there's. There's probably other ones too, but.

Kolby Reddish 48:11 Yeah, yep.

Julia 48:13 Listeners. Yeah.

Kolby Reddish 48:15 So in every single one of these slides, the great Isaiah scroll version is going to be on the left. The Masoretic text version is going to be on the right. And then we're going to basically point out the differences between the two. Actually, if you'll go to the next slide, Julia, then it's got the arrows that kind of show the differences here on this one. So the first variant that I came across was in Isaiah chapter two. And this one was very interesting, exciting for me. John, to your point of we need to see the evidence. One of the things I saw in this one when I started looking at it is this was the first one I said, oh my gosh, I found one where Joseph Smith got it right. Now, is it a very small variant, one that's just basically a synonym? Yep. And then this is why I added the King James Version, because you can't only compare to the Masoretic text version because sometimes the King James Version and the Masoretic text version disagree. So In Isaiah chapter 2, verse 1, the great Isaiah scroll version recapitulates that or has that translated as the word that Isaiah son of Amos saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. In the Masoretic text version, that word saw is changed to prophesied. So in my view, that's very small. Those are more or less synonyms. Right. We're dealing with saw versus prophesied. However, the King James Version and the Book of Mormon both have it translated as saw rather than prophesied. And so this is one I was super excited, like, wow, I found a hit for Joseph Smith until I went and looked at the King James Version and saw. Oh, wait, the King James Version has saw. Well, he just followed the King James Version.

Variant Analysis of Specific Isaiah Passages

Julia 49:45 And then again, if there's any Joseph Smith translation changes, those will be indicated on the slides as well.

Kolby Reddish 49:50 Correct.

Julia 49:51 So there was no. Okay, so that was this.

Kolby Reddish 49:52 There are, there are versions of, or there are changes that Joseph Smith makes to chapter two. But because this is also in chapter two, I'll talk about it kind of at the end of chapter two. So now that example, very small, right? We've got a saw versus a prophesied. This is one of the most interesting ones. In Isaiah chapter 2, the great Isaiah scroll version, there is a back half of verse nine that's included in the Masoretic Text version and the King James Version that isn't present in the Great Isaiah scroll version. So Isaiah chapter 2, verse 9 in the great Isaiah scroll version reads, but humanity will be humbled and a mortal brought low. Then there is no verse 10. And then it continues with verse 11, what we would know as verse 11 in Isaiah chapter 2, the Masoretic text version adds another sentence on to verse nine saying, oh, do not forgive them, and then has an entire verse that's, that's missing from the Great Isaiah scroll version. Go deep into the rock, bury yourselves in the ground before the terror of the Lord and his dread majesty. So what we're seeing here is that the Masoretic Text version adds half of verse nine that doesn't exist in the Great Isaiah scroll version, meaning that it's almost certainly a later scribal addition because it's not present in an earlier version, adds all of verse 10. And so what this gives us is an incredible piece of evidence to test this hypothesis. Right? Because if this verse, this verse and a half, is absent from our earlier version, we should expect it to be absent from the version that's captured in the Book of Mormon because of the way time works again, right? And so the experts who helped translate this explain why they believe this verse in particular was a later scribal creation. A field advance forward one Julia. So they note many of the variants that show the development of the Book of Isaiah over time and represent scribal errors unique to this particular scroll. Again, Great Isaiah Scrolls 1q Isaiah A. So these professors argue the absence of the second half of verse 9 and all of verse 10 in chapter 2 of 1Q Isaiah A indicates that these are slightly later editions. Now, aside from just by operation of the way time works, the other reason these professors are convinced of this is because the same scroll in Qumran where they found the Great Isaiah scroll had other versions of Isaiah 1q, Isaiah B that did have the second half of verse 9 and all of verse 10. But from a much later time period. And so what they're seeing is, well, whoever compiled this library of scrolls in that original cave, they were able to see the differences between those versions and allow both of them to live. Basically they looked at the Bible or they looked at these records, I guess different than many contemporary Christians look at the Bible today like it's the infallible perfect word of God. They were able to live in this tension between these two different versions and get value out of both of them. And then I think on the next slide we actually look at the Joseph Smith translation. Before we did though, I had more of an introduction on the Joseph Smith translation and I pulled this directly from Scripture Central. And I think this is really interesting and kind of goes back to our comments earlier Nemo about, you know, heading off that potential apologetic argument. Do you want to read this summary of what the great Isaiah or I'm sorry, what the Joseph Smith translation is.

Nemo 53:14 I'll read that. Scripture Central is our friend Jasmine, right? Or it was. Was recently. I think she left it. Yeah. Okay. While the Book of Mormon was being printed, Joseph Smith and his associates began plans to complete a translation of the Bible intended to correct many of the errors that had crept into the text and restore many of the plain and precious truths lost. On October 8, 1829, Oliver Cowdery purchased a large King James Bible from the Grandin Press, the same press where the Book of Mormon was printed. Intensive study of this Bible led to the creation of the Joseph Smith translation, parts of which are found in Scripture as the book of Moses, as Joseph Smith Matthew and in hundreds of jst footnotes in Latter day Saint editions of the Bible. The Joseph Smith translation is not a translation in the traditional sense because they love to change what translation means, don't they? One very well informed scholar, Kent Jackson, described the translation as recasting the text into a new form by means of inspiration from the Holy Spirit. Although Joseph Smith did eventually study a little Hebrew and owned and used a Greek dictionary, if we ever talked about the Greek psalter, because we should, his translation did not consist of taking ancient Hebrew or Greek texts and rendering them into modern English instead, which is what we call translation. Indeed, that's what translation looks like instead. His special version of translation. No, his translation resulted from receiving inspiration while conducting an intensive and word by word study of the Bible which is non translation perspective. Laws, ordinances, personalities and eternal potentialities. Exactly, John. It's not translation. With changes implemented to restore the original intent of the writers to make the text more understandable, to modern readers.

Kolby Reddish 55:05 And again, they were citing Kent Jackson for that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin 55:11 Don't tell me. Is Ken Jackson a BYU employee by chance?

Nemo 55:16 John. John. He's very well informed is what he is. I don't know exactly what those credentials are, but he's very well informed.

Julia 55:22 Yeah, he's a professor at byu.

Kolby Reddish 55:24 He's a professor.

John Dehlin 55:25 Surprise, surprise.

Kolby Reddish 55:30 Yep, you nailed it.

John Dehlin 55:31 So.

Kolby Reddish 55:31 So here's the really interesting thing with that framing then, of what believing people say about the Joseph Smith translation. The real interesting thing is when you look at the actual Joseph Smith paper's manuscript of the Joseph Smith translation, what do we find? We find Joseph Smith making changes to this verse 10, which again, didn't exist in the earliest version of Isaiah. Right. So here's a huge problem, because Joseph Smith is supposedly receiving this revelatory experience to correct this back to the intent of the original authors. This verse doesn't exist in the mouth of the original author at all, and yet Joseph Smith is making modifications to it in his Joseph Smith translation. So what he adds, it would have

John Dehlin 56:18 been way without providing attribution to Adam Clark, by the way.

Kolby Reddish 56:23 Without providing attribution, that's absolutely right. He captures it and adds the words, and his majesty shall smite thee. A sentence which isn't there at all. And like you said, John, as we look at the Adam Clark's Bible commentary, you can see this right here. In that same verse, he adds, when he ariseth to strike the earth with terror. On the authority of the Septuagint confirmed by the Arabic and an ancient manuscript, I have added here to the text a line which in the 19th and 21st verses is repeated together with the preceding line and has, I think, evidently been omitted by mistake in this place. Now, is it an exact match saying exactly to strike the earth with terror? No, but you can see that Joseph Smith adds this idea that, again, this entire verse shouldn't exist in the original. Right. If Joseph Smith is capturing the original, what he should have done is said verse 10 should not exist. But he didn't. Instead, he added this idea of smiting which we see reflected in Adam Clark's Bible commentary, which we know that Joseph Smith had access to. The other thing I think is a really interesting note is. Yeah. As he continues from verse 10 to verse 11 in the handwriting, he adds, and it shall come to pass to the beginning of verse 11. Now, I'm not sure if people have read the Book of Mormon very, very much, but there's a phrase that occurs more in the Book of Mormon than it does any other book I've ever read in my life. And it's the phrase and it shall come to pass. So it's just interesting to note does Joseph Smith adds this unnecessary extraneous, not in the earliest manuscripts. And it shall come to pass to verse 11 that also shouldn't be added if he's doing what he says he's doing.

Julia 58:04 So Adam Clark made an assumption, Joseph built on that assumption and added his own to a verse that didn't exist.

Kolby Reddish 58:10 Yes.

Nemo 58:11 Yeah.

Kolby Reddish 58:11 And that's a real.

John Dehlin 58:12 Providing attribution.

Julia 58:13 Right.

Kolby Reddish 58:15 So this, this particular example to me is the very best one because we've got a missing verse. We've got Joseph Smith making changes to the missing verse rather than just deleting it in his supposedly inspired translation of the Bible. This is a real problem, I think, for testing the historical claim of what Joseph Smith is doing.

Nemo 58:35 So in the same way.

John Dehlin 58:37 Go ahead, Nemo. No, go ahead.

Nemo 58:40 Okay. I was just gonna say in the same way as about half an hour into this episode, we said we could end it here because the brass plates are anachronistic because they were a codex and codexes weren't a technology that was being used. We could now end this at about an hour in saying, right, so Joseph Smith, in trying to restore the original intent of the authors of Isaiah, didn't remove the verse that wasn't there in the earliest version of Isaiah that we have. And then not only that, he added to it without attributing the person from whom he was drawing the ideas. And we could just end it there and say, right, so not only should the brass plates have not existed, but the version of Isaiah that's in them wasn't properly restored by Joseph Smith and doesn't properly reflect the earliest version of Isaiah that we have that is contemporary to it. Is that about summing up where we are? So far that's perfect.

John Dehlin 59:24 And another important tell that we've already kind of addressed is who does the church cart out to explain this all away? Their own BYU professor Kent Jackson, who's on the payroll, who gets degrees in Master's and PhDs degrees in near Eastern studies. But clearly what his role and what BYU quote, scholars role is to use their degrees, to use their fancy language to make excuses, unscholarly non credible, non consensus based excuses to explain away problems. As if to say, these are not the droids you're looking for because I have a PhD and I come from a pretty good school and you don't need to worry about that. Stuff, because translation doesn't really mean translation. Even though Joseph Smith thought he was translating, Joseph Smith didn't actually know what he was doing. And instead you should trust Ken Jackson, BYU professor on the Church's payroll.

Nemo 1:00:37 Can I ask a question there, John?

John Dehlin 1:00:39 Yes.

Nemo 1:00:40 Has Joseph Smith ever actually undergone what we would call traditional translation in the jst, in the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, in the Kinderhook Plates, in the Book of Abraham, any of those successful translation?

Julia 1:00:55 Because he sure thought he was.

John Dehlin 1:00:58 No, I mean, he tried. There are times where he tried, I think the language for the Egyptian grammar and Alphabet. He's trying to do some translation. He tried to learn Hebrew in the school of the Prophets, but it seems like any genuine attempt at translation gets scuttled and aborted. And that's why we've covered a lot of this in past LDS discussions episodes. And by the way, in my multi 20 plus series with John Turner, we've also covered this as well. Joseph was given by the Doctrine and Covenants by God, allegedly the power to translate. It was prophet, seer, revelator and translator, according to scripture, according to Jesus own mouth, Jesus could have used any word Jesus wanted to use. Jesus chose the word translator. And yet we have, I think, to your point, Nemo, zero instances of Joseph ever correctly translating pretty much anything.

Nemo 1:02:01 Anything.

Kolby Reddish 1:02:02 Yes. Zero examples of him correctly doing it. And I think it's really important to also say, but that's what he thought he was doing. So the classic example is when the Kinderhook Plates fiasco happens, Joseph Smith runs and grabs the Egyptian Alphabet and grammar, or the grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian language and translates a single character using what he had established in the grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian language. So Joseph Smith very much thought he was doing actual translation. Like, did he also think there was revelation involved? Yes, I think that's also true. But he did absolutely think he was restoring these things back to their original state. And that's the reason I think it's important. And I know it's kind of sarcastic, but that's why. My question is, if you believe, if you believe that Joseph Smith was mistaken about what he was doing, yet you're still going to take what comes out the end of that process that he was mistaken about as scripture. My question is just like, why is God punking Joseph Smith? Like, why is he making him think that he's doing something that he's not doing? Couldn't God have just told, like, if God can tell Joseph Smith how many shares someone's entitled to for what amount of money in the Doctrine and Covenants and what dimensions temple need. Temples need to be. How in the world am I supposed to believe that he cannot communicate to Joseph Smith? Hey, hey, by the way, bro, you think you're doing translation, but you're not doing translation. I'm using this as a catalyst and a jumping off point for you to expand and build your own theology. That's what's really going on. But that's not what Joseph Smith thought he was doing.

John Dehlin 1:03:36 And by the way, what's that email

Nemo 1:03:40 I said all claimed to do?

John Dehlin 1:03:42 Yeah. And if people don't get why Joseph would make claims to translation over just claims to reveal stuff, it's because nobody's less. People are going to be impressed in the early 19th century that you could just make stuff up. They're going to be a lot less impressed by just making stuff up then they're going to be impressed. If you can claim to translate foreign ancient languages that no one else in the world can translate. Because if you could do the latter, if you actually have the power to translate things that no one else in the world can translate, well, then you've got godly power. Anybody can make stuff up. Only special people with godly power can translate multiple languages that are even unknown to the, to anyone on earth, allegedly. And so again, just like he claimed to have the power with the seer stone and the hat to see underground defined buried treasure, he claimed to be able to translate ancient languages that no one else could translate. And that was part of what made him appealing or impressive to people.

Kolby Reddish 1:04:58 Right. The other piece, I think that's really important too. I'm sorry, Julia, but the other part I think is really important is that like we were all, we all grew up as Mormons. Right. And so we're not told or we don't understand how Mormonism fits into that early American history. Because Mormonism is not the only sect of Christianity that was like a restorationist movement trying to restore Christianity to what it was originally. Right. The Campbellites were part of restorationism also, and they predated Mormonism. And so not only was it, like you just said, John, a claim to special authority, it's also special authority restoring back to this original version of Christianity or proto Christianity in the case of the pre Christian Jews. And so that's the other piece of this is it's also hooking into this religious narrative of restorationist movements generally.

John Dehlin 1:05:54 Julia?

Julia 1:05:55 Yeah, I just wanted to say, like, even the early Saints understood what John had said about like, people aren't just going to listen to you if you say you speak for God, they're going to listen more if you translate. If you have ancient records, you have James Strang, who left the Mormon Church, started his own church by claiming that he had plates and he had witnesses. And I think even Martin Harris was one of them. And he was able to like build up his own church because he understood that this is what will get people to follow him. So Joseph Smith had just said, I'm just receiving revelation from my head, or God's just putting it in my, in my heart, in my mind, and I'm writing it down. People aren't going to listen to that as much as they'll listen to his

John Dehlin 1:06:27 claims of translation, because anybody can just make stuff up.

Julia 1:06:32 Right?

John Dehlin 1:06:34 Yeah, Very good, Very good to the slides.

Kolby Reddish 1:06:43 Great. So we'll continue on with a few more examples. This one comes from chapter 54, second Nephi 22 or I'm sorry, third Nephi 22 to. So this one is interesting to me because for people who understand the overall narrative of the Book of Mormon in third Nephi, which is much later than first and second Nephi, Third Nephi is actually where Jesus himself comes to the temple in Bountiful and gives a sermon, including quoting directly from verses of Isaiah as well as Malachi and telling the people that he wants them to have these records and that's why he's bringing them to them. So this one is interesting to me because it's Isaiah 54:30 Nephi 22. Supposedly the, the words of Mormon Jesus re quoting Isaiah. So this is in 54 verse 17. The original, the great Isaiah scroll version reads, no weapon that is forged against you will be effective. This is the heritage of the Lord's servants and their righteousness from me says the Lord. The Masoretic text version and then the King James Version adds this sentence in the middle and every tongue that contends with you at law you shall defeat. King James Version is slightly different. And every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn. But more or less synonyms, right? The, the meaning isn't that different. Then I've got the Book of Mormon version here. It reads, and every tongue that shall revile against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn. So again, that entire sentence missing from the great Isaiah scroll version. It's a later edition. So the Book of Mormon contains the sentence that's in the King James Version of Isaiah, which is missing from our earlier manuscript. Julia, to your question earlier about Deutero Isaiah, this is Actually in deutero, Isaiah too. So we've got an additional problem. And the interesting thing about this one is that Joseph Smith also makes edits to the same chapter of Isaiah, verses 10 and 15, but doesn't make any edits to this particular verse. But again, if he's supposedly studying this and receiving revelation while he's going through this verse by verse study of the Bible, it's interesting that God didn't tell Joseph Smith to strike out that sentence that shouldn't have been in the original

Examples of KJV Errors Reproduced in the Book of Mormon

Nemo 1:08:53 because to be very clear, God would have known it wasn't in the original because he's omniscient. That's just just to be really. Yeah, one would presume.

John Dehlin 1:09:04 And it just. Just to go back, it just seems really clear that he's. He's ripping this, this sentence out from the King James Bible that he's got sitting on his table. Maybe he changes a word, just like the high school student that plagiarizes something and maybe move some words around or changes the word, or maybe he just said the word wrong or misread the word and the scribe wrote the wrong word. But either way, it's just very clear he's plagiarizing from his King James Bible and this is a smoking gun like the previous one. If he is reading from some Book of Mormon prophets transcribing of Laban's brass plates that had Isaiah's writings, they should not be reflecting the version of the King James Bible that Joseph conveniently has on his table.

Kolby Reddish 1:10:03 Yeah, and this one is actually word for word with the King James Version. So it's directly. You're right. There are times where he modifies it by a word or two here or there. This one's word for word.

John Dehlin 1:10:13 Well, there's revile versus.

Nemo 1:10:16 Right, right.

Kolby Reddish 1:10:17 Oh, you're right. I'm sorry. Yes.

John Dehlin 1:10:19 I mean, again, he could have just missed the word.

Nemo 1:10:22 But otherwise it's the exact same sentiment. Yeah, exactly. The same sentiment.

Kolby Reddish 1:10:27 Synonyms. Right. It's the same concept. Same concept. But then we give Joseph Smith another chance. Right. When he's finished with the Book of Mormon and then he's doing his Book of Mormon or his Joseph Smith translation of the Bible and has another chance, a same bite at the. Or a second bite at the same apple to get it right. Supposedly receiving Revelation the entire time, he misses it again. And I think that even though that

Nemo 1:10:52 revelation took him to this chapter.

Kolby Reddish 1:10:54 Exactly. And to make edits in this chapter, and yet he doesn't receive revelation, that he needs to edit this verse. In alignment with what it should be if he's doing what he claims to be doing.

Julia 1:11:08 So I just want to ask so I can understand clearly. So you have the Great Isaiah scroll, which he's not even reflecting because he. That's not even there. Then you have the Masoretic text, which it's so different from the Book of Mormon. So is everything. Is most of what you have found from the Book of Mormon using the King James as the base text, not the Masoretic or the clear, the Great skull. Okay, so he is using the King James as the base of these Bible verses and not any of these other ones.

Kolby Reddish 1:11:35 Correct. Yep. So the reason I have all of them is because the Great Isaiah scroll is closest to what the brass plate should reflect. But then Masoretic text version should be, you would imagine, a little bit closer because it comes in a thousand A.D. right. King James Version comes in 1611. And so, yes, that's the reason that we have all of these comparisons. And the King James Version, again, sometimes draws from the Masoretic text tradition, sometimes it draws from the Septuagint. So this is probably one where, if it's not just a variant and how you translate it, because translation is an art, not a science. Right. But none of that can solve the problem of Joseph Smith having words, whole sentences, whole verses in the Book of Mormon and in continuing them in his translation of the Bible. That shouldn't be there. There's no amount of vagueness or differing opinion amongst translators that can solve that problem of there being entirely missing sentences that should be missing that are then included.

Nemo 1:12:36 Right?

Julia 1:12:37 Right.

Kolby Reddish 1:12:39 Yeah. So continuing on with another example. This is in chapter seven of Isaiah. Many people know this because it's a Messianic prophecy. It's captured in second Nephi chapter 17. This is one that the original reads, therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman has conceived and is bearing a son, and his name will be Emmanuel. That young woman is also the phrase that's used or the way that that word is translated in the Masoretic text version. But then when we get to the King James Version, that word young woman is translated as virgin. So this is, this is where the idea of Jesus being an immaculate conception, being born of a virgin, comes from this prophecy in Isaiah chapter 7. Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign. The virgin shall conceive and give birth to a son and will call him Emmanuel. The Book of Mormon captures again virgin. So it matches exactly with the King James Version of Isaiah, which just is not justified by the earliest manuscript. So basically, as the language evolved over time, this word that's translated as virgin in earlier days could have meant just a young woman, just a young maiden, not someone who was necessarily a virgin. And so this is one again where the king or the Joseph Smith translation. During the Joseph Smith translation, Joseph Smith does make edits to the same chapter and including to this same verse. But not to change the word virgin back to its original young woman, which

Julia 1:14:08 to me that changes the story so much to have this, this young woman rather than virgin. I feel like that's a big change to me.

John Dehlin 1:14:14 The word virgin should not be there.

Julia 1:14:17 Yeah,

Nemo 1:14:20 all young woman, right? So there's footnotes on the kjv, right, saying that it's all your woman, but that's completely ignored. I've just checked LDS scripture. The footnote for second Nephi 17:14a isn't all young woman. The footnote it leads you to Isaiah and you look at Isaiah and it isn't all young woman. It just takes you to the topical guide, right?

Kolby Reddish 1:14:43 This is a more up to date translation of a King James version. And modern Bibles will have a footnote because of what we learned from the great Isaiah scroll, basically teaching us what this original would have looked at. That's where that footnote in the King James Version I have pictured on the screen comes from is basically this is current Bible scholars acknowledging this should have been translated as young woman. But because it's a King James Version, they keep the original language and add it in a footnote. But like an NRSV would just have the young woman will conceive they would just change it.

Julia 1:15:13 So the church, I'm assuming the church knows about the great Isaiah scrolls. They have an opportunity to put this in as a, as a footnote and they're just not going to because I think pretty sure it's because it hurts their, their arguments.

Kolby Reddish 1:15:24 The church will never be able to pivot from the King James Version because the Book of Mormon is so tied to the King James Version of the Bible. They can never advance. I, I don't think they'll ever, ever be able to advance to a more modern translation of the Bible because of that. But that's a great point, Julia. That's why though they can't do it because it's so inextricably linked because it

Julia 1:15:44 is not an ancient translation or a translation of an ancient text.

Guest 1:15:47 Right?

Julia 1:15:48 Is that's the bottom line is that's. Anyway, this is why I'm.

John Dehlin 1:15:51 Didn't we establish that just the way that Joseph Smith dealt with the italices in the King James Version of the Bible, he had as reflected in what he writes into the Book of Mormon kind of proves that he was using the King James Bible to plagiarize from it to inject text into the Book of Mormon. Just the italicies alone.

Nemo 1:16:14 Very specific 1700s edition of the KJV 1769.

Kolby Reddish 1:16:20 So yes. And to. To that point, John 1, 1 academic paper I read in preparation for today's presentation is actually David P. Wright, who I think was a mentor to David Bockavoy that we listened to earlier.

John Dehlin 1:16:32 He wrote the church excommunicated because they didn't like his scholarship.

Kolby Reddish 1:16:36 Correct. He wrote an essay in Dan Vogel and Brent Metcalfe's American Apocrypha where he deals with italics specific to Isaiah because he wasn't dealing with the same analysis I'm looking at. I just kind of read it for background information. But I would point people to that if they have a greater desire to learn about the italics in the Book of Mormon specific to Isaiah at least.

Julia 1:16:59 Okay, I'll have to put that in the show notes because that's really good. That's really good. Okay.

Kolby Reddish 1:17:04 Okay. Continuing on with our next example again, another. Another example. This is one where we've got a Latin loanword. So in chapter 14 of Isaiah and that's at second Nephi 24 we have. In the great Isaiah scroll version we have how are you fallen from heaven, O day star, son of the morning? How have you been cut down to the ground, you who laid low the nation? The Masoretic text version keeps that consistent. So there's no difference between the Masoretic text version and the great Isaiah scroll version here. But the King James version uses this Latin loan word and translates odestar to O Lucifer, son of the morning. The Book of Mormon again has the O Lucifer, son of morning tracks exactly with the King James version. In new updated Bibles, the new Revised Standard Version, they track with the great Isaiah scroll translation because the word Lucifer wouldn't have existed in 600 BC and definitely Latin would not have been available to ancient Jews in 600 BC. Again, in chapter 14 of Isaiah, Joseph Smith translates. In the Joseph Smith translation, he edits many of the verses in this chapter, but doesn't make any edits to this chapter. Changing that Lucifer back to daystar to

Nemo 1:18:20 reflect the original version and fun fact from memory. I think in Latin Lucifer is something like bringer of light or correct light or something like that. Yeah.

Julia 1:18:31 And is this Am I Correct in saying this is the only place in the Bible where Lucifer occurs. I thought it was only once. Is that incorrect?

Kolby Reddish 1:18:39 I believe that's correct, Julia. Yeah.

Julia 1:18:41 Because if that's true, then it doesn't exist at all in the. Or it shouldn't exist at all in the great Isaiah scroll. Because if this is the only one spot and it's not there, that's just super interesting to me that he really is using the, the, the King James as the base text. Like there's no way around that.

John Dehlin 1:18:57 And just to fact check you, I searched Google, when and where did the word Lucifer originate? And Google says the word Lucifer originated in Latin meaning light bringer from lux and meaning light and fur to carry, used by St. Jerome in his 4th century Vulgate Bible. That'd be a thousand years after Lehi allegedly would have left Jerusalem with Laban's brass plates. Yeah. So that word came a thousand years after Joseph Smith would need it to have emerged.

Kolby Reddish 1:19:40 And you can even see there. Right. Which originally described the fallen king of Babylon. So it's not even really talking about what this is. One of the problems with the way Christians read the Old Testament is Christians backfit Christianity into the Old Testament when it really didn't exist. And that's what this is highlighting. And it's also highlighting later mythologically linked to Satan. So I think that goes to your question, Julia. There really is no relationship between these two figures, except for it's been retrofitted by Christians back into the Old Testament.

Julia 1:20:11 I feel like that's the case with a lot of the, the, the prophecies that Joseph Smith pulls from Isaiah to the Book of Mormon though, that originally those are not even about Christ or about whatever he's trying to purport that they are about. I don't know if I could like point specifically to those, but that's what I have heard. Is that like listening to David Bachavoy? Those are not actually most of them. I don't think any, maybe even any are about Christ. Yeah, that's fascinating to me.

Kolby Reddish 1:20:38 Yeah. So that's one example. This is another fun one from the same chapter of Isaiah. So Isaiah chapter 14, which is 2nd Nephi 24, verse 23, is translated in the great Isaiah scroll as saying, I will also make it a possession for the hedgehog pools of water. And I will. And I will sweep it with the broom of destruction, says the Lord of hosts. Now when we get to the Masoretic text version, it's worth noting this Masoretic text version on the Right hand side of the screen is actually a 1980s version of the Masoretic text. It's a translation in the 1980s of the Masoretic text. So they rendered that word hedgehog as bittern. And people might be wondering what is a bittern? So I have it there at the bottom. A bittern is a heron like bird that is native, I think, to Europe. And that word itself was. Wasn't invented until 1300 AD. So that's why I'm explaining this is a 1980s translation because that word wouldn't have existed in the original Masoretic text version either.

Julia 1:21:38 Because at 1,900.

Kolby Reddish 1:21:40 Right, correct, correct. So the Book of Mormon keeps and follows exactly with the Masoretic text version and with the King James version of the Bible. I think if we'll go to the next slide. I've got more. More.

Nemo 1:21:56 Can I just wax lyrical about hedgehogs for a moment? How wonderful they are. Sorry. In. In the UK we love hedgehogs. In fact, we love them so much that if viewers were to go and look up a British politician called Rory Stewart, he gave a 10 minute speech in the British Parliament about hedgehog. He spoke verbosy about how wonderful hedgehogs

John Dehlin 1:22:15 are because of the video game or some other reason.

Nemo 1:22:18 We just love hedgehogs. Hedgehogs are great. They're one of. Yeah, they're an icon here. I don't know how else to explain it. They're just within the zeitgeist. Hedgehogs are brilliant.

Julia 1:22:30 That's funny.

John Dehlin 1:22:33 Anyway, it's kind of like honey badgers in the honey badger phase in the United States a few years ago. I don't know if people remember the

Nemo 1:22:41 honey badgers, got really excited about honey badgers.

John Dehlin 1:22:44 Kolby, where I didn't see a Book of Mormon text that had hedgehog or bittern or Lucifer. Can you show us?

Kolby Reddish 1:22:53 It has bittern. So if you see it right here, right here, it just says it follows the King James version. So it has.

John Dehlin 1:23:00 Okay, so the Book of Mormon uses a word that's 1900 years to too late, basically.

Kolby Reddish 1:23:09 Correct? Correct. Yep. So if you go forward to the next slide, Julia, we can kind of elaborate on that. So the word bittern, which comes from Middle English batur and Old French boutor, refers to a large marsh bird, which is a kind of heron. The term entered English around 1300s-1400s AD, centuries after this Masoretic text version was copied when the early English translators. So Wycliffe and his cadre, when they encountered the Hebrew word kipod, a creature that they didn't recognize. They rendered it bittern, probably because the bird was associated with desolate marshes and made eerie nighttime sounds. So this word bittern is a Renaissance era English guess, meant to evoke the same mood that they were finding in that verse. It's not a translation of known zoology. And I think, if you'll go forward one more slide, Julia.

Julia 1:24:00 So they changed hedgehog to this bird because of the mood? Yeah, the mood.

Nemo 1:24:07 That's a word that's later been translated as hedgehog. They didn't recognize at the time.

Kolby Reddish 1:24:11 Correct.

Nemo 1:24:12 Right.

Kolby Reddish 1:24:12 And I want. I want to remind people why Nephi tells us that he was putting these verses from Isaiah or these chapters from Isaiah in the Book of Mormon. He says that he's doing it to liken his words unto his people. So my adorable claymation image to the right there. How in the world are you going to liken if you're an ancient. Sometimes it's so hard for me to even get these sentences out. If you're an ancient American Jew living in ancient America in around 500 B.C. how are you going to liken the word bittern or something translated as the word bittern, a word that wouldn't exist, like John said, for almost 2,000 years to yourself, how is that going to be useful to you to understand a bird that doesn't exist in that region or in that time period?

Nemo 1:25:06 The same way we liken horses, Kolby. The same way we liken horses.

John Dehlin 1:25:12 I almost want viewers to create some sort of meme with like, second or third Isaiah, wearing a French beret, sipping a cappuccino, eating. Eating a croissant, playing Sonic, Sonic the Hedgehog, producing the word.

Nemo 1:25:32 I want to make hedgehogs great again is what I want to do. I want to restore hedgehogs to their proper place in biblical texts.

Julia 1:25:39 Oh, my gosh. Make hedgehogs great again. That's hilarious.

Nemo 1:25:42 Hedgehogs great again.

John Dehlin 1:25:48 Are we saying the word bittern is as much of an anachronism almost as playing Sonic the Hedgehog? Do we basically have second or third Isaiah playing Sonic the Hedgehog using the word bittern? Is that basically writing a French spray with the French beret?

Nemo 1:26:06 Well, where are bitterns native to? Just for a start, Are they Eurasian? Are they?

Kolby Reddish 1:26:12 They're European.

Nemo 1:26:13 Yeah, they're European. So they have no analog for them at all. They're a creature that just doesn't exist either where they came from or where they ended up.

Kolby Reddish 1:26:23 Exactly.

Nemo 1:26:23 Nothing analogous. It's not even like horses, where they at least had one point of Reference.

Kolby Reddish 1:26:28 Yep.

Julia 1:26:29 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:26:32 What a mess.

Julia 1:26:33 Okay, so this next one is, is my showing. So I did my own comparison with the kgv. I didn't bring in the, how do you say it? Meso.

Kolby Reddish 1:26:42 Maseratic.

Julia 1:26:43 Maseratic. I always say that. Maseratic. So this is just my comparison and I just wanted to point out a little bit of sexism in the verse before that. So one thing that I've noticed with these older ones, and I've had scholars even say that even reference early references of the Holy Ghost are usually female and they have been changed to male. But in the Great Isaiah scroll, in Isaiah 14:22, he says, I will rise up against them, says the Lord of hosts and cut off from Babylon, name and remnant and offspring. Offspring and posterity, says the Lord. But the word offspring and posterity were changed to the masculine. So it says now a son and nephew. And then in the, in the Book of Mormon that's. It reflects the same thing. And so I just think that was interesting. Where most of the great Isaiah scroll I've noticed is. Is very like non gendered. It's just, it's just kind of general. But then as you move forward, they, they gender them to the masculine usually. So I just thought that was really interesting. And then another. Yeah, another thing that I noticed and I Kolby, I wonder if you notice this too. This is one of my other. Another comparison where you have the KJV on one side, the Great School in the opposite, and then the Book of Mormon in the center. And Joseph Smith is just sort of adding in whatever he kind of wants. Whereas the KJV and the Great Isaiah scroll kind of match similarly. There's some words that are different. He's just got a huge chunk where. I guess I'll just read it. This is 1st Nephi 21, verse 1 where it says, and again, hearken, O ye house of Israel. All ye that are broken off and are driven out because of the wickedness of the pastors of my people. Yea, all ye that are broken off, that are scattered abroad, who are of my people. O house of Israel. Listen, O isles unto me, and hearken ye people from far. The Lord hath called me from the womb, from the bowels of my mother hath he made mention of my name. And here it seems like he's adding this, this whole thing because he's trying to. To me it looks like he's trying to show that these churches are corrupt, that these pastors are corrupt and they're wicked and they're teaching things that shouldn't be taught. Kind of giving him credibility to restore, again, this church. Anyway, he does that a lot where he's just adding these chunks that don't even need to be in there. And it would be interesting to see if he changes this in the jst, if he adds those paintings.

Kolby Reddish 1:28:51 I didn't look at Isaiah 49. We could double check. The thing that really strikes me, yes, this goes hand in hand with Joseph Smith's overall narrative about religion. Right. That he needs to restore the original because the professors are all corrupt. That's what he puts into the mouth of Jesus Christ in his 1838 First Vision account. But the other thing that's really interesting to note about this is the word pastor. Like, the word pastor didn't exist. Like, that's. That's again, a Middle English term. That is a combination of English and Old French. So just like Bittern. This is a good, good follow on to the Bittern slide because again, we've got this problem of the Book of Mormon containing words that if we're looking at this like a legitimate ancient record would have had. These people would have had no context for what this word is, because the word didn't exist at that time. So it's like, what would that word have been that he's rendering as pastors? That's the problem. We have no idea because of the way the Book of Mormon was translated. Because the strongest.

Nemo 1:29:52 Even if there was, because I'm looking at the Wikipedia article for the American bittern. So there is a species of animal that lives in America that is now described as a bittern, but that word for it would not have been in the Americas at the time of the writing. Yeah, that word for it comes from Europe. That word for it would not have been interacting with the authors of the Book of Mormon or the writers of the words of Isaiah.

Kolby Reddish 1:30:20 Yeah, exactly.

Nemo 1:30:23 Just to make that really clear.

Kolby Reddish 1:30:24 Sorry.

Julia 1:30:25 Yeah, yeah.

Kolby Reddish 1:30:25 This one is an. This is one of my favorite examples.

Julia 1:30:28 Also.

Kolby Reddish 1:30:29 This one comes from Isaiah chapter 48, which is in 1st Nephi 20. And the reason this one's really fun is, remember we talked about how some of these variants are like translation errors? And that's. This is one of those examples. So in 48, verse one, it's originally translated as, hear this house of Jacob, who are called by the name of Israel, and have come forth from the loins of Judah, who swear by the name of the Lord and invoke the God of Israel, but not in truth nor in righteousness. The Masoretic text version then changes this from loins of Judah to Fountain of Judah. That's how it's rendered in the Masoretic text version. The King James Version then deviates even further from that original intent. You can kind of see the connection between loins and fountain, right? Like that. You can see how someone could get there, how they're kind of similar. But the King James Version then is rendered as waters of Judah. So it goes from loins to fountain to waters. And then this one's very interesting because in most instances in the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith is just pulling directly from the King James Version. But like you said, Julia, there are times where he makes additions and kind of just adds. Adds his own kind of unique narrative spin on things. And this is one example where he then uses the waters of Judah, but adds this phrase that isn't in the original or out of the waters of baptism. And this particular example is very funny to me because Joseph Smith basically sees this translation error, right? This waters of Judah, which originally should be loins of Judah, and then he sees waters of Judah and says, like, oh, well, I know, like baptism and water are connected. The hilarious thing about that is that baptism wasn't a concept that existed in 600 B.C. so again, would have no relevance to these people as they would have actually existed in 600 BC as ancient Hebrews. This chapter had no edits in the Joseph Smith translation. And I only note that to say, I'm not only pointing out the instances where the Joseph Smith translation makes our case stronger. This is one where Joseph Smith saw no need to make any edits, even though I guess you could say he should have seen the need to change the waters of Judah back to loins of Judah.

Nemo 1:32:39 Because you can see, like, to really push home that connection there. Like the loins of Judah and the Fountain of Judah. The fountain, I mean, if you look at it in German, yeah, the fountain of something can be the source of something. And the place exactly has come. And so you can see the connection there. But then it's the. The English translators, the kjv, have gone down the very literal water route and taken it to waters of Judah. Here is something else. So we've done episodes on the way in which the text of the Book of Mormon indicates that it was a orally dictated text, right? And evidence is for Joseph Smith backtracking or adding and going and correcting himself. This here is reminding me of that, where it says the waters of Judah or out of the waters of baptism. Or to say another way this. That is to say that he did a lot of that throughout the Book of Mormon. And this is an example of that where he's like, why would they. I guess my question is why would they waste so much space, precious space, engraving such things for him? Then just in the next phrase, go, or out of the water. Why wouldn't they just make it clear the first time? Why wouldn't they say, second forth out is the waters of baptism.

Julia 1:33:46 So I hope this isn't a tangent, but when I, when we were kids, we would read these verses out loud as a family and we would kind of tease because it's like, oh, he would sometimes say something and then immediately go, well, this is what I mean. And we're like, well, the reason we joked is because. Not because it was an oral translation or dictation, but because, like, you're just, you're just scratching this into gold and now you've just scratched it, but you've. Now you have to add or fix it so you have to scratch more. So like, that was how we understood that. But whereas, like, I don't know how else, because, like, it is Joseph Smith. It's also an evidence of Joseph Smith saying this out loud and having this be written.

Nemo 1:34:19 Because the narrative the church wants to show you is when the gold plates are being compiled, when the abridgment's being made. That would have been a very deliberate process. So those scratchings out, those writing downs are well thought out. And he's drawing from a source text. Isn't the writing on the gold plates should never have been thought of? I shouldn't say should never have been thought of. This is the way your family were thinking of it. But it wouldn't be correct to think of it as a stream of consciousness writing upon gold plates. That's not how those plates were written. It was very deliberately drawn from source. So there shouldn't be any of this, oh, I've just written that.

Kolby Reddish 1:34:52 Whoops, right.

Nemo 1:34:54 He would just completely stamp out a character and then continue with the source text if a character was engraved wrong or whatever.

Kolby Reddish 1:35:01 Right. So I've always called those kind of those aside phrases. Maybe this is just a legal writing term, but we call them a positives because it's like adding more explanation or sometimes slightly changing the meaning, saying, oh, whoops, this is what I meant to say. Sometimes it's just adding clarity. But yeah, I think that is one of the clearest examples of the. The oral composition or like the oral dictation of the Book of Mormon is so many of these phrases where Joseph Smith, the ones where he's adding additional detail like this. You can see this in writing because people do this all of the time, right? Where they're emphasizing a point. What you don't see in writing, especially like you're saying Nemo, when there's an abridgment being made or someone's copying from another source, is where they say X and then they turn around and say the exact opposite, not X. So the example I think of off the top of my head, and I don't remember where it is in the Book of Mormon, but is the time that it says, like they laid down their weapons of peace or their weapons of war for peace. Like that's. That's not just adding additional detail. That's completely changing what was previously said.

Nemo 1:36:10 That's a man catching himself.

Kolby Reddish 1:36:12 Exactly, exactly.

Nemo 1:36:14 Yeah, yeah. His peace. I mean, weapons of war for peace. Yeah.

Kolby Reddish 1:36:21 This one is in Messiah, chapter 14. And this is Isaiah, chapter 53, probably the biggest messianic prophecy that people see in the Old Testament, the original. This is one where we actually do have a lost plain and precious part that Joseph Smith just leaves on the table. So the great Isaiah scroll in verse 11 of this messianic prophecy says, out of the suffering of his soul, he will see light and find satisfaction. And through his knowledge, his servant, the righteous one, will make many righteous, and he will bear their iniquities. The Masoretic text version then misses this. He will see light. It just says out of anguish, he will see it. So it's less descriptive, it's adding less detail. The King James Version has the same thing. He will, or more or less the same meaning. I mean, he shall see out of the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied by his knowledge. Shall my righteous servant justify many, for he shall buy. I'm sorry, bear their iniquities. The Book of Mormon version, then right below that tracks with the King James Version. And so what we have is this. He will see. The light phrase is omitted after all of these, except for the great Isaiah scroll. And so imagine this is the way I want people to think about this. Imagine how impressive it would have been if when the Book of Mormon was published, Joseph Smith had added this phrase to the Book of Mormon's capturing of these Isaiah verses. This would have been Joseph Smith, like a hit for Joseph Smith, demonstrating that he was able to do what he claimed he was doing, which was restoring these lost plain and precious parts of the Old Testament back originally.

Nemo 1:38:04 And apologists would not be shutting up about it. They would be talking about this constantly. When the great Isaiah scroll was discovered, they were going, look what Joseph Smith did. Look how this points to his ability to, to do what he was saying he was doing, to translate, to correct, to restore the plain and precious truths.

Kolby Reddish 1:38:21 Exactly.

Julia 1:38:22 Wait, so what is a way to frame this? What is a way to frame this for a person who still wants to believe in the historicity of the Book of Mormon? Is there any way to frame this and still hold on to that? Because like, I don't see one unless Nemo, you, I think you kind of argued that like God is putting in Joseph's head the kjv. I just don't understand how people can.

Nemo 1:38:43 The problem with that argument that I put forward is if God is putting the KJV in Joseph's head, then why is Joseph correcting the kjv? Why is he then going around and correcting it under God's influence with the Joseph Smith translation? There's, that's the issue there with that.

Julia 1:38:58 So he's not. So already we know he's not.

Nemo 1:39:00 The ultimate, the ultimate fallback is that God just chose not to give Joseph this part back. We don't know why, we don't know for what purpose, but God just chose not to give it to him. Does it. Or why didn't God get the text?

John Dehlin 1:39:14 Why didn't God get the Bible right from the start? Why didn't produce a good Bible, by the way?

Kolby Reddish 1:39:22 Well, and I think that's basically what I was going to say to your question, Julia. How do you reckon that reconcile this? If you want to maintain fate, I don't think you can maintain, maintain that the Book of Mormon is historical in the view of this evidence. Unless you're willing to basically say basically to John's comment, well, all forms of scripture are humans trying to clothe the words of the divine. And so it's always kind of an approximation basically that God can't communicate with humans in this level of specificity, that they're always kind of clothing it in human language. And so we always expect some kind of imperfection. That's, I mean, that's the only argument I can think of.

Julia 1:40:02 I mean, I guess, I guess people can say that he stopped translating and then would just like kind of pull the Bible to him and then was writing down the verses because he's like, oh, this is easier on my eyes if I write it from the KJV or something. I don't know if, I don't think there's any evidence for that.

Kolby Reddish 1:40:17 But the Problem. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. The problem with that is there's no evidence for it and that Emma explicitly denied that he used any book or manuscript. So that's another problem for that view. The last one would be.

Nemo 1:40:30 And revelators are saying that it was a tight translation. Sorry, go on, Kolby.

Julia 1:40:34 Right, right.

Kolby Reddish 1:40:35 Well, I was going to say the last problem would be like in our previous example, From Isaiah, chapter 48, Joseph Smith is adding words. He's not just copying from the King James version. There's times where he's adding words to make the Old Testament more Christian. Right. Adding that phrase out of the waters of baptism. He's claiming by doing that that that was what was in the original because he's trying to Christianize the original Old Testament language. And so I don't know how a believer would make sense of this. It's really difficult, from my view, to see how you would maintain a historical Book of Mormon not just based on this, but based on many, many, many, many things.

Julia 1:41:12 Right, right.

Nemo 1:41:13 I think you retreating back to that place of does it even matter? Does any of this matter? Is this all, like, this will get called nitpicking by those who want to maintain their belief in the Book of Mormon?

Julia 1:41:24 That's.

Nemo 1:41:24 That's what it'll be called. It'll be nitpicking. I don't think that's what this is. I think this is problematic for the Book of Mormon's claims about its own world. But, yeah, for those people will always find a way to maintain the narrative they want to maintain if they're not open to changing it. We are very good at, as human beings, at convincing ourselves of the narratives that we hold on to if we're not willing to change them.

Julia 1:41:48 Yeah.

Apologist Claims Examined and Evaluated

Kolby Reddish 1:41:53 So I said there were a few examples that apologists have claimed, vindicate Joseph Smith. I want to give all five of them to you right now. So this is a 2011 piece that was published by Don Perry and Stephen Ricks, but what they're doing is they're restating research in this very short article. It's like two pages. We'll show the entirety of it here in just a second so people can see actually how short it is. All they're doing is they're restating research that was done by John tvetness in the 1980s. There are five examples where he claims the great Isaiah scroll and the Book of Mormon match. Let me give you those five examples. John, hang on to your hat, because I know you're going to be blown away by the significance of these examples. I'm ready. Is there's the first is there's one time that Joseph Smith adds an and that was in the Great Isaiah scroll, but wasn't in the King James Version.

John Dehlin 1:42:44 Whoa,

Kolby Reddish 1:42:46 I know. You're falling over dumbfounded. I know. The second example is there's a time wherein Joseph Smith uses a plural verb with an incorrect noun, just like the Great Isaiah. The third time is he changes the use of I to my or vice versa. I can't remember which it is, but yep, I know. Very important example number five. He uses a plural noun when that plural noun was required by the context in English. But it's also in the Great Isaiah Scroll. And then the fourth example that they give in this piece is actually very funny to me. It's in Isaiah.

Nemo 1:43:24 Substantive though.

Kolby Reddish 1:43:26 Well, wait till we get into it. Isaiah chapter 50, verse 2 has this phrase here's the Book of Mormon's Version, I make their rivers a wilderness and their fish to stink because the waters are dried up up and they die because of their thirst. Now the King James Version has I make the rivers a wilderness. Their fish stink because there is no water. So there's nothing necessarily about the waters drying up, but the water. There is no water. Presumably there's no water because it's dried up. Seems more or less the same right now in the Great Isaiah scroll version it says their fish stink for lack of water and die of thirst. The apologists incorrectly write in this piece that the Great Isaiah scroll reads their fish dry up because there is no water. It's slightly translated differently, not a huge, huge difference. But it's worth noting that in the Adam Clark Bible commentary on this same verse, Adam Clark reads this way their fish stinketh. Their fish is dried up. Stinketh is dried up. So it stands in the Bodo manuscript and it is confirmed by the Septuagint. They shall be dried up. So this similarity seems to me to be inspired by the Adam Clark's Bible commentary. But it's interesting to note that the big difference they see between the Great Isaiah Scroll Version or I'm sorry, the huge similarities they see between the Great Isaiah Scroll Version and the Book of Mormon Version. I don't even see it when we look at the the different translation based on what they were looking at.

Nemo 1:44:58 It just seems that it's been consistently translated throughout. To my eye, the meaning of the text is very similar throughout. Some slight word choice changes, but there's nothing substantively changed. I withdraw myself that it looks substantive. There was just Lots of words.

Kolby Reddish 1:45:16 Exactly. A lot of words to demonstrate there's no substance. That was my purpose here.

Nemo 1:45:21 Yeah, yeah.

Kolby Reddish 1:45:23 So when we compare, like, these examples of these five hits that the apologists have claimed, but then you're looking at the flip side of the coin, and we've got verses where Joseph Smith is adding things that aren't in the original. He's making changes to things that are Christianizing the original. He's not eliminating verses that shouldn't exist if he's actually relying on the original. Really, what I'm pointing out here is a huge methodology difference. These apologists are looking at the tiniest, tiniest little hits that, as we look at them, really are not substantive or compelling in any way. Ignoring these huge misses where Joseph Smith keeps verses that shouldn't be there if he's actually somehow capturing the Great Isaiah Scroll. Honestly, it's just ridiculous that they're pointing to these when they would have known if they're doing legitimate scholarly research, that these huge misses exist between the Great Isaiah scroll and the Book of Mormon, that they are silent about.

Julia 1:46:21 This feels so disingenuous. Do we know if the Church. Can I. Can I jump forward? This is. This is the full thing, right?

Kolby Reddish 1:46:29 This is the. Well, this is the abstract. The full article is one.

Julia 1:46:34 Oh, gotcha. I just want to know who. Who commissioned that? Who wrote this? Was it the church publication? Was. Did the Church pay for this research to get done? Do we know?

Kolby Reddish 1:46:41 Well, Perry and Ricks, I think, were both BYU professors. If you go forward, it'll tell us. So it was published in. Oh, go back one. I'm sorry.

Julia 1:46:48 Oh, sorry.

Kolby Reddish 1:46:49 So it was published at BYU by Neal Maxwell Institute. So, yes, that's just what.

Julia 1:46:58 That just feels really disingenuous for them to pull out these tiny little. What they're calling hits when, if you step back, you're like, oh, this is really messy. This is nothing like the Great Isaiah Scroll. This just feels like deceptive. I don't know if that's fair.

John Dehlin 1:47:16 And that goes back to me, the point I made previously, which is that the Church pays and hires pseudo scholars to buttress LDS Church truth claims, and they're biased from the start, and then they. They manipulate scholarship to deceive people.

Kolby Reddish 1:47:37 Can I bush back on that one tiny little way? Which. Having worked, having worked as a research assistant in BYU's ancient scripture department when I was there, and again, this was over a decade ago, I would say that there are a lot of legitimate scholars that work at byu. So I wouldn't necessarily say all they're doing is like pseudo scientific nonsense. But here's where it does line up with that I would agree, John, is that they cannot deviate from the conclusion. So they will always be making whatever argument they need to be or need to make to keep the conclusion that Joseph Smith was a true prophet, that the Book of Mormon is historical in an ancient text, that it's inspired of God. They'll make whatever argument they need to to make that conclusion fit. So in some sense it's almost worse because a lot of pseudoscience is a result of just like Dunning Kruger, people don't know what they're talking about. These people know what they're talking about. So I actually think it's a little bit worse than you're saying because it's not just pseudoscience, it's conclusion first thinking and leaving on the table the obvious hits from this theory. Like if you look at what they're saying here. Go forward to the abstract, Julia. They say numerous differences exist between the Isaiah passages in the Book of Mormon and the corresponding passages in the King James version of the Bible. The great Isaiah scroll supports several of the differences found in the Book of Mormon. Five parallel passages in the Isaiah scroll. I gave them all to you.

Pseudo-Scholarship vs. Real Scholarship

John Dehlin 1:49:02 You.

Kolby Reddish 1:49:02 From this entire piece, the Book of Mormon and the King James version of the Bible are compared to illustrate the Book of Mormon's agreement with the Isaiah scroll. What they're leaving unsaid is these huge differences that indicate these hits are completely meaningless. Because if you're going to call an inclusion of an unnecessary and a hit, but then you're not going to tell your readers about the fact that Joseph Smith left verses in there that shouldn't be in there. If the, if the Book of Mormon is capturing this version of the Isaiah scroll, that to me is conclusion first thinking. I think it's actually a little worse than pseudo scholarship. It's extremely misleading and dishonest scholarship.

Nemo 1:49:42 Well, Kerry Muhlstein said as much publicly, didn't he, when he said, I start with the conclusion that the Book of Abraham or the Book of Mormon is true, and then I fit what I need to into that paradigm to make it work. That's conclusion first thinking.

Julia 1:49:56 That's, that's ridiculous to me. I want to, I want to share a little story that I've shared before. But so Fawn Brody wrote, no man knows my history. And then Hugh Nibley wrote, no ma', am, that's not history. And I was talking to my dad about this and he was like, oh, he wrote this pamphlet rebutting her, so therefore her book isn't true. And I was like, oh, dad, have you read Hugh Nibley's pamphlet? And he was like, well, no, but. But it exists. So to him, its existence was enough that he didn't need to worry about Fawn Brody anymore. To me, this is them hand waving and saying, we've answered the question. There are similarities. Don't worry about it anymore. Because the great Isaiah scroll to me disproves. I think that's what we're showing, that the Book of Mormon is not historical. It proves that it is not historical. But them making this paper, this two, this huge paper with all their research, this is saying they're like, don't worry about it. It's totally fine. I don't know, it just feels like that hand wavy thing that you were talking about, John. Don't worry about it. Anyway,

Kolby Reddish 1:50:57 yeah, that's my one bit of pushback, John, is I actually think it's worse than you're saying. I think it is incredibly deceptive. If you look at this from the editor, too, it's interesting that this is the entirety of this piece from 2011. But the editor, the note from the editor here to me is also very interesting. It says, since the discovery of the Isaiah scrolls among the Qumran text, the scholarly world has made extensive studies of the various Isaiah textual families, that is, groups of ancient Isaiah texts that seem to come from a common source. The Isaiah passages in the Book of Mormon on numerous occasions do not line up with the Hebrew text behind the King James Version of Isaiah. So that's the Masoretic text we've been talking about. Right. As the article by Don Perry and Stephen Ricks demonstrates, on a small scale, contrary to gainsayers of the Book of Mormon who claim Joseph Smith simply copied from the King James Bible, the Book of Mormon version of Isaiah belongs to a different textual family than the Masoretic text of Isaiah behind the King James Version. So the thing that's interesting to me is you can see what they're doing here. They're trying to say the argument, they're trying to counter with this piece to your question, Julie, of like, what are they doing? Is they're trying to say for people who say Joseph Smith just copied directly from the King James Version, when we look at this great Isaiah scroll and do this comparison, it's actually more complicated than that. And I agree. The problem is when you get into the actual complication and you get into the actual details, it proves that Joseph Smith was Not doing what he said he was doing. That the Book of Mormon does not reflect what we would expect to see by reflecting these changes in the great Isaiah scroll version.

Julia 1:52:36 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:52:40 And that's. And that's what this whole series is about is really. It's a. I mean it's about the truth claims and it's about apologists attempts. Church funded apologists. Attempts to deceive.

Kolby Reddish 1:52:55 Mm.

John Dehlin 1:52:57 So.

Kolby Reddish 1:52:58 Yep, exactly. So if you'll move forward, just recapitulating the summary as we've looked at these examples in depth and we could have done more because I did every single comparison. And I know, Julia, you did too. But across every Isaiah chapter quoted in the Book of Mormon, there is no verse that substantively aligns with the great Isaiah scrolls. Older readings. Except for those five examples we talked about. Right. Which I don't consider them substantive at all. A pattern that directly contradicts the claim of the Book of Mormon that it is a translation from 6th century Hebrew records. 6th century BC Hebrew records. And so you can see the brass plates narrative is a huge problem for the Book of Mormon from a historicity perspective because it doesn't reflect what we would expect to see.

Julia 1:53:45 But. Yeah, but like the book is anachronistic. The brass plates itself, there's deutero Isaiah and it doesn't even reflect what we have in the great Isaiah scroll. So that's.

Kolby Reddish 1:53:55 It's a real problem. There's about four or five different problems.

John Dehlin 1:53:58 Yeah, there's like. There's no, there's no Adam and Eve. There never was an Adam and Eve. There was no global flood. There was no Tower of Babel, which the Book of Mormon relies upon. There's no evidence that Abraham or Moses ever really existed. There's multiple Isaiah authors, not just one, but. But certainly the Book of Mormon is depicting text that would have been produced by second or third Isaiah. After Lehi leaves Jerusalem with the breastplates, there were no book like metal plates written in 600 BC. We know that Joseph needed to replace the 115 pages that he lost with Martin Harris. So we know that he injected Isaiah as just a way to kind of crib text to come up with the 115 pages that he needed to replace. So we kind of have the motive there. And then what Joseph produces as Isaiah suggests direct plagiarism of the version of the King James Version Bible that we know he had in his possession, along with unattributed Adam Clark commentary that he plagiarizes. And then what we know the text should resemble the Isaiah text should resemble. If he was truly producing the. The most accurate text possible, he would have been producing text that would be more similar to the earliest versions or scrolls or codices that we have from Isaiah that inconveniently were discovered after Joseph Smith died, and that the biblical passages that Joseph Smith does edit or produce or create in the Book of Mormon often conflict with his own Joseph Smith translation that he ends up producing later that is also, you know, borrowed from and or plagiarized from in many instances, the Adam Clark commentary. Not to mention the fact that it makes no sense that Native Americans were speaking in King, speaking and writing in King James English or practicing Protestant Christianity before Jesus was even born in America. Not to mention Native American DNA being a problem. And there's no geography to fit the text in the Book of Mormon.

Kolby Reddish 1:56:41 But aside from all of those problems.

Nemo 1:56:44 Yeah, aside from all that. And I think your last point there, John, points to something really interesting, which is that in defending the Book of Mormon, often what you have to do is broaden the net. So when it comes to things like geography, all of a sudden we've gone from what was the understanding of Joseph Smith and his contemporaries that the hill Cumorah was that very hill. Then all of a sudden it could be in Central America. We don't know the events of the Book of Mormon, all these archaeological hits they've been finding. Every time Jasmine Rapley comes up on screen saying, oh, they've just found this in Central America, immediately I go, well, then it doesn't help, does it? Because we have to default to what Joseph Smith actually believed at the time about where the events the Book of Mormon took place. And in order to get around the problems with that, with it being an archaeologically clean hill, they broaden the net, they widen it out. They say, well, actually it could be any number of these things. That's why translation all of a sudden has gone from being tight translation to, well, we're going to have to loosen it. We have to broaden it out to try and fix the problems. We don't care that all the witnesses to the translation said it was tight. No, we're going to have to broaden these things out again. And this is another example of that,

Kolby Reddish 1:57:56 what you call broadening the net. I would say, like the More the modern Mormon apologetic movement is taking everything that Joseph said, Joseph Smith said and his early contemporary said, everything the Book of Mormon says, everything the Bible says, that's testable. And by testable, I mean, like falsifiable. We can look like we did today and say, does this, does the evidence help show that this is historical, or does it show the opposite? Right. If the book was historical, we would expect to see certain evidence. Do we see that evidence? What I see the modern Mormon apologetic movement doing is just finding every way to make the Book of Mormon and what Joseph Smith said unfalsifiable. That's all it does. So when the Book of Mormon talks about skin, it doesn't really mean skin. When it's. When Joseph Smith talks about doing a translation, he's not really doing a translation, he's doing something else. And every single one of those. It's so weird to me from this, from this side of the aisle now, seeing how desperately the church and these apologists are running from what Joseph Smith actually said and what Joseph Smith actually thought he was doing, it's so weird that to preserve their image of Joseph Smith and Joseph Smith's calling as a prophet, they have to run desperately from so many things. The guy actually said that we know that he said that. You can pull up on the Joseph Smith papers, like you said, Nemo, everything Joseph Smith ever said about the Book of Mormon, including pointing to specific archaeological finds, reproducing them in the times and seasons, and saying, look, this is prophecy fulfilled. This is the promises of the Book of Mormon being fulfilled. Look, these are the ruins of the Nephites. They run away from all of that stuff because it's such a problem, because we can test those things today and they never vindicate Joseph Smith, not once that I've ever found. And to go back to my disclaimer at the beginning of this episode, I understand the Book of Mormon gives a separate test for whether it's true, which is whether it's good and inspires people to do good. And I want to acknowledge that the Book of Mormon can inspire people to do good. The Book of Mormon can bring meaning and utility to people's lives. That's why in my mind, when we're talking about historicity, we're not talking about faith based questions. And I think it's important that if people want to continue believing the Book of Mormon as being inspired, as being scripture, whatever they want to believe it to be, that's fine. Like, it would be the heights of arrogance for me to presume that people need to weigh those things the same way that I do. But people need to be honest about the things that they believe based on faith and the things they believe based on evidence. And my problem with apologists is that they're Constantly arguing that these things are believable based on the evidence. When you actually look at the evidence, that is just ridiculous. They're the only people who believe these things are believable based on evidence. Yeah.

What the Evidence Means for Joseph Smith's Story

John Dehlin 2:00:45 I have a question, either for the panel or for any viewer listener that is paying attention. If Joseph Smith just made up this idea of brass plates, Laban's brass plates existing 600 BC containing the words of Isaiah, why didn't he just make up that Laban had a scroll, a paper scroll, and that Nephi had to go chop off Laban's head to get a scroll instead of brass plates?

Nemo 2:01:19 I have an answer.

John Dehlin 2:01:20 Nemo.

Nemo 2:01:22 Joseph Smith likes to draw himself in the Book of Mormon or write himself into the Book of Mormon by way of analogous stories, such as a man having to go and retrieve some plates that other people wanted to try and keep from him that contain a very important record that needs to be preserved. I wonder what story he's telling contemporary about some other plates that he's found that he needs to get hold of. It's a way of writing in that story as something that happened anciently to prophets and is now happening also today to prophets. He gets to write himself into the narrative there

John Dehlin 2:01:55 because he had told people that an angel gave him golden plates, then he's just putting that into, you know, 600 B.C. jerusalem with Laban as well.

Nemo 2:02:07 Plates are the format that prophets get these important words through. And if you don't know he got that idea.

John Dehlin 2:02:15 Where would someone in 1823 get the idea that ancient Jewish prophets wrote on plates?

Nemo 2:02:25 I know Dan Vogel versus scrolls.

Julia 2:02:29 I know Dan Vogel in his. I think it's the Book of Mormon origins book. He talks about some of the references that people understood as having written on plates. But again, they were just like the decorative. They're not like, full text. And so I wonder if that's where Joseph's getting it. But he's also a treasure hunter, so he's looking for gold anyway. And, like, he's. He's wanting to answer these religious questions in his family, like, and he also needs something to have lasted for a really long time so that he can't. I don't know, like, but I know that there is. There is a precedent for having this. This idea of plates in general. And you can. I think Dan Vogel lists off different sources in Joseph Smith's era or time where they have plates.

John Dehlin 2:03:08 All right, well, if our viewers or listeners have Dan Vogel, maybe Brett Metcalf, others, you know, if any of y' all can Help us identify where Joseph would have gotten the idea that Jews wrote on. Wrote books on plates, basically. I would love to hear where he borrowed that idea from versus just paper scrolls.

Kolby Reddish 2:03:34 Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I'll have to look into that more.

John Dehlin 2:03:39 I mean, I do know that you can't bury paper scrolls for, you know, 2000 years or 1500 years and expect them to be in good condition.

Nemo 2:03:51 The great Isaiah scroll survived for a good sort of.

John Dehlin 2:03:56 But in a cave, not in the ground. Right, right.

Nemo 2:03:59 In a cave in a arid environment.

Guest 2:04:02 Right.

Nemo 2:04:02 Versus not in downstate New York.

Julia 2:04:05 Yeah.

Kolby Reddish 2:04:06 Completely different climate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I had just to kind of conclude. Julia, I think I had the, the timeline slide one more time.

Julia 2:04:16 Oh, yes. Did you want to say anything about this? Because you bring it up again. Did you just want to reemphasize?

Kolby Reddish 2:04:21 I wanted to emphasize just the literal nature of what Nephi claims he's doing just to remind people about that. Because I know there's so much, much detail.

Nemo 2:04:28 Right.

Kolby Reddish 2:04:28 And now I need, if I write more of the words of Isaiah, like just for people who wanted to respond to this and try and argue like, oh, it doesn't have to be one for one. Well, that's not what Nephi is saying here. He's saying exactly what we have depicted here, which is like he's quoting directly from the words of Isaiah. And I think the next slide also has a problem for these looser conceptual translations, which is you've brought up a few times, John, the difference between the pre loss of the lost 116 pages and the post lost 116 pages. This is where Joseph then builds this idea of two different sets of plates. Right. And it's important that Mormon was doing the abridgment of the post first and second Nephi plates. Most of the quotes we've looked at today come from first and second Nephi. So in Words of Mormon, where he's talking about this abridgment, he says, and now I speak somewhat concerning that which I have written. For after I had made an abridgment from the plates of Nephi down to the reign of this King Benjamin, of whom Amaleki spake, which that begins the book of Mosiah, I searched among the records which had been delivered into my hands and I found these plates, meaning the plates of first and second Nephi, which contained the small account of the prophets from Jacob down to the reign of this King Benjamin, and also many of the words of Nephi. But behold, I shall take these plates which contain these prophesyings and revelations and put them into the remainder of my record. For they are choice unto me, and I know they will be choice unto my brethren. What I'm doing here is illustrating the clear chain of custody of this literal text of the translation from what's supposed to be closest to this great Isaiah scroll.

Guest 2:06:08 Right.

Kolby Reddish 2:06:08 That the brass plates literally copied down by Nephi Mormon doesn't change any of Nephi's first and second Nephi plates. He literally says, I shall take these plates and put them with the remainder of the record. So what Joseph Smith had access to should be directly what was on those brass plates when Nephi is quoting from Isaiah. That's what this serves to do. So then our last concluding slide just helps bring this back. Right, we've got our timeline. The question is, imagine how significant of evidence for Book of Mormon historicity it would be if the Book of Mormon's version of Isaiah captured the version of Isaiah that we see in the great Isaiah scroll. Instead we don't see that. We see that the King James Version is what is the source text for the Isaiah verses in the Book of Mormon or the King James Version, plus Joseph Smith's own theological interpretation, sometimes borrowing from the Adam Clark Bible commentary. So while we should see our blue line if the Book of Mormon were historical, instead we see this purple line where the Book of Mormon is drawing from texts that it should not be drawing from.

Nemo 2:07:20 Yep, about sums it up.

Julia 2:07:23 Yeah, case closed.

John Dehlin 2:07:27 And I, I think we should not just trust on this search, but I'm reading from just an initial search that like John Wesley in Letter to a Roman Catholic in 1749 described Christians writing on gold plates. I haven't confirmed this, so maybe we should do an episode on this as a follow up LDS discussions.

Kolby Reddish 2:07:52 Sure.

John Dehlin 2:07:53 Series. But there's the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which, which claims to have articles about lead plates and gold plates and ancient engraved records. And here's one. James Joyce's the Wonders of Nature and Art claims to reference ancient inscriptions on plates of gold and brass. And then an 1820 article mentions discoveries of ancient brass plates in Italy. And then it's saying that the Wayne Sentinel in 1825 has an article describing brass plates found with. With ancient ruins. So the Wayne Sentinel was in Joseph Smith's hometown. So I haven't confirmed any of those. But maybe we write this down. Kolby and Julia.

Guest 2:08:47 Yeah.

John Dehlin 2:08:48 As something either Maybe Dan Vogel's already done this research or maybe we can do our own search if he hasn't to see where this idea may have come from.

Julia 2:08:58 Yeah, that'd be great.

Nemo 2:08:59 Sounds good.

John Dehlin 2:09:00 But Kolby, I think this work that you've done to me is almost as significant as the book of Abraham in the sense that it's this, you know, this old Isaiah scroll is something where believers would get really excited because as you've said, it would, if Joseph Smith were truly a prophet, truly translating ancient Isaiah, you know, they would be excited because the earlier scrolls would only validate or verify Joseph's divine calling or special power. But. But then. And you should be able to create a theory, learning that an ancient Isaiah scroll was discovered, you should be able to create a theory of if Joseph Smith was really translating ancient Isaiah, you know, would his text more closely resemble the King James version of the Bible that he had or the thousand 2000 earlier year discovered scroll? You could create that theory and then test it. And it seems like you've tested that theory. And unfortunately it doesn't speak well for Joseph Smith's abilities.

Kolby Reddish 2:10:18 Yeah, imagine. The real simple way I guess I'd sum this up is imagine how impressive it would have been if when Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon in 1830, and when it's capturing Isaiah chapter two and we know that there's a missing verse and a half from this original that's been added to over time. Imagine if when Joseph Smith published his version of Isaiah that's in the Book of Mormon, that those verses would have been missing. People in his day would have been so troubled by that. Right. They would have been like, why did he take this stuff out? He's modifying the King James Version. But then in 1947, when the dead Sea Scrolls are discovered and this scroll is discovered, it would have vindicated Joseph Smith for his claim to be translating actual historical records, that would have been really compelling, strong evidence of Joseph Smith's calling as a prophet and that he was doing what he claimed to do. Instead, we see the exact opposite. We see Joseph Smith tracking exactly with the Bible that he had available to him. So again, whatever people want to believe, the Book of Mormon is meaning, value, meaning value and utility to their lives. Like, I have no qualms about that. But when we're looking at the question of historicity, there's a really clear example in the discovery of this great Isaiah scroll for Joseph Smith to have been vindicated. And instead we find the exact opposite. And that's a real problem for Book of Mormon's theory of historicity. It's almost like if there were an apologist that were willing to debate Me on Book of Mormon historicity. This would be a prime thing that I would offer as evidence for why the Book of Mormon cannot be viewed as historical.

Nemo 2:11:56 It's just a shame you're a rando with no podcast of your own, isn't it, really?

John Dehlin 2:12:04 Well, Kolby, thank you so much for making today possible. Julia and Nemo, thanks for your support and thanks for helping us continue this LDS discussion series. Many. Many of my viewers and listeners say it's the most important single thing Mormon Stories has ever done, this LDS discussion series. And every time we create a new one, it helps promote the entire series, which I think is really important, and it's helped a lot of people figure out what's true and what's not true. So thank you.

Kolby Reddish 2:12:36 Of course. Yeah. And I would be interested to know from the listeners what type of stuff they would like to see added to this series in the future, because my recent area of study has been doing these types of analysis on the Book of Mormon, looking at it like. Like trying to test the hypothesis of the Book of Mormon being historical and doing that according to the best way I can make sense of the evidence. So if that's exciting to people, I have more ideas to keep digging on that.

Upcoming Episodes and Closing Remarks

John Dehlin 2:13:02 Do we have any episodes in the works, Julia or Kolby?

Kolby Reddish 2:13:09 Oh, go ahead.

Julia 2:13:10 Oh, no, no, you go.

Kolby Reddish 2:13:12 I was gonna say I would love to do the episode dealing with the Book of Mormon's claims about the information density of Egyptian and Hebrew. I just have to find a way to really make that understandable. It can get kind of technical.

Nemo 2:13:26 So I'm happy to work on you with that one because we've covered that a little bit together before, so I think we can. We can make that happen.

Julia 2:13:33 And if there's still interest in the CES letter, because for a while we were doing some episodes just, like, kind of reiterating the CES letters chapters, and if people still have interest in that, we can still obviously do those. I think those are. Those are good. And then some of the ones about, like, the. The historical claims of sealing and what Joseph was thinking and how those have all evolved, that's in the works as well. But, yeah, this one.

John Dehlin 2:13:53 Hey, when are you going to finish that one, Julia?

Julia 2:13:55 Yeah, it's almost done.

John Dehlin 2:13:57 All right. All right. Fun. Well, all that is to say, more LDS discussions episodes coming up in the future. It is giving a season. We lose donors every month here on the Open Stories Foundation. We do pay Kolby, Nemo, and Julia for their work, and we need your support to do that. So, please, if you value the LDS discussion series and you want to see continue and you're not currently a donor. Please become a monthly donor@mormonstories.org donate if you are already a donor. Thank you so much for making this possible. Please like and subscribe this episode, share it, comment on it. We want your feedback. Email us@mormonstoriesgmail.com and while you're at it, subscribe to Nemo the Mormon on YouTube. Donate to him and subscribe and like analyzing Mormonism and donate to Julia as well. And Kolby because he's a rich attorney in Idaho. Don't donate anything to Kolby.

Nemo 2:15:01 Send in potatoes. That's what I'd have.

Kolby Reddish 2:15:05 Yeah, I'm good.

Nemo 2:15:06 All right.

John Dehlin 2:15:07 Kolby doesn't need anything. He's got it.

Nemo 2:15:09 Don't send potatoes once for nothing.

Julia 2:15:12 Maybe hedgehogs.

Nemo 2:15:14 Yeah, cute pictures of hedgehogs. Send him those.

Kolby Reddish 2:15:17 What have you done?

John Dehlin 2:15:20 We need, we really do need a meme of, like, Isaiah playing Sonic the Hedgehog with a French beret. Eating croissants, drinking a latte.

Julia 2:15:31 Yeah.

Kolby Reddish 2:15:31 Riding a.

John Dehlin 2:15:34 Writing a bite.

Nemo 2:15:39 It's a chat GPT entrance away. Right. You just type that into chat GPT. You'll have it in but a moment.

John Dehlin 2:15:47 All right. Thanks, Kolby. Thanks, Nemo. Thanks, Julia. Thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Be good to each other. Be kind to each other. Be bridge builders and peacemakers. We'll see you all again soon. Take care, everybody.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.