Where Did Joseph Smith Get the Idea of Ancient Plates? – LDS Discussions

Introduction and Episode Overview

Kolby Reddish 0:00 Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast, LDS Discussions Edition. It is Friday, January 16, 2026, and we are joined this morning for our episode on where did Joseph Smith come up with the idea of gold plates by Julia Sanders and Nemo. The morning. Good morning both of you. How are you?

Julia 0:21 Good. How are you guys?

Nemo 0:23 Very well.

Kolby Reddish 0:24 Good. Julia, do you mind introducing yourself and then we'll turn it over to Nemo to do the same.

Julia 0:29 Sure. So I'm Julia. I run the, the TikTok, Instagram, YouTube for analyzing Mormonism. I grew up Mormon. I served a mission. I went to byu, Idaho. I'm getting my master's degree and I'll get that this year, hopefully. Um, and I've been on this is episode 70 for LDS discussions and I think I've been on somewhere in the mid-50s. So, yeah.

Kolby Reddish 0:51 Great.

Nemo 0:52 I'm Nemo. Hi everyone. I've been on since, I think episode two and I'm glad to be here, though slightly disappointed because I thought, Colby, we'd agreed you'd do the John Dehlin impression to open and you know, the people need to hear it.

Kolby Reddish 1:06 I think I know better than that. But yes, I'll go ahead and introduce myself. I am not John Dehlin. Instead, I am your guest host for today, Colby Reddish. I am a, I like to say a prolific post Mormon podcast guest, but don't have my own podcast or anything like that. I'm a licensed attorney that left the church in 2022. My first kind of entry into the space was an appearance on Mormon stories, episodes 1550 and 1551, where we talked about our faith crisis, my wife and I's faith crisis, which was catalyzed by our sitting bishop pleading guilty to several sex abuse crimes. So that is kind of my background. One of the reasons I am happy to be the guest host for today's episode is because the LDS discussion series is aimed at at doing as much as we can to do an objective evaluation of LDS Church truth claims. Nemo, do you mind giving the folks kind of an overview of the LDS discussion series since you're our longest standing guest on this series?

Nemo 2:06 Yeah. So it started with a guy called Mike who did a website called LDS Discussions where he set out a series of essays tackling some of these difficult things. Think about like the gospel topics essays, but better. So a lot of really good research, well researched material. And so that got turned into a series here on Mormon stories. John always likes to say it's the most important series that he's ever done. And I think I would agree it's been very impactful. I think I'm proud to have been part of it. I think it's an important work and I'm glad that we're able to carry it on now that Mike has retired from this space.

Kolby Reddish 2:40 Yeah. I just point out that earlier this week, the Main Street Plaza blog awarded one of the previous entries in this series a Brody Award for 2025's best single podcast episode. The episode we did entitled Could Joseph Smith Write or Dictate a well Worded Letter? Julia, you did a bunch of great research on that. And then I put together some. What's that?

Julia 3:02 I think your research was just top notch because just. That was really, really good episode. So if you guys haven't seen it, go back and watch that. That was really good.

Kolby Reddish 3:08 Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. And thank you for being part of it, for sure. Yeah. So tell us how we got to analyzing this question today, Julia, and then we'll kind of move through this material.

Could Joseph Smith Have Known About Ancient Plates?

Julia 3:20 Oh, I feel like you'd be better at maybe addressing this, but, like, because a lot of people say that Joseph Smith couldn't possibly have known that there were ancient plates or ancient plates anciently. How do I say that? And so, like this, what we're trying to frame today is not to prove that. It's to show that Joseph Smith had it in his idea, in his milieu, that people were talking about ancient plates. So I don't know if there's a. That's really, really simply all it is.

Kolby Reddish 3:47 Yeah, I think one of the things that prompted this question is as we were doing a previous episode, I think specifically about the Great Isaiah scroll and looking at the Great Isaiah scroll and what it means for the Book of Mormon's capture of certain Isaiah passages and what that means for a Book of Mormon historicity, I think we kind of prompted the. It prompted the question, where may Joseph Smith have gotten this idea of ancient metal plates that kind of bore a history, like an actual historical record? Because we were looking at the idea of a codex and how all of those things interface. So I think really the purpose of today's episode, and I'm going to be basically serving in the live reaction to the evidence that Julia has been able to put together and the research Julia's been able to put together. I think really the point of this episode to me is, is very often we see apologists create these arguments of Joseph Smith, of the gaps when it comes to the Book of Mormon. And what I mean by that is, they'll basically say that Joseph Smith could not have, or no human could have created a text like the Book of Mormon. And so they'll often point to, like, the dictation timeline or the translation timeline or, you know, certain Hebraic elements they want to point to in the text and say, how could Joseph Smith have known this but for receiving this information from God? And the same argument is often made about Joseph Smith's inability to know that humans had recorded things on metal plates anciently. And so I think. I think to me, that is what we'll be analyzing today is were there other possible alternative ways that in Joseph Smith's milieu, he may have been able to learn about ancient metal plates? How does that sound for a thesis?

Julia 5:28 That sounds perfect. That sounds really good.

Kolby Reddish 5:30 Good.

Julia 5:31 Nima, did you want to add anything?

Nemo 5:32 Well, no, just that I think that's a really good summary. And you and Colby both do the research for these episodes. My job behind the scenes, what little I do, is to look at the slides and summarize things like that. Like Colby said, put it into what is the question we're actually asking here, defining the thrust of the assessment so that we make sure we're clear about what it is we're trying to talk about. So if you want to put those up on screen, we can maybe run through those now. Yeah, Which I'm happy to read. The question here is, did the concept of metal plates containing writings or inscriptions exist within Joseph Smith's milieu prior to his claim to discover the golden plates, I. E. Could he have got the idea from somewhere? If it did exist, if that idea did exist, then it presents a reasonable explanation of where Joseph Smith may have obtained the idea of ancient records written on metal plates. Not saying that's necessarily where he got the idea, not necessarily saying he copied it from anyone, but it creates a reasonable explanation as to where he may have got that idea from, where he may have drawn inspiration? So the question is not, did metal plates exist during the times at which the brass plates and golden plates would have been created? We've gone over the anachronisms that are the brass plates, and we've discussed the gold plates in great detail. I believe in episode two, actually, of LDS discussions, we talked about the gold plates in great detail.

Kolby Reddish 6:48 So we're not going to be getting

Nemo 6:49 into that too much today. We're not really concerned with that. Yeah, the episode's not about the possibility of ancient plates, nor whether the gold or brass plates represent an anachronism. We've addressed that in the other Isaiah problem and episode two of LDS discussions.

Kolby Reddish 7:04 Right. And one thing I'll say about that is very often the apologetics that we see, and maybe we'll see some of that as we go through today's material. Very often, the apologetics we see on that is not comparing like, for like. So the brass plates. The story of the brass plates that's recorded in the Book of Mormon's narrative is not just writing on metal plates. It's writing on metal plates in a very specific form and in a form of keeping history that is anachronistic. So that's one thing to look out for, is very often people will point to, like, decorative plates that have a few words on them. That is not the type of plate that we're talking about. We're talking about a form of keeping a history and whether that itself is anachronistic. Like Nemo said, that's not the focus of today's episode. Instead, today we're going to look at where or basically what a contemporary American in Joseph Smith's day may have thought about the idea of ancient metal plates.

Julia 7:58 And to start off, I just wanted to quote the Church, because the Church, we've talked about this before with the Church's definition of codex. So the Church even says the general conclusion among scholars is that the Hebrews did not use codices until the 2nd or 3rd century A.D. so they're even saying that in a way, they're saying that the brass plates are anachronistic. And then Nemo and I were talking about this yesterday. The. The Book of Mormon ends in 400 A.D. and so you could. You could say that, sure, it's not anachronistic after the third century, but like, everything before that, it's all the golden plates even are anachronistic.

Kolby Reddish 8:32 Right.

Julia 8:35 Okay. So to start off, we're going to look at the evidence.

Nemo 8:37 Here we go.

Julia 8:38 Yeah. Evidence for metal plates and Joseph Smith's milieu. So a lot of what I'm. A lot of what I'm talking about, the research that I'm pulling today comes from Dan Vogel's book, Indian Origins and the Book of Mormon, and it was published in 1986 by Signature Books, and you can follow dan Vogel on YouTube. But one thing that I'm. This. This kind of. I have his book here. It's out of print. It's 1986. So, like, we're still having. I don't understand why people are still arguing these points today when we've already known for decades that it wasn't Joseph Smith's milieu. So this. I just thought that was interesting.

Kolby Reddish 9:13 So, yeah, that's literally longer than Nemo's been alive. This argument has been in existence about

Nemo 9:20 10 years longer, in fact.

Julia 9:24 So how I've set this up is that I. We're. We're going to show Dan Vogel's research and then we've had Brent Medkoff, who's been on Mormon stories a few times. We have his research, too. And so, so I'll show concluding slides with Dan Vogel and then concluding slides with Brent Metcalf, and then we'll talk about everything else in between. So the first slide. Yeah, so the first slide comes from James Adair. This was in 1775. He published a book and he described two brass plates and five copper plates. And he also says that they were given to them by men who were called of God. So it's very like scripture, like. And I don't know if we want to comment on this or just keep going.

Kolby Reddish 10:00 Yeah.

Nemo 10:00 Just to say as early as 1775, which I believe is that older than the United States of America by one year. Right. So older than the country in which Joseph Smith founded his religion. The concept of place existed.

Julia 10:14 Yeah.

Kolby Reddish 10:15 Right. And if you'll go back to that slide, Julia, I do actually want to read that full quote because I think it. When people compare the thematic parallel to the Book of Mormon, you can kind of see one there. The quote says he was told by his forefathers that those plates were given to them by the man we call God, that there had been many more other shapes, some had writing upon them which were buried with particular men. So that comes from James Adair's book. And was this a fiction book or was it. Was it purporting to be a history?

Julia 10:46 No, it's purporting to be a history. And I had more slides that I have since removed because I didn't want to overwhelm the audience. But I'll put his. I'll put a link to his book. And also he's talking about shapes of the plates. And in his book you'll see the shapes that he's pointing out. One of them looks like almost like an anchor. It kind of reminds me of the Kinderhook plates. So they're just little decorative plates that he's talking about. Certainly nothing like what Joseph Smith described as the Book of Mormon.

Nemo 11:08 And a point to make, again, just to re hammer this home right at the beginning is that it almost wouldn't matter if it was A historical book or a fictional book. If someone is putting out the idea that ancient peoples may have written something on metal plates, then Joseph Smith could take that idea and use it to create his narrative. If you hold a position that Joseph Smith made this up.

Kolby Reddish 11:29 Yeah. Similarly. Sorry, Julia. One additional thing I'd say along those lines is it also is not us pointing to James Adair's book and saying, so Joseph Smith secretly accessed some copy of James Adair's book, and this is exactly where he got the idea. I think when we talk about things like this, people need to expand their mind a little bit and understand the basics of how we communicate cultural information. So we pass cultural information sometimes without even being aware of it. If you've ever watched a movie, especially like a kids movie, the classic example I think of is the 1999 cinematic classic space Jam, which I've never seen. Which you've never seen, but I'm aware of. It's also your point of classic. Yeah, but in that movie, and there's tons of kids movies that have things like this. Right. There's an homage to the very adult movie Pulp Fiction. And so you can be aware of this reference to a movie that you've never seen because of how we pass cultural information. So we are not exactly saying that Joseph Smith necessarily needed to read any of these sources that Julia is going to present to us today. It's more about where are these things kind of floating in this early American ether? And could they have been known to Joseph Smith in some other way than being directly revealed by God? That's the question. Here is where we're engaging in hypothesis testing, looking at two parallel hypotheses, and then asking which is more probable based on, you know, the way science and history and critical thinking works.

Julia 13:05 Yeah. And I was just going to add that later we're going to talk about Solomon Spalding, who wrote a novel, and he only ever claimed that it was a novel. He didn't claim it was a history. And so even he has the idea of ancient records buried, I think, in a box. I don't. They were scrolls. But still, it's the idea in his head where even he understood people will accept this, I think, as believable. So let me write about it. So we're going to talk about his source as well later. So.

Kolby Reddish 13:27 Great.

Julia 13:27 Yeah.

Kolby Reddish 13:28 So what's our next source, Julia?

Copper and Brass Plates in Joseph Smith's Environment

Julia 13:30 So the next one. These are New York copper plates in 1809. Orsimus Turner reported that in 1809, a New York farmer plowed up an ancient Record or tablet. This plate, according to Turner, was made of copper, had engraved upon one side of it what would appear to have been some record, or as we. Or as we may well imagine, some brief code of laws. And then he goes on to say that the plate was made in manner and form, like the tablets of the early nations, to which allusions are made in both sacred and profane history. So I like this one just because, like, it's just. It's. He's just saying there's one. And he's also saying this is how people did it anciently in the early nations.

Kolby Reddish 14:13 It's also interesting that in his reference to early nation history, there is both good and bad. So sacred and profane. That's kind of an interesting that that dichotomy is something that readers of the Book of Mormon would be very familiar with, at least thematically, that you've got these two different, you know, classes of people.

Julia 14:32 Yeah, that I think. And specifically, is it the Book of Helaman where he says that records almost like the. There's like bad plates that were kept of the evil. The. The. I can't remember which book it is.

Kolby Reddish 14:43 Like the secret combinations.

Julia 14:45 Yeah, the secret combinations. And that just kind of made me think of that where both records are kept of the secret combinations and then of the righteous people, the followers of God. That's just an interesting thing to point out.

Kolby Reddish 14:55 Yeah, I don't remember exactly where that's spoken of in the Book of Mormon because I'm a lazy learner. So what's our next source?

Julia 15:05 So next is brass plates in 1823. In 1823, John Heywood published a book titled the Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee. In it, he describes plates found in Native American burial mounds. And he describes. He says that they were found with human bones of large size. And he says two or three plates of brass were found with characters inscribed, resembling letters. Again, another source, 1823. So just a pretty close to when Joseph Smith claims to have been visited by the angel. So people are talking about this as well.

Nemo 15:36 And links in with burial mounds, which we know links into a lot of what was going on in Joseph Smith's time, engagement with the bound builder myth, etc.

Julia 15:45 Right. I think Dan Vogel dates Joseph Smith's first treasure digging to 1820. And so if he's specifically digging in these ancient mounds, this would be. I feel like he would know this type of information that these things are buried with these people.

Kolby Reddish 16:02 That account also, to me, parallels what we see later with the Kinderhook Plates hoax, which is there was this set of the six bell shaped plates being buried with and I believe it even was supposed to be like an exaggerated in size human skeleton if I remember correctly.

Julia 16:19 Yeah, so there's another one I wanted to point out one. So this is not a source for records. Instead Joseph smith In his 1832 first vision, he claims that at about the age of 12 years my mind became seriously impressed with regard to all important concerns for the welfare of my immortal soul. And then he says, which led me to searching the scriptures, believing as I was taught that they contained the word of God. So Joseph Smith, he's saying here that at the age of 12 he's studying the Bible. He says he studies the Apocrypha. And so to me, because later we're going to show that a lot of these people were commenting, were Bible comment commenters and so then they're talking about records on plates and even the Bible itself talks about records on plates. So Joseph as a 12 year old is also getting this information from Bible scholars or from the Bible.

Nemo 17:10 And we know of at least, we know of at least one Bible commentator that Joseph Smith had connection to, shall we say. We've gone over the Adam Clark commentary on the Bible and then we have

Julia 17:21 his, we have his source in here too.

Kolby Reddish 17:24 So yeah, the additional thing, just because this series does link together in so many instances, I also see a clear link here to that well worded episode we did several months ago. Because if people are thinking that Joseph Smith was not familiar with the Bible in 1830, that has been something that's been claimed historically by the church and by apologists. If you look at Joseph Smith's earliest letters in 1829 and 1830, there really is just no way to reconcile that argument with the reality of Joseph Smith's dictated letters in 1830. He was very, very conversant with the bible. So this 1832 account of Joseph Smith's history and first vision hooks in very, very cleanly with what we know. When looking at Those letters in 1830

Nemo 18:07 I would say yeah, next slide.

Julia 18:12 So the next slide is the Apocrypha and in it he mentions, it is mentioned tables of brass. And this is in the Maccabees book. Is that how you say it? First Maccabees, 8, 22. And I don't know if we need to read this but they're again they're talking in a couple of places about the tables of brass and then yeah, I don't know what else to say about that. But so if it's in the Bible and Joseph was studying it at age 12. He'd be aware that this is how people kept, or he would think that this is how people kept their records.

Kolby Reddish 18:38 Right, interesting. Aside from the Apocrypha, are there other examples from the Bible that more people would be familiar with? Because a lot of people may not, if they grew up lds, they may not have read the Apocrypha. Are there?

Julia 18:51 Yeah. So, actually, so later when we talk about bread, Mac, a lot of the sources that he has given me, they're people commenting on the Bible, like the Book of Job and other places in the Bible. So we'll talk about that kind of in the second chunk. So.

Kolby Reddish 19:01 Yeah, great.

Julia 19:02 Yeah. So definitely. Nima, do you want to talk about this one?

Nemo 19:05 Sure. There were copper plates in 1823. In 1823, a book was published titled Yan's Biblical Archaeology, translated from Latin by Thomas C. Upham. In this book, Johann Jan covers topics such as the geography of the Holy Land, the history of the Israelites, and the customs and traditions of the ancient Near East. He also discusses the ancient books that make up the Bible. We read in part those ancient books, which were inscribed on tablets of wood, leave lead, brass or ivory, were connected together by rings at the back through which a rod was passed by to carry them.

Kolby Reddish 19:42 Yeah. So really clearly here he's describing what Julia had provided as a codex from the church's website. I think that was from the Bible dictionary, actually in the LDS scriptures.

Julia 19:54 Oh, yeah.

Kolby Reddish 19:54 That, that is basically what would be a codex when you've got a ring or some type of binding, basically, or what we would think of as a binding today, connecting in book form, basically, records like that. But we know that that actually isn't the way that these records were kept anciently. They were instead kept on massive scrolls. Right. When we talked about the great Isaiah scroll, I can't remember exactly how many feet, feet long it was, but it's, it's very long. It was like over 50, I believe. So.

Nemo 20:23 And you, you have again, a idea here present that these plates of brass or of lead can be tied together at the back with rings.

Kolby Reddish 20:33 Right, Right.

Nemo 20:34 So what do we. Here is the description of the Book of Mormon, but plates fastened together with 3D shaped rings at the back.

Kolby Reddish 20:41 Right?

Julia 20:43 Yeah.

Kolby Reddish 20:43 And the great Isaiah scroll, just so I can confirm, is about 24ft long. I just wanted to look that up. But when you think of one long piece of paper, that's really, really long. Right?

Julia 20:55 Yeah. So with this specific source, Brent Metcalf, he wrote a paper and he has his footnote 17 expounds on this a little bit more. Colby, do you actually mind reading this?

Kolby Reddish 21:05 No, not at all. So in a dialogue article entitled Apologetic and Critical Assumptions about the Book of Mormon, Brent Metcalfe stated farm's founding president John Welch. John Jack Welch has acknowledged that Jan's work preceded the Book of Mormon dictation, but added the simple existence of Jan's book does not imply that Joseph. Joseph Smith knew anything about it. Welch may be unaware that paraphrased excerpts from John's Biblical archaeology appeared in early Book of Mormon apologia. And he cites the Evening and Morning Star as well as under Joseph Smith's editorial direction during the Times and Seasons in September of 1842. So both of those cited to Jan's volume to buttress Smith's description of the Book of Mormon gold plates. I really like that you included this Julia, because I think it actually comes back to. Brent is basically seeing it the same way I do when I was talking about this isn't saying that Joseph Smith necessarily read any of these sources. You can be aware of an idea, right. How many people are aware of Frankenstein, Frankenstein's monster as a concept that have never read Mary Shelley's original novel? So many people, and that's what we're talking about here is Joseph Smith had the ability to receive information and ideas without him having directly to have read those ideas in the books that we're talking about. Because that especially in that day, that's how information was passed was through discussion.

Julia 22:29 That's a really good example using Mary Shelley's book because like, like, like other movies and books can have references to that one. And even though we never like a whole collection of people have. Has not read her book. So I think that's a great example.

Nemo 22:43 And then I think, yeah, here shows the argument by Jack Welch saying, well, just because it was there doesn't mean Joseph Smith also doesn't mean he didn't. You don't know either way. Right. He's not providing any evidence that Joseph didn't engage with that material. And then we see evidence that he did after the Book of Mormon engaged with it. Certainly it was under his editorship at the Times and Seasons. It was used to justify his description of the place.

Julia 23:08 Right, sorry, yeah. 1833 and 1842. At least by then he knew about it.

Kolby Reddish 23:13 Right. And that's where it really does kind of become about that hypothesis testing.

Julia 23:17 It's.

Kolby Reddish 23:18 Which is more likely because remember the way this is often framed by apologists on the front end is Joseph Smith could not have known this except for God revealing it to him. And the difficulty with that argument, then is. But then why did Jan understand these concepts without them being directly revealed to him by God? That's the special pleading problem between these other contemporary alternatives to Joseph Smith and Joseph Smith is you can't have it both ways on this.

Julia 23:49 Yeah.

Nemo 23:50 Especially because then if you try to argue that all the people that are coming up with this idea are somehow inspired, like the Church has tried to argue that the King James translators are inspired. Well, in the same way that the King James translators made mistakes, got things wrong, and used bad translations sometimes. And that pushes up against the idea they were inspired. Why is God inspiring a load of people to bring forth an idea to Joseph Smith's mind about plates that are anachronistic? And God wouldn't need to. If the gold plates are truly real, he wouldn't need to bring that idea to Joseph Smith's mind at all, because they would just physically exist in front of him. So whenever you're having a discussion about where could he have got this idea from, you need to say, well, he couldn't have got it from anywhere, because entering into the. He got it from somewhere is kind of some sort of tacit admission that he's getting the idea from somewhere, not just seeing the plates in front of him. So you can't really engage that argument on the apologetic side.

Julia 24:44 Right. Yeah. Okay. So I don't. These are not in chronological order, so I can't remember when the other ones were, but. So this is 1814. So in 1814, a man named Thomas Hartwell wrote a book called An Introduction to the Study of Bibliography. And in it he wrote of copper plates containing Egyptian figures. And there's actually quite a bit in here that I want to talk about. So do you actually mind reading just that whole section?

Historical Records of Lead and Metal Plates

Nemo 25:09 Sure can do. History indeed records that tablets of lead and copper have been indifferently employed for preserving treaties, laws, and alliances. Some writers have asserted that leaden paper charter plumbia was formerly used, but is most. But it is most probable that such paper, even if it ever existed, was nothing else than thin plates of lead reduced to a very great degree tenuity by the mallet. Montfaucon assures us that in the year 1699, he purchased at Rome a book consisting entirely of lead about 4 inches long and 3 inches wide, not only the two pieces which formed the COVID but also all the leaves, six in number, together with the stick inserted through the rings which held the Leaves together, as well as the hinges and nails, were entirely composed of lead. This volume contained Egyptian Gnostic figures and other unintelligible writing. It is not known what has since become of this curious article.

Julia 26:12 Yeah, so 1814, they're talking about lead plates.

Kolby Reddish 26:17 Well, and beyond just the lead plates, the other parallel I see is this relationship with Egyptian. So you also have that interesting relationship there. I think it's worth noting, actually. One of the future LDS discussions episodes I hope to put together, building on research I've done in the past, is basically looking at the relationship between Egyptian and Hebrew and what the Book of Mormon says about the information density of those two languages. As I was doing that research, I was really struck by how in Joseph Smith's day, Egyptian really was the, like fundamentally unknowable mystical language. Like, it was the. There. There was even a period in Joseph Smith's day where throughout all of America, not just the region that Joseph Smith lived in, it was referred to as a period of Egyptomania because people were so enthralled with this idea, and it hooked into what was going on in Europe, you know, with capturing some of these artifacts. And by capturing, I mean stealing. It's. It's just a very interesting. Yeah, yeah, thank you for that.

Nemo 27:22 Bunch of Victorian hoorays on a holiday in the Nile Delta, just taking stuff. Yeah, yeah.

Kolby Reddish 27:28 But it did allow us to then, you know, learn more about these cultures, but in that time period, because I think that was from 1814, you know, the Rosetta Stone had not been cracked yet by Champilion and his successors. And so it's just interesting to me to note that there were other people who were seeing similar connections between mysterious records and ancient. And the ancients that Joseph Smith would later build into the DNA of the Book of Mormon.

Nemo 27:56 And again, it doesn't matter if on this slide they're talking about these plates with doubt or as though they're not real, as though the guy he's talking about is making them up. Because this is again, just another point of contact for the genesis of an idea. For Joseph Smith, it's just another place where he may have come across it as a concept, true or otherwise.

Kolby Reddish 28:15 Yeah. The other thing that's really interesting to me about this one is the number of plates is probably lower than most people would imagine. And I think there are accounts of. Dating back to that second episode where you and Mike and John analyzed the. The plates themselves in great detail. I'm often surprised by the accounts of how many plates there were involved in the. You Know the book of Mormon's purported

Nemo 28:37 14, I think record.

Kolby Reddish 28:38 Right. It's lower than most people would assume. And I think we see that in this quote as well. Yeah, yeah.

Julia 28:45 Also with this. He's quoting. I can't. I cannot say his name. Malfoy, Montfaucon, Montfoucauld.

Kolby Reddish 28:51 Okay, so let the European pronounce it correctly for us.

Julia 28:54 Julian, maybe I should just have you read this slide. Nemo.

Nemo 28:56 Sure. I mean, I'll get murdered by the French in the comments, but yeah. In 1721, Bernard de Montfaugault wrote a book called Antiquity Explained and Represented in sculptures with a description and drawing of an Egyptian Gnostic book of lead. One website describes this and another lead codex in a museum in Rome. This piece is described as having six lead sheets between two lead covers, though only four of the lead sheets were said to have text and there's a picture of it there.

Kolby Reddish 29:27 So this basically is that predecessor to what the last quote was talking about. Julia, am I understanding?

Julia 29:32 Yeah, yeah. So he's. So Thomas Hartwell is talking about this 1721 book. So I just. I like this too, because if Hartwell is. Is understanding this from 1721 in 1814, so it just means that more people are talking about him. And that. That to me, like this is like widespread. People are understanding who this person is. And then it would be. It would be reasonable to think that Joseph Smith would have known of this person too, or that others would have known in Joseph Smith's milieu.

Kolby Reddish 29:59 Can you also pull up that the Mongfu Koul slide one more time? I had one more thing that kind of stuck out to me. It's interesting that he. I'm not sure if these were supposed to be tracings or if he's just drawing, you know, what he's seeing on these plates, but I was just kind of struck by how interesting that he basically makes a record of what he actually sees on these plates. And when you compare and contrast that with, you know, Joseph Smith having the. The Book of Mormon artifact, it's interesting that there was no. I guess I'll just put it this way. It seems to me like even if God told me I couldn't show the plates to anyone, but didn't say anything about me being able to create a charcoal rubbing of the plates on paper, that would be a much better system. Or even drawing the entirety of what I see on each of those plates would be a much better system than what we do have from Joseph Smith, which is basically the character's document which Is deformed English.

Nemo 30:55 Right.

Kolby Reddish 30:56 Or just a. Even in the faithful narrative is just a random grab bag of characters from different parts of the record, supposedly.

Nemo 31:04 Yeah. I would expect to see. Even if it's just one, like, leaf of the plates. Just one. Exactly. Laid out as it was on the plates, either rubbed or, you know, drawn out. I wouldn't expect him to go through all 14 of them necessarily, but just one as an example.

Julia 31:22 Yeah. Which they. Because I think they talk about it being dipped like they were inscribing, so you could have made an impression. And I think with the Kinderhook plates, we have pictures of that somebody.

Kolby Reddish 31:31 Correct. We actually have wood cuttings. Which is the other thing I was going to say is when we do get to the Book of Abraham, how interesting that Joseph Smith has wood cuttings prepared of the facsimiles. So he does. He does what Montfoucault does here with later records that he has, but doesn't do it with the Book of Mormons, you know, supposed plates.

Nemo 31:52 But did you guys never go brass rubbing as kids? Was that never a thing you did?

Julia 31:56 I think so.

Nemo 31:57 We used to go to, like, the local church where there's, like, some guy buried and, you know, you. You got the brass plaque. Yeah. With some prey on it.

Kolby Reddish 32:05 Yeah, definitely did that.

Julia 32:06 Yeah. We've also done that in cemeteries where the names were hard to read. We would take the impression on the headstone, but also just for those of you listening, so on the. On the side you can see he's recreated or he's drawn the lead plates. And a lot of it that you can see some text underneath. It's maybe four lines of text with an image of a person or a figure above that. So there's really not. It's really not text dense. It's mostly just figurines. It's mostly. Mostly just decorative. And then he's showing all six pieces and then he's got the covers on there. So anyway, just. That's just very, very interesting to me. And those are. That's a really good point. Colby is like, why did Joseph not draw his own version? Or why did nobody else? None of the witnesses did that and none of them took. Even when he took the character's page to Martin Harris, to Charles. Yeah, he didn't bring anything like that. Joseph had to. Joseph wrote that, I think. Or John, I think. There's a couple of characters, pages.

Kolby Reddish 32:58 John Whitmer, I think.

Julia 32:59 Yeah, right. Yeah. Anyway, that's a really good point. So the next one is in 1811, Claudius Buchanan wrote a book titled the Star in the east, in which he says that the Jews of Cochin India, who Buchanan believed were remnants of the lost 10 tribes, kept a history of their journey to those parts on plates of brass. The plates are six in number. They are composed of a mixed metal. The engraved page on the largest plate is 13 inches long by four broad. They are closely written, four of them on both sides of the plates, making it all 11 pages. On the plate reputed to be the oldest, there is writing perspiciously engraved in nail headed or triangular headed letters resembling or Babylonish. There is one manuscript written in character resembling Palmyrene Hebrew on the brass plate. So again, six and number. This one was interesting because it talks about engraving on both sides. Not a lot of the ones talk about that. It's usually just the one side. And Joseph Smith's gold plates, it was on both sides. Did you guys have any?

Nemo 34:04 No, I mean it absolutely had to be engraved on both sides for Joseph to even begin to start to get near to enough information.

Kolby Reddish 34:11 I don't even think with it being engraved on both sides it's even humanly possible.

Nemo 34:16 No, we will get to that later on, I think.

Kolby Reddish 34:19 But yeah, yeah, it's just interesting to me how many of these different accounts there are. And I guess my follow up question, and maybe you didn't look into this Julia, but I think I know the answer Anyways, so we have all these accounts from basically contemporary with Joseph Smith's life of all these different plates and records. I'm guessing none of these plates and records have ever been located. We just have accounts of their existence.

Julia 34:44 Well, there's the one source that talks about Montfoucault's being in Rome, but again, I don't have verification of that because that's the 1814 book. So again, I don't know.

Nemo 34:57 Yeah, I guess find them in 1699, I think.

Kolby Reddish 34:59 Yeah, and I guess I'm asking that question because there could be someone who looks at all of these accounts and says, look, there are all these accounts that kind of vindicates Joseph Smith. But I think I'm almost positive none of these records actually exist or have ever been located aside from these accounts of their existence. And so to me that then just goes, well, maybe people were just really fascinated with the ancients at this time period.

Nemo 35:27 Again, back to your point near the beginning. The ones that do exist we see are far more decorative and far less information dense than what Joseph Smith was claiming as well. So even if you can say, well look, there are genuine examples of ancient plates. Sure, the church loved to publish the Darius plates for a while, but we see that the information density is just nowhere near sufficient.

Julia 35:49 One thing that I find interesting in this slide is that he talks about, he says the oldest one, the one plate reputed to be the oldest. So to me this shows that maybe they weren't connected by a book or as a book or a codex. It seems like they're separate plates. I don't know if you guys are reading the same thing, but.

Nemo 36:04 Well, it looks as a history, so it would have been done. Yeah. Added upon over time would be the idea he's probably putting forward.

Julia 36:10 So like six plates added over time, not, not a dense book that one person created or gathered together.

Kolby Reddish 36:17 And yeah, so there are also similarities with. Depending on exactly how they were put together. To your point, Julia, there are also similarities there with the Book of Mormon's record because we do have records from different time periods that are then compiled together by Mormon and Moroni. And so I guess I can see a similarity there also with having different dates for different plates attached to the same, you know, collective record.

Julia 36:43 That's true because you have the small plates of Nephi, the Book of Ether and then the abridgement of Moroni.

Kolby Reddish 36:48 Right.

Julia 36:48 Mormon.

Kolby Reddish 36:49 Because that's the, that's one of the other things. Maybe just a slight aside, but that's one of the other things about the Book of Mormon. And the idea of plates is you don't just need one like anachronism to have violated like the law of probability. There are multiple different sets of plates encountered throughout the Book of Mormon, which is a great point, Julia. There's the plates of Ether, there's the different versions of plates of Nephi. This isn't just like a one off problem. The, the narrative of the Book of Mormon very clearly is built on this idea that coda codices were just everywhere. But that was a thing that was everywhere.

Nemo 37:24 This is just what they did.

Kolby Reddish 37:25 Yeah, right.

Julia 37:26 Also with the plates being 7 or 14 plates total, not including this, the sealed portion, which we'll talk about again. But like that means that like you're delegating these seven or 14 plates to different. Only so many can go to the Book of Nephi. Only so many can go to the Book of Paper. And so that's just.

Nemo 37:41 Well, you know, it's an abridgment. So that gets, that all gets spun out in the wash, I suppose.

Kolby Reddish 37:48 Yeah. And I do think that will hook in very well in the future when we look at the information density of Egyptian And Hebrew. Because I think I have an explanation for why Joseph Smith thinks that you could record that much information in such a small. Basically in such a small character amount.

Nemo 38:06 So to say something unusual, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss that episode when that does come out. There you go. We don't often do calls to action on LDS discussions, but, yeah, you should

Kolby Reddish 38:18 have used the commitment pattern. Email, will you?

Nemo 38:20 Sorry. Yeah.

Kolby Reddish 38:21 To subscribe to Mormon Stories podcast today.

Ethan Smith and the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel

Julia 38:25 Okay, so the next one is about Reverend Ethan Smith. Colby, do you want to talk about this one? Sure.

Kolby Reddish 38:32 So Reverend Ethan Smith wrote a book titled View of the Hebrews in which he spoke of the Native Americans being part of the lost 10 tribes. To me, View of the Hebrews is an exact example of. One of the reasons that I framed my earlier comments the way I did is I think there are a lot of people, especially when they're like, fresh in their faith crisis, they'll claim that the Book of Mormon is just a plagiarism, a view of the Hebrews. That is not true. If you read View of the Hebrews, you really. There are thematic parallels, yes. And there are ideas that are captured in both of those works, but you're over claiming the evidence if you were to say something like that. What it does show and the significance of it is why is Ethan Smith able to come up with very similar ideas that then apologists say when Joseph Smith comes up with them, Joseph Smith could only have known these things as revealed by God. So I think View of the Hebrews is a great example of how critics need to be careful and not over claim what this evidence shows. Really, what it shows is if we're thinking probabilistically, we're thinking critically, there are alternative explanations, like through a naturalistic kind of secular lens that are just as likely, much more likely, in fact, than Joseph Smith, you know, receiving these plates that shouldn't have existed from a resurrected ancient American Hebrew figure. I guess I'll just put it that way. Okay. Do you want me to read more about that, Julia? Okay, so Smith records Ethan Smith, I mean, records an old Indian informed him that his fathers in this country had not long since had a book which they had for a long time preserved. But having lost the knowledge of reading it, they concluded it would be of no further use to them, and they buried it with an Indian chief. In view of the subject, this view of the subject, I'm sorry, may give an intelligible view of the account of the old Indian in Stockbridge to Dr. West, that his Fathers had buried not so long ago a book which they could not read, which should combine to bring to light that outcast people. So I think people who are familiar with the Book of Mormon's kind of, like, overarching narrative. Again, we'll see the clear thematic parallels between Ethan Smith's ideas and Joseph Smith. But what is the significance of this to you, Julia, and how it connects to this episode?

Julia 40:49 Oh, well, just the same idea. So this one's not about specifically about the plates. It's about the concept that you were just talking about, where these Native Americans were, the lost 10 tribes. Like, he has a lot of parallels with the Book of Mormon, and that's just what everyone was talking about. So Ethan Smith is not inspired of God. He's not translating an ancient text, but he has all these same similar ideas as Joseph. And so this just shows to me that a lot of people were talking about it, and Joseph's just pulling from what his culture from what. What they're talking about in 1820s or the 1830s. And so it's the same as the plates. So, like, I don't know, it's just. It's the same kind of evidence to me.

Kolby Reddish 41:25 Yeah. One thing that was really interesting to me about that quote, if you'll pull it up one more time, is the. The last line here about how the book will combine to bring to light that outcast people. That is one of the explicit promises in the Book of Mormon's introduction that. That is the reason that it's given is to, like, restore the. The lost. Basically the lost children of Israel that are the remnants of the Book of Mormon peoples. And so you can see, again, another clear thematic parallel that's a little bit more specific than just, you know, what is the relationship between ancient Americans and ancient Hebrews.

Julia 42:05 Yeah. So with this next source, we're getting another source from 1816 where they're talking about an ancient book that has been handed down and buried. And Nemo. Just because my tongue is American. Do you mind reading this one?

Nemo 42:18 Okay, so another book that was published in 1816 was called a Star in the west or A Humble Attempt to Discover the Long Lost Ten Tribes of Israel. That was by Elias. Oh, Budano.

Kolby Reddish 42:31 Okay, can I just pause you there, Nemo, and just say, like, look at. So this book is published in 1816, and its literal title is about trying to discover the lost 10 tribes. Like, this is an idea that was not unique to Joseph Smith nor Ethan Smith.

Julia 42:47 Right.

Nemo 42:48 And it perpetuated the idea that Native Americans were one of the lost 10 tribes. Which is again exactly Joseph Smith's claim in the Book of Mormon. And that they too once had a book that was handed down from their ancestors. Another big thematic point of the Book of Mormon. And there's a little quote here. The Indian informed him that one of their most ancient traditions was that a great while ago they had a common father who lived towards the rising of the sun that would be in the east, that he had 12 sons by whom he administered his government, that the authority was derived from the Great Spirit by virtue of some special gift from him. So it's Jacob and his 12 sons sons. And it's these Jewish parallels that are being brought in to kind of add to the idea that the lost. One of the lost tribes is the Native Americans.

Julia 43:40 Yeah. Another point I want to.

Nemo 43:43 Which feels a bit icky these days because once you start to realize the actual cultural history of Native Americans and that they have their own mythos and culture and it's, it's a very old. It's incredibly old. That's one of the things that struck me last time I was in the States driving down through Utah and looking out at different views than I've ever seen before and thinking there were people that lived here for 10,000 years before people from Europe turned up. I think their history has been just co opted by a lot of people in Joseph Smith's time saying no, actually what they are really. Because they couldn't possibly have been. They must have been ancient white people that did all these wonderful things and had all this culture and history. And then yeah, it hit me for

Kolby Reddish 44:29 people to like try and think of that as an analogy. Imagine if there was a new religion that started tomorrow. They used the early Mormon settlers trek across the plains as part of its origin narrative. But it was taking that history from the early Mormon settlers and making them the bad guys of the story that is very akin to what Joseph Smith is doing with these ancient American people. And maybe he was doing it unintentionally from my perspective. It doesn't really matter. The point you're making. Nemo I completely agree with. And we see this Joseph Smith do this repeatedly right when he is translating and I put that in the strongest of air quotes when he's translating the Book of Abraham materials that was a priest. Those were the papers for the afterlife that this priest known as Horus or Horror had probably worked and saved his entire life to have drawn up. And yet when Joseph Smith finds it, it becomes incorporated into Joseph Smith's narrative in something that doesn't reflect anything of what that person believed or of their actual history. And so that is one of the things I guess I would ask people to think about, especially if they are still believers in this narrative where they still find meaning in it, which I completely understand is just maybe we can find a way to reconcile our faith without basically stealing other people's history and appropriating these other cultures, actual history to make them part of your faith based narrative, I guess would be my plea.

Nemo 46:02 Yeah. Speaking as a Brit, going around and stealing other people's history and cultural artifacts generally doesn't make you particularly popular. We're still in trouble for it now. The Greeks still want their marbles back. So. Yeah, don't do it.

Kolby Reddish 46:17 Yeah, yeah. I did have one last thought on this, Julia, if you'll pull that slide up one more time. I was actually, while Nemo was reading, I was kind of impressed at the snippet that you. Oh, no, okay, well, Nemo, I'm always impressed by that. But no, I was impressed by kind of this very small text. And I'll go ahead and read it on the. The image that you snipped on the left, which is the front page of this book from 1816. So again, the title, A Star in the west or A Humble Attempt to Discover the Long Lost Tribes of Israel. Just note, anytime you have to name your book A humble Attempt, it's probably a little braggadocious, right? And it says, and then the subtitle is preparatory to their return to their beloved city, Jerusalem. So what is that talking about? That's talking about second coming type ideas. Right? Like last days type ideas. Then it, it has this introduction here quoting, I think from. Yeah, two books of scripture, Hosea and Habakkuk. Who is wise and who shall understand these things prudent, and he shall know them. For all the ways of the Lord are right, and the just shall walk in them, but the transgressors shall fall therein. And the Lord answered me and said, write the vision and make it plain upon a writing table that he may run who readeth it. For the vision is yet for an appointed time. But at the end it shall speak and not lie. Though it tarry, wait for it, because it will surely come, it will not tarry. And I guess my point here is what this author, Budino. Is that how you said it? Okay, what Budnot is obviously hooking into here is also a religious narrative. And he's making religious promises by incorporating this in. Into the beginning of his book. So again, when we're looking at a comparison. Why would you be willing to believe Joseph Smith and not believe Budna? That, I think is the way to think about this in testing hypotheses.

Julia 48:13 Yeah. And I think that with the, with the quotes that you just read, I feel like they kind of talk about this as well. But you have Buddha now who's talking about a lost book or a book handed down by their ancestors, and then Ethan Smith saying the same thing. A book that was buried and preserved. And that's, and just that's what Joseph Smith comes up with, that he's so, he's hearing this, these men are hearing us food and O. And Reverend Ethan Smith. And so Joseph's like, oh, I found the book. I don't know that he specifically talked about it that way or thought about it that way, but that's essentially what he's doing is he's finding this book from this tribe that came from Jerusalem. So.

Kolby Reddish 48:47 Yeah, yeah. And as a matter of psychology, I think the interesting thing to me, and I don't know where you guys fall on this spectrum, but it's entirely possible Joseph Smith is doing this like hooking into these ideas without even realizing it. Right. If you had grown up hearing these ideas being exchanged between adults or hearing them from your relatives, you may be looking for those things that you then later manifest through the Book of Mormon plates without even fully recognizing what you're being influenced by.

Nemo 49:22 And I think Egyptian is a really good example of kind of expounding on that point, which is presentism is often an argument used by apologists to accuse people of acting a bad faith or whatever. But the idea of presentism, the idea of applying your modern day understanding to past events, in this sense, we can all now look back at this and know, okay, what we know now through DNA evidence, what we know now through archaeological record, all this sort of stuff, is that the Native Americans were not part of the lost 10 tribes of Israel. They don't have Jewish DNA. We, we know this now. Joseph Smith didn't know that at the time. As far as he was concerned, this is an eminently plausible case for who these people were and where they would have came from. So it's, it's not that he has to be in a position where he goes, well, I'm making this up knowing that this wouldn't work historically. We forget that as far as he's concerned, it could well have. This is perfectly historically legitimate.

Kolby Reddish 50:18 Yeah. DNA wasn't a thing that we knew existed in Joseph Smith's day. Right. Like A modern microwave to someone from Joseph Smith's day is like black magic. Like, I truly don't think people understand how much the world has changed within the scope of that several hundred year period. Our technological innovations are basically like a complete exponential growth during that time period after the Enlightenment. Yeah.

Nemo 50:47 So in the same way no one knew what the information density of Egyptian. So he had every reason to believe you could get multiple paragraphs of meaning from a single character. He had no reason to think that the history of the Native Americans wasn't. That they were ancient Jews that built boats and sailed to America.

Julia 51:04 Yeah, right.

Nemo 51:06 He could have been completely sincere. Yeah, sorry.

Kolby Reddish 51:09 No, it's a really good point though. And just to drive it home a little bit more, what I'm hearing you say is if people can criticize critics of the church for engaging in presentism, because that's the way humans work, they need to be aware. And in fact, it's often an apologetic that prophets work exactly the same way. Right. The reason that the priesthood ban, the racist priesthood ban didn't end earlier, supposedly I've heard from multiple apologists, is because they were. They, like all of us, are men and products of our time. And they. The same would be true of Joseph Smith. That's one of the reasons that we see some of the ideas that we see from him is what I'm hearing you say.

Nemo 51:46 Yeah, exactly.

Kolby Reddish 51:47 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting.

Julia 51:49 Yeah. So this next one is an earlier source. This comes from 1768. So in 1768, a book was published by Charles Beattie titled the Journal of Two Months Tour, in which he speaks of a book that was kept and passed down by the Native Americans that when they acted according to it, their God was kind to them and they prospered. The book held a tradition of a great flood where all drowned except a few who made a great canoe and were saved in it. The book also held the tradition that the people were building a high place and that their language were confounded as well as the story of how they came into America. So again, this idea of an ancient book kept by the Native Americans. And then I also put in the little excerpt from where he's talking about the Noah's Ark, essentially, and the Tower of Babel. Babel, in which languages were confounded.

Pre-Book of Mormon Sources on Ancient American Origins

Nemo 52:41 Well, it's almost the book of ether there. Because the great canoe doesn't necessarily have to be Noah's Ark. It can also be the transoceanic vessels.

Julia 52:51 Well, here they say that everyone drowned. Right. Except for a few.

Nemo 52:55 Yeah, true, true.

Kolby Reddish 52:58 Last, when we did the other Isaiah problem episode. We had our listeners deliver on some. Some really funny images of Isaiah playing Sonic the Hedgehog riding on a bittern. And I would like to see some similarly creative illustrations of this great canoe. Because the idea of people being saved by a global flood in a great canoe is rather funny to me. I'm not sure if you've ever been in a canoe, but they tip over quite easily. I can't imagine surviving a global flood in one.

Julia 53:29 Yeah, that's funny, that's all.

Nemo 53:32 But yeah, here's again another place where Joseph Smith could have got these themes from.

Julia 53:39 And then we have more.

Nemo 53:41 Another book published in 1828 also spoke of the Native Americans being of the lost ten tribes of Israel. That book was written by Israel Worsley entitled A View of the American Indians, which is. It's quite a common title at that time, seemingly to call things A view of or the view of just a fun fact there. Worsey wrote about an ancient book that they had handed down from their ancestors. He also said that their fathers were possessed of an extraordinary divine spirit by which they foretold future things and controlled the course of nature whilst they obeyed the sacred laws. But that this power had left them. They had once a holy book which they kept. Things were well with them when they lost it and in consequence of their loss fell under the displeasure of the Great Spirit. But they believed they shall one day regain it. They are looking for and expecting someone to come and teach them the right way. If that is not the redemption of the Lamanites narrative by bringing their ancient book back to them, that is the Book of Mormon, then I don't know what is.

Kolby Reddish 54:43 Yeah, to that point, King Lamoni's father, one of the Lamanites in the text that ends up converting because of the missionary work of one of the missionaries in the Book of Alma, literally calls God the Great Spirit. He reaches out to God through the name the Great Spirit. I think also if you'll pull that slide up one more time, Julia, again, actually looking at the front page, there's impressive more detail here. So the title, as Nemo read, was A View of the American Indians. And then it says their general character, customs, language, festivals, religious rites and traditions showing them to be descendants of the ten tribes of Israel. The language of prophecy concerning them and the course by which they traveled from media into America. I just am struck at how much they're promising on these cover pages that seem to hook in directly to what the Book of Mormon is is saying and showing. I think it also shows, as each of us know, Joseph Smith really did believe that the events of the Book of Mormon took place literally in his backyard, not his literal backyard, but in his general community, and that it took place in North America. And maybe I. I think he was a hemispheric model. He believed that the Book of Mormon took place over the entire Western Hemisphere. But I, I think you can see Joseph Smith throughout his lifetime, point to these different archaeological finds, the Zealf Mound things with the Kinderhook plates. Look at those and say, look at the Book of Mormon's prophecies coming true. And it's interesting to me that you see the same thing in these other contemporary authors, basically pointing at different things and saying, and look, this is. This proves that my views are right. It's very interesting.

Nemo 56:25 I'm not one to agree with Rod Meldrum very often, but, you know, the Heartland model seemed to be very much what Joseph Smith believed. And there's a lot of contemporary evidence that that is what he taught. And so it always, it always bears repeating whenever an apologist tries to tell you that they found archaeological evidence of something, if it's not in the places where Joseph Smith described it as happening, if it's somewhere down in South America, chances are it's not really very good evidence.

Julia 56:51 This might be random, but when you were reading the COVID page, Colby. So we have. We have sources of Joseph Smith's mother saying that Joseph Smith was telling stories that were about the Native Americans in 1823. And she lists them out. And so here you're saying their character, their customs and language. I wish I had her language in front of me. But she says that he would tell stories of their. Their customs, their. Their mode of travel, their warfare, and things like that. And that list reminded me of her list. And so Joseph seems to be really engaging in all of this research just based on what his mother was talking about. And he would. They would gather the family night after night, and he would tell the story, these stories to his family.

Kolby Reddish 57:31 Yeah, let me go ahead and actually read that quote, Julia. And if you want to put the. That title page back on the. Yeah, back on the screen, then people can compare. So Lucy writes in her 1853 biography, from this time forth, after the initial visits from Moroni, Joseph continued to receive instructions from the Lord. And we continued to get the children together every evening for the purpose of listening while he gave us a relation of the same. I presume our family presented an aspect as singular as any that ever lived upon the face of the earth all seated in a circle, father, mother, sons and daughters. And giving to the most profound attention to a boy 18 years of age who had never read the Bible through in his life. Well, we know that is just demonstrably not true. He seemed much less inclined to the perusal of books than any of the rest of our children, but far more given to meditation and deep study. And I'll skip down a few lines to the. The line you were talking about. She says specifically. I just wanted that context to introduce it. Sure, she says specifically. During our evening conversations, Joseph would occasionally give us some of the most amusing recitals that could be imagined. He would describe the ancient inhabitants of this continent, their dress, their mode of traveling, and the animals upon which they rode, their cities and their buildings with every particular. Their mode of warfare and also their religious worship. This he would do with as much ease, seemingly as if he had spent his whole life with them.

Nemo 58:57 Yeah, I have something I want to ask about that. So you said the animals upon which they rode, and the context there is he's talking about the things he's translating from the Book of Mormon. Right. So whenever apologists try and say there's nothing in the Book of Mormon that says they rode on the horses, what other animals are present in the Book of Mormon other than cure alons and cumons, which I have no idea what they are, what other animals are there in the Book of Mormon that they could have been riding upon?

Kolby Reddish 59:24 I.

Nemo 59:25 Well, maybe that presents more credence to the idea that they were riding upon the horses. Right.

Kolby Reddish 59:30 The idea that they weren't riding upon the horses because the text doesn't explicitly say they were riding upon the horses is one of the most ridiculous apologetics I've ever heard. Sometimes apologists damage their overall credibility by making arguments like that. There's a passage in Alma when it's talking about Ammon, the guy who cut off all the arms. For people who are familiar with the Book of Mormon's text, where he is basically, he's offered a himself up as a servant to this king. There's a passage that literally talks about the servants going and preparing the chariot and the horses, and then the king is conveyed somewhere. And apologists will argue that doesn't actually mean that they use the horses. It's the most absurd thing to say, particularly when you think about how the text came to be. So for portions of first and Second Nephi, apologists can at least say, well, Nephi was recording all of this basically in real time, or however he was doing it we don't know, but it was not abridged. But for the text in Alma, where this passage comes from, or maybe it's in Messiah. Either way, it's part of the abridged portion. So not only do you have to solve the problem of why would Alma record this according to the apologist argument, completely extraneous detail of they prepared the horses and chariots and then the king was conveyed by some other method which makes absolutely no sense. But Moroni, a Mormon, preserve this extraneous detail that has no purpose in abridging the text and bringing to you the most relevant parts of the text. It is the most ridiculous notion and they should just take the L on that one, I think.

Nemo 1:01:06 But Joseph was describing them riding animals, I think as well. I agree with all your points. I just want to say there's an extra instance of Joseph describing animals being ridden provides further credence the idea of those horses or, sorry, Tapias, people were riding them. Cheers, Dan. Right, next slide.

Julia 1:01:25 That was great. Okay, so this next one is Solomon Spalding. So written before his death in 1816, Solomon Spalding wrote a book called Manuscript Found, which he. Which was a fanciful romance of ancient America in which he. Which it is pretended to be a translation of an ancient record. And I don't want to read all of it, but I'm just going to read the highlights. He talks about those people who are far exceeded the present Indians and talks about how he comes across a flat stone and then he moves it. The stone is on a mound and he raises it with a lever and in it he finds this room, this man made room. And in this little box he finds it contained 28 rolls of parchment. And he says those rolls contained a history of the author's life and that part of America which extends along the Great Lakes and the waters of the Mississippi. So again, this idea of this ancient book being especially in a box, this ancient record of the people and specifically where it's located, kind of near Joseph, Joseph himself. I don't know if there's any more commentary on this.

Kolby Reddish 1:02:32 I don't think so.

Nemo 1:02:33 Yeah, I think we're making a pretty strong point that there's loads of examples contemporary to Joseph Smith.

Julia 1:02:38 Yeah. So that brings me to my concluding slide on all of these from Dan Vogel. So the top. So the what I've. So this is a timeline and what I've put in blue is Joseph Smith's what is relevant to Joseph. So at age 12, he's studying the Bible. In 1817, when he starts treasure Hunting, because I think that's somewhat significant. And then whenever he obtains the gold plates and anything below the timeline line, all the time, the dates there are not about plates themselves, but about this concept of Native books or the Native American histories and things like that. And then everything above that are the specific plates that are being discussed. So as you can see, this is being discussed in Joseph Smith's milieu. Everyone's talking about it. So it would be reasonable to think that he got this idea from what

Nemo 1:03:21 was around him, or certainly just reasonable to think that it's possible he came across this idea.

Julia 1:03:27 Right, yeah.

Nemo 1:03:28 It's eminently plausible that he could have encountered this concept outside of a divine interaction with deity.

Kolby Reddish 1:03:37 Yeah, right. Which doesn't mean this. It doesn't necessarily mean that believers in that narrative or people who accept that the church is a good place for them or accept the Book of Mormon based on the meaning or utility or value it brings to their lives. We're not speaking to those questions. We're really just speaking to which is more likely, that Joseph Smith received this literal ancient record that is an anachronism, from, again, a resurrected ancient American prophet, or that he may have heard about this idea of plates first in his milieu from any one of these sources, or frankly, from none of those sources, people talking about the same idea. I think an often overlooked impact on Joseph Smith's ability to know things is his family's proximity to the project of the Erie Canal. That canal was an exchange, like a true exchange of so much information. And I know that we know some of his brothers, and I think maybe even Joseph himself worked on the construction of the canal for a time period, and they may have received information from just being there at work. How many of us have learned of a television show or an idea or a book because of a conversation we had at work? That's the only leap in direct evidence that we're asking people to at least entertain through looking at these sources in this episode.

Julia 1:05:06 Yeah, yeah. And there's a quote here from Dan Vogel where he says, given the currency of such stories, Joseph Smith's own claim that he found a stone box, metal plates, and an Indian record in the hill near his father's farm certainly would have seemed credible to his money digging friends as well as to others of his contemporaries.

Kolby Reddish 1:05:26 Yeah, that's a really good point I

Nemo 1:05:28 was making earlier about this would have been just perfectly plausible in Joseph Smith's time because they didn't know any different.

Kolby Reddish 1:05:35 Yeah, right. And with so many other contemporaries talking about the similar idea, it makes any other claim to the same type of idea much more believable. People are already basically primed to believe that this is a possibility.

Julia 1:05:51 Yeah.

Nemo 1:05:53 Okay, so like you said earlier, Julia is when he's like, right, well, I found that book that they were all talking about. Everyone goes, oh, well, they've been talking about it for a while, so. Okay, cool.

Julia 1:06:01 Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that. So that's the Dan Vogel research part. So now we're going to jump into the sources that Brett Metcalf shared with us. And like I said, these are, I think, mostly all coming from Bible commentary from different people.

Kolby Reddish 1:06:16 Yeah.

Nemo 1:06:17 And Brent, from his personal collection.

Julia 1:06:19 Right, Right.

Kolby Reddish 1:06:19 Yep. And Brent was great to have a few phone calls with. Did you talk to him directly, Julia, or just me? Okay. Brent was great to give us some behind the scenes information and share some of these excerpts with us. So definitely wanted to give him a shout out. And thank you to Brent. For people who aren't aware, Brent and Dan have done a lot of work in Mormon studies, again dating back to before Nemo was alive. And Brent is the mind that brought us. I think his most. I want to say his most influential idea is Brent is the one that did the research that basically confirmed even to most apologists who accept now the Messiah priority of the Book of Mormon's dictation order, which I think is a complete game changer in understanding how to analyze the Book of Mormon. It makes you. In other words, it makes the Book of Mormon a lot more believable as a human production rather than if it were dictated from the beginning to the end. A lot of the complexity, I guess I would say, melts away when you understand that it started at Messiah and then wrapped back around to first and second Nephi. Sorry, Nemo, go ahead. Oh, no.

Nemo 1:07:29 I was gonna say to show how pervasive that idea has become and how well accepted that idea has become. I was taught in institute as like an 1819 year old by my Institute teacher about Mosiah priority.

Kolby Reddish 1:07:44 Interesting.

Nemo 1:07:44 In a faithful setting by an Institute teacher. He was talking about the way the Book of Mormon was composed and how it was actually composed starting at Mosiah because of the lost 116 pages.

Kolby Reddish 1:07:56 Right.

Nemo 1:07:56 So there's a faithful narrative you can now apply onto that. And apologists do. But the point is, apologists, like you said, aren't stepping away because Brent's work is so unassailable.

Kolby Reddish 1:08:05 Right.

Nemo 1:08:05 That they've had to accept it and it's being taught.

Julia 1:08:08 Yeah, yeah. That's really Good. So I'll be sure to link that in the show Notes.

Kolby Reddish 1:08:13 Great.

Julia 1:08:14 So, like Nima was saying, these come from Brent Metcalf's personal collection. So some of these images come from his own library. But this first one that he sent, and I think I did put these in chronological order, I can't remember. But in 1806, Thomas Maurice wrote a book titled Indian Antiquities or Dissertations Relative to the Ancient Geographic. In the book, he writes about a colony of Jews, and he says that their traditional history was kept on copper plates, deeply engraved in Hebrew characters. And then he goes on to talk about the contents and things like that and the history of the people. But just again, this idea, this ancient plates, the Jews keeping records on ancient plates, is again happening in Joseph Smith's time.

Biblical Commentaries on Engraving and Durable Records

Nemo 1:08:57 So the next, for everyone watching, this is just part two of More Evidence, essentially.

Julia 1:09:04 So the next one is in 1812, Charles Taylor wrote a book, wrote a book titled Clement's A Great Dictionary of the Holy Bible. In it, he defines the word book. Nemo, do you want to read this definition of book?

Nemo 1:09:15 Sure. Book in Hebrew, sefer. In Greek, biblios in Latin, liber. Several sorts of materials were anciently used in making books. Plates of lead or copper, barks of trees, bricks, stone and wood were originally employed to engrave such things and monuments upon as men desired to transmit to posterity.

Julia 1:09:41 Yeah,

Nemo 1:09:44 I like how it says boo at the top.

Julia 1:09:46 Oh, yeah. I don't know why it doesn't sound

Nemo 1:09:47 visual joke for the listeners.

Julia 1:09:50 Yeah. So again, plates of lead, copper. He even goes into saying barks or bark of trees, bricks, stone.

Nemo 1:09:58 Can we just point to for a moment the use of the term anciently, because we now have a very clearly defined period in which codices came into being. But I think there is a tendency of authors of this sort of time to describe things anciently as just. That's a very broad term. So they may accurately be talking about books that were indeed made, but anciently, for some people, may refer to the sorts of time periods that we're thinking about in the bcs, back in the Egyptian times, the ancient Greeks, things like that. We kind of talk about ancient Rome, and that spans that gap. But, you know, codices coming about much later, those sorts of times were still described as ancient times or antiquity by these sorts of authors.

Kolby Reddish 1:10:45 They also. Oh, go ahead, Julia.

Julia 1:10:47 I was just gonna say it makes me think of the scrolls of the Book of Abraham, where I think this book of breathings, that one specifically is that 200 AD, I believe.

Kolby Reddish 1:10:55 So in that Ballpark. Yes.

Julia 1:10:57 And then Joseph Smith is claiming that it was from, I think Abraham was said to have lived in 2000 BCE. So again, which one is ancient? So it's just a. You have to be specific on when you're talking about that.

Kolby Reddish 1:11:09 Yeah. And for the same reason, my comment was going to be to your concern about basically equivocating on the claim of ancient. The bottom line is authors contemporary to Joe Smith had no idea what they were talking about. Like, we didn't have any dating method. We also didn't have like the checks we have against legitimate like forgeries and hoaxes and frauds. Something that we know, at least with the Kinderhook plates, that Joseph Smith had no ability to distinguish between real, legitimate, antiquated artifacts and a hoax.

Nemo 1:11:42 Give Brother Joseph a break. Because Gord B. Hinckley couldn't spot a hoax either when Mark Hoffman put it in front of him.

Kolby Reddish 1:11:47 That's true. They're nothing if not consistent.

Nemo 1:11:50 Exactly. Sorry, carry on.

Julia 1:11:54 Okay, so the next One is from 1818. This is Thomas Scott. He published a book on the Holy Bible. In it he talks about how books were written with an iron pen in lead or upon a rock forever. And we'll see the same kind of phrase going, going throughout these slides. So again, it's a Bible commentary book written with an iron pen in lead so that it will last forever. So.

Nemo 1:12:18 So this is the concept of preserving things for posterity by putting them on metal.

Kolby Reddish 1:12:22 Right.

Nemo 1:12:23 That's the theme Joseph could have taken from that.

Kolby Reddish 1:12:25 The thing that's really interesting too, if you'll go back. So at the end of that quote that you read, it continues and says, according to the several methods then in use of registering remarkable transactions. So again we see a similarity between Joseph Smith and these authors. One of the other similarities I'm seeing is there's all of this appeal to this esoteric ancient knowledge. Like this, this magical worldview is not just shared by Joseph Smith. It seems to be shared by many of these authors that we're looking at just when we've looked at the title pages or, or when we're looking at the full quotes in a little bit more context. We see another similarity here, which is. And again, to our point earlier, that doesn't mean that Joseph Smith was necessarily making these things up. Knowing that he was making these things up. It just shows that there are certain people who are more willing to believe certain things. And there are always inherently people who are a little bit more skeptical. And I think Joseph Smith was one of those people. That truly did believe in so many magical elements in our world that he almost saw it everywhere. I joked before and said, when you really add up, like, all the magical artifacts that Joseph Smith encountered during the span of his lifetime, it's like he couldn't walk outside without tripping over some magic artifact that dated back to ancient Hebrews. That's literally just the way he saw the world. Along with the Book of Abraham scrolls. It wasn't just the Book of Abraham scrolls. He also purportedly says that one of the scrolls related back to Joseph, the Joseph who was sold into Egypt and says this is the Book of Joseph. It's like, wow, what would the odds be of one person encountering basically, like, every mystical artifact that existed in upstate New York during his lifetime? Pretty unbelievable when you think about it from that lens.

Julia 1:14:15 Well, and then also the mummies attached with them. Didn't he say one of them was a princess or something like that? Like royalty? Yeah, again. Yeah.

Kolby Reddish 1:14:23 Princess Carmen.

Julia 1:14:25 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the next one is 1824. Flavius Josephus and William Whiston wrote a book titled the Genuine Works of Flavius Josephus, in which they wrote about. They rich. They wrote about an ancient inscription on brass tables.

Nemo 1:14:44 And I don't know, in the same way you have to say something is like a humble attempt and, you know, saying something's genuine.

Julia 1:14:50 The genuine work.

Nemo 1:14:51 Yeah. It doesn't pass the sniff test.

Julia 1:14:54 Yeah. So this one, they talk about the donation engraved on. So they're talking about this donation. There's talking about some history and how the gift was this inscription of tables of brass and how they set it up at the Capitol. So it's not really a record that they're talking about. They're talking about, again, this donation, this gift, but the idea of plates being used.

Kolby Reddish 1:15:19 Yeah. So today this kind of comes back to our earlier comments about, like, the type of plates we're talking about. This record or this account here. Seems to me to hearken more to, like, the decorative plates. Right. It was something that had an engraving on it, and then it was placed in the capital to mark this remembrance of the. At least the way that the authentic. What was it? Oh. Genuine works of Flavius Josephus. So he's promising the. Trust me, bro, that that actually existed. Right. That's. That's the way it sounds to me. With that title again, someone in Joseph Smith's milieu and worldview is not going to understand, as we do today, the differentiation between, like, a purely decorative plate and a plate upon which an actual history is recorded. Those, I think, would have come much later. That distinction would have come much later.

Julia 1:16:13 Yeah.

Nemo 1:16:14 Well, it would have to show an understanding of why. So the reason why decorative plates are used is because of the effort it takes to engrave these things because of the amount of information you can actually engrave, because you have to engrave in a certain size, et cetera. Not understanding that, as it seems Joseph didn't, you can then take that seed of an idea and go, all right, cool. People were engraving information on plates, so why wouldn't they have engraved an entire book? He didn't have the reasons necessarily available to him as to why they wouldn't.

Kolby Reddish 1:16:46 Right, right. Well put.

Julia 1:16:49 Yeah. So continuing on, Nima, do you want to go over this slide?

Nemo 1:16:52 Sure. In 1825, Joseph Benson wrote a book on the Bible. In it, he talks about how their words to. Yeah. How their words to be engraven with an iron pen and lead that is upon lead or on the rocks. And it is very probable it was customary in those times to engrave inscriptions on plates of lead as well as on stones. One of these ways of engraving must have been intended by Job.

Julia 1:17:19 Yeah. So again, like you asked earlier, Colby, is this spoken of anywhere else in the Bible? And so this one's pointing to Job specifically.

Kolby Reddish 1:17:28 Yeah, I see that. It's interesting that there's another similarity here with some of the earlier sources that you pointed to, which is not just recording on plates, but also recording on stone. And I guess that really would go all the way back to Moses and, like the Ark of the Covenant. Right. The material that's in the Ark of

Nemo 1:17:46 the Covenant and the Ten. Yeah, the Ten Commandments.

Kolby Reddish 1:17:48 Ten Commandments on the stones.

Nemo 1:17:50 And then there's another. Where is it in Scripture things are engraved upon the fleshy tables of their hearts.

Julia 1:17:58 Oh, yeah.

Kolby Reddish 1:17:59 Isn't that New Testament?

Nemo 1:18:01 That is New Testament. But again, you have the idea of engraving things upon tables. You describe them as fleshy because that's the material. But again, engraving things on tables. We've seen brass tables, we've seen lead, et cetera.

Kolby Reddish 1:18:14 That's in Second Corinthians.

Nemo 1:18:15 There we go.

Julia 1:18:17 Also, this reminds me of the story in the Book of Mormon. And it's been a long time since I've read the Book of Mormon, but they talk about the history of coriantumr being kept on. On a stone. And so I get. This reminds me of that same concept where, like, they described this huge stone in the Book of Mormon that was. That he couldn't.

Kolby Reddish 1:18:33 That he had to use like a Stella. Like what we think of as a Stella.

Julia 1:18:36 Yeah, yeah. So that made me think of that as well. Okay, so the next one is 1826. Colby, do you want to talk about this one?

Kolby Reddish 1:18:45 I sure do. So in 1826, Adam Clark published his commentary on the Bible. It's a multi part series. I think how many parts depends on whether it was published in America or Europe. In it, he wrote about an account of a book of this kind with an engraved facsimile taken also out of an Egyptian mummy, as well as cutting with an iron style on plates of lead and engraving on large stones or rocks. Do you know where he was, like where this note appeared in his Bible commentary, Julia?

Julia 1:19:18 I actually don't. So this one. So I have. I linked. I linked Brent or I mean, I linked Adam Clark's book here, but I don't know exactly which page is on this. Is this image comes from Brent Metcalfe's collection.

Kolby Reddish 1:19:29 Okay.

Julia 1:19:30 I don't know exactly where it comes

Kolby Reddish 1:19:31 from, just given the many references to Egypt. Probably something that's speaking about Egypt, I would guess, because the Adam Clark Bible commentary, for people who haven't looked at it before, it basically has notes from each verse or from many verses where Adam Clark is trying to reconcile different manuscripts and adding additional historical information on the verses of the Bible. So it's to be used in companion with the Bible. In fact, I think every edition I've ever seen actually has like the Bible text up top and then Adam Clark's commentary below where he's adding this additional detail. So that would be the context he's making this commentary in.

Julia 1:20:10 Yeah. Okay. So there's one more for Brent Metcalfe.

Nemo 1:20:14 Oh, sorry, just.

Julia 1:20:15 Oh, sure.

Nemo 1:20:15 Just in case we mentioned it earlier, we should mention it again. The Adam Clark commentary on the Bible is seen to have informed Joseph Smith's translation of the Bible quite heavily. And there's been comparative works done. I believe one of them that really broke the story came out of byu where they said essentially it's too similar to be a coincidence.

Julia 1:20:36 Yeah.

Nemo 1:20:37 So we know that Joseph Smith had access to Adam Clarke's commentary of the Bible or the information therein, because he drew upon it for his own work.

Kolby Reddish 1:20:46 Yeah, And I actually worked as a research assistant for the professor that published that research. So that was Professor Tom Wayment and then his graduate student, Haley Wilson Lamont. He did an interview with John on Mormon stories as well as with Bill Real on Mormon discussions, kind of talking about that research. I know from Tom's perspective. One of the reasons he published that research and wanted people to look at it is he wanted people to kind of correct their misunderstandings or their misapprehensions about what it meant for Joseph Smith to translate the. Especially the. His inspired Bible, his. What does he call it? Joe Smith translation of the Bible. Excuse me. And he basically wanted to invite Latter Day Saints to rethink their approach to critical biblical scholarship and basically say, look, even Joseph Smith was engaging with the best scholarship available to him at the time as he was going through his translation of the Bible. I think obviously, the way that most people are brought up in the church, that just is a very stark and different approach from what they were taught. The Joseph Smith translation of the Bible is versus what the evidence basically shows through Tom's research. So I can understand kind of both sides of that issue and his perspective and wonderful, great, kind man who was willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

Nemo 1:22:12 Yeah, kudos to him for putting it out.

Julia 1:22:15 Yeah, yeah. So we have one more source from Brent Mackoff's collection. So in 1828, Matthew Henry wrote a book on the New and Old Testament. In it, he writes instructions about engravings. It may be engraven, like an inscription upon a monument with an iron pen and lead, or in the stone, let the engraver use all his art to make it a durable appeal to posterity. And so one thing that caught my attention here is that it's. It's again, he's talking about a decorative thing or he's saying, make it, make it an appeal to posterity and use his art. And so. So the idea of lead plates or stone, but it's not the same. It's not, it's not.

Nemo 1:22:52 I'm not sure I would read that decoratively just because. So I'm going to get this wrong and someone will crucify me in the comments, but there is a saying in German im arten weiser, which is like in the method of. Or in the way of doing something. And I think art in this sense is more connected to that Germanic origin. It's like use all his craft, all his trade or whatever trade to make it a durable appeal to posterity. So the idea that it's not appealing, but it's an appeal to that posterity there, that's certainly how I read that.

Kolby Reddish 1:23:29 Even in that phrase, though, that durable appeal to post.

Nemo 1:23:32 Yeah.

Kolby Reddish 1:23:32 Yes, sorry. Even in that phrase, that durable appeal to posterity, I see thematic parallels very clearly between that and the narrative surrounding the plates in the Book of Mormon. Like we're literally told in first Nephi, the reason that they need the brass plates is so that this generation of people that are leaving will not perish and dwindle in unbelief. And so you can see this idea of whether it's a record or how extensive the record is that he's talking about here, because he's again talking about the line in Job. The idea is we need to do this to preserve this knowledge for the people who come after us. And that idea is very clearly captured in the Book of Mormon, for sure.

Gold Plates and the Material Claims of Joseph Smith

Nemo 1:24:15 I have a question that can lead us into our next segment. If we're done with Brent Metcalfe there. We'll have the conclusion slide, obviously, but the question maybe for us to be pondering on or to have a quick discussion about is what we see or what we'll go on to talk about is how Joseph Smith takes an idea and expands it, makes it bigger, makes it more fantastical, opens it up. Why do you think he chose to go for golden plates when we are seeing here so many dimensions of lead and copper, specifically as materials.

Julia 1:24:51 Does gold show up at all in these slides?

Nemo 1:24:54 I can't. I didn't spot it.

Julia 1:24:55 I don't think I did.

Kolby Reddish 1:24:56 I didn't either.

Nemo 1:24:58 So is it just him going, well, mine will be bigger and better and they'll be made of gold because they're more valuable. And I love treasure digging. Perhaps we can't know this for certain, obviously, but it's just something I thought we could maybe discuss at some point as we move through, but I didn't want to forget it.

Kolby Reddish 1:25:14 Yeah, it's an interesting idea. Truthfully, I don't know. I do think, wasn't there something about view of the Hebrews that the record was kept on like a golden scroll because it was like bark scrolls, if I remember correctly. So that may be the only contemporary evidence or contemporary account, I guess, of some reference to gold. But it's a different. It's not metal. It's very clearly not metal in view of the Hebrews, because the fact that

Nemo 1:25:41 they're gold or golden is the only unique thing so far left. I think so. But let's do the summary, Julia, and then we can get into that maybe.

Julia 1:25:50 Yeah. Okay. So this is just the, this is the same timeline, but with Brent Metcalfe's sources. So you'll just see that again. It's around Joseph Smith studying his Bible. And these are all. Most of these are Bible commentaries. And then from the time where Joseph Smith says he, he obtained the plates. So Again, Joseph Smith is very steeped in this. This is. Or at least this is spoken of. This is being spoken of around him. And then I didn't. I didn't make a timeline with all of them together because it was just too busy. But so that's, you know, put. Put Dan Vogel's timeline and then put Brett Metcalf's timeline where you'll see that this was very. It's very reasonable to think that Joseph Smith was aware of these stories. Yeah. So the next part is this next. This next section of this expansion of a concept. And so as I was putting these slides together, I was interested in the amount of. As if these plates are comparable to Joseph Smith's plates. And so what I'm showing here is, I'm listing the sources. These are from Dan Vogel of the amount of sources or the amount of plates. Excuse me. So Adairs, he talks about two brass plates and five copper. Turner talks about one copper. Haywood talks about three brass plates. Rogan talks about one copper plate. And then Harwell and. And Montfoucon, they talk about the six lead plates. And Buchanan, also six lead plates. So my question was just, are these comparable? And then the. We've talked about this. We've made reference to this. But how many plates make up the golden plates? But also, I want to talk about the size for a second, so that the plates are described by the witnesses as being 6 inches wide and 8 inches long. They're. When piled one above another, they were 4 inches thick, about 8 inches long, 7 inches wide. So these are varying sizes. They talk about two thirds were sealed up, and Martin Harris says they weighed from 40 to 60 pounds. So these are. These are not the same as what we're. They're discussing here.

Nemo 1:27:43 And nor are they the same material because like we started to say here, we have no reference to gold. But now Joseph Smith claiming they're golden.

Julia 1:27:52 And then some of the witnesses also talk about how they were the thickness of tin. And we don't have. I don't think tin was referenced anywhere either. I think so tin and gold are absent in the sources that we've pulled. But there's two sources. There's secondhand and late. So I'll admit that. But they're talking about the length of the golden plates. Nemo, will you talk about this one?

Nemo 1:28:14 Yeah, sure. So from the Pittsburgh Telegraph, published In August of 1876, they had an account from Sidney Rigdon. When the box was once safe upon deck, everyone then was anxious to hear what was in it. When we were told that it contained 14 gold plates covered with mysterious characters, together with the sword of Gideon and the spectacles of Samuel, the prophet Joe, he said, was a very illiterate man, was unable either to read or write. But when he put on the nose the prophet's spectacles and took the gold plates one by one, letter by letter and word by word presented themselves, and with the aid of the Amanuensis, the Bible that he held in his hands was a literal translation of the writing upon the gold plates. I mean, that's problematic for several reasons to modern apologetics now, and particularly this account here, I think is where the Church drew their artwork from for many years, this idea of him putting the spectacles upon his nose. But we just know that that's not how it went down anymore.

Kolby Reddish 1:29:19 I was going to say, I mean, it's good to have, regardless of whether we believe an account or don't, it's good to have a full picture of all the different accounts. But there are so many things here that I think even faithful folks accept today, based on more recent scholarship, that I think would cause me to seriously doubt this account. For example, it's, I mean, there was a sword, but it's not the sword of Gideon. And we know that this idea of the spectacles being used in translation really is not supported by the evidence. Instead, Joseph Smith used the seer stone, the brown egg shaped seer stone for the majority of the Book of Mormon's translation, as far as we know. So also he wasn't illiterate.

Julia 1:30:01 Right? So I should have prefaced all of these because none of the witnesses nor did Joseph Smith speak of the amount of plates. So these are the only two sources I could find. And I acknowledge that they are weak, that they have problems in them, but I just pulling them so that we can have a discussion about them because I just think it's worth talking about. But I do acknowledge that there are problems with this and that's what we

Nemo 1:30:22 do at LDS discussions. We need to be fair about the sources because the amount of times that we complain that the Church will sometimes make Emma Smith a valid credible source and then at other times say that she just can't be trusted. You know, we can't be doing that ourselves. So in order for us to give a number, these are the only sources we have. But we have to accept that, you know, they may not necessarily be accurate.

Kolby Reddish 1:30:46 I do think one of the interesting things though, Julia, is what you just said is we do not have any account from any of the Firsthand witnesses involved in the translation project. So Joseph, Emma Martin, Oliver Cowdery, the Wimmers. We don't have an account of the number of the plates. Again, that is very odd to me. If the plates were a literal, a literal physical artifact that people were engaging with, it seems odd to me that no one would have counted them or mentioned in some context and they were too numerous to count. That just seems like a very odd thing to me. When you look at all these other accounts we've looked at, even the fictional ones, notice how every single author I was noticing along the way, every single author was mentioning either the number of plates, the number of scrolls. In this context, however, we do not get that level of detail. That's an interesting thing to ask, like why, why wouldn't you record there? There was no prohibition from God on recording the number of plates or describing the plates in greater detail. Why don't we get any of that detail?

Nemo 1:31:51 We describe their dimensions, their dimensions and their weight get described to us.

Julia 1:31:55 But not the amount of plates in conflicting ways.

Kolby Reddish 1:31:57 I would notice.

Julia 1:31:58 But yeah, right, so just, yeah, put a pen and this is not these. Yes, there's some problems with these sources but I want to talk about the second one as well. So from an interview with William Hyde in 1888. So again, late he, he records the contents of the parcel or the plates were kept secret for a long time and I was the first person, Smith Senior. So Joseph Smith's dad confided the arrangement to the mysterious package was alleged to have contained seven gold plates, 16 inches long, 10 wide and an inch thick. Certain marks or hieroglyphics on those plates recorded the history of a highly civilized community that people this earth. Many centuries ago no one could comprehend the meaning of the characters engraved on the tablets. But young, but young Smith and he had used the transparent rocks. So again, this, this, you know, again it's late secondhand. Well, I guess he's claiming to be. Well no, he's still secondhand because he's hearing it from Joseph Smith Sr. But anyway he's saying that there's seven and there was at one point where I zoomed in on this. So the church uses this little replica, one of the members made it and it's, it's to the same scale, it's the right thickness, it's the right sealed portion amount, the D shaped rings, the weight and everything. So this is where the plates would have looked like. And I, at one point I zoomed in and I tried counting each plate and I think there was like 21, 22. But again, we don't have any. We don't have any witnesses saying how many plates.

Nemo 1:33:26 But. But then. So just to get a little bit nitpicky here for a second.

Julia 1:33:30 Sure.

Nemo 1:33:31 If you imagine that we have dimensions and we have a rough division of the plates that were sealed. So when Emma says that she ruffled the leaves and they moved like thick paper, we know roughly how thick thick paper would need to be in order to ruffle. Right. Of any kind of metal that's quite thin for metal. Which means that within, if I've understood correctly, there's six inches. Just to do one of the measurements that we're given for quick maths. Then you've got four inches of sealed plates and you've got two inches of loose plates. So how many metal plates can fit into 2 inches of depth while still being able to rustle like paper? It's going to be more than 14, I would imagine.

Julia 1:34:13 Yeah. But also the ruffling, otherwise they would be too thick. Right. But I still don't know how you can preserve it. The ruffling doesn't ever made sense to me.

Nemo 1:34:22 No. Because then you can't engrave on both sides because they'd be too thin. So I'm just pointing to another problem here. Yeah.

Kolby Reddish 1:34:28 And all the discussion about the number plates, I guess the one thing I was thinking about, Julia, as far as number goes, since we don't have a clear, really reliable source for number, is we do have in the Book of Mormon's text, and I think you referenced this earlier, we do have, when they find the Jaredite plates, that they recorded their entire civilization's history for multiple thousands of years. And I think even a vision of all things is what's recorded in ether on 24 plates. The book of Mormon specifically numbers the number of plates. So I guess that is the one thing I would say that does weigh in favor of being like, maybe these accounts, there's something to. At least the number of plates is. That does kind of seem consistent with what the Jaredite number of plates is, but I think it's just fair to say we really don't know.

Julia 1:35:17 Yeah. Yeah. So one thing that I was just thinking as I was putting these together was just this idea that, you know, going from. Again, I'll acknowledge that these are latent and not as credible, but so either Joseph Smith took seven golden plates and turned them into 588 pages of standard English text, which is, if you look at the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon, there are 588 pages. Or he took 14 gold plates, which front, back is 28 sides, and turned those into 588 pages of standard English text. So here I made some, like, images. So like, that would mean that for every, for if they were 14 plates, 28 signs, that would mean that for every one plate it is 21 pages of the Book of Mormon. Or if you have seven plates, 14 sides, that would be. Each one plate would be 42 pages of what is now the Book of Mormon. And so just again with. I'm interested in your episode with the condensity of reformed Egyptian or Egyptian and Hebrew and like the amount of characters that can be. Or the amount of text that can be derived from a character. This is all very interesting to me. And this just doesn't make sense in my mind. Even if you were to add it to 20, even if you were to make 20 plates or 25 plates or whatever amount of plates, it's still so dense with information. I just don't see how that works,

Kolby Reddish 1:36:38 particularly when you look at the fact that the Book of Mormon. And again, maybe a little precursor to where we'll go in that episode here soon. But when you've got names, like proper names, which you do all over the Book of Mormon, right? Like even that first page you had wherefore I Nephi, there's really no way to make a proper name less information than at least a single character. Like, think of all the. Think of all the times that it references someone's name. That is going to have to be, at bare minimum, like that one character that stands in for that person's name. That's just not going to be possible to fit that much information. To your point, Julia, just using that as one analog, you're not going to be able to fit that much information into these dimensions. Even if you doubled these dimensions, even if you tripled these dimensions, I don't even think it would be possible. Now, I know there are apologists that have done, you know, they try and basically say, well, the plates could be this thin. And as I've looked at some of those arguments, I'm just like, but we're talking about plates that were like, made by a guy, Nephi, that never made plates before on a mountainside without tools like this. At some point, the narrative that you have to believe, to believe all of these things at the same time is just so. You're like stacking impossibility on impossibility on impossibility. And when I say impossibility, I mean so remotely unlikely that it borders on impossibility. Remember that for all of those things to be true at the same time from a probability perspective, you have to multiply those unlikely probability probabilities by each other for all of them to have been true at the same time. And sometimes the way all of those claims stack together is just so difficult to take seriously, even when we're looking at it as objective as we can.

Nemo 1:38:31 Can I be the cranky Brit for a moment?

Kolby Reddish 1:38:34 You always are.

Nemo 1:38:35 Yes, because in the same way that you people measure things like flour by volume rather than by weight, you use cups, which is a measurement system entirely alien to me that I'll never understand. Julia decided to do her analysis through the medium of pages, which are perhaps a somewhat inconsistent measure because you say pages, pages of different sizes, etc. When we did episode two of LDS discussions and we looked at the Phoe tablets and how they're a problem. I'm just going to. I've got the slide in front of me here. The three Perzee tablets totaled about 200 words. There was 67 words per plate. And that's actually evidence against long records on metal more than it is evidence for the Book of Mormon, because the Book of Mormon is about 270,000 words and was translated off of 14 plates according to Sidney Rigdon. So if we use Sidney Rigdon's number for a moment, that means each plate of the Book of Mormon would need an average of 19,000 words. And yet three piety tablets produce just 200 words total, about 56,800 short of what the Book of Mormon would need in just those three plates. Even if each reformed Egyptian symbol of a sort of median size consisted of 20 to 30 words, which is just nonsense, you would still need 630 or 950 characters per plate to make it work.

Julia 1:39:57 Dang.

Kolby Reddish 1:39:57 Wow. Yeah. And for. For people who may not have been understanding what I was trying to hint at, what you just said, a single Egyptian reformed Egyptian character translates to 20 words, 20 or 30 words. Think about what that would mean. Like, think about how you would actually get meaning out of one symbol having 20. And that's just averaging it out. One symbol having 20 English words that would come out the end of that, that's longer than most sentences. There's just no possible way the language would be working like that, because there would be no way to discern meaning if you had that much information packed into one character. You just can't get that granular with communicating ideas.

Nemo 1:40:39 And yet we know that Joseph Smith believed of the Egyptian language, as we see in contemporary documents of his, that you could get paragraphs of meaning from a single symbol.

Kolby Reddish 1:40:50 You're spoiling that episode, Nima.

Nemo 1:40:53 Sorry.

Julia 1:40:54 Well, don't we see the same thing with the book of Abraham where he's exceeding the text?

Kolby Reddish 1:40:59 That's what I mean. When you look at the Kirtland Egyptian papers, Joseph Smith, and it was a very common belief in his day, before they had cracked the resistance, Joseph Smith very much believed that a single character of Egyptian could generate a paragraph worth of text which you don't have to know anything about it, first of all. Not even remotely true. But you don't have to know a thing about Egyptian to understand how problematic that idea would be. If one character can generate a paragraph worth of meaning and nuance, that's just impossible to even think about. Think about what that would mean. How do you discern. I just can't even. I can't even grapple with, like, what that would mean for communicating. Maybe it's just my view as a lawyer, like every single word when I'm arguing in court or when I'm writing something that's legally relevant is chosen so carefully. Maybe not in a live conversation like this, but when I'm drafting, everything is chosen so carefully because every word has meaning ascribed to it. To collapse all of that and say I can get all of this English meaning of an entire paragraph of text out of one character, that's just not like. That's not even humanly possible. How would you do that? How would you discern, like one little squiggle in that character changes the meaning slightly? That just doesn't make any sense.

Nemo 1:42:15 I just. I really glibly want to say, well, you know, a picture's worth a thousand words, but even that's a stretch anyway.

Kolby Reddish 1:42:26 I love it.

Nemo 1:42:27 Let's carry on.

Julia 1:42:28 No, that's so. Yeah, that's my point is just that these few little plates that they're talking about, like six, I think is one of the most that we've talked about, like one or two or six. It's not. Those don't make. Those don't seem to produce as much as what Joseph Smith is saying that these. That his golden plates produce. So it's. It's just not. They're not really comparable.

Nemo 1:42:47 Yeah, you can tell we're going to have fun with that information density episode. So again, subscribe if you want to see it because it's going to be great. This is what happens when John leaves us to our own devices. Yeah, it's great time.

Kolby Reddish 1:43:00 Yeah, it is.

Nemo 1:43:02 And we get in under two hours.

Julia 1:43:04 Yeah, true.

Kolby Reddish 1:43:06 Great. Well, let's do any concluding thoughts. I'll go ahead and start. Julia, I just wanted to thank you for putting together the research on this episode. I think when you look especially at that timeline, again, to really drive a point home that we've made a few times in the course of this episode, the question here isn't did Joseph Smith read any of these books or get any of these ideas directly from someone sharing one of these books with him? The question is just which is more likely that Joseph Smith was able to receive this idea that was floating about in his milieu from all of these different sources that Julia's put together. And maybe we can kind of look at that timeline one more time as we conclude, because I think that does a really good job of showing. Look at all these ways. Look at all these different people, probably from all across both America and Europe, I'm guessing, Julia, who were thinking about the same idea that apologists today say Joseph Smith could only have received through direct revelation from God. I think regardless of what people believe about the Book of Mormons and ancient or, you know, more contemporary to Joseph Smith historical origins, it seems very clear to me that it is more likely from a historical methodological standpoint that Joseph Smith almost certainly was hooking into this idea, that many of his contemporaries were also hooking into very similar thematic parallels as we've looked at those title pages, than it is that he received this information or could have only received this information through direct revelation from God. So I think this is a great addition to the LDS discussions episodes. And thank you for putting all of it together.

Julia 1:44:45 Yeah, I just was thinking about the. The letter episode. Could Joseph Smith write or dictate a well worded letter? John Delaney, he had the conclusion that Joseph Smith is the most likely person looking at his letters to have written the Book of Mormon. And looking at these, these timelines where you have Joseph Smith's treasure hunting, he's aware of what's being buried in the ground. He is studying the Bible in 1817 at the age of 12. Looking at these, he really does seem like he is the most likely author of the Book of Mormon.

Nemo 1:45:18 My only final remark would be to say that putting my apologist hat on, I wouldn't even feel the need to get into whether this is a more likely explanation for the gold plates or a less likely one. I would just have to admit as an apologist, in the same way that the apologists kind of have to Admit now, Mosaic priority. I would have to admit that, okay, this idea existed in Joseph Smith's time. Does that mean that he got it from those people? Not necessarily. Does that mean that the gold plates aren't. That story isn't necessarily true. It doesn't actually have any bearing on that, really. All that we can establish right here is that this idea definitely exists in his time, and it is possible that he could have got this idea through these means. And that's even from an apologist position. I just don't see how you could argue that.

Kolby Reddish 1:46:08 Right. To your earlier question, Nemo, of the one unique thing we were noticing between Joseph Smith's account of gold plates versus these other plates was the actual gold element. One of the things I was struck by is it's actually in the book of Exodus, chapter 28, verse 36, where this is where the Lord is supposedly commanding Aaron to make his, you know, to make his ritual raiment. And it directly says in that verse, and thou shalt make a plate of pure gold, engrave upon it like the engravings of a signet, holiness to the Lord. So this is part of like the ritualistic raiment that the children of Israel would have been wearing. And right there you have a reference. Right. In the Bible itself, which we know Joseph Smith was very conversant in. You have a reference to a gold plate. And again, that one does seem to be more decorative because it's really just a phrase that's, you know, basically engraved upon this decorative plate that's worn by the priest. But right there you have a reference to gold in the Bible. A gold plate in the Bible.

Nemo 1:47:12 And the first temple of the church, the Kirtland Temple, I believe, has the phrase holiness to the Lord inscribed above it. So that shows an awareness of that as a phrase taken from the Bible. So we can see how we would have then also seen that it was engraven upon a gold plate.

Kolby Reddish 1:47:28 Right, right. Well, thank you everyone for joining us today on this LDS discussions series episode. Let us know what you thought about this episode, particularly since John wasn't able to join us today. This was my first time around as co host Julia Nemo. I'm really grateful to you making the time for the interview today. You guys are both great and people should definitely follow and subscribe to your individual channels and follow your other work. Do you guys want to share that really quickly and then I'll. I'll take us out of here.

Closing Thoughts and Where to Follow Along

Julia 1:47:59 Yeah. So my channels are analyzing mormonism. I have YouTube, Instagram, TikTok. I have a website that I try to keep updated. But yeah, follow me there. And then. And then Nemo.

Nemo 1:48:10 Yeah, it's Nemo the Mormon. On all platforms. I talk about the church. I generally talk about the contemporary statements of church leaders and checking if they're being honest with us or not.

Kolby Reddish 1:48:21 Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you everyone for listening to this episode on LDS Discussions. Remember to please subscribe to Mormon Stories Podcast like and share this video and please donate to help keep this series alive. John does pay each of us for our time and for Julia's time and research on this episode. He does pay Nemo exclusively in Jammie Dodgers, I've heard. So let us know what you thought about this format. Trying to trying here with a dad out of the house today, the three of us. You can email feedback to john@mormonstories Gmail.com or just leave it in the comments of the YouTube video you're watching right now. Thank you again and I hope everyone has a good day. What does John always say? Be good to each other. Be kind to each other.

Nemo 1:49:11 I'll see you again on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care, everybody. Bye.

Kolby Reddish 1:49:18 You can tell someone's been on 50 of these.

Nemo 1:49:21 70.

Julia 1:49:22 70.

Kolby Reddish 1:49:24 That's right.

Nemo 1:49:25 Yeah.

Julia 1:49:27 Well, take care, everybody.

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