Zosimus

Because Moroni had access to Jaredite records, and the Jaredites had a record of their fathers from the flood to the tower period. That's a primary source. It's not more modern, its more ancient, and for that reason Moroni would have followed the Jaredite record over the Mosaic record IMO

See my views here See my views here I look forward to that day when we recognize that these AI-generated responses don't add a whole lot to the conversation. My day job is prompt engineering. From daily experience with every learning model out there, I know how easy it is to get Claude, or Grok or ChatGPT to affirm anything you want. I just skip over any comment that starts out "I asked Grok:" See above I anticipated you'd ask this, so I already responded here See here See here Ugo is discussing Lehite DNA, he doesn't directly discuss Jaredite DNA. I am referring to Jaredite DNA. I anticipate you'll again ask "what would "Jaredite DNA" look like, and how do we know that?" I propose it would look like Onge. See here Do you ever actually read my responses? Because you sure do ignore them well See above

Exactly, we can't be sure how the Jaredites understood the flood. All we have is Moroni's abridgment of their account. But Moroni does include one overlooked and extremely critical detail: "Now the daughter of Jared was exceedingly fair. And it came to pass that she did talk with her father, and said unto him: Whereby hath my father so much sorrow? Hath he not read the record which our fathers brought across the great deep? Behold, is there not an account concerning them of old, that they by their secret plans did obtain kingdoms and great glory?" The Jaredites had carried with them, across the sea, a record of their fathers. This is only a few generations after the flood, so they had a manuscript history as a primary source, and would have known a lot about the flood and the tower. Everything Moroni knew about the flood would have come through either the Jaredite 24 plates or the brass plates or anything he might have picked up from Lehi or Nephi's understanding of the Mosaic record. My guess is since the Jaredite records were the closest in time to the actual events, and were first person accounts of the flood and the tower and the migrations, Moroni would have followed that, while cross-checking brass plates and Nephite plates I fully agree, but this complicates things quite a lot because a local flood goes against the Mosaic record. If Moroni understood the flood as a local event, he only solution would be that Moroni was following an older Jaredite primary source like the one introduced in Ether 8:9. If Moroni was following the Mosaic account, then he'd understand that only 8 people survived the global flood, and the entire world was unpopulated. otoh If Moroni was following the Jaredite record carried across the deep (and I believe he was) then it could be that he understood the flood was not a catastrophic genetic bottleneck. He would not be troubled to square the Mosaic record with the millions of indigenous people that had been in the promised land for thousands of years before the Jaredites. BTW, ever since the Americas were discovered, this was a huge problem for the Mosaic record and Biblical apologists. Joseph Smith, whether through revelation or otherwise, resolved the problem with the publication of his translation of the Book of Ether. I am truly impressed with his work, and this is why I never want to get dragged into a back-and-forth about whether he was a fraud or not.

I can't really make sense of the phrasing either, because a literal meaning would be that no man had ever been anywhere in the world after the flood and the tower. All quarters were uninhabited. So maybe its talking about antediluvian populations? Either way, a literal reading of the text from the view of a 400 AD compiler would be that the entire New World was empty, there would have been noone there between the flood and the arrival of the Jaredites, unless another group left the tower and beat them to it. But that also wouldn't explain how there's no unique DNA signal that appears within indigenous populations around 2000 BCE.

The text clearly says: "And it came to pass that the Lord commanded them that they should go forth into the wilderness, yea, into that quarter where there never had man been." Ether 2:5 So we know that at least for the Jaredites around 2500-2000 BCE, there was no pre-existing population in their promised land, and we know that the Jaredites quickly became a civilization of millions. So why do we not find anything that resembles Jaredite DNA in ancient burials dating to the Jaredite timeframe of 2500 BCE to 600 BCE? They would have been the only people there according to the text, and there were numerous Jaredites (most agree at least a million or more) in the text, so why can't we find a signal that represents a Jaredite civilization in the Americas? The apologetic is that the empty quarter refers to the wilderness and not the New World and that we don't know what Jaredite DNA looks like. That's fair, but that implies Jaredite DNA is indistinguishable from the DNA of indigenous Americans that have been living in America since 15,000-20,000 years ago. That wouldn't be the case if they migrated from ANE into a population that had been isolated from ANE for 15 millennia. There would be a distinguishable Jaredite signal within the indigenous signal There is an interesting unique signal of DNA that pops up among the indigenous populations of South America that most closely resembles the Onge people, that I have argued could represent Jaredite DNA, but there are also problems with that solution

true, if the BoM is ancient, you need to sift Mormon’s interpretation from what really happened. But when the text identifies and describes things that a 400 AD indigenous American could not plausibly know, while leaving out a number of things we'd expect a 400 AD indigenous American to take for granted, the simpler explanation is that the author isn't writing that history in America before 400 AD

Read here, here and here and here and here. Watch here, here and also here. Please see above Thanks, -Zosimus

“Nephite" or "Lamanite" civilizations should look a lot like the civilization described in the Book of Mormon. We have an enormous amount of detailed data about that civilization, because they went to great lengths to document as much as they could on metal plates so we could learn about them. by reading the Book of Mormon?

Even the highly-respected scholar Matthew Black wasn't too bothered providing a speculative explanation over an extraordinary one: "[Matthew Black] then formulated a hypothesis, consistent with his lecture, that a member of one of the esoteric groups he had described previously must have survived into the nineteenth century, and hearing of Joseph Smith, must have brought the group’s Enoch texts to New York from Italy for the Prophet to translate and publish." (source) Given his expertise, I was intrigued by his suggestion, and poked around to find there was a lot of wild esoteric German, French and Italian material floating around in the 1820's. Anthon was putting some of it in a textbook he was working on in 1827. Since Anthon was also working with Edmund Barker on a compilation of Native American lore at the same time, I don't see it being totally impossible that the gold plate characters triggered a conversation of some of Anthon's wilder speculations on the origins of American Indians coming from Egypt. No proof for it of course, but since Harris did come back convinced that Anthon saw something authentically Egyptian in the characters, is it really so implausible?

See, I did not find any of these responses substantive. I was not really impressed with the "evidence" you alleged here. etc etc

I was paraphrasing your comment: "I think you abuse the phrase "Mormon prophet," as I don't think Strang qualifies." You poison the well with such things that cannot be so easily defined without back and forth for days. I would ask you how I have abused the phrase "Mormon prophet" and "why does Strang not qualify", but then we're sliding down the slope into definitions that we'll never agree upon. "Absolutely, Strang was a Mormon prophet", I'll say. "No, he was not", you'll say. "Not really impressed with your evidence, so not a substantive response", we'll both say. BTW These are not actual quotes, so no need to reply with three unique individual replies pointing out we never said the above. This imagined dialogue is only meant to be only an example of how frustrating this discussion has become Same endless loop. You say you gave evidence Strang fabricated plates. I'll say antagonistic comments by detractors is not evidence, so let's not go that way. You'll say something about me retreating with a non-sequitor, and then you'll still continue saying there's evidence out there that Strang fabricated plates. Ignoring the same comments by detractors of Joseph Smith that he had sand in his frock, or an empty chest. etc etc. And then there's this stream of responses from you that are absolutely impossible to respond to without investing hours into sorting out what you are referring to exactly: - "Quite an overstatement, this." - "See, I did not find any of these responses substantive." - "Again, not really a substantive response." - "I give you credit for this one." - "Not really responsive" (3x) - "I was not really impressed with the "evidence" you alleged here." - "It was at this point that you started to withdraw from the discussion with what I saw as a non sequitur" (even after I've responded to this numerous times) - "See, nobody has asked you that." I'm also OK with this conversation being over because I highly doubt anybody can make sense of it. But I'm also happy to continue, just need to respond to this single question: Restricting our focus to plates and witnesses, what did Joseph Smith do that James Strang did not replicate? Just focus on that one question, and please don't link me back to our previous conversations, if you can resist the temptation. One single question. And I'll follow up with one single response.

This whole exchange has become a non-sequitor. Moving on I've read and written way more than I care to admit about the copper plates of India, and still consider them to be the best evidence for a historical Book of Mormon. Over the years I've even gone to the extreme of constructing a Book of Mormon geography model based on the ancient Jewish and Christian plates of Cochin. So I'll be the first to admit and defend that it was completely possible for ancient Jews and Christians in a foreign land to etch Semitic words on metal and bind them together with rings. But over time, this exercise constructing a geography model that fit history (elephants, silk, steel etc.) kinda revealed to me that it won't ever really matter to anyone, critics and skeptics alike, if there is historical evidence for the Book of Mormon. Why? Because it still won't be more plausible than the possibility that Joseph Smith had heard about the Jews of Cochin with their records on metal plates and their elephants and horses and chariots, and wrote an American adaptation about all of it. These accounts were quite popular and widely discussed. But that's absurd, right? Yet it is exactly what Strang did. Where do you think Strang got the name Rajah Manchou? Rajah is exactly a Sanskrit word for king, and Manchou is of course as Asian a word as one could get in 1820s America. In imitation of Joseph Smith's gold plates, James Strang dug up a set of ancient Indian copper plates in Wisconsin

Not to beat a dead horse, but let's look at this closer because it feels unresolved somehow, and that will make discussion harder until its cleared up. This is how I see our exchange: Me: Advances arguments against the probative value of the Smith's plates and witnesses by comparing them to Strang's plates and witnesses. Smac: OK, but James Strang is not really a prophet and there's evidence that he fabricated his plates. Me: James Strang was considered a prophet by many Mormons, including Martin Harris and other witnesses to the gold plates, and there's no evidence he fabricated his plates beyond his enemies saying he did. Just like Smith had enemies that said he, for example, only had a smock full of sand or an empty chest or copper plates from the local print shop. But I don't want to waste time discussing what enemies said about either years later. Smac: OK, since you brought up Smith's moral character, let's look more closely at what all his detractors actually said. Me: Like I said, there are statements on both sides that the plates were faked or fabricated, and its too messy to bother with all those statements here. I'm not interested in defending the moral character, motives/actions or prophetic status of either Smith or Strang here. Its too messy and emotionally charged, I prefer not discuss it here. Ryan: But you brought it up, and now you are retreating from your stated claims? Me: No, I haven't retreated from arguments. I'm just not interested in discussing motives and character based on statements of the angry villagers 40 years after the fact. f Smac wants, we can discuss that in DM. Smac: So your explanation for why you made that statement (about you not being interested in defending actions) seems like a non-sequitur. Ryan: This was exactly my point as well.

I feel I've responded to all your distinctions, but not your long sprawling requests for clarification and follow up queries. One thing that would help is just responding to two or three questions at a time, in a few sentences. As many have said before me, it's very difficult to respond to your formatting. Restricting our focus to plates and witnesses, what did Joseph Smith do that James Strang did not replicate? See above I then responded to all 10 As I explained to Ryan, my comment is not a retreat, it is a clarification of scope. I’m interested in what the Smith and Strang plates and their witnesses can and cannot establish, regardless of which 19th‑century prophet we’re talking about. I am not interested in discussing whether or not Strang was a true Mormon prophet, or the witnesses and villagers who would claim over the next 40 years that Smith or Strang were fallen or false prophets and/or con artists and that they fabricated the plates and duped the witnesses etc. I hope this is finally clear No, as soon as you did, I responded to all 10. Here I never abandoned my arguments or retreated, but I did request we clarify scope. See above. And even then I was clear if you do want to discuss what witnesses had to say about the moral character or prophetic status of Smith, Strang, you can DM me. Nice, I'll respond in another thread because this one seems to be fully dedicated to your conclusions that I have abandoned my arguments and retreated from the discussion

I am indeed sooo confused, but its largely because your comment here that links to the very article about the metal plates that I responded to: When you said "You also have to acknowledge that some ancient and medieval metal records are actually quite lengthy" and then linked to the Gold Books article I assumed you were referring to the examples in the article you linked to there. As I still cannot find any mention of the Lengthy Plates article in that thread. That thread does say "Discoveries since that time have shown that many religious texts were indeed recorded on gold. Additionally, some examples of such artifacts were attached together to form what may properly be considered “books” analogous to the Book of Mormon." So it is really baffling that you consider my follow up to the claim in the article that "some examples of such artifacts ... analogous to the Book of Mormon" to be me "charging at windmills" But nevermind, misundertanding is now clear. Thanks

Correction: this should say the reasons why Smith excommunicated Cowery and Whitmer and why Young excommunicated Strang

Ryan, I was responding to this comment from you: Now you are saying that the article is not trying to make that point?

Kindly reread my response. My reasoning is explain very clearly in there. I don't want to copy/paste back and forth things that in a forum, for example, the things the Whitmers (including Cowdery) said about Smith and then the things that Smith said about Cowdery and the Whitmers and then the reasons why Brigham Young excommunicated Cowdery, Whitmer and Strang, and then the things the Cowdery, Whitmer and Strang said about Young etc etc etc Why is that so odd? Its becoming odd that you continue to push the point, even after I apologized for contributing to the conversation veering off to talk about the moral character of Smith, Strang and the witnesses. Now if you'd like to talk about metal plates, or pseudo-biblical histories, or even the similarities between Smith's plates and Strang's plates, I'm down

Well, this entire comment from you is a good example of the kind of problem we often find ourselves in. "Run-of-the-mill charlatan" was not my choice of words. I view the projects of both Smith and Strang as pious frauds, but even then I don't like the word fraud because I don't think Smith was necessarily a fraud. I believe he was sincere. So I definitely don't consider Joseph Smith to be a run-of-the-mill charlatan and its frustrating to even have to respond to your comment, because it makes me feel combative and icky. if I said anything previous to this comment that contributed to the discussion veering off to talk about the moral character of Smith and Strang or the witnesses, I apologize. I'm not going to slip down the slope of comparing all the garbage that the detractors of Joseph Smith said about him with the garbage that detractors of James Strang said about him. I don't want to get into the bog of some witnesses later said about Joseph and what nasty things some witnesses later said about Strang, and the nasty things defenders would later say about the Smith and Strang witnesses. I've read a lot of that mess, and its not something I want to start copy/pasting all over this forever online public forum with my profile attached to any of it Besides, I feel I've already responded adequately to Smac's queries. Firstly, I largely agree with Vogel's conclusions on the witnesses and the pious fraud projects. Secondly, I have already explained why I consider the gold plate witnesses as equivalent to the Strang witnesses. Recap, they were all members of the same two families (plus Harris) and its really really hard to recant testimonies that would completely wreck the reputation of their entire family and put themselves and their family members at risk. I know both Cowdery and David Whitmer even feared for their lives at different points after they were excommunicated. This alone explains it for me, and I don't feel the need to then veer off into all the different nasty things all these people later said about each other in a futile effort to defend (or whatever you want to call it) some of them And yet I remain absolutely willing to defend my full statement. "After studying it all out in my head for many decades, there is not enough difference in motive or execution between Smith, Strang and dozens if not hundreds of others that played the same pseudo-biblical-history-found-in-a-hole-and-then-miraculously-disappeared playbook." If you'd like to discuss the long history of pseudo-biblical histories then, great I'd much rather talk about that. Which reminds me, you made the claim that several examples of metal plates in Asia provided evidence of lengthy documents written on metal plates. I took an hour to write up a response to that, providing evidence that they are not. But instead of responding to that (a topic I would much rather talk about) you wrote the above implicitly characterizing me as someone who is dodging a conversation. Meanwhile, I'm waiting for your response. So let's reset. I consider the gold plates, the Record of Rajah Manchou and the Book of the Law of the Lord to be fine examples of the "pseudo-biblical-history-found-in-a-hole-and-then-miraculously-disappeared playbook"

Nah that's not what's happening here. I'd made it very clear in my previous post that if Smac took the conversation that way, I was not interested in continuing. Here: And then a good deal of Smac's follow up response was exactly him piling up queries on the topics I'm not interested in discussing here. Because If I were to respond to those queries, then inevitably this conversation will veer off into a long miserable thread where I post links to evidence that the Joseph Smith and the gold plate witnesses had all these human flaws, and then Smac would post links to evidence about how James Strang and the Strangite witnesses had the same human flaws. By default it becomes a conversation where everyone is obligated to make moral judgements on people that are highly respected by the majority of members here. I just don't want to go down that path, mostly because its already available ad nauseam on Youtube and Google and ChatGPT. And I'm just not interested in having that conversation in a public forum. If Smac wants to continue than he can DM me, I'm happy to proceed in private.

I'll be honest, I'm not at all interested in defending the actions of James Strang or Joseph Smith. Not going to slide down this slope of putting taking on any of that burden. For me, after studying it all out in my head for many decades, there is not enough difference in motive or execution between Smith, Strang and dozens if not hundreds of others that played the same pseudo-biblical-history-found-in-a-hole-and-then-miraculously-disappeared playbook. I believe Smith and Strang were both products of the conflict between the Enlightenment and Romanticism mixed into a nascent American history with a little bit of orientalism and freemasonry on the side. Strang basically admits it in his journals, and several scholars have reached similar conclusions with Smith. So I'd rather spend my time discussing something more interesting than whether the witnesses of Smith or Strang were more likeable. I've already given my reasons for being skeptical of both Smith and Strang, so not interested in defending either

The Whitmer family were 7 out of 11 of the gold plate witnesses if you include Page and Cowdery as Whitmer-in-laws. If we throw Mary in for good measure, then the Whitmerites were batting .667

When I say Strang ran the Smith playbook twice, I'm referring to the eight witnesses. As I suggested, we'll have to treat the extraordinary claims of the three witnesses in a different conversation, because there are unique problems with those claims. Setting the three witnesses aside for now, I don't see the testimonies of the Strangite witnesses being significantly different from Smith's eight witnesses. More below. As mentioned above, we'll have to treat the extraordinary claims of the three witnesses in a different conversation, because there are unique problems with those claims. This is where it gets tricky. Many of the witnesses would fall away from the Church. Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer and Martin Harris included and they all had harsh things to say about Smith and other leaders of the Church. Sure, they never denied their witness statements, but there are a number of reasons why they might have chosen not too. Reputation, pride, fear of God...cough, Danites, cough. Like Nehor mentions above, the Whitmerites had great reason to not torpedo the Book of Mormon as they were starting their own Book of Mormon book club. Then it gets more complicated when we consider that Martin Harris even joined the Strangites and served a mission for Strang in the UK. Which would suggest that after the death of Joseph Smith, at least one of the three witnesses considered Strang to be the prophetic successor. Hiram Page (eight witnesses) also showed support for Strang, and claimed that the Whitmers were also supportive of Strang, at least until they all became the Whitmerites. So, to me, it does seems like Strang succeeded in running the Smith playbook. He captured a number of Smith's witnesses, followers and quite a few prominent leaders, including Joseph Smith's brother William. Like Smith, most would eventually leave Strang due to polygamy, but that's added confirmation that Strang mimicked Smith quite successfully, and had very similar outcomes. wrt Samuel Bacon, if you want to get into hearsay and antagonists, then there's way too much to sort through. Let me just say that Joseph Smith and the gold plate witnesses had plenty of detractors saying all sorts of things to discredit them. And only then did Smith and the witnesses begin to badmouth and discredit each other. Do you really want to open that can of worms? As I keep saying, Strang was a Mormon, he'd been baptized a member of the Church and never excommunicated under Smith's leadership, unlike all of the three witnesses. Strang was a priesthood holder. In other words, he also had the capacity of confirming the veracity of the Book of Mormon through the Holy Spirit and he also had access to the Moroni 10:3-5 mechanism. Strangites to this day, accept the Book of Mormon as canon. (source) So, yes, he did. See above. Strang was a critical part of the movement that Joseph Smith founded. The Brighamites were more successful in the end, but that says nothing about how well Strang ran the Smith playbook. See above. If we are to extend your analogy properly, Strang was not only a full member of the Chiefs, he was one of the coaches. Oh come on, you can't pick and choose the evidence you allow, and dismiss. There's just as much, if not more, so called "evidence" that Smith fabricated his plates as there is that Strang fabricated his. For example... and... Both Smith and Strang had enemies, we don't have enough space here to go back and forth around the hearsay to determine who had the most detractors vs who had the most evidence, so please don't @ me with points. I'm not interested in discussing whether Smith or Strang was more hated by the villagers Youtube videos make this claim a lot, but Strang's brass plates of Laban were quite close and elaborateness in size to Smith's. See Weeble's comment above. Have you ever read Strang's translation of the brass plates of Laban?

I'm mostly responding to the (in)accuracy of the claims within the article, not the motives of the authors. But none of the examples (apart from the purely mythical and legendary ones) are anything close to the length of the Book of Mormon. 1. "According to Jeremiah Losty, Buddhist canonical texts were inscribed on gold sheets as early as 88 BC, although none of these have survived from that early period." Losty is clearly referring to later traditions that, for political reasons, were an attempt to legitimize the theravada canon over other schools. The claim was that Ashoka's brother feared the destruction of the teachings so he sent monks to Sri Lanka to write the teachings down on gold or copper plates. This was later known as the "copper plate school". There's no extant examples of any written Buddhist canon in Sri Lanka until the 4th Theravada Council around 30 BC, and that was on palm leaf. The earliest evidence for Buddhist canon written on gold plates comes from 5th century Burma. The first actual Buddhist epigraphy was, you'll never guess ... Aramaic, the former administrative language of Babylon and the Levant. Findings like these are what drove many 19th century writers like Charles Anthon to run with their wild theories that the Buddha was an Egyptian/Israelite priest, and the sculptures of the Buddha in Bamiyan (Afghanistan) were constructed by the descendants of Israelite kings. Ethan Smith get's into that a bit in View of the Hebrews. Charles Anthon had a book by Carl Ritter called "The Stupas, or the architectural monuments on the Indo‑Bactrian royal road, and the colossi of Bamiyan", and it was Anthon's view that these Indo-European peoples migrated to the Americas bringing the Old Doctrine of Noah with them. 2. "In the 5th century AD, the Buddhist writer Buddhaghosa claimed that a stupa (a mound-like structure) built during the reign of King Ajatsatru in eastern India contained a trove of relics including a prophecy inscribed on a gold plate about the deeds of King Ashoka and his role in the spread of Buddhist teachings." This is entirely legendary, written in the 5th century AD by a monk in Sri Lanka. We're unsure there even was a King Ajatsatru to build a stupa in the 5th century BCE containing a trove of relics of the Buddha and a gold plate about the deeds of Asoka, because Asoka wouldn't even by born for another 200 years after the construction of the stupa. 3. "The Jatakas (stories about former incarnations of the Buddha) refer to “important family records of wealthy merchants, royal edicts, poetic verses, and moral maxims on gold.” Only problem is the author of the article left off the sentence in the original source leading the discussion of legends of gold being used for writing: "Gold: this metal, being costly, was rarely used for writing." And the cited source confirms, the earliest examples we have of gold being used is 5th century AD Burma. 4. The Perfection of Wisdom sutra, an important text in Mahāyāna Buddhism, refers to an ornate box containing a Buddhist inscription “written with melted vaidurya on golden tablets.” Again, legendary. The sutra is describing events that took place between bodhisattvas in imaginary realms. No such golden tablet exists. 5. In 1982 archaeologist discovered a set of seven gold plates in a stupa in Sri Lanka inscribed with parts of this sutra. Examples of inscriptions on either gold plates or more delicate gold foil have now been recovered from various parts of India, Burma (Myanmar), Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Indonesia. This is all true, but the inscriptions are all far from lengthy. 6. The Borobudur Plates are a set of eleven gold plates now held in the National Museum in Jakarta. They are the oldest known inscription of Buddhist texts from Indonesia. Eight of the plates have inscriptions on both sides, similar to the plates of the Book of Mormon. Also true, but the provenance of the Borobudur plates is unknown as they were found in a museum after World War II. The inscriptions are far from lengthy. 7. A set of nineteen gold plates were recovered during repairs to a pagoda in Iksan, southwestern Korea in 1965. These were inscribed with a portion of the Diamond Sutra and are believed to date to the 7th century AD. The plates and other relics recovered from the site were part of an exhibition at the Chonju National Museum in 2015. This set of “19 pure gold sheets” was found inside a double-walled reliquary box with a lid. Small portion of the Diamond Sutra, not lengthy. 8. Some inscribed gold plates were actually attached together in various ways and have, for this reason, been described as “books” by scholars. In 1926–1927 Charles Duroiselle excavated several brick mounds in Burma (Myanmar) on the land of a farmer named Khin Ba. Among the many artifacts he discovered was a small gold “book” containing twenty leaves set between two gold covers. Each plate measured 6 ½ inches long (16.5 cm) and 1 ¼ inches (3.2 cm) wide. The plates were “held together by a gold wire placed through two holes in the covers of each page, and then wound around the book. Carved on the gold pages are brief excerpts from eight Pali Buddhist texts.” The text has sixty lines and dates to the 5th–6th centuries AD. Too small to contain any inscriptions of length. 7. Chinese archaeologists recently discovered a set of artifacts from a pagoda (a tiered tower) in Inner Mongolia with two rectangular sheets, one in silver, the other in gold. The gold sheet was inscribed with a Tantric mantra written in Sanskrit Short tantric mantra inscription, nothing like a Book of Mormon length historical record.

Yes. In short, Strang runs the same Smith playbook, with two different sets of metal plates, and he succeeds both times. That’s a problem for any argument that treats the 8 gold plate witnesses as evidence against a “cheap hoax” model. First, the Voree plates. Four men testify in plain language that they recovered the ancient record. You are correct, no angel or divine voice appears in their testimony, but Strang’s larger claim is certainly supernatural, an angel revealed the record’s location, Strang received divine interpreters, and translated the plates by the power of God. Their affidavit does the same thing for Strang as the Eight witnesses do for Joseph. This was intentional. Strang intentionally repeated the gold plate witness playbook. The 4 witnesses to the Record of Rajah Manchou provided a mundane naturalistic witness to underwrite Strang's intentional imitation of Smith's extraordinary narrative of ancient American prophets and metal plates. But then Strang did something even closer to the 8 gold plate witnesses with his follow-up witnesses to the brass plates of Laban. Seven men signed a testimony printed at the front of the book affirming that Strang “has the plates of the ancient Book of the Law of the Lord given to Moses,” from which he translated, and that he “has shown them to us.” They said they “examined them as closely as we could,” found eighteen brass plates about 7⅜ × 9 inches, of brass, “beautiful antique workmanship,” “occasionally embellished with beautiful pictures,” covered in characters resembling “ancient oriental languages.” Again, there's no angel involved, but there is the same familiar pattern. Multiple men in daylight physically handling and inspecting with natural eyes a stack of beautifully engraved metal plates with “curious workmanship,” all in support of supernatural claims about angels revealing ancient metal plates to a modern prophet. So Strang's witnesses give us two additional concrete examples of a 19th‑century proof‑of‑concept confirming: it was possible for two different Mormon prophets to claim angelic revelations of three distinct ancient metal records, it was possible to stage multiple discovery and/or show-and-tell event with credible witnesses, it was possible to obtain multiple detailed sober, non‑supernatural affidavits describing hands‑on examination of ancient metal plates, it was possible that all those witnesses never formally recant, For anyone framing the evidence provided by the eight gold plate witnesses as important, how to simultaneously dismiss the Strangite witness evidence as unimportant? Because whatever arguments we might make for Smith's witnesses have to be framed so they don't also canonize Strang’s witnesses. note: I do acknowledge that you also might assign additional weight to the testimonies of the three witnesses because they claim to have seen an angel, but I agree with Vogel here. We really should discuss Vogel's work on this