Zosimus

This apologetic (I see it all over the place in videos and articles about the gold plate witnesses all the sudden) confuses me. Strang's witnesses are not reporting a mundane event. There statement is clear that they perceived it as a sort of miraculous event. Strang, an approved "Prophet and Seer of God" had it "revealed to him in a vision that an account of an ancient people was buried in a hill" The angel had told Strang where to dig the witnesses confirm that the "sole inducement to our digging was our faith in his statement as a Prophet of the Lord that a record would thus and there be found". They went to the spot revealed through a vision, and behold, a box with plates! What is mundane about any of this? By comparison, the 8 witnesses account is far more mundane: "And this we bear record with words of soberness, that the said Smith has shewn unto us, for we have seen and hefted, and know of a surety that the said Smith has got the plates of which we have spoken" The three witness account is certainly not mundane, but I tend to agree with Vogel, there are some critical problems

Strang’s “brass plates of Laban” are a useful comparison because they also involve an angel, they are also Nephite artifacts, and seven witnesses who saw and hefted them. Yet almost no one outside Strangite circles feels obligated to explain “how it happened”. Strang was a Mormon prophet, yet we probably all agree here that from a non-Strangite viewpoint, the best explanation for his brass plates is the simplest most ordinary one: Strang fabricated a set of brass plates and a set of witnesses either conspired with him, or were otherwise duped. We do not have to account for the exact method or provide evidence for a conspiracy to justify the easiest explanation. The same applies in principle to Joseph Smith’s gold plates, including the overlap in some witnesses (Martin Harris and Hiram Page) who later accepted Strang, and claimed that other gold plate witnesses (David Whitmer, John Whitmer Jacob Whitmer) also accepted Strang. We can confidently say of those gold plate witnesses: People sometimes exaggerate ambiguous experiences. Groups can define and reinforce collective memories and interpretations over time. Multiple sincere witnesses are compatible with natural explanations. It is possible that the gold plate witnesses and the brass plates witnesses really handled ancient Nephite records brought from Jerusalem to America, but that explanation is less plausible than fraud. Most everyone can see this easily in Strang's case. If Strangites believe the brass plates were authentic and translated by Urim and Thummim, the burden of providing evidence falls on those that believe that extraordinary claim. Those who have no interest in the claim can be comfortable saying that “something happened here" and the most likely explanation is naturalistic. The precise details of how Strang did it, or where he got the brass, or how did he engrave oriental characters in the plates without anyone seeing him or why didn't anyone ever rat on him?! are underdetermined and aren't needed to justify skepticism

Anthon was there front and center for the early days of Aryan nationalism, only back then it was called Indo-Germanic. All the stuff Anthon was wrapping up for American students was eventually co-opted by German nationalists as evidence of a superior Hamitic/Japhetic root race that out-civilized the Semites. From the Ark to the Aryans: A Dangerous Revelation

Looking closer, it wasn't ubiquitous, as in it wasn't lying around in piles in places like Palmyra. But also, if someone in Palmyra needed some tinplate, they wouldn't need to custom order it from abroad. It was produced in America from the early 1700s, with production increasing after the War of 1812. Tinplate was available for tinsmiths and tinplate goods were distributed by village-to-village peddlers: https://hylandhouse.org/early-guilford-days/virtual-early-guilford-days-2020/tinsmithing "A Short History of Tinsmithing: The tinsmith has been plying his trade in America since 1720. Colonial tin products were made of imported tinplate. England banned the production of tinplate in the colonies, thus restricting the amount of goods the colonists could produce. Tinplate is thin steel that has been dipped several times into molten tin. If there is rust on a piece of tinware, it is because the tinplate has worn away or a cut in the metal has exposed the steel which has rusted. Colonial tinsmiths used tinplate, wire, sodder, and a few simple tools to produce their wares. When tinplate was finally produced in America in the early 1800’s the products of the tinsmith became more widely available. They in turn saw an increase in demand and a need to speed up production. This brought about the development of many ingenious hand powered machines which sped up production and helped the tinsmith meet the demands for his products. The goods were “brought to market” by peddlers traveling from village to village."

That's fair of you. Your thoughts on Vogel's presentation today? Could Joseph Smith Have Made the Plates? His idea is that Joseph could have used tin roof shingles that were commonly used in America in the early 19th century. It wouldn't require much smithing or effort to put some rings on a stack of tin roof shingles. Its even something that could be done without anyone noticing

That was my first thought, but Anthon was still publicly discussing his theory that American Indians came from the same source population as the Egyptians and India Indians as late as 1836 in his letters supporting the United States Exploring Expedition to the South Seas. Anthon continued to embed the theories of Ritter, Creuzer and Gorres in his later editions of A Classical Dictionary, greatly expanding on his articles about Egyptus, Pelsagians and Pyramids to include his speculations like the Mexican Votan being a grandson of Noah who helped build the Tower of Babel and who was related somehow to Woden and Buddha, an idea that passed from Sir William Jones through Ritter to Humboldt, who was a close associate of Ritter. Anthon discusses all this in his 1842 edition, so he was still convinced there was a connection between the religions of the east and west at least 15 years after announcing his plans for the textbook. In the preface of his 1842 Classical Dictionary, Anthon ramps up his commitments to the German Mystics Creuzer, Ritter and Guigniaut: "The subject of Mythology has supplied, next to that of Ancient Geography, the largest number of articles to the present work. In the treatment of these, it has been the chief aim of the author to lay before the student the most important speculations of the two great schools (the Mystic and anti-Mystic) which now divide the learned of Europe. At the head of the former stands Creuzer, whose elaborate work (Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker) has reappeared under so attractive a form through the taste and learning of Guigniaut." The entire battle between the Creuzer Mystics and the Lobeck anti-Mystics was over the origins of Western civilization. The mystics placed the source in the Hindu Kush area east of the Caspian Sea and west of the Indus, and the anti-Mystics rejected this in favor of Greece. Anthon says of the division "It has been the aim of the author to give a fair and impartial view of both systems, although he cannot doubt but that the former will appear to the student by far the more attractive one of the two." Anthon was on Creuzer's side, that Western civilization began in the highlands of Bactria, Hindoostan and Little Tibet, As I mention above, Joseph Smith in 1842 (same year Anthon publishes his updated dictionary to include hundreds of citations of Creuzer and Ritter) lines up almost precisely with the diffusionist theories of the Mystics. "In the opinion of the most learned among the moderns, Mount Ararat, where the ark of Noah rested, after the deluge, was in Armenia, or Thibet, and between 90o and 100o E. long. and between 30o and 35o north lat. north of Hindostan and Persia, west of the river Indus and of central Asia, and east of Mesopotamia and of the Caspian Sea." - Times and Seasons, 15 October 1842

Dan Vogel is discussing this in a livestream right now: Could Joseph Smith Have Made the Plates?

The Book of Mormon is impressive, but it has nothing on this guy. Annius of Viterbo didn’t produce just one ancient book, he forged a entire library of lost Babylonian, Egyptian, Chaldean, Greek and Latin texts all cross‑referencing each other to neatly fool Europe’s top scholars for centuries. Annius' Biblical chronologies are still occasionally cited today by people that mistake his forgeries as authentic. And on top of that, as evidence for the claims found in his texts, Annius secretly buried counterfeit inscriptions, carved pillars, and marble statues all around Viterbo. He'd sit it out until an opportunity (like a hunting trip through the forest with the Pope) for a big reveal. His forged books authenticated his forged props and the forged props authenticated his forged books. It was a massive pious fraud designed to do things like link his tiny hometown of Viterbo to Noah and give Pope Alexander III Egyptian ancestry. In a way the Book of Mormon links America to Noah and the Mosaic chronology in the same way Annius' books linked Europe to Noah and the Mosaic chronology, only in a way that was not quite as elaborate and complicated

IMO View of the Hebrews does provide at least some evidence for the historicity of the broad underlying narrative of the BoM, just not in the Americas. The one person in America that was attempting a synthesis of hundreds of Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, German, French etc. texts to include America in the Biblical genealogy was Charles Anthon. In 1827, Anthon was working on a school textbook laying out all the evidence for a diffusion of civilization from the sons of Noah to the Americas. He was in the middle of this project when Harris turned up with the gold plate characters The Lost Key to an American Revelation: Reconstructing Charles Anthon’s Phantom Textbook

All valid points, but I find his translation of Laban's brass plates called the Book of the Law of the Lord most relevant to this discussion: Strang’s witnesses described eighteen brass plates, each roughly 7–7.5 by 9 inches, engraved with characters and “beautiful pictures.” They emphasized physicality: substantial size, brass material, “beautiful antique workmanship,” and resemblance to “ancient oriental languages.” These plates were said to contain the lost Mosaic law (the “Book of the Law”) as preserved on the plates of Laban. Strang claimed to translate them by Urim and Thummim. No direct physical examinations by modern scholars are known. After Strang’s death, the large plates disappear from the historical record.

Having some ancestors with ties to the Strangites, the Book of the Law of the Lord and the Record of Rajah Manchou have long fascinated me. James Strang also claimed that an angel informed him of the location of the plates containing the Record of Rajah Manchou buried in a hill. Strang took four witnesses to dig up the plates for him. They all testified: Finding witnesses willing to sign their names to a pre-written statement describing their experiences handling ancient metal plates and scripture is clearly not as difficult in the early 1800s as it might seem to us today.

Why apples to oranges? Very also claimed he received his words from some supernatural power or Holy Ghost: "What he did and what he said, he felt that he was directed to do and to say by the Infinite Power. In fact, he claimed that he acted not of his own will, but always as he was directed. This theory he accepted with the utmost literalness, so that he said to Dr. Channing that even the putting his hand upon a mantel in the room where they were was not of his own free-will He wrote his poems and his prose essays as they were given to him. and he regarded himself as only the messenger or spokesman of the Spirit. His sonnets on religious themes. especially, he regarded as containing a message that was “given him” by the Spirit. He had an absolute confidence in the word that was thus spoken through him, and he gave it to others as something that had authority behind it, not as his own. He wrote to Emerson: “I am glad at last to be able to transmit what had been told me of Shakespeare. You hear not mine own words. but the teachings of the Holy Ghost.” (source) Do you believe his claim, or do you believe there is a naturalistic explanation for his use of an archaism that we also find in the Book of Mormon?

But a shrink gun can't be reverse-engineered. There's no known physics to explain for it. That's what makes an alien abduction suddenly credible. But the BoM isn't a shrinking raygun. It's a book and humans have produced 130 to 150 million books. The extraordinary thing about the BoM is that it does well synthesizing KJV, EMod english, biblical and apocryphal narratives, and other materials that were floating around 19th-century New England. Sure thats all very impressive but there is a plausible explanation for all that. It's not something that "those seeking a counter explanation" have to resort to wild speculation to account for. The simplest counter explanation is that a deeply faithful, religiously creative mind produced a impressive literary revelation, like hundreds or thousands of deeply faithful minds have done before. I collect apocyphal texts on PDF. I've been at it for almost three years, and I'm nowhere close to completing the collection. otoh, I have never ever seen a raygun that can shrink mailboxes. Also, its telling that the BoM doesn't predict any syntax. Is there any Present-Day English (PDE) in the Book of Mormon? Anything that wasn't in circulation before 1830? all the multifaceted archaisms you identify are exactly that, archaisms. Everything in the text was in circulation somewhere, in a book or in conversations at the local debate club. We might bicker about whether or not Joseph had access, but we still can't find anything in the book that wasn't already out there. I'd argue that there's nothing in the book that couldn't have been learned from a conversation with a knowledgable Palmyra acquaintance like Luther Bradish. So here's a somewhat relevant analogy. Could Luther Bradish have written the BoM? Not saying he did, but did he have the experience and knowledge to write it? How about Samuel Mitchill? Gilbert Hunt? Charles Anthon? Nathaniel Hawthorne? Washington Irving? I'd argue there were several humans capable of writing and dictating the Book of Mormon in 1828-1829. The book does a lot of innovative sythesisizing, but its nothing like a raygun

Granted all this is a new thread that requires context that hasn't yet been fleshed out in Mormon studies. but it feels relevant to me so i'll drop notes here as I research I start with an article in Times and Seasons, 15 October 1842: MOUNT ARARAT, AND THE EARLY ABODE OF NOAH AND HIS DESCENDANTS "In the opinion of the most learned among the moderns, Mount Ararat, where the ark of Noah rested, after the deluge, was in Armenia, or Thibet, and between 90o and 100o E. long. and between 30o and 35o north lat. north of Hindostan and Persia, west of the river Indus and of central Asia, and east of Mesopotamia and of the Caspian Sea." In the early 19th century there was a very small subset of Biblical apologetics that placed Ararat west of the Indus and east of the Caspian. If we use Feroe Islands as 0° longitude, the coordinates for Ararat in T&S would be: The T&S editorial places Ararat in the region of the Hindu Kush. This is a very clear fingerprint indicating the sources that the editors of T&S were using. Tracing the sources of this editorial, the influence of Sir William Jones, Francis Wilford and the Biblical mythographers Jacob Bryant and G.S. Faber becomes evident This material was circulating around America in the 1820s through the works of James McCulloh, Caleb Atwater, Josiah Priest and Ethan Smith to explain the origins of the moundbuilders

Couldn't agree more. Ethan Smith identifies his sources, and they all fit within a very public effort to counter the criticisms of Enlightenment-era writers that were an influence on Joseph Smith Sr, specifically Paine and Voltaire. Ethan Smith was heavily influenced by the writings of G.S. Faber, his "A Dissertation on the Prophecies" (1811) was a knock-off of Faber's earlier "A Dissertation on the Prophecies" (1808). From the Ethan Smith's book: "I HAVE believed the signs of the times to be very interesting and have wished that some able writer might succeed in opening and presenting, in a judicious and connected manner, the sacred Prophecies which are receiving their fulfilment. Mr. Faber , I think , has succeeded better in this, than any other writer on the subject." He then proceeds to pretty much copy/paste several themes and arguments from Faber's text, with over 62 citations, including the material I mentioned above from View of the Hebrews. Faber is a name I've never heard mentioned in the context of Mormon studies, so I've been going through his two most popular works: The origin of pagan idolatry ascertained from historical testimony and circumstantial evidence A Dissertation on the Mysteries of the Cabiri: or the Great Gods of Phenicia, Samothrace, Egypt, Troas, Greece, Italy, and Crete Faber's "arkite" system is directly injected into the moundbuilder discussion through James McCulloh, Caleb Atwater and Ethan Smith. The Book of Mormon emerges from those broader themes.

My youtube algorithm must have seen me posting about Ethan Smith in the Secular Theory because this surfaced in my feed this morning: Did He Plagiarize It? Joseph Smith, Ethan Smith, and View of the Hebrews I've been re-reading all of Ethan Smith's works the past few months, and am convinced we've missed a lot of material there. Just a couple things: It's hard to imagine that 100 years after BH Roberts introduced "View of the Hebrews" into the discussion, we are still completely missing the most interesting bits in the book. In the appendix of the 1825 edition, Ethan Smith discusses a group of Israelites/Jews that cross the sea with manuscripts that pre-date the Babylonian captivity. He mentions that their skin became "black" and he says this happened for the same reasons (climate and habits of living) that gave the American natives a skin that was darker than their ancestors. Ethan Smith in View of the Hebrews directly compares the black Jews in India to the American Indians, which he considered to be lost tribes. Ethan Smith then asks whether these Israelites are a remnant of the lost tribes or not. He concludes that they are not lost tribes because: They called themselves Jews, not Israel. They had books (including the Old Testament) that date to just before the Babylonian captivity. Also, as pointed out in the video, Ethan Smith's most popular book was not View of the Hebrews, it was his 1809 work "A Dissertation on the Prophecies". This IMO is far more interesting for anyone looking for overlap between the Book of Mormon and contemporary sources. There's a lot in the video worth discussing, but i'll start with the above

Reformed Egyptian wasn't yet a thing when Harris visited Anthon in 1828. Mitchill did tell Harris the script was from a nation in the east, which would have thoroughly impressed Harris, so that's probably where we get reformed Egyptian from. It was accepted in the 1820s that Asia (and the Americas) were colonized by Egyptians, and that Chinese (and Mesoamerican) hieroglyphs were just a variation of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Anthon himself believed this and was actively seeking evidence for a sort of diffused language from Egypt across the Polynesian Islands and into the Americas

IMO this is the true intellectual backdrop behind the Book of Mormon. The book extends conversations taking place in the 1820s about Josiah’s reforms, the Babylonian captivity, and the location and identity of the Israelite diaspora. In the appendix of his 1825 View of the Hebrews, Ethan Smith mentions a group of Israelite exiles sailing to India shortly after the Babylonian captivity. He identifies them as "black jews" and mentions they had Biblical records or manuscripts that predate the Babylonian captivity. VOTH appendix also mentions another Israelite group that settled to the north of the black Jews that he identifies as "muloc, or kings". Mulek was spelled Mulok in the 1830 Book of Mormon We also know Asael Smith was a read of Paine's Age of Reason, and he encouraged Smith Sr. to read it until he believed it. Which meant there was a copy of the book flying around the homestead as Smith Jr. grew up. Paine wrote a lot in Age of Reason about the fall of Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity, and some have made a strong case that the Book of Mormon is a response to the secular criticism of Paine's Deism and Smith Sr's universalism. But, Paine also wrote a more controversial pamphlet about the Babylonian captivity, or rather the fallout of Josiah's reforms, called "On the Origin of Freemasonry", which was published after his death. In there, he argues that Josiah had put to death a number of temple priests who were too devout in their devotion to the sun, moon, stars and planets and the astronomical symbols that were found throughout the temple. These priests went underground, and embedded the earlier purer temple rituals and symbols in what we know today as freemasonry. If we're looking for a secular theory of where the Book of Mormon came from. Thomas Paine and Ethan Smith are a good start

Another prime hallmark that a society that has ripened in iniquity is when people are beheaded in the street because someone decides it is their job to clean up the streets its possible to object to both

you're not using the word sympathize correctly

I haven't seen anyone argue that Anthon could actually read and translate Egyptian. What I'm saying is he had an intense interest in Egyptian scripts and language, and as late as 1836 was actively advocating for the United States government to fund an expedition into the Pacific Ocean to gather philological evidence to prove his favorite pet theory that American Indians crossed the South Seas from Egypt. Anthon was a diffusionist just like Joseph Smith. Anthon would not have been immediately antagonistic to the idea that Egyptian script had been found in a hill in New York. If presented with such a claim, he would have compared to the books on his shelf. Even he would not be able to translate them, he would have been able to compare them to a number of Egyptian, Semitic and other ancient scripts

Anthon was afaict, the most knowledgeable about Egypt. For example, read his massive entry on Egyptus and Meroe in his Classical Dictionary. Also check the massive bibliography, the books on his shelf are a good indication of his interests. The only other person that would have been more knowlegable about Egypt was Luther Bradish, who had traveled deep into Egypt, all the way to Sudan, and then to Jerusalem (past the Red Sea) on camel back. Bradish was a friend of Harris, and his family lived in Palmyra. Imagine that, a local Palmyra boy riding on camel back on the trail of the Lehites.

I’m trying to get a better feel for the cultural and academic world the Book of Mormon came out of. To me, Harris’s trip to Albany, New York City, and maybe Philadelphia is one of the most important and under‑researched episodes in early Mormonism. People like Luther Bradish, Samuel Mitchill, and Charles Anthon are big pieces of that story we still don’t really have nailed down. The meme is that Anthon was a stuffy professor who shut Harris down the moment he mentioned Moroni. I don’t think that’s the whole picture. Anthon was arguably America’s leading classicist, and in the 1820s classics and biblical apologetics were joined at the hip. His Classical Dictionary opens with a chronology that follows Ussher's standard, which tells you a lot about where he was coming from. Around 1827 Anthon is working on a textbook laying out textual evidence from Herodutus and other classics proving out how religion in the East and West connect, drawing on what he later calls the “mystic” school. In other words, Anthon was a diffusionist in the vein of the German Romantics. And wow, that's a very long thread that researchers haven't even began to pull yet. In this Mystic school framework, civilization and revelation start with Melchizedek as their priestly archetype somewhere east of the Caspian, the "old doctrine" then moves through Europe, and eventually reaches the Americas. Even after the Harris visit, we still find Anthon hunting for textual and philological proofs that American Indians are tied to Egyptians from Meroe. Put all that together, and a guy shows up at his door with “Egyptian‑looking” characters from a mound in upstate New York. I doubt Anthon’s first reaction was pure hostility. Given his own pet theories, he had every reason to at least be curious. My hunch is that he initially gave Harris some kind of thumbs up or at least didn’t straight away dismiss him. Then Harris brings in the angels and gold plates, and the whole thing suddenly too risky for a scholar at Columbia College. At that point it'd make total sense for Anthon to rip up his letter of certification. Both Bradish and Mitchill have equally interesting backgrounds, and similar responses to the transcript

There are plenty of people inside and outside the Church who grapple with the data and try to approach it without bias. I find that I flip flop frequently depending on who I’m speaking with. At times I feel like defending a naturalistic explanation, and at other times a faithful one. Some friends label me a misguided critic and others call me an amateur apologist. As I flip flop, I hardly see much difference between the two extremes. Both sides lack strong answers and solid evidence to support them. neither side is short on hubris or overconfidence The good news is that the more I grapple, the more I sense there’s a workable middle ground, for myself at least

What was the prompt you used?