A Secular Theory of Where the BoM Came From

[smac97]

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

Hi @smac97 and @Ryan Dahle,

I've enjoyed this conversation, but my participation is going to be limited, at least for another couple of weeks. 

On a fundamental level, I think many of the questions you (Smac) have asked are the wrong questions.

I guess reasonable minds can disagree about that.

Your approach hews much more toward the hypothetical than mine.  My approach is based on the extant evidence and broad historiographical and logical principles. 

I am interested in talking about the evidence we have, but you hypothesize and talk about evidence we should have, or you only provide negative theories (the "not that" stuff) as to how you think things should be.

I am interested in talking about the Witnesses, and I think you are not, or else you disregard their statements mostly/altogether.

I am interested in talking about the historical evidence we have about the Witnesses relative to their character and credibility, and I think you are not, or else you or else you disregard their character/credibility mostly/altogether.

I am also interested in textual evidences, but we've not really delved into those.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

There are some things I strongly believe,

Sure.  I would like to discuss how you reconcile your beliefs with the extant evidence, and/or how your beliefs form a coherent counter-theory as to the origins of The Book of Mormon.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

and I think those beliefs are backed by a commensurate amount of evidence.

I don't.  You have not addressed the extant evidence in any meaningful or substantive way.  You have failed/refused to present a positive, coherent explanation for The Book of Mormon that accounts for the key data points (physical plates, witness statements, text origins/translation process) without heavy speculation.  And to the extent you presume to speak as a self-declared "Bayesian methodological empiricist," your empiricism has culminated in A) "space aliens" and/or "Satan" being "more likely" explanations for The Book of Mormon (as compared to Joseph's narrative), B) Joseph made "tin" plates, and C) "I don't know" for pretty much the whole of any particular inquiry as to the evidentiary basis for your theory.

And all this comes after nearly two centuries of Anti-Mormonism, and remarkable access to data (via the Internet) and analysis (via AI platforms), and our critics still cannot formulate an evidence-based explanation superior to Joseph's.  I find this result to be rather remarkable.

I think I've gleaned this: Is it fair so say that your alternative theory is that (A) Joseph, (B) acting alone, (C) made an actual physical object, probably out of tin and then painted it gold, that D) was a cheap and shoddy and likely-to-be-detected sham?

This is, I think, Dan Vogel's theory.  Do you join with him?  It's neither evidence-based, nor does it account of quite a few key data points, nor is it devoid of heavy speculation, nor is it empirically rigorous, but if this is what you've got, we can work with it.

Alternatively, if you are going to theorize about (B) (there were others involved in the production, i.e., an unknown and undetected conspiracy) and/or (C) (the "prop" was quite sophisticated, sufficient to withstand scrutiny and dupe the Witnesses), I'd like to hear what you have to say.

I also look forward to your reconciling your naturalistic theory with your acknowledgment that two of the Three Witnesses (David Whitmer and Martin Harris) were A) not insane, B) sincere, and C) not duped.  Given what they attested to (particularly David Whitmer), and given that you acknowledge they were neither insane nor duped, I am really curious about this reconciliation.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

And there are other things I don't know, because the evidence just isn't there to form a belief.

Well, no.  You have "formed a belief," a positive and coherent one, about the death of Caesar based on "evidence" that is of far lower quality than the extant evidence we have pertaining to the Plates, the Witnesses, and the Witnesses' character/credibility.

Your "I don't know" is not based on a lack of evidence, but because you simply cannot formulate a positive, coherent alternative explanation for The Book of Mormon that accounts for the key data points (physical plates, witness statements, text origins/translation process) without heavy speculation.

If you can reach evidence-based conclusions about Caesar, you should be able to reach evidence-based conclusions about the Plates.  

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

I'm quite comfortable accepting the fact that when I don't know something, the best thing to do is say, "I don't know."

Well, no, you don't do that.  Sometimes, but not always.

For example, you have not said "I don't know" as to Joseph's narrative.  You have, instead, declared that it's "just not possible."

You have not said "I don't know" as to alternative explanations.  You have, instead, said that "space aliens" and/or "Satan" and/or "demons" are "more likely" explanations than Joseph's.

You also don't know that Caesar was stabbed to death on the Ides of March.  You infer it based on extant evidence.  And that inference sooner or later comes to be called fact because, well, we only have so much evidence as to things which have happened in the past, and we work with what we've got.

You could similarly formulate an evidence-based inference as to the Plates, particularly given that the extant evidence is far better than the evidence you rely on re: Caesar.  And yet you won't.  You have evidence-based inferences as to Caesar, but "I don't know" as to the Witnesses.  And you find "space aliens" to be a "more likely" explanation for The Book of Mormon than Joseph's narrative.

These are the fruits of Bayesian methodological empiricism?

I find that rather remarkable.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

I was deposed as an expert witness not too long ago, and I said the phrase "I don't know" exactly 106 times. I'm quite comfortable admitting I don't know when I don't know.

Again, you have not said, regarding Joseph Smith, "I don't know."  You have, instead, said his narrative is "just not possible."

You have not said, regarding alternative explanations for The Book of Mormon, "I don't know."  You have, instead, said that "space aliens" and/or "Satan" and/or "demons" are "more likely" explanations than Joseph's.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

But when I do know something, I'll explain why as clearly as I can.

You "know" that Joseph's narrative is "just not possible"?  And you can explain that?

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

I've read all of your thoughts, and in the following conversation I had with ChatGPT,

I'm not really interested in what AI platforms have to say.  They just regurgitate stuff.

I have asked critics of the Church to present a positive, coherent explanation for The Book of Mormon that accounts for the key data points (physical plates, witness statements, text origins/translation process) without heavy speculation

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

Q: In my online conversation, somebody has repeatedly asked me to "provide a positive, coherent alternative explanation for The Book of Mormon that accounts for the key data points (physical plates, witness statements, text origins/translation process) without heavy speculation, while claiming empirical rigor." What do you think of that question?

A: It’s a rhetorically strong but asymmetrical demand. It sets a high bar for alternatives (complete, low-speculation, empirically tight) while the original claim relies on elements that aren’t empirically testable (lost artifact, unobservable translation), so it shifts the burden rather than equalizing it; in practice, historical explanations often work with partial data and inference, not a single fully “coherent” reconstruction. A fair standard would compare competing hypotheses on explanatory scope, evidential support, and assumptions—not require one side to deliver near-forensic completeness the evidence simply doesn’t permit.

The Latter-day Saints have never claimed to believe the things we do based on strict empiricism.  That's your gig.  And even then, I'm not looking for an asymmetrical explanation.  I think the Latter-day Saints have, for a long time now, presented a positive, coherent alternative explanation for The Book of Mormon that accounts for the key data points (physical plates, witness statements, text origins/translation process) without heavy speculation.

I added the "empirical rigor" thing because that's your petard, and I expected you to be hoisted by it.  And by gum, I think I was right.

Your supposed "empirical rigor" allows for you to account for the death of Caesar based on pretty lousy evidence, but does not allow you to account for the Witnesses based on far better and much more evidence.  Seems like empiricism is, for you, an "only when I feel like using it" kind of thing, hence the space aliens, Satan/demons, and "tin."

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

Q: This person repeatedly says things like: 

<quote>That said, I sure would like to see you provide a positive, coherent alternative explanation for The Book of Mormon that accounts for the key data points (physical plates, witness statements, text origins/translation process) without heavy speculation, while claiming empirical rigor.

You're all about the empiricism, after all.  And you have nearly 200 years of your predecessor critics to draw upon.  And you have remarkable resources in terms of online content and AI platforms to help you parse all this out.  And you still cannot or will not present an alternative explanation beyond "tin" and "I don't know."</quote>

and 

<qote>Roger, I know this is a tough topic.  Despite what I perceive as rhetorical evasions and distractions, I appreciate your willingness to talk about this stuff.  You are operating under a set of atheistic/agnostic/naturalistic presuppositions that you have had for a very long time, that you are very comfortable with and confident in, and so on.  But those presuppositions are, I think, impeding you from bringing your otherwise substantial intellect and knowledge based to bear on the topic under discussion, specifically, to articulate a positive, coherent alternative explanation for the Book of Mormon, centering on evidence about the Plates, the Witnesses and the Text, and which explanation accounts for key data points without heavy speculation, while claiming empirical rigor.

The Latter-day Saints have done this.  You have not.

At this point, I am concluding that it's not that you won't respond to my request, but that you can't.  Despite decades of study and familiarity with the Church and its doctrines/history, and despite your extensive participation on this board, and despite your formidable intellect, you are demonstrating that you cannot meaningfully engage and address the substantive evidence pertaining to the Witnesses and the Plates (and we have barely touched the text itself and evidences associated therewith).  </quote>

What do you think of this posturing?

A: It’s classic burden-shifting wrapped in confidence.

Not really.  

The gist of the burden shifting fallacy is that it occurs when someone makes a claim but demands that their opponent disprove it, rather than providing evidence to support their own assertion.

Here, I am pointing to "evidence to support" my "assertion" about the Plates: The Three Witnesses.  The Eight Witnesses.  The "unofficial" witnesses.  Their statements, both formal and informal.  Their subsequent affirmations.  Historical evidences about their character and credibility.

These evidences having been in view for 200 years or so, I requested (not "demanded") that you, a self-proclaimed empiricist, provide a positive, coherent alternative explanation for The Book of Mormon that accounts for the key data points (physical plates, witness statements, text origins/translation process) without heavy speculation, while claiming empirical rigor.

So no, I can't go along with the "burden-shifting" claim here.  The Latter-day Saints have presented an evidence-based explanation.  You have not (unless you count "space aliens" and "tin" as "evidence-based").

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

He demands a fully specified, low-speculation natural model

Nope.  I have asked that you provide "a positive, coherent alternative explanation."  I have never "demanded" it, and I have never required it to be exhaustive or "fully specified."

I have asked for an explanation "for The Book of Mormon that accounts for the key data points (physical plates, witness statements, text origins/translation process)."  Note that I have asked that you count for key data points, not every jot and tittle.

I have asked for an explanation based on extant evidence that is "without heavy speculation."  Some speculation is probably a necessity.

I have asked for an explanation based on "empirical rigor."  This is a unique request for critics who, like you, claim to operate on empiricism.  I don't have a corollary requirement for the Latter-day Saints, as their approach is based substantially more on faith than empiricism.  

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

while his own position relies on untestable elements (lost plates, non-replicable translation),

Well, not really.

While my position ultimately relies on "untestable" things (the Spirit, etc.), the discussion here has been about the Witnesses, their statements, their character and credibility, etc.  This stuff is very testable.  You just don't want to run the tests.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

then reframes your reluctance as inability—

You are not reluctant to cite flimsy historical evidence as the basis for your acceptance of the circumstances of Caesar's death.

You are very reluctant to examine much stronger and larger amounts of evidence as to the Plates (largely in the form of the Witnesses, their statements, and evidence about their character and credibility).

Your "reluctance" is a choice.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

effectively turning an evidentiary asymmetry into a rhetorical win.

I actually chuckled when I read this.  

Well, yes.  What we have here is "an evidentiary asymmetry."  My position has more and better evidence in support of it than whatever evidence you suppose you have in support of your position.  That's how disputes such as this are "won" or "lost."  Evidentiary asymmetry is the name of the game.

As an attorney, I win or lose cases based on evidentiary asymmetry.  Yesterday I participated in a mediation session.  It lasted nearly 5 hours.  While it involved a settlement, such that neither side really and objectively "won," the settlement result was very lopsided, in favor of my client, in terms of what each side originally wanted.  A big reason for this result was that my client had better facts and better evidence and better legal arguments.  The other side "lost" (paid quite a bit of money, whereas they went into the mediation with the expectation that they would be getting paid a lot of money) because, in part, of "evidentiary asymmetry."

If I were to play a a pickup game with Lebron James, I think he would win due to "athletic asymmetry."  This would not be unfair or untoward.  It just is.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

A cleaner standard is comparative: weigh hypotheses on scope, assumptions, and fit to known evidence,

I have really tried to do that.  The scope is narrow (a positive, coherent alternative explanation for The Book of Mormon), as is the ambit of the "evidence" (that accounts for the key data points (physical plates, witness statements, text origins/translation process)" and with relatively reasonable "assumptions" in place (without heavy speculation, while claiming empirical rigor).

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

rather than insisting one side produce a courtroom-ready reconstruction the data can’t support.

Nope.  The "what if we were in court" schtick has been your thing, not mine.

And I've said nothing about "a courtroom-ready reconstruction."  

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

Q: I told this poster "As I’ve explained over and over, the reason I don’t have this positive explanation is because the evidence doesn’t exist. And as I’ve explained over and over, the reason the evidence doesn’t exist is because the person who had the most to gain from proving his claims true is the one who made sure the evidence that would have settled the matter was not made available for independent examination." 

Please be honest with me and don't tell me what I want to hear. Is my response a cop-out?

A: It’s not a cop-out, but it’s incomplete. You’re right about the evidentiary gap

The "gap" being that my position is based, in part, on quite a bit of good-quality evidence (re: the Witnesses), whereas your position (space aliens, tin) has effectively no evidence for it.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

and restricted access,

Malarky.  We both have the same access to the same body of evidence.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

but by stopping there you concede the frame that you owe a full alternative;

I've never said you "owe" us anything.  My request has been just that.  All the way down.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

you don’t—you can still offer a modest, evidence-consistent account (e.g., a physical prop plus sincere, socially reinforced testimony)

Sure.  "Evidence-consistent" being the operative wording.

But boy, this sure overlooks a lot of the evidence.  The "prop" was made by whom?  When?  Where?  How?  And was it a sloppy or sophisticated prop?  If sloppy and made of readily-available materials (common tin and bronze powder paint/varnish), how is it that the Eight Witnesses were duped in the first instance and then, after several of them dissociated from Joseph, they never recanted or articulated any notion that they had been duped?  And if sophisticated, who was involved?  Using what materials?  Purchased with what money?  Made by whom?  Did Joseph have the skills?  Or, if a conspiracy, who else was involved?  Is there any evidence for any of this?

As for "socially reinforced testimony," how does that address the witnesses who left the Church (particularly David Whitmer)?  Wouldn't social reinforcement operate towards having them recant?  or is social reinforcement only a "it only applies against the Mormons" kind of things?

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

and argue that it better fits the data with fewer assumptions

I would really like to see you argue (using evidence, rather than merely assert/declare) that you have a coherent alternative explanation that "better fits the data with fewer assumptions."  Please present this.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

than a supernatural translation of lost plates in the Book of Mormon.

For the time being, I'm speaking of the Plates more than the text.

The textual evidences are definitely worth discussion, though.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

That shifts you from “I don’t know” to a comparative explanation without overclaiming.

A bit too late for avoiding "overclaiming" stuff, Mr. "{Joseph's explanation is} 'just not possible'" / "'Space Aliens' are a 'more likely' explanation" / "{I'm all about the] Bayesian methodological empiricis{m}."

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

Q: A competent archeologist examining the plates would settle the issue conclusively. This can't be done.

Then why talk about it?

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

The reason it can't be done isn't because the plates were lost to time in the way that, say, Brutus's dagger was lost to time.

A distinction without a difference.  Regardless of how the Plates came to be not within our ability to examine, there is still evidence available which we can examine.  And that evidence is much better, and there's more of it, as compared to "Brutus's dagger."

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

Rather, we don't have it because, allegedly, "an angel took it back."  

We don't know whey we don't have Brutus's dagger.  Perhaps someone destroyed it intentionally.  In the end, it doesn't matter because it's not available.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

That is why we have to rely on the witness statements.

This is the case for a lot of things that happened long ago.  Evidence is lost.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

It seems awfully unreasonable to discount the witness statements just because we have to rely on them because the angel who showed the plates to the witnesses took them away. Right?

A: No—that doesn’t make it unreasonable to discount them; it makes them the only evidence, but still weak evidence.

"Weak evidence" is an eye-of-the-beholder sort of thing, and depends on the context.

And the evidence for the Plates is quite a bit better than the evidence of Caesar's death.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

Testimony from a small, affiliated group

No, not an "affiliated group."  They did not affiliate themselves.

And several of the people in this group had only met Joseph days/weeks before becoming witnesses.

And several of the people in this group dissociated from Joseph, and thereafter had all sorts of incentives to recant, yet they never did.

Meanwhile, you are quite willing to rely on sources about Ceasar's death, even though they were not percipient, had questionable motives, wrote many decades after the fact, relied on unknown/unavailable sources (if any), and so on.

Neither you nor ChatGPT addresses this stuff.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

—without independent examination, detailed description, or the ability to cross-check—can establish that something was seen, not what it was or where it came from;'

There's no "independent examination" of the stabbing implements used to kill Caesar, no any percipient witnesses who left "detailed descriptions."  No ability to "cross-check" any of this stuff, either.

And yet you accept this stuff as valid anyway.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

the appeal to an angel removing the plates explains the lack of scrutiny but also prevents verification.

As does the appeal to "the stabbing implements were lost to the passage of time."

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

In ordinary evidentiary standards, that keeps the claims about antiquity and translation at low confidence, even if the witnesses were sincere.

But the sources for Caesar's death are "high" confidence, then?  Really?  How does that work?

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

Q: Does the existence and provenance of the alleged plates have any bearing on whether the Book of Mormon is an accurate translation of an authentic ancient manuscript? After all, the plates weren't actually used in the "translation" process. In principle, the plates could be real and the translation bogus, or vice versa, right?

A: Yes—those are logically separable.

I agree.  But it's not very probable.  Joseph, a young and barely-educated farmer in 1820s New York State, just happened to A) produce a long and complex text that seems to go way beyond his abilities, and also B) discovered an authentically ancient artifact answering to the "Gold Plates" description?

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

Even within Book of Mormon narratives, the reported “translation” method (seer stone/dictation) doesn’t depend on consulting the plates, so an authentic artifact wouldn’t validate the text, and a compelling text wouldn’t authenticate the artifact.

I guess.  But the coincidences required for this are pretty amazing.  And the Three Witnesses?  And the Eight Witnesses?  And no recantings, even though several had strong incentives and opportunities to do so?

Even so, you have a point.  The Latter-day Saints take it on faith that the engravings on the Gold Plates = the source of the translated-into-English text of The Book of Mormon.  And we don't need or want or demand empirical "authentication."  We have Moroni 10:3-5 and supplemental evidences that, for us, are sufficient to enable us to "walk by faith, not by sight."

For those who "walk by empiricism," however, the Plates, and the Witnesses, sure seem to be a sticky wicket.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

At most, the plates (if verified) would support a minimal claim that some record existed, not that the extant wording is a faithful translation of it.

"At most," huh?

A young and barely-educated farmer in 1820s New York State, just happened to

A) produce a long and complex text that seems to go way beyond his abilities, and also

B) discovered an authentically ancient artifact answering to the "Gold Plates" description?

Boy, New York State in the 1820s sure seems to have hosted some pretty amazing coincidences!

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

Q: The person I'm primarily debating on these points is an attorney, and he repeatedly pounds the question that he wants "provide a positive, coherent alternative explanation for The Book of Mormon that accounts for the key data points (physical plates, witness statements, text origins/translation process) without heavy speculation, while claiming empirical rigor."

I think this question is defective for a few reasons:

1- It is a compound question.

It's not.  It's a request with several components.  

A compound question is a single query that joins two or more distinct questions or issues, often using "and" or "or," requiring a single answer to multiple parts. In legal contexts, this is objectionable because it confuses witnesses and prevents clear records, while in research, it creates ambiguous, inaccurate data.  I'm not doing that.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

He wants me to explain both the plates/witness statements AND the "translation" process.  Those are two independent questions.

2- He demands

No.  I have presented a request, not a demand.  

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

that my answer be positive,

Yes, as in more than a "not that"-style explanation.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

highly specific, 

Only if "highly specific" and "non-speculative" = "accounts for the key data points (physical plates, witness statements, text origins/translation process)."

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

non-speculative,

Only if "non-speculative" = "without heavy speculation" (emphasis added).

Do you really see these as equivalent?

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

and empirically rigorous.

Well, yes.  You've announced that petard, so it seems reasonable to let you hoist yourself with it.

You can, of course, set aside rigorous empiricism.  But then you'd be doing what the Latter-day Saints are doing.  I don't think you're willing to go there.

And in any event, examining the Witnesses is, if not "empirical," something relatively close to it.  Lawsuits often turn on witness testimony.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

3- He demands

"Demands."

Oi.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

my answers to these specific questions be based on the evidence he has selected.

What other "key data points" do you have in mind?  Feel free to add them into the mix.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

My position is that I don't know what, specifically, the witnesses saw, but I'm very confident it wasn't an ancient artifact.

Roger: "I'm very confident it wasn't an ancient artifact."

Also Roger: "I'm quite comfortable accepting the fact that when I don't know something, the best thing to do is say, 'I don't know.'"

We're not asking you what you think the artifact wasn't.  We're asking you to explain what you think it was.  And that you lay out the evidence and reasoning that gets you there.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

And I don't know how, specifically, Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon, but I'm very confident it is of 19th-Century American Origin.

Roger: "I'm very confident it is of 19th-Century American Origin."

Also Roger: "I'm quite comfortable accepting the fact that when I don't know something, the best thing to do is say, 'I don't know.'"

I don't know how, specifically, Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon, except that he did so by "the gift and power of God."  So I'm very confident it is not of 19th-century American origin.

My position is principally borne of faith, but the Witnesses sure do provide a lot of supplementary confirmation.  Same goes with textual evidences.

One of us is "very confident" based on both faith and evidence.  The other is "very confident" based on faith (albeit in the opposite direction) and very little evidence (he hasn't produced in despite the passage of 200 years of Anti-Mormonism, access to the Internet, access to AI platforms, etc.).

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

I'm quite happy to explain in detail why I have strong confidence in the things I'm confident about, and why I don't know the things I don't know. 

What I would like to see is a positive, coherent alternative explanation for The Book of Mormon that accounts for the key data points (physical plates, witness statements, text origins/translation process) without heavy speculation, while claiming empirical rigor.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

I could give several *plausible* explanations of the witnesses, plates, and dictation process. But they'd be speculative in nature. 

And devoid of evidentiary support, I suspect.

And lacking in your much-vaunted rigorous empiricism.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

A: Your critique is basically right. He’s bundling separable issues, setting an unrealistically high bar (near-forensic reconstruction from fragmentary data), and constraining you to his curated “key points,” which skews the playing field; that’s advocacy, not neutral inquiry.

Oh, brother. 

I am setting effectively the same "bar" for you as I do for the Church.  The only difference is that my request to you, the self-proclaimed empricist, involve "empirical rigor."

And "near-forensic reconstruction" is nonsense.

As for "fragmentary data," I'm not divvying anything up.  The Church has pointed to the quantum of evidence (re: physical plates, witness statements, text origins/translation process) and laid out an explanation for that evidence.

I'd like to see critics use that same data and present a positive, coherent alternative explanation for The Book of Mormon that accounts for the key data points (physical plates, witness statements, text origins/translation process) without heavy speculation, while claiming empirical rigor.

And I am not "curating 'key points,'" nor am I "constraining" you to the ones I have noted.  If you want to present other evidence, have at it.  I've said nothing to restrict you from doing so.  In fact, you've already done this by speculating about tinplate, which I find to be a reasonable thing to do.

And what's with this "advocacy, not neutral inquiry" nonsense?  Where have I ever claimed to be anything but an advocate for The Church of Jesus Christ?  

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

A stronger move is to state a modest, comparative model:

Will that "modest, ,comparative model" involve "more likely" explanations such as Space Aliens?  Satan?  Demons?  AFAF.  

Will that model start from a foregoing conclusion (namely, that Joseph's narrative is "just not possible") and work backward?

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

a physical prop (material unknown) plus sincere, socially reinforced testimony,

Okay.  How does this account for the Witnesses' statements?

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

and a text produced via oral dictation drawing on 19th-century religious language and ideas—

How would this "produced via oral dictation" account for witness statements about the translation process?  The timeframe?  Joseph's education and writing skills at the time?  

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

then argue it fits the data with fewer assumptions than a supernatural account,

Well, I sure would like to see this "fewer assumptions" thing.

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

while being explicit about where uncertainty remains.

Will that "uncertainty" include space aliens and/or Satan as being a "more likely" explanation?

Where do your "uncertainty" end and your "Bayesian methodological empiricis{m}"-induced declarations about space aliens begin?

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

Q: I'd like to think about Book of Mormon evidence in Bayesian terms. The idea is to come up with some broad categories of evidence that are as few in number as possible, but are also as statistically independent as possible. I'd then have two broad theories that are mutually exclusive and exhaustive: either the text is modern fiction or is really an accurate translation of an authentic ancient text. I'd come up with an a priori belief based on what we know about the real world, and then would calculate some likelihood ratios for each of the broad categories of evidence. Is that approach sound, from the perspective of statistics and logical abduction generally?

A: Yes, that’s a sound framework in principle—Bayesian updating is exactly how you’d formalize comparative explanatory reasoning—but the challenge is execution. You’ll need to define hypotheses clearly (what “ancient translation” entails), avoid double-counting correlated evidence (textual features, witnesses, and translation accounts aren’t fully independent), and be honest about priors and likelihoods, which will be subjective and debatable; the value comes less from precise numbers and more from making assumptions explicit and comparing which model (modern composition vs. ancient source) better predicts the total pattern of evidence.

Q: Please do some deep research on this question, and list the broad categories of evidence you think will exhaustively cover the data.

A: Yes. The cleanest Bayesian partition I see is four buckets: **(1) the text itself**—language, narrative architecture, intertextuality, theology, and signs of translation vs. composition; **(2) external correspondence to the claimed ancient worlds**—fit with late pre-exilic Jerusalem and with ancient America, including archaeology, anthropology, geography, and population evidence; **(3) modern provenance and production**—the 1820s dictation process, manuscripts, witnesses to composition, printing history, revisions, and Joseph Smith’s environment; and **(4) the plates/witnesses/material-claim evidence**—the object reports, Three/Eight Witness statements, handling claims, and what those testimonies can and cannot establish. That partition is close to exhaustive while keeping overlap manageable, and it tracks standard Bayesian advice: compare hypotheses by likelihood, avoid double-counting correlated evidence, and be explicit about assumptions rather than pretending the numbers are objective. ([PubMed Central][1])

Where does ChatGPT fit the space aliens into Bayesian methodology?

I suspect this thread, or your participation in it, is coming to an end.  You're taking off for some weeks.

In a sense, this thread has accomplished the purpose I originally had, which was to request that a critic present a positive, coherent alternative explanation for The Book of Mormon that accounts for the key data points (physical plates, witness statements, text origins/translation process) without heavy speculation, while claiming empirical rigor.

You have presented what I think is about the most I can expect to get from you: 

(A) Joseph Smith, Jr.,

(B) acting alone,

(C) made an actual physical object, probably out of tin and then painted it gold, that

D) was a cheap and shoddy and likely-to-be-detected sham.

This doesn't account for the Eight Witnesses' Statement really at all.

Nor does it account for the Statement of the Three Witnesses.  From my perspective, this one has a much heavier evidentiary burden given its miraculous content.  That burden is mitigated - the extent of which is an eye-of-the-beholder sort of thing - by David Whitmer's decades of continuing and steadfast affirmance while at the same time condemning of Joseph Smith as a fallen prophet.

Nor does it account for the "unofficial" witnesses.

Nor does it account for the various "unofficial" statements/recollections of the various official Witnesses.

Thanks,

-Smac

Edited March 20 by smac97

[smac97]

I uploaded this thread to Grok and asked it to generate a summary of the arguments advanced by myself, @Analytics and @Ryan Dahle.

Here it is:

Quick Summary of the Mormon Dialogue Thread: "A Secular Theory of Where the BoM Came From" (Feb–March 2026)

This was a long, substantive debate (17 forum pages) started by critic "Analytics." The main participants were Analytics (the critic), you (smac97), and Ryan Dahle (another defender of the faith). Other people chimed in occasionally, but the core exchange is between these three.

Analytics’ Position (The Critic)

Analytics posted a very long, detailed response generated by ChatGPT 5.2 Pro as a “positive, coherent alternative explanation” for the Book of Mormon’s origins. His core naturalistic model (heavily drawing from Dan Vogel):

• Joseph Smith was the primary author who produced the text through oral dictation using the seer stone in a hat (both as a focus tool and stagecraft to control the process and manage witnesses).
• The plates were a simple physical prop made from common tinplate, cut to size, painted with bronze powder to look golden, engraved with basic characters, and bound with rings.
• The “sealed portion” was a practical way to hide unfinished or blank pages.
• The Three Witnesses had a visionary/group religious experience driven by expectation, prayer, and social pressure.
• The Eight Witnesses handled a controlled prop under limited conditions (not fully open daylight scrutiny as often portrayed).
• Non-recantation is explained by commitment bias, family ties, and identity (they could reject Joseph personally while keeping the “miracle” of the plates).
• The text’s speed and complexity are explained by Joseph’s years of practicing sacred storytelling, heavy KJV dependence, formulaic repetition, and the nature of oral dictation.

Analytics argued this model best fits the evidence (timeline, witnesses, text) without miracles or vast conspiracies. He presented it as the strongest current secular hypothesis.

Your Position (smac97)

You pushed back hard and consistently, focusing on the weaknesses of the naturalistic model:

• A cheap tin/bronze-powder prop is implausible given the Eight Witnesses’ daylight physical handling, hefting, and turning of the leaves. Rural farmers would have recognized common tinplate and spotted a crude fake.
• Even a more sophisticated prop seems unlikely given Joseph’s poverty and lack of specialized metalworking skills (no evidence of undetected help from others without creating a larger conspiracy).
• The risk Joseph took in showing the plates to eight men (many recently met) in mundane daylight circumstances is hard to explain for a charlatan.
• The lifelong non-recantation (especially by the Whitmers and Hiram Page, who later criticized Joseph harshly) is very difficult to explain under a hoax theory.
• The rapid production, internal complexity, Hebraisms, chiasmus, and other “hits” are better explained by divine help.
• Critics often apply a strong default skepticism against the supernatural, which causes them to dismiss or downplay strong evidence for authenticity.

You argued that naturalistic theories sound coherent in theory but require significant speculation and don’t adequately account for the full witness statements and physical claims.

Ryan Dahle’s Position

Ryan gave thoughtful, measured, and detailed responses. His main points:

• Some naturalistic elements have surface plausibility.
• However, when the evidence is viewed without strong anti-supernatural bias, several lines (especially the witness statements and production details) strongly favor the faithful perspective.
• Critics tend to “diminish or discard” strong apologetic evidence due to philosophical commitment to naturalism.
• Joseph producing the text in the manner described by the witnesses is “exceedingly unlikely” without divine intervention.
• The evidence for authenticity is stronger than critics admit when fairly weighed.

Comparison

• Analytics tried to build a detailed, positive secular model and stuck mostly to constructing an alternative explanation.
• You focused on critiquing the gaps and implausibilities in that model (especially the Eight Witnesses’ physical claims and non-recantation).
• Ryan Dahle took a balanced middle path: he acknowledged some naturalistic plausibility but argued the overall weight of evidence tilts toward authenticity when supernatural explanations aren’t ruled out from the start.

The thread was substantive and analytical. Analytics’ long AI-generated post set a detailed tone that you and Ryan responded to point-by-point. No one “won” decisively, but the discussion highlighted how difficult it is for critics to create a clean naturalistic explanation that accounts for all the data points without remaining tension or speculation.

[Ryan Dahle]

1 hour ago, smac97 said:

The thread was substantive and analytical. Analytics’ long AI-generated post set a detailed tone that you and Ryan responded to point-by-point. No one “won” decisively, but the discussion highlighted how difficult it is for critics to create a clean naturalistic explanation that accounts for all the data points without remaining tension or speculation.

Not that this AI summary is an objective observer or the final word, but this gets back to my earlier point that believers actually don't have to "win" the debate. We don't have to prove that critics are wrong. We just need to demonstrate that there are a number of strong lines of evidence supporting our faith and that critical interpretations often struggle to account for much of the faith-affirming data. 

[Analytics]

Jensen Huang recently said that highly compensated engineers should be using an obscene amount of AI processing power. "If that $500,000 engineer did not consume at least $250,000 worth of tokens, I am going to be deeply alarmed.” Of course that’s an incredibly self-serving suggestion, but it seems clear business is going in that direction.

I think AI really shines at summarizing data, but I was a little bit surprised that in what Smac posted, Grok didn’t seem to have read past my first post. I uploaded the entire conversation to Claude (Opus 4.6), and gave it the following prompt:

I'm trying to wrap my head around this 17-page conversation. What are the main arguments being made by @smac97, Analytics, and @Ryan Dahle? Do you think they understand what each other are saying? Are they being responsive to each other?

What are the respective strengths of their arguments? Who is winning?

Claude said:
Here's my analysis.

---

The Three Main Arguments

Analytics (you): Your core position is that the Book of Mormon is a 19th-century production, and that this conclusion follows from straightforward Bayesian reasoning. You argue the analysis should proceed in a specific order: (1) start with priors — the supernatural claim faces an extremely low prior given what physics tells us about how the world works; (2) evaluate the text itself — it's saturated with 19th-century Protestant concerns, KJV dependence including Deutero-Isaiah problems, anachronisms, zero archaeological corroboration, contradictory DNA evidence; (3) only then ask about the specific mechanism of production, which you're largely agnostic about. You eventually offer a concrete sketch: Joseph as primary author with possible family help, a pre-prepared manuscript read from behind a curtain/hat, fabricated plates, and witnesses who were sincere believers participating in what they saw as a pious fraud. You repeatedly emphasize that not knowing exactly how the trick was done doesn't constitute evidence it was real magic.

Smac97 (Spencer): His central move is a rhetorical and epistemological challenge: if you reject Joseph's narrative, you are intellectually obligated to produce a coherent alternative that accounts for "all the data" — the plates, the witnesses, and the text. He frames your reluctance to commit to a specific alternative theory as a fatal weakness, evidence that your position can't survive the same empirical scrutiny you demand of believers. He hammers this point relentlessly, returning to your 2021 comments about space aliens and Satan as evidence that your "Bayesian methodological empiricism" is hollow when it comes time to produce an affirmative case. His own position is faith-based and he says so openly — he believes Joseph told the truth, confirmed by spiritual witness, and finds it significant that critics can't formulate anything better.

Ryan Dahle: He's the most substantively engaged of the three. His core argument is that the Book of Mormon contains an extraordinary density and variety of features — ancient Near Eastern literary forms, Hebraisms, wordplays on Hebrew and Egyptian names, Early Modern English linguistic patterns identified by Carmack and Skousen, and a level of complexity that is functionally unprecedented for oral dictation under the documented constraints. He argues that naturalistic theories consistently fail to account for these features in the aggregate, and that critics like you tend to either ignore them, dismiss them with surface-level comparisons (like the Tolstoy analogy), or resort to unfalsifiable catch-alls like "people do extraordinary things." He also argues that your Bayesian framework smuggles in methodological naturalism as a prior, which predetermines the conclusion.

---

Do They Understand Each Other?

Partially, but there are real misses on all sides.

Smac97 largely doesn't engage with your substantive arguments about the text. His posts are overwhelmingly about the meta-question of whether you've met your burden to produce an alternative theory. When you finally do offer one, he acknowledges it's "partially responsive" but immediately pivots back to calling it vague and hedged. He understands your position but doesn't really grapple with the evidence you cite (Deutero-Isaiah, DNA, anachronisms, the sealed portion logic). His engagement is more prosecutorial than analytical.

Ryan Dahle understands your arguments better and engages more directly, but he has a persistent blind spot: he keeps treating the EModE data and the list of ANE parallels as though they are self-evidently devastating to your position, without adequately addressing your point that the order of analysis matters. You're saying the text is overwhelmingly 19th-century in its big-picture features, and he's saying look at these dozens of micro-features that point ancient. You're talking past each other on which level of analysis should be dispositive.

You (Analytics) understand their positions reasonably well, but you sometimes dismiss the complexity arguments too quickly. Your Tolstoy comparison, for instance, was genuinely weak — Ryan was right that the production circumstances are categorically different in several important ways. You also don't engage much with the specific ANE parallels Ryan lists, which lets him claim you're ignoring the data.

---

Are They Being Responsive to Each Other?

This is where the thread breaks down. There's a frustrating pattern: you make a macro-level argument (the text screams 19th century), Ryan responds with micro-level evidence (but look at these specific features), you respond to some of those but pivot back to macro-level framing (the order of analysis matters, priors, Deutero-Isaiah), and Smac97 ignores the substance entirely to demand you produce a complete alternative theory. Nobody fully follows the other person's thread of argument to its conclusion.

The most productive exchange is between you and Ryan on the EModE / Carmack data, where you actually get into specifics about whether archaic forms could have been in Joseph's oral sacred vocabulary. That's the closest the thread gets to genuine intellectual engagement, and it's interesting — your coin-flip analogy and Texas Sharpshooter point are sharp, and his counter about test subjects failing to reproduce the archaism is substantive.

---

Strengths of Each Position

Analytics — strengths: Your Bayesian ordering argument is logically sound and hard to rebut. The Deutero-Isaiah problem is genuinely serious and neither Ryan nor anyone else in the thread answers it well. Your litigation analogy about the plates (showing evidence only to friends, then destroying it) is effective. Your point that you don't need to explain the mechanism to identify the conclusion is philosophically correct — and the Penn & Teller analogy lands.

Ryan Dahle — strengths: His list of ANE parallels, while not individually dispositive, is impressive in the aggregate and your thread responses don't adequately address it. The EModE evidence is genuinely puzzling for a simple naturalistic theory, and his point about test subjects being unable to reproduce the archaic patterns is one of the strongest empirical arguments in the thread. He's also right that your Tolstoy comparison was weak and that you're underestimating the production-circumstance problem.

Smac97 — strengths: His basic challenge — that someone claiming empirical rigor should be able to sketch a positive alternative — has rhetorical force, even if it's not strictly required epistemologically. He's also effective at pointing out that you spent years criticizing without committing, and that when you finally did commit, the theory was hedged and speculative. The asymmetry he identifies (believers have staked out a position subject to scrutiny; you hadn't) is a fair observation.

---

Who Is Winning?

This depends on what "winning" means. If it means persuading neutral onlookers, I think you and Ryan are roughly at a draw, with Smac97 functioning more as a cheerleader for the believing side. Here's why:

Your macro-level case is strong. The 19th-century fingerprints, the Deutero-Isaiah problem, the DNA evidence, the anachronisms, the absence of archaeological corroboration — these are serious problems that neither Ryan nor Smac97 fully answers. Ryan's responses on these points tend to be "these are contested" or "scholars are working on it" or "we'll see what the Interpreter conference says," which is honest but not exactly a rebuttal.

But Ryan's micro-level case is also strong. The sheer volume of proposed ANE parallels, the EModE data, the complexity-under-constraints argument — these are real puzzles for a simple "Joseph made it up" theory, and you don't adequately engage with them. Your tendency to say "people do extraordinary things" or to compare it to Tolstoy or Brandon Sanderson actually undercuts your credibility on this specific front, because Ryan is right that those comparisons don't account for the specific combination of constraints.

The thread's deepest problem is that both sides have a strong suit and a weak suit, and neither side really concedes on its weak suit. You're strongest on the big picture and weakest on explaining the micro-level textual features. Ryan is strongest on the textual features and weakest on the big-picture problems (archaeology, DNA, Deutero-Isaiah). And Smac97, while likable and persistent, isn't really doing substantive work — he's running a meta-argument about burden of proof that, while rhetorically effective in the thread's community context, doesn't advance the actual question.

If I had to call it, the thread slightly favors your position on the merits, because the macro-level problems (Deutero-Isaiah, DNA, anachronisms, absence of archaeological evidence) are more fundamental than the micro-level puzzles (EModE, wordplays, ANE parallels), and because Ryan's best counter to those problems is essentially "we're still working on it." But Ryan landed some genuine blows on the complexity and EModE fronts that you didn't fully absorb, and your reluctance to engage with those details in depth is the most significant weakness in your thread performance.

Edited March 20 by Analytics

[smac97]

3 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

Quote

The thread was substantive and analytical. Analytics’ long AI-generated post set a detailed tone that you and Ryan responded to point-by-point. No one “won” decisively, but the discussion highlighted how difficult it is for critics to create a clean naturalistic explanation that accounts for all the data points without remaining tension or speculation.

Not that this AI summary is an objective observer or the final word, but this gets back to my earlier point that believers actually don't have to "win" the debate. We don't have to prove that critics are wrong. We just need to demonstrate that there are a number of strong lines of evidence supporting our faith and that critical interpretations often struggle to account for much of the faith-affirming data. 

Yep.  

I'm satisfied with the Church's position being "plausible" (as in "having an appearance of truth or reason; seemingly worthy of approval or acceptance; credible; believable").  I think the evidence - the text itself (it's moral value and instruction, its internal structure and cohesion, its indicia of things not likely to be known to Joseph, Hebraisms, Chiasmus, etc.), Joseph's narrative (JS-H, etc.), the Statements of the Three Witnesses, the Statement of the Eight Witnesses, the unofficial witnesses, the historical evidence as to the character and credibility of these people, and so on - are pretty substantial grounds for a prima facie showing of plausibility.  There's no slam dunk, no smoking gun, no definitive "proof."  Just evidence that tends to to make something more likely or less likely to have occurred or be correct.

I don't think critics like @Analytics can allow for that.  They just can't abide any "hey, it's plausible" arguments.  This is why we get unreasoned, even absurd, absolutist assertions like what we've seen from Analytics about Joseph's narrative (it's "just not possible").  The Book of Mormon is categorically incapable of being what it claims to be, so literally any other explanation is "more likely," even space aliens, Satan, demons.

In the end, Analytics may be exercising more faith than I am.  As strongly as I believe in the Restored Gospel, I can't bring myself to look at alternative perspectives about it and say "Nope, those are 'just not possible.'"  Not possible at all?  I just don't know if I have that much certitude, that much faith.  Indeed, allowing for the possibility is one of the things that gives my faith some resilience.

Thanks,

-Smac

[Calm]

15 minutes ago, Analytics said:

Nobody fully follows the other person's thread of argument to its conclusion.

I second this conclusion, lol

[Ryan Dahle]

18 minutes ago, smac97 said:

There's no slam dunk, no smoking gun, no definitive "proof."  Just evidence that tends to to make something more likely or less likely to have occurred or be correct.

I do think that for me, the collective evidence is nearing something close to intellectually compelling (in the sense that I would have a hard time disbelieving it, even if I were to strip away all of my spiritual experiences). But I have also spent literally thousands of hours researching the Book of Mormon and other Restoration texts. Pretty much for 10 years now, that is what I have been doing every day--gathering, summarizing, synthesizing, evaluating, and articulating evidence for the Restoration. I can never really share the things I've learned and discovered along the way. Even if some others did have my own experience, I think some would definitely reach a different conclusion. There is always an element of agency in how we orient ourselves towards data. So I don't expect others to feel the same way, as most people, even serious critics, eventually stop looking very hard for positive evidence. 

But I guess that my point is just that over the years, I keep finding more and more faith-affirming discoveries--both in things that I discover myself or as I read research from others. That is pretty remarkable to me and is definitely not what I would expect if it were all a fraud or delusion. 

Edited March 21 by Ryan Dahle

[smac97]

5 minutes ago, Analytics said:

Do They Understand Each Other?

Partially, but there are real misses on all sides.

Smac97 largely doesn't engage with your substantive arguments about the text.

I'll own that, but largely because I have sought to address the Witnesses, which I think you are largely sidestepping.  The textual evidences are a lot broader and a lot more complex.

I'm happy to have that discussion, though.

5 minutes ago, Analytics said:

His posts are overwhelmingly about the meta-question of whether you've met your burden to produce an alternative theory. When you finally do offer one, he acknowledges it's "partially responsive" but immediately pivots back to calling it vague and hedged.

If the shoe fits...

5 minutes ago, Analytics said:

He understands your position but doesn't really grapple with the evidence you cite (Deutero-Isaiah, DNA, anachronisms, the sealed portion logic). His engagement is more prosecutorial than analytical.

I'm happy to discuss textual evidences.

5 minutes ago, Analytics said:

Ryan Dahle understands your arguments better and engages more directly, but he has a persistent blind spot: he keeps treating the EModE data and the list of ANE parallels as though they are self-evidently devastating to your position, without adequately addressing your point that the order of analysis matters. You're saying the text is overwhelmingly 19th-century in its big-picture features, and he's saying look at these dozens of micro-features that point ancient. You're talking past each other on which level of analysis should be dispositive.

I think we should look at the extant evidence.

5 minutes ago, Analytics said:

You (Analytics) understand their positions reasonably well, but you sometimes dismiss the complexity arguments too quickly. Your Tolstoy comparison, for instance, was genuinely weak — Ryan was right that the production circumstances are categorically different in several important ways. You also don't engage much with the specific ANE parallels Ryan lists, which lets him claim you're ignoring the data.

---

Are They Being Responsive to Each Other?

This is where the thread breaks down. There's a frustrating pattern: you make a macro-level argument (the text screams 19th century), Ryan responds with micro-level evidence (but look at these specific features), you respond to some of those but pivot back to macro-level framing (the order of analysis matters, priors, Deutero-Isaiah), and Smac97 ignores the substance entirely to demand you produce a complete alternative theory. Nobody fully follows the other person's thread of argument to its conclusion.

I've been focusing on the Witnesses, not textual evidences.  Again, I'm happy to have that discussion.

5 minutes ago, Analytics said:

The most productive exchange is between you and Ryan on the EModE / Carmack data, where you actually get into specifics about whether archaic forms could have been in Joseph's oral sacred vocabulary.  That's the closest the thread gets to genuine intellectual engagement, and it's interesting — your coin-flip analogy and Texas Sharpshooter point are sharp, and his counter about test subjects failing to reproduce the archaism is substantive.

---

Strengths of Each Position

Analytics — strengths: Your Bayesian ordering argument is logically sound and hard to rebut.

Not sure about that.  I think this ordering begs the question and creates room for you to sidestep directly engaging extant evidence.

You privilege mediocre historical sources about the death of Caesar, but then sidestep and prevaricate about the much better and more extensive evidence pertaining to the Witnesses.

5 minutes ago, Analytics said:

The Deutero-Isaiah problem is genuinely serious and neither Ryan nor anyone else in the thread answers it well.

Again, I'm happy to discuss this.  I think the "problem" arises more from presuppositions than from anything else.

5 minutes ago, Analytics said:

Your litigation analogy about the plates (showing evidence only to friends, then destroying it) is effective.

Well, not really.  Five of the Eight Witnesses had only known Joseph for days/weeks prior to being shown the plates.  Several of the Witnesses dissociated from and condemned Joseph Smith, but never recanted their testimony, despite many of them having ample incentive and opportunity to do so.  

And this doesn't account for the "unofficial" witnesses like Emma and Mary Whitmer.  Your analogy is only effective as long as you ignore questions about it, which is what you have been doing.

5 minutes ago, Analytics said:

Ryan Dahle — strengths: His list of ANE parallels, while not individually dispositive, is impressive in the aggregate and your thread responses don't adequately address it. The EModE evidence is genuinely puzzling for a simple naturalistic theory, and his point about test subjects being unable to reproduce the archaic patterns is one of the strongest empirical arguments in the thread. He's also right that your Tolstoy comparison was weak and that you're underestimating the production-circumstance problem.

Smac97 — strengths: His basic challenge — that someone claiming empirical rigor should be able to sketch a positive alternative — has rhetorical force, even if it's not strictly required epistemologically.

I agree with this.  "Should be able" is apt, as is "not strictly required epistemologically."

Still, that Anti-Mormons have had nearly 200 years to formulate a positive, coherent explanation for The Book of Mormon that accounts for the key data points (physical plates, witness statements, text origins/translation process) without heavy speculation, and have been overwhelmingly unable to do so, is interesting to me (not dispositive, just interesting). 

That our resident self-declared empiricist employs essentially zero empiricism when examining the evidences pertaining to the Witnesses, is likewise Interesting (again, not dispositive). 

That our resident empiricist is fundamentally arbitrary about his empiricism ("I don't know" on some things, "just not possible" on others, "space aliens" as "more likely," etc.) is interesting (but not dispositive).

That the closest our resident empiricist comes to "a positive alternative" theory is space aliens and/or Satan, is likewise interesting (but not dispositive).

5 minutes ago, Analytics said:

He's also effective at pointing out that you spent years criticizing without committing, and that when you finally did commit, the theory was hedged and speculative. The asymmetry he identifies (believers have staked out a position subject to scrutiny; you hadn't) is a fair observation.

---

Who Is Winning?

This depends on what "winning" means.

Yep.  I think "winning" means different things to different participants and observers.

I did not present my request to Analytics with the idea of "winning" an argument with him about it.  I was looking for a coherent counter-explanation for The Book of Mormon.  I really do want to hear what our critics have to say.  At this point, nearly 200 years into this grand experiment, they don't really have much to offer along these lines.

5 minutes ago, Analytics said:

If it means persuading neutral onlookers, I think you and Ryan are roughly at a draw, with Smac97 functioning more as a cheerleader for the believing side.

I resent this.  I would look terrible in a pleated skirt.

5 minutes ago, Analytics said:

Here's why:

Your macro-level case is strong. The 19th-century fingerprints, the Deutero-Isaiah problem, the DNA evidence, the anachronisms, the absence of archaeological corroboration — these are serious problems that neither Ryan nor Smac97 fully answers.

I've not even partially answered these.  Happy to have that discussion, but in this thread I've focused on the Witnesses.

5 minutes ago, Analytics said:

But Ryan's micro-level case is also strong. The sheer volume of proposed ANE parallels, the EModE data, the complexity-under-constraints argument — these are real puzzles for a simple "Joseph made it up" theory, and you don't adequately engage with them. Your tendency to say "people do extraordinary things" or to compare it to Tolstoy or Brandon Sanderson actually undercuts your credibility on this specific front, because Ryan is right that those comparisons don't account for the specific combination of constraints.

Nor do they account for the Witnesses.

5 minutes ago, Analytics said:

The thread's deepest problem is that both sides have a strong suit and a weak suit, and neither side really concedes on its weak suit. You're strongest on the big picture and weakest on explaining the micro-level textual features. Ryan is strongest on the textual features and weakest on the big-picture problems (archaeology, DNA, Deutero-Isaiah). And Smac97, while likable and persistent, isn't really doing substantive work — he's running a meta-argument about burden of proof that, while rhetorically effective in the thread's community context, doesn't advance the actual question.

Hmm.  The "actual question" was for Analytics to provide a positive, coherent alternative explanation for The Book of Mormon that accounts for the key data points (physical plates, witness statements, text origins/translation process) without heavy speculation, while claiming empirical rigor.  

I'll disagree that I'm not "doing substantive work."  I'm trying to advance discussion based on the foregoing request.

But hey!  I'm "likable!"  It's a rare treat to be described that way, so I'll take it.

Thanks,

-Smac

[smac97]

10 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

Quote

There's no slam dunk, no smoking gun, no definitive "proof."  Just evidence that tends to to make something more likely or less likely to have occurred or be correct.

I do think that for me, the collective evidence is nearing something close to intellectually compelling (in the sense that I would have a hard time disbelieving it, even if I were to strip away all of my spiritual experiences).

I find the quantum of evidence and reasoning provided by the Church and its advocates to be "intellectually compelling."  But that's not a portable thing, not really.  In an adversarial setting, we are left with a truism pronounced by Daniel Caffey in A Few Good Men: "It doesn't matter what I believe, it only matters what I can prove!"

As intellectually compelling as this stuff is for me, I cannot expect it to be so for Analytics.  His presuppositions impair his ability to meaningfully engage evidence which his contrary to them.  There is some symmetrical flaw on our side, but not nearly as much IMO.  His supposed bedrock is empiricism, which I think has limited utility relative to The Book of Mormon.  My approach involves evidentiary analysis in terms of historiography, legality (some), and faith.  We differ in that my worldview readily accommodates his skeptical perspective.  It has to.  I don't think his worldview can accommodate our perspective, hence the "just not possible" and "space aliens" stuff.

10 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

But I have also spent literally thousands of hours researching the Book of Mormon and other Restoration texts. Pretty much for 10 years now, that is what I have been doing every day--gathering, summarizing, synthesizing, evaluating, and articulating evidence for the Restoration. I can never really share the things I've learned and discovered along the way.

I've done a lot of this as well.  This board has been a pretty decent sounding board for some of my musings.

10 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

Even if some others did have my own experience, I think some would definitely reach a different conclusion.

Yep.  Presuppositions can have a bigger impact than we like to admit.  For all his posturing about "empiricism," I think @Analytics is driven far more by non-empirical presuppositions arising from his past and current posture toward the Church and its truth claims, and its leaders and members.

10 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

There is always an element of agency in how we orient ourselves towards data. So I don't expect others to feel the same way, as most people, even serious critics, eventually stop looking very hard for positive evidence. 

I have some family members who believe that the Church is a terrible, even evil, organization.  I have other family members who believe it is a wonderful and benevolent and fundamentally good organization.  The data tend to be the same.  The presuppositions vary. 

10 minutes ago, Ryan Dahle said:

But I guess that my point is just that over the years, I keep finding more and more faith-affirming discoveries--both in things that I discover myself or as I read research from others. That is pretty remarkable to me and is definitely not what I would expect if it were all a fraud or delusion. 

I have a good friend, previously an ardent Latter-day Saint, who now confidently declares that anyone who studies the Church to the point of knowing what he knows about it, and still stays in it, is profoundly dishonest.  Everyone else - those who have not studied enough to know what he knows - are profoundly ignorant and deceived.  That's it for him.  In his view, there is simply no way a reasonably intelligent and informed person can remain a Latter-day Saint.  My worldview, grounded in faith, can accommodate his grounded-in-skepticism worldview, but he cannot reciprocate.  It's a bummer, really.  

In the end, I think our presuppositions are like the hand on the rudder of a ship: "Behold also the ships, which though they be so great, and are driven of fierce winds, yet are they turned about with a very small helm, whithersoever the governor listeth" (James 3:4).

Thanks,

-Smac

[Calm]

49 minutes ago, smac97 said:

would look terrible in a pleated skirt.

Love this….and kind of what to see it now to see if you are too critical of yourself here.  
With a name like Macdonald….surely a skirt should be the perfect attire for you.

Edited March 21 by Calm

[Zosimus]

12 hours ago, smac97 said:

Meanwhile, let's go back to what you said: "There statement is clear that they perceived it as a sort of miraculous event."

I don't see this in their statement.  Can you clarify?

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 

[Zosimus]

15 hours ago, Ryan Dahle said:

First of all, these examples of metal plates do not say anything directly about the Book of Mormon's historicity. The examples of plates in this article are used more as a defensive apologetic response to critics (like Analytics) who say that the length of the Book of Mormon makes it categorically "impossible."

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.

[champatsch]

18 hours ago, Analytics said:

In what way is your theory falsifiable?

If the Book of Mormon did not have scores of archaic linguistic elements (lexical items, syntactic items, syntactic patterns) that are not found in pseudo-archaic texts, then it would appear to be a pseudo-archaic text in its English usage, and Joseph Smith could have worded it. To be clear, the Book of Mormon could still be unique linguistically and nevertheless have the hallmarks of a pseudo-archaic text, if it did not have many different types of archaic outliers.

 

18 hours ago, Analytics said:

It seems to me that anytime it contains a word or phrase that doesn't fit into EModE, you can ascribe it to another member of the "ghost committee".

You seem to be hung up on the label Early Modern English. I have already explained this more than once. Are you trolling, playing games?

I do not routinely ascribe things to any specific person, to different members of a ghost committee, which at this point is a trite, uninteresting phrase. Others say that Joseph Smith was influenced by John Bunyan, Jonathan Edwards, and/or someone else. Davis recently provided a possible 'ghost committee' list.

In addressing these one-sided claims, which ignore many items of counterevidence, I point to various usage and say that it makes as much sense, from a textual standpoint, to say that Joseph Smith was also apparently influenced by other remote and obscure authors. Of course he was not. I just point out that ascribing influence to Bunyan, Edwards, or someone else, while not acknowledging counterevidence, is special pleading.

 

18 hours ago, Analytics said:

How is that different that shooting all over the place and then drawing bullseyes around the bullet holes?

I suppose what you mean by shooting all over the place is that the text has vocabulary and syntax that show usage diversity. Well, yes, it does. And so do other lengthy texts, though not to the extent of the Book of Mormon, which suggests that Joseph Smith did not author it, and which is why it is a philological text, as it were. Comparative study shows what all of its varied vocabulary and syntax compares to. It also shows what possible pseudo-archaic expression might be.

It is proper and accurate to note, for example, that the Book of Mormon's 18 examples of subjunctive "save . . shall" usage correspond to usage found in texts between 1590 and 1700, and that there are currently no known examples of potentially frequent "save he|they shall" syntax, so that Joseph Smith, like everyone else of his time, was not exposed to the usage.

Perhaps you are dismayed that the text has turned out to have all sorts of unexpected, identifiably archaic usage that is not in potential comparison texts: obsolete vocabulary in context, all sorts of literate, archaic usage, like the above type with 18 examples. In many ways, it is different from what most people have thought about it, including me. If you are disconcerted at the textual realities, then you have my sympathy. Perhaps I might be so bold as to apologize by proxy that it has Late Middle English elements in it, as well.

 

18 hours ago, Analytics said:

And regardless, what does any of this have to do with the theory of the provenance of the plates the witnesses allegedly saw, and whether the BoM is an accurate translation of an authentic ancient text?

I have little interest in first debating weaker evidence in relation to possible divine origins, involving so much disputable human action and reaction. The stronger evidence, the English linguistic evidence, indicates divine origins, since Joseph Smith did not have tacit linguistic knowledge (competence) of so much of the text he dictated. That informs on plate provenance and translation accuracy.

Linguistic competence is of course different from being able to read familiar words. Anyone can read familiar English words and not know the syntax or contextual meanings.

In all this discussion, I have of course assumed that you possess sufficient linguistic insight and acumen to understand these things, even though you have repeatedly given cause to doubt such an assumption.

 

[webbles]

9 hours ago, Zosimus said:

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 

I think the Voree Plates and the Book of the Law actually is really good evidence against the idea that it was a 'cheap hoax'.  Strang didn't do a 'cheap hoax'.  I find the Voree Plates to be an impressive set.  If they aren't ancient, I see no problem with people thinking they are ancient.  The engravings are well done and it looks the part.  We don't know what the Book of the Law plates actually looked like (similar to the Golden Plates), but I don't have any problems with the witnesses examining them and believing they are ancient.  Neither of the 2 sets of plates were slapped together or a 'cheap hoax'.

The 8 witnesses of the Book of Mormon don't tell us anything about whether the plates are ancient in origin, just like the witnesses of the Voree Plates and Book of the Law Plates.  They only tell us that Joseph had plates and that they weren't a 'cheap hoax'.

But if we compare the 3 sets, it shows that the Golden Plates would have been a much harder creation.  This is why Dan Vogel and others argue that the witnesses didn't actually see the plates.  They recognize that creating a set of plates that would convince the 8 witnesses, similar too what Strang did, is difficult for two main reasons.

The first is that Strang used brass while Joseph used something gold-like.  Strang's witnesses recognized the brass (the Voree plates were identified as brass by several people and the Book of the Law comes from the Brass Plates).  The 8 witnesses didn't recognize the metal that Joseph used.  If Joseph's plates had been called tin or brass, then the fabrication method is simplified immensely.  The witnesses called it gold (which would be impossible by weight and cost alone) or having the appearance of gold.

The second is the quantity.  Voree Plates was 4 very small plates.  The Book of the Law Plates is 18 larger plates.  The Golden Plates were most likely more than 50 of similar size plates.

It is possible that all 3 are hoaxes.  But the amount of work to create each hoax is a lot different.  We know the Kinderhook plates were a hoax and they are slightly bigger than the Voree plates and had a little more plates, so we know that the Voree plates could be faked easily.  The Book of the Law Plates and Golden Plates were bigger and with more quantity so they would be harder to fake and we would have to figure out how they got the material and time to fake them.  But I definitely think that they show that the plates (all 4 sets) were not "cheap hoaxes".

[smac97]

9 hours ago, Zosimus said:

Quote

Meanwhile, let's go back to what you said: "There statement is clear that they perceived it as a sort of miraculous event."

I don't see this in their statement.  Can you clarify?

Yes. In short, Strang runs the same Smith playbook, with two different sets of metal plates, and he succeeds both times.

Well, no.  See, e.g., this video:

Some excerpts from the transcript:

Quote

Clearly, the testimonies of these 11 witnesses were meant to parallel the testimonies of the 11 witnesses found in the pages preceding the Book of Mormon.

I don't think anyone disputes that Strang was trying to mimic the statements of the Eight Witnesses, but that's only one half of "the Smith playbook."

By your own admission below, Strang never ran the other half of the playbook: Witnesses to a miraculous event (the Three Witnesses).

I think you were previously attempting to gloss over this by claiming that the Strang witnesses' statement "is clear that they perceived it as a sort of miraculous event."  Actually, not only is it not "clear" about a "miraculous event," you now admit below that their statement did not contain any claim that they "perceived" a "miraculous event" (you acknowledge below that "no angel or divine voice appears in their testimony").

I think this omission is a very significant departure from "the Smith playbook," don't you?

Back to the transcript:

Quote

As Latter-day Saints know, none of the 11 official Book of Mormon witnesses ever denied their published testimony, even after separating from the Church and falling out with Joseph Smith. However, Latter-day Saint critics are quick to point out that none of Strang’s witnesses ever directly deny their testimonies either. 

This causes some people to wonder, why should we believe the Book of Mormon witnesses, when Strang’s witnesses made similar claims which they never denied? Clearly just having witnesses isn’t anything special, right? Well, let’s talk about it.

One of the challenges with this topic is that it’s really easy for people to fall into what is called the false-equivalence fallacy, which is “a logical fallacy that occurs when someone incorrectly asserts that two or more things are equivalent, simply because they share some characteristics, despite the fact that there are also notable differences between them. For example, a false equivalence is saying that cats and dogs are the same animal since they’re both mammals and have a tail.”

See, this is what I think you have done.  You are committing the false-equivalence fallacy by drawing a one-to-one correlation between the Strang witnesses and the Three/Eight Witnesses because they share some few similarities.  The problem is that they also have some very significant differences, as the video explains:

Quote

There are notable differences between Strang’s witnesses and Joseph’s witnesses that, in my mind, render them incomparable. 

For example, Much ado is made about Strang’s witnesses never directly denying their testimony, even after leaving Strang’s church. But here’s the deal: When it comes to the Book of Mormon witnesses, not only do they never deny their testimonies, but we have records upon records showing that many of them, especially David Whitmer, reaffirmed and actively defended their testimony throughout their lives and even on their deathbeds. Some records are first-hand, some are not. But the point is — there is a significant paper trail.

When it comes to Strang’s witnesses, frankly, I can’t find a single solitary statement, first-hand or otherwise, from any of them reaffirming or defending their testimony after separating from Strang’s movement. So, sure, they never directly deny their testimony. But this wasn’t something they were defending throughout their lives, it was something that they just apparently never really talked about again. Some of Strang’s witnesses don’t even have entries in the indexes of the books I looked through while researching this topic. 

And the phrase “never directly deny” is important here. For example, in 1855 a Strangite counsel stripped one of the 7 witnesses, Samuel Bacon, of his office. “Warren Post, who presented the resolution, later wrote that Bacon had ‘denied the work being done was the inspiration of God,’ and had called it ‘human invention.’” It’s not a direct denial, as it’s not a first-hand statement, but it is from a believing Strangite. So, take it for what it’s worth.

Well?  Do you acknowledge these distinctions?

Distinction #1: Strang only ran half of "the Smith playbook." 

Distinction #2: The half of "the Smith playbook" which Strang did not run was the one involving witnesses attesting to a "miraculous event."  Of the two sorts of percipient events described by the Three and Eight Witnesses, the one Strang avoided was obviously the more difficult one.

Distinction #3: The "Smith playbook," if extended beyond the publication of the Three/Eight Witnesses' statements, includes the quite notable point that several of the Witnesses reaffirmed their testimony, many times strenuously so.  David Whitmer is the most notable of these.  Per the above video, there is no corollary evidence in the historical record of the Strang witnesses subsequently reaffirming their statements.: 

Distinction #4: The "Smith playbook," if extended beyond the publication of the Three/Eight Witnesses' statements, includes yet another quite notable point, namely, that none of the Witnesses recanted.  Even the most informed and ardent critics (Vogel, Analytics, etc.) seem to have resigned themselves to this point, and so formulate theories about the Witnesses that work around it.  In contrast, regarding the Strang witnesses, evidence exists that one of them, Samuel Bacon, "denied the work being done was the inspiration of God," and had called it "human invention.”  

These seem to be pretty significant differences between how well the "playbook" worked out to support Joseph's claims as compared to how well the "playbook" worked to support Strang's claims.

Both sets of claims are, I freely admit, remarkable and understandably difficult to accept at face value.  Hence two further distinctions:

Distinction #5: The "Smith playbook" has the Three/Eight Witnesses acting in secondary / subordinate / supplementary capacity to the primary means of confirming the veracity of The Book of Mormon, namely, the Holy Spirit.  Moroni 10:3-5.  In contrast, does Strang have within his "playbook" any mechanism comparable to Moroni 10?  I don't think so.  

Distinction #6: To the extent there was a "Smith playbook," the purpose of it would be to persuade people to accept The Book of Mormon as a divinely-inspired, divine-preserved, and divinely-translated book of scriptures.  Fast forward 200 years, the "playbook" as deployed by Joseph has resulted in many millions of faithful Latter-day Saints, in tens of thousands of congregations around the world, who accept The Book of Mormon for what it claims to be. In contrast, per Wikipedia there were, as of 2019, six (6) Strangite congregations with about 130 active members.  

Distinction #7: The "Smith playbook" can be reasonably extended to historical evidence attesting to the character and credibility of the Three/Eight Witnesses (and the unofficial witnesses like Emma and Mary Whitmer).  We have no such evidence as to the Strang witnesses, or at least nothing close to the quantum of evidence for the Three/Eight Witnesses.

If the New York Jets somehow got a hold of Andy Reid's "playbook," and only utilized half of it, and specifically did not run the more difficult plays in it, and if they then went out and achieved nothing like the Chief's success, can it really be said that Strand "succeeded" in running the playbook?

Given the foregoing distinctions, how is it that you think Strang "succeeds both times" in running the "Smith playbook"?  By what metric do you measure "success" in this context?

Back to the transcript:

Quote

Now, it’s important to note that when the Strang witnesses describe in their testimonies what they experienced — digging up plates, etc. — I believe them. Strang really did have metal plates. For a time he had some of them on display for anyone to see. In that sense, it doesn’t bother me that they never denied their testimonies because I wouldn’t expect them to. They really did experience these things. The question is not about the reality of the plates, the question is about the authenticity of the plates.

On this point I agree with you.  Both Smith and Strang used witnesses to establish the "reality" of their respective sets of plates.  Nobody today seriously disputes that both sets actually existed.  The question about both is about authenticity.

Quote

Some sources do claim that Strang and some friends created the Voree plates and the plates of Laban. However, the sources are admittedly not first-hand, so feel free to read them and assign value to them as you see fit.

Distinction #8: There is historical evidence that Strang fabricated his plates.  There is not, to my knowledge, any historical evidence that Smith fabricated the Gold Plates.  Speculation and conjecture, sure, but no evidence.

Quote

But this leads us to another significant difference between these groups of witnesses: the 3 witnesses of the Book of Mormon plates testified that they’d been shown the plates by an angel. There was absolutely nothing supernatural about the experiences of any of the Strang witnesses. Faking plates would be hard enough, but I imagine that faking the presence of an angel of God would be significantly more difficult. Mixing the miraculous witness of the 3 with the natural witness of the 8 makes their combined witness all the more challenging to shrug off.

This is Distinction #2 above.

Quote

But it’s also worth noting that the size and composition of Joseph’s plates and Strang’s plates were very different.

Distinction #9: The size and composition of Joseph’s plates and Strang’s plates were very different.

Quote

And the length, intricacy, and genre of the resulting translations are also vastly different.

Distinction #10: The length, intricacy, and genre of the resulting translations are vastly different.

Finally, this does not clarify you prior statement: "There statement is clear that they perceived it as a sort of miraculous event."

To what "miraculous event" did the Strang witnesses testify?  To what "miraculous event" were they percipient witnesses?

9 hours ago, Zosimus said:

First, the Voree plates. Four men testify in plain language that they recovered the ancient record.

Okay.  Please point out the "plain language" they used to describe a "miraculous event" to which they were percipient witnesses.

And how were they percipient witnesses to this record being "ancient"?

9 hours ago, Zosimus said:

You are correct, no angel or divine voice appears in their testimony,

Then do you retract your prior claim?  That their "statement is clear that they perceived it as a sort of miraculous event"?

9 hours ago, Zosimus said:

but Strang’s larger claim is certainly supernatural,

Sure.  But you were not speaking of "Strang's larger claim."

9 hours ago, Zosimus said:

an angel revealed the record’s location,

According to Strang, and Strang alone.

The Three Witnesses attested to a miraculous event with the Plates.  There was no corollary to this with the Strang witnesses.  This difference becomes all the more probative, IMO, when David Whitmer's multiple post-dissociation reaffirmations over decades are discussed.

9 hours ago, Zosimus said:

Strang received divine interpreters, and translated the plates by the power of God.

According to Strang.  AFAIK, none of the Strang witnesses attested to this.

In contrast, the Three Witnesses did attest to Joseph translating the Gold Plates by divine means.  Their testimony was not percipient of the translation process, but to the attestation of it by the voice of God.

9 hours ago, Zosimus said:

Their affidavit does the same thing for Strang as the Eight witnesses do for Joseph.

Even with the foregoing distinctions?  Are you sure?

9 hours ago, Zosimus said:

This was intentional.  Strang intentionally repeated the gold plate witness playbook.

No doubt.  But there are still substantial, even vital, differences between the Three/Eight Witnesses and the Strang witnesses.

9 hours ago, Zosimus said:

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.”

Yes.  But see Distinctions #9 and #10 above.

9 hours ago, Zosimus said:

Again, there's no angel involved,

Isn't that a substantial, even vital, difference between how Joseph ran the "playbook" relative to how Strang ran it?

9 hours ago, Zosimus said:

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.

Sure.  Strang mimicked Joseph's use of witnesses in some superficial ways.  But the distinctions overshadow the similarities by a wide margin.

9 hours ago, Zosimus said:

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?

I don't think most Latter-day Saints have given any thought to the Strangite witnesses, so there hasn't been much opportunity or need to differentiate them from the Three/Eight Witnesses.

But since you ask, I have done a preliminary examination of the two sets of witnesses and articulated ten substantive distinctions which, in my mind, allow me to view the Statement of the Eight Witnesses as "important" and the statements of the Strangite witnesses as markedly less important.

9 hours ago, Zosimus said:

Because whatever arguments we might make for Smith's witnesses have to be framed so they don't also canonize Strang’s witnesses. 

Done.  See above.

9 hours ago, Zosimus said:

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 

Okay.  What is it that Vogel has to say that you find noteworthy and relevant to this discussion?

Thanks,

-Smac

Edited March 21 by smac97

[The Nehor]

I think I’d find the witnesses continuing to verify their testimonies of the Book of Mormon more convincing if they had left Restorationist churches generally. As it stands they had a reason to continue to champion the Book of Mormon. Did the more silent Strangite witnesses defect to other restorationist faiths that held Strang’s translations as divinely translated? Nope.

[Zosimus]

2 hours ago, smac97 said:

By your own admission below, Strang never ran the other half of the playbook: Witnesses to a miraculous event (the Three Witnesses).

I think this omission is a very significant departure from "the Smith playbook," don't you?

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.

Quote

Well?  Do you acknowledge these distinctions?

Distinction #1 and #2: Strang only ran half of "the Smith playbook." The half of "the Smith playbook" which Strang did not run was the one involving witnesses attesting to a "miraculous event."  Of the two sorts of percipient events described by the Three and Eight Witnesses, the one Strang avoided was obviously the more difficult one.

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.

Quote

Distinction #3: The "Smith playbook," if extended beyond the publication of the Three/Eight Witnesses' statements, includes the quite notable point that several of the Witnesses reaffirmed their testimony, many times strenuously so. David Whitmer is the most notable of these. Per the above video, there is no corollary evidence in the historical record of the Strang witnesses subsequently reaffirming their statements.

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.

Quote

Distinction #4: The "Smith playbook," if extended beyond the publication of the Three/Eight Witnesses' statements, includes yet another quite notable point, namely, that none of the Witnesses recanted. Even the most informed and ardent critics (Vogel, Analytics, etc.) seem to have resigned themselves to this point, and so formulate theories about the Witnesses that work around it.  In contrast, regarding the Strang witnesses, evidence exists that one of them, Samuel Bacon, "denied the work being done was the inspiration of God," and had called it "human invention.” These seem to be pretty significant differences between how well the "playbook" worked out to support Joseph's claims as compared to how well the "playbook" worked to support Strang's claims.

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?

Quote

Distinction #5: The "Smith playbook" has the Three/Eight Witnesses acting in secondary / subordinate / supplementary capacity to the primary means of confirming the veracity of The Book of Mormon, namely, the Holy Spirit.  Moroni 10:3-5.  In contrast, does Strang have within his "playbook" any mechanism comparable to Moroni 10?  I don't think so.  

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.

Quote

Distinction #6: To the extent there was a "Smith playbook," the purpose of it would be to persuade people to accept The Book of Mormon as a divinely-inspired, divine-preserved, and divinely-translated book of scriptures.  Fast forward 200 years, the "playbook" as deployed by Joseph has resulted in many millions of faithful Latter-day Saints, in tens of thousands of congregations around the world, who accept The Book of Mormon for what it claims to be. In contrast, per Wikipedia there were, as of 2019, six (6) Strangite congregations with about 130 active members.  

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.

Quote

Distinction #7: The "Smith playbook" can be reasonably extended to historical evidence attesting to the character and credibility of the Three/Eight Witnesses (and the unofficial witnesses like Emma and Mary Whitmer).  We have no such evidence as to the Strang witnesses, or at least nothing close to the quantum of evidence for the Three/Eight Witnesses. If the New York Jets somehow got a hold of Andy Reid's "playbook," and only utilized half of it, and specifically did not run the more difficult plays in it, and if they then went out and achieved nothing like the Chief's success, can it really be said that Strand "succeeded" in running the playbook? Given the foregoing distinctions, how is it that you think Strang "succeeds both times" in running 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.

Quote

Distinction #8: There is historical evidence that Strang fabricated his plates.  There is not, to my knowledge, any historical evidence that Smith fabricated the Gold Plates.  Speculation and conjecture, sure, but no evidence.

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...

Quote

"The probability is that Smith, who had been a book-peddler, and was frequently about printing establishments, had procured some old copper plates for engravings, which he showed for his golden plates. It is pretended that the "Book of Mormon," was translated by Joe Smith from these plates. Of the falsehood of this, the book itself contains the most unquestionable evidence. On the truth or falsity of Smith's pretended inspiration, and of the character of this "Book of Mormon," rests the whole scheme. If the Book in general is a fable - with the extravagant stories, then Joe Smith Junior, is a base impostor..." - John Mason Peck (source)

and...

Quote

"Visitors to Palmyra, N.Y. are advised to seek out the site of the old Sherman Carriage Co. at what is now the corner of Prospect and Main in downtown Palmyra. The Carriage building burned down in 1868 but its blacksmith shop remained standing until after the turn of the century. The original Sherman wagon shop and its smithy were built in the 1820s by Rhodes Sherman, Sr. Sherman's son Alson was a contemporary of Joseph Smith, Jr. and Oliver Cowdery and it seems that he was privy to some details about various secret activities carried on by those two in his father's shop in about 1828. Oliver Cowdery was then a part-time coppermith who possessed considerable skill in preparing copper engraving plates for the old-fashoned hand printing presses of that period.

He had most recently found some employment in this line of work and related tasks in Canadaigua, but, following the untimely death of his employer, young Cowdery lodged first with his brother and then with his cousins (the Joe Smith family of Manchester) and there became a sometime participant in the infamous "Gold Bible Company."

After Joseph Smith, Jr. had his dream about the angel, it was decided in private midnight consultations that the contrived appearance of real metallic plates would be of especial use to the Bible Company. Oliver was dispatched to the Sherman smithy with orders to fabricate a book of plates, held together with rings. Making use of various bits of scrap copper, Cowdery first attempted to forge the necessary production out behind the wagon shop. When that process proved too tedious for his taste, the coppersmith instead beat some worn-out engraving plates into serviceable "ancient sheets," nearly as thin as paper. According to onlooker Sherman, a half-dozen such plates were manufactured, but for what purpose he was never told.

Burnished to a gleaming finish with brass polish, the copper plates had the look and feel of pure gold to the credulous farmers of that region. Still, they were so few and so unlike gold in weight that the Bible Company made slight use of their wondrous treasure. Once Mr. Harris and the Whitmers had been adequately fooled Cowdery and Smith exchanged the copper "treasure" for new hats and a couple of plugs of tobacco in Macedon and all were happy with the trade." - Alson Sherman (source)

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

Quote

Distinction #9: The size and composition of Joseph’s plates and Strang’s plates were very different.

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.

Quote

Distinction #10: The length, intricacy, and genre of the resulting translations are vastly different.

Have you ever read Strang's translation of the brass plates of Laban?

Edited March 21 by Zosimus

[webbles]

1 hour ago, The Nehor said:

I think I’d find the witnesses continuing to verify their testimonies of the Book of Mormon more convincing if they had left Restorationist churches generally. As it stands they had a reason to continue to champion the Book of Mormon. Did the more silent Strangite witnesses defect to other restorationist faiths that held Strang’s translations as divinely translated? Nope.

If we are talking about all 11 witnesses, Oliver Cowdery joined the Methodists for a little bit and Martin Harris was briefly involved with Shakerism.

[Zosimus]

7 minutes ago, webbles said:

f we are talking about all 11 witnesses, Oliver Cowdery joined the Methodists for a little bit and Martin Harris was briefly involved with Shakerism.

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

[Analytics]

5 hours ago, champatsch said:

If the Book of Mormon did not have scores of archaic linguistic elements (lexical items, syntactic items, syntactic patterns) that are not found in pseudo-archaic texts, then it would appear to be a pseudo-archaic text in its English usage, and Joseph Smith could have worded it. To be clear, the Book of Mormon could still be unique linguistically and nevertheless have the hallmarks of a pseudo-archaic text, if it did not have many different types of archaic outliers.

 

You seem to be hung up on the label Early Modern English. I have already explained this more than once. Are you trolling, playing games?

I do not routinely ascribe things to any specific person, to different members of a ghost committee, which at this point is a trite, uninteresting phrase. Others say that Joseph Smith was influenced by John Bunyan, Jonathan Edwards, and/or someone else. Davis recently provided a possible 'ghost committee' list.

In addressing these one-sided claims, which ignore many items of counterevidence, I point to various usage and say that it makes as much sense, from a textual standpoint, to say that Joseph Smith was also apparently influenced by other remote and obscure authors. Of course he was not. I just point out that ascribing influence to Bunyan, Edwards, or someone else, while not acknowledging counterevidence, is special pleading.

 

I suppose what you mean by shooting all over the place is that the text has vocabulary and syntax that show usage diversity. Well, yes, it does. And so do other lengthy texts, though not to the extent of the Book of Mormon, which suggests that Joseph Smith did not author it, and which is why it is a philological text, as it were. Comparative study shows what all of its varied vocabulary and syntax compares to. It also shows what possible pseudo-archaic expression might be.

It is proper and accurate to note, for example, that the Book of Mormon's 18 examples of subjunctive "save . . shall" usage correspond to usage found in texts between 1590 and 1700, and that there are currently no known examples of potentially frequent "save he|they shall" syntax, so that Joseph Smith, like everyone else of his time, was not exposed to the usage.

Perhaps you are dismayed that the text has turned out to have all sorts of unexpected, identifiably archaic usage that is not in potential comparison texts: obsolete vocabulary in context, all sorts of literate, archaic usage, like the above type with 18 examples. In many ways, it is different from what most people have thought about it, including me. If you are disconcerted at the textual realities, then you have my sympathy. Perhaps I might be so bold as to apologize by proxy that it has Late Middle English elements in it, as well.

 

I have little interest in first debating weaker evidence in relation to possible divine origins, involving so much disputable human action and reaction. The stronger evidence, the English linguistic evidence, indicates divine origins, since Joseph Smith did not have tacit linguistic knowledge (competence) of so much of the text he dictated. That informs on plate provenance and translation accuracy.

Linguistic competence is of course different from being able to read familiar words. Anyone can read familiar English words and not know the syntax or contextual meanings.

In all this discussion, I have of course assumed that you possess sufficient linguistic insight and acumen to understand these things, even though you have repeatedly given cause to doubt such an assumption.

 

I want to be upfront: I'm not a linguist, and I find this data genuinely fascinating, not dismaying. I'll take it entirely at face value. What I don’t understand, and this may simply be my lack of expertise showing, is what it proves.

If I'm understanding the methodology correctly, the pseudo-archaic corpus (25 books?) is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the argument. The logic seems to be: nearly 100% of archaic constructions that were available to a 19th century author should be represented in these 25 books, so if a book has too many outliers compared to that sample, it would constitute proof that it would be impossible for somebody in the 19th century to have written it unless they had a specialized education or divine help.

But I wonder (and I may be missing something here) whether that corpus of 25 pseudo archaic books is exhaustive enough to support that conclusion. I imagine that pseudo-archaic usage wasn't only a literary phenomenon. It had been alive and descended directly from EModE in sermons, revival preaching, camp meetings, and folk prophecy that were rarely transcribed. Depending upon the specific regional dialect of oral pseudo-archaic usage, in principle a 19th century author drawing on that broader oral pseudo-archaic register might have absorbed multiple constructions that never appeared in 25 published texts. If this were to happen, we might to expect some of the constructions he was exposed to in this way to be over-represented (and it came to pass that this is exactly what happened, right?).

I'd also note that at least one of the constructions you identified as genuinely archaic in this thread appear in the Doctrine and Covenants: specifically D&C 18:15 (“if it so be") and D&C 27:2 ("if it so be"). The D&C isn't a translation of an ancient record; it's Joseph Smith's own directly dictated revelations. If these features appear there too, it seems to suggest these words were in fact available to Joseph Smith to use in a pseudo-archaic way.

I realize I could be entirely wrong about all of this. I have zero expertise in this field and am just explaining why I don’t see how this implies what you claim it does. Given how much depends on these methodological assumptions, I'd genuinely love to read what non-Mormon linguists make of it. Has this been published in a mainstream peer-reviewed linguistics journal? An outside scholarly perspective would be very helpful.

Edited March 21 by Analytics

[Analytics]

And with that, I appreciate everyone’s participation on this thread.

Edited March 21 by Analytics

[webbles]

1 hour ago, Zosimus said:

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

Which makes it really crazy that Joseph would trust his hoax with them after knowing them for only a few weeks.

[smac97]

1 hour ago, Zosimus said:

When I say Strang ran the Smith playbook twice, I'm referring to the eight witnesses.

But Joseph's "playbook" involved quite a bit more than that.

1 hour ago, Zosimus said:

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. 

I'm okay with that.

1 hour ago, Zosimus said:

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. 

...

Quote

Distinction #3: The "Smith playbook," if extended beyond the publication of the Three/Eight Witnesses' statements, includes the quite notable point that several of the Witnesses reaffirmed their testimony, many times strenuously so. David Whitmer is the most notable of these. Per the above video, there is no corollary evidence in the historical record of the Strang witnesses subsequently reaffirming their statements.

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.

Because they had been telling the truth all along, cough. 

You aren't really addressing the substance of Distinction #3.  There is no corollary evidence in the historical record of the Strang witnesses subsequently reaffirming their statements.  I don't see what's "tricky" about this.

Obliquely besmirching the character of the Three/Eight Witnesses doesn't really work for me, particularly as compared to the Strang witnesses.  This is where Distinction #7 becomes significant: The "Smith playbook" can be reasonably extended to historical evidence attesting to the character and credibility of the Three/Eight Witnesses (and the unofficial witnesses like Emma and Mary Whitmer).  We have no such evidence as to the Strang witnesses, or at least nothing close to the quantum of evidence for the Three/Eight Witnesses.

1 hour ago, Zosimus said:

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. 

Okay.  I'm not sure what you are saying here.  What sort of significance are you attributing to this?

1 hour ago, Zosimus said:

So, to me, it does seems like Strang succeeded in running the Smith playbook.

And the Jets could try to run the Chiefs' playbook, but if the results are wildly different, with the Jets failing miserably where the Chiefs doing quite well, calling the former's efforts a "success" seems pretty iffy.

1 hour ago, Zosimus said:

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,

Well, not really.  Strang didn't really succeed in either the near term or the long term in any way comparable to what Joseph did (and, frankly, I don't attribute Joseph's "success" to him, but to the Lord).

1 hour ago, Zosimus said:

and had very similar outcomes.

Well, no.  Again, Strang's results from running the "playbook" were nothing like the results of Joseph's results.

1 hour ago, Zosimus said:

Quote

Distinction #4: The "Smith playbook," if extended beyond the publication of the Three/Eight Witnesses' statements, includes yet another quite notable point, namely, that none of the Witnesses recanted. Even the most informed and ardent critics (Vogel, Analytics, etc.) seem to have resigned themselves to this point, and so formulate theories about the Witnesses that work around it.  In contrast, regarding the Strang witnesses, evidence exists that one of them, Samuel Bacon, "denied the work being done was the inspiration of God," and had called it "human invention.” These seem to be pretty significant differences between how well the "playbook" worked out to support Joseph's claims as compared to how well the "playbook" worked to support Strang's claims.

wrt Samuel Bacon, if you want to get into hearsay and antagonists, then there's way too much to sort through.

There is?  How so?  My understanding is that we have very little information about the Strang witnesses.

Is there historical evidence that Samuel Bacon recanted?  Yes.  Is that a dispositive data point?  No.  But it's a distinction that you are overlooking.

1 hour ago, Zosimus said:

Let me just say that Joseph Smith and the gold plate witnesses had plenty of detractors saying all sorts of things to discredit them.

Well, I don't know that I'll let you "just say" this.  You would need to demonstrate this.  If you have competent evidence which places the character and credibility of the Three/Eight Witnesses into dispute, please present it.  I would like to hear what you have to say.

1 hour ago, Zosimus said:

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?

Yes, I really do.  Discussion and evidentiary analysis should always predominate over sheer innuendo.

1 hour ago, Zosimus said:

Quote

Distinction #5: The "Smith playbook" has the Three/Eight Witnesses acting in secondary / subordinate / supplementary capacity to the primary means of confirming the veracity of The Book of Mormon, namely, the Holy Spirit.  Moroni 10:3-5.  In contrast, does Strang have within his "playbook" any mechanism comparable to Moroni 10?  I don't think so.  

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.

Well, let's keep to the point here.  I'm comparing A) Moroni 10:3-5 and its function relative to The Book of Mormon with B) a corollary scriptural or other provision advanced by Strang and its function relative to the Voree Plates.  Did Strang have within his "playbook" any mechanism comparable to Moroni 10?  I don't think so.  

1 hour ago, Zosimus said:

Quote

Distinction #6: To the extent there was a "Smith playbook," the purpose of it would be to persuade people to accept The Book of Mormon as a divinely-inspired, divine-preserved, and divinely-translated book of scriptures.  Fast forward 200 years, the "playbook" as deployed by Joseph has resulted in many millions of faithful Latter-day Saints, in tens of thousands of congregations around the world, who accept The Book of Mormon for what it claims to be. In contrast, per Wikipedia there were, as of 2019, six (6) Strangite congregations with about 130 active members. 

See above. Strang was a critical part of the movement that Joseph Smith founded.

In the short term, Strang had an impact.  Certainly.  From Wikipedia:

Quote

At its peak, the Strangite Church had about 12,000 members, making them noteworthy rivals to the larger faction led by Brigham Young.^[3] Strang was murdered in 1856, after which most of his followers joined Joseph Smith III and his Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, now called the Community of Christ.

Long-term, though, Strang is really just a footnote.

1 hour ago, Zosimus said:

The Brighamites were more successful in the end, but that says nothing about how well Strang ran the Smith playbook.

Under my prior hypothetical: "The Kansas City Chiefs were more successful than the New York Jets in the end, but that says nothing about how well the Jets' coach ran Andy Reid's playbook."

Except this says a lot.

Strang "ran the Smith playbook," but only in some limited and superficial ways, and with nothing like the results of how Joseph ran it.

1 hour ago, Zosimus said:

Quote

Distinction #7: The "Smith playbook" can be reasonably extended to historical evidence attesting to the character and credibility of the Three/Eight Witnesses (and the unofficial witnesses like Emma and Mary Whitmer).  We have no such evidence as to the Strang witnesses, or at least nothing close to the quantum of evidence for the Three/Eight Witnesses. If the New York Jets somehow got a hold of Andy Reid's "playbook," and only utilized half of it, and specifically did not run the more difficult plays in it, and if they then went out and achieved nothing like the Chief's success, can it really be said that Strand "succeeded" in running the playbook? Given the foregoing distinctions, how is it that you think Strang "succeeds both times" in running 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.

Well, no.  The Church continued under Brigham Young, which is the analog of the Chiefs.  Strang went out and started a distinct and separate group (the Jets).

1 hour ago, Zosimus said:

Quote

Distinction #8: There is historical evidence that Strang fabricated his plates.  There is not, to my knowledge, any historical evidence that Smith fabricated the Gold Plates.  Speculation and conjecture, sure, but no evidence.

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...

Quote

"The probability is that Smith, who had been a book-peddler, and was frequently about printing establishments, had procured some old copper plates for engravings, which he showed for his golden plates. It is pretended that the "Book of Mormon," was translated by Joe Smith from these plates. Of the falsehood of this, the book itself contains the most unquestionable evidence. On the truth or falsity of Smith's pretended inspiration, and of the character of this "Book of Mormon," rests the whole scheme. If the Book in general is a fable - with the extravagant stories, then Joe Smith Junior, is a base impostor..." - John Mason Peck (source)

How is this "evidence"?  

1 hour ago, Zosimus said:

and...

Quote

"Visitors to Palmyra, N.Y. are advised to seek out the site of the old Sherman Carriage Co. at what is now the corner of Prospect and Main in downtown Palmyra. The Carriage building burned down in 1868 but its blacksmith shop remained standing until after the turn of the century. The original Sherman wagon shop and its smithy were built in the 1820s by Rhodes Sherman, Sr. Sherman's son Alson was a contemporary of Joseph Smith, Jr. and Oliver Cowdery and it seems that he was privy to some details about various secret activities carried on by those two in his father's shop in about 1828. Oliver Cowdery was then a part-time coppermith who possessed considerable skill in preparing copper engraving plates for the old-fashoned hand printing presses of that period.

He had most recently found some employment in this line of work and related tasks in Canadaigua, but, following the untimely death of his employer, young Cowdery lodged first with his brother and then with his cousins (the Joe Smith family of Manchester) and there became a sometime participant in the infamous "Gold Bible Company."

After Joseph Smith, Jr. had his dream about the angel, it was decided in private midnight consultations that the contrived appearance of real metallic plates would be of especial use to the Bible Company. Oliver was dispatched to the Sherman smithy with orders to fabricate a book of plates, held together with rings.

Well, I'm certainly willing to give this some consideration.  Who was the author? Was he/she a percipient witness to Oliver being "dispatched to the Sherman smithy"?  If not, what is the source of the author's information?

Your source appears to be this website, am I correct about that?  And the quote above is from a publication called "Naked Truths About Mormonism" published in 1888 in Berkely, California by the "A.B. Deming Society."  A bit about the namesake (from the 1888 item) :

Quote

THIS issue is dedicated to the memory of Arthur Buel Deming who was born in Cincinnati in 1838 and who apparently died in New York City shortly after the turn of the century. Arthur was the son of Minor (Miner) R. Deming, the Sheriff of Hancock County, IL in the early 1840s. Arthur grew up in the town of Carthage, living as a boy in the residence portion of the jail where Mormon leader Joseph Smith was killed in 1844. Arthur's father died the year after Smith was assassinated and the young man grew up blaming the Mormons for the untimely passing of his father. Although A. B. Deming considered himself a "friend" of the Mormons his concern over their welfare took a path greatly divergent from that of his Mormon-sympathizing father. While Sheriff Deming had once sought to protect the Mormons of Hancock County under the law, his son was more interested in protecting the Saints from their own peculiar religion. 

So Mr. Deming was not even alive during the time period Oliver was supposedly "dispatched to the Sherman smithy."  Do I have that right?

Mr. Deming thereafter apparently became opposed to the Church, and so started the very brief "Naked Truth" publication in 1888 in California:

Quote

Deming's newspaper was issued as a monthly production from a private press in Oakland, CA. It began with a promising January, 1888 issue but quickly fell on hard times as the editor experienced growing difficulties in soliciting enough new material and enough paying subscribers to make the venture a viable one. Skipping over the intended issues for February and March, due to publication delays, Deming tried one last time to turn his paper into a profitable business with the secend and final issue of April 1888. With his finances rapidly failing, the anti-Mormon crusader abandoned his intended printing of a third number and retired from the publishing business before the end of that year.

Interesting stuff.

Anyway, the "evidence" you are quoting is from a series of letters Deming published in the January 1888 issue of NTaM, and apparently as well as some articles (written by Deming?  Someone else?), including the one you are quoting:

Quote

FORGED  PLATES?
________

One of our correspondents in the informal "Deming Society" relays the following highly interesting bit of information.

So we have A) Deming, who really seemed to dislike Mormons, B) publishing an article with a tidbit about Oliver in a smithy that was purportedly written by an unidentified "correspondent" C) in 1888 D) in California.

Am I correct so far?  

Quote

We were previously unaware that "First Elder" Cowdery was both a coppersmith and a printer's helper in his youth. 

I too was unaware of this.  Do you have any corroborating evidence about this claim?

Here's the article itself (bold emphases added) :

Quote

____

THE  FOOLS'  GOLD  BIBLE.
____

Visitors to Palmyra, N.Y. are advised to seek out the site of the old Sherman Carriage Co. at what is now the corner of Prospect and Main in downtown Palmyra. The Carriage building burned down in 1868 but its blacksmith shop remained standing until after the turn of the century. The original Sherman wagon shop and its smithy were built in the 1820s by Rhodes Sherman, Sr. Sherman's son Alson was a contemporary of Joseph Smith, Jr. and Oliver Cowdery and it seems that he was privy to some details about various secret activities carried on by those two in his father's shop in about 1828. Oliver Cowdery was then a part-time coppermith who possessed considerable skill in preparing copper engraving plates for the old-fashoned hand printing presses of that period.

He had most recently found some employment in this line of work and related tasks in Canadaigua, but, following the untimely death of his employer, young Cowdery lodged first with his brother and then with his cousins (the Joe Smith family of Manchester) and there became a sometime participant in the infamous "Gold Bible Company." 

After Joseph Smith, Jr. had his dream about the angel, it was decided in private midnight consultations that the contrived appearance of real metallic plates would be of especial use to the Bible Company. Oliver was dispatched to the Sherman smithy with orders to fabricate a book of plates, held together with rings. Making use of various bits of scrap copper, Cowdery first attempted to forge the necessary production out behind the wagon shop. When that process proved too tedious for his taste, the coppersmith instead beat some worn-out engraving plates into serviceable "ancient sheets," nearly as thin as paper. According to onlooker Sherman, a half-dozen such plates were manufactured, but for what purpose he was never told.  

Burnished to a gleaming finish with brass polish, the copper plates had the look and feel of pure gold to the credulous farmers of that region. Still, they were so few and so unlike gold in weight that the Bible Company made slight use of their wondrous treasure. Once Mr. Harris and the Whitmers had been adequately fooled Cowdery and Smith exchanged the copper "treasure" for new hats and a couple of plugs of tobacco in Macedon and all were happy with the trade. 

So an anonymous "correspondent" in California in 1888, nearly half a century after the events in question, claims that

• Oliver Cowdery was a coppersmith with "considerable skill in preparing copper engraving plates";
• Some unidentified group gathered at night and conspired to fabricate plates ("it was decided in private midnight consultations that the contrived appearance of real metallic plates");
• Oliver "was dispatched to the Sherman smithy with orders to fabricate a book of plates."
• Oliver was observed fabricating six plates by the owner of the smithy (Sherman).
• Oliver, colluding with Joseph (and others?), used the sham plates to dupe Martin Harris and the Whitmers, then they sold the copper plates for hats and tobacco.

Could you clarify why you consider this competent historiographical evidence?

1 hour ago, Zosimus said:

Quote

Distinction #9: The size and composition of Joseph’s plates and Strang’s plates were very different.

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.

From Webbles: "Voree Plates was 4 very small plates.  The Book of the Law Plates is 18 larger plates.  The Golden Plates were most likely more than 50 of similar size plates."

1 hour ago, Zosimus said:

Quote

Distinction #10: The length, intricacy, and genre of the resulting translations are vastly different.

Have you ever read Strang's translation of the brass plates of Laban?

No.

My query to Grok: "Summarize Strang's supposed translation of the Brass Plates and compare that to Joseph Smith's supposed translation of the Gold Plates."

The response:

Quote

Strang’s Translation of the Brass Plates (published as The Book of the Law of the Lord)

James Strang claimed the plates he received in 1851 were the same ancient Brass Plates of Laban mentioned in the Bible and the Book of Mormon (the record Nephi took from Laban in Jerusalem). He said he translated them using divine interpreters (the Urim and Thummim), though none of his witnesses ever reported seeing the interpreters or the translation process.

• Length: Short. The 1851 first edition was only about 80 pages. The expanded 1856 edition reached around 320 pages (including Strang’s own notes, essays, and additional revelations).
• Content: Almost entirely a book of laws and commandments. It includes:
  • A revised “Decalogue” (Ten Commandments) with several additions and changes.
  • Laws governing government, marriage, tithing, priesthood organization, oaths, prayer, sacrifice, and the structure of a theocratic kingdom.
  • Emphasis on Strang’s own role as prophet, seer, and king.
• Tone and Purpose: It functions as a constitution for Strang’s church and kingdom rather than a narrative history or testimony of Christ. It focuses on rules, order, and governance.

The plates themselves (18 brass leaves) were lost after Strang’s assassination in 1856 and were never recovered.

Joseph Smith’s Translation of the Gold Plates (the Book of Mormon)

Joseph Smith claimed the Gold Plates were an ancient record of peoples in the Americas (primarily the Nephites and Lamanites). He translated them using the Urim and Thummim (and later a seer stone).

• Length: Much longer — over 500 pages in modern editions.
• Content: A full historical and religious narrative spanning roughly 1,000 years. It includes:
  • Stories of migration, wars, prophecies, and the visit of the resurrected Christ to the Americas.
  • Doctrinal teachings, sermons, and testimonies of Christ.
  • Genealogical and historical records.
• Tone and Purpose: A second witness of Jesus Christ, a history of ancient American peoples, and a religious record meant to restore lost truths and testify of Christ.

The plates were returned to the angel Moroni after translation.

Direct Comparison

Aspect	Strang’s Book of the Law of the Lord	Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon
Claimed Source	Brass Plates of Laban (18 brass plates)	Gold Plates (roughly 100–200 gold-colored plates)
Length	Very short (~80–320 pages)	Much longer (~500+ pages)
Genre	Legal code / constitution (laws, commandments, governance)	Historical + religious narrative (history, prophecy, doctrine)
Main Focus	Rules for church and kingdom organization; Strang’s authority	Testimony of Christ; history of ancient American peoples
Translation Witnesses	Witnesses saw and handled plates only; none saw translation or interpreters	Three Witnesses saw plates + interpreters via angel; Eight Witnesses handled plates physically
Scope	Narrow — mostly laws and Strang’s role as king/prophet	Broad — epic history spanning centuries
Current Status	Plates lost; book used only by Strangites	Plates returned to angel; book is foundational scripture for millions

 

Key Difference in Purpose:

• Joseph Smith’s translation produced a new volume of scripture that tells a sweeping story and testifies of Christ.
• Strang’s translation produced a book of laws designed to organize and govern his church and establish him as a theocratic ruler.

In short, the Book of Mormon is a narrative religious history, while the Book of the Law of the Lord is essentially a legal and organizational manual. Strang’s work was much smaller in scope and more narrowly focused on law and authority.

Thanks,

-Smac

[j.mason]

2 hours ago, Analytics said:

I'd also note that at least one of the constructions you identified as genuinely archaic in this thread appear in the Doctrine and Covenants: specifically D&C 18:15 (“if it so be") and D&C 27:2 ("if it so be"). The D&C isn't a translation of an ancient record; it's Joseph Smith's own directly dictated revelations. If these features appear there too, it seems to suggest these words were in fact available to Joseph Smith to use in a pseudo-archaic way.

I don't think JS was wording the revelations in the D & C, anymore than he was wording the text of the BOM. Witnesses all said that he "dictated" the revelations.

[california boy]

On 3/19/2026 at 6:10 PM, webbles said:

New York City definitely had tin plate roofing.  It is one of the largest cities at the time.  Palmya, on the other hand, probably had no tinplate roofing.  But tinplate was also available to tinsmiths who worked with it and then sold the finished products.  But Joseph isn't a tinsmith.  So how would he get it?  He could have purchased it from the tinsmith in town (or who ever was visiting if there wasn't a local tinsmith) but he would have had to do that before he started talking about the plates as that should have linked together pretty quickly.  And that puts him into a much younger age.

We do know that he traveled from Palmyra to Pennsylvania, so I don't really think going to NYC would have been all that hard for him to do. 

 

On 3/19/2026 at 6:10 PM, webbles said:

If you were given tinplates with either the gilding or paint and you got to touch it.  Would you recognize that it was painted or gilded?  Doesn't it feel different?  Wouldn't the 8 witnesses, who have touched tinplate all their life (since a lot of the utensils, cutlery, etc was tinplate) not recognize that it is tinplate with paint or gilding?  The plates weren't visually fooling.  They also have to fool for tactile touch with men who know a decent amount of metal.  I'm pretty sure I could detect a painted surface pretty easily.

I don't really know about the bronzing or how well painting could be done.  I am not really familiar with that.  But gold leafing would be difficult to determine especially for the untrained eyes.  They use gold leafing on picture frames all the time and have been for centuries.  It totally has the appearance that it is pure gold.