A Secular Theory of Where the BoM Came From

[Zosimus]

8 hours ago, Calm said:

Jacob Bryant was from the 1700s, correct?  If so, he lacked many of the tools they now used to examine texts.  I am more interested in a modern appraisal of consistency, etc.

• Meyerstein’s 1930 biography treated the Rowley poems as serious art, identifying a consistent meter resembling Edmund Spenser (16th c) and spotting numerous echoes of Shakespeare and Dryden
• Taylor’s 1971 Complete Works set the Rowley canon and traced sources for “Rowleyese”. Taylor is the one that compiled a glossary of all Chatterton's invented archaisms, and recast Chatterton as an “imaginative historian” rather than a con artist.
• Cottle complained that critics obsessed over the suicide and the forgeries instead of reading the Rowley poems as real literature.
• Farrer wrote about how the Rowley poems still impress even when read today.
• Hall and Forman argued the musical and natural qualities of Chatterton's can only be sensed when read in the original fake-archaic diction.
• Groom used the fake Rowley documents, ink, and parchment to question how history and texts get their authority in the first place.
• Studies of Keats show how deeply Chatterton’s style and medievalism seeped into Romantic poetry.

Overall, modern scholarship places Chatterton within a wider revival of medieval things and praise him as a wildly inventive "poet historian" who invented his own language in an age obsessed with reason. FWIW, my sense is Joseph Smith's approach to inventing a language and history for America was not much different.

Edited April 3 by Zosimus

[Zosimus]

10 hours ago, Ryan Dahle said:

Well, yes, if Joseph Smith actually had a very convincing artifact in his possession, such as the plates described by the witnesses, then that time would be sufficient, since he wouldn't have to worry about them expressing doubt or skepticism about its authenticity. But it is not a lot of time if he had a fairly dubious artifact that he was hoping they would affirm and corroborate, despite any suspicious features. Imagine, for instance, if the artifact only had like 5-10 plates with fairly large writing and that was made from painted modern tin. Smith might very well have been uncertain if his bogus plates would convince these folks, and he would be right to question their loyalty and trust. He wouldn't be able to assume they would just overlook suspicious activity. 

There are too many examples throughout history of witnesses corroborating suspicious artifacts. Sometimes they go along with it even if they know the artifact is dubious. There are a number of reasons why, but usually it boils down to the witnesses have something to gain or something to lose, or some combination of both.

I gave the example earlier of police investigators and a wide range of church and state officials going along with the Etruscan texts (scariths) that Curzio buried throughout his hometown. Even if state officials knew the artifacts were fabricated, they vouched for their authenticity, because they all had enough to gain from it. There are dozens of similar examples over the past 400 years.

10 hours ago, Ryan Dahle said:

I think the limited time would be especially problematic for the Three Witnesses (particularly Whitmer and Cowdery). It is hard to come up with a plausible theory for how he convinced them that they saw an angel and the other artifacts or, alternatively, trusted them so quickly to be a part of his fraudulent scheme, and that they would affirm their witnesses so adamantly even after falling out with him. 

Its not that difficult to explain. I believe the witnesses to the gold plates and the witnesses to Strang's plates were motivated to vouch for the authenticity of the plates, because they had something to gain from it. They were similarly motivated to never recant, because they all had more to gain by not reversing their previous witness of the plates.

I know there's the argument out there that the Cowdery, Harris and the Whitmers faced tremendous hardship because of their testimonies, but IMO this is why they were quick to fall out with Smith and then Brigham Young. They perceived they would benefit by falling out and starting their own movements. But as the plates were central to the movements that they were starting themselves, they needed to maintain their testimonies of the authenticity of the plates and their angelic witness. They benefited by falling out with Smith, while at the same time they also benefitted by maintaining their testimony of the plates.

 

[Ryan Dahle]

9 hours ago, Zosimus said:

There are too many examples throughout history of witnesses corroborating suspicious artifacts. Sometimes they go along with it even if they know the artifact is dubious. There are a number of reasons why, but usually it boils down to the witnesses have something to gain or something to lose, or some combination of both.

That's not even what we are talking about. The point of this portion of the discussion was whether the Whitmers should be viewed as unreliable witnesses, by default, because of their close association with Smith (despite the fact that he had only known most of them for a few weeks). 

As for other precedents for false witnesses, each instance would need to be thoroughly compared to the Witnesses of the Book of Mormon. Otherwise, just as in the example of the Strangite witnesses that you tried to employ earlier, similarities can easily be inflated while important differences may be ignored. It seems like that was the point of Smac's line of questioning earlier. And when he demonstrated you were misrepresenting the parallels, you all of a sudden wanted to stop talking about the witnesses and their motivations (ostensibly because of a strange aversion on your part to discuss the quality of their characters, as if that wasn't obviously relevant and ultimately unavoidable in this type of discussion).

Now you seem interested, once again, in discussing their motivations for fraud. I think if you would have continued the conversation with Smac at the point where you chose to disengage, it would have been quite illuminating. 

[champatsch]

On 4/2/2026 at 11:15 AM, Calm said:

I actually haven’t been able to read it, but he talked about his ideas on this board some iirc.  

His book was published in 2012, I think.  Was wondering how much info at the time was available onEModE, etc in the text and if Brant interacted with it, what your response is.

https://gregkofford.com/products/the-gift-and-power

I haven’t kept up on his work since he hasn’t posted much on the board.

Yes, I am quite familiar with the view of his 2011 book. I am an expert in this area – beyond him in expertise.

Consider the beginning of the 1829 dictation. This opening verse has, for the most part, fairly simple syntax, persistent over centuries.

Quote

(Mosiah 1:1) And now there was no more contention in all the land of Zarahemla
        among all the people which belonged to king Benjamin,
        so that king Benjamin had continual peace all the remainder of his days.

The way the revelation worked for the names is that Joseph Smith saw them spelled out in English. He did not just hear them, because he corrected scribal spelling of names in some cases, even when the scribal spelling was phonetically appropriate English spelling.

So in mh0101, at a minimum, Zarahemla and Benjamin (twice) were revealed as visible words to Joseph Smith. Perhaps even "king Benjamin." The idea for the view that the Book of Mormon text was the result of a hybrid of revealed thoughts and revealed words is that the rest was not shown to Joseph Smith as words; rather, it was revealed as thoughts. In this case, it looks like three or four stretches of thought, broken up by three occurrences of two names.

As far as lexical choice, disputes and strife were more common than contention in the 19c, rest was more likely than remainder, and life more likely than days. In the latter case, however, days is more appropriate in the sense of time of rule. The more likely choices were appropriate as pseudo-archaic wordings as well.

We might even question whether Joseph Smith would have begun with just "now" rather than "and now." The Ngram viewer suggests that he would have preferred just "now": https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=And+now+there+was%2CNow+there+was&year_start=1701&year_end=1829&corpus=en&smoothing=0. And would he have used "all" three times? Perhaps not.

As far as syntax, "people who" was more likely than "people that," which was much more likely than "people which." Only one of 25 pseudo-archaic authors used "people which," three times, and he was an editor of Shakespeare. So he was highly literate and much more knowledgeable in nonbiblical Early Modern English than Joseph Smith. ("People that|who(m)" occur 63 times in 25 pseudo-archaic texts.)

One general point is that the entire personal relative pronoun complex of the Book of Mormon is archaic but not biblical or pseudo-archaic in formation (it is mostly which). So the which in mh0101 was probably revealed as a word, perhaps even "people which" revealed as a unit. And as mentioned, inconsequential syntax being revealed as words, like personal which, implies specific revelation of important substantives. This supports the real possibility that contention and remainder were revealed as words. Here I will leave it at that.

So, what are we left with? A discontinuous revelation of words and thoughts, at times highly discontinuous. I see such a hybrid revelation as problematic and difficult for a human to parse. This is one reason I do not support such a view.

[Ryan Dahle]

2 hours ago, champatsch said:

So, what are we left with? A discontinuous revelation of words and thoughts, at times highly discontinuous. I see such a hybrid revelation as problematic and difficult for a human to parse. This is one reason I do not support such a view.

Another reason is simply time. If Joseph Smith was supposed to be studying things out in his mind and then asking if they are right, that would have naturally resulted in a a much slower translation. And we also would very likely have reports from the witnesses commenting on his deliberation process. Instead, he just reads steadily from the translation devices, day after day, without any mention of him wanting to revise, adjust, or otherwise refine the text. If it he were the one clothing raw ideas in his own language, I think there would be evidence of him struggling to find the right words, both in the extant original manuscript and in the reports from the witnesses. And if he spent much time deliberating over the text, that would very likely have slowed down the translation considerably, such that it might not have been possible to dictate in the timeframe that it was produced. 

On another front, it is technically possible that distinct words could be revealed to Smith's mind, rather than being visually represented in the translation device, but to me that would essentially still be a revelation of words (rather than ideas). And the problems with the hybrid approach you mentioned before would still be at play (with a constant and confusing vacillation of revealed words + revealed ideas). 

Another problem, under Gardner's mentalese model, is simply the redundancy of having Smith mentally formulate words to express the raw ideas of the text, and then having those mentally formulated words show up on his translation device for him to then read, as if he couldn't have simply spoken them when they came to his mind. Then there is the issue of human fallibility. What would happen if he were to hesitate or deliberate in his mind about how to say the text. Would he have to just keep thinking and iterating until an "acceptable" option showed up on the translation device? Or would the text on the device shift in real time as he waffled back and forth about how to best express an idea? Depending on what solution one might assume, I think this again would result in a host of errors in the text or else much longer periods of deliberation, in which nothing would show up in the device until he mentally found a sufficient mode of expression. 

Yet another problem is that the text has truly remarkable intertextual control, both externally with biblical texts and internally. If Smith were responsible for the wording of the text, I think we would see far less specific and impressive intertextuality on various fronts.

The list goes on, but there are a number of reasons that believers in the Book of Mormon should abandon the "revealed ideas" model of the text. The robust and multifaceted archaism is one major line of evidence pointing towards that conclusion, but there are other reasons as well. 

[Calm]

On 4/2/2026 at 8:37 AM, Zosimus said:

Idk, were the dictionaries and glossaries that Chatterton used to isolate archaisms also circulating in the Americas? The KJV certainly was.

For me, Chatterton demonstrates that a 15-17 year old from an impoverished background with minimal education was capable of producing a set of pseudo-archaic documents that impressed the likes of Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Bryant and Blake. He wrote them himself. In 1768, he invented his own 15th century “provincial dialect” using nothing but dictionaries and glossaries from his local library. He did all this without his family and friends suspecting any fraud

Wiki claims it was more than just dictionaries and glossaries if I understand it correctly:

Quote

His pocket-money was spent on borrowing books from a circulating library; and he ingratiated himself with book collectors, in order to obtain access to John Weever, William Dugdale and Arthur Collins, as well as to Thomas Speght's edition of Chaucer, Spenser and other books.[3] At some point he came across Elizabeth Cooper's anthology of verse, which is said to have been a major source for his inventions.[8]

Chatterton's "Rowleian" jargon appears to have been chiefly the result of the study of John Kersey's Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, and it seems his knowledge even of Chaucer was very slight. His holidays were mostly spent at his mother's house, and much of them in the favourite retreat of his attic study there. He lived for the most part in an ideal world of his own, in the reign of Edward IV, during the mid-15th century, when the great Bristol merchant William II Canynges (died 1474), five times mayor of Bristol, patron and rebuilder of St Mary Redcliffe "still ruled in Bristol's civic chair." Canynges was familiar to him from his recumbent effigy in Redcliffe church, and is represented by Chatterton as an enlightened patron of art and literature.[9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Chatterton

Another source has him in possession of documents he could use and others he could borrow:

Quote

Chatterton also filled his hideaway with drawing materials and with the treasured manuscripts and ancient parchments he’d looted from the muniments room at St Mary Redcliffe….

He strove to create a jargon of the Middle Ages, by scrutinising books from the circulating library as well as those he obtained by ingratiating himself with Bristol’s booksellers. He appears to have drawn much from the Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, compiled by the philologist John Kersey and published in 1708. Other elements in his fabrication were likely taken from the works of the poet and antiquarian John Weever (1576-1632) and the writings of the antiquarian and herald John William Dugdale (1605-1686), who did a great deal to establish medieval history as a subject of serious study. Other sources appear to have been the antiquarian, genealogist and historian Arthur Collins (1682-1760) – best-known for his Peerage of England – and Thomas Speight’s editions of the great medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer (1340s-1400). Chatterton would have studied the poetry of Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) and Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays and likely had access to Elizabeth Cooper’s The Muses Library, a whopping 400-page tome containing the works of older English poets like Edward the Confessor (1003-1066) and the Earl of Surrey (1517-47).

Chatterton probably also plundered Thomas Percy’s three-volume Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), which included Percy’s highly useful Essay on the Ancient Minstrels, a work contrasting medieval with modern ballads. Another source seems to have been Ossian – a collection of ‘ancient Scottish epics’ the poet James MacPherson claimed to have transcribed either from accounts passed down orally or from old Gaelic manuscripts he’d discovered. These epics – the publication of which began in 1760 – were both massively popular and massively controversial, with Dr Johnson, among others, denouncing them as a fraud created by MacPherson himself. Out of these diverse, centuries-spanning sources – no doubt augmented by his finds in the muniment room – Chatterton cobbled together his fake medieval argot. 

https://www.davidcastleton.net/thomas-chatterton-poet-death-suicide-seventeen-forgery-medieval/#:~:text=This began to change when,the church some years earlier.

need to resort to chat again to,summarize, sorry, but too impatient to wait for my brain to catch up with my curiosity…

I asked it if there were comparable sources in Joseph’s environment for what Carmack and others had found in terms of archaic language

Quote

 

What Chatterton actually had (and why it matters)

Chatterton’s case works because of three specific conditions:

A. Medieval/early modern manuscript survival in place

Parish churches in England often retained:

pre-1600 parish registers

legal charters

liturgical documents

Some were written in:

late Middle English

Early Modern English 

or transitional forms

B. Antiquarian culture

England had:

Active manuscript collecting

Local antiquarians

A tradition of preserving and studying old texts

C. Dense historical continuity

Same institutions (churches, guilds, towns) operating for centuries

Documents accumulated rather than being recent

👉 This gave Chatterton direct exposure to genuinely old linguistic strata, even if he misunderstood or recombined them.

 

2) Now contrast: upstate New York (Joseph Smith’s environment)

A. Settlement timeline (critical constraint)

Western New York (Palmyra/Manchester area):

Substantial Euro-American settlement: post-1790

Explosive growth: 1800–1825 (Erie Canal era)

That means:

Local institutions were ~0–30 years old

There was no multi-century document accumulation

👉 This alone largely eliminates the Chatterton scenario.

 

B. What churches actually had in that region

Typical early 19th-century American churches:

They did have:

A King James Bible

Hymnals (e.g., Isaac Watts)

Sermons / printed theology

Possibly a Book of Common Prayer (Anglican/Episcopal contexts)

They did NOT have (in any routine sense):

16th-century manuscripts

archived parish records from the 1500s

early modern legal or ecclesiastical documents

Why:

These congregations were newly formed

They were not inheritors of medieval institutions

Record-keeping started locally in the early 1800s

 

👉 There is no evidence of American frontier churches functioning as manuscript repositories.

C. Libraries in the region

Types available:

Small subscription libraries

Private collections

Bookstores

What they typically contained:

Bibles

Classical works (sometimes)

Enlightenment-era books

Contemporary religious literature

 

What they generally did not contain:

Broad collections of 1500–1600 English texts

Early printed editions preserving nonstandard morphosyntax

Manuscript archives

Even where older works existed:

They were usually standardized editions

Not linguistically raw in the way Carmack’s argument requires

 

3) Availability of Early Modern English texts in America

This is the key nuance:

YES — Early Modern English was present via:

King James Bible (1611)

Some reprinted classics (e.g., The Pilgrim’s Progress)

NO — but the range was narrow:

Heavily filtered through:

religious canon

standardized print editions

Lacking:

broad corpus diversity

rare constructions

variant morphologies

👉 This is the difference between:

Exposure to a style vs Exposure to a linguistic system across many texts

 

Chatterton could approximate that because:

He had fragmentary access to older materials

Joseph Smith’s environment:

Provides deep exposure to one major text (KJV)

But not breadth across the Early Modern corpus

 

5) Could any pathway bridge that gap?

Let’s test plausible alternatives:

A. Imported old books?

Possible but rare

Frontier households prioritized practical/religious works

No evidence of extensive 16th-century collections locally

B. Clergy collections?

Ministers sometimes had libraries

But typically:

theological works

commentaries

not linguistic archives

C. Colleges?

Nearest institutions (e.g., Dartmouth, Union College) had older books

But:

no evidence of access

still limited compared to English archives

6) Bottom line

The English antiquarian environment that enabled Chatterton simply did not exist in early 19th-century upstate New York.

More precisely:

Local churches → no deep archival holdings

Local libraries → limited, modern, and filtered

Print culture → rich, but dominated by KJV-style standardization

So:

While archaic style was widely available, access to the full range of Early Modern English morphosyntax found across 1500–1600 texts was not.

Pulling out the bit on Carmack…

Quote

 

4) Why this matters for the Carmack argument

To reproduce features like:

“had spake”

non-KJV distributions of “which”

rare clause structures

You would need access to:

multiple Early Modern sources including non-canonical, non-standardized usage

 

Chatterton could approximate that because:

He had fragmentary access to older materials

Joseph Smith’s environment:

Provides deep exposure to one major text (KJV)

But not breadth across the Early Modern corpus

 

 

Since I don’t view Chat as an authority, I am posting this to show where the search would need to be to,show a true parallel situation between Chatterton and Smith.

I also noticed in my reading Chatterton’s description in his early and late childhood is dramatically different than Smith’s.

Chatterton was recognized as gifted by his mother, was quite the reader (but not of “small books”) and was published by age 11.

Joseph…not so much the reader or writer, though he was said by his mother to be a good storyteller (as in presenting material, whether he made it up himself or was presenting information he learned in his visions is what is debated).

 

Edited April 3 by Calm

[Zosimus]

19 hours ago, Ryan Dahle said:

That's not even what we are talking about. The point of this portion of the discussion was whether the Whitmers should be viewed as unreliable witnesses, by default, because of their close association with Smith (despite the fact that he had only known most of them for a few weeks). 

The point of this portion of the discussion was whether or not Joseph Smith "hardly knew" the Whitmers, after living in their home for 3-4 weeks while translating the gold plates. 

My opinion is by the time they witness the plates, they knew enough about the importance and significance of Smith's translation project to endorse it and support it and to commit to their testimonies all their lives.

19 hours ago, Ryan Dahle said:

As for other precedents for false witnesses, each instance would need to be thoroughly compared to the Witnesses of the Book of Mormon. Otherwise, just as in the example of the Strangite witnesses that you tried to employ earlier, similarities can easily be inflated while important differences may be ignored. It seems like that was the point of Smac's line of questioning earlier. And when he demonstrated you were misrepresenting the parallels, you all of a sudden wanted to stop talking about the witnesses and their motivations (ostensibly because of a strange aversion on your part to discuss the quality of their characters, as if that wasn't obviously relevant and ultimately unavoidable in this type of discussion).

I responded to Smac's line of questioning already. From my view, he is also misrepresenting the parallels, inflating some and ignoring others. So its a draw of sorts I suppose.

What's getting strange is your constant fixation on my unwillingness to discuss the moral character of Joseph Smith, James Strang and their witnesses. Discussing the moral character of Smith, Strang and the witnesses would be a waste of time. I don't mind discussing motives, so long as we "don't go down the path of depending on all the statements of all the angry villagers 40 years after the fact."

19 hours ago, Ryan Dahle said:

Now you seem interested, once again, in discussing their motivations for fraud. I think if you would have continued the conversation with Smac at the point where you chose to disengage, it would have been quite illuminating. 

See above. I don't frame Joseph as a con artist or a fraud. I did once use the term pious fraud, but qualified that I think fraud isn't the right term. My words were: ""I view the projects of both Smith and Strang as pious frauds, but even then I don't like the word fraud because I don't think Smith was necessarily a fraud. I believe he was sincere."

I also said I don't think con job is a fair label for the translation project, and I provided examples of other "imaginative historians" that did indeed fabricate histories for reasons that explain why I do not consider them to be con artists involved in fraud.

Edited April 4 by Zosimus

[Zosimus]

13 hours ago, Calm said:

I also noticed in my reading Chatterton’s description in his early and late childhood is dramatically different than Smith’s.

I brought Chatterton into the discussion not just as another example of a talented and "imaginative historian" who wrote pseudo-archaic works that still impress literary critics today. I mostly introduced him here as an example of how scholars like Jacob Bryant explained away Chatterton's natural talents to prove that Chatterton's works were authentically ancient. Similar explanations are often used to explain away Joseph's natural talents to prove that the Book of Mormon is authentically ancient: 

1. The "Ignorant Transcriber" argument. After interviewing Chatterton's mother, sister and friends, Bryant claimed that Chatterton was described as a dull boy incapable of instruction. He was fatherless and poor so his mother could only teach him to read from a music book and a Bible. Bryant's argument was that Chatterton was too ignorant and under-educated to have fabricated such sophisticated and apparently ancient material.
2. Lack of Historical and Geographical Knowledge The Rowley poems contained obscure historical references that Bryant believed a poorly educated charity-school boy could never have known. When writing in his own hand, Chatterton exhibited no familiarity with geography, believing for example that the Tiber River was in Arabia.
3. Unknowable dialects thought to be bad grammar. Rowley's poems were written in an older dialect that Chatterton couldn't have known. When critics complained about “bad grammar” Bryant pointed out that Chatterton had tried to fix up awkward 15th century language using his own 18th century language. Bryant also provided examples of grammar and syntax inaccessible to an under-educated teenager.
4. Chatterton was too poor and busy. "If a young lad of little or no principle should find a treasure of old poetry, and put it off for his own; I should not much wonder. But that such a person should compose to this amount, and then give the credit of it to another, is past my comprehension." The argument was that Chatterton was too busy trying to escape poverty that he wouldn't have time to do all of the above.
5. Witnesses to the process. Bryant interviewd neighbors who knew Chatterton intimately testified that they had seen him copying from ancient parchments and that he never hinted at being the author.
6. Too long and sophisticated to produce in so short a timeframe. 3,700 verses on various subjects and in very difficult language (see below) within the time frame of about eighteen months. His verses were admired by Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth etc. Not a single copy/paste job from the KJV and no "it came to pass" filler 

Edited April 4 by Zosimus

[Ryan Dahle]

5 hours ago, Zosimus said:

On 4/3/2026 at 8:57 AM, Ryan Dahle said:

That's not even what we are talking about. The point of this portion of the discussion was whether the Whitmers should be viewed as unreliable witnesses, by default, because of their close association with Smith (despite the fact that he had only known most of them for a few weeks). 

The point of this portion of the discussion was whether or not Joseph Smith "hardly knew" the Whitmers, after living in their home for 3-4 weeks while translating the gold plates. 

My opinion is by the time they witness the plates, they knew enough about the importance and significance of Smith's translation project to endorse it and support it and to commit to their testimonies all their lives.

Yes, it is whether Smith 'hardly knew" the Whitmers--BUT in the context of him presumably orchestrating an elaborate fraud. If he had a shoddy artifact and expected the Whitmers to go along with his claims even if they didn't believe the artifact was authentic, that would have been a huge risk. He "hardly knew" these people well enough to assume they would all just overlook a dubious artifact. Likewise, if he expected Oliver Cowdery and David Whitmer to just imagine an angel and a whole set of ancient artifacts or to blatantly lie about their experience, that would also have been a huge risk. Again, Smith barely knew these people in that context, and they barely knew him. If Smith's claims were fraudulent, it would have been a huge risk to trust these people that he had just met a few weeks before. This is why I think it is inappropriate to blanketly discount the testimonies of the Whitmer clan (which is the whole point of this portion of the conversation). It is true that they weren't disinterested parties. But Smith also didn't have a lot of time to coopt them into an elaborate fraud or to trust that they would lie or embellish details to support his claims. 

On the other hand, if Smith knew the artifact was genuine and if he knew he really had seen an angel and that the Lord was promising a similar vision to chosen witnesses, then the short amount of time that he had known these individuals would be rather irrelevant. So, yes, I guess we agree they "they knew enough about the importance and significance of Smith's translation project to endorse it and support it and to commit to their testimonies all their lives." I assume this is because they witnessed a genuinely convincing artifact and also that Oliver and David experienced a genuinely convincing vision of the plates and the angel. You seem to think they were either deluded or pious frauds. 

I'll let you have the last word on this topic. We seem to be having miscommunication. I'm not sure if, as in the other discussion of the lengthy plates, you are just not following the flow of the thread or what.

5 hours ago, Zosimus said:

What's getting strange is your constant fixation on my unwillingness to discuss the moral character of Joseph Smith, James Strang and their witnesses. Discussing the moral character of Smith, Strang and the witnesses would be a waste of time. I don't mind discussing motives, so long as we "don't go down the path of depending on all the statements of all the angry villagers 40 years after the fact."

The reason I keep bringing this up is because the whole discussion surrounds the credibility of the witnesses, and their moral character is obviously integral to their credibility. Are they the type of people who are going to lie, embellish, and engage in elaborate fraud in this context, or not. There are only so many logical options here. They were either (1) lying, (2) delusional, or (3) telling the truth.

You persist in bringing up talking points that hint that they are lying and engaged in a fraud, but then you keep backing away from that position, as if it is unsavory to talk about. For instance, you wrote:

On 4/2/2026 at 11:48 PM, Zosimus said:

There are too many examples throughout history of witnesses corroborating suspicious artifacts. Sometimes they go along with it even if they know the artifact is dubious. There are a number of reasons why, but usually it boils down to the witnesses have something to gain or something to lose, or some combination of both.

I gave the example earlier of police investigators and a wide range of church and state officials going along with the Etruscan texts (scariths) that Curzio buried throughout his hometown. Even if state officials knew the artifacts were fabricated, they vouched for their authenticity, because they all had enough to gain from it. There are dozens of similar examples over the past 400 years.

I find this type of constant innuendo, followed by an unwillingness to talk about the moral character of the witnesses, as utterly incoherent (and slightly annoying). If you don't want to talk about the moral character of the witnesses, then stop bringing up talking points that implicitly impugn their characters. Again, I'll let you have the last word, since this conversation is clearly going nowhere. 

Edited April 4 by Ryan Dahle

[webbles]

5 hours ago, Zosimus said:

I brought Chatterton into the discussion not just as another example of a talented and "imaginative historian" who wrote pseudo-archaic works that still impress literary critics today. I mostly introduced him here as an example of how scholars like Jacob Bryant explained away Chatterton's natural talents to prove that Chatterton's works were authentically ancient. Similar explanations are often used to explain away Joseph's natural talents to prove that the Book of Mormon is authentically ancient: 

1. The "Ignorant Transcriber" argument. After interviewing Chatterton's mother, sister and friends, Bryant claimed that Chatterton was described as a dull boy incapable of instruction. He was fatherless and poor so his mother could only teach him to read from a music book and a Bible. Bryant's argument was that Chatterton was too ignorant and under-educated to have fabricated such sophisticated and apparently ancient material.
2. Lack of Historical and Geographical Knowledge The Rowley poems contained obscure historical references that Bryant believed a poorly educated charity-school boy could never have known. When writing in his own hand, Chatterton exhibited no familiarity with geography, believing for example that the Tiber River was in Arabia.
3. Unknowable dialects thought to be bad grammar. Rowley's poems were written in an older dialect that Chatterton couldn't have known. When critics complained about “bad grammar” Bryant pointed out that Chatterton had tried to fix up awkward 15th century language using his own 18th century language. Bryant also provided examples of grammar and syntax inaccessible to an under-educated teenager.
4. Chatterton was too poor and busy. "If a young lad of little or no principle should find a treasure of old poetry, and put it off for his own; I should not much wonder. But that such a person should compose to this amount, and then give the credit of it to another, is past my comprehension." The argument was that Chatterton was too busy trying to escape poverty that he wouldn't have time to do all of the above.
5. Witnesses to the process. Bryant interviewd neighbors who knew Chatterton intimately testified that they had seen him copying from ancient parchments and that he never hinted at being the author.
6. Too long and sophisticated to produce in so short a timeframe. 3,700 verses on various subjects and in very difficult language (see below) within the time frame of about eighteen months. His verses were admired by Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth etc. Not a single copy/paste job from the KJV and no "it came to pass" filler 

Some of the explanations are similar and still fit (Lack of Historical and Geographical Knowledge, Too long and sophisticated).  But the "ignorant transcriber" and 'too poor and busy' don't fit because after Chatterton's death, people looked into his story and were able to find that he had a decent amount of schooling and read a lot.  One of his first poems (in his name, sent to his sister) has obvious connections to other authors and he is known to have read at least 70 books while at the charity school.  So Bryant was either misinformed or this information came after him.  With Smith, we've been searching for anything to show that Smith was well read.  The only evidence is his reading the Bible.  No one has brought up him reading books.

And the "unknowable dialects" isn't similar either.  Rowley's poems have been scrutinized and it shows that Chatterton was guessing at what an archaic structure would look like.  It is definitely Chatterton's language with archaism laced through it vs an archaic language with Chatterton's language layered on top.  He definitely worked on injecting archaism into it and did an impressive job but the writing is definitely within his reach based on the books that he has read.  But Carmack argues that the Book of Mormon has archaic structure that doesn't match the KJV and wasn't something that Joseph would have access to.  And also that it is much more structurally laced through the text.

And the "witnesses" aren't really the same.  We know that Chatterton had access to ancient parchments.  His father had a collection and had even give them to his wife for use around the house.

[Pyreaux]

My Secular Theory: Abyssinian Sensul Plates Theory

Eight Witnesses claimed to have "hefted" and "handled" the plates. This is the hardest part for the hallucination theories. A major hurdle for the prop theory is that high-quality metal plates are expensive and difficult to manufacture. Joseph could not have made them, bought them, nor had he the ability to come up with the Book of Mormon, at least not alone.

There could be a natural solution, I think sometimes critics (by nature) tend to lack the special imagination required to solve problems they come up with. They never entertain a secular idea that there was an ancient metallic artifact in 19th-century America, a genuine ancient object that was displaced or a misidentified historical relic. In this scenario, the plates are in America, aren't from ancient America, but are 16th- or 17th-century Ethiopic liturgical artifacts brought to the Americas by a traveler, a Jesuit, or a colonial-era collector.

It's an Ethiopian "Sensul", a folding book, a metal-leaf manuscript would be remarkably similar to Joseph's description. There are metal ones made of copper, bronze or brass, sometimes gilded. They did use a D "ring" or "wire" binding through the edges of the metal sheets, exactly what the Three and Eight Witnesses described. Ge'ez is a Semitic script that looks incredibly exotic and ancient to an 1820s American.

When Martin Harris took the "Anthon Transcript" to New York, Professor Anthon reportedly said the characters resembled Egyptian, Chaldaic, Assyrian, and Arabic. Ge'ez is a Semitic language like Arabic and Chaldaic but uses a unique syllabary. It is a cousin to the scripts Anthon would have recognized. If Joseph did copy actual characters from an Ethiopic metal artifact, Anthon’s reaction makes perfect sense: he saw script that was real and ancient, but he just couldn't quite place the specific dialect because Ge'ez was extremely rare in American academia in 1828.

Historically, the Portuguese had a strong military and religious presence in Ethiopia in the 1500s. Maybe a Portuguese knight or Jesuit priest traveled from Ethiopia to the New World or if their collection was looted, it would explain the presence of a high-quality European steel sword alongside an Ethiopic metal book. Portuguese mariners used sophisticated brass nocturnals and astrolabes. If one of these was found with the Ethiopic plates, Joseph’s savant brain would naturally think the strange brass ball and sword were all somehow connected with the ancient records with them.

Ethiopia has a rich tradition of Pseudepigrapha lost to the rest of the world. If a man calling himself "Moroni" provided Joseph with a set of stolen Ethiopic gilded texts and an English translation of it or an Ethiopic Grammer book, Joseph could have a translation with themes that perfectly match the Book of Mormon. A Judaism mixed with Christianity, and a history of lost tribe or a righteous remnant fleeing the wicked city of Jerusalem.

Early Ethiopian Christians and the Beta Israel Jewish community claim to be Lost Tribes who fled Jerusalem. The Kebra Nagast ("The Glory of the Kings") is the national epic of Ethiopia. The Kebra Nagast deals heavily with the idea of a chosen lineage and a cursed one. The Kebra Nagast argues that the black skin of the Ethiopians is a sign of God's new favor. It contains a profound belief that the "Zion" (the Presence of God) moved from Jerusalem to Ethiopia.

The biggest "anachronisms" in the text, are at home in Ethiopia. Horses, chariots, high-quality European/Islamic trade steel was common in Ethiopia by the 1500s. Ethiopia is a primary center for ancient barley and Teff (a cereal grain). One of the few places where elephants and honey bees have a deep, co-dependent history. "Beehive fences" keep elephants away from crops. The "Lehi Trail" is widely accepted to go through the Arabian Peninsula (specifically Nahom in Yemen). Maybe it did. Instead of a 10,000-mile trek across the Pacific, the original story was about the crossing of the Red Sea into Ethiopia.

In the 1820s, the Church Missionary Society was active in Ethiopia. They were producing The Ethiopic Psalter. Printed versions of Ethiopic texts. Also, Grammars, the English guides on how to read Ge'ez. The English translations were based on the KJV-style English popular in British academia at the time.

In the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition, wealthy patrons or royalty would commission a scribe to create a specific book for a specific monastery or for a family. Metal leaves (gilded copper or brass) were reserved for "Eternal Records", royal genealogies, land grants, or unique hagiographies (lives of saints). If a royal family's "House Record" was stolen or looted, there would be no other copy in existence. It was a physical object intended to be the only one of its kind.

The "Great Looting" of Magdala (1868) occurred after Joseph’s time, but it illustrates what could happen. The British expedition to Abyssinia resulted in the seizure of over 1,000 unique manuscripts from the Emperor’s library. There was an earlier displacements during the Jesuit expulsion (1630s) and the wars with the Adal Sultanate. During these conflicts, entire libraries were burned, and a few metal books survived were often those carried away by fleeing individuals. 

If Joseph’s plates were an ancient 17th century Ethiopic-Jewish history from a Beta Israel family, it could have been a text that never made it. Joseph sincerely believes he has found the record of "Ancient Americans" because the artifact was physically real and he found it in America. The only lie maybe exactly where it came from.

In the early 1800s, museums like the American Museum in New York were not the high-security vaults they are today. They were "cabinets of curiosities" that often held artifacts from Egypt, Rome, and the Near East brought back by sailors and early explorers. Sometimes an artifact is stolen by a disgruntled employee or a collector.

The thief sells it, or loans it, or fearing getting caught, buries the object in a rural area (like Upstate New York) to "cool off." They die or are imprisoned, and the object is found decades later by a renown "treasure hunter." This would explain why an Egyptian-styled object, allegedly confirmed by Professor Anton, would be in a New York forest without requiring God or "ancient" trans-oceanic travel. It’s a displaced yet authentic object.

I think they were high metal plates, a brass ball, a breastplate and a sword, maybe there was a pair of oversized, uniquely set spectacles (perhaps old navigational lenses or jeweler’s loupes). Maybe when Joseph puts them on it helped him read tiny writing. Maybe aside the plates, one day Joseph borrows a few other odds and ends from the man who plays Moroni. He shows the collection, though all mismatched, it all looked aged and mysterious to 1820s farmers.

Alternatively in 1820, People were finding Native American Hopewell artifacts (hammered copper, gorgets, and stone tablets) in mounds. Because they didn't believe Native Americans were capable of such work, they "misidentified" them as Egyptian or Phoenician. A treasure hunter might find a hammered copper Hopewell plate and call it "Egyptian". If you were a treasure hunter in 1825 New York, you had a decent chance of finding copper or silver scraps left by Native Americans or early settlers. However, because of "Egyptomania" trend, you would just as likely have convinced yourself (and your neighbors) that a revolutionary-era brass object in good condition was an ancient gold relic, and the 'treasure hunter' simply saw what his cultural bias told him to see: an ancient book.

If we position Joseph as an Idiot Savant, someone with a genius-level gifts combined with a naive or magical worldview. A man calling himself "Moroni" knows Joseph is a "glass-looker" with a local following. Secretly loans him objects for a time to support Joseph's reputation as a successful treasure finder. Joseph’s "Savant" quality is his hyper-associative memory. He sees these mismatched "props" provided by the thief and builds a world-class epic around the objects. 

If the plates were stolen from a museum, a Jesuit mission, or a private collection of "antiquities," the cost of production and the time is zero. Joseph indeed runs for his life through the woods with a sack with a heavy golden book, Josiah indeed saw it when he made it home, people were indeed chasing him, they indeed all believe he has a gold book. The problem is they are "hot." They are recognizable as stolen property. He finds witnesses to inspect them, not too long before needing to return them.

The Lost 116 Pages of the "Book of Lehi" was a longer direct translation of a royal Ethiopic record, likely contained explicit references to the Red Sea, Axum, or the Nile. Or "Moroni" stole those pages, Joseph realized he could not or should not do another re-translation, but pivot to make a micro draft. Maybe this is where Joseph’s Hyper-Associative Memory kicks in, he takes the source material, or memory of it, and strips much of it away, "Americanizes" it on the fly, the Ethiopic themes become more American ones and a dash of the local Mound Builder mythology, the "anachronisms" aren't mistakes, they are what remains of geographical markers for the wrong continent.

This took 3 days to write before clicking submit, I'm done for now. If there is no angel, just maybe an equally extraordinary thing happened. This seems to be just as plausible as anything else I've read.

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."~ Sherlock Holmes

On 3/31/2026 at 4:47 PM, Zosimus said:

This is not in the linked article. If you are discussing all this with AI, you might be getting hallucinations. I’ve seen this quite a lot with ChatGPT. It will make up an authoritative quote and even cite a journal and a paper, but the paper might be completely hallucinated, and the quote is loosely based on words it finds in similar papers in the cited journal.

Can you find the actual quote in that journal? Or ask your AI to verify the quote, pointing out that it might be hallucinating. It will usually fess up if it has and you catch it. 

It seems like the quote is real. I fed just the quote to 3 different, free but unprompted, AIs, all are saying the quote is by Huchet in 2010. I'm also getting from all 3 is broken links for what is supposed to be Huchet, J.-B. (2010). "Vestiges d’insectes et pratiques funéraires moche". Search engines aren't finding the quote at all. 

Edited April 5 by Pyreaux

[Navidad]

Happy Easter to all. This is a day I am reminded of the wideness in God's mercy. That means a lot to me and provides me with hope for my own eternal destiny. 

Related to this thread, I resist being  compartmentalized into how I am allowed to respond. For example, I reject both options to respond that Joseph Smith was a fraud or that he was a great prophet. He was the founder of a church. He was one in a long line of founders of churches. It is natural that a member of a church that he founded holds some kind of a hagiographic perspective on his life and work. I don't begrudge them that. I simply am not there. I believe that Joseph Smith most likely wrote the Book of Mormon with help from his friends. I believe he had some visions. I have no idea whether they were from God or not. I reject aspects of some of their beliefs as they developed over time. I reject that Christ told Joseph that all the creeds were abomination to Him. That (for me) was Christological projection. For me, that type of verbiage is inconsistent with the nature of Christ. I place Joseph in the same place I would put many reformers, founders of movements, and heroes of differing faith groups. I put him in the same place I put myself—deeply flawed and in need of Christ. 

As you all know, I don't believe the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the only anything. Ditto for every other denomination, group, or gathering. So, when it comes to the LDS Church, I bear it no ill will. I regret those exclusivistic doctrines that developed over time because of the lived experiences of its leaders, those responsible for their doctrines and their evolution over time. I believe that has also happened in most other Christian groups, hence the diversity of beliefs within the Christian community.

My LDS friends have often told me the others must be wrong because God is not a God of confusion. Ok, but we humans are experts at it. We are also experts at binarisms,  throwing stones, ranking, generalizing, normalizing, and dehumanizing those who aren't us. I confess to some feelings somewhere between anger and sadness at the times my wife came home from the ward in tears. Therefore we no longer go. At the same time, I deeply value and appreciate the human kindness shown us by many of our LDS friends. Therefore I am in a conundrum, a conflict, and confused about how to relate to my LDS friends. However, I know I will not cast them out of Christianity because of my confusion. I will not relegate them or their founder to something less than the fullness of the Christian life (even though they have done that to my wife and me . . . Sorry, I just couldn't resist that). 

I love writing. I have written thousands of pages. Therefore I have no problem with Joseph Smith doing that. The early LDS leaders produced many volumes with many pages of material. Many were quite prolific. I have never tried to figure out an alternative source of the Book of Mormon, because I simply assume that Joseph wrote it with the help of his friends. I have some struggle with the Whitmers, solely and only because they were kind of, sort of religious coddiwomplers, wandering here and there, always thinking of a new way to express their desire for faith.

 

I will continue to defend my LDS friends to the non-LDS Christian Fundamentalists I come across in my work. I will continue to claim a special LDS friend as one of the Godliest men I have ever known. I will continue to believe that D&C 1:30 was written, as it says to the Church collectively and not to the Church individually. I still might agree to write the first academic history of the LeBarons. I have friends in that community who I equate with those in the LDS Church, and every other church wherein I have friends. It is only fair that the LeBarons not be left with only sensationalist writings about their fascinating history. Beliefs are stubborn things, especially when held with certitude and exclusivity. I am with Peter Enns in declaring certainty a sin. Best wishes and Happy Easter again, to all. 

[Calm]

11 hours ago, Zosimus said:

My opinion is by the time they witness the plates, they knew enough about the importance and significance of Smith's translation project to endorse it and support it and to commit to their testimonies all their lives.

That really depends on the type of people they were, imo.  Why assume all the witnesses were the kind that would commit in just the necessary fashion?

Some people will commit to baptism after the first encounter with the missionaries and be devout the rest of their lives with others after baptism disengage as soon as the missionaries they connected are transferred.  Others will accept the possibility of baptism even though they insist on having more lessons, etc before truly committing; others refuse to commit at all, but want to continue the lessons and months or even years later finally commit for the rest of their lives; others will never commit no matter how many lessons and deep relationships with members they have.  There are many more variations on commitment to this one faith community, all with their own reasons of why and why not they commit with these patterns.

Plenty of golden investigators never get baptized and sometimes the most unlikely candidate is the one who commits and is faithful life long.

Unless Joseph was a mind reader or overly naive about people, why would he assume he could trust these men not to publicly challenge him, immediately or in the future?

Edited April 4 by Calm

[Calm]

Zosimus, If you don’t like “pious fraud”, I have seen someone use (you perhaps?) “pious fiction”.  Avoids the connotation of immoral personal gain “fraud” carries, imo.  Chat supplied the option of “devotional mythmaking”, which I rather like.  It claims no one uses the phrase yet with Joseph, though Jan Shipps used “myth making” for him. (Haven’t checked).  I can only find one hit of use of that term with Google, two with the variation of “devotional myth-making”.

Edited April 4 by Calm

[Zosimus]

 

I think the misunderstanding has been around this point:

11 hours ago, Ryan Dahle said:

You seem to think they were either deluded or pious frauds. 

And also this:

12 hours ago, Ryan Dahle said:

There are only so many logical options here. They were either (1) lying, (2) delusional, or (3) telling the truth.

You are not wrong, but I can't help but to want a 4th option, whether its epistemologically sound or not.

I've tried to explain through examples of other sincere people believing that they were playing a role in a restoration of a lost truth, including ancient texts. I don't see them as liars or frauds. Swedenborg is another example. He wrote thousands of pages describing his visits with angels in spiritual worlds and the teachings and texts that the angels revealed to him. I don't think Swedenborg was lying, or delusional, but he also wasn't telling the truth as I would understand it. I don't believe Swedenborg actually spoke with angels. But I believe he was sincere in believing that he did, and that he wasn't running some con job or fraud.

I don't know what truly happened to Swedenborg, so I don't want to be forced into calling Swedenborg a deceiver, a dupe, or someone who was simply insane. I feel the same about Joseph Smith and the witnesses. I just find myself unable to collapse it into three options, so I suppose I am trying to resolve for myself what a 4th option might look like and what the implications would be.

So I think we can close this out with our agreement that "by the time the witnesses experience the plates, they knew enough about the importance and significance of Smith's translation project to endorse it and support it and to commit to their testimonies all their lives." 

Thanks for the discussion

[Calm]

41 minutes ago, Zosimus said:

I don't believe Swedenborg actually spoke with angels. But I believe he was sincere in believing that he did

Doesn’t that mean he was delusional?  Someone can be delusional in something, but not be insane (legally incompetent).

Or if you are thinking he was assuming a dream or day dream or NDE/out of body type of experience was a visitation or vision when it wasn’t, that could be viewed as simply misunderstanding his world because he had a religious belief that angels may visit one in dreams.

Insanity is not usually used in clinical diagnosis, but is used, I believe, as a legal term about whether someone can understand right from wrong. 
 

Psychosis is probably what you mean by insanity.  Psychosis is more than just one simple delusion or perhaps unrealistic view of what dreams, etc or some other incorrect (if it actually is) religious belief mean.  It is a loss of contact with reality.

Edited April 5 by Calm

[Zosimus]

8 hours ago, Calm said:

Zosimus, If you don’t like “pious fraud”, I have seen someone use (you perhaps?) “pious fiction”.  Avoids the connotation of immoral personal gain “fraud” carries, imo.  Chat supplied the option of “devotional mythmaking”, which I rather like.  It claims no one uses the phrase yet with Joseph, though Jan Shipps used “myth making” for him. (Haven’t checked).  I can only find one hit of use of that term with Google, two with the variation of “devotional myth-making”.

I do much prefer all these options, as fraud is such a loaded term.

I'm following Urs App's idea of a long-running tradition of "original truth" restorers across a wide range of traditions. What stands out is how consistently the same elements appear across different cultures and contexts, without any obvious imitation.

Drawing on App's case studies, the pattern involves:

1. An original pure teaching or proto-revelation.
2. A Golden Age → Age of Degeneration → Age of Restoration arc.
3. A transmission lineage connecting the original teaching to the present. 
4. Pivotal figures who serve as links in the chain.
5. A protagonist as the restorer, the one who recovers the primordial doctrine.
6. Ancient texts and material objects serving as proof.

He even references Smith while defining #6 in the pattern: "divine revelations stored on golden tablets in heaven or in some American prophet's backyard."

App's point (that I'm grappling with) is that this isn't a playbook for fraudsters and con artists. It's the pattern of restorationism, and seekers like Joseph Smith unwittingly fall into the pattern because the template already existed and the hunger for original truth is genuinely human.

Devotional mythmaking does capture the idea. So does Jan Shipps' mythmaking. But making myths kinda sounds like lying, so it still feels inadequate to me. The word I keep returning to is restorationist, as it describes the pattern of restoring something that was lost, rather than inventing or imagining something new. It describes a pattern of recovering truth without passing moral judgements

Edited April 5 by Zosimus

[Zosimus]

14 hours ago, webbles said:

Some of the explanations are similar and still fit (Lack of Historical and Geographical Knowledge, Too long and sophisticated).  But the "ignorant transcriber" and 'too poor and busy' don't fit because after Chatterton's death, people looked into his story and were able to find that he had a decent amount of schooling and read a lot.  One of his first poems (in his name, sent to his sister) has obvious connections to other authors and he is known to have read at least 70 books while at the charity school.  So Bryant was either misinformed or this information came after him.  With Smith, we've been searching for anything to show that Smith was well read.  The only evidence is his reading the Bible.  No one has brought up him reading books.

True. Bryant was wrong about Chatterton's education. By 15 Chatterton had read several books at the charity school and his early poems show his literary influences. His charity school education was far more substantial than Bryant claimed.

Quote

And the "unknowable dialects" isn't similar either.  Rowley's poems have been scrutinized and it shows that Chatterton was guessing at what an archaic structure would look like.  It is definitely Chatterton's language with archaism laced through it vs an archaic language with Chatterton's language layered on top.  He definitely worked on injecting archaism into it and did an impressive job but the writing is definitely within his reach based on the books that he has read.  But Carmack argues that the Book of Mormon has archaic structure that doesn't match the KJV and wasn't something that Joseph would have access to.  And also that it is much more structurally laced through the text.

Yes, Chatterton was mixing his invented pseudo-archaism with his modern usage, whereas Champatsch argues the BoM exhibits something almost inverse. If Carmack is right, that's super significant.

Quote

And the "witnesses" aren't really the same.  We know that Chatterton had access to ancient parchments.  His father had a collection and had even give them to his wife for use around the house.

The old parchment collection at the church does explain pseudo-archaic Rowleyese in a way that the archaisms in the BoM can't be explained. However, I do think it's worth looking at 16th-17th century reference works and older Bibles that were circulating in lending libraries and were on shelves at, for example, the charity school Hiram attended.

But these are all fair points you make, so let me reframe what I think the Chatterton example demonstrates. That is, restored texts (whether the Rowley Poems or the Book of Mormon) are so powerful and timely that many will embrace them as true without much concern for evidence or provenance. Having committed, they are then motivated to defend the text to preserve authenticity. That's the overlap with Chatterton I find interesting.

For example, Bryant defended the ancient Rowley texts by arguing Chatterton was too ignorant and poor to have produced such sophisticated works. When skeptics established that Chatterton was actually well-read and his charity school education was decent, the defense shifted to something else, the language, the historical and geographical references, the parchment witnesses. 

But alongside the evidence-based arguments, a second line of defense ran in parallel. William Blake bypassed the debates entirely and simply declared: "I believe both Macpherson and Chatterton that what they say is ancient, is so." For Blake, the poems were too mighty and too ancient-feeling to have been a con job orchestrated by a 15 year old boy. He could feel that burning in the bosom, despite the critics.

What's interesting is that both lines of defense are recognizable in this thread. Smac, Champatsch and Ryan Dahle are doing sophisticated evidence work, the same work Bryant did for Chatterton. But this is hard because critics will challenge the evidence requiring another kick to the can down the road. At that point yesterday's Nibley apologetics and Sorenson's Mormon's Codex are no longer enough. We are then introduced to more sophisticated  word-play analysis, pseudo-archaic language, and the impossible-to-argue-against witnesses to the tangible plates. Alongside all these arguments Smac also does the Blake move, describing Moroni's Promise as "the catalyst" from which everything else is derivative of and is "downstream from". The evidence doesn't establish the foundation, only personal revelation can do that, and the evidence reinforces it. Like Blake, Teddyaware skips the evidence entirely, "once authentic faith is exercised, the doors of spiritual perception are unlocked and it becomes so perfectly obvious that the Book of Mormon is a mighty miracle."

This IMO is what App means by #3 transmission lineages. The defense of the restored text becomes the transmission. The restored tradition thrives not despite its critics but because of them. The irony is the critics are likely so active because they sense that same mightiness and power in the restoration. This is likely why Strang's movement failed, his restored texts weren't as powerful as the Book of Mormon, and they weren't as timely (published after the Book of Mormon), so after he was killed he lost his defenders and the critics along with them. 

Edited April 5 by Zosimus

[Zosimus]

15 hours ago, Pyreaux said:

They never entertain a secular idea that there was an ancient metallic artifact in 19th-century America, a genuine ancient object that was displaced or a misidentified historical relic. In this scenario, the plates are in America, aren't from ancient America, but are 16th- or 17th-century Ethiopic liturgical artifacts brought to the Americas by a traveler, a Jesuit, or a colonial-era collector.

Although I don't think it necessary to explain physical plates getting to New York, somewhere on this forum I did propose that the plates were authentic ancient plates, carried to New York by a totally ordinary (apart from the disappearing acts) heavy-set old man who was described by several witnesses (including David and Mary Whitmer) carrying the plates in a rucksack.

In my version, the old man the Whitmer's described was perhaps a sailor from Salem. These sailors would often bring back artifacts from their travels through the East Indies to be catalogued and displayed at the East India Marine Society Museum. Since many Salem traders passed through South India, they would have been curious about the mysterious Jewish copper plates. But perhaps the old man was carrying something far less exotic, a set of tin roof tiles or copper printing plates

Regardless of where the plates came from, I do think the pleasant old gentleman on the road to Cumorah deserves a lot more attention. The Whitmers had two separate encounters with him and the plates or whatever was in the book-shaped bag. If we're going to accept Mary Whitmer's testimony as valid, we also have to consider it was the same ordinary old man with a knapsack that showed her the plates

Quote

In the early 1800s, museums like the American Museum in New York were not the high-security vaults they are today. They were "cabinets of curiosities" that often held artifacts from Egypt, Rome, and the Near East brought back by sailors and early explorers. Sometimes an artifact is stolen by a disgruntled employee or a collector.

Here's an example of some copper plates from India from the 1830s that somehow ended up in New York. So although my scenario is highly ridiculous, its not entirely ridiculous.

 

 

Edited April 5 by Zosimus

[champatsch]

A comparison of “they | them which” with “those which” in the 1829 dictation of the Book of Mormon.

Dictation order                        they | them    those    % they | them
Mosiah 1 to 3 Nephi 7                    31               91               25.4
3 Nephi 8 to Words of Mormon   104               9               92.0

The Yates chi-square test is one of the highest of 30 tests of shifting English usage: [ n = 235, χ² ≐ 103.82, p < .0001 ]. For example, the therefore to wherefore shift is higher.

This is an interesting dataset and it adds to the improbability of what is generally believed: that Joseph Smith worded the Book of Mormon. For such a theory to be correct, he must have intuited all kinds of archaism, including rare and obscure archaism. In this case, he needed to intuit that “they | them which” referring to persons was more archaic than “those which,” and then proceed to implement a usage shift. The implementation was highly unlikely.

More generally, it was unlikely for Joseph Smith to dictate more than 50 percent of personal relative pronouns as which, since out of 25 pseudo-archaic authors, not one wrote with even 20 percent personal which; almost all such authors did not even employ which 10 percent of the time.

Specifically, it was unlikely for Joseph Smith to dictate as much “they|them which” as he did (135 examples), since only one of twenty-five pseudo-archaic authors wrote with any, and he was an editor of Shakespeare (R. G. White, eighteen examples). It was unlikely for Joseph Smith to decide to switch from using mostly “those which” up to 3 Nephi 7, to almost all “they|them which” after that. It was unlikely for him to successfully implement such a decision: to go from dictating “those which” 91 times up to 3 Nephi 7, but only nine times after that.

Edited April 5 by champatsch

[champatsch]

Another type of phraseology to consider is "of which hath been spoken." This one requires some background.

The original Book of Mormon text has "of which hath been spoken" twice, "of which have been spoken" twice, "of whom (it) hath been spoken" twice, and "of which has been spoken" four times. (The Book of Mormon was originally about 92% hath and 8% has and about 97% doth and 3% does; see the first edition.) The Book of Mormon has one example with an it and nine without an it. There are no intervening or accompanying adverbs in the Book of Mormon phraseology (non-subject adverbs like already), although these often occurred in the past, in addition to the bare usage without any adverbs.

Both "of which it hath been spoken" and "of which hath been spoken" occurred earlier, and almost exclusively before 1690. I have seen one outlier in 1735, with an intervening already in the subject slot: "of which already hath been spoken".

Pretty much the same thing for "of whom (it) hath been spoken".

Usage like "one of which hath been spoken of" is distinct syntax, since "one of which" is the subject of hath.

Usage with an expletive it or an adjective|adverb in the role of subject was more persistent (e.g. adjectives like enough|sufficient and the adverb more).

There are a few examples of this phraseology in other revelatory output: in the Doctrine and Covenants and in the witness statements. There is also one at the end of the 1830 preface, which is frequently derivative of section 10. Some of these examples of "of which hath been spoken" could have been the result of revelation; some could have been derivative.

So far I have noted two early modern texts with two examples of this phraseology. The usage without a subject was rare by the early 1700s. It was very rare by the early 1800s.

So far I have verified only one example of "of which has been spoken" in Google Books, in a Church of Ireland magazine in 1832: "The advantage of which has been spoken regards the public". There is one example of "of which already has been spok'n" in 1687. (Already is not a subject in these, since it could have co-occurred. In contrast, it could not grammatically co-occur with words like more, enough, or sufficient.) The largest databases currently do not have "of whom (already) has been spoken" before 1830.

I have not found "of which have been spoken" elsewhere. (Properly excluded are cases similar to "[some of which] have been spoken|mentioned . . . .") Two of these occur in the original Book of Mormon text where which is plural, so they are cases of proximity agreement. This was grammatical in the absence of an expletive it. That is, *"of which it have been spoken" would have been ungrammatical.

There is one "of whom hath been spoken" in the Book of Mormon. There are at least seven without an overt subject in texts between 1550 and 1685. The one that is most similar to the Book of Mormon's bare usage was written around the year 1600, and can be found at least twice in Google Books:

c 1600, Google Books, 33 • Google Books, 439
The book lying in her window, her maid (of whom hath been spoken) took it up,

There is one "of whom it hath been spoken" in the Book of Mormon, which was later edited to has. There are at least five with it in texts, between 1563 and 1710. Here is the earliest one, which also has periphrastic did: "The begynnynge of Rome was at that tyme as the Kynge Salmanasar (of whome it hath been spoken) dyd raygne ouer the Assyrians." 1563, EEBO A09568, 13.

The Book of Mormon sentence with "of whom hath been spoken" has two examples of periphrastic did:

"And it came to pass that he did teach and minister unto the children of the multitude,
of whom hath been spoken, and he did loose their tongues." (3n2614)

Here is a rare example of "did teach and minister":

1590, EEBO A10609, 207
P. Martyr saith, there were two sorts of Elders: the one which did teach and minister the Sacraments, and did gouerne with the Bishops:

Here is a rare example of "do loose their tongues":

1600, EEBO A13159, 223
to restraine such turbulent spirits . . which . . do loose their tongues with ouermuch liberty

The above sentence from 3 Nephi 26:14 is early modern in character in at least five different ways.

No text is like the Book of Mormon in this phraseology, which was almost entirely used between 1550 and 1735.

It is highly unlikely that Joseph Smith worded this phraseology.

[Pyreaux]

On 4/5/2026 at 3:00 AM, Zosimus said:

Although I don't think it necessary to explain physical plates getting to New York, somewhere on this forum I did propose that the plates were authentic ancient plates, carried to New York by a totally ordinary (apart from the disappearing acts) heavy-set old man who was described by several witnesses (including David and Mary Whitmer) carrying the plates in a rucksack.

In my version, the old man the Whitmer's described was perhaps a sailor from Salem. These sailors would often bring back artifacts from their travels through the East Indies to be catalogued and displayed at the East India Marine Society Museum. Since many Salem traders passed through South India, they would have been curious about the mysterious Jewish copper plates. But perhaps the old man was carrying something far less exotic, a set of tin roof tiles or copper printing plates

Regardless of where the plates came from, I do think the pleasant old gentleman on the road to Cumorah deserves a lot more attention. The Whitmers had two separate encounters with him and the plates or whatever was in the book-shaped bag. If we're going to accept Mary Whitmer's testimony as valid, we also have to consider it was the same ordinary old man with a knapsack that showed her the plates

Here's an example of some copper plates from India from the 1830s that somehow ended up in New York. So although my scenario is highly ridiculous, its not entirely ridiculous.

 

 

Awesome, we have a potential suspect, the Sailor from Salem. The "Old Man" seen by the Whitmers. Mary Whitmer is unique because she describes a Moroni-like encounter as a very ordinary encounter. A pleasant old gentleman met her in the barn and showed her the plates to encourage her. The 3 Witnesses felt real metal because a real man was carrying a real bag of copper or brass plates. This man walks into the woods and once he isn't seen again, that is often all you need to say he must be an "Angel".

Southern India is home to the Cochin Jews or Malabar Jews, who have a famous tradition of recording royal grants and community history on Copper Plates, Sasanas. Indian Sasanas Plates Theory? Plates of the Cochin Jews like the ones granted to Joseph Rabban around 1000 AD were high-quality copper or bronze, which, when polished or aged, has the heft and a metallic sheen described by the Eight Witnesses. A famous 1676 letter from Cochin leaders describes their records being "cut on a bronze tablet with an iron pen and diamond point". Thus the fine engravings mentioned in the Book of Mormon.

These Indian copper plates are remarkably similar to the descriptions of the Gold Plates. They are thin, metallic, engraved with ancient Semitic-linked scripts, like Vatteluttu, and often bound with rings. If a sailor brought back a set of Cochin Jewish Copper Plates (maybe it even discusses a "Lost Tribe" and a migration... to India), someone could easily have presented them to Joseph as "American Indian" records.

I remember you did a thing saying the Book of Mormon as an accurate geographical description of South Asia. South India, the land of the elephant. The path from Jerusalem through Nahom (Yemen) is the ancient maritime silk road. They sail the Arabian Peninsula to the Malabar Coast of India, a well-worn route for Jewish sailors since King Solomon. The Cochin Jewish community is famously divided into the Paradesi (White) Jews and the Malabari (Black) Jews. 

Edited April 9 by Pyreaux

[Zosimus]

8 hours ago, Pyreaux said:

The "Old Man" seen by the Whitmers. Mary Whitmer is unique because she describes a Moroni-like encounter as a very ordinary encounter. A pleasant old gentleman met her in the barn and showed her the plates to encourage her. The 3 Witnesses felt real metal because a real man was carrying a real bag of copper or brass plates.

There were a few accounts of seeing the old man with a book-shaped bag. 

Source 1: David Whitmer interview with Orson Pratt and Joseph F. Smith, September 1878 Published in the Deseret News, 16 November 1878. Reproduced in Dan Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, 5:51-52.

When I was returning to Fayette, with Joseph and Oliver, all of us riding in the wagon, Oliver and I on an old-fashioned, wooden, spring seat and Joseph behind us; while traveling along in a clear open place, a very pleasant, nice-looking old man suddenly appeared by the side of our wagon and saluted us with, “Good morning, it is very warm,” at the same time wiping his face or forehead with his hand. We returned the salutation, and, by a sign from Joseph, I invited him to ride if he was going our way. But he said very pleasantly, “No, I am going to Cumorah.” This name was something new to me, I did not know what Cumorah meant. We all gazed at him and at each other, and as I looked around inquiringly of Joseph, the old man instantly disappeared, so that I did not see him again. (source)

When asked about the man's appearance, Whitmer replied:

I should think I did. He was, I should think, about 5 feet 8 or 9 inches tall and heavy set, about such a man as James Vancleave there, but heavier; his face was as large, he was dressed in a suit of brown woolen clothes, his hair and beard were white, like Brother Pratt’s, but his beard was not so heavy. I also remember that he had on his back a sort of knapsack with something in, shaped like a book. It was the messenger who had the plates, who had taken them from Joseph just prior to our starting from Harmony. Soon after our arrival home, I saw something which led me to the belief that the plates were placed or concealed in my father’s barn. I frankly asked Joseph if my [page 773] supposition was right, he told me it was. (source)

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Source 2: Edward Stevenson's journal, December 23 1877 Quoted in Richard L. Anderson, Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1989), p. 30.

And an aged man about 5 feet 10, heavy set and on his back an old fashioned army knapsack strapped over his shoulders and something square in it, and he walked alongside of the wagon and wiped the sweat off his face, smiling very pleasant. David asked him to ride and he replied, ‘I am going across to the Hill Cumorah. (source)

Stevenson adds Joseph's reported explanation:

He said that the Prophet looked as white as a sheet and said that it was one of the Nephites, and that he had the plates.” (source)

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Source 3: David Whitmer on Mary Whitmer's encounter (same figure, at the Whitmer barn) From the same 1878 Deseret News interview:

Some time after this, my mother was going to milk the cows, when she was met out near the yard by the same old man (judging by her description of him) who said to her: “You have been very faithful and diligent in your labors, but you are tired because of the increase in your toil; it is proper therefore that you should receive a witness that your faith may be strengthened.” Thereupon he showed her the plates. (source)

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Source 4: John C. Whitmer (Mary's grandson) on Mary's encounter

I have heard my grandmother say on several occasions that she was shown the plates of the Book of Mormon by a holy angel, whom she always called Brother Nephi. It was at the time, she said, when the translation was going on at the house of the elder Peter Whitmer, her husband. (source)

And his fuller account of the encounter:

He then untied his knapsack and showed her a bundle of plates, which in size and appearance corresponded with the description subsequently given by the witnesses to the Book of Mormon. This strange person turned the leaves of the book of plates over, leaf after leaf, and also [Page 38]showed her the engravings upon them; after which he told her to be patient and faithful in bearing her burden a little longer, promising that if she would do so, she should be blessed; and her reward would be sure, if she proved faithful to the end. The personage then suddenly vanished with the plates, and where he went, she could not tell. (source)

Source 5: Elvira Pamela Mills, written by Orville Cox Day:

One morning, just at daybreak, she came out of her cow stable with two full buckets of milk in her hands, when a short, heavy-set, gray-haired man carrying a package met her and said: “My name is Moroni. You have become pretty tired with all the extra work you have to do. The Lord has given me permission to show you this record:” turning the golden leaves one by one! (source)

8 hours ago, Pyreaux said:

These Indian copper plates are remarkably similar to the descriptions of the Gold Plates. They are thin, metallic, engraved with ancient Semitic-linked scripts, like Vatteluttu, and often bound with rings. If a sailor brought back a set of Cochin Jewish Copper Plates (maybe it even discusses a "Lost Tribe" and a migration... to India)

According to Ethan Smith, the Cochin Jews were not a lost lost tribe, in View of the Hebrews he gives his arguments for why he believed they arrived in India shortly after the Babylonian captivity. There are also several reference works from the 18th century describing the cooper plates as Hebrew documents and the Cochin Jews as the Tribe of Manasseh. For example:

"CochIn is situated on an island separated from the main land by a narrow creek of the sea. It is a rajahship dependent upon that of Travancore, which extends along this coast to Cape Comorin. Cochin was one of the earliest settlements of the. Portuguese in India. The Dutch gained possession of it in 1660; and from them it was taken, in 1795, by the English. In the vicinity of Cochin are to be found some thousands of Jews, who pretend to be of the tribe of Manasseh, and to have records engraven on copper-plates in Hebrew characters; they are said to be so poor, that many of them embrace the Gentoo religion." (source)

Quote

I remember you did a thing saying the Book of Mormon as an accurate geographical description of South Asia. South India, the land of the elephant. The path from Jerusalem through Nahom (Yemen) is the ancient maritime silk road. They sail the Arabian Peninsula to the Malabar Coast of India, a well-worn route for Jewish sailors since King Solomon. The Cochin Jewish community is famously divided into the Paradesi (White) Jews and the Malabari (Black) Jews. 

My secular explanation for the Book of Mormon is the ordinary angel witnessed by David and Mary Whitmer was walking the roads around Palmyra carrying a book (engraved metal plates whether ancient or modern bundled up in his knapsack) that he claimed was a record of the Tribe of Manasseh from Comorin, the record was an account of these people, and the source from whence they sprang. It was very popular in the early 1800s to speculate that American Indians were Semites, Japhethites or Hamites (Cushites) from India. I'd argue it was the default view, as it was supported by the best scholars in that day, from Bryant to Faber to Humboldt to Samuel Mitchill and Charles Anthon.

After the old man gave the plates to Joseph Smith to translate, Anthon and Mitchill would both recognize the characters, following their own theories that American Indians were Semites/Cushites from India.

My secular explanation for the Book of Mormon text is that it was a pseudo-historical account of Israelites that left Jerusalem in 600 BC, the Semites/Cushites of Comorin discussed in the works of Bryant, Buchanan, Faber and Ethan Smith were the historical template for the narrative. This is the most historically grounded explanation for the narrative in the text, as there's nothing in the Book of Mormon that doesn't fit a South Indian setting. I compared this model to Roper's Anachronism list and it fits surprisingly well, even against a list that is biased towards favoring an American setting. 

Roper Anachronisms (2025) × Comorin Model — All 226 Items, Direct Comparison

Edited April 9 by Zosimus