An Impressive Array of Evidence

[webbles]

4 hours ago, Zosimus said:

Opposite really. My opinion is that a variety of methods and combinations of methods were used, and the method would be dependent on the conditions in the room (lighting etc) and the number of observers in the room and whether or not they were hostile witnesses or sympathetic etc.

The idea of changing the method because of the number of observers kind of makes sense (barely), but I don't think the statements we have match that at all.  Stone in the hat is used for both private situations (Emma and Martin) and public situations (David and Isaac).  Curtain is used in private situation (Martin) and public (Martin).

4 hours ago, Zosimus said:

Because sitting behind a curtain and telling observers that they will be struck dead if they look behind it is super sus and people were starting to ask why he needed the curtain. 

Sorry, this doesn't make sense to me.  I think it is pretty certain that he started with a curtain.  And he already had simple explanation for why he needed the curtain and why they couldn't look behind the curtain.  Why does he need a different way?  It is simple, easy, and accomplishes everything he needs.  And people appear to have had no problems with it; the blanket is actually rarely mentioned in the statements so either it wasn't used or people were so accepting that they felt like they didn't need to mention it.

4 hours ago, Zosimus said:

Isaiah is just an example, memorized sessions could have been from the Bible or the Book of Mormon or from any other manuscript memorized in advance. Other than Emma's comment about the walls of Jerusalem, we have no accounts describing the content being dictated so we can't know if what was being dictated ever even makes it into the Book of Mormon. We have no idea what was dictated in the presence of observers. I tend to agree with you that it would not be Isaiah because I believe the evidence points to Isaiah being read directly from an open Bible, and there is one account of Joseph dictating JST with a Bible open in front of him. If that's the case, it shows that there were times when Joseph was dictating from an open book, so we might add that to the list of methods above.

JST is not the Book of Mormon.  And I believe all accounts have him reading from the Bible for the JST.  I don't know of any that say Joseph didn't have a Bible directly in front of him.  We even have the Bible that he used for most of the JST - https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/bible-used-for-bible-revision/1.  Statements from the JST about him having a Bible in front of him can't be used for evidence of the Book of Mormon translation.

We actually are pretty sure that all of the Original Manuscript that we contain (which includes the Isaiah sections) was all dictated.  All the errors that are seen are dictation errors, none are copying errors.

And there would be no point for Joseph to dictate something from his hat and not have it written down.  None of the statements about using the hat indicate that a scribe wasn't present or not writing it down.  You have to remember that they are rushing through this.  They spend 5+ hours a day on this.  He isn't taking a lot of breaks or doing magic shows for visitors.  The number of days available and the amount of words that were recorded just makes it difficult to include him doing a dictation show with out it being included in the Book of Mormon.

4 hours ago, Zosimus said:

Curious why you find these as being something to expect if Joseph was really translating. A curtain that could hide a pre-wrtitten mansuscript and penalties for those that get too curious sound like the kind of thing someone hiding a pre-written manuscript would do.

A curtain and warnings fit perfectly for someone doing a pre-written manuscript.  But they also fit perfectly for his supernatural story (plates that no one is allowed to see).  Honestly, it is the stone in the hat that doesn't fit his supernatural story (why the existence of the plates if he doesn't even use them?).  But the stone in the hat, in my mind, forces Joseph to either be telling the truth, memorizing it, making itl up on the spot, or some mixture of the memorization and invention.  The reason why I got the white hat was to determine if a manuscript could be read from it as that would add another way for it to work and after experimenting with it, I just don't see that being feasible.  So, I can't add "reading a pre-existing manuscript" to the possibilities.  So, I'm back to memorization and on-the-spot invention.

4 hours ago, Zosimus said:

I find it truly interesting that Joseph was deciphering characters off the plates using large spectacles behind a curtain before February 1828, before the translation began. And that he was handing around the results. That's the earliest account I have found and its very telling that the very first attempts at translating the gold plates were concealed behind a curtain.

Why do you find it telling?  He is told to not show anyone the plates.  He needs to copy a few characters.  He thus needs to do it behind a curtain.  I don't see anything from this that even tells us anything about how he actually did the translation.  This just tells us that he had some physical object that no one was supposed to see but there are other statements that tell us that as well.

4 hours ago, Zosimus said:

As for Bradish, Mitchill and Anthon informing the content of the Book of Mormon. It would not be too late as Bradish visited Egypt and Jerusalem in 1821. There would have been 8 years for Harris or the Smiths to cross paths with him on his trips back to Palmyra. Mitchill's theories on America being the Garden of Eden and a great battle of extinction between a light skinned and a dark skinned race 60 miles from Palmyra were in print since 1821. Anthon's Classical Dictionary was in print in 1825 with another edition in 1827. Harris visited all three two months before the translation started, but the material had been circulating for years before. I'm writing up more on this, and will post to another thread some day rather than derail this one.

I'll wait for your post, but you are talking about a different thing than what I'm talking about.  I'm saying the visit of 1828 to those 3 is too late for the content of the Book of Mormon.  But yes, before 1828, Joseph may have heard of those things and may have incorporated them into his story (I don't think we even need to say he heard about it from those three vs he heard about in the environment he was in).  But the 1828 visit is too late to trigger a lot of changes to the story.

And the "Harris visited all three two months before the translation started" makes it seem like Joseph knew about the contents of the visit for 2 months.  Harris visited Joseph for a day or two in March, went back to Palmyra, came back for 2 weeks, then went back to Palmyra, and then returned to actually start the translation around April 12.  So Joseph knew about the visits at most 1 month before and more like 2-3 weeks before.  Still not that much time to actually change his story.

[Kevin Christensen]

On 10/11/2026 at 1:11 PM, Eschaton said:

 

So nothing here is responsive in any way to anything I said. Positivism is a strawman because you can't respond to the historical problems of the Book of Mormon using historical scholarship. You're shopped around for the one obscure Biblical scholar who you suppose makes the apologetics mission a little easier. But even if she represented some kind of consensus or even large minority view (she doesn't - her hypotheses haven't caught on at all in the academy and she doesn't even represent a small group of like-minded scholars), her fanciful hypotheses are not enough to rescue the Book of Mormon from its 19th century milieu. Your inability to muster any historical case for the Book of Mormon from the standpoint of Biblical scholarship speaks for itself. Time is linear, therefore the Book of Mormon is not ancient. 

Actually, it does.  Positivism is not a strawman because the larger academic world has long been dominated by Positivism, a world view on which moderates what counts as evidence, which voices count as authoritative, which questions get asked, who gets published and reviewed.  It is directly akin to a famous comment Bacon I quoted.  Where Bacon declare "don't theorize" he also exposes exactly his problem, a refusal to become self critical, to think about his own assumptions in comparison to another set of assumptions that explain the same observations in a different way, and it happens, solves problems that he does not engage.

I notice that you have not acknowledged that I pointed out a set of interlocking serious issues with your statement that "Time is linear, therefore the Book of Mormon is not ancient."  I pointed out that the primary Book of Mormon authors and editors post-date the New Testament, that both Mormon and Moroni reported personal encounters with the Risen Jesus (who, I think, was not ignorant of the New Testament), which, in concert with the report that the Risen Jesus also appeared to the Nephites earlier and told them many things, more of which were not recorded than were recorded, and that the translator of the Book of Mormon was not isolated from the New Testament before beginning his efforts, and therefore was open to influence from the single most influential text and translation in his culture and language, your assumptions of an easy, open and shut case, has serious and legitimate competition that you have no acknowledged or addressed, in exactly the same way that Bacon does not consider how his interpretation of his observations of heavenly motions might be accounted for by another theory, and indeed how that theory might better account for planetary motion, just as other theories, such as explored at depth and in detail by John Sorenson in Mormon's Codex, and Brant Gardner in The Book of Mormon as History, and literally hundreds of other scholars publishing via Interpreter and Maxwell Institute, account for countless details in the Book of Mormon that your easy dismissal does not so much as acknowledge as problems worth mentioning in public.  Back in 1953 Hugh Nibley pointed out Blass’s rules for authenticating historical documents, based on the experience of Renaissance scholars dealing with the flood of new manuscripts:

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To begin with, says Blass, “We have the document, and the same of its author; we must begin our examination by assuming that the author indicated really wrote it” You always begin by assuming the text is genuine. What critic of the Book of Mormon has ever done that?

What was remarkable about Barker’s approach in comparison to most non-Latter Day Saint scholars is that it actually allows that assumption to inform her test. She reads it against the Jerusalem 600 BCE context that it claims for itself, rather than uncritically supposing that it must be a 19th Century fabrication by Joseph Smith, maybe persons unknown. And that is the point Nibley made: “If one assumes that it is true, its features at least become testable.” Price began, as Professor Midgley observes of some LDS scholars, and most outside critics do, and that is “to approach the text of the Book of Mormon already knowing, from sources exterior to the text, both the questions and the answers.”

It also happens that arguments that a particular set of words and titles used in the Book of Mormon are or are not anachronistic, is always subject to revision in light of new evidence.  For instance, 

Quote

Here is Matt Roper discussing some implications of the content of a fragment called 4Q246 relative to the Book of Mormon:

Another example of the problems with assuming that certain passages from the New Testament represent later developments, peculiar to Christianity, is seen in the Book of Mormon usage of the terms “Son of God” and “Son of the Most High God” (1 Nephi 11:6–7). These terms are seen by the Tanners as obvious plagiarisms from New Testament gospels . . . yet both titles have recently turned up in an unpublished Dead Sea Scroll fragment written in Aramaic from before the time of Jesus. Although it is unknown to whom the prophecy refers, the fragment states:

[X] shall be great upon the earth. (0 king, all (people) shall] make [peace], and all shall serve [him. He shall be called the son of the [G]reat [God], and by his name shall be hailed (as) the Son of God, and they shall call him Son of the Most High,”

The writer for Biblical Archaeology Review [Hershel Shanks] states, “This is the first time that the term ‘Son of God’ has been found in a Palestinian text outside the Bible. . . . Previously some scholars have insisted that the origin of terms like ‘Most High’ and ‘Son of the Most High’ were to be found in Hellenistic usage outside of Palestine and that therefore they relate to later development of Christian doctrine. Now we know that these terms were part of Christianity’s original Jewish heritage.’’ If one small fragment can change our understanding of this term, is it really that hard to believe [Page 152]that other ideas and phrases found in the Book of Mormon, heretofore thought to be anachronistic, might also be verified in the future?112  (see https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/nurture-and-harvest-a-continued-conversation-with-the-annotated-book-of-mormon )

Elsewhere, Roper has considered generally all of the major claims of anachronism that have been put forward against the Book of Mormon, and has demonstrated that the general tendency is towards resolution. 

Quote

Notably, while the number of alleged anachronisms increased during each of the three periods, so did the number of confirmations. Not only did they increase, but they increased exponentially. Whereas 90.2% of the items remained unconfirmed in 1844, today that figure has dropped to a meager 9.29%. Thus, the key finding of this study is that, over time, allegedly problematic features of the Book of Mormon text have strongly trended towards confirmation or partial confirmation, especially in the past fifty-eight years.  See https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/anachronisms-accidental-evidence-in-book-of-mormon-criticisms-chapter-9-concluding-observations 

And you demonstrate that you have not carefully considered what I actually wrote here, let alone what I have published elsewhere.  I did not only cite Barker.  I also linked James Charlesworth's 1978 paper on the Book of Mormon, in which he offered his own suggestions for dealing with apparent anachronisms in the Book of Mormon via translator influence, which suggestions were preceded by Hugh Nibley in Since Cumorah, and followed later by Blake Ostler in his 1987 Dialogue essay on the Expansion Hypothesis.   

And besides that, your dismissal of Barker simply does not account for the many credentialed scholars who appreciate and champion her work.  Those who voted her to the Presidency of the Society for Old Testament Study in 1998 clearly saw something in her work that you do not.  Those Doctors who invited her to speak and work at a range of Universities in the UK actually exist.  The Archbishop of Canterbury awarded her the Lambeth Doctor of Divinity because he appreciated her work.   She has 18 books in print.  (Do you?)  In a review of The Risen Lord, Professor John McDade said:

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Meyer and Wright have made a strong case for a body of esoteric teachings given by Jesus about his death to an inner group of disciples. Barker has amplified this and provided a possible account of the source and content of that teaching by uncovering the significance of mystical traditions within Judaism which were afterwards excised by the Rabbinic reordering of Judaism after the traumas of ce 70 and 135. What flows into the Christian development of 2nd Temple imagery has as much right to claim continuity with Biblical Judaism as does Rabbinic Judaism. If Barker is right, then the principal Jewish context in which we must place Jesus is not that of Galilean healers and teachers, but that of mystical Judaism and Temple traditions.

And when giving the Gifford lectures, N.T. Wright notes that Barker has done "remarkable work in alerting scholarly and popular circles to a temple based understanding".   Barker has never had a formal academic post, around this time she served as President of the Society for Old Testament Study, she was invited by the Centre of Advanced Religious and Theological Studies at Cambridge to devise a research project. She later withdrew, and the essays she produced as seed for that project along with six essays that she had previously published in various journals was published in 2002 as The Great High Priest: The Temple Roots of Christian Liturgy.  Far from being isolated, in 2008, Margaret Barker, Robin Griffith-Jones, Laurence Hemming, Susan Parsons and Bishop Geoffrey Rowell organized a Temple Studies Group to promote “study of the Temple in Jerusalem, believing that the worldview, traditions, customs and symbolism of the Temple were formative influences on the development of Christianity.” The group successfully organized symposia for several years running, up to 2018 and COVID.  After the publication of Temple Themes in Christian Worship, the Archbishop of Canterbury awarded her a Lambeth Doctor of Divinity “in recognition of her work on the Jerusalem Temple and the origins of Christian Liturgy, which has made a significantly new contribution to our understanding of the New Testament and opened up important fields for research.”  In 2015, scholar Crispin Fletcher-Louis, in the introduction to the first volume of Jesus Monotheism,  mentions Margaret Barker as “a muse to many of us, albeit from beyond the immediate confines of Oxford on the cosmology and religious experiences nurtured by Israel’s Temple.”  A noted scholar like Andrei Orlov at Marquette incorporated her journal articles into the syllabus for his classes.   So if the Academy in general is committed to a secular view of the Bible, and various other academics in schools run by Evangelicals or Catholics or whomever, and many of them do not publicly endorse Barker's work in ways that would directly challenge the paradigm communities upon which their careers were built and lively-hoods depend, that is the way of things.  Paradigm change takes generations, particularly in religious matters.    Depicting her as isolated does not account for this kind of thing.  She has not been adopted by the majority, but she has her champions in many notable places.

FWIW

Kevin Christensen

Tooele, UT

[Zosimus]

11 hours ago, webbles said:

Sorry, this doesn't make sense to me.  I think it is pretty certain that he started with a curtain.  And he already had simple explanation for why he needed the curtain and why they couldn't look behind the curtain.  Why does he need a different way?  It is simple, easy, and accomplishes everything he needs.  And people appear to have had no problems with it; the blanket is actually rarely mentioned in the statements so either it wasn't used or people were so accepting that they felt like they didn't need to mention it.

Fair point that the curtain was simple and nobody objected. But I think that’s because of what people thought was happening in 1828. Anthon informs us in 1834 that Harris initially said nothing in 1828 about a divine or supernatural process. According to Harris, Anthon endorsed the translation when he understood the "decypherment" to be the result of a natural process.

Then take the account from Joseph’s 1838 history as told by Martin: Joseph had copied characters off the plates and made a translation of some of them, and Martin carried both to Anthon to have the translation checked. Whatever one thinks of Anthon’s later denials, the people involved clearly understood the work at that stage as reading an actual ancient script, the kind of thing scholars like Mitchill and Anthon could verify the decipherment. And it seems they both did verify initially, at least before the story shifted to the supernatural. 

The reason I tend to push back on defenses of a supernatural method like yours is that I don’t think the early accounts require one. According to Martin’s own account, Mitchill and Anthon, the most learned men he could find in New York in 1828, were at first satisfied with the characters and with the sample translation. Everyone involved treated it as something scholars could check. The story only turned supernatural when the angel came up, and Anthon withdrew. I sometimes wonder how the Book of Mormon would have been received if the supernatural elements had never come up, and Martin had come home with that certificate intact.

11 hours ago, webbles said:

JST is not the Book of Mormon.  And I believe all accounts have him reading from the Bible for the JST.

Apologies, I should have explained better. What I had in mind is this Lorenzo Brown account 1880:

“After I got through translating the Book of Mormon, I took up the Bible to read with the Urim and Thummim. I read the first chapter of Genesis and saw things as they were done…the whole passed before me like a grand panorama.” (source)

It’s late and Matthews argues there’s no evidence a stone was used in the actual JST. There's only this report that Joseph first “looked at” the Bible with it. Orson Pratt said Joseph stopped needing the instrument once he was experienced. So the most I’d claim is that the Genesis work may have begun with the stone, and that the method then moved from instrument to inspiration. Interestingly that’s the same direction I think the numerous accounts of mutliple methods of translation show.

Edited Friday at 06:44 AM by Zosimus

[Zosimus]

16 hours ago, webbles said:

I'm saying the visit of 1828 to those 3 is too late for the content of the Book of Mormon.

The account of Harris meeting Anthon is literally in the Book of Mormon. 2 Nephi 27

And somehow, Anthon's telling of his meeting with Harris is more aligned with the Book of Mormon than the official 1838 JS History account

[Navidad]

What I don't understand is that I think each of you in this discussion accepts revealed truth as valid as indicated in the famous Moroni challenge In Moroni 10. If that is correct, then why is there all the emphasis on this thread from all sides participating on trying to create rational truth to demonstrate the historicity (or "truth") of the Book of Mormon? If folks don't believe, they probably won't accept your rational belief anyway. If they do believe, there is no need for rational belief. What am I missing? Might it have something to do with Cardinal Newman's concept of illative truth? 

[webbles]

On 10/15/2026 at 11:36 PM, Zosimus said:

Fair point that the curtain was simple and nobody objected. But I think that’s because of what people thought was happening in 1828. Anthon informs us in 1834 that Harris initially said nothing in 1828 about a divine or supernatural process. According to Harris, Anthon endorsed the translation when he understood the "decypherment" to be the result of a natural process.

Then take the account from Joseph’s 1838 history as told by Martin: Joseph had copied characters off the plates and made a translation of some of them, and Martin carried both to Anthon to have the translation checked. Whatever one thinks of Anthon’s later denials, the people involved clearly understood the work at that stage as reading an actual ancient script, the kind of thing scholars like Mitchill and Anthon could verify the decipherment. And it seems they both did verify initially, at least before the story shifted to the supernatural. 

The reason I tend to push back on defenses of a supernatural method like yours is that I don’t think the early accounts require one. According to Martin’s own account, Mitchill and Anthon, the most learned men he could find in New York in 1828, were at first satisfied with the characters and with the sample translation. Everyone involved treated it as something scholars could check. The story only turned supernatural when the angel came up, and Anthon withdrew. I sometimes wonder how the Book of Mormon would have been received if the supernatural elements had never come up, and Martin had come home with that certificate intact.

Have you read https://rsc.byu.edu/approaching-antiquity-joseph-smith-ancient-world/git-them-translated-translating-characters-gold-plates?  Because that's kind of the same idea.  And I'm actually in favor of that.  At the beginning, Joseph wasn't really attempting to translate.  He had received the plates, put up a curtain, and then copied several characters and gave them to Martin Harris so he could shop around for someone to actually translate the plates.

But Anthon does indicate that there was some supernatural mechanism.  He said in his 1834 letter:

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Whoever examined the plates through the spectacles, was enabled not only to read them, but fully to understand their meaning.

That sounds like a supernatural ability.  I doubt Anthon is telling us that the spectacles are ordinary, scientific spectacles.  I would bet Anthon is writing that to indicate how he sees this whole attempt as a fraud, but that does show that Martin did talk about some supernatural process.

On 10/15/2026 at 11:36 PM, Zosimus said:

Apologies, I should have explained better. What I had in mind is this Lorenzo Brown account 1880:

“After I got through translating the Book of Mormon, I took up the Bible to read with the Urim and Thummim. I read the first chapter of Genesis and saw things as they were done…the whole passed before me like a grand panorama.” (source)

It’s late and Matthews argues there’s no evidence a stone was used in the actual JST. There's only this report that Joseph first “looked at” the Bible with it. Orson Pratt said Joseph stopped needing the instrument once he was experienced. So the most I’d claim is that the Genesis work may have begun with the stone, and that the method then moved from instrument to inspiration. Interestingly that’s the same direction I think the numerous accounts of mutliple methods of translation show.

I don't think there are any statements of Joseph translating the Book of Mormon purely by inspiration (no stone, spectacles, etc).  But yes, I do agree the direction is the same.  Joseph first looked at the plates (behind a curtain), then used the interpreters (in a hat), then used the seer stone (in a hat), then after translating the Book of Mormon he kept progressing till the point that he didn't need any instrument at all.

On 10/16/2026 at 6:10 AM, Zosimus said:

The account of Harris meeting Anthon is literally in the Book of Mormon. 2 Nephi 27

And somehow, Anthon's telling of his meeting with Harris is more aligned with the Book of Mormon than the official 1838 JS History account

Ok, that is over a year later, so yeah, Joseph could incorporate it there.  But I do wonder, did Joseph already have Isaiah in mind when he sent Martin to find scholars?  Did Joseph already have this snippet in the Book of Mormon and just needed Martin to act it out so he could show a prophecy fulfilled?  Or did he incorporate it only after Martin came back?

[webbles]

12 minutes ago, Navidad said:

What I don't understand is that I think each of you in this discussion accepts revealed truth as valid as indicated in the famous Moroni challenge In Moroni 10. If that is correct, then why is there all the emphasis on this thread from all sides participating on trying to create rational truth to demonstrate the historicity (or "truth") of the Book of Mormon? If folks don't believe, they probably won't accept your rational belief anyway. If they do believe, there is no need for rational belief. What am I missing? Might it have something to do with Cardinal Newman's concept of illative truth? 

Not all of the people in this discussion accept revealed truth as valid.  Analytics definitely doesn't.

I do it because I want to understand what really happened.  Did Joseph actually have a set of ancient plates that he supernaturally translated?  Or did he pre-write it and then read it off?  Did he pre-write it himself or with others?  Did he make it up on the fly?  That to me is what I'm interested in.