Introduction and Episode Overview

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. And what I should actually say is a joint podcast production brought to you by Mormon Stories Podcast and Radio Free Mormon. I am John Dehlin and I am so excited today for this really important episode. We are streaming live on Facebook and on YouTube, and today we have a really important subject to talk about. The title of today's podcast is Civil War the Battle between John Gee, BYU professor, Egyptologist, and the Joseph Smith Papers Project, which is also sponsored by the Mormon Church or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. This is really interesting. The question is, why would a BYU professor bankrolled and funded by the Mormon Church as an apologist, the Mormon Church's top Egyptologist, why would he be attacking the church's own Joseph Smith Papers Project? And specifically, I believe it's volume four, which is a recent volume released by the Joseph Smith Papers Project that is talking specifically about the Book of Abraham. That makes no sense unless you've been following these stories closely. And so, in a joint production effort, I have brought on one of my favorite experts on Joseph Smith and the Book of Abraham and all things Mormon, of course, Radio Free Mormon. It is so wonderful to have you back on Mormon Stories Podcast.

Radio Free Mormon [00:01:27] Thanks, John. It's great to be here.

John Dehlin [00:01:30] So, for those who don't know, for the three of you who don't know, Radio Free Mormon can be found@radiofreem Mormon.org and it's a phenomenally legendary, important podcast with at least 213 episodes.

Radio Free Mormon [00:01:41] It's sponsored by, I say, at least 213 listeners.

John Dehlin [00:01:46] Absolutely.

Radio Free Mormon [00:01:47] Sorry, I got.

John Dehlin [00:01:48] I'm 214. It's sponsored by Bill Real, of course, who's done amazing work and continues to do amazing work really quickly. Radio Free Mormon, talk about your podcast and about Bill Real and about marriage on a tightrope and all the great things brought to you by your organization.

Radio Free Mormon [00:02:05] Well, sure. It's really. Bill Real is the mastermind behind this and he has mormondiscussions.com, which he's done for a number of years, which he continues to do. And a few years ago, it was 2016, he brought me on, on as a podcaster at Radio Free Mormon under the umbrella of Mormon discussions. And under that umbrella there is now Radio Free Mormon. There's also Marriage on the Tightrope with Alan and Katie Mount. That's Katie.

John Dehlin [00:02:34] What's that about? What's that about?

Radio Free Mormon [00:02:36] Oh, that's about how to navigate, hopefully successfully, a mixed faith marriage, which is what they have.

John Dehlin [00:02:44] Excellent, excellent.

Radio Free Mormon [00:02:46] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:02:47] And Then what's Radio Free Mormon about?

Radio Free Mormon [00:02:49] Radio Free Mormon. Oh boy. Why don't you tell me what is your perception? I know you've listened to almost all of the podcasts.

John Dehlin [00:02:55] Oh, don't mock me. I barely have time to do my own podcast. But I did listen last night to one of my favorite hours of Mormon themed content in my life, and that's saying something. Radio Free Mormon is this brilliant attorney who used to be an apologist for the church, used to be a super orthodox believing Mormon. And he at some point started to really question hard the church's truth claims. And it's 213 episodes of brilliant review and analysis of Mormon church history and doctrine, theology, policy, and it's amazing. So that's, that's ready to Free Mormon. Check it out.

Radio Free Mormon [00:03:35] So that last one that you listened to, Bad Blood, we'll talk a little bit about that tonight because that bears on what we'll be talking about.

John Dehlin [00:03:42] Yeah, yeah. And I can't wait. I've got it up to show it, but okay, so Radio Free Mormon today we're going to be talking about John Gee and the Joe Smith Papers Project, kind of old school Mormon apologetics. The first thing I just want to do is set a little bit of intention. One of the things that we're really critical of Mormon apologists historically for is the use of ad hominem, which is the ways that they dodge attacks on the church by attacking critics, people like you and me and others. And I want to always work hard to avoid to be a hypocrite. I also don't want to ever be mean spirited and I don't ever want to hurt any individual person. And my belief is it's systems, not individuals. Even someone like John Gee or Daniel Peterson, in some ways they're victims of a larger system. And, and I was thinking about this in the shower this morning, there's a degree to which they're human shields because the extent to which we're focusing on John Gee or Daniel Peterson or Kwaku or whoever is the extent that we're sort of getting letting the church and its leaders and its system off the hook for supporting and backing and bankrolling and really being the major influence and cause of all the things that we're talking about. So I guess I want to ask you to begin with, how do we talk about John Geese be without stooping to ad hominem stuff? And how do we set a tone for this discussion where we're not trying to hurt him, we're not trying to hurt his family. We're not trying to be mean spirited, but we are also trying to educate as many people as possible and make the church change and hold the church accountable. How do we do that? Do you have any thoughts on that?

John Gee's Pattern of Ad Hominem Arguments

Radio Free Mormon [00:05:32] Yeah, it's really easy not to engage in ad hominem arguments, John. You just don't do the ad hominem arguments. You talk about what he's writing, what he's saying. You analyze that instead of going for the jugular and trying to make some kind of character assassination.

John Dehlin [00:05:51] So that's going to be. That's going to be our intent going into this. Is that okay? Okay. So, of course, many of our listeners will have listened to my interview with you and Dr. Robert Rittner, where we did talk decently, extensively about both John Gee and Kerry Muhlstein, the two main BYU Egyptologists. So I know that many of my listeners, and also many of my listeners listen to you. So some of them will be familiar with John Gee. But what I wanted to do today, since we're really going to be focusing on John Gee today, is to just go ahead and spend a little bit of a few minutes backing up and giving people a history for those who are kind of coming in this to the first time, who haven't been following the Book of Abraham controversies, who don't know John Gee from John Doe. And we want to bring them up to speed so that they can value this conversation, because I think when there's civil war in the Mormon Church, I think that's really important. So we don't want to leave anyone out of this conversation. So let's back up. Can you give us a brief, a quick brief primer on the history of John Gee, if you don't mind. Sure.

Radio Free Mormon [00:07:01] I can even give you a primer and a primer.

John Dehlin [00:07:04] Okay. No.

Radio Free Mormon [00:07:07] Anyway, this all goes back to 1967 and the book of Abraham. In 67, when the Joseph Smith papyri fragments were found at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, those being fragments that were in Joseph Smith's possession and were part of the scrolls that he got in Kirtland in 1835. Anyway, at that time, those fragments were looked at. And when I say fragments, there's large pieces, we have a pretty good idea of a lot of what it is that Joseph Smith had in his possession. And when Egyptologists looked at that in 1967 and 68, they immediately recognized that they had nothing to do with what was in the text of the Book of Abraham, which raised a problem, obviously, for the LDS Church. I'm sure that they were wanting it to translate from Egyptian into an English text of the Book of Abraham or at least something resembling the Book of Abraham or maybe even mentioning the name of Abraham somewhere on the papyri. But unfortunately that was not the case. And that's where began the apologist activities that basically were forwarded by Hugh Nibley at the time. And he came up with many, many explanations as to why it is that the Book of Abraham doesn't show up on the Joseph Smith Papyrus. I think that John Gee, who at the time, I don't know how old he was, probably, well, much younger than he is now, just like all of us. But he idolizes Hugh Nibley and Hugh Nibley's work. And to a large extent, I think that he patterned maybe his career, maybe even his field of study, which is Egyptology, in order to forward those arguments and definitely in an attempt to defend the authenticity and the antiquity of the Book of Abraham. So he went to school to be an Egyptologist. He went to Yale University back in the 1990s. And I think he was winding up his coursework around 1996 because one of his professors there was Robert Rittner. And Robert Rittner is not just any. An. An Egyptologist. He is a world recognized Egyptologist. He's perhaps the foremost Egyptologist in the Western Hemisphere. And he left at that time from Yale University, where he was a professor, one of John Geese professors, to go to the Oriel Institute at the University of Chicago. That was 1996. And that was, like I said, right around the time that John Gee was writing his. His dissertation on Egyptology. And we talked a little bit about that with Robert Ritter. I don't want to rehash everything, but that was where they parted ways to a certain extent. And then later on, John GE now writes quite a few articles. But almost everything he writes has either directly or indirectly to do with the Book of Abraham and trying to support it as an ancient document. I think that possibly Dr. Rittner does not appreciate the fact that John Gee is using the skills that he was taught by Robert Ritter in Egyptology to defend what Robert Ritter doubtless sees as a fraud, I. E. The Book of Abraham. And so there's been some back and forth between the two of them over the years. And let me just talk a little bit about. Is that enough right now about John Ge?

John Dehlin [00:11:00] Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great.

Radio Free Mormon [00:11:02] He continues to work at BYU as a professor. I. They don't have an Egyptology department really, or at All. So he's an Egyptologist who teaches classes in different things. I know at least one time he taught a class on Egyptian, the language, to a class, but I'm not sure how much he's able to actually teach as a professor in the subject of Egyptology. Certainly writes about it a great deal.

John Dehlin [00:11:28] Yeah. One thing, so one thing that I want to mention, which for me, you accused me of drunk texting last night and of course I don't drink, but I was listening to your episode 213 on Radio Free Mormon called Bad Blood, which has a Neil Sedaka song at the end, which was particularly moving to me, but you sang it to me

Radio Free Mormon [00:11:54] last night on the phone.

John Dehlin [00:11:55] I sure did. I sure did.

Radio Free Mormon [00:11:57] Great falsetto.

John Dehlin [00:12:00] Taking me for a ride. The only good thing about. Okay, sorry. So what, what, what? This, this is, this was one of the most powerful hours of Mormon content I've ever listened to because I was stunned by it. Like, it's, it's kind of hard to stun me these days because I've been, you know, in this arena for 20 years. I've seen a lot. But, you know, in my interview with you and Dr. Rittner, Dr. Rittner seemed really upset at this article that, that John Gee had written about him. And I, I think we plan on talking about this a bit later, but I'm just going to say this, that, that I was, I was literally floored by how unprofessional and outrageous John Geese, you know, final book review that he published as the editor of an Egyptology journal. Not only how it talked down the importance of peer review, but he used his position to bypass peer review and to publish in an Egyptology professional journal. Just this unprofessional screed against Dr. Rittner that it's literally one of the most mean spirited, unprofessional things I've ever seen in my life. I'm convinced that if John Gee had done this at any other university than byu, he would have been fired from his job as a professor. That's how bad. And so I want to recommend that everybody go listen to this episode. And it's hard because I have friends that live in John Geese ward and they say he's a really lovely, nice guy, friendly, you know, kind. But there's something about Mormon apologetics, and I'm going to say it's the system that brings out this real viciousness and mean spiritedness. And I, I, I don't think I'm, I'm being hyperbolic when I say that, and, and for those of you who don't, who don't believe me, just, you know, pause this. Go listen to this hour with Radio Free Mormon and then come back. Your mind will be blown. And Radio Free Mormon, I just want to congratulate you on this episode and Bill Real for tracking down the two journal, journal, journal editions that allowed you to do this review. The only other thing I, John Gee, is that recently he released a book, I think, through Deseret Book. It's certainly sold a Deseret book. And this book is trying to help people who are losing their faith in Mormonism. And the book basically associates being gay with being a child molester to the point of, I believe at least one BYU professor explicitly calling out John Gee and saying, I'm an, I'm a social, yeah, I'm a social scientist. I'm an expert in this field. John Gee, please stop associating being gay or lesbian or bisexual with being a child molester. There's no evidence for that and it's deeply harmful. And so while we don't want to smear John Gee, I just want to, as we're talking about his background a bit, I just want to make sure that we understand John Gee is doing real harm to people sometimes, not always, but sometimes. And so part of why we're talking about him and is because he's hurting people. And that's a little bit of background that I just wanted to throw in as context before we jump in. The only other thing I want to say is that in the shower, I was thinking of John Gee as kind of Hugh Nibley the Second. And is Kerry Mohlstein as kind of Hugh Nibley iii? Can you just briefly tell us who Kerry Mohlstein is, because he's going to come into this discussion a little bit later.

Radio Free Mormon [00:15:43] Kerry Muelstein is similar to John Key, though I don't think quite the same. But he is an Egyptologist who is a Latter Day Saint who also works at BYU and who also writes a lot of articles trying to defend the Book of Abraham.

John Dehlin [00:15:59] Okay, all right. All right. So, so where do we go next in our discussion?

Gee's Book Review of The Libyan Anarchy

Radio Free Mormon [00:16:03] Rfm well, where I would like to go is launching off from that Bad Blood episode because I talked about this book review that John Gee did of a book written by Robert Rittner. Now, this book review that John Gee did, and he wrote it in this journal, and this is an Egyptological journal, I believe. It's the, the jssea. It's the Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities, which is located up there in Canada. And they had been working on this journal. I don't know how old it is, but they got John Ge to be their editor for a couple of years, apparently from 2008 to 2010. And John Gee was finally going to leave being editor. He's going to resign. The reason he stated in the last issue is because he could not bring the journal in on time. It was late getting published. And he used that opportunity to write a book review on a book that Robert Ridner had written that had nothing to do with the Book of ABRAHAM. But back 10 years before, in 2000, Robert Rittner had written an article that was published in Dialogue, a journal of Book of Journal of Mormon Thought. And it had to do with John Gee and Hugh Nibley and their translations of the Breathing Permit of Horror now, or Horus, his friends call him. But this breathing Pyramid of Horror is the main document that was recovered in the Joseph Smith Papyri. And it is almost certainly the document that Joseph Smith used to translate the Book of Abraham. So all he did was he's looking at this breathing permit, and Robert Rittner is giving his translation of the breathing permit. And at the same time, he's taking the task, Hugh Nibley's translation of it and also Robert Rittner's translation of it. And it's. The language is somewhat sharp. In some places, it could have been a little bit softer. But once again, there's this. This back and forth. Here's Robert Rittner, here's his protege, one of them, John Gee, using his powers for evil and not for good from Robert Rittner's point of view. And so he writes this article. It appears in dialogue. It also appears in another publication. The name is escaping me right now, but an academic, secular publication. And it appears that this has been festering for about 10 years with John Gee. And so he uses the opportunity now in his last issue as editor for this journal, to write this book review. And the book review doesn't take on Robert Rittner on the Book of Abraham. Robert Rittner actually does things other than just the Book of Abraham. In fact, this Book of Abraham stuff that he does is sort of a side thing that he does. He publishes.

John Dehlin [00:19:10] It's almost like a public service.

Radio Free Mormon [00:19:12] It has been for a lot of people. But this is a book. It's a collection of documents and their translations, and I think it's called the Libyan Anarchy. And so the thing that. The important thing to understand here, and this will become Important later is that this book that is written by Robert Rittner, the Libyan Anarchy, is not a standalone book. It is a volume in a series. I think it's up in the 20 something series by the time they get to the Libyan Anarchy. And the point of this series is to collect all of these texts and give translations and, and reproductions and make them available to the general public. So that's part of it. So what John Yee does now in his book review is he absolutely savages Robert Ritter. And the details and the entire text of it are in that. The Bad Blood episode. I won't go into it here, but the thing is, he cannot say anything good about this book when he's reviewing it. So.

John Dehlin [00:20:14] But that's, but that's putting it lightly. He's deeply insulting, which is outrageously unprofessional in an academic setting. And then it's even worse because it's Dr. Rittner who, who is the, the, as I understand it, the only. Sits in the only endowed chair of Egyptology in the entire Western hemisphere. This is a person that deserves respect. He's at the University of Chicago. And, and it's just so disrespectful and it's just so clear. It's a vendetta because Guy's upset that Rittner spoke the truth about the Book of Abraham, and it's Guy's job to defend it, and Guy's losing, and so guy's mad at Rittner and so he just. He does this sort of like, burn it all down as he runs the journal into the ground. You know, burned down peer review, burned down. Robert Rittner burned down the journal because he's already ruined the journal, so why not use it as a platform to burn everything down? It's. It's so revolting.

Radio Free Mormon [00:21:10] Right? One of the things you say, there's very important. It's all important, but I want to focus on one of the things you say, which is about the impact that this has on the journal itself. Because what it appears is that John Gee is so focused on his animus and getting back at Robert Rittner in this particular book review that he is unaware of the damage that he's doing collaterally to a number of people. We have a journal that a lot of people have worked on very hard to get it established, to publish good, reputable articles from scholars. That'll be contributions to the field, everything you'd want to do in an academic journal. And he comes along with his book review now, and he's so focused on getting Robert Rittner that he can't see the damage that it's doing to everybody else who's associated with the Journal and the Journal itself. So that's one thing. There's another thing there that I want to say about his. His book review, which is going to be important later, which is that I mentioned it's a series of books. So what he does there and what he's going to do again later on is that he tries to distinguish this particular book in this series by Robert Rittner. He wrote this one book in the series, and he's going to try and distinguish this one book from all the others in the series, because this is a very, very reputable series with reputable editors. So he says, oh, they're so great. All everything else they've done, but this one is a real, real exception to the rule. And let me tell you why. And that's what he does in the book review. The other thing he does there is he tries to make an artificial distinction between Robert Rittner, who is the specific editor and writer of this one volume in the series, and the general editors who are over the entire series, including this volume that Robert Rittner wrote. So you can't really do that in the real world, because Robert Rittner cannot be separated from the editors who are over the volume, who reviewed the volume, who finally sanctioned it and published it. They're the ones who are responsible for what is in this volume just as much as Robert Rittner is, because it's in the series. Right.

John Dehlin [00:23:33] And so it's kind of like saying Mormon apologists are awful, but the first presidency of the quorum of 12 are great. I mean, at some sense, you. There's accountability, Right?

Radio Free Mormon [00:23:43] Well, that. Yeah. And that if you criticize someone below,

John Dehlin [00:23:46] you criticize someone above. Right.

Radio Free Mormon [00:23:47] Yeah. Your example would be even further removed than this, because these are the editors who are actually reading and probably making corrections and suggestions and deletion everything that editors do, and they're the ones who publish this book. So you can't publish the author of this book without at the same time criticizing. Excuse me. You can't criticize the author of this book without criticizing the editors of the book as well.

John Dehlin [00:24:14] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [00:24:15] And he's going to be doing the same thing. So what ends up happening is, is. I want to talk a little bit more about that in a second, but just to give the thumbnail sketch of what we're going to be covering today is that now what happens is that The Joseph Smith Papers Project.

The Joseph Smith Papers Abraham Volume Introduced

John Dehlin [00:24:30] Tell us about that. Tell us what that is. Give us a quick.

Radio Free Mormon [00:24:33] It is a. It's a church project to try and publish all. And maybe there's a little quotation marks around that. All the writings of Joseph Smith that exist or things that people have heard from him, but mainly it's supposed to be his writing. So they've got a number of volumes already in print and available online. And in 2018, I think it was, they finally got around to publishing the Joseph Smith Papers relating to the Book of Abraham. And by that I mean the Abraham Egyptian Papers that were created by Joseph Smith and scribes back in 1835 in Kirtland, Ohio. Let me just show you this book. Okay. Because it's massive.

John Dehlin [00:25:15] Is that Volume four? Is that Volume four?

Radio Free Mormon [00:25:17] Well, yeah, and it's confusing because there are different series even within the Joseph Smith Papers Project. And what I mean by that is that this one is called Revelations and Translations. I don't know if you can see that.

John Dehlin [00:25:32] Yeah, we can see it. Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [00:25:33] Revelations and Translations, Abraham and Related Manuscripts. Right. It's a volume four of the Revelations and Translations series.

John Dehlin [00:25:42] Got it, got it. Okay, got it.

Radio Free Mormon [00:25:43] And it's Book of Abraham and related Manuscripts. All right, so they. Go ahead, they publish that.

John Dehlin [00:25:50] And just to be clear, and we'll get to this, but John Gee, a noted Egyptologist, apparently was not invited for some reason. And this would have been prior to 2018. This would have been. Yeah, several years prior to 18.

Radio Free Mormon [00:26:03] He was not seven years. I think it was seven years. They were working.

John Dehlin [00:26:06] So like by 2011, something was going on where they. The church wouldn't invite its top Egyptologists to be a part of a prod. The most prominent Egyptology related project in the church. Is that fair to say, or am I overstating?

Radio Free Mormon [00:26:22] Is extremely important. Important subject for John Gee as well as for others in the church. The, the Abraham Egyptian Papers, I'll tell you the reason why, very simply, is this, is that the Abraham Egyptian Papers more and more scholars are. Have understood and are coming to understand and even switching sides on. The Abrahamic Egyptian Papers were used by Joseph Smith as part of at least his translation of the Book of Abraham.

John Dehlin [00:26:55] So remind us what those were really quickly.

Radio Free Mormon [00:26:57] The, the Abrahamic Papers.

John Dehlin [00:26:59] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [00:27:00] There's several sets of papers and they're all reproduced in this volume. And what they are is they're different things. There's different collections, okay. Within even these papers. But the, the main significant part that really is the source of controversy is the fact that it looks like there are certain Egyptian hieroglyphs in the left margin of some of these papers. And then next to those hieroglyphs are written paragraphs, like about a paragraph for each hieroglyph of the text of the Book of Abraham, at least in chapter one, and maybe a little bit in chapter two. But I think it's mainly chapter one as we have it today. So it looks for all the world, like these papers are showing here in this section, characters from real Egyptian being translated into the English text of part of the Book of Abraham. Now, so that's one thing. The second thing is that these very characters in this section are characters that are located on the Joseph Smith papyri that was recovered and is now in the possession of the Church. So not only do we have what it looks like, these papers translating Egyptian into the Book of Abraham, it's the very Egyptian that was found on the papyri that we have, which is for

John Dehlin [00:28:21] his Book of Breathings. Right?

Radio Free Mormon [00:28:23] Yeah. Yes. So, having said that much, this gets to Hugh Nibley's theory, which John G. Has picked up and run with, and which he continues to attempt to defend to the very best of his ability, which is the idea that, well, if the papyri, as we have it today was used at least in part, to translate the Book of Abraham and this, these Egyptian characters from the papyri have nothing to do with the text of the Book of Abraham, which the Church even admits.

The Missing Scroll Theory Explained

John Dehlin [00:29:00] Right?

Radio Free Mormon [00:29:01] Yes. Yes, they do. So if that's the case, and that's what it looks like, then it's starting to be more and more difficult to argue that the Book of Abraham is an authentic translation of Ancient Egyptian, let's put it that way. So what had happened early with Hugh Nibley and continues to happen with John Gee, is a theory that there is a missing part of the scroll. Now, we don't have all the scroll or all the scrolls that Joseph Smith had in his possession. We have significant parts and fragments. But the theory is, of course, this is why it's called the missing scroll theory, is that there's either a part of the scroll that existed once that no longer exists, or a completely different scroll, but it's a missing scroll theory. Either way, we've got to have a part of the scroll that we no longer have today, that if you translated that from Egyptian into English, then you would get the Book of Abraham. Does that make sense?

John Dehlin [00:29:58] Makes total sense.

Radio Free Mormon [00:29:59] So that's the missing scroll theory, and John G. Is a proponent of that and continues to be A proponent of it.

John Dehlin [00:30:06] And it's kind of. I don't like that type of apologetic, which is if you don't like the evidence, create some sort of possibility of something that doesn't exist, which can never be disproven, as a way to divert attention from the inconvenient evidence that Joseph Smith clearly did not have the power to translate like he claimed, that the papyrus that he claimed was written by the hand of Abraham literally was written hundreds, if not more years after Abraham would have died if he had even existed. That's way too inconvenient of evidence that it's really just a common funerary text and has nothing to do with Abraham at all. So let's say there must have been some scroll that existed elsewhere. And that'll assuage the concerns of any questioning Mormon.

Radio Free Mormon [00:31:00] Right?

John Dehlin [00:31:00] Yeah, right. Which is a very scholarly.

Radio Free Mormon [00:31:04] Well, yeah, his scholarship is of one mind, and that is to prove his theory, no matter what the evidence is, to use whatever evidence there is to support his theory, even if it has to be massaged a little bit in order to get it to do that and perhaps ignore other evidence that might contradict his theory. And that's what we see in his writings over and over again. Now, I do want to bring up this fact is that in this huge, wonderful book, the Joseph Smith Papers Project produced this Volume four. Let me show you, because we talked about the fact that. Well, I'm so sorry. I know that I had an outline and you have a certain way you want to go. So I'm going back and forth in my mind trying to answer your questions without trying to lose total track of where I'm trying to go. Let me take off this.

John Dehlin [00:31:55] We'll jump on your track. We'll jump on your track.

Radio Free Mormon [00:31:57] Okay, let me take off this dust jacket here for a second so I can open it up and you can see all the editors. Well, let me back up here a second. All right. The specific editors of this book are Brian Hauglid and Robin Jensen. They are the two editors of this volume. Now, of course, above them are the editors of the Joseph Smith Papers Project, and they are the ones who are responsible for the contents of this volume being up to snuff, being peer reviewed, being made sure that it is accurate and reflects the best scholarship available. So I'll show you these people in here because I was looking through this the other day. It's in the first pages that usually you skip through. Okay. All those people there, let me see. These are the editors, the general editors. And the, the people who are over the book. Yeah, I'm not really, and you can't really see it too well, but I highlighted something over there.

John Dehlin [00:32:56] Even Snow.

Radio Free Mormon [00:32:57] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:32:59] Church History Department executive Stephen Snow.

Radio Free Mormon [00:33:02] Yeah, that's at the top of the food chain of the people that they list here. So in other words, this is not just an academic or secular academic series or volume. This is also has the imprimatur of authority of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Because this is their book. They have a general authority. The church historian Stephen Snow at the time that this was published or produced. And there's something else in here that I want to show you. Actually it's too small, you won't be able to see it. But when you look at the copyright, it says copyright 2018 and it's copyrighted by guess who, John?

John Dehlin [00:33:43] Well, I would say the corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints. But I could be wrong.

Radio Free Mormon [00:33:48] No intellectual reserve.

John Dehlin [00:33:51] Oh, intellectual reserve, of course.

Radio Free Mormon [00:33:53] Right. Which is the copyright arm of the LDS Church and then underneath it it's the Church Historians Press, which is the press that produced this book and the other others in the series. The Church Historians Press is an as an imprint of the Church History department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Okay, so yeah, you're right, it's on there, just not right there next to the copyright. This is a church book. It is a church sanctioned book, is sanctioned by the leaders of the church. So that's important to understand as well because what, what's going to happen is now John Guy not only has bad blood with Robert Rittner, but he also has significant bad blood and heartburn with Brian Hauglett. Because Brian Howglid, who with Robin Jensen were the specific editors of this volume underneath the general editorship. Right. Brian Haughlin used to be an apologist and write apologetic materials related to the Book of Abraham with John Gee. In fact, back in 2000 they were co editors along with John 20th. So there were three of them who were editors of a large volume that was produced by, I'm pretty sure it was by farms. It's called Traditions about the Life of Abraham. So they have a working relationship at that time and they work together in order to produce materials that was supportive of the ancientness of the Book of Abraham. And since that time Brian Howlett has had a change of mind about the subject and he no longer sees the Book of Abraham as being ancient. He sees it as being more of a modern creation of Joseph Smith, Brian Haglett also has abandoned the missing scroll theory and believes that the papyri that we have today was used by Joseph Smith in order to translate the Book of Abraham. And now we get to the. The Abraham Egyptian papers. Okay, so let me just say a couple words about that to make this really.

Why Gee Was Excluded from the JSP Editorial Team

John Dehlin [00:35:58] Can I ask you one super quick question? Do we have any information as to why John Gee was not invited to be one of the main co editors of this volume? Have you heard anything? Did he decline? Was he not interested?

Radio Free Mormon [00:36:13] It's not that he declined.

John Dehlin [00:36:14] Okay.

Radio Free Mormon [00:36:15] He was very interested because this deals with the Abraham Egyptian papers of Kirtland. And this is the center of a huge controversy in the LDS Church among different scholars, John Gee on one side and pretty much everybody else on the other at this point, because Brian Hauglett and Robin Jensen as well have sort of jumped ship on this. But the whole, the whole thing can be summarized this simply. Did Joseph Smith use the Egyptian, the Abraham Egyptian papers from Kirtland? Did he use those in order to translate the Book of Abraham? Or was the Book of Abraham produced completely separately and independently of the Abraham Egyptian papers? Because if they were used to translate the Book of Abraham, then what it shows us is that Joseph Smith really could not translate Egyptian and he was translating off of the papyri that we have. It wasn't off of a missing piece. John Gee, on the other hand, appears to have the position that not only was it off a missing piece, but that Joseph Smith could totally, by revelation, translate the Egyptian characters from the missing piece of papyrus into the text of the Book of Abraham as we have it today. So really that's the, the simplified version of why it is that these papers from Kirtland, Ohio, which were produced by Joseph Smith and his scribes, why it is that they're so important in this controversy? Because like I say, I'm going to tell you, my personal opinion is that it does look like these papers were used in some sense in order to translate the Book of Abraham. And it's not just me saying that. There have been scholars who've been saying this for quite some time. There's Ed Ashman, there is Brent Metcalfe, there's Dan Vogel. And up to this point there's like those three main names on one side

John Dehlin [00:38:18] and Robert in there.

Radio Free Mormon [00:38:21] Yeah, you know. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah, I would put him there too. Although a lot of what he's done has had to do with actually looking at the, the papyri themselves and then translating them and saying that doesn't have anything to do with the Book of Abraham. But you're right. Robert Rittner would be on that side, too. And over on the other side, you have John Gee, Kerry Muhlstein, and you used to have Brian Haugland and Robin Jensen. But in the last few years, I can't really speak to Robin Jensen. I don't know about his arc. I know where he is now. Now he's over here with Robert Rittner and Dan Vogel and Ed Ashman and Brent Metcalf. So they. He's at least on that side now. But Brian Haugland, definitely, we know his arc is that he went from being with John Gee on this issue to going over to the enemy camp from John Gee's point of view. And he even posted something. I think it was on Dan Vogel's Facebook page, where a few years ago he came out and publicly, he being Brian, how publicly? Said, I don't agree with anything that I wrote back in 2010. Back then I was still agreeing with John Dee, basically. And now I have. I have abandoned that and I've adopted this other line of reasoning, which seems to me to make a lot more sense, and even called John De's apologetics abhorrent, I think, was the word he used. It wasn't in a publication, but it was up on a Facebook page. So I'm sure that if there wasn't already bad blood between the two of them, there was now. And by the way, the bad blood appears to be going one direction, really, which is from John Key toward Brian Hauglett.

John Dehlin [00:40:09] Right.

Radio Free Mormon [00:40:09] Okay, so now we get this paper really quick. Really quick.

John Dehlin [00:40:14] So we have a comment from a listener, Ken. He writes, didn't Brian Haugland say Guy wasn't invited to. To be on the Joseph Smith Papers project for this volume because the book is about 19th century Historical texts and not Egyptian history. Thus, Guy was not an appropriate expert in the subject matter. Does Ken have that right, according to your understanding?

Radio Free Mormon [00:40:37] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:40:38] RFM. Okay, so he's not a historian of 19th century documents, so it wouldn't make sense. But he could be an advisor. But anyway, he wasn't. For whatever reason, he wasn't chosen.

Radio Free Mormon [00:40:48] Well, he wasn't. He wasn't. But we can see why it is that these Abraham Egyptian papers are so important to John Gee. And he wanted very much to be a part of this, of this volume and be an editor of this volume. And the reason why is so that he could put his spin on the Abraham Egyptian papers. Now, let me Just go ahead and synopsize this here. The importance of the Abraham Egyptian Papers to John Gee is proving that they're not important. Okay, say that again.

John Dehlin [00:41:23] Say that again.

Radio Free Mormon [00:41:25] It sounds funny, but the. The significance and importance of the Abraham Egyptian Papers, which is what this deals with, to John Gee is proving that they're not important. They have no relevance whatsoever to the Book of Abraham. They're just sort of an anomaly that some scribes got together and cooked up when Joseph Smith wasn't around on a rainy day in Kirtland. They're not important at all. Because from his point of view, remember, he's committed to the idea that these were not used in order to translate the Book of Abraham, therefore, they're not important.

John Dehlin [00:41:56] It reminds me of sort of like, these are not the droids you're looking for. My sense is that guy is saying, hey, Mormon Church, hey, Joseph Smith Papers Project. Don't give any credibility or attention to these Abraham Egyptian papers and specifically the Egyptian Alphabet and grammar, because if you do, you make Joseph Smith look like a fool. And so the right move is to ignore them or to downplay them or to discredit them, because to give them any credibility is to make Joseph Smith look like a fool and a charlatan. And John Gee is in the business of not having that happen. And I guess the Joe Smith Papers Project is on the side of tell the truth regardless of what happens. I don't know.

Radio Free Mormon [00:42:40] Yeah. Or maybe just with a little bit less emotional language that they. They. The Abraham Egyptian Papers Project Abraham Egyptian Papers tend to make Joseph Smith look like he couldn't translate Egyptian.

John Dehlin [00:42:51] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [00:42:53] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:42:53] But he said he could, so that's a problem.

Radio Free Mormon [00:42:55] Well, right. Yes. And that's the problem that John G. Is trying to avoid by minimizing and marginalizing the Abraham Egyptian Papers and saying they're not important. They're not important at all. They're a historical anomaly. They have nothing to do with the text of the Book of Abraham. So he was not invited to do it. I mean, and I'm sure that this really stung John Gee. I think it's clear from later writings, which we'll talk about here in a few minutes, that it really did sting. He's like a kid in high school who has spent years studying Shakespeare and practicing and practicing in front of the mirror. And then his senior year, and the high school is going to put on Hamlet. Okay. And this is my big chance. This is what I've been waiting for. I need to be a part of this. So he goes and tries out for the part of Hamlet and somebody else gets cast instead. And he's very disappointed by this and he's very upset by it. And then he writes a review of the play for the school newspaper, right?

John Dehlin [00:43:50] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [00:43:51] He's just going to cut it to shreds. This is the crappiest version of Hamlet I've ever seen in my life. The guy playing Hamlet, he stinks up the stage and he can't say anything good about it. That's kind of what we have going on here. Because now what John Gee is going to do is he's going to write a book review of this book that he was not invited to be the editor of. And guess what? He can't say anything good about it.

John Dehlin [00:44:21] Sounds familiar.

Radio Free Mormon [00:44:23] Yeah, he's going to write a total screed about it. But now I want to say a couple things here. Okay. If I can go back to my little outline here.

Gee's Misreading of Rittner's Scholarship

John Dehlin [00:44:30] We're onto your outline now. RFM thanks for the background.

Radio Free Mormon [00:44:33] Okay, so here's the deal. In this book review, back in 2010, when John Dee wrote the book review about Robert Rittner's book about the Libyan anarchy, there are a number of things that he did there, and I talked about some of them, but other things, I did not go into the detail that I want to go into here. There are three main things I want to talk about. I did talk about the fact that John Gee makes this absolutely very hypercritical comment about Robert Rittner. Now, once again, remember that John Gee is an Egyptologist here, and Robert Rittner is the Egyptologist here, and everybody in the Egyptological world knows that. But what he says about Robert Rittner is he says that Professor Rittner is generally a capable scholar, but anytime there's anything vaguely positive that John Key writes about Robert Rittner, there's going to be a comma and there's going to be a. But Professor Rittner is generally a capable scholar, but has been known to badly misread the texts that he was purportedly publishing. Once again, I think purportedly was a typo by the editor of the journal, which was, oh, junkie. I think. I think he meant. I think he meant purportedly. But anyway, the main thing is that he's. That he's alleging that Robert has been known to badly misread the texts, I. E. The Egyptian text. Right. That he was purportedly publishing. He gives footnote 24, and for this remarkable allegation, he cites the one paper, and that paper is written by his good friend Kerry Muhlstein. And it's not an academic paper in terms of it being a secular academic thing. It's from the Farm's review.

John Dehlin [00:46:26] Yeah. It's so outrageous that the only way that guy can criticize Rittner is to quote a non scholarly Mormon owned BYU sponsored journal and his, his colleague Kerry Mohlstein. That's the only way he can credibly attack Rittner.

Radio Free Mormon [00:46:42] Yeah, I mean it's like there's, well, there's John Gee here and Kerry Muhlstein may be here and then Robert Rittner. Yeah. In some sense Kerry Muelstein is like John Geese crummy little toady. If I can quote a Christmas movie that I really, really like, his crummy little toady. Was it Dilbert Gills or something?

John Dehlin [00:47:04] I can't remember because, because most. He didn't go to Yale. Right. Like he doesn't have.

Radio Free Mormon [00:47:08] He went to ucla.

John Dehlin [00:47:09] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [00:47:10] And they're still trying to wash the stain off apparently.

John Dehlin [00:47:13] Right.

Radio Free Mormon [00:47:13] Yeah, we talked about it before. Once again, not trying to get into all those details, but yes, yes, I think he got his degree from ucla. Anyway, so for this proposition that Robert Rittner has been known to badly misread text guy cites to Kerry Muelstein is footnote 24 cites to Kerry Muhlstein doing a farms review article from 2005. Now here's the funny thing is, right, Terry Muhlstein doesn't say that Kerry Muelstein does not say that Robert Rittner badly misreads texts. So let me just tell you a little bit about this book review that Kerry Muelstein's doing in 2005 for farms. He's not reviewing a book by Robert Ritter, he's reviewing a book by Michael Rhodes. And Michael Rhodes is a guy who's, he's lds. He, he is not an Egyptologist, but he's done a lot of study in Egyptology. He's an enthusiastic amateur, kind of like Hugh Nibley was. And that's not to take away from what he knows because he knows a lot about Egyptology and even Egyptian Michael Rhodes does. But he had just brought out a book which itself was a book that had a translation once again dealing with the Breathing Pyramid of Horror has this wonderful reproduction of the papyrus and his translation of it. All right, so that is the book that Kerry Muhlstein is reviewing in this footnote that John Gee is citing to for his proposition that Robert Rittner has been known to badly misread the text he was purportedly publishing. And it's at the very end of this book review that what Kerry Muhlstein does is he creates a little chart because he does mention Robert Rittner. And Robert Rittner, remember back in 2000, had done his translation of the Breathing Permit of Horror. And now we have Michael Rhodes, a non Egyptologist, providing his translation of the same document, the Breathing Permit of. And so what Kerry Muelstein is going to do is he's going to take certain examples of them where there's variations between the two, the two translations, and he's going to put them side by side and he's going to comment a little bit about them. But here's what he says in the very last. It's the last page of text of this article. This is what Kerry Muelstein says he's going to do. And listen carefully and see if this sounds like he's saying that Robert Rittner badly misreads the text quote, I have made such a comparison that's a comparison of these two translations between Rhodes and Rittner's translations and have not found variations that would suggest a remarkably different interpretation of the document or its context. That's what he says. It's not a whole lot of difference. And actually when you look at them, there really isn't very much difference. There's a couple of variations and they're not super significant, but those are what he's going to talk about. So what he says here, and I'm checking this, yeah, I've made such a comparison and have not found variations that would suggest a remarkably different interpretation of the document or its context. Yet some differences are worth noting, and I do so below. And he creates a chart where he does that. Entries in the chart below appear only if I felt the differences merited comment. Most do not. This is Gary Muhlstein writing. Most do not. I do not note general preferences such as Rhodes tendency to translate verbs in certain contexts as perspective, as opposed to Rittner's tendency to translate them as indicatives where the graphemes allow either translation. In other words, you know, it's dealer's choice as to how you want to translate it. Neither of these tendencies is right or wrong, and neither preference essentially changes the nature of the meaning of the translation. In the variations I note in the chart, sometimes the translations are equally meritorious. Where I feel one choice is preferable, I indicate that preference and provide an explanation. Does it sound like Kerry Muhlstein is actually saying that Robert Rittner badly misreads the text? No, no, it Doesn't. It doesn't at all. And so here you've got this problem. I mean, this is a fatal problem for John Gee is not only is he writing this in the context of a screed, but now he's making a very defamatory allegation against a world renowned Egyptologist and he cites to a publication as support for that. And not only is the publication written by his friend Kerry Muhlstein, not only is it for the FARMS book review, but it also doesn't support what he says it supports.

John Dehlin [00:52:20] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [00:52:22] So that's one of the, one of the things. And by the way, and this is subtle, but it's important.

John Dehlin [00:52:28] That's dishonest. That's dishonest. You know, it's not academically credible to be citing the FARMS review in my opinion, in a, in a legit Egyptology journal. It's also questionable to be citing a buddy who's your, as you call it, a toady crummy to be mis citing it and saying that it says something to support your argument when it doesn't. That's actually potentially dishonest because you're basically creating a fictitious footnote claiming that it supports what you're saying when it actually says the opposite. So it's actually, it lacks academic credibility and it, it seems to be overtly dishonest.

Radio Free Mormon [00:53:06] It's academic malpractice. Yeah, is what it is. And by the way, this, this particular insight was brought up on ex Mormon Reddit, I think it was by a fellow who post under the name the Marmot King. And then because I want to shout

John Dehlin [00:53:20] out to the Marmot King, he's great.

Radio Free Mormon [00:53:21] Yeah, I want to give credit where credit's due on that. And then another person over there did some further research on other allegations that John Gee made against Robert Rittner in this very article, this very book review. And this is from Elkanah the Sky Dragon. I don't think that's his real name, but Elkanah the Sky Dragon does a little more research and he finds a couple of other misstatements is a nice word for it that John G. Includes in his article. Okay, so here's what he says. Gee claims Rittner never mentions the works of another scholar named Carl Janssen Winkhelm. Let me see if I can find this here because I've got the book review right here. Yeah, this is from the book review by John Key. Here's what he says. Professor Rittner translates nearly 300 texts in his anthology, but numbers them rather Oddly, so that it seems as though there are only about 200. Okay, here it is. Most of this material is conveniently available in the more comprehensive work of Carl Janssen Winkhelm and Olivier Perdue. But Carl Janssen Winkhelm is the name. Neither of which does Rittner mention. So he says he doesn't mention this work or this name of this scholar. And here's what we find here by this poster. Gee claims Rittner never mentions the works of Carl Janssen Winkhelm. Apparently Guy did not rate. Excuse, Excuse me. Apparently Guy did not read page 8 of Rittner's book nor any of the 31 times Rittner references Janssen Winkhelm by name in his book. So right there he's making an out and out misstatement. Guy is claiming that Rittner doesn't mention the work of Carl Janssen Winghelm when he does.

John Dehlin [00:55:21] Multiple dozens of times.

Radio Free Mormon [00:55:23] Yes. And the significance of this criticism is that this Carl Janssen Winkhelm has done a comprehensive work along the same lines of the book on the Libyan anarchy that Rittner has produced. And so you should be giving credit to people and referencing people who have gone before you who have done work that should also be considered in light of what it is that you're producing. So he's slamming Robert Rittner for that omission and oversight when actually Rittner does mention it. That's the key.

John Dehlin [00:55:51] Again, that sounds like academic malpractice.

Radio Free Mormon [00:55:54] Yeah, yeah. And there's another thing that is said in this. Really, it's only about a two page review where. I'll just read this here. Oh, yes. John Gee in this review claims at one point Rittner says that a book that came out five years before he his did was too late to be considered. Okay, let me see if I can find this here. And if I can't, I'll just go ahead and synopsize it for you and you can find it as well. Yeah, let me go ahead and just mention it to you. All right, so there's a significant book. This book by Robert Ritter is published in 2009, which makes it makes it subject to being reviewed by John Gee in 2010. But there's another book that is significant that came out in about 2004. In other words, five years or so before Robert Rittner's book came out. And this is another significant book which John Gee feels Robert Rittner should have mentioned or referred to in some way. And so what John Gee says in the book review is that as soon as John Gee's book came off The Press in 2009, it was immediately five years out of date, is what he says, because Robert Rittner failed to include a reference to this book that came out five years before. And what it is that Elkanah, the Sky Dragon notes is that actually Robert Rittner does mention that book, at least in the introduction. And how he describes it is this, is that Rittner mentioned a book by Wilson, that's the Guy, that came out in 2005. But Rittner explains in his book that he didn't use it because Rittner's manuscript was already finished before Wilson was published. In other words, it seems Guy is mad because Rittner wrote his book and then it took a while before it was published. So just breaking that down a little bit, here's Wilson, who writes his book about five years before Robert Rittner's book comes out. But there's a time difference here because Robert Rittner has a lot of things that he's working on, and it takes some time after he get his manuscript to the publisher and the editors for review that it gets published. So what Robert Rittner does in his introduction is he explains the fact that he had actually completed his manuscript before the 2005 book by Wilson came out, and then it took that time for Robert Rittner's book to finally hit the press. So it's not something where he refuses to mention. He actually does mention it. And he says the reason he didn't reference is because as the time Robert Rittner finished his manuscript, the Wilson book was not out yet. That's all it's about. So here we have another example of John Gee misrepresenting things in order to try and make Robert Rittner look as bad as he possibly can, even at the expense of overlooking explanations that make perfect sense and misrepresenting things that Robert Rittner does really mention in his book.

John Dehlin [00:59:08] And part of what's outrageous about this is, number one, he's lying. Number two, he's smearing. Number three, he's smearing in defiance of sort of what. What is the basis of science and or academic endeavor, which is to remove your personal bias and to be as scholarly and to go with the evidence and to be as academic and as scholarly as possible. He's sort of like thumbing his nose at the whole institution along with peer review. And so he's like. And again, motivated by religious bias. It's like the most flagrant violation of sort of the core tenants of scholarship. And I'm saying, as someone who has a PhD who's published 12 or 14 academic journal articles or book chapters, this is outrageous. It's not just like, oh, it's kind of unfortunate. I think academic malpractice is putting it kindly.

Radio Free Mormon [01:00:10] Yeah, there's definitely a flag on the field for unsportsmanlike conduct. And he gets his book review published in this journal without letting anybody see it before it comes out. Because obviously, if they. There's a book review committee.

John Dehlin [01:00:24] Yeah, yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:00:25] And then the next editor says there was a book review committee. They never saw this, and before it

John Dehlin [01:00:30] came out, they're embarrassed by it. They're embarrassed by what guy did.

Radio Free Mormon [01:00:33] Yeah. So he used his position as editor to put stuff in that would not have been allowed by a book review committee anywhere, and certainly not for that journal in order to get back at Robert Rittner and show that Robert Rittner is a hack and he doesn't know what he's talking about, and he badly misreads texts and he doesn't include obvious other books or manuscripts that he should have included all those kinds of things. And I go into more detail about that in Bad Blood. But I wanted to add those two things here to underscore this point. The discussion of the Book of Abraham and the Kirtland Egyptian papers gets very complicated. I don't understand all of it. Okay. It gets very complicated, very complex. But the one thing that we know is that, unfortunately, we cannot trust what John Gee says about it. Because we know now that John Gee is so motivated in his defense of his particular missing scroll theory that he will twist evidence to slam people who disagree with him or step on his toes. And also there's other examples of his misusing sources in order to create an incorrect impression. And I think it was Brian Hauglett who mentioned this, or he brought it to my attention anyway, that in one of John Geese books about the Book of Abraham, remember, he's invested in this idea that this super long scroll, that vignette one or facsimile one appears on, it's a super long scroll. So there's plenty of room that a lot of it was lost. And on that missing piece of the long scroll was really. There's the Book of Abraham there in Egyptian. Okay? That's the missing scroll theory. And he took two recollections of two independent witnesses, both of them female. I think it's later in life. They were girls at the time, maybe in Nauvoo. And one of them says, that she saw a long scroll that Joseph Smith had, or maybe his mother had after he passed away. It was a long scroll. She doesn't say exactly what she means by a long scroll, but that's what, you know, John G. Is keying in on. He wants it to be long. So she says she saw a long stroll. In a completely separate and independent statement from another witness at another time, she says that she saw or was shown to her by Mother Smith the papyrus from which Joseph Smith translated the Book of Abraham. At least that's what Mother Smith told this witness. Okay. Is that part clear? Yes, John Gee. Now, in his book, and I think it's an introduction to the Book of Abraham, uses both. He conflates both of these sources. He doesn't actually quote them, but he conflates them, and he says that witnesses testified or saw that there was a long scroll from which Joseph Smith translated the Book of Abraham. So you can see how he takes both of those. There's a long scroll in one statement, doesn't mention translating the Book of Abraham from it. There's another one that talks about a scroll from which Joseph Smith translated the Book of Abraham. They have nothing to do with each other. And he puts them together because he is motivated to reach the conclusion that he's defending, which is that there was a long scroll from which Joseph Smith translated the Book of Abraham. Neither one of those statements independently say that he puts them together so that they can say that. So he can argue the missing scroll theory.

John Dehlin [01:04:08] It's called motivate. It's called motivated reasoning. Right.

Radio Free Mormon [01:04:11] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:04:12] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:04:12] He's arguing from his conclusion the tail is wagging the dog. And that's one of the things that you have to keep in mind. At least I have to keep in mind when I'm reading anything that he writes because I don't have the expertise or the background to know whether he is accurate or not in many of the things he says. But what I know now is that I can't take him at face value. I can't simply trust that what he's saying is accurate because I've seen too many examples of his misrepresentations. And then the further irony is, of course, that that's just what he regularly alleges against those with whom he disagrees is that they are the ones who misrepresent things and that you can't really trust what they're saying.

John Dehlin [01:04:55] Yeah. And for me, what's most outrageous, just at a super high level, is that it's pretty clear that most Universities, I would think, in my experience, they want to hire the best scholars in the fields that they are, you know, involved in, to do the best scholarship, to advance the field, to advance the reputation of the university, but also just to do really good work. But it's really clear that when the Mormon Church hires someone like Guy, what they're trying to do is it's like, oh, Hugh Nibley is old or dying. We need someone to bolster the Book of Abraham because it's clearly one of the things that's most vulnerable for the Church. I, John Dehlin, my faith crisis, started learning about the Book of Abraham and the scrolls back in 2000, 2001. It's a huge problem. So the church has to fund multiple tenure track positions to defend this thing that's indefensible. And so John Gee, they find someone, he goes to Yale, they fund him, they give him a tenure track position, and his full time job is to defend the Book of Abraham. Not to do great Egyptology scholarship, not to advance the field, not to contribute meaningfully in the profession, but to use motivated reasoning to bolster an indefensible book and to smear anyone who would dare contradict the potential divinity of the book. And it's an outrageous use of the university system, the academic system, to do this faux scholarship based on motivated reasoning. And that's what Guy and Muhlstein generally do. And it's outrageous.

Gee Returns to Defending the Book of Abraham

Radio Free Mormon [01:06:39] Right? So what that's going to bring us to is the, really the second part of the presentation today, which has to do with the fact that John Gee is now back to his old tricks. What he did to Robert Rittner in 2010 in that journal book review is what he's starting to do now. Well, he's already done three papers.

John Dehlin [01:07:01] Okay, so just to be clear, what you just told us about how Guy deals with Rittner, you didn't just tell us that to kind of give a follow on to the episode you did previously. You're basically saying that history repeats itself, that what, what he did to Rittner, he. He ends up repeating some of that behavior in the Jill Smith Papers project.

Radio Free Mormon [01:07:21] Yeah, I was just gonna say John Geese certainly repeats himself. And what he's gonna do now is he is instead of.

John Dehlin [01:07:27] Did I misstate?

Radio Free Mormon [01:07:29] No, you said history repeats itself, which is, you know, true, and it's an axiom, but John Gee is definitely repeating himself. So what he did to Rittner in the context of that book review there 10 years ago, he's going to repeat again in much the similar way, really against Brian. How good. Because that's the guy he's really, really mad at. This is who John G. Must perceive as a Judas of sorts to him personally because you know Brian how changed his mind because he thought the evidence actually was stronger in support of a different position.

John Dehlin [01:07:59] Oh wait, so Brian, how good went with the evidence? Is that what you're saying?

Radio Free Mormon [01:08:02] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:08:03] Ooh, that's a problem.

Radio Free Mormon [01:08:04] You know, and reasonable people can come to different conclusions based upon the same evidence. All right, that's definitely true. But. But when we see that John Gee continues to massage the evidence in order to get it to support his position, when we see that there are all these scholars who are over on the other side now and that Brian Hauglett and Robin Jensen have gone over to the other side now, it's pretty much John Gee all alone. I mean, I'm sure he has a little bit of solace from Kerry Muhlstein though. There are indications that Kerry Muhlstein has given that he is open to the Catalyst theory as well as the Missing scroll theory. So more and more it's looking like the cheese stands alone and John Gee now is defending his position, which he's not going to leave apparently for any reason, certainly not because of the evidence against a growing host of scholars who are on the other side. And more and more it's looking like John Gee is desperate at this point. I don't want to be mean to him, so I'll try and put this in the nicest way possible. My view of this situation is that John Gee has to a large extent sacrificed his reputation in the wider Egyptological community among his peers because of his apologetic writings on behalf of the Book of Abraham.

John Dehlin [01:09:26] He's a human shield. He really is an apologetic Mormon human shield.

Radio Free Mormon [01:09:31] Yes, he is. And right now he's taken a lot of bullets and a lot of them are self inflicted. But he's lost that, I think to a large extent. I can't say whether he realizes that or not. I think it's pretty clear.

John Dehlin [01:09:42] Can I just. I don't want to argue with you, but is it self inflicted or is this why the Church hired him and he's just doing what the Church hired him to do?

Radio Free Mormon [01:09:52] I couldn't tell because I haven't read his contract.

John Dehlin [01:09:55] Yeah, he's being John Gee as he's been for decades. Yeah, it's just now the Church is moving under his feet and we'll talk about this later about his motivations and what this means for the Church. But it's gotta be feel awful to have everyone abandoning the thing that he sacrificed his career and has been defending for decades. He's trying to honor the legacy of Hugh Nibley, which is what he was hired to do. And now not only is the entire academic community against him, including the most reputable Egyptologist in the Western Hemisphere, but now all his surrounding Egyptologists, and I say that in quotes, are all abandoning ship and he's left having besmirched his reputation alone, looking like a fool. And it's kind of like he's lashing out as his boat is sinking.

Radio Free Mormon [01:10:47] Yeah, I like how you say looking after looking like a fool after that, that long preface about how we're not going to engage in Ed Hommen arguments. Let's just say he doesn't look like a fool.

John Dehlin [01:10:59] I'm saying how he feels.

Radio Free Mormon [01:11:01] Oh, okay, okay. I do not think for a second that John Gee has ever thought he looks like a fool.

John Dehlin [01:11:06] Okay. I did not call him a fool, but I.

Radio Free Mormon [01:11:10] Okay, okay.

John Dehlin [01:11:11] That he might feel like everyone abandoning his side around him makes him look like a fool.

Radio Free Mormon [01:11:18] Right. It certainly makes him look more and more isolated. And to finish that, that comment I was going to make before, which is that I think that he has to a large extent sacrificed his reputation among Egyptologists because of his apologetics for the Book of Abra. Now he seems desperate because he's losing his. His reputation even among Book of Abraham apologists in Mormonism. Yes. And so I could readily understand how someone like that would be acting desperately and lashing out because what he ends up doing in these papers that he publishes, especially the first one from 2018, attacking this book, remember, this is Hamlet. This is the show that he wasn't cast in when he felt like he should have had the part. And he can't say anything good about it. What he's doing now is the same thing, is that he's going to focus his ire on Brian Hauglett. But Brian Howgled is a co editor of this book with Robin Jensen. And the editors above it are also associated with it because they put their signature of approval. They're the ones who have reviewed everything that Robin Jensen and Brian Howgley put together. They, they. There's obviously there's a lot of corrections, a lot of reworking, a lot of why don't we do this, why don't we do that? A lot of collaboration between them. And so the editors are just as responsible, if not more so for the contents of the book than how good. And Jensen and the editors of this book represent the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. So just as John Gee focuses on Robert Rittner and attacks him, completely oblivious to the collateral damage he's causing to everybody else associated with the journal, as well as to his own reputation, he's just so focused on that he's going to do a similar thing now, which he's going to be so upset, apparently, with Brian Hagler, that he's going to focus on this book and attack it, oblivious to the fact that he is, at the same time not only attacking Brian Haugland, he's also attacking Robin Jensen. He's also attacking the editors of the Joseph Smith Papers Project, the whole project, which includes Steven Snow, the church historian, and he ends up inadvertently attacking the church that has sanctioned and approved this series of books in the Joseph Smith Papers Project, including this one right here, and rfm.

John Dehlin [01:13:49] I just want to make a point, not because I'm trying to defend myself, but because I don't want to be.

Radio Free Mormon [01:13:54] Defend yourself. I'll defend you.

John Dehlin [01:13:56] No, my point was not to call John G. A fool. My point was to highlight the. The corruption of the system, because I was trying to actually show empathy for John G. To say it must feel horrible to be hired for job A, to sacrifice your reputation for job A, and then to have the church and all your surrounding Egyptologists move to job B, leaving you to look like a fool having sacrificed your reputation. My point is actually a point of trying to show empathy for John Gee and to show understanding for why he might be lashing out because he feels like he's being abandoned after having sacrificed his entire career and reputation, which would make him look like a fool to everyone else around him. He must feel awful inside, even if he would never admit it. And I know that I'm speculating. I just want to be clear that I'm trying to show empathy for John Gee here. That's what I am guessing might be happening in his mind.

Radio Free Mormon [01:15:05] And I know that that's what you're doing. And I'm glad that at least my comment gave you the opportunity to explain it more clearly, because there are others who might have taken it a different way.

John Dehlin [01:15:15] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. It's great. Thank you.

Radio Free Mormon [01:15:17] Okay. Thank you.

John Dehlin [01:15:20] So is this the first article we're talking about, or is there something else you wanted to say in your outline before we talk about the article?

Radio Free Mormon [01:15:26] Well, that's pretty much it.

John Dehlin [01:15:28] We're going to say something about Geese. Degree or diploma, or did you already talk about that?

Radio Free Mormon [01:15:32] Or do you have a private Chat message.

John Dehlin [01:15:35] Yes.

Radio Free Mormon [01:15:36] Oh, okay. Okay. I'll check anyway. Anyway. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:15:40] So, okay. Okay. Let me go ahead and share a few comments from our listeners and. And we'll give you a chance to get a drink of water. How's that? Our fam. Okay. All right. So I want to. Quickly, I want to thank all our listeners for checking in. We do have a few comments that I thought I would share. Richard writes thoughts and prayers for John Gee. Didn't he see what happened to Dr. Peterson at farms? I think what Richard is doing is he is reiterating the fact that there's a systemic problem here, which is that the Mormon Church uses their apologists as human shields, and then they're not necessarily loyal to them or especially their reputations. Once the Church is forced to move on from a position just like Daniel Peterson was, you know, the FARMS was dissolved in all intents and purposes of the word. It was evolved into the Maxwell Institute. Then the Maxwell Institute ends up kicking out Daniel Peterson from being the head of it and hires others. And now, you know, slowly, Daniel Peterson and John Gee are being kind of mothballed and marginalized with. While, you know, the new Spencer Fluman Maxwell Institute and even the Joseph Smith Papers Project are being elevated. In the end, systems aren't loyal to some of their most loyal, devout supporters because it's all about the power and the influence of the system, and martyrs can be sacrificed. And so that's, you know, I guess Richard's basically saying that John Gee and Daniel Peterson, many others, are really victims of a system. Drew makes a similar point here. Isn't that the point? Guy becomes the proverbial martyr for a historical revisionist story for future generations of the faithful. So those are a couple. Those are a couple comments from our listeners. I'll just add one more. Wendy writes, brian Hauglid is a man for all seasons and one of the nicest people on earth. I'm gonna echo that comment, Wendy. Brian Haglett is indeed a gentleman and a scholar. He was willing to take the heat and change his position at sacrifice to his own sort of relationships and even reputation within the Maxwell Institute. And. And a huge shout out to Brian Hauglett. And someday I hope he'll be able to come on Mormon stories himself. But we understand why there. There are sensitive reasons why at this time, he can't do that, but we're gonna. We're gonna give him a shout out nonetheless. All right, rfm, you're back. And I was just gonna ask. Oh, one last comment. Gary Ogden writes, RFM's interview with Brian Hagled was fantastic. If you, if you have not seen it, go to RFM's website and look it up. Great insight to how the church whitewashes the narrative. Catalyst Theory is the only argument for apologists. We'll be talking about the Catalyst Theory, maybe this program, but Gary, that's a great comment. Rfm, we have you back. I was just curious if you wanted to mention anything about G's diploma or if. Or if that ship has sailed.

Gee's Review in The Interpreter Foundation

Radio Free Mormon [01:19:07] No, no, I. I think we'll skip that part because it's really not that important to what we're talking about right now. I think you're reading off my. My outline, my somewhat jumbled outline that I sent to you.

John Dehlin [01:19:17] Okay, that's great. Where do you want to go next? Are we going on to paper one?

Radio Free Mormon [01:19:22] Yes, now we're going to go to this paper. There's a series of three papers. And first we thought was just going to be one because it should have been done in 2018 or 2019. Excuse me. That John Gee wrote. Now it's published in the online journal. There's also a print version, but an online journal called Interpreter. The Interpreter. I think it's called a Journal of Latter Day Saint Faith and Scholarship.

John Dehlin [01:19:44] And what would you say just quickly about the Interpreter? Just for those who have no idea what that is and what it means or doesn't mean, how would you describe the nature and reputation of the Interpreter?

Radio Free Mormon [01:19:56] The Interpreter is a publication that Daniel Peterson started after he was let go from the Maxwell Institute. And the general understanding is that he was let go from the Maxwell Institute because he insisted on being hyperbolic and insulting and engaging and ad hominems in a lot of his writings. He not only wrote that way, he also encouraged others to write that way and allowed them to publish that way in the. The mi. Maxwell Institute publications over which he was editor, which included that review of books. So he was let go. He then starts his own publication, which is the Interpreter and which tries to put out. Actually has put out a new paper every Friday that he's quite proud of that fact. And unfortunately, in addition to probably what I'm sure is good scholarship related to Mormonism, there's also a healthy dose of the ad hominem, which he continues in the Interpreter and allows others to continue in the Interpreter. And this paper by John Gee is an excellent example. So John Gee, mad about not being cast as Hamlet, is going to write an absolute savage review of the play. And where else should he publish this? By the end, the Interpreter, really quickly,

John Dehlin [01:21:18] I just want to, I just want to kind of defend scholarship for a second. The interpreter has that word scholarship there. I wonder if that is a fair use of the word scholarship. And the only reason I say that is because, number one, a credible academic journal is indexed and it's searchable, it's credible, it's objective. And if the interpreter, you know, and I can just tell you when I was, you know, being investigated for my disciplinary council, the interpreter creates at least two articles by, by Greg Smith where the whole purpose of these articles are to assassinate my character, to smear me, to lie about me. I don't mean to make this personal, but my sense is over the years that the interpreter by and large has been used to either employ tactics of motivated reasoning to defend the faith, not, not observing the basic rules of scholarship like independent blind peer review, but it's also just used as an arm of, of ad hominem character assassination under the guise of scholarship. And so I guess I just want to ask you your opinion is, you know, would any other university that isn't sympathetic to Mormon faith truth claims, do you have a sense that anybody would consider this a scholarly journal by any standard outside of, of Mormon apologetics?

Radio Free Mormon [01:22:49] Well, I think that there are. Well, probably not overall, probably not. There's certainly a lot of scholarship that goes on. It's religiously motivated scholarship. But every now and again, once again, you have articles that are really not so much about scholarship as they are about attacking somebody else. And this is what John Key's first article was back in 2019, in which he reviews. You have that up there on the page. I have my own copy of it up here on my, my screen where John Gee is allowed to review. It's going to be another book review, John Book review of volume four of the Joseph Smith Papers Revelations and Translation series. And you see that up there at the top. That's what he's reviewing. And if you look in his abstract, you're going to hear some familiar language. Volume four, the Revelations and Translation series of the Joseph Smith Papers does not live up to the standards set in previous volumes. So once again, he's going to try and cull the herd. He's going to try and cull Brian Howgled. And unfortunately Robin Jensen is sort of hooked at the hip with Brian, but he's going to try and cull him from the herd. In other words, criticize Brian Hauglid as the editor of this volume while separating him from the general editors of the entire series, just like he did with Robert Rittner. But as we're going to see with Robert Rittner, you can't do that. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't really function in the real world because the editors, including church representatives, are in charge of editing, being the general editors of this book as well as the other books in the series. While the. While the production values are still top notch. Once again, saying something positive, comma. While the production values are still top notch, the actual content is substandard. Problems fill the volume. Wow, this is really. This must be a horrible book. Problems fill the volume, including misplaced photographs and numerous questionable transcriptions beyond the more than 200 places where the editors admitted they could not read the documents. For this particular volume, producing it incorrectly is arguably worse than not producing it at all. Now, this is the most unkindest cut of all. This is the worst slam you could ever give. Here are these editors, not just Hauglid and Jensen, but also all the editors above them at the Joseph Smith Papers Project who have worked seven years putting this volume together. You can only imagine the kind of work that was expended and the expense of this book is a wonderfully constructed and published volume on glossy paper. But now, for them to do that and for him to say, this book is so bad that it would have been better if it had never been born. The world would be better scholarship if this book didn't exist. That's how bad it is. So that's about the biggest slam you could possibly give to a volume. And he kind of does the same thing with Robert Rittner's book on the Libyan Anarchy, too. So if you go down there and once again, I'm looking at my. My version here. Let me. Let me see what you've got. Oh, you have mine up there?

John Dehlin [01:26:00] Yeah, I switched it over.

Radio Free Mormon [01:26:01] Okay, well, I'm not going to use all of my.

John Dehlin [01:26:04] I'll jump to wherever you are. I'll jump to wherever you are.

Radio Free Mormon [01:26:06] Okay, great. Well, I'm. So if we're going to use my pagination. Page two, the second complete paragraph. On the surface, this volume appears to conform to the standards of the previous volumes. But in the details, that is not the case. There is much in the volume with which one could and perhaps should quibble. Now, interesting. He uses the word quibble because what he's going to be doing almost incessantly, is quibbling. But he says, I will not be able to spend much time on the numerous questionable editorial decisions or. Or scholarship evident in the volume. All right, this is the same kind of stuff he does all the time. There's so much that's wrong with it. I don't have time to point everything out. So I'm just going to give you a few examples, you know, that kind of thing. Right. So he's going to just say a few things, which really is probably all that he has. And one of the things that he's very upset with is that the two editors are modern American historians. They're not ancient Egyptologists or Egyptologists of ancient Egypt. These are modern American historians. And like Brian Howgled said, this volume deals with a modern American production, which is the Abraham Egyptian Papers. It doesn't deal with translating literally or accurately Egyptian into English. It doesn't have that as its goal at all. So therefore, it really doesn't need the hand of an Egyptologist in it. Modern American scholars were perfect for this. And that's certainly what the editorship of the Church of the Joseph Smith Papers Project felt as well. So then they go down a ways. I'm not going to go through all the different arguments that he makes in any of these papers that would be so time consuming and frankly, so boring that I don't want to do that. But then if you go right above introduction, because he's not even to his introduction yet, for crying out loud, and he's already slamming it right and left. He says space does not allow. I don't know why, because this is. I'm sorry, this is an online journal. There's nothing. There's. There is no space. There are no space limitations in an online journal. He can write as much as he wants. Just blogging. Basically. Space does not allow listing all the problems in the volume, nor even all the problems I know of, Though others using different standards may not consider them errors by their standards. Now that's an interesting admission. So a smattering from each section will have to suffice. I will address each section in turn. Oh, now he's going to talk about their introduction. That's why he's at the introduction. But notice that he says all the problems. There's so many problems. I don't even have space in an online article to list them all. But then he says others using different standards may not consider them errors by their standards. It's really interesting because every now and again he has to actually admit something that is against his argument. He's saying there's all these problems, although other people might see them as problem, other people might not see them as problems. Okay, so it goes to introduction and basically the thing I wanted to mention was, yeah, American historians. He just hates the fact that these American historians are involved as the editors of this book and not his Egyptological self. And he talks about the Internet. This introduction probably will not age well. The whole introduction in the book is basically talking about how the evidence in the Abraham Egyptian Papers indicates strongly that they were used to translate the text of the Book of Abraham. That is just killing him. He wants to be able to write this introduction, to write it the right way, which is that the Abraham Egyptian Papers had nothing to do with the translation of the Book of Abraham. And this is why he's so motivated to write these types of things. And if you read through the entire thing, it goes down through papyri, it goes to notebooks of copied Egyptian characters. He goes through all these things and he cannot say one good thing about this book. It is once again a screed against this book where he says, notebook of copied Egyptian characters. If the editor's assumptions about the translation process were correct, which they are not. Okay, those are the assumptions. Right. He says it's an assumption that they use these papers to translate the Book of Abraham. That's the assumption that he says is incorrect. He knows the correct assumption. Even if the editor's assumptions about the translation process were correct, one would have expected that Joseph Smith and others would have copied characters before they started providing translations. Okay, so that's leading into another part of his argument. Not going to go in there. Copies of Egyptian characters. The editors date the copying of Egyptian characters to early July based on their assumptions rather than any evidence. Yeah, based on their assumptions. So they're just going with their assumptions, not based on the evidence. Well, if you actually read the introduction to this book, you'll find out there's plenty of evidence that they are using. They're trying to follow the evidence as best they can to reconstruct how. How these papers were used in producing the Book of Abraham. And this is something with which John G. Vehemently disagrees. Here's an interesting thing. If you go down to the bottom of page five in my outline, this is such a tiny part, and I'm not going to get into why this is important, but I am going to talk about what it is he's writing. There are also worrying problems in the description of the documents. The editor state. Now that's how good. And Jensen, the editors state that the documents contain hieratic and unknown characters in unidentified handwriting, parentheses, likely js. Of course, that's Joseph Smith. Likely JS. And possibly Cowdery. End of parentheses, end of quote, page 55. Right. Now, notice what John G. Says about that statement. I grant that the editors can specify the English handwriting on documents, but there is no way of knowing who wrote the Egyptian characters on the document. So the proposed describable identifications are simply guesswork or speculation on the part of the editors, which is why they said likely JS and possibly Cowdery. I added that last part. In other words, he says they can't say who wrote them. They can only speculate. And that's exactly what they did. And they identified the fact that they were guessing by using the word likely Joseph Smith and possibly cowdery. So he's finding fault for they're not doing something that they actually did. Does that make sense?

John Dehlin [01:32:44] Yeah. Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:32:45] You're following what I'm saying.

John Dehlin [01:32:46] I think so.

Radio Free Mormon [01:32:48] Okay. Well, in other words, he's saying that they can't identify. They say it's likely Joseph Smith and possibly Cowdery. And he says, who are these people? They can't identify who it was. It's simply guesswork, which is what they say and why they use likely Joseph Smith and possibly Cowdery. Okay, that's an example down to page six under Book of Abraham manuscripts. You'll see. Unfortunately, these documents are also plagued by transcription problems. It's a plague, John. There are so many problems with this book. It's a freaking plague. Then he goes to footnotes, comparison of characters, presuppositions. I'm not even going to go into that.

John Dehlin [01:33:29] If you had to rfm, if you had to summarize kind of a few of the main criticisms he has, because, I mean, it's obvious that what he's doing, he's just. He's got one play which is eviscerate a text, smear it, say there's nothing good about it, insult it, nitpick it to death. Is. Are there. Are there one, two or three kind of main arguments that he's trying to make in this first. In this first article?

Radio Free Mormon [01:33:55] Well, mainly what he's trying to do is trying to show why it is that this book is horribly done and why it is that the world would have been a better place if it had never been produced at all. So what he's trying to do is show all these things that he thinks are errors. Of course, we saw what he did with Ritter before. Right. We saw what he did with Rittner before, where he claims errors that were not errors. I'm not sure. He's probably doing A similar thing here. I can't vouch for that. But, you know, if he did it there, he's probably doing a similar thing here. And I really wish that Brian Hagley could have come on the show to talk about those things. However, he could not make it so. But let me go down just to page eight. All right? Here's one of his favorite things, which is guilt by association. He's going to do this throughout his papers toward the bottom. This is very important, okay? Because once again, this gets the chronology for them, the editors of the book, the chrono. The chronological order of the documents is first the papyri, next the notebooks of characters, then the pages of characters, then the Egyptian Alphabet, then the grammar and Alphabet, then the Book of Abraham manuscripts, and finally the published editions of the Book of Abraham. What all that means is that for the editors of this book, the chronological order is that the Abraham Egyptian paper served as the basis for translating the Book of Abraham. That's what all that amounts to. Okay? The organization of the volume, while logical, implies the ordering of the document. So in other words, because they put him in that order, it's implying the chronology, with which he totally disagrees, and therefore he's going to find fault even with the way the order that the documents are placed in the volume. But notice what he says here. And I actually made it bigger. I increased the font. Can you read that?

Gee's Objections to the Volume's Document Ordering

John Dehlin [01:35:50] Yeah. The organization of the volume, while logical, implies the ordering of the documents favored by critics of the church. But this order is not necessarily supported by the dates given by the editors. And let me just see if I understand this rfm. You tell me if I'm wrong. I probably am. By ordering the. The documents in the. In volume four the way that the editors did, they're basically saying that Joseph Smith received the papyru. Then he started writing down the characters in, you know, in a notebook. Then he started, you know, creating an Alphabet. Then he started trying to create a grammar that tied. That's tied to the Alphabet. And, and, and basically they're showing in their sequence that the grammar and Alphabet that Joseph Smith ultimately created was then in some way used to produce what we now have as the Book of Abraham, which is what Guy finds is deeply problematic, because why would Joseph Smith go to all this effort to try and understand what the characters mean, to develop a grammar and Alphabet, and then have papers that tie the actual grammar and Alphabet to the ultimate Book of Abraham text that Joseph produces? If it's a total, ineffective, inaccurate translation, it just shows sort of Blatantly that Joseph Smith had no idea what he was doing, could not translate Egyptian in any way. And guy is like, don't go there. And by sequencing them the way that you do, you're basically making the point that critics make, which is that Joseph Smith had no idea what he's doing. So create some other order. Basically create it's papyru, then Book of Abraham as we have it today. And then the grammar and Alphabet afterwards is like this afterthought. Like, oh, well, you know, the grammar Alphabet was what Joseph Smith did after he was just kind of playing around after he had already produced the Book of Abraham.

Radio Free Mormon [01:37:57] And more than that, you've got that exactly right, by the way. But with Joseph Smith playing around, it's also important to get Joseph Smith out of that room. Okay? Joseph Smith has to have little to no contact with the Abraham Egyptian papers for the same reason. This has to be just what his scribes are doing. They're just knocking around. They're just trying to reverse engineer some kind of grammar and Alphabet based upon the papyrus which is already in existence, and the text of the Book of Abraham. Those come before these Abraham Egyptian documents. And that's why the Abraham Egyptian documents have to be meaningless as far as John Gee is concerned. Their importance is that they're not important. And that's what he spends all this time trying to prove. The other thing here is that he makes it very clear that the ordering of this volume and the editors and the general editors and the church is favored by critics of the church. Okay, he's trying to do guilt by

John Dehlin [01:39:01] association, which is kind of ad hominem. Is that right?

Radio Free Mormon [01:39:04] Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's guilt by association.

John Dehlin [01:39:07] He's basically saying Robin Jensen and Brian Hauglett have now become stooges for critics of the church like Brett Metcalf and Dan Vogel. Basically.

Radio Free Mormon [01:39:18] Right.

John Dehlin [01:39:19] They're doing the evil church critics bidding and that now the fortress has been infiltrated by the Enem.

Radio Free Mormon [01:39:27] And I'm sure that's how he sees it. But what happens is that the, the general editors of the Joseph Smith Papers project, he is now accusing them of putting this forward in a manner favored by critics of the church. And then even the church itself is putting it forward in a manner favored by critics of the church. So in his mind he must think, yeah, they are dupes. They're being duped by Jensen and Hauglet and they don't even realize what it is they're doing. Well, the ordering of the materials is based upon the same thing they put in their lengthy introduction, which is saying the same thing. So they're not being dupes at all. They're setting it out there in black and white in the introduction.

John Dehlin [01:40:04] And tell me if I'm wrong, but does this sort of mean that the Joe Smith Papers Project is kind of invalidating years and even decades worth of arguments and research that Gee has been making? And Guy is like, you're basically attacking my life's work by arranging these documents in this way. I've been trying to tell everybody there's a missing scroll and that's, you know, and that the grammar and Alphabet is, you know, these are not the droids you're looking for. And you're basically giving credibility and status to the grammar and Alphabet. And you're basically dismissing my missing scroll theory. And then what leg do I have to stand on? It makes me look foolish. Is that. Is that possibly what he might be feeling?

Radio Free Mormon [01:40:47] Right. And this is where I'm talking about his last desperation being that he's being made inconsequential and insignificant even within the realm of Mormon apologetics. That that whole career path that he chose, which made him lose his credibility to a large extent among Egyptologists in general. So that's why I think he's desperate here.

John Dehlin [01:41:08] Yeah. It's like, what have I. What have I given my life to? Yeah. I imagine him thinking that what have I given my life to now? That the church and the super reputable project Joseph Smith Papers Project is now invalidating everything I've been standing for for decades.

Radio Free Mormon [01:41:25] Right. Which is why he should have been chosen to play Hamlet.

John Dehlin [01:41:28] I'd be angry, too, if I were him. I'd be angry too.

Radio Free Mormon [01:41:31] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [01:41:31] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:41:33] And then in page nine, that highlighted part, he's saying a similar thing. The editor's assumption about the order of translation is manifest in a number of ways. For example, the Egyptian Alphabet documents seem to parallel Abraham 1, 24 and 25 and 31. In other words, this is where it seems to parallel and to be a translation of from the Egyptian Abraham documents to the text of the Book of Abraham. Right. That's the one thing he doesn't like. He says, one could argue either that the Abraham verses were produced from the Egyptian Alphabet documents, which is what this volume does. And what the great number of scholars are deciding is that actually it was used to produce the Book of Abraham, or and now this is what he believes, or that the Egyptian Alphabet document, document documents were produced from the Book of Abraham. See, that's what he thinks, that the Abraham Egyptian documents were produced from the Book of Abraham. Does that make sense? You understand what I'm saying?

Did the Egyptian Alphabet Produce the Book of Abraham?

John Dehlin [01:42:41] I think so.

Radio Free Mormon [01:42:43] Okay, well, then I'll just say it again. Once again, it's, it's the same old thing. Were the Egyptian Abraham documents used to produce the Book of Abraham, which is what this volume says? What. How glad changed his mind on what all the other scholars agree? Or was the Book of Abraham text produced? And then for some reason and later on in another article say, well, we don't know why, and I can't come up with really a good reason why the Book of Abraham text is produced. And then all of a sudden you've got all these Abraham Egyptian documents where the only reason they could exist is to try and reverse engineer the text of the Book of Abraham into some kind of grammar and Alphabet using characters that are on the papyri.

John Dehlin [01:43:25] It's kind of a weird argument. Once you've produced the Book of Abraham, why is a prophet of God going to spend his time fiddling around with any Alphabet and grammar after he's already produced the major translations? Like, doesn't he have better things to do at this time, like he's produced the scripture already? Yes, I don't understand why the prophet would. Would bother.

Radio Free Mormon [01:43:46] Right.

John Dehlin [01:43:47] And so once again, hiring, hiring scribes and spending days and weeks or even months doing this, like you would think you would have better things to do.

Radio Free Mormon [01:43:57] You would think so. And once again, he tries to get Joseph Smith out of the room as much as he can. Unfortunately, one of the documents is actually written in Joseph Smith's handwriting. But other than that, it's like in William W. Phelps Cowdery, Oliver Cowdery's handwriting. So he theorizes these scribes working on their own to try and reverse engineer, they've got the text of the Book of Abraham, they've got the papyri. So now they're going to try and create an Alphabet and grammar out of this by linking passages from the Book of Abraham with certain characters in Egyptian that are on the papyri.

John Dehlin [01:44:31] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:44:31] Now what, what we know, what we know for a fact, is that certain characters on the papyri do line up in the Abraham Egyptian documents with some text from the Book of Abraham. Right?

John Dehlin [01:44:44] Absolutely.

Radio Free Mormon [01:44:45] What John Key does not say, and it's very hard to understand that if that's what's happening, why is it then that these particular verses in the Book of Abraham are linked to these verses, certain sequential Egyptian characters on the papyri? I mean, there's hundreds of them right there's. Hundreds of these Egyptian characters. Why did they pick these three that end up being right next to facsimile one? Right. Why did they pick those? Well, that's where you get into a question of, I don't know. I have no idea why they would pick those. Wouldn't you think that maybe they were being directed by somebody? If indeed that's. If it's reverse engineering, wouldn't they be being directed by somebody? And maybe by somebody who's saying that as a prophet, they can tell that that's where it came from. That's where his theory breaks down, if not before that point. But he has to maintain that theory because Book of Mormon. Excuse me, Book of Abraham produced like the book by translation, revelation. He's actually translating the characters. And it has to be a missing part of the papyrus. This is another reason why.

John Dehlin [01:45:53] Rfm. Tell me really quickly if, if this image helps our viewers and listeners understand what we're talking about. Is this related to what you're talking about?

Radio Free Mormon [01:46:03] Yeah, that's it.

John Dehlin [01:46:04] So it's. So explain what, explain to our viewers what they're seeing here.

Radio Free Mormon [01:46:07] Yeah, you got that sequence of characters there from the papyrus that's recovered. And this is a papyrus that fit right next to facsimile one. What we have is facsimile one. It's the only facsimile in the Book of Abraham that's recovered on the papyrus that was found. And so you've got four characters. One, two, three. Those are three characters right there. This is one page. Right. And you can see the arrow from that character being reproduced in the margin of the Abraham Egyptian papers. And next to it there is a paragraph from the Book of Abraham. Then you've got the very next one, the very next character. And he's reading him right to left, right, as he would probably from, I don't know, Hebrew studies. Next character there is reproduced in that margin. There's a paragraph of the Book of Abraham next to it. And finally that third character here on this page gets reproduced down here. And there's another passage from the Book of Abraham. So the, the apparent straightforward and the majority opinion by now is that these are characters written down from the papyrus and then the translation of them next to them. And what John G. Is trying to say, no, the translation came first. And then later on, these scribes, acting on their own, went and just sort of either ornamented the. The margins with characters drawn at random from any. The papyru. He kind of fluctuates back and forth. It's hard to pin him down on this. Or this is something where the scribes, acting on their own, no Joseph Smith involved, are using the text of the Book of Abraham and trying now to understand which characters they came from on the papyrus. This is also one of the reasons why John Gee is wedded to the idea. You see, when you have this, this theory that he has, it has all sorts of ramifications on other things. And one of the things is, is that the Joseph Smith translation of everything we have in the Book of Abraham today happened in 1835 and basically happened before and separate and apart from the Joseph Smith papers or the Abraham Egyptian papers. I'm sorry, we're dealing with two groups of papers here. The Abraham Egyptian papers from Kirtland. Now, the Abraham Egyptian Pa can be dated to the end, like November, October, November of 1835. They're working on them. It's mentioned in journals. So he's got to have the text of the Book of Abraham translated before that. So he has that happening in July or August, probably in July of 1835. Okay. So because of his, his theory that the text comes first and then the Joseph Smith papers, the Abraham Egyptian papers, therefore, he cannot agree with what all the other experts are saying, which is that Only the first two chapters of Abraham were translated in 1835, and the last three chapters of Abraham were not translated by Joseph Smith or produced by Joseph Smith until 1842. I think it is right before they were published in the, the LDS newspaper. the time, I think it was the, the times and seasons. So that's what everybody else says, according to all the evidence from history. But he cannot allow that. He cannot allow the last three chapters of the Book of Abraham to be translated as late as 1842, because for his theory, it's essential that it's all translated in 1835.

John Dehlin [01:49:31] Yeah. So just to, just to tell me if I got this right, so guy doesn't want people to take again, the grammar, enough of it seriously. Because it shows Joseph Smith didn't know what he was doing. And so he has to use this motivated reasoning to make the assertion that the Book of Abraham was fully completed in, you know, before July of 1835, so that it can't be tainted with the, the obvious, you know, display with the, with the, with the Abraham Egyptian papers that Joseph Smith didn't know how to translate.

Radio Free Mormon [01:50:11] Right. He has to get those, the manuscript pages of the Book of Abraham completely separate. And apart from the working on the Alphabet and grammar and the other documents in The Abraham Egyptian Papers.

John Dehlin [01:50:21] All right, that's important.

Gee's Conclusions and Personal Criticisms of the Editors

Radio Free Mormon [01:50:24] And I know it seems we're in the weeds, and I'm trying not to go in the weeds any more than necessary, but let's see if we go to conclusions. Once again, this is in his 2019 paper in the Interpreter, where he really cannot say anything nice about this book. Conclusions. Given the constraints of space, once again, what space are you constrained by? Given the constraints of space, this is.

John Dehlin [01:50:47] He may have been given a word count, you know, maximum.

Radio Free Mormon [01:50:51] No, it's not. Give me a break. Given the constraints of space, this is only a sample of the types of problems and errors found in the volume. And then, interestingly, say, he says, it may seem that some of these matters are mere trifles. He even recognizes how it could look that he's quibbling about trifles, but I disagree. And then he talks about why it is that he disagrees. And then he says, the 213 unique instances in the documents where the editors admitted they could not read what the scribes wrote is an indication of the difficulty in reading the documents and how often the challenge of transcription defeated the editors. Now, notice what he says here, because he knows that really there are good reasons for difficulty in reading, you know, documents from 1835. Maybe they're not really clear in places, you know, he says, though, some of these instances would defeat in a responsible scholar, some of them can be read.

John Dehlin [01:51:57] Is he basically saying, if you had brought me onto this project, I would have done this? Right, but because you didn't bring someone on who could actually understand Egyptian, you got it all wrong? Is that what that's saying now?

Radio Free Mormon [01:52:09] What he's really saying is a lot of these, that he's counting 213instances where they couldn't read. First off, the fact that they admit they can't read them is good scholarship. Okay? It's not trying to just wing it and pretend you can read them when you can't. Saying you can't read them is good scholarship. But what he's saying is, I'm going to count 213 of these instances, even though he's going to admit in that last sentence that some of these instances would defeat any responsible scholar. What he's saying is, yeah, he couldn't read them either. Okay, all right, he couldn't read them either, but some of them can be read. But I'm going to count all 213 of them against him anyway.

John Dehlin [01:52:50] Okay?

Radio Free Mormon [01:52:51] So page 11.

John Dehlin [01:52:56] All right?

Radio Free Mormon [01:52:57] It is regrettable that although the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints count Several faithful Egyptologists among its members.

John Dehlin [01:53:03] Is that, Is that spelling error? Is that your error or is this the journal's error?

Radio Free Mormon [01:53:10] I think it's a journal's error. I don't know because I copied and pasted it and sometimes funny things happen. But I copied and pasted the entire article so I didn't spell it independently.

John Dehlin [01:53:21] That's fine. Keep. Keep going. Sorry.

Radio Free Mormon [01:53:24] No, I had noticed that too, and I wondered, but didn't go back and check. They count several faithful Egyptologists among its members. I eat. Me, me and me. No, there's John, there's Carrie, there's some others. The editors deliberately chose not to involve them in any serious way. Can you see? He's mad about not being cast as Hamlet. It is true that two of the. Of that number. That's himself and Carrie Muhlstein. It is true that two of that number were given a month to peer review the volume. Oh, wait a second. So they actually were included.

John Dehlin [01:53:57] Included

Radio Free Mormon [01:53:59] to peer review the volume. And some of their suggestions were accepted. So what is it he's so mad about, you might ask? But no photographs were included in what was reviewed, nor did the Egyptologists see the appendix on the Egyptian characters. Come on. He's mad about not being included and then admits he was included, but he wasn't included enough.

John Dehlin [01:54:24] I thought he didn't believe in peer review.

Radio Free Mormon [01:54:28] Well, I think that's a one way argument. I think he believes in peer review when he should be the one peer reviewing this book. But when it comes to people peer reviewing him, it's another story. I think that's what it is.

John Dehlin [01:54:38] That's because you have to. You have to go back and listen to the bad blood episode with RFM to understand why I said that in that screed that guy publishes. As he's run the journal into the ground and is exiting and is trying to do a hijab on Ritter, he takes a blindside at the peer review process in general. And that's why I made that comment.

Radio Free Mormon [01:54:59] Thanks.

John Dehlin [01:55:00] So what's the point of this, what's the point of this paragraph that you just read? And by the way, I, I spell. I spell checked. Regrettable. It is misspelled in the original. And it's weird that a scholarly journal, you know, wasn't spell checked, but maybe

Radio Free Mormon [01:55:14] they don't have spell check in the interpreter.

John Dehlin [01:55:16] Okay, all right. So what's the, what's the point? I mean, I misspell stuff all the time, so. Yeah, yeah, right, so.

Radio Free Mormon [01:55:25] But by the way. But do you misspell Words in articles where you are really, really lambasting a scholarly journal for misspelling words.

John Dehlin [01:55:34] No, no.

Radio Free Mormon [01:55:36] That's where you got to be really careful. And he says there in some. This volume does not display the care one has come to expect from the Joseph Smith Papers Project. Next highlight part. While it is great to have good quality images of the documents finally available to the public, the transcriptions and notes are often inadequate to the needs of the ongoing debates about the documents. By the way, the underlining and the capital. Those are my comments, which is, why should the needs of the ongoing debates be the overriding concern of the Joseph Smith Papers Project? Yeah, what he's talking about is his debate about which came first, the chicken or the egg. And they said the A came first and he's sure it's a chicken. So. But why should this journal be concerned about the debates about that and not concerned with putting forth the best scholarship? See what I mean? Yeah. He feels at least he should have a chance to argue his side of the position in this book. And I'm not sure that that really is a book that is produced for that reason, especially when his side of the debate is becoming increasingly less likely to be correct.

John Dehlin [01:56:46] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:56:48] Okay. And then he says, once again, neither the serious researcher nor the layperson is in a better position than they were before the volume was produced.

John Dehlin [01:56:56] He's basically arguing that everyone has been harmed by the release of this volume. He's basically saying it's only done harm. This has only harmed people. And that's. That's so outrageous. And then I just want to go back when he talks about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, counts several faithful Egyptologists amongst its membership. The editors deliberately chose not to involve them in any serious way. He's basically saying Robin Jensen, if I'm reading it right, he's basically saying Robin Jensen and Brian Hoglit aren't faithful Latter Day Saints. He's basically trying to smear them as being, you know, enemies to faith, basically.

Radio Free Mormon [01:57:36] I think there's an insinuation there. He does say faithful Egyptologists, neither which Jensen or Hauglet are. So, yeah, I think that that's going on, but he'll get more specific about that here in a bit. So I want to go quickly because what happened when this hit the pages of the virtual pages of the interpreter, is it unleashed a firestorm? Because it was taken, rightly so, by the editors of the whole Joseph Smith Papers Project as a slam on them. And what is John G. Doing? I mean, John Key has been involved with all sorts of stuff. And now he's slamming the editors of the. Of the Joseph Smith Papers Project, including Elder Snow, including the church that puts its imprimatur on this. And John Gee got called down to Salt Lake City to the Joseph Smith Papers Project and was yelled at by the general editors of the Joseph Smith Papers Project over this article. The reason I know that is because I think that I can say that Brian howled, told this to me. And Brian Hauglet himself heard it directly from a member of the Joseph Smith Papers Project who was present in the room when said yelling ensued. And not only was John Gee there, guess who else was there getting yelled at?

The Interpreter Foundation Pushes Back on Gee

John Dehlin [01:58:59] I have a guess.

Radio Free Mormon [01:59:00] Daniel. Oh, go ahead. Sorry.

John Dehlin [01:59:02] No, we've talked about this. It was Daniel C. Peterson.

Radio Free Mormon [01:59:04] Daniel Peterson was there too, getting yelled at, and rightfully so, because he's the editor of the Interpreter. He's responsible for the contents of the Interpreter Journal and he's the one who allowed this to be published. So they both got yelled at. So this actually is referenced here in this Editor's Note, which was written later and put on this after it was originally issued. Editor's Note. This review was edited by the author after initial publication to address multiple requests for clarification. Clarification. Right.

John Dehlin [01:59:41] So was the version you just read as the original or was it the corrected version?

Radio Free Mormon [01:59:44] Corrected? I don't have access.

John Dehlin [01:59:46] We don't even know what things that are you saying. We don't know what they took out that got corrected.

Radio Free Mormon [01:59:50] I understand. My understanding from Brian Hauglett is that he was told he really needed to clean it up and he said he would. And he went back and he really didn't change very much at all.

John Dehlin [01:59:59] Wow.

Radio Free Mormon [02:00:00] As you can tell because it's still a screed. He didn't make it from a screed into not a screed. It's still a screed.

John Dehlin [02:00:05] It feels a little bit like Mutiny, right?

Radio Free Mormon [02:00:08] Yes.

John Dehlin [02:00:10] And can I. I just want to share one quick thing that I'm going to share the. This is just kind of bizarre to me. I'm sharing the 990 form for the Interpreter foundation, which is the financial statement for the Interpreter foundation for 2019, Form 990. And if so, this is the Interpreter publishing its financial information. And what you'll notice here is a line item of a million dollars. $1,177,102 in contributions and grants for a total of $1,183,636 into the Interpreter foundation in 2019. And then if you scroll down and look at where those contributions come from, what you'll find is that the main donor to the Interpreter foundation is. And I'll ask for your drum roll, please. It shows that I believe. I think I missed. I missed the spot where. Where it tells you who. Oh, where it tells you who the donor is. Let me quickly see if I can find that. I'm pretty sure that it's the church that's funding the Interpreter foundation along with wealthy people from the church. And the only other thing that I have to mention is that when the Interpreter publishes its expenses in this report, $1,090,000 of the expenses are just bucketed. In other, it doesn't actually itemize those expenses and tell you how they're being spent. So it's almost like this massive slush fund where a million dollars is funneled in, and then we don't know actually how the money is being spent. And so, you know, this document was telling for me for a couple reasons. One is because it's a million dollars in a single year that now is shepherded by Daniel Peterson, we don't know really how it's being spent, which is a problem. But then the other thing is that this money is coming from the church in some way. And for me, that just begs the question, why is the church funneling a million dollars plus into the Interpreter foundation only to have the Interpreter foundation trashing the church and claiming that its own, you know, authors or editors of the publication are. Are faithless, you know, kind of infidels. Can you explain any of this to me?

Radio Free Mormon [02:03:07] No, no, but I think that's. This is what it's setting up is this struggle now between John Gee, who feels offended by Bran Hauglet, so he's going to attack this volume of the Joseph Smith Papers Project. He can't see that he's attacking, apparently can't see he's attacking the editors. And the church itself is producing it. And so now the Interpreter foundation that's receiving money, probably through the more good foundation to the Interpreter, is in a position where, at least in these articles by John Gee, they're attacked, where they're biting the hand that feeds them. Them. How's that?

John Dehlin [02:03:43] Yeah, they're biting the hand that feeds them. And it. And it almost looks a little bit like Keystone Cops, right? It's like the church is taking all this, all this tithing money and. And spending it in all these different places. But it's like the right hand doesn't know what the Left hand's doing or like they're. They're fighting amongst themselves. And all of this is on the. On the tithing payer's dimension. It seems kind of outrageous a little bit. And weird.

Radio Free Mormon [02:04:13] Yeah. I can't imagine that the church is taking this very well.

John Dehlin [02:04:17] Yeah. Yeah. All right.

Radio Free Mormon [02:04:20] So now that I hadn't finished quite reading that editor's note.

John Dehlin [02:04:25] Yeah, let's keep going.

Radio Free Mormon [02:04:26] In part, these clarifications came after a substantive conversation. I think that means the volume of the yelling, the substantive conversation between the author and principal figures in the Joseph Smith Papers Project. So it's great we know the backstory on what really happened because here he refers to it. He changed the article. Whether he changed it enough is subjective. But he changes the article after it's published and after he has a substantive conversation between himself, John G. And principal figures in the Joseph Smith Papers Project. That's where he was called down to Salt Lake to the Justice Smith Papers Project to get yelled at by the editors. That's what that's talking about. And he even references that it there in the editor's note. Though of course he describes it in a little bit nicer kind of way. So one would think that this would have been the end of the whole thing. Right?

John Dehlin [02:05:17] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:05:18] Young GI writes this. It's ill advised. He gets yelled at. He changes a little bit. He puts a note there. He's done. Because he knows now beyond doubt that he's attacking or seen as attacking the editors of the Joseph Smith Papers Project. He shouldn't be doing that. And he's also in some sense attacking the church that authored it. That's why it was so surprising to the entire world, John, when he went back to start doing the same thing again earlier this year in January.

John Dehlin [02:05:46] And rfm, I'm just ask your forgiveness for one quick thing. You reminded me Moregood Foundation. This is the more good foundations, I believe 2018 financial report. If you look on there, it says the LDS foundation of the LDS Church donated $430,000 to the more Good Foundation. And then if you scroll above, you'll see that the More Good foundation then turns around and donates money to the Interpreter Foundation. So literally there it is. Interpreter foundation receives $90,000 from the more Good Foundation. So literally wealthy Mormon who are faithful along with the LDS foundation and the Church are donating money to the Morgan foundation who are then donating money to the Interpreter foundation who are then attacking the Joseph Smith Papers Project. And it's again, it's just keystone cops

Radio Free Mormon [02:06:43] craziness or it's just money laundering. Yeah, that sounds terrible. But you know what I mean, there's the church to an organization, to another organization, then to the interpreter, also to Fair Mormon. Right.

John Dehlin [02:06:57] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:06:57] So they could produce those videos that they had up there. Those. This is the show.

John Dehlin [02:07:03] After they've gotten taken to the woodshed, they would stop Ghee. Ghee and Peterson would stop attacking the church and. And the Joseph Smith Papers project. That's what you would think.

Radio Free Mormon [02:07:14] Yeah. You think that would be the prudent thing to do.

John Dehlin [02:07:16] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:07:16] And that's why everybody was surprised when all of a sudden another paper shows up in January by John Ge, once again criticizing this same volume. This. He cannot let it go. So now he's going to criticize the volume again. He's going to show why they're wrong and he's right. And then the very Friday after that, remember they publish every Friday. The very Friday after that, there's a second paper by John Gee, once again continuing his criticism of this same volume. And we'll go over this really quickly here because I don't want to talk about all the different things he says. I want to talk about what he's. Yeah, go ahead. The strategies he uses.

John Dehlin [02:07:53] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:07:54] And this first one.

John Dehlin [02:07:55] So which article are we looking at now?

Radio Free Mormon [02:07:59] What we're looking at is the one that came out on January 22nd of 2021. It's called Pro. Pro Lego Prolegoma. Pro Lego Mina. Sorry. It's all Greek to me. Yeah, it's like what? Prologue. That's where prologue comes from, I expect. To a study of the Egyptian Alphabet documents in the Joseph Smith papers. Okay, so ah, in his abstract. Let's look at his abstract really quickly. Okay. For many theories about the book of Abraham, the Egyptian Alphabet documents are seen as the key to understanding the translation process. Those are not his theories. This is the theory of the enemies that he's going to debunk in this paper. While the original publication of those documents allows many researchers access to the documents for the first time, once again he's talking about this book. Right. Careful attention to the Joseph Smith Papers as a whole and the practices of Joseph Smith scribes in particular allows for improvements in the date, labeling and understanding of the historical context of the Egyptian Alphabet documents. Okay, here this essay supports the understanding of these documents found in the other volumes of the Joseph Smith Papers, the ones that were done well, remember, supports the understanding of those other Joseph Smith Papers volumes that the Egyptian Alphabet documents are an incidental byproduct of the translation process rather than an essential step in that process.

John Dehlin [02:09:30] Okay, these are not the droids you're looking for.

Radio Free Mormon [02:09:32] Yes. First thing he says, this study comes as a response to an invitation by principals of the Joseph Smith Papers Project to examine Revelations and Translations, Volume 4. More close. Oh, you don't have my thing up there, do you? Have the original? Don't you?

John Dehlin [02:09:46] I have yours. I have yours.

Radio Free Mormon [02:09:47] Don't. Don't have mine up there.

John Dehlin [02:09:52] These are not the droids you're looking for. Oh, my gosh.

Radio Free Mormon [02:09:55] Yeah. These are not the comments that I made in capitals that you're looking for. Well, I guess the whole world just saw it. But in my discussions with Brian Haglett, he thought that wasn't very likely, that actually John Gee got an invitation by them to resume his criticism of this essay. Probably not a good idea. Now, I will tell you as a caveat, okay. John Gee as a scholar, can write whatever he wants in any publication he wants that criticizes any other book or any other publication. That's supposed to be what good scholarship is. And that's how the discussion occurs. Certainly not going to occur on a live podcast, but that's how it goes. Right? And then people get to read both and decide which is the better argument. That's fine. The deal here is that all this background makes it so surprising that he's once again going back to criticizing this volume. In this one, he considers only the section on the Egyptian Alphabet documents. And he says while doing so, however, I must correct a number of errors and misconceptions promoted in the volume about the documents. He just can't let go of that. He's got to go back to all the errors and misconceptions that are in this book. So even when he's talking scholarly, he's got to go back to attacking this book. So I'm going to go down.

John Dehlin [02:11:12] So just to make sure, he's. He's basically claiming that the Joseph Smith Papers Project asked him to write the second article.

Radio Free Mormon [02:11:22] Yeah, he.

John Dehlin [02:11:23] You're saying that. That you have good information to suggest that who in the world in the Joseph Papers Project would ask to write a second article?

Radio Free Mormon [02:11:33] Yeah, kind of like that. Although, you know, if he wants to take issue and talk about it in a scholarly way without doing a screed or ad hominems, then maybe, maybe he said, well, can I do that? And they said, well, yeah, if you can control yourself. Okay, possibly. There's so many things in here that I have marked, but I. We are limited in our time, and that's okay. It's a good thing. Believe me, the audience will appreciate it.

John Dehlin [02:11:59] I'm. What, I'm wondering. I'm wondering what, what the first, like the main couple arguments that he's kind of making in this document.

Radio Free Mormon [02:12:08] Well, what he's going to do is he's just going to try and correct all the errors in this volume that support the theory that he's against, and then he's going to try and promote his theory. But what I want to talk about here is what he does toward the end. Excuse me, I'm going way down here. Pages and pages and pages in this document that he goes to and that he researches in order to once again write another paper. It is not as inflammatory as the first one, I'll give him that much.

John Dehlin [02:12:45] But that's after he's been taken to the woodshed.

Radio Free Mormon [02:12:48] Yes, that's true.

John Dehlin [02:12:49] So he's got to chill the. Chill out a little bit.

Radio Free Mormon [02:12:51] Yeah. If you go all the way down to my page 30. And I know I got you off that, but it's under the theory of the editors.

John Dehlin [02:12:57] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:12:58] Once again he's talking about how Glidden and Jensen. As has been demonstrated, the evidence from the manuscripts indicates that the Egyptian ALPH Alphabet did not originate with Joseph Smith. Remember, you got to get him out of the room and away from the scene of the crime, who was generally copying the other two manuscripts. This is not the way the editors portray it in the footnotes in the introduction to the section. Okay. Oh, here we go. Theories of translation. This is what I wanted to get to. Once again, the guilt by association he cannot resist. There are. Can you read this part?

Three Theories on Book of Abraham Translation Origins

John Dehlin [02:13:31] Yeah, absolutely. All right. There are three basic theories about the original source text from which the Book of Abraham was translated. One is that Joseph Smith translated the text of the Book of Abraham from the papyri fragments. We now have few members, by the way.

Radio Free Mormon [02:13:48] That's the. That's the one that this volume supports and that Hauglet et al support and the one he is adamantly, vehemently opposed to. But that's one theory.

John Dehlin [02:13:57] Theory. Few members of the Church believe this theory, but it is pushed by anti Mormon.

Radio Free Mormon [02:14:04] Now that's the guilt by association. Okay, so in other words, this volume and how good are pushing the same theory that the anti Mormon push?

John Dehlin [02:14:13] So it's anti Mormon to believe that the current fragments that we have, where we literally have scribes taking off characters and then showing huge paragraphs of the Book of Abraham that we have that actually surround the facsimiles that we have put into our scriptures whoever believes that is anti Mormon.

Radio Free Mormon [02:14:42] Right, right. And this book published by the Church is the latest anti Mormon book on the market. It.

John Dehlin [02:14:50] So that's the anti Mormon argument.

Radio Free Mormon [02:14:52] The Mormon Church is publishing anti Mormon material.

John Dehlin [02:14:54] Now what all the evidence shows is what really happened, happened. That's anti Mormon. That's the bad theory. The second theory is that Joseph Smith translated the Book of Abraham from Papyru that we do not currently possess.

Radio Free Mormon [02:15:09] That's his theory.

John Dehlin [02:15:10] The Missing scroll theory, Nibley's theory, and that's Geese theory. That's the. These are not the droids you're looking for. That's the creator fictitious evidence that can never be disproved when you're desperate to rescue Joseph Smith as a credible translator. Yes, that's the second theory.

Radio Free Mormon [02:15:25] Right.

John Dehlin [02:15:26] The third theory is that Joseph Smith received the Book of Abraham directly through Revelation without possessing a text that contained the ancient text of the Book of Abraham. That's called the Catalyst theory, which Givens and, you know, Flumen and Mason and the kind of Neo apologists are kind of now leaning towards. Basically the. Joseph received the Book of Abraham directly through Revelation without possessing a text that contained the ancient text of the Book of Abraham. The Church accommodates either of these latter two theories. Presumably the Joseph Smith Papers project would be fine with either of the latter two options. Right.

Radio Free Mormon [02:16:09] And you can go ahead and you don't have to scroll down there, but. Yeah, okay, but if you go back up to the yellow part, because this is very, very important here, because first off, what he's saying is very interestingly that now John Gee is speaking for the Church. He says the Church accommodates either of the latter two theories. Missing scroller. Catalyst. The Church accommodates it. But the Church does not accommodate the first theory, the one being pushed by this book that's published strangely by Church. Yeah. So the Church accommodates either the latter two theories. This is remarkable to me that John G. Has now exalted himself to the point where he believes that he's the president of the Church and that he can speak for the Church as to what it accommodates and what it does not. Actually, the Church accommodates all three theories because what he's saying is the one thing it can't be is that Joseph Smith translated the papyri we have. Well, well, the Catalyst theory has a lot of different variations. And one of those variations is that Joseph Smith did believe he was translating the papyri that we have, which the Abraham Egyptian papers indicate. But he was wrong. Yeah, he was not translating Egyptian, at least not the way scholars translate Egyptian. He was looking at the characters. He believed he was translating them into English. But actually, unbeknownst to Joseph Smith, he's receiving this divine revelation that's giving him the text of the Book of Abraham. And that is one of the versions of the Catalyst Theory, which the Church does accommodate.

John Dehlin [02:17:42] If I were to ask Flumen or Bushman or Mason, any of the Neo apologists, they would say both. They would say that the grammar Alphabet, you know, that Joseph was trying to figure things out. He was doing that before he produced the actual manuscript, that he thought he was translating Egyptian, but that he didn't understand what he was doing.

Radio Free Mormon [02:18:05] Right.

John Dehlin [02:18:05] And that prophets are fallible and that's the way prophets are. And that he channeled that somehow the papyra motivated him or inspired him to channel that revelation directly from God. So there's this paradox where Joseph Smith didn't know what he was doing, told everyone he was doing something he wasn't, which was actually translating, and he was legitimately channeling and revealing God's word. Both. It's basically both. Right?

Radio Free Mormon [02:18:37] Right. And so now John G. Is presenting this framing as the church for whom he speaks. And the Church will not allow the theory being proposed by how Glid and Jensen to stand. The Church does not accommodate their theory. It accommodates his theory, Geese theory and the Catalyst Theory theory. But now he speaks for the Church and how Good and Jensen are characterized as being equated with anti Mormon. So he has taken what is Ghee against Hauglid and Jensen and reframed it as the church against the anti Mormon. John Gee is the Church and how Good and Jensen are the anti Mormon.

John Dehlin [02:19:15] And unfortunately, that taints Snow and all the editors of the Joseph Smith Papers Project. Because they approved this, right?

Radio Free Mormon [02:19:22] Yes. And so if you just scroll down here to page 32. By the way, the reason it's 32, it's on my outline is because I have all three of these articles that I made a Word document out of. He does this over and over and over again, which is where he says anti Mormon and critics the middle of that page. Only if one assumes that Joseph Smith tried to translate the Book of Abraham from papyri that have survived, does the program propounded by the editors make any kind kind of sense. Well, of course it makes sense because that's what they're propounding. But then he says this scenario is pushed by critics of the Church. See, he says it again, and not many members of the church believe it. Well, most members of the church actually think what John? That Joseph Smith translated the papyri from Egyptian into English and got the Book of Abraham?

John Dehlin [02:20:09] Yeah. That he was a good translator and he knew what he was doing and that he translated Abraham's papyrus. That's what most members of the church think. Think.

Radio Free Mormon [02:20:16] Right. So basically most members of the church probably do believe that. As much thought as they put into the. The. The issue at all. And then he goes down another. Or as we've seen, the editors of the documents promote a historical scenario in which Joseph Smith decided to produce an Egyptian Alphabet and use it to produce the Book of Abraham. This is a scenario promoted by critics of the church. He can't say it enough. It's anti Mormon. Anti Mormon. Critics of the Church. Critics of the church. Church. And this is once again his pension. It's like he started off okay, but the more he wrote, the more he went back to his old tactics of trying to show that Hagled and Jensen are in line with critics of the Church and the anti Mormon. And what they're producing is an anti Mormon book under the auspices of the Joseph Smith Papers Project. So let me see here. There's other notes there, but not time. And here where you get to results. This is where he sort of gives himself away. Remember I talked earlier about what sense does it make for this whole reverse engineering project to get underway? Why would they do that? Why would the scribes do this? And then he says the Egyptian Alphabet documents seem to be evidence that Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery and W.W. phelps studied things out in their mind. There seems to be an attempt, for unknown reasons, to match concepts from Abraham 124 and 25 and 31 with characters from Joseph Smith Papyrus 1. Oh, you still have my notes up there where I have. Lol. This is so embarrassing. I'm supposed to take those notes and try and make them sound a little more professional. I don't know if I succeed. Lol. Even Guy has no answer for why they would reverse engineer it. Okay, anyway, so we go on. Oh, oh, now page 34. This is his last paragraph. Okay. Such insights may be obtained by careful study of the documents. If one does not subscribe, as the editors do, to anti Mormon theories about the production of the Book of Abraham. The evidence of editorial bias in this book. Joseph Smith Papers. No, Joseph Smith Papers. Revelations and Translations, Volume four. That's what that stands for. The evidence of editorial bias is demonstrable. Pervasive. Pervasive and systemic. And what he's upset about is that he wasn't able to get his own editorial bias in that book. This bias opposes the interests of the Joseph Smith Papers institutional sponsors. Wow. People give money. The beliefs of most members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and most importantly, the evidence of the manuscripts being published.

John Dehlin [02:22:52] So he's saying because the evidence is the most important thing after all.

Radio Free Mormon [02:22:56] Well, yeah, at least you got to say it. But, but he says that this book published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints opposes the beliefs of most of its members. Yeah, there's where he's going. So that's this first paper in January and now if we can get to

John Dehlin [02:23:14] the second paper too. Let me just quickly say I, I have to say that doesn't this, I mean, if John Geese hating something, doesn't that mean it's probably a good thing? In other words, shouldn't the Joseph Smith Papers Project be commended for correcting the false narratives that have been perpetuated by Guy and by Muhlstein and by Nibley and by Peterson and by Farms and by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute? This is without actually confessing the sin. They're kind of forsaking the sin. They're moving away from the lies and the deceptions. They're actually trying to do genuine scholarship. Shouldn't in some ways the Joseph Smith Papers Project Robin Jensen, Brian Hauglett, Stephen Snow, shouldn't they be commended for actually being scholarly here?

Radio Free Mormon [02:24:14] Yeah, they should be. And in fact, there's a general understanding, I think, amongst the principals at the Joseph Smith Papers Project that this first paper that John Gee wrote, that screed about the volume served as his own evidence that they made a good decision of not including him as an editor in the volume itself. It's like he proved that they were correct and not including him.

John Dehlin [02:24:35] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So shout out and kudos to the Joseph Papers Project for doing the right thing because that's also the Church. I mean, the Church is sponsoring the Joe Smith Papers Project. That's right. So we, we have to give credit where credit is due. The Church is trying to come clean just in a very obtuse, academic, you know, a footnote scholarly type way that is going to take forever, you know, to, to penetrate the consciousness of the average Mormon mind. But at least in, in the scholarly arena, the Church is starting to try and be open and honest. So kudos.

Radio Free Mormon [02:25:11] Yeah, kudos, Church.

John Dehlin [02:25:14] Yeah, yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:25:16] Now this last paper, I'm only going to say one thing about this last paper, the one that came out most recently. And that's because it's so long, it's so involved. It is so, frankly boring. I'm sorry, John Guy. Brian Hauglett. It is so. Robin Jetson is so boring to me. I know what the points he's making. But he gets into all this minutiae in order to support his version. Right.

John Dehlin [02:25:38] And by the way, isn't the title kind of insulting?

Radio Free Mormon [02:25:42] Well, what is that title again?

John Dehlin [02:25:43] Fantasy and reality in the translation of the Book of Abraham. Like he's kind of beating a dead horse here.

Radio Free Mormon [02:25:51] Oh, yeah. Like you can guess which side is fantasy from John Geese point of view. You got to be careful, though, when you use those kind of titles because somebody else could look at it and think exactly the opposite. That John Geese is the fantasy side of it.

John Dehlin [02:26:06] Right. Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:26:07] But of course, he's saying their fantasy. Once again, he's going back this book, he's going to criticize it some more. And what he's going to do is he's going to go through this whole thing. All I want to point out is once again his linking of the editors of this book with anti Mormon. And I was saying that it's so long and involved because I was going to say that I was just sort of scanning through it the first time through it. My gosh, it's just like, oh, geez, when will you stop? And I got like down to page 67. Okay. Where he's juxtaposing two different theories. And this is my page.

John Dehlin [02:26:42] I have just a quick favorite ask of you.

Radio Free Mormon [02:26:44] Yeah. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:26:45] There's this weird thing that he does in the beginning of the article where in a supposedly scholarly article, what he includes a dialogue between. That was sort of recorded at, like a book sighting.

Radio Free Mormon [02:26:59] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [02:27:00] Between, you know, you know, Robin Jensen and Brian Hauglett and Blair Hodges, of all people. Like, this is one of the least scholarly things I've ever seen in a reportedly academic journal. Why is he recording it, including a transcript of a dialogue at a book signing between Hagled, you know, hot Blair Hodges and. And Robin Jensen? What's the point of that?

Radio Free Mormon [02:27:25] Can I ask you what page that's on?

John Dehlin [02:27:26] Because at the very beginning, within the first couple pages.

Radio Free Mormon [02:27:32] What page on mine. Page number upper right corner.

John Dehlin [02:27:35] I think our pages are a little bit out of sync.

Radio Free Mormon [02:27:38] Okay. You don't have to.

John Dehlin [02:27:39] I'm gonna.

Radio Free Mormon [02:27:40] Yeah, it's okay. We'll get it. Why does he do that? Well, the reason why is because what they're talking about is this idea that two manuscripts of part of the book of Abraham which are basically identical to each other but in different handwritings. That.

John Dehlin [02:27:57] So there's two scribes, right?

Radio Free Mormon [02:27:59] Yeah. Jensen has come up with the idea, which he supports, that these were actually simultaneously created. And so they're explaining it. Robin Jensen is explaining it because it seems to be this very, very abstruse piece of scholarly minutia. And who the heck cares about it? Right. And that's exactly what Hodges says. Right? Oh, okay. Yeah. Ed Ashman. Okay, Ed. Okay. How good says it's interesting that we're now talking about this when years and years ago Ed Ashman to propose the same thing. Now Ed Ashman used to be member of the church since is not so much anymore. And he studied these documents very carefully and he came to the same conclusion. And how good being a good scholar is giving credit to Ed Ashman for first noticing or proposing the same thing? Jensen has come up with some additional evidence to support that. And how good goes on it created a firestorm of rejection amongst our LDS scholars. But now here we are talking about this and agreeing with Ed Astronomy judgment. Hodges says about having multiple clerks in particular at the same time and how it says receiving dictation. Yeah. And, and Hodges Blair says why was that so controversial? It's like who the heck cares? Right. And Jensen says I have no idea. And Hagled says probably probably because it was Ed Ashmut that proposed it. And then there's laughter. The reason he quotes this is because Ed Ashman Mockinghee.

John Dehlin [02:29:25] It sounds like some of these scholars or member, you know, participants in the Maxwell Institute are kind of making fun of Ghee at a book signing. Is that fair to say?

Radio Free Mormon [02:29:34] I don't think so. I don't see that. But what they're doing is giving credit to Ed Ashman. Ed Ashman is now classified by John Gee as an anti Mormon. How glitz is probably because it was Ed Ashman that proposed it. Which plays into John Geese strategy of linking how good with anti Mormon.

John Dehlin [02:29:51] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:29:51] Now he's proposing the same idea that an anti Mormon came up with with first. So that's what he's going to use against him later on. And that's why I believe he quotes it there. So I'd gone down to. Are you done with that part?

John Dehlin [02:30:03] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:30:04] Anything else about. Okay, so gone down to page 67 or whatever. I'll just go down to mine. Okay. Yeah, it's page 67 and I. I'm scanning through this and I'm finding that way down in here, John G. Is juxtaposing my theory, right, which is of course the correct theory, which is, of course, we've gone over it before. We know what his theory is with the AMVHJ theory. You see that down there?

John Dehlin [02:30:32] I'll get there. Keep going.

Radio Free Mormon [02:30:33] Okay. And he says, my theory is this and the AMVHJ theory is this. And I'm going, well, why? What the heck is the AMVHJ theory? I know what your theory is. The other theory is obviously the opposite. It's obviously the one that's proposed in this book. Right, but why are you calling the AMVHJ theory? I Look at that. What the heck is that supposed to be? It is unwieldy. It's not easy to say. It's certainly not easy to remember. It doesn't exactly flow trippingly off the tongue. But he keeps going through this. And I thought, okay, obviously I've missed it. So now I have to scroll back up and find out why it is that he calls it the AMVHJ theory. Because I was only scanning it before, right? So if you go back, hello, to my page 58, okay. Where it says comparative chronology, okay. He says to see the difference that a more accurate view of the documents gives to the translation of the Book of Abraham. I will compare my chronology based on the manuscript evidence with that proposed by Edward Ashmant, Brent Metcalf, Dan Vogel, Brian Hauglid and Robin Jensen.

John Dehlin [02:31:49] So he's creating an acronym in his mind of all the anti Mormon and lumping them together. And by the way, he's putting Robin Jensen and Brian Haugland with what he would consider to be the anti Mormon, Dan Vogel, Brent Metcalfe and Ed Ashman.

Radio Free Mormon [02:32:05] Exactly.

John Dehlin [02:32:05] So it's just again, more ad hominem, more guilt by association. And part of what's just so outrageous about this RFM to me is that, you know, who are the anti Mormon? It's like Von Brody, it's like the Tanners, you know, it's Jeremy Runnels in the CES letter. It's me, it's you. It's anybody that shows that the Church has not been teaching accurate history and then proposes a more accurate scholarly view of how to read the history. These are the reasons the Joseph Smith Papers Project exists. These are the reasons why the Gospel Topics essays exist. It's because honest former Mormon or progressive Mormon were willing to stand up to the Church, call it on its deceptions, speak the truth. And that's what's been turning the Church away from John. Gee. And so instead of just like being respectful and saying, hey, we got it wrong, thanks to Fawn Brody, thanks to Juanita Brooks, thanks to, you know, the Tanners, they got this stuff right. And they've helped us become more honest and open. What guy wants to do is just continue labeling them all as anti Mormon, which is an offensive term. And anyone in the church that moves in the honest, truly scholarly direction, sometimes, including Bushman and Givens, it looks like, become labeled by the old guard as anti Mormon through guilt by association. And it's just, it's gross and it's, it's, it's, it's so disgusting to me.

Radio Free Mormon [02:33:44] Yeah. And essentially it's not scholarly at all because what you're doing is you are engaging in ad hominem. You are attacking the person instead of their arguments. Now, there are places in here where he attacks their arguments, you know, know. But he can't resist Jungi, cannot resist his instinct or instinct to be ad hominem. So he says, by Edward Ashman Britt MacF Dan Vogue hereafter AMVHJ. And I can almost imagine John G. Shuffling those letters around and trying to come up with some kind of clever word that's actually pronounceable, but it's AMV H.J. you only got the one vowel. It's not going to work. And promoted by Hauglitt and Jensen in their volume of the Joseph Smith Papers. So they are promoting the anti Mormon. And then he says, although by their own admission, Hauglitt and Jensen derive their theory from critics of the church. There it is again. I do not address the individual claims of those critics, but instead focus only on the theory as Haughlin and Jensen articulated in this volume. And then I said, okay, so why call it the AMVHW or whatever it was. I was reading it here, let me read it off mine. And I said, okay, so why call it the AMVHJ theory unless it is to link how good and Jensen with critics of the church? You just said you're going to address how good and Jensen specifically and not the other critics. But I'm still going to link them with the other critics every time I mention it. Because it's ad hominem. That's all he's doing here. Yeah, I just thought that was an extremely.

John Dehlin [02:35:15] And it's just classic geek. Yeah, classic Daniel Peterson classic interpreter. Attack. Attack someone who disagrees with you in defense of the faith.

Radio Free Mormon [02:35:26] Yes.

John Dehlin [02:35:27] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:35:28] And you know, you or I, most scholars would not think it was A terribly good argument to say that someone else is, well, they're anti Mormon, and therefore, you know, we can't really trust what it is that they have to say. But this is something that John Gee uses and he believes to good effect. And perhaps in some instances it is to good effect. I'm surprised at how much effect it has on members of the church tbms to find out that someone is an anti Mormon or an apostate or an excommunicant. But you yourself have had experience with people and their dealings with you both before and after your excommunication. You had a lot more access to members of the church, scholars who would come on your show and talk to you about things before your excommunication, then after, even though you're the same person, it's just your status has changed and therefore you are anathema, you are unclean, you're a pariah. They really can't have anything to do with you anymore.

John Dehlin [02:36:25] Yeah, yeah. Is it. Is it. Is it even worth trying to discuss, really, just super briefly, the theory about the dual. Dual transcription?

Radio Free Mormon [02:36:39] And I don't think so.

John Dehlin [02:36:41] Okay.

Radio Free Mormon [02:36:42] He spends pages and pages and pages talking about the simultaneous transcription, which is a great discovery that's been made by Robin Jensen. I talked to Brian Haglett. He gives total credit to Robin Jensen for coming up with figuring out it's really.

John Dehlin [02:36:55] It's really valuable.

Radio Free Mormon [02:36:57] Well, it's very interesting in the sense that the. These pages on which these dual translations occur or texts occur, which are basically identical, all come from the same piece of paper. And that's what Robin Jensen figured out. It was a big piece of paper, that. Big pieces of paper back then. Right. And it was folded in half and folded in half again to quarters and then cut. So now you've got four pieces of paper front and back. And so what he figured out was that these two manuscripts are not simply one that was written or maybe dictated, and then the other one sometime after that was copied from the first one because they're all from the same piece of paper. So it looks like there was a simultaneity, I think that's right. Simultaneity in their transcription and therefore leading to the idea that maybe they're actually taking it down at the same time as Joseph Smith potentially is dictating the text of the Book of Abraham. So without getting into details, some of which I know, others of which are just even too abstruse for me, the problem here for John Geese is that if these papers are being dictated by Joseph Smith. The. The creation of these papers is dated too late for John Geese version of when the Book of Abraham text was translated by Joseph Smith.

John Dehlin [02:38:13] And if I could, I. I just made a couple notes as I was trying to prepare. So basically it's Williams and Parish that are the two scribes, right?

Radio Free Mormon [02:38:22] Yep. Frederick G. And Morgan.

John Dehlin [02:38:24] And it looks like. It looks like Parrish would have been hired around October 1935 or after.

Radio Free Mormon [02:38:35] Or even 1835.

John Dehlin [02:38:37] What did I say 1935?

Radio Free Mormon [02:38:38] Yeah, I do.

John Dehlin [02:38:39] That Parrish would have been hired October 1835 or later, which basically would have meant that the two main manuscripts that we have for the Book of Abraham would have been produced on or after October 1835. Which puts them. Which puts the Book of Abraham manuscript being created after the production of the Egyptian Alphabet and grammar, which earlier or during.

Radio Free Mormon [02:39:07] During, yes, during and after. That's what John Dee cannot have happening. He cannot have that being created at that time.

John Dehlin [02:39:13] And this ties it back to the beginning, which is that that means that Joseph Smith in fact thought or was trying to convey that he was looking at the characters on the papyrus, translating a single character into sentences of text and then producing the Book of Abraham from the horror book of breathings that we have in our possession. That includes the facsimile, at least one facsimile that we've published in Scripture, which shows that Joseph Smith did not know what he was doing, that he was not translating Egyptian, that intentionally or unintentionally he misled everybody into thinking that he could translate when he clearly couldn't. And. Or that he himself didn't even understand what he was doing, which then calls into question the validity of the Book of Abraham for some, which is what Guy would have never wanted. And it's this, Robin Jensen, that helps substantiate the dual transcription. What are you calling it?

Radio Free Mormon [02:40:08] The dual simultaneous.

John Dehlin [02:40:09] Simultaneous

Radio Free Mormon [02:40:12] or dictation transcription.

John Dehlin [02:40:15] And this is what got has ghee kind of upsetting up in arms, right?

Radio Free Mormon [02:40:19] Absolutely. That's exactly right. And that's why when you look at the second paper, the most recent one that he wrote, he spends half of the paper, page after page after page after page of meticulous minutia and argumentation arguing against this idea that this was a. A dictation, that these are two scribes writing it down as Joseph Smith dictates it. He never says why he takes such issue with this that he's going to go to all this effort. He never actually explains that. But the fact that he goes through all this effort shows it's important to him. And when you realize why it is something he never tells you, then you see, okay, this is why he's spending all this time to argue against it. Because if that's true, then his theory is flawed.

John Dehlin [02:41:02] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:41:02] So he's fine with it being a copy and a copy of a copy of an original manuscript that was produced by Joseph Smith in the summer of 1835. That's fine. What they can't be is two scribes taking down dictation simultaneously from Joseph Smith as he is translating the Book of Mormon Abraham in October of 1835. At the same time, all the Joseph Smith papers are being. Or Abraham Egyptian papers are being produced and worked with. With.

John Dehlin [02:41:31] Interesting. Okay. Anything else you want to say about those three papers before I ask you? Just to try and figure out what this all means.

Final Analysis and Closing Thoughts

Radio Free Mormon [02:41:41] I have nothing else to say about those three papers. I'm gonna have to run here in a few minutes. I think what this all means is that John GE is so mono. He's got a monomania on this issue. And anybody who criticizes his theory of how the Book of Abraham was produced, it's like an E Day fix that he has where he just keeps focusing and focusing and things eat at him and eat at him. And Even though in 2019 he publishes the first paper in the Interpreter, he gets yelled at by the Joseph Smith papers project editors, the general editors, such that he changes it. Now here it is, less than two years later in January of 2021, and he's back doing the same thing. And one would expect that it may have the same kind of results, except probably worse results because he's already been upbraided and chastised about it once before, but he's back at it again.

John Dehlin [02:42:45] So what I have to ask is why would they do this? Now, obviously, obviously he feels embarrassed. Obviously he feels sad. Obviously he feels frustrated. He probably feels concerned that the church is going to be deteriorating people's faith, which is, you know, his main purpose is to bolster faith. I can get all that. But if anybody knows anything about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, it's that authority reigns supreme. The most sacred thing in the Mormon Church, in the LDS Church, is obedience to authority. That trumps everything. So why would Daniel Peterson and John Gee go rogue after they've already been yelled at once? Why would they go rogue using church dollars and continue attacking the very hand that biting the very hand that feeds them, attacking the organization that they claim to be supporting and bolstering? One could Argue, well, this is great. This is the church supporting discourse. This is the church supporting critics and opponents and different points of view. And this is a beautiful example of the church supporting diversity of thought. That's one possibility. Another possibility is that the church is just in chaos. It's like the Keystone Cops. Another possible theory is that these dudes are going to get in trouble. And the church may not publicize this, but just like Daniel Peterson was kicked out of the Maxwell Institute and shunned and embarrassed in so many ways that a comeuppance is coming where Guy and Peterson potentially are going to be facing internal charges of corruption. And honestly I think this episode makes that less likely because the last thing the church wants to do is what happened before, which is all of us shining a spotlight on this stupidity and then the church taking action and then it be perceived that the church is actually responding to its critics again, which is obviously the thing that they all fear the most, that the church, these prophecies or revelators would ever take sort of marching orders or follow the lead of its critics. But some would wonder, doesn't this mean Guy and Peterson at some point are going to get in trouble? What do you think about those different possibilities?

Radio Free Mormon [02:45:02] Rfm, I think, and you can write this down as the prophet RFM speaking. I think that what's going to happen in the near future is that John Gee is going to receive a mission call to be a mission president in a remote part of the world. That's what I think.

John Dehlin [02:45:24] What about Daniel Peterson?

Radio Free Mormon [02:45:28] It's possible the same thing could happen. I, I don't know. I mean they already dislodged him from BYU because the Maxwell Institute got put it with byu and so I'm. They tried to talk with him, they tried to talk sense to him. He refused to comply. He refused to have his conduct changed in any way to not be so vitriolic and ad hominem him. And ultimately they had to let him go from his responsibilities. And I think that that same character trait is showing up here is that you can talk to him and you can tell him to knock it off or bad things are going to happen. And he cannot knock it off. It reminds me, I think it's of Aesop's fable of the the Scorpion and the Turtle. You know this one? I'll close with this. Okay, okay. Scorpion and the Turtle. There's a scorpion who comes down and he's going to a scorpion party or wherever scorpions are going. He's in the desert, he's heading someplace and he comes to this river, and he's a scorpion. He can't cross the river. There's no bridges. He's got to find a way across this river. And sure enough, along comes this turtle floating down the river. And he says to the turtle, he

John Dehlin [02:46:39] says, hey, bud, come here.

Radio Free Mormon [02:46:42] So the turtle goes swimming over to the scorpion, but, you know, stays a little bit back, doesn't want to get in trouble. And the scorpion says, hey, look, I got a party I got to go to on the other side of the river. Why don't you give me a ride? Just take me across the river. And the turtle says, what, are you kidding? And the scorpion says, no, no, no. Just come over here. I'll jump up on your back and you can swim me across the river. And then I'll jump off. Everything will be great. And the turtle says to him, he says, look, you've got to be. You got to think I'm nuts. Because as soon as I get you on my back back and I'm halfway across the river, you're going to sting me. I know you're a scorpion. And scorpion says, no, no, no, I'm not going to do that. What's. Think about, what sense would it make for me to sting you when you're giving me a ride across the river? Because if I sting you, I kill you. And you sink and I sink and I'm a scorpion. I can't swim, and so I die, too. So why on earth would I sting you when it's going to kill me? And the turtle thinks about it, says, well, that makes sense to me.

John Dehlin [02:47:39] Me.

Radio Free Mormon [02:47:40] So he goes, okay, come on, hop on board. So the turtle is giving the scorpion a ride across the river. They get halfway across the river, and sure enough, that scorpion's tail comes up over the scorpion's head and bam. Right into the back of the neck of the turtle. And the turtle's just shocked. And he feels the venom going through his body and it's stiffening and he's starting to sink. He can't swim anymore. And end. He looks back at the scorpion and says, why on earth did you sting me? I'm gonna sink. I'm gonna die. You're gonna sink. You're gonna die. Why on earth did you do that? And the scorpion looks at the turtle sorrowfully and says, one cannot change one's nature. Are you still there? It was a very long paraglass.

John Dehlin [02:48:28] Sorry.

Radio Free Mormon [02:48:29] I was dramatizing it as best I could. I love it, but that's the idea.

John Dehlin [02:48:32] Are you saying the church Is the scorpion.

Radio Free Mormon [02:48:35] No, I'm saying that, well, we all are in some way or other, but specifically here that Daniel Peterson is a scorpion. He can't change his nature. He's going to be vitriolic and ad hominem. Doesn't make any difference if he's going to lose a position over it. He can't help himself. And I think that John GE is a similar type of person and put him together and, you know, Katie, bar

John Dehlin [02:48:56] the door and I'll just end with just a quick thought. Randall writes to the, the, to the point that Professor Gee may feel isolated as fellow academics in the church move off in different directions. This is also common organizational behavior in the corporate world. And by the way, the church is a corporation. It's the corporation of the president of the church, Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints, meaning quote, employees are our most important assets until they are not. Every corporation eventually implements staff downsizing, changes priorities, relocates operations, et cetera. And any of these can transform a highly valued employee into a surplus employee. And what we're seeing is that for me, this sort of is another sign of like one of the last gasps of the death of old style Mormon apologetics. For as long as the Church could control the narrative, for as long as the Internet wasn't there, the Church could use apologists like Nibley, like Guy, like Muhlstein, like Peterson, to distract people, to do pseudo scholarship, to attack any critic. And the Church relied on that for decades because of the work of the Internet, of podcasts like yours and of mine, of CES Letter, of all the good work that's going out there in the Mormon Internet in 2005 and beyond. The Church has been embarrassed to the point where it has to move in a direction, a new direction. It's moving towards credible scholarship, at least in part, which means it moves away from Guy and Peterson. So they're feeling abandoned, they're feeling betrayed, they've become martyrs. And the Church is willing to sort of have their reputations be sacrificed. They're expendable. And it must really hurt to be John Gee and Daniel Peterson if you care about truth and evidence and integrity. And so this represents Guy and Peterson, their dying gasps as they move into irrelevance, as the Church moves in the direction of Gibbons and Bushman and Fluman and Mason and kind of the neo apologetic stance. And I just have to say the church has to be careful. And that's why they give mission calls and make people temple presidents. So they make people mission presidents or they call them on missions after a scandal because you don't want to piss off Daniel Peterson or John Gee, because the last thing the Church would ever want is like a Hans Mattson where a former official or authority turns back and starts attacking the Church. And so you got to give them a plum honorable discharge that makes it look like it's inspired, where they still get their pension, they still get their money, they still have their dignity intact, but you silently use ecclesiastical justifications to redirect them into a noble, faithful cause, because you got to get them off the scene because they're embarrassing, they're embarrassing you. And they're actually now fighting and biting the hand that has fed them so long. But in so many cases, they're really victims. They're kind of willing martyrs to the overall cause. And in that sense, I think of the Church as the scorpion Guy and Peterson should have known as turtles who the Church was when they were picking up the Church and carrying it across the river. And of course, the Church as the scorpion stings Guy and Peterson on its way. Because that's what the Church ultimately has to do. Its own apologists are expendable when the Church needs to move in a new direction. Action.

Radio Free Mormon [02:52:43] Yeah. And how frustrating is that when the Church has a position and you expend yourself, all your capital in defending that position and now the Church starts moving away from that position. And in these two cases, a lot of people go with the Church or they find other ways of theories, but certain individuals now have invested their entire life and careers into those original positions that the Church is moving away from. So they're going to keep arguing for this and they're going to have to envision that the Church leaders are not responsible for the new direction. Rather, it's people underneath the leaders who are acting as well. Traitors basically, to the Church. They're pulling one over on the Church and they're getting these anti Mormon theories into church publications without the knowledge of the leaders of the Church. The one thing they can't possibly admit is that the same leaders of the Church who gave the original direction are leading the new direction as well. They're aware of it. They're sanctioning it. No, this has to be happening without their knowledge. And so now they're writing these articles in order to try and bring it to the awareness of the leaders of the Church so they can find out they're being duped and come back home to the positions that are being defended by John Key and Daniel Peterson, which

John Dehlin [02:53:58] ironically calls the Church's leadership into question. Because if you're basically saying the Brethren are too out of touch or too uninformed to realize that they've hired and promoted enemies, Elder Snow, Robin Jensen, Brian Hagler. It means that the leaders are asleep at the wheel and they don't know what's going on under them. That's the core argument. And so ironically, they're undermining the very leadership that they claim to be trying to bolster. Is that not right?

Radio Free Mormon [02:54:28] Yeah, right. You're absolutely right. But honestly, just between you and Daniel Peterson, because the reason that he got booted largely had to do with you and the hit piece he was sponsoring on you that he was going to publish, and you got the ear of an apostle, Elder Holland, who didn't think that was cool, and he sent the word down and didn't happen, if I got that right. Is that pretty much right? That's.

John Dehlin [02:54:50] That's pretty. Pretty true. Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:54:52] So what, What Daniel Peterson, when he was let go from a church institution, the Maxwell Institute at byu, the one thing that he can never ever accept is that general authorities were involved in that. You see, he cannot accept that because he's a faithful member of the Church. By the way, Dan. Yes. I'm psychoanalyzing you. You'll get my bill in the mail, hopefully. You can correct me if he wants, but he cannot accept that they were involved because he's a believing member of the church and a believer in their inspiration. And therefore, the way he's always characterized it is that this is something that was a rogue operation done underneath teeth. The notor. The notice of the leaders of the Church, who are of course over BYU and the Maxwell Institute. It had to be done by the director of the Maxwell Institute without input from the leaders. As if the director of the Maxwell Institute is going to do anything without talking to the leaders of the Church. But that can't be a possibility for Dan Peterson. No. This had to be a hatchet job concocted and executed by the director of the Maxwell Institute without any input from the leaders. And therefore he still thinks that the Leaders are supportive of him in his new efforts at the Interpreter.

John Dehlin [02:56:05] Yeah, and ironically, fast forwarding, it was Elder Holland that helped fundraise for the More Good foundation and for the Book of Mormon Central and for the Interpreter Foundation. And that's smart of Holland to do because he doesn't want Peterson as an enemy. So he's got to make Peterson feel like he didn't take Peterson out, which he totally did. And so he actually gives, sort of allows Peterson to Do the Interpreter as a booby prize so that Peterson has something to think that he's still contributing on, even though he's not. But. But they allow the interpreter to continue so that Peterson didn't feel like he's contributing. Who reads the interpreter other than the editors of the Interpreter. And. And Holland will even fundraise for the Interpreter so that Peterson cannot become an enemy of the Church or become soured or angry. And so the Church has. Even Elder Holland has to do this dance of keeping Peterson happy enough or placated enough or funded just enough so that he doesn't become sour grapes and start. Really. Because what would happen if Daniel C. Peterson, of all people, turned against the Church and started attacking it? Talk about something really damaging. So. So that's the fine line that Holland and the other apostles have to walk, is to slowly, slowly move Peterson into irrelevance without shaming him, without embarrassing him, and with giving him just enough to feel relevant when in reality, the real money and the real power and the real thinking in the Church has totally moved in a different direction.

Radio Free Mormon [02:57:43] Right. The question in my mind now is now that we have Daniel Peterson as the editor of the Interpreter, publishing articles by John Gee, essentially speaking for the Church and calling a book published by the Church in the Joseph Smith Papers Project anti Mormon literature. Okay. I think something's got to give.

John Dehlin [02:58:05] Yeah. Yeah. And that's why I wanted to do this episode with you, because this is all Kremlin watching that their discussion boards, Mormon discussions, LDS discussions, whatever they're called. Ex Mormon Red.

Radio Free Mormon [02:58:18] It.

John Dehlin [02:58:18] Lots of us talk about it, but a lot of times this stuff doesn't get put into broad Mormon consciousness. And this is my feeble, meager effort along with yours, to see if we can slingshot or catapult what's happening into broad Mormon consciousness. Because people, this is this. Faithful members of the Church, this is your tithing at work. This is your tithing at work funding both this huge Joseph Smith Papers Project and money being funneled to apologists to attack the Church and the Joseph Smith Papers Project. It's ludicrous. It's a huge waste of money. There are poor people starving. There's COVID 19. There are all sorts of noble uses of actual money. And instead tithing money is being used for this Keystone Cops like behavior. And members of the church and donors should know about it.

Radio Free Mormon [02:59:10] Yeah. Within this realm of the LDS Church and the Joseph Smith Papers Project and Mormon Apologetics analytics, this is a big deal.

John Dehlin [02:59:17] Yeah. And hopefully more people will maybe become aware of it. Thanks to you, rfm, for your wonderful analysis and wisdom.

Radio Free Mormon [02:59:27] Hey, you're welcome. Thanks for having me on, John. It's always so great to talk with you. I'm probably about 22 minutes late to get where I'm going, so I probably. I better split.

John Dehlin [02:59:36] All right. All right. I love you, brother. And I'm going to promote your work while you're gone. Thanks for coming on, rfm. You're the best.

Radio Free Mormon [02:59:42] No, you're the best.

John Dehlin [02:59:45] Love you, brother. Thanks for coming on. And for our listeners, I just want to do what I try and do often, which is to plug Radio Free Mormon. So if you go to radiofreemormon.org, you can donate to Radio Free Mormon. Some of that goes to support Bill Real, but the majority and his good works with Marriage on a Tightrope and his podcast network, and then the rest goes to Radio Free Mormon. He deserves to be funded for his great work, and so I'm never going to pass up an opportunity to promote that good work. Thank you, rfm. Check out his podcast. It's fantastic. A lot of you love our Radio Free Mormon more than Mormon Stories. That doesn't bother me one bit because for me, the more there's better podcasts and programming out there, the happier that I am. And if at some point a bunch of other cool YouTube channels and podcasts makes Mormon Stories irrelevant, I'll go do other cool things because there's a lot I could do with my life. So support Ready for Mormon. Support Bill Real. Support Marriage on a Tightrope. Support Jonathan Streeter. Support all Sunstone. Support Lindsay Anson park and Year of Polygamy. Support all the good efforts out there to try and bring truth and openness and transparency to Mormonism. Heck, support the Joseph Smith Papers Project, because at least they're moving towards honest, credible scholarship and they're doing really great work.

Radio Free Mormon [03:01:06] Work.

John Dehlin [03:01:06] Support the Maxwell Institute under Spencer Fluman because they're trying to move Mormonism in a more honest and open direction. And if you want to, it turns out that less than one out of a thousand people that listen to Mormon Stories podcast, we had our best year ever. In 2020. We had almost 9 million downloads and views, which was almost like a million more than the previous year. Mormon Stories Podcast had its best year ever, and far less than one out of a thousand of my listeners are actual donors. And so if you want to see programming like this continue, we need you to become a donor. So please go to MormonStories.org click on the Donate button at the top of the page become a monthly donor. 10 bucks a month, 20 bucks a month, 100 bucks a month. Whatever you can afford. We're a 501c3 nonprofit. Our trust, our finances are transparent. We don't categorize all of our donations as other like the interpreter does. We actually categorize our expenses in an honest and a credible way. My compensation is a matter of public record. We have a board, we have a credible accountant that does our finances. And we do our best to be open and transparent as a 501c nonprofit. And we invite you all to support Open Stories foundation and Mormon Stories with tax tax deductions that that with donations that are tax deductible. So thanks for all your support. Thanks for everyone who gave comments and suggestions. I'm I have to share Dan Vogel's comments because anytime Dan Vogel comments, I pay attention. A true credible scholar, Dan Vogel writes, Peterson and Guy are merely defending a fundamentalist interpretation of Mormon history and classifying other points of view as anti Mormon, including their own believing scholars. Vogel Wright goes on to write, oddly, Guy has complained about being called an apologist, but doesn't mind calling others anti Mormon. And that's a shout out to Dan Vogel. Dan Vogel, your work is a treasure. So please support Buy Dan Vogel's books, support Signature Books, support the Smith Pettit Foundation. A huge shout out to George Smith, to Gary Bergera, and to Ron Predis, and to all the good people at Signature Books because they're doing amazing work. Dan Vogel is doing amazing work. I hope to have Dan Vogel on soon to be talking about his new book about about the Book of Abraham. Believe it or not, there's going to be more on if we haven't spoken enough about the Book of Abraham, we plan to have Dan Vogel on to talk more about the Book of Abraham and Book of Abraham apologetics. So look for that in the weeks or months ahead. Also a shout out to Devere Anderson. Of the of the Signature Books who I've been working with on that, Akeem writes, daniel Peterson is the best ever. He's pretty darn good. But so is Brett Metcalf and many of the other scholars that have helped us see the Book of Abraham in a more accurate light. As it should be seen, Gerardo writes, dan is my hero. And I would say, Gerardo, you're my hero. So this is a circle of admiration. Thanks to everyone who supports what we do. Thanks to all the listeners. If you can't support us financially, feel free to donate to feel free to give us A positive review on Facebook At Mormon Stories Podcast we always have mean spirited apology apologists who don't listen to the podcast just try and write bad reviews. So give us a positive review at Mormon Stories Podcast, Facebook page or at Apple Podcasts or an itunes because those reviews help give us a favorable rating so people will want to listen and tune in and so they won't be scared off by false, you know, apologetic negative reviews, one star reviews that, that do hurt our overall rating. So you can also share these episodes right now. Please go share this on Facebook, share it on Instagram, share it on Twitter, Twitter, share it with family members through email. However you want to share it on Facebook. The more that we share these episodes broadly, the more that people build awareness of them. And so I really appreciate any ways that you guys can support any of the good work that's happening anywhere. We would love that. We would really appreciate it. And Dan Vogel is giving us the name, I think of his book Book of Abraham Apologetics. I may have that wrong, but whether or not check out soon a book coming out by Signature Books and Dan Vogel on Book of Abraham and check out dan Vogel's amazing YouTube channel. And then finally Sarka writes, this was very insightful. Thank you for a great podcast. Thank you, Sarka. Thanks to everyone who tuned in today. Thanks to Gerardo for making my camera and my lighting and my backdrop so beautiful. Thanks to Brooklyn Alden for editing these episodes. She does great work. And again, thanks all our donors, to our board of directors and everyone that makes all this possible. You guys are amazing. I love you all. Stay tuned for more amazing Mormon Stories podcast. Join us this very afternoon where we're going to be having the founder of QuitMormon.com attorney Mark Naugle on to talk about what is QuitMormon, why did he create it, what's behind it, why he does it, how it works, where they are in the backlog, how many people that they've helped process their resignations. 70,000 people. 70,000 resignations have been submitted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I believe 50,000 have been processed. Another 20,000 are just in backlog limbo. But we're going to be interviewing, we are going to be interviewing Mark Nagel soon. So lots of good stuff coming up soon on Mormon Stories Podcast. Love you guys. Take care. See you guys all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories Podcast. Take care everybody.

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