Introduction and Brant Gardner's Background

Part 1 of 5 · Ep. 307

Brant Gardner [00:00:00] 1, 2, 3.

John Dehlin [00:00:07] Mormon Stories Podcast is a production of the Open Stories Foundation. All donations to Mormon Stories are fully tax deductible and go directly towards keeping the podcast alive and towards building a community of support for Mormons like you. To support the podcast or to join the community, please become a monthly subscriber today@mormonstories.org hello and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John delind and as always, I'm very excited to have with me a very special guest today. My guest is a man by the name of Brant Gardner. Hi Brant.

Brant Gardner [00:00:43] Hello.

John Dehlin [00:00:44] Thanks for joining us.

Brant Gardner [00:00:45] Thank you for the opportunity.

John Dehlin [00:00:47] Now, Brant is interesting from my perspective for a couple reasons. Many of you will know that I've interviewed Grant Palmer on this podcast about his book and an Insider's View of Mormon Origins where he talks about his theories on the origins of the Book of Mormon. I've also interviewed Richard Bushman who's talked a lot about kind of his views of the Book of Mormon. And I've interviewed Terrell Givens. When I originally planned to interview Grant Palmer, I always, I worked really hard with Fair and Farms to try and get someone who I believed would be sort of credible, kind of a scholar or a really thoughtful person to respond to the Grant Palmer interview. Lots, I asked lots of people and no one was willing to do the interview. Brett Gardner, as far as I can tell, is one of the better people that I could ever hope for to, to respond to the critics attacks on the Book of Mormon. He also has a lot to say about archaeology and, and I think would be one of the better people that I could find as well to, to speak to the Michael Coe interview where we talked about Book of Mormon archeology and in his, you know, Dr. Coe's outsider's view. Those are all podcasts that I strongly recommend you guys listen to. But let me just go ahead Brant, and read your bio if that's okay.

Brant Gardner [00:02:24] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:02:25] From your book it says Brent Gardner earned his Ms. In Anthropology specializing in Mesoamerican ethnohistory from the State University of New York at Albany. You are the author of a six volume series published by Cofer Books called Second Witness Analytical and Contextual Commentary on the Book of Mormon. You are also the author of the main book that we're going to be featuring today called the Gift and Translating the Book of Mormon by Brant A. Gardner again brought to you by Greg Coford Books. And you've presented lots of papers for Fair Farms Sunstone. You've written articles for Meridian magazine. And you and your wife Valerie have four children and 11 grandchildren. Is there anything I've left out of that bio?

Brant Gardner [00:03:19] I think that covers it.

John Dehlin [00:03:21] Okay. And also I want to note this, this, this maybe is going to seem a little bit self serving, but it's, it's not really. I've become relatively good friends with a man by the name of Greg Coford. Some of you may know who he is, but my guess is that most of you don't. Greg Crowford is a publisher. He publishes books and he publishes good books, really high quality books. And he's a thoughtful, I'm going to say, you know, sophisticated Mormon in his own right and his books deserve attention. And so I had some talks with Greg and we sort of made this deal that I would help promote some of his better books and, and he would offer our listeners a discount. And then finally, you know, for every book that's bought, you know, using the code that I'm about to give you, you know, maybe a small amount of that is going to come to Mormon Stories to help us fund the podcast, etc. So the, the website is gregkofer.com that's G R E G K O F f o r d.com and the promotion code is M stories, all in caps, M S T O R I S O all in caps. So I want you to, I want to encourage you guys, if you like what we talk about today with, with Brent Gardner, to go up onto Greg Coford books and to type in that code and to buy this book, the Gift and Power Translating the Book of Mormon and any other books that Greg offers. And we're just going to see if we can help drive some sales to Greg because his books are good and also see to what extent, you know, we can help out Mormon stories with, with projects like this. So, so that's my, that's my disclaimer and all the news items and now I'm ready to jump into the book. Is that all right?

Brant Gardner [00:05:14] Fine. Here.

John Dehlin [00:05:15] Okay, so, so first and foremost, Brant, let's talk a little bit about your history. That's something we always do with Mormon stories and we don't have to go into lots of detail, but just tell us a bit about your upbringing in the church and what are the things that kind of led you to want to study Mesoamerican archaeology and what led you to the route of writing scholarly books about Mormonism?

Brant Gardner [00:05:46] I grew up in the Church, so I don't have any great conversion story to tell. What I have is sort of the process that I went through. I was always interested in things like archaeology. I had somebody give me a book when I was somewhere around 12 that covered archeology of the world in a mode that was appropriate for 12 years old and 12 year olds. And I was absolutely fascinated with it. Went on my mission to Spain.

John Dehlin [00:06:15] Were you raised in Utah?

Brant Gardner [00:06:18] I spent a little bit of time in Utah. I was raised in probably California more often than Utah.

John Dehlin [00:06:25] And born in the church.

Brant Gardner [00:06:26] Born in the church.

John Dehlin [00:06:27] Pioneer ancestry, all that?

Brant Gardner [00:06:30] Yeah.

Brant Gardner [00:06:30] Actually, if you've got any listeners that are in the Utah area and they've heard of Gardner Mill in West Jordan, that's. And how many greats grandfather of mine founded that. And my father remembers working in it when it was a working flour mill. And now it's a restaurant. So.

John Dehlin [00:06:47] Nice. Okay. All right. So raised mostly in California. Right. Served a mission where.

Brant Gardner [00:06:55] Served a mission in Spain. And it turned out that that sort of had one of the two major influences in the direction that I was interested in going. Because obviously, if you're going to serve in Spain, one of the languages that you're going to learn is going to be Spanish. So I remember being on my mission and teaching all of these things about the Great White God and how it really how that related to the Book of Mormon. And when I got back from my mission, I was going to BYU and decided that what I really needed to do was to read up on this Great White God, because now that I spoke the language, I could actually read the sources. And then when somebody said, is that really true? I could say, well, yes, of course it is, because I read it and now I know that it's true.

John Dehlin [00:07:46] Right.

Brant Gardner [00:07:46] And then I went to BYU and got into the library and started doing the research and found out that the sources didn't say what everybody said that they were saying. And you know, the very short version of that very long story is that I really don't see any connection between the Great White God, Quetzalcoatl and Jesus Christ at all. Those are all. All of the things that make it appear that there is something connected are all related to much later Spanish interpretations of native myth, rather than anything that the Indians believed or talked about. But that also got me to the point where I said, wow, this is absolutely fascinating stuff. And although it doesn't relate directly to the Book of Mormon, I am now in love with it. And so that fostered my desire to learn more about Mesoamerica and traipsed off to Albany, New York to do Graduate work.

John Dehlin [00:08:48] Okay, real quick. Was that a. Was that at all disconcerting to you? That. I mean, I remember those film strips that I used to show, you know, as a missionary. I think it was called Ancient America Speaks, but I don't remember. But we'd show these. Oh, yeah, these film strips. And, you know, we would tell Native Americans or Latin Americans that they were descendants of Laman and Lemuel, and we would talk about the Popol Vuh in Guatemala, and we would show, you know, we would basically say that Jesus was the great white God, that that was in the Popol Vuh, just because that's kind of. That's the material the church was putting out.

Brant Gardner [00:09:31] Oh, yeah. And went back to John Taylor, who said that, you know, from all of the evidence he could see, it looked like Castle coat was a remembrance of Jesus Christ. And the key idea there isn't that John Taylor was, by revelation, saying this. He said, from all the evidence. I see. Well, what evidence was he reading? And again, it was the evidence that made it look similar. But a lot of what we are able to know about that kind of mythology simply wasn't available at the time. Now, was it disconcerting to me, not really. Specifically about that video, Ancient America Speaks. While I was at byu, I got to know some of the BYU professors, archaeologists, and the people who were doing work. And I was sitting around talking to them one day, and that film strip came up and one of them said, oh, yeah, we usually put that on for a good laugh. We consider it a comedy.

John Dehlin [00:10:33] But, yeah, so how can that not. I mean, maybe you were just more sophisticated than me, but how can that not cause you to, you know, some concern, at least from the standpoint that, you know, the church is putting out this curriculum that it's giving to missionaries that's saying stuff that you find to not be, you know, maybe accurate or relevant. How do you avoid. I'm not saying that that should destroy your testimony, but how do you avoid not having some cognitive dissonance about it or concern or a feeling like we can't be misleading people? How do you avoid not feeling those things?

Brant Gardner [00:11:18] I guess a part of it is to understand what the nature of revelation is and sort of the human side of inspiration. I can believe that prophets are inspired. I really have a hard time believing that they're inspired in what they choose for breakfast. It is entirely possible that you can have a church that's led by God and have real human beings that are involved in it doing the best they can with the best information that they have. And so they come up with some of these things, and they're popular for a time because it's the best information they have. And then typically, when they learn that there is something better going on, then they kind of move those things away and, you know, learn something else. And that's what happened, of course, with Ancient America Speaks. We don't show that anymore, and it's been replaced with things that have a much better scholarly foundation. So.

John Dehlin [00:12:18] Okay, so, you know, what you just articulated, I think, is a. I don't want to sound condescending, but that sounds like a more mature, informed view on Mormonism and spirituality. But it's not necessarily a point of view that is encouraged by ces. It's not the type of point of view that you would come out of four years of seminary or four years of institute or BYU and just sort of have. Naturally, people who usually have that perspective have to kind of earn it and fight for it, and many people get lost along the way. Were you raised with that perspective? Did it just come to you through reading? How did you arrive there?

Brant Gardner [00:13:02] I suppose it was just reading. I certainly wasn't raised with that kind of understanding. I was raised in the same church that pretty much everybody else was. And, you know, when I was younger, I would smile when they talked about people coming across the Bering Strait, because, of course, I knew better and everybody came across. With Lehigh, it was a process of simply learning more and understanding and probably just continuing to learn. I find that the more I read and the more I understand, the less I have those problems of cognitive dissonance.

John Dehlin [00:13:40] But you had this perspective as a. As a college student at byu.

Brant Gardner [00:13:46] Certainly by the time I got back from my mission, I did exactly what it might have been like before that I'm not sure.

Studying Mesoamerica and the Book of Mormon

John Dehlin [00:13:52] Okay, okay. All right. Well, good. So. All right. So you. You decided to go off to grad school to study this stuff more in depth, is that right?

Brant Gardner [00:14:02] I did, and at that particular point in time, pretty much gave up the idea of studying it with any relationship to the Book of Mormon. I really wanted to do Mesoamerican research because I was in love with the field and fascinated with it, and my particular specialty was sort of Central America, Central Mexican religion. And all of that comes much, much later than the Book of Mormon. So the things that I was really terribly interested in at the time had to do with the fact that when I was going through graduate school in the early 70s, that's where we had the texts. That's where we had the largest amount of material where you could learn something. The decipherment of the Maya hieroglyphs has altered that perspective within the last 40 years. But in the early 70s, if you wanted to know something about Mesoamerican religion, you were required to go to Central Mexico because that's where we had the information. So that's what I was interested in. There is a smaller piece of that story, however, which is while I was at Brigham Young University, I did meet John Sorensen. And in one of my conversations with him, I told him that I had kind of come to the conclusion that I just wasn't going to find a real world location for the Book of Mormon. And I was pretty convinced that I'd have to take it on faith and wasn't ever going to really see any that would convince me that it had really taken place in any location that I was going to be able to find and know anything about. And at that point in time, this was prior to the publication of his book, An Ancient American Setting of the Book of Mormon. And he gave me a manuscript to go through. I read that.

John Dehlin [00:15:55] What year would this have been about?

Brant Gardner [00:15:57] This would have been, let's say, 72, 73, somewhere in there. And the book was published in 85.

John Dehlin [00:16:07] Okay.

Brant Gardner [00:16:08] So I had the manuscript prior to that time.

John Dehlin [00:16:11] Okay. So Sorensen was doing research to try and establish some type of what Central American setting for the Book of Mormon.

Brant Gardner [00:16:18] He'd been working on it for a number of years. I'm sure that probably by at least 1950, the outlines of the geography that he favored were probably reasonably well set. And it was a question of sort of defining it and refining it between, like, 1950 and the 1970s.

John Dehlin [00:16:39] Okay.

Brant Gardner [00:16:40] And then maybe a little bit more by the time of the publication of this book. But as I remember it, there weren't huge differences between the manuscript and the actual published text.

John Dehlin [00:16:50] And what were your thoughts about the manuscript at the time you read it?

Brant Gardner [00:16:54] I was thoroughly excited. I said, gog on it. The guy's done it. He's giving me a way of seeing the Book of Mormon where I could relate it to real people. And part of the reason that that could happen is because I understood that area of the world. And one of the major things that it allowed me to do was to reconceptualize the Book of Mormon so that I was no longer in my mind picturing a Book of Mormon that happened in Jerusalem with everybody wearing clothes from the Middle east and everybody acting like what we understand the world of the ancient near east to have been, But I could see it occurring with the people that I understood. A very different culture, a very different background, and it made all the difference in the way I read the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:17:46] Okay, and so you still see. Do you still. Do you still view his theories as plausible or viable in terms of geography and the Book of Mormon?

Brant Gardner [00:18:01] Yes. And then I should probably qualify that, because he and I probably disagree on several things, even though there's probably a major amount of agreement. Okay. I've been through, for instance, every geographical theory that I can think of, and his is the only one I've been able to find that actually makes sense in the real world. So from that standpoint, his basic geography backing away, perhaps on some of the identifications of specific cities, but that general relationship seems to work, seems to describe, you know, locations and interconnectedness in ways that I've not seen anywhere else. And then what I did when I was going through the commentary on the Book of Mormon was to say, if I take that location and read the Book of Mormon against it, does that tell us something about the Book of Mormon that we would not otherwise learn? The result of that process is I am quite convinced that the Book of Mormon took place in that area, and I have a very hard time reading it without seeing it in that cultural area.

John Dehlin [00:19:14] Again, in which area?

Brant Gardner [00:19:18] The area that John Sorensen has located would have the land of Nephi, probably in highland Guatemala, and then in the Grijalva River Valley would be where Zarahemla had been located, and then Jaredite lands, probably up along the Gulf coast to the north.

John Dehlin [00:19:41] Okay. And maybe we'll get into the different theories in a bit, but I guess in your timeline, it's just good to know you were, in some ways, contemporaries with John Sorensen, were familiar with his work, and what that informed your graduate studies?

Brant Gardner [00:19:57] It informed my sort of religious understanding as I was going through the graduate studies. So in my graduate studies, I was not doing anything overtly related to the Book of Mormon. Most of what I was trying to do is nail down that Qetzalcoat character and try to figure out what was going on, but that, by then, had nothing to do with the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:20:21] Got it. Okay, so take us from getting your master's degree to now just in terms of what track you followed in terms of Book of Mormon scholarship For a

Writing the Commentary and the Gift and Power

Brant Gardner [00:20:37] long time, probably relatively dormant in that I had to actually go work for a living. My wife became addicted to having food on the table and a roof over her head. So we, we had to feed that particular need. So it was, oh, I don't know, 20 years plus, I guess that I really didn't do much except read both in Mesoamerican archaeology and sort of thinking a little bit in the Book of Mormon. The real change occurred after we had moved to Albuquerque and I got online and you know, by that time, this is 15, 16 years ago, by that time, the Internet was a little bit easier to manipulate than it had been earlier. And there was a list that discussed LDS doctrine and scripture. And the guy who ran the list contacted me and said, you know, I'd really like you to do sort of a magazine article once a week. And I knew that one of the biggest problems I would possibly have with that is coming up with a topic every week. So I said, well, here's what we'll do. We'll do a nice slow commentary on the Book of Mormon and I can do that once a week and we'll just go and see what happens. And then I became addicted to that process and that turned into the six volume commentary that Covert has published. So that's kind of what got me back into thinking about the Book of Mormon and Mesoamerica and writing on those topics.

John Dehlin [00:22:12] So you did that six volume series before you did the Gift and Power?

Brant Gardner [00:22:15] That's correct.

John Dehlin [00:22:16] Okay, when did you publish those?

Brant Gardner [00:22:20] The first one came out. I think it was December of 2007.

John Dehlin [00:22:24] Okay.

Brant Gardner [00:22:24] And then the rest of them early in 2008. That was the last time we as a church were doing the Book of Mormon. So we were trying really hard to get it out. So that, as Greg Kofert has said, the wonderful LDS buying market doesn't buy those kinds of things except when gospel doctrine comes around.

John Dehlin [00:22:41] Right.

Brant Gardner [00:22:42] So.

John Dehlin [00:22:43] So you try to get them, get them ready. Okay, well that, that makes it, that makes good sense. And so anything else about your background or history before we dive into your views on Joseph Smith and the in the Book of Mormon?

Brant Gardner [00:22:58] No, I think that probably covers it. I'm not even sure that was interesting, but everything else is even less.

John Dehlin [00:23:03] Okay, all right, well, well, let's start with Joseph Smith and your book the Gift and Power. Translating the Book of Mormon goes into all this stuff in reasonable depth. And so what I'm going to do is present the typical, let's just say non faithful view of Joseph Smith in the Book of Mormon. And then I want just to have you talk about your perspective so that those who desire to believe in the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith or who are Struggling can maybe hear. I don't want to put you up as a role model, but maybe just alternative approaches to ones that would necessarily preclude faith. Does that make sense?

Brant Gardner [00:23:49] Sure it does.

John Dehlin [00:23:50] Okay. So, you know, most people, when they start studying church history, realize that Joseph Smith. Well, that there was an environment of folk magic, you know, divining for water, treasure seeking, treasure digging, you know, in the New York area and probably in other states in the early 1800s that Joseph Smith and his father and many of his friends and associates all participated in. And so there would be rumors of gold mines, Spanish gold mines, or buried treasure. And Joseph would either take part in or lead expeditions to help people try and find this buried treasure. And he would often do it using some type of stone that could be called a seer stone or a peep stone or something else to search for that buried treasure. Now, tell me if I've got that right and if you would add anything to that narrative.

Brant Gardner [00:25:00] I guess what I'd add to the narrative is that we know the basic outlines that are there. And the question is, what is really going on with all of that? Because as soon as we hear that Joseph Smith was involved with even divining rods, we're kind of wondering what was going on. But there's enough of a tradition of, you know, the witching stick or the divining rod that that one doesn't sound terribly strange. But when you get into a seer stone that were sometimes more derogatively called a peep stone, boy, that just sounds strange. And so what I was hoping to do in about the first third of the book is try to understand what was going on. What was that culture like? Why would Joseph Smith get involved in doing some of these things? And then part of it is also trying to understand why we tell the stories that we do. Because one of the very important pieces of information is that as the historians learn more about that part of Joseph's life, we understand that he translated the Book of Mormon using a seer stone. But there have been a lot of stories since then that a couple of. Well, even Joseph Fielding Smith, who said, no, he would never have used the seer stone. A couple of other people denied that that would have ever happened. Certainly, when artists depict the translation of the Book of Mormon, that's not typically the way LDS artists will depict it. And so there is a question of, you know, if we know something about the history, how is it that we get these other questions? And so the history of the history is probably, you know, another one of those things. That's kind of interesting. But if we go back to Joseph Smith and we try to understand what he was doing, one of the really important things is to understand that the world that Joseph Smith lived in is a different kind of world than the one we lived in. And things that we call magic would not have had that label at the time. They would simply be, this is the way people do things. When I was looking at that history, I looked at the history of those kinds of practices in England. And prior to the time that people would have police forces, one of the ways that they would try to find out, you know, who the thief was or where something was lost, they'd go to somebody who used a stone to find things. And it was part of the tradition coming out of England that if you had something that was lost, you would go to this person who would consult their seer stone, and they would tell you where the thing was that was hidden, or they would say, this is the person who stole it. So it was a very long history of these things that continued in the new world and in America. And what was interesting is it's about that time that there begins to be a kind of a dichotomy between the people who would believe those things and a more educated populace that was moving off of the eastern seaboard and populating more and more of the territory that once had been a frontier, but now was even less so. And so you get places like Palmyra that had a distinct population of people who had some of these older, more rural beliefs, and then the newer people coming in that were more highly educated. And in addition to the question of seer stones, you have a population where some people believe and other people say, oh, that's just terrible. And it's that sort of division in perspective that explains a lot of the stories that we hear about Joseph Smith and what he was doing with the seer stone. One of those things, for instance, everybody knows, or like, I guess everybody knows is the wrong way to put it, but most of us have heard that there was something about Joseph Smith and using a seer stone for treasure hunting. And all of that just seems terribly weird. And one of the things you mentioned is that maybe Joseph Smith had led some of these things. As you look at what Joseph Smith was doing, the majority of people, and it wasn't just Joseph Smith. There were other people in the area that used seer stones. There were other people in other states who use seer stones. The whole idea of the seer stone in popular usage was that it's something that would help you find something that was lost or not easily visible. So people who were looking for buried treasure would go to someone who was a user of a seer stone and request their help, hoping that this person could help them find something. And that's kind of what we find with Joseph Smith, at least in every case that we know of. Joseph never solicited business with the seer stone. People always came to him and said, I want your services, and basically hired him to do what it was that he did. So that whole world about how you use them and what you use them for was very, very different from. From what we expect. And certainly not in the definitions of magic and certainly not occult magic, like we tend to think.

Seer Stones, Folk Magic, and Sacred Power

John Dehlin [00:30:43] Okay, what power do you think people assumed was driving, you know, the stones or those who were fighting things?

Brant Gardner [00:30:55] You know, I'm not sure that they would have known much about power. I think all of those, you know, what power is it that makes it happen? Our modern definitions, where we're trying to say, you know, it's either God or the devil doing it, I don't think those are definitions that those people would have understood. Pardon me. If they would have thought about it, it certainly would have been, you know, some good, divine, angelic power that was helping them out, but in a very generalized way. This was very much simply a talent that someone had. And there would be someone in the village who was talented with herbs and healing. There was somebody else, you know, who was talented with seer stone, somebody else with finding water with the witching stick. And these communities that had to rely on themselves would have these local specialists. And in most cases, they were considered to be people who had a good power. Now, where it came from, I'm not sure any of them ever wondered or cared as long as it worked.

John Dehlin [00:32:12] Got it. Okay, so it seems like you're saying that this was certainly something that that wasn't uncommon, that that happened, you know, in Europe and in America. Maybe it happened mostly among. Maybe the less educated you got, the more common this would be. But there were certainly still educated, affluent people who engaged in these types of behaviors. Is that all a fair summary of what you're saying?

Brant Gardner [00:32:40] Yes, all of that's true. There was certainly a continuum, and there would be educated people who would still believe just like. And you get it even less now. But certainly, you know, when I was growing up in the early 50s, you'd find well educated people that, you know, would not walk under a ladder or would worry about a black cat. Crossing their path.

John Dehlin [00:33:04] Okay, and so. So you're also sort of saying that it's not. It wasn't necessarily some dark art, occult kind of thing, or maybe not at all.

Brant Gardner [00:33:15] Not at all. Nobody who was involved in it would have thought that it was a dark art at all.

John Dehlin [00:33:21] What about those who would say, well, if Joseph had his first vision at age 14 or 13 or 12, whenever, you know, whenever he had it, that he would have had better sense than engage in this kind of stuff because, you know, he would have the access of God. He would have been inspired and, you know, been serious about preparing to form the church, and he just wouldn't have engaged in such silliness or nonsense.

Brant Gardner [00:33:51] Yeah, that's kind of an interesting way of doing history. You've got multiple options of how to understand history. And unfortunately, one of the ones that we usually take is, well, if I were to do it, this is how I would have done it. Or the other correlation. If I were God, this is what I would have had happen. None of those things explain history because they presume that people in history or 100 years ago, 200 years ago, must have been in a world just like ours and thought exactly the way that we do. And therefore we have to come up with some excuse as to why they didn't act the way we think they should have. And that's the wrong approach to take. You don't go back in history and say, why wasn't that person modern? You look at the influences that that person was under and you say, okay, let me understand how they lived, when they lived, how that influenced their development, and how they moved from point to point. So, you know, the idea of, you know, if Joseph Smith had really seen God, he must have done something differently, begs the question, because it presumes that we can be this omniscient God and decide how things should have happened.

John Dehlin [00:35:10] So it says more about the questioner than it does anything else.

Brant Gardner [00:35:13] Yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:35:15] Okay. Okay. So. So the. So the answer is, we don't know. Like, you know, maybe God was okay with maybe, you know, God never had an opinion about it. Maybe, maybe Joseph was just learning as he went and bumbled along the way. I mean, lots of different theories about,

Brant Gardner [00:35:34] you know, if Moses is going to get water out of a rock and taps it with his rod. There are some really good reasons why he would use his rod to do that. But most of us today would never think of saying, you know, if I had this big wooden stick, I think I'll go pound on that rock until water comes out. It just. It is a completely different way of looking at things. And the only reason we accept those things in the Bible is because they're old enough that we say, oh, well, way back then, the world must have been different. And this is how God did things. God has always worked with the understanding of the people in the time and the place where they were. And I don't see any reason for God to have changed his method of dealing with humans when he got to Joseph Smith. And I don't see any reason why he has to change, because I'm different than Joseph Smith was.

John Dehlin [00:36:33] Okay, well, is it true? Have you ever found any indication that any. You know, it's clear that people went to Joseph to find treasure. Is there any indication that any treasure was ever found?

Brant Gardner [00:36:48] Oh, not that I know of, no.

John Dehlin [00:36:49] So why did people keep coming to him if he wasn't finding anything? And why did he keep entertaining expeditions if he was never finding anything? Isn't that odd? A little bit.

Brant Gardner [00:37:01] Oh, yeah. And the odd part isn't in what happened with Joseph. It's the specific question you asked me because you said, did they find treasure? I know very, very few people ever found treasure, ever. And there's one well documented case where Joseph was hired to help find treasure. And perhaps out of that entire thing, the best treasure he found was his wife when he was off trying to find this mine. But most of the time, people came to him. They weren't looking for treasure. They were looking for something else. Somebody came to Joseph and were looking for a lost horse, and he told him where the horse was, and the guy went out and found the horse. A judge had lost his pocketbook and came to Joseph and said, you know, I've lost it. Can you help me figure out where it was? And Joseph gave him an answer. And oddly enough, we've got about two or three stories, not a lot, but two or three stories that place Joseph in the context of the typical village seer person who found lost things. And what's really fascinating about the stories that have been preserved is they're all stories where Joseph was successful. There are stories preserved about Sally Chase, who was also one who used a seer stone to find things that were lost. And oddly enough, the stories that are preserved for her have her succeeding. I think the reality is, if you look at, you know, anybody in that world, anybody who would have used a seer stone would have successes and then probably some misses if they didn't have some success, nobody would come back to them twice.

John Dehlin [00:38:52] So do you believe that Joseph had a power to. Do you personally believe that he had the power to find stuff, hidden stuff, or do you even have a position?

Brant Gardner [00:39:06] That one's complicated. Because as soon as you say, well, yes, he had a power, now we're making him mystical. You know, I think there was something that was going on, and that's part of why I spend time in the third part of the book looking at what you might call scientific reasons to explain how seer stones work. The only thing I can tell you about some of those things is that there are people who have claimed to have some similar capabilities in the modern world and have inexplicable success. There's a story that I read. I believe it was Elizabeth Meyer who was. Who ended up writing a book because of the experience that she had. Her daughter had a very expensive. I believe it was a cello, you know, and we're talking, you know, vintage and lots of money here. Not hundreds, but thousands, probably tens of thousands of dollars. And somebody had stolen it. Nobody could find it. And so she finally went to someone who wasn't using a seer stone, but was someone who professed to be able to find lost things. He was in a completely different state and was able to tell her exactly where it was and what was happening with it, and she was able to recover it. So she writes her book talking about the fact that this thing is inexplicable and that there are inexplicable things that happen, none of which invoke the divine. They just something happens. And I think in many cases, that's kind of what was happening with Joseph Smith. There was something there, and exactly what it was, I'm not sure.

John Dehlin [00:40:57] Yeah, you'd be speculating. What do you think about the Richard Bushman theory, or at least the one that I've attributed to him, that this was Joseph's way of practicing accessing God's power. These behaviors.

Brant Gardner [00:41:11] That's certainly one of the theories that I've seen people use. Not really the idea that I would have behind it. I think that rather than see Joseph using that to practice, I see God using what Joseph was doing to help him become something else. So there is an idea that Joseph was in training to become the prophet, and I guess I don't subscribe to that one. I think God took a more active hand in it and said, joseph, you're going to be the prophet. And if you put yourself in Joseph's position, how in the world is Joseph going to translate the Book of Mormon? He knows it's In a language he can't read, he doesn't understand it. He knows he doesn't have a dictionary. How in the world is he ever going to do this? The only way he's ever known to be able to do something that other people can't is through the Seer Stone. So God says, use what you know, which I think is what God does with all of us, is he said, you know, use who you are and become better than what you've been.

John Dehlin [00:42:20] Okay, we'll talk more about the Book of Mormon translation in a bit. But what would you say to people who just say, look, Joseph was a con man. He just, you know, and your book talks about this. I'm actually. I'm quoting one of the chapters of your book in terms of the use of that word. Right, right. What would you say about the fact that instead of him receiving the first vision, you know, being righteous, receiving the first vision, doing some. Some cultural stuff that then leads to his fulfilling of God's prophecies, instead, he started out doing this. This goofy folk magic stuff, realized that he could convince people that he had power, and then from that said, well, heck, why don't I invent a book and invent a religion? Because people clearly will believe that I have power, so I may as well capitalize on that.

Joseph Smith's Court Trials and Credibility

Brant Gardner [00:43:20] Yeah. I mean, he was even brought to court and basically accused of being a con man prior to the time of the Book of Mormon. This is involved with the Seer Stone and the silver mine. So there were people who certainly thought that he was a con man. The question is, people believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet, and people still believe that he is not. It isn't a question of what do we believe, but what kind of evidence do we have? So we know that people believed he was a con man. The question is, you know, was he? Is there any evidence for it? And if you look at what con men did, particularly those who used things like Seer Stones, they'd come into a town and they promise, you know, find great treasure. All you have to do is buy shares. And then once they collect the money, the guy would skedaddle out of town, take the money and run.

John Dehlin [00:44:19] Kind of like the Music Man.

Brant Gardner [00:44:20] Yeah, exactly like the Music Man. That is, the Music man is the quintessential con man. And all of the evidence that we have for Joseph Smith is that he didn't do any of that. He lived in the community, he stayed in the community. People would consult him, People came back to him. The person who actually took him to Trial wasn't a member of the community. It was a nephew of Josiah Stowell who had hired Joseph. And, you know, his Josiah stole is the one who came and said, you don't know. Joseph is upright and upstanding and testified in his behalf. Even though they didn't find the silver, the guy who hired him to find it stood behind him. So there really isn't any indication that there was ever anything in Joseph's character that would have qualified for the definition of con man.

John Dehlin [00:45:18] A lot of this is in a later time period, but a lot of people would call the Kirtland bank stuff that would come to their mind as something that might approximate this type of fraud or deception for some. Is that fair to make that association or maybe not for you,

Brant Gardner [00:45:37] that people would look at it that way? Certainly. Whether or not that's evidence that you would take of that? No, I don't think so. Because you. Again, it's a question of understanding history. What the banks were and how they operated was significantly different then than they are now. And in the historical context, you really can't again say that there was any conning going on there. Everybody knew what was happening. Certainly a financial disaster and certainly not one where you'd want to say there was a lot of great inspiration in it seemed to have been a pretty human endeavor and failed very humanly. But not as a means of deception, I thought.

John Dehlin [00:46:25] I remember reading something about there being gold and then bricks, fake bricks underneath, something that would show deception in terms of the financial backing behind the deposits in the bank. Are you familiar with any of that?

Brant Gardner [00:46:42] Yeah, I remember that, you know, those were methods they were trying to do to stop a panic. And again, it's a question of, you know, what are they trying to do? And if you're trying to stop a run on the bank, people have tried all kinds of things. You know, if it would have worked, maybe things might have turned out differently. But you're saying.

John Dehlin [00:47:06] You're saying that that's different than setting up a con from the start in your mind.

Brant Gardner [00:47:11] Right.

John Dehlin [00:47:11] They set up a bank and it went bad, and then maybe they tried to cover it up. But that's different from setting up a bank for the purposes of defrauding people.

Brant Gardner [00:47:21] Exactly. And I'm not even sure that I'd say covering up as much as trying to bolster, you know, trying to salvage whatever it was. You know, it was a failed bank, and it was a failed bank at a time. Lots of banks failed. So, okay. Certainly in modern history, we've seen Banks fail. So none of that should be surprising to us.

John Dehlin [00:47:44] So in all those instances where Joseph. This is something that really got me, you know, I remember in Sunday school and primary hearing about Joseph, you know, being brought to court. And, you know, the way it was always painted was, you know, Satan inspires wicked people to fight against the Lord's anointed. And so people brought Joseph to court on spurious matters. And there were never any grounds for anything he was brought to court on. And it was all because they were trying to fight God's righteous plan. When in reality, what were these trials and what were these courts about, from your perspective?

Brant Gardner [00:48:31] Well, Joseph was involved in so many of them that we probably shouldn't sort of over generalize from any particular one. But in many cases, people had various beefs with Joseph. In the case of the one that we've already talked about, the Bainbridge trial, when he was brought up for being basically a con man, for using a seer stone, the person who brought the suit, I'm sure, sincerely believed that Joseph Smith was a con man. So I suspect that there's a very complicated history. I suspect that they get simplified when you get into Sunday school classes. And then again, the more you understand of history, the more complex things become. And I doubt there were very many satanic people trying to bring him to court. Might have been a few. Of course, I doubt that was the major reason.

John Dehlin [00:49:31] Okay, but he was brought to court, and was he ever actually prosecuted for any of that behavior or ever found to be a conversation to your knowledge?

Brant Gardner [00:49:44] That depends on how you read the information coming out of the courts.

John Dehlin [00:49:50] Was you ever find or put in jail for any of that behavior? Found guilty?

Brant Gardner [00:49:55] Not that I'm aware of, no. There were no guilty verdicts rendered, although some of the history on some of these was muddy enough that there, you know, might have been something where they said, okay, you know, cease and desist. Don't use that thing anymore. But not so much that he was convicted of being a disorderly person, which at that time would have been the con man.

John Dehlin [00:50:18] Okay, okay. And if I understand the history right, you get this sense that he was torn about participating in a lot of this stuff. And you even get a sense that at times he swore that he would stop and then start it again. Is that right?

Brant Gardner [00:50:39] I think what happened, at least in the way I read the history, is that Joseph was a village seer who performed these functions of finding things. And then Moroni comes along and says, you got something much more important to do than finding lost horses. You need to translate, you know, a lost book. And that process took him four years before, you know, from the time when Moroni came and said, this is your mission, to the time that he did it. The trial in Bainbridge came in between those times. I think what happened is in those four years, Moroni said, you have to learn how to do something else, you know, with this particular talent. And in that Bainbridge trial, Joseph Smith Sr. Said of his son, it's too bad he was doing this. He was doing it for the money because he was hired to do it. But he really needs to take his talent and dedicate it to the Lord. So I think there was a learning process going on, and it took Joseph a few years to do it. So I don't really see him vacillating back and forth as much as all of us. Take a while to actually learn something. I don't know of any time after he received the plates where he ever went back to finding lost things.

How Stories Evolve and Change Over Time

John Dehlin [00:52:04] Okay, okay, let's jump back just for a second, and we're going to treat this really quickly. But it's such a common criticism of Joseph and of the early, you know, beginnings of Mormonism that I just wanted to get your take. There's this. Well, as I understand it, there are few, if anyone, that Joseph ever told about the first vision sort of in the years leading up to the founding of the church. And then the telling of the first vision story as it is told today is sort of conspicuously, for some, absent for many of the early years of the founding of the church. And then when people sort of compound that with the multiple versions of the first vision story and how when he first writes it down or dictates it, only the Lord appears to him, not God and Jesus. In some accounts, there was a satanic force, and others there weren't. And in some accounts, there were angels swirling around. And there are a lot of people who just sort of say, that's just all. Why didn't he tell people from the start? Why did the story change over time? Why did the story not get fully developed until 1838 when there was a crisis? And you could argue for a need for that story to get sort of embellished upon. What's your take, just your brief take on the first vision and that sort of telling of the first vision story and the critics take on it.

Brant Gardner [00:53:46] That's actually one of the things that I tried to treat in the book, although not mentioning that one in particular, but this whole idea of how do stories develop? How do we tell what we tell, and why do we decide to tell them? And a lot of the answer to that has nothing to do with, you know, what's true and what's not true, but in how we tell our own stories. It's a question of folklore research. How do stories change over time? And in the case of Joseph Smith, his original story was probably very similar to pretty much anybody else who'd had one of these great conversion stories. He wasn't the only one claiming to have seen God in a vision when he was a young man. And Bushman treats this indicating it's much more likely that the reason he wasn't believed was because it was common, not because it was uncommon. The early church didn't think much of the first vision because what was really spectacular was the Book of Mormon, and they had that. And there really wasn't anything they were terribly interested in in the first vision. So when you get into why are there so many different stories of the first vision? It's because it didn't interest them until later. And then, you know, why are there different versions? All you have to do is look at pretty much any history and any development of folk history, and you see that it's very common to have those different things because different audiences will want something different. So hardly surprising at all. It's just, again, part of normal history.

John Dehlin [00:55:25] But some are going to go, now, wait a minute. You know, if you're talking about, like, what you had for breakfast last Thursday, that's one thing. But when you're talking about a visit from God Almighty and His son, and you know, something that's unforgettable and would clearly leave major impressions, then you wouldn't, you know, leave out one of those two major members of the Godhead in your recounting?

Brant Gardner [00:55:52] You know, as I said, that's that great perspective. If I were God, I would have done it this way. If I were Joseph, this is how I would have written my history. It's the modern perspective taking what we expect ought to have happened and then saying, because what I expect to have happened didn't happen, then something's wrong. It's the wrong question to ask of any history in any history. You have to ask what's happening in the history, not why didn't something happen differently? Because I wish it would have, or I expect it to have been differently, done differently.

John Dehlin [00:56:28] Okay, I understand that, and I think that's reasonable. But would you also concede that if we were talking about the history of Jim Jones in Guyana and Jonestown And I were to. We were evaluating the claims of Jim Jones as a religious leader, and we were to find out. Or even L. Ron Hubbard in Scientology. We were to find out that, you know, stories that he told in World War II turned out to be not true. And does that strike to the heart of the credibility. My guess is you wouldn't have as charitable of a take on those changes in history or those variances in recollection as you would on Joseph. Is that fair to say?

Brant Gardner [00:57:16] No, not really. There's just way too much information about how we remember and why we remember. One of the things they found out about the process of memory is that your memory of the past is conditioned by the experiences of the present. So there are a lot of things that, you know. For instance, my daughter is infamous for this. She remembers any number of things that we will have to inform her. Nope, didn't happen that way at all. She lived through them and is absolutely positive she remembers things in certain ways, and it's a memory that's formed from something else. And the problem is this fragile thing that we call our memory is just developed in so many different ways that to presume that memory is going to be absolutely true and never changing is just completely against the human condition, against all science of memory.

John Dehlin [00:58:20] Right. And as I'm talking to you, I'm recalling an argument I had with my wife yesterday where we remembered exactly opposite.

Brant Gardner [00:58:29] Oh, yeah.

Brant Gardner [00:58:30] But.

Brant Gardner [00:58:30] But it's just.

John Dehlin [00:58:31] Okay, but I'm just gonna. I'm gonna push this point one last time. And that's just that with something so important, you know, there is such thing as fraud. There is such thing as deception. There is such thing as, you know, mental illness where people do make things up and people do lie and people do deceive and. And we have to, you know, we have to, in some sense, be discerning and be willing to call fraud. You know, if things don't add up, right, we can't just say everyone's speaking the truth all the time, you know, so when do you draw the line, and how do you draw the line?

Brant Gardner [00:59:12] Well, you draw the line by not accepting, you know, any single thing. And what the early church did is it said, you know, the place where we draw the line is the Book of Mormon. I can't explain it any other way. And here's this tangible thing. So the Book of Mormon would be the cane that they would lean on if they had a question about something else. They go back and say, well, there's at least the Book of Mormon I can't do anything about that. So everything else has to be true. And when you talk about the Book of Mormon, some of those things are the same kind of thing where you have to say, well, okay, this is questionable, but what else is there? So it's always a process. You don't accept. And you know, the word we would use these days is swallow. You know, you don't swallow everything. You work hard to understand it and you work hard to understand what all of the ramifications are. And you don't accept one single thing. You build a case. And I think that's where Joseph Smith and his experience is. You build the case with Joseph Smith. That's where it gets stronger rather than looking at some of these individual pieces.

John Dehlin [01:00:21] And that's, I'll throw you a softball here, but I can hear Fair Farm saying you can pick apart and find holes in the narrative. How do you explain the fact that thousands and eventually tens of thousands of people were willing to die for this man? Certainly over, oh, let's just say a 20 to 24 year period, he established a record of doing a lot of things that led a lot of people to believe and follow him. And you can't, if you're going to be fair, you can't just dismiss all that and only fish for the holes and inaccuracies. Is there anything you'd add to that?

Brant Gardner [01:01:12] Probably just that in order to be fair, it's also true that lots of people have followings. And so even the fact that there's a following doesn't prove anything. And that's why eventually what any good missionary would tell someone is you just have to understand for yourself. It has to be something that you feel and that you understand. That's a reflection of your communication with God. There isn't any way to absolutely prove. And if you're looking for proof, it's almost guaranteed that you won't find. Is something that we require of faith. And I don't see that as a bad thing, certainly not a comfortable thing. I would really like to have my world defined a little bit more black and white than that. But we're not given that kind of a world.

John Dehlin [01:02:16] Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Music today was provided by the Saber Rattlers. Check them out@sabre-rattlers.com the Mormon Stories logo was generously donated by StudioCase.com thanks for listening.

Brant Gardner [01:02:31] Come, come ye saints. No toil nor labor fear but with joy wend your way Though hard to you this journey may appear Grace shall be as your day Tis better far for us to strive Our useless cares from us to drive to the San Jo. Your hearts will swell oh, I'll. All is well all is well. Why should we mourn? I think our lot is hard Tis not so all is right why should should we think to earn a great reward if we now shun the fight Gird up your lo Fresh courage take our God will ever us forsake soon we'll have tale to tell oh, all is well all is well oh, all is well all is well. We die before our journey's through Happy days All is well we that are free from toil and sorrow too with the just we shall dwell. But if our lives are spared again to see the sa the rest obtain I will make this chorus swell oh, all is well I live well all is well

John Dehlin [01:06:24] all is well

Brant Gardner [01:06:27] all is well oh, all is well. In the.

Moroni's Visit and the Gold Plates

Part 2 of 5 · Ep. 308

John Dehlin [00:00:00] 1, 2, 3.

John Dehlin [00:00:07] Mormon Stories Podcast is a production of the Open Stories Foundation. All donations to Mormon Stories are fully tax deductible and go directly towards keeping the podcast alive and towards building a community of support for Mormons like you. To support the podcast or to join the community, please become a monthly subscriber today@mormonstories.org. all right, everyone. Well, welcome back to Mormon Stories Podcast. We're now in hour two with author Brant Gardner. His book is entitled the Gift and Power Translating the Book of Mormon. You can get this book at Greg Coford Books. It's Greg Coford. K-O-F-F-O-R-D.com. you can purchase the book there along with lots of other good books. And if you use the code M Stories, I believe, is the code, you can get 20% off your purchases there. That code needs to be all in caps. M Stories, all in caps. And again, if you buy a book through us, you'll get a discount and a little bit will come to warm stories. So in our first hour, we learned a little bit about books. Brant. And then we dove into Joseph Smith. We talked about the first vision. We talked about the folk magic and treasure digging stuff and his use of a seer stone or a stone to do some of that treasure seeking. And now we're going to dive into what. What really is the core of your book, Brett. And that's the translation of the Book of Mormon, is that right?

Brant Gardner [00:01:50] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:01:51] Okay, so.

Brant Gardner [00:01:54] So I. I don't know.

John Dehlin [00:01:55] Let me just see if I can remember what I know about church history, which is little, but. But basically, there was no mention of the Book of Mormon in the first vision, right?

Brant Gardner [00:02:07] Correct.

John Dehlin [00:02:07] Okay, so it was 18. 1820. What, 3, 4. When did Barana first appear to Joseph?

Brant Gardner [00:02:16] You see, now you're gonna get me.

John Dehlin [00:02:18] Oh, I'm sorry. I shouldn't put you on the spot with the.

Brant Gardner [00:02:20] Yeah, really. Come on.

John Dehlin [00:02:22] Sorry.

Brant Gardner [00:02:23] Now that we have all these computer tools to remember things like dates, we don't have to have them on the tongue anymore.

John Dehlin [00:02:30] Okay, so sometime within, what, five years after the first vision, Moroni appears. Right, Right. Okay. And. And what does he say to Joseph, basically?

Brant Gardner [00:02:45] Well, the gist of it is that there is a record on golden plates and that Joseph is to translate that and bring its message to the world. And then it takes him four years of trying to be, at least in the terms of the story, to be worthy enough to be able to receive the plates. And then after he has the plates in his possession, there is some period of time where he has the plates and has not yet begun the translation. And the story of Martin Harris taking some of the characters to Charles Anthon comes during that period of time that seems to be before any real translation had begun.

John Dehlin [00:03:31] Okay, so let's. Let's go ahead. I guess this is as good a time as any. Let's go ahead and back up and talk about the Book of Mormon and these gold plates for a second. Everyone's gonna, you know, unless you're just never learned anything about Mormonism, they're gonna know that the Book of Mormon claims to begin around what, 600 BC where, where there's a family in Jerusalem. It's presumed that they're Jews or Israelites in some fashion. And, you know, there's a prophet named Lehi who's told by God to leave Jerusalem and come to America or to leave Jerusalem and that he'll be. That he'll take his family to New World to inhabit it and to, you know, perpetuate and multiply and replenish the earth, I guess you could say. And so, and I don't know exactly when we would think that plates started being engraved upon or whether for the first several years of that history, the history is recorded in some other way. But what we do know from the Book of Mormon is that Lehi and his family leave Jerusalem, wander somewhere, you know, through the Middle east for a while, eventually build a boat and sail over to the Americas. At least that's what we're taught now. Any corrections you want to make to the story up to that point, Brant?

Brant Gardner [00:05:02] That's the basic story. Just the only thing we know about the engraving on the plates is that it was occurring by at least 30 years after they had been in the New World. Whether or not they would do anything earlier than that, we don't have direct evidence for it.

John Dehlin [00:05:19] Okay. And so, and we know, well, the story is that the plates were engraved on little sheets of gold and. Or leaves of gold, and that the language that they were written in is reformed Egyptian. Is that right?

Brant Gardner [00:05:37] That it was called reformed Egyptian by the time the compiler of the plates Mormon is writing. It wasn't called reformed Egyptian when the Nephi, who was the first one who was writing on it, was writing at that point in time. The only thing it says indicates somehow that it was Egyptian. And then by the time Mormon is writing, something has changed so that they say, well, it's reformed Egyptian. It's something different.

John Dehlin [00:06:06] So why Egyptian? Like, first of all, how likely is it that a family of Israelites would know Egyptian.

Brant Gardner [00:06:17] You know, that's kind of an interesting question. And Hugh Nibley had answered that by saying that this was when 600 BC was a time of tremendous Egyptian influence in Jerusalem, and positing that Lehi would have been some sort of a traitor that would have therefore known something about Egyptian. I recently did some more work looking at the figure of Nephi, and based on a book I was reading talking about what scribes were like in that area of the world, it struck me that Nephi had to have been trained as a scribe. And in that kind of a training, one of the languages that the scribes would have learned even in Jerusalem was Egyptian. So if you look at that background and the evidence that there might be for Nephi having had scribal training, then it makes perfect sense that he would have known and perhaps written something in Egyptian due to that training.

John Dehlin [00:07:20] So do we have documents from 600 BC written in or around Jerusalem that are written in Egyptian?

Brant Gardner [00:07:28] Like, you certainly have documents that are written in Egyptian. And some of the more interesting ones are those that are written with Egyptian script but Hebrew words.

John Dehlin [00:07:39] Really?

Brant Gardner [00:07:40] Yeah. And that's one of the reasons why the people at the Maxwell Institute will say that it is highly likely that what's happening is you have Nephi, who is writing in his language, which would be Hebrew, but in a vocabulary, or not a vocabulary, but in a written style that borrowed the characters from Egyptian. And we certainly should not think of what we see from like, you know, temple Egyptian, Egyptian hieroglyphics, more the. Probably the Demotic, the Meroitic, one of those, you know, more freehand, quicker types of scripts than the ones that we see that have all of those wonderful pictures on them whenever we see things in Egyptian temples.

John Dehlin [00:08:31] So again, why not Hebrew?

Brant Gardner [00:08:35] There isn't any really good evidence for that, except that for some reason it appears that the brass plates that they took with them that were so important that they went back to get them, those appear to have been in. And again, the text says Egyptian. And whether it means Egyptian language and Egyptian characters or Egyptian characters in Hebrew language, we really don't know. I strongly suspect that it was the brass plates influence that dictated Nephi's choice of what he would do, because he was imitating those scriptures that they had. Now, why were the brass plates there? It's because they were a remnant of the house of Joseph. And Joseph, of course, has traditional history going back into Egypt.

John Dehlin [00:09:23] Okay, so the brass plates were in some form of Egyptian, and so it makes sense that they would just keep

Brant Gardner [00:09:31] with that same language, that would be his model. And although it doesn't say so in the Book of Mormon, it makes sense that because the brass plates, you know, had this golden sheen and they were on plates, that that's what inspires Nephi to find the ability to create some sort of metal plates that, again, have that sheen to them and to record his history. And again, although it's pure speculation, I would guess that since Nephi had to make them himself, that he used the brass plates size, you know, as his model. And that's why the plates ended up in the size they were, because they were, again, intentional imitations of those brass plates.

Egyptian Writing, Reformed Egyptian, and Mesoamerica

John Dehlin [00:10:14] Okay, and is there. Is there. Has there ever been Egyptian writings found in Mesoamerica that would indicate from an external source that Egyptian was known commonly in ancient America?

Brant Gardner [00:10:35] None that I'm aware of. But of course, you also have to understand that there is sort of limited understanding of what the multiple writing systems might have been. There are some hints of a large number of them, but so few representative characters that we know there were a lot of writing systems around, and we just don't have enough of them that we know what they were. And most of the writing systems we have are coming from post Christian era, so somewhere after the time of Christ. And one of the reasons for that is that by that time, that's when the Maya started carving all of their writings in stone. And we still have those. It wasn't until probably three or four years ago that they uncovered a temple in San Bartolo where they found this marvelous paintings inside the temple. And they had hieroglyphic texts in a form that was much earlier than the later glyphic texts, enough that they cannot yet read all of it. They can see that, you know, it's similar. They know that this was, you know, that these were Maya writing, but they can't read it because it was some earlier form of the script and not one that anybody had seen before or could even have anticipated because it was painted. So apparently they were writing for a long time. We just lost it, unfortunately.

John Dehlin [00:12:09] Okay, so you're saying on the one hand, no, no, they've never found Egyptian in Mesoamerica, but at the same time, there's probably lots of languages that we don't have that would have been destroyed or deteriorated or that we haven't yet discovered.

Brant Gardner [00:12:22] Yeah. Or that we have, you know, two or three characters of them and, you know, we can guess that there was a writing system there, but we cannot discern what it was like.

John Dehlin [00:12:32] If I were to pick your random PhD Egyptologist and ask them if they're aware of anything called reformed Egyptian, would. What would they say, do you think?

Brant Gardner [00:12:40] Oh, they'd laugh. There isn't anything like reformed Egyptian. And in their world, that would be absolutely true. The only place that a reformed Egyptian exists is in the Book of Mormon. And then only as an indication that whatever it is that they were writing was no longer what was considered Egyptian. So exactly what it might have been like, no one knows. The only thing you can guarantee is that it couldn't have been anything like anything that you would have in the old world because you've got a separation of over a thousand years between them, and there's no way that you'd have parallel development in the way scripts are created and changed.

John Dehlin [00:13:25] What would a skeptic say, like, did Joseph ever produce characters from the Book of Mormon?

Brant Gardner [00:13:33] The only copies that you know, the only indication that we have is what has become known as the Anthon transcript, which is somewhat in debate, because when Charles Anthon described the paper that Martin Harris gave him, that description doesn't fit the piece of paper that we have now that we call the Anthon transcript. So there is a piece of paper that has some characters on it, and it has the label characters. Excuse me, at the top. And that's all we have. There isn't. For those who have looked at it, it has no relationship that anybody currently knows to any known script.

John Dehlin [00:14:19] Okay, so. Okay, so what you're. So there is. There is a. Well, we know that Joseph did take these characters to someone to be validated. Right, Right. And we do have a piece of paper that is allegedly reported to be a remnant from that. Right.

Brant Gardner [00:14:39] Either from that or certainly some characters that were from the plates. So we do have a few lines that appear to represent characters that were

John Dehlin [00:14:50] on the plates, and it's reasonable to think that those were the characters that Joseph showed Anton. Right.

Brant Gardner [00:14:57] Possible. The only reason for saying it might not have been is that Anton gave a description that doesn't match that piece of paper.

John Dehlin [00:15:06] Okay, but you've said yourself that memory can be faulty and.

Brant Gardner [00:15:09] Oh, exactly.

John Dehlin [00:15:10] Okay, so very well could be. Right?

Brant Gardner [00:15:11] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:15:12] Okay. And so if that. And we don't have any reason to believe that it's not from sources other than Anton. Right. I mean, where did that. Where did that remnant come from? Do we know?

Brant Gardner [00:15:26] That's. I'm trying to remember.

John Dehlin [00:15:27] Wasn't it ever reproduced in the, you know, one of the church newspapers or publications?

Brant Gardner [00:15:31] Oh, it was. It was reproduced in broadsides and handed out. So it was certainly recognized as a representative of what the characters would have been.

John Dehlin [00:15:41] Okay. So, I mean, chances are the church published this because they. It was what Joseph showed Anthon. Right. Okay. And so if an Egyptologist looked at that today, would he go, oh, yeah, that's totally Egyptian, or what would he say?

Brant Gardner [00:15:57] He would look at it and say, no, that's not Egyptian.

John Dehlin [00:16:01] Would it resemble anything?

Brant Gardner [00:16:04] I haven't seen any script that it resembles. Basically, what happens is when you look at a script that you don't know, you compare it to everything that you do know, and it always resembles something and then doesn't resemble anything. So I have seen people who have said they have some training in some of these Egyptian scripts, and they say, yeah, it looks similar to that. Some people say it looks similar to shorthand. And when you really get into looking at any of those, you know, it isn't any of them. Basically, it is a unique script that we have no copy of anywhere else. And of course, from the standpoint of Egyptian, that's hardly surprising because we've got well over a thousand years of separation between whatever script it was that they started with and the one that later was somehow changed and sufficiently changed that Mormon would say, hey, this is reformed Egyptian. It's not Egyptian anymore.

John Dehlin [00:17:03] Okay, let me flip the tables just for a second and ask you to play the role of a critic. If Joseph was making up the Book of Mormon and trying to convince people that this was credible or trying to even create a plausible story, would he have had an incentive to claim that it was reformed Egyptian? He was translating from, you know, in other words, some language that no one would possibly know.

Brant Gardner [00:17:38] Well, at the time he produced the Book of Mormon, nobody knew Egyptian. They had seen various characters, and certainly Egyptian was on. Egyptian was popular, but nobody could read it at the time. So this is before Champollion came along and used the Rosetta Stone to be able to translate it. So at this point in time, you know, if. If again, I were trying to come up with a reason why Joseph would choose that out of thin air, it would be because the idea of exotic things being Egyptian was certainly in the air at the time. And if you were going to come up with something that nobody could read, Egyptian was as good as anything else because everybody knew you couldn't read it.

John Dehlin [00:18:24] Okay. And reformed Egyptian would be one step further beyond the unreadable. Right?

Brant Gardner [00:18:31] Exactly.

John Dehlin [00:18:32] Okay. So he would want to say it was some text that he would have a good chance of. Well, he would want to produce Characters that would have a very low probability of ever being declared a fraud. And so he would do that by creating. By saying that there are in some language that theoretically, you know, 600 B.C. israelis would have access to, but in a derivation that no one would ever be able to then determine as fraudulent later. Is that right?

Brant Gardner [00:19:02] That puts a really heavy weight on Joseph's understanding. But yeah, you could make that case. Okay, I don't think you could hold that case, but you can certainly make it.

John Dehlin [00:19:15] What would keep that case from holding.

Brant Gardner [00:19:19] That's a pretty sophisticated understanding of both the nature of what you're trying to produce fraudulently and kind of a pretty sophisticated way of putting it together. There's no indication that Joseph had training or sufficient imagination to be able to come up with anything that was quite that slick.

John Dehlin [00:19:42] Right?

Brant Gardner [00:19:43] I mean, Orson Scott Card might be able to come up with some story like that, but I'm not even sure I've seen anything in his imagination that has been quite like that one.

John Dehlin [00:19:54] But wasn't Joseph brilliant? I mean, a lot of the time it seems like a classic and I'm just gonna say apologetic technique, but on the one hand we want to sing praise to the man. On the other hand, we want to say he was an uneducated yokel. You know, and the truth is, even the most hardened skeptics of Joseph will claim that he was brilliant.

Brant Gardner [00:20:17] It depends. It depends on what the popular view is. Certainly at the time, he was not considered brilliant. He was a spindle shanked ignoramus. Most people were pretty certain that the Book of Mormon couldn't be true because Joseph was an idiot. And the best evidence of it was this terrible Book of Mormon. And then the more people have had to deal with Joseph Smith and what his life was like and what he was able to accomplish have had to say, okay, well, the evidence of his life suggests something else. So you've got this wild variation between the village idiot and maybe the idiot savant. But certainly when you look at what Joseph Smith accomplished, it is unusual for anyone. And then the question is, okay, how do we explain the fact that that was unusual? Do we explain it because he had this innate brilliance for invention or because there was some inspiration involved or is, you know, there's some combination. And I'm probably leaning to the combination. I think he was a very intelligent person who wasn't given credit for it, but I still don't see him having the sophistication to be able to come up with at that point in his life, something that was, you Know that sophisticated, and particularly when you start looking at the Book of Mormon itself and what he produced, It would require an incredible genius to have been able to come up with that.

John Dehlin [00:22:02] Right, well, let's. I'm going to come to that in just one second, but I'm just going to go back. If he had manufactured the, The. The characters of supposedly reformed Egyptian, what was he do? What was he taking those to Anthon for? If, if he knew, if he had made those up and knew that no one would be able to validate them because he didn't want anyone to be able to uncover his fraud, why would he be taking those characters to a professor?

Brant Gardner [00:22:33] Yeah, Another part of the theoretical genius. If Joseph is going to be putting it together. And I think your question is an astute one. You know, if it were a fraud, trying to have someone vindicate the fraud would be really kind of crazy. The actual story, you know, based on what we see of it, is that the function of that was to convince Martin Harris. Joseph at the time may not have understood how to translate the Book of Mormon, may not have known what the method was going to be. There seems to be some indication that he was floundering, trying to figure out how the Book of Mormon would be translated, and took some of those characters off, or had Martin Harris go do it, just to be able to see if there was someone that would be able to translate them. And of course, the end of that story is Joseph Smith begins translating and Martin Harris becomes a believer. Exactly how all those events work out is again part of history.

John Dehlin [00:23:34] So it was Harris that took the Remnant.

Brant Gardner [00:23:37] Right. Martin Harris is the one who took the script and was the one who. See, is it Williams that he went to first? There were two people he visited in Anthem was the second.

John Dehlin [00:23:50] And somehow. Well, either Harris was part of the scheme, which would make you wonder why took the remnants there, or he. He was duped, but somehow left that interview believing in the fraud. Right?

Brant Gardner [00:24:08] Yeah. And that's again, one of those really interesting things, because Martin Harris is a skeptic. Everything that we see about Martin is that he does not believe easily. He certainly comes to believe. But he tells Joseph, you know, I have to see, I have to understand. I can't just believe you at your word. You need to show me something. So there were several times when there was something that occurred because Martin Harris was a skeptic and needed to have some sort of confirmation. And this, whatever else happened with Charles Anton, the result of it was that Martin Harris became convinced that Joseph Smith not only had the plates but was to translate them.

John Dehlin [00:24:55] Okay, okay. All right.

Brant Gardner [00:24:58] So.

John Dehlin [00:25:04] There's part of me trying to debate whether to tackle this now or later, but I'm going to go and tackle it now. When you read Grant Palmer's book, An Insider's View of Mormon Origins, he basically has a theory which many find to be pretty plausible about how Joseph came up with the book. And I'll just recite what I remember about it.

Brant Gardner [00:25:24] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:25:24] He basically would say that, let's just say a fifth or a sixth of the book comes from Joseph Smith's own narrative. You know, he had older brothers, he had a father who was a visionary. There's evidence that Lehi's dream is very similar to a dream that Joseph Smith Sr. Had. And, you know, maybe Joseph saw himself in the Nephi figure who was more righteous than his older brothers. And, you know, whatever else, you know, let's just say a sixth is Joseph's own narrative. Another sixth is just direct copying from the King James version of the Bible that Joseph had, which as I understand there were errors. We know what version of the King James Bible Joseph Smith had. That version had errors in it. And those errors make it into the Book of Mormon in the places where the Book of Mormon is supposedly recounting what's in the Bible. So that then accounts for a fifth or sixth of the Book of Mormons directly copied out of Joseph Smith's own Bible. Then you have a fifth or sixth that come from sermons that would have been given with some level of frequency at, you know, at the burned over district. These Evangelical Presbyterian or Methodist or whatever ministers that would come through would give these big old long sermons on basic traditional, you know, Christian thought, you know, King Benjamin's sermons and whoever else gave sermons in the Book of Mormon you could say very much resemble those speeches given on the frontier. And I think Grant Palmer tries to demonstrate those similarities. Then you have all these wars that were happening and the writings about the wars that I guess Grant Palmer would link to whatever warfare was happening in the early 1800s. I'm not familiar enough or I don't remember exactly what he was tying that to. And then you've got just this whole Masonic sort of stuff going on in New York where some people got murdered and they blamed it on the Masonic Lodge. And the Masonic Lodge was this sort of secret combination. And so you'd see a lot of this talk about secret combinations, et cetera, maybe coming from all that talk about the Masons and secret combinations in New York. I don't know you can tell me if I'm missing some other sources that Grant Palmer would allege, but in Grant Palmer's. Oh, and then you. Then you've got the view of the Hebrews, which is, you know, a book that Oliver Cowdery would have had access to that was written apparently by Oliver Cowdery's preacher or minister, which basically is this narrative that Native Americans have a Hebrew origin. And as I understand it, in the view of the Hebrews, there's this family that comes over in a boat, comes to America and settles here, and there's a good group and a bad group, and eventually the bad group kills off the good group. I could have it all wrong, but that's my understanding of a basic narrative in the view of the Hebrews that again, people in the 1820s and early 1830s would have had access to, would have been thinking about. And if you just sort of take Joseph or maybe he collaborated with Oliver Cowdery and Signe Rigdon or others, if you just sort of assume that they had these sources for inspiration, the Book of Mormon becomes not this miraculous, amazing text, but instead it becomes this hodgepodge of synthesis that you. You can trace to some very specific or not, if not specific, you know, some extant sources that are reasonable to then lead to the manufacturing of the book or the creation of the Book. Like, you know, on the one hand, you've got to believe that God exists and that he works with angels and that they're, you know, having these golden plates manufactured and hidden and produced to Joseph. You know, that's a pretty. That's a pretty big stretch on reason right there. Then you've got this other version, which you might say is a stretch, but maybe this other version is a bit less of a stretch than the idea that Occam's razor might invoke, which is that it was all manufactured.

Brant Gardner [00:30:13] Well, what we need to do, though, is kind of look at some of the specifics and. And I do have to correct. Kind of.

John Dehlin [00:30:21] Please do, please, because I'm wrong.

Brant Gardner [00:30:23] Well, the view of the Hebrews piece, we'll get to that one in a second. But, you know, if. If you begin with a dichotomy of saying, well, on the one hand you have to believe in God, and the other you don't need to have God invoked. I agree that you're not going to get anywhere with the Book of Mormon. If you say there is no God and therefore there are no angels, that sort of predisposes you to say that you've got to Find some explanation for the Book of Mormon that doesn't involve God or angels. And so you'll find something. The question is, does this one, using your synopsis of Grant Palmer, does that actually explain anything? So let's start kind of backwards view of the Hebrews. The synopsis you gave was actually of Solomon Spalding's manuscript found. And the synopsis that you gave really wasn't even of that book. It was of what people said about that book when they were reminded of what the Book of Mormon was. And they said, oh yeah, I seem to remember that that's what this manuscript found.

View of the Hebrews and Alternative Origin Theories

John Dehlin [00:31:26] So the view of the Hebrews,

Brant Gardner [00:31:30] is

John Dehlin [00:31:30] there anything in the narrative of the view of the Hebrews that I'm not saying is Nephi in the view of the Hebrews? Is there anything in the view of the Hebrews that mirrors what's in the Book of Mormon?

Brant Gardner [00:31:44] What would be in view of the Hebrews would be the use of Isaiah to support an Israelite presence in the new world and using that to explain Native Americans and I think probably more civilized and less civilized version those kinds of the Native Americans.

John Dehlin [00:32:09] Would there be a light and a dark skinned people in the view of Hebrews?

Brant Gardner [00:32:12] Nope. Of course I don't think there is one in the Book of Mormon either. So.

John Dehlin [00:32:19] Okay, we can talk about that later. Okay. But definitely a Hebrew origin for Native Americans or at least some Native Americans.

Brant Gardner [00:32:26] Right. And that idea that and what it

John Dehlin [00:32:30] really was a family that comes over on a boat, right?

Brant Gardner [00:32:32] No, no, that wasn't there. That's not in view of the Hebrews. That is only in the unsupported recollections about Solomon Spalding's manuscript that after his manuscript was found and you could read it, wasn't there another one of those sort of faulty memory kinds of things that was primed by someone saying, don't you remember it being similar to this? And they're going, oh yeah, yeah, I think so. It was one of those where it, the evidence really appeared damaging to the Book of Mormon until they actually found the manuscript and read it and they said, oh wait a minute, those people, you know, we're not remembering it correctly.

John Dehlin [00:33:09] Yeah. I mean even, even Fon Brodie doesn't give much credence to the Spalding theory, right?

Brant Gardner [00:33:14] No, no. And you can BYU published the book and certainly if they were going to publish it, they didn't think that it had anything damaging in it to the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:33:27] Okay, so we don't know. We don't know. Okay, wait, I'm sorry. I'm just. I just. I Googled view of the Hebrews and Wikipedia. It says, the peopling of the new world from the old via a long journey northward which encountered seas of many waters.

Brant Gardner [00:33:43] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:33:44] Now that. So there is water. But you're saying what, it's not necessarily a naval migration or what?

Brant Gardner [00:33:53] Oh, I'm sure it was, but there aren't that many similarities.

John Dehlin [00:34:01] Okay.

Brant Gardner [00:34:04] What you have to look at in any of these things is this whole concept of what do you do with parallels? And one of the problems with using parallels as a methodology is you can probably draw parallels with just about anything. And depending on who it is that you're trying to influence, you can construct a parallel that says, wow, doesn't this look similar? And the way you do it is by always pulling out the things that look similar and never pulling out the things that say, well, wait a minute, this is completely different.

John Dehlin [00:34:32] But isn't that what apologists do?

Brant Gardner [00:34:35] Oh, there certainly have been a lot who did. I mean, isn't that what chiasmus is?

John Dehlin [00:34:38] I mean, you find these patterns in the Book of Mormon and you say, oh, well, that really seems ancient, you know.

Brant Gardner [00:34:46] Oh, no, I mean, chias. There. There have been people who've done statistical analysis to try to find out intentionality of a chiasm. You know, the. The literary form of chiasm is absolutely authentic. It was surprising to find it in the Book of Mormon. What happened at one point in time is too many people thought that it actually proved something. The only thing it proved is you can find that literary form in the Book of Mormon. But it's absolutely true that you can find it there and that you can perform statistical analysis that will indicate that it's intentional. I think that it's gone over the top. I think that there are times when people find certain chiasms that are more in the eye of the beholder than in the text.

John Dehlin [00:35:36] Right.

Brant Gardner [00:35:37] But that doesn't mean that they're not there.

John Dehlin [00:35:40] And this technique of finding parallels, I mean, that's what critics would use to tear down the Book of Mormon. And that's really the technique that FARMS or the Maxwell Institute would use to build it up to say, oh, this with B's or oh, that with certain names, and you would find parallels and then say, that gives evidence. Right. And what you're saying is either attempts to either tear down or build up based on drawing these parallels really says more about the person doing it than reality.

Brant Gardner [00:36:14] Oh, absolutely, yeah. I remember going through a particular passage in Sagon. Who's One of the really important Spanish fathers writing about Aztec culture. And he says, here is how all of these gods are like the Greek gods. Well, of course, Aztec gods aren't like the Greek gods at all, but he certainly makes it sound like they are. Burkhody Brundage did the same kind of thing. He says, you know, here's why Sahagun might have thought that Quetzalcoatl would look like Heracles. And he goes through this list, and if you know something about the mythology, you know that he's only putting together the list that says this is why it might seem similar, but there isn't any real similarity at all. And many of the things that appear similar superficially aren't similar at all. And so that's part of the problem of, you know, any of these kinds of discussions that say, you know, this is parallel to that, and therefore it proves something. It's not a good methodology, whether you use it for the Book of Mormon or against the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:37:23] Okay, okay, that. I think that makes sense. I agree. I think. I agree mostly especially with apologetic attempts to prove the Book of Mormon's true. But let me just go back to the view of the Hebrews really quickly and just read what Wikipedia says. So it's got extensive quotations from Isaiah, right? And Israelite origins of the American Indian. It talks about the gathering of Israel and the restoration of the 10 tribes. It's got the peopling of the new world from the old via a journey and many waters. It's got a religious motive for the migration. It's got a division of those migrants into a civilized and an uncivilized group. And eventually it says the destruction of the civilized by the uncivilized. It talks about the burial of a lost book with yellow leaves. It talks about extensive military fortifications with watchtowers. It talks about a change from monarchy to republican forms of government. And it talks about the preaching of the gospel in ancient America. Now, that's all according to Wikipedia, which, you know, may or may not be true. But I mean, now, can you be fair to say that that would sound like it could at least inform the narrative of the Book of Mormon? Well, at least the arc, kind of the narc. The narrative arc a little bit.

Brant Gardner [00:38:58] Yes and no. And again, you're looking at something where, hearing that, I can almost guarantee that whoever wrote that tried very hard to make it sound like that Hebrews sounded like the Book of Mormon, because it doesn't sound that much like the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:39:12] You've probably read. I've never read it.

Brant Gardner [00:39:14] Oh yeah, of course, I wouldn't be able to say much about the Book of Mormon if I hadn't read it. Here's just a couple of things that are important. One of them is it talks about the old world, Hebrews coming to the new world. In view of the Hebrews, this is an explanation for the lost 10 tribes. And there was a number of books, there was a whole idea at this particular point in time that if you're trying to explain where the Native Americans came from, because in the biblical world you could only be a descendant of Noah, you didn't have a place for them. So people found a good place in the lost 10 tribes. So native Americans became the remnant of the lost 10 tribes. And so everybody is pretty certain that that's parallel to the Book of Mormon. Except the Book of Mormon starts 100 years after the loss of the 10 tribes. Happens with a completely different war, a completely different people. Has nothing to do with the ten tribes, except that Lehi is a descendant of one of them. But there's, you know, the Book of Mormon has nothing to do with the loss of the ten tribes. So yeah, there's a parallel in that something has been lost, but it isn't a direct parallel. And the next one is the same kind of thing. You know, both of them quote Isaiah a lot. Absolutely true. All of the proof texts that Ethan Smith did in view of the Hebrews, the proof tests he used from Isaiah to prove this is what's happening, don't show up in the Book of Mormon. So yeah, they both cite Isaiah, but they don't cite the same thing. You can't look at it and say, aha, this idea came from here.

John Dehlin [00:41:04] Different parts of Isaiah.

Brant Gardner [00:41:05] Yeah, it's completely different things and for different reasons. And if you go through all of it, it's that kind of thing. The fact that, I mean, if you read View of the Hebrews without being primed to think that it has any relationship to the Book of Mormon, I would defy anybody to come up with one.

John Dehlin [00:41:25] Yeah, I tried to read it once and I just, I couldn't read it.

Brant Gardner [00:41:30] No, it's. Well, and that's the other thing is it's, you know, early 1800s literature and that's really pretty boring stuff.

John Dehlin [00:41:39] Yeah, it was pretty thick for me at the time. Maybe I just wasn't motivated enough. I should say that Wikipedia says Mormon apologists argue that the parallels between the works are weak, over emphasized or non existent.

Brant Gardner [00:41:51] Yep. And that that sentence itself verifies what I told you before where it sounded like somebody was pulling those things out to make it sound parallel. It's exactly the thing that they're complaining about in the Mormon apologists. Yeah, it's the, the fallacy of parallels. It's. You construct it by making it sound better than it is, but that it

John Dehlin [00:42:14] sounds like you're making an argument against Fair and Farms, or at least they're, they're or the maximalists to kind of their primary mode of operation. And I don't, I don't mean I. Okay. I want to be honest. I'm not trying to get you to denounce them. I'm not trying to get you in trouble.

Brant Gardner [00:42:34] I know pretty much all of the people that are writing for them. So, yeah, you wouldn't get me to denounce them. Many of them are friends of mine.

John Dehlin [00:42:41] But are you saying that what they're doing is maybe not useful or counterproductive or problematic or helpful? What would you say about the fact that they're relying on this parallelism that you say is, is not necessarily to be trusted?

Brant Gardner [00:43:00] Well, I'd say two things. One of them is the Maxwell Institute is, you know, not a single entity. That's a lot of different people. So you really can't answer that question without saying, how about this particular article? What's it doing?

John Dehlin [00:43:14] Okay.

Brant Gardner [00:43:15] But secondly, I think in many cases I don't see what the majority of them are doing as being that kind of parallelism. Some of it is, and when it is, I'm not overly fond of it, and I'll say so. But there are a lot of the things that they're doing that, you know, are not really relying on that kind of parallels.

John Dehlin [00:43:34] Okay. All right. Well, I honestly not trying to get you in trouble there, but that's a fair question, right? I mean.

Brant Gardner [00:43:41] Oh, of course. And one of the questions that anybody would have to ask of anything I've written is how do I avoid the fallacy of parallels? And the problem there is you cannot write anything in history without trying to make some sort of a connection. If you're going to do a biblical history, you have to draw some sort of parallel somewhere. And the question is, you know, are you drawing a parallel that is completely superficial or one that has some validity? And when William Deaver was looking at that same problem, what he said was, you know, let's use a different word. Rather than parallel, let's talk about a convergence. And in his vocabulary, a convergence was when two or three different things start pulling together at the Same time period, in the same place. What I would say for the Book of Mormon, what you have to do is start making sure that if you're looking at parallels, it's not so much that it's parallel lines as it is intersecting lines at a point where you've got multiple things that are all pointing to the same place, same time. Where parallels get really bad is when you say, let me take the fact that they use Isaiah in view of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon uses Isaiah and therefore it's parallel and therefore it's borrowed. That one doesn't hold up because they're not the same. When you actually examine it, the connection doesn't work. There are other places where you start looking at them and you say, oh well, wait a minute, something else is happening here. And they're converging in time and place and culture and in non random ways. And those are much more important than there's a chiasm in Greek and there's a chiasm of the Book of Mormon. That certainly doesn't tell us that the Book of Mormon was written in Greek.

John Dehlin [00:45:36] Right. Okay, so let's go back to the overall Grant Palmer thesis we talked about view of the Hebrews and why we need to be careful between. We make too much of that connection. Although it is fair to say that this idea of Native Americans having a Hebrew origin, it would have been a milieu that Joseph was swimming in. Right. It would have been popular notion or at least a notion that some would have been considering.

Brant Gardner [00:46:09] Right? Oh yeah. It was certainly well understood at the time. The difference of course, being that they would have expected it to have something to do with the 10 tribes. And the fact that the Book of Mormon expressly has nothing to do with the 10 tribes is a little strange for somebody who's trying to, if you will, pander to that.

John Dehlin [00:46:31] Okay, what about just the other? So just address real quickly the other elements of the Palmer thesis. Maybe not in particular, just overall or whatever you want to say about it.

Brant Gardner [00:46:45] Again, it's one where if you look very carefully at what the correlations are, you'll find that they're at a very, very high level and that they are written in such a way to make them look more parallel than they are. For example, you were talking about the Masonic.

John Dehlin [00:47:04] Right. Stories or Rumble.

Brant Gardner [00:47:05] Yeah, they. Okay, come on. Why am I forgetting the specific conspiracy word there?

John Dehlin [00:47:13] Secret combination.

Brant Gardner [00:47:14] Secret combinations. You would think I would know that. You know, that whole idea of the Masons as a secret combination would probably work until you Go through the Book of Mormon and you can't find it. There is very, very little that you would say is Masonic about what's happening. Secret combinations in Book of Mormon, their function in the text is completely different. Where they show up is completely different. It again, is one of those correlation that looks better from 30,000ft than it does when you make the direct comparisons.

John Dehlin [00:47:50] And you'd say that about the evangelical sermons. You'd say that about.

Brant Gardner [00:47:58] Well, actually with the evangelical sermons, the two things that, you know, again, go back to the book, the gift and the power, which we kind of haven't talked about as much as we might have, but.

John Dehlin [00:48:08] Oh, we will, I promise.

Brant Gardner [00:48:09] Yeah, but the two things that go back to that are what we, what do we do with all of the texts that show up that are in the Bible, that appear to be copied out of the Bible and these sermons? And one of the things that happens with the sermons is that you get a lot of the same language coming out. So to sing the song of redeeming love, which is put in the mouth of Alma in the Book of Mormon is something that is part of the rhetoric of those sermons that all gets to the question of translation. And again, if you begin by positing that the translation has to be word for word, perfectly accurate, then you don't have any way of explaining those things. And that's why one of the reasons that sort of the second third of the book goes through the nature of translation isn't just what kinds of translations might it be, which the possibilities run the gamut from an absolutely perfect to a completely conceptual, tangentially related, but not the same words kind of translation like the Good News Bible. So, you know, with that range of possibilities, then you have to start looking at the evidence. You know, what does the evidence say about the kind of translation that we have? And one of the things that I think it clearly shows in the evidence is that Joseph vocabulary strongly influenced the vocabulary that you have in the Book of Mormon. And sometimes we have places where we know that the vocabulary in the Book of Mormon is a direct reflection of not only the Bible that he had, but in some cases, even when we know that the source that would have been quoted would have been on the brass plates and would have been part of the Old Testament. The particular translation of that is the version out of the New Testament that's translating, you know, that's quoting that rather than the version that you find in the Old Testament. So I think that tells us something about the nature of translation, but it doesn't tell us whether it was a translation. It just says, here's some of the evidence you have to take into account when you look at what kind of translation was.

John Dehlin [00:50:32] So we'll get into it. We'll put a pin in this. But if I could just restate what I think I heard you say, it's that, you know, let's say that Joseph had a sermon of, you know, of King Benjamin. To translate, you need to first agree upon what it means to translate. And if he's trying to convey some sentiments that he's translating, he very well might, according to a certain version of what it means to translate, invoke the vocabulary and maybe even the phraseology of sermons that he might have heard on the frontier and incorporate them as the way to express what he's translating.

Brant Gardner [00:51:16] Exactly.

John Dehlin [00:51:16] Is that what you're saying?

Brant Gardner [00:51:17] That's what I'm saying. And I'll give you sort of a very personal example of that kind of thing. I was taking a class in Greek at Brigham Young University, and the teacher happened to give us a passage out of Matthew to translate. And when we started, we didn't really know what. What it was, but, you know, working our way into the passage, the entire class recognized that verse and almost to a person, translated exactly the way we have memorized that in the King James Version. And of course, that was what the teacher had expected us to do and then went on to say, you know, here's why. The actual vocabulary is slightly different. But as soon as we recognized what it was, you know, every one of us translated it exactly the way we had always translated before. So that's, you know, that's such a natural process that I certainly see that as one of the explanations for how some of these vocabulary items end up in the Book Mormon.

Digging Into the Translation of the Book of Mormon

John Dehlin [00:52:14] Okay. All right. So you've been very patient. I just. I couldn't help but address some of these things before we dig into the book, just because I think you're a unique individual who can speak to these in, let's just say, as credible as a way as I've ever heard. And so I didn't want to let you go without addressing them. So I'm going to throw you this last question just at a high level, and it's really a chance for you to just bear your testimony about the Book of Mormon. But I'm going to just. I'll just summarize it in this way, and then I promise we'll go right to your book. Well, we've been talking about your book, but we'll go specifically to the translation part of your book. So somebody might say, look, I've had people say this. The Book of Mormon is not that amazing. I mean, in the church, we've got this culture of saying how amazing the book is. But in reality, if you take these five or six sources that Grant Palmer posits, if you take the fact that maybe it wasn't just Joseph that wrote it, but instead Joseph collaborated with Sidney Rigdon or Oliver Cowdery or others over a period of years, instead of unnecessarily constraining it to a matter of weeks or months, JRR Tolkien came up with much better. Lots of people could come up with, through fiction, something that would equal to or even surpass the marvel of the Book of Mormon. It's just not that amazing. And these sources, using Occam's Razor, provide a much more credible explanation for how the book was manufactured than something supernatural. How would you just summarize your feelings as a response to that argument?

Brant Gardner [00:54:05] I think the argument has validity if and only if you put as your beginning point that there cannot be anything supernatural. So once you've said that the supernatural isn't possible, anything that allows you to come up with an explanation that isn't supernatural becomes plausible, all based on the fact that you can't accept anything else. Now, if you say, I believe that there is a God and that some of these things are possible. Now the question is, what kind of text is the Book of Mormon? From my experience, the more I have really delved into the Book of Mormon and looked at it very, very closely. The picture that's painted of these external sources and these proposed parallels that are supposed to explain the text don't reflect the text at all. It isn't the same book that I see. There are two kinds of things that will kind of tell you that the Book of Mormon is probably more marvelous than we actually understand it. And one of them is the nature of its construction. It's not only pretty complex, but there's some really unusual and interesting things going on in it. But the second and most important is the kinds of things that are going on and the kinds of things that it's interested in have direct connections not only to historical places in time, but to the events and the concerns and the reasons why human beings would do the things that they did that are absolutely relevant to the particular place and time, and they change through time. So, you know, the things that Nephi is worried about and the reason he writes his record have a lot to do with traditions from the old world. By the time you get to King Benjamin, who is giving his discourse, there isn't a connection to the old world anymore, and references that he gives become explicable only in the context of this new world that he's in. One of the examples, just to give you one, he spends time at the beginning of his sermon talking about what kind of king he is not. That is a really strange way to begin a sermon unless you are contrasting yourself to other kings that they would know about. And when you look at the kinds of things where he says I'm not that kind of guy, those are the qualifications that you begin to see in the Mesoamerican kings that would have been around him. So when you put it into an historical context, it becomes richer in ways that Joseph Smith didn't even have access to, let alone come up with some of these 30,000 foot parallels.

John Dehlin [00:57:02] Got it. So you strike me as a bright guy. You've spent a lot of time with the Book of Mormon, and for you, the Book of Mormon is every bit as sophisticated and as intricate and as marvelous as many believers would testify.

Brant Gardner [00:57:24] And probably more so because I suspect that most of the people who read it read it with modern eyes and you know, what they are seeing as complex or interesting are probably completely different kinds of things than what I'm seeing in the text.

John Dehlin [00:57:40] I see. Okay, thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Music today was provided by the Saber Rattlers. Check them out@sabre-rattlers.com the Mormon Stories logo was generously donated by StudioCase.com thanks for listening.

John Dehlin [00:58:00] Come, come ye saints no toil nor labor fear but with joy wend your way Though hard to you this journey may appear Grace shall be as your day Tis better far for us to strive Are you useless cares from us to drive to the San Jo your hearts will swell oh, all is well, all is well. Why should we mourn? I think think our lot is hard Tis not so all is right why should we think to earn a great reward if we now shun the fight Good up your l fresh courage take our God will ever us forsake soon we'll have tell the tales oh, all is well, all is well oh, how is well? All is well. Sam. And should we die before our journey is through Happy day All is well we, we that are free from toil and sorrow too with the just we shall dwell but if our lives are spared again to see the saints, the rest obtained I will make this chorus well. Oh, all is well all is well all is well all is well all is well. Away. All

John Dehlin [01:02:12] is away.

Part 3 of 5 · Ep. 309

John Dehlin [00:00:00] 1, 2, 3.

John Dehlin [00:00:07] Mormon Stories podcast is a production of the Open Stories Foundation. All donations to Mormon Stories are fully tax deductible and go directly towards keeping the podcast alive and towards building a community of support for Mormons like you. To support the podcast or to join the community, please become a monthly subscriber today@mormonstories.org all right, Brent. Well, we're now at part three of this interview. We've covered your history. We've covered a bit about Joseph Smith, and then we've covered quite a bit about, you know, kind of maybe a secular theory for the Book of Mormon and Grant Palmer's view and what it is about the Book of Mormon at a high level that you find, you know, valuable or miraculous or special that, that, that secular views just can't quite explain. We haven't dug much into that, but we've, you know, touched on it a little bit now, now, given that we're gonna, I, I, it's kind of funny Terell Givens used this word, go down the rabbit hole. Have you heard that phrase before?

Brant Gardner [00:01:11] Right.

What Kind of Translation Is the Book of Mormon?

John Dehlin [00:01:12] So what we're going to do now, and I don't mean this in a disrespectful way, I'm, I'm lovingly invoking Terrell Givens when I say that we're going to go down the rabbit hole a bit and we're going to talk about if you are to believe that there's a God and if you are to believe that God works, as Richard Bushman said, if you want to believe in a world where God works, you know, through prophets in this world, and that God chose to work with Joseph Smith to bring about the Book of Mormon through gold plates, then you have to ask some other questions because, you know, we talk about the Book of Mormon being viewed as, you know, the most correct book on the face of the earth. I think that's a quote that's been used about it. And yet, and so we expect it, we sort of maybe are raised to expect it to have never been changed, to have never had any flaws to represent the fullness of the gospel and to sort of stand on its own in many ways, where Joseph would have just been someone who facilitated it, but in no way would his own personal opinions or vocabulary or anything have influenced it in any way. And all that sort of presumes or presupposes a certain view on what it means to translate. Is that right?

Brant Gardner [00:02:45] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:02:46] And so in your book, the Gift and Power, Translating the Book of Mormon, again, Greg Coford Books Greg K-O-F-F-O R-.com in this book, you tackle head on what it does and does it mean to translate. Now, I'm going to start by giving you what I understood the process to be with the Book of Mormon. And that's. Well, there's a couple things. First of all, we have this perception that Joseph obtained this thing called a Urim and Thummim, okay? And what I think of when I think of Urim and Thummim is some Old Testament like breastplate with some type of goggles or glasses where Joseph sitting in front of the plates, he's got the glasses on, he's got the breastplate. And so that's part one and then part two is that somehow he's looking at these characters in reformed Egyptian. And I don't know where I get this, but I think it's from someone's quote. He's actually watching the English appear before his eyes or his mind's eye or spiritual eyes.

Brant Gardner [00:04:05] And.

John Dehlin [00:04:05] And then he's simply dictating whatever these, you know, the English that emerges from this process to the scribe who's in the room. And, you know, he's separated by a curtain and the scribe is simply writing down the English that Joseph is saying or speaking. And so it's a very literal thing using these sort of ancient relics that he got when he grab the plates out of the ground. Now, based on the historical record, and we've talked about this before, but tell us how this, just based on historical accounts might not be factually accurate in terms of the mechanics of the translation. Then we'll talk about the theories on the spiritual nature of the translation. But let's talk about the mechanics.

Brant Gardner [00:04:59] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:04:59] How did I get it wrong?

Brant Gardner [00:05:01] Well, let me start with one other sort of background piece because I kind of had to do this in the text of the book, it seems to put the cart before the horse to try to talk about whether or not what kind of translation the Book of Mormon is, if we haven't settled the fact that it is a translation. So one of the things you have to posit in the book in order to move on is that it is a translation. So all these questions about historicity and everything are, you know, in volume two, I guess at one point in time I had hoped to put it all together and it just wasn't going to work. So you begin with that, you know, saying that this is a translation. So the next thing is mechanically what happened. And the best information that we have is that Joseph, who Is this village seer. And who understood what a seer stone was, got hold of the interpreters in the Book of Mormon which were delivered with the plates, and he understood them as though they were seer stones and thought they were wonderful and apparently used them to translate the 116 pages that were lost. It appears that they were returned with the plates and that Joseph, after that point in time, no longer had those interpreters that had been delivered with the plates. And it appears that all of the texts of the Book of Mormon that we have was translated with a seer stone. And the way you use a seer stone is to put it in the crown of a hat and to put your head in the hat to exclude all light. And that that process, mechanically, is how you use them, no matter how you're going to use them or what you're going to use them for, and that somehow that's how you're getting the translation. And, of course, what that pretty much precludes is Joseph Smith reading any manuscript. It pretty much precludes him reading, you know, putting his finger on the plates, as Thomas Coe had indicated, from an 1836 story that the Saints had told. Yet really appears that the plates themselves weren't being consulted at the time. So mechanically, it certainly doesn't look like any translation that we know about. Again, no dictionaries around, no scholars sitting in dusty rooms trying to figure out the meaning of certain characters in verb tenses. It was a process that came through inspiration. And again, you go back to the fact that none of that works without positing the presence of God in the process.

John Dehlin [00:07:50] Right, okay, okay. That. That I hear. I hear that. Let me just. Let me just go back and. Well, let me just ask you then, to say what we do know about the mechanics of how he translated it, the versions that we have now.

Brant Gardner [00:08:15] Do you mean the way people tend to think of it?

John Dehlin [00:08:18] Yeah.

Brant Gardner [00:08:19] Oh, I mean, you get all kinds of ways that people will.

John Dehlin [00:08:22] No, I mean, like, I'm talking about the hat and the stone. We have an account of people that were in the room with him describing what physical artifacts were used and how. And I just want to make sure that that version gets told.

Brant Gardner [00:08:39] Yeah. Joseph appears to sit with his seer stone on the crown of the hat and puts his head in the hat and dictates the text. What people who saw it. You know, you mentioned the curtain. It appears that the curtain that had been hung was actually hung at the door to keep people from bothering Joseph and his scribe, rather than between Joseph and the Scribe. But you know, Joseph is dictating and he is dictating, according to Royal Skousen's examination of the original manuscript, about 20 some odd words at a time. And then the scribe would write them down and Joseph would continue. And the descriptions of the process were Joseph would give the sentence, these 20 or so words, they'd say they were written and then they'd go on to other ones. Every once in a while, typically at the beginning, the first time you come up with an unusual name, Joseph would spell it out. The witnesses to the process saw that you could hear that there were times when Joseph was spelling words. So that process is what was described later on. And then in some cases, the people who were describing it were trying to imagine what Joseph might have seen with his head and hat. And that's where we get, you know, the words would appear on parchment and we don't know for certain where that came from. Whether someone decided that that's what happened or Joseph had mentioned that's what happened. That part we don't know.

John Dehlin [00:10:20] Okay. And again, we're not going to dig too much more into this, but you can imagine how difficult it is for people to hear this count. On the one hand, it's true that Elder Russell M. Nelson, I guess there's an article in the ensign from 10 or 20 or 30 years ago that sort of lets you know, that sort of conveys this account that the plates probably weren't in the room, or at least there's no evidence that the plates were in the room. That this Urim and Thummim that we thought was being used really wasn't used, but instead it was a stone in a hat with Joseph's face in the hat. And then as I understand it, it's one of the same stones that Joseph would have used in his previous treasure digging expeditions. Is that possible? Is that likely?

Brant Gardner [00:11:14] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:11:14] Okay.

Brant Gardner [00:11:15] Yes. So. And then I would only qualify it to say that by limiting it to treasure digging, you've artificially limited what it was really used for.

John Dehlin [00:11:24] Horse finding.

Brant Gardner [00:11:26] It was the process of trying to find things that were lost.

John Dehlin [00:11:29] Okay. Now I'm only. I'm not trying to stack the deck. I'm just. This is what people get hung up on. And so, you know, this is something I was never taught in seminary. It's something I was never taught at byu. It's something I've never heard mentioned over the pulpit or a general conference. And I would say 95% of the church is still unaware of this. And whenever the church depicts the translation, they. I've never once seen the church depict a picture with Joseph with his head in a hat.

Brant Gardner [00:12:05] Well, let's just make sure that we understand that it's artists that are depicting it, not the church.

John Dehlin [00:12:11] Well, the church shows the artists renderings.

Brant Gardner [00:12:13] The church shows the artist renderings, and

John Dehlin [00:12:15] they publish the church's. The artist renderings.

Brant Gardner [00:12:18] Well, and they published Arnold Freeberg, and believe me, there are very few men that look like those guys.

John Dehlin [00:12:23] No, no, I know, I know. But we know that the translation happened in a way different than the way the church is choosing to depict it. And the church at any time could commission an artist to do a more accurate depiction in the way that's historically accurate. And they choose not to.

Brant Gardner [00:12:43] Well, frankly, that's one of the questions that I had in the first third of the book is why do we tell the stories? One of the things that I point out in the first chapter is here's what the story is and the best information we have for how it occurred. But very, very soon, you know, within three years, or, excuse me, six years of the church being published, that was the story the Mormons were telling. You know, Presbyterian minister Thomas Coe gives us the quotation that talks about Joseph translating by looking through the spectacles with his, you know, as he traces the. The characters on the plates with his finger. It's a question of why did that story become the one that got circulated and why did it change so rapidly? And I think that's, you know, one of the interesting questions. And it has to do with the nature of history and the nature again of. Of how folk histories are created and how communities pass stories around. And in many ways, it's because it was more understandable to them than, you know, when they were trying to figure out how Joseph Smith would have done it, that story made more sense to them. And so that's the one they told. I suspect that that's the reason why it continues to be told is it just makes more sense to people. And, you know, the historical accuracy, frankly, wasn't anything that people were terribly concerned with until recently.

John Dehlin [00:14:08] Right. This is a. This is an instance where I'm not gonna. Are you okay?

Brant Gardner [00:14:14] Sorry. Yeah, I'm fine.

John Dehlin [00:14:16] Bless you. It's going to sound like I'm trying to put you at odds with the church, but I'm really not. But someone would say, dang, don't you think it would be responsible of the church to clarify this now and. And to just start teaching the story accurately? And do you ever feel frustration that they haven't done it because apologists will all acknowledge that it's the feeling of being betrayed or deceived by that always stings more than the actual evidence, because it's all down the rabbit hole. Whether he's using, you know, breastplates and goggles or a seer stone, it's all supernatural. So are you, you know, how do you feel about the fact that we're still not depicting this accurately?

Brant Gardner [00:15:02] I guess I'm too much of a historian to worry about that. My questions are always, how did we get to this point? I'm always surprised that people feel betrayed because somebody else hasn't taught them something where there's information that they could easily go learn something about. And perhaps one of the reasons why I wrote the book was so that there was another source out there that people could go to to learn about this kind of thing and to do it with some understanding of what the historical process is. But, you know, things don't happen in vacuums. They happen historically. They happen because of the people who were there. We tell the stories that we tell for lots of different reasons. Frankly, I'm really surprised at this entire idea of someone assuming that the church was betraying them because, again, it. It seems to say that somebody else is responsible for telling me things that are going to shock me. If you look at a worldwide church, that's really pretty irrelevant. The information about what the Book of Mormon is and what it teaches is really significant to people's eternal salvation. The way it was translated. That's a historical question.

John Dehlin [00:16:27] Hmm.

John Dehlin [00:16:29] I guess I just feel like, given the fact that we do seminary and institute and Sunday school for so many years, it just feels like the responsible thing to do. If we know now which we do, that this is a problem for lots of people, it just feels to me like the responsible thing to do to set the record straight, given that the Church is going to be producing this curriculum, they're going to be talking about the translation and they're going to be showing pictures of just. I can understand your point that we've gotten where we are, however we've gotten here. I can even understand that. Let's not blame people or be negative about it. But don't you think setting the record straight is the responsible thing to do, given where we are now?

Brant Gardner [00:17:28] Well, let me tell you about a conversation I had with my wife when she was teaching early morning seminary. We started talking about the nature of things that you teach, and then we started talking about what those kids needed and what was important in their lives. And the kinds of things that she would perceive that they needed to learn had to do with how are they going to live their lives, how are they going to take principles of the Gospel and, and do something with them? You know, at that level. There were very, very few of the students in her class that were at the point where you said, you know, let's delve into history and get history right. They didn't know much history to know that they had any of it wrong. Sunday school classes, I've taught them. You have the same kind of thing. You know, what, what is it that you're trying to teach in a Sunday school class? It's, you know, the things that they are interested in teaching. It's not that you're misrepresenting any of it. It's you're skipping entirely because you're on to something else in the short amount of time that you have that is deemed to be more important. Now, if we don't start teaching it when we get into institute, into college level classes, then I'm going to be terribly disappointed. But Sunday school, you know, there's just a different purpose for them. Something else is happening there.

John Dehlin [00:18:53] And seminary, too?

Brant Gardner [00:18:55] Seminary too. You know, most of the experience I've seen with them is that most of them are young enough and inexperienced enough in the gospel that what they're still learning how to do is to, you know, apply those things to their lives. What does it really mean? I doubt very many of them are terribly interested in, in any kind of history, let alone specifics of LDS history.

John Dehlin [00:19:21] So what I hear you saying is maybe not appropriate for Sunday school or seminary. By the time we get to BYU Religious Education and Institute, you think that it would be responsible for this to be covered?

Brant Gardner [00:19:36] That's where I would see it. And I think it is going to take perhaps some changes in the philosophy of some of the people who teach there. I suspect that many of them would use that same argument to say that the college kids still need it. But I would certainly like to see much more of the history taught more accurately at the institute and college level.

John Dehlin [00:20:04] And you do see that this is tripping people up, right? I mean.

Brant Gardner [00:20:08] Oh, of course. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:20:09] Lots of people, right?

Brant Gardner [00:20:11] Oh, yeah. I mean, you don't read things on the Internet without noticing that there are people who get disturbed about that. I would certainly wish that people who come up with that idea of betrayal might talk to some other people before they allow that sentiment to influence the way they feel about the church.

John Dehlin [00:20:35] Right. And that's, and that's Why I wanted to bring you on, to provide role models for belief that didn't only lead to disaffection, you know.

Brant Gardner [00:20:44] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:20:45] So that's why I'm really glad. I can imagine that the curriculum committee is just thinking, well, if we depicted this new way, the biggest problem is it's different from the old way. And then it gets people saying, well, that's weird. It's even weirder. And it means that I should start questioning what's been taught in the past. Do you imagine that that might be the conversations that happen at the curriculum level about introducing this stuff, that they don't know how to do it without introducing more problems and questions?

Brant Gardner [00:21:19] I suppose it's possible that there would be that kind of a question. I have limited experience with the curriculum committee, but I know that one of the real problems they have is that they can only begin work on a new manual for either seminary, institute or even Sunday school periodically. That thing's going to be around for several years. So even if they're in the process of making some changes right now, we're not going to see them for a few years. So they may have decided to make certain changes a couple of years ago. And, you know, just in the nature of how things work, it'll come out more slowly. Unfortunately, the nature of sort of any kind of religious organization is that things tend to be pretty conservative and change relatively slowly. It's just, you know, it's kind of the nature of what we expect from a church.

John Dehlin [00:22:16] But you do imagine that the day that they do roll all that out, it will cause some people to start asking more questions. Right. It could be a trigger for further questioning and potential doubt. Right.

Brant Gardner [00:22:30] You know, certainly anytime something like that is done, if it's done correctly, it should be able to prevent doubt rather than introduce it. You know, it's all in the presentation. I think the biggest problem that we have in the church is that it's a lay church and that when we teach seminary and institute and Sunday school, you know, the person who's teaching us next week is sitting in the class the week before and doesn't know any more about it than we do.

John Dehlin [00:22:58] Unless it's ces.

Brant Gardner [00:23:00] Unless it's ces, and, you know, that's again, a different kind of process. And I guess you see that a lot in Utah. But I've lived most of my life away from the mothership.

John Dehlin [00:23:12] Right.

John Dehlin [00:23:14] And do you like this idea of inoculation that if we can just teach the history accurately in the early years, will likely have less Disillusionment later. Do you believe that?

Brant Gardner [00:23:25] I certainly believe that education is always good. So, yes, I would like to see it. I guess part of my problem is I would love to start teaching the high school students perhaps a little bit more sophisticated course than the kinds of things they get. And that's the reason I had the conversation with my wife. Some of the things I would have loved to start teaching to them. She's saying, you know, they're just not ready for it. And that's, you know, it's a legitimate concern as to what, you know, what is your goal in teaching the various ages. Certainly I'd like to see better instruction in the church all the way around, including Sunday school. I'm not sure I've got the right answer on how to do that.

John Dehlin [00:24:11] Yeah, and I'll just confirm. I taught seminary for a couple years in Seattle, and I was all eager to get into these issues. And the youth just. That's not where they were. They were like, help me, you know, help me survive high school.

Brant Gardner [00:24:27] Yeah, really?

John Dehlin [00:24:28] Really. They did not want to talk about historical details at all.

Brant Gardner [00:24:32] No. And I think it's an important reality to be able to understand that effective teaching understands the people that we're teaching and teach us what they need rather than what we need to think they need.

John Dehlin [00:24:45] Yeah, it's true. It was hard for me, but it was totally true. I realized how selfish I was being and potentially destructive to be bringing all my concerns into that classroom when it's not where the kids were, it's not what they wanted, it's not what they want needed, and it usually didn't help, you know, So I. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can. I can confirm that. Okay, so now let's talk about what. So I've set up this expectation or what I've been taught or this certain vision of the translation, and it's a very literal one, and I think there's even some historical backing. You talked about Royal Skousen of this sort of dictation model, but your book talks about several theories of the translation process, and these are theories that might help prevent us from a lot of the pitfalls that were explored during the Michael Koh interview and maybe even in the Grant Palmer interview. And so talk to us about. And I know you've already started touching on it, but do it again and maybe in more depth. Talk about other theories or views of translation that aren't as literal, that are still credible, and that might be helpful in people's understanding of the Book of Mormon and in preventing Concerns about the Book of Mormon.

Tight vs. Loose Translation and the Seer Stone Process

Brant Gardner [00:26:21] Okay, there are sort of two different parallel issues here. One of them is, what kind of translation might the Book of Mormon be? And then the next one is, is there any evidence that we can discern from the Book of Mormon that would tell us of the options which type it is? So for the first question, you have, again, a range that would say there is a type of translation that is absolutely literal, this is absolutely perfect, and every word is exactly the way it's supposed to be. That's kind of the inerrant philosophy. It's really very evident that the early members of the church believed that, which is hardly surprising because they had kind of an inerrant understanding of the Bible that was their religious heritage. One of the things that has happened with Skousen's examination of the manuscript is he can show that that inerrant concept, where you could not make a mistake, does not describe the evidence. So one of the things that we can say is we know that whatever else happens in the translation of the Book of Mormon, it was not absolutely inerrant and perfect. Even without that, though, there is a type of translation that is what you might call literal, which means that it takes the language and tries to replicate as much as possible the precise vocabulary and the syntax of the original. Then there is another that moves a little bit farther away from that that you would call functional. And a functional translation says, okay, I'm going to translate as closely as I can to what's there. But sometimes in order to create understanding, I have to translate slightly differently. For example, if I'm translating a text into another language than English, and somebody has said, boy, that is more fun than a barrel of monkeys, I'm going to have to find some other way to translate that into the other language. If I'm lucky, there's a parallel idiom. But translating that idiom about a barrel of monkeys is going to get somebody terribly confused, because I have no idea why a barrel of monkeys is fun. Or as many people have said, if I'm happy as a clam, how happy is a clam? So certain things don't work. Idioms are really only going to translate well if you do them in a functional translation. And then the last type of translation is one that, you know, sort of conceptual, where you're saying, well, I'm taking the general idea, but I'm retelling it. And the one that most people will be familiar with, there might be the Good News Bible that retells the story of the Bible, but in A completely different syntax and vocabulary than what the original Greek or Hebrew might have been. And when I look at the text of the Book of Mormon, trying to find places where the data will tell me what kind of translation it is, most of the evidence that I see would put it in a functional translation where you're not getting an absolute representation of whatever the vocabulary is. And one of the ways that you can look at that, everybody knows the horse and the steel and all of those terms. If you believe that the Book of Mormon is a translation, those vocabulary items that we spend all of our time worrying about, can I find a horse? Become a very different issue, because the horse may or may not have been a horse. And the example I use is the King James version, where everybody knows that you shouldn't put a candle under a bushel. Very famous. We know that example is there. We quote it all of the time. It never occurs to us that a candle is an anachronism. In the King James Version, they had oil lamps, they didn't have candles. Candles came much later.

John Dehlin [00:30:30] Doesn't it say light? It doesn't say candle, does it?

Brant Gardner [00:30:33] I think there's a place where I think it's a candle under the bushel.

John Dehlin [00:30:37] So there's references to candle in the King James vers. That would be anachronistic.

Brant Gardner [00:30:43] That's correct. And you'll get other kinds of vocabulary like that. Now, when you look at a translation, does that mean that the King James Version has to be thrown away because it's therefore anachronism and can't be true? Well, heavens, no. It's a translation. That vocabulary item is anachronistic, but it's related to giving light and putting the light under the bushel, that kind of thing. So the meaning is clearly there. They just happen to use, you know, the translators used an anachronism, you know, in the vocabulary.

John Dehlin [00:31:18] And I'm just. I'm just going to confirm this. So even Job, as far back as Job, in Psalms, there are references to candle. And you're saying candles didn't exist back in.

Brant Gardner [00:31:28] Right. They came much later. Yeah, they would have had oil lamps. So in the New Testament time, the parable of the 10 virgins who need the oil for the lamps, that's accurate because it's talking about the lamp and the oil.

John Dehlin [00:31:46] Got it.

Brant Gardner [00:31:47] The candle is an anachronism of vocabulary. And again, if you go back to the original, it's not going to say candle, it's going to say lamp. But the translator put it in. So once you Understand that the Book of Mormon is translated. Translation. And that there are many reasons why the text. And again, positing that it is a translation, the evidence suggests that it is functionally translated rather than literally.

John Dehlin [00:32:21] Okay.

Brant Gardner [00:32:22] You know, then you start looking at the vocabulary and what does it mean? But that's the place where you say, you know, there was meaning on the plate. And Joseph's understanding of that was influenced by his understanding of the King James New Testament. And so King James vocabulary for New Testament passages shows up in the Book of Mormon because that's the way he understood it. Vocabulary from the revivals, which show up because that's vocabulary that was quite familiar to him. We do that all the time. The reason that we tend to toss out cliches is because we've heard them so many times that in a context where that becomes applicable, that's just this phrase that comes out because it's easier to come up with something that we've heard before than to come up with something that's completely new.

John Dehlin [00:33:18] And just to sort of extend your theory. One of the early critiques that I read of the Book of Mormon was when somebody finds all these names of Book of Mormon characters and of Book of Mormon places around, you know, in Joseph's, you know, in books Joseph would have had, or in maps of towns near Palmyra, you know, according to your theory, you know, there might have been some ancient word for Nephi or Laban or whatever. But how do you make that into English? It very well could have been that Joseph just had to arbitrarily draw on names from maps and literature around him to fill in the blank, to put it into English. Would that sort of be an example of extending your theory or this theory?

Brant Gardner [00:34:16] Or more likely, what would happen in the case of names would be that the particular form, if it was close to something he knew, then it would end up being the name that he was familiar with. So it may not have been exactly like that, but somewhat similar, and it reminded him of that name. Although I have to say, with the specific example you were giving of the vernal Hawley, Joseph Smith saw these names. A lot of the names that Hawley comes up with, you know, did not exist at Joseph Smith's time. So he was still a little bit prescient, but still.

John Dehlin [00:34:56] But. But I mean, you. You probably could find some of those parallels, right?

Brant Gardner [00:35:01] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:35:02] As we talked about parallels before.

Brant Gardner [00:35:04] Right. And, you know, no matter what you come up with with Joseph Smith in rendering these names, he renders them according to his understanding of the, the sound structure of English. You know, we don't tend to get accurate phonetic representations of, you know, foreign words. Whenever the foreign word is represented, it's represented in, you know, something that would represent vowels and syllable combinations that he would understand.

John Dehlin [00:35:39] Yeah, I know people from China who just don't even bother trying to explain how to pronounce their name to people in America. They just adopt an American name. Because to try and get American people to even pronounce their name correctly after multiple efforts is usually in vain.

Brant Gardner [00:35:56] Right.

John Dehlin [00:35:56] So they just go with like Lucy or Bill, you know.

Brant Gardner [00:36:01] Yeah, that, that kind of thing happens when we tend to only hear the things that we've grown up hearing. That's language acquisition theory and what happens and changes after puberty and all those kinds of things. But yeah, definitely in the Book of Mormon, you're going to get Joseph rendering even unfamiliar words in syllabic patterns that are not completely foreign to the way he would understand it.

John Dehlin [00:36:34] Okay, so, so let me ask it. Let me back up and ask you just a higher level question. Did Joseph ever describe the mechanics by which he translated or the, you know, did he ever describe his process?

Brant Gardner [00:36:50] Joseph basically said one thing. He translated by the gift and power of God. That's it, folks.

John Dehlin [00:36:55] That's all he said.

Brant Gardner [00:36:56] That's all he says.

John Dehlin [00:36:57] Okay.

Brant Gardner [00:36:58] At one point in time, his brother said, you know, we might want to know something more about the coming forth of the book Mormon. And you know, here's Joseph. Joseph, would you explain it? And Joseph says, no, it's not something we need to know now. So the only thing he's really ever on record saying about the process is that he translated through the gift and power of God. And, you know, he never makes that so use to tell us.

John Dehlin [00:37:21] He did use the word translate.

Brant Gardner [00:37:24] Yeah, he would certainly use the word translate. I strongly suspect he meant the word translate in a very different term than we do. For him, translate wasn't the way we think of a linguist going through a text for him, something that was translated, if it was made understandable. So when he translated the Bible, it was not from an original language. It was from English to a version of English. That made things more understandable. So his concept of translation was even different than we believe it to be.

John Dehlin [00:38:02] Yeah, because this is a real flexible interpretation of the word translate. Right. But that's not just created out of necessity. Are you saying that that word in even non Mormon context can have similar meanings to what you're ascribing to it?

Brant Gardner [00:38:22] In Webster's 1823, Dictionary. That is the more common meaning of the word.

John Dehlin [00:38:28] Repeat it again or just give us

Brant Gardner [00:38:30] a sense for it making sense of something. So it wasn't necessarily changing the language. It was making sense, making it more comprehensible.

John Dehlin [00:38:42] So there's meaning in the plates. And then he's trying to say, what's the best way with my vocabulary and with my audience and with the human English language, what's the best way I can convey the meaning that will be maximally or optimally understood by the reading audience.

Brant Gardner [00:39:05] Yeah, as a quick thing. Yes.

John Dehlin [00:39:07] Okay. Okay. And you're saying that using the word translate is a reasonable choice of words. There's probably no better choice of words that could have describe that process, even though it's different from the word for word type of thing that we usually associate with it.

Brant Gardner [00:39:25] And based on the way he and his contemporaries would have understood the word, it worked perfectly. What's happened is that our concept of that word has shifted since that time, which is really not surprising at all. Words change in their meaning and their context all the time. But this is one where the word that we use has a set of connotations that are more limited than they were for Joseph Smith.

John Dehlin [00:39:52] Got it. Okay, so why. Okay, so again, this notion that I've read some quotes somewhere where the words would appear, he would say the words, and then they would erase. Tell me again where that comes from.

Brant Gardner [00:40:10] And.

John Dehlin [00:40:12] And how we synthesize that with this other, more functional view of translation.

Brant Gardner [00:40:23] That's one of the witness accounts, which means that this is what somebody came up with as what they thought Joseph was doing. And all of us, including myself, who come up with some explanation for what Joseph were doing are using our best guesses. Because Joseph Smith said, I did it through the gift and power of God. And when we say anything else, we're going beyond what the only person who really knew could have told us. What I believe happened is that Joseph, in his process of using a seer stone, had a visual memory. So that when he was using the seer stone, back in the days as a village seer, and someone would say, you know, where is my wallet? He would see a picture that would say, this is where the wallet was and that it was a visual process to him. There is, you know, a sort of scientific explanation for how that process works. All of us have dreams where we see things in our dreams. Some people are more visual than others, and we always have this concept of imagination where we can close our eyes and imagine the picture. Some people are much better at it than others. And some people have what's called an eidetic memory, which means that they're able to sort of capture pictures and review pictures better than most. In some of the examples, there was one man who had this just phenomenal memory. And people would say, well, you know, how do you do this? And they would describe a large matrix of numbers totally at random. And even years later, he could, you know, repeat series, you know, the diagonal and the horizontal and the vertical. And they asked him how to do it. He said, well, I see a picture of it and I just read it off the board. And I think that's the kind of memory that Joseph had. Where the pieces all get put together is looking at sort of language theory and where language comes from. Steven Pinker examined sort of where we get our words and how do we create sentences. And what he said was, pretty much everybody has had the experience of saying, you know, well, that wasn't what I meant to say. What I meant to say was, and if we can say something and be able to understand that the words that came out of our mouth did not reflect what we meant to say, that we have to have some meant to say, that is prior to the time that it's encoded into words. And his term for that is mentalese. And he says, you know, this is sort of the pre language of the brain. We think in mental ease. You know, these processes occur in mental ease. And then we apply vocabulary and language to that meaning as we speak. And I think what happens is the understanding of what was on the plates. And again, this is where you invoke the divine is given to Joseph Smith, but it's given to him in this pre language. And what happens is it's Joseph's mind that is taking that meaning, clothing that meaning with vocabulary that he understands, vocabulary that's familiar to him, vocabulary that is certainly in English, that is reflective of the King James version, because that's the language of scripture. And then the mental process translates that into a visual process. And to him, it looks like he's reading a text off of the seer stone. I was doing a lot of reading in, you know, what people did with seer stones, and found an interesting example from the late. I think it was, must have been early 1800s. Andrew Lang, a British anthropologist, decided that he wanted to see what would happen with people who used crystal balls or seer stones or any of these kinds of things. And so he took one. He says, you know, here's a crystal ball, and he would hand it to his friends, to see if they could see something in it. And, you know, totally without assuming that they could. And it was just the experiment, hardly rigorous, but, you know, he passed this thing out. And one of the examples of someone who saw it was this young girl who said what she saw was writing on a paper that was so real, she turned the ball over to see the paper on the other side. So there's. There's actually, you know, anecdotal information that someone is able to generate a vision of words on a page. So I think putting all of the pieces together to explain what happens with Joseph Smith, you have a very naturalistic explanation of everything except the content of the Book of Mormon. You can explain why he puts his head in the hat to exclude light. That's so that he and everybody else knows that when he sees something, it is seeing with something beyond sight, because you're not seeing with your natural eyes. And that gives him an explanation as to where this is coming from, the information about words on a page that he can see. The Doctrine Covenants talks about this translation of a papyrus from John. That's exactly that kind of thing. It's all part of this process where he can see things. And to him, it looks like he's seeing on the stone, but he's actually, you know, his brain is generating the words and he's reading them off. So I think he really was reading the text, but I think he was reading a text that his brain was translating. And again, the place where you put the divine content in is, you know, here's the content of the Book of Mormon, which means, okay, now we have an explanation for the translation. Now we're left with the text, and we have to, again, look at the text and say, well, is it really a translation? And that, of course, is a different and much longer discussion.

John Dehlin [00:46:33] Right, okay, so this, this. This approach, which seems reasonable, you know, once. Once you're. Once you. If you stipulate that. That God, you know, works with prophets, this seems reasonable. But it really does beg the question, why have plates at all? Right? I mean, a tremendous amount of effort would have gone into writing, you know, scratching into these gold leafs of passing them down from generation to generation, of protecting them. I'm sure Moroni went to a lot of effort to bury them, and then Joseph had to unbury them and wait years to actually obtain them and then hide them and run around, you know, with them to keep people from stealing them. And then when it comes time to actually use them, they're not in the room. According to the accounts we have of, of the Book of Mormon that we currently have, the version of the Book Mormon we currently have. So I'm sure you've. I'm sure you've thought about that question. Why were plates even necessary?

Brant Gardner [00:47:47] Well, and if you're talking about the translation, perhaps the plates weren't necessary for the translation. But were the plates necessary? Absolutely. How else would Joseph Smith believe that there was something to translate? How would Martin Harris believe that there was something real? How would any of them have been able to produce them, to believe that something was happening, that that physical presence of the plates became a touchstone of belief even for people who did not see them and did not touch them because they had the testimony of the witnesses who did so that physicality of the plates as plates was very important to what everybody was able to believe about the translation of the text. Now, would the story have been any different if the plates had been used? The translation process might have been exactly the same. Having the plates there wouldn't, in my opinion, have made, you know, a significant difference. Would it have made a difference if someone other than Joseph Smith had been the one chosen to do the translation? Brigham Young certainly thought so. He said if somebody else other than Joseph had translated, that our translation would be substantially different. So Brigham's opinion was that there was a lot of Joseph as part of that translation. And I would certainly agree with him. But I certainly believe that the plates were absolutely essential. People needed to have that physical touchstone to be able to know that there was a real connection to real people.

John Dehlin [00:49:28] But they weren't necessary for the production of the version of the Book of Mormon we have today, right?

Brant Gardner [00:49:36] No, and probably couldn't have been. I mean, if, you know, if we had the plates today and someone put them down in front of me and said, brant, you translate that. I would look at it and say, okay, where's the dictionary? You know, who's going to teach me the language? I can see characters, but I don't know what they mean. You know, I assume that you have, you know, looked at Chinese and Japanese characters and they look beautiful. The calligraphy is wonderful. I have no clue what's going on in them. So having that text in front of me, if I were to translate, that wouldn't do me any good.

John Dehlin [00:50:16] Right. So they were necessary as part of the story, as part of the building of faith and of the sort of the achieving buy in among Joseph's peers and associates less relevant to the actual translation. Although apparently he did use them earlier.

Brant Gardner [00:50:39] He Certainly had perused them and certainly had copied some characters off. Whether or not that led to any translation, that part of it's not known. And certainly by having the physical plates, Joseph and anyone else who is part of the process of translation would have reason to believe that there was a connection between what Joseph Smith dictated and those physical plates. It just wasn't the one where you said this character means the word the.

John Dehlin [00:51:13] Right, right. Well, this obviously reminds me of the theories around the Book of Abraham, because I don't know if you want to tell the story or if you want me to really briefly, but basically, do you want to tell or you want me to?

Book of Abraham and Theories of Inspired Translation

Brant Gardner [00:51:28] Oh, you can.

John Dehlin [00:51:29] Well, just that Joseph purchased apparently some papyru from some mummies that showed up, I think it was in Kirtland. Right, right. And claimed to have translated them into what we now have as the Book of Abraham. But when Egyptologists have reviewed the remnants of the papyru that we still have that survived the fire in the museum, whenever that fire was, they apparently it

Brant Gardner [00:52:03] was a great Chicago fire.

John Dehlin [00:52:04] Right. Whatever is written in Egypt on these papyra, according to Egyptologists, bears no resemblance to. To what we have in the Book of Abraham. There's nothing about Abraham or of Abraham at all in the papyrus. And so, again, this is another instance where we're basically saying that what Joseph did was there would be some text that might stand as a source of inspiration, but in no sense was it a translation in any sense of the word that we would assume today.

Brant Gardner [00:52:47] You know, I can't speak directly to that issue of the papyri because we have, as you mentioned, the remnants of what was there in the fire, which means that you cannot say with absolute certainty that what we have in the Book of Abraham intended to translate that portion. Now, let's say that it did and that what we have is a revelatory translation that doesn't bear any relationship to the words on the papyrus. And then we get the Book of Abraham out of it. We are left then with the Book of Abraham, just as we're left with the Book of Mormon, where we have to say, does this text actually reflect an understanding of the ancient world? And that's the part where, again, my understanding of the Book of Abraham is that it does. It's certainly my understanding and experience with the Book of Mormon that it certainly reflects the ancient world. So translation of something, whether it was those particular pieces of papyrus, some other piece, or conceptual translation, revelatory translation like we have in the Book of Moses, however those things happen we have the mind and will of God being translated for us and to us.

John Dehlin [00:54:19] Right. And so again, in theory, the actual plates or the actual papyra weren't even necessary mechanically for the translation to be produced. They might have only just served as inspiration or, you know, something of that nature for the process that occurred.

Brant Gardner [00:54:51] Right, that would be correct. And again, the question then becomes, you know, is the resulting translated text reflective of the culture that it says it should be? And that, again, becomes a different question.

John Dehlin [00:55:05] Right. Because the most extreme example is the one of the Kinderhook plates that sort of, some would say is a factual expose of Joseph as fraud. Do you have. Do you have a take on the Kinderhook plates?

Brant Gardner [00:55:25] I think the best answer to that is to refer everybody to Don Bradley's discussion of the Kinderhook plates from a fair conference. And I can't remember whether it was last year or the year before. I think it was last year, but he has some really, really good historical information on them that I think is absolutely the best discussion on them available. And I know that. I know that it's supposed to be available on the fair conference website. I actually don't know if it's up yet.

John Dehlin [00:56:00] And the basic gist is what, if you remember, is it just that it never happened or that Joseph never claimed to have translated or.

Brant Gardner [00:56:12] Yeah, basically that it. Yeah, actually, I can't remember what it is now. Whatever it is, it's one of those things where you read it and you go, oh, yeah, that's what was going on, of course, and certainly doesn't come across as an expose of Joseph as a translator. The actual historical context reads very, very differently.

John Dehlin [00:56:37] Okay, so. So as we kind of wrap up this. This section, well, is there anything else that you talk about in your book? What we're going to do in our last section, we're going to spend a little bit of time on the co. On the co interview and the whole anachronism thing. My guess is that's going to go pretty quickly because you've. You've seemed to have laid out. You seem to have laid out of an approach to what translation means that would allow for almost anything, you know, to be written in the book and still not necessarily undermine the claim. But is there any other fundamental points that you make in the book that you want to make sure, get conveyed in this part of the discussion, or do we cover the main things?

Brant Gardner [00:57:32] Yeah, I think we've covered pretty much the main things. One of the things that I try to do at the end of the book is to take that theory of translation and use it to see if we can explain historical information or events that otherwise might not have some explanation. So one of the questions would be, how do you know whether or not this is an accurate representation? And of course you don't, because it's an hypothesis, it's a theory. The only advantage that it has is that it does serve to explain certain features. And that's kind of how the book ends, is saying, here's how you apply that theory to these other things. And the fact that it works as an explanatory theory suggests that something other than just totally out of the blue.

John Dehlin [00:58:27] Okay, right, right. So you're saying that why I want to make sure I understood what you. What you just said, but you're basically saying that there, there's more. There's more meat and credibility to the text. If you, if you look at. Can't be that. That this was just total Joseph shooting from the hip. Is that what you're saying?

Brant Gardner [00:58:51] Well, not exactly, because that statement would have to do with the historicity. And I'm actually talking about the theory of the translation. So the idea is, if it is a functional translation and this is the way it happened, and if this really is an explanation for the process that Joseph used, can we take that information, begin to explain other facets of history? So in other words, is. Is the theory productive in being able to explain things rather than simply, you know, a wild theory that.

John Dehlin [00:59:25] Oh, right, right.

Brant Gardner [00:59:27] Is it useful?

John Dehlin [00:59:29] Gotcha. So when you talk about how do we get the Isaiah passages, how do we get New Testament influence passages, how do we get revival language, you're basically testing the theory, right? By. By explaining all these things that some people would list as problems. And you're saying, well, it depends on how you start with your assumptions. If you start with assumptions of a more functional type of translation, then all these things actually make perfect sense.

Brant Gardner [00:59:59] Right?

John Dehlin [00:59:59] Is that, Is that what you mean?

Brant Gardner [01:00:00] That's correct.

John Dehlin [01:00:01] Okay, got it. Okay, so let me think.

Brant Gardner [01:00:14] So

John Dehlin [01:00:18] is there a sense that this more literalistic view that many people have has been encouraged by church leaders over time?

Brant Gardner [01:00:30] Oh, absolutely, yeah. I mean, again, looking at things historically, you know, they certainly began with that very literalistic view and a very, I would say, simplistic view of the Book of Mormon and where it took place and how it explained things. And as I mentioned much earlier now, you know, when I'm growing up in, you know, the 1950s and the early 60s, I'm sitting in classes, you know, all smug, because I know how the Indians came to the New World and this Bering Strait thing was just scientific fiction. So, yeah, it's certainly been taught that way and understood that way. It has been much more recently that there's been more research done into the Book of Mormon, and I think that we've had a more solid foundation for understanding it than we had in the traditional way that everybody grew up with.

John Dehlin [01:01:27] Okay, so presidents of the church and members of the quorum of the 12 would probably have been encouraging this type of view, this more literalistic view of the translation, Is that fair to say?

Brant Gardner [01:01:46] Oh, certainly. And some. Certainly more than others. You know, for as much as we like to say that the quorum of 12 is always unanimous in thought, certainly we know historically that that hasn't been true. And there have been differences of opinion and differences of personalities and understandings. So, you know, there are going to be some who are going to be very adamant that the Book of Mormon is, boy, just exactly this way, the way tradition says, and others that would have been more open to, you know, different kinds of geography or different interpretations of the text. I think things are in the process of changing over the last 40 years. I expect to see more change in the next 20 to 30, although, again, not as fast as some of us would like to see change, but it's going to happen.

John Dehlin [01:02:38] So how much. How much of. How much of this. We'll just. What do you like to call it? A functionality theory of translation? What do you like to call it?

Brant Gardner [01:02:46] That'll do. Yep.

John Dehlin [01:02:47] How much of this can we find? You know, like you said, 40, 50, 100 years ago, like, do we have any evidence of this? Or is this your thinking? Is this just more modern thinking? Do we have a sense for when this emerges? And. And if there's a trend, is this a 21st century thing?

Brant Gardner [01:03:08] Like, oh, no, it's something that has sort of wandered in and out. As I mentioned, Brigham Young pretty much had. Brigham Young, I don't think ever articulated a theory of the Book of Mormon or what it was like, but his statement that if someone other than Joseph Smith had translated, it would be substantially different tells us that he understood that Joseph had a role and that it couldn't have been, you know, an absolute dictation word for word, or else it couldn't have changed or been substantially different. So we'll see that in Brigham Young. You see it certainly in BH Roberts, his understandings, and he was quite vocal on the process of translation, and that was probably his conclusion, was that it would be more functional.

John Dehlin [01:04:02] Do we know how that was received?

Brant Gardner [01:04:05] Oh, it was printed in Sunday school manuals. It was sort of the explanation that was kind of the official stuff.

John Dehlin [01:04:13] And yet somehow he fell out of favor in the history books, in the official church narrative, it seems. Would he have had people who, like, let's just say, the classic Joseph Fielding Smith, B H Roberts, you know, rivalry. Would he have had members of the quorum of the 12 who are uncomfortable with this functional translation approach and who would have fought with them about it or published alternative views or even denounced this functional translation theory

Brant Gardner [01:04:49] without having any historical evidence to say so? It certainly wouldn't be surprising.

John Dehlin [01:04:55] But no one's researched this that you're aware of. You know, we know about the evolution debates between B.H. roberts and Joseph Fielding Smith. Are there any similar debates around Book of Mormon translation that you're aware of?

Brant Gardner [01:05:10] Not that I'm aware of, no.

John Dehlin [01:05:12] Okay, so this has never been. This hasn't been an issue of debate.

Brant Gardner [01:05:17] Not really. And mostly because, again, the final statement from Joseph Smith is that it's by the gift and power of God. And, you know, it's really hard to prove any theory other than that because you just. You don't have much to go on. And what's tended to happen is that people have therefore said, this is the way I think it should be. And, you know, my attempt was to say, well, okay, you know, what does the evidence tell me? So, you know, one of the things that's somewhat different about the approach I'm taking is I'm actually looking at the evidence rather than making presumptions about what I think the evidence should be. So probably the most controversial thing from a orthodox viewpoint that I've got in the book is that I am not fond of Hebrewisms as evidence of the Book of Mormon. I think they're evidence of the influence of the King James Version. But I don't. I don't see any conclusive evidence that there was any process of translation that authentically replicated Hebrewisms, apart from those that would naturally show up by imitating the King James Version.

John Dehlin [01:06:32] But isn't that a big thrust of what the Maxwell Institute does these days?

Brant Gardner [01:06:36] Sure.

John Dehlin [01:06:37] Oh, yeah.

Brant Gardner [01:06:38] And I have a good friend, David Bacavoy, who. We are good friends, and we respect each other. And on this one, we agree to disagree.

John Dehlin [01:06:47] Okay. Okay, got it. Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Music today was provided by the Saber Rattlers. Check them out@saber rattlers.com the Mormon Stories logo was generously donated by StudioCase.com thanks for listening.

John Dehlin [01:07:09] Come, come, you saints. No toil nor labor fear but with joy wend your way though hard to you this journey may appear Grace shall be as your day Tis better far for us to strive Our useless cares from us to drive to the San Jo Hearts will swell oh, all is well all is well. Why should we mourn? I think our lot is hard Tis not so all is right why should we think to earn a great reward if we now, now sh the fight Gird up your lo fresh courage take our God will ever us for sake soon we'll have tal talent well, all is well oh, all is well all is well. Sam. And should we die before our journey is through happy days all is well we then are free from toil and sorrow too with the just we shall dwell but if our lives are spared again to see the saints the rest obtain I will make this chorus swell. Oh, all is well all is well all is well

John Dehlin [01:11:01] all is well

John Dehlin [01:11:04] all

Brant Gardner [01:11:05] is well

John Dehlin [01:11:09] oh, all is well. All is well all is away. Sa.

Anachronisms: Horses, Elephants, and Steel

Part 4 of 5 · Ep. 310

John Dehlin [00:00:00] 1, 2, 3.

John Dehlin [00:00:07] Mormon Stories Podcast is a production of the Open Stories Foundation. All donations to Mormon Stories are fully tax deductible and go directly towards keeping the podcast alive and towards building a community of support for Mormons like you. To support the podcast or to join the community, please become a monthly subscriber today@mormonstories.org Alrighty. Well, we're back with the fourth hour of this marathon discussion with Brant Gardner. Again, I'm just going to repeat this for a number of reasons. Because it's an excellent book, because Greg Kofer deserves our support, and because it's a special offer that we want to offer to you. We're talking about the Gift and power Translating the Book of Mormon by Brant Gardner. You can purchase this book at a discount at Greg Coford Books. That's Greg. K dash O dash F dash. F dash O dash R dash. You can type in M stories, all in caps, M stories. And if you do, you'll get a discount on the book. The book definitely covers a lot more in depth than what we've been able to discuss, even in three hours so far. Is that right, Brant?

Brant Gardner [00:01:15] Oh, yes.

John Dehlin [00:01:16] Yeah. So even if. Even if you've enjoyed this conversation, the book goes into much more depth. So, anyway, if you want to support Brant, or if you want to support Greg Coford, or if you want to support Mormon Stories or just Mormon scholarship in general, I would really encourage you to purchase the book. Okay, so my guess is this part's going to go really quickly. But again, just for our listeners, I did an interview with Richard with Michael Kohler, who is a Yale archaeologist specializing in Mesoamerican archaeology. And we basically covered. We basically covered all the different issues with the Book of Mormon that critics have found. And so I'm going to just. I'm going to really just rifle through them. And, Brant, if you want to, you can just invoke concepts that we've already discussed in just a few words to say, well, that one I would ascribe to this, and that one I ascribe to this. You know, we don't necessarily need to spend a lot of time on any one of these things. Okay.

Brant Gardner [00:02:28] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:02:29] Is that all right if we do it? Sure. Okay. So animals, you know, the classic example is horses. The Book of Mormon. You know, we have no evidence that Native Americans had horses, but instead that the Spaniards brought horses over with them when they explored and worked with Latin America, such that we wouldn't expect to find people between 600 BC and what, a thousand AD in the Americas with horses. Is that all fair so far?

Brant Gardner [00:03:10] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:03:11] So why do horses exist in the Book of Mormon?

Brant Gardner [00:03:15] And that's probably a good one to take just, you know, a fraction longer with, because then we can say, yeah, you remember the horse. It applies to everything else.

John Dehlin [00:03:24] Right.

Brant Gardner [00:03:25] The first thing is the concept of a functional translation where the word that we have may or may not be the precise representation of what was in the plate text. Again, going back to the concept of a candle being translated into the King James Version, we have the word candle. It isn't in the original text. It's an anachronism and doesn't belong there, but it relates to some source of light. So there's every reason to believe that there was a source of light on the plates or not on the plates, but, you know, in the original text and we just happen to have the wrong vocabulary. The question is, then, you know, if it is possible that the word horse is an anachronistic translation, can we tell that by looking at the text? And so you've got two ways of approaching something, and the first one would be to say, oh, well, I'm going to invoke anachronism of text and therefore I don't have to deal with a horse. That's really quite unfair because it could have been a horse. What you have to do in any text like that is examine it to see what the text says. That will let you know whether or not the word horse is an accurate translation of whatever that translator was translating. And when you do that for the Book of Mormon, you find out that whatever the animal was, that was a horse, it never does anything horse like except eat and move.

John Dehlin [00:04:52] So we don't have people riding horses or going into battle on horses in the text.

Brant Gardner [00:04:57] Never happens in the text. The horse never pulls anything. We assume that it does because they say the word chariot. But that's an assumption. It's not in the text. In the text, a horse moves and it eats. And the only context where we have it, where there's a list of things that are, you know, being moved along its context is in a set of animals that are eaten. So maybe it was a food animal, who knows? The point is, regardless of whatever we say about the horse, the text never has a horse doing a horse like thing. So when you say that we don't know, you know, we've never seen a horse there, I would say, sure, I know that. That's very different from the way, you know, most apologists answer that question, which is to say, well, they found horse bones. In my philosophy, they could find absolutely authentic horse bones and it wouldn't change my reading of the Book of Mormon because the horse never does anything horse. Like, even if they had a real horse, it never altered their civilization or altered anything that happened in the Book of Mormon because of it.

John Dehlin [00:06:11] Yeah. You don't have Nephi riding around on a horse, right? He's always walking.

Brant Gardner [00:06:16] Yeah, nobody does. Nobody ever runs.

John Dehlin [00:06:20] And there's no Lamanites on horseback going into battle, huh?

Brant Gardner [00:06:24] No, no. The only time that the horse is mentioned in the context of battle is in the scorched earth policy when all of their possessions are being gathered up so the Gadianton robbers don't get them. And then you have a horse as one of the things that's being moved so that somebody doesn't get it, but never shows up in any context. Like I said, never pulls anything. It never does any work. The only thing we know is that Ammon feeds the darn thing. That's all that it says. So there is nothing in the text that would tell us that we have to translate as a horse, that we understand whatever word was there. Now does that mean that there was or was not a horse? What it means is the text does not give us any information, which means that as a, as an item where you would say this is against the Book of Mormon, you really can't say that because it's possible that it's only a translation and you have to go to something else to decide whether there's a reason to believe in the Book of Mormon and then come back to the horse question later.

John Dehlin [00:07:37] Okay. All right.

Brant Gardner [00:07:42] So

John Dehlin [00:07:44] that's horses. Do you have a. I mean, one of the things that people make fun of and that some would argue gives apologetics a bad name is the attempt to explain horses as tapirs or something to that effect. Do you have an opinion on that?

Brant Gardner [00:08:03] Oh, yeah. It's a different translation philosophy than mine. It's the same general concept. The idea is that when you have cross cultural labeling of animals and you have somebody who comes in and finds a new animal, it is not unusual for them to apply a name that they understand to this new animal where the label doesn't particularly fit. So we have buffalo, that we know exactly what they are, except they are not buffalo, they are bison. We have the hippopotamus, which is a river horse, and that's the literal translation of the word hippopotamus is river horse. And of course, a hippo doesn't look at all like a horse. But it was called a horse. So that is a known cross cultural phenomenon. And what John Sorensen came up with is he said, okay, this is a known phenomenon that could have happened. And if that happened, perhaps the animal they saw was a tapir and they used horse as a label. And then in his understanding of translation, the Nephites would have done the cross labeling and Joseph would have accurately translated their cross labeling. My understanding would be that regardless of what the Nephites called the thing, it was Joseph's culture that saw this animal and in his mind ended up with the translation of horse. So where the word comes from would be very different in Sorensen's translation than it would be in mine. I'm amused at all of the people who talk about writing tapers and taking them into war and everything else, because it unfortunately shows that they have no understanding of what the actual linguistic principle is like. It's actually a debating tactic called reductio ad absurdum. You make fun of something and you can make it sound like a bad argument, even if it's a good one, if you just make fun of it enough.

John Dehlin [00:10:07] Right. And to depict Daniel Peterson on a taper, you know, with the sword is actually not being at all true to the text of the Book of Mormon.

Brant Gardner [00:10:20] No.

John Dehlin [00:10:20] Because the Book of Mormon never claims that.

Brant Gardner [00:10:22] No, no. And it's, It's. It's a process that's intended to discount the argument by using ridicule and not a particularly good way to engage in discussion.

John Dehlin [00:10:36] Okay, all right. What about elephants?

Brant Gardner [00:10:41] Same thing. I'd say it's a translation issue.

John Dehlin [00:10:45] Okay.

Brant Gardner [00:10:45] Certainly they've seen that, you know, those animals were around and they, you know, the textual information is at the oldest level of the Book of Mormon, back into the Jaredite times. And so there's a theoretical possibility it might have carried through. But again, you have so little evidence in the text of what this elephant does that you cannot say for certain whether or not it's an accurate translation of the term or not.

John Dehlin [00:11:14] Okay, how about cattle and.

Brant Gardner [00:11:17] Same kind of thing. Okay.

John Dehlin [00:11:19] Goats and swine? All the same.

Brant Gardner [00:11:22] All the same, Yeah. I mean, anything that is vocabulary based, you have to go to the text and say, you know, what was it? Is there anything in the text that can give me a clue as to what it was? And the answer is pretty much on anything that's based in vocabulary. We just don't have a lot of good information for it. The one place where it does differ, though, is in metals. It is absolutely true, as Michael Coe pointed out, that we don't have evidence for metalworking as early as the Book of Mormon says it was there. I don't have a good answer for that one. That's one where I'm waiting for more information. But that's also one where I cannot say that's a labeling anachronism because we have the metal plates. There's absolute indication that there was something metal there. So that's one where I cannot invoke that because the evidence says it really was metal plates.

John Dehlin [00:12:20] Okay, so just. Just to go back, so goats and swine all the same, right?

Brant Gardner [00:12:25] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:12:26] Barley and wheat and pollen, all the same.

Brant Gardner [00:12:30] All of those kinds of things. Exactly the same. And. And what I would say on every one of them is that because it's a potential question of translation, it is one of those where you cannot make a determination on that basis. I'm not saying there aren't other reasons why you have to look at the Book of Mormon against history, but using those particular vocabulary terms doesn't allow you to say either yea or nay. And the fact that they found barley doesn't mean that the barley in the Book of Mormon is exactly what we think it might be.

John Dehlin [00:13:08] Right. Okay. So sometimes I'm slow. So if we jump to metallurgy now, what's different about metallurgy from all these other things is the detail in which they go into about how they're used.

Brant Gardner [00:13:24] Yeah. You have him creating plates out of ore, you have them engraving plates. You know, all of those kinds of things, again, are actions that are telling you that they really are interacting with metal. And then you have the fact of the golden plates that are delivered to Joseph, some of which, you know, according to what the Book of Mormon tells us, were actually original plates that Nephi had made. So although I can agree that we don't have the evidence for metallurgy, I also have to agree that that's, you know, a point where the archaeology doesn't support what we understand of the text. And, you know, the faithful part of me has to add yet and cross my fingers and hope we find something.

John Dehlin [00:14:12] Okay, so steel swords are a problem as the archaeology current exists.

Brant Gardner [00:14:21] If you're talking about steel swords, frankly, I doubt that. Yeah, I'll refer people to the book. I talk about steel swords in the book, and, you know, whether or not they might have been there and if they were there, you know, the reasons why they might not have continued. I don't think that was. We assume that if you had steel swords, that therefore it would have been a revolution. And you would have had steel swords all the way along. And I. I actually don't see that happening.

John Dehlin [00:14:54] But all these battles of hundreds of thousands of people fighting with swords, that's what the Book of Mormon asserts, right?

Brant Gardner [00:15:01] It asserts steel swords only if you look at the sword of Laban as the precise model that's going to happen for Nephi, and you see it only early on, later on, you have swords, and we presume that they're steel just because of habit.

John Dehlin [00:15:21] The text doesn't claim that.

Brant Gardner [00:15:23] No, the text says swords, which means it could have been something made of something entirely different. And the sword that was eventually used in Mesoamerica was a wooden club with, you know, lined with obsidian, which actually had a much sharper blade than the steel did and was apparently much more flexible as an instrument of war. Because if the steel sword ever got dulled, it was hard to sharpen with these other ones. You just pull the one blade out and put a new one in and you're on your way.

John Dehlin [00:15:57] Okay, so I'm finding here in ether. When's ether?

Brant Gardner [00:16:01] Aether is very, very early. It's prior to anything with Nephi.

John Dehlin [00:16:06] Okay, so when it says made swords out of steel ether, that's. That's brother of Jared kind of stuff, Right?

Brant Gardner [00:16:17] Right, That's.

John Dehlin [00:16:18] Yeah, but that's a problem, right, because it's earlier.

Brant Gardner [00:16:22] Oh, yeah. I mean, as far as far as metallurgy, we don't have good evidence for metals prior to 700 AD.

John Dehlin [00:16:28] You're just saying. You're saying that's a problem. But to assume that all the sword battles with hundreds of thousands of soldiers, to assume that those were all steel swords, is to make a leap beyond what the text actually says.

Brant Gardner [00:16:42] That's correct.

John Dehlin [00:16:44] Okay, got it, got it. And the only mention of steel swords is sort of Nephi and earlier, no mention of steel swords after Nephi.

Brant Gardner [00:16:56] Right. And whether or not even at that time, you know, it's whether or not they would have continued or whether they would have created them, whether they would have, you know, whether that's just. This is what we did, and then we gave it up. You know, it never says that. So the real problem, of course, from an archaeological standpoint, is that there isn't any indication of metallurgy. So even if they made them and gave them up, we have no indication that that's what happened.

John Dehlin [00:17:27] Okay. Okay. And what about coins? Any, any, any. Any showing up of metal coins that you're aware of?

Brant Gardner [00:17:37] Metal coins don't show up, but they also don't show up in the text. The only time you have a coin in the Book of Mormon is when you read the header of that chapter, and that header has since been replaced because it was misleading. So there. There are no coins in the Book of Mormon at all.

John Dehlin [00:17:55] Okay, so I'm reading in Alma 11, and it says Alma 11 4. Now, these are the names of the different pieces of their gold and of their silver according to their value.

Brant Gardner [00:18:10] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:18:11] Is that not coins?

Brant Gardner [00:18:13] No. Doesn't have to be. If you remember, even when they had coins and they would use the Spanish doubloon, they would use pieces, and they would put it into eight pieces and have a piece of eight. So even when they were using coins, at some point in time, they would use a piece. So piece simply says, this is some version of this metal and only refers to coins because we assume that rather than because the text requires it.

John Dehlin [00:18:46] So when it says a sinine of gold, a scion of gold, a shum of gold, a limnah of gold.

Brant Gardner [00:18:52] Yeah, it's some kind of a measure.

John Dehlin [00:18:55] You're using gold, though, right?

Brant Gardner [00:18:57] Oh, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:18:58] And silver. So, okay, so what you're saying is the text is claiming that metal was used for currency, but not necessarily in the shape of a coin.

Brant Gardner [00:19:13] You know, look at the way you phrased the sentence. I didn't say that it was used as currency. I said it was used as a medium of exchange. Later on, the Aztecs used cacao beans as a medium of exchange. And some people, in order to let us understand how they used that, have said that the cacao bean was a currency. And so, you know, you might be able to say that and use the analogy, but nobody would ever say that a cacao bean was a coin. So all of these things are mediums of exchange that are used because they have some value where someone would be able to say, I'll trade you this for that.

John Dehlin [00:19:51] Right. That's. You can call that currency. Right. You can call the calbenes currency. Right.

Brant Gardner [00:19:57] Many people have. Yeah. And calling them currency still, although it gives you the concept of the way they were used, Saying that they were therefore coins, you know, makes a jump. So coins are currency, but, you know, cacao bean is currency as well.

John Dehlin [00:20:12] Okay, so you're saying gold and silver used as currency, not necessarily as coin.

Brant Gardner [00:20:17] Right.

John Dehlin [00:20:18] And what shape would they have taken if not in coin shape?

Brant Gardner [00:20:22] Well, the Aztecs used a copper. They called it a copper axe, but it was actually, if you think of maybe what a long, skinny mushroom, a chisel that has a really thin slice Taken off of it. You know, that's what they used as a copper currency. In fact, I've got two of them sitting on my wall that I'm staring at that I was given as a gift. But, yeah, so, I mean, they're not shaped like coins at all. And, you know, here you have. Of course, Much later, but here is a copper currency that. Let's see. One of them, I'm guessing, is about 8 inches long and about inch and a half wide and extremely thin. So has nothing to do with the coin. But it was a metal currency.

John Dehlin [00:21:14] But were gold and silver even being shaped and smelted during Book of Mormon times?

Brant Gardner [00:21:21] There is no archaeological evidence that they were during that time period.

John Dehlin [00:21:25] Okay. All right. Okay. Got it. So metal is a potential problem.

Brant Gardner [00:21:31] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:21:32] And you're holding out hope that. Well, I guess you. For a believer, it doesn't matter because God. God's purposes will all come to pass whether or not evidence ever shows up to support any of this. Right. But from a. From an archaeological standpoint, it would be nice if.

Brant Gardner [00:21:51] It would be nice. It's not, you know, essential. And certainly at some point in time, if they ever do find evidence of this, everybody's going to say, wow, isn't that great? And nobody will say that proves the Book of Mormon. They'll just say, well, we have metal earlier than we thought in Mesoamerica.

John Dehlin [00:22:08] Well, people at Farron Farms might say that, right?

Brant Gardner [00:22:10] Oh, yeah, I'm sure they will. Yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:22:14] Yeah. How about the wheel?

Brant Gardner [00:22:17] Wheels are never mentioned in the Book of Mormon. Don't have any wheels in the Book of Mormon. You have a chariot.

John Dehlin [00:22:23] Okay.

Brant Gardner [00:22:24] And by implication, the chariot has a wheel, but it never says that. And since we don't know how a chariot moves, we're simply taking our assumption and putting it into the text when we talk about a wheel.

John Dehlin [00:22:41] Okay, so wheels are never mentioned.

Brant Gardner [00:22:44] Nope.

John Dehlin [00:22:45] Okay. All right. Well, let's see. Any other. I guess we could talk. We're not going to talk about food, because that's kind of similar. What about the argument that a lot of things that should be there, like turkeys and cocoa beans and jaguars aren't there, that it's all domesticated New England stuff? I guess you're going to say that that goes to Joseph.

Brant Gardner [00:23:14] Same kind of thing. Yeah. It's all in the vocabulary. And it's one of those points where you say, because it's a translation. I don't know how to take any of those terms, so I can't use them either for or against the Book of Mormon. I have to kind of set them aside and say, I've got to judge the Book of Mormon on something more substantial than vocabulary. Just like I can't say that the Book of Mormon can't be true because the French word adieu is in there. It's translation, folks. English wasn't the original language. So vocabulary is something that we can't use either for or against until you've gone and done something else. So you've got to judge the Book of Mormon on something other than that before you deal with those particular issues.

Book of Mormon Geography and the Cumorah Question

John Dehlin [00:24:04] Okay, all right, so geography. Where in the heck did it take place? You know, a lot of people say there's just no geography that maps to the geography that's described in the Book of Mormon.

Brant Gardner [00:24:22] Yeah. And half of the people, I suppose, that say that haven't really looked. Half of the other half, I suppose, have competing geographies. There's only one that I've been able to see that that actually fits with a very stringent reading of both the text, the nature of the geography, the topography, so that all of the ups and downs are in the same places, the hydrology, so that, you know where the rivers are and the rivers are in the right places. Getting all of those pieces together, the only place that that fits is in the area that we call Mesoamerica. And the part of the Book of Mormon that fits that region would cover from kind of the bottom third, let's say, of Guatemala, up into the Chiapas area of southern Mexico, up into the Gulf of Mexico, and probably no further north than that, with the River Sidon being probably the Nephite name for what we call the Grijalva River. And that geography actually works quite well.

John Dehlin [00:25:38] And then what do you do about Cumorah?

Brant Gardner [00:25:42] Cumorah is one of those interesting issues because it becomes a battle cry for so many people. There is a Cumorah in the Book of Mormon, and there is a Cumorah from which Joseph took plates. And the real question is, you know, are they the same hill? Well, there is a hill Cumorah in the Book of Mormon. And so, you know, certainly there's a hill Cumorah. The question is, is that Drumlin in New York, the very hill Cumorah around which the Nephites died and around which there were so many Jaredite battles? And the answer to that one is there certainly isn't any evidence for it. There is certainly evidence that the early Saints called that hill Cumorah, but they called it that hill after the fact. And based on the fact that plates were taken out of it. Which is kind of ironic because the textual reason that you would talk about Cumorah as the place that have the plates is because Mormon says that he put plates into the hill Cumorah. What's really ironic is he says, save these that I'm giving to Moroni. In other words, there were plates put in to hill Cumorah except the ones that Joseph Smith got. So the ones that Joseph Smith received were never in Cumorah to be taken from Cumorah. So are you saying that.

John Dehlin [00:27:10] Are you saying that the plates Joseph received were different than the ones Moroni buried?

Brant Gardner [00:27:14] Moroni had source plates and then he created his record on a set of plates and he took the sources that he read and buried them in Cumorah. He took the book that he wrote and that Moroni finished, gave it to Moroni. And the plates that Moroni have, you know, that he worked with are the ones that Joseph Smith got. And those, according to the text, were never buried in Cumorah.

John Dehlin [00:27:44] What happened to them?

Brant Gardner [00:27:47] Don't know. Moroni probably took them up to some Drumland in New York and buried them there.

John Dehlin [00:27:53] Okay, so. Okay, so one of the things people mock is the idea that Moroni would bury the plates in one Cumorah and then God would like move them to a different Cumorah.

Brant Gardner [00:28:05] Yeah, I'd probably mock that one too. I wouldn't believe that.

John Dehlin [00:28:09] So what do you think happened?

Brant Gardner [00:28:12] The most parsimonious explanation is that at some point in time, good old Moroni walked a long way and buried the plates in this hill in New York because God told him that's where they needed to be so Joseph could find them?

John Dehlin [00:28:27] What about the argument that they would have been too heavy for a man to carry and he could have made that big long journey and survived?

Brant Gardner [00:28:34] Joseph carried them around and the information was about £60. I don't see a problem with anybody carrying a 60 pound pack or a 60 pound worth of anything. One of the things that John Sorensen found was a record of a person who actually made that trek in, I think it was the 1700s who came from somewhere around Central America and walked basically toward New York. So we know that not only can it happen, somebody has actually done it. So knowing that someone has done it makes it much more logical that Moroni could have done it as well.

John Dehlin [00:29:12] So again, I'm sorry if I'm asking you to repeat yourself. So nowhere in the Book of Mormon does it say Moroni buried the plates in the same Hill, Cumorah, that everyone fought around.

Brant Gardner [00:29:24] No, the one statement. You are correct. That's what I'm saying. The one statement that we have about burying things in the Hill, Cumorah, is that Mormon buried records in the Hill, except the ones that have become our Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:29:41] Huh?

Brant Gardner [00:29:44] Yeah. It very clearly says that, you know, the plates that Joseph Smith got were not buried in Cumorah. Now somebody will say, of course, that he went back and buried them. And the text doesn't preclude that. It just doesn't say that.

John Dehlin [00:30:00] Okay, so there's all this talk of a large. What is it? Large geography versus small geography kind of theories. Is that right?

Brant Gardner [00:30:10] Yeah. Hemispheric versus limited. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:30:13] And why are people battling over this? What's the nature? What's the nature of the battle?

Brant Gardner [00:30:20] The nature of the battle is, I guess everybody would really like to know where the Book of Mormon took place. And everybody has different theories. And, you know, there are lots of them. One of them is this hemispheric theory that is probably the oldest one, which says that there were Nephites probably over all of North America and all of South America. I'm reasonably certain that that was the idea that most of the early church had. Even when they looked at the Stevens and Catherwood book that described all of the wonderful things they were finding in Central America, and people like Joseph Smith and even Orson Pratt would look at those and go, wow, those must have had something to do with the Nephites. They would still believe that the Nephites were in north and South America. It was a time period when they kind of accepted anything and everything pretty much uncritically because the Book of Mormon was wonderful. Therefore, it wonderfully happened everywhere and explained everything. Since that time, there have been other people that have been trying to figure out where the Book of Mormon took place. You will find traditionalists who will say that because Joseph Smith believed, at least at one point in time, that it happened all over the entire hemisphere, that that's what we must believe. You'll find other people that say, well, I can find a way to make it look like it happened all in the Great Lakes area. Somebody else in Baja California, the really fascinating one in the Malay Peninsula.

John Dehlin [00:31:58] Is it fascinating or are you saying that tongue in cheek?

Brant Gardner [00:32:01] Oh, fascinating in the way the argument is presented. It's another one of those where, if you look at specifics, the model cannot survive close scrutiny. But fascinating in the attempt that was made to put it there.

John Dehlin [00:32:21] Is that true about the Baja theory and the Great Lakes theory as well, as far as your opinion is none of those can survive.

Brant Gardner [00:32:29] Yeah, none of them survive. There's all kinds of problems that they have just with the geography, topography, distances between. But then when you try to put cultural information with them, then they really

John Dehlin [00:32:43] fall apart and then large versus limited. Does large stand up at all in your estimation?

Brant Gardner [00:32:56] My understanding is that Sorensen's calculation of the distances involved in the Book of Mormon is probably as rigorous as what we have, and of course cannot be precise, but gives us a ballpark of something that in its largest extent, north to south would have been about 600 miles. And what I find fascinating is that gives us about the same area as Palestine. So, you know, the Book of Mormon is taking place in a number of square miles. That's very, very similar to the Bible, but, yeah, limited, because, you know, in all of the travels from place to place, you've got human beings who have to make that trek, and we've got a certain number of days that they've done it in, and that appears to necessarily limit the distances.

John Dehlin [00:33:48] Okay, okay. But it's fair to say that church leaders, prophets, apostles, for what, 100 and whatever years seem to kind of favor the large geography theory, right?

Brant Gardner [00:34:09] Certainly that's the theory that was the most traditional, the one that most people believed. If you look very carefully, what you'll find is that, oh, I guess it was somewhere around the late 1800s to early 1900s, there was a resurgence of people looking at the geography of the Book of Mormon, and the Brethren were basically saying, nobody's agreeing on this stuff, so it's interesting, but not doctrine. And their caution was we don't know where it's taken place. So if you look at official pronouncements, where they're trying to be specific, the only specific thing they say is there is nothing specific. If you look at the generalities and the rhetoric, it's going to follow the traditional lines.

John Dehlin [00:34:54] Right. But I mean, you get the sense with Joseph that he thinks everybody, every. Every Native American is a Lamanite, right?

Brant Gardner [00:35:03] Oh, certainly. And if you read Armand Moss's book, All Abraham's Children, he has a really good discussion of what that word Lamanite meant in the church and how it's changed its meaning over time. So that would be a good source for people to look at if they're interested in that. But Joseph certainly would have used the term Lamanite for anybody that was a Native American. And then after the publication of the Stevenson Catherwood Book, that's when he got excited about things in Central America and started saying that some of those cities must have been Lamanite or Nephite.

John Dehlin [00:35:49] Okay, okay. So as far as you're concerned, the time it takes to travel distances in the Book of Mormon alone really only leaves us with the limited geography theory. And Central America is about the only place that makes sense geographically and culturally for you.

Brant Gardner [00:36:08] Right? Limited because of the time. So no matter where you place it on the world, it has to be in a more limited geography. And then when you're looking for a specific geography, the one that fits best with all of the features is going to be the one that Sorensen's come up with down in Central America. Now, of course, there are competing Mesoamerican theories as well. You know, people who've lined up things in slightly different ways. And having gone through those, I still lean to Sorenson's.

John Dehlin [00:36:44] Okay, why. Why don't we find credible, or do we credible remnants of Hebrew in the languages that survive in Mesoamerica? And why don't we find references to Christ in Christianity and Christian doctrine? And why doesn't any of this show up in the history books?

Brant Gardner [00:37:10] Okay, certainly valid questions. And the problem really isn't even in the answer. The problem is in the question itself. Because there's a presumption that we should see Hebrew in the New World or that we should see Christian doctrines or Christian artifacts. And when you look at the actual history of how populations come together, you're not going to find that that's the expectation that we ought to have. And a lot of it is related back to the time when we assumed that the Book of Mormon explained everybody's everything. So we assume that if the Book of Mormon people spoke Hebrew, that everybody would speak Hebrew. And in fact, there were books in the early 1700s. Josiah, priests being one of them, was passing along the information. Oh, Boudinot was one of the guys that did it, where they would say there is remnants of Hebrew in these native Indian languages. At the time of Joseph Smith, there were people who were saying that, yeah, we find Hebrew all over the place. No modern linguist would believe that. And it wasn't true then and isn't true now. It was, you know, kind of the result of what they were looking for and, you know, sort of finding something because they really didn't know what they were looking at. But when you have a really small population that enters a larger established population, history tells us that it's really, really unusual for that smaller population to dominate the language of the larger population. Even if you retain it for a while, the larger population language is going to continue. So just as one example, you've got the Norman kings in France or in England. So you have a French speaking court in England. And we speak English, we don't speak French. Now, of course, there's a lot of vocabulary that came from the French, So it's not exactly the same thing. But still, that general idea where a small group of people is mixing in with a larger group of people, with the number of people who came across the boat with Lehi, you've got maybe 40 people. And if they're landing on, let's say, the coast of Guatemala, 600 B.C. archaeologically, we know of at least six sites in the foothills along the coast of Guatemala that had a thousand people each. So you take 40 people, mix them in with a minimum of 6,000 people whose language is going to prevail, even though they kept whatever they knew of Hebrew and whatever they knew of Egyptian. And some of those things were certainly scholarly languages. I can't imagine that they would have been the lingua franca that would have been the language of the people. So I'm not shocked at all that the languages that we find don't have any remnant of Hebrew, because I wouldn't expect them to find one. The question of Christianity is a little different because obviously.

John Dehlin [00:40:24] Wait, wait, wait. I'm sorry, let me.

Brant Gardner [00:40:25] Sorry.

John Dehlin [00:40:26] Okay, sorry, I don't mean to interrupt. I had, I had you on mute. So I tried to interject earlier. So is there anything in the Book of Mormon that suggests or that emphasizes that Lehi and Nephi joined a much larger population?

Population, DNA, and Archaeological Evidence

Brant Gardner [00:40:50] There is no direct text that says Lehi and Nephi met up with thousands of people. What you have to do is read the text and kind of read between the lines and look at the history to find out, you know, what's happening. The clearest text that's there is when Nephi is separating from his brothers and he's saying, you know, here are the people who came with me, and of course Laman and Lemuel are staying behind. And he names Sam and Jacob and Joseph and names a sister or two and, you know, names pretty much, you know, between the ones we know left with Laman and Lemuel and the ones that he names. He pretty much names everybody that we could possibly think of who would have come over on the boat and was still alive. And then he says, and everybody else who would come. So a whole bunch of people went with him that we don't know anything about. Because he never tells us. So there's an indication that, you know, they must have merged with someone else. The rest of it is, again, inference. Very soon after, Nephi goes up into the mountains and again, in Sorensen's correlation, up into highland Guatemala, as soon as they arrive there, they start building a city, and very, very quickly they're building a temple. When you're putting a city together, if you don't have very many people at all, you don't build public monuments. You've got to build your houses, you've got to make sure that you've got food, you don't get to have public buildings until you have a reasonably large population. So that's another indication that there must have been a much larger population that early. There are other indications that you have where, again, if you're reading the text and looking at what's happening and what the background would be, where the only reasonable explanation is that there were other people there that were present, but the text never specifically says that.

John Dehlin [00:42:46] Doesn't that feel a little bit like a stretch, though? Like, I mean, shouldn't the book say, you know, I mean, you know, yeah, we built this city, but then these weirdos that spoke a totally different language, these savages that, you know, used clubs or. And had turkeys or whatever, you know, shouldn't it give some. Indicate, give us something that speaks to these massive populations that likely existed, millions of people.

Brant Gardner [00:43:21] And there is again, the sort of the problem of imposing our assumptions of what something should have been like on an ancient text. You know, we assume, obviously, that they should have mentioned that. Now, the real question is, that's fair, right?

John Dehlin [00:43:39] It's fair. Isn't that fair?

Brant Gardner [00:43:40] It's certainly a fair question to ask. The question then becomes, is it a fair requirement? Can we say, because it is not there, that there's something wrong with the Book of Mormon? And in that case, you have to look at it and look at a couple of things. One of them is the beginning that we have in the Book of Mormon is this Book of Nephi. According to the story that the text tells us about the Book of Nephi, it isn't the first book that Nephi wrote. He wrote a history. And then he specifically says, what I'm writing now isn't a history. Now, there's all kinds of reasons for going through one Nephi and looking at its structure and what it's doing and why it's written the way it is. But back to the question of, you know, should he have mentioned something if he did it should have been in those other plates, and isn't the reason why he wrote this one. So the fact that it's not there doesn't really tell us much, because that wasn't the reason why Nephi wrote the text that we have. He wrote another book that was specifically about history, which, if he were going to mention it, would have been the place. We don't even have that. The second thing is the 116 pages that were lost weren't what Nephi wrote. They were what Mormon wrote. And so the question would then be, would it have been something that Mormon thought was really important? And the answer to that is probably not, because he's been in the, you know, his people have been in the New World for a thousand years. He doesn't have to explain to anybody else that there are people around because they know it. So Mormon has no reason to do it. Nephi has no reason to do it. We really wish it were there, but modern scholars wish lots of things were in ancient documents. And unfortunately, we don't get what we want. We get what they gave us.

John Dehlin [00:45:36] Hmm. Well, I see your point, and I guess you. You concede that the questions are. Are fair ones, right?

Brant Gardner [00:45:46] Oh, they're absolutely fair. What. What would not be fair is to say, because I don't get the answer that I think I should have had, that that's an indictment on the Book of Mormon, because then that's taking a fair question and presuming that there's only one possible answer to it, which would not be fair.

John Dehlin [00:46:05] Right. I posted on Facebook, I asked people to offer questions, and one guy just wrote in, ask him if he can name any other civilizations that have simply disappeared off the face of the earth without at least leaving some trace of their existence. What would you say to Craig?

Brant Gardner [00:46:23] Can I tell you that somebody has disappeared and we don't know anything about them and tell you exactly who it is that we don't know anything about? No. Now, let's go back to the rest of the question, though. What the question is asking is, it is presuming that I cannot find anything that materially describes a Nephite. And that goes back to the question of expectations. What would a Nephite city look like? What would a Nephite house look like? What does a Nephite pot look like? We started earlier with the question of Christianity, and it's a really important one because we know that there is Christianity being taught in the Book of Mormon, and yet we don't seem to find it. Now, of course, if you Read the early Spanish Fathers and you read the right ones, they were finding it all over the place. But I think there's a different reason for that. But archaeologically, that's the parallel fallacy you talked about. Yeah, exactly. But archaeologically, we don't find, you know, this evidence of Christianity. And the real problem there is, what would New World Christianity look like? Well, the question then is, what does Old World Christianity look like? Well, artistically, it pulled themes that were already available in the art of the time and incorporated them and adopted them. So Old World Christianity, although we have come to understand it as Christian art, began as adopted pagan art. So the earliest representations of Jesus Christ looked a lot like Apollo, not like the, you know, the beatific bearded man that we see in pictures now, which some people think might have been, you know, based on Zeus in the Temple of Zeus, but early on it was Apollo even so much that you'd have the image of Apollo with the sheep on the shoulder, and that would become an image of Christ. Other things that become an image of Christ are loaves and fishes, which you would understand if and only if you know that story in the Bible. But if you're not sure about that story and you just see a picture of bread and fish, you're looking at dinner. So the problem is, when we start looking for Christianity, all of the symbols that we would recognize as Christian post date the Book of Mormon's departure from the old world by 600 years. So you've got 600 years where there's a complete separation in iconographic representation at a time when, if you're going to borrow something. Now, what you're borrowing from is coming from a completely different iconographic system than it is from the Old World. So you might have pictures of Christ in some mural somewhere, and you might look at it and say, boy, that looks like the God, so? And so. And the Nephites would have said, well, no, that's a picture of Christ. How would we know? Well, how did you know when you looked at a picture of Apollo, if it was Apollo or Christ? So we're making assumptions about what should be there rather than understanding what the actual historical situation would have been. So do we have Nephites that have vanished without leaving trace? Oh, I doubt it. I'm pretty sure that we've got people who have dug up Nephite cities. The problem is we can't say that they were Nephite cities, but just like if someone were to dig up Albuquerque a thousand years from now, I'm not sure they could Tell that Mormon lived in my house and a non Mormon lived in the house next door. They couldn't do it by the shape of the house. They couldn't do it by the car I drive. They couldn't do it by the pans I cook in. There's just a lot of things that are going to survive that are built on material culture that is indistinguishable from my neighbors.

John Dehlin [00:50:35] And so it's fair for people to

Brant Gardner [00:50:37] say

John Dehlin [00:50:40] that those things should, there should be traces that show up. And it's also. You're saying it's fair to also say that it's unfair to expect that always to be the case.

Brant Gardner [00:50:52] No, what I'm saying is it is always fair to say that we expect that people will leave traces. What is not fair is to say that because the trace doesn't look like we think it should look, that therefore it doesn't represent any fight.

John Dehlin [00:51:09] And that that would probably be the way that you would handle the DNA concerns the fact that, the fact that you, you don't find DNA in Native Americans that, that scholars would, would tie back to, you know, to Jerusalem. Instead you find markers that would tie back to Asia or Mongolia or, you know, people that would have come over the Bering Strait. A typical apologist response would be, how do we know what, you know, you know, Hebrew or Israelite DNA would have looked like in 1600 B.C. right, right. And why would we expect Native Americans now to have Israel DNA when they would have been subsumed by the larger population anyway?

Brant Gardner [00:52:01] Right. And all of the, what people forget about the DNA studies is that they are reductive. You know, the more you go back into the past, the more they reduce variations into consistency. And so you had people that came up with, oh, we found the mitochondrial Eve, and you know, we found this one woman and we go back to that one woman. Well, that sounds like you've got one woman and everybody's descended from her. That one woman, at the time she lived would have been surrounded by thousands, maybe tens of thousands of other women. It's just that their DNA or their mitochondrial DNA did not survive. So, you know, all these things do is tell you where the trends are of the surviving DNA. It doesn't tell you about anybody whose DNA didn't survive. And so, you know, using it again as a negative saying, you know, I'm not finding anything that's really obviously Israelite, therefore there were no Israelites, goes far, far beyond the evidence and what the evidence was even designed to do right now, I do have to come back to one thing because we were talking about Michael coe. There were two things in the things that Dr. Koh was talking about. You know, one of them, we're not finding these specific things. And of course we've talked about vocabulary, you know, anachronisms as the reason why I'm not terribly worried about those. But there is something else that he was very strong about and I think important for everyone to understand because it's a shift in, again, perception of the Book of Mormon. What he was talking about is we can go back to the Maya and for as far back as we can understand, they were Maya. We go back to the Olmec, and for as far back as we go, they're Olmec. We never see a time when the Olmec, you know, were once Hebrew and became Olmec. And I think that's an important distinction in first of all, the nature of the evidence and secondly, the way we perceive the Book of Mormon. I know of many people who've done work on the Book of Mormon who, if not explicitly, implicitly, still believe that all of New World civilization was caused because these sophisticated Nephites came over and gave them culture. And Coe is reacting against that idea. And I would agree with him. I don't think there's any evidence of it. I don't see any need for it. I don't think that suggests that there were no Nephites or were no Lamanites. What it does is say that we have to understand that there were cultural processes and material culture and intellectual culture that was already in place when the peoples of the Book of Mormon showed up. And what I've done when I was working on the six volume commentary was take that background and say, you know, can we see those historical pressures and those cultures reflected in the concerns and the issues that the Book of Mormon talks about? And I think we do see them there. So if you want to talk about archaeology, I guess I see sort of textual archaeology in the Book of Mormon that says that the Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica. I don't necessarily see material artifacts that say Hebrews were in Mesoamerica, but then again, I don't expect to find them,

John Dehlin [00:55:40] but it would make sense that they would be there. The probabilities would be that artifacts or DNA or markers or cultural markers, the probabilities would lead us to expect remnants and artifacts. Right.

Brant Gardner [00:55:59] What the probabilities tell you is that whoever the Nephites were, they left some indication where they lived. You know, there was they had houses, and the houses left remnants. They had pots and they left pots. But as a people who was coming from a different climate, a different set of natural resources, and coming to a new world where there were different foodstuffs, different animals, different dangers, different climates, different sources of pots, different fashions, and certainly all of us have been in the situation where something that, you know, we originally think is a little bit strange a couple of years later, after seeing it becomes high fashion, we wish we had one. You know, that's what's happening with the Nephites. They become enculturated into Mesoamerica and their material culture, the kinds of things that you leave on the ground, would be very similar to what everybody else had. So did they leave any remnants of who they were? Sure. Can you look at them and say, well, that certainly wasn't appropriate to the area. It must have come from the old world? No. Heavens, no. And particularly when we start looking at things after the Book of Mormon's been in the new world for four or five hundred years, there's every reason to believe that the cultural pressures would have had similar material culture, particularly with. With the trades. Just like, you know, wherever I go in the United States, houses look, you know, regionally similar to each other and are not differentiated by religion.

John Dehlin [00:57:43] I hear you. And there's still a part of me that. That realizes that somehow, you know, Latin, Latin shows up in English today, and Greek, I don't know that the English that we have today, you can trace it back and find remnants of other civilizations aggregating into the English that we use today. And you can, you know, they're just. And you can go to other historical sites and find plates or tablets or. Or weapons or buried fossils that match whatever history that we have. And so while theoretically and philosophically I think I can get what you're saying, it just feels like there's a material difference between what the Book of Mormon claims and asserts and what the archaeological evidence show. You're just. It seems like you're. You're relying on those exceptions to a much larger degree, and you're sort of discounting the probabilities to a much larger degree than you would under other, let's say, neutral or scientific circumstances. Isn't that fair to say?

Brant Gardner [00:59:04] No, not at all. And the reason is, again, if you go back to, you know, the people who came over in the ship with Lehi, let's say there's 40 people, and soon after they arrived, those 40 people, let's make a nice even division split into Lamanites and Nephites, and there were 20 of them in each group. How influential are 20 people going to be if they're in an area where we know archaeologically that in the immediate vicinity there were a minimum of 6,000 and probably a lot more. And by the time the 20 that were Nephites went up into highland Guatemala, certainly a much larger population. You know, exactly how much influence are those 20 people going to have? How much is their language going to be retained for a thousand years and influence other languages? You know, you're putting really, really heavy weight on some really thin threads. If you're expecting 20 people to have, you know, immaterial and linguistic influence that's going to last that long. It just. I know why people expect it because we're so excited about the Book of Mormon. We assume that it should have done all these things, but again, pretty dispassionately from the nature of history, you're not going to get 20 people that are going to cause that kind of cultural revolution, particularly when they come from the wrong place, don't know the material culture, and have to learn how to deal with this new world. They're in the mode of. Of receiving, not giving.

John Dehlin [01:00:40] Okay, all right. Well, I think. I think. I think we've covered this point, and it leads me to a question that, that I think touches on what I'm trying to get at, but maybe looking at it from a different angle. I mean, if you go to reputable non LDS archaeologists, right, they may grant philosophically and theoretically everything you're saying about what we should or shouldn't expect from archaeology or linguistics or DNA, but at the same time, if you said read the Book of Mormon and how credible is this? What do you think the response would be for most PhDs in archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, the focus of Mesoamerica, what do you think their response would be?

Brant Gardner [01:01:32] Well, the immediate response would be, I don't have time to read that thing.

John Dehlin [01:01:35] And then let's say that they actually read it.

Brant Gardner [01:01:37] Then what do they say if they read it again? It would depend on sort of the way that you read it. If I read it in English and I read horse and I choke on the word horse, excuse me. You know, I'm going to say, yep, horse, yep, not there. And it's. And they're going to reject it. What I am hoping would happen is if someone goes through, you know, sort of the historical way that I put things together in the commentary that says this is how it fits into that area, what I would Expect someone to say at some point in time is, okay, I can see why you would believe that. I certainly doubt that anybody would say, okay, therefore I believe the Book of Mormon is true. I think the best statement that we would ever get from a non Mormon specialist would be, okay, I understand why you believe that, and that's probably as good as it'll ever get.

John Dehlin [01:02:33] But the likely response, if you forced 100 anthropologists to sit down and read the book and you didn't let them get up until they were done and then they got done, what do you think the distribution of responses would be? Where would the mean fall? Like wouldn't it be, this is ridiculous. You just wasted X hours of my time. This is a fantasy fairytale. And I see, I can see through plausible deniability why you could say this is theoretically possible. But would any of the responses be or would any significant number of the responses be, wow, I'm going to start incorporating Book of Mormon stuff into my research because it's so this is really fascinating and probable. You know, this provides new data to help us understand Mesoamerican archaeology better. How much of that would there be, do you think?

Brant Gardner [01:03:27] Well, I mean, one of the questions is you would have to ask me whether I think that understanding the Book of Mormon this way helps me understand Mesoamerican archaeology better. And I would say, no, it doesn't. You know, I think the Nephite record is a record just like that of the Jews of sort of a little bit more of a bywater in the cultural history. The Bible is a history of the people that were the doormats to the Egyptians and the Hittites and, you know, Assyrians and Babylonians. So it doesn't surprise me at all that the record that we have of the Nephites was not of an influencing group of people, but one that was on the receiving end of the major trends. And archaeologists are going to be following the major trends. We don't have enough information to follow the minor ones. We simply don't have the data available. The rest of it is. It's kind of a loaded question because if you start with the presumption that there is no God and that this couldn't have happened, how many are going to be convinced? Well, those who are convinced are probably going to believe the Book of Mormon and be baptized and therefore not be qualified as non Mormon archaeologists anymore. And so you're probably going to find ideological divisions. So yeah. Is there anything about this that will compel anybody's belief? No. Is There enough information in the Book of Mormon that when you read it against that area, you can see how the Book of Mormon fits into that area, that time period, those cultures, those cultural trends that are happening in exactly the time period that the Book of Mormon states. Yeah, you can certainly never enough to compel belief.

John Dehlin [01:05:09] Right. But if you were to ask a hundred anthropologists, is the Book of Mormon credible? Is the text of the Book of Mormon credible or probable or probably historical, based on what you know about anthropology and archaeology, don't you think the overwhelming response would be, no, not credible?

Brant Gardner [01:05:31] You know, if you put the question that way, I could also say what would happen if I asked, you know, a few hundred airline pilots what they thought of it. They'd also think it wasn't credible. It's not necessarily the correct question to ask because of the prejudices going into it and in many cases the difficulty of reading the text without prejudice.

John Dehlin [01:05:53] Okay, so you agree that they would probably come back overwhelmingly as saying not credible, but you say that, that is.

Brant Gardner [01:06:03] You really want me to say that, don't you?

John Dehlin [01:06:05] Well, no, I just, I, you know, this, this, this comes not from a place of trying to do gotcha. This comes from a place of like, being taught that the age of the earth is 6,000 years and the dinosaurs were put on the earth by Satan to deceive mankind. I guess I've got a little bit of a frustration that I was raised to hold science in low regard and to dismiss science and to look on scientists with suspicion and ill intent on their part, because so often what science has discovered, age of the earth, fossil record, whatever, you know, conflicts with traditional religious narratives. And so let's throw the scientists under the bus instead of reflect back on our narratives. Now, I have to give you credit because you've looked hard at the science and I don't see you throwing scientists under the bus at all. I see you respecting science. But at the same time, I think that if we're going to respect science, we need to, you know, it's a fair question to say, you know, there's a lot. There's this rumor that the Book of Mormon is so awesome that, you know, the National Geographic Institute or the Smithsonian used to send their archaeologists out with the Book of Mormon to help them find archaeology digs. Right. In other words, the Book of Mormon is so awesome that scientists use it to help, you know, do better science. And that's obviously been proven to be ridiculous. But the flip side is also, you know, worth exploring. And that's that let's Take credible scientists who understand linguistics and archaeology and anthropology and DNA and let's have them read the Book of Mormon and say, what's the probability that this bears any resemblance to the data? And see what their response would be. I'm not trying to, like, trap you, but can you see why people would want to sort of say, does it pass the smell test? Forget plausible deniability. Does the book. Is the book credible from an archaeological, historical, linguistic, you know, anthropological sort of point of view? It's a fair question, right?

Brant Gardner [01:08:30] Yeah, it's a fair question, but one that almost requires that I sort of stand outside of history and anything I know of human populations to answer it. For example, Einstein comes along and has this theory of relativity. If within five or six years, the publication of the theory of relativity, you were to line up physicists and ask them to review it and tell you whether or not they thought that was any good, do you know what the answer would have been? They'd have dismissed it entirely and did and required, you know, some proof that they. That took a long time coming before they were able to accept it. So, you know, the fact that based on the way we understand the world, if we come up against something new, you know, what's our response going to be? You know, history tells us that you're going to interpret the world the way you understand it and not according to this new information. So, yeah, if they were to read the text in English and not have any other coaching on how to look at the text or to read it as translation literature. Yeah, I can't imagine very many of them saying that sounds like a Mesoamerican book. Nevertheless, I think if they would look at some of the kinds of things that I'm pointing out in the text, they'd say, well, yeah, okay, that does. But it still isn't going to be anything where they'd say, oh, therefore I'm going to change the way I do archeology. Because again, there's nothing in the Book of Mormon that dictates that mainstream of the flow of history in Mesoamerica. What was happening in the Book of Mormon was reactive to that mainstream, not causative of it.

John Dehlin [01:10:28] Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Music today was provided by the Saber Rattlers. Check them out at saber-rattlers.com the Mormon Stories logo was generously donated by StudioCase.com thanks for listening.

John Dehlin [01:10:43] Come, come, ye saints no toil nor labor fear but with joy wend your way Though hard to you this journey may appear grace shall be as your day Tis better far for us to strive Are you useless cares from us to drive to the San Jo your hearts will swell oh, all is well all is well. Why should we mourn? Think our lot is hard Tis not so all is right why should we think to earn a great reward if we now shun the fight Good up your lo Fresh courage take our God Will ever us forsake soon we'll have this tale of tales oh, all is well all is well oh, is well all is well. Sam. And should we die before our journey is through Happy day All is well we that are free from toil and sorrow too with the just we shall dwell but if our lives are spared Again to see the saints there is best obtain Or I will make this ch swell oh, all is well all is well all is well all is well all is well oh, all is well. All is away all is away. It.

Part 5 of 5 · Ep. 311

John Dehlin [00:00:00] 1, 2, 3.

John Dehlin [00:00:07] Mormon Stories Podcast is a production of the Open Stories Foundation. All donations to Mormon Stories are fully tax deductible and go directly towards keeping the podcast alive and towards building a community of support for Mormons like you. To support the podcast or to join the community, please become a monthly subscriber today@mormonstories.org all right, well, we're back for an epic fifth hour. Hopefully it won't go a full hour, but we're. We're back with Brant Gardner, author of the Gift and Power Translating the Book of Mormon. Again, go to GregCofford.com to buy the book and type in M Stories all in caps if you want a discount on this book or on any other books. But Grant, I just want to. Brant, I just want to thank you for standing up to the tough. I don't know if these are tough questions, maybe my listeners could come up with tougher ones, but I want to thank you for facing the questions and doing it with a lot of interesting insight.

Race, Skin Color, and Problematic Passages

Brant Gardner [00:01:11] No, thank you.

John Dehlin [00:01:12] Yeah. Now I would like to kind of maybe just end talking about just faith and scripture and the church in general, kind of the implications for some of the things you're saying and then end with your testimony. Is that okay?

Brant Gardner [00:01:31] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:01:32] All right.

Brant Gardner [00:01:33] So

John Dehlin [00:01:37] something that I didn't bring up because I wanted to save it towards the end is if Joseph can get horse wrong or if he can get steal wrong or whatever, then what's to say he didn't get faith wrong or repentance wrong or, you know, other important parts of the Book of Mormon? And I'll even extend that one bit further. If we're willing to grant so many possible exceptions, so many possible interpretations,

Brant Gardner [00:02:15] doesn't

John Dehlin [00:02:15] at some point it become kind of absurd or ridiculous to just sort of say that anything is possible, any. Anything goes, you know, because it seems like this line of reasoning that you might be taking could be taken to the extreme to where any word can mean anything and anything is possible and we don't have to ground any of our thoughts or beliefs in language or history or anthropology. You know, anything's possible. What would you say to those two sort of lines of thought, both on a micro level, about the words and the language in the Book of Mormon and then the implications for these more liberal interpretations or theories or approaches?

Brant Gardner [00:03:01] Certainly one of the things that people have mentioned looking at concepts of translation of the Book of Mormon is this slippery slope theory, which says that once you've backed away from an absolute literal definition, that you get to the point where, you know, anything is free form and, you know, you can do anything you want. And I certainly understand that as a problem. And the question then becomes, what do you do to sort of counteract that so that you're not simply saying, well, this is what works in this position and this is what works over here. And you just sort of pull one from column A and one from column B, and you answer everything by, you know, some diversion or sleight of hand. And the actual answer to that is, no matter what you're doing, you have to have some sort of regulation to it. So that if I say I don't know whether or not a horse is a horse, I have to have something that tells me, you know, can I make that distinction if it's possible, that it's different, does the text tell me what it's like? And so I actually have to go to the text and I have to say, you know, does the horse behave like a horse? If it does, then I have to believe that it's a horse. So you get the contrast between, you know, metal plates and the horse, where the text does not have the horse ever acting like a horse or doing anything like a horse. But I do have to say that there are metal plates because, you know, that's very obvious from the nature of the plates. So you have to be grounded in what the text says. Now, as far as what happens in archeology, you have to ask the right questions. I cannot be held, you know, to a theory that says I don't see any Christian artifacts in the New world, when everything we know about Christian artifacts is absolutely dependent on artistic traditions of the old world. So something there has to be different. What I can do is I can do what is done with any text of any kind of questionable provenance. I can take it back to the time period and I can say, does this text reflect or what the time period says should be reflected? Does it tell me, you know, does it describe the political tensions? Does it describe, you know, all other kinds of developments? And, you know, we've gone on long enough that I'm certainly not going to try to come up with any. But one of the things that I was doing in the commentary, that six volume set was to go through and look at the historical background, assuming that the Book of Mormon would have taken place in Mesoamerica and say, you know, is what we know of Mesoamerica based on what's something that, you know, Michael Coe would recognize, does that inform the Book of Mormon? And I think there's some very important ways that it does. So there are controls that absolutely have to be put in place. If you come up with a theory that explains things by saying anything is possible, and then you're no better off than saying it's true because I said so.

John Dehlin [00:06:25] Okay, all right. And again, how do we trust the spiritual or the doctrinal parts of the Book of Mormon

Brant Gardner [00:06:37] as opposed to vocabulary that can't be there or that may or may not be different, as opposed

John Dehlin [00:06:43] to all the other potential errors or.

Brant Gardner [00:06:46] Yeah, again, spiritual things. How do you trust that the people in the Bible got the religious content correct based on other things? I may believe that Christ's teachings on baptism actually accurately reflect what he believed. I probably do not. Well, probably I do not believe in Balaam's talking ass. You know, there are some places that are story and that does not preclude that I can learn a lesson from Balaam, but I don't have to believe that his ass was actually talking to him. So you know what happens in the Book of Mormon? Can you believe those things because it's a religious document? Ultimately the spirit is what's going to tell you what you can and cannot believe. But as far as an historical document or the nature of translation, one of the things that I found in my examination of the information there is that what it is is a functional translation, which means that it's close. It's just changing vocabulary. But, but content certainly seems to come from the Book of Mormon. And because it was the content that was there, and it's the content of those spiritual things that is really important rather than the vocabulary in which they're described, I think we can still have tremendous faith that those religious teachings are accurate and useful for us.

John Dehlin [00:08:20] You say that you don't, do you not, do you not believe that there's dark skinned and light skinned people in the Book of Mormon? Did I hear you say that?

Brant Gardner [00:08:30] You did hear me say that and that is true. I went through the Book of Mormon trying to figure out what the text said about that. Because again, what we have is vocabulary. And the question is, what does that vocabulary mean in the Old Testament when it talks about skin and color, it's talking about emotion and sinfulness and not talking about pigmentation. So if we have a tradition of color being used to describe a state of righteousness rather than pigmentation, the question is, is that what we're seeing in the Book of Mormon or are we seeing pigmentation? And it's all part of, you know, the analysis is in the Commentary. But I went through everything that I could possibly look at in all the places where a change in pigmentation should have shown up or should have been important and wasn't there. The only conclusion I can come up with is that the way color is used with relationship to skin in the Book of Mormon is the same way that it is in the Bible, and it refers to a state of righteousness and has nothing to do with pigmentation.

John Dehlin [00:09:48] Okay, so I wasn't prepared to talk about this, but help me understand a little bit further. So the Book of Mormon talks about people's skin being turned dark. Right, right. And that they were dark and loathsome.

Brant Gardner [00:10:02] Yep, yep. And that simply by becoming a, you know, just by changing from political affiliation of Lamanite to Nephite, all of a sudden they're white and delightsome. You know, there is no known process that takes somebody from, you know, a dark pigment to a white pigment simply because you've changed political parties. You know, doesn't happen. So first of all, scientifically, we know those things don't happen. Secondly, you know, is though, you know, is the use of those terms something that can be supported where you can find cases where, oh yeah, I know you're a Nephite because you're white and I'm black. None of that ever happens. And in fact, you have Nephites who very easily infiltrate all of the Lamanites and nobody can tell the difference. So it's pretty clear that there is no pigmentation difference in the Book of Mormon that has. It's an artifact of the way we read it based on unfortunate prejudices we have in American culture. If the Book of Mormon had been printed originally in England, I would not expect people to have assumed that it would have been skin color that was the difference. That's unfortunately an American prejudice that's been around for too long and is long overdue to be gone.

John Dehlin [00:11:29] Okay, so I'm going to just. I'm going to confess that I'm not understanding. And so what I want to do, I'll just read a couple verses and I just need you to explain to me what you think it's saying versus what I think it's saying. So. Third Nephi 2:15. And their curse was taken from them and their skin became white, like unto the Nephites.

Brant Gardner [00:11:49] What do you think that's saying in the Old Testament? It talks about, you know, my face became black. Or, you know, what that means is it's a state of righteousness. If you change and adopt the gospel and you Say, okay, it's sort of like you're saying, the scales have fallen from my eyes. Well, nobody has scales on their eyes. But that image of the scales following means that now you're seeing something you hadn't seen before. And so this change where the outer person is reflective of the inner person uses the color to represent that contrast between gospel acceptance and unacceptance.

John Dehlin [00:12:36] So even though it says their skin became white, it doesn't mean their skin became white?

Brant Gardner [00:12:42] No, no. It does not mean that there was a physical change in the pigmentation. Just like in the Bible, when it says my face became black, it doesn't mean that their face was black. It meant that they were, you know, be sad or in mourning or, you know, depressed or whatever.

John Dehlin [00:13:00] Even though it's saying skin.

Brant Gardner [00:13:03] Sure, yeah. Just like the Old Testament said face.

John Dehlin [00:13:09] Yeah. But the difference is that Native Americans had dark skin, you know, and Europeans have light skin. And every. Every prophet, an apostle from, like, Joseph Smith to, like, last year, if you ask them, did God turn Nephi's skin dark, Nephite's skin dark, when they became wicked in terms of pigment, they would all say, yes, right?

Brant Gardner [00:13:38] Oh, yeah. I'm not saying that that hasn't been a way to read the Book of Mormon for a long time.

John Dehlin [00:13:45] Been read, really.

Brant Gardner [00:13:46] What I'm saying is that that is an artifact of our cultural predisposition that we've brought to the text. And that isn't what the text means, isn't supportable by the text itself.

John Dehlin [00:13:58] Isn't it what this text is saying? No. Aren't you saying that it's metaphorical, even though the text is saying that? You're saying you read it metaphorically, but the text clearly says that in, like, six places at least, right?

Brant Gardner [00:14:14] Oh, yeah. I mean, it says that. Now the question is, what does it mean when it says it?

John Dehlin [00:14:19] Okay.

Brant Gardner [00:14:20] And again, just like the question of a horse, how do you know whether or not the word horse means horse? Well, you have to look at the text to see what it says. And because you cannot see the horse doing anything, horse like, you are not forced to say that. That has to be the only possible meaning. So when you take this idea of a skin color changing and you take it to the text and you ask the text to show you examples, you cannot find any example anywhere where anybody has any reaction to anybody that is based on pigmentation. It just never happens. And in places where you have a spy that is sent in and you've got a white laymanite going into a black lamanite, they don't know who they are. Now, if you've ever seen. There was a wonderful picture a long time ago of basketball teams, and they were showing sort of these profiles of certain teams. And I say, you know, here's such and such a team. And, you know, it'd be all black silhouettes with one white guy. And then they showed the Boston Celtics, and it's all white guys and one black guy. And you look at that and you. Oh, yeah, I can. I can see there's a difference. And we all laugh because we knew that there was a difference. But it's just like that. You can tell that there's a difference. You cannot say, gee, I wonder if that guy's white or black. You know, it's pretty easy to tell in the Book of Mormon. It never makes a difference.

John Dehlin [00:15:45] Okay, so when it says, wherefore a commandment I give unto you, which is the word of God, that ye revile no more against them because of the darkness of their skins, it's not referring there to reviling them because of the darkness of their skins?

Brant Gardner [00:16:02] No, it's an idiom coming out of the Bible, and it doesn't mean it any differently in the Book of Mormon than similar Semitic idioms meant, you know, in the old world.

John Dehlin [00:16:15] Do you concede that it could mean pigment?

Brant Gardner [00:16:18] No, I do.

John Dehlin [00:16:19] You're just. You're just that. You're just. You're choosing to, you know, to ascribe a different meaning, but that God very well could be changing pigment. I mean.

Brant Gardner [00:16:31] Nope, nope, don't admit that one at all. And again, because I read very closely in the Book of Mormon and I look for all of the occasions when you would have a situation of Lamanite and Nephite interaction, and skin color is not only not there, but in places where it should have made a difference. It does not. The text itself does not support the literal interpretation of the pigment color there. I admit that it's traditional, but the text does not support it. There is no place where you can find any action that ever occurs that is based on skin pigmentation. It is always in the context of righteousness.

John Dehlin [00:17:16] Hmm. Well, on this one, I'm just gonna have to say I'm not as smart as you are, because I don't know. This part I don't understand. But I also.

Brant Gardner [00:17:26] Some somewhere it's second Nephi 5 something, I think. Anyway, there's. I've got a long discussion of it in the. The second Nephi volume, so find someone to borrow it from.

John Dehlin [00:17:38] Another reason to Buy your books. Okay.

Brant Gardner [00:17:40] Somebody else can buy it. You're welcome to borrow it.

John Dehlin [00:17:42] No, I've got it. Greg sent me a free copy, so.

Brant Gardner [00:17:45] Oh, well, hey, you're in good shape then. Go to Second Nephi, go to the index and look up Blacknesskin or something like that. You'll find it.

John Dehlin [00:17:54] Okay.

Brant Gardner [00:17:54] It's not too hard to find.

John Dehlin [00:17:55] Okay. All right. So what should we take from the fact that prophets, seers and I mean, there are implications to this, and this is my biggest concern with traditional apologetics, because so often, where do we as members get these ideas? Well, we get it from prophets and apostles. You know, Spencer B. Kimball says, you know, the Lamanites will blossom and their skin will get turned light. Well, that's why we think about pigmentation, because that's what Spencer W. Kimball said. And he was a prophet, seer and revelator. So, you know, and Brigham Young, you know, you could read a thousand, you know, a lot of quotes from him, talking all about skin color and pigmentation and curses and the pre existence and Bruce Armaconkie and, you know, a lot of these notions. It's not just we're a bunch of dummies who are bringing a bunch of biases. It's we believe in our prophets, seers and revelators. They tell us stuff and then we believe it and teach it and follow it. And so what apologists do is they, on the one hand they want to say, oh, well, that's just the opinions of men. That's just men, you know, and prophets and apostles have opinions and you need to take what they say with a grain of salt. Yet if I stood up in soccer meeting and said, everyone here, you know, Brent Gardner gave you permission to take what Thomas S. Monson says with a grain of salt, you'd be invited to step down from the podium. I mean, culturally there's not a tolerance for the type of liberties that you and other apologists seem to be encouraging us to take because it's a non trivial thing to say, oh well, Joseph Smith just got it wrong and Spencer W. Kimball got it wrong And Bruce R. McConkie got it wrong. And not only did they get it wrong on skin color, they got it wrong on Book of Mormon geography. And they went down to Mexico and Central America and called everybody Lamanites, and now we don't know whether they really are descendants or not. And as soon as you apply this to Book of Mormon stuff and race stuff, you can apply it to birth control and you can apply it to abortion and you can apply it to gay rights, and it becomes a real slippery slope. Yet if I asked an apologist, should I follow the Brethren? They'd say yes. And should I obey Thomas S. Monson now? They'd say yes. And if I said, well, I don't like Proposition 8 and I don't want to go take marriage away from people, they'd say, well, follow the prophet, and it's just a real mess. If I extend out the implications and if I tried to bring what you're saying into traditional Mormonism, I swear they would disfellowship, excommunicate me. And I bet none of you would be as courageous to teach a lot of these things over the pulpit that you're willing to say in your books. How do you make sense of. Do you concede what I'm saying, at least in part? And if so, how do you. How do you make sense of it in a way that doesn't lead all of us, you know, towards disbelief or discrediting of the brethren?

Brant Gardner [00:21:16] Well, that's a lot to respond to real quick.

John Dehlin [00:21:19] But they're fair questions, right? Can you at least acknowledge the issue?

Brant Gardner [00:21:24] Sure. And one of the reason that it's a fair question is that it has always been easier for people in religion to believe the simplest version of faith rather than anything that's more complex. And so it is much easier to say, I believe in the prophet absolutely and unequivocally than it is to say, wait a minute, the prophet is also a human being. And, you know, the church has had history. And if I understand history, I understand that things have not always been uniformly exactly the same. That's, you know, more difficult. So I certainly understand that there are lots of reasons why people would like to say, you know, I follow the prophet, and therefore any prophet who has ever said anything, I believe them. And unfortunately, the people who would do that don't actually read very many different people. And so they'll pick the one prophet that they want to follow and say, you see, this is the one, this is what he said. And then they don't have to figure out, well, wait a minute, that isn't what the next one said. And so now what do I do? So the reality of religion, if you actually are going to be an historian and you're going to try to understand how, you know, any religion has occurred through history, one of the things you have to do is to be able to say, you know, God reveals things through human beings, and, you know, through any period of time in history, we have received what we are able to receive according to the knowledge and the understanding that we have at that time. And as we learn more, we are able to receive more. And sometimes the reason that you have a living profit is, is so that you can respond to different changing times. So on the issue of pigmentation, does it bother me that I'm reading things in a different way than some of the prophets have? No, because I know why they read theirs the way they did. It doesn't bother me that Bruce R. McConkey would have written so many of the things that he did that he later stood up and said, excuse me, those are wrong. Revelation comes on and changes our opinion of some things sometimes when we were absolutely adamant about them. If you really understand the history, even going back to Old Testament, New Testament, and certainly from the history of this church, you have to realize that it has been a process of continual revelation and that things have not been always exactly the same. And that prophets, like anybody else, speak in the vocabulary of their times. Just like when Joseph Smith translated, he translated in vocabulary and phraseology that he knew and understood. Everybody does the same thing. So it's hardly surprising and certainly not an indictment of the prophets.

John Dehlin [00:24:21] Right. But are you at all bothered by the way that. That people who have chosen to speak up about some of these issues or discrepancies? Let's just say, you know, Juanita Brooks or Fawn Brody or Lowell Bennion or Eugene, England, or, you know, take dozens and dozens of people who have stood up to say there are problems here. I don't totally buy all this, BH Roberts, etc. It seems like they're so often met by church leaders with punishment and with marginalization and with scorn and derision. And that seems terribly tragic to me given that there are so many problems with what so many of our prophets, seers and revelators have taught us. Does that bother you at all that

Brant Gardner [00:25:20] there have been some tragic instances and very good people have been maligned? Yeah. I don't know if bother is the right word. Saddened by it, certainly. I wish it would have been different. But you know, my intellectual life has spanned a time period when the church was pretty adamantly anti intellectual. And I'm saying that statistically, not necessarily theologically, it wasn't necessarily that God said, by the way, we shouldn't believe intellectuals anymore. But absolutely statistically there was a strong anti intellectual feeling. I was really quite uncomfortable with that because that was kind of the way I was going. And I was saying, wait a minute, I'm Seemed to be one of the ones that is understanding things in the way that I'm being told shouldn't happen. And then there was, you know, the Camelot Leonard Arrington period, when a lot of us sort of breathed a sigh of relief and said, oh, wow, okay, that's over, and now it's changed. And then there was a bit of retrenchment from that. And frankly, I think the pendulum is swinging again. And because I certainly believe in inspiration, but inspiration to humans, the fact that there are these human aspects of the way people deal with their life in the church, yes, I find it sad. I don't find it terribly surprising, and I certainly don't find it definitive of the way the Lord works with his prophets.

John Dehlin [00:26:56] So there's just some inspiration with a bunch of messages and that we shouldn't expect otherwise. But it's sad when the mess happens

Brant Gardner [00:27:04] is that, you know, I probably wouldn't put it that way. Let me give you an analogy. I worked for a while on a petroleum plant. Not one of the times when I was doing what I really think I should have been doing, but I was working in a petroleum plant. And they put me in the control booth for a while, and the guy said to me, okay, to learn how to make product, you have to open these valves. And everything about producing petroleum products was controlling the temperature in all of these different towers that were distilling the crude oil into all these various products. And he said, here, I want you to practice, and I want you to practice by trying to control the temperature of the water. And so he said, here you are, go ahead. And we had these electrical valves where you just turned. Turn this little dial and that would open the valve out on this, what they called the skid. And, boy, I would open it up. I'd see it getting too hot, and I'd open up the thing, but I'd open it so far that water would come crashing in, and all of a sudden the temperature just dropped. And then I'd react to it and go, no, man, that was too bad. Now I've got to put heat in. And I was having these huge swings in the temperature. And he was allowing me to do that because it was a time when, for other reasons, they couldn't make good product anyway, because he knew I was going to blow it and mess everything up. What I learned from that is that what you had to do to really make good product out of crude oil was to make very, very small and finite changes and wait for them to take effect and then continually make small changes that if you try to make big rapid changes, it would really throw things out of whack. That has become my analogy for how the Lord works with all of his prophets, way he works with his people. He makes small tweaks and waits for things to calm down and see what the reaction is and then change it again. I have never seen a period of time in history other than those miraculous ones where he's leading Israel out of Egypt and where he really gets in there and interferes and makes big changes. Most of the time it's just small tweaks and you change something and you wait for it to happen. And I think that's how it happens with the prophets. I believe that they're inspired. I believe that small changes occur and sometimes we have to wait for us to catch up. Look what happened after the priesthood was given to the blacks. For as much as that was considered overdue by many, there were still members of the church who left the church because of it, because they were absolutely certain that there was no inspiration anymore. And I think that was an incorrect position. And again, I was one of those that wished it would have happened earlier, but it did, and I'm certainly glad that it did. It just took time.

Faith, Doubt, Criticism, and Final Reflections

John Dehlin [00:30:00] Okay, well, I appreciate you sharing that perspective and I guess we could go into a whole discussion about theodicy and your views on God and stuff. But I'll just say this is a two part question. What would you say to someone? Well, a typical approach by, let's say, classic Mormon apologists is almost to what I would say to blame the victim. To say things like, you know, you should have been studying books on your own. You know, why did you, why would you rely on CES alone in Sunday school to teach you your Mormonism? And the church doesn't hide anything. There's almost a sense that if someone struggles with the church, it's because they're weak or they want to sin, or they're just evil or dumb. And you don't feel a lot of compassion in a lot of the writings and reactions of Farron Farms for people who struggle, for people who lose their faith, for people who lose their testimony, for people who look at the same Book of Mormon as you do and say, I'm sorry, you know, Brent Gardner, but this is incredible. There's just too much. It's just too much. Your explanations are straining and, you know, laborious and. And I'm going to choose Occam's Razor. It's just made up. That's just easier it's more probable. So I guess my question is, you know, do you have. Do you see credibility and empathy for people who look at the same evidence as you and decide that it's just too much, it's not credible? And then what would you say about the type of apologetics that seems to disparage people who arrive at those conclusions?

Brant Gardner [00:32:06] I guess for the first part of the question, what do I think of somebody who sees things differently than I do? Certainly I have empathy for them. I understand that I have a particular perspective. And even among faithful members, there are people who certainly do not agree with my opinions on things. And so I don't expect it. And, you know, if you're a good, faithful member of the church and you say, boy, Gardner, you're all wet and you're crazy, and I know people online who have said that, welcome to their opinion. And, you know, we don't share it, but, you know, that's fine for those who have also said, gardner, you're crazy, and I don't believe in the Book of Mormon, you know, I understand those, too. My position is that I explain things the way I understand them, and if that helps someone, it helps someone. And if it doesn't, you know, maybe somebody else will have an approach that will. Or if, you know, they've already got to the point where they, you know, just. Just can't find a way to believe, then again, that's the, the way things have shaken out. And I have to hope that, you know, from the faithful side that it's temporary and somewhere at some point in time that'll change around. But I certainly can't denigrate anybody for the decisions they've made. As far as, you know, the apologetic position, again, we really shouldn't talk about either Fair or the Maxwell Institute, as, you know, anything. Yeah. And because what'll happen is you get into specifics and you say, well, okay, tell me where this person said that. And you go, well, it wasn't that person. It was so and so. And so you're into personalities. And, you know, is it true that there are some personalities that are more soft spoken or more strident than others? Yeah, there are. Am I uncomfortable with the most strident positions? Yeah. Although I can understand why they say it sometimes I would prefer more diplomacy. The question is, you know, what are the points and the issues? If anybody is attacking the person rather than, you know, the issues and the points, then I'm uncomfortable with it. I believe that there are any number of us that can share completely different opinions and if we sit down to dinner with each other, can have, you know, absolutely wonderful conversation and respect each other. So, yeah, that's kind of what I hope will happen at some point is that that becomes the nature of the conversation. Now. I have to also admit that every once in a while, when I see somebody who takes particular shots at my character and talks about what kind of crazy idiot I am, I have to admit to being human and wishing that they would say something else or nothing at all. But, you know, I understand that's part of it as well.

John Dehlin [00:35:09] Right. So the ad hominem and the negative attacks go both ways, right?

Brant Gardner [00:35:15] Yeah, they do, and they're not effective in either case. We really shouldn't be talking about, you know, who we are. You know, it's not the person, it's the ideas that we should be talking about. And unfortunately, it's way too easy to cross that line. And again, that's part of human tendency that I wish we were better at.

John Dehlin [00:35:39] Okay, and again, do you feel. Do you empathize with the disaffected point of view? Can you look at people who look at all the evidence and leave the church and say, I totally get why you do this? This is a credible. This is a credible conclusion to reach based on the evidence. I choose to take a different conclusion, but I see why you would arrive at that. And I think it's an understandable, credible conclusion that the church isn't what it claims to be.

Brant Gardner [00:36:22] Again, I've got to qualify that one, because if I were to agree with that completely, I'd be saying that I thought it was credible, and therefore I'm incredible for believing what I believe. So what I would have to say to qualify that is that I can empathize and say based on what I see, the influences are that people have, what their exposure to the evidence is and to their backgrounds. I can see why they come to the conclusions that they do. So, you know, I can see why, you know, in their mind, it would be justified without saying that I agree with that justification.

John Dehlin [00:36:59] How about just from an objective standpoint, if you were just to, like, step outside the believing point of view and just say, I'll just pretend to be objective for a second, look at the evidence and make a conclusion.

Brant Gardner [00:37:11] You have to understand what you're saying here. You're saying that if I say yes to the objective, that therefore I can't be objective and I'm unobjective from my standpoint, I am objectively looking at the information and making a conclusion.

John Dehlin [00:37:26] You really Are you're not taking a leap of faith? You're not just saying, you know what, I've had spiritual experiences, or I'm in a situation culturally where belief is really what I want. I choose to believe. And so I'm going to work really hard to either find evidence or interpret evidence that supports my desire to believe. You can't sort of step out and say that that's what you're doing?

Brant Gardner [00:37:53] Oh, heavens, no.

John Dehlin [00:37:54] Okay, so from your standpoint, if you found evidence tomorrow that ran counter to the Church's truth claims, you'd be willing to abandon it all?

Brant Gardner [00:38:07] Sure, I have to. I cannot take any other position than that.

John Dehlin [00:38:11] So what type of evidence in the Book of Mormon or otherwise, would be an example of something that would be enough for you to change your belief?

Brant Gardner [00:38:22] Well, you know, that's sort of. Oh, heavens. Yeah, I mean. Yeah, I mean, there have been several times where I've looked at the things that I believe and I've said, gee, I wonder if I really do believe in the Church. I wonder if I can continue. I wonder if, you know, I'm required, based on my understanding, to sever my ties with the Church. And, you know, I've given that serious consideration and obviously decided that that's not the case. In several cases that I can think of, it was only after a lot more understanding and a lot more study. Now, what kinds of things would cause me to disbelieve in the Book of Mormon? Really a difficult question, sort of like asking me, can I find evidence of somebody that doesn't exist? It's the same question where you say to someone who doesn't believe in the Book of Mormon, well, what evidence could you find that would make you believe similarly, they can't come up with that. You just can't commit yourself. In my case, it's the sum of all of the evidence and not one particular thing that makes the difference. And then it's the question of, do I, again, objectively, seriously, with any kind of intellectual rigor, examine the data? And the best example I can give you of that is when I got back from my mission and we talked about the Quetzalcoatl stuff. I went through that, and the answer was, it just isn't what people were telling me. And I was not only more than willing to abandon it, I've been on a personal crusade to try and get that removed from the rhetoric of the Church, and cross my fingers, it's slowly happening, but really, really slowly.

John Dehlin [00:40:06] Have you ever caught any heat for. For your interpretations or your Writings or your scholarship or opinions from church leaders or from peers?

Brant Gardner [00:40:15] No, I have not. I've had certainly people who disagree with me, but I haven't had anybody officially say that. I mean, the place where I get it more often than anything else is on the Internet, where everything goes. Then I'll have good, faithful members who are pretty sure that I'm in league with the devil. Because I suggest that Mormon might have been a human historian who invented conversations rather than faithfully recording what the spirit told him. Somebody actually said five or six hundred years before. So there are those people that aren't too fond of some of the things I've said, but I've never had any kind of official criticism of which I am aware.

John Dehlin [00:41:05] Okay. Okay, cool. All right. Well. Dang it. This is really.

Brant Gardner [00:41:15] Well, I.

John Dehlin [00:41:17] So have you ever wondered. Okay, so if we. This is going to be another theoretical. But I. It's really a fair question. I think it's important. If we got a hundred, you know, college educated, you know, north, you know, us Mormons, and we gave them the full historical record, peep stones, polyandry, you know, DNA, Book of Mormon anachronisms, race stuff, just all the difficult issues of Mormon history and doctrine, What do you think the percentages will be of. Of members who would ultimately leave the church versus have stronger testimonies than they ever had? In other words, do you think that more often than not, a full exposure to these tough issues leads people away from the church?

Brant Gardner [00:42:15] I would not think so, no. I would think that if you took that population that at some point in time you'd end up with a statistical bell curve. And exactly how high the bell part would be, I don't know. But I think you're going to find some whose testimony is stronger and some whose testimony leads them away from church, and you'll find the vast majority of people go, oh, okay, then that's about all the reaction they'd have to it.

John Dehlin [00:42:41] So in your mind, we need as much exposure as possible to the general membership on all these issues because it will more often than not lead to stronger testimonies and. And stronger commitment to the church.

Brant Gardner [00:42:58] Yeah, I really do believe that. I believe that anytime somebody asks a question and you can get an honest and sincere response that says, you know, here's how I understand it. Most of the people who are asking the questions would go, oh, okay. And frankly, that's been my experience. It has also been my experience that when somebody has a question and they ask it and the reaction is, oh, why are you asking? That question, you must be on your way to apostasy. That. That isn't a good response to any question. It never helps the person. And whether or not it would lead them away from the church, it certainly doesn't strengthen them. So that whole idea that we fear certain answers, I really would like a better way of responding than that. The more information we have and the more we have faithful responses to things, so that when someone says, oh, what about. And we can say, well, here's the information. My experience has been that most of the people, at least that I've had the experience with, are saying, oh, okay,

John Dehlin [00:44:07] so I've heard Tarell Givens and maybe even Marlon Jensen quoted as saying, you know, it hasn't been since Kirtland, since the church has experienced such an apostasy or defection of membership. And it just seems from the Internet that exposure to these issues is leading to a hemorrhage in church membership. Now, that may be overblown. I don't know. Do you not see that right now? Do you not see that happening?

Brant Gardner [00:44:43] Well, one of the problems with the Internet is that you see things that you might not normally have seen. I have not been in very many wards where I've had very many compatriots in my studies of the Book of Mormon or in scholarship of the church. But on the Internet, there are a lot of people out there. And all of a sudden when I found it, I said, oh, wow, there's a community out there. And all of a sudden there's more of us than I thought, not having seen it in a ward. And I think that kind of thing happens on both ends of the scale. The Internet allows people who have similarities of ideas to get together. Now, is it true that. That, you know, wide availability of information is changing people's perception of the church? Sometimes for ill? Yeah, I think that's happening. And I think that's one of the reasons why the church is embracing, you know, the Internet and this kind of a media as a more positive way of putting its message out there. It's. It is changing our statistical perceptions. If you go into any given ward, however, you know, the wards look like they've looked for a long time. And, you know, there's a couple of scholars on one end and a couple of really adamant people on the other, and every once in a while, somebody on the fence and the vast majority of people who function in the ward are just salt of the earth and making things go and don't ask the questions that the rest of us get all hot and bothered about, you know, I know with my wife, I'll come up with something in the Book of Mormon and I'll say, wow, here's this great idea. And she looks at me, she says, why would anyone care? It just, you know, isn't anything that she thinks is terribly important at all.

John Dehlin [00:46:36] So I'm going to take that as you saying you don't see a hemorrhage or a crisis in the church.

Brant Gardner [00:46:43] I certainly don't see a crisis. I certainly am well aware that this more rapid dissemination of information allows more people to find fellow travelers than they ever had before. And certainly for those people that are finding more and more people like them, it may seem like a hemorrhage. I suspect that it's not statistically hugely different than any other time, depending on, you know, how you're going to count people in the church and whether or not you count, you know, just the United States or you count worldwide. And, you know, I think that, again, statistically, if you start looking at things, you're going to find that there's probably the good old standard bell curve and that if we find ourselves among those on one smaller side of the bell curve, the Internet makes it appear that there's a lot more of us than there ever has been before. I've certainly come to meet a lot more LDS scholars than I ever did when I was just attending wards and before the Internet ever introduced me to them.

John Dehlin [00:47:54] Okay, so again, what I'm hearing you say is that there's not a significant. A statistically significant crisis based on your perceptions that.

Brant Gardner [00:48:05] Yeah, I don't think it's a statistically important one. What I do believe is that it is a humanly important one, and that for each individual who's going through these things, it's a very real and a very important crisis, and one that affects them deeply. I honestly believe that that happens.

John Dehlin [00:48:26] Okay. All right. Interesting, because that's just a totally different perspective. But I actually don't have the data to argue with you, so it could be true.

Brant Gardner [00:48:36] Neither do I. So we get to. We get to both pretend that statistics are on our side.

John Dehlin [00:48:42] Okay. Are you willing at all to offer a final set of recommendations to or critiques of traditional Mormon apologetics or of ces what's education done wrong versus education done right? What's apologetics done wrong versus apologetics done right so that we can have a guide for the future on maybe how to handle these questions more appropriately?

Brant Gardner [00:49:13] Yeah, I think when it comes to teaching in the church, it really is A difficult thing to figure out because it so much depends on the people that we get to teach. And again, as we talked about earlier, the nature of the people we're teaching, in many cases, what the people need that we're teaching has nothing to do with all these other issues that some of us love to play with, and even with all the things that I really enjoy about the Book of Mormon and its cultural context. If I were teaching a gospel doctrine class on the Book of Mormon, you know, although I would be tempted to spend a long time on it, I can see the reasons why I should spend it on something other than these historical things. From the standpoint of teaching, it's, you know, it's a Gordian knot that I don't know how to cut. As far as apologetics, I think the right way to do apologetics is with data, with information, with insight. What I would love for the writers of apologetics to do is to also do it with compassion. I certainly see every reason to propose information with, you know, with firmness, if you believe something, but certainly with compassion for somebody who might not believe that.

John Dehlin [00:50:33] So a call for compassion, certainly.

Brant Gardner [00:50:37] Yeah. All of us could use that. Okay. I would like some of the people who think I'm an idiot to have a little bit more compassion on me.

John Dehlin [00:50:43] Totally, totally.

Brant Gardner [00:50:44] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:50:45] Yeah.

Brant Gardner [00:50:46] Including my children.

John Dehlin [00:50:48] Right. All right. Well. Well, Bram, let's end in traditional. You've been wonderful. I really appreciate it.

Brant Gardner [00:50:56] I.

John Dehlin [00:50:56] You know, when I. When I interviewed Taro Givens, I said, it's hard for me to imagine a better hope at credible apologetics and Tarot Givens, but I think you just. You belong in his class, which I

Brant Gardner [00:51:10] was just never placed there.

John Dehlin [00:51:12] What's that said?

Brant Gardner [00:51:13] I would never place myself there.

John Dehlin [00:51:14] Well, I'm placing you there from my perspective. And, I mean, that was a compliment. Let's. Let's end before we plug your book one final time. I would just. In typical Mormon stories fashion, I'd love to just give you a chance to bear your testimony and share whatever you'd like to with our audience about. Well, let me frame it a little bit differently. A big chunk of my audience, you know, some still believe, some maybe don't believe that the Book of Mormon is literally a historical document, but still find metaphorical or spiritual value in it. And then there's a big chunk of my audience who just don't believe the Church is what it claims to be at all. And so I would love to hear you bear your testimony in a way that speaks to those people who either can't view the Book of Mormon as historical or even believe the church is true anymore. That would be your best attempt at saying, here's why I believe, and maybe you ought to consider giving belief another shot. What would you say to these people?

Brant Gardner [00:52:21] You know, I think what I would say is that for many of the reasons that I've heard people say that they can't believe in the Book of Mormon, that for many of those reasons, I agree with them. You know, as I look at history and I look at some of the traditional beliefs of the Book of Mormon, where somebody says, you know, the Book of Mormon has to explain everybody that's ever been here. You know, I can't believe that one either. I look at somebody who says, you know, I can't believe in the, you know, the literal pigmentation changing. You know, I've looked through the Book of Mormon. I can't believe that one either. You know, I think in a lot of cases there are a number of things that people have looked at in the Book of Mormon and said, you know, I just can't believe that. And when I look at the same things, I said, by golly, you're right, I can't believe that either. I think the difference is I have a different perspective and I come from a different place. I'm not assuming that I am required by my Mormon ness to believe in a traditional definition of what the Book of Mormon is that has occurred only by historical accident and not by revelation. I believe that the Church allows me to use my brain to look at the Book of Mormon and try to understand it, and that the more I take principles that I would have used as an ethnohistorian to look at any kind of ancient document cross culturally, something describing the ancient world. If I look at the Book of Mormon and apply those principles and allow the Book of Mormon the same kind of leeway I would allow some of these other texts, the Book of Mormon really looks a lot better than it did when I was looking at it through those sort of much more traditional eyes. So, you know, I'm not saying that there is anything that would ever compel belief. I'm not sure that that's even a doctrine that we ought to espouse. But there are ways of looking at the Book of Mormon that are enriching, that make it more human, that make the people come alive and that can be seen in a real place, in a real time, and, you know, do not violate the sort of archaeological information we know, but rather go hand in hand with it. Close enough.

John Dehlin [00:54:52] Yeah. That's good. And ultimately your testimony is rooted in what?

Brant Gardner [00:54:57] You know, actually, ultimately my testimony is rooted in the place where it's supposed to be, which is in sort of, you know, personal communication, you know, spiritual feelings, you know, you know, who I am and what I understand the world to be like. But when I talk about revolves a lot around the Book of Mormon because that's where I spend my time. So, you know, I have probably a more spiritual testimony, but the one where, you know, I really work on it and try to understand it is the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:55:31] Got it. Well, Brent Gardner, I just want to thank you so much for coming on Mormon Stories. I'm going to plug your book books one more time. The Gift and power Translating the Book of Mormon. And then you've got what's it called? Second Witness. What's that series called?

Brant Gardner [00:55:50] Second Witness. An Analytical and contextual Commentary on the Book of Mormon. Nothing like a short title, right?

John Dehlin [00:55:57] And you can get all these books and more at Greg Coford. That's G R E G K O F f o r d dot com. If you put in the code M stories all in caps, M stories for Mormon stories, you'll get a 20% discount and your purchases will help support Mormon Stories and what we're trying to do. So, Brant, thank you again for coming on Mormon Stories. I just can't thank you enough.

Brant Gardner [00:56:20] Thank you for having me.

John Dehlin [00:56:21] All right, take care.

Brant Gardner [00:56:22] Thanks.

John Dehlin [00:56:27] Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Music today was provided by the Saber Rattlers. Check them out at sabre rattles rattlers.com the Mormon Stories logo was generously donated by StudioCase.com thanks for listening.

John Dehlin [00:56:43] Come, come ye saints no toil nor labor fear but with joy wend your way though hard to you this journey may appear Grace shall be as your day Tis better far for us to strive Our useless cares from us to drive to the San Jose your hearts will swell. Oh, all is well all is well. Why should we mourn? I think our Lord is hard Tis not so all is right why should we think to earn a great reward if we now shun the fight? Gird up your lo fresh courage take Our God will help us for sake soon we'll have let's tell it tales oh, all is well, all is well oh, all is well all is well. Sam. Sa. And should we die before our journey's through happy day all is well we that are free from toil and sorrow too with the justice we shall dwell but if our lives are spared again to see the saints the rest obtain. I will make this chorus swell. Oh, I'll is aware well, all is well all is well all is well all is well oh, is well.

Brant Gardner [01:00:55] In the.

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