Introduction and Episode Overview

John Dehlin [00:00:18] Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I am your host, Dr. John Dehlin. It is December 17, 2021 and today I am so excited for a very special Mormon Stories podcast episode. We are broadcasting live from Mormon Story Studios in Holiday, Utah. And today we are so pleased, so honored to be talking about a relatively brand new book that came out recently.

John Dehlin [00:00:52] And the book is called, Here it is, Book of Abraham Apologetics, A review and critique by the one, the only, probably, I would say the number one living Joseph Smith scholar. That's my personal opinion, that's Dan Vogel. And many of you will know the late, the great Dr. Robert Ridner came on Mormon Stories within the past year or two and did like a 12 or 13 hour epic series on Joseph Smith's Book of Abraham and the Egyptian papyrus, etc. And at the time I was so pleased to have the also one, the only, the most handsome, intelligent and most funny Mormon themed podcaster on the planet, Radio Free Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:01:47] And we have Radio Free Mormon back to give us another assist with today's episode. Radio Free Mormon. It's so good to have you joining us today.

Radio Free Mormon [00:01:57] Thank you so much. Dr. John Dehlin. Yes, I'm a triple threat.

John Dehlin [00:02:01] You are. And, and we all hold, try to hold your water and we'll try today.

Radio Free Mormon [00:02:07] Okay, well, I'll try not to take that in a suggestive way.

John Dehlin [00:02:12] Yeah.

Dan Vogel [00:02:12] So

John Dehlin [00:02:15] we also are so thrilled to have with us streaming live from Ohio. Right, right. Dan Vogel, the, the Dan Vogel. And let me unmute you, Dan. Dan, welcome.

Dan Vogel [00:02:29] Thank you.

John Dehlin [00:02:30] Welcome back to Mormon Stories podcast. Dan Vogel.

Dan Vogel [00:02:34] Glad to be here. Glad to be with you guys. I hope we can talk about the Book of Abraham and associated documents. Kind of fill in where Robert Rittner didn't really touch on because he was focusing on the Egyptian manuscripts, the papyri, and I'll be focusing on the English text that was produced while Joseph Smith was translating to produce the Book of Abraham.

John Dehlin [00:03:04] Yeah, yeah, There's a lot of discussion within, let's just say learned Mormonism, progressive Mormonism, post Mormonism and Mormon studies about the Egyptian papyrus and how Egyptologists have translated the papyrus and have found that the translation that Joseph Smith made didn't quite check out. And again, we've talked about that very thoroughly. Rfm, why don't you tell us just really briefly, and I know we're going to get into this, but why don't you just set this up, rfm and tell us what the Egyptian grammar and Alphabet is and why it's such an important piece to Book of Abraham, and then we'll let Dan kind of take over.

What Are the Kirtland Egyptian Papers

Radio Free Mormon [00:03:46] Well, sure thing. You know, it was only recently when I was talking with Brian Hauglett that he corrected me and told me that the Kirtland Egyptian papers is sort of a. An old expression that isn't favored anymore. And because there are a number of papers that Dan Vogel is an expert on that we'll be talking about tonight that were apparently used in some way to produce at least part of the text of the Book of Abraham. And there's a lot of mysteries associated with it, but that the Kirtland Egyptian papers may be a correct description of part of them, but all of them together, I think he said, were referred to as the Abraham Egyptian paper.

Radio Free Mormon [00:04:20] So as far as that goes, that's the nomenclature that I learned from him. I don't know if Dan Vogel agrees with that, but. But they're very, very important. And in fact, I had spent a lifetime studying the Book of Abraham as an apologist and never ever getting into the Abraham Egyptian papers that were used in this process. I read a lot about the arguments surrounding them, and the arguments are usually from the apologetic side. That Joseph Smith had nothing, repeat, nothing to do with these Abraham Egyptian papers, and that this is something that his scribes got up to on a rainy afternoon when they had nothing better to do and were simply using them for kicks and grins, I think really is all that it was it.

Radio Free Mormon [00:05:05] But the important thing is they have nothing to do with the production of the Book of Abraham. At least that's what I learned as an apologist and reading Dr. Geese materials, and I think Hugh Nibley's materials as well. But I finally, finally got into them because I realized that this argument that's going on, I need to sort of understand why it is they're arguing about this so strenuously. And then I took a look at these papers and started finding out what others, including Dan Vogel, had written about them. And then I suddenly realized why it is that this is such a battleground, because these papers look for all the world like they were used in an attempt to translate the text of at least part of the Book of Abraham from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Radio Free Mormon [00:05:51] And the problem is, is that the translation that looks like it's coming off the hieroglyphs in the margins have nothing to do with the hieroglyphs in the margins as far as Egyptologists are concerned. Therefore, Joseph Smith could not have been involved in this. Otherwise, they are. The papers are kind of a smoking gun that he didn't know what he was doing and he actually could not translate Egyptian. And on the other side of that, which is really, I think the one that has the weight of the evidence is Dan Vogel's side of things or the side that he represents, which is no, Joseph Smith was very much involved with these papers and these papers actually were used in order to produce the Book of Abraham. Is that about right, Dan?

Dan Vogel [00:06:34] Very close. I, I have maybe a few quibbles, but I would call them the Joseph Smith Egyptian Papers. Nibley was wrong by titling them the Kirtland Egyptian papers because quite a number of them deal with the Nauvoo period of translating it in March 1842. So then the more neutral title would be How Glids, which would be

Radio Free Mormon [00:07:08] the Abraham Egyptian.

Dan Vogel [00:07:11] The Abraham Egyptian Papers. So it's kind of neutral. Well, I, I believe it's pretty obvious that these are Joseph Smith's Egyptian papers. And it seems like maybe the Joseph Smith Papers Project also believes that because they may they put it into the Joe Smith collection of papers and they didn't like, stick it like John Gee wanted them to, to stick most of this stuff in some kind of appendix where it's a disputed authorship. It's only disputed by the apologists because for very obvious reasons, they don't want Joseph Smith connected with this because it shows Egyptian characters and translations. And we couldn't check Joseph Smith out on the Book of Mormon, but we can check him out right here.

Dan Vogel [00:07:57] Not while he was alive, really, but we can do it now and we can see that he doesn't know Egyptian. He's only pretending to know Egyptian to produce confidence in his followers. He probably impressed W.W. phelps, who was the main scribe.

Dan Vogel [00:08:17] But as Rittner has shown and other scholars or Egyptologists shown that there is no connection between the Egyptian characters and the English translation. So the apologists really want to work really hard to distance Joseph Smith from those documents.

John Dehlin [00:08:37] Yeah. And let's go ahead and jump into the presentation. But Dan and RFM tell me if this is a decent analogy. It's one thing. Let's say you're a math teacher and you're trying to decide if your student knows the math. It's one thing, you know, if you give them a test, and it's one thing if they have the wrong answer, but it's another thing if you can actually see their work and see how they arrived at the answer. It's almost like the Joseph Smith's Egyptian grammar and Alphabet is, is like showing the work of how the Answers were arrived at and it basically shows that, that Joseph Smith's attempts to translate were completely erroneous. It's like showing the work of the math problem. Is that a fair analogy, Dan Vogel?

Dan Vogel [00:09:27] Well, I would say that scholars cannot say whether or not the actual book of Abraham's inspired or not. That is a religious conclusion, not a scholarly conclusion. All scholars can talk about is whether there was some degree of deception involved in producing it. So, you know, the question is, did Joseph Smith get an independent revelation and just pretend like he got it from the scrolls so that he can produce confidence in his followers, or is it just a complete fraud from beginning to end for whatever reason? But the little analogy that you were making between showing the work and some. Sometimes there, there are some hit hits and so there's a lot of misses where Joseph Smith like Rittner show.

Dan Vogel [00:10:25] There's a lot of misses on, on the facsimiles, especially where he doesn't get things right. But every now and then, you know, you might get something right. Well, you can have the right reason. I mean, the, the right answer for the wrong reason. And that's why teachers would want you to show your work to make sure you got it for the right reason.

John Dehlin [00:10:47] Yeah. Okay, so. So the book is again, Book of Abraham Apologetics A review and critique. Dan Vogel. Please, everyone, go buy this book. We will have the link to the book in the show notes. We need to support Mormon scholarship. We need to support signature books. We need to support Dan Vogel. But most importantly, it's a fascinating read. I have read this book. It's a great book. It's an important book. So go buy it. All right, Dan, let's start with the very first slide. I'm assuming rfm, this book has your endorsement as well?

Radio Free Mormon [00:11:21] Absolutely. I love it. I marked it up from stem to stern.

John Dehlin [00:11:24] All right. All right. Beautiful. All right, Dan, so we've got first slide. Let's get into this because we've only.

Dan Vogel [00:11:31] I want to make a little disclaimer or talk about my approach.

John Dehlin [00:11:39] Okay.

Dan Vogel [00:11:39] These documents. So my primary objective is not only to respond to the apologetic arguments, but to teach about the meaning of the Joseph Smith Egyptian language papers. Because this is the reason why. Because apologists can change their arguments. They can abandon arguments. They do all the time and change. So knowing the materials better than the apologists will prevent any future maneuvering. And. But that will involve getting down into the weeds somewhat. So part I'm going to be responding to the apologists as I'm going along, but I'm Also trying to teach everyone about what is the meaning of these documents. So a lot of people look at them, see Egyptian characters in English and they.

Dan Vogel [00:12:30] What did they mean? And the thing is, is that we don't know everything about them. Okay. So we're trying to dig into them and trying to figure out what was going through their minds as they were creating these documents and what the documents mean amongst themselves and when they were written, what's the correct chronology. So that's what I'll be doing here.

John Dehlin [00:12:57] Excellent.

Dan Vogel [00:13:00] So our three main apologists of course are the first, the well known Hugh Nibley, who got this all started in 1971, is when he published his BYU article called the Meaning of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers. I'll also be dealing with John Geese writings and Carrie Meelstein's writings. These are two professors from byu. Of course, Nibli was also a professor at byu. And these are the main apologists on the book of Abraham. So we'll be looking at their writings. But these, it's also fair to say

John Dehlin [00:13:45] you mentioned Brian Hagled quite a bit in, in the book, correct?

Dan Vogel [00:13:50] Yes. Okay. The story with Brian Haglett is that he used to be with these guys and when he actually studied the documents and got into the nitty gritty of them, he had to abandon a lot of the theories as, you know, not worth defending anymore. And he's kind of come over, you know, to the other side of things, let's say.

John Dehlin [00:14:17] So I think, I think retiring from BYU helps you see the light a little bit. And honestly he changed his views before he retired, but it helps.

Dan Vogel [00:14:28] It was largely with his discussions also with my good friend Britt Medcalf. And Brent's quite knowledgeable on all the stuff I'm talking about. And in he learned his point of view a lot from Edward Ashmut, who's kind of dropped out of things unfortunately over the many years. And Ed A.T. schmidt was pursuing an Egyptologist degree at the time. He was contradicting Nibley in public, you know, at Sunstone meetings and things like that, which, you know, I was there. And so we're focusing on a group of apologists and not all apologists are the same. The apologists are kind of divided amongst themselves between the, what I would call the fundamentalist apostles that, I mean, apostles, boy, is that Freudian. But apologists, they might think of themselves as apostles, but a lot of people

Radio Free Mormon [00:15:36] think that John Gee is bucking for an apostleship.

Dan Vogel [00:15:39] Yeah. So these are the fundamentalists. These are the ones that want to preserve Joseph Smith's reputation of being a real legitimate translator of legitimate documents. And then there's a whole group starting to sprout out now called that would defend a catalyst theory that the papyri that came into Josephus possession only triggered an independent revelation that he just dictated, had nothing to do with the papyri. And then later, as the fundamentalist apologists imagine tried to connect the characters with the revelation. So the, the fundamentalist apologists think that there was another scroll that is now missing that he actually literally translated. But both groups of apologists connect it with the papyri that we have, that it was a mistake. Both, both of them argue that it was a mistake to connect the characters with the translation.

John Dehlin [00:17:07] And let me just say I think it's important, it would be an important position for I guess, I guess Mormon faithful, Mormon scholars to try and uphold Joseph Smith's title as translator. Not only because Joseph Smith claimed to be translating these documents, but because as I understand it, in the Doctrine and Covenants. Let's just say the, the first version of the Doctrine and Covenants or the Book of Commandments. Doesn't, doesn't Joseph Smith does. Isn't, isn't Joseph Smith named as a prophet, seer, revelator and translator? Isn't he named as a translator in the scriptures?

Dan Vogel [00:17:45] Yes, that's, that's what his official title is, a translator. But the apologists try to mess around with the word translate and try to. Some of them go so far as to re. Translate it to the point where the word translates has no meaning anymore. Yeah, you know, so okay, we move on to Ghee. I focus on Ghee mostly because he's the main publisher of the Fundamentalist View. And these are his two publications coming from the year 2000 and 2017 most recently. So most of my arguments in my book quote him and respond to his views, his chronology, his apologetic because he's leading, he's kind of leading the pack.

John Dehlin [00:18:45] Okay, great.

Dan Vogel [00:18:48] So we can. Yeah, so now we're going to talk about the documents. And these are the ones that the, that we're looking at is mostly what Rittner dealt with. He's Egyptologist and I'm not. But when Joseph Smith got them, they.

Joseph Smith Acquires the Mummies and Scrolls

Dan Vogel [00:19:06] He got two scrolls. He got two scrolls, some fragments. And the fragments cons included another Book of the Dead by Amen Hotep. And he also got the hypocephalus that we all look at the round. Facsimile2 as we know it. Here's on the top. We're looking at a scroll that was between 4 and 5ft long if it were intact but it would already had been damaged before Joseph Smith got it four and five feet long.

Dan Vogel [00:19:50] And right now the fragments that he got at the beginning you can see facsimile 1. I know I'm not sure how much detail is showing up on a lot of people's computer screens but facsimile one is on the right hand side and it's known as the fragment 1. The next group of glued on characters there are manuscript or papyri fragment is known as Joseph Smith Fragment 11 and 4 and then there's a blank spot for stuff. We don't have missing parts, we don't have facsimile 3 either. But we know what it looks like probably unless it was restored a lot like the other ones.

Dan Vogel [00:20:47] So it was four or five feet long. We only have about three feet of it. There's, there's you know, maybe two to three feet missing maybe. But that last portion was intact and that's the portion that people like Charlotte Haven in 1843 visited Nauvoo and Lucy Smith showed her the last portion.

Dan Vogel [00:21:16] Charlotte Haven says she rolled out the papyrus on the table, a long scroll. And John Gee tries to make a big deal. Oh it's a long scroll, it could be longer than what we know and at the end included the Book of Abraham. That's lost also.

Dan Vogel [00:21:33] Well what she saw was a 4 inch, that's, that's really 4 inches wide and maybe 2 to 3ft long. She rolls out on a table and talks about it and that's all she was talking about. There was no like there's no good argument that could be made from that witness testimony for an additional, you know, 40ft or 30, 40ft or whatever. John G now says he keeps changing the, the link.

Dan Vogel [00:22:07] So and on the bottom below that is, Pardon me, the top one is known as the scroll or the book of breathings of the priest Hor and the bottom one is the book of the dead of Ta Sheret Min.

Dan Vogel [00:22:27] And altogether there's seven fragments that were recovered and Joseph Smith associated the top one with the book of Abraham and that one was found on the breast of one of the male mummy. There were five mummies and the other mummies, four mummies, excuse me, the other three were females and the bottom scroll of tall sheridan was on the female mummies breast.

Dan Vogel [00:22:57] So these date to maybe 100 to 300 BCE and well after the time of Abraham and Joseph of course. And they were glued to plans of the Kirtland Temple and for preservation because they were crumbling and later cut up into smaller pieces and framed in glass frames.

Dan Vogel [00:23:30] So that, that's, I think that's good, good enough for the, that slide. The next slide shows the provenance of these documents. So as soon as Lucy Smith used, I mean, yeah, Lucy Smith used to exhibit these and charge money to, to see the mummies and the scrolls. And as soon as Lucy died, Emma Smith, Joseph's widow, sold them in 1856, right afterwards to Abel Combs. And Abel Combs ended up dividing it into two.

Dan Vogel [00:24:11] Most of the collection and the mummies went to the St. Louis Museum over here on the left, which went to the Chicago Museum, which was renamed the Woods Museum, which were destroyed in the Great Chicago fire of 1871.

Dan Vogel [00:24:26] The fragments that we have now went to Combs maid Alice Hooser and her husband and they sold them to the New York Metropolitan museum. And in 1966 they were kind of discovered because of, they were glued to the plans of the Kirtland Temple and, and on the backs were other Mormonish kind of things. And they turned them over to the LDS Church in 1967.

Dan Vogel [00:25:00] And when they, when they did. Okay, so what we're looking at here is Joseph Smith Papyrus 11 and, and 1. Actually it's the other way around. On the right hand side, facsimile two, you can see that's fragment one. And here you can see a little more than what is in facsimile two. You can see that there's five columns, vertical columns, three on one side, one in the middle above the Anubis arm and another one on the left.

Dan Vogel [00:25:41] Then the fragment over here on, on the left used to be connected. They were connected. They were intact. And they were glued together on the backing paper. Because this was thick paper that was discard paper used to, to like as I said, the Kirtland Egyptian. I mean the Kirtland Temple plans. And you can see penciled. Not only is the, the missing part of the papyri filled in with the, you know, incorrectly with the, you know, the body. This is Osiris, of course, and Anubis.

Dan Vogel [00:26:21] But pencil also shows the, the pews, middle pews and the corner pews. And then there's a real thick part on the wall of the temple and that, that where a chimney was built. So we have that, we have it.

Dan Vogel [00:26:41] That's the how they were preserved on thick paper. Now we see a timeline as I have reconstructed these documents. Now we're going to look at these documents and learn about Them, what are they? And so in early July, when Joseph Smith purchased them from Chandler, Michael Chandler, who inherited these things from his rich uncle, kind of a traveler who discovered the mummies and the papyri, went around trying to sell them and he had 11 mummies when he and a bunch of other documents. And he sold those. And by the time he got near Kirtland, he was in Cleveland and he heard about Joseph Smith and he took the occasion to try to sell him to Joseph Smith because he heard that Joe Smith translated reformed Egyptian, you know, so here's these Egyptian documents, maybe you can offload them there and finish his.

Creation of the Egyptian Alphabets

Dan Vogel [00:27:57] Get rid of his whole collection. So he did go to Kirtland and Joseph Smith looked at them and said, aha, you know, here's some actual documents I can own. And he managed to get gather up money from various sources around the Mormon community. And for $2400, which was a huge sum, he purchased the mummies. And then right away he started translating them to impress Chandler. And Chandler signed a document saying just Smith. His translation matched the people that he discussed these documents with in the east, different scholars, amateur type scholars. And so the first thing he did was to preserve these texts. He started this, these two, these are two documents and they're little tiny notebooks on the left hand side in early July.

Dan Vogel [00:28:59] And they he titled one Valuable discovery of ancient Documents, you know, discovered in the catacombs of Egypt. And that's written on the COVID of the top one in Frederick G. Williams handwriting. And then he signed it, just mis. Signed it. So and then the bottom one is just a, you know, similar text. That's why I include them together.

Dan Vogel [00:29:25] What we'll look, we will look closely at some of those pages because this is initial translating of the papyri and these are fragments and not the scrolls. The next group of documents are the. Called the Egyptian alphabets. There's three different alphabets, one mostly in Oliver Cowdery's handwriting and the other one in W.W. phelps's handwriting. And finally the one that's on the top there is Joseph Smith's handwriting. So it's a little difficult for the apologists nowadays to just totally dismiss these things as Joseph Smith had nothing to do with them because you have a whole document written in his handwriting.

John Dehlin [00:30:10] Dan, really quickly, this is going to probably sound like an obvious question. Why is it called an Alphabet? So in English we think Alphabet. Abcdefg yeah. Why would they have called this an Alphabet?

Dan Vogel [00:30:23] Because as we'll see, I'll get later on there'll be closer up. Photographs of some of the pages from Joseph Smith's Alphabet, but they're a list of characters on one column, a name of the character in the next column, and finally in the last column is an explanation. He doesn't. He didn't translate them like word for word, kind of. This means this. This means that he gave an explanation. And that's why there's a little variation. When you read the explanation for each of the characters, they're all writing more or less at the same time, and Joseph Smith's explaining them and they're writing their explanation down. And so it's a little different in each one, but they're all writing about the same thing.

John Dehlin [00:31:15] What's weird is when we think of an Alphabet, we don't think A and then some explanation and B and.

Dan Vogel [00:31:22] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:31:22] Nation. It's just the letters, you know what I'm saying?

Dan Vogel [00:31:24] Right.

John Dehlin [00:31:25] So that's why I. That's why I asked the question just

Dan Vogel [00:31:27] abc, like our letters. But this is Egyptian. And Egyptian isn't like an Alphabet in Joseph Smith's mind anyway, isn't an alphabetic language. It's more of symbolic language that has a lot of meaning in one character.

John Dehlin [00:31:44] Is it. Is it interpret. An interpretation of symbols, basically. Is that what he means?

Dan Vogel [00:31:49] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:31:50] When he says. When they say Alphabet, it's basically a key or a legend to explain the interpretation of the various symbols. Is that right?

Dan Vogel [00:31:59] Yeah. So it isn't just like word character and a word character and a word, you know, or a letter. An alphabetic language.

John Dehlin [00:32:07] Right.

Dan Vogel [00:32:08] It's a different kind of language. So that's why it's not so exact.

John Dehlin [00:32:12] Got it. Thank you.

Dan Vogel [00:32:13] So. And that's. That's late July. And the reason why we know that is because Joseph, in Joseph Smith's History, there's a passage in the histories telling us that. That in late July, he and his scribes, Oliver Cowdery and W.W. phelps, started to make a. An Alphabet of the Egyptian language and also a grammar as practiced by the ancients. Well, that. He also started that in late July.

Dan Vogel [00:32:50] And. And we know that he was still working on the very end of that of the grammar book in. On October 1st, where he talks about a very specific part of the Alphabet. And we'll see that in the future, too. And I put another book under. There's two books. And W.W. phelps started two books at the same time. It looks like one was a grammar book. Grammar, the title is Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language. And another book, which I call the Translating book. And this. In this book, he put the final finalized translation of the Book of Abraham.

Dan Vogel [00:33:36] He happened to put the first three verses of the Book of Abraham in that book. But the pages subsequently get cut out of that book and the books disappeared. But for the purposes of my demonstration here, I use the exact volume because they're about the same size pages.

Dan Vogel [00:33:58] We'll see. I'll show you what how they got cut out and how we know they got cut out. And later it was Warren Parish added the other verses of the Book of Abraham. After W.W. phelps, the next group of documents is Abraham 1 verse 4 to 2 verse 6.

Dan Vogel [00:34:25] And there's two documents that we need to consider here. There's only two. One is by Warren Parrish and the other ones by Frederick G. Williams and Warren Parish. He wasn't hired until the 29th of October, 1835. So we know pretty much that this Book of Abraham text comes from after that time period. But there's no date on the document, so we don't know the exact date. But the best candidate from reading Joseph Smith's journals would be the 19th of November.

Dan Vogel [00:35:03] And we kind of know from the examining both of these texts, the one by Frederick G. Williams, the one by Warren Parish, were simultaneously written from Joseph Smith's dictation because they have the same corrections in them that can only be performed at the same time, not one copying the other, then just miss. Journal also talks about continuing translating on the 20th. So we give him like two days to write this text. The next phase of in the chronology is rfm.

John Dehlin [00:35:47] Do you want to say something?

Radio Free Mormon [00:35:47] Yeah, if it's okay, Dan. I just want to highlight something that I think is of any time importance and it took me quite a while to trip to this. But if you can put that document back up on the screen. John, as much as I like looking at my mug right there, those two documents, second from the right, the Warren Parish and Frederick Williams documents. These are dictations, apparently, and there's a dispute there, right? These are dictations, but it has the text of the Book of Abraham, basically as we have it today, from 1 verse 4 to 2 verse 6, as you've already mentioned. Now, there's a couple of really important facts here.

Radio Free Mormon [00:36:23] The first is that Warren Parish's, if you'll forgive me, is the most important for purposes of this part of the discussion, because I think everybody agrees and there's no disputation that Warren Parish did not start working as Joseph smith's scribe until October 29th of 1830. 5.

Dan Vogel [00:36:44] That's correct.

Radio Free Mormon [00:36:46] And that's so important to the argument that I think that if there were any way to dispute it, the apologists would be disputing it. The second thing is this is definitely Warren Parish's handwriting in one of these documents. And one of the reasons this becomes very difficult and thorny for the apologetic, or at least Dr. Gee's position, is that. His position is that the entirety of the Book of Abraham text as we have it today, maybe plus a little bit more, was all dictated in July of 1835. It all happened before any of this rigmarole with all of these translation documents, the grammar, the translation, the Alphabet, all of this stuff.

Radio Free Mormon [00:37:25] Because that has nothing to do with producing the text of the Book of Abraham from the apologetic point of view. But here we have now a text that has part of the Book of Abraham written by Warren Parish, who didn't start as Joseph smith scribed until October 29th, which is way after July.

Radio Free Mormon [00:37:48] So now they have to come up with an answer to that and an explanation for that. First off, this is evidence that Dan Vogel is right and the apologists are wrong. And maybe later on we'll talk about what they try and do with that. I don't want to get too far afield right now while Dan Vogel is just producing the timeline, but that is a critical part of the puzzle that helped me understand things. So I just wanted to highlight it here. Thank you for allowing me to interrupt.

Why Apologists Fear Joseph Smith's Involvement

John Dehlin [00:38:13] So, Dan and rfm, I'm going to just ask you both to put a really fine point on it. Why are apologists so terrified to have Joseph Smith associated with the Alphabet and grammar? Why are they so desperate to force Joseph's a timeline of having Joseph Smith produce the entire Book of Abraham before the grammar and Alphabet ever commences to be written on? Why are they so afraid of. Of Joseph Smith having involvement in the grammar and Alphabet? You go first, Dan Vogel and then rfm. I'll let you put a fine point on Dan's point. Why are they terrified?

Dan Vogel [00:38:51] Well, if.

John Dehlin [00:38:52] If Joseph.

Dan Vogel [00:38:53] Because we have. We have Egyptian characters and the translation right next to it. And the thing to remember about this is we didn't. We had these translation documents. And when I show close ups of these pages, you will see that the Book of Abraham is written out by Warren Parish and Frederick G. Williams and there's characters right next to the paragraphs of the Book of Abraham. And for more than 100 years, we didn't know anything. We didn't know where these characters were from until 1967, Gerald Tanner and Grant S. Heward published an article in the dialogue that put it all together. And I have a couple of slides coming up that will demonstrate this, that the characters coming off of the translation documents line up perfectly with the Hoar Papyrus and we can see that they're copied sequentially.

Dan Vogel [00:39:58] And not only that, that when wherever the papyri is damaged, Joseph Smith fills in. And it is Joseph Smith fills in because he's the only one who can do it with invented characters. So that there's a continuous flow of characters. And you'll see that in my upcoming slides.

John Dehlin [00:40:20] Yeah, and we'll dig into that. I, I just want to like complete the sentence and maybe rfm, you can jump in here. If Joseph Smith was involved with the Alphabet and grammar. If the, if Joseph Smith used the Alphabet and grammar in the production of the Book of Abraham, then what? Rfm, then what?

Radio Free Mormon [00:40:41] Then it's glaringly obvious that he could not translate Egyptian.

Dan Vogel [00:40:46] Yeah, no. And so thank you. This is why they're anxious to try to. And this is Nibley's first apologetic that he put out in 1971 and, and kept it up somewhat during his lifetime in various articles. And John Geass jumped on and Kerry Muelstein jumped on and kind of modified a little to keep it alive. They want to argue that the translation was done first in July and that the Egyptian alphabets and the grammar book were written later based on the translation. And I'm going to argue that

John Dehlin [00:41:39] the

Dan Vogel [00:41:39] grammar and the alphabets really don't have anything to do with the Book of Abraham. They don't have anything to do with Abraham. They, they are independent translations. They're additional translations to what the Book of Abraham is. And if you follow along, I'll show you that there's a. It starts with other doc. Other Egyptian documents actually and other pre Egyptian documents are mixed in there and they work up to the columns next to facsimile one and then move over to the fragment 11 where Abraham starts. So it's all in succession.

John Dehlin [00:42:28] Yeah.

Dan Vogel [00:42:28] And it's not like a do over. Like there isn't either way, there's, there's not a do over either way. There's no like translating the Book of Abraham. And then let's re read, reverse engineer some sort of Alphabet and grammar based on the translation Joseph Smith did by under inspiration or the other way around. There was no like precursor to the Book of Abraham and then translating the Book of Abraham based on what had already been done except in one, except one exception to that Rule is, and you'll see, you'll see that yeah, there is a part, but it's, it's invented in a whole nother context than Abraham and then added to the Book of Abraham later from it in creating a whole different context.

John Dehlin [00:43:23] And just for the benefit of those who tend to get confused and overwhelmed by all this information, I'll just say one more time. If Joseph Smith used the grammar and Alphabet to produce the text of the Book of Abraham, it shows in painstaking detail how wrong and false Joseph Smith's quote translations were. And so apologists are desperate to force a timeline where Joseph Smith produced the entire text of the Book of Abraham prior to the initiation of the grammar and Alphabet and more so that, so that Joseph Smith won't be revealed in painstaking detail and as being a completely erroneous translator. And that that's what your, almost your whole book is about and that's what today's about.

Radio Free Mormon [00:44:13] And can I, can I just mention

Dan Vogel [00:44:15] here, it's their major apologetic. It's the major apologetic. It's what makes everything work for them. And if this, if this goes, a lot of other stuff goes.

Radio Free Mormon [00:44:27] Can I make two points here just because it's so important?

Dan Vogel [00:44:29] Sorry.

Radio Free Mormon [00:44:30] Oh, yeah. The first thing is that I think we're all aware about the Church art when it comes to Joseph Smith's translation of the Book of Mormon and how the church art has for a hundred years shown something that the historical record did not. I. E. Him looking at the plates instead of with his face in the hat. Right. So when it comes to light that actually that's not what the historical documents ever showed. And why are these artists doing it then? The Church tries to lay the blame at the feet of the artists. These are the guys who are out there making these pictures.

Radio Free Mormon [00:44:59] We didn't sanction them, we didn't direct them. We just had them paint something and then we put it in our magazines for everybody to see. Well, that argument doesn't hold a whole lot of water because it's not true, because the Church does dictate exactly to minutest detail what it is that shows up in their magazines. And they make their artist paint according to what they want them to paint. By analogy, here's what's going on with these documents is that the apologists want to say this is all the work of the scribes.

Radio Free Mormon [00:45:31] Joseph Smith had nothing to do with these. This is all the scribes getting together and doing stuff that has nothing to do with the Book of Abraham or at least with its production as A text. Okay, so that's the first analogy they got to get Joseph Smith out of the room and have him have nothing or as little to nothing to do with this process with these documents. In fact, there's at least one instance of which I'm aware of where John GE presented on the subject of these documents and somehow avoided mentioning the one Egyptian Alphabet from late July that is actually written in Joseph Smith's handwriting.

Radio Free Mormon [00:46:06] So that's how important it is for them to get Joseph Smith out of the room. They will actually omit and not mention Joseph Smith's handwriting on the late July document. The other thing I want to mention, because it goes right here, is that if you're paying attention, what it is that the apologists now have said is that because the original text of the Book of Abraham must have been written or dictated in early July or the month of July, 1835, guess where that document is, John?

John Dehlin [00:46:37] Tell us.

Radio Free Mormon [00:46:38] Well, it doesn't exist. That's. That's the first and most obvious problem with their theory. They have hypothesized an or text or an original document which contains the entirety of the Book of Abraham, which somehow managed to get lost.

John Dehlin [00:46:54] Of course, even though you would think

Radio Free Mormon [00:46:55] that as far as all of these documents go, that would be the one that you'd want to hold on to the most closely. But it is lost. And therefore John Gee and others who follow this, this argument have to say, well, there was an original text of the Book of Abraham, but we just don't have it anymore. So the evidence to support their theory is conveniently missing or inconveniently, depending on how you look at it.

John Dehlin [00:47:22] And that's.

Dan Vogel [00:47:24] I would add that the Frederick G. Williams and Warren Parish documents are thorn in their side in a way. It's. If they are original dictations of the Book of Abraham and it can't be written before 29th of October, that means their theory about it, the whole Book of Abraham coming before the Egyptian language documents, can't be maintained. So they have to try to explain these two documents as copies somehow. They're just copies of original or text from July that strangely begins with verse four, you know. And why would Warren Parish and Ephraim G. Williams want to start at verse four with some kind of copy?

Dan Vogel [00:48:29] I can't imagine. But it's very clear that they're dictated simultaneously. Even Robin Jensen and Brian Hauglid's volume on the Book of Abraham and related texts agrees with that much. And so that's a real big problem. And they struggle to get out of that evidence. And I'll talk about that evidence towards the end of this presentation.

Dan Vogel [00:49:01] But they try to straw. They struggle to get out of it, but not very well. Guy has tried recently to argue against the simultaneous dictation theory and just not very well at all.

Radio Free Mormon [00:49:17] Right. And when you look at Dan's book, he does a wonderful job in a very erudite fashion, of showing just by looking at the text of these End of November, these two documents by Warren Parish and Frederick G. Williams that you can tell from the text that these are not people copying something that they are looking at. Instead, they are actually writing something that they are hearing. And you can tell that. And Dan shows how you can tell that from the text itself. In fact, Royal Skousen did a similar kind of analysis for lots of the Book of Mormon where he talks about the mistakes being made by the scribe that show that these types of mistakes are made when you're hearing words incorrectly or hearing them differently and understanding differently and writing it down, as opposed to copying from a different text where different types of mistakes will be made.

Dan Vogel [00:50:08] Right. One little glimpse I'll give about the evidence of hearing is in the Elkana or Elkan Elkanur, and one scribe writes Elkin ur mostly, and the other one writes Elkanah. And it's probably due to Joseph Smith's New England accent where there is called a rhotic R and it's sort of like wata or water or you idea, they might say the word idear, you know, and if it's a strange word you've never heard before, like Elkanah. And he says, well, Elkoner. Well, one might realize that it's an H eventually and the other one will hear the R and just write the R. And a similar thing happens in the grammar book when Warren Parish writes Methuselah, you know Methuselah. It's Methuselah. Right. So let's jump.

John Dehlin [00:51:20] Let's. Let's jump. I know we're going to be showing this in, in detail, but thank you for the overviews, Dan and rfm. I just want to make sure, for those who are kind of new to this discussion, they solidify in their mind what's going on. Yeah.

Dan Vogel [00:51:33] To finish the timeline, though, the last little piece, chapter two, verses seven to 18, was all that was written in Kirtland. The rest of the book of Abraham's written in. In Nauvoo. And we know that because it has all these Hebrew terms. And Joseph Smith doesn't learn Hebrew. Until 1836.

Dan Vogel [00:51:53] So this last part is where Warren Paris takes these, his shorter document, written from dictation, copies it into the book. After W.W. phelps's entry, after he gets done doing that, he takes dictation from Joseph Smith again and adds verses 7 through 18.

Dan Vogel [00:52:25] And that's where we end, in Kirtland. That's as far as they got in Kirtland. So if we can look at the next slide here. This is the first page of Joseph Smith's Egyptian Alphabet. And he's writing at the same time, remember, as Oliver Cowdery and W.W. phelps.

Examining the Grammar Book and Alphabet Documents

Dan Vogel [00:52:49] And Guy tries to argue that Joseph Smith's just a passive. He's not really involved and doesn't really care about this project at all. And he's just copying from W.W. phelps and Oliver Cowdery, which is not true. When you look closer and compare the various alphabets, you can see that their writing and their spelling of words are different. And sometimes the characters are different. And so I don't know how well you can see this, but there's two places in the left hand margin where there's additional characters.

Dan Vogel [00:53:28] And the bottom one, there's like three attempts to write the same character. And it happens to be the character for Cotumen. And as we'll see, it's Princess Coutumin. And so it shows that Joseph Smith's Alphabet, he's taken more care than either Cowdery or Phelps on these characters.

Dan Vogel [00:54:00] So we can go to the next one. This is the page 34 of the grammar book, and you can see the characters, and there's names and translation or explanation. And the darker ink on the top is W.W. phelps's, and below that is Warren Parrish.

Dan Vogel [00:54:23] And this is towards the end of the project, we'll see in October, Joseph Smith is working on the Cosmos or the Astronomy section. And up above in W.W. phelps's handwriting is talking about the moon and the earth. And the bottom part is the very last part that was added later. No, if this is.

Dan Vogel [00:54:55] This is WWE Phelps's project, how do you explain how Kolob, on the bottom there is written in Warren Parish's handwriting? I mean, what is Warren Parish? Why is Warren Parrish writing in W.W. phelps's book? So the arguments of the apologists are. Are just way out of there. There's. They just are desperate.

John Dehlin [00:55:19] Rfm, did you want to jump in either to the last image or this one?

Radio Free Mormon [00:55:23] I wanted to ask a question of Dan, if I could. We've talked a little bit about the later Documents by Warren Parish and Frederick G. Williams with the text of the Book of Abraham on it. These are earlier documents, probably from late July, I think, is what you. You think, Dan, is that right? The alphabets.

Dan Vogel [00:55:40] Well, okay, so it would they. The alphabets and the grammar book were begun in late July according to just Smith's history. He was evidently still working. And. And the Alphabet gets done more or less before. There's some overlap, but more or less, it goes from the valuable discovery to the alphabets to the grammar book to. And each time there's a development.

Dan Vogel [00:56:14] And they are still working on the grammar book on October 1, where Joseph Smith says that they were working on the Egyptian Alphabet and the grammar book was called an Alphabet also with the grammar added in front of each degree of the Alphabet, but it's mostly Alphabet and on the tops, Alphabet. And guy tries to argue. Well, it says Alphabet, it means the Alphabet. But it says they were working, that the astronomy was unfolded to them.

Dan Vogel [00:56:50] And that's what this is. This is the only place that has astronomy. This place right here at the end of the grammar book. So the only place it really fits, unless you're trying not to let it fit, is the end of the grammar book, where the unfolding of astronomy is written in vast detail, and then that gets put into facsimile to the explanation of facsimile 2 in 1842. That's what that's based on.

Multiple Scribes and the Alphabet Documents

Radio Free Mormon [00:57:23] So my question is, with those three documents, we're talking about the alphabets, right? We've got one by Oliver Cowdery, one by W.W. phelps, and surprisingly, one by Joseph Smith. And I only say surprisingly because I understand it's very rare to find anything written in his own hand. Yeah. How do you envision the production of these three alphabets, which are by and large similar, with similar characters in the side with similar translations next to them. How do you envision that as having happened to Joseph Smith? Write his down first or what do you think?

Dan Vogel [00:57:59] And why were.

John Dehlin [00:58:00] Why were there three?

Dan Vogel [00:58:01] Yeah, why were they. Well, there's. Why were there two dictation manuscripts? And you'll see that. Why. Why two valuable discoveries with the same passage about Katuman in. In it. You know, he seems to be doing several copies just to, you know, make sure nothing gets lost or.

John Dehlin [00:58:28] Yeah, I'm thinking about when I visited Monticello, Thomas Jefferson created a machine where when he would write. When he would write on one piece of paper, there'd be a. There was like a mechanical second pen that would write a second version of the document. Basically. They don't have, you know, email, they don't have Dropbox. They can't create in the cloud replicas of documents in case one gets destroyed. So in. In the 19th century, there's a real value in having multiple copies of any. Any valuable document, so that if one gets damaged or destroyed or stolen or lost, there's a second copy. Is that, Is that. Is it that simple?

Dan Vogel [00:59:13] Well, I'm not sure why he wanted three copies or why there were three copies, but there are three copies, you

John Dehlin [00:59:19] know, But I'm just saying it helps us understand why they might want multiple copies. Right.

Dan Vogel [00:59:28] Just to make sure they have it. Because this is. He's giving explanations and they're not. Obviously they're not writing it word for word into their alphabets. Yeah, but there's a. They have some kind of need to have multiple copies. But I can't say why exactly.

John Dehlin [00:59:47] No, I'm not asking you to say why. I'm just asking you to help us think about what they might. Why they.

Dan Vogel [00:59:53] Yeah, but there's only one grammar book where they take each. You'll see each of the. Each of the characters, and they expand them five times, actually. Sometimes they purposely make it shorter, you know, from even the Alphabet, and then they expand it shortly. And it's all very artificial. It's, you know, it's very manipulative. It's not. It doesn't read like a. What you would think actual grammar or actual Alphabet would look like. It's very artificial, the whole thing. But they're expanding it, and sometimes. And one reason for doing this, I believe, is that Joseph Smith can expand his definition and he can brainstorm on various ideas right in front of everybody without anybody suspecting anything, and he can add and change his definitions without any suspicion.

John Dehlin [01:01:01] And rfm, did you get your questions out? Because I want to ask a question or make a point, but I want to make sure you finished.

Radio Free Mormon [01:01:09] I did, and I would suggest that maybe just a modest proposition would be that the multiple copies indicate the importance in which these documents were held.

Dan Vogel [01:01:18] Yeah, that's a good point.

John Dehlin [01:01:20] Yeah. Okay. And I just want to step back and kind of try and always make sure we make a point for the people that tend to get lost in. In the details. There's kind of this Occam's razor approach, which is, what is this? What is the simplest explanation for everything? And if you're looking at the overall quote translation process, what makes the most sense?

John Dehlin [01:01:42] It makes perfect sense that we would start with the Egyptian fragments that they would look at each character, that they would try and make sense of what each character means, which would be sort of an Alphabet. Then they would try and start to assemble what phrases might be, you know, might be, you know, meaning, and that would be a grammar. And then they would end with the actual production of the, the full translation. That would be a logical sequence. Start with the manuscript, create, understand the characters, figure out what, what text might be produced and, and then have the final document that makes perfect sense to everyone.

John Dehlin [01:02:26] And what the apologists want us to believe is that Joseph Smith would go from the original papyrus to a complete production of the final text. And then they would say, oh, well, let's, now that we've produced the full complete text, figure out, let's just play around and figure out what the characters might have meant, figure out the Alphabet and the grammar after the full production of the text. Is that what Guy and Muhlstein want us to believe happened?

Dan Vogel [01:03:04] Yeah, more or less. That's the reverse translation theory or reverse engineering theory that they are trying to figure out. Now that we have a translation, let's take the Egyptian characters and try to figure out how the Egyptians, what the Egyptian language is, how it worked.

John Dehlin [01:03:24] And not only does that defy basic logic, it also defies what Joseph Smith said he was doing, correct?

Dan Vogel [01:03:32] Well, yeah, right. He's the translator. And the basic flaw to the apologist position is that they have Joseph Smith and W.W. phelps changing positions. They have Joseph Smith becoming ascribed to Phelps's translation, which is kind of, you know, bizarre for Mormon mind anyway. And, but on what basis would they even attempt such a thing except through inspiration or revelation?

Dan Vogel [01:04:07] How could they possibly, like nibbly, imagine, guess and make some kind of, kind of elaborate Alphabet and grammar based on just trying to match up characters. And then the apologists try to say that, well, they got the wrong characters. You know, they didn't go to the end of the long scroll and get the right characters. They started at the front of the scroll because they're, you know, they're bumbling around and Joe Smith isn't going to help him. And Joe Smith maybe doesn't even know where they, where his translation came from, you know, so at any rate, I think we should move on to the, to the next slide.

Dan Vogel [01:04:51] Now this slide shows the translation book. These are the pages that were cut. And you can see the page, the cut was with a straight edge and not very straight. You can see it's kind of wavy line. And to the two boxes to the right show you that it damaged the characters on one side of the page. And when you turn the page, the writing got kind of cut off. So if you could ever find the book and you find the, the nubs, you know, the, the edges of the pages probably will have some of this writing and you'd know you have the right book.

Dan Vogel [01:05:28] But Robin Jensen told me that he tried to find it but could not find the actual book. So that's good for that. Okay, now we get down to the characters. And this page here that we're looking at is page three from. Then this is Warren Parrish's handwriting. This is the translation book, the part cut out, showing the characters, how they match up to the characters on the Horror papyrus, Joseph fragment 11.

Characters Copied from the Papyrus

Dan Vogel [01:06:09] And you can see they're sequentially copied. You can show the next slide. This is another way of looking at it. This is a strip of the Horror Papyrus with the characters from the translation document. Above each line, there's four lines, so you can see all the, all the characters for all the whole translation done in Kirtland is accounted for, except for where the lacunae, the empty space.

Dan Vogel [01:06:52] These characters that are there are make believe, they're invented characters. And in some of the manuscripts, they left those sections blank and filled them in later.

John Dehlin [01:07:08] And is that something RFM or Dan Vogel, that Robert Rittner would confirm that, that when, when, when they're actually copying characters from the, from the actual papyrus, that they're legitimate Egyptian characters and that as soon as there's, there's, you know, fragments and there's a need to fill in the missing characters, that all of a sudden those characters are no longer legitimate Egyptian characters.

Dan Vogel [01:07:35] That's right. Well, Rittner's teacher, Klaus Baer, he wrote an essay in dialogue, the same dialogue with Huart and Tanner, and, and he gave a translation of the. One of the earliest translations of the Horror Papyrus, the Book of Breathings. And whenever he got to these characters, he just wrote incorrect. Incorrectly restored, you know, restored, because versions

John Dehlin [01:08:04] of these scrolls would appear elsewhere. And so we would have the missing characters just on other scrolls that basically said the same. The same thing. Is that right?

Dan Vogel [01:08:14] That's also true.

Radio Free Mormon [01:08:15] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:08:15] Okay.

Radio Free Mormon [01:08:17] All right.

Dan Vogel [01:08:18] Okay. And show the next one. This is a similar thing, but it shows the lacunae, the missing papyrus sections, and I have them segmented out as, as they appear in, in the columns or the margins of the translation manuscripts. So. Okay, we'll go to the next one.

Radio Free Mormon [01:08:50] Can I state the obvious here for just a second, please?

Dan Vogel [01:08:53] Oh, you want to go back?

Radio Free Mormon [01:08:54] No, no, no, that's fine. It just appears that this may be evidence that Joseph Smith had a certain facility with creating fictional characters to look ancient. Yeah.

Dan Vogel [01:09:04] And if you really look close, well, when I show you where they really came from, that they're invented here in the margins. But they are little bits and pieces actually, of real Egyptian characters all jumbled in with make believes. He connects them together in a very strange way.

Radio Free Mormon [01:09:30] So he got these from different places on the papyrus other than this location, and just copied them in. But if you're.

Dan Vogel [01:09:38] Some of them are totally invented.

Radio Free Mormon [01:09:40] Oh, some are invented. Okay.

Dan Vogel [01:09:41] Some are invented. But you see like on the bottom row to the right.

Radio Free Mormon [01:09:48] Yes.

Dan Vogel [01:09:49] That little loop and a dot. That loop and a dot at the end. And then there's like an H figure.

Radio Free Mormon [01:09:59] Yeah, I see that. It's at the left on my screen.

Dan Vogel [01:10:01] Oh, I. Oh, it's on the right. It's on the left of the box.

Radio Free Mormon [01:10:10] Yes, that's what I meant.

John Dehlin [01:10:11] Right here.

Dan Vogel [01:10:11] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:10:12] The right of the papyri at the left of the box, underneath the papyri.

Dan Vogel [01:10:15] Yeah, that's. That's the actual character you'll see. And up at the top, I have to point out the very first characters on the right, because this is read from right to left like Hebrew. Those first two characters you can't see anymore. Okay.

Dan Vogel [01:10:36] But they're in the columns or the margins of the translation documents, or at least W.W. phelps's part. That is a reed and a W loop character in Egyptian. And they know that. That that was there because it was copied by Joseph Smith scribes and because other books of breathings begin with those two characters. So that's kind of important to know in the future of my discussion.

Dan Vogel [01:11:09] Got it. Okay, so keep going. Okay, so now we have Lucy Smith about, and she just discussed the holes in the papyrus. When Joseph was reading the papyrus, he closed his eyes and held a hat over his face and that the revelation came to him and that where the papyrus was torn, he could read those part that read the parts that were destroyed equally as well as that were there. Those that were there. Anyway, that's from 1846 source.

Joseph Smith's Translation Method

Radio Free Mormon [01:11:42] Now, it is interesting that what Lucy's describing is apparently the same method of translation that Joseph Smith used with the Book of Mormon. Yeah, he doesn't even really need the papyrus to be there in front of him.

Dan Vogel [01:11:55] True. But we know that it kind of was.

Radio Free Mormon [01:11:58] Oh, yes, we know it was. But he holds the hat over his face.

John Dehlin [01:12:01] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:12:02] Revelation comes to him, and he can read the papyrus that's there just as well as the pyrus that's not there.

Dan Vogel [01:12:08] Yeah, because remember that one part where he plays around with the. Where there's two ver. Two verses that refer to the facsimile one, and one of it says that it's the. The. You'll see the representation of the bed that is before you is one version that was crossed out and it would put some other wording that was more appropriate to a publication. So Lucy. Lucy's telling us that Joseph Smith could. Could or claimed to read the gaps in the papyrus.

John Dehlin [01:12:52] And Dan, tell me if I'm right, but if you're putting yourself in kind of a 19th century New England kind of mindset, it's a lot less impressive to the people around Joseph Smith if he's just making stuff up. But if he can actually read and interpret, if he has the power from a divine source to read and interpret characters that no one else can read and interpret, that's impressive. And so the fact that modern apologists like Terrell Gibbons want to say he was just revealing and not actually translating, they're basically not only defying what the Book of Commandments or Doctrine and Covenants actually said about Joseph Smith's power, but they're taking away a lot of the power that. That Joseph's contemporaries would have been impressed by. Is that correct?

Dan Vogel [01:13:44] I'm not sure I understand.

John Dehlin [01:13:46] People wanted. Joseph Smith needed people to believe that he had the power to lead ancient language that no one else could read. Not just channel stuff from God directly.

Dan Vogel [01:13:59] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:13:59] But actually read the characters and understand them that no one else could read or understand.

Dan Vogel [01:14:07] Right. So he has. He actually, the point is, I think, is that he actually has a document this time. He doesn't have some gold plates that nobody really sees. He actually has scrolls. And he can point to the scrolls. He hangs the scrolls up, he shows the scrolls off. He's. He's very in tune with trying to provide evidence of his gift to whoever

John Dehlin [01:14:35] will listen to translate.

Dan Vogel [01:14:38] But he also learned from Chandler that he was on safe ground because no one could really trans translate. He could say whatever he wanted. He wouldn't be contradicted by the learned.

John Dehlin [01:14:49] Right. Yeah. Because the. The world wasn't yet familiar with the proper translations of the Egyptian characters.

Dan Vogel [01:14:58] Right. At least. Yeah, he learned that they couldn't translate him. But in the back. Back east where Chandler was. Except for maybe, you know, a few names and things here and there. But yeah, general things. And anyway, he knew he was on safe ground, but he did have an actual document this time. An Actual ancient text, you know. So. Okay, we'll move on from Lucy to. Okay, what are the apologists responses to the. This kind of thing? Well, one line of argument is the unrealistic disproportion between the Egyptian characters and the assumed English translation is proof that no translation was intended. And this would be nibley and fair LDs online, you can find it there. Those.

John Dehlin [01:15:56] Translate. Translate Nibley into human, into actual common human speak. What is, what is Nibley trying to say there?

Radio Free Mormon [01:16:02] RFM well, oh, what he's trying to say is you've got a little character over here in the margin and then you've got a paragraph of text and it's. If this were a real translation, you wouldn't have so much text coming from just one character is what he's saying.

John Dehlin [01:16:19] Right?

Dan Vogel [01:16:20] Yeah. There's a disproportion between one Egyptian character and a whole lot of English words.

Radio Free Mormon [01:16:29] If I could throw in there for a second. I'm sorry, I knew you're going to get to this, Dan. But the problem is that that does strike us as strange in the 20th century when Hugh Nibley is writing this. The problem is back in the 19th century, before Egyptian was actually deciphered, it was very common to understand Egyptian to be an ideographic language, which meant that one character could indeed have a paragraph that it translates into. And in fact, Joseph Smith wasn't the only person who believe this about it. And he's not the only person who produced such voluminous translations of Egyptian from one character. Now, they were all equally wrong, but it's an illustration of how widely this idea was believed at the time.

John Dehlin [01:17:13] But Nibley's trying to say that. So. Yes, what you just said. Rfm But Nibley's trying to say here that Joseph never intended to translate to begin with, correct?

Radio Free Mormon [01:17:22] Yes. And we know why he's arguing that, right?

John Dehlin [01:17:25] That's so silly. Because he is a prophet, seer, revelator and translator and he's claiming to translate.

Radio Free Mormon [01:17:32] But what, what Nibbley's doing is he's saying, no, these documents, the. Let's use Dan's term, the Joseph Smith Egyptian papers, remember, the critical thing is that they have nothing to do with the translation of the Book of Abraham. Okay? That's the critical thing. Therefore, this argument comes into play, which makes sense to the argument to the audience that he's addressing it, that Nible is addressing it. It made sense to me, to me when I read it lo these many years ago. And then I was quite shocked to find out that actually in the 19th century, the early 19th century, it was very common for people to believe that Egyptian was an ideographic language and not a phonetic language like English. Beautiful.

Dan Vogel [01:18:12] Okay, Dan, the second line of argument is that the Egyptian characters were added in the left margins of the three translation documents after the English text, possibly as exotic decoration or a means of organizing the paragraphs of the different documents. That's Nibley. Or as an attempt to reverse engineer Joseph Smith's translation of the Book of Abraham. That's Guy and Fair lds. Now, the thing to notice right off with these two lines of argument is that they're contradictory. If there was an attempt to reverse engineer, then they are trying to make a link between the characters and the translation, and therefore the disproportionate argument that can't apply because it's a translation. So whoever is trying to reverse engineer the translation documents are believing that a lot of English words can come from an Egyptian character. So the two lines of argument are incompatible. But they try. They. They try to do it anyway.

Radio Free Mormon [01:19:33] Right? And as I understand what Dan is saying, that this idea that there's too much text for one character cuts both ways. If you have the character first and then the translation. Nibbly saying that doesn't make any sense, although we understand it did in the early 19th century. But if you go with their argument that actually the text is there first and then the characters put in there that they're trying to reverse engineer without Joseph Smith around to figure out what it is that these characters mean by comparing them with the already produced text of the Book of Abraham.

Radio Free Mormon [01:20:05] Well, you still have the same problem because you still have people thinking that this massive amount of text goes with one character. Either way you do it, you have the same problem. Of course, their goal is to get Joseph Smith out of the room, so it's not his problem, it's the scribe's problem. But the very fact that they have this additional argument that these are ornamentations in the margin, that they're just sort of writing in there, they have nothing to do with the text at all, almost suggests to me that at least somebody recognized that the first argument wasn't going to cut it, because it does cut both ways.

Radio Free Mormon [01:20:39] So we better have a fallback position of ornamentation. And when I read Guy, when I read Nibley, they kind of just say, well, we don't know exactly for sure what it was. All we know is it wasn't coming from the character to the text. Right? That's the one thing it can't be therefore anything else it can be, will throw it out there and hope something sticks against the wall.

Dan Vogel [01:21:03] Got it. All right, so I got this off the fair board, and this gives you a sample of what they argue. There is a substantial and obvious disproportion between the hieratic symbols in the left margins of the Kirtland Egyptian papers and the accompanying English text to the right. Critics often trot this fact out as an obvious artifact of Joseph Smith's ignorance, but this begs the question why such a disproportion exists. The disproportion is so marked that surely even Joseph must have been aware of it. And even if he were not, the scribes involved in the project had training in other languages such that they would have noted and objected to the disproportion.

Disproportion Between Egyptian Symbols and English Text

Dan Vogel [01:21:53] It is not enough merely to observe the disproportion. It must be explained. What did these men think they were doing? Does the juxtaposition of the hieratic symbol and the entire paragraph of English text intend to reflect a translation process, or is some other process at work? If so, what? Okay, so I accept that challenge.

John Dehlin [01:22:21] So

Dan Vogel [01:22:25] the thing is that if they would just take the time and read the documents, they wouldn't be even asking this kind of question. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to look at the documents. So we'll look at the next slide first. We'll have a word from Brother Cowdery here in the 1835. December 1835 messenger and advocate. In a long article on the. On the papyri, Oliver Cowdery said that the language in which this record meaning the Abraham is written is very comprehensive, and many of the hieroglyphics exceedingly striking.

Dan Vogel [01:23:09] So what Alvar Caudry meant by comprehensive is that a lot of meaning comes from one Egyptian hieroglyph. So. And he knows that because he actually worked on the project himself. Okay, so the next slide, we have an example here of.

Dan Vogel [01:23:36] On. On the left is W.W. phelps's translation manuscript. The first three verses of the book of Abraham. And there's three characters in that margin. And there at the top we see that reed and W loop characters that we saw from the Horus Book of the Breathings that we discussed earlier on. On the right, I mean, on the left is the Egyptian grammar. And those three characters appear in the first three pages of the. This is the first three pages of the Egyptian grammar. And it's going to explain how these characters are translated. And so the bot. The Bottom character we'll also discuss. And that comes from the Egyptian scrolls, but from a different place.

Dan Vogel [01:24:30] And it was brought here, but it would coincide with the hole in the manuscript in the. In the papyri. So all I can conclude from this is that they're implying that that character was. And it's a character for Abraham and some other stuff was in that hole.

Dan Vogel [01:24:52] Okay, so the first one represents Chaldea and the second one represents Abraham. But this system was abandoned, this numbering of each character. One, there's a one and there's a two next to each of those two first characters. And then in the text next to Chaldea is one and next to Abraham's two. But this couldn't be kept up because of the. The expansion of various degrees of meaning and dissecting, you'll see dissecting parts of the thing of each character couldn't be numbered and put into the text. So it was kind of abandoned as time went on.

Dan Vogel [01:25:40] It was only done with the first two characters. So the next slide. Okay, next slide. This is first page grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian language. And it reads this character in the fifth degree. And that's the read read character right there.

Dan Vogel [01:26:04] And the other underlying part says by inserting a straight mark over this, it increases its signification 5 degrees, meaning five times more information comes out of that character. And by inserting two, it's five times more than that. And inserting three lines, it's five times more than that.

Dan Vogel [01:26:29] So you can see a lot of information. And this is. This is what needs to be done before you start saying, oh, there's some disproportion between the characters and the language in their minds. They had a reason for that.

Dan Vogel [01:26:46] So you should at least go with what they believed. The next slide shows page three of this grammar book. And this is that one character we were describing. It has a series of dots, lines and a dash. The.

Dan Vogel [01:27:10] And it says this character shown dissected. So they take that one character. This doesn't mean one letter or even one word. Each part of that character in their minds had a different meaning and it was the whole character. Kaya bro am Kaya bra om Zub zul. Okay, next slide.

Dan Vogel [01:27:41] This is the character shown dissected. So what we have is that that whole character. And then the dot is a chi and the line is abrom and another chi and abra om. And then the curve is the loop or whatever is zabzool O. So each part has a meaning. Now go to the next slide. Not that one

John Dehlin [01:28:11] Sorry. Right there.

Dan Vogel [01:28:14] Okay. Yeah. Here's another way of looking at it. Chi, which is defined in the grammar book. The compound of iota. See? Saw. Oh, you. You went backwards.

John Dehlin [01:28:31] Gerardo, one full.

Dan Vogel [01:28:33] There we are. Gerardo's still there. Okay.

John Dehlin [01:28:37] Gerardo's helping out. I have to run to the rest.

Dan Vogel [01:28:39] Okay. I thought you were doing it.

John Dehlin [01:28:40] John's going to help out with the slides while I run to the restroom because I had too much water this morning. Sorry about that.

Dan Vogel [01:28:46] Okay. Too much coffee, huh?

John Dehlin [01:28:47] Yeah.

Dan Vogel [01:28:50] Anyway, Kai, which is a compound of iota, see or to see. Seeing, having seen. Abroam, which gets defined in another place. Kai, the compound again, the same thing. Abra om, which means father of many nations, a prince of peace, and one who keeps the commandments of God. A patriarch, a rightful heir, A high priest is Abzu Olan, means the firstborn or the first man or father or fathers.

Dan Vogel [01:29:23] So we can see that a lot of meaning is coming out of that one character as they view it. Next slide. This is the last page of Joseph Smith's Alphabet. And Oliver Cowdery comes there later to write the definition of that one reed character in the different degrees.

Characters in the Margin and the Book of Abraham Text

Dan Vogel [01:29:48] And is he right? And Cowdery writes, and what? And you must recognize also that this is written only in Joseph Smith's Alphabet, not in the other two alphabets, which shows that they consider Joseph Smith's Alphabet as the main Alphabet.

Dan Vogel [01:30:08] In the first degree, this is Kadri Cowdery writing in the first degree. Abroad signifies the father, the faithful, the first right. The elders of the second. The elders. Second degree, same sound. A follower of righteousness. Third degree, same sound. One who possesses great knowledge. Fourth degree, same sound. A follower of righteousness, a possessor of greater knowledge. Fifth degree, abroad. The father of many nations, a prince of peace, one who keeps the commandments of God, a patriarch, a rightful era high priest. Okay, so. So a lot of meaning coming out of that one character, which sounds an

Radio Free Mormon [01:30:49] awful lot like the first verse of the book of Abraham.

Dan Vogel [01:30:51] That's exactly where we're going. If we can see the next slide there. So I kind of color coded it so we can just kind of compare without reading everything. But on the left is the what we just read, and on the right is the first two verses, 2 and 3 of the first chapter of the book of Abraham. It's moving.

John Dehlin [01:31:24] How's this?

Dan Vogel [01:31:25] Okay, that's it. Okay, so you can see follow righteousness on both sides and you just go through. And it's the same language. So you see, they're translating The Book of Abraham for us. You know, at this point, there is a connection between the alphabets and the Book of Abraham for the first three verses. Okay, next slide. This is again the. The grammar book. These are the definitions of Abra, Om and kaya brah, Om. And you can see that this section comes from those. The names that were part of that one complex character.

Radio Free Mormon [01:32:17] Right. So I see this as being important because what you've established here is a link between the grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian language. That is these documents that we've been talking about and the actual text of the Book of Abraham. Now, I want to ask you this, Stan. Obviously, the apologists have to come back and say, no, it didn't go from the grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian to the text of the Book of Abraham. It must have gone from the text of the Book of Abraham on the right to the grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian language. Why is it that you feel that is not an accurate or adequate explanation?

Dan Vogel [01:32:55] Well, for the first three verses, they are kind of working back and forth, so it's kind of difficult to say which one exactly came first, but it shows that they're translating. And one argument could be made that the first three verses are choppy and not very smooth, and that later in Nauvoo, this. This passage gets the most working over by Willard Richards or Joseph Smith with Willard Richards as his scribe gets smoothed out. So this is really, really choppy. And it suggests that the grammar part, the translation of the various parts of those characters came first, was written by WWE Phelps. It was put into, like a paragraph form and later smoothed out. It would seem like they were. It would be smoother if Joseph Smith just dictated it and then they tried to make a grammar from it.

Radio Free Mormon [01:34:10] Okay.

Dan Vogel [01:34:11] And so the first three verses are used in the first pages of the grammar. The grammar takes the alphabets and those simple definitions and transfers them to the book and then expands them in five degrees of meaning. And then at some point, either during or after little grammar lectures are added in the front of each of these five parts. Not every single one, but most of them have a little grammar discussion about how the grammar works and what grammar is. So that's why it's called a grammar and Alphabet. But it's still. Still mainly an Alphabet with. With three or four lectures on Egyptian grammar in the front of some of the degrees.

Radio Free Mormon [01:35:04] The other part that I think that's really important is what you've shown here is that the people who created the Alphabet and the Alphabet and grammar are actually showing their work. They are showing how it is that even a character or even parts of a single character can be amplified into very large passages of information. And so the documents themselves show how it is that these tiny characters in Egyptian have massive amounts of information in them, much more than we would think if we were looking at them as phonetic characters like English or German or something like that. But then at the end of it, here we have Hugh Nibley, who's coming up with an argument saying, well, that obviously this can't be considered to be a translation because there's so much information that's being gotten from each individual character.

John Dehlin [01:35:55] Yeah, it almost feels. It almost feels like a disingenuous argument for the apologist to be making to say that clearly there's so much text coming from a single symbol. It's clear that. That whoever was, you know, the scribes were doing something else other than, you know, trying to translate. When, if you actually look at the documents like you suggest, Dan Vogel, it's, it's, it's blatantly obvious exactly what they not only thought they were doing, but they actually were doing. They leave no doubt, these documents leave no doubt that, that they thought they were converting a single symbol into multiple words. So why would the apologists implant or suggest any question as to what they not only thought they were doing, but what they actually were doing? Why would they even cast doubt or suspicion when it's so obvious?

Dan Vogel [01:36:54] Well, I can't answer for them, but the, the situation would be resolved if they would just read the documents. And a lot of them just don't want to spend the time to try to decipher what they were doing and thinking as they were putting these things together. But that's what I do. And I got into this because I was writing the biography of this period of just Smith's life, and I wanted to know how it unfolded, what. What was the true chronology? I wanted to get the chronology correct. So I had this actual. Actually dig into these documents.

John Dehlin [01:37:36] Beautiful.

Dan Vogel [01:37:37] So now I'm trying to spread the word to other people about what this all means because it's, you know, fairly difficult to piece it all together. What we're looking at here is that character that we're talking about, the Abra Om character. And up in the right hand side is W.W. phelps, then Joseph Smith and Robert Cowdery, writing the same character a little differently than each other. The character actually comes from the second column next to facsimile two.

Dan Vogel [01:38:20] It's actually means great. It's, it's Part of a two character name for Osiris. It's a man holding a staff. You can't tell that from how they copied it because they, they didn't know what they were looking at when they were copying these characters.

Dan Vogel [01:38:40] And it's some parts become dots, as you can see the hand or whatever becomes a dot because of some flaking of the ink. So it's. Anyway, it's the name of the great Osiris there that you're looking at part of the name.

John Dehlin [01:39:00] Right.

Dan Vogel [01:39:04] So anyway, this is. We should. For the first part, the first question. We now know what Cowdery meant by comprehensive and we know, we now know how part of how they thought about what they were doing.

Radio Free Mormon [01:39:29] Right. And you know, this really shouldn't surprise anybody because it's not like Joseph Smith suddenly started viewing Egyptian in this manner. From the work that Royal Skousen's done on the Book of Mormon, it appears very clear that what Joseph Smith was presenting is doing is looking in his hat, having one character from the gold plates appear above the stone. And then he would dictate between 20 and 30 words from the one character, ask that it be repeated to confirm that it was correct. Correct and match what he was seeing there. And then they would continue. But it looks like he thought that Egyptian was an idiographic or an expansive language six years before 1835 and 1829, when he's interpreting or translating the Book of Mormon.

Dan Vogel [01:40:16] Yeah. Remember, the Book of Mormon itself says that it would have been written in Hebrew, you know, but they wrote it in Egyptian because it took less space basically to write Egyptian. So Joseph Smith already had a reformed Egyptian. Some, some reporters said that it was Egyptian shorthand.

Radio Free Mormon [01:40:42] Right. Egyptian shorthand. Which is why just such a small group of plates and only one third that's not sealed can produce the Book of Mormon. Plus apparently the 116 pages before it that we have no longer.

Dan Vogel [01:40:53] Yeah. So moving on to. We'll deal with the second claim that the characters were added in the margins as either decoration or, you know, a way to organize the documents. That's Nibley and Geese idea that it's a reverse engineering of the translation. But you have to, in order to argue this, there is an underlying assumption that the documents were written first, that the English was written just like you would write English with paragraphs and things. And then somebody says, well, let's, let's add these weird characters at the beginning of each paragraph. The problem with that is that's not what appears on the documents.

Radio Free Mormon [01:41:44] Right. Once the, once the translation is there first. It's a very easy matter to figure out where the beginning of each paragraph is to put the ornamentation in there, isn't it, Dan?

Dan Vogel [01:41:54] Yeah, but that's not what we see. So next slide, we'll look closer. This is translation manuscript, Frederick G. Williams, the one that we were talking about earlier that was simultaneously written along with Warren Parishes document, which the. The.

Dan Vogel [01:42:13] We will discover one reason why the apologists want this to be a copy, not just the chronology part. What we're looking at is two characters in the margins. And you expect them to be at the beginning of paragraphs, but they're not. The. The bottom the. Or the top one appears in a fragment.

Dan Vogel [01:42:37] It goes along and blah, blah, blah. And it gets to who was the daughter of Haran, you know, so who is not a paragraph or a sentence, but there's a character there. So if they were just adding characters to text that had been written without characters in mind, you would not have written a paragraph like this. So that's a little problem. That's a problem with their theory right there. You want to say something?

Radio Free Mormon [01:43:15] No, I'm sorry, I was just going to say. And this makes it look like exactly what it is they're describing in the other documents, which is one thing. One glyph. I'll just call it a glyph. One glyph can represent a clause. Doesn't have to be a complete sentence. It can just be a clause.

Dan Vogel [01:43:33] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:43:33] If it's in a lower degree.

Dan Vogel [01:43:35] Right. So the conclusion from that would be that when they're making this document, they have the characters already in mind. They are. The characters are integral to the creation of this document. Not. They're not afterthoughts. So that's a problem. That's a serious problem with their theory. So in the next slide, we'll see that this is Warren Parish's document, that he was a shorter document that he was writing simultaneously with Frederick G. Williams. His document ends before Frederick G. Williams document ended. He had to leave or quit for some reason that we don't know. But he wrote a character, but didn't put the English next to it. Now, if you're like reverse engineering, why would you put a character there? There's nothing to reverse engineer with. So that implies that they were writing these characters in this instance anyway before they added the English text.

John Dehlin [01:44:50] Because the character preceded the text.

Dan Vogel [01:44:52] Yeah. So Parrish didn't. Wasn't able to put the English text next to his character. He had to.

John Dehlin [01:44:58] Characters come before the text.

Dan Vogel [01:45:00] Yeah. In this, in this instance. Right. Okay. When he's. They're writing from dictation, they're taking the time to draw the character and then the translation. That's what that would imply anyway.

John Dehlin [01:45:15] Yeah.

Dan Vogel [01:45:16] Okay, so next slide. Now this is Warren Parish's longer text. This is the one he entered into the translation book. So he writes his document up to that same character that we saw. He skips a line and then adds the part that he didn't get probably from Frederick J. Williams document.

Dan Vogel [01:45:46] And then after he finishes. And Frederick G. Williams wrote more, we don't know how much more exactly that he wrote because there's some of. Evidently the next page was missing, but Warren Parrish added what he had missed, then started taking dictation after this and wrote up to chapter two, verse 18, the. The longest text that we have from the Kirtland era in the book. And then this book was used. This book was used by Willard Richards. He made another manuscript for the printer when they were printing the Book of Abraham in the Times and seasons in March 1842. And he used this one. And we know how that he wrote it because Raleighnos when.

Dan Vogel [01:46:39] When or calling us or Rawlinas is calling us. M. Warren Parish's capital K looks like an R and Willard Richards mistook it for an R. So. So we know he's looking at this when he's cut. Now if there was an original or text from July, why wouldn't he use that? You know, so.

Radio Free Mormon [01:47:11] Right. Why wouldn't he use the original text that's now missing? That must be there if Joseph Smith actually did the entire translation in July of 1835.

Dan Vogel [01:47:19] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:47:20] Which now forces another problem on the apologists, which they would have to respond by saying that the missing text, the original text, not only is it missing now, it must have been missing as early as 1842.

Dan Vogel [01:47:36] Yeah, but it doesn't make any sense why Willie Richards would go to go to this and not some other document or original document.

Radio Free Mormon [01:47:48] Right. The indication is, is that the Frederick G. Williams and Warren Parish documents are the most reliable, the most accurate. They reflect the best translation and therefore it's used to create the one that's finally going to be published seven years later in 1842.

Dan Vogel [01:48:10] Well, there's. Yeah. Willard Richards made editing corrections and things to this also. But why would, if there was an urtext, why would WWE Phelps only copy the first three choppy like verses into the book and stop? And why would Warren Parish and Frederick G. Williams later start at verse four and carry on from there? And we have evidence that it's simultaneously written, which we'll discuss a little bit later.

Dan Vogel [01:48:48] So what we have, what I'm showing here is that the characters are being copied from Warren Parish's document that he had that were probably written at the time of dictation. The. You can't see it. But these two characters, if we can look at the next slide, these two characters right below each of them is what we call scratch erased characters. Exact same characters appear.

Dan Vogel [01:49:27] They were originally written in those positions, scratch erased and written above one another. So this implies in this situation that Warren Parish had copied the characters first. He had guessed, and they did this often. They had guessed the number of lines and just wrote the characters while they had the characters before them. Because he went beyond that and miscalculated. And so he had to scratch them off and readjust them to the text. So there's. That implies that the characters do go, you know, with these English paragraphs. They were very intentionally placed.

Radio Free Mormon [01:50:19] Right. And Dan, I find this to be the strongest evidence that the characters were put on the paper in the margins first before the text was written. What do you think?

Dan Vogel [01:50:29] Yes. In this instance, it comes first, which is a problem for Guy, because he argues that they're all added later. Well, these aren't added later. The evidence shows. Thank you, rfm. The evidence shows that the characters are integral to the text. They're there while they're writing, not some unknown scribe, many even years later, maybe adding them that had no connection to the English text. All of that is pure fantasy.

John Dehlin [01:51:09] Yeah. Or. Or, you know, deception.

Radio Free Mormon [01:51:14] More motivated reasoning.

John Dehlin [01:51:16] Motivated reasoning, yeah.

Dan Vogel [01:51:17] Yep.

Radio Free Mormon [01:51:17] It's a more charitable way of characterizing it.

John Dehlin [01:51:20] Yeah, sure. Yep, Yep. Yeah.

Dan Vogel [01:51:24] So in this. This here that we're looking at is right below. This is the translation book. Right. And W.W. phelps is writing. And right below W.W. phelps's writing is where Warren Parish adds to W.W. phelps's writing that was done in July, probably Warren Parrish adds it into the book right below WWE Phelps sometime shortly after he was hired as Joseph Scribe on 29th of October. And these are the three characters. These three characters are the invented characters that appear in. In the hole in the papyrus. But the point I'm going to make here is that we have another example of a paragraph in starting abruptly.

Dan Vogel [01:52:24] It says the. The first character and the translation next to it. I sought for mine appointment under the priesthood, according to the appointment of God unto the fathers concerning the seed. And the second character, my father's having turned from their righteousness and from the holy commandments which the Lord their God had given unto them, unto the worshiping of the. Of the gods, of the heathens. Now, that's not a complete paragraph.

Dan Vogel [01:52:52] So the point is that these paragraphs are being artificially created to line up with the characters. The characters are not afterthoughts. So he has. And that's motivation to try to make these copies and maybe intentional copies to line up with the characters and. But if the evidence is stronger for them being simultaneous productions given, you know, presumably while Justice Smith dictating. Unless you're going to invent some weird explanation for some other way of creating these documents that don't make any sense, that has no example of. In Joseph Smith's history before or after, you're going to have a serious problem with your theory that it's a reverse translation for many different angles, many different approaches, many types of evidence.

Dan Vogel [01:53:55] And this is one additional type of evidence that the translation came after the Alphabet and grammar. Yeah. So if you don't have any comments

Radio Free Mormon [01:54:09] from the apologetic point of view, though, it's really interesting to me. And you've got a wonderful quote from Hugh Nibley that he wants the scribes to be doing this because it's important for him, not Joseph Smith. And he. They're reverse engineering it or doing whatever it is they're doing, but it's not a translation. Underscore that highlight it, capitalize. So he creates this entire scenario out of whole cloth about the scribes being really upset and envious of Joseph Smith and his ability to translate. And so they're going to show him that they can translate to or they can work this thing back into it. And do we have that quote? I hope I'm not trying to get ahead of you on your slides.

Dan Vogel [01:54:49] There it is. That's it. Yeah, that's it. The brethren at Kirtland, Ohio, were.

John Dehlin [01:54:56] Sorry, this is Hugh Nibley, right?

Dan Vogel [01:54:59] Yes, this is Hugh Nibley in 1975.

John Dehlin [01:55:04] Yeah.

Dan Vogel [01:55:04] In his book the Message of the Just My Proprietary, the brethren at Kirtland were invited to try their skill at translation. In 1835, the Prophet's associates, miffed by his superior knowledge and determined and determined to show him up, made determined efforts to match up the finished text of the Book of Abraham with characters from the Joseph SMITH Papyrus number 11. But they never got beyond the second line of characters. If they were really trying to translate. They soon demonstrated that it simply did not work.

Dan Vogel [01:55:43] So that's. That's totally invented. There's no evidence for any of this. Now he says in this, in the 1975 book that it was 1835, but in his 1971 article in the BYU studies it was 1837. And he tried to date all of these documents to 1837, because 1837 was the bank crisis, the bank Kirtland bank failure. And a lot of Josephus followers and key ones and apostles started be apostatizing. And so he sees this as during this commotion that they all tried to show him up for some reason.

Dan Vogel [01:56:25] And. But when it became clear that these documents did not date to 1837, that they actually dated to 1835, he adjusted his argument. But the problem is he. There's nobody really in 1835 saying any of this kind of stuff. They have 1831 where William E. McClellan tried to show him up in dictating a revelation and bettering Joseph Smith's language in Revelation, but not in a translation.

Dan Vogel [01:57:01] But Frederick G. Williams failed because he wouldn't. He. He wouldn't dictate a revelation and in God's voice, none of just Miss Followers would. Only Joseph Smith had the nerve to do that kind of thing.

Radio Free Mormon [01:57:16] Right. So this entire vignette that Hugh Nibley has put here in his book is completely fabricated in order to support his theory of the reverse engineering. And it's. I just want to underscore the irony that this is the same individual who for all of his virtues and all of his research and all of his intelligence, this is the same individual who wrote the piece against Fawn Brody titled no ma', Am, that's not History. Yes, well, this paragraph I'd have to say to him, no, man, that's not History.

Dan Vogel [01:57:49] Yeah, that's good. That's a good, that's a good point.

John Dehlin [01:57:51] Touche.

Dan Vogel [01:57:58] So how, how Nibley imagines this would work. How would they know where to divide the characters? For what purpose? How would this show Joseph Smith up? I don't get it. Anyway, on this next slide, Geese has nearly the same thing in a shorter amount or fewer words. The grammar seems to have been produced from the book of Abraham, not the other way around. So this is the reverse translation that cannot be maintained. Give that up and move on. That's what we need to do is move on to, you know, actually coming to terms with Joseph Smith pretending to translate Egyptian. For what purpose? You know.

John Dehlin [01:58:51] Yeah. And you introducing the idea of motivated reasoning. RFM to me is really crucial here for people trying to make sense of this what's what. It's kind of mind boggling to me that we have to go into the excruciating detail of like trying to establish that, that the characters preceded the, you know, the, the, the sentences. It almost seems obnoxious to be doing that. The left hand column, it usually precedes the right hand column in, in English when, when we're writing in, in an Excel spreadsheet, you go in order of left column and then the next column and the next column. That's, that's just the way that the human mind works and the logic works. Yeah.

Dan Vogel [01:59:40] Pardon, but you, yeah, you for. To your point that when you were showing that one page with the translation and the characters at the top of that page, it says characters and then translation of the book of Abraham, you know.

John Dehlin [01:59:57] Yeah. So it defies, it kind of defies reason or logic or need. It's kind of crazy that we have to even be proving this in excruciating detail. Really does illustrate RFM to your point, is motivated reasoning. What these apologists have to do is what Kerry Mohlstein tells us he does, which is he starts with the faithful conclusion and then will arrange all the evidence that they possibly can or create fear, uncertainty and doubt to then, you know, arrange the evidence to try and support the conclusion, omit evidence, manufacture evidence, or arrange evidence to then bolster the faithful conclusion that they begin with. Correct?

Radio Free Mormon [02:00:49] Yes. And something else that occurs to me is that they're treating this document, the translation documents, as if they exist in a vacuum and saying, well, these hieroglyphs were obviously put on there afterward for ornamental purposes. What they're not telling their audience is about the earlier documents, the grammar, the Alphabet, where we have a very similar situation, which is where characters are placed on the left margin and to the right are obviously the interpretations of those characters, some of them even in different degrees.

Radio Free Mormon [02:01:24] So what they're actually arguing. They don't tell you that. They don't tell you that because you don't. They don't want you to see that the same thing is going on. Nobody would argue with these earlier documents, the grammar, the Alphabet. Nobody would argue that the text is not a translation of the Egyptian character that's in the margin. So they want to hide that and not mention it. Because when you see that, you see the exact same thing is going on with the translation documents.

John Dehlin [02:01:51] And this sentence, this paragraph from Guy just kind of really puts in fine detail their motivated reasoning.

Dan Vogel [02:02:00] Do you want to read it?

John Dehlin [02:02:00] Yeah, go ahead.

Dan Vogel [02:02:02] Okay, that's going to make you read it.

John Dehlin [02:02:05] John Gee says the Kirtland Egyptian papers that have been connected with the Papyri appear to be a later attempt to match up the translation of the Book of Abraham with some of the Egyptian characters. If one assumes that the Book of Abraham was the second text on the Papyrus of Hor, a possible scenario is that, I would say a motivated reasoning scenario is that having the translation of the Book of Abraham, the brethren at Kirtland tried to match the Egyptian characters with the translation, but chose the characters from the first text.

Dan Vogel [02:02:45] So yeah, they got confused. They didn't know that there was an Abraham text at the end of the scroll and so they just went up near facsimile one and started putting it all together. But how, how would they do that without Joseph Smith's help?

Radio Free Mormon [02:03:02] You know, it's not like there's anybody they can ask who the right character is or what the right character is

John Dehlin [02:03:11] and they've just got time to sit

Dan Vogel [02:03:12] around and Joseph Smith let him do it without trying to help him, you know, or correct him or anything. So. But it doesn't fit. It's not supported by the evidence. The major problem with the reverse translation or reverse engineering theory is that the Egyptian alphabets and grammar book are primarily not about the Book of Abraham. Although some of the material and concepts that are developed in the 5 degrees of the grammar book, albeit in a different context, get worked into the Book of Abraham. Since the reverse translation theory can only persist through a lack of familiarity with the primary documents, the remedy is to learn more about them. So that is what I propose to do. Indeed, it would maintain, I would maintain the more you know about them, the less plausible the reverse translation theory becomes.

Radio Free Mormon [02:04:13] Can you break that down a bit for me, Dan? Yeah, you say it's the major problem, right? And I understand, I understand the factual situation, which is that the Egyptian alphabets and grammar books primarily not about the Book of Abraham. It's a bunch of other stuff that's in there that never shows up in the Book of Abraham. Although there are some parts that do get worked into the Book of Abraham letter later. Excuse me, why is it that you see that as the, the major problem with the reverse engineering theory?

Dan Vogel [02:04:42] Well, how can it be a reverse engineering of the Book of Abraham if it's not about Abraham? How, how can it be, how can you maintain a reverse engineering theory if, if the documents that you're saying were reverse engineered aren't in the final product? Where did the, where did it come from is where did they come from if they didn't come from the Book of Abraham? Well, that's what I propose to discussing briefly if we have time.

John Dehlin [02:05:16] Part of what's so ridiculous about this whole thing is that even the Mormon Church today will acknowledge that the word Abraham does not appear on any of the papyrus of the papyri. Even the word Abraham doesn't exist, let alone all the words that Joseph Smith manufactures. And that's what makes this all so absurd, is that these papyrus, literally, we don't even have any real reason to believe that a person named Abraham ever actually existed. But aside from that, the word Abraham, according to modern Egyptologists, the word Abraham doesn't appear anywhere on these scrolls and yet the text that Joseph Smith manufactures is all about Abraham. It's just all kind of really silly and ridiculous that we're even having this conversation, isn't it?

Radio Free Mormon [02:06:08] Well, there goes the last of our audience, John. Thank you. No, but this, I think it's fascinating personally, and I'm just really loving this book and this opportunity to directly ask Dan some questions. But this whole idea is just brilliant because if you actually look at the documents, there's all this stuff in those grammar and Alphabet things like Kumin, all these different things have, that don't show up in the Book of Abraham. And, and so your point is very well taken that how can it be reverse engineered when if we're going through the Book of Abraham, there's nothing in there about these things like Katuman, how can you reverse engineer it into something that doesn't exist in the Book of Abraham when the whole argument is you have to have the Book of Abraham first in order to reverse engineer by the scribes later.

Apologist Counter-Arguments and Hidden Records Theory

Radio Free Mormon [02:06:55] Which by the way, which by the way, the apologists like John Gee have recognized the strength of your argument and have therefore proposed the counter argument, which seems like it's obvious because it's the only argument they can make here. But by the way, it's kudos to you that they have to make this argument, which is that In July of 1835, not only did Joseph Smith translate by inspiration the Book of Abraham as we have it now, he also translated some more.

Dan Vogel [02:07:27] Yeah, that is one aspect, one method of trying to account for the unusual material. But the problem with that argument is that the material from the alphabets that get expanded in the grammar as well as the valuable discovery notebooks is that they're not about Abraham either. Guy proposes that in addition to the Book of Abraham presently goes up to chapter five, verse 21. That Joseph Smith went beyond that and that this material was in there is that still it's not about Abraham. This material comes from another place. The Material comes from other places actually and not from an imaginary chapter 11 of the book of Abraham.

Radio Free Mormon [02:08:29] You'd have to get way beyond it because one of the figures in there is Princess Katuman. Right. And according to the chronology that is set forth in these papers from the Joseph Smith Egyptian papers I have to keep referring to that she lived hundreds of years after Abraham.

Dan Vogel [02:08:46] That's right. That's what we learned from the valuable discovery notebook. That's in the next slide. Right. If you want to show that this is. These are the notebooks. There's only three pages in the notebooks and I. All I can do is gather that they were trying to preserve some of these characters before they crumbled. This is from the Book of the Dead of Amenhotep which is missing. But Joseph Smith had. Rittner and other Egyptologists can read this writing somewhat if you go to the next slide. Valuable discovery. Let's see.

Radio Free Mormon [02:09:37] Valuable discovery.

Dan Vogel [02:09:38] I can't read it. I can't read it.

Radio Free Mormon [02:09:39] Is it some or hidden records that have. Hidden records that have been obtained from the ancient

Dan Vogel [02:09:48] burying place of the Egyptians.

Radio Free Mormon [02:09:51] There we go. And then there's Joseph Smith's signature.

Dan Vogel [02:09:53] Find Joseph Smith Jr. And that's the COVID So the next slide.

John Dehlin [02:09:59] And we need to be, we need to be translators to read their translations.

Dan Vogel [02:10:06] There are various chapters of the Book of the Dead. On the, on the left is chapter 45 and on the right it's chapters 18, 19 and possibly 20. And the English it says on the left in Oliver Cowgirly's handwriting.

Dan Vogel [02:10:31] The above were taken from beneath the figures of two persons. One the appearance of a male and the other a female. On the, on the right the above was taken from beneath figures like the first standing a little to the left and a little below.

Dan Vogel [02:10:49] And that's all they're doing is like recording these things. These are like very early, you know, gropings maybe. So the next slide is another one from the Book of the Dead from some chapter. They're not sure because it's too fragmentary or something. Next, next slide. This is the meat of this little document. This is Oliver Cowdery's handwriting.

Dan Vogel [02:11:20] Katuman. See, you see the characters? There's three groups of characters at the beginning of each paragraph and one in the middle of the second paragraph. The first paragraph. Katuman Princess, daughter of Oneidas Pharaoh strike King of Egypt who began to. Began to. Written above the line reigned or and ded cancelled. So it was really originally written who reigned and changed to began to reign in the year of the world 2962. The second paragraph. Katuman was born in the 30th year, the reign of her father, and died when she was 28 years old, which was the year 23020.

Dan Vogel [02:12:13] So the next one, King Oneidis. Who's this King Oneidis? You know, here, here's Katuman's timeline, BCE so you see, Abraham died 1821 BCE and Joseph died 1635 BCE. Kutumen lived like 800 years. Oneidis begins his reign 1042. And Katuba was born 1012. And Kutuman died 984.

John Dehlin [02:12:45] So you're, am I, am I understanding you guys right? That, that the actual dating of these papyri are something somewhere between 6 and 800 years after Abraham would have already died, if Abraham even existed at all. Is that right?

Dan Vogel [02:13:03] Like 1600 years or whatever.

Radio Free Mormon [02:13:05] Right. And I think what's going on here, the unstated assumption in those calculations is that the beginning of the age of the Earth is about 4000 BC.

Dan Vogel [02:13:14] Yes.

Radio Free Mormon [02:13:15] And so when he's talking about after the creation of the world or the year of the creation of the world being around 3000, that's 1000 BCE to us because it's 3000 after the creation of the world. But he's very careful to date Oneidis the father and Katuman the princess and when she died. And I think the reason why is because what he's trying to do is give us a genealogy and a provenance of the mummies themselves.

Dan Vogel [02:13:44] Yes.

Radio Free Mormon [02:13:45] And of these people who now for some reason, which he's also trying to figure out why these mummies of Egyptian royalty have these particular documents of Abraham and, and Joseph.

Dan Vogel [02:13:59] Yep, that's exactly it. So he has to explain, so he has these Egyptian scrolls. Why are they about Abraham and Joseph? That's, that's what he's trying to do. But the important thing to notice too are the characters are from the Amen Hotep papyrus. They're not from Abraham's papyrus. And Oliver Cowdery in his December 1835 article says that among the two, in addition to the two scrolls, there were fragments dealing with astronomy and one was an epitaph. And I think that's what he's talking about here is Katuman's epitaph. Ah. Which is from the Amenhotep fragment. Fragment. Not from the Horror papyrus, which was

Radio Free Mormon [02:14:54] held by the one man, the one male mummy. Right.

Dan Vogel [02:14:58] The hor papyrus was in. On the breast of the male mummy.

Radio Free Mormon [02:15:02] And the other three are female.

Dan Vogel [02:15:04] On the female Mummy and this? I. I don't know. They could have been totally separated from any mummy. You know, I, I don't know if it was attached to a mummy or not.

Radio Free Mormon [02:15:14] Okay. And I will say this is probably kind of obvious, and I don't want to beat a dead horse here, but Joseph Smith's dating of the mummies and the papyrus is not to the time of Abraham, interestingly. Right. But these people have it about. What is it? Could you put that back up there? Was it a thousand years or 800 years later? Yeah, about 800 years after Abraham, they get a hold of this papyrus, which presumably is still existing in its original form, that Abraham wrote with his own hand.

Dan Vogel [02:15:48] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:15:48] But if that's correct, which it apparently isn't, it's still about 700 years before the actual dating that scientists and Egyptologists have done on it say that these manuscripts, these papyrus, were actually created in 300 B.C.

Dan Vogel [02:16:09] true. That's correct. So now we get to Lucy again. Lucy, King Oneidis and his royal household. One mummy she did not know. So this is Charlotte Haven, who, where she was, she and some other people were shown the mummies and the scrolls. And Lucy explained during that visit in Nauvoo in 1843 that King Oneida, this, the. These mummies, she introduced the mummies to the people. King Oneidas and his royal household. One mummy she did not know, another Lafayette night in 1843. Also it wrote that examined the four mummies, one of which his mother told me was King Oneidas, on whose breast was found the writing of Abraham. So there you are. The. The mummy is not poor. It's King Oneidis.

Scribal Changes and the Production Timeline

Radio Free Mormon [02:17:18] Right, Good point. And Joseph Smith has created this entire backstory for the, the, the mummies. They're. They're royalty. They're a family. They have names and a history.

Dan Vogel [02:17:32] Right, the next slide. Now we get back to this notebook and the passage, and we're going to take a little closer look at the crossouts. And that one where I stumbled was the who Reigned. So what we're looking at on, on this one, this is W.W. phelps's valuable discovery notebook, or a notebook of Egyptian characters. W.W. phelps writes a translation of or part constellation of the next page and then adds in pencil very lightly, in part, which Nibley didn't notice, I guess, when he was using the microphone. Probably he didn't notice that in part. I'll explain that later. But W.W. phelps wrote who Reigned, crossed it out, and then continued on the same line. Began to rain in the Year of the World. So in order to do this, the correction had to be made at the time of dictation. That's the important part I want to point out here. The next slide.

Radio Free Mormon [02:19:01] Why is that important for you to point out, Dan, that the change was made?

Dan Vogel [02:19:09] Go back one. Did I miss? I missed. I thought the next slide would be Oliver Cowdery. So Oliver Cowdery did it differently. Oh, I think I have one coming up where I compare the two. But Oliver Cowdery wrote.

Dan Vogel [02:19:30] Just go back, John or whoever. Aubrey Cowdery corrected the words in a different way. He crossed out the Ed on rained and then added above the line, began to rain or began to rain. It would read. So if Robert Cadre was just simply copying W.W. phelps's, he would have seen that and just wrote the right, correct way.

Dan Vogel [02:20:00] Right. And if W.W. phillips was copying over Cowdery's, he would have just wrote it the correct way also. And when you wouldn't have had a cross out. So even this here suggests not. Not. It's not nailed down ironclad, but it suggests that both were writing about the same time from dictation and the similar type. A similar type of correction is made three times in the. The Warren Parish and Frederick G. Williams documents that they wrote.

Dan Vogel [02:20:35] And it's even more clear there than it is here. This type, this type of change shows up three times in those documents. That's why we can argue one reason, one reason why we can argue that they were simultaneously composed or written from dictation.

Dan Vogel [02:20:53] Okay, so let's go to the next slide. Here we have. Rittner talked about this page especially, but this is W.W. phelps's writing. Over this stood the figure of a man. And Rittner pointed out that it or a woman. I mean, and Rittner pointed out that, no, it was a man. It was Amenhotep.

Dan Vogel [02:21:19] So he got the sex wrong. Below that is the snake and a woman figure as they interpreted it coming from the Tasha Min papyrus. And up in the right hand corner is the falcon and the Canopic jar from facsimile 1. Above and below the Canopic jar are that character, the characters for Ketumen. And you can see they're writing him in different ways.

Dan Vogel [02:21:51] And it comes from the first two characters starting on the right from that paragraph. And those are the same characters that Joseph Smith hesitated over in the margin of his Alphabet. This is. Evidently it was damaged and they couldn't decide exactly how it should look.

Radio Free Mormon [02:22:14] Have we mentioned that this Tasha at men Scroll. There's two scrolls and some fragments, but two scrolls. The. We always hear about the. The Book of Breathing or the breathing Pyramid of Hor or Horus being identified as the Abraham scroll. That's easy because we've still got facsimile one in the recovered papyrus. But also that this Tasha at Men scroll, the one with the interesting picture of the serpent on legs talking to the woman, who is of course going to be irresistibly identified as the Garden of Eden story of Satan, or the serpent who gets legs or had legs before they were taken away. Right. And he was forced to crawl on his belly talking with Eve. But that. That scroll was identified by Joseph as being the writings of Joseph.

Dan Vogel [02:22:59] That. That's absolutely correct. And I do have a slide about that coming up, but you're absolutely right. We'll point it out again so you can. You'll get the connections even more clearly. So, yeah, those are. This shows the three characters are the same.

Dan Vogel [02:23:21] And the point. Show the next. Show the next slide. The point here is that on Cowdery's Kutumen passage, the three groups of characters are those up above. You can see the three groups in that paragraph. And it's only part of the paragraph. That's what. That's why Phelps added in pencil in part. Well, Nibley tried to say in his 1971 article that where he introduced these documents that there was a. An equal proportion between the. The hieratic characters and the English text. And he tried to brag that. See, Joseph Smith didn't think that they were, you know, comprehensive type language.

Dan Vogel [02:24:07] There's a paragraph of English and a paragraph of pyretic. He didn't see the penciled part saying in part. And here's the. In part, when you compare it with Cowdery's Kutumen passage, that these are the exact characters. And then another thing to notice is that if you compare them real carefully, you'll see that Cowdery, if you look at the Kutumen passage, but it's very small, but he transposes them, meaning he. They evidently believe that the characters could be written one way or the other way. You can mirror them around and turn them around. The middle one, the green one, is transposed, which will become important up ahead.

Radio Free Mormon [02:25:00] But yeah, I will say that not only did Hugh Nibley not see the. In part. Part in. In pencil, in light pencil, but if you'd taken the time to do the analysis that you have and actually look at the characters that Oliver Cowdery is using to translate the Ones that you've highlighted in different colors. If he had done that, then he would have seen that his conclusion, conclusion that all of those characters were used to make these two paragraphs of interpretation was incorrect and that actually these three sets of characters were being used.

Dan Vogel [02:25:35] Right. And it was only the other notebook he had to look at and compare the two passages that are exact. I don't know why he didn't do it. He just. Well, I don't think he cared that much about the documents.

John Dehlin [02:25:50] This is the way confirmation bias works. You see the things you want to see that bolster your argument, and you ignore or don't see the things or don't care about anything that wouldn't support your argument. That's just basic confirmation bias. And we all do it,

Dan Vogel [02:26:08] right.

John Dehlin [02:26:10] Maybe Dan less than most of us.

Dan Vogel [02:26:14] Everybody. It needs to be a community effort.

John Dehlin [02:26:17] Yeah.

Dan Vogel [02:26:18] You know, that's how scholarship works. So going back, go back quickly. Okay. The character for Kutumen in the red is really a cobra and a hand character. But they've written it so fragmentary. Well, it was probably damaged, but that's. That's what they were trying to draw. And it means recitation. Okay, so the next slide. That's a comparison where I was going to show. We already discussed it, but W.W. phelps's version and Auburn Cowdery's version and. And how they came to the same correction in the same place. They came to correct the same thing. So one good reason is that they were writing from dictation and the wording. Joseph Smith was dictating it and changed his wording, and both of them corrected it at the same time, but in different ways.

John Dehlin [02:27:23] Got it.

Dan Vogel [02:27:24] Okay, next. Oh, that's just a transcription of it. Next. That's the last page of these notebooks. And it's obviously a different scribe copying these characters. A different chapter from Amenhotep's Book of the dead, probably chapters 77 and 78. Now we get to the alphabets, and here are the three. The first one's Joe Smith and or W.W. phelps and then Joseph Smith and then Oliver Cowdery's. Oliver Cowdery's tends to be in the. The neater, more well written, transcribed one from July, late July. Next. Okay, this is the contents of. We're going to overview the contents of the Egyptian alphabets. And there's five parts, not degrees.

Overview of the Five Egyptian Alphabet Documents

John Dehlin [02:28:33] I'm going to ask you a question that maybe we've already answered many, many times, but I just have to ask it again, just to drive. Maybe the point home. If I'm even understanding what's going on. How can they be claiming that Joseph Smith had nothing to do with the alphabets and the grammar when one of the alphabets is written in Joseph Smith's own hand?

Dan Vogel [02:28:54] Yeah, they want it to be W.W. phelps project and Joseph Smith following along. He even argues in his latest book that Joseph Smith, because there's different differences in the explanations of each of these characters, they try to argue that Joseph Smith just is copying Oliver Cowdery and W.W. phelps.

John Dehlin [02:29:20] So Joseph is just being Oliver's scribe basically.

Dan Vogel [02:29:23] Yeah. Or W.W. phelps's scribe.

Radio Free Mormon [02:29:25] Right. And that hooks into what Dan had said originally, which is that if you follow the apologist logic you end up having Joseph Smith being The scribe for W.W. phelps.

Dan Vogel [02:29:38] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:29:39] Makes zero sense.

Dan Vogel [02:29:41] No, well that's.

Radio Free Mormon [02:29:43] That is the first thing that should lead you to suspect that your argument is wrong when it leads you into brick wall after brick wall.

John Dehlin [02:29:52] Yeah, yeah. It's so silly.

Dan Vogel [02:29:55] Or you have to keep inventing things and all your evidence is gone. That's a fallacy of possible proof. You know what is known to historians?

John Dehlin [02:30:07] A fallacy of possible proof or plausible deniability.

Dan Vogel [02:30:11] Possible proof, meaning if we had the documents we could prove it.

Radio Free Mormon [02:30:15] Yeah,

Dan Vogel [02:30:18] but we don't have the documents so we're stuck. We're victims of circumstance.

John Dehlin [02:30:24] But if you can create the existence of a mysterious non existent document, you can create plausibility in the mind of the would be believer that there's still reason to hold on to hope because of that non existent but possibly existing document that we're going to create out of thin air.

Radio Free Mormon [02:30:43] Right. And sometimes a non existent document actually makes sense from the evidence. Like, like the famous Q source, the Q text. Right. In the New Testament studies. But there are other times when you can take a missing document and use it in order to support your theory which all the other evidence contradicts and which your invented document or your hypothesized document only makes the situation worse.

John Dehlin [02:31:09] Got it. Yeah. Makes sense.

Dan Vogel [02:31:12] So in this overview of the Egyptian alphabets there's five parts and the five parts are only where it change. It transitions from one source to another source or a group in their minds, a group that belong together. So in the first, in the whole the alphabets are all in the first degree.

Dan Vogel [02:31:39] There's no five degrees in the alphabets, it's all first degree. So for the overview, the first part that we'll look at is the book of the Dead of Amenhotep that the characters that we Saw in the valuable discovery notebooks are kind of brought over to here or other places for me when Hope tips document and what appears to be copies of characters from the Thai Sherrit Minh Papyrus, the one associated with Joseph. And there's 23 characters.

Dan Vogel [02:32:18] The second part of the first degree, and this breaks down into three parts, is the source from that comes from the pure language, which was a document that existed before the Egyptian papyri even showed up in Kirtland, Ohio. We'll look at that too.

Dan Vogel [02:32:38] Then that turns into the copying characters from the breathing permit of Hoare from those columns next to facsimile two. And that finally, that totals 59 characters when they're done with that section. And then the rest of the alphabets, it's incomplete really, except for one exception. Abraham thing and thing at the end that is from another place. But these are just simply copying characters from those columns and without any names or translation. So let's look at the first, the next slide.

Dan Vogel [02:33:23] This is the first page of Joseph Smith's Alphabet. And I have Kutumen underlined. And that's the part where there's more characters in the margin where they're playing around with how the character looks. But this is Kutumen, the name of the royal family in the female line.

Dan Vogel [02:33:47] And that becomes the name of the mother. And whoever comes after that becomes a royal name. Okay, all right, so here we have. I'm going to jump from the Alphabet the contume and character, and we're going to look at how it's developed there. In the various degrees, each degree gets bigger. So the name of royal family in the female line, second degree, a distinction of the royal female line, and the third descent from her by whom Egypt was discovered while it was underwater.

Dan Vogel [02:34:32] Kutumen a lineage, a daughter of Ham. Ketumen, a lineage with whom a record of the fathers was entrusted by the tradition of Ham and according to the tradition of their elders, by whom also the tradition of the art of embalming was kept.

Dan Vogel [02:34:51] So what we see here is that it finally gets developed. And it is. It's an explanation for why the record is on the female mummy's breast. And that it's a patriarchal record and it's handed down through the lineage to them. And finally gets. It doesn't. Never explains why it was buried, what made them bury it all of a sudden with these mummies.

Dan Vogel [02:35:22] So you see there that if you know your book of Abraham, you know that it talks. There's three passages that talk about Egypt being discovered while it was underwater by a daughter of Ham, and she settled her sons in it. And that Pharaoh was a son and he carried on the patriarchal lineage.

Dan Vogel [02:35:43] And these passages, in these three passages, they happen to coincide with the hole in the papyrus and. They kind of like are dropped in the text of Abraham. Don't mention Abraham. It's kind of background information. But they were first developed in a whole different context, dealing with the mummies and cantumen and her lineage, trying to explain their lineage, not. It didn't have anything to do with Abraham. So like I was saying, if it doesn't have anything to do with Abraham, how can it be a, a reverse translation of the book of Abraham?

John Dehlin [02:36:29] Right.

Dan Vogel [02:36:30] It just happens. The B, that just later decided to use this for background in his own dictation of when he does get to the book of Abraham. But the characters are coming from the Amenhotep papyrus and the tall Sheritan papyrus.

John Dehlin [02:36:49] Yeah.

Dan Vogel [02:36:49] So show the next slide. This, this is not Kutum, and this is another female mummy I, I borrowed. But this is, this is. This would be Queen Katuman, not Princess Katuman. Princess Kutuman was her daughter. Unmarried daughter. And this is Queen Katuman, the mother, the mummy that had the tall Sheritan papyrus on the breast of. Okay, so then that would be the record of Joseph. Next slide. This is Oliver Cowdery's December 1835 article in the messenger and Advocate where he mentions. And he's talking about papyri fragments 4 and 5, the serpent represented as walking near a female figure, Enoch's pillar as mentioned by Josephus, the representation of the Godhead, three, yet in one. So we know he's talking about the Tashir at Min papyrus and calling it the record of Joseph.

Radio Free Mormon [02:38:07] Go ahead, Marcia. We also get a nice reference there to the possession and use of Josephus by at least Oliver Cowdery in close connection to Joseph Smith's translations.

Dan Vogel [02:38:17] And Josephus talks about Abraham astronomy and, and Abraham taught the Egyptians astronomy.

John Dehlin [02:38:25] And for. And for those who don't understand why that's important. And one of the great things about this book, Dan Vogel, is that you spend several chapters talking about the likely sources of content. If Joseph didn't in fact translate, but he did supply content in the book of Abraham. And, and Joseph wasn't necessarily the originator of the content. Where did the content that ends up in the Book of Abraham come from? And that's why you're mentioning Josephus. And that's what your book does, is it mentions all sorts of different sources for potential sources For Joseph Smith's Book of Abraham, which actually includes things like Josephus and. And a Philosophy of a Future State by Thomas Dick and, you know, lots of other sources. Is that right? And Joseph Smith's Hebrew lessons that. That he experienced in 1836, actually. Ironically. Correct.

Dan Vogel [02:39:25] Yeah, yeah, yeah. We can account for most of the material from his own environment and imagination by looking at facsimile one.

Radio Free Mormon [02:39:36] Right.

John Dehlin [02:39:36] And we'll be. We'll be talking about all that in a part two of this series. Yeah, yeah. That we're not going to cover today.

Radio Free Mormon [02:39:41] Dan, can I ask you a quick question here from the prior slide? You're talking about Queen Katuman versus Princess Katuman.

Dan Vogel [02:39:48] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:39:48] Because they're part of the royal family. Right, right.

Dan Vogel [02:39:51] That's. That's the female line. It says Katuman. It represents the female line.

Radio Free Mormon [02:39:56] Even though these people are dated much later according to Joseph Smith. Do you see a reflection of that in the confusion in the Book of Abraham between the mother of Ham being named Egyptus and apparently also his wife?

Dan Vogel [02:40:12] Well, yeah, there, there. The mother's name was not Egyptus. So there's a confusion because the. The daughter of Ham was named Aegyptus and there was another name. Escapes my mind right now, but there was another name and then it was changed. So it made it appear that the daughter and the mother's name was. Both of their names were Egyptus. The mother. I believe it's the mother, isn't it?

Radio Free Mormon [02:40:52] Ziptah.

Dan Vogel [02:40:54] That's Zepta. That's it.

Radio Free Mormon [02:40:57] I'll be here all week.

Dan Vogel [02:40:58] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:40:59] Try the fish.

Dan Vogel [02:41:00] Yeah. Zeptah and Brit Metcalf wrote a whole article on this confusion and how at the end both of them become the name Egyptus which is taken from Josephus. Probably there is an Egyptus in Josephus.

Radio Free Mormon [02:41:23] Okay. So not so much a reflection of the mother daughter Katuman, as it is a confusion that crept into the text inadvertently.

Dan Vogel [02:41:31] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:41:31] About Egyptus.

Dan Vogel [02:41:32] Yeah. But remember in the Book of Mormon all the kings become named Nephi also.

Radio Free Mormon [02:41:40] We're told that, but we don't ever really read about any of them.

Dan Vogel [02:41:43] Yeah, because he couldn't remember the names lost in 116 pages. So they keep all became Nephi. All right, we can go to the next one there. So we're going to look below that to the part. Let me see. Oh, yeah. Iota zip Zai. IO Iota Taoist zip Zai, the land of Egypt, first seen underwater.

Radio Free Mormon [02:42:23] That's important.

John Dehlin [02:42:25] Yeah. Tell us why this is a. Once we start saying things like Iota To a zip zai people are going to get lost. Why is this important?

Dan Vogel [02:42:34] Joseph Smith speaking in tongues. So this, this is important because the Book of Abraham, chapter one, verses like 23 to 26, I believe it is, or seven, as I mentioned before, has the daughter of Ham settling her sons in Egypt, finding the discovering Egypt while it was still underwater from the floods, presumably or obviously, and settling her sons in it and her oldest son Pharaoh, making him a king. And that they feigned claim through Ham for being the lineage of the patriarchs, but they weren't, they didn't have the right to the patriarchal priesthood. And this is why Joseph Smith's dictating this, what I would call pseudepigrapha Abrahamic pseudepigrapha.

Dan Vogel [02:43:33] He needs textual, ancient textual evidence to support his innovation in the hierarchy. His introduction to the high priesthood, which some other brethren were questioning even during his lifetime. David Whitmer and Nick Leland and others were questioning whether there needs to be a high priesthood, whether Jesus wasn't the only high priest. Why do we have this high priesthood? And then the development from that in 1834, just before this text comes, is that he introduces the patriarchal priesthood. And the patriarchal priesthood was going to be the right of kingship also, which would be the rulers in his Zion once it is established and restored in Missouri.

Dan Vogel [02:44:29] So he's providing a text for the high priesthood and patriarchal priesthood and getting involved in government, you know, and politics, which part of his own leadership were resisting all of this, you know, being involved in establishing some sort of shadow government in Missouri. And that's what this, this is pseudepigrapha. This is what he was going for even before the papyrus showed up.

Dan Vogel [02:45:06] He started revising early revelations and innovating on the patriarchy, which became Section 107 of the Doctrine Covenants. And then in there he goes through the from Adam up to Enoch. And be a little beyond tracing the lineage of the high priesthood which doesn't exist in the Old Testament. There's no high priesthood lineage in the Old Testament from Adam on up. Joseph Smith innovated that and, but he had no ancient text to establish that.

John Dehlin [02:45:43] And Dan, just for the people that don't understand 25 cent words, if I understand it right, pseudepigrapher means that, that you are right, someone is writing in the name of some prior likely dead historical figure who had authority, whose name you would recognize. And so if Joseph Smith, if Joseph Smith says there's a high priesthood, people are going to go, well, who are You. But if Joseph Smith is able to have Abraham, who, who everyone respects because they respect the Bible, if Joseph Smith is able to have Abraham talking about a high priesthood, then that can give weight to his theological claims that he's trying to make in 1835 or 1836. Is that right?

Dan Vogel [02:46:30] That's exactly right. That's why pseudepigrapha was invented anciently even. It's a pseudo writing. Writing. They assume the, you know, a character of one of the dead prophets or and pretend like they discovered some writing that hadn't been discovered before.

Dan Vogel [02:46:48] Like you know, you heard of the assumption of Moses, the books of Enoch, you know, these kinds of books are pseudo writings and usually they introduce them. This is Bart, Bart Ehrman has done a fantastic job writing about Pseudepigrapha in the New Testament apocryphal writings.

Dan Vogel [02:47:13] They would get ancient authority for a new doctrine they want to introduce into the, to the church, the Christian church, by writing and be under the name of an ancient prophet as if it were the prophet. And that would give the new doctrine some authority. Well, you know, Joseph Smith did that, right? That's what the whole Book of Mormon's about basically is he actually invented his characters in order to give himself authority for various doctrines and things he wanted to correct.

Dan Vogel [02:47:51] So he invented characters and then the characters quote ancient Joseph, which is another pseudepigrapha that doesn't exist, prophesying Joseph Smith coming in the last days. Joseph named after his father Joseph. You know, a very exact prophecy, something he could never do from his point forward but always really well going backwards.

John Dehlin [02:48:15] That's right.

Dan Vogel [02:48:18] So these, these are pseudo graphic writings. Nobody would accept a book written by Joseph Smith, the farm boy, former money digging scryer. So he invented characters to give himself authority. And so he needed. And the early Mormon didn't just like buy whatever justice, just miss revelations. Obviously in 1831, McClellan and others are balking at some of the revelations and they, you know, there's that Canadian revelation, very inconvenient Canadian revelation hanging around. And so they didn't, they didn't just go, oh, Joe Smith said it, that's it. They wanted it to.

Dan Vogel [02:49:05] One early Mormon said we believe his revelations insofar as they are consistent with the Bible, you know, and so he had to. There's a lot of political movement maneuvering. That's what my biography is about, a lot of political maneuvering to keep Joseph Smith, you know, one step ahead of his followers. And one of them was this high priesthood and Patriarchal priesthood and inventing a lineage of Melchizedek priests, you know, started in the Book of Mormon, and he developed it in section 84 and then 107 and in 107. And this was revised and prepared for publication in the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants, which was being typeset.

Dan Vogel [02:49:55] And Joseph Smith Revised an early 1831 revelation and then added to it a new revelation about Adam on diamond and Adam being in the valley of Edomondiamon and all. All the high priests meeting there. And here's the lineage up to Enoch and, and Noah and.

Dan Vogel [02:50:21] And at the end of this little evidence or revelation dealing with the lineage of high priests, it says that this would be revealed in the Book of Enoch in due time. And this book of. I argue that he was first going to provide a pseudo pographic writing of Enoch, and that's why we have this pure language.

Dan Vogel [02:50:47] And you will see that the pure language subject matter is the high priests lineage of high priests. And that gets impressed. That's in the second part of these Egyptian alphabets. What does that have to do with Egypt? Well, I argue that he's carrying on what his original plan was, that these documents fell into his lap just in the right time where he could actually have a document. He first provided characters for W.W. phelps to look at characters and definitions, and then he had the right. The translation of those characters. And that that pure writing sample that we're going to look at was sort of like what the characters Joseph Smith gave to Martin Harris with the Book of Mormon to take to the learned.

Dan Vogel [02:51:45] Here's the characters, you know, see if you can get them translated. This pure language sample was Joseph Smith's way of providing evidence for W.W. phelps, one of the leading linguists he had amongst his followers.

John Dehlin [02:52:04] And for any orthodox or believing Mormon that would take umbrage at Joseph Smith at the accusation or the proposition that Joseph Smith might engage in pseudepigrapha. I was in the room at a conference with Richard Bushman where he felt perfectly comfortable using the. The word pseudepigraphy in association with Joseph Smith. Am I right, Dan Vogel and RFM right?

Radio Free Mormon [02:52:30] Yes, yes. And I'm gonna have to leave here in just a minute. I just want to make a comment and then ask another question of Dan trying to put a fine point on it. All of this. We don't do patriarchal priesthood in our church anymore. You know, it's all you get called of God will set you apart and you can stay there as long as you do what you're saying you're supposed to do and don't do anything you're not supposed to do. But Joseph Smith has already set up in the Book of Mormon in Second Nephi chapter three, that he is a prophesied literal descendant of Joseph, which is, from his point of view, the chosen line from Abraham.

Radio Free Mormon [02:53:04] So he's a literal descendant of Abraham. Now, there's questions about priesthood, there's questions about authority. And Joseph Smith is starting to receive revelations like Section 107, that talk about this patriarchal lineage and the patriarchal priesthood that is received. And then 1835, the first two chapters, almost all the first two chapters of the Abraham translation in 1835 coincidentally deal with the exact same issue about this patriarchal priesthood and how it was that Abraham, you know, you can only receive it from the fathers. Right. It comes down from father to son in a righteous line. So you've got that going on. So having said all of that, I wanted to ask you, Dan, and bring it back to that one line in that one document that we just had up on the screen.

Radio Free Mormon [02:53:49] Because the reason I think you have it underlined in red is because with all the other stuff that's going on in that document that has no obvious connection with the text of the Book of Abraham as we have it, this one does, because it has a very unusual comment about the land of Egypt, which is first being seen, seen underwater, that is highly unusual. And so when we see the same idea reflected in the text of the Book of Abraham, it leads to the conclusion that there is a connection between the Egyptian Alphabet, at least this one line of it, and the text of the Book of Abraham.

Radio Free Mormon [02:54:28] And I'm going to give you the softball, Dan, which is, I think, one of the reasons why it is that you argue that, that it makes no sense to think of this being a reverse translation of any kind, because all this other stuff is in these documents that has nothing to do with what we find in the Book of Abraham, with certain exceptions, like that one.

Dan Vogel [02:54:54] Well, this whole first part, one of the Egyptian alphabets is about the royal family. Family. It's about. Princes, kings, queens. Yeah, you know, things like that. It's all about the royal family and that this and it's explaining their lineage is back to Ham, and that it was just Egypt was discovered. This is the history of Egypt and how it was founded. Because they're talking about Queen Khutumin and not Abraham. So this idea was invented not in an Abraham context. The ideas were invented and the characters, when we look at the characters come from a different. Come from the Amenhotep papyrus and the Tasharet Min Papyrus. And it's tr. And as I read the development of Katuman went to the queen and tried to explain why the record was with her. So it has nothing to do with Abraham yet. Yet, you know, nothing at all.

Radio Free Mormon [02:56:12] Except we have this one idea about the land of Egypt first being seen underwater, which then will show up in the Book of Abraham.

Dan Vogel [02:56:19] It does.

Radio Free Mormon [02:56:20] Except in this Egyptian Alphabet. It's something that happened a long time ago because it was hundreds of years before Cotumen existed. The fictional Cotumen princess or queen existed. But in the Book of Abraham, it shows up in present tense. Well, it's. It's a past tense thing in there as well.

Dan Vogel [02:56:37] Yeah, it's. It's filling in the background of Pharaoh. Yes. In. In the Abraham. And you know, it could be argued that it wasn't integral to Abraham's record at all and that it was just dropped in there by Joseph Smith to. As background.

Radio Free Mormon [02:56:56] Yes. And to give Advera similitude.

Dan Vogel [02:56:59] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:57:00] I've got to run, guys. It's been great. I apologize. I hadn't anticipated staying this long, but I will run. I wish you all the luck. It's been great. Dan, your book's fantastic. I encourage everybody to get it, to read it, to read it again.

John Dehlin [02:57:14] You're a legend. I expect our audience to drop in half once you drop off. Check out Mormonism Live. It's every Wednesday night. At what time?

Radio Free Mormon [02:57:22] Well, 6:20, Mountain Time.

John Dehlin [02:57:24] Mountain Time and RFM. You're going to come back and we're going to do a part two where we talk about Book of Abraham apologetics with Dan. Is that correct?

Radio Free Mormon [02:57:32] Yes. I'm looking forward to that so much. Thanks again, Dan. I appreciate it. Thank you, John, for having me. You bet. Bye. Bye.

John Dehlin [02:57:40] Yeah.

Dan Vogel [02:57:43] Okay. Can we take a break of some kind?

John Dehlin [02:57:46] Yeah, yeah. I'll just. You go ahead and take a break. I'm just going to.

Dan Vogel [02:57:51] Quickly, real quick.

John Dehlin [02:57:53] It's no problem. I'm going to go ahead. Just while we're here, I want to thank our audience for being with us today. And I want to kind of make a point that I think we don't make explicitly and that's that, you know, the majority of people that consume Mormon stories podcast right now do it through audio still because we started out as an audio only podcast. And one of the benefits of. Of having a podcast is that you can listen to it or consume it without using your eyeballs. So you can be, you know, riding your Bike or mowing the lawn or riding in your car, driving your car, commuting, washing the dishes, whatever it is you do, sleeping at night, you don't have to be watching to enjoy most audio podcasts.

John Dehlin [02:58:40] But what we need to kind of make sure everybody understands is, is that we have been for many, many years now providing a visual version of Mormon Stories podcast. And of course, those of you who are joining us now on Facebook or YouTube obviously know that. But what I want to make sure people understand, number one, is if you are joining us through Facebook or through YouTube, please click the subscribe button or the Follow button. Because number one, that helps us with our number of subscribers, but, but it also notifies you whenever new episodes come out. And it helps us with the algorithms. It helps us become more popular.

John Dehlin [02:59:17] It makes YouTube and Facebook more likely to recommend the, you know, our, our episodes more, the more subscribers or followers that we have. But also I, I do want to make one more point and that's that to really enjoy these episodes like the ones with Dan or like the ones with Robert Ritter and others with rfm, it's so much more useful to have visuals than to just be trying to follow along audibly to what we're talking about. And so, you know, and if, and last thing I'll say is if you purchase a premium version of YouTube, which I think is only 10, $10 a month, you not only get to skip the ads, but you can listen to these episodes audibly and lock your, your smartphone and it won't pause what you're listening to.

John Dehlin [03:00:07] So you could basically in effect use YouTube as an audio based podcast streamer. And you know, these are just new tools and tips and techniques that the Gen Z folks would tell us all so that we can just get the most out of our content. All right, welcome back, Dan.

Dan Vogel [03:00:26] Hello, everybody.

John Dehlin [03:00:27] I'm glad you got that break. Where should we go next?

Pure Language Characters and Their Origins

Dan Vogel [03:00:32] Okay, well, let's see. Okay, this is the shows. The character for Kutumen on the top, it has like number 15. This is the 15th character out of the 23. And there's Smith, Phelps, Cowdery. They draw the character differently. There's a line, a dot and a curved line. And it appears that they came from the Ta Sherat Min papyrus. And so I have like three examples right by that snake and one's in red or two. Two of them are in red writing. And they can face either way. Remember we talked about how they, Cowdrie transposed them? They, they got the idea from the scrolls themselves, I guess. Okay.

John Dehlin [03:01:30] So what is interesting or important about that?

Dan Vogel [03:01:34] So this character is the character for discovering Egypt underwater.

John Dehlin [03:01:38] Okay, got it.

Dan Vogel [03:01:40] And it doesn't come from the horror papyrus or imaginary extra piece at the end.

John Dehlin [03:01:47] Got it. Okay.

Dan Vogel [03:01:52] Okay, you go to the next one. Okay. Iota, Taoist, zip Zai. The land of Egypt, second degree, is the land which is discovered underwater by a woman. The woman sought to settle her sons in that land, she being a daughter of Ham. The land of Egypt discovered by a woman who afterwards settled her sons in it. And now the fifth degree, finally, the land of Egypt, which was first discovered by a woman while underwater and afterwards settled her sons, she being a daughter of Ham. Any land overflown with water, a land seen when overflown by water, land overflown by the seasons, land enriched by being overflown. Low marshy ground. So it sort of sounds like a dictionary.

John Dehlin [03:02:46] Now, Dan, for those who joined us late or have not been really understanding or tracking, what do these degrees mean? Why. Why are we having a first through a fifth degree?

Dan Vogel [03:02:56] Just.

John Dehlin [03:02:56] Just to kind of remind people what. What these degrees are for or what they mean.

Dan Vogel [03:03:02] Well, in Joseph Smith's Imaginary Grammar and Alphabet, he imagines that this is a comprehensive language, that one character yields a lot of meaning. And if you add a line, take a line out or whatnot, it increases or decreases its meaning. So it's. So this is. This gave him room, as you can see. He could take that land of Egypt and a little idea and keep on expanding it so that he can get meaning out of the character. Think about it out loud and expand it in these five degrees. And then in this case, he can finally use it. But the other parts probably triggered his imagination in various other ways also. But to know these different degrees of this language.

John Dehlin [03:04:10] And were these degrees written out in. In the grammar book? Did it say first degree, second degree?

Dan Vogel [03:04:16] Yeah, so I think I have a thing coming up. But each. The first degree is copied almost directly from the alphabets and then expanded. And it's kind of written backwards in a way. And so the first degree is in the alphabets. And then he skips pages and adds a few pages of the second degree, skips pages so that he can expand each degree if he needed to.

John Dehlin [03:04:51] Got it.

Dan Vogel [03:04:53] So these are the three mummies, not the real ones that we're talking about. Hang on. What number is this slide, by the way? Can you see it? Oh, here. Here I am. Okay. 61, part one. This is the conclusion of the alphabets. Part one of the alphabets deals with Katuman and her parents. And although it will be used as background material for Pharaoh and Abraham, 2326, it was originally developed in the context of identifying the mummies, then explaining how the record of Joseph came into possession of one of the female mummies. So the conclusion of all this is that how could it be backwards or reverse translation if it has nothing to do with Abraham? It's not about Abraham, it's about Kutumen, who lived 800 years later. Right?

John Dehlin [03:05:59] Yeah.

Dan Vogel [03:06:01] So it's not reverse engineered, even if the subject is touched on in the book of Abraham when he finally dictates that portion. So now we're going to go to the pure language, the second part, if you recall this chart.

Dan Vogel [03:06:21] So the first 13 characters are the pure language. The 14 through 42 are a mixture of make believe characters copied off of one of the columns of the. Of. Column three of next to facsimile two. And then the 43 through 59 are just sequential for the rest of that column three. And we'll see that I'll have photographs for that too.

Dan Vogel [03:06:56] So, next slide. So this is just the first page of Joseph. Excuse me. This is the bottom half of Justice Smith's first page of his Alphabet, which is the pure, the first 13 characters. What you were looking at is the pure language.

Dan Vogel [03:07:16] Part of, part of those characters we know are the pure language. The other parts are not Egyptian. So I'm assuming that the sample, it was a sample of a larger pure language text that Joseph Smith had produced prior to the Book of eight or the Egyptian papyri coming to him.

Dan Vogel [03:07:38] Next slide. That's a transcription of that page. You can see Amios, God without beginning or end. Alf. And this is where it gets kind of Hebrewish. So Joseph knew, at least knew

John Dehlin [03:07:59] the

Dan Vogel [03:07:59] Hebrew Alphabet, which is not hard to discover. But in the beginning, God the Son or the firstborn angels or disembodied spirits or saints, angels in the un altered, immortal, alterable, immortal state. Ministers of God, High priest kings, ministers of God under the less or the less. I mean ministers or ordained, not ordained of God, sinful ministers who are less sinful for want of power. Name of all human, all mankind. Men or men, Adam or the first man or first king. Next, from Adam one ordained under him, third patriarch forth from Adam. So you see, it turns into

Radio Free Mormon [03:08:55] a

Dan Vogel [03:08:55] discussion of the patriarchs, the lineage of the patriarchs. In other words, what, what we saw there is a development. The different grades of gods, different grades of angels, different grades of ministers and the patriarchal lineage. So next slide. If there's no question.

Dan Vogel [03:09:16] So this is a page from W.W. phelps's letter to his wife Sally. Phelps had left Missouri and went to Kirtland, Ohio, to become just Smith's scribe and to help publish the Doctrine and Covenants. And on the 26th and 27th of May, 1835, at least a month before the papyri showed up, Phelps wrote to his wife.

Dan Vogel [03:09:45] So in the center of this, you will see, you can kind of vaguely see, go back, that's them. But in the center of this letter he gives a sample and there's characters and columns and names and definitions, sort of what later appears in the alphabets and the grammar and Alphabet.

Dan Vogel [03:10:10] So next, this is a transcription below that God, son of God, sons of God, ordained angels, children of men, the earth. Sound familiar? You know, sounds like that. Joseph Smith's Alphabet there. And this is before the Alphabet showed up or before the papyri showed up. He's writing this stuff and having these characters. And these characters are not Egyptian. They're a sample of the pure language.

Dan Vogel [03:10:45] Next slide this on the. The Egyptian Alphabet, second part from July from Joseph Smith's. I think this is actually W.W. phillips or Cowdery's, but on the right is the pure language. So you can see the characters are exactly the same written into the alphabets.

Dan Vogel [03:11:12] So the argument that I'm making from this is it's about the pure language. It's not about Abraham. If it's not about Abraham, how can it be a reverse engineering of the Book of Abraham? Yet at the same time we see that the subject matter is also being borrowed in the translation and will carry on into his definitions of Egyptian characters. So the subject matter begins. That's why I argue that it's a Book of Enoch material that he had begun and then plugged into the Egyptian project when it showed up.

Dan Vogel [03:11:53] And he just carried on the subject that he had started in association with the Book of Enoch. So, next slide. That's, that's the. This, this looks like the same. Well, go ahead there. That's it. This is a sample of the pure language given by Joseph Smith is copied by Brother Johnson. Well, this Brother Johnson is who the family he lived with in hiram, Ohio, in 1831 and 32, 33.

Dan Vogel [03:12:40] This is where Joseph Smith. 1832, March 1832, around. Around that date is his first sample of the pure language. It doesn't include any characters in this document. Probably didn't have any characters at this time. So he gives the pure language. Next slide so we can read it. This Is in question and answer form. And you'll see it's the same subject matter as just miss Alphabet at the beginning of part two. The meaning of the pure word. Amen.

Dan Vogel [03:13:21] It is the beginning. It is the being which made all things in all parts. What is the name of the son of God? Son. All men. What is son? All men. The greatest of all the parts of all men. Which is the Godhead? The firstborn. What is man? This signifies sons. Amen. The human family, the children have been the greatest parts of all men. Sons, the son. Amen. What are angels called in the pure language? All men. Angels, men. What are the me. What are the meaning of these words? All men.

Dan Vogel [03:13:59] Servants, ministers, servants sanctified, who are sent forth from heaven to minister for the sons. All men. The greatest part of all men. Son. Sons. All men. Son. All men. All men. Sounds like a lot of gibberish. But you see, these are the subjects that he in 1832 that are on his mind about the pure language. And he's developing the pure language. He hasn't got to the Egyptian stuff yet.

Dan Vogel [03:14:28] So you can see where I'm going with this, obviously. Okay, next slide. This is a comparison of the 1832 specimen and Phelps's specimen that had the characters. And even I summarized the 1832 1. God, sons of God. You know, all men, son, all men, Sons, all men. And there we go. On the other side, it's all men, Sons, all men. Anglo Sons, all men, Sons, all men. Olia, the earth.

Dan Vogel [03:15:07] That's. That's a. Not Egyptian name, but a Adamic name. So, next slide. On the left side is the pure language by Phelps, dating to May 1835, a month before the Egyptian gets there. And on the right is the Egyptian Alphabet, part two with God. I summarized it again to show the comparison that it's the same subjects. The first 13 characters are not Egyptian, according to the Egyptologists.

Dan Vogel [03:15:56] And we know the ones in the middle are Adamic characters or the pure language characters. But you can see the subject matter expanding out and following the pure language that predates the Egyptian scrolls. It's God. Son. God, Son of God. Angels, spirits, angels resurrected, ministers, high priests, kings, ministers, lesser priests, ministers not ordained of God, ministers not ordained all mankind. Adam, the first king. You recall this? We read this next. From Adam, ordained third, ordained patriarch, fourth from Adam, fifth from.

Dan Vogel [03:16:46] Now we get into the new material. Fifth high priest from Adam, man's first residence. Another place five times greater, a third place, five times greater, so forth, the whole earth. And then it gets to the Heavenly bodies and the celestial kingdom of God's and God's residence.

Dan Vogel [03:17:06] That's the 23rd character. That's the whole part. A whole first. First part of the Egyptian Alphabet. So this shows that there is a natural progression of themes dealing with grades and levels of various subjects that I just mentioned.

Dan Vogel [03:17:28] The Alphabet, the Egyptian Alphabet explains the end. The last character end at the character 23. All right, so the next slide. This is again Joseph Smith's Alphabet, page two. And we're down to character 24 through 41. And this was added in Oliver Cowdery's handwriting, again, like we mentioned before, showing that Joseph Smith's Alphabet is the main Alphabet.

Dan Vogel [03:18:06] And all he does is add the names of these characters all the way up to 41. Not the definitions. The definitions of these characters are in the bound grammar. Character 42 was added by Warren Parish after October 29th colob. And that's where all the definitions end. And the rest is merely copying from the columns next to facsimile 2.

Dan Vogel [03:18:46] So these characters comes from the columns, not from the characters. They are not the characters next to the translation documents showing that. How can it be a backward reworking or reverse engineering of the Book of Abraham translation if it has nothing to do with the Abraham text?

Dan Vogel [03:19:14] Totally different characters. The subject matter. There is no subject matter. This subject matter is astronomy, the Earth and various grades of planets and the sun and Kolob, finally, you know, up there next to God's throne. So none of this is in the five chapters of the Book of Abraham. And the apologists try to remedy this by saying that there's 11 chapters that. And. And there. The ones after the fifth chapter are missing. And that that would be found in there. So we have another missing possible proof situation.

John Dehlin [03:19:59] Right.

Dan Vogel [03:20:00] Okay, John, that this shows you another. Recall this where the characters are copied from this part of the scroll, not from the columns next to facsimile two. Okay, next, here we have. Those are the columns. Five columns on the right. That's where these characters are being copied from into the. Into the rest of the book of. Or the Egyptian Alphabet. On. On the left is the area where the characters come from that are in the margins of the translation of the Book of Abraham. Documents different places. How can it be a reverse engineering? Can't happen. Okay, John, here, here, just for completeness. This is column. What is it? Can you see? Read the column.

John Dehlin [03:21:13] There's. There's column three in the middle.

Dan Vogel [03:21:15] Yeah, column three in the middle there. That's right. From that, the Horror Papyrus. And I'm showing the characters there on either side of that. I broke it down. Characters 14 through 42 and Cola being the last one come. And I'm showing you exactly where they come from in that column being copied into the alphabets. So next slide. Oh, go back, sorry. That one in the middle, number 32, is it? Yeah, that's the one with the arms raised above the head. It looks like a man with the arms raised above his head, right?

John Dehlin [03:22:06] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dan Vogel [03:22:07] So now we're going to look at the definition Joseph Smith gave of that character.

John Dehlin [03:22:12] It's an important character for those of us who have been through the Mormon temple ceremony.

Dan Vogel [03:22:16] Yeah. Or if you're Masons.

John Dehlin [03:22:19] Yeah. Who are Masons, let's say.

Dan Vogel [03:22:21] Okay, so here's the grammar book, pages 27, 29, 31. Because the different degrees are spread out. So we have character 32 and the Maniba. This is the drawing, not the actual papyri. This is how they drew it into the Alphabet. And then they wrote the definition intercedes for another invocate or another.

Dan Vogel [03:22:51] For another intersection. Sorry, intercedes for another or invocation. And then 33 is like a U shaped, sort of like reminds you of the arms above the head. And that's what they learned from the proprietary, is that they sometimes took hieroglyphs and made them into cursive writing. And that's the Alphabet, basically.

Dan Vogel [03:23:14] So a sign among the Egyptians that is used for influence or power, a sign made use of for one to escape his enemies. So people know the story of Josephus martyrdom. That might make sense for you'll find out how that connects to Masonry in a second.

Dan Vogel [03:23:36] And the bottom one is. And I accidentally left off the last part, but it reads the same as the one above and but then adds to excite commiseration being had in honor, thereby affecting an escape. Okay, next one. So this is a actual page from William Morgan, his book.

John Dehlin [03:24:11] And William Morgan, that's the, that's the master Mason, right?

Dan Vogel [03:24:15] William Morgan, 1827 book. I thought I had it written down here, but it's a sign of Greece. Oh, it's down there. Okay. William Morgan's illustrations of masonry published in 1827 in Batavia, which is like 50 miles west of Palmyra. And he gives this, this Masonic sign and then gives the definition. Should I ever see that sign given or the word accompanying it, and the person who gave it appearing to be in distress, I will fly to his relief at the risk of my life. So you could see just now imagine those, you know, six other chapters having Something like that in it. Right. You know, so anyway, Joseph Smith is giving these random meanings to the call, the characters on the columns, which has nothing to do with the Book of Abraham. How can it be a reverse translation document, you know?

Radio Free Mormon [03:25:33] Right.

Dan Vogel [03:25:34] Okay, so we'll move on. This is Mulestein.

John Dehlin [03:25:41] Do you want me to read it?

Dan Vogel [03:25:42] Go ahead.

John Dehlin [03:25:43] Do you want to set it up? Do you want to tell us what we're about to read?

Dan Vogel [03:25:46] Well, then, okay. This is. He said this. He wrote this basically similar paragraph in 2016 in an article, but he repeated this same position at the last fair conference. He made this statement.

John Dehlin [03:26:07] Go ahead, read it.

Dan Vogel [03:26:08] Yeah.

Was the Alphabet the Tool Used for Translation

John Dehlin [03:26:09] All right. Yet some have supposed that the Egyptian Alphabet was the tool used to create the translation. And I would add, including Joseph Smith himself, in order to assess whether this could be the case or not, I conducted research to test the assumption. First, I located all the phrase, all of the phrases in the Egyptian Alphabet that also appear in the Book of Abraham. I then compared the Egyptian characters next to those phrases to the Egyptian characters adjacent to the matching lines in the early Book of Abraham manuscripts of the 21 times I found text in the Egyptian Alphabet that match text in the Book of Abraham, I found only one time that the corresponding Egyptian characters matched, four times when part of the characters matched, and 16 times in which there was no match whatsoever.

John Dehlin [03:27:02] Clearly, the Egyptian Alphabet was not used to translate the papyra, nor is there any demonstrable relationship between the characters on the papyru and the text of the Book of Abraham. This is not surprising since the characters come from fragments of papyri that eyewitnesses noted were not the source of the Book of Abraham. Well, he's kind of throwing down the gauntlet. He's saying just no connection, no association, completely unrelated. I mean, that's pretty clear, right?

Dan Vogel [03:27:35] Yeah. So in his presentation, he would find phrases that were similar to the Book of Abraham, but in context had nothing to do with the Abraham, you know, and he would say, here's the character next to the document, the translation document next to the paragraph of an Abraham passage. And then he would go into the alphabets and then look for similar, some kind of wording that had some sort of association, and say, see, the character next to this phrase is not the same character as appears in the translation document, and then say, there's no connection between the two.

Dan Vogel [03:28:20] So what he's trying to do is make the critics look bad, and he's setting up a straw man and saying that the critics are the ones that said that the alphabets and the Alphabet and grammar were created first and were the basis for the Book of Abraham. That came later. But as we can see, the characters are different.

Dan Vogel [03:28:46] Therefore it's not. The alphabets are not the source. He doesn't mention or apply the same principle to the reverse translation theory. So this implies that the reverse translation theory is not true either, But. Right, so I want to hear. I want to hear him say it.

John Dehlin [03:29:11] Mining his own theory, basically.

Dan Vogel [03:29:13] Yeah, but he doesn't mention that part. He tries to make it seem like it's the critics that were wrong all the time, not the apologists. Right, that was. That's a major thing I want from that quote there.

John Dehlin [03:29:31] Okay, that's a great point.

Dan Vogel [03:29:38] So he doesn't understand also that the. Where the characters are coming from in the alphabets, what is going on in those alphabets and how they relate to the book of Abraham or don't relate to the book of Abraham. And who's claiming what.

Dan Vogel [03:29:57] They're continuous. The test shows that he does not know where the characters come from or how the Alphabet and grammar, or grammar and Alphabet the Egyptian language were made. His finding similar phrases also shows that he has no regard for context.

Dan Vogel [03:30:17] For example, in one parallel in the grammar book mentions Abraham as an example, but from a story in Genesis that is not found in the Book of Abraham. His fair presentation was full of misinformation and was sheer nonsense to anyone who knows the documents.

Dan Vogel [03:30:39] That's why I'm trying to show you how these documents interrelate and how they work. All right, so absolutely. The. Where. Where. This is part three showing where all the. All the rest of part three. The. The last part of part three showing how all of the characters are just being transcribed, but there's no names, there is no definitions. It's just being copied. So there's not nothing. It has nothing to do with Abraham whatsoever. Okay, next.

Dan Vogel [03:31:21] Except in this one instance, and this comes from column two that I showed you earlier, this name for Osiris that Joseph Smith translated as Kai Kai abrom kai bra om zabzul oen. And right below, that's iota naive without any definition. We don't even know what he thought that meant.

Dan Vogel [03:31:52] So that's the one exception. That character there, which he obviously liked and used at the beginning of this Book of Abraham. Okay, right. This is the. Just for completeness, this is what it looked like, the column one looks like.

Dan Vogel [03:32:10] And I didn't draw any lines there, but there are. It's just a simple copying. What. What was there Anyway? Okay, so Here, here at the end of the Egyptian alphabets. This over here on the right hand side, this is the Egyptian Alphabet, part five, the very last. This is how the alphabets end.

Dan Vogel [03:32:34] At the very bottom of the column are those two characters, the reed and the W loop characters that they aren't part of the. That column. Okay. They are the first characters of the Book of Abraham. And they're definitely, they're defined there as a reference to Chaldea and Father Abraham. And then Cowdery and Joseph Smith's Alphabet crosses that definition out and then writes the six degrees or the five, excuse me, the five degrees that we read earlier for an expanded meaning of Father Abraham, which then gets integrated into the first three verses of the book of Abraham in W.W. phelps's handwriting.

Dan Vogel [03:33:33] Okay, okay, I think that's good. So that, that's what I just mentioned was these two characters at the bottom of that column are really these that appear at the beginning of the Book of Abraham and were used in the grammar. Beginning of the grammar book.

Dan Vogel [03:33:53] Right. So you see a progression that he's going from the beginning of the scroll and then he winds up to the proper place where Book of Abraham begins at the bottom of the alphabets. And then, and then they will carry on from there. Okay?

John Dehlin [03:34:12] Yeah, absolutely.

Dan Vogel [03:34:15] Go ahead, change. Oh, recall that, that those two characters were at the beginning. Yeah. And that third character is in the hole.

John Dehlin [03:34:26] That's right.

Dan Vogel [03:34:27] And then just go carries on from there. And those other ones were where that other hole is where it talks about Egypt underwater. And see that one character with the curve and the dot?

John Dehlin [03:34:40] Yep.

Dan Vogel [03:34:41] That some of the other stuff are made is. They're made up.

John Dehlin [03:34:48] Absolutely.

Dan Vogel [03:34:48] Okay. Okay.

John Dehlin [03:34:50] Yeah. So recall this back to the timeline, right?

Dan Vogel [03:34:55] Yeah. This is our timeline of why you can now see that Katuman came in the valuable discovery early July and then late July, the coutumen becomes part one, the pure language becomes the beginning of part two. Then they copy from the columns and that carries on the pure language subject matter.

Dan Vogel [03:35:26] And finally in the grammar book is where in the 1st of October, the unfolding of the astronomy or the cosmos was given with the Kolob and 15 planets, the three presiding planets and 12 other ruling planets. That really reflects his growing hierarchy. So we're right in the midst of trying to prove the high priesthood, the innovation of the patriarchal priesthood.

Dan Vogel [03:36:01] And they're building the Kirtland temple with the pulpits that show the hierarchy right there in front of them with three presidents, 12 other rulers, just like the cosmos that he dictated in 1835 gets portrayed in front of everybody.

Dan Vogel [03:36:27] The hierarchy of the Church. So he has the same hierarchy of the heavens, three ruling planets, 15. Fifteen all together, 12 other ruling planets.

John Dehlin [03:36:38] You know, and your book, Your book talks. Your book talks about that kind of.

Dan Vogel [03:36:42] Yeah, the book talks about all of that.

John Dehlin [03:36:44] Yeah, yeah.

Dan Vogel [03:36:46] And then there's the translation documents that were dictated. And then the translation book. So trying to put the. The translation book before all of this makes no sense.

John Dehlin [03:37:00] Yeah. In all the ways.

Dan Vogel [03:37:04] Okay.

John Dehlin [03:37:05] Yeah, yeah, we're coming to the book. Yeah. Yes.

Journal Entries and the Translation Timeline

Dan Vogel [03:37:13] Okay. This is the two passages from the history of the Church. And you should know that this was being written in the history of the Church by Willard Richards, who has a helper. And the helper is W.W. phelps, the eyewitness. The eyewitness, right. And then they're both reading these, the history segments of the history of the Church to Joseph Smith for approval. And the first passage in the history

John Dehlin [03:37:45] was written when again?

Dan Vogel [03:37:47] Well, I'm going to give you the exact date because we know the exact date when each part is being written because Willard Richards kept a journal.

John Dehlin [03:37:55] But I mean, the actual history.

Dan Vogel [03:37:58] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:37:58] When was the history published?

Dan Vogel [03:38:00] Yeah, I'm going to tell you.

John Dehlin [03:38:01] Okay, okay, okay.

Dan Vogel [03:38:04] So Willard Richards kept a journal while he was writing the history as just Ms. Ghostwriter in it, probably. And W.W. phelps. And then Joseph Smith approved it. Okay, so in his journal he wrote that. He wrote these pages in the history, which is volume B1, page 597. 596, 597 on the 17th. Hold on. Shoot. Sorry. Well, September. It was written in September of 1843.

John Dehlin [03:38:52] There you go. Yeah.

Dan Vogel [03:38:55] Oh, here it is. Entry in Smith's history was composed by Apostle Willard Richards on the 15th of September, 1843, as noted in Willard Richards own journal. Right. He was working with W.W. phelps, and they occasionally read portions to Justice Smith for approval. So the first passage, I, with W.W. phelps and Oliver Cowdery as scribes, commenced translation of some of the characters or hieroglyphics, and much to our joy, found that one of the roles contained the writings of Abraham, another the writings of Joseph of Egypt, etc.

Dan Vogel [03:39:34] A more full account of which will appear in its place as I proceed to examine or unfold them. So this is in early July context of the history, and W.W. phelps is an eyewitness. So this is. This is really the only source for dating the translation which Ghee and company happily adopt.

Dan Vogel [03:40:06] July date for the Book of Mormon. They. For the Book of Abraham. They try to say the Whole thing was done. But as you can see, it says some of the characters are hieroglyphs. There's no claim here, you know, or as it unfolds, he will be informed. As it unfolds, there's more to come, you know. It wasn't all done. No.

John Dehlin [03:40:26] It says, commence, not concluded.

Dan Vogel [03:40:28] Right. And. And the funny thing is that in Geese book, he uses July 1835, as the date for the complete book of Abraham being dictated by Joseph Smith. But he gives no footnote. No footnote. He just states it.

Dan Vogel [03:40:54] He doesn't give a footnote. He could. A footnote. A letter W.W. phelps wrote to his wife in September or in. In July, I think it's 19. Where he talks about Joseph Smith translating and finding out the identity. The authors of the scrolls was Abraham and Joseph.

Dan Vogel [03:41:16] But that's why I say only the first three verses of Abraham were done to identify the author. And he did that by just translating a few of the characters. So the next passage is the one that gives Ghee the heartburn. And that's.

Dan Vogel [03:41:45] The remainder of this month. I was continually engaged in translating an Alphabet to the book of Abraham and arranging a grammar of the Egyptian language as practiced by the ancients. Now, he doesn't want to quote this, really, but the remainder of the month, and this was after 17th of July statement.

Dan Vogel [03:42:15] He was translating an Alphabet. He wasn't making it up, he was translating it. And it's not Phelps doing the translating of the Alphabet is Joseph Smith's, the author of the Alphabet, and Phelps is helping to write this.

John Dehlin [03:42:34] Right.

Dan Vogel [03:42:34] So Phelps doesn't think he did it.

John Dehlin [03:42:37] Exactly.

Dan Vogel [03:42:38] If you ask Phelps who did, who. Who wrote, wrote the Alphabet? Joseph Smith, of course. And how was it done? He translated it, you know. Yeah, through the gift of being a translator, like you said at the beginning of this. Right. Phelps is not a translator. Right. Not. Not a seer translator, anyway.

Radio Free Mormon [03:42:59] Yeah.

Dan Vogel [03:43:03] So anyway, that's all I have to say about that, I guess. How do.

John Dehlin [03:43:11] How do apologists answer the fact that in. In the actual official church history, these. These things are all being made very clear and explicit. How do apologists explain this away?

Dan Vogel [03:43:29] Well, they like to refer to Phelps later. And Nauvoo became a ghost writer for Joseph Smith. He wasn't a ghost writer for the Alphabet and grammar, you know, because that was 1835, but he became a ghost writer. He wrote letters for Joseph Smith. And the odd thing is that at the same time, Joseph Smith is saying he wanted to finish the Alphabet and publish it. You know, why would he Want to publish Phelps's Alphabet? Unless you're imagining there's some other document he's referring to and not the one that we have. He also, according to Don Bradley, in translating the Kinderhook plates, he goes and gets his own Alphabet and uses that to translate it with. Why would he go get Phelps's Alphabet, you know?

John Dehlin [03:44:26] Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. I mean, how many. How many twisted, contorted, you know, invented explanations, you know, can. Can we swallow or try to swallow before we just. That the kind of Occam's razor point that the simplest explanation is most often the correct one, you know.

Dan Vogel [03:44:55] Right. Well, so usually you could tell the difference between a good theory and a bad theory, and the bad theory needs continual doctoring with further evidence comes along, and you have to keep doctoring it. They call them ad hoc hypotheses. You know, they're on the spur of the moment. You make something up that for which you have no real evidence but will answer the get rid of the adverse evidence that you're running into. Your theory's running up against constantly. You keep inventing theories, you keep inventing missing documents. And a good theory bears good fruit. The more you find, the more it verifies what you have.

John Dehlin [03:45:42] Exactly, exactly.

Dan Vogel [03:45:44] And that's the difference here. That's a difference here. It would need continual maintenance, you know, and additional.

John Dehlin [03:45:53] And additional explanations. And additional explanations.

Dan Vogel [03:45:56] Yeah. So the Occam, that's how you violate the law of parsimony. It's known as. Or the Occam's razor. I think it applies here. Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:46:10] Okay, well,

Dan Vogel [03:46:14] so let's look at Joseph Smith's journal real quickly. And this is Joseph Smith's journal, okay. For 1835. And what he. What is he doing? So on a. We already figured out the July thing from. From. And Phelps is the scribe for most of that. Those documents.

Dan Vogel [03:46:37] On October 1st in his journal, he writes, after this afternoon, labored on the Egyptian Alphabet in company with brothers Oliver Cowdery and W.W. phelps. Hold on a second. Okay, so this. This afternoon, labored on the Egyptian Alphabet in company with brothers Albert Cowdery and W.W. phelps. The system of astronomy was unfolded.

Dan Vogel [03:47:05] So. And the only part we have is the grammar and Alphabet, pages 24 and 25. And the only way around that is to invent some other document somewhere else. So that's why I say he was working on it. He was finishing the grammar and Alphabet. This dealing in the last part of the Alphabet deals with the system of astronomy.

John Dehlin [03:47:29] And tell me if I'm Understanding this, right? If, I mean, clearly the Book of Abraham, the final product, ends up talking about the planets in the universe and all that sort of stuff.

Dan Vogel [03:47:41] Facsimile too, Right. Okay, this is the problem with that. Facsimile 2 is. Is not the Book of Abraham. He's giving explanations of facsimile too. But the system of astronomy was unfolded using characters that were from the columns next to fax, next to facsimile 2. I mean, facsimile 1, not 2. 2 is the hypocephalus that's round and totally separate. That, Rittner explained, was round, never rectangle or on a scroll. Facsimile 2 is a whole different thing, has nothing to do with the papyrus. And so he's giving.

John Dehlin [03:48:28] I guess the point I'm trying to make is in Joseph Smith's own journal, he's number one, acknowledging that he's working on the Alphabet, right?

Dan Vogel [03:48:36] Yes.

John Dehlin [03:48:37] And then secondly, he's acknowledging getting revelation while working on the Alphabet. So it's in Joseph's own hand, in his own journal, acknowledging that he's working on the Alphabet in October and that he's getting revelation that ends up, you know, being used to describe one of the facsimiles. I mean, it's. It's all there.

Dan Vogel [03:48:57] Well, now. Now the apologists will try to separate the two activities. First, that's one approach, is they were working on the Alphabet and then they got a separate revelation about astronomy. And. Or like Guy likes to argue, is it says Egyptian Alphabet. It has to be those three Egyptian alphabets.

Dan Vogel [03:49:17] That's the title on them. And the grammar and Alphabet's a different thing. It's not the grammar and Alphabet. Well, there's no unfolding of astronomy in the alphabets. The unfolding astronomy is in. In the grammar, and the grammar is the book.

Dan Vogel [03:49:36] If you read the spine, the spine has a label on it saying Egyptian Alphabet. But. And, but we don't know when that was added. But for Cowdery's writing this in Joseph Smith's journal, for Joseph Smith, and in Cowdery's mind, the.

Dan Vogel [03:49:57] The grammar and Alphabet is an Alphabet, and that it's the Alphabet part that has the astronomy being unfolded, not the grammar part. It has the Alphabet part. And if you go through the pages, at the top of the pages of the grammar book, every now and then, you'll see Egyptian Alphabet written.

Dan Vogel [03:50:18] So he didn't make the distinction between the two volume or two activities necessarily. They were the same thing. They were expanding the first Egyptian Alphabet. That's Basically what they were doing was expanding that Alphabet, so it's still an Alphabet. So to say that, oh, you can't be referring to the bound volume is. Is silly nonsense.

John Dehlin [03:50:44] Right? Okay.

Dan Vogel [03:50:46] Okay. And so on. Then the next Joseph Smith entry in his journal is 7 October, a week later and says recommenced translating the ancient records. Well, so they want to try to interpret this as, oh, this is translating to Abraham, you know, somewhere in chapter 11 or whatever. Well, no, recommenced translating the ancient records. Well, he was translating an Alphabet before, you know, so he's translating the Alphabet, which is translating the records. So it could refer to either one. It doesn't have to refer to the proper text of the Book of Abraham. You know, it's those, you know, soliciting sale kind of people.

John Dehlin [03:51:40] But yeah,

Dan Vogel [03:51:43] robocalling. Anyway, on the 19th, this is the best candidate, best time we have for when Parrish and Williams wrote their two documents. And on the 19th, he wrote went in company with Dr. Frederick G. Williams, my and my scribe, which is Warren Parish, to see how the workmen prospered on finishing the house of the Lord. I returned home, spent the day in translating the Egyptian records. So he's with them. It doesn't say they went home with them, but this is the best time in candidate for when it happened. This is when we know they're together and we're assuming that the accompanied Joseph Smith home to work on the Egyptian records. I don't know. Imagine Joseph Smith working on it by himself. That's not his style.

John Dehlin [03:52:35] Right.

Dan Vogel [03:52:36] So on the next day, the 20th spent the day translating and made rapid progress. I imagine here that they're still working together. And Parish leaves after verse two, but Williams carries on for verses three through six. On the 24th is the next entry in Josephus journal. In the afternoon, we translated some of the Egyptian records. So this could be the records and plus some other parts that we don't know about.

Radio Free Mormon [03:53:12] But

Dan Vogel [03:53:15] this would be Parish. Okay, so after he copied it into the translation book, the previous work, Joseph Smith dictated again verses 7 through 18. On the 25th, it says spent the day in translating. And this could be the same part. So. So I think that's good.

John Dehlin [03:53:49] Yeah. So what do you conclude? What do you conclude from this, Dan?

Dan Vogel [03:53:54] Okay, November is when the Book of Abraham was most likely dictated the text as we more or less know it. We know Warren Parish and W. Frederick D. Williams wrote saying simultaneously from Smith's dictation because there are several corrections that only can be explained reasonably that way. There are three key passages where both write the same word or words, then cross it out, then continue writing on the same line.

Dan Vogel [03:54:30] So in Abraham 1:4, for example, both of them write where unto I sought for mine appointment? Where unto Unto the priesthood. So both of them right on the line where unto cross it out, both of them and continue on the same line.

Dan Vogel [03:54:55] And they wrote unto and keep going. The only way that can be explained is that both of them made the correction from dictation at the same time. Or else if one copied the other, they would just skip the cross out.

Dan Vogel [03:55:12] In Abraham 126, they started to write for in his days. So it begins like this. And also Noah his father. And then for in his days who blessed him. So it goes like it. It now reads, and know his father who blessed him.

Dan Vogel [03:55:37] They originally got interrupted with four in his days. And you imagine Joseph Smith dictating says, scratch that and goes to who blessed him and carried on with that idea. So both of them in line, cross it out, continue on the same line.

Dan Vogel [03:56:02] That's hard to explain unless both of them are writing from just miss dictation. In Abraham 117, they Right. And this because their hearts were turned. They having turned their hearts away from me. Well, they both crossed out. Their hearts are turned. So. And this because their hearts are turned. Joseph Smith's dictation is going in one direction and then he changes.

Dan Vogel [03:56:34] They have turned their hearts away from me. That's where he wanted to go. And so they both made the same correction. So the summary, this examination of the Book of Abraham and related documents has shown that there was no retracing in steps either forward or backwards, but that the valuable discovery Egyptian Alphabet grammar book and book of Abraham represent independent translations along a continuum. That's my conclusion. So it's not the reverse translation cannot be true. You can show my last slide.

John Dehlin [03:57:15] And. And I think it's important to mention that the final, final portions of the Book of Abraham actually don't you date them to be having been written down in 1842, isn't that right?

Dan Vogel [03:57:29] Yes. In Nauvoo in March, March 1842, he wanted to translate his translation. And they translated everything they had done in Kirtland up to chapter two, verse 18. And then in his journal he is recorded that at the same right after that they worked on the next issue, which was number 10 in the times and Seasons. They translated for the next issue of the number 10 of the times and Seasons.

Dan Vogel [03:58:12] So they're doing translation. And then the day after that they were translating and revising. And then they published everything, all the rest that we have now, which is chapter 2, verse 18 to chapter 5, verse 21. And then they promised more, but it never happened. They never got to it. All they did was publish facsimile 3, and that was it. That ended the whole project.

Dan Vogel [03:58:47] So the translating of the rest of the Book of Abraham is done in March of 1842, which has Hebrew words, and they're also transliterated in the way that Joshua Satius, his teacher, transliterated Hebrew into English, which was different. He was a Sephardic Jew.

Dan Vogel [03:59:17] Most of the transliterations that you see are Ashkenazi Jewish Hebrew transliterations. But Joseph Smith learned kind of a, you know, a minor method of transliterating from his. His Sephardic Jewish teacher. So these. These Sephardic spellings nail it down that this dictation was done in Nauvoo, not in Kirtland, and certainly not in July in Kirtland, as Guy wants to make it seem.

John Dehlin [03:59:55] Yeah. And so the final. The final conclusion of your presentation, my

Dan Vogel [04:00:00] message to Guy and Neil Stein, rest in peace, you know, reverse engineering theory.

John Dehlin [04:00:10] Yeah. And I.

Dan Vogel [04:00:12] A lot hangs on that.

John Dehlin [04:00:14] Well, yeah, and I want. I want you to drive that point home because. And I'll just say one of the, you know, one of the most important witnesses to. To your theory is that, you know, Brian Hauglett himself, who went on the payroll, you know, as. As one of the Mormon Church's top, you know, Book of Abraham apologists. He shared the position of John Gee and Kerry Muhlstein and Daniel Peterson and others. And then as he really dug into the sources and as he got more closer and closer towards his retirement, where he knew that he was going to be leaving the Maxwell Institute, of course he officially came out, changed his position and came down on the side of Brett Metcalf and you and others, and even wrote that out in a Facebook post or comment which you include in your book, correct?

Dan Vogel [04:01:09] Yes, I include that comment. What happened was I was making my videos on YouTube and explaining a lot of this stuff, and. And I was using Brian How Good's early book, 2010 book, where he expressed some of these conservative ideas. And Brian, maybe he was a little embarrassed that I was using them, and that kind of motivated him to come out on my Facebook thread where we were discussing these subjects and more or less denounced his earlier position and said that he more or less agreed with my position and my chronology and that dual dictation of. Of those two, you know, the manuscripts, the parish and Williams manuscripts, and that.

Dan Vogel [04:02:07] That the Hebrew did demonstrate that the last part of the Book of Abraham was dictated in 1842 in Nauvoo. So more. More or less that this is, I believe, is the same scholarly position. The. The position that if you're doing adjustable biography, this is the chronology of events that should be followed.

Dan Vogel [04:02:37] And that's why I wanted to make sure before I wrote my biography that I was getting chronology correct. Now, my. My sense is that a lot of Brian probably had inklings of doubts about it early on, even in 2010, but he was. That book was published through FARMS and the religious institute, I think, at BYU, and his superiors were very much into that.

Dan Vogel [04:03:13] The apologetic chronology. And the chronology is what really has gotten under Guy's bonnet there. He. That's what he's complained about. The newest volume of the Joseph Smith Papers dealing with the Book of Abraham and associated documents, that they didn't implement his chronology in the footnotes or have any apologetic polemical works in their footnotes or bibliography.

Dan Vogel [04:03:50] And so Guy has tried to, you know, chastise them for siding with the anti Mormon, you know, and this is not an anti Mormon position. It might challenge their theory. And challenging their theory is really not the same as challenging Joseph Smith or his powers of inspiration or anything like that. So it's only challenging their pet theory. And so. And they can sometimes confuse their theories with the gospel truth. And anybody that veers from that is, you know, athema and gets it attacked. Yeah, ad hominoli attacked.

John Dehlin [04:04:43] And there's a really good episode on Mormon Stories podcast that I bring RFM on and we talk about the Civil War where not. Not only has, you know, not only has Brian Haugland now with integrity, changed his position to align with the evidence and with the facts, but even now, the Joseph Smith Papers Project seems to align with. With Brian Hagled's changed position with. Which aligns with you and with Brent Metcalfe and with the scholars. And so really, more and more, John Gee and Kerry Muhlstein are becoming marginalized and, you know, they're becoming footnotes. But I think I want to close with kind of two main points.

Final Reflections on Book of Abraham Apologetics

John Dehlin [04:05:25] Well, three main points, but one, Dan Vogel, is that the Mormon Church, you know, has been hiring Book of Abraham apologists since. Or employing or giving important work to Book of Abraham apologists since the 1960s, if not before, because it needs to continually bolster the Book of Abraham because the Mormon Church decided to canonize the Book of Abraham as scripture. And if scholars are able to take down part of the canon, the Mormon canon as a fraudulent or false or inaccurate translation.

John Dehlin [04:06:07] You know, that that really does really since severely, significantly question the credibility of Joseph Smith, if not as a translator, which something he was called to be in, in the Book of Commandments or Doctrine and Covenants, it potentially calls into question his credibility as the founder of the Mormon Church, not to mention many of the doctrinal teachings that are rooted in, in the Book of Abraham, including the Curse of Cain doctrines. You know, I think it's, it's at least referenced there, and the high priesthood, etc. So, so, so, you know, Guy and Muhlstein follow a line of professional paid Mormon apologists that, that are desperately decade across decade trying to bolster the Book of Abraham to keep Joseph Smith as a credible, as a credible prophet, seer, revelator and translator.

John Dehlin [04:07:01] And you know, this theory, this theory, this chronology is kind of central to their attempt. And now I guess you could say everybody's abandoning ship of the reversed engineering theory. Everybody's abandoning it. And, and it seems as though John Gee and Kerry Mohlstein are kind of going down with the ship, so to speak.

Dan Vogel [04:07:26] Well, as I see it, I'm probably a little more charitable, but Nibley invented a theory, a response quickly, right after the scrolls came into position with the church. He hadn't really studied the, the documents all that thoroughly. He invented a response about the competing elders, you know, to Justice Smith's inspiration, jealousy or whatever. And that stuck. That apologetic stuck. It then became a matter of defending Nibley's apologetic. And Guy and Muhlstein have followed in that line and tried to salvage it and doctor it up somewhat, make it a little more sophisticated. But I think that they were sincere in a way. I don't see them as intentionally trying to deceive people. And on Justice Smith, well, I. So most people know me for my pious fraud theory, which is I think the most charitable.

John Dehlin [04:08:51] Explain that for the people that don't know what that is.

Dan Vogel [04:08:53] I think it's the most charitable theory about Joseph Smith from a non believer's point of view, which is that he believed that he was inspired in a general way, that God was leading him and guiding him, but that he needed to use the talents he developed as a treasure seer, a confidence man for God, and that he sometimes needed to use deception to bolster his revelations that he was sincere about.

Dan Vogel [04:09:35] So he wasn't unconscious about this. He was very intentional in it. And he also believed that he had God's permission to do that, that doing pious fraud, doing Pseudepigrapha can be an inspired endeavor in itself. And that God sometimes uses deception like.

Dan Vogel [04:09:58] Well, the Book of Abraham is an example in it. In it where Joseph Smith rewrites the story of Abraham and Sarah and the Egyptians. And the Egyptians want to kill Abraham to get to Sarah because they think they're married. And J. Ram says Sarah is his sister. And so Pharaoh takes Sarah into his tent and God's okay.

John Dehlin [04:10:23] God's okay with. With Abraham and Sarah lying.

Dan Vogel [04:10:27] Well, okay, so that's the story as it's written in Genesis. But Joe Smith rewrites it and says, has God tell Abraham to tell the Egyptians that Sarah is his sister.

John Dehlin [04:10:42] So God approves.

Dan Vogel [04:10:43] It actually recommends God approving of deception.

John Dehlin [04:10:47] Right.

Dan Vogel [04:10:47] In order for Abraham to live to become the father of many nations.

John Dehlin [04:10:53] Yeah.

Dan Vogel [04:10:53] So it served a greater good. There's other examples.

John Dehlin [04:10:57] So Joseph Smith in the Book of Abraham has God being okay with lying or deception for a greater good or a greater cause.

Dan Vogel [04:11:07] Right. And I believe there's other examples, but I won't go through that right now. But that Joseph Smith did believe in pious deception. Pious fraud. Price deception. Price Fraud was the word that was used in Joseph's own day by like the deists, like Thomas Paine. And they, they referred to Pius Fraud as the scribe Ezra writing the Book of Deuteronomy because Moses couldn't write it because he was dead. You know, Moses dies in the last chapter, and he couldn't write that himself.

Dan Vogel [04:11:45] And so they surmised way back then, something like the documentary hypothesis that we all know about now, that Moses didn't write the fifth Book of Moses, you know, which is a problem for the Book of Mormon. But anyway, so in my view, Joseph Smith is this instance is sincere about being inspired in a very general way. But people, you know, what would be special about him, as opposed to other prophets that were running around in the Burnover district in. And Ohio, you know, the leather stocking prophet was over here in Ohio, and there's the New Jerusalem people. And so there's other prophets running around. What would make him so special?

Dan Vogel [04:12:44] Just like there were other seers in Palmyra, you know, in Manchester, New York. But he rose to the top. And how did he do that? How did he rise to the top? Well, he used deception. You know, he found a feather, he found people's lost goods that maybe he borrowed and put in another place, and they came to him and asked where they were, that kind of stuff.

John Dehlin [04:13:08] Well, and he claimed, he claimed to be able to trans. Have the special Powers to translate foreign unknown languages by the gift and power of God. You know, he claimed to be a prophet, Syrian revelator, and to have talked with. With God. And, and, well, he pro.

Dan Vogel [04:13:27] Yeah, he provided proof, even though there were no plates. He was able to get witnesses from various methods. He was able to dictate in such a way as it was hard to explain as other than some kind of revelatory situation. And that was what he did. We know he did that as a treasure seer, that he was able to instill confidence in other people, to donate money to pay him to, you know, $12 a month or whatever it was. He inspired confidence. He knew how to inspire confidence and he rose above his competitors in both arenas.

John Dehlin [04:14:13] Yeah. And even after, even when he wasn't able to find the treasure he said that he was going to find, somehow he was able to instill belief, continued belief within his followers even when he failed, even when his prophecies didn't come true, and maybe even, especially when his prophecy didn't come true.

Dan Vogel [04:14:33] Well, that's, that's where you get to the other side of the symbiotic relationship, the, the creation of charisma. How is charisma created? Well, part of it is created by the viewer, by the followers. It's not, it's not all the person projecting charisma. Other people saw Joe Smith, they didn't see any charisma in Joseph Smith whatsoever.

John Dehlin [04:14:56] Right.

Dan Vogel [04:14:56] But other people saw light coming out of them and all sorts of things about him, and they got sold on his charisma. He had a way of doing it, and one of the ways is his power of language.

John Dehlin [04:15:07] Yeah.

Dan Vogel [04:15:08] It's very hard to be a charismatic leader and, and not have some kind of power of language. And I believe he, the Book of Mormon and other and his scriptural productions show that ability.

Radio Free Mormon [04:15:22] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:15:24] Well, Dan Vogel, I've got a. I've got another interview I have to do.

Dan Vogel [04:15:27] All right.

John Dehlin [04:15:27] Another four hours of interview. But what I, what I want to make sure and do before we end is, is really plug this book. The book is Book of Abraham Apologetics, a review and critique by Dan Vogel. It's published by Signature Books and it's a really important book. So please support Dan Vogel. Please support this book. Please support Signature books, Please support Mormon scholarship. Let's all go out and buy this. Let's have thousands of you go out and buy this book and learn about it. Because in it, it not only goes into extensive detail, everything you've heard today, it also provides many, you know, Sound possibilities for many, you know, many of the sources of the content that ends up in the Book of Abraham.

John Dehlin [04:16:17] It talks about the catalyst theory. It gives a lot of the background and the history of the Book of Abraham. And again, it talks about the, the Alphabet and the grammar and the, you know, the Joseph Smith papers in ways that not even Robert Rittner does in the level of detail. So this is an important, very important contribution.

John Dehlin [04:16:41] And then most importantly, it really does reveal the tactics of Mormon apologists with regards to trying to defend and bolster both the Book of Abraham and Joseph Smith. And it exposes them as just not being thoughtful enough, not being meticulous enough, not being scholarly enough, and frankly, is just not being credible or worthy of consideration. So for all those reasons and many more. Dan Vogel, thank you so much for this book, for your lifetime of scholarly contribution. I want to refer all my listeners to the many hours of interviews that I do with Dan Bogle on Mormon Stories podcast where we talk about Joseph Smith, his history, the first vision, the, you know, the, the creation of the Book of Mormon, some phenomenal series with Dan Vogel, not just on Mormon Stories podcast, but Dan Vogel, you have your own channel where you talk about a lot of your scholarship in depth, Is that right? Your own YouTube channel.

Dan Vogel [04:17:46] YouTube, yeah. Just search under my name, Dan Vogel, and you'll find my channel on YouTube. There's, I don't know how many videos on various subjects like the First Vision, the Book of Abraham, the Book of Mormon, you know, the ruins of in ancient America and how that relates to the Book of Mormon, the priesthood and how the priesthood got developed in. In stages and you know, the angel stories, how they were made up in the middle 1830s and you know, all sorts of subjects like that. And I continually adding videos. I've been away for a little while to finish my biography, but I'm back.

John Dehlin [04:18:31] Yeah. And so also we'll talk about this next time. I want to bring you an RFM back to kind of summarize.

Dan Vogel [04:18:37] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:18:38] Ologist. Efforts of Book of Abraham apologetics. But you did just complete another important biography on Joseph Smith dealing primarily with this Kirtland years, which I think you told me is going to be, hopefully be coming out in 2022. Is that right?

Dan Vogel [04:18:54] 2023.

John Dehlin [04:18:55] That's just too far away. Yeah, that's too far.

Dan Vogel [04:18:57] Yeah. You know, everybody write to signature books and complain.

John Dehlin [04:19:01] Yeah. You know, and then, and then hopefully we'll get you back on more, you know, Mormon Stories podcast in the future. We're talking about some potential projects as well.

Dan Vogel [04:19:11] Yeah, yeah, definitely.

John Dehlin [04:19:13] All right, Dan Vogel, you're a gentleman and a scholar and a legend to me and so many, thank you so much for joining us today on Mormon Stories podcast.

Dan Vogel [04:19:22] Thank you to you and rfm, thank you, rfm, so much for participating. Your input was really important. And John, thank you for providing the forum and your comment and your guidance. I appreciate it very much.

John Dehlin [04:19:37] All right, we're going to see you back soon. All right?

Dan Vogel [04:19:39] All right.

John Dehlin [04:19:40] All right. Thanks, Dan Vogel, thanks to all our listeners for joining us today on Mormon Stories podcast. Thanks to everyone who commented or, you know, provided questions or input. Huge thanks to rfm, Radio Free Mormon. You can check him out every Wednesday night on Mormonism Live with Bill Real. Check out his podcast, Radio Free Mormon Support them because it's definitely worthy stuff. And then finally, we couldn't do Mormon Stories podcast without our supporters. So for everyone who supports Mormon Stories in the Open Stories foundation, thank you. For those of you who aren't yet financial supporters, just know that we can't do this without you. We lose 10 to 20 recurring donors a month because they move on, they lose interest, they fall in financial hard times, and less than one out of a thousand of our listeners and viewers are donors.

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John Dehlin [04:21:15] So please support us if you can. Also, we always welcome super chat donations here on YouTube. There's a little dollar sign. Those of you who are following us on YouTube, in the chat window, you can on click. Click on the little dollar sign. You can donate directly here on YouTube and on Facebook. There's a Stars feature where you can donate through Facebook as well. So thanks so much for the support.

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Radio Free Mormon [04:21:51] Bye.

John Dehlin [04:21:51] Bye.

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