Introduction and Episode Overview

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I am not your Host for today, Dr. John Dehlin. Why are you laughing? No. You are in for a very special treat today. What's the date? It's April 11th. April 11th, 2026. We are here for another LDS discussions episode. What's super exciting is a random combination of events made it such that probably for the only time in the history of LDS discussions, past, present, present, or future, will we have all members of the LDS discussions crew in studio at the same time. So believe it or not, today in studio, we have the rando on the Internet, Colby Redish. Hey, Colby.

Kolby Reddish [00:00:46] Hey. Good morning, John. Thank you for having me.

John Dehlin [00:00:48] Our pleasure. You're joining us from Boise originally, but you're here in Salt Lake City in studio. Thanks for coming.

Kolby Reddish [00:00:55] Yeah, of course.

John Dehlin [00:00:56] All our best to Cam. Yeah.

Kolby Reddish [00:00:58] Thank you.

John Dehlin [00:00:58] And believe it or not, Julia drove with her family all the way from Missouri to Salt Lake City to record this episode. So we have Julia in studio.

Julia [00:01:08] Hi.

John Dehlin [00:01:09] Thanks for coming, Julia.

Julia [00:01:10] Yeah, of course.

John Dehlin [00:01:11] Last time I saw you was, like, right before you moved to Missouri.

Julia [00:01:15] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:01:15] Remember that?

Julia [00:01:16] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:01:16] Is that right or miss?

Julia [00:01:17] Well, I've lived in Missouri, but I came up to.

John Dehlin [00:01:19] I mean, moved back, right?

Julia [00:01:22] Yeah, probably something like that. Anyway. Yeah, that was a long time ago.

John Dehlin [00:01:25] It's good to have you.

Julia [00:01:26] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:01:26] It's good to have you in studio. And believe it or not, we're pulling a rabbit out of the hat. We have all the way from across the pond, Nemo the Mormon, here in studio, joining us on the LDS discussions team. What's up, Nemo?

Nemo [00:01:41] Not much. It's great to be here.

John Dehlin [00:01:42] What the heck are you doing in Utah?

Nemo [00:01:44] Having a great time.

John Dehlin [00:01:45] Good.

Kolby Reddish [00:01:45] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:01:46] Well, it's good to have you, and I'll just say it. LDS discussions has been chugging along without me, and I'm super happy that that's happening. And so I'm gonna play a very minor role in today's episode. I wouldn't have even been introducing except Colby asked me to. Right, Colby?

Kolby Reddish [00:02:05] Yeah. I may have fumbled it the first time, the first take, which is why we opened with a little bit of laughter, but I do think it's funny. Now with Nemo here with us in studio, this episode is literally an international incident.

John Dehlin [00:02:18] Well, we have a lot of those these days. And so let's do it. Let's have an international incident on Mormon stories. But take it away, Colby.

Kolby Reddish [00:02:26] Perfect. So our topic for today's episode is discussing what the Book of Mormon says about reformed Egyptian and then Analyzing those claims in the same way, we've looked at, you know, different episodes regarding the stone box or looking at other things about the historical claims that the Book of Mormon or that Mormon leaders have made. And so we're going to look at reformed Egyptian and what the Book of Mormon says about that. Because for the Book of Mormon to exist, its claims that it makes about reformed Egyptian must be literally historically true. And so that's one of the reasons that this episode, episode has been something I thought about doing for a long time and we kind of have talked about doing this in the context of other episodes. So when we start talking about the Book of Mormon, I think one of the ways that's important to frame this episode is that the Book of Mormon, when it makes claims about the reason the Book of Mormon exists or the way that the Book of Mormon was written, those things must be literally true for the Book of Mormon to exist in the way that we have it today. And so if we can pull up the slides, we'll look at that first, first claim that the Book of Mormon makes about itself. Nemo, would you mind reading? This comes from the Book of Mormon's. There's an entry in the Book of Mormon about the Book of Mormon and this comes from that page in the Book of Mormon.

Nemo [00:03:43] Okay, so the original title page immediately preceding the contents page is taken from the plates and is part of the sacred text. Introductions in a non italic typeface such as in 1st Nephi and immediately preceding Mosiah chapter 9 are also part of the sacred text. Introductions in italics such as in chapter headings are not original to the text but are study helps included for convenience in reading. And that's from the Book of Mormon's page titled A Brief Explanation about the Book of Mormon.

Kolby Reddish [00:04:12] It is. And so this hooks in very closely to something that Joseph Smith said in History of the Church. He said that the title page of the Book of Mormon is a literal translation taken from the very last leaf on the left hand side of the collected Book of plates which contain the record which has been translated, the language of the whole, running the same as all Hebrew writing, general, in general, that is from right to left. And that said title page is not by any means a modern composition, either of mine or of any other man who has lived or does live in this generation. And so these are important kind of stepping stones to understanding the framing of today's episode, which is we are seeing this movement from certain apologists that the Book of Mormon can still be scripture or can still be Inspired, even if it is not a literal translation of historical events. And, of course, in this series, we don't try and speak for the conclusion that people should reach. But one of the things I do think is interesting is that that apologetic attempt really disagrees with what Joseph Smith said about the Book of Mormon and the way that Joseph Smith did very much view the Book of Mormon as being literally historically accurate and true. Nemo and Julia, do you have any framing you would add as we start to jump into these claims the Book of Mormon makes about itself?

What Is Reformed Egyptian in the Book of Mormon

Julia [00:05:29] No.

Nemo [00:05:29] I would perhaps say that in similar ways to the book's claims about where it took place. I think this is another example of where very clear and obvious things about the Book of Mormon have had to be made more opaque by certain apologists to try and hold onto the idea that the Book of Mormon is still true and is still scripture and those sorts of things. In the same way as we find a distinct lack of archaeological evidence for certain events in the Book of Mormon. So then we have to change where they may have happened, even though Joseph Smith believed they happened in a very specific place and all his contemporaries did similarly. You're going to have to start disagreeing with the Book of Mormon itself to try and explain away some of these issues. And I always think it's worth highlighting that that is what apologists are willing to do. They're willing to disagree with scripture, they're willing to disagree with the founder of the church. They're willing to disagree with modern prophets, if necessary, to try and make an argument work. And then you have to decide who you want to believe, I suppose, or who you want to listen to. Apologists or those other people.

Kolby Reddish [00:06:27] Mm. Julia, any opening from you?

Julia [00:06:30] I just wanted to say, like, I really like Dr. Lundwal's episode that he just did with on Mormon Stories, and he talks about this idea. And I think this could be one of the questions that we talk about today, too, is the difference between the tight versus loose translation. And I made a little short where he says, like, what is a loose translation? And he says you can translate loosely, green eggs and ham into the Book of Mormon. So it's like if you're. You're either translating or you're not. And so I just think, like, just the study of text and things like that. Just go back and watch that episode. It's really, really good.

Kolby Reddish [00:07:00] I completely agree, and I agree, Julia, that this episode will hook in very well to what Dr. Lundwall has said. That is something we always talk about with regard to the LDS discussion series in particular is each of these episodes builds on each other. So this very much hooks into our episode we did earlier about the brass plates and what it means about the great Isaiah scroll. So it's important to remember that this series is best consumed in order. And yes, it does also hook Dr. Lundwall's recent episode talking about basically the text itself as an anachronism. So it does build on itself there.

John Dehlin [00:07:34] And people can watch this series on Spotify as its own series under the LDS Discussions name. The Mormon Stories Podcast YouTube channel has its own playlist called LDS Discussions. You can check it out on Apple Podcasts as well. But those are the ways to consume this series in sequence. And you'll just get the most out of it. Okay, back to you.

Kolby Reddish [00:07:56] Perfect. And so I think to continue on with our framing, before we really talk about the problem that the Book of Mormon's claims pose for viewing it as a literal historical record, we started by introducing where the Book of Mormon comes from, how it was compiled, by looking at its explanation about itself. And one of the things that Nemo read for us is that the Book of Mormon has the title page, which Joseph Smith claimed was part of the original plates, that it was translated by him directly, that it was the last thing he translated. So if we can pull up the next slide, Nemo, we'll look at that title page. I don't think we'll read all of this in particular, but what we will do is we'll just show that the title page itself makes really particular claims. And it's very clear that those claims really foreclose the recent apologetic attempts to say that maybe the Book of Mormon can continue to still be a revelation, at least in the view that the way Joseph Smith understood what he was doing is that it was a literal translation of an ancient record. And so the title page itself, you know, starts by saying it is an abridgment of a record of the people of Nephi, and also of the Lamanites, written to the Lamanites, or a remnant of the House of Israel, and also to Jew and Gentile, written by way of commandment, and also by the spirit of prophecy and revelation, written and sealed up and hid up unto the Lord, that they might not be destroyed. And I'll just go ahead and read that far because I think what it really helps show is the where the Book of Mormon comes from. Nemo, would you help? Kind of. For readers who may not have listened to our past episodes on the brass plates and Mormon and Moroni's involvement in the Book of Mormon. Can you just give us the standard kind of seminary answer of where the Book of Mormon itself came from, like how it was actually produced?

Nemo [00:09:42] So the Book of Mormon is a collection of ancient records. It's the histories of a people, which was discussed in Dr. Lundwald's episode about oral histories versus written histories. But it's the idea that ancient Jewish people, Lehi and his family got records that contained parts of the books of the ancient books of Scripture of the Jewish people, Moses, Exodus, into the wilderness, those sorts of things took them to America, kept their own records. There was also records found of another people that went to America. And over time they were preserved and kept and added upon until you've got Mormon and Moroni who take them. They abridged those records, all these things that have been kept, put them into a volume, seal that volume up by burying it, and wait for Joseph Smith to pick it up and find it. And they engrave it onto plates for longevity purposes, because, you know, gold doesn't tarnish.

Kolby Reddish [00:10:32] Yeah. And if you're curious about what was in the stone box that contained the plates, we recently did an episode on that that was our last entry in the LDS discussion series. So I think that's the way that everybody kind of understood it, is that the Book of Mormon is this compilation of records and that Mormon and Moroni really served as that abridging function. So if we can look at the.

John Dehlin [00:10:51] I'm really wishing that somehow we could have just incorporated John's recent episode, Lundwall, we could have incorporated that into the LDS discussion series. Because just the idea of a title page being written somewhere between 400 B.C. and 600 A.D. it must have been the first title page ever written in the history of humankind, because books like this didn't exist even as late as 600 A.D. and yet we've got Moroni or whoever engraving a title page into

Kolby Reddish [00:11:23] the golden plates and a title page that looks exactly like a contemporary title page for Joseph Smith's time period.

John Dehlin [00:11:30] I would add I'll never look at the Book of Mormon again after John Lundwald's episode. Right?

Kolby Reddish [00:11:36] Yeah. And I think this episode, kind of in a different way, but in a similar way, this episode poses a similar problem because if you'll pull up the next slide, there are two graphics I wanted to talk about here. So that figure on the left is what's known as an Ouroboros. It's a mythological symbol where you've got the snake eating its own tail on the right. I've got Mormon or Moroni, I don't care which. Basically disappearing. Almost like the Back to the Future problem. Right. So, John, you remember the cinematic classic Back to the Future, where Marty McFly has to go back to the future. And as he's in the past, he's trying to solve these issues. At one point, there's a photograph that's disappearing of him and his siblings because he's basically undoing the future. And that's one of the reasons that I wanted to do this episode, is the Book of Mormon makes very particular claims about the information density of reformed Egyptian and Hebrew. And when we examine those claims closely, they just don't match up. And those claims, because they're claims that have to do exactly with where the Book of Mormon came from, have to be literally true for the Book of Mormon to exist. So that's why I focused on on those two graphics. We've got a snake eating its own tail and we've got Mormon and Moroni. Mormon and Moroni basically disappearing. Because what the book says about Mormon and Moroni and the reasons that they're writing the Book of Mormon just simply are not borne out in reality. And we're going to go through in detail and basically show that. Any other introductory comments? Nemo, you looked like you were dying to say something.

Julia [00:13:09] Nope.

Kolby Reddish [00:13:10] No, it's just that stoic British face I think it is. Yeah. Perfect. So let's look at the very particular verses that kind of frame this problem. So in the Book of Mormon, which is a book inside the Book of Mormon. So this is where Mormon and his son Moroni, I think for a portion of it, are basically sharing, you know, their experience with the plates, keeping their record. And this is in Mormon chapter nine. Julia, would you be able to read the scriptures on Mormon Chapter 9?

Analyzing the Language Claims on the Title Page

Julia [00:13:39] I also did read my scriptures too, but I could just use my phone. So the first one.

Kolby Reddish [00:13:43] Yes.

Julia [00:13:44] Condemn me not because of mine imperfections, neither my father, because of his imperfections, neither them who have reigned before him, but rather give thanks unto God that he hath made manifest unto you our imperfections that you may learn to be more wise than we have been.

Kolby Reddish [00:13:59] Okay, can we pause there for a second? I just have to observe how interesting it is that the author of this passage repeatedly starts out basically pre apologizing for any weaknesses or imperfections that are going to be found in the record,

Nemo [00:14:14] which is a really interesting position for the editor of a record to take. It is within, entirely within his power for those things to not exist within this record. He's taking the effort. Yeah, he's taking the effort to engrave this stuff on gold plates. You know, he can undo mistakes, he can catch his mistakes. Maybe it comes from a place of. I might miss a little thing here or there, but it just feels like a really odd place to start for the person who's putting together a permanent version of these things.

Julia [00:14:42] I was also thinking of the repetition. He could have just said, don't get onto me for my and my father's and people before me's mistakes and make it a lot more.

Nemo [00:14:50] Yeah, but you know, he's engraving, right. Plenty of room on these plates. Plenty of information can be captured in one symbol, Julia. That's what we're getting into. That's barely a brushstroke, what we've just read, or a stylist movement. I don't know.

Kolby Reddish [00:15:03] Yeah, absolutely. And it goes ahead and continues. I'll read the next ver and then we can get any thoughts on this one. And now, behold. We have written this record according to our knowledge in the characters which are called, among us, the reformed Egyptian, being handed down and altered by us according to our manner of speech. So this is where the Book of Mormon tells us that it's written in this script known as reformed Egyptian. Now, there is no such language. That's one of the biggest problems that we know of. That we know of.

John Dehlin [00:15:30] I'm joking, I'm joking. I did ask Robert Rinder, does the form to Egypt Egyptian exist?

Kolby Reddish [00:15:35] If we just hold out hope a little bit longer, maybe we'll find that reformed Egyptian. Now, there are obviously different versions of Egyptian, so Egyptian. And we'll touch on this a little bit more in detail here in a minute. But we have different forms of Egyptian. We have hieroglyphic, which is what people are most often going to be familiar with. Right. That was originally etched on temple walls and had to do with rituals and with really their view of the afterlife. That hieroglyphic language then was simplified to hieratic and then further simplified to like a cursive form of hieroglyphics known as demotic. So there are different versions of Egyptian. And that's often what apologists will point to is, what do you mean there's no such thing as reformed Egyptian? We have these other languages. Now, what we don't have is a language the way that the Book of Mormon claims that reformed Egyptian was developed. The other thing I think is interesting is that the author of Mormon 9, whether it's Mormon, Moroni or Joseph Smith, whichever particular view you Want to take is again, we're seeing this pre apologetic effect, Right. He's saying that the characters have been altered by us according to our speech. So you can see already he's building in this idea. If someone were to basically fact check what he's saying here, that the fact checking isn't going to bear out. And he's already making an excuse for that on the front end.

Nemo [00:16:56] Yeah, because he's saying it's our special secret language that you wouldn't know about. He's like that friend that goes to another school, you know, you wouldn't know him. But it's interesting that he says according to our manner of speech. It feels like if you take the view that Joseph Smith dictated this text orally, it feels like he's kind of telling on himself almost. Because why would a pictographic language or a symbolic language that contains vast paragraphs and meaning per symbol be altered in any way by the way people speak? Yeah, why would that make a difference? Why is that a valid excuse there saying that, you know? Okay, well, according to the way we speak, according to the way we project our voices, the way we use our lungs, our diaphragm, whatever, that makes a big difference to the way that we write things down pictographically and the amount of text that we can get into one of those little symbols.

Julia [00:17:42] Wait, I want to just push back for a second, just so I understand, not push back. So did Nephi. Because I'm thinking of what would have to happen in order to create the Book of Mormon. Did Nephi speak the language and write down in the plates the same language that Mormon and Moroni would have written down? Because in fact, he talks about the language of the Egyptians. He doesn't say reformed.

Kolby Reddish [00:18:02] Right. I was going to say, actually the very next verse, I think adds some clarity on this. So it says, and this is really where we get the position that this Author of Mormon 9 takes about this information density issue, says, and if our plates had been sufficiently large, we should have written in Hebrew, but the Hebrew hath been altered by us also. And if we could have written in Hebrew, behold, you would have had no imperfection in our record.

John Dehlin [00:18:26] Really problematic.

Kolby Reddish [00:18:28] Yeah, this is.

John Dehlin [00:18:29] Keep going. I didn't mean to interrupt. No, we're all laughing.

Kolby Reddish [00:18:31] No, it's completely fine. It's because areas like this, where we start to look at the seams of the Book of Mormon, like where the different parts are put together. I think like Nemo used the phrase, I think Joseph Smith is telling on himself a little bit, and that's basically my position in this episode, is that if you look carefully at what's being said here, it's kind of patently ridiculous, even if you take it at face value. It's saying that they wrote in reformed Egyptian because there wasn't enough space for Hebrew. That's actually the purpose of today's episode, and we'll come back to that in just a second. But it's worth observing that it says that they'd altered the reformed Egyptian, as Nima said, according to their manner of speech. And then it says, but the Hebrew hath been altered by us also. And if we could have written in Hebrew, behold, you would have had no imperfection or record. So to your question, Julia, of how would Nephi, a thousand years earlier, roughly a thousand years earlier, had been writing in any type of language that would have been understood by Mormon and Moroni? Well, Mormon and Moroni see the same exact issue, because they're saying that all of these things have been altered. And it continues, it gets even worse. But the Lord knoweth the things which have been written, and also that none other people knoweth our language. And because that none other people knoweth our language, therefore he hath prepared means for the interpretation thereof. So what it's really saying to me is don't fact check any of this because only God can tell you how this is going to work.

Nemo [00:19:55] Trust me, bro, I got this.

Julia [00:19:57] Yes, I have more questions, too, but

Nemo [00:19:59] can I just throw something in real quick? I think what we've got here is Joseph Smith teeing up this idea that this is unintelligible, this is ungettable, it's untranslatable without God. Therefore you God's. That's the convenient part of that, is that it's unfalsifiable. But you've got Joseph saying, hey, look, this is something no one else would know. So if some expert comes along and says this isn't a real language, well, of course he's not going to know. But I know because God told me. So. This is almost if, again, if you believe that Joseph Smith wrote this, this is Joseph Smith teeing himself up as the only possible person that could have brought this forward. Exactly. That's what he's writing this in for.

Julia [00:20:34] Okay, I just have other questions, too. And they just emphasize the thing, what you just said. So, like, I think in the Scriptures, you have Mosiah, I think, and you have Jesus. And they're all saying, like, study the words of Isaiah. What language is Isaiah written in for them? Is it written in Hebrew? Is it written in reformed Egyptian? Is reformed Egyptian? Just like. I'm confused.

Nemo [00:20:51] So when Nephi is saying that he read the words of Isaiah and they wrote him much joy. So that's why he wrote them in himself. Right. Because in second Nephi, he writes vast swathes of the brass plates would have

John Dehlin [00:20:59] been written in Hebrew. Correct?

Kolby Reddish [00:21:00] Correct, yes.

John Dehlin [00:21:01] Except for the fact that they didn't write on plates back when.

Kolby Reddish [00:21:04] Except for the fact that when we looked at the brass plates or what the brass plates would have had in them relative to the great Isaiah scroll, the brass plates always tracked like the Isaiah verses in the Book of Mormon, is what I'm really saying. The Isaiah verses in the Book of Mormon literally included the word Lucifer. So which, which was a, you know, a Greek word. And so it was. It would not have been written in Hebrew because it wasn't a Hebrew word. And yet we find it in the Book of Mormon.

Julia [00:21:29] Neither is the word ado, which I

Nemo [00:21:31] think Jacob says adieu. Yeah, is French.

Julia [00:21:34] But my question is, I think he's telling the people to study the scriptures. But they couldn't have studied from the brass plates, right? There's only one set of brass plates. So, like, are there scrolls? Are those written in Hebrew?

John Dehlin [00:21:46] I bet they had a printing press. It just disappeared somehow, right?

Kolby Reddish [00:21:50] Yeah, yeah.

Nemo [00:21:50] And goosebumps, I guess.

Julia [00:21:52] That's another point I was making. Is that like, why is there no evidence of Hebrew or this type of Hebrew or reformed Hebrew or reformed Egyptian?

John Dehlin [00:21:59] All of the Americas, Right, exactly. There's no evidence of any Hebrew ever. Nor any Egyptian or reformed Egyptian.

Julia [00:22:05] Right, Exactly. Yeah. That's another question.

Kolby Reddish [00:22:07] I think you all are just being a little too skeptical because verses 17 and 18 continue and they say, speaking directly to the three of you. And if there be faults, they be the faults of a man. But behold, we know of no fault. Nevertheless, God knoweth all things. Therefore he that condemneth, let him be aware, lest he shall be in danger of hellfire. And he that saith, show unto me, or ye shall be smitten. Let him beware, lest he commandeth that which is forbidden of the Lord. So we're seeing what I would say a lot of pre apologizing and explaining around these plot holes right there on the front end.

John Dehlin [00:22:42] But if you disagree, then you're damned.

Kolby Reddish [00:22:44] Then you're going to go to hell. That's right.

Nemo [00:22:45] But isn't it interesting though? It's like, don't ask for a witness. I mean, I'll provide witnesses and we'll treat Them, like that's a really important way of knowing this is true. But don't you ask for a witness? Because even if you did, you wouldn't believe it. As Ballard has gone on to say again, it's a problem with evidences. He's like, well, actually, if you want evidence, too bad you can't have it because only the special people that have spiritual witnesses get special evidence that you've got to believe.

John Dehlin [00:23:06] So, I mean, is Occam's Razor sort of say that Joseph Smith had to claim that he was translating an ancient record because that's his gift of seership, but he couldn't do just regular old Egyptian because, you know, he could have been disproven at some point and he couldn't do Hebrew because he didn't know Hebrew and he could have been disproven. So he had to manufacture some language that no one could ever.

Nemo [00:23:30] Because we've seen what happens when he does claim to translate Egyptian. It gets fact checked and he was wrong.

Kolby Reddish [00:23:35] Yeah, yeah. And I guess the way I see it is he can't make the claim that the plates were written directly in Hebrew because there's still people who speak Hebrew. And so that could have been fact checked. But in the early or the late 1820s, 1830, Joseph Smith can't be fact checked on Egyptian. Egyptian was the famously unknowable arcane language. So even though the Rosetta Stone was discovered around the same time that Joseph Smith is translating the Book of Mormon, the code really wasn't cracked. A lot of people don't understand this. The code really wasn't cracked until like Fuller, until like the 1850s. So it started with Champilion and with other scholars who were working on crafting the Rosetta Stone. And we'll talk about that in just a minute. But it really wasn't finished. And we, we could actually translate Egyptian until after Joseph's son.

Why Reformed Egyptian Instead of Just Egyptian

John Dehlin [00:24:22] So why didn't he just say Egyptian? Why did he say reformed Egyptian if he's making it up?

Kolby Reddish [00:24:25] I think that goes to Julius questions earlier about the link between the Hebrew and the Egyptian. And what's in First Nephi is Joseph needs to create a language that makes sense for a Hebrew speaking people or for someone from Jerusalem to be speaking. And the way that reformed Egyptian is described in the Book of Mormon in First Nephi is that it is using Egyptian characters but using the Hebrew language. That's my understanding.

Nemo [00:24:53] And so what Joseph's playing on here is this idea. The languages change over time. And so, I mean, and I'm giving him a lot of credit here that he who might have been thinking this, but this idea that languages change over time. So if I have a distinct group of people that have moved to a different continent, untouched by others, then their language will change and evolve over time and it will be different. So we would expect that. So if you give him a lot of credit, that's a plausible idea. But then what you'd have to show is a version of Hebrew that is consistent with the way that other languages change. You'd be seeing something more like Swiss German to German rather than reformed Egyptian or just whatever the Hebrew ended up being.

Kolby Reddish [00:25:29] Right. And I think what's ironic is that in trying to make that explanation, which I think is what Joseph is doing, he introduces a whole separate problem, which is he's saying that no one else knows their language and that these things have been changed. But in the narrative, like if we're just thinking about what the narrative is claiming about itself, taking the text at face value, the Book of Mormon is being written and compiled by these guys who are supposedly reading records from a thousand years earlier or even longer than that. And that introduces a whole new problem. It's like Joseph Smith trying to pre apologize for these other problems that he's aware of. He creates a whole host of other issues, which is how are Mormon and Moroni if what is written here is true, which is that the Hebrew hath been altered by us also and none other people knoweth our language? How are Mormon and Moroni reading records that are written a thousand years earlier by Nephi and Lehi if that is true?

Julia [00:26:23] The Seer Stone, like that's the only thing that makes sense, right? Is they're just. I don't know.

Nemo [00:26:27] Well, it does say it was translated by Revelation. Does it?

Kolby Reddish [00:26:31] It does, yes. And it tells you if you don't believe it, you better watch out. Yeah. So the big reason we're looking at this in so much depth is because these are claims in the Book of Mormon about how the Book of Mormon came to be. So these claims, at bare minimum, these claims must be literally historically true for the Book of Mormon to exist the way that we have it today. Right? Because these are claims that the Book of Mormon is about itself and the reason it was written. And the real clear implication of these verses, or one of the real clear implications of these verses is that Hebrew is a less information dense language than Egyptian is. And I want to reread that portion right here where he says, if our plates had been sufficiently large, we should have written in Hebrew. What that means, implicitly, that this author is saying, is that Egyptian allowed them to record more information than Hebrew would have. Okay, everybody agree?

Julia [00:27:35] Yes.

Kolby Reddish [00:27:38] Yeah. So what it is saying, if. Maybe if we can just pop up that next slide, too, just to really drive this home, it's implying a relationship between these two different languages. It's saying, implicitly, that Hebrew would require more space to express the same content and that reformed Egyptian allows more content per unit of space. So what this means is that the Book of Mormon is saying the reformed Egyptian is more information dense than Hebrew.

Nemo [00:28:04] Yeah. If your amount of space is a plate that is being engraved upon, the claim here is that Hebrew would require more of those plates to express the same content than if you were to do it in reformed Egyptian, which allows more of that content per plate. If you want to pick that as your unit of space, because I feel like that's maybe quite neat. And we know roughly the size that they were meant to be. Right.

Kolby Reddish [00:28:27] Right. So let's talk about the big problem for that, which is none of that is true. So if we pull up the next slide, we'll look at these different Egyptian scripts that I kind of have already introduced. But the first of these scripts that we'll talk about is hieroglyphic. So, hieroglyphic, its use dates back to around 2600 BCE to 400 CE or AD and as I said, this was a formal, monumental type writing. It was found in temple temples, in tombs. And as far as information density goes, it had lower efficiency for long texts, and it often used multiple signs to convey meaning. And what I mean by that is Egyptian was not always necessarily a logographic language or a pictographic language. So a pictographic is basically going to be a picture that is conveying some type of concept. Logographic is going to be something akin to each character relates to a word. Right. That's what a logo is. A logos is a word. And then we have phonetic languages like Hebrew. So Hebrew has an Alphabet. They did not, at least at this time, they did not use vowels. And so you can see kind of that relationship between information density. So one of the things about Egyptian and about hieroglyphic in particular that's very interesting is that it was not simply one type of language. So it had some elements of phonetics, like where they would spell things out using characters as an Alphabet. And in fact, that's one of the ways that the Rosetta Stone was cracked, is those characters where things were spelled out phonetically. It had logographs but what it definitely did not have is, but was a very popular but incorrect belief in Joseph Smith's day is a character that could relate to basically an entire paragraph half worth of text that just simply isn't something that we see reflected in Egyptian. And for people who are listening and thinking, colby, you're just a lawyer. What do you know about linguistics? I thought the same exact thing. So John was nice enough to put me in contact with a PhD linguist. And I've talked through my ideas that we're presenting in this episode with them, and they have basically said, yep, you have it exactly right. And in fact gave me some additional ammunition as we're talking about Egyptian and how it worked.

Nemo [00:30:47] Can I just throw something in there real quick? Of course. I think it seems to me that this is an inherently magical or spiritual view to take of this language. I think it implies a certain level of mysticism projected towards the Egyptian language. Because I'm struggling to imagine a world in which you don't think it is either a revelatory experience or a spiritual experience or some kind of mystical experience to be able to divine that much information from a single character. I don't know that it's reasonable to think that anyone would look at a character and go, these people memorized an entire paragraph of distinct specific text that relates to a specific character. And that character is only ever written for those exact words at a paragraph's length. I don't think anyone is really believing that in Joseph Smith's time. I think what they're doing is they're looking at this and going, this is a mystical language. This is something that we. With a mystical worldview or a religious worldview, a divine being or a spirit or something like that will reveal the meaning of it to you through whatever medium that would be.

Kolby Reddish [00:31:50] Yeah. And I think you can understand why people would have that view. Right. Like today we can read Egyptian. But if you were to go back in time to Joseph Smith's time, and you're going over to the catacombs of Egypt and you're looking at this language inscribed on a tomb, and it's such an otherworldly experience, of course you're going to have this appeal to the arcane, because it wasn't just popular with religious people. Egyptian was the famously unknowable language to kind of hit some. To hit some additional detail on exactly how hieroglyphics itself worked. This is a quote from Champilion, based on his work with the language actually cracking the Rosetta Stone. He said, of Hieroglyphic. It is a complex system writing figurative, symbolic, and phonetic all at once in the same text, in the same phrase. I would almost say in the same word. And so it's important to note that Egyptian didn't simply work the way that the author of Mormon 9 is claiming it. Where you can pull, like Nemo said, pull a whole paragraph of text out of a single character. And in fact, when you start thinking about how that would work, work, it's pretty apparent that it can't work that way because no language is going to function if you have to memorize an entire paragraph's worth of very specific text for every individual character.

John Dehlin [00:33:10] Is it worth noting that in the grammar, in the grammar and Egyptian Alphabet that Joseph Smith produces, we can talk about that.

Kolby Reddish [00:33:18] I'm looking at you like you are stealing my thunder, John.

Nemo [00:33:21] We will bring that up, John.

Julia [00:33:22] All right.

John Dehlin [00:33:22] I didn't say Thomas. Keep going, keep going, keep going.

Hieroglyphic and Demotic Scripts Compared

Kolby Reddish [00:33:26] So one of the other reasons that I've pointed to, or we're doing this analysis by looking at hieroglyphic, which again dates back to 3000 B.C. roughly, is because apologists may claim after this episode comes out, well, reformed. Egyptian is an Egyptian. But one of the reasons that we're looking at hieroglyphic Egyptian first is because languages really only evolve the one direction. They usually go from being pictographic to logographic to then being phonetic, and they never go the other direction. It wouldn't make any sense for us now that we have an Alphabet, and so we can really easily use words to go backwards and to start using pictographic languages. It just wouldn't be practical. Language doesn't evolve that way. So let's look at our two other Egyptian scripts. We've got Hieratic, which started being used around 2600 BC to around 600 BCE and again, this was its first. Our first cursive form of hieroglyphics used for everyday writing, like on papyrus or administration. And as far as its information density goes, it was more compact than hieroglyphics. And the form of using this Egyptian, or I'm sorry, this cursive form of Egyptian, reduced the visual complexity while preserving similar linguistic. And so we do see it being a little more information dense than hieroglyphics, but that's because it's simplifying the characters. Basically, the way hieroglyphics worked is you would have characters and then you would have special characters next to them, like they were called determinatives. That would help you understand the relationship between These different characters. And as this language evolved, we can see it becoming simplified in that hieratic form.

John Dehlin [00:35:14] And just for someone who's not super smart, me, when you say a language is more dense, it means it can provide more specificity per character than a previous language. In other words, tell me if I.

Nemo [00:35:28] The other way around.

Kolby Reddish [00:35:29] I think the other way around, but yes.

John Dehlin [00:35:31] Wait, so hieroglyphics, the first one, I would just assume those characters there are more broad, more general, and less specific in terms of what is conveyed in meaning by each symbol than the hieratic, than the demotic.

Kolby Reddish [00:35:49] When I say information density, what I mean is we're looking at one character. How much information is going to be conveyed by that one character? And so hieratic does get simpler in some ways because it becomes more compact. But I wouldn't say that it packs more information per character. It's more like we're simplifying the characters. You can see kind of the difference. Like if we pull up that hieroglyphic slide and then look at the hieratic slide, you can see the difference in the formality of the writing systems. Right. The.

John Dehlin [00:36:21] It's easier to write. It's easier to write hieratic correct the symbols for hieratic than it is the symbols for hieratic correct.

Nemo [00:36:32] A good modern example that might help people is if you look at something like Mandarin Chinese that has a traditional and a simplified version. So the character is either more complex or more simple, depending on where you're from speaking it. But to the point, you'll have a character that represents the word tree. Right. And so that in one character, in one unit of space is the word tree. In English, that's four letters. T, R, E, E. Each of those four letters is one of our characters. And that's less information dense because each one of those is just a unit of phonetic sound that we put together to create the word. Whereas in Chinese, it's just one symbol that signifies that word.

John Dehlin [00:37:09] Got it. Thank you.

Kolby Reddish [00:37:11] Right. And then demotic basically gets further streamlined and becomes more efficient. So this begins being used around the time that the Book of Mormon begins, so in 650 BCE and was used until about 450 CE or AD it's a highly abstract, abstract language, a streamlined script used for legal, commercial and daily documents. And you can see it becomes the most efficient pre alphabetic Egyptian script maximizes the speed and compression for practical writing. So you can see the big difference. Like Nemo talked about, the characters become less formal, they become easier to write. And instead of using one character within multiple determinatives or special characters that are off to the side that are helping explain. So using Nemo's example of, like, tree, we may have had a character that said tree, and then determinatives that were added to say, like, what color of tree it was or what species of tree it was. This is just a hypothetical example.

Nemo [00:38:07] Obviously, you do get this in languages like Korean and Chinese, where you have compound characters, where you have additional determinatives that determine the relationship of that thing. Because it's not just tree, it's big tree, or it's far tree, or it's near tree or whatever.

Kolby Reddish [00:38:21] Right. One of the examples I was looking at when I was looking at the hieroglyphics is you would have a character for man, for example, and then you would have a determinative that was basically added or adjacent to that character. So it's a separate character, but it's another character that's helping clarify the meaning of that first character. And what it was often adding is what profession that man worked in, or whether he was married or whether he was single, even what sequence in birth order he came from and his family. So they had these determinatives that were adding this traditional meaning. And the way I'm seeing it is the hieratic and demotic is basically combining those multiple characters into a new character, but not necessarily always just one new character. It's just simplifying the script to convey the same meaning. So I would say it's becoming more compact over time, getting closer to phonetics, which is where the language evolved later. Any other thoughts on that?

Julia [00:39:20] One of my thoughts was that here you talk about how some of these are used for daily use. And I think Lundwall's argument is that the text people didn't keep histories. They didn't write them down like that. So I don't think people were keeping journal entries saying like, I am in, or I nephi being like, I don't

John Dehlin [00:39:36] think that was today I went to the store.

Julia [00:39:38] Right. I don't think that was what you mean by daily, maybe because that's what I think of daily writing.

Kolby Reddish [00:39:43] No, what I mean is some of the earliest texts that we have are the things just relating to basic administration, basic legal questions. You can find contracts. I remember once when I was looking at early Egyptian documents, I found a complaint that someone was lodging about a set of iron ingots that they had bought from some trader. And so that's what I mean by daily use is not necessarily journaling. Or keeping histories like Dr. Londois was talking about. I'm talking about daily, daily everyday use that people would use writing for. And again, I guess it's important to remember most people in that day and age were not literate. So the people who are using daily writing is going to be more formal. It's going to be basically, lawyers like me are going to be the people who are doing the writing in the way that they kind of conduct business.

Julia [00:40:33] That's another thing about the Book of Mormon, because I think it does make. That's not what we're discussing today. I don't think is they're making the claim that all these people were literate. And because I think they say, oh, write down Mosiah's speech and then send it out to all the people. So these are people that are very advanced in this language area, yet we have zero trace of this.

John Dehlin [00:40:49] I'm sure Benjamin and Mosiah are like, everyone study the scriptures. You need to study your scriptures every day. Well, all of the Nephites and Lamanites,

Kolby Reddish [00:40:57] even Jesus says directly search the words of Isaiah because they're so valuable. Which begs the question or prompts the question, how exactly are they searching the records of Isaiah?

Nemo [00:41:07] I mean, at this point, probably Google Advanced.

John Dehlin [00:41:10] Is that Book of Mormon Jesus?

Kolby Reddish [00:41:11] That's Book of Mormon Jesus.

Julia [00:41:13] That's why I'm confused why we must have at least. I mean, then you have all the Nephites that are studying the scriptures studying Isaiah.

John Dehlin [00:41:20] Wait, so New Testament Jesus isn't saying

Nemo [00:41:22] study the scriptures, but then if they're studying the Scriptures.

Julia [00:41:24] I don't think so.

Nemo [00:41:25] We have this situation where we're not in a place which we would be in this sort of time, where you have a copy of scripture, maybe that is read by a priest and everyone hears it it orally. People apparently have got their own copies of ancient scripture.

John Dehlin [00:41:37] They have triple combinations.

Nemo [00:41:39] So like you made that glib, that remark about having a printing press, John. They must have done in order for people to have their own copies of the scriptures to go search.

Kolby Reddish [00:41:47] It is very odd how much the way that the Book of Mormon peoples engage with writing and with orality and literality is basically exactly what we would

John Dehlin [00:41:57] expect from some textiles. You know how we had that meme? You know, we've had different memes and we had the plates that couldn't be lifted cause they were so heavy meme. And we had the other meme that

Kolby Reddish [00:42:07] we did, the Egyptian or I'm sorry, the Isaiah. Isaiah playing Sonic the Hedgehog riding On a bittern.

John Dehlin [00:42:13] We need the meme of like ancient Nephites and Lamanites carrying their triple combinations of their quads around with them to study the words of Isaiah.

Nemo [00:42:22] Yeah, because we had this whole thing in England to drop being English for a second. We had this whole thing where people wanted the Bible in their own language. For a long time it was in Latin and they had to just rely on being told what it said. And there was this whole movement, there were martyrs that died for the language of the Scriptures being the common tongue of the people, that people could then access it. And then you had the invention of the printing press and all those sorts of things.

John Dehlin [00:42:46] The Book of Mormon had to learn to read.

Nemo [00:42:48] Yeah, the Book of Mormon discards all that and just goes, no, no, no. We don't have like a common Bible that people read from. We don't have people that stand between people and God. It's this very democratized vision of the religious landscape that just didn't exist in those times because it couldn't be democratized because people didn't have their own scriptures and they often couldn't read them even if they were in their language.

Kolby Reddish [00:43:08] Right. And not only did it not exist in that time period, what time period does it reflect? It literally reflects Joseph Smith's world. Where the American Bible Society, I believe it was, was trying to get a Bible at every home where children were taught to read using the King James Bible.

Nemo [00:43:23] Including Joseph Smith himself.

Kolby Reddish [00:43:24] Including Joseph Smith himself. I really don't. I don't think that context of really putting Joseph Smith in his time and place like in the burned over district during the second Great Awakening in New York, the way I view it is like that itself. That context is almost a character in the Book of Mormon's creation and the creation of Mormonism all by itself. That when you understand Joseph Smith wasn't even the first restorationist in that area like there were other people, including the Campbellites, who believed that Christianity had been lost, that we needed to recapture this lost form of primitive Christianity. And I guess it is just so telling, you know, when we look at the way Joseph Smith thought that worked, it reflects his worldview, not the worldview of the time period that he was. He or these authors, these purported ancient authors were actually writing about, I feel Moroni disappearing. I know he's a Thanos because also

Nemo [00:44:23] then why is it this great challenge for him to abridge these records and go through all this effort to abridge them and engrave them on plates to preserve them? There were dozens of Copies kicking around easily. These scriptures were everywhere. So the Book of Mormon, could they

John Dehlin [00:44:38] survive a thousand years?

Nemo [00:44:39] But the Book of Mormon at the same time talks about how people should go and study the scriptures and go and study those words, but also talks about how these records are coming, kept and preserved and passed down. So it's like they're democratized, but also they're very specific and held and need to be. They talk about people having caretakers like these scriptures being passed down from father to son to be looked after and to be moved forward. Why is that happening if they're also just amongst the people and the people can study them themselves?

Julia [00:45:05] I guess the way I'd viewed it as an active member is that you have the plates that you keep track of and you protect and whatever, but then you have like maybe scrolls that everyone's got. Maybe instead of a quad, it's like you got a whole stack of.

Nemo [00:45:17] But then scrolls have to be handwritten. That's so much effort.

Julia [00:45:20] Yeah. I don't apparently.

John Dehlin [00:45:21] Well, God in his wisdom saw that there would need to be plates someday.

Nemo [00:45:25] Yeah. But in the meantime, everybody's got their

John Dehlin [00:45:28] own box in a stone box so that they could be preserved for a thousand years so that Joseph could get them. God. Checkmate.

Nemo [00:45:36] These agricultural.

Kolby Reddish [00:45:37] Sounds like you two are in favor of hellfire.

John Dehlin [00:45:39] That's what I'm hearing.

Kolby Reddish [00:45:40] Yeah.

Nemo [00:45:40] These agricultural Native Americans have got enough time because they are using agriculture and whatnot. They've got enough time to sit down and write all this stuff.

Kolby Reddish [00:45:49] I do think it may be for a future LDS discussions episode may be good. And actually I talked about this four years ago the last time I was in the studio with you, John, I talked about how when you look at the Book of Mormon's values, to your point, Julia, about democratization, there's so many values that are spoken of in the Book of Mormon that make absolute perfect sense from that early American worldview that Joseph Smith had and make absolutely no sense from an ancient pre Christian Hebrew like infant baptism. Well, infant baptism is one. But even just the idea of democracy in the first place is something that we would not. I mean, yes, it dates back to ancient times in theory and dates back to Greek and Rome, but it isn't something that the Hebrews experimented with. Yet according to the Book of Mormon, they see the wisdom in something that looks very akin to early American government systems. It's very telling to me.

The Rosetta Stone as a Framework for Analysis

Nemo [00:46:48] Getting rid of kings and saying no more of those.

Kolby Reddish [00:46:52] Yes.

Nemo [00:46:52] Not that I feel that personally or anything. Let's move on.

Kolby Reddish [00:46:56] Well, let's look at the Rosetta Stone, because when I did have a chance to speak to that linguist, they pointed me to the Rosetta Stone being a great way to understand the information density of Hebrew relative to Egyptian. So for people who aren't familiar, the Rosetta Stone was found in Egypt. And I believe Nemo still probably exists over in the British Museum.

Nemo [00:47:17] Oh, absolutely, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:47:19] It's at the Louvre, right?

Kolby Reddish [00:47:21] Is it at the Louvre?

Nemo [00:47:22] Is it at the Louvre? I thought it was at the British Museum.

John Dehlin [00:47:24] Oh, British Museum, you're right.

Julia [00:47:25] I think your point is that you can see it without your spiritual eyes. Is that what you're.

Kolby Reddish [00:47:30] You can see it without your spiritualizing?

Nemo [00:47:32] Yeah, you don't even have to pay to see it because we're just lovely. We let people see other people's stuff for free, for no cost.

Kolby Reddish [00:47:39] So one of the things about the Rosetta Stone that's so interesting in the way they were able to crack the code, is that the Rosetta Stone has a phrase, a decree, written in three different languages on it. So it's written in hieroglyphic, then it's written in Demotic, then it's written in Greek. And the reason is because of kind of the confluence of King Ptolemy. And so if we can pull up the slides, I've got a picture of the Rosetta Stone for people who may not be familiar with it. I've got a selection of the characters that basically shows kind of how it works. So this, I believe, comes from actually Champilion's notebooks. And you can see he's trying to line up the hieroglyphics with the Demotic and then with the Greek below it. Now, one of the phrases that's written on the reserve out of stone is this phrase here. Nima, would you mind reading that for us?

Nemo [00:48:27] The priests of Egypt declare that King Ptolemy V is a benefactor. He has supported the temples, reduced taxes and maintained order. Therefore he should be honoured with statues and worship. This decree shall be written in hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek.

Kolby Reddish [00:48:44] And so that's one of the ways that they were able to find out the relationship between these languages and basically reverse engineer a translation is because we did understand Greek. And so we worked from that to then specifically with the names. And we'll get there in just a minute to break the code.

Nemo [00:48:59] It sounds a little bit facetious, but I think it is really worth saying this is an example of an ancient text talking about what language it has been written in and living up to that claim that can happen. It has happened. The Rosetta Stone made a very accurate claim about itself that it was written in three languages. And it was written in those three languages.

Kolby Reddish [00:49:16] Yes. And to link with Dr. Lundwall's episode, one of the things you can see is, look at the way this is written. It's a decree written about the king about a place, and then it tells you just the very basic formulaic stuff that you need to know. And that's the way that people wrote in those days.

Nemo [00:49:32] You could argue it's almost superfluous to say, this decree shall be written in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek. That's a flourish. And even then it's very tight. There's no and yet, even verily, I say it shall be written in even hieroglyphic and demotic and also the language of our forefathers, which is Greek. No, it's just bam, bam, bam. This is written in this, this, and this.

Kolby Reddish [00:49:54] Right.

Julia [00:49:55] Because we had just read, you know, don't judge me for my father's mistakes or my mistakes or mistakes.

Nemo [00:49:59] Nobody's got time to be carving that into stone.

Kolby Reddish [00:50:02] No one's got time for it instead. No, you're absolutely right. When you're having to write using, like, physical elements, where you have to etch something into plates or you're having to chisel something into stone, you are pretty practical with how you use language, how you use that space. And yet the Book of Mormon is full of so many just endless space fillers and asides that make total sense when you look at the Book of Mormon as a dictated text, an orally dictated text, but make very little sense when you picture Mormon and Moroni abridging these records. Like, there's so many times when the Book of Mormon uses phrases like it'll say a phrase and it'll say, which is to say. Or in other words, that makes absolutely no sense when you're doing abridging.

Nemo [00:50:44] And it's worth pointing out that we've done an episode on this as part of the LDS discussion series. The sort of fingerprints of it being an orally dictated text. And that is definitely worth checking out.

Kolby Reddish [00:50:53] Right.

John Dehlin [00:50:54] And I know you're building towards this point, but I'm just gonna say it right now. This slide alone really proves the point about plates and characters and density, because if we look at how many Egyptian characters, I don't care if it's reformed Egyptian or traditional Egyptian, if you just look at how many Egyptian characters are needed to produce that number of English words, and then you try and multiply that out. There's no way that plates that could exist in our realm of physics, with the dimensions of the plates as described, not even counting the sealed portion, there's no way that the number of words produced in the Book of Mormon that we have could have fit on the gold plates.

Kolby Reddish [00:51:44] Right.

John Dehlin [00:51:45] I know we're building to that point, but right now, that slide. Yeah, it's kind of already proving this

Nemo [00:51:49] point today that is the most information dense of all the languages on that stone. And it's still not enough to get you what you'd need for the Book of Mormon. And also, just a quick point to what we said, the fact that Mormon and Moroni were abridging this record, we tend to gloss over that word abridged, but they were editing. They were trying to bring together all these things. In doing so you think they would have absolutely cleared up the filler phrases, even if those filler phrases were there because it was written on scrolls and it was easy to just. And whatever, once you're tightening it up, once you're abridging, once you're bringing together and putting into a physical form, you're going to be practical and efficient with it. And they just weren't.

Kolby Reddish [00:52:27] Yeah, absolutely. There's this. This is a slight aside, but there's this scripture in the Book of Alma. One of the other areas I've been looking at that's interesting is how little the Book of Mormon talks about disease. And I don't know, as someone who experienced, you know, the COVID pandemic, and we kind of saw the way that diseases can shut down the entire world, I started thinking about how we have certain diseases that are present in our population that are called zoonotic diseases. Covid was one of those diseases. Right. It's something that lives in reservoirs of animals. And then we, because we have contact with those animals, just as a consequence of having domesticated animals and animals that live close to us, we experience different diseases that are present in those animals and that make this species cross. And Covid was one of those. And one of the things that's interesting is the Book of Mormon seems to have no recognition of this at all. There's like one phrase where the Book of Mormon talks about fevers or people. It does use sicknesses kind of in a spiritual sense, but there's actually only one phrase when it's talked about people experiencing fevers. And the thing that's really odd to your point, Nemo, is the scriptures. And again, this is part of the abridged portion because it's in the Book of Alma, it's talking about how, you know, some people get fevers, but not very many people get fevers. And it's just a very weird, like, it's a very weird phrase that makes total sense when we're looking at the Book of Mormon as an orally dictated text. Because if I'm orally dictating something or I'm orally speaking, a lot of times I'll change my mind or I'll add additional clarity. But it makes no sense looking at the literality of having to engrave these phrases on metal plates and condensing down records that were originally written on scrolls or however else they were kept onto those metal plates. It just doesn't reflect that at all. So, yeah, like you said, John, we're building to this idea that the Book of Mormon's claims about reformed Egyptian and this information density really don't bear out. If we can go to the next slide. I think I am always appreciative, John, when you say we could have ended these slides several slides ago, because that's the way I approach stuff as an attorney is I like to win multiple ways if I can. So let's keep going because I think it gets worse, not better. For the Book of Mormon's claims. On this slide, I've pulled an extract from a real story that was written in Egyptian highlands hieroglyphics from around 1200 BC called the Tale of Two Brothers. And it basically tells the mythological story of Osiris and Anubis and the origins of Anubis as being guardian of the underworld in Egyptian mythology. And on the right hand somewhere I've

Character Density in Egyptian Versus Hebrew

John Dehlin [00:55:09] heard those names before.

Nemo [00:55:10] Yeah.

Kolby Reddish [00:55:11] And on the right hand slide, I've got a translation of the first couple of verses of Genesis 1. In the beginning, king created God, the heavens and the earth. And I've got those laid next to each other just so that people can start to see the information density of Egyptian relative to Hebrew. You can see that for the word his, for example, in Egyptian, that first character, you can see we've got 1, 2, 3, 4, maybe 5 characters that come together to make that word his. Whereas that's wild. It is wild because you've got those determinatives that are helping, adding that additional clarifying meaning. Then when you look at Hebrew, obviously Hebrew is a phonetic script, so it's being written as an Alphabet, and you can see that they're not exactly equivalent. But are you guys seeing any appreciable space saving between the two? I get that These aren't exactly the same same phrase. But are you seeing kind of what the Book of Mormon tells us, which is Egyptians should be able to encode much more language or much more information per character than Hebrew. Are you seeing that at all on this slide? No. No.

Nemo [00:56:31] And that's even with Hebrew doing things like dropping vowels and adding dots to show the vowels ought to be there and things like that, it's just not there.

Kolby Reddish [00:56:40] And to give a direct comparison, if we go to the next slide, I actually did take a phrase from this extract of A Tale of Two Brothers. So he made sharp his dagger. He placed it in his hand. When we translate that into Hebrew, you can see that this second sentence of the story takes 41 Egyptian characters. It takes 39 English letters or characters to convey the same information. And it gives us. And that is then Translated into. Into 33 Hebrew characters. So, ironically, what we're actually seeing is the exact opposite of what the Book of Mormon Sundays. It takes 33 characters. And again, as you said, Nemo, Hebrew doesn't use vowels in this time period. So we're using 33 Hebrew characters to convey the same meaning as 41 Egyptian characters. There are actually more Egyptian characters than Hebrew characters.

John Dehlin [00:57:31] In other words, if Joseph wanted to be more efficient or if the Nephites and Lamanites wanted to be more efficient, they would have written in Hebrew, not Egyptian.

Kolby Reddish [00:57:41] Is that right?

Nemo [00:57:42] Based on how Egyptian actually works, in that multiple characters are needed to make one word at times, rather than what Joseph Smith believed about Egyptian, which was that one character can contain multiple words, sentences.

John Dehlin [00:57:55] But we'll get there.

Nemo [00:57:56] Yeah.

Kolby Reddish [00:57:57] Right. So if we can go forward a few slides to the one with the notebook on it. This is actually from Champion's notebook. This helps explain how they cracked the code beginning in 1822 as Champilion was working on this over in France. You can see that the way they were able to crack the code is because there are certain words in Hebrew that are spelled phonetically, including names. So the name that we talked about from that inscription earlier, King Ptolemy, you can see that that grouping of characters in the upper right hand of your screen spelled out in Egyptian the name Ptolemy. So all of that, all of those characters, there's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 characters that I'm counting, plus the cartouche, which is the circle around it. That basically recognizes it as something that should be spelled out phonetically. We've got eight characters to then go to spell out the name Ptolemy. And again, this helps just make this point of Egyptian is not going to save you any space, especially when you're dealing with, with names, which is something that the Book of Mormon has quite a lot of many, many, many names.

Nemo [00:59:07] And in fact, what's ironic about that is the church will often push forward as a claim about the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon, just how many unique names there are, how many unique nouns the Book of Mormon contains. But that creates a massive issue for its information density.

Kolby Reddish [00:59:20] Yes, yes. Because when we're getting, especially when we're dealing with names and nouns that aren't originally Egyptian, which is literally everything that's in the Book of Mormon, that's when you lose any information density of Egyptian in the first place. So even if there is a slight advantage, information density in writing some things in Egyptian, it's the things that Egyptian have been writing, Egyptians have been writing for a long time, not what the Book of Mormon records, which is things that are actually Hebrew, like Hebrew thought patterns, Hebrew words, Hebrew names, but then are being translated over into Egyptian.

Nemo [00:59:57] It's just made me think about some of the loan shifting arguments that people like Dan Peterson make about things like horses in the Book of Mormon. And it's this idea that, okay, well, they didn't have a word for it, so they used a word they already had. And I wonder now whether they might try and add to that and say, well, oh yes, because he's using a form of Egyptian. Therefore to use a more familiar word would save space rather than having to spell out what a tapir is or anything like that. I wonder whether this might give them ammunition to do that.

John Dehlin [01:00:23] That.

Nemo [01:00:24] But even if it did, it doesn't work for the information density of Egyptian anyway.

Kolby Reddish [01:00:29] Right.

Nemo [01:00:29] Because even if you make that little space saving there, you can't do that for everything. You can't do that for unique names. And the word his is quite important, appears a lot in the Book of Mormon. It takes four characters to write.

Julia [01:00:40] Wait, hang on, let me see if I understand. So you're saying names kind of have to be long, is that kind of right?

Kolby Reddish [01:00:45] Names, because they're often spelled phonetically, are going to be longer.

Julia [01:00:48] But then I'm thinking of like the Book of Ether or, or Mormon. Whenever he's saying this man with all of his 10,000 are being killed, but he's saying the names of these people. Right. Like I feel like that would take up so much space.

John Dehlin [01:00:59] Do they do that, don't they do that genealogy thing in the Book of Mormon where so and so begot? So and so begot. So and so begot. So and so.

Kolby Reddish [01:01:05] Yeah, think about that.

John Dehlin [01:01:06] Another problem, right?

Kolby Reddish [01:01:07] In the little books between Jacob and Words of Mormon, you've got some of those little books like Jared, you've got not guys who entered the narrative and basically say, and here's my name, and my dad's name was this. And now I'm going to give the plates to my brother or to my son, whose name is this. That would take up an incredible amount of space for absolutely no substantive effect. Right. It doesn't do anything to move the narrative forward, but what it also links to. And again, this comes back to kind of the framing we use to respond to certain apologists that are trying to make the Book of Mormon a looser translation. That very clearly is the Book of Mormon treating itself as a tight, literal translation of this guy wrote these words on this piece of metal. And that's why it's so important. And that's why it was translated and kept for our day.

Physical Constraints of the Gold Plates

Julia [01:01:57] I was going to say in one of our past episodes, we talked about how there was a couple of witnesses, late and secondhand, but they said that the plates were either seven plates big or 14, which, like, if you just put down the names in the way that you've just shown, that's going to take up your space is gone. I would feel like. Like you don't have a lot of wiggle room.

Nemo [01:02:16] Again, we've looked at information density in the past and we've looked at similar examples of metal plates, and it was determined, I think, that 10,000 words a plate are missing. Yeah, Right. In any language that we know of that has been written into plates and the amount of information that's then contained on those plates, you're missing an entire university dissertation's worth of text per plate, which is in order to get the amount of information that you need for the Book of Mormon.

Julia [01:02:41] That's wild.

Nemo [01:02:42] We can go back and check that episode that we did on that, but.

John Dehlin [01:02:45] Yeah, or Mormon and Moroni and Joseph Smith were really strong.

Nemo [01:02:50] Yeah. Joseph Smith with his limp and his.

Kolby Reddish [01:02:53] I mean, we know they were. Because of how heavy those plates would have been. Right.

Nemo [01:02:57] I felt a bit back.

John Dehlin [01:02:58] Or the paper was really thinner.

Kolby Reddish [01:03:02] Got something.

Nemo [01:03:03] I went to the Church History Museum last week while I was here, and I went there, and they've got this set of plates that weigh about what the witnesses described them to weigh. And they're in a box and they're on a little rack so you can try and lift them up. So you got guys coming over and doing a Little bit of deadlift or whatever. And I tried to hold my tongue, but I went to the senior missionary that was sat there, and I lifted them up, and I went, oof. And Joseph Smith ran with these for three miles. And she went, well, you know, he was a strong farm boy.

John Dehlin [01:03:30] While fighting people off, I was like.

Nemo [01:03:32] While fighting people off, she's like, yeah.

Kolby Reddish [01:03:33] I was like.

Nemo [01:03:34] And with a limp. She was like, yeah. I was like, okay, cool. I left it because. Well, I'm not. What can you do there? But, yeah, it really shows that if these needed to be heavier than they were described by the witnesses, if the witnesses were lifting them with their spiritual arms, as well as seeing them with their spiritual eyes, then, yeah, that's maybe an explanation.

Kolby Reddish [01:03:51] Their spiritual arms were jacked.

Nemo [01:03:53] Absolutely jacked. Just some jacked spiritual arms.

Kolby Reddish [01:03:57] I mean, we've seen their physical arms in Arnold Freyberg's depictions.

John Dehlin [01:04:00] Imagine that's who was inspired, was Arnold Friedman.

Nemo [01:04:04] Arnold Freiberg had a thing for delts and biceps.

Julia [01:04:06] Even the women are kind of ripped. The baptism

Kolby Reddish [01:04:11] painting, definitely. So let's keep talking about the Rosetta Stone. Really quickly, if we can go to, I think, the second slide, Nemo, with

Nemo [01:04:18] the notebook on it, the number of lines total.

Kolby Reddish [01:04:21] Yes.

Nemo [01:04:21] And by the way, for those who are interested, this is what an actual translation of ancient text looks like written in a notebook. We'll get to it another version of what it looks like later. But this is what a pro looks like.

Kolby Reddish [01:04:30] This is from someone who actually cracked the coding. Yes. I did pull this from Champillon's notebook himself. So the total number of hieroglyphic lines on the Rosetta Stone is 14 lines. Over those 14 lines, we have about 1200-1400 individual signs. You may be asking, like, why is it difficult to calculate the number of additional signs? That's because the way that Egyptian works with these determinatives and with these other characters that are added to clarify the meaning of an original character, it just is. It's not as simple as, like, the way we would count the number of letters. It's almost like if anyone took Spanish in high school, and you've got, like, an Enye. Right. Does that count as two characters, or does it count as one?

Nemo [01:05:10] In German, you've got the S set, which is one character represent two letter S's.

Kolby Reddish [01:05:14] Yes.

Nemo [01:05:15] Which is. Is it one or two? Similarly, like I was talking about earlier, with compound characters in things like Korean. Again, is that one character or two? Because they've been brought together, but they are two separate characters.

Kolby Reddish [01:05:24] Exactly. Then when we get to the demotic lines, we've got 32 lines of demotic that comprises 4 to 5,000 sign or stroke equivalents. And again, because it was a cursive form, it's a little difficult to break down exactly where you demarcate those lines. But that's basically why we have to give a range then. And in Greek, the lines in Greek that are written on the Rosetta stone, we have 54 lines in Greek. And again, this is going to take up the most amount of space because it's an alphabetic language. And so we've got seven to 8,000 letters. Now, what I did from here was I kind of theorized what would it take if we imagined that on the Rosetta Stone, we had hieroglyphics at the top, then we had. Then we had the demotic, then we had the Greek, and then at the bottom, we add a fourth language of Hebrew from that time period. That's where this slide, this next slide or this table then comes from, is trying to imagine that. So what this helps show is both what type of writing system we're talking about, right? Greek is alphabetic, hieroglyphic is mixed. It can have some phonetics, plus it can have some logographs and some. Some things that work alphabetically. Then with demotic, we've got cursive logograph hybrids because it's building from that Egyptian base of hieroglyphics. Then with Hebrew, we've got consonantal alphabetic, so an alphabetic system that doesn't use any vowels. And so if we were to envision writing that phrase that we read earlier, or I think just you've put it at the bottom of that phrase.

Nemo [01:06:57] You've put Ptolemy, beloved of Ptah, has reduced taxes for the people. That's the phrase we're working with.

Kolby Reddish [01:07:02] Yes, that is the phrase. So trying to envision what would that phrase look like if it were spelled or written in these different languages, we've got the Greek would take 30 to 40 letters to write that. The hieroglyphic would take 25 to 40 signs. Right there you can see a huge problem, right? Which is even though the Egyptian was written in fewer lines, we're seeing the same amount of signs to communicate roughly the same amount of information as. As the Greek Alphabet, the Demotic, it's got names in it because it's got names in it. Right. The demotic, you've got 15 to 25 clusters. And again, the clusters are a little bit more complicated because it's a cursive form. Of kind of bringing together what was already in the hieroglyphic. Then with Hebrew. And again, we're only dealing with the consonants. You've got 22 different letters. So what strikes you about kind of looking at it this way?

Nemo [01:07:56] Hebrew is one of the most information dense. And they're complaining that they couldn't have used Hebrew because it would have taken up too much space. Well, actually, it's about almost half of what the sort of hieroglyphic or the Greek took up. At the higher end of their range is the.

Julia [01:08:10] Demotic is pretty.

Nemo [01:08:11] Demotic would have been a good use,

Kolby Reddish [01:08:13] but it's also written in clusters. So if we go to the next slide, you can kind of see a rudimentary kind of translation of this. Ptolemy, beloved of Ptah, has reduced taxes for the people. So you can see here we've got it in Greek. Greek, we've got it in the hieroglyphics here on the top right. And then in demotic. One of the reasons that it is a little bit more complicated for demotic, or. I'm sorry, yes, Demotic is because it is written in these clusters. So it's difficult to break down exactly where you draw the line between one and the next.

John Dehlin [01:08:44] Where's demotic? Bottom right.

Kolby Reddish [01:08:45] Demotic is bottom right. Yes. And then Hebrew is bottom left. So you can see the 22 letters in biblical Hebrew. So I did make sure and use the. The Hebrew from the time period that we're talking about.

John Dehlin [01:08:57] The top right is Egyptian. Right.

Kolby Reddish [01:08:58] And the top right is Egyptian hieroglyphics. And then below that is the Egyptian demotic. So what you can see is you can see like maybe some space saving. As far as the Egyptian hieroglyphics are more like pictures, so they're harder characters to establish. But we're really not saving any space when we're talking about just character number.

Information Density and the Book of Mormon Text

Nemo [01:09:21] And something I want to make clear to the audience, because I'm not sure we have really pressed on it, is that the reason we're talking about both demotic and hieroglyphic is because there's some wiggle room for an apologist to say reformed Egyptian. Well, you're assuming he's talking about hieroglyphs. He might have been talking about a former Demotic or something like that. Doesn't matter which one we look at exactly. They have the same problem.

John Dehlin [01:09:39] So my summary from looking at this slide is that it doesn't matter which language you're ever going to be talking about. They're all within the same sort of order of magnitude of taking up space. There's no magical language that's going to take you to extra orders of magnitude of efficiency. They're all going to be within one standard deviation of space from each other at best.

Kolby Reddish [01:10:03] Yeah. And ironically, the other takeaway I have, particularly from that slide, is Egyptian takes up more room, not less room, if anything. Yes, I agree with you. They basically are equivalent. Roughly equivalent. I would say. There's no significant space savings one way or the other. But if there were, there are significant space savings in favor of Hebrew, not the opposite way as the Book of Mormon claims.

Nemo [01:10:26] And then if they were to argue that the Egyptian was reformed, we've already kind of alluded to the point that languages don't go that direction.

Kolby Reddish [01:10:32] Exactly.

Nemo [01:10:32] They don't get more information dense, they get less information dense.

Kolby Reddish [01:10:35] Exactly. They allow you to. To John's question earlier about this, they allow you to convey greater levels of specificity. When we get to an alphabetic language, we're able to convey more specific specificity because we're compacting less information in each individual character.

Julia [01:10:52] I was going to say, like, if Nephi, if he's reading Isaiah and things like that, he must understand Hebrew to some degree. Why is it. Why is the Book of Mormon written in reformed Egyptian?

Kolby Reddish [01:11:01] Because they claim that it's literally.

Nemo [01:11:04] That's what they say. Yeah. They said if we could have had the space to write it in Hebrew, then we would, and it would have been perfect.

Kolby Reddish [01:11:11] But also we've changed the Hebrew, I guess.

Julia [01:11:12] Let me change my question. Why did Joseph Smith claim that they were writing? Right, Right. Cause, like.

Nemo [01:11:16] Cause he needed a language that people couldn't understand so he could claim to

Kolby Reddish [01:11:20] be able to Hebrew and they would

Nemo [01:11:22] understand why he's saying no Hebrew. He's saying reformed Egyptian because that's something he gets to play with and no one gets to claim he's wrong.

John Dehlin [01:11:28] Was it Julia, Aren't you kind of asking, Aren't you noting the fact that In America in 1827 or 8, nobody knew that the Rosetta Stone had been interpreted.

Julia [01:11:40] Right.

John Dehlin [01:11:40] So Joseph didn't know that no one could read Egyptian, that someone could read Egyptian.

Kolby Reddish [01:11:45] Joseph knew no one could read Egyptian. It was the famously unknowable land.

Nemo [01:11:49] That's why you picked it.

Julia [01:11:50] But it makes most sense to me for Nephi and Lehi to be writing in Hebrew or a reformed Hebrew, like he's claiming, reformed Egyptian. It doesn't make sense for me to be.

Nemo [01:11:58] But then, like I said, so reformed Hebrew is too close to a language that people can understand in his time period, so he knows he can get fact checked. Whereas if he picks Egyptian, the famously unknowable language, not knowing the Rosetta stones on its way, that's where he would pick that. And he gets the Egyptian connection from the. They're wandering on the Arabian peninsula and they're kind of being in that sort of area.

Julia [01:12:16] It just, to me, it just feels so obvious that that's like, as you said, he's picked a language that is unfalsifiable. Like, it just reminds me of the story. I don't mean to get sidetracked, but it reminds me of the story of the lost 116 pages where Nephi's like, oh my gosh, God told me to write this down. And this is the reason why, because 2,000 years later, or however long later, Joseph's gonna lose these pages. I'm like, oh my gosh, that's such a faith building story. But it's like, no, it's different because Joseph didn't. I don't know, like, it just seems silly to think that this is the case. Or Reformed Egyptian. Oh yeah, reformed Egyptian. Nobody knows this language because the other

Nemo [01:12:49] out with the 116 pages is he just reproduces them perfectly. Again, if he's really having it revealed directly to him by God, he should just be able to do them. Again, if he can't, the question is why can't he? Because he should be able to. That shouldn't be an issue of, oh well, people will take them and say, well, you're wrong about this, you're wrong about that.

John Dehlin [01:13:07] That. I mean, it just makes much more sense that God would have not let Joseph give the 116 pages to Martin. Right, right. Doesn't that make the most sense?

Nemo [01:13:16] Oh no. But God doesn't interfere with agency unless it's to get Joseph to practice polygamy. Then he does interfere with agency quite heavily.

John Dehlin [01:13:22] Yeah, he certainly interfered with Laban's agency and Joseph chopped his head off. Like God interferes in the scriptures with people's agency all the time.

Julia [01:13:32] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:13:33] Does he?

Julia [01:13:33] Yeah.

Kolby Reddish [01:13:34] I mean, yeah, I think, you know, your question, Julia, is a great one because I think what it reveals to me is just where you start to really look at the Book of Mormon seams, like where the narrative fits together. It just really doesn't make any sense. And that sounds so pejorative, but I don't mean it that way. I mean, when we view it from literal historicity, when we're just looking at the question of historicity, it is really difficult to understand why, to your point, why Nephi and Lehi would be writing in Egyptian when, according to the book itself, Hebrew would allow them to keep a perfect record. It just doesn't really make any sense unless you view it as Joseph Smith needs some other language for the record to be written in because people can't. To Nemo's point, people can read and write Hebrew in Joseph Smith's day. And he knows that because he took tutors in Kirtland. He had a Hebrew tutor in kirtland, Isaias, in 1835. And so we know that, and we know that Joseph Smith knew that people could read and write Hebrew. But we know that no one in the Americas at that time suspected that we'd be able to figure out Egyptian. One of the great ironies, because we're going to now talk about if Mormon and Moroni's claims about information density about Hebrew and Egyptian are false, where then is the author of Mormon 9 kind of getting this idea? Does it match with Joseph Smith's idea? And so we are going to now to your question, John. Look at some of the materials from Kirtland, from the Kirtland Egyptian papers. Because what we'll find as we look at this is not only are these claims false about the way that these languages work, like we just established, but this misunderstanding that the author of Mormon 9 has about the information density of Egyptian relative to Hebrew. What do you know? Just happens to be the exact same misunderstanding of Egyptian that we see demonstrated in Joseph Smith's work with Egyptian during the translation of the book of Abraham and with the Kirtland Egyptian papers. Before we go though, though, I just wanted to give one more kind of conclusion for this first part of our slides. Nemo, can we pull that up? So this is again from Those verses in Mormon 9 that we read. And now behold, we have written this record according to our knowledge and the characters which are called among us the reformed Egyptian, being handed down and altered by us according to our manner of speech. And if our plates had been sufficiently large, we would have written in Hebrew, but the Hebrew hath been altered by us also. And if we could have written in Hebrew, behold, you would have had no imperfection on our record. So here's the conclusion, I think, to this first part. Do you have thoughts on that?

Nemo [01:16:13] I have a thought on that.

John Dehlin [01:16:14] He needed to blame the language, for he needed as many reasons to write off criticisms as he could muster.

Kolby Reddish [01:16:25] Absolutely. There are like three outs in that passage alone.

Nemo [01:16:28] We go back to the great Isaiah scrolls Right. That were written in Hebrew. And we've got Joseph Smith then taking a text from Hebrew, throwing it through reformed Egyptian back into the King James version of that original Hebrew, when he could have actually taken that original Hebrew, which is more information dense, and that's how it could have been written down. So you've got the problem with the timeframes that we looked at from the great Isaiah scrolls where the Book of Mormon doesn't reflect the earliest versions of the Hebrew.

Kolby Reddish [01:16:54] Right.

Nemo [01:16:55] So it's like there's a weird disconnect there in the language that's used, because actually we had that information already in Hebrew, which is more information dense than what Joseph Smith claimed he was using or what the Book of Mormon claims about itself to have been using. So you have a more information dense version that's found on the great Isaiah scrolls. So that was preserved by, you know, that was preserved over the years that we have that information. So it's even more ridiculous that then the Book of Mormon claims that through this other language, it was better preserved than what we actually had, because it wasn't better preserved. And they said, could we have written it in Hebrew, it would have been better. Well, I think we've actually seen that played out, that when it was preserved in Hebrew in the great Isaiah scrolls, we had a more correct version than what the King James version that Joseph Smith got through reformed Egyptian was, if that makes sense. You following there?

Kolby Reddish [01:17:48] Yeah, yeah. And I think my big question after we look at that is those claims, as we just established of the information density of Hebrew relative to Egyptian are just simply not true, if anything in Hebrew is more information dense than Egyptian. So the question is, why does the Book of Mormon exist at all, frankly? Because it says why it was written, it says how it was written, and those claims don't match up with reality. So then it gets us to the second phase of saying, okay, if those claims are not true, if the claims the Book of Mormon makes about the way it was written are not true, where then did it come from? And I think that's when it gets really interesting, because now we look at Joseph Smith's relationship to these languages based on his other work, and before we

John Dehlin [01:18:33] jump there, I'm not convinced that we've totally cracked the code on Joseph's thinking. And this is getting back to Julia, what you were about to ask. So I think y' all can fill in the blank. Joseph's sitting there thinking, okay, what language do I need, you know, Book of Mormon characters to have written in? I can't do Hebrew because. Fill in the blank.

Kolby Reddish [01:18:54] I can't do Hebrew because people can read and write Hebrew today.

John Dehlin [01:18:58] And people will be able to say, well, show me the plates. All the characters on the plates are Hebrew.

Kolby Reddish [01:19:02] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:19:02] Okay. Is there a match? There's not. Joseph doesn't know Hebrews. So we all can agree why Joseph didn't have Book of Mormon characters writing in Hebrew. Right. So we've all agreed then that Joseph switches to Egyptian because in his mind no one can read Egyptian. Correct.

Kolby Reddish [01:19:24] Well, that. And there's also a very clear link between. Because the Book of Mormon people start in Jerusalem. There's also a very clear link in the Bible itself, which we know Joseph Smith was very conversant.

John Dehlin [01:19:35] Old Testament.

Kolby Reddish [01:19:36] Yeah, in the Old Testament between the Hebrews and Egypt. Right? Yeah. So we have the link with Moses and the Hebrews when they're in Egypt, and then we have Joseph who was sold into Egypt. What do you know?

Nemo [01:19:49] Yeah. Joseph claims to be a descendant of.

Kolby Reddish [01:19:52] Yes.

Nemo [01:19:53] When he adds himself into Genesis.

Kolby Reddish [01:19:54] I think one of the things that a lot of people don't know is a lot of people know the story of the Book of Abraham. But one of the scrolls that Joseph Smith found with the Book of Abraham, documents that he purchased from Michael Chandler is he said one of the scrolls was a scroll from Joseph out of Egypt. So I guess the way I look at it, John, is we know that probably because of the Old Testament link between the Hebrews and the Egyptians, that Joseph Smith already saw a plausible link between Hebrew and Egyptian. So I don't necessarily think it was just purely Joseph Smith saying, oh, this is the famously unfalsifiable language. It's also believable to his audience because it was believable to him.

John Dehlin [01:20:32] Okay. So I think that's part of the puzzle. We know that Joseph picked Egyptian as the writing, as the written language for Nephites because A, it was unfalsifiable, and B, there are associations in the Old Testament between Israelites and Egypt. What I don't know that we've totally answered is why did Joseph go. But I can't just say Egyptian even though no one read it. I've got to say reformed Egyptian. I know we've all said maybe it's because he believed that languages change over time, but that's pretty sophisticated of Joseph to go. No. People, once they figure out how languages really work, in another hundred or so years, they're going to call me on the fact that languages drift or change over time. So I have to invent a Derivative of a no own undecipherable language. For the critiques that are going to come by linguists in the 20th century,

Nemo [01:21:30] I think perhaps it's simpler. It's simply a case of. It is unknown currently other ancient languages have been discovered and translated. If Egyptian is. Then I've got a safety net in saying, ah, well, it's not normal Egyptian, it's reformed Egypt.

John Dehlin [01:21:43] So you're saying he's looking around the corner as a prophet might.

Nemo [01:21:46] As a prophet might say it's a safe. It's an extra line in case his rope breaks.

John Dehlin [01:21:51] In case. But see, he didn't produce the plates. So in his mind no one would have had any way. I mean, because no one was able to see the plates. Talk about unfalsifiable. It's a language that no one can read that actually doesn't exist on plates. That he's not gonna show anyone. But see your answer. Nemo assumes that Joseph thinks people are gonna. Egyptologists are not only gonna decipher the Egyptian, but also have access to the plates, which he probably knows don't exist. So no one would have access.

Nemo [01:22:24] But then you have things like the character's document kicking around. That's what you're awesome. They have things like the character's document kicking around. So there are things that people can look at and try and factor.

John Dehlin [01:22:34] You're saying the one that Martin Harris took to Mark.

Nemo [01:22:37] Anton.

John Dehlin [01:22:38] To Anton.

Nemo [01:22:39] To Anton, yeah.

Julia [01:22:40] Or Charles Anton, which I think Charles does say Anton Anthon. I think he does say that it had hieroglyphics on it. So people for the apologists who want to say, oh, maybe it was demonic or whatever. I think he does say hieroglyphics.

John Dehlin [01:22:52] But I mean, is that what Joseph is worried about? He chose reformed Egyptian because he was worried that people would be trying to interpret the Antonio.

Nemo [01:23:01] Although we could be getting too deep on it to be fair. He could have just picked it. There may not be a rhyme or reason to it.

John Dehlin [01:23:07] I'm just saying it's worth thinking about it absolutely is. I wish for trouble.

Kolby Reddish [01:23:10] I wouldn't say he just picked it. But what I would say is there's a narrative right reason for it, which is because he is writing to a Christian audience. Joseph Smith and how knowing he was. I guess it's worth noting I don't really see the model of Joseph Smith knowingly like making up the Book of Mormon, knowing that it was fake from the beginning. I just don't. There's too many things about Joseph Smith. I guess what I'm saying is I'm a big believer in Dan Vogel's pious fraud theory because there are too many times when I look at the evidence that I think Joseph Smith is being sincere. In fact, I would. One of the prime pieces of evidence we're going to look at here is Joseph Smith's work on the Kirtland Egyptian papers. Like this was a serious effort that took a lot of time and drew his attention away. And so to me, the biggest explanation for why does Joseph Smith link Hebrew and Egyptian is because he probably knows that he needs to write it in a different language. We've got a plausible link between Egyptian and Hebrew Hebrew. And how are we going to like make that link? Well, what he writes in first Nephi is that it's using Egyptian characters, but that it's still using the Hebrew language. So I think that's why he calls it reformed Egyptian is not because he's pre apologizing, knowing that people are going to figure out Egyptians someday. Maybe he might have thought about that. But I guess the way I see it is he's just saying this is the way that they dealt with Egyptian and Hebrew at the same time. Because it always makes clear this is the language which is called by us reformed Egyptian. And it's explaining that this is the way this language worked. So that's the way I'm picturing it is not that it's some attempt to make something unfalsifiable. That's just a happy consequence, I guess, of the way he's telling the story.

John Dehlin [01:24:54] Well, I want to invite our viewers and listeners to write in the comments of this episode if they have theories on what Joseph, Joseph was thinking when he decided not to just say Egyptian, but to say reformed Egyptian. Maybe you've got interesting theories. We'd love to hear him.

Kolby Reddish [01:25:08] Yeah, absolutely.

Julia [01:25:10] Before we move on, I just want to say something that might be kind of random, but I want to do an LDS discussion on this topic because I'm thinking of this Hebrew where it's dense and then by then people say, oh, there's chiasms. There's a lot of different Hebrew style of writing in the Book of Mormon. Supposedly in the Book of Mormon text you have like anaphora, which is like certain repetitions or polycedon 10 or different types. So like the Book of Mormon written by Hebrew understanding people written in reformed Egyptian then translated into so reformed Egyptian. Like, I just don't. I'm confused by how it, how those Hebrew styles of writing were saved, like

Nemo [01:25:47] in reformed Egyptian Reform.

Kolby Reddish [01:25:48] Yeah, like how those Hebrew literature, like, people often point to one I've heard that I do think is actually compelling is the name Jershan. The name Jershan in Hebrew, if you were to like, like, you know, translated over means like a place of inheritance or a place of blessing. And there's a story in the Book of Mormon about certain people being given this land of Jershan for an inheritance. I've often struggled with the same question, Julia, which is, why are we having these Hebrew forms, whether it's literary forms, names, why are they preserved at all in a tight literal translation, which is what the witnesses talked about, if the language these things are being written in in the first place, place isn't even Hebrew? I do think that's a little bit of apologists playing Texas sharpshooter. Like, they're finding hits and counting hits that really shouldn't count because if they're taking what the text says itself, we literally just read it. It says the Hebrew hath been altered by us also, and no man speaketh our language. So why are we finding chiasms in the Book of Mormon at all if it's being written in a form of Hebrew that's completely different from a other forms of Hebrew? Is that your point?

Julia [01:26:50] Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. And then I think. And then I think, if I'm not mistaken, there are some chiasms in the Book of Abraham, which that doesn't make sense to me either because, like, these are. And you can see with these, what we'll show is like, a character can mean all these things, but, like, how can. I'm just confused by how chiasm is going to be preserved at all. Like, if it's a Hebrew understanding written in reformed Egyptian or whatever, and then translated into English, into King James English

John Dehlin [01:27:15] and King James English.

Julia [01:27:16] So, like, I don't know, like, I'm kind of curious to. To ask your linguist friend to see if. Can things be preserved like that?

John Dehlin [01:27:24] Yeah.

Nemo [01:27:24] Because I would imagine that when you have things like. I'm trying to think of very specific stylistic things like the haiku in Japanese literature or the limerick in English. Right. There are things about that that come from the language that create those styles of writing. There's something about the Japanese language, about its flow, about the way people speak it, the way people relate to. To it. That means that that form of poetry is beautiful to them. If you were to do that in English, haikus still kind of work in English, but I would imagine. I don't speak Japanese, but I imagine There is something missing. If you, as a native Japanese speaker, hear a haiku in Japanese, there's something there that's missing when you translate it into English. And similarly, there's probably something missing when you take chiasmus or chiasms and put them into reformed Egyptian. And so the question is, then, why would they still try and preserve that literary style in that different language?

Kolby Reddish [01:28:18] Well, and my question too, because we talked about at the beginning of this episode, a lot of recent apologetic framing is basically, the Book of Mormon is a revelation. It doesn't have to be a tight literal translation. And my question is, then why are apologists still counting these hits? If the Book of Mormon is more a conceptual translation, you shouldn't be able to count hits.

Nemo [01:28:38] Yeah, it's about the types of evidence people are looking for. I've been speaking about this a lot recently. It's like, okay, you want to put forward witnesses for. For the Book of Mormon, fine. Then the plates have to be something that were someone to witness them, that would count as evidence. So when you have Ballard saying, even if you had the plates, you wouldn't believe it. You're like, right, okay, so what is the point of witnesses then? And similarly, okay, if the Book of Mormon is a loose translation, is not a tight translation, then why are we still counting hits as though it is? Why are we still saying, ah, well, this is evidence that it is exactly as it ought to be. It's loose. It isn't, I guess.

Kolby Reddish [01:29:09] Right. Instead of just having, like one cohesive theory that's consistent. Yes. They often are not picking up both ends of the stick at the same time. They want to count those apostles like those. I'll just use chiasms. They want to count chiasms as a hit. But if you're someone who subscribes to the model of the Book of Mormon as a conceptual translation, those things shouldn't be a hit at all because it's a looser translation. The only way they would be preserved is if it's a tight, literal translation. And to your example, Julie, I don't know. There are chiasms in the Book of Abraham. I've never looked at that specifically, but there are chiasms all over the Doctrine and Covenants. And I recently was talking with Dr. Randy Bell at Thrive about his theory of where he thinks chiasms came from in the Book of Mormon. And in my view, I mean, Randy's work on that is interesting. In my view, chiasms are easy enough to explain from the point of view of Joseph Smith read a lot of the King James Bible and he thought that the King James Bible language is the way that the language of scripture sounded. We can obviously see that from the Doctrine and Covenants in the Book of Mormon. And I think the explanation is just as simple as the book. The language of the King James Bible uses a lot of repetitive language that follows a certain form, and Joseph Smith was trying to mimic that form. And I think that's, in my mind, the easiest explanation.

Julia [01:30:26] Yeah, we can go into this more when we go talk about this, but I think Jack Welch was the first person to discover this.

John Dehlin [01:30:31] Those.

Julia [01:30:31] And the reason he discovered chiasm or was first learning about them is because he went to a seminar or whatever where this guy was talking about the New Testament and the chiasm is present in there. And if Joseph Smith is using the new assessment, the King James Version, as his primer in school as a child, he of course is going to be exposed to these. So of course they're going to end up in the Book of Mormon. So to me, that's not. Yeah, that's not hit at all. But just this idea of this language where it's like Hebrew style translated to Reformed, Egyptian translated into English. It's still preserved somehow.

John Dehlin [01:30:59] We got to do a chiasm episode,

Kolby Reddish [01:31:01] even if it's short.

John Dehlin [01:31:01] Short.

Kolby Reddish [01:31:02] We'll do it twice, once forward.

Nemo [01:31:04] Exactly.

John Dehlin [01:31:07] Yeah.

Nemo [01:31:08] Beat me to it there, Colby.

John Dehlin [01:31:10] Thank you. Always have three, like the beginning and then the middle.

Kolby Reddish [01:31:14] That's right. The most important episode will be in the middle.

John Dehlin [01:31:17] That's right.

Kolby Reddish [01:31:17] All the good stuff. People can just watch that one. That's right. Going back to this information density. So I think. I think, you know, we've asked really a lot of really interesting questions, questions about this, but I think the real takeaway that we're going to look at now is looking at Joseph Smith's understanding of Egyptian based on certain documents in the Kirtland Egyptian papers. And I will say I think the Church deserves a lot of credit for its work on the Joseph Smith papers and making this material available. Another resource that I would point people to, I'll just say real quickly, my pet theory for why the Church has been so transparent in the Joseph Smith Papers is because before the Joe Smith Papers, the thing that even pro Mormon scholars would have to cite to so often was Dan Vogel's Early Mormon Documents series. And I think the Church was a little tired of people citing to someone who does not view Joseph Smith as a prophet. And I would recommend for people who want a deeper dive on just the documents involved in the Book of Abraham's translation and the Kirtland Egyptian papers, I would point people to Dan Vogel's book on Book of Abraham Apologetics. I think that's the title of it. Book of Abraham Apologetics. A response and critique, I think, is what it is. But Dan does a great job of walking through and introducing the documents themselves so that you can understand. On this next slide, I've got from the Book of Abraham's actual manuscript. So there are three different versions of the Book of Abraham manuscript. So this is like the. The manuscript written by the scribes who were taking notes as Joseph Smith engaged in this translation project. These parts are from July to November of 1835. The first manuscript is written by Frederick G. Williams, one of the scribes. The second is written by Warren Parish. And what I really want people to see here is I've pulled the same excerpt from these. From both of these manuscripts, the English text is translated as I sought for mine appointment unto the priesthood, according to the appointment of God unto the Fathers concerning the seed. And I've got that in the first manuscript in Frederick G. Williams handwriting on the top and in Warren Parish's handwriting on the bottom.

Joseph Smith's Egyptian Alphabet and Book of Abraham

John Dehlin [01:33:28] It's kind of wild. Joseph loved this project so much. He's got two scribes, three at some point.

Kolby Reddish [01:33:35] That's what I mean.

Nemo [01:33:36] To your point, when apologists try and minimize it, look at the amount of effort he's putting into it.

Kolby Reddish [01:33:40] Yes, yeah, absolutely. And Joseph Smith absolutely believed he was engaged in the process of translation. That's not to say he didn't believe there was a revel aspect to it. But for apologists today who want to act like those are just two completely separate things, they weren't and they weren't to Joseph and they weren't to the scribes. And you can see that when you actually read these manuscripts and when you read the journal entries from this time period, this was a serious effort that they were engaged in for multiple years, like over the course of multiple years,

Nemo [01:34:10] because also running from the law while also all these other things going on, it's. It's a busy time in Mormonism. And he's spending a significant portion of

Kolby Reddish [01:34:18] it dealing with this, especially when they get to Nauvoo. He had a lot of things that were.

John Dehlin [01:34:22] I mean, he's tied to seership because the Doctrine and Covenants says that's one of his main gifts. In fact, that was his only original gift. And then it was changed to add, you know, prophet and revelator.

Kolby Reddish [01:34:34] And the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon specifically says that a seer is greater.

John Dehlin [01:34:37] Yeah, yeah. So he's got to be a seer.

Kolby Reddish [01:34:40] Exactly.

John Dehlin [01:34:40] Which at the time meant. Right. Seer, stone user.

Kolby Reddish [01:34:45] What you can see here, if we pull up the manuscripts one more time, is you can see that. That phrase, that entire sentence in both of these manuscript versions, you've got an Egyptian character off to the left. You have one character or, like, one grouping of characters that is then translated into this entire sentence. Based on what we looked at with Egyptian early. This just simply isn't the way that Egyptian works.

John Dehlin [01:35:10] Why are there different characters between the two passages there?

Kolby Reddish [01:35:13] I think that note on the bottom one is actually. I think they are the same character. The bottom one just added, like, an additional flourish or maybe that was some line. But what I'm seeing is almost like a backwards four, but without the bottom line. Parrish's version does add, like, a little. Almost like the tail of a Y on the end of it. So I'm not sure why they're slightly different, but they are similar, I guess.

John Dehlin [01:35:38] Okay.

Nemo [01:35:39] But again, to the point I was. I'd made earlier, and I think it's worth reiterating here, what you would have to believe with no magical worldview or any spiritual worldview or revelatory worldview, is that people in a functional language were able to know that that one symbol meant all this.

John Dehlin [01:35:55] The one in the top left of each of these boxes means all the lines of text I sought for my

Nemo [01:36:00] appointment unto the priesthood, according to the appointment of God unto the fathers concerning the seed. Now, maybe. Maybe to play devil's advocate, perhaps in certain religious circumstances where the same phrase is said over and over again, you might shorthand it to that extent. If there was a certain ceremonial or ritual expression that, you know, in a religious service, people would see that in a. In a book of Mass, like a missal or something, and go, that's what that means. And then memorize that it. But as a functional language, with all the different ways that we communicate day to day about all these different things, and particularly because the Book of Abraham isn't a mass or a religious ceremony that's been written down. It is an account. It is a history that contains various details and various things like that, a more narrative approach, to have a conversational or narrative language that functions in that way is borderline impossible outside of. Of a revelatory or a religious view or any of those things.

Kolby Reddish [01:36:56] Right. And to make that point, if we pull that slide up one more time, so the English text is translated as I sought for mine appointment unto the priesthood, according to the appointment of God unto the fathers concerning the seed. Just imagine changing one of those words. Imagine instead of it saying I sought for mine appointment. It's you sought for your appointment. How exactly are you going to delineate that on that character?

Nemo [01:37:20] It's a whole new character.

Kolby Reddish [01:37:21] It would have to be a whole new character. Exactly. Which to your point, just makes this language completely impracticable to you.

Nemo [01:37:26] The amount you would have to learn.

John Dehlin [01:37:28] Can you imagine?

Nemo [01:37:30] It's incredible.

John Dehlin [01:37:31] For all the different verb tenses or possible pronoun combinations.

Nemo [01:37:35] Yeah. Everyone. These has just.

Kolby Reddish [01:37:38] Yeah.

Nemo [01:37:38] A pronoun table. And that's a new symbol for every single one. There's a reason, to our knowledge, no language has ever worked that way. And it's because no one would ever come because language is an outgrowth of speech. We talked about it earlier. You know, they've changed it according to the way they speak. Written language is just a way of recording the way that we speak to one another.

John Dehlin [01:37:57] How would they capture plural words? How would they capture.

Nemo [01:38:00] No one's coming up with this way of capturing it because it's just deeply impractical and not intelligible.

Kolby Reddish [01:38:05] Yeah. To drive it a little further home, I want to know what the character that says I sought for my appointment under the priesthood according to the appointment of God unto the mothers would look like. Like, that's the level of consistency. It's got the tail that we're talking about. It's the no tail. Yeah. To me. Make this a little bit clearer too. Let's go to the next slide. And you can see an even more egregious example here. We've got a selection of. I see two characters. There's like a circle and a little dot. There's an underlining and there's something that looks like a backwards Y. You literally have an entire paragraph of English texts that the scribes are writing down that Joseph has translated from this. And kind of sarcastically, basically I added our example of his back from the tale of two brothers.

John Dehlin [01:38:50] It's like a penguin and two brothers.

Nemo [01:38:52] One three letter word takes three symbols in hieroglyphics. And Joseph is giving us an entire paragraph from maybe a couple of symbols.

Kolby Reddish [01:39:00] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:39:01] This is wild.

Nemo [01:39:02] It keeps going.

Kolby Reddish [01:39:03] We've got more examples on the next page. All right, you can see here. So here you at least have. I'm counting four, maybe five symbols. I can't tell if they're completely separated. But again, we've Got an entire paragraph of text. And you can again, when we look at the way Egyptian hieroglyphics really worked, the word brother, you've got multiple different characters to just get out that one word, brother. Think about what that means. One of the words on the first example that we used was the word father. Those are equivalent levels of meaning because they're about a role in a family. Brother takes multiple characters. And yet fathers was one of the English words. Translated an entire sentence from one character. This just simply isn't the way Egyptian worked.

Nemo [01:39:49] I mean, these characters that Joseph Smith is translating, they're the ones that come from the papyri. Correct. So these are. We know what these should say. That's the other thing. We know what small words these do say. Because Robert Ritten, you've done an excellent long series with him covering what this actually says. So it's not even like he's making up characters and saying this is reformed Egyptian here. He's just looking at actual Egyptian and this is his view of that language. And so perhaps he thinks that reformed Egyptian is even more information dense. Maybe that's the way he's going there.

John Dehlin [01:40:25] I mean, it's just the biggest tell. We know how Joseph Smith viewed the Egyptian language, and then we know how the Book of Mormon explains its perception of the density of the Egyptian language. How do you explain it? Joseph was the author.

Kolby Reddish [01:40:43] Yeah. And I honestly. So I've been. As you know, John, I've been working on this. This idea for like the last several years and noodling on it. I legitimately have no idea what the apologetic would be to this, because this is not like the numbers of deaths that are recorded in the Book of Ether or disputes about where the Hill Cumorah might be. You know, even between believers. To me, this is a bigger problem because again, if we go back to that first slide, the Ouroboros image or the disappearing Moroni, these are clarity claims in the Book of Mormon about why the Book of Mormon exists as a physical artifact in reality. And those claims that the Book of Mormon makes about the reason and the way it was written, they simply aren't true. And the bigger problem, like you just talked about, is not only are those things not true, they demonstrate the exact same misunderstanding or misapprehension of the way that the Egyptian worked that we know that Joseph Smith had for a fact, because there are documents that were written in that Kirtland Egyptian period or in the Kirtland Egyptian papers that are in Joseph Smith's own handwriting. You Just have to look closely and you will see that Joseph Smith wrote some of those things, even in his own handwriting.

John Dehlin [01:41:55] I do know what the apologetic response to this would be. Colby, do you want to know what

Kolby Reddish [01:41:58] it is that I'm in danger of hellfire?

John Dehlin [01:42:00] It's that you, Colby, are either gay or cheated on your wife.

Kolby Reddish [01:42:05] Honey, I'm sorry you had a feeling

John Dehlin [01:42:07] find out this way. Am I wrong?

Kolby Reddish [01:42:11] I don't know. Or that I'm too skeptical. I've heard stuff like that.

John Dehlin [01:42:14] Michael Quinn was gay. And Simon Southerton. They tried to say he was unfaithful. I mean, that's how they.

Kolby Reddish [01:42:21] Gay Cammy that you had to find out this way.

Nemo [01:42:22] I think a broader point there, John, is they will just resort to ad hominem, right? They will just attack constantly. Yeah, exactly.

John Dehlin [01:42:30] Or Brett Metcalf was a butthead. Do you remember that?

Julia [01:42:33] Oh my gosh, I do. I'm so dumb.

Kolby Reddish [01:42:36] Calling people a butthead for Jes is just top marks.

Nemo [01:42:41] Butt heads for Jesus. We need merch, John. We need T shirts. Butt heads for Jesus.

Julia [01:42:46] Because you can't argue that this is Revelation, right? Because this is. Because he's using. This is the character that means these things in reality.

Kolby Reddish [01:42:52] How would that even so they will argue that it was revelation. And Joseph Smith's theory do talk about him receiving revelation, but I don't see how that helps. Because when they say revelation, what they're saying is it shows we shouldn't expect it to line up like an actual translation. But that is very much not what Joseph Smith understood. Joseph Smith understood that while he was translating with the help of God. It's not like he viewed it like the.

John Dehlin [01:43:18] With the help of a magic stone.

Kolby Reddish [01:43:20] With the help of magic stone.

Nemo [01:43:22] But he didn't do it like the Catalyst theory. You're right. What he did do was he said, I'm going to translate this ancient language and God will help me do it.

Kolby Reddish [01:43:28] Exactly.

Nemo [01:43:29] That's that magical worldview I was talking about earlier, that spiritual worldview. Through the power of God, I can decipher the meaning of these small characters into the larger paragraphs. The meaning that they contain that are only revealed by someone who, like me, has the gift of being a seer, has the gift of being a translator, etc. That was Joseph Smith's view of this.

Kolby Reddish [01:43:46] Right. And he went to a lot of effort to producing these materials that viewed like, even through Revelation, to Julia's point, he viewed what he was doing as a literal translation of the Egyptian language. So much so that he actually produced or scribes produced with his approval the grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian language during this period. So if we can pull up that slide, Nemo, would you read that for us?

John Dehlin [01:44:09] Sure.

Nemo [01:44:10] Joseph Smith and his associates retained the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language volume and later used it several times in 1842 and 1843. The volume was used extensively when Joseph Smith and his associates published Facsimile II and its accompanying explanation in March 1842, which remains in canonized LDS scripture.

Kolby Reddish [01:44:30] Correct. And just for people who don't understand, the facsimiles are part of the book of Abraham. So that was one of the figures. Facsimile two. Excuse me. Facsimile two is what's known as a hypocephalus. So it was a circular disc that was placed below the head of one of the mummies. And so it then does make its way into Scripture.

Nemo [01:44:50] And the hypocephalus is what? One thing's just Joseph Smith bought off Chandler and he tried to fill in some of the blanks with his own information. But that incorrectly.

Kolby Reddish [01:45:00] Incorrectly, incorrectly, incorrectly. He did that. Yes.

Nemo [01:45:04] But that information is still within canonized earlier scripture. That image and its explanation, part of

Julia [01:45:09] it was taken out of canonization. I'm just joking.

Nemo [01:45:12] Parts were taken out, put back, taken out, put back. Nin lost and gained several times, castrated

John Dehlin [01:45:18] God, which

Nemo [01:45:20] Min lost his member, then got it back and then lost it again.

John Dehlin [01:45:23] What if God minded?

Kolby Reddish [01:45:24] Being you might not know what we're talking about. There is the Egyptian God. Min is one of the figures that's in this facsimile number two. And he is featured at one time and originally depicted with an erect penis. And that penis is then removed in one version of the Scriptures and then added back in the 1981 version of the Scriptures and the subsequent editions of the scriptures.

Nemo [01:45:47] Scriptures today, indeed. It's all just a little bit of Carry on humor there. But the following spring, back to the slide. Six brass plates were dug out of an Indian burial mound near Kinderhook, Illinois, and brought to Nauvoo, Illinois, for Joseph Smith to translate. One of the men who unearthed the plates had manufactured them and planted them in a mound to deceive local Mormons. According to one source, Joseph Smith looked at the plates and then compared them with his Egyptian Alphabet, an apparent reference to the grammar and Alphabet volume. So we've done a whole episode on the Kinderhoe plates and that incident, so we don't really need to get into it here. But the point is, when Joseph Smith was presented with what he believed to be an ancient artifact. He, as a prophet, as a seer, as a translator, referenced this document. So we're establishing here the primacy of this document in Joseph Smith's functioning in his way of moving about the world.

Kolby Reddish [01:46:34] Exactly. And that's why I thought it was a good companion to Julia's question is, this is why I don't think the revelation, or saying Joseph Smith viewed this as a revelation. Like, yes, I'll concede that's true. Joseph Smith's journals absolutely talk about him having an unfolding from God of like, this cosmological system that's in the Book of Abraham. I just don't see how that helps. Because the way that Joseph Smith engaged with the materials that he produced, he very much viewed it as a literal translation of the Egyptian language. That's why when the Kinderhook plates are brought to him, he goes and he looks for a character that matches the work that he and the scribes have already done. And even the folks at the Joseph Smith Papers Project understand this. What you just read comes from the Joseph Smith Papers, probably the source note, or maybe the historical introduction to the grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian language. But even they concede that though Joseph Smith's handwriting isn't in the grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian language, just some of the other documents, they say it is likely that Joseph Smith knew and approved of the work that Phelps and Parrish were doing doing in compiling this grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian language. And I wanted to throw this in as a little bonus. So if we go to that, first,

John Dehlin [01:47:43] I just have to say, you can't make this up. Joseph takes fake plates that were falsely created to fool him and then compares those fake false plates with this totally erroneous Egyptian and grammar Alphabet, which we know is completely false, and then makes a completely false conclusion that there is a connection between these completely problematic documents. You can't make this up. This stuff, it's like the blind leading the blind leading the blind.

Kolby Reddish [01:48:17] It sure is. I think that is the best way to put it. But a seer is chosen.

Nemo [01:48:21] The three blind mice in a conga line.

Kolby Reddish [01:48:23] That's right. A seer is what I said. But a seer is choice above all, as the Book of Mormons tells us. So one of the things that's really interesting about this grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian language is that it goes through and establishes different levels of degrees of meaning in the Egyptian language. Let me just start by saying that's complete nonsense. That's not the way that Egyptian worked. It didn't have different degrees of meaning. So if we pull up that next slide, you can see that this is Joseph Smith basically talking about the fifth degree, or the Joseph and the scribes, I guess, working out how Egyptian worked and the way that they saw it is like you could have a character that had a little thing added to it that increased its degree. So whether it was underlined or you added an extra circle or something, you were basically furthering the meaning along the same lines by working up in degrees. So, like, the first degree might be a father, and fifth degree might be like God, the Father of everything. And at a simple level, like, this is just not the way Egyptian works.

Nemo [01:49:26] What year is this?

Kolby Reddish [01:49:29] This page specifically.

Nemo [01:49:31] Yeah. Or just this you're making.

Kolby Reddish [01:49:33] He's working out in.

John Dehlin [01:49:36] Is this Nauvoo time period or Kirtland. Nauvoo or Kirtland.

Kolby Reddish [01:49:38] He would have started in Kirtland, but I don't think it was finished until Nabu.

Nemo [01:49:42] I'm just wondering, right. This idea of progressing in degrees feels very Masonic. I'm wondering how deeply integrated Joseph Smith is with Freemasonry at this point. If he's talking about things being revealed in degrees, which is a very Masonic idea that you have information added as you go through the degrees.

Julia [01:49:58] That's a good question. That's a good point.

Kolby Reddish [01:49:59] Yeah, that is a good point. I haven't looked at it under that lens.

Nemo [01:50:02] Tell us in the comments.

Kolby Reddish [01:50:03] Yeah, I think the thing that is really interesting is that, like Mandarin Chinese, Nemo, you referenced that earlier, has tones. So you might have the same word or something that sounds very similar, but the tone in which it is said changes the meaning. And so I can see that some languages work this way, but Egyptian did not work this way. And the grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian language basically builds upon this idea.

Nemo [01:50:26] So the famous example is Ma and Ma. I can't do the. Get the tones right. Yeah, Right. Ma, the sound said four different ways. One of them means mother, one of them means horse.

Kolby Reddish [01:50:35] Yes.

Nemo [01:50:36] So you can get that very wrong in context if you're not. If you're not careful.

John Dehlin [01:50:40] Joseph was a prophet, basically.

Nemo [01:50:41] Cantonese has nine.

Kolby Reddish [01:50:42] Just about the wrong language.

Nemo [01:50:44] Yes, but just about the wrong language because that's not how Egyptian words. And the degrees of meaning isn't. I don't think is the same thing as tones necessarily.

John Dehlin [01:50:53] Right pronunciations.

Nemo [01:50:54] Yeah.

Kolby Reddish [01:50:55] So then I think we have a few more examples kind of of specific characters. And, Julie, I think you might have added these.

Julia [01:51:00] Yeah. So this is the same thing you just saw. I just blew it up so that you could see very clearly. This is the symbol and this is what it means. And this is just wild to me and like, thinking about the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [01:51:10] Read it.

Julia [01:51:10] Oh, the whole thing. So this little. It looks almost like an eye, like a closed eye to me, is what I. Like someone's eyeball. I don't know how to say these people's names. Names. Kutuman. A lineage with whom a record of the Fathers was entrusted. Sorry, I left the spelling original by tradition of him and according to the tradition of their elders, by whom also the tradition of the art of the embalming was kept.

John Dehlin [01:51:35] That's so brilliant.

Nemo [01:51:36] The phrase by whom.

John Dehlin [01:51:38] Your point is?

Julia [01:51:39] Well, I was going to say, just like in the Book of Mormon, he stops the. So all the witnesses say that it was a tight translation from everything we can say. And they said if they spelled a name wrong, he would stop them and say he would correct them. Or if they got anything missed a word, he would stop them and they would correct it. This doesn't make any sense. Because he's got a name in there. And how are you supposed to know if the person spelled it, wrote it down wrong?

Kolby Reddish [01:52:00] Oh, can we please go to the next one? Because it has multiple names, right?

Julia [01:52:04] Like that doesn't make any sense.

Nemo [01:52:05] Can I read this one? Okay, we have Ho E oop.

John Dehlin [01:52:11] One symbol.

Nemo [01:52:11] This is one symbol that kind of looks like an axe on its side.

Kolby Reddish [01:52:14] It looks like Oklahoma.

Nemo [01:52:16] Yeah, it does a little bit look like Oklahoma. Yeah.

Julia [01:52:18] Oh, the state.

John Dehlin [01:52:19] This little symbol that looks like Oklahoma

Nemo [01:52:21] says Ho I oop. A prince of the royal blood, a true descendant from Ham, the son of Noah and inheritor of the kingly blessings from under the hand of Noah. But not according to the priestly blessing because of the transgressions of Ham, which blessing fell upon Shem from under the hand of Noah. Methinks perhaps he's making the.

Kolby Reddish [01:52:41] There are three. There are three proper names in there. Think about what that means. You have three proper names repeated lots of times in one. You have a subjunctive clause in there. So to have a subjunctive clause.

John Dehlin [01:52:56] A.

Kolby Reddish [01:52:56] But not.

Nemo [01:52:57] That's what the line is. That's a subjunctive clause.

Julia [01:53:01] Is the apologetic for this that this was. This is just the book of Abraham. This isn't the Book of. This isn't the gold plates. I'm just trying to figure out how to. You can respond to this.

John Dehlin [01:53:08] It's that you're gay. Julia,

Julia [01:53:14] I just don't understand how, how people address this.

Kolby Reddish [01:53:17] They, they, they don't.

Nemo [01:53:19] Other than.

Kolby Reddish [01:53:20] They literally don't. They literally do not. They act like claiming that Joseph Smith was involved in a revelatory project makes all of this go away. When in my view, it actually makes it much worse. Because if Joseph Smith thinks he was getting these translations through Revelation the same way he thinks he's getting the translation of the Book of Mormon by Revelation, and this is the one time we can fact check him, that is what poses a huge problem from my perspective.

John Dehlin [01:53:50] Yeah.

Kolby Reddish [01:53:51] Yeah. So shall we talk about.

John Dehlin [01:53:55] Julie? Those are great sites. Thank you.

Kolby Reddish [01:53:57] Oh, yeah. Thank you for blowing those up. Can we talk about kind of our conclusion of the second piece? And then I know Julia had a few more, so slide. So our conclusion from the second piece, I think we've already reiterated it a number of times, but it's that Joseph Smith's work on the Book of Abraham and the other Egyptian projects demonstrates that Joseph Smith shared the same exact incorrect belief about how Egyptian worked that the author of Mormon 9 possessed. So if we're engaged in hypothesis testing and we're trying to think which is more likely, is it more likely language

Implications for Book of Mormon Historicity

John Dehlin [01:54:30] works like we just described, is it

Kolby Reddish [01:54:33] more likely that you're going to believe everything about the way language works, multiple things about the way Egyptian works, or are you going to believe Joseph Smith's claims? I think it's as simple as that. And one of the things that's really interesting to me about this argument in general is that again, these are the claims the Book of Mormon makes about the way it is written. So remember that framing back to the future or Moroni disappearing in the dust. Because if these claims aren't true, which I think we have shown pretty compelling case that they are not true, why does the Book of Mormon exist? Unless it is a fabrication or something coming directly from Joseph Smith. Even if you believe Joseph Smith was sincerely deluded in coming up with this, I think it is clear that we can trace this claim in the Book of Mormon back to Joseph Smith and nobody else.

Nemo [01:55:23] Because we do have to accept that it exists. Right? It is here. We can read it, we can look at it. So it's come into existence somehow. And so the question is how?

John Dehlin [01:55:34] I'll just say I really like what. When I interviewed John Hamer, just the brilliant scholar who now is with Community of Christ, he always would say to me, not only could Joseph have have written the Book of Mormon, he would always say, there's no one but Joseph Smith that really could have written the Book of Mormon. And in my interpretation of today's episode, this is a really good example of what John Hamer was saying. You need someone with an understanding that the language of Egyptian works in a way that not only is totally impossible and ridiculous, but is not true and makes no sense. You need someone who has that belief to have created the Book of Mormon.

Kolby Reddish [01:56:23] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:56:23] To put a read, who among us had that view? It was Joseph Smith.

Nemo [01:56:28] To put a really fine point on it. Colby keeps saying Joseph Smith shares the same misapprehension about Egyptian that The author of Mormon 9. Yeah. Mormon 9 has. That is to say, the conclusion seems to be that Joseph Smith is the author of Mormon 9. That seems the most likely conclusion based on this evidence is that he is that author. That is why they share that same misapprehension.

John Dehlin [01:56:51] It reminds me of the Joseph and the Amazing Terry Koeber Dreamcoat song. Who this man could be, I just don't know. Have you heard that before?

Kolby Reddish [01:56:58] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:56:59] I love that musical. And it's Joseph.

Kolby Reddish [01:57:00] Yeah. Yeah. I think the other thing I'm really struck by is, you know, because there are so many historic problems for the Book of Mormon, apologists have been forced to basically treat it like they've treated the Book of Abraham. I think we're seeing people a of lot. Lot of apologetic movement that direction. And I think the other reason this episode is important to me is that Book of Mormon historicity is not something that can just be hand waved away. Joseph Smith has literal artifacts from the Book of Mormon that are in the narrative, like the interpreters. The Urim and Thummim are physical artifacts that are recorded in the text of the Book of Mormon that then he later uses the fact that he encountered the angel Morona, someone that we've been talking about today. Mormon and Moroni both as these redactors in Joseph Smith's worldview, these people were. They existed, they were literal like personages. Even though they were resurrected people, they were literal experiences that Joseph Smith recounted. And I think that's the reason that I don't think historicity as a problem for the Book of Mormon is going to get better. And I don't think it can be hand waved away. And so I guess my. The best like steel man version of the opposing view I can give is the Book of Mormon gives a separate test for what is good, what is true, basically whether it leads someone to Christ. And I don't want to take any of that away from people if they feel like the Book of Mormon is scripture to them. I'm not trying to take that away. I think this episode to me just shows though, we can't view it as a historical record based upon feelings because how we determine whether it's a historical record is by looking at the types of questions we looked at today. And like we've looked at in our brass plates and great Isaiah scroll episode, the Stone Box episode, when we look at these things from the way we would look at settling historicity in literally any other arena of our life, the question would be kind of, as you said it, Nemo.

Nemo [01:58:52] On the point of who Joseph Smith saw, what resurrected beings he encountered. I did a video the other day on taking people's Mormon hot takes and it came that not only the Elijah Elisha problem in the Kirtland Temple is an issue. It's in that they are the same person. The same person. They're the Greek or the Hebrew name for the same person. But also that if you talk to someone like Dan McClellan, he will tell you that the historical figure of Moses isn't real. And yet Joseph encountered the resurrected Moses in the Kirtland Temple. So who did he encounter? I think again, when we start to look at these things from a historical perspective, we start to encounter more problems, not less. So just wanted to add that in as a little bonus.

John Dehlin [01:59:31] I'll just. Two things I wanted to say before we get to your last two slides, Jul. One is we had a comment on the John Lindwell episode that kind of blew my mind. And the basic comment was that all the, let's just say anti Book of Mormon criticisms that we've seen, DNA, horses, steel, deutero, Isaiah. Pick your top 10 most problematic or devastating critiques. They're kind of like rifle shots to specific parts of the Book of Mormon. But what John Lundwall's episode combined with honestly with today's episode, they're these macro comprehensive critiques of Book of Mormon authenticity and historicity that are absolute smoking guns and devastating to anyone who's honestly sincerely reviewing the evidence. And again, it's. It's not rifle micro shots. They're devastating to the whole.

Nemo [02:00:38] It burns the whole book down because the book should exist.

Kolby Reddish [02:00:41] Well, and in fact, the reason that I came up with this approach to this episode, John, is when I was talking about historicity and archeological evidence and talking about it was as RFM and I or Radio Free Mormon and I were responding to the Light and Truth Letter, we did an episode focused on archeology and historicity and I was talking about how the numbers of deaths are recorded in the Book of Ether are literally like one of the largest battles that's ever happened in the entire world. Yes.

Nemo [02:01:06] Let alone bigger than Stalingrad.

Kolby Reddish [02:01:08] Bigger than Stalingrad. And we're talking with like pre Columbian technology. So the fact that something like that is recorded as happening, it just simply is. It borders on impossible. And I was talking to an apologetic friend about that and they were pointing out that like, well, you know, but there is this pattern of ancient texts exaggerating the numbers. And so what got me thinking about this episode is okay, if I had to pick one Book of Mormon problem that can't be explained away, it is the claims the Book of Mormon makes about the way the Book of Mormon was written. Because if those claims aren't literally historically true, the Book of Mormon shouldn't exist. That's why I use that image of Moroni disappearing. Because if these claims aren't true, which they aren't, the Book of Mormon should not exist as a historical document. Correct.

Nemo [02:01:58] Yes, it can exist as a work of fiction, as a production of someone's whatever, but as a historical document.

Kolby Reddish [02:02:05] Correct.

Nemo [02:02:05] Shouldn't exist.

Julia [02:02:07] They're saying that the author was exaggerating the numbers.

Kolby Reddish [02:02:10] Yeah. There are patterns in ancient texts of Romans or whatever. Yeah, Romans, Phoenicians, of exaggerating the numbers of soldiers who, who are involved in a conflict because they weren't writing from. This goes back to John Lundball's episode. They weren't writing from the perspective of recording literal history. They were writing things often in like a form of propaganda or a form of boasting. Right. A lot of these wars between different tribes were literally a stand in for my God is bigger than your God and can beat up your God. And in fact we see a lot of that reflected in the Old Testament. So there is that pattern. But again, this is where we talked about apologists not picking up both ends of the stick. If you're going to pick up that side of the stick, it then begs the question like how much of the Book of Mormon cannot be literal before it just is entirely fiction or inspired. Pseudepigrapha. Whatever approach you want to take. That's why I decided to focus my efforts on looking at the Book of Mormon of what claims in the Book of Mormon must be literally historically true. And if it's not these ones about how the Book is Mormon says it was written and how it came to be, then I don't know what else. If you're willing to hand wave away this, then you're willing to hand wave away anything really is my view.

Nemo [02:03:24] And that's fine. If you're not actually concerned with the evidence and those sorts of things, then that's okay. But if you claim to be concerned with those things, then the follow through has to be that you have to engage with them.

Kolby Reddish [02:03:36] Sure.

John Dehlin [02:03:37] I'll never forget, I don't know, 10 or so years ago, I'm talking, talking to one of the most famous Mormon scholars ever. I'll just say she was one of the six most famous Mormon scholars in the fall of 1993. Let's just put it that way.

Kolby Reddish [02:03:55] I might be able to figure that out come September.

John Dehlin [02:03:58] So I'm talking to her because she's still a believer. And so I was getting really upset about believing of Mormon historicity and the plates and the golden plates and the witnesses. And this was her explanation of making it all fit. She believes, according to my memory of what she said, that Joseph Smith was a prophet and that, you know, Nephi and Laman and Lemuel and Laban and Moroni, they all did exist, but there weren't gold plates. But Joseph said there were gold plates, but that Joseph created fake plates to make people believe that there were gold plates, but that when he was translating, even though he knew that he didn't have the gold plates and that he created fake plates to fool people when he was translating, he believed he was still channeling an ancient civilization in his creation of the Book of Mormon. So she believes all of that at once.

Julia [02:05:08] Oh my gosh.

John Dehlin [02:05:09] Wow. I'm not joking. And I've got it in writing where she explains this to me. So it's the pious fraud that Joseph. No, there wasn't golden plates because that story is ridiculous. And yes, he had to create fake plates to fool everybody, but he still believed that there was a Moroni and a Nephi and you know, why did

Nemo [02:05:33] he have to fool everybody if there were? No. Like, why couldn't he have just said

John Dehlin [02:05:36] he challenged people needed some physical, just like the people needed some artifacts to be able to believe a story so ridiculous, even though the story was true, they weren't going to believe it unless

Nemo [02:05:47] it feels tangible to you because you believe and have not seen.

John Dehlin [02:05:51] Wait, are you telling me the story doesn't. This explanation doesn't make sense?

Nemo [02:05:53] Well, Jesus was a big fan of people believing without seeing things. And so the idea that Jesus, Joseph had to lie to people to give

John Dehlin [02:05:59] them something to believe, this well respected, profoundly unmistakable beliefs.

Kolby Reddish [02:06:05] Yeah. When we get to those types of explanations again, I'm never trying to take away faith from people. I think the.

John Dehlin [02:06:12] No, no, no, no.

Kolby Reddish [02:06:13] Yeah. And I think the main reason I engage in like this type of analysis is I simply want to help people, especially even believers, understand why historicity is a requirement for me to believe in the Book of Mormon. I believed in the Book of Mormon because I believed it was historical, because that's the way I was always taught. That's the way Joseph Smith understood it. I'm not trying to take away from people who see it differently, but that story and just how difficult it is to believe that theory makes me think of this quatrain from Omar Khayyam. It's more generally about revelation, but I hope I can get it correctly. He says, and do you think that unto such as you, a maggot minded starved fanatic, crack true God gave a secret and denied it Me. Well, well, what matters it believe that too. And I just think about that at a certain point when we get to revelation as the answer. I can't take someone else's revelatory experience. I just can't. That's their experience. And so if they feel like that's the truth or that's what they want to base their lives on, I can understand that.

John Dehlin [02:07:14] But for me, and to be clear, my point wasn't to mock this person, to make fun of their belief beliefs, it's to say what type of pretzel intellectually you have to bend your brain into to make all of this make sense. Bless that person for their belief. Bless everyone who has beliefs. If it helps you live a better life, believe it. Right. But it's just an illustration of what you have to do.

Kolby Reddish [02:07:40] Yeah.

Nemo [02:07:40] We're asking the question, how could you possibly believe that? That's one of the ways in which you can.

John Dehlin [02:07:44] That's how you do it.

Kolby Reddish [02:07:48] Yeah.

Nemo [02:07:49] Right. Should we talk about how Joseph Julius does.

Where Joseph Got the Density Idea and Known Frauds

Julia [02:07:51] There's a couple more slides. So when you and I were going over this earlier this week, I was wondering, where did Joseph get this idea that you could fit so much into so little? And I think you've even mentioned.

John Dehlin [02:08:01] Wait, don't tell me. He borrows it from somebody else.

Julia [02:08:04] Right. So I looked a lot to try to find a good quote from these different people that were publishing in the 1820s. To see if I could find. To see if I could find one that fit really well.

John Dehlin [02:08:15] Love it.

Julia [02:08:16] So one of them was from Thomas Young and he published a book called An Account of Some Recent Discoveries in Hieroglyphical Literature in Egyptian Antiquities.

John Dehlin [02:08:24] In what year?

Julia [02:08:25] In 1823. And so the thing is, I was looking. That book is on archive.org, you can look at it, but I couldn't find, like a really good quote. But. So there's another person that wrote. This is going to sound really weird. This person wrote an article in 2019, and her name is Sarah Gillian Gilliam. And so I'm pulling this quote from her understanding of his book, if that makes sense, because I really liked how she framed, kind of summarized his work. Does somebody actually want to read Sarah's quote?

John Dehlin [02:08:50] Sure.

Nemo [02:08:50] Hieroglyphs were used by Egyptians for thousands of years, but following the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great and the imposition of Hellenistic rule, the script gradually ceased to be used. Roman and Greek authors who could not read hieroglyphs believed them to be symbolic and not phonetic, a belief which went unquestioned and effectively hampered decipherment for centuries.

Julia [02:09:13] Thank you. And that article was called Thomas Young and the Decipherment of Hieroglyphics. So she's specifically talking about his understanding. So, yeah, so it's a symbolic, not phonetic. And this belief went unquestioned for years. And so I thought that one did a really good job of showing Joseph what Joseph could be understanding of the Egyptian language. This other one, the second one that I found, is not as clear, but it was a book that was written in 1742 by William Warburton. And I won't say the title of it, it's just super long. The Divine. Yeah, it's just. It's just all right there, if you want to throw it up on the

Nemo [02:09:46] screen, I'm gonna read that.

Julia [02:09:47] Okay.

Nemo [02:09:47] The divine legation of Moses, demonstrated on the principles of a religious deist. From the omission of the doctrine of a future state of reward and punishment in the Jewish dispensation.

John Dehlin [02:09:57] That's a book title.

Julia [02:09:58] That's a book title.

John Dehlin [02:09:59] Okay. Okay.

Julia [02:10:00] And he says the common foundation, and his emphasis, not mine, the common foundation of writing and speaking was a picture or image presented to the imagination through the eyes and ears. And kind of what I was getting from that is that it's the same idea where it's like it's a picture or an image, and then by your imagination, you can figure out the translation of that. And so I think those were. Those were at least some good examples. And then I found a lot of. How do you say his name? Champollion. Yeah. And I did find other scholars that were pushing against this idea that this doesn't make sense. Sense for this symbol to mean so much that I can't remember those specifically, but I put them in the show notes as well, that people were being critical, but people were accepting that understanding that Joseph Smith latched onto and then created the Book of Mormon and then created the Book of Abraham. So I just thought those were good.

John Dehlin [02:10:43] Sounds like a good master's thesis or doctoral dissertation.

Julia [02:10:47] Yeah, for real.

Kolby Reddish [02:10:50] The other thing that's really interesting is that Joseph Smith, you know, Joseph Smith receives the Egyptian material that he gets from Michael Chandler. And one thing that's really, really interesting is that Michael Chandler, when he sells Joseph Smith those materials in Kirtland, he gives Joseph Smith a certificate. And it's really interesting to me from the point of view of Nemo. Earlier, you talked about different types of evidence or how people look at different types of evidence. I'm going to read that certificate. And people can find this on the Joseph Smith papers. It's dated July 6, 1835. Chandler writes, this is to make known to all who may be desirous concerning the knowledge of Mr. Joseph Smith, Jr. In deciphering the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic characters in my possession, which I have in many eminent cities shown to the most learned. And from the information that I could ever learn or meet with, I find that of Mr. Joseph Smith, Jr. To correspond in the most minute matters. My point here is just that Joseph Smith obviously believed that he was actually engaging with Egyptian, and so did other people, people in Joseph Smith's worldview. It's kind of funny with Michael Chandler in the sense that Michael Chandler stood to make a profit off of telling Joseph Smith what he wanted to hear, but it's just significant to me that it lines up with the quotes you found. Also, Julia.

Julia [02:12:06] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:12:09] Wow. What a great episode, y'.

Nemo [02:12:11] All.

Julia [02:12:12] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:12:12] Nice work.

Julia [02:12:13] Yeah, this is really good.

Kolby Reddish [02:12:14] It's been a long time coming, so I'm glad we were able to do this one. Thanks for having us, John.

John Dehlin [02:12:19] Yeah. So is LDS discussions going to continue? Are y' all still.

Julia [02:12:24] Oh, yeah, for sure.

Nemo [02:12:25] We've got episodes in the works. We've got slides.

John Dehlin [02:12:26] We're working on any possible themes.

Kolby Reddish [02:12:31] The next idea I think we have slated to talk about is all of the times that frauds, like knowing frauds, were directly incorporated into kind of the overall Mormon narrative and myth.

Nemo [02:12:44] So think Hoffman, think Kinderhook, that sort of stuff.

Julia [02:12:47] And then even modern ones, which I would include, is like, Hildebrand, who she's meeting with general authorities. Yeah, yeah.

Nemo [02:12:55] Tim Ballard.

Kolby Reddish [02:12:55] And to me, that kind of speaks to even just the certificate we just looked at from Michael Chandler. It speaks to what happens to you epistemologically when you are so determined to reach a certain conclusion. One of the things I want to incorporate in that episode is the time that Dallin Oaks, in response to Mark Hoffman writing the White Salamander letter, prepped the membership of the church at an apologetics group conference to just wholly accept a White Salamander being the origins of the Moroni story.

John Dehlin [02:13:25] So all the times church leaders were fooled?

Kolby Reddish [02:13:27] Basically, yeah. But specifically looking at the lens of what happens when we want a certain conclusion so badly that we ignore all of the red flags, it's the opposite

Nemo [02:13:37] of what Gerald Tanner did. When Hoffman's forgeries came up, he had more reason than anyone to want them to be true, and he stood his ground, said no, I don't think they passed the snake if test.

John Dehlin [02:13:46] So Mormon motivated reasoning. Basically fun. All right, well again, just to remind everyone this LDS discussion series exists, it's enjoyed best in sequence. So you can check out the playlist LDS discussions on YouTube under the Mormon Stories Podcast channel. You can check it out as its own podcast on Spotify or on Apple Podcasts, or you can enjoy it integrated into the traditional Mormon Stories podcast feed. It's also always worth mentioning, I'm sure you all mention this every time that the idea the origins of the LDS discussion series is the honorific Mike who now tiktoks on other topics. But back in the day he wrote an amazing website called LDS discussions and the original 60 or 70 episodes of this series were with Mike from his website and from his writings. And please do check out LDSDiscussions.com for Mike's original work. We always give honor and praise. If we're going to give honor and praise to anyone, it should be Mike, right?

Closing Remarks and Support Information

Kolby Reddish [02:14:57] That's right. Praise to the man who wrote the

John Dehlin [02:14:59] website and always I'll just end by saying if you value this series and want to see it continue, we pay everyone here for their work along with other post production work behind the scenes. So please do donate to Mormon Stories podcast. You can go to mormonstories.org donate Become a monthly donor and that will allow us to afford to keep doing this series because obviously this is one of the most expensive series that we do because we're paying three to four people to do it instead of no one or just one or two. And while you're donating to Mormon Stories and the OPA Stories foundation, you can also donate to Nemo the Mormon via what?

Nemo [02:15:42] Via donorbox.org Nemo the Mormon.

John Dehlin [02:15:45] And you can donate to analyzing Mormonism. Julia's channels. How?

Julia [02:15:49] Yeah, you can go to my website, analyzingmormonism.com there's a section donate. And you can just do that there if you. If you wanted.

John Dehlin [02:15:56] All right. And Colby, how do people give you money?

Kolby Reddish [02:16:00] Just send your money right now to John. That is completely fine with me. Please do support this series if it's important to you. I really appreciate John hosting these discussions on his channel, and I think we'll continue to look at it as long as there's interest. Look at topics like this, as long as there's interest. So please support that way.

John Dehlin [02:16:17] And please give us your comments on YouTube or Spotify. We love your comments. Comments, questions, criticisms. We love it all if it's thoughtful and not ad hominem. But we're pretty much all gay. I think we've established one thing for sure, right? Which is that all four of us

Kolby Reddish [02:16:31] are gay and that we cheat.

Julia [02:16:33] One of us really is gay.

John Dehlin [02:16:34] And you'll have to figure out who that is. What did you say, Colby?

Kolby Reddish [02:16:37] I said, and that we all cheat. Also.

John Dehlin [02:16:39] We're cheaters. And we're gay. We're gay cheaters because we criticize the church sometimes anyway. I don't know. How did I get there? How did I even know?

Nemo [02:16:49] John, you gotta land that. You can land it. I believe in you.

John Dehlin [02:16:53] I'll just say thanks for joining us today. Mormon Stories. Thanks for all your support. Be good to each other. Be kind to each other. Oh, we want your feedback. Yeah. So when you make comments on YouTube, we prefer that you not leave ad hominem comments, but instead substantive comments are criticisms, but we welcome them anyway. Email us, give us your feedback. If you have ideas of topics you want us to cover on the LDS discussion series, you can email me@mormonstoriesmail.com I'll share them with the group and maybe we'll do your topic as well. So thanks, everyone. Thanks, Colby. Thanks, Julia. Thanks, Nemo.

Kolby Reddish [02:17:30] Pleasure.

John Dehlin [02:17:31] Thanks for coming all the way to our studios today. We should have planned more having us all four here, but I'm glad we got today done. Thanks for joining us. Take care, everyone, and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of LDS Discussions and Mormon Stories podcast. Take care, everybody.

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