Welcome and Introducing John Larsen

John Dehlin [00:00:02] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John De Lynn. It is December 15, 2022, and we are excited for another treat, another John Larsen episode. We are joined in studio by literally, your favorite woman podcast co host of Mormon stories in 2022. Its official care. Burrell.

Carah Burrell [00:00:27] Wow.

John Dehlin [00:00:28] I mean, you and Mark, you're like neck and neck. But we actually did a brief.

Carah Burrell [00:00:31] I'm just grateful to be nominated. We're all winners.

John Dehlin [00:00:35] NuanceHoe. Carah Burrell, thanks for joining us today.

Carah Burrell [00:00:37] Thanks for having me. I love these John Larsen episodes.

John Dehlin [00:00:40] How are you feeling about holidays and Christmas time coming up and Thanksgiving behind us?

Carah Burrell [00:00:46] Just ready to blast through it and get to spring. And my 14th wedding anniversary is in three days, so that's when I get to escape from all of this and actually go, like, be and have a night away from my family. And I'm gonna go stand at the Grand America and stuff. So that's all I care about right now. Fun weekend away.

John Dehlin [00:01:04] I know why you like spring, but I'm not telling.

Carah Burrell [00:01:09] Things go into bloom. Introvertness and extrovertness.

John Dehlin [00:01:13] Personal joke. Okay. And we are super excited.

Carah Burrell [00:01:15] It's because I said within the first 10 minutes, isn't it?

John Dehlin [00:01:19] Well, you know, whenever we have Carah and John Larsen on, you just need to know. There might be some swear words, but we're all adults and hopefully we can handle it. John Larsen's in the house. Brother John. How are you, brother?

John Larsen [00:01:29] Good. Thanks for having me, John.

John Dehlin [00:01:32] Yeah.

John Larsen [00:01:32] Good to talk to you both. Hi, Carah.

Carah Burrell [00:01:35] Hi, bud.

John Dehlin [00:01:37] All right, well, for those who don't know, John Larsen has. He has a history of being one of the most famous and beloved podcasters in Mormonism. He was the host of Mormon Expression Podcast for many years. You can find the catalog of Mormon Expression Podcast on Spotify on itunes. And we were really grateful that John was willing to come and do a monthly series on Mormon Stories podcast. And if you go to mormonstories.org mormonexpression you will learn a bit more about that situation. And you can donate if you want to keep John Larsen and Carah on the show. And we appreciate everyone who financially supports these episodes. John Larsen, they're loved. So. So, yeah. So, John Larsen, what you got for us this week?

John Larsen [00:02:31] Well, you know, we've had a great year. I. I think this is episode 18 or 19 that we've done since you graciously invited me back. And it's been a wild ride this year. It's a. It's. It's been a lot A lot of. A lot of heavy, heady stuff, you know?

John Dehlin [00:02:51] Yeah.

John Larsen [00:02:51] Do you feel it?

John Dehlin [00:02:53] It is, it. It's heavy, but it's also. There's this. You've got this fan base, John Larsen and YouTube, Carah, of Just people that they want it. They want the passion, they want the intellect, they want the humor and they want the intensity. So as long as you're. You both are doing okay, you know, depression, anxiety, mental health wise.

Carah Burrell [00:03:15] This time of year, we all go around the room and say which John Larsen episodes we're thankful for.

John Dehlin [00:03:19] Okay.

Carah Burrell [00:03:20] The Lily and Martin handcart company. I am grateful for that one.

John Dehlin [00:03:24] That was a big one, I think the Great Salt Lake one. I'm. I'm super grateful for on the Great Salt Lake. How about you, John? Do you have a favorite for the year?

John Larsen [00:03:32] Oh, man, do I have a favorite for the year. I try to immediately forget about them after I record them. So it's this one. This one is my favorite one for the year.

John Dehlin [00:03:44] I didn't know you were officially a Buddhist, John Larsen, but that's very Buddhist of you.

John Larsen [00:03:50] Yeah, I've never found anything wrong with Buddhism, at least the original teachings. Of course, it's subject to human foibles, but, yeah, I'll take it. I'm a Buddhist.

John Dehlin [00:04:01] All right, and we'll, we'll invite our audience. We have a live viewing audience. We want to ask everyone who is joining us on YouTube to please subscribe. We're trying to hit 100, 000 subscribers on YouTube within the next couple months because good things happen when you hit that mark. And if you subscribe, not only will it help with the algorithms, but also you'll be notified when new episodes come up. So for all those reasons, please, please subscribe. A big thanks to Colby Reddish. Colby, we love you. Colby's already sending in a super, super chat. For those of you who want to support John or Caro financially, you can also do it through the super chat feature on YouTube.

John Dehlin [00:04:40] So we appreciate all that, but please, please, please do subscribe. Whether you're listening to the viewing the live stream now or, you know, viewing it after the live stream, please become a subscriber. All right, and, and of course, our, our those in the chat, both on Facebook and on YouTube. We would love to see your comments today. We'll try and integrate them as we can. Maven is here moderating the chats. We appreciate Maven being here in studio. And, and yeah, let's have, let's have another great episode. So, John Larsen, any, any announcements you want to make before we jump in.

John Larsen [00:05:19] No, no, I don't. I don't think I have any announcements, but I'd like to echo you and thank Maven. I mean, she works behind the scene tirelessly. I know I'm not always the prompt. The most prompt person in getting my notes or getting the titles and all that kind of stuff out. And, you know, she's always gracious. And

John Dehlin [00:05:41] John froze for a second, but I'm. He's basically singing Maven's praises. So, Carah, I'm guessing. I'm guessing you're jumping in on the support for that.

Carah Burrell [00:05:51] I absolutely am. If I were him, I would be saying, maven, you're amazing. Thanks for keeping this. This truck moving.

John Dehlin [00:05:58] So, Carah, we. We're on a live stream. And John Larsen froze. Okay, he's back.

John Larsen [00:06:03] Yeah, I'm back. You got my love for Maven, right? That. That's. That's all I was saying.

John Dehlin [00:06:07] Yeah, we. We picked it up for you. All right. Yeah, sorry about that.

John Larsen [00:06:10] Yeah. I'll have to say I. You know, I. I work in partially remote, and I'm on video calls all day, every day. And I have to apologize. Comcast has not been reliable the last week or so, so we might drop, but I'll try to pick up where I left off.

John Dehlin [00:06:26] Well, that's where Carah and I can be professionals. And we have to be Johnny on the spot or Susie on the spot with the comedy and the fill ins. I know Carah can do it. It's hard to keep up with Carah, basically.

John Larsen [00:06:35] Johnny and Susie. It's more like Chad and Becky, isn't it? I know.

John Dehlin [00:06:41] All right, John, so yeah, we love Maven. What else you got for us?

The Mental Health of Studying Mormon History

John Larsen [00:06:45] All right, well, let's. Let's jump. You know, it's funny you were talking about the mental health of this. I've said before that oftentimes when I do these things, I made a decision a long time ago just to not check my emotions, because this whole thing, processing religion and all that is very emotional, emotional driven thing.

John Larsen [00:07:08] And that was a decision I made for good or for bad. I don't operate the way I operate here in all my life. I try to be more of a nuanced hoe myself. But there is. I believe in what we're doing. I believe in what we're saying, but it is a negative energy.

John Larsen [00:07:29] And I think the world needs less negative energy. And. But this is ultimately a positive thing. And I was thinking about this leading up to this discussion, and I was realizing that when I did this before, when I did Mormon expression.

John Larsen [00:07:44] I always balanced it with basically community activism that, you know, I came on the podcast, but I was always, like, hosting things and trying to encourage people and to do that positive thing. And now that I live out here in the sticks, I don't really have as much opportunity for that.

John Larsen [00:08:01] And that does kind of, you know, weigh on me a little bit. I don't like all the negative energy is what I'm saying. So, you know, I thought for this episode and a few more, I wanted to touch base again. I want to touch the roots of where I got, how I got here, and some of the information that I used to when I was processing out of the church.

John Larsen [00:08:29] So that's kind of. That's kind of where we're going to go tonight. And I do have to apologize. You asked me about any business. I was supposed to come into Utah earlier a couple of weeks ago, and I ended up canceling the trip for various personal reasons and other things. And, you know, in these days, it's kind of hard to justify getting on a plane unless something's going on. But I will give a preview, sort of. I'm probably letting the cat out of the bag.

John Larsen [00:08:54] I am planning on appearing at Thrive in Seattle in March. So if you're going to be in Seattle in March, you can come see me. And whenever I talk at Thrive conferences, I don't criticize the church. It's all usually about trying to find your sense of spirituality when you don't believe in anything. That's usually what I talk about.

John Dehlin [00:09:16] I didn't even know there was a Thrive in Seattle in March. Now, maybe I need to plan a trip. But if you tell people you're not going to criticize the church, you may have less people come.

John Larsen [00:09:26] Oh, well, no, no, let's. John, I don't. You know, I'll still call a spade a spade.

John Dehlin [00:09:33] Okay. All right. All right. Well, that's exciting to hear about Thrive. Thrive, Seattle.

John Larsen [00:09:38] Yeah. There'll be more information. It's just preliminary, but I've agreed to go up there. I'm looking forward to it. It's a. It's a great city. The ex Mormons and Mormons who I've had the pleasure of interacting with from the area over the years have been fantastic people, people. It'll be a lot of fun.

John Dehlin [00:09:54] All right. All right. So I guess the topic today is primary sources in Mormon history, right?

John Larsen [00:10:01] Yeah. Let me give a little background. When I was a believing Mormon, I was taught, like, probably all the rest of you were to not believe Any exterior sources, especially ones that were critical of the church. They were misguided and lies at best and demonically inspired at worst.

John Larsen [00:10:23] That there was a great Luciferian conspiracy against us pure and righteous Mormons and they were there to deceive us. Well, you know, I, like everyone else, had the formidable shelf that I put things on when I run into things that didn't make sense or whatever. And my shelf really started breaking around about 2003, 2002, and the last time I went to church was 2005, so there are a couple years there. So I decided I want to get to the bottom of church history. I kind of want to really understand what was going on.

John Larsen [00:10:59] And a big motivator for me was polygamy. I really wanted to understand what polygamy was about. You know, I'd heard lots of things, but, you know, growing up as a multi generational Mormon, I knew the family tales of polygamy, and none of them were really positive at all.

John Larsen [00:11:16] So I kind of say, well, let's cut through the crap. So I decided in the beginning that I had seen enough problems in my 30 years in the church with official church sources that even as a full believer, I knew that they couldn't always be believed. I knew that they always put spin on things or covered things up or things that I knew about that they would gloss over.

John Larsen [00:11:41] So I decided that what I wanted to do is I wanted to only read source documents. And that started, really, a passionate love that I still have today for church history. And, you know, I get on these podcasts and we're punching hard at the church and pointing out different problems and, you know, all with the hope and intent of helping people. But I think sometimes it buries or glosses over just the fascinating part about the church. I've said before, the church has three Fs. It is fascinating, it's infuriating, and it's funny. That's my three Fs.

John Dehlin [00:12:25] I thought you were going to go somewhere else with the F's. John Larsen.

John Larsen [00:12:28] See what I did there? See what I did there?

John Dehlin [00:12:31] That was good.

John Larsen [00:12:34] So the fascinating and funny part sometimes gets neglected over the infuriating part of the church. So I also know that we live in the age of the Internet, and when I left the church, Facebook didn't exist. And there were great resources out there, but not like there are now. So a lot of times we had to go find the original source documents as best we could.

John Larsen [00:13:10] And that was a great privilege because it allowed me to engage church history directly unfiltered not by the critics, not by the apologists, not by the leaders in the church. And so for tonight, I've actually started creating a bunch of these lists that over the next year, I want to share with people different aspects of Mormonism, like, what are the best faithful histories of the church? What are the best histories by people who have become disillusioned with the church? But tonight, I want to focus in on the early period, basically the Smith period of the church. And I want to go over 10 sources that are readily available.

John Larsen [00:13:56] I didn't want to talk about anything tonight that's too archaic. The Church has a terrible history with this. So the church likes to take its historical documents and then wrap them up in really expensive packaging. And I'm directly referring to, say, the Joseph Smith papers.

John Larsen [00:14:19] So, you know, those books are glossy and they're expensive. A lot of them are over $100. They're oversized. It's like they were designed specifically to not be affordable or readable by most people. And the question is, who are they making these things for?

John Larsen [00:14:39] If I want to learn about church history, I want to know what people wrote, and I want to know that it hasn't been messed with. But I'm not really doing handwriting analysis to see if Lucy Smack pressed harder on the page than W.W. phelps. So I'm not exactly sure who the Church is trying to appeal to. I think they're really. If I would accuse them of negative things, I would say they're doing this game to keep this material out of the common people's hand. So for Tonight, I picked 10 resources that will really give you a beautiful and accurate view of those first 14, 16 years of the church.

Carah Burrell [00:15:20] And.

John Larsen [00:15:20] And these are all affordable. We put up in the link, Amazon links to all of these. And I believe that everything that we're going to talk about tonight is also in the public domain. So if you just go to a Google search, you can find these sources online. But I'm a lover of books, so I would encourage people who like books to go after these and read it yourself. Don't listen to me. Don't listen to Delin. Don't listen to the church. Don't listen to the apologists. Go engage it yourself. And that. That's what this list is about tonight.

John Dehlin [00:15:51] And, John, I'll just, you know, and Carrie, you may have a question or reaction here, too. Like, if I'm thinking about the types of people we want to reach with this podcast, we not only want, you know, this type of information is not only helpful to people that are suspicious that the church is withholding information or hiding information or misleading people. Going to primary sources is also super useful for faithful Mormons that don't want anti Mormon or ex Mormon bias kind of, you know, filtering or weighing through the evidence. So. So the good thing is about. One of the good things about primary sources is it's good for all sides, regardless of where you are.

John Dehlin [00:16:33] That's the first thing that came to my mind. The second thing is I'm just thinking about like what it was like to try and learn about the church, you know, 30 or 40 years ago when I would have wanted to start learning. It's kind of like you had Joseph, you know, maybe a history by Joseph Fielding Smith that would have been super curated and filtered. If you were really lucky, you would have had something by BH Roberts that would have been like a, like a, you know, a consolidated history of the Church in some way.

John Dehlin [00:17:02] And then you would have had the Journal of Discourses. Of course, if you, you know, knew someone who had like that 18 volume set or whatever that was, but there wasn't an Internet and you didn't know about any other books. The only book you would have known about maybe would have been no Man Knows My History by Fawn Brody. And of course you would have been warned that that's evil and anti Mormon and you're not supposed to read it. And of course the Tanner stuff would have been all off limits. So that's kind of, if I'm thinking back to what I would have done to try and learn church history.

John Dehlin [00:17:34] And then of course you would have had the seminary and institute manuals made available. The one Church History in the Fullness of Times manual that was around for a while. And then the only other thing I'll say is John Larsen. Do you remember when those CDs or DVD ROMs came out where I think it was Signature Books. You know, this is kind of pre Internet. Put a bunch of these original documents on dvd. Do you remember any of that or is that before your time?

John Larsen [00:18:02] Yeah, Signature Books did one and then I actually had it in my notes. This was way before the Joseph Smith papers, but some of these papers would get leaked and maybe there's a brief history of kind of the history of church history we need to talk about.

John Larsen [00:18:20] Leonard Arrington was the church historian for a lot of years during what Mormon scholars called the Camelot period. And during that period, we're Talking about the 60s and 70s, he was the church historian and he allowed graduate students to come in and into the church archives. And they were able to see a lot of material that got shut down during the 80s, 90s and 2000s. There's about 30 years that we had to take these scholars word for it. And if we were to go through a list of Mormon scholars who wrote these books, who were Leonard Arrington's grad students, it's a list of who's who in things that. Things that you've read and had access to. So.

John Dehlin [00:19:02] But people like Michael Quinn and Marquis Marquardt and people.

John Larsen [00:19:11] Yeah, the, the guys who write about Joseph Smith. Anyway, you've had most of them who

John Dehlin [00:19:15] are still Richard Turley. Right.

John Larsen [00:19:17] You've had a lot of these guys on, on, on your, on your podcast. A lot of great scholars. And, and we'll go through over the course this next year because books will. Mormon history books are my passion. And I want to share that with people. And oh, by the way, I want to say, you know, you were saying there are all these reasons to read this stuff. And I want to add, because it's fun.

John Larsen [00:19:36] When you start reading Joseph Smith the way he. You realize that there's the guy that the church talks about and then there's this whole other guy over there who's this really fascinating person who you have not even met most of you. And even the critics, you know where they go and poll the worst things he said. But, but you're still not getting a flavor for who that guy was. And so it's really interesting. Anyway, to your point, it was in the 90s that some of these documents had been leaked. So the church put together this cd. They said they were gonna put documents out and they, honest to God, they redacted some of these documents with big black bars. Like you were reading something from, I

John Dehlin [00:20:18] don't know, like FBI, like an FDI, right?

John Larsen [00:20:21] And these are documents that are 170 years old. And the church said, well, we want to protect people's privacy. And it's kind of like, oh, bullshit. Like you guys drag people's name through the mud all the time. And the idea that all these years later. But they also priced it so high. And they did a limited run. They've done this many, many times. I think they only printed like 500 of them. And they were $300 each just like 30 years ago. Those are the kind of games that the Church has been playing even as they slow roll these Joseph Smith papers. It's been so long, they could have released all of it without a problem.

John Larsen [00:20:56] But they're, you know, they're, they're. Because. Because if they're doing what they're saying, they're saying, all right, we're just going to show you what we got. Well, that's easy. You don't have to have editorial nonsense on it. That's neither here nor there, I guess.

John Dehlin [00:21:09] Yeah, it's been super. Just incidentally, it's been super fun for me to read Sandra Tanner's biography because it talks about how Joseph Fielding Smith ruled the Church history department with an iron fist for decades and decades and restricted access to pretty much everything. Even apostles couldn't get certain diaries and journals and of course, you know, cut accounts of the first vision out of, you know, Joseph Smith Dyer, if you needed to. And it was just a really dark, dark time. And John, wouldn't you say that Even if it's B.H. roberts history of the Church or Joseph Fielding Smith's History of the Church that tried to consolidate an overview of. Of church history, that those historical books were found very much wanting?

John Larsen [00:21:53] Well, they are, and I plan on going through all those histories of the church as they've been rewritten. The problem is they always were infused with the current interpretation of the doctrine. But Mormon doctrine has been so slippery that that itself has become an embarrassment to the church because you have them constantly correcting the history, but then they have to correct the corrections and correct the corrections and correct the corrections, corrections, and. And. And then we have just a lot of nothing, you know, so. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:22:28] Okay. All right, well, so where's next? Where do we go next?

Primary Sources and Joseph Smith's Journals

John Larsen [00:22:34] All right, well, let's. Let's jump in. Number one, an American Prophets record the diaries and journals of Joseph Smith. I've kind of organized these sequentially. I think it's 10 bucks. It's still available on Amazon. So this book was compiled by Scott H. Farling, who unfortunately passed away in 2018.

John Larsen [00:22:59] He was a BYU professor. All of the guys who edited these books, and we'll go through this, they are all faithful lds. We don't have anything in this list. We. By anybody who left the church except David Whitmer, and we'll get there.

John Larsen [00:23:17] But the American prophets record the diaries and journals of Joseph Smith. And it is a book that shows the exact text, and they do corrections so that you can actually read it because a lot of the words are misspelled or they're left off. You know, they're notes. They're just from a regular person, but they have a marking system so you can see exactly what was written. And if you don't Believe this book. You can then go to the Joseph Smith papers, because I think all of these have been released in Joseph Smith papers where you can actually see the photographs of the handwriting if you want to.

John Larsen [00:23:59] This book opened up my biggest first Mormon existential crisis because Joseph Smith is considered by Mormons to be the greatest mortal who ever existed, second only to Jesus Christ, who is a God. Right. But for Mormons, Joseph Smith is the intellectual, philosophical superman of all of human existence, which is what I've been taught. And in case I thought somebody might say no, I have printed out the lyrics to the song in the hymn book, Praise to the Man. Shall we read them?

John Dehlin [00:24:47] Sure.

John Larsen [00:24:49] Praise to the man, which is Joseph Smith, by the way, who communes with Jehovah. Jesus anointed the prophet and seer Blessed to open the last dispensation. Kings shall extol him and nations revere. Hail to the prophet ascended to heaven Traitors and tyrants such as John Dolan now fight him in vain. Mingling with gods he can plan for his brethren Death cannot conquer the hero. Again, praise to his memory he died as a martyr, Honored and blessed be his ever great name. Long shall his blood which was shed by assassins plead unto heaven while the earth lauds his fame. I'll skip the chorus. Great is his glory and endless his priesthood. Ever and ever his keys he will hold faithful and true he will enter his kingdom crowned in the midst of the prophets of old. Let's see. Sacrifice brings forth the blessings of heaven. Earth must atone for the death the blood of that man.

Carah Burrell [00:26:03] Only sing it if I pretend I'm punching him in the face. I'm sorry.

John Larsen [00:26:05] Wake up the world for the conflict of justice Millions shall know Brother Joseph again. And it should be noted that for many decades in the temple, the patrons in the temple swore vengeance on the world for Joseph Smith.

John Dehlin [00:26:19] Even that hymn used to say, long, long will his blood which was shed by assassins stain Illinois while the earth lots his fame. He used to stain Illinois and then they changed it to plead unto heaven. Right? Am I right? Do I got that right?

John Larsen [00:26:39] Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. But I just. This, this. The, the. The. It's hard to explain. And, and, and. And John, we've been. I don't know if you've. You've. You've released this information to the public, but I'll leak it. You guys did some research and found that half of Mormon stories listeners are not Mormons or never were.

John Dehlin [00:26:58] That's right.

John Larsen [00:27:00] They just find this interesting. So I realize sometimes I have to Explain things. It's hard to understand just how important Mormons believe Joseph Smith is. I've said nothing here that's hyperbole at all.

Carah Burrell [00:27:16] I made a shirt in high school for a Joseph Smith steak Young Men, Young Women's Art competition where we had to show our testimony of Joseph Smith through art. So some people did dances and I made a graphic T shirt in the shape of a heart with all of my favorite images of Joseph Smith. So that was a steak activity that everyone had to participate in. Yeah. If you ask example A.

John Dehlin [00:27:37] If you ask Mormons if they worship Joseph Smith, they're going to say, no, we worship God and Jesus. But then they sing that hymn and talk about him often more than they talk about Jesus. And you're not allowed to ever criticize him or say anything bad about him. So if. And then they erect statues towards him. If erecting statues towards him, singing hymns to him, and not allowing any criticism of him isn't worshiping, I guess I don't know what worshiping is indeed.

John Larsen [00:28:02] So. But I set this up as this first dilemma, and this is part of my story. I was a faithful Latter Day Saint reading this book, the next one we're going to talk about, and I was just engaged by who this man really was.

John Larsen [00:28:20] And I don't mean that like that he was just a villain and a criminal, but he was a human being with parts and passions, as they say. And this existential dilemma was, how is it that we revere this man so greatly and he wrote lots of stuff and we don't even bother to read it? How is it that when you learn Mormon history, you are not poring over everything that he said?

John Larsen [00:28:56] Muslims tried to get every last word that came out of Muhammad's mouth. Buddhists try to find everything that the Buddha said, and we could go on and on and on. Why do Mormons love a man so much and have such a repulsion to anything that he actually wrote? You can buy the Journal of Joseph Smith online for 10 bucks, but I doubt there's more than 1% of the audience listening right now who has read this book.

John Dehlin [00:29:26] Okay, so, John, I'm going to put this up on the screen for those who have a visual sense. This is the book that you're talking about, right, John? Is that the book?

John Larsen [00:29:38] Yep, that's it.

John Dehlin [00:29:40] All right. Yeah, I've seen this book in many, many a Mormon home, and we'll include a link to it in the show notes as well.

John Larsen [00:29:47] Okay, so that's it. And again, I'm not a Big fan of Jeff Bezos. All of your favorite, if you're in Salt Lake City or in Utah, all of your favorite retailers. Like, I don't want to start naming them because then I'll forget them. They all have copies of these books. You can, you can go to any bookstore and ask them to order them for you. They're still, you know, basically in print.

John Dehlin [00:30:06] So for sure, we're fans of benchmark books here on Mormon stories and of Ken Sanders rare books. So I'm happy to give shout outs to them.

John Larsen [00:30:13] Benchmark Ken Sanders Coford there. You know, there's, there's a lot of these guys.

John Dehlin [00:30:17] Yeah.

John Larsen [00:30:18] And any book retailer in Utah will be happy to get it for you. Okay, so, so, I mean, to me, that, that, that's like a roundhouse to the, to, to the face. Like, honestly, why are we not studying Joseph Smith? And that was a huge crack in my testimony because it was clear that we were avoiding the topic because we would go to three hours of church at the time and we would have Sunday school. Why were we just reviewing the same things every four years and not actually reading all this stuff that prophet seers and revelators had actually written? Well, I'll invite you to read the book and you can decide for yourself really quickly.

John Dehlin [00:30:57] John, reading this book, you probably read it a long time ago. We all know that Joseph Smith wasn't the best writer. We all know that he got scribes because he couldn't really write well. So what's it like? Do you remember what it was like reading his diaries? Was it a fun read? Was it an interesting read? Was it tedious? Or do you remember?

John Larsen [00:31:21] I thought it was fun. I was going to go through and pull all the gee whiz moments out of these books. They're in there. But yeah, he speaks and he writes like a regular frontier person. And there's nothing really that sticks out in my memory that was in this one, other than his humanity. It took him out of the clouds for me. That wasn't enough to make me leave the church, by the way, but it was to. And all of these books that. These are real human beings that were really in, on the frontier trying to, you know, work out this new religion and what it meant and to witness their, their thought process, what they believed at the time, what they didn't. It's just, it's just I, it's just a joy of feeling the connection to him for me.

John Dehlin [00:32:15] Yeah. All right. What do you think, Carah? Has John convinced you to go out and get this Book and read from the man himself.

Carah Burrell [00:32:22] Yeah, I can't wait to hear his backwoods folksy talk. But it just reminds me that so many apostles and leaders don't keep journals anymore. And yeah, I mean, I guess nobody's really like hot off the presses trying to get Joseph Smith's journal either. But I do love your point, John Larsen. And it reminds me of one of the very first episodes that you did about the curse of Cain and making the point that, like, you have a prophet on earth, they only have so many revelations to give, so many things that they writ, wrote down. Are we going to follow them? Are we going to read them?

Carah Burrell [00:32:53] Are we going to be absorbing these things if we really believe this person's a prophet? And the answer in Mormonism is usually no. We're just going to cherry pick the things that are the most faith promoting, whether it's the doctrines we follow or just, you know, reading the words of a prophet.

John Larsen [00:33:04] Yeah, well, and that's all absolutely true, Carah, but also they keep retelling the story of the foundation of the church to validate whatever it is they're saying right now. You know, you watch like the, some of the videos, the historic videos that were produced during the Hinckley administration and they're all wearing their, you know, their Sunday best and they all, you know, I think there's one I remember they're taking the sacrament and they're all just, just very solemn. And you know, in the, in the, in reality they were. They had a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine that they were passing around. You know, so they were taking hits off the bottle, which to me, there's nothing irreligious about that.

John Larsen [00:33:49] In a way, it's more special. It's more. Here's this group of people sitting in the living room sharing this communal experience. To me, that's closer to what the biblical experience was. Yet these guys in Salt Lake want it to completely validate who they are. So it's the absolute narcissism of the current 15 that, that they always have to retell Joseph Smith as a validation of their perspective.

John Dehlin [00:34:16] Got it.

Carah Burrell [00:34:17] Love that.

John Dehlin [00:34:17] Yeah.

Essential Joseph Smith and Early Texts

John Larsen [00:34:18] Okay. The second one is sort of a companion to that one. It's the Essential Joseph Smith. This book was compiled by Marvin Hill, who was a BYU professor of history and he passed away in 2016. He is the brother of Donahill, who wrote, I think, one of the better biographies of Joseph Smith.

John Larsen [00:34:37] And Marvin Hill also co wrote Carthage Conspiracy with Dallin Oaks. I'm just anticipating that people will dismiss these Books and say, oh, that's just anti Mormon drivel. This was written by, you know, this was collated by, you know, somebody who was faithful enough to co write a book with Dallin Oaks.

John Larsen [00:34:59] The Essential Joseph Smith. I think one of the things you really see here is that frontier language mixed with the biblical King James English. You're talking about what stands out. And this happens in these other books as they try to sound really spiritual.

John Larsen [00:35:16] And so the model they have is the Bible. So they're always trying to use Bible phrases and it's just awkward and weird and hilarious and endearing and so it's just wonderful. The book, like the American prophets record, it preserves the original language, but will oftentimes define terms and put things in brackets so that it is actually readable. So there's a little bit of commentary in there, but you can ignore all the commentary if you want and just engage the documents directly. And again, these things are, I think, mostly available in the Joseph Smith Papers. If you don't believe this book, you can go to the Joseph Smith Papers and see it.

John Dehlin [00:35:57] Okay, so we've got two books about Joseph Smith's own words.

John Larsen [00:36:02] Yeah. And some of them are from sermons that were written down. But to me this is the best. Outside the scripture and the revelations, these two books are the best way and easiest way to engage Joseph Smith directly and get a sense of how he was talking to folks.

John Dehlin [00:36:21] Okay, that makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah.

John Larsen [00:36:24] All right, number three, and people are going to groan on this. We're talking about the Book of Mormon. But the Book of Mormon, the earliest text as compiled by Royal Skousen. This was released 10 years ago and then there's a paperback version that's out now. So the link we have is to the paperback version. Royal Skousen is a professor of linguistics emeritus at BYU and this was a 20 year project for him.

John Larsen [00:36:57] He is the nephew of Cleon Skousen and so he's kind of connected to Mormon royalty. The Book of Mormon itself was written over 13 months. Basically it was started in 1828 and it was finished in 1830 when it was printed. There is the original manuscript, which was the handwritten document that's in the handwriting of people like Oliver Cowdery, Lucy Mack Smith, Emma Smith, just Martin Harris, the people who acted as his scribe. And interestingly enough, there are handwriting samples in the original manuscript that we haven't identified yet. We don't know who that person was.

John Larsen [00:37:46] There were only two of the manuscripts that existed and one of them was put in the Cornerstone of the Nauvoo Temple. And it was several decades later they dug it out and unfortunately water had seeped in and destroyed it. But then there was also the printer's manuscript, which we do have copies of. As a matter of fact, in 2017, the Mormon Church bought the original printer's manuscript for $35 million. $35 million. So if we took all the tithing that has ever been paid by everybody listening to this episode, all of our monies went for that one manuscript, which of course the Church put on display for us all to see.

John Larsen [00:38:33] Right? No, it's locked in some vault somewhere. So Skousen took everything that he could find, the original manuscript, the printer's manuscript, and he compiled them all into the kind of the definitive source of what the original transcript of the Book of Mormon was. And this has been done several times. This is by far and away the best one. There's a few problems that we encounter when we're trying to engage the original Book of Mormon. One, you know, when a printer prints, has a paper that represents two pages and then it's back and front. So when you running the printing press, you are doing four pages simultaneously, but on the left side will be like page number one and on the right side will be page number 433.

John Larsen [00:39:25] So Joseph Smith actually changed, was changing the manuscript oftentimes during the runs. So we have some of the original editions of the Book of Mormon that are different from copy to copy to copy because they would stop the run and then change the text and then continue on with the run. And then you have these different pages that have been put into different.

John Larsen [00:39:51] That would be, you know, this page that had been changed would go over with this copy number 44, the next one to go to copy 127. So it's all a jumbled up mess. But the key changes have been talked about. I think one of the most accessible ways to do it is the work that was done by Lighthouse Ministries that went through and detailed for the most part, all 4,000 changes. Mostly they're grammatical. But what I think is important about this book, and Mark Twain was right, it is chloroform in print. I don't expect anybody to make it all the way through it. But that's the Book of Mormon.

John Larsen [00:40:29] That Joseph Smith was the most correct book of any that had ever been written. Of course, Joseph Smith was involved in the 1837 revision and the 1842 revision, but I think the original one is just to engage and see what the book that Started this whole movement. And of course it absolutely comes from a faithful source.

Carah Burrell [00:40:56] Sounds like a newspaper editor with like a 4am deadline who's like, Hurry, Joseph, God. One person or two, is Mary A virgin or not? And he's like, well, I'm scrambling and putting the papers together and coming up with the exact revelation of what the exact words should be right before the deadline. Never a moment too late.

John Dehlin [00:41:14] Yeah, yeah. And, and honestly, John, it's real. I love it that you're bringing this up. I'm going to go ahead and just show on the screen really quickly something slightly different than what you're talking about. It's the Joseph Smith Papers kind of original Book of Mormon manuscript that's not only got kind of the handwritten manuscript that the scribes would have written, but then the computer generated text that goes next to it. And one of the most important things that apologists do or that Mormon general authorities do is they try and build the Book of Mormon up to be so incredibly amazing that it's the greatest single witness that Joseph was a prophet and that the church is true.

John Dehlin [00:42:01] Because the Book of Mormon is just unassailably brilliant and never could have been written by an uneducated farm boy, you know, in his late teens or early twenties. And so, but, but that's very different than when you actually go and look at the manuscript, you know, and I've got it here up on the screen and you look at the actual text that's generated from the original manuscript. And we have to thank, you know, the Joseph Smith Papers project for producing this.

John Dehlin [00:42:31] Once you just, once you just, just read and try and read the original manuscript, it takes a lot of the wonder and amazement completely away. It demystifies and it demotes the quality of the Book of Mormon just right there in and of itself. And then when you take that next step to, you know, the skousen version of the Book of Mormon, the original version that you're showing us here, John, you know, all you got to do is read that and read how different it is from the Book of Mormon that we have today. And then you just go to the Tanner's, you know, Gerald and Sandra Tanner's work, and you read about the thousands and the thousands of changes that were made between the original, you know, sort of transcription and the book that we have today.

John Dehlin [00:43:22] That's, that's all a really important process you go through to help demystify and, you know, relegate the Book of Mormon to the place that it belongs, which is 19th century fan fiction. Written on the frontier by a dude who knew a lot about the Bible but couldn't really write, spoke in a folksy accent and, and, and used his creative knowledge of, of, you know, things like the mound builder myth and his knowledge of the Old Testament and his own personal narratives and a lot of the Protestant sermons that he would have been exposed to at the time. And he munged that all together into a book that really comes into sharper focus when you, when you start to engage the original manuscripts in the original text. Now, Carrie, you're nodding. So I think you, I like that,

Carah Burrell [00:44:15] that imagery of the sharper focus because that is when you read these original texts and you actually become a steward of, you know, this Mormon history. Like, hopefully you viewers are out there wherever you lie on the Mormon or ex Mormon spectrum, you do get a sharper focus of the Book of Mormon. And from the time I was a youth, everything in the church, let's, let's remember back to the Y ex Mormons are so angry episode. Everything was around this idea that Joseph Smith couldn't have written the Book of Mormon. He was just this humble farm boy. And that the text that you're reading from in seminary, that this is such beautiful language.

Carah Burrell [00:44:49] It just, it fits so well with the Bible. Everything that you're told is just a very well constructed lie that is just blurry enough for you to gain that elevated emotion and kind of force yourself into a conversion, a communal conversion with your youth groups and your seminaries and you go off on a mission because you're then becoming the preacher and the salesman of that elevated emotion. But it was all based on fucking lies.

John Dehlin [00:45:13] Whoa, whoa, Carah.

Carah Burrell [00:45:16] We didn't get angry enough. I just thought I would get there.

John Larsen [00:45:19] Well, you know, they've done things to the book. Like if you ever read. And this isn't just Mormons, if you ever have the chance to read the Psalms again, read them written in poetic form. You'll find them much more beautiful and much more engaging, and you won't be distracted by all the verses.

John Larsen [00:45:39] So the Bible was organized the way it is to be able to pull exeges, to be able to talk about different passages, but the way it's organized is really difficult to read. And breaking it up into chapters like they do, and breaking it up into verses. So the original Book of Mormon didn't look that way. That was Orson Pratt who went and put it into verses. And then it was Bruce R. McConkie who went and wrote the headings. I think Orson Pratt wrote the original headings. Then Bruce R. Rewrote them, if I remember correctly. But that's like the Teacher's Edition telling you what it's supposed to say down here, whether or not it actually clearly makes that point.

John Larsen [00:46:17] But when you engage the original Book of Mormon without the formatting, you don't naturally go into a bias saying, this is scripture, it's a book, and it's a sloppy book. It's sloppy in every way that you can call. Characters show up after they're dead in the original one.

John Larsen [00:46:34] People are where they're not supposed to be. Timelines get mixed up. You know, it's just as well as all the things we pointed out that are just full of, you know, things that can't possibly be true or, you know, and it begs the question. We were just looking at that. The Church is constantly messing with things Joseph Smith said in history.

John Larsen [00:46:57] Why don't they mess with Nephi? Well, I mean, you know, he's just. If Joseph Smith, the most righteous man ever who existed on the world, if he's. If he's. If we're free to mess with what he's writing, why don't we change what Alma wrote? You know, so that's a. It's an interesting question to me.

John Dehlin [00:47:16] All right, well, that's a good. I really am glad you included the original edition of the Book of Mormon in that list, John. I think that's a crucial source and resource for understanding Mormonism.

John Larsen [00:47:27] For sure. For sure. Our next one is the book of commandments, 1833 edition. This is the earliest publication. Well, this is the earliest published. Well, no, it's the earliest book where they brought together the Revelations. And my hesitancy will makes sense in a minute here.

Book of Commandments and Early Church Publications

John Larsen [00:47:49] So the Book of Commandments has a really fascinating story behind it, of course. W.W. phelps, one of the early members, had been sent to Independence, Missouri, where he set up a printing press and he would print leaf Bill, you know, like they would give a speech, and then he'd print it up and they'd tack it around town.

John Larsen [00:48:09] He also started a newspaper called Evening and Morning Star, which is what we're going to talk about next. And he was printing the Book of Commandments, which was a collection of all the revelations that Joseph Smith had made a month to that time. And people forget because they always see it like John is showing it right now. The Book of Commandments is a tiny book.

John Larsen [00:48:30] It's like two and a half inches tall. It's like this little tiny small thing. And they were printing this book and they were up to Revelation 65 in the original book, when the Missourians went and ransacked W.W. phelps printing press in Independence, Missouri. And so they tipped over the printing press. This would be 1833, July 20th.

John Larsen [00:49:04] And then those two young women famously grabbed the pages that had been printed, printed and ran out into the wheat fields or whatever and hid from the mob. And that's what those pages were used in the original run.

John Larsen [00:49:21] We are not exactly sure how many original copies of this book there are, and it's complicated by the fact that a lot of them are in the hands of private rich people. If you can find an original copy of the Book of Commandments, that is the single most valid, valuable book in Mormonism, that's really out there. I think there's less than 30 of them in existence. Most of them are in the vault in the church.

John Larsen [00:49:48] So an intact copy of the book is beaucoup valuable. That being said, you can buy reprints of it. That'll show you exactly, word for word, page for page, what the original said. This book was replaced by the Doctrine and Covenants, which was published in 1835. We're going to get to that in a minute. But I really like this book because it shows a lot of the evolution of the doctrine. And there's been many Mormon expression episodes, and I'm sure there have been many Mormon stories episodes where this has been used as a source to show how revelations were changed. Because even between 1833 and 1830, they went and had to revise the doctrine quite a bit, because even in those two years, they had changed what they believed, which is really important because Mormons believe this was direct revelation.

John Larsen [00:50:40] There's only how many in the Salt Lake doctrine and covenants? 132, 133 revelations. I can't remember the full number. So, I mean, God has only spoke to us in this modern time, very, very short time, number of times. And almost all of Joseph Smith's revelations came from this early period when, by the time he got to Nauvoo, Joseph Smith was not writing Revelations from God anymore. So there is such a limited amount of information that if you're a believer, that God gave us, and here it is, as it was published and sent out to the church and sent out to the world. So it is. It is a book that every Mormon should really almost know by heart.

John Dehlin [00:51:25] Yeah, absolutely. And I just want to echo what you're saying, John, and kind of give credit where credit is due. This was one of the major initiatives that Gerald and Sandra Tanner engaged in during their, I don't know, 40 year ministry. And if you get the book, we'll have made maven add this to the show notes. If you get the book Lighthouse kind of the history of Gerald and Sandra Tanner, there's an entire chapter on Gerald and Sandra trying to find what microfish or whatever of the original Book of Commandments so that they could then, you know, make a purchasable copy of the book. And, and then Gerald just does this meticulous comparing of the 1833 Book of Commandments with the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants.

John Dehlin [00:52:13] And of course you'll find things like in the Book of Commandments, polygamy was literally forbidden. I think it was DNC or Book of Commandments section 101, where it basically says we are not to practice polygamy as a church. It's forbidden.

John Dehlin [00:52:32] And then later that's taken out. I think that actually persists to later Doctrine and Covenants. And it's taken out in a much later version of the Doctrine and Covenants once they came to Salt Lake. But for me, the most memorable changes are around priesthood because the, the priesthood, the offices of the priesthood, the roles of the offices of the priesthood are very, very different between the 1833 Book of Commandments and the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants. And it just so happens to change along with Joseph Smith's interactions with Sidney Rigdon and his evolving view of authority. And as people start challenging Joseph Smith's authority, then he needs ways to solidify that authority.

John Dehlin [00:53:16] And so, you know, why would any of that be been changing? Why wouldn't God have gotten that right from the start? You know, those are the types of questions that this book helps us see more clearly. So I do want to recommend the Tanner's work and also LDS discussions. This series we're doing with Mike, we have an entire episode or two that talks about Joseph Smith's changing revelations and the differences between the Book of Commandments and the Doctrine and Covenants. Really, really crucial, important stuff, John. So I'm glad you're mentioning it. Carah. Is this stuff you've been aware of or learned about or studied at all?

Carah Burrell [00:53:51] A little bit. And I think it all just goes along with the theme of general logic tells us, all right, was he writing as a man then and then writing. But that was writing as God then or writing as God now? Well, how do we know when he's writing as God and which revelations to pay attention to or not? Or is he just making it all up?

John Dehlin [00:54:10] Yeah. And, and Carah, part of what's infuriating that the Tanners help illustrate is that he even changes revelations. So, like, he had the audacity to take a, you know, a fully written revelation that was written out, edited, and print it as God's revelation. And then he'll literally add and take away from that written revelation, totally altering its meaning in. In. In the 1835 version. And it's just like, is that how revelation works? Where God reveals it word for word? You print it, and then a couple years later, you add stuff and take stuff away? That fundamentally transforms the meaning of the original revelation, oftentimes making it the opposite of what was said previously. I mean, is that how revelation works? I mean, it's.

Carah Burrell [00:54:57] He was just a vessel that can only be filled with so much oil or whatever. Holland said that it's not our fault that we're finite vessels and that we sometimes spew bull crap. I don't know.

John Dehlin [00:55:08] Am I right, John? Are we. Are we covering?

John Larsen [00:55:09] Yeah, yeah, you guys are right on. And this is addressing Joe Shua, I hope I say your name correctly. And he said that, you know, these aren't available in the Philippines. I believe that everything that we are talking about here is available online. It's all open source. The copyright's expired, and especially. Yeah, I think everything that I have on this list, except for the Skousen edition, but you can find other renditions of the early one, are all available for free if you want to read online.

John Larsen [00:55:40] But here's the most important thing I want to say. You have people like me or John or Carah or the Tanners saying all these things, and it's easy to dismiss us. You know, we're apostates. We're whatever. Please. I'm going to tell you. I'm going to say something that you will never hear a member of the quorum of the 12 say.

John Larsen [00:56:00] Don't take my word for it. Go read it yourself. Don't listen to me. I don't know anything. When you see the Buddha, kill him, go to the source document. Find out yourself. Read the book that Joseph Smith wrote.

John Larsen [00:56:22] It's super imperative, because if you're still a believer, you're shaping your entire life and your relationship with your children and your parents and your neighbors and your friends. You're potentially ruining people's lives over small things, over something that you have a responsibility to understand.

John Larsen [00:56:46] And for everybody who's been on a mission, I implore you, you have to repent in that. You have to go read what you actually were out there teaching to Unsuspecting people. It's really important to me that people understand that we're not making this up, that you don't have to listen to any of us. You can go as. As we put. As I put the title, this. You can find it in their own words. The original sources.

John Dehlin [00:57:15] Yeah. And John, can I say yes? And I'm going to say yes. And only because once you get the original sources, you're probably going to have a hard time being able to really do a lot of these in depth analyses and comparisons and care. Maybe he can grab Mormonism shadow and reality over there. But it's also helpful to then when you're looking at the original sources, to have someone like Gerald and Sandra Tanner actually do the work of showing you the discrepancies between the 1833 and the 1835 version. And what you can do is you can see what Gerald and Sandra Tanner did to show you the differences. And then you can look at the original sources and confirm that they're not just making stuff up.

Carah Burrell [00:58:04] I have read this book cover to

John Dehlin [00:58:05] cover and Carah's got to show it to the camera. Yeah.

Carah Burrell [00:58:08] So like the table of contents, you'll find everything you need to know about the Book of Mormon, all the witnesses, Oliver Cowdery, the archeology of the Book of Mormon, changes in history, all the first vision, everything you need to know about Adam, God doctrine, plural marriage, the manifesto. And my favorite part is about all of the original sources, about the Word of Wisdom and where all of that came about. So whenever I need to write like a TikTok script, sometimes I just open this up and I can retell the history out of this. It's very accessible.

John Dehlin [00:58:34] Show the COVID Show the COVID Yeah. Mormonism shattered reality. And John, I hope you don't feel like I'm neutralizing or neutering the points you were making.

John Larsen [00:58:43] Oh, no, not at all. And I just decided to leave these sources out. There's actually, I mean, I don't want to cast shade on the Tanners. There's actually even better sources than the Tanners. More academic, scholarly, linear side by sides

John Dehlin [00:58:59] of dialogue or other.

John Larsen [00:59:01] Yeah. And I think in a future episode I want to bring those up that will really help you and contextualize and explain everything that was going on. But again, I wanted to kind of reproduce my footsteps out of Mormonism because the rule I gave myself in the beginning is I wouldn't read those. I would only read the source things.

John Larsen [00:59:22] And reading the source documents, by the way, when you first start, it's a little bit foggy who all these people are. But if you read all 10 sources that I have, you will get a really deep understanding of who these people were, how they interact with each other, because you'll start to hear the names over and over again. You'll start to be able to put them together as to where they were and who Joseph Smith was using as a scribe and who he's bouncing ideas off and all that stuff. That's really important to understand the church.

John Dehlin [00:59:53] I love it. All right, so that's Book of Commandments. So that's number four, right? We're at four.

Evening and Morning Star and the Messenger and Advocate

John Larsen [01:00:00] Yep. The next one, the Evening and Morning Star. I already mentioned the Evening and morning star. When W.W. phelps set up the printing press in 1832 in Independence, Missouri, he started to produce a newspaper. And it is this newspaper that got the Mormons in big trouble.

John Larsen [01:00:18] So it was published from June 1832 to July 1833. When the printing press was flipped over, W.W. phelps and others skedaddled out of town. They were chased out by the mob. And because the whole conflicts in Missouri and the church history are a little foggy for all of us, unless you've read this stuff, that's when they were chased out. The first time they went back to Kirtland and then they came back to Far west and those other places before they went up to Nauvoo. But the first time they were chased out of Missouri, it was really because they were agitating for the release of slaves.

John Larsen [01:00:57] For one thing, in the early days of the church, the church was anti slavery. It reversed its position. And under Brigham Young, the church, actually the Mormon church, had black slaves. The church itself did so. But that's neither here nor there. That's down the road. So they were agitating. And Missouri was a very.

John Larsen [01:01:20] It was a rough and tumble place. And in a coming episode, we're gonna deal a little bit with the relationships with the Indians. A little bit. But this was the raw and dirty frontier. And already the Civil War tensions were brewing even this early between the slave states and the non slave slates. So you have all these Yankees coming down into the south, which was upsetting to the locals to begin with. And then they start talking all this fancy talk and they're going to take over and they're going to buy up all the property. And so they got chased out.

John Larsen [01:02:01] So the Evening and Morning Star. One of the reasons I loved this one, this one really, really, you know, the first one, I saw the humanity of Joseph Smith, but this was A newspaper. And what you really see in there is. And it's, by the way, it's the source for most of the Book of Commandments.

John Larsen [01:02:21] And there's even changes oftentimes between the Evening and Morning Star publication and then the Book of Commandment publication that came just a little bit later. They never. Joseph Smith never stopped messing with the previous stuff. This is where you get a real taste of how Mormons viewed the world. There are two reoccurring columns that appear in it, and one is Signs of the Times and the other one is Worldly Matters.

John Larsen [01:02:50] And they'll talk about an outbreak of cholera in India. And they're always like, this is. This is kind of glossed over. But these guys believed that they were in the latter days, not 180 years before the latter days. They believed Jesus was just around the corner.

John Larsen [01:03:10] And this newspaper really reflects that apocryphal, millennialist vibe. And it's hard to get a sense of how dark they viewed the rest of the world without reading this. So you get to see advertisements and you get to see what people were saying in church, their sermons, the revelations, the interpretations. This gives you a broader view of how Mormonism was processed in the first. In the first years from Missouri.

John Dehlin [01:03:44] Okay. Yeah. So evening and Evening and Morning Star. And again, we're showing it here on the screen for anyone who wants to get a book copy of it. But all of that can be available in the public domain just through Googling.

John Larsen [01:04:00] Yeah. And hymns too. You can see some of the earliest text of the hymns. And there's nothing sacred in Mormonism that can't be changed. So there's even catalogs of changes on those. And again, like you're talking. The Tanners have gone through. And I never met Gerald. He was. He'd passed away long before my time. But the man's mind is just incredible. The amount of material he got through and published in his lifetime just. Just blows me away.

John Dehlin [01:04:28] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:04:30] Okay. Number six, the messenger and Advocate. So after they went back to. They left. They were chased out of Missouri, out of the Promised Land. Then they went back to Kirtland and they. This was published. This was the Kirtland newspaper that went after Evening Amongst Star, and it was published from October 1834 to September of 1837, at which time the next publication was called the Elders Journal. Now I have a copy of the Elders Journal.

John Larsen [01:05:05] I was looking online to see if I could find one. It is kind of a rare book, so I left it out of this list. If you can find it by all means, it's another one in sequence, but it's not part of this list because it's a little bit harder to find.

John Larsen [01:05:19] Their reasoning for ending the Evening and Morning Star and starting the messenger and Advocate is they wanted to focus on Ohio instead of Missouri. The first edition was published by Cowdery, who later turned it over to John Whitmer. And they were assisted by W.W. phelps, who. Who had been publishing the book down in Missouri.

John Larsen [01:05:44] And then in 1837, the printing press was sold to Warren Cowdery, Oliver's brother. But they didn't like it, and then they retired it, just as a word of warning. The term messenger and advocate has been used multiple times over the years by both the Reorganized Church and the Salt Lake Branch. So if you go search for messenger and Advocate, you'll see a lot of different things. But this here that we have is the original copy of the messenger and Advocate.

John Larsen [01:06:16] Again, I picked these as sources. I don't have anything earth shattering to say about the messenger and Advocate, except you'll see the revelations that are published before they're in the book, like the Doctrine and Covenants, but they're in context.

John Larsen [01:06:33] You can see what they were talking about, what they were doing, what conferences they were having, the people who are writing things. It really gives you a good sense of what was on the mind of the early church. This is why, for example, I can say without hesitation that the early Mormons were trinitarian. And part of it is, if you read these sources, you'll find they're consistently trinitarian in everything. And then it's just modern Mormons who are confused because they haven't read this stuff. They haven't looked at it.

John Dehlin [01:07:04] Got it. Okay.

John Whitmer's History and Its Significance

John Larsen [01:07:06] All right, this next one is a hoot.

John Dehlin [01:07:10] Like, these are. These are like newspapers, right? These are like periodicals.

John Larsen [01:07:13] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:07:14] And I'm just trying to imagine. So you sat down and would, like read July 12, you know, 1837, and you would, like, really read these articles from the.

Carah Burrell [01:07:25] Still Got Women Cool.

John Larsen [01:07:28] I. I don't. I don't claim to have read everything in.

John Dehlin [01:07:31] Oh, no, no, no. I just mean you found it valuable to go. Was it. Did you more look up things that you would see referenced elsewhere, or did you sit down and just try and read from these, picking, you know, picking

John Larsen [01:07:45] different parts, messenger and Advocate. I mean, if I'm going to be perfectly honest with you, is not one that I ever sat down. I think I have. I'm looking at my books. I think I have copies of it now. But I didn't. In the early days, I'd found a copy of Evening and Morning Star, this big red edition that I have, that was full size, and so I could pull that out. And it just, it felt like I was touching the past. And you have to remember, I was reading this as a member.

John Larsen [01:08:18] So luckily, you know, my wife at the time, Zilpha, she was interested and it was just like this. I would. I would say it was akin to like digging in your backyard and finding a stegosaurus. You know, you're just digging. You're like, oh, my God, look at this. Did you see this? So some of them I would skim, or you'd see the headlines and read it through, but I just. The joy it gave me, I. It's, it's, it's not, it's not like a big negative thing. It's. It's this, this hollow, vacuous shell of a religion I was in suddenly had blood. It was. It was pumped to life. And, and by. By reading their newspaper, you could see that.

Carah Burrell [01:09:05] I like this one comment. I don't know what happened to my voice, but, hey, there I am. Somebody said that this episode is John Larsen's villain origin story. Yeah. And then the most boring origin story of a villain ever, where you're just reading in a library for hours and hours, very slowly, like, mutate, but we're all a benefit of that.

John Dehlin [01:09:29] Well, where are the murders? Where are the murders? In the debauchery, John Larsen.

John Larsen [01:09:33] Well, you know, in some of these books, you'll see fist fights and you'll see accusations of adultery. They love to accuse each other of adultery all the time. That's why it's laughable when we're talking earlier about the church blocking things out because, because there's a lot of people who get their names. They, in the early church, they did not have a problem excommunicating people. And then going to the, going to the newspaper or to the, or to the pulpit and saying, we just excommunicated that asshole for cheating on his wife. You know, so it's, it's, it's, it's fun.

Carah Burrell [01:10:05] Yeah, they were, they were ruffians back then. Like, again, going back to what you're saying about the, like the Q15. Now they want to look all dignified and stuff. But, like, these were frontier ruffian folks that were drinking wine in the temple and getting into fistfights and having endowments, ceremonies inside of cinnamon whiskey. Like, you get into that stuff, and it's like, this was A dope cult. Sounds cool. It's got boring after a while.

John Larsen [01:10:27] But like at the last meeting in the story, the last meeting in the Kirtland Temple before Joseph Smith that night, Joseph Smith had to hightail it out of town. One of his bodyguards tossed somebody through the fucking window, you know, and, and you know, you go to conference and the idea that they picked this guy up by a suspenders and just crashed him through a window, like, like these guys were, were so different than what you've been told they were, but, but in the most charming way.

Carah Burrell [01:11:01] Yeah, like Brigham Young with his bowie knives. Yeah, charming.

John Larsen [01:11:05] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:11:06] Hey, really quickly, just as a, you know, we, we don't do product placement or product endorsements here or have commercial sponsors. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I'm just going to do a quick shout out. We're, we're. We would really appreciate it if everyone on YouTube would take a moment to subscribe to the Mormon Stories Podcast YouTube channel. Either now in the live stream or later when you're watching. That really helps with the algorithms. It'll keep you up to date when we release or schedule a new episode and it'll help us reach our goal. And the, and the bigger the influence we have, the more subscribers, the more reach we're going to have to be able to impact people. So please do your part and subscribe to our YouTube channel. While you're at it, subscribe to the NuanceHoe YouTube channel.

Carah Burrell [01:11:47] Thanks.

John Dehlin [01:11:48] And Nemo the Mormon ends up on the shelf. All of those channels and many others are worth supporting. All right, back to you, John Larsen.

John Larsen [01:11:55] Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so the next one is John Whitmer's history. This one is. This one is surprisingly important. John Whitmer was one of the eight witnesses, and of course, his brother David Whitmer was one of the three witnesses to the Book of Mormon.

John Larsen [01:12:14] And he has a revelation directed to him specifically in the Doctrine Covenants. In fact, it's still in the Doctrine Covenants, the Salt Lake version. Today it's Section 47, in which that David Whitmer was instructed by God himself, the big guy, through Joseph Smith, for him to write and keep a regular history of the church.

John Larsen [01:12:40] And everybody who's in the church today, every missionary carrying around their triple combination, is carrying around a printed copy of this revelation. So I was saying before that God has said very few things to Mormons since the restoration. And one of the things that he said, which is one of the only 132 revelations or whatever the number is in The Doctrine Covenants is a commandment for John Whitmer to keep the history of the official history of the Church. So I would say for. From God's perspective, that's really so important that every single one of you probably has multiple copies of the revelation given to John Whitmer in your house today.

John Dehlin [01:13:23] Are you being sarcastic, John Larsen?

John Larsen [01:13:25] Not at all. If Mormonism is true, then this book should be very, very, very important to you, because God, according to Mormons, they tell me he's omniscient. That means of the story of John Whitmer that we're going to talk about here in a few seconds. God knew everything that would happen. God knew exactly what would happen to John Whitmer. God knew exactly when the book would be published. God knew exactly that, all of it. And God still chose to have Joseph Smith receive a revelation on March 8, 1831, instructing John Whitmer to keep this history. Okay, this is. This is Mormonism, right? This is not. This is not me.

John Dehlin [01:14:09] All right, well, I'm dying. You know, it's in this important book.

John Larsen [01:14:14] So. So. And. And John Whitner was very, very important. He. He was part of the Missouri contingent that founded Far West. And so he and Oliver Cowdery and later W.W. phelps, I think it was 1836. So 1833, 1834, they're in Missouri. They hightail it out of Missouri. But during that early Missouri period, Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon and those guys were still in Kirtland. So there was Ohio and Missouri. They lost all their Missouri presence. And then they went back in about 1836, his story. And all this time, he was supposed to keep this history of the Church, and he really very much copied the language of the Book of Mormon, or he was trying to.

John Larsen [01:15:12] So he writes in this history all the time. And it came to pass that. And uses that biblical language fused on top of his frontier English. It's charming and delightful. However, Joseph Smith came into far west in 1838.

John Larsen [01:15:31] Well, 1838 was when I referenced this before, Joseph Smith had started a bank, an illegal bank, in Kirtland, the Kirtland Safety Society. And when they had applied for a banking license from the government and it was denied, they went and bought a little rubber stamp with the word anti on it. So they took their dollar bills that they'd already had printed up, and they stamped the Kirtland Anti Banking Society on those dollars. If you have one with the stamp on them, they're worth a lot of money.

John Larsen [01:16:01] So they had done all this speculation both in New York. Well, in New York and in Kirtland and again in Nauvoo and again in Salt Lake City. Church leaders were always involved in land speculation. It's probably more than anything what got Joseph Smith killed is his trying to do make money off of property. But the whole thing fell apart in Kirtland in 1838. And again, Joseph Smith hightailed it out of town on a horse in the middle of the night with just two of his bodyguards. He left his babies and his wife behind.

John Larsen [01:16:36] Son of a bitch. He really was kind of a dick. I'm sorry. Joseph Smith was not that great of a guy. And he heads out to Far West. By this time, like, people have lost money, they've lost property, they're having these troubles. So Joseph Smith rolls into Far west and he excommunicates the entire Whitmer family.

John Larsen [01:17:00] And he excommunicates. He excommunicates Oliver Cowdery, and he excommunicates W.W. phelps on March 10, 1838. And then Sidney Rigdon gives what's called the Salt Sermon. And one of the things that he does in that Salt Sermon is he puts a warning to the dissenters that was taken by the people at the time to be these guys. And Sidney Rigdon basically.

John Larsen [01:17:28] Basically threatened their life. So the Whitmers and Oliver Cowdery and those guys fled across the county line into Ray County. And that was the moment that started the 1838 Mormon War. And it was a hot shooting war, but more like, you know, it wasn't with, like a Calvary charges. What would happen on both sides is the Mormons would go to find either a dissident or a non Mormon, and they would put, you know, tar on their faces, and they'd go and they'd steal their saddles and their cattle and their horses, and then they would burn down the house. And then the Missourians would do the same thing.

John Larsen [01:18:15] And so they were doing all these raids, and people were getting really, really nervous. So John Whitmer was one of the dissidents who was in open warfare with Joseph Smith and crew. But. But he was still keeping the history of the church during this time.

John Larsen [01:18:35] So it's a really fascinating book. He kept records, and then it has big gaps in it. And then he wrote it kind of all the way up to 1847. But he explains from his perspective what happened in 1838.

John Larsen [01:18:57] So that's one of the ways we kind of. We know about this because there were people who are involved that's what the church has, this official narrative of all of these different things that happen in the church. Here you have what is ostensibly the official history of the church that was commissioned by God himself, the Great Elohim. And it really does document what Joseph Smith was doing to these guys. It was eventually acquired by the reorganized Church and it has been published. The best version of it, the one that I have, is called from historian to dissident, the Book of John Whitmer, which has a lot more of the exposition and explanation of what's going on.

John Larsen [01:19:43] Some of these books, what the scholars did is they went through and sort of explained, but that one is out of print. And I looked the cheapest copy I could find out there was like 50 or 60. So if you're really into this stuff, it's worth getting a copy of that book. But otherwise you can just get a copy. I think we displayed it, it's online, of the book. I think it's original. It's actually called the Book of John Whitmer as kind of taking on the nomenclature of the Book of Alma, the Book of Nephi, that sort of stuff. Fascinating book. And really seeing Joseph Smith sideways from somebody who was part of the inner circle than out of the inner circle. Really interesting.

John Dehlin [01:20:23] You know, John, you know, there's. There's at least two things that come up for me as I'm hearing you talk about this. The first is how mind blowing is it? Like, you can't get closer to the founding of Mormonism than to. Than to be uttering the names John Whitmer and David Whitmer and Oliver Cowdery. And I'm just trying to imagine, like, if. If Russell M. Nelson today became prophetic and all of a sudden was excommunicating down H. Oaks, Jeffrey Holland Bednar, you know, maybe the first excommunication, you'd go, oh, I wonder what. You know, I wonder what Oaks did. But after, like the second or third, you would probably turn around and say, now why is Nelson doing this?

John Dehlin [01:21:03] Is there something going on where Nelson's trying to clean house because he's trying to cover up something that he's done? You know, that's what you would wonder if the top leader of the Mormon Church today started excommunicating all the top leaders. Well, that's exactly what happened back in Joseph Smith's day, you know, and. And so, you know, take it as just a question. Don't take John's word for it. Like you say, john, don't take care of my Word for it. Go learn why Oliver Cowdery was excommunicated. Why?

John Larsen [01:21:33] You know, we.

John Dehlin [01:21:34] We lift him up. The Mormon Church lifts him up as one of the three witnesses of the Book of Mormon. Must be a credible guy, or the Church wouldn't name him as one of the three witnesses to the Book of Mormon. Why Was he excommunicated? 1838, Carah, I bet you know the answer.

Carah Burrell [01:21:49] He was writing a letter to his brother, and he's like, hot Goss on the scene. Prophet Joseph Smith. I saw him banging his adopted teenage daughter Fanny in the barn. And I am like, what is going on? And he's like, keep it on the down low or you're being excommunicated. But, bro, I've got to tell you, I don't know about this prophet anymore.

John Larsen [01:22:08] You let the cat out the bag.

Carah Burrell [01:22:10] Excommunicated.

John Larsen [01:22:11] Carah. Carah, Have I taught you nothing? I am disappointed. You always have to say, oliver Cowdery accused Joseph Smith of banging Fanny.

Carah Burrell [01:22:22] Yeah, those are the better words I could have chosen. Rewind. Let me do it again, please, sir.

John Dehlin [01:22:29] Yeah, and. And like. Yeah. So why. Why was David Whitmer. Why was John Whitner excommunicated? Why was William Law in the First Presidency excommunicated? Why was John C. Bennett excommunicated?

Carah Burrell [01:22:41] I can act all of it out for you.

John Dehlin [01:22:42] Yeah, no, but. But I mean, like, you know, either God called these people by revelation or he didn't. And if so many of them get excommunicated, either God's a really bad choice as to who he wants leading the church and being witnesses for the early years of the church, or maybe Joseph Smith is cleaning house because he's doing some things wrong, doing some shady stuff, and he. He wants to.

John Dehlin [01:23:09] He wants to put the kibosh on any dissent. That's the first thing, John Larsen, that kind of your. You know, your discussion. This John Whitmer book kind of reminds me of. The other thing is to pay attention to the documents that these dissenters, former First Presidency members, former apostles, former witnesses to the Book of Mormon. People pay attention to the documents that they publish. And for me, John Larsen, I'll just say there's two that are essential. One is an episode of Mormon expression that we're going to ask Maven or Carah to list in the show notes. It's the novel Expositor. You just got to go read the novel Expositor published by William Law, who was in the First Presidency at the end of the Joseph Smith's reign in Nauvoo, and read about what William Law says Joseph Smith was doing in Nauvoo.

John Dehlin [01:24:04] And there's no other way to read it than as sex trafficking teenage women from vulnerable teenage women from Western Europe to Nauvoo. There's no other way to describe it. In addition to creating the kingdom of God on earth and having himself crowned a king and all sorts of other crazy things, read William Law's novel Expositor. It is going to tell you a lot. And the other thing that you really want to read, and we've covered this on LDS discussions, is David Whitmer's An Address to All Believers in Christ. Because what you'll find is that not only can you compare D and C. Oh, sorry, Book of commandments from 1833 with the doctrine and covenants from 1835, you can not only compare those two and realize that they're messed up, you've got people like David Whitmer, you know, one of the three witnesses to the Book of Mormon again, publishing a pamphlet saying, hey, all that stuff Joseph Smith taught later, that appears in the Doctrine and Covenants later, you've got one of the witnesses to the Book of Mormon saying, Joseph changed his own revelations.

John Dehlin [01:25:15] You can't do that. Joseph has corrupted and perverted the original pure gospel that he received through revelation from God. And that's not how revelation works. And so you can't, on the one hand, lift up Oliver Cowdery and David Whitmer as witnesses to the Book of Mormon and then completely ignore what they actually wrote once they were kicked out or disaffected, or once they apostatized or were excommunicated and then published their accounts of what was going on. You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you pick up one side of the stick, you gotta pick up the other side of the stick. Now, John Larsen, am I getting any of this right?

John Larsen [01:25:57] No, you preach the word, I love myself a good John Dehlin rant. No, you're spot on. I mean. Cause in reality, Joseph Smith instituted a church that was the. There's a lot of history there from the New York and Kirtland period. And then he went to Nauvoo and he completely flipped it on its head.

John Larsen [01:26:22] And most of these early guys that we're talking about were annoyed and upset and they all wrote like Joseph Smith wrote, lost almost all of his high level followers. And they are consistent in their criticism. And you know, the church always likes to point out that they never disavowed the fraudulent part, that they were part of which is the, you know, the witnessing.

John Larsen [01:26:47] But if we're to believe them on that point, like we're to believe that they really were witnesses to the angels and the plates, then we also need to give them credence for the things that they said about Joseph Smith, because they are consistent and they're backed up. It's like you say about the Nauvoo Expositor. The old Nauvoo Expositor episode is only valuable because what we do is we go through and show that everything that William Law wrote in there can be validated by outside sources. It was 100% the truth. Yet Joseph Smith still had his thugs go flip the printing press, which I've said before, the two bookends of Mormonism, that really, you have Joseph Smith starting this religion, and then the printing press gets flipped.

John Larsen [01:27:28] And when I say flipped, they would actually throw it into the dirt and scatter the type. They flipped it over in Missouri, and then Joseph Smith did the exact same thing, which was instrumental in him being locked up in prison and then killed in a gunfight, which is important. Joe Smith died in a gunfight?

John Dehlin [01:27:50] Yeah.

Carah Burrell [01:27:51] Can I ask a question?

John Dehlin [01:27:51] Sure did. Oh, please, Carah, we love your question.

Carah Burrell [01:27:53] What is the name of the book that Oaks was co authoring about the Navo Expositor?

John Larsen [01:28:00] Did

Carah Burrell [01:28:02] you guys mentioned it?

John Larsen [01:28:03] Carthage Conspiracy.

John Dehlin [01:28:05] Yeah.

Carah Burrell [01:28:06] And my question is around the same thing. Like Mormon apologists and apostles, they can spin things that look so obviously wrong to us that they can write an entire book and make it faith promoting, that Oaks can write that book and they could say that, yeah, they needed to do this to keep the peace. Or like, yeah, Joseph needed to excommunicate these people because they were troublemakers. Like, is there just like this common theme with especially like the modern day church that anything that looks like it's a little bit nefarious, they're like, this is what we had to do to preserve the authenticity of the church.

Carah Burrell [01:28:41] We had to kick out all of the people who were saying stuff about Joseph's character. And all that matters is that, you know, he's a prophet and all the bad people have gone away, little darling. They're all gone now. That's kind of how modern church rolls. Is that making sense?

John Larsen [01:28:55] I mean, you're telling me an attorney can't always be believed about what they say?

John Dehlin [01:29:01] Hey, we, you know, attorneys can be good people. John Larsen, we have listeners that are attorneys.

John Larsen [01:29:05] I've. I've heard that.

John Dehlin [01:29:06] Yeah.

Carah Burrell [01:29:09] Well, we like Colby.

John Dehlin [01:29:10] We love our. We love Radio Free Mormons. Shout out to Mormonism. Live. Subscribe to Mormonism Live. Everybody makes fun of attorneys until they need one. Personal experience. Attorneys can be super useful and helpful.

John Larsen [01:29:25] Yeah, I mean, everybody's moral till they're not. Okay, all right, let's go forward. So the next one. Number eight, Lectures on Florida Faith. Originally, this document was just called On Faith. And when we say Doctrine and Covenants, we talked a minute ago that in 1833 they published the Book of Commandments, which of course got interrupted by the mob in Missouri. So they went back, and then they recompiled it. Joseph Smith had already started changing the Revelations. They added a few more, and they republished it in conjunction with Lectures on Faith. There are seven lectures widely believed to have been written by Sidney Rigdon. It matches his style, but Joseph Smith was the kind of shyster who gloms on to people.

Lectures on Faith and the Evolving Godhead

John Larsen [01:30:24] So he'll find. He'll find, you know. Well, let's. He'll find a mark like a Martin Harris, and then he'll be with him and tell him all sorts of great things. Oh, you're the best. God loves you. Here's this Revelation. And he'll use up all of his money, and then he'll go to Oliver Cowdery, and then he goes to Sidney Rigdon, and then he goes to William McClellan, and then he goes. It's just one person after the other after the other after the other.

John Larsen [01:30:52] And in standard sociopathic practice, he'll use you until you're no good, and then he'll throw you out. So Lectures on Faith was the doctrine part of Doctrine and Covenants. So when that book was named Doctrine and Covenants, Doctrine was the Lectures on Faith and Covenants was the Revelation.

John Larsen [01:31:16] This book was presented before the General Conference of the church in 1835 and accepted as Canon. That's important because the Church continues to lie about that point. There are seven lectures that are about theology. A lot of them are about God. And the reason these became kind of a pariah is because God in the Lectures on Faith is a spirit. And it very much matches a trinitarian view of. Of Jesus. But it says specifically that God does not have a body. He is a spirit in there. This book was interesting because it was such part of the canon and came about under Joseph Smith. It stuck around for a long time.

John Larsen [01:32:06] The name change to Lectures on faith happened in 1876 when it was edited by Orson Pratt. The Reorganized Church removed On Faith from the Doctrine and covenants in 1897. The Utah branch removed it in 1921. And the church then began claiming it wasn't actual canon, it wasn't actual doctrine, which is almost 100 years, like 85 years after it had been written. And the year 1921 is significant because the Reed Smoot hearings happened between 1904 and 1907. And what we have is the church renouncing polygamy on paper in 1890.

John Larsen [01:32:51] And because of that, Utah was granted statehood in 1896. But they were still practicing post manifesto polygamy on the down low. And then with the Reed Smoot hearings, they all got dragged in before Congress and said, you promised us it was contingent upon this that we withdrew federal officers, we returned land, we removed the warrants. They're out for church leaders because you said to us that you were not going to practice polygamy. And of course they were. They got raked over the coals. Joseph F. Smith had to admit that he never spoke to Jesus, that he never had any revelations. It's all there in the Smoot hearings.

John Larsen [01:33:29] So the church had a crisis. After all that happened then who are we? And that's when the modern theology started taking shape. So by 1821, they had. By 1921, they'd sort of redefined the notion of the Godhead because they had early Smith, they had late Smith, they had young and Adam, God and all that kind of stuff. They had lectures on faith. They had all these contradictory sources that couldn't be aligned. So the church needed it to go away. So they just removed it from the Doctrine and Covenants.

John Larsen [01:34:06] Anyway, that's my take on it. But these seven lectures on faith really give you a good understanding of the Kirtland period doctrine on God and man and man's relationship to God, or I should say humankind's relationship to God. And so they're a really important read to understand the development of early Mormonism.

John Dehlin [01:34:29] Yeah. Thank you, John. And again, why would God put the lectures of faith in the Doctrine and Covenants and call it doctrine if he was then going to have it removed later? That makes no. That makes no sense. But it. It makes total sense. And it's just like an extra layer of validity because what do we know? Carah Burrell, I know you're down on this. What do we know about Joseph Smith's evolving view of. Of God and the Godhead? What do we know? You're muted.

Carah Burrell [01:35:06] I'm muted because I was chewing a taco. Don't worry, guys. I was fed tonight. What do we know about Joseph's evolving view on the Godhead? Yeah, it started off as a trinitarian view. And then evolved later to say that, oh, actually one God. It's a pretty unique doctrine. You only find it over here. God, Jesus, same person.

John Dehlin [01:35:26] That's how it started. He starts out as seeing God and Jesus is one person. And then over time, as he gets into Nauvoo or even Lake Kirtland, he's seeing God and Jesus as two separate people. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it makes total sense why the first vision changes, right?

Carah Burrell [01:35:43] Yeah. And it also makes sense why people are like, he was just so hated and persecuted because he. He was telling people that they were separate people. He didn't even tell anybody. And if he did, he would have said that they were one person. Shut up. Another push of the microphone.

John Dehlin [01:36:00] Yeah. So the book. So the. So if you want. If you want multiple evidences of Joseph Smith's evolving theology, you. You just look at the. You look at his first vision that changes between the 1832 version and the 1838 version. Going from a single Lord in the 1832 version to God and Jesus the Son in 1838. But you don't just have that. You also have the Book of Mormon, which, in the original version of the Book of Mormon, you know, God and Jesus are one. Mary is the. Mary is the mother of God, not the mother of the Son of God. And then you've got later versions of the Book of Mormon where that gets changed.

John Dehlin [01:36:43] Well, if that weren't enough, if I were Ron Popel, I would say. And yet there's more. We have the lectures on faith that again, showed a trinitarian view of the Godhead that was. That was incorporated into sacred Holy Scripture, Doctrine and Covenants. It was the very doctrine of the Doctrine and Covenants. And then it gets removed because, oh, Joseph changed his view on the Godhead. Like, how many witnesses to Joseph changing things do we need to realize either he wasn't a prophet to begin with, or God changes his mind? I mean, what do we need?

Carah Burrell [01:37:25] It's called a restoration. Because so many truths had been lost. God's like, we're restoring the church also.

John Dehlin [01:37:31] JK yeah, he's constantly restoring the restoration. Right. Like, the restoration is constantly needing restoration. When does the restoration. John Larsen, when does the restoration stop needing additional restorations?

John Larsen [01:37:46] Well, you know, like, the Book of Mormon had a lifespan of, you know, 600 BC to 1830 before it started getting changed. The Bible, you know, if you listen to believers, believers goes from 4000 BC to, you know, what's interesting is that the length of time that we as humans believe that A revelation is good, is shrinking.

John Larsen [01:38:13] And people have pointed this out. Like, I struggle to articulate what Mormons are doing today because it changes so quickly. Like literally like two, three years. Like, the. The changes are just piling up on top of each other.

John Larsen [01:38:27] So you guys are absolutely right. I want to point out how apologists lie, and I'm not going to call it anything but lies. So we have basically eight versions of the first vision. And some of those versions of the first vision come from the sources we're talking about tonight. So you can actually read them the way they were published in the Evening and Morning Star.

John Larsen [01:38:49] So if you take all of those out of these sources and then put them in a spreadsheet and line them up, and then you start saying, well, this actually means this, and this actually means this, and this actually means this. You can create this smoke and mirrors view that makes it sound. It's completely unconvincing to me. Even doing that makes it sound like there is a consistent story. But you can only do that by not reading or paying attention. This is why I get so frustrated with apologists, because if they read these things that we're talking about tonight, and you could easily read all 10 books I'm giving you tonight in six months, no problem.

John Larsen [01:39:27] This is not that many pages. If you read these, you absolutely know that the first vision was consistent with everything else that they were teaching at the time. So it's not just the evolution that comes through from the first vision. You put those in. In context and you can see that it was absolutely consistent with what they believed. So what apologists do is they pull it out of context, scramble them up, compare them to each other, and they tell you a story about it. And the story is a lie.

John Larsen [01:39:55] It's not real. And you can find it by just reading what people actually said and believed at the time. And in the age of the Internet, this is all available.

John Dehlin [01:40:04] And John, while we're on the subject of Mormon apologists, I went ahead and just Googled, like, hey, why was the lectures on faith removed? And even in Wikipedia, which of course the Mormon Church has apologists paid to edit and monitor these Wikipedia pages and make sure that they reflect as faithful and as apologetic of a narrative of the church history as possible.

John Dehlin [01:40:28] I checked out Wikipedia and just asked, why were the lectures of faith removed? And. And you get back the apologetic line. And I just want to. I want to run this by your BS meter, John Larsen. And if, Carah, you want to add something as well, I'd love to hear it. But here's what it says.

John Dehlin [01:40:48] It says the committee proposed to delete the lectures on faith on the grounds that they were lessons prepared for use in the School of the Elders, conducted in Kirtland, Ohio, during the winter of 1834-1835. But they were never presented to nor accepted by the Church as being otherwise than theological lectures or lessons. So, John Larsen, I say to you, they were never voted on by the church membership and they were never voted on or accepted as being anything other than mere theological lectures or lessons. So no harm, no foul.

John Larsen [01:41:28] I would say they were voted on by the members. I think that's a misdirection. And the line that says they were just written only for those lessons. What's your source? Let's see it. Otherwise you're just making shit up again. It was published. It was canonized. It was published by the Church as canon for 90 years. And then they suddenly say, oh, these were just lessons 1834 to 1835. They were undoubtedly presented that way. I could say the same thing about everything in the Doctrine and Covenants. It came out and it was published in the evening in Morning Star or Messenger and Advocate. It's a false argument without any source. I want the source where they say, this is only for this thing and not used otherwise outside of that, you know?

John Dehlin [01:42:21] Yeah, yeah. I mean, what else do you need than the church publishing a set of scripture, calling it Doctrine and Covenants. It's approved by Joseph. It's paid for by the Church. They call it Doctrine and Covenants. It includes the lectures on faith. What else do you do, Carah? Do we need actual members of the church voting to approve that?

Carah Burrell [01:42:42] No, but the church has a narrative that they have everything under control. Nothing's on fire here. And then they're just, like, burning documents. Burning documents?

John Dehlin [01:42:50] Yeah. Nothing's changed. Right. The gospel's the same yesterday, today, and forever. God never changes. Right.

Carah Burrell [01:42:56] That's the hope. That's kind of what you're sold is like, again, restoration again. Everything's on fire back here, but just stay looking. Not the person behind the. The curtain filling the livers.

John Dehlin [01:43:08] Yeah. John, do you like reading lectures on faith? Was it interesting to you?

John Larsen [01:43:12] They're a little. I find Rigden to be. Be a yawner. I. I find him to be snobby and sort of kind of the things people say about me, I say about Sidney Rigdon, okay, Rigdon is an interesting character. He is his own thing, like. And the church has tried to make him go away as much as they can. It's something that needs a. A lot of time spent on to unravel the man, Sidney Rigdon. But, you know, he was clearly driving doctrine for a while there until Joseph Smith got sick of him. But, you know, he's got different philosophical themes that show up and themes he developed later. It's kind of a complicated thing. And, you know, the church uses that complicated nature things to obfuscate. So it'll be interesting for anybody reading this to see kind of how that stuff was injected. But doctrinally, I don't find Rigdon as interesting as I find Smith.

John Dehlin [01:44:18] Yeah, okay. All right, what's number nine? What do we got at number nine?

Far West Record and Times and Seasons

John Larsen [01:44:23] Number nine. The Far west record. The minutes of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, 1830-1844. This was compiled by Lyndon Cook. He was a history professor at uvu. He is still alive. He. I think he's retired and he also has remained. Oh, he was. He was, yeah. He also has remained faithful.

John Larsen [01:44:44] The Far west record is just. Is minutes from the early time of the church all the way up to 1844. There are big gaps in there. They're minutes from meetings. I do believe, if I remember right, the when Joseph Smith and his brother got into a fist fight in a priesthood meeting is in this book.

John Larsen [01:45:02] It talks about that, but it's a really easy read. It was one of the first things that I always just chuckles a minute as you see what was going on. But it also gives you a good idea of.

John Larsen [01:45:15] They would meet a lot in the winter in the upper room of the store because they weren't out in the fields. And you can kind of get a sense for the timing of how things would go, you know, and they would sit in the room and they would drink whiskey and chew tobacco, and they would have all these different, you know, in depth discussions. They talk about this stuff from morning to night. And then, you know, William McClellan would say something like, well, what if it was that God actually meant this? And then he'd go home, they'd come back the next day, and Joseph said, I had a dream last night.

John Larsen [01:45:49] And God says exactly what you just said last night. So it's really a fascinating book. It's easy to read because it's just minutes, but it gives you an idea of how the church was actually operating.

John Dehlin [01:46:05] Okay, so that's Far West.

John Larsen [01:46:08] The Far west record. It's about 10 bucks too.

Carah Burrell [01:46:11] I'm sorry, I just have the voice of Keith Erickson, one of the church historians or apologists, in my head. He has These great lines. He's such a. Oh, he's such a dork. And I'll say stuff like maybe, you know, we need to have a little humility and realize that we just misunderstood the way that prophets are actually supposed to be. You know that line of reasoning, John, where it's like, we. I need to have humility for ourselves and realize that prophets are not perfect and stuff. I was like, well, I didn't. I didn't expect them to be perfect. I shouldn't expect them to be like fist fighting with their brother.

Carah Burrell [01:46:42] I didn't expect them to be doing a whole lot of other scandalous stuff. So it's like they. That's one of those logical fallacies it just reminds me of. That always comes up. It's like this straw man that's like, you guys ex Mormons, you guys want prophets to be perfect. And it's like, I'm just reading about

John Larsen [01:46:56] them and I didn't, I didn't know

Carah Burrell [01:46:58] that they could be this effed up. And I can't possibly put my faith into a church that is this mismanaged.

John Larsen [01:47:06] I agree with them that we do need more humility, but it's not us trying to understand what the fuck they're talking about. It's them. They need to apologize. They need to say, clearly, we have misled you. Like, like, like, like if. If I get robbed by one guy and then I get robbed by another guy and get robbed by another guy and the next guy comes along says, I'm not gonna rob you, it's not me who needs humility. It's those guys. Like, like the, the. The we do. When I say these guys were just frontier human beings, I don't mean that as an insult. I mean it as a compliment.

John Larsen [01:47:42] That you can see that they were people trying to construct a view of meaning. These people who were raiding Indian lands, you know, and like, trying to create this new Zion by a mass genocide like, that must have been weighing on them.

John Larsen [01:48:00] It had to have been. And the fact that they were trying to create this narrative that made them special is understandable for us all these years later to say what was going on there. There's nothing wrong with us to ask that question. It is a perfectly humble question to say, I want to know what they actually said. And the fact that people like me or our listeners are vilified for just saying, I want to know what happened that you're talking about is varsity level gaslighting that they're doing.

John Dehlin [01:48:36] Right.

John Larsen [01:48:37] Yeah.

Carah Burrell [01:48:38] Well said.

John Dehlin [01:48:39] Yeah. And Carah, I agree on the one hand, I agree with you, John, that in some ways these are people who exhibited a lot of courage or integrity or strength or. Or at least resilience. But on the other hand, like, I don't expect my prophets to be perfect, but can they not be sexual predators? Can they not be charlatans? Can they not claim to have powers to translate when they clearly don't. Right.

Carah Burrell [01:49:07] They call something revelation, say this will never be changed, and then be like, oh, we're actually going to change it and follow us. Whatever we say, just forget the old changes and out with the old and the new.

John Dehlin [01:49:16] Yeah. Or if their former partners, you know, if they make changes and then their former colleagues call them on it, you know, excommunicating them is a really heinous way to marginalize and cut off people that are calling you on your bs. Like, nobody, nobody should be above scrutiny. And the person that holds themselves above scrutiny and criticism is the first person to. To be suspicious of. And that there seems to be a clear, repeated pattern of Joseph Smith setting the example of squelching any, you know, squelching any dissent or criticism or anyone that tried to call him on his stuff. And I think that just carried forward through all the church leaders to this very day, I think.

John Larsen [01:50:04] Can't we just not contextualize it? Like, if I want to learn about the Napoleonic wars, can't I just review the history and not try to constantly decide if Napoleon was wrong? I mean, Napoleon was a terrible person, but can't we just look and see what happened without trying to always say, well, the Waterlooans, they were not really buying into the Napoleonic thing. And none of us really understand what Napoleon was after when he was trying to march into Moscow or, you know, like, just what did they do? Let's reserve all the trying to emotionally make it easy for us to understand until after. Let's. There's nothing wrong with reading history that was published by these guys without trying to constantly pigeonhole it in a way that makes you feel good about yourself.

John Larsen [01:50:55] And, you know, that's a message to Americans in general and white Americans in particular. White people have done terrible things. Black people have done terrible things. Brown people have done terrible things. Human beings are pretty shitty. And we don't have to constantly have a narrative that makes us out to be the good guy. It's okay that our ancestors were terrible people. I guarantee you, dear listener, you are descended from prostitutes and murderers and drug addicts and everything, because human beings are human beings, right? And rather than try to fit this into some kind of narrative that makes sure that we can sit on billions of dollars in our big red chairs.

John Larsen [01:51:39] Is anybody out there just want to engage in Mormon history for Mormon history sake? That's what I wanted when I started Mormon expression. But then I found out all this pain and terrible stuff. But this stuff is interesting. This stuff is good to know. This stuff is a part of the American experience. It's a part of our engagement with aboriginal Americans, with the First Nation people. It's of part. Part of the settling of the West. It's part of the ideas that shape modern conservatism. It's part of the ideas that shaped the modern evangelical movement across the world.

John Larsen [01:52:17] These are critical things that we need to understand ourselves and we need to let go of our self esteem hanging on people that died 170 years ago.

John Dehlin [01:52:27] All right.

Carah Burrell [01:52:28] Hell yeah.

John Larsen [01:52:30] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:52:30] All right, John. So we're at number 10.

John Larsen [01:52:32] Number 10. Times and seasons.

John Dehlin [01:52:34] Don't be confused with the blog. Times and Seasons.

John Larsen [01:52:38] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:52:38] What was the Times and Seasons?

John Larsen [01:52:40] Time and Season was the newspaper of record in Nauvoo. So just a quick recap. It was evening and Morning Star was published basically in Missouri in Independence Movies, Missouri. It was replaced by the messenger and Advocate, which was replaced by the Elders Journal, which was replaced by the Times and Seasons, which there's a foggy part that I don't remember, which became the Improvement era and then the New era. So the church has always had an official kind of newspaper publication arm. And this is that arm from 1839 to 1846, when it ceased publication during the Mormon wars in 1838, they took the printing press that they used to publish in Far west and they buried it so that it wouldn't get taken.

John Larsen [01:53:32] They went and they dug it up and they hauled it up to Nauvoo up the river. And Ebenezer Robinson and Don Carlos Smith were editors. Now, famously, the printing press was set up down in the basement of the Nauvoo house and there was like a well seepage down there.

John Larsen [01:53:51] And the big problem in Nauvoo was malaria was the ague. And it is generally believed that Don Carlos Smith died, or I think Lucy Mack said this, that he died because he was working in that dank basement running the printing press. So Ebenezer Robinson and Don Carlos were the editors.

John Larsen [01:54:12] The printing shop was deeded to Joseph Smith in 1842. So they gave it to Joseph in 1842. And then John Taylor and Wilfred Woodruff ran it. And it was eventually sold to John Taylor. It is A really important paper because it is the source of the Wentworth Letters, the King Follett Discourse, the Pearl of Great Price, the Book of Abraham and the Personal History of Joseph Smith. So all of those key documents from this period all come from, all come from the times and season.

John Dehlin [01:54:47] Okay. Yeah. And that's, yeah, some of the most important stuff out there, including you know, a lot of that, that Book of Abraham stuff, that late Book of Abraham stuff that, that talks about the, the translation and what Joseph was doing with it. Doesn't that come from the times and seasons, just as one example?

John Larsen [01:55:06] Yeah, yeah, I believe so.

John Dehlin [01:55:07] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:55:07] And I didn't include. We talked about the Nauvoo Expositor for this collection. I wanted all that were principally faithful sources from insiders. The Navu Expositor was of course 1844 and I think somebody posted. Where can they see it? It's online so you can read it in its entirety. But those are the 10. If you read those 10 sources again, we start with the two the American Prophet Record, the Diaries of Joseph Smith and the Essential Joseph Smith, which are a collection of the things that he wrote or dictated himself. The Book of Mormon was of course the book that he wrote that started the whole process.

John Larsen [01:55:49] His early revelations were compiled into the book of commandments, 1833. Evening and morning Star was really the publishing arm of the Church, followed by the messenger and advocate, John Whitmer. History, as we about talked, talked about was, was commissioned by the, by the Doctrine and Covenants itself.

John Larsen [01:56:07] And then we get the Lectures on Faith which was part of the LDS canon, the Far West Record which shows the, the minutes from the meetings all the way from 1830 to 1844 and of course the Time and Seasons, which really was the arm for publishing the new revised Nauvoo period doctrine, which is what the Young based his doctrinal exist on Young and Taylor that took us to Young's death in 1877 and Taylor died a few short years after that. 1880, I believe.

John Dehlin [01:56:37] I love it. A lot of our viewers and listeners are now sharing some of their favorite original documents. I, I encourage anyone who wants to quickly nominate their favorite. Brian Craig says that Lucy Mack Smith's diography, biography or diary is a really valuable resource because she was willing to kind of tell all about what her memories were regarding the early years of the Church. And of course, what did Brigham Young do with Lucy Mack's biography and diary?

John Larsen [01:57:08] JOHN Larsen well, there were two versions, her original version and then he republished it. You could get excommunicated for a while keeping a copy of it and then they, they rewrote it without her, her permission. I just know I love this, sharing these books. This is great. I, I, I left this one out because I wanted the source documents. I want to do one in the future where we talk about the most important sort of non source documents that were written by people and that's definitely one that we will include and, and discuss totally.

Viewer Recommendations and the Joseph Smith Papers

John Dehlin [01:57:41] I'll share another comment made by one of our viewers. Hugh Beringer writes, I think John Larsen's desire to study all these history for the sake of history is difficult to do simply because faith based religion is involved. It's much like trying to dispassionately study biblical history and the life of Jesus. John Larsen, what do you. Thank you Hugh for sharing your comment. John Larsen, what do you have to say about Hugh's comment?

John Larsen [01:58:08] I agree with Hugh, it is difficult, but it's rewarding. I mean this stuff will, reading the source documents will destroy your testimony and if your testimony is destroyed, it'll piss you off. But you'll laugh a lot and hopefully you'll develop a little bit of empathy for these guys.

John Larsen [01:58:28] They weren't monsters, they were human beings who did monstrous things from time to time. And yeah, and I agree with you, it's interesting and fun to try to engage them Bible and Jesus Christ that way and say what really happened.

John Larsen [01:58:44] I have a kind of a personal philosophy about the world today. We live in the era of post truth. There's just so much information that's flooding things and much of it is incorrect and people are like, do your own research and find the things out yourself. And we need to recognize that things are complicated and we need to stop arriving at conclusions as humanity and say let's just try to understand what actually is happening. Let's just try to understand what people. What did the founding fathers actually say? Not what we think they said.

John Larsen [01:59:21] What did the original Bible say? That's a very Bart Ehrman approach to it. How did the people at the time process these things? These are really important questions but like Hugh points out, it's so difficult. Everybody just wants to skip to Tell me what I'm supposed to think about this, tell me what I'm supposed to feel about it. And you know, I've spent years doing that, you know, pulling this stuff and telling you what to think and feel about it. Hopefully I'm trying to show you along the way, but my knowledge of the scripture didn't come because I'm some kind of abstract genius. I just thought this stuff was funny, so I kept reading it.

John Larsen [02:00:00] I thought it was interesting, so I kept reading it. And that's what allowed me, in the long run, to start putting the pieces together. And church doctrine, church teachings, the classes you take at seminary or institute are designed to have you not do that. They're designed to have you not connect the pieces. So when you can start connecting the pieces, I think it's this brilliant thing. Not for everybody, but I think there's a lot of people who listen to these podcasts endlessly and engage all this thought and listen to 10, 20, 50 hours a week of this stuff. Sometimes because they have their headphones in while they're working. I'm saying, take a breath and go. Actually read it. You'll find it more interesting than you think you will.

John Dehlin [02:00:46] All right, John Larsen, a couple other quick things. First of all, we have one of our viewers, Hob Hobgoblin, writes, I recommend Dan Vogel's Early Mormon Document series. What do you have to say about that, John Larsen? Do you agree? Do you not agree? Yeah, John's getting to his bookshelf. The sacred bookshelf.

John Larsen [02:01:13] Yeah, yeah, yeah. But before, before, before the Joe Smith Papers came out, this is one of the best sources there's there. There. There are others. The Joseph Smith. I think it's called the Papers of Joseph Smith, Volume one and two.

John Larsen [02:01:29] Volume one is. Or Volume two is hard to get a hold of. So before the Joseph Smith Papers, there were several different attempts to. To publish this stuff and put these things out. And if you can get your hands on these copies. The problem is Mormon. For how many Mormons there are, there are very few people on either side who actually engage church history. It's rare that any Mormon book has a run of more than 5,000 books. It's very rare for any Mormon book to have second run.

John Larsen [02:01:57] At the height, I've paired my Mormon book collection down to about five or six hundred volumes. At the height, I had several thousand, and most of them had never been most Mormon books, the spine has never been broken.

John Larsen [02:02:11] You would find, you know, somebody had given it to somebody else for Christmas and then it sat on their shelf for a while and then they gave it to Di. And it's really a travesty because there's interesting stuff in here.

John Dehlin [02:02:29] Let me ask you, John, do you recommend the Joseph Smith Papers website as a resource for reading early Mormon documents?

John Larsen [02:02:36] It's a fantastic resource. Yeah. The church is not, you know, they're not, as far as I know, they've never been Caught editing anything. It's, it's. Yeah, you can see the documents. I think, like I, like I said in the beginning, I think sometimes it's overwhelming.

John Larsen [02:02:57] It's, it's really hard to read their cursive. I struggle reading the, you know, I got taught cursive when I was in school. If you're like Millennial or Gen Z, you probably don't even even know how to read cursive and. But I struggle reading those documents. So a lot of it is way overkill. They still are pruning. There are documents that. And this, this is another episode. There are documents that we are pretty sure exist and that are in the vault that'd be really important.

John Larsen [02:03:26] Oliver Cowdery's history. There's a whole story about William McClellan papers. And of course that got Hoffman involved. They ended up getting punked by Hoffman over those. And so, so there, there are some documents that the church is clearly hoarding and not letting out.

John Larsen [02:03:46] However, for as best as I can tell, those are, those are the actual faithful reproductions. So, so yeah, it's, it's, it's a good source.

Council of Fifty Minutes and Closing Thoughts

John Dehlin [02:03:55] Okay. One other thing I was surprised you didn't mention is, is in the past, I don't know, five years or so, maybe 10, the Council of 50 Minutes finally were released after being kind of held for a long, long time and sort of having been suspected as, you know, containing a lot of important top secrets like information about the day nights, etc. Day nights. Any reason why you didn't include the council 50 minutes?

John Larsen [02:04:23] I just, I, I wanted books that were really accessible and. The Council of 50 minutes. The Council of 50 started in Nauvoo but really extended. So I was really kind of concentrating on the Nauvoo period church history. As the church grows, it gets a lot more complicated. And I wanted to focus on the foundation. And one of the best ways to engage the notes of the council of 50 is D. Michael Quinn had access to those minutes and that was one of the sources. By the way, the church owes Quinn an apology because he had access to documents that apologists and other people in farms basically accused him of making sources up.

John Larsen [02:05:04] Sources that we now have in the Joseph Smith Papers. So yeah, yeah, there's the notes on the temple, the Nauvoo endowment companies. We have, we have it. We have those. We have the cat minutes of the council 50. So there's more interesting stuff that is coming out.

Carah Burrell [02:05:28] Okay.

John Dehlin [02:05:28] All right, well, John Larsen, thank you again for another fascinating episode. I want to really quickly, anyone who's still with us. Please subscribe on YouTube. We really appreciate that it'll help you keep abreast of episodes that they've come out. It will also help us with the algorithms and help us in our program reach more people. Also, thanks to everyone who shot us some super chat donations during this episode. Your donations pay for John, they pay for Carah, they pay for Maven and we, we really want to be able to keep this, this offering for as long as possible. So thank you for your super chats. Please everyone take a moment to subscribe and follow us on YouTube. And Carah's got something she wants to share.

Carah Burrell [02:06:13] I just want to clarify that.

John Dehlin [02:06:15] Clarifying or clarifying John,

Carah Burrell [02:06:20] that when you donate at the Mormon expressions link through mormonstories.org Mormon expressions, Mormon expressions. That that does go into a separate fund. And so John Larsen gets paid out of that fund. I get paid out of that fund, Maven gets paid out of that fund for these episodes. So it's specific to when that fund runs out. Then John Larsen episodes have to go away. So it's different than just donating to Mormon stories. So some people don't like John Larsen episodes and they wish they would go away. Well, too bad people like you are going to keep donating to that fun. Somebody else asked how much does Carah had to drink tonight? None. I'm just sleepy and tired so I get a little bit silly and impersonate. That's it.

John Dehlin [02:06:57] All right. Yeah. So please thank you Carah for that reminder. If you want to see, you know, we, we had at least one or two large donors to the Mormon expression projects drop off recently. That's not super alarming. Just it's oftentimes people get excited about stuff and then they lose interest or move on. That's normal for any, you know, donation, any flaky person.

Carah Burrell [02:07:19] It's normal for flaky people.

John Dehlin [02:07:20] But if you value this content with John Larsen and you want to see continue, please do donate to it. Go to mormonstories.org mormonexpression Sign up for a monthly donation. And as long as you know we get enough revenue from that, we'll keep offering this. But John Larsen, thanks for not just for your work and for your wisdom and your passion, but just thanks for who you are and thanks for the bear of a human that's big hearted and brilliant and for all you have done and continue to do for this community. You know that we see you as a hero and as a legend and for me, it's one of my great honors the past five years or More to have you as a special guest on the show.

John Larsen [02:08:06] Well, thanks so much. I really enjoy it and I think that you guys are doing the Lord's work. It's really important. Processing out of the church is really, really difficult and any help anybody can get. Hey. To answer two questions from the chat, it's water. I seldom if ever drink when I'm, when I'm doing this. And there was a question about the best sources for Joseph Smith polygamy. The best sources are all in letters that were written. The church at the time was not acknowledging it publicly, so it didn't appear in any official things. But we have like this Nancy Rigdon letter and other things where Chelsea Smith mentions it. The best semi official source, I would suggest the William Clayton journals. Although he was the personal secretary to Joseph Smith, he writes extensively about what Joseph Smith was doing. He was a polygamist himself.

John Dehlin [02:09:04] All right, all right. Well, Joan Larsen, thank you so much for everything today. Thanks to all our viewers and commenters. Thanks to Maven for coming in last minute and being here in studio. And last but not least, Carah, thanks for you and, and being riding shotgun. Thanks for all you do on your Nuanceo channel, both on YouTube and on tick Tock to, to spread a little bit of humor along with the wit and wisdom.

Carah Burrell [02:09:33] Oh, that's nice of you to say, but I just, I'm just like a little, little squirrel getting the roots and nuts and berries from all of the other amazing content creators, podcasters. So shout out to people like Bill Real and RFM and John Larsen and John Dylan and people who just like keep this train and move in. So this is such a good community. Help anyone who is out there who's maybe going through a faith crisis or something and you're trying to figure out sources and stuff. Another great video, John Larsen, Sorry, John Dehlin and I did on my Nuanceo channel where we brought in my friend Eve who had never heard any of these things and we just have tell her all about Joseph's Smith and she's asking questions and we talk about original sources a lot in that video.

Carah Burrell [02:10:14] It's got like 80, 90,000 views at this point. Really good, like starting place for people to go for. So if this felt a little bit heavy and over your head, don't worry. There's a whole community, people who got you. This is big, overwhelming stuff. But yeah, there's a lot of good resources and a lot of hand holding, so don't worry about it.

John Dehlin [02:10:34] All right. And please subscribe to the Nuance YouTube channel along with Nemo, the Mormon, Mormonism Live, Zelf on the Shelf, and any other important creator. Subscribe to their channels and like their stuff and share it and donate as well. All right, thanks everybody. Thanks for all your support. Thanks for making Mormon Stories what it is. Be kind to each other, be good to each other, love each other, and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care.

Carah Burrell [02:11:08] Bye.

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