Introduction and Guest Background

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is March 4, 2026, and today we are going to be discussing possibly the biggest anachronism in the Book of Mormon, the text itself. And joining us for the first time on Mormon Stories podcast to discuss. This is Dr. John Lundwall. Hey, Dr. John.

John Lundwall [00:00:25] Hello, John. Pleasure to be on your show.

John Dehlin [00:00:27] Yeah, well, I think I discovered you through Mormonish and Rebecca and Landon and Radio Free Mormon and Bill Real and those guys. But it's long past due to have you share with us your, I don't know, writings or research here on Mormon Stories.

John Lundwall [00:00:44] Well, I'm happy to do so. I'm happy to be here. I can thank you personally for Mormon Stories. I'm an ex Mormon and I found your show about 2019 and watched an episode of it every day for six months.

John Dehlin [00:01:03] Was that before your faith started being challenged or after?

John Lundwall [00:01:08] After.

John Dehlin [00:01:08] Oh, okay.

John Lundwall [00:01:09] I was out, but I still needed a place to put my feet, and your platform did that. So I appreciate that.

John Dehlin [00:01:18] Well, thank you. Thank you. Well, tell us a bit about what you're a doctor of and just your basic background before we dive into your presentation.

John Lundwall [00:01:29] You bet. I have a doctorate in Comparative Myth and Religion from the Joseph Campbell School of Myth and Religion, Pacifica Graduate Institute out of California. I teach there as an associate professor and I also run the Utah Cultural Astronomy Project. It's a lot of theory at the school, so I do field work in the state of Utah. My research partner in that group is an archeologist with the state of Utah. He and I go out. His name's also John. So we have a lot of johns. We go out in the deserts of Utah and survey rock art shrines and rock art sites of the Fremont. So I'm going to actually begin our presentation with some of that because we're going to sort of step into a world without writing cultures without writing.

John Dehlin [00:02:29] Okay. And so maybe any. Any other introduction before we start. Dive. Dive in just about you or your background? Well, like, it's sounding very archaeological or anthropological to me. Is that right?

John Lundwall [00:02:43] Yes, I'm a cultural anthropologist. My work is in Utah. It's with archaeologists and anthropologists, and I teach cultural anthropology at my school. I'm basically just a big nerd, though. I am a founding board member of the Utah Valley Astronomy Club. So we work with state national parks in Utah. I've helped state parks get dark sky status. So I'm a backyard astronomer. We do a lot of observational astronomy in our Field work. I'm a photographer. I go around the world with my camera. I love doing that.

John Dehlin [00:03:33] And we'll have a lot of photos today.

John Lundwall [00:03:35] Yeah, all the photos are mine.

John Dehlin [00:03:36] Okay.

John Lundwall [00:03:37] So, yeah, it's a lot of photographs of these sites.

John Dehlin [00:03:41] And if you had to share kind of your thesis like we rehearsed maybe before, what's the elevator pitch or summary of your thesis regarding the Book of Mormon and its historicity, just so that people can kind of know what you're going to be discussing today?

John Lundwall [00:04:01] In the Book of Mormon, religion is managed through texts and is accessed through texts. You read Isaiah, you search the scriptures, everything is managed by texts. In the ancient world, religion was not practiced through text. It was practiced through rituals, through cosmological scenarios, through seasonal agricultural rights.

John Dehlin [00:04:31] In oral tradition, right?

John Lundwall [00:04:32] In oral tradition, yes. So orality is its own epistemological framework in the Book of Mormon. The framework, the world building of the Book of Mormon does not belong to the time and place it's supposed to be in. And we can show that. And that makes the entire world of the Book of Mormon anachronistic.

John Dehlin [00:04:59] I'll refer really quickly, our viewers and listeners to my past episodes with Dr. Michael Koh. He was a Yale anthropologist archaeologist who talked about horses and steel and wheat and silk and barley and all the different specific anachronisms that are in the Book of Mormon. For me, that's one of the top five Mormon stories episodes of all time. But this is similar to interject.

John Lundwall [00:05:26] People argue the Book of Mormon is a play. The props of the play, the steel, the animals, people say they're anachronistic and they are anachronistic. My argument is not only are the props anachronistic, the stage and the scenery are also anachronistic. The entire play is anachronism.

John Dehlin [00:05:48] All right, well, let's dive in. I can't wait. Thanks for joining us today.

Rock Art and Oral Cultures in the Ancient Americas

John Lundwall [00:05:52] All right, I thought here's the title slide. This is a very famous rock art site in Utah. This is near Vernal. That bluff has a large panel that we'll get a close up of it. What's interesting here though is that they carved the Fremont. Let me just tell you really quick. The Fremont were an indigenous group that lived in present day Utah between about 300 and 1300 CE. And they had no writing. So primary orality, they had no conception of writing. So it's a completely oral culture. They left tens of thousands of images carved and painted on rock faces throughout the Southwest, mostly in Utah. This is a rock bluff with A famous panel on it. Our team was the first to look at it and say, well, the reason why they carved this panel at this location is because at the equinox, the sun rises into the crack. And as it does so, actually the reflected light illuminates the panel, and it's a really cool effect. And you can see the image on the right is the illuminated rock art panel from the equinocal sunrise. The image on the left is a close up of what is there. And what you're looking at is a sun warrior, that large figure with the feather headdress surrounded by other anthropomorphic figures, perhaps priests, perhaps divine beings, but it's definitely a warrior panel. It's called the three kings panel. And I'm only showing this to show you that these people are thinking orally, which is thinking analogically. Literacy develops analytically. Orality develops analogically. So if two things are related, they believe that they are functionally related. So when the equinocal sun rises, there is a spirit, a vitality, a power in the sun, which is personified as a living being, which animates the images on the rock face, and they become living beings. And so this is a cosmic interplay. We don't think this way, but this is a cosmic interplay where these figures become animated, living presences in the culture, in the tribe. This is kind of like the precursor

John Dehlin [00:08:58] to a film strip or a movie.

John Lundwall [00:08:59] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:09:00] The sun animates the images in a way that attempts to bring them the story to life a little bit.

John Lundwall [00:09:07] Yeah. It's actually the power and intelligence of the sun being present in the image. Here's another image. This is several miles away from the first site that is a solar deity. It's about three feet tall, that pictograph. And at the summer solstice, that chevron of light comes down and perfectly fills his headdress.

John Dehlin [00:09:36] That's not just a coincidence.

John Lundwall [00:09:37] That's not a coincidence. So what we do is we photograph that phenomenon 30 every morning before sunrise. We're standing there with a camera, 30 days, every day for. For 30 days before the solstice. That gives us 60 days of data, because the sun will move, stop and move back. So the 30 days gives us two sets, and then we're there actually every month, at least for a couple days, photographing it to falsify how the sunlight works on this panel. And actually, I don't have the full photography, but that chevron of light comes down as the sun rises and wraps his curved staff, and then it comes down Further, and he ends up standing on it. One leg is twice as long as the other. And they painted that to fit on the sun shadow line. In other words, they're watching that sun shadow line at the summer solstice, and they're using it as their template to paint the size, position, and proportion of the figure. And it only aligns. It aligns seven days of the year, three days before the solstice, the solstice three days after. And that's the moment when that image becomes a living image of the summer solstice sun. Now, if I am at the summer solstice, they're performing rain ceremonies. This is the heat of the year. So you want your rain, so you perform your rain ceremonies. This figure here, by the way, is a headhunter. So in other sites, he's holding a head in one hand and a knife in the other. He's taking a head. And what's happening here is the son is actually taking his head. And so this all is part of a analogical cosmology where head taking is very popular in Mesoamerica and in Mexico. And it's lined with maize, the growth of maize. And this culture is growing maize. We can talk about that here in the next slide. But the whole point is, if I want to perform a ritual to bring rain at the summer solstice, I will go to this site. This rock face itself will probably be animated with a living spirit. And I will go and I will negotiate with that living spirit with a ritual. And then the sun, the summer solstice sun is also a living spirit, and it will descend into this image on the rock face. And so I will perform a ritual to negotiate with that spirit. The idea being is I want to bring those spirits into my tribe, into my crops, and to bring rain. This is how they're practicing religion, agriculture, religion, politics. They're inseparable. Astronomy, astronomy, sky watching. In oral cultures, you often get these astronomical alignments in various ways because the sky serves as a sort of proto printing press. A culture without a printing press needs a way to maintain cultural memory. So when that star rises on the horizon at that season, I perform this ritual. I will tell this story. And then when the next star rises, I will perform a different ritual. So the sky then becomes a sort of cultural library that manages that.

John Dehlin [00:13:37] So

John Lundwall [00:13:39] there's all kinds of manifestations. This is a. This is a beautiful site. And what we're looking at is a birthing shrine. This is where Fremont, we believe this is where Fremont women would give birth. There's A semicircular wall. It's all collapsed. So there's a debris wall that's left. And so that wall probably would have covered the entire rock face so that you couldn't have seen the sunrise. There's one petroglyphic image in the shrine and that's vulva. Right. And so this is where they would give birth. What's interesting about this site, that semicircular line is the debris wall and it's oriented east, southeast to all the sunrises in the year. So that's what you look at when you sit within it. Now, again, it's probably enclosed, so it's like a womb. You enter the womb and you give birth, but it's oriented to the sunrises through the year. Well, in these cosmologies, you know, we don't have writing for the Fremont, so we study the ethnography of every culture we can that might be related to the Fremont. And that's how we. There's sort of a pan cosmology that exists amongst people who grow maize and they're growing maize and the life ways of these people. So in these cultures, the soul is a seed of the sun. You know, the Nahuatl word Aztec tonali is the animated force of the sun, the animated spirit, life intelligence of the sun. And it imbues itself in every human person. In fact, the seed of the sun exists in the head. And that's why your head's always warm, is because it's animated by the sun, spirit, father, son. And this is why they take heads. When you want to offer a perpetuary ritual to feed the gods so that they will feed you, you offer them a related equivalent and so you take a head. So when you go into Mesoamerica, very often they're head taking cultures, human sacrificial cultures. At least in this part of Utah, there was a head taking culture for a couple centuries. In any case, this is a pun. We're looking at a pun. The sun rises is being born every morning on the horizon right here. The sun imbues its vitality in the human soul, which is being born in the shrine. And the first thing that emerges out of the womb is the head. It's a analogical sunrise. As the head emerges out of the womb, the sun emerges out of the horizon. They are connected. Makes sense.

John Dehlin [00:17:14] I mean, you're smart and educated, so I'm inclined to believe what you say. That feels like a lot to extrapolate from some rock formations in a horizon.

John Lundwall [00:17:28] Yeah, well, I'm citing the Ethnography of what? The belief systems in Mesoamerica, Mexico, and the American Southwest. Now, when we come here, all we know is we have a birthing shrine oriented to the sunrise.

John Dehlin [00:17:42] How do you know it's a birthing shrine?

John Lundwall [00:17:44] That's a very good question. So in addition to the vulva, there are.

John Dehlin [00:17:51] You don't have a picture of the vulva, is that right?

John Lundwall [00:17:53] That's the vulva. Okay, wait, where that center petroglyph. You can't see it. It's right on that rock face. Can you see the mouse? No.

John Dehlin [00:18:13] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. Oh, my goodness. Right there.

John Lundwall [00:18:18] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:18:19] Oh, thank you. I don't think the viewers and listeners would have seen that. So towards the middle of the rock formation, you're saying there's a carving of the vulva there?

John Lundwall [00:18:30] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:18:31] And. Okay, now I see it. And that is. Is why did they carve a vulva there?

John Lundwall [00:18:38] Yes, because they're giving birth there. Actually, right behind that petroglyph are a series of deeply incised grooves. And we know that those grooves in the rock is where they sharpen their stone tools.

John Dehlin [00:18:52] Got it.

John Lundwall [00:18:52] And so they're sharpening knives in a shrine that has a vulva. Well, that knife sharpening is to cut the umbilical cord. It's a birthing shrine.

John Dehlin [00:19:02] Got it. Okay. Okay. And Brooklyn's following this. We'll have her edit whatever she needs to, but that was helpful to me, so I'm guessing it's going to be helpful to a couple people as well. Okay.

John Lundwall [00:19:12] All right. Well, if you didn't see the vulva, then. Yeah, that wouldn't make sense.

John Dehlin [00:19:16] No, we see it. I see it now very clearly. Yeah. Okay. Got it, got it. Okay, thank you.

John Lundwall [00:19:23] All right, this slide is. This is a sky house in Colorado. And I'm just showing it to express that idea that oral cultures are deeply connected to the landscape. But there's two parts to the landscape.

John Dehlin [00:19:39] You're flex. You're. You're doing a photography flex there. That's just a beautiful photo. That's what you're actually doing.

John Lundwall [00:19:44] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:19:45] But no, I'm kidding. Yeah, you're showing us how beautiful your photography is.

John Lundwall [00:19:49] There's a rock wall here.

John Dehlin [00:19:50] Yes.

John Lundwall [00:19:51] And that is a. And it's on a promontory. If I walk past 10ft, past that rock wall, I fall off an 80 foot sheer drop.

John Dehlin [00:20:00] Oh, wow.

John Lundwall [00:20:02] So it's on a promontory with a 360 degree view of the sky. Yeah, I am flexing. That is a cool shot, but it's showing a Wide open landscape where they're watching. These cultures had sun priests that would watch sunrises and sunsets through the year. And again, you know, there's all kinds of the pueblos down in New Mexico and Arizona have sun priests. And we actually know that mitochondria DNA from Fremont burials can be tracked to the pueblos. So we know there's links that around 1300, the Fremont villages got vacated.

John Dehlin [00:20:49] 1300 AD? Yeah.

John Lundwall [00:20:53] There is a collapse that happens. And they migrate, and a lot of them migrate into the pueblos further south. And we can track that through the DNA. Can't track the Book of Mormon DNA, but we can track this DNA. Can't find a civilization of millions of people, but we deal with villages that have less than 100 people and we can tell you all about them. And so in any case, you're saying

John Dehlin [00:21:23] there should be more evidence for the Book of Mormon peoples if they existed.

John Lundwall [00:21:27] Huge.

John Dehlin [00:21:27] Yeah. But you're saying there's not?

John Lundwall [00:21:30] No.

John Dehlin [00:21:30] Okay.

John Lundwall [00:21:31] No. This is sort of a. I'm just showing what I do so that you kind of have a grounding as to how we are going to enter the Book of Mormon conversation.

John Dehlin [00:21:44] No, it makes sense.

John Lundwall [00:21:46] So these kinds of features exist worldwide. This is the temple of, you know, in Chichen Itza, where on the equinox you see that stairway? There's a serpent head at the bottom, a serpent tail at the top, and those undulating shadow lines connect the two at the equinox. So it forms a solar serpent. Here is that left image. I'm just showing that cultures do these kinds of things. That's the temple of Hathor Dendera. So that's Egypt. And a solar phallus is coming down the wall and it inseminates the two figures who are in a ritual negotiation. And so you have a solar phallus doing that in Egypt. On the right is a petroglyph of a phallus, that's a five foot long penis. And at summer solstice, this triangle of light goes up through the center of the penis, the phallus, inseminating it with solar light. So these cultures worldwide are bringing the power and vitality of the sun, the moon, the stars, the animals, the plants, the seasons into their culture through rituals. This is how religion is being practiced.

John Dehlin [00:23:15] And I'm gonna mask her. The technical language, obviously, but it seems kind of miraculous to me that independent cultures evolve the practice of carving into the wall and carving into the wall in a way that has interplay with the sun and the sunlight and the the fact that that emerges in Mesoamerica or North America independent from what's going on in Egypt, I don't know. That's kind of miraculous. Or maybe one descends from the other types of practices.

John Lundwall [00:23:52] These kinds of practices are ubiquitous around the world through history, through time, through place, through culture, through language. What unites them is a reality

John Dehlin [00:24:04] and define orality. I think it's spoken word. Is that right?

John Lundwall [00:24:08] Spoken word cultures without writing.

John Dehlin [00:24:10] Okay, yeah. Okay, okay, yeah.

John Lundwall [00:24:13] Egypt has writing, but for thousands of years, the writing serves the oral tradition. Okay. I call that. There's primary orality, no writing whatsoever. There's secondary orality where writing is invented, but it serves the oral tradition. That's most of the history of Egypt. The first Temple period in Israel was secondary oral. The Book of Mormon begins with Nephi grabbing the brass plates, right? There's no way there's a set of brass plates. Those temple priests at that time, 600 BCE are doing rain dances. They're bringing the power of the sun with a solar phallus into their ritual. They're doing agricultural rites and animal sacrifices. This is what they're doing. And they're doing astrological prognostications. They're watching the stars using their Urim and Thummim and doing divinations and astrological practices. All the cultures were doing this. The Israelites were doing this.

John Dehlin [00:25:24] They're not compiling their scriptures into books and then no, you know, plates, and then bound plates by rings of brass

John Lundwall [00:25:33] or whatever they were not.

John Dehlin [00:25:35] So the brass plates. And I think David Bacavoi, even Bart Ehrman, we interviewed him, I believe, last week. Every scholar I've ever talked to of ancient whatever civilization says the brass plates themselves would, in 600 B.C. would not exist, never have existed.

John Lundwall [00:25:52] That is correct.

John Dehlin [00:25:53] Yeah. They're in and of themselves an anachronism in terms of just existence, actually.

John Lundwall [00:26:01] First, Nephi begins, you know, I, Nephi, haven't been born a goodly parents, let me tell you. My father, Lehi had a vision where God appears and opens a book, right? The very first chapter, the very first page is text oriented. The prophecy of Jerusalem being destroyed is recorded in a heavenly book. All the visions are associated with the heavenly book. So then Lehi leaves, because of the prophecy, out of the heavenly book, and then they go back to Jerusalem to get another book, the brass plates. Because in this worldview, religion is practiced textually, right? The visions are textual, the prophecies are textual, the scriptures are textual. And I'm showing, actually the Israelite priests are doing much More of what's on your screen with these slides than they don't get into textual religion until centuries later.

Textual vs. Oral Cultures in History

John Dehlin [00:27:06] And the explanation not to jump to that at all, but I just, I'm trying to process this in my mind. Joseph Smith in 1827 was living in a textural, a textual culture with books and with religious practices based on text based books. And so Joseph Smith is projecting back, you know, 3500 years prior or 2400 years prior, his textual, book based religious practice worldview. Just assuming that ancient Old Testament prophets would have had that same text based, book based, literate perspective, which you're saying they didn't correct.

John Lundwall [00:27:54] The problem's much worse. We know that Joseph Smith has his fingerprints all over the Book of Mormon. And the Book of Mormon is written as a text based world, but so is the pearl of great price.

John Dehlin [00:28:06] Right? Yeah. Which is even more ancient.

John Lundwall [00:28:09] Right, right. The Book of Abraham. Abraham is the father. He has the priesthoods that come to him through texts. In the book of Moses, Adam teaches his children to read and write. And this is called the priesthood. This is Moses, chapter six. So the very first generation practices religion through texts.

John Dehlin [00:28:35] And you're saying 6,000 years ago, I'm just dating the way I was dating.

John Lundwall [00:28:39] Right, right, right. Me too.

John Dehlin [00:28:41] Adam and Eve. You know, the Mormon Church taught me that Adam and Eve lived 6,000 years ago. And you're saying, and of course genetics and anthropologists and archeologists will all say humankind has been around for a lot longer than 6,000 years. But even if we just assume that magically, that humans appeared magically 6,000 years ago, what you're saying is Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel and Noah, they didn't have books, they didn't have writing, they didn't have text in the Middle east at the time that those stories would have taken place. No, no, they did not.

John Lundwall [00:29:19] They did not.

John Dehlin [00:29:21] And we're pretty sure that they didn't have writing or text.

John Lundwall [00:29:24] We're very sure.

John Dehlin [00:29:27] When did writing develop for what? Semitic? What Middle Eastern people?

John Lundwall [00:29:31] Writing originates in about six places independently in the world. The earliest is in Mesopotamia, about 34,3500 BCE.

John Dehlin [00:29:44] So that's later than Adam and Eve.

John Lundwall [00:29:45] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:29:46] Yeah.

John Lundwall [00:29:47] Egypt. It appears around 3200 BCE, plus or minus a little bit. China. We're in the third millennium bce. Crete, third millennium bce. The Indus Valley, third millennium bce. The Americas. It originates very late. There's one stone that has symbols on it. That's 900 BCE. Scholars still argue whether it's a writing system. But by 5600 BCE, there is a writing system. But these are logosyllabic scripts. They're not alphabetic. And even with writing, these cultures are all doing this. It takes centuries, centuries of textual practice in order to. Well, actually what happens? Jerusalem's cult is destroyed, their temple is destroyed. Right. Nebuchadnezzar comes in 587 BCE. We know that's historical.

John Dehlin [00:30:53] A few years after Lehigh, a few

John Lundwall [00:30:54] years after Lehi leaves Jerusalem, the cult is destroyed. And that's their religion. It's the rituals in the temple cult. Okay. Doing the agriculture, doing all of that.

John Dehlin [00:31:07] You're saying Judaism. When you said the cult, you mean Judaism.

John Lundwall [00:31:09] Well, I define Judaism as the textual version. And that comes centuries after. So the Israelites, their cult is destroyed, they go into Babylon as slaves, they come back 500 BCE and that's when they start, at least traditionally, where they start compiling their texts to write the Torah. Now it still takes centuries after that for the Torah as text to be central to the religious ideology. They come back and the first thing they want to do is rebuild the temple, rebuild the cult, redo all the things that they were doing before. But there's an upgrade or an innovation and that is, well, we lost everything. Let's transfer our religion into a portable temple. And that's a text. It's a radical innovation of recording all your traditions in a text to be read as a text. But even then it's not read as a text. I mean, there's so many portions of the Torah that are actually oral performance. Deuteronomy is Moses speaking to the people of Israel. And actually a lot of scholarship suggests that it's a temple priest performing an oral ritual on behalf of the people. So even large portions of what we consider historical text turns out to be oral ritual performance.

John Dehlin [00:32:54] Isn't the entire Quran kind of like established as an oral tradition passed down?

John Lundwall [00:33:00] It is an oral tradition.

John Dehlin [00:33:02] Yeah.

John Lundwall [00:33:03] Yes, it is.

John Dehlin [00:33:05] Eventually got written down.

John Lundwall [00:33:07] Eventually got written down.

John Dehlin [00:33:08] But it was passed down orally first.

John Lundwall [00:33:09] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:33:10] Okay. That's just the way it works.

John Lundwall [00:33:13] That's the way it was for almost all of history.

John Dehlin [00:33:16] Yeah. That's why when you go to like a bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah, you know, these kids are learning to chant very basic scripture. That almost feels like it's in similitude of the millennia long tradition of passing down religious beliefs or stories or ritual orally.

John Lundwall [00:33:39] Correct.

John Dehlin [00:33:39] Okay.

John Lundwall [00:33:40] In oral societies, things are practiced, sung, chanted and danced. Yeah, that's how religion is done.

John Dehlin [00:33:48] Yeah.

John Lundwall [00:33:49] Not through not through texts, not through books.

John Dehlin [00:33:52] Yeah, yeah.

John Lundwall [00:33:54] Priests were dancing around the altars in the Catholic Church until the council of Toledo, 6th 7th century CE.

John Dehlin [00:34:04] Really?

John Lundwall [00:34:05] Yes. There are vestiges of these practices that exist in early Christianity. They slowly evolve out, so even. And again through early Christianity. Christianity is the first world religion that begins with the management of texts. The Gospels, the letters of Paul, they're central to the Christian cosmo vision, and they're textual. Okay. Judaism doesn't begin that way. And it takes most of the history of Judaism to develop into arguing textual. The Torah. Right.

John Dehlin [00:34:53] So, so that, that makes me want to ask, like, we call it the Book of Matthew, the Book of Mark.

John Lundwall [00:34:58] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:34:59] The Book of Luke, the Book of John. I. I'm guessing that when those scrolls, original scrolls or whatever were written, books didn't like. Books as we know them didn't exist yet. So I'm guessing they didn't start calling the scroll of Matthew a book until much later. Do you know. Do you even know what I'm saying?

John Lundwall [00:35:20] Well, the codex is invented by the Romans, second century. So that is. So that's about contemporary with Christian writing.

John Dehlin [00:35:38] Yeah. Okay.

John Lundwall [00:35:42] There is, you know, before the codex, you did have scrolls. You know, the medium is the message. How information is relayed is how structures thought. It structures how people practice their thinking, how they practice their religion. When your writing is on a scroll, you write on only one side of a scroll and you have to roll and unroll it. So religious texts were often written along a calendar. You unrolled part of it, read it during this liturgical day, then you rolled and unrolled and you read that part during the next liturgical day. So it followed a cosmological calendar and an ecclesiastical calendar. Books don't do that. The innovation of books is you can flip back and forth and read any text you want and cross reference. And this changes how we access religious ideas because with a scroll, you're following a very specific ecclesiastical cosmological calendar. I perform this on this Sunday, this Sabbath, this on this Sabbath, this on this Sabbath, I sing and chant this, and I unroll and roll the scroll as I go.

John Dehlin [00:37:00] Yeah. That's why, I don't mean to belabor the point, but to call it the Book of Matthew. That must have come later when books became popularized, because it originally was a scroll, not a book. Right.

John Lundwall [00:37:10] Originally probably was a scroll. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:37:15] So I bet we started calling them books centuries later.

John Lundwall [00:37:19] I'll have to look that up.

John Dehlin [00:37:20] Yeah. Does that make sense?

John Lundwall [00:37:21] Yeah, no, that does make sense.

John Dehlin [00:37:23] Yeah. It's a scroll. It's not a book. Yeah, none of those books in the New Testament, wherever. Books, Right.

John Lundwall [00:37:32] They're scrolls.

John Dehlin [00:37:33] They're still not books, by the way.

John Lundwall [00:37:35] Right.

John Dehlin [00:37:36] The Bible's a book.

John Lundwall [00:37:39] Right.

John Dehlin [00:37:39] But the book of Matthew was a scroll and was never a book. I mean, unless I misunderstand.

John Lundwall [00:37:46] But they are a different kind of text though. Instead of ritual performance at a, at a podium, they're, they're autobiographical. 90% of the sayings of Jesus are oral stories.

John Dehlin [00:38:06] Right.

John Lundwall [00:38:06] They're parables.

John Dehlin [00:38:07] Yeah.

John Lundwall [00:38:08] But you know, the writings of Paul are, that's, that's semi histographical.

John Dehlin [00:38:16] So they're letters, right?

John Lundwall [00:38:18] Yeah. Letters.

John Dehlin [00:38:19] Paul wrote letters?

John Lundwall [00:38:20] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:38:20] Yeah. Not books.

John Lundwall [00:38:21] Right, right.

John Dehlin [00:38:24] Okay. All right. Where are we now? This is something that, I mean, I'm wrapping my brain around this, but I think viewers and listeners are going to need to process this to wrap their brain around it. Right? I think so, yeah. Because we're using words that don't necessarily mean what we think they mean or didn't mean back then what we now think they mean. So anyway.

John Lundwall [00:38:45] Right.

John Dehlin [00:38:45] Thanks for helping us understand better.

John Lundwall [00:38:47] There's a long sermon that Nephi gives. This is, you know, 550 BCE he's in the New World. 550 BCE. It's a Bible. A Bible? You have a Bible? I command all people in the east and the west to write my words down and practice. Right. It's all a book based religion. A Bible based religion in a world where that didn't exist.

John Dehlin [00:39:14] Yeah. When Nephi writes a Bible. A Bible. We have a Bible.

John Lundwall [00:39:16] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:39:17] This is 550 years before Jesus. They didn't have a Bible. They didn't have the word Bible.

John Lundwall [00:39:23] That's right, right, right. Well, there's that, but the framework is wrong.

John Dehlin [00:39:29] Right.

John Lundwall [00:39:30] That's not. If Nephi were in Mesoamerica, if you believe that model, and he's growing maize, he might have said ahead. Ahead. We have ahead. Let's take another right.

John Dehlin [00:39:45] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Lundwall [00:39:48] I'm doing a shameless plug. Can I do a shameless plug?

John Dehlin [00:39:51] Yeah.

John Lundwall [00:39:52] Do you mind?

John Dehlin [00:39:52] No.

John Lundwall [00:39:53] May 2027. I'm leading a tour in Egypt with graduate students.

John Dehlin [00:39:58] Okay.

John Lundwall [00:39:59] And so I'll give you the link, but it's a. I just thought I would announce it. I've got 10 open spots if people are interested. It's really inexpensive.

John Dehlin [00:40:11] We'll include a link in the show notes.

John Lundwall [00:40:12] Great. All right. So what I did then is I read the Book of Mormon specifically with orality and literacy in mind. I wanted to just look to see how the book was structured and how if its bias was completely towards literacy, then there would be a lot of problems. And so I'm just going to fly through this text. But when doing that, I realized the greatest anachronism in the Book of Mormon is the text itself. A tight translation is impossible because all the references internal to the narrative relate to a world that cannot exist. And a loose translation then is an act of violence because you're now taking the actual history and heritage of cultures that would be living there and you're subverting them into something that didn't exist. So you can't have either a tight or a loose translation. One is some form of a mischaracterization of history. The text of the Book of Mormon cannot be derived from the description of the gold plates. We're not going to talk about that. These are just points that I realized when reading the Book of Mormon with this framework in mind. How do literate people think and practice religion? How do oral people think and practice religion? It shows that the entire Book of

Translation Problems and Book of Mormon Literacy

John Dehlin [00:41:43] Mormon has read 4 and 5. Just so the problems.

John Lundwall [00:41:47] The Book of Mormon characters are fabricated and can be falsified.

John Dehlin [00:41:50] These are the Anton characters.

John Lundwall [00:41:52] Yes, the Anton characters. I was looking at it and realized that the entire description of the plates, the what kind of writing system you would need in order to fit 270, 330,000 words, because there's a lost manuscript on 2 inches or 4 inches of plates, 6 by 8 inches. I mean, it becomes so improbable that

John Dehlin [00:42:19] it's just not the space on the golden plates per the dimensions that Joseph Smith gave us for all the words that they claim. Yeah.

John Lundwall [00:42:26] Not for any writing system.

John Dehlin [00:42:28] Yeah.

John Lundwall [00:42:30] It's impossible.

John Dehlin [00:42:31] Yeah.

John Lundwall [00:42:34] And the standard of proof for the Book of Mormon as set by the priesthood brethren resides only in a tight translation. And it's literal historicity. And that becomes problematic.

John Dehlin [00:42:43] And just, you know, we've done entire episodes on LDS discussions about tight versus loose translation, but when we say tight

John Lundwall [00:42:50] translation, a word for word translation from the stone to the text that Joseph Smith declared was happening, and all the

John Dehlin [00:43:01] witnesses claimed that Joseph Smith was somehow using his peep stone to channel the characters on the gold plates and word by word to transform them or transcribe them from whatever the original alleged golden plates characters were into English and he was reading it word for word.

John Lundwall [00:43:23] Correct.

John Dehlin [00:43:24] So loose would be just trying to use his own words. Right. Well.

John Lundwall [00:43:31] Well, please tell me what a loose translation is. It's whatever they want it to be.

John Dehlin [00:43:35] Yeah.

John Lundwall [00:43:36] And that, you know, that's moving the goalpost to wherever you need them.

John Dehlin [00:43:40] It's not translating, basically.

John Lundwall [00:43:42] It's not translating. There's what, what translator loosely translates anything, right? You can loosely translate any text into anything. You can loosely translate green eggs and ham into the Book of Mormon if you want. That is, you know, that's what you can do.

John Dehlin [00:44:04] You're either translating or you're not.

John Lundwall [00:44:06] Right?

John Dehlin [00:44:07] Yeah. And so either Joseph was looking at characters, I mean, he needed the gold plates because they had the characters on them. He's taking the characters to Anton or whatever because he's saying the characters exist. You're saying we can pretty much demonstrate that the characters on that Anton manuscript are false to begin with.

John Lundwall [00:44:26] Correct.

John Dehlin [00:44:27] But even if he did have characters he was looking at, there's no way that he could have been translating those in any sense of the word from whatever. And we even know that reformed Egyptian, there's no record of that even existing, right?

John Lundwall [00:44:42] That's correct.

John Dehlin [00:44:43] There's Egyptian, there's no record. Reformed Egyptian.

John Lundwall [00:44:45] Right.

John Dehlin [00:44:46] But even if reformed Egyptian did exist and the plates did exist and he was looking at characters, he was either translating or he wasn't. And there's just no way that he got all those characters on all those plates.

John Lundwall [00:45:00] This is a real problem for Mormonism because Mormonism is a religion. The origin story of Mormonism is not the first vision, it's the gold plates.

John Dehlin [00:45:09] Right.

John Lundwall [00:45:10] And therefore, in order for any of the truth claims of Mormonism to be accurate, there has to be a resurrected Moroni with a set of plates that detail a thousand year history of a real people in history. This must happen. And if it doesn't happen, then all the other dominoes fall. If there's no Moroni, there's no John the Baptist and therefore there's no restoration of the Aaronic priesthood. There's no Peter, James and John, there's no restoration of the Melchizedek priesthood. There's no Moses and Elijah and no ceiling keys or polygamy or temple endowment. All the dominoes fall. It all goes back to a literal, historical, tight translation of a text. And when you open the text, you can almost immediately, from page one with the book in heaven and the book of the brass plates and the book of the gold plates. Realize this cannot be historical.

John Dehlin [00:46:07] All right, tell us more.

John Lundwall [00:46:11] Well, I don't know as a. All right, here's, here's a slide where I'm simply showing that, you know, I've got a timeline there at the bottom. 100,000 BCE. That's modern homo sapiens. Talk about Adam, but, you know, upright gait, brain cavity size, that's a couple hundred thousand years old. But we have evidence of art at least to 100,000 BCE. We have burials with red ochre in the fetal position, which suggests some sort of ritual or belief in an afterlife. 50, 60,000 BCE we have modern homo sapiens at least for 100,000 BCE and you can see writings invented 3400 BCE. So for all that time, there was no writing, People were oral. And then for 3,000 years after the invention of writing, writing is serving the oral tradition, Right? So really this idea of managing things by text, thinking by text, it requires more than text. It requires, well, it requires an alphabetic system, it requires books, it requires a printing press to have primary print culture, which allows for the exponential growth of literacy and for everything to be managed by text. The worldview of the Book of Mormon is everything is managed by text. It's not just the religion. So there's helman13, where the editor tells us that every aspect of Nephite society is written in plates on plates. Their politics, their shipbuilding, their temples, their wars, their kings, their economies and their prophecies and their right. Every aspect of Nephite civilization is textual within the text. Well, that's really interesting. That does require a very robust literacy with a very robust technology to record the literacy. How are they recording this? What are, are they making books? How are they managing the books? How are they managing the libraries? How are they producing it? Mass producing it? King Benjamin gives a speech and then everyone is to go and read the speech and then reflect on it, right? So every, you know, Jesus, when Jesus appears, he says to everyone, go and search the words of Isaiah.

John Dehlin [00:49:01] Does he not say that in the, in the New Testament?

John Lundwall [00:49:07] Does Jesus say that? Anyway, he does reference Isaiah in the New Testament, right? Yes, right, right. The point I'm making is this society amongst the Nephites, therefore must know what Isaiah is and have the ability to go search for them, right? Which means they have to have the ability to read them, which means there's gotta be some form of literacy and libraries. We should be finding Isaiah quotes in the Archaeology of the Americas because the Book of Mormon people are constantly telling us to read Isaiah, right?

John Dehlin [00:49:46] And I guess apologists are going to say that this small geography theory, limited geography theory, that the Book of Mormon happened in a teeny place in Mesoamerica somewhere and they all got killed by the Lamanites, snuffed out the culture, which would have snuffed Out. The literate culture, the reading culture, the libraries, the savage dark Lamanites would have just wiped that entire literate, text based, book based culture from civilization.

John Lundwall [00:50:16] Sure enough, you have to argue from the absence of evidence. That's what you have to do. And that's how they frame it. You know, I constantly am hearing that 99% of the archeology isn't done. And so we, in the Book of Mormon of the Americas.

John Dehlin [00:50:36] Oh, okay, yeah.

John Lundwall [00:50:38] So we can find the Nephites in the undiscovered, unexcavated portions of the Americas. So that's one way they tried to hide the Nephites. The other way is, as you just said, it was all destroyed. And actually these two arguments do overlap. Let me just address that real quick. 99% of all archaeology disappears. You know, when you go to Egypt, you see the temples, the pyramids, the tombs, the obelisk, you're looking at 1%. When you go to Italy, the Parthenon, the Coliseum, the roads, the churches, you're looking at the 1%, 99% of all of it disappears. Right? But we have the 1% of cultures throughout the Americas that actually existed. That actually existed. And that gives us the kind of culture they are. Right? That tells us their life ways. Did they have riding? Were they urbanized, were they hunter gatherers, were they agriculturalists, did they have baskets, did they have pottery, stone tools, metal tools? Right. This tells us all kinds of things about these cultures. The argument that the apologists miss, in my view is we don't have 99% of the archeology and we can find the Nephites in this missing archeology is actually the Book of Mormon, is the 99%. The Book of Mormon gives us what all archaeologists want, a huge record of, of the life in the names and the places and the peoples and the beliefs. That's the 99.

John Dehlin [00:52:23] And the food and that.

John Lundwall [00:52:24] The food and the animals and the stories and the.

John Dehlin [00:52:27] So we do have genealogies, right?

John Lundwall [00:52:30] We do have the 99. That's the book of Mormon and all we have. We're not looking for the 99, we're looking for the 1%. We just have to match the two. And that should be easy. I, I can pick up a Roman coin and say, oh, that's a Roman coin. I can identify it. I have enough to identify to the language, the medal, the king that's being commemorated. Right.

John Dehlin [00:52:55] The dating. The dating, it corresponds with the history. That's right, yeah, the written history.

John Lundwall [00:53:02] So this should exist. There should be A very sizable thumbprint. Residual thumbprint of this culture. And this isn't. I mean, this is obvious.

John Dehlin [00:53:15] Yeah. So it's obvious to everyone, but none. Everyone but believing BYU scholars, basically. Right.

John Lundwall [00:53:25] I have to think that, you know, BYU has an archeology department. I have to think that they take this a little more serious.

John Dehlin [00:53:35] But they don't come on Mormon Stories.

John Lundwall [00:53:36] They do not come on Mormon Stories, podcast or any podcast. Because I can't.

John Dehlin [00:53:40] They'll lose their job.

John Lundwall [00:53:41] I don't know of any current archaeologist that tackles these topics publicly.

John Dehlin [00:53:49] So, I mean, John Sorensen did, but he's probably retired now.

John Lundwall [00:53:54] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:53:54] Okay.

John Lundwall [00:53:55] Well, all right. The point of this slide, if you go back to it, is that we have primary orality for 99% of human history, and then these next things, secondary orality. Literacy. There's a technological advance that occurs, and that is these writing systems develop into alphabets. An Alphabet is a marvelous technological advancement, much like the creation of the book is an advancement from the scroll. In an Alphabet, symbols represent sounds, and the human speech only creates a certain number of sounds. So alphabets are reductive, generally less than 30 symbols to represent all the sounds that your language will say.

John Dehlin [00:54:54] It's like Egyptian is not an Alphabet. It's symbols.

John Lundwall [00:54:57] Symbols. It's logosyllabic, which means they have symbols that represent sounds, but they also have symbols that represent words, words. Well, how many words are in your vocabulary? Egyptian has hundreds of symbols. China has thousands of symbols. China invented a printing press a millennium before the Gutenberg printing press in Europe. But they didn't have a scientific revolution because their writing system is thousands of characters. It takes a lifetime just to learn the writing system, let alone mass produce it with a printing press. So there's these different things that need to occur in order for this prime literacy to evolve.

John Dehlin [00:55:41] You need an Alphabet.

John Lundwall [00:55:42] You need an Alphabet.

John Dehlin [00:55:43] Yeah. Did the Mayans have an Alphabet?

John Lundwall [00:55:46] No.

John Dehlin [00:55:47] That's a problem.

John Lundwall [00:55:48] It's a problem.

John Dehlin [00:55:51] Let's just say all the Nephites were killed off. I don't think the idea of an Alphabet would have just disappeared amongst the Lamanites, right?

John Lundwall [00:56:00] No.

John Dehlin [00:56:02] Once you're used to using an Alphabet, you kind of want to keep using it because it's kind of useful. Is that right?

John Lundwall [00:56:08] That's correct. The technology would spread and stay.

John Dehlin [00:56:12] Yeah.

John Lundwall [00:56:13] You know, within a single generation, with Spanish contact, literate mind scribes adopted the Spanish Alphabet. And it stayed from then on out. We expect that this didn't happen. Or the Nephites are writing in Hebrew. Right. Should have been yes. Right. So these are big problems.

John Dehlin [00:56:41] Okay?

John Lundwall [00:56:45] This slide is just showing how oral cultures collate, transmit information differently than literate cultures. And so they watch the landscape, sky, earth, and they encode that into memory because that's how they're going to survive. Hunter gatherers will follow a herd. If they're hunting an animal, the herds foal during a certain part of the year. They mate, they give birth. There's prime times to hunt. There's prime times not to hunt. They'll be in certain valleys and canyons when you want to hunt them. And so they line all this up. When a certain star rises before the sun on that notch on the horizon, it's time for me to move into this valley and do my hunt. Okay, well, the star is a deity. The notch it rises in is a deity. The canyon I'm going to is a deity. And you then give rituals to all these deities in order for a successful hunt. But it's also a way to memorize everything you have to do in order to survive. Right? You do your ritual, and that's preparing you for the hunt. That's when you sharpen all your tools, make all your addle adles or your bows and arrows or whatever you're using. All those require rituals. They're integrated. Right. And so. This process is given in narrative form that we call myth. But really, it's just a. It's a narrative form of this ritual landscape. And myths aren't just campfire stories. In fact, myths are technical, oral stories that relate to the lifeways of the tribe. And they can only be told in certain times. You don't tell them around the campfire. You wait for that star to rise and the notch on the horizon, and then you tell the associated myth. Right. And so these are two different layers of two different mediums to layer the same kind of knowledge. Then you practice the myth and ritual. So you tell a story, you perform it in song and dance, and you do all this at a sacred site. So these elements is how oral cultures collate, transmit all their information. Makes sense.

Judaism, Temple Cosmology, and the Exodus

John Dehlin [00:59:19] Temple, cosmos. What? Cosmos, temple, ritual, myth. Yeah, yeah. And that applies to Judaism as well. Right. So give us illustrate that through Judaism. Just quickly as an example, you. The.

John Lundwall [00:59:39] The temple was the cult of the state. Everything had to be done at the temple. Right. But the temple is where they're observing the heavens. It's where they're making their astrological prognostications. It's where they're doing their prime rituals, whatever those prime rituals are. But the priest would Go into the Hakal from the gate, give offerings, put on a new cloak, enter into the holy of Holies through the veil, and do their annual ritual of bringing Yahweh into the tribe. Right. What we forget is all of this is linked to their agriculture, to their farming, to their lifeways. It's also linked to their politics. If, if you have to go to war, you perform a ritual in the temple to get Yahweh on your side in the army there. There is no word for religion in ancient Hebrew. Everything is religion, politics, agriculture, astrology, trade, economy. All of it has religious functions overseen through religious rituals. Wow.

John Dehlin [01:00:57] You know, I'm just thinking about this now. My feeble brain is processing it. And, you know, we all know that, like, you know, the Greeks have their own gods. Right. And the Romans have their own pantheon, and then Jews and Christians made it monotheistic. Right. So the idea of a divine being is something that lots of cultures have had, and Judaism wasn't the first. Right?

John Lundwall [01:01:22] Correct.

John Dehlin [01:01:23] What I'm realizing now is this. This model that you're sharing with us of like, thinking about the cosmos, seeing the stars and the heavens, and then creating a holy place, and then creating, you know, having stories, and then enshrining the stories in myth that get told and. Or practiced in a holy place. Performed. Performed in conjunction with the cosmos and heavens. That didn't start with the Jews. It wasn't like God came to Adam or Abraham or Isaac or Jacob or David and said, I'm going to teach you a ritual. It's more like civilizations developed this structure of having a fascination with the cosmos, of having a holy place, and of telling myth through ritual and performance in the temple. Judaism is just an iteration of that structure or practice that emerged 2,600 or 3,000 or 4,000 years ago, but it branches from a lot of other prior traditions doing the same thing. So just like. I guess what I'm saying is just like the idea of a God or gods emerged or holy oral traditions, the whole thing, the temple, the ritual, it's all remixed. Judaism is just a remix of the same types of religious structure that came before it. Right.

John Lundwall [01:02:58] I would say that all religion is a process of transmission, adaptation, innovation.

John Dehlin [01:03:04] Yeah.

John Lundwall [01:03:05] So the Israelites didn't invent Yahweh, they inherited Yahweh, adapted it, and innovated their practice into something specifically Israelite for the local landscape and lifeways they needed to survive.

John Dehlin [01:03:20] Right.

John Lundwall [01:03:22] So that's true of all of every. The Egyptians did not invent Egyptian religion. They inherited it, adapted it innovated it and made it specifically Egyptian within the Nile Valley. This goes back tens of thousands of years to Hunter Gatherers. So. So it's a process of adaptation, innovation. Those innovations can be very creative. They can be reversals, they can be cancellations, they can be adaptations that are novel, or they can just be. We want a bigger stick.

John Dehlin [01:03:57] All right, so I'm processing this. So the thing that comes to my mind first is, like, this idea. This is from Charlton Heston and the Ten Commandments movie. It's like.

John Lundwall [01:04:09] I like a good Charlton Heston quote.

John Dehlin [01:04:11] Yeah. What do you got? Cecil B. DeMille. So, I mean, the story, as we've heard it, is that Moses is frustrated with the Israelites. He goes up to Mount Sinai or whatever, and God gives him the advanced law. He brings it down, the people violate it. So what? So he goes back up and he gets the Ten Commandments on tablets written by the finger of God. Would God have been writing language on tablets back at that point in history? Or is that story in and of itself? In other words, the Moses on Mount Sinai with the tablets written by the finger of God with language, Is that in and of itself anachronistic? Or have you even thought about that?

John Lundwall [01:04:55] No, it's an adaptation. There's an earlier form of that story in Mesopotamia where Sargon goes to the mountain and is given the law by his God. So this is an old trope where one goes to the sacred place, performs a ritual to bring the God into the place, and then that God delivers their spirit, which enables them to function as a society.

John Dehlin [01:05:29] Yeah, and I'm just saying if Moses existed, we could pinpoint. I mean, and Bart Ehrman and others have. And even Jews, like secular Jews or scholarly Jews, acknowledge that we don't even really know if a Moses existed, but if a Moses existed, he would have existed around what? What?

John Lundwall [01:05:49] 1300 BCE? 1300 BCE plus or minus.

John Dehlin [01:05:52] And I guess I'm asking, were Jews writing? Did they have an Alphabet and were they writing on tablets and reading off. Reading an Alphabet off of tablets at 30. What?

John Lundwall [01:06:06] 30, 1300 BCE. You know, writing exists. The Phoenicians actually have an alphabetic language.

John Dehlin [01:06:14] Moses would not have been 1300 BC. He would have been much earlier, Right?

John Lundwall [01:06:18] No, Moses is about 1300 BC. I mean, look, you're dealing with mythological

John Dehlin [01:06:24] time because you don't think Moses existed.

John Lundwall [01:06:27] No, the story we have of the Exodus is mythologized history. So oral peoples mythologized their histories, literate peoples historicized their myths. And so the stories we're told in the Torah are they're coming out of this framework. So these stories are. Emerge from a different epistemological framework. We read them as history, but that's their dances, they're rituals, and they've been converted into history.

John Dehlin [01:07:04] Interesting.

John Lundwall [01:07:05] And so, yeah, you know, there might have been a Moses like figure. There might be a little kernel of historical truth to the story, but that's not. The story we have has been readapted. Re. Innovated and changed and mythologized.

John Dehlin [01:07:23] And you were going to say, do you think the Jews had an Alphabet in 1300? Did they have the practice?

John Lundwall [01:07:29] The proto Hebrew is alphabetic, but they're not writing. I mean, the question is, would God write on tablets and then would the tablets be distributed? I mean, maybe the law of Hammurabi. There's precursors to this. But the point is, is what they don't have is the Torah. They don't have the Bible, and they're not practicing their religion through text. If they had anything, it would be a law code written on a stone pillar next to their temple that says this is what the God commands.

John Dehlin [01:08:02] Okay. All right. I'm just trying to process this framework through the only tradition I'm aware of, the earliest tradition. Okay, let's keep going.

John Lundwall [01:08:11] All right. Is this interesting?

John Dehlin [01:08:13] Are we okay? It's fast. It's. No, it's. It's like blowing open doors of conceptual frameworks that we haven't, as Mormons, we haven't even considered.

John Lundwall [01:08:23] Right, right.

John Dehlin [01:08:24] Yeah, yeah. So this is fascinating. I apologize. I hope my viewers and listeners aren't annoyed that. Aren't annoyed that I'm processing.

John Lundwall [01:08:32] No, no, no. It's a different way of thinking.

Origins of Monotheism and Literacy

John Dehlin [01:08:37] Paradigm shift.

John Lundwall [01:08:38] One of the things orality does is it creates polytheism in order to line up all your life ways with the star and the herd and the hunt in the valley. You personify all these spirits, and so you have a polytheistic system. One of the things that interested me is how did we get monotheism? Because the ancient world is polytheistic. Because they're oral.

John Dehlin [01:09:05] Yeah. Like Greece originally, you know, it's polytheistic. Right.

John Lundwall [01:09:09] Rome's polytheistic.

John Dehlin [01:09:11] Yeah.

John Lundwall [01:09:12] Everyone's polytheistic until we get basically Judaism.

John Dehlin [01:09:16] Yeah, right. Yep.

John Lundwall [01:09:18] How did that happen? Yeah, that's really interesting. The temple cult is destroyed. Monotheism. The Israelites were not monotheistic.

John Dehlin [01:09:29] They weren't.

John Lundwall [01:09:30] They were not. All you have to do is read the Bible. They have groves with golden statues and calves. Asherah, the goddess that's right. It's all embedded in the text.

John Dehlin [01:09:43] In fact, Moses is getting mad at them for worshiping other gods.

John Lundwall [01:09:46] Right, Right.

John Dehlin [01:09:47] Yeah.

John Lundwall [01:09:47] Right. And Abraham.

John Dehlin [01:09:50] Yeah.

John Lundwall [01:09:50] And so the tradition, the Bible itself, tells us the Israelites were not practicing monotheists. They were polytheistic. Yeah, but actually, they're still polytheistic. They still have Asherah statues centuries after the writing of the Torah. There's excavations of Jewish shrines, synagogues that have their zodiacs and more than Yahweh. And so it takes a lot of time to have monotheism established into this religious form. And my argument is literacy backs this up, because in order to transfer all your deities that belong to the sky and the ground in all your lifeways into one deity, you have to collapse it into an abstraction, and literacy allows you to do that. And so you need literacy in order to establish monotheism. And. But it will still take centuries for. It did take centuries for that to develop. In the Book of Mormon, everyone's monotheistic, which, by the way, we should be finding monotheistic iconography in the architecture and archaeology of Mesoamerica or North America. And everywhere we go, we find polytheism. Right. So it's just mismatch. Mismatch, mismatch all the way through. We've kind of talked about these slides. I'm just trying to explain.

John Dehlin [01:11:35] No, go ahead and. Go ahead and go over that slide.

John Lundwall [01:11:37] Okay. With literate thinking, you have the observer and what you observe and a layer of thought in between. That's writing. But writing is not what you're observing. It's abstract symbols. And so you. You have what you observe or what you experience, but you access it through thinking about abstract symbols. And that little innovation rewires the brain, because now we start thinking abstractly, and so we. We think in abstract symbols to access what we observe, and then we write about it in abstract symbols, and we end up thinking and writing, which is abstract. So literacy then allows for one. The permanent recording of memory. But it allows for a lot of abstraction, which increases the word counts in your vocabularies, your technical jargons, and it just allows for a lot more complexity. Orality.

John Dehlin [01:12:46] Okay, wait, did you finish the last two boxes on that slide? So observer to writing.

John Lundwall [01:12:52] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:12:53] Object of thought.

John Lundwall [01:12:54] Differentiation, abstraction in what you're observing. The object of thought. Massive vocabularies, technical jargons. Then we start thinking in text. Writing becomes the object of thought. That's the world of the Book of Mormon. The world of the Book of Mormon is everything is textual. You think in text. Your religion is textual, your salvation is textual because you're always being referred back to reading the scriptures.

John Dehlin [01:13:26] So Joseph Smith is projecting his world of literate thinking into ancient Book of Mormon prophets.

John Lundwall [01:13:33] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:13:34] Okay, got it. Okay.

John Lundwall [01:13:37] Oral thinking is quite different in that that layer of abstraction is removed. So you have what you observe, and that's what you've got. And so. But how do you remember all the relationships that you have to remember in order to survive the star? You want to teach your people how to grow a crop. First off, you have to domesticate it. I mean, these are really large intellectual tasks that we forget. The oral primitive world did. Right. They're using enormous intellectual genius to do what they do, but it's in within an oral framework. So they negotiate with the object of thought through an intermediary, which is a social contract, a spirit. So almost everything in primary oral societies, the landscape is inhabited by spirits. The trees, the rocks, the rivers. But that's a way to negotiate with it. One to serve memory. I now know what this tree will provide whether I eat it or I don't eat it because a spirit belongs to it. It'll be a good spirit or a bad spirit. And if it's a good spirit, I can use it. If it's a bad spirit, I can't use it. Right. There's some ritual which will tell me when to arrive to pick the fruit or to germinate the seed. Right. And so a pantheon is created of spirits to negotiate with your object of thought. Okay. Completely different than a literate worldview

John Dehlin [01:15:25] because they don't understand chemical composition.

John Lundwall [01:15:28] No.

John Dehlin [01:15:28] Good fruit, bad fruit, good spirit, bad spirit. Yes, Sort of thing.

John Lundwall [01:15:33] Right, yeah. Oral. Oral cultures have limited vocabulary, reductive vocabulary. So they, you know, they don't have a word for fertility, fecundity, maturation, but they understand those things. But they express them through a ritual dealing with the spirit. And they express them using very concrete images. Penises, vulvas, lots of genitalia. But that is an image of fertility, maturation, fecundity. They understand the process, but it's related in very concrete terms. One of the things I did when reading the Book of Mormon is I just looked at the technical religious terms in the Book of Mormon. We have redemption, atonement, salvation, grace. These are the technical religious terms. And then I looked at the technical religious terms in the Popol vu, which is the Mayan creation epic, and they're all agricultural terms. It's the eats, the rain, the flowering bud. Right. These are puns. Metaphors for the growth and life of the human being and of the culture. Right. So it's the difference between orality and literacy. I'll go to this slide. Oral peoples mythologize history. Literate people historicize myth. We talked about that a little bit. There's no way oral peoples can keep a history. Histories require sources, footnotes, journals, quotations. Right, the history. Modern historiography requires all of that. Oral peoples don't keep those histories. Where is this histography coming from? In the Book of Mormon, Nephi is day one recording all the history of his people. Where is he learning that reformed Egyptians, The Egyptians aren't writing these kinds of long, sequential narrative histories. You get victory scenes. All the kings want to show everyone who they beat up. You get a lot of that in the Bronze Age, you get a lot of that in the Iron Age, but you don't get these histories. You go to Mesoamerica, you get royal Maya stela. So a King will have 3, 5, 7, 9 Stela. And on 1 Stela, you'll have a date, a place and an event that's being commemorated. That's it. So that's how Mayan history is kept. You have a date, place and event, a marriage, a treaty. Oh, victory. Victory. They like the victories. And that is. That's Mesoamerican history. Where is this histography coming from in the book? Mormon.

First-Person Historiography as a Modern Anachronism

John Dehlin [01:18:35] So the whole I Nephi, being born of goodly parents. You're not seeing that type of writing in Mesoamerica?

John Lundwall [01:18:41] No. Or in the Old World.

John Dehlin [01:18:44] Right.

John Lundwall [01:18:45] Or in Jerusalem.

John Dehlin [01:18:46] Right.

John Lundwall [01:18:47] You're not seeing it on either side of the ocean.

John Dehlin [01:18:50] Yeah.

John Lundwall [01:18:52] So where is it coming from?

John Dehlin [01:18:53] From Joseph's dad, Joseph Smith Sr. Right.

John Lundwall [01:18:59] You know, I did a podcast last night on Mormonish where there is this really curious convention in the Book of Mormon. Everyone who writes on plates in the Book of Mormon writes in first person. I Nephi, I Jacob, I Enos. They write in first person narrative. Who does that? Actually, no one. You go into the Greek and Roman histories, they write in third person narrative. When you write a history, you write about other people's places, times. You write in third person. The Book of Mormon is written in first person narrative. It only exists in the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [01:19:39] So when do you think that actually started emerging as a form of literature?

John Lundwall [01:19:45] First person, first person histography.

John Dehlin [01:19:48] That's narrative driven, like autobiography, memoir kind of stuff.

John Lundwall [01:19:52] My question is, did this exist in antiquity? It does not. So if Joseph Smith created the text, where is he getting it from? And so I looked at the late war. Solomon Spalding's manuscript found View of the Hebrews. All the texts the critics compare the Book of Mormon to, and they're all written in third person narrative, which means he's not getting that tradition from contemporary texts or from antiquity. So that is a fingerprint that the Book of Mormon is not a textual tradition. It's being orally performed using sermon oral techniques, because there's no literature that would provide a first person narrative history. More on Mormonish podcast.

John Dehlin [01:20:52] Interesting.

John Lundwall [01:20:53] Yeah, it goes deeper than that because there's textual constructions that are very unusual, including Early Modern English that shouldn't be in the Book of Mormon. And yet they're there. And I can trace them to an oral performance tradition that uses first person narrative in Early Modern English. That's probably the tradition Joseph Smith has trained himself in to perform the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [01:21:25] This is the whole William Davis laying down heads kind of thing.

John Lundwall [01:21:28] Yes, but Davis goes to the sermon tradition. That's not an Early Modern English tradition. There's another oral performative Early Modern English tradition that does the same thing. Would you like to guess what it is? It might have something to do with his treasure digging. So in any case, I'm off on a rabbit trail. Do you mind? I'm sorry about that.

John Dehlin [01:21:56] No, it's fun.

John Lundwall [01:21:58] To oral people, truth is cosmic fact. To literate people, truth is historical fact.

John Dehlin [01:22:05] This is.

John Lundwall [01:22:05] This is big. Oral peoples, you know, myths are about principles of nature that are being personified that you live off of. And so you go out and you see the sons on this position. There's a ritual that a pueblo does when they plant their corn. They go out and they sing a song. And the song is 20 identical stanzas with the name of the deity replaced in each stanza. In other words, you sing the same stanza but to a different name of a God in each stanza. And there's 20 of them. What took a long time for people to realize that the name of the deity was actually a location on the horizon, that the sun rose and set. And there were 20 of them. In other words, they were singing their agricultural calendar. The sun rises here, that's this spirit. That's spring. It sets here, that's this spirit. That's the setting of spring. It moves over here. This is when we plant. That's the planting sun. That's a different spirit. Right. And so all of their relationship is to cosmic facts observed. And so for them, truth is the reality that nature provides. It's cosmic fact. To literate peoples, we don't think that way. To us, truth is historic fact. I don't know anything about the sun. Just tell me what happened and who did it. Okay. The Book of Mormon is written from truth as historic fact in a world where truth was cosmic fact. Right. So they. In. In Maya cosmology, the human being is a cornstalk is made out of maize and. And is a seed of the sun, because maize is a seed of the sun. So they've linked the way they survived the growth of maize with the agricultural cycle of the sun which grows the maize and human beings which survive off the maize. These are cosmic facts. They perform rituals at specific seasonal points in the year where they grow the maize. This is how religion is practiced. There's no maize religion in the Book of Mormon. Again, it starts out with the convention that all truth is historically codified. Here's some texts I'm just. You know. This is a Bart Ehrman quote.

John Dehlin [01:24:53] Go and read it.

John Lundwall [01:24:54] For modern people intimately familiar with any of the major contemporary Western religions. Judaism, Christianity, Islam. It may be hard to imagine, but books played virtually no role in the polytheistic religions of the ancient Western world. These religions were almost exclusively concerned with honoring the gods through ritual acts of sacrifice. There were no doctrines to be learned as explained in books, and almost no ethical principles to be followed as laid out in books.

John Dehlin [01:25:25] That's important.

John Lundwall [01:25:27] And I'm contrasting it with our Favorite quote in 2 Nephi. Can I read it?

John Dehlin [01:25:32] Yeah, please.

John Lundwall [01:25:33] Wherefore, because that ye have a Bible, ye need not suppose that it contains all of my words. Neither need ye suppose that I have not caused it more to be written. For I command all men, both in the east and in the west, and in the north, in the south, and in the islands of the sea, that they will write the words which I speak unto them. For out of the books which shall be written, I will judge the world, every man, according to their works, according to that which is written. For behold, I shall speak unto the Jews, and they shall write it. And I shall speak unto you, unto the Nephites, and they shall write it. And I shall speak unto. I'm losing it. The tribes of the house of Israel which I have led away, and they shall write it. And I shall also speak unto all the nations of the earth, and they shall write it.

John Dehlin [01:26:23] So that's not coming from the book of Isaiah.

John Lundwall [01:26:26] No, no, this is.

John Dehlin [01:26:27] That's Joseph Smith.

John Lundwall [01:26:29] This is Nephi, right?

John Dehlin [01:26:31] Joseph Smith writing Nephi.

John Lundwall [01:26:32] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:26:32] Joseph Smith writing Nephi with his literate culture.

John Lundwall [01:26:36] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:26:37] Yeah.

John Lundwall [01:26:38] Right.

John Dehlin [01:26:38] As God Basically Right, but.

John Lundwall [01:26:41] But the whole paradigm is laid right out there. 600 BCE everything is to be written down. God speaks, people write it. This is how religion is practiced.

John Dehlin [01:26:52] So that's like a massive anachronism. Just. Yeah, those three verses kind of, it's, it's almost like a silver bullet. Right? You're laughing. It's.

John Lundwall [01:27:02] It's a death blow.

John Dehlin [01:27:03] Is it? Yeah, yeah. Because 600 BC, 550 BC people in the Americas weren't thinking about God says something, write it down.

John Lundwall [01:27:16] Nor in Jerusalem.

John Dehlin [01:27:19] That's so good. You keep reminding us.

John Lundwall [01:27:21] Yes, yes, again, that takes centuries after in order for this kind of consciousness to emerge. So sure enough, we need to be finding this in the Americas though, right? The apologists are always giving us comparative texts in the Old World, but you got to be showing me writing on gold plates in the Americas.

John Dehlin [01:27:49] Yeah.

John Lundwall [01:27:54] This is just how literate and oral peoples practice their religion. On the one side, it's laws, doctrine, sermons, histories. On the other side, dances, rituals, cosmology, agriculture. That's all the cultures in the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans. That's how it's practiced. The Book of Mormon is on the left. So completely anachronistic. I give an example here of the Pyramid Texts. These are all rituals and they're astronomical texts. You perform a ritual for the afterlife when it's astrologically, astronomically primed. This is how the Popol Vuh is written. The Popol Vu is an astronomical text. The only surviving codices that survive in Mayan are all astronomical texts. So I'm giving an example here. Here are the examples that Scripture Central tells people. We have found writing on gold plates. And this proves the claim that writing can be on gold plates for the Book of Mormon. Well, here's the top three examples. They the Darius gold plates, the Etruscan gold book and the Pergi golden tablets. And what they seem to miss is that all the writing on these tablets are rituals. The writing on the gold plates of the Book of Mormon is supposed to be history. Now remember, right. To oral peoples, truth is cosmic fact performed in a ritual. To literate peoples, truth is historic fact read in a book. Right. The writing on gold plates is a historical book and all the comparisons they compare it to are ritual texts.

Gold Plates, Ritual Writing, and Ancient Parallels

John Dehlin [01:29:44] So you're saying in the Darius gold plates, the Etruscan gold book and the. How do you pronounce that? Pyrgi.

John Lundwall [01:29:52] The Pergi golden tablets.

John Dehlin [01:29:53] Pyrgi golden tablets, there's no first person narrative, storytelling history.

John Lundwall [01:29:57] No.

John Dehlin [01:29:58] And then in this, this Year this happened, and then that happened. And I was really strong and confident and my dad was a pretty good guy and my brothers mistreated me. There's none of that type of narrative on any of these gold plates. Is that right?

John Lundwall [01:30:11] That's cool. Correct? That is correct.

John Dehlin [01:30:13] And that's important.

John Lundwall [01:30:14] It's very important. These examples that they use to authenticate the Book of Mormon are actually examples that argue against the authenticity of the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [01:30:25] For those who want to scratch the surface of their argument.

John Lundwall [01:30:27] For those who want to scratch the

John Dehlin [01:30:28] surface, which is actually very few people,

John Lundwall [01:30:30] these cultures are thinking not only astrologically but alchemically. You write on gold to negotiate with the gods. And so it's always a ritual that brings you into the presence of the deity or the deity into the presence of your court. Right. Curse tablets are always written on lead. Right. They're thinking alchemically, lead is a base metal. I'm going to curse someone, I will write it on lead. Treaties, diplomas, they're written on brass. Right. So they use different metals to write on. But there are no histories being written on metal. None. And people aren't thinking histiographically in this time period.

John Dehlin [01:31:15] So just tell us, do you have a sense for what those three examples of ancient gold plates are saying? I guess you're going to say ritual.

John Lundwall [01:31:23] Sure, sure. No. The Darius gold plate is a dedicatory ritual. It was buried in the floor of the palace to dedicate the palace to the realm of the gods. And so it's, you know, this is

John Dehlin [01:31:39] like the Book of Breathings. It's. It's basically funerary text.

John Lundwall [01:31:45] That's not. That's a dedicatory text.

John Dehlin [01:31:46] I mean. Okay, but it's the same category.

John Lundwall [01:31:49] It's. It's a ritual text that unites the human realm with the divine realm, right?

John Dehlin [01:31:54] Yeah. It's ritualistic.

John Lundwall [01:31:56] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:31:56] Yeah.

John Lundwall [01:31:57] The Etruscan gold book is a funerary text. But. But guess what? That is just pictures. Right. It's not a text.

John Dehlin [01:32:06] Right.

John Lundwall [01:32:07] It's, it's, it's. There's these Orphic gold tablets, and they're the size of a credit card. And they're buried with the dead.

John Dehlin [01:32:15] Yeah.

John Lundwall [01:32:15] And they're. They're instructions for the afterlife. They're actually fun to read because there's like 30 or 40 of them have been found. Orphic priests would go around and sell these. This is how they would make money. You will be guaranteed a blessed afterlife if you buy my tablet and it gives you directions. But the problem is they've collected enough of them where none of the tablets are agreeing with each other. So if you buy this tablet, you go on the left road. If you buy this tablet, you go on the right road. Right. And so in any case, it's an afterlife ritual. The Pergigon tablet is another dedicatory ritual nailed to a temple post, dedicating the temple to the goddess.

John Dehlin [01:33:00] So for them to prove their point, they wouldn't just need to find gold plates with writing on it around 600 years before Jesus. They would need to have alphabets with. I got a thumbs up. Alphabets with first person historical narrative with dates and places and.

John Lundwall [01:33:23] On gold plates.

John Dehlin [01:33:24] On gold plates. Which they haven't found.

John Lundwall [01:33:26] And it needs to be in the Americas, right?

John Dehlin [01:33:29] Yeah.

John Lundwall [01:33:31] Actually, there is one example of writing on gold plate in Mesa America. It's in Chichen Itza. And it's. Guess what it is. It's a ritual.

John Dehlin [01:33:43] It's a ritual, yes.

John Lundwall [01:33:45] So they found 12, 15 golden discs, Mossovich pictures. A few of them have Mayan glyphs and they're being used as a ritual. They're being torn apart. So it's a votive offering for when they go to war. They're doing a ritual, please bless me. I'm going to kill this ritual tablet, toss it into a cenote. So again, it's a ritual tablet.

John Dehlin [01:34:11] And the approximate century for that, 9 to 1200 CE. So way later.

John Lundwall [01:34:16] Way later.

John Dehlin [01:34:17] And not first person narrative.

John Lundwall [01:34:19] No, actually of the. I can't remember. There's 1215 tablets that have been found. Only two or three have Mayan glyphs on them. But it's a ritual scene.

John Dehlin [01:34:30] But no alphabets.

John Lundwall [01:34:31] No, no. It's a logosyllabic script.

John Dehlin [01:34:33] Okay. Yeah. So there's nothing anywhere near, you know, artifacts that would substantiate the existence of Old Testament stuff written on brass or gold plates 600 years before Jesus. In a historical form.

John Lundwall [01:34:50] No.

John Dehlin [01:34:51] Yeah. Anywhere for any civilization at all.

John Lundwall [01:34:55] Correct. The world of the Book of Mormon only exists in the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [01:35:01] Yeah.

John Lundwall [01:35:01] It cannot be corroborated anywhere else.

John Dehlin [01:35:03] And it coincidentally reflects Joseph smith's worldview in 1823.

John Lundwall [01:35:08] And the sermons.

John Dehlin [01:35:09] So many ways.

John Lundwall [01:35:10] In so many ways.

John Dehlin [01:35:11] Because it has Protestant Christianity. I mean, the anachronisms are endless. It's not just goal. It's not. Not just like horses and steel. And It's Protestant Christianity. 600 years before Jesus was born. Somehow Nephites knew the name of Jesus before Jews, from whose loins Jesus sprang. Somehow the Nephites knew the name of Jesus but the Israelites, who were the ancestors of Jesus, didn't know the name of Jesus, let alone practice baptism and confirmation of and read Protestant 19th century American sermons. It's kind of silly that we're even having this conversation. Is it? Is that fair or not fair?

John Lundwall [01:35:56] It is. Well, it's silly in a good way because it's so much fun, John.

John Dehlin [01:36:00] It is kind of fun. We're laughing. I mean, people who are losing their faith might not be laughing. You know, it might be sad or tragic for them, Right?

John Lundwall [01:36:10] Well, yes, yeah. But life's a journey.

John Dehlin [01:36:18] Yeah.

John Lundwall [01:36:18] You walk out and. Yeah, no, it definitely has serious consequences. And I think that's why shows like yours are important. That's why you have these conversations. Even though it's silly, it's good to leave the testimony out there.

John Dehlin [01:36:37] I mean, honestly, if for many people religion is myth and ritual. Like, I don't need to take that from anyone. Like, if somebody wants to in 2026, wants to establish their beliefs in myth and ritual and tradition, that's fine. I think it's just there's a certain subgroup who care that it's actually true, that care that it's actually factual or historical and that if it is, they're willing to go all in and then some. But if it's not, then they're like, well, I want to use my 10% on other 10% of my income on other causes. I want to. Maybe I want to drink coffee because it makes me feel happy. And they don't want to be constrained by all the demands and rules of a religious tradition if it's not actually true. That's who these episodes are for. It's not to spoil the faith of people who want to live in a mythic, ritualistic, symbolic religious world. It's for the people who care about facts and evidence and history and truth and want to root their lives in that.

John Lundwall [01:37:52] I agree. I have a few quibbles.

John Dehlin [01:37:56] Go ahead, quibble. Quibble away. That's why you're here.

John Lundwall [01:37:59] Quibble away. This is an adjacent topic. Not on, but it's on the nature of religion, which I quibble with. When people discuss it, Human beings, everybody wants to live by truth and fact and reason.

John Dehlin [01:38:20] Are you sure?

John Lundwall [01:38:22] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:38:22] I meet people all the time that say, I don't care if it's true, it's good. You know what I mean? There's the validity and the utility and they'll say, I don't care if there was actually golden plates. This helps me raise this Mormon framework, helps me raise my Kids, I understand,

John Lundwall [01:38:37] but they've transferred the kind of truth they're willing to live with, but they're still living by truth. It doesn't need to be histor. Look, there are different kinds of truth, John.

John Dehlin [01:38:45] Right. Okay.

John Lundwall [01:38:46] Historical truth is just one kind of truth.

John Dehlin [01:38:48] Moral truth, moral truth, social truth, mythic

John Lundwall [01:38:52] truth, cosmological truth, religion weaves through all of those. And so a lot of people are just stuck on the historic truth when in fact, religion is developed. You know, people are homo religioso, autonomous creators of religion. We're always creating some mythic system in. To contain the truths we're willing to live. Anyway. That's a completely other topic. But sure enough, there are a lot of people. You know, I can just reflect personally. Mormonism worked for me for as long as I found awe in it. And when I no longer found awe or wonder in it, it became a drudgery. But what really got me out of the church was when I realized not only is it not true, it's not good. And that. What's that for you?

John Dehlin [01:40:00] I mean, that's your calculus, right?

John Lundwall [01:40:03] That is my calculus, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:40:05] Yeah, yeah.

John Lundwall [01:40:08] But I have lots of family and friends who still are tbm Mormons. I love them.

John Dehlin [01:40:13] Yeah.

John Lundwall [01:40:14] And to them it's good.

John Dehlin [01:40:16] Yeah. Right? Yeah. Okay.

John Lundwall [01:40:21] I just had a brother publish a book from BYU Religious studies called the Book of Mormon Authentic Evidences of a Miracle. It's a deeply scholarly apologetic work, so you can imagine our conversations.

John Dehlin [01:40:37] This your brother?

John Lundwall [01:40:38] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:40:38] You have a brother that works?

John Lundwall [01:40:41] He's a intellectual rights property attorney, but he wrote a book with his wife published through BYU Studies.

John Dehlin [01:40:51] Oh, wow.

John Lundwall [01:40:51] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:40:52] Whoa. So he's an uber BYU apologist? In a sense, yes. And you're doing the opposite type of work.

John Lundwall [01:41:00] My grandfather was N.B. lundball. All the way through the 90s, everybody had an N.B. lundwald book in their Temples of the Most High. Fate of the Persecutors of the Prophet Joseph Smith, Discourses on the Holy Ghost, Lectures on Faith. Those are the. My books. My grandfather.

John Dehlin [01:41:17] We need to have you tell your Mormon story separate from this episode.

John Lundwall [01:41:20] Basically separate. That, sadly, is not a fun story to tell.

John Dehlin [01:41:26] Okay, well, let's finish out this presentation then. What else we got?

John Lundwall [01:41:33] Actually, we can just. We've already talked about this. Israelites is an oral tradition. Jews is a literate religion. Takes centuries for that transfer to happen. It's certainly centuries after Nephi leaves Jerusalem. This goes over several verses in the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [01:41:54] Let's do it. Let's do it. Yeah.

John Lundwall [01:41:55] Go for it this?

John Dehlin [01:41:57] Yeah.

John Lundwall [01:41:58] Several verses in the Book of Mormon. Over 140 mentions of recordkeeping, 117 mentions of writing in the Book of Mormon. Mosiah 28:17. The Record of the Jaredites gives a historical account of the Jaredites. I'm summarizing. I back to the Tower of Babel into the creation of Adam.

John Dehlin [01:42:16] Okay, so Joseph Smith is basically projecting his writing paradigm. Not just 600 B.C. he's projecting it 6,000 years to Adam. To Adam and then through the Tower of Babel and then the Jaredite culture.

John Lundwall [01:42:35] This is again in the primary text of Mormonism, Moses, chapter six. Adam teaches his sons and daughters to read and write so that they can live by the law of the Lord. So writing is connected to correct religious practice.

John Dehlin [01:42:50] And you mentioned like the six or seven written languages that emerged. None of them emerged before 6,000 years ago. Correct.

John Lundwall [01:43:00] The earliest 3400, 3500 BCE.

John Dehlin [01:43:03] Yeah.

John Lundwall [01:43:04] Logosyllabic scripts serving the oral tradition, not alphabetical, that are polytheistic.

John Dehlin [01:43:10] Right, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay, keep going.

John Lundwall [01:43:15] Messiah 24, 5, 7. The Lamanites keep records so that they may write one to another. So in the Book of Mormon, one of the arguments is the Nephites, we lost all their writing. Okay, well, the Lamanites had the same writing system because the Nephites give it to them Amla.

John Dehlin [01:43:32] And they're writing to each other.

John Lundwall [01:43:33] That's right.

John Dehlin [01:43:34] So we know the Lamanites didn't lose the right. They didn't become the savages that Joseph Smith wants.

John Lundwall [01:43:39] They're writing in the same alphabetic writing system that the Nephites are writing.

John Dehlin [01:43:44] I guess Joseph Smith or apologists would say they became so evil they forgot how to write.

John Lundwall [01:43:50] Of course.

John Dehlin [01:43:52] Again, what civilization has become so evil it forgot how to write? Is there any other example in the history of did Germans forget how to write under Hitler?

John Lundwall [01:44:03] No, no, no, they didn't forget.

John Dehlin [01:44:06] They wrote a lot under Hitler.

John Lundwall [01:44:07] They wrote a lot. I'm saying they didn't forget how to write.

John Dehlin [01:44:09] That's what I'm saying. Like they wrote more maybe under Hitler. All those scientists doing eugenics and stuff, they're writing a whole lot. Yes. So evil doesn't make you forget. Becoming evil doesn't make you forget how to write.

John Lundwall [01:44:21] No.

John Dehlin [01:44:21] At least there's no evidence of that. I mean, that's all the whole mound builder myth. Right. That the dark savages couldn't have done. Sophisticated things like that's racism projected back. Right.

John Lundwall [01:44:35] In these cultures, writing is a projection of the political state. So if you because that's how you manage and control your state. And so evil would not destroy writing. It would co opt it to serve its ends, which means it would proliferate.

John Dehlin [01:44:56] Yeah.

John Lundwall [01:44:59] In any case, the Lamanites are writing in the same system as the Nephites, so you can't argue that we lose it all. And again, I give the example of the Mayan scribes learning the Spanish Alphabet. Within one generation, within two generations, they're reading and writing Spanish because they understand

John Dehlin [01:45:21] how to read, right?

John Lundwall [01:45:22] Right. And they never lose it.

John Dehlin [01:45:25] Right? Yeah.

John Lundwall [01:45:27] Mosiah 28:20. All the kings keep a record and hand them down to every generation. So the political state is entirely managed by tax.

The Book of Mormon's Impossibly Literate Culture

John Dehlin [01:45:38] By the way, the apologists want us to think that this microgeography with this micro culture got snuffed out. Wouldn't surrounding cultures. Wouldn't there have been trade?

John Lundwall [01:45:51] Of course.

John Dehlin [01:45:52] Wouldn't there have been exchange of cultural, scientific, whatever, social artifacts, such that writing and language would have spread to the surrounding cultures?

John Lundwall [01:46:06] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [01:46:07] Because they could have existed in a small, little purely geographical area without any interaction with surrounding cultures.

John Lundwall [01:46:13] Nobody does that. We study a village in Clear Creek Canyon, Fremont Indian State park, south central Utah. It's the largest Fremont village yet excavated. Its peak population was 120 people over centuries. Right. So the average population is about 70 people. Right. We find artifacts in their pit houses, and we can trace the artifacts. There's seashells from the Pacific Coast. There's obsidian and artifacts from Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, northern Utah. They have trade networks. They have motifs that are coming in that show up in Mesa Verde. They show up in southern pueblos. So we know that they're trading with specific peoples, with specific materials, with specific motifs. This is a group of 70 people. And we can tell you how far their trade network is. But they have them. And so. And everywhere we go, archaeologists can give us a fingerprint as to how this culture is working. So sure enough, if you have this really limited geography, look, writing, alphabetic writing, reductive writing is a powerful technology that would spread. Maze is a powerful technology. And once they develop that, it spread everywhere. Writing would be similar. It would spread everywhere. So, no.

John Dehlin [01:47:52] Yeah.

John Lundwall [01:47:54] Messiah 2:34. The records of prophecy from all the prophets since the days of Lehi are kept in writing. So now we have the political state managed by text, and we have the religious state managed by the text. And by the way, in these cultures, there's no church and state. Remember, Mosiah reforms the government with judges, while Alma creates a church. Complete anachronism. Doesn't exist. Alma 18:38Ammon teaches the lame knights from the scriptures, Right. So the entire missionary programs and stories in the Book of Mormon come by people reading texts. Alma 37:9 records are necessary to keep people living the correct law and bring them to repentance. The primary cultural law is in writing and record keeping. All these are anachronistic. Mormon 9, 32 Records written in reformed Egyptian, but would have been written in Hebrew if the plates were sufficiently large. We need to find Hebrew writing. And even if 99% of it were destroyed, we would still be finding tens of thousands of fragments. It would be written on stone, bone, clay, textile, walls, tombs, trees. We should have tens of thousands of scraps. This is what we have in Rome. 99% of it is gone, and we have tens of thousands of scraps. And 80% of the proper names in the Book of Mormon are Semitic. And that tells you the language they're speaking because your rulers are named after the language you speak. So they're speaking a Semitic language. We're being told they're writing in Hebrew. So we should have a fully literate Hebrew writing system. And if 99% of it is gone, we're still going to have tens of thousands of scraps.

John Dehlin [01:49:59] All right, So in all sorts of ways, the Book of Mormon describes an impossibly literate culture.

John Lundwall [01:50:12] That's what this verse is. This is Helaman 3, if I can read it, please. And now there are many records kept of the proceedings of this people by many of this people, which are particular and very large concerning them. But behold, a hundredth part of the proceedings of this people, yea, the account of the Lamanites and, and the Nephites are wars, contentions, dissensions, preaching, prophecies, shipping, building, building of ships. They're building of temples, of synagogues and sanctuaries, and the righteousness and their wickedness and their murders and the robbing and their plundering and all manner of abominations and whoredoms cannot be contained in this work. But behold, there are many books and many records of every kind, and they have been kept chiefly by the Nephites,

John Dehlin [01:50:54] but also by the Lamanites.

John Lundwall [01:50:55] But also by the Lamentation.

John Dehlin [01:50:57] Yeah. So I mean, Lamanites were highly literate.

John Lundwall [01:50:59] Highly literate.

John Dehlin [01:51:00] Writing with alphabets. Yes, writing every little jot and tittle of what's going on in their cultures. And yet Native American, Mesoamerican, South American cultures reflect none of this, none of that. Not even an Alphabet.

John Lundwall [01:51:18] Right.

John Dehlin [01:51:19] Let alone advanced writing.

John Lundwall [01:51:21] Yes. Okay, yeah, we can end on this slide because this kind of gives you the trajectory of how frameworks of thought existed coexisting with writing. And I've lined it with the, you know, the Book of Mormon. Right. 2300. The Jaredites are from the Tower of Babel. Right. So if we take that dating, then, you know, that's 22, 2300 BCE and the Jaredites are writing a literate history with sermons. So but in that world, that's where we get the pyramid texts. That's what we should be getting. We should be getting astronomical ritual texts. That's how that religion is practiced. And instead we get the Book of Ethereum. It doesn't belong 600 BCE the there, the temple cult. And the word is still ritual. Everything's being done by dances and sacrifices. There are no brass plates there, there is no Bible that there are. There is no text based religion. 400 BCE we have collecting. I can't read it.

John Dehlin [01:52:40] In the real world we have collecting the traditions in writing.

John Lundwall [01:52:44] In writing. And the writing of the Torah. Right. That's in the real world. But the Torah is again, the Torah is the book of the law with a lot of oral traditions and mythologized history in it. In the Book of Mormon we have a gold plate tradition where everyone's recording everything in modern historical, in first person with Alphabet. Yes.

John Dehlin [01:53:10] Dates and names and narrative and feelings.

John Lundwall [01:53:13] And the first narrative history doesn't belong anywhere in the world. Only exists in the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [01:53:18] Yeah.

John Lundwall [01:53:20] So 0ce, we have illiterate Jesus again. In the New Testament, Jesus preaches using oral stories, he preaches parables. When he comes to the Nephites, he tells everyone to read scriptures. I mean, I mean, why am I the only one laughing? This is hilarious.

John Dehlin [01:53:40] He may as well say pull out Jesus may as well have told the Nephites. Pull out your triple combinations and turn to page 47. Right, right. Or pull out your Doctrine and Covenants.

John Lundwall [01:53:54] That's right. That's what he's saying. 400 C.E. we have the. The word is canonized. Right. This is the canonization of the New Testament.

John Dehlin [01:54:09] Well, that's where they're picking through scrolls to decide which scrolls are official and holy.

John Lundwall [01:54:14] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:54:15] They're not putting books together in, you know, in chapters.

John Lundwall [01:54:19] They're forming the New Testament. Right, right. In the old world, in the Book

John Dehlin [01:54:24] of Mormon of scrolls. I just want to make that point.

John Lundwall [01:54:26] They're forming the New Testament, but in the Book of Mormon they've already cited several passages of the New Testament before it was formed from libraries of written

John Dehlin [01:54:36] text before Jesus was born.

John Lundwall [01:54:37] Before Jesus was born. All true. See, this is fun. I know that people are struggling.

John Dehlin [01:54:43] We're mocking people's sacred beliefs. Well, I know we're not intending to, but it is funny.

John Lundwall [01:54:49] It's hilarious.

John Dehlin [01:54:50] Yeah. Tragic. Yeah, yeah.

John Lundwall [01:54:54] Humor is God's chief attribute, John.

John Dehlin [01:54:57] Just remember that I once had a cousin tell me the chief proof that the Book of Mormon isn't true is that there's nothing funny, intentionally funny. There's no humor in the entire Book of Mormon. There's not a trace of humor.

John Lundwall [01:55:11] Ah, that's actually a good point. Rich cultural texts have a wide spectrum of human experience, including humor. So, yeah, the Book of Mormon is a univocal sermon text. It's quite humorless. It probably explains many of the gospel doctrines I sat through. Anyway, thousand ce, we get manuscripts and primacy of print. The word is inerrant. Actually, there's an evolution as to how people relate to the Scriptures. You know, around a thousand ce, they're actually developing punctuation rules, grammar rules, and so they're trying to create an inerrant copy of a text, and this gets them to thinking about an inerrant text. Right. And so there's a very strong Protestant tradition of the Scriptures being inerrant, but it follows a trajectory of what's happening in the history of literacy. By 1500 CE, we have the Protestant Reformation. This is where the Bible is interpreted largely as historical. And before that, the Bible. You know, Aquinas says there's four ways to interpret Scripture. Only the base, most basic way is historical and literal. There's much more sophisticated ways. Allegorical, Christological, eschatological. In any case, 1800 CE, Great Awakening. The word is literal. Well, the Book of Mormon cosmovision exists somewhere between the 1500 and 1800 timeline, because that is this idea of the word being literate, literal, historical. That is a modern sort of consciousness that develops during this time period. So there it is. The Book of Mormon is completely out of time and place for when it's supposed to have been written, which is how.

John Dehlin [01:57:26] I mean, that makes sense. If it's not a translation of ancient history on golden plates.

John Lundwall [01:57:35] It's not.

John Dehlin [01:57:35] It's exactly what it should be if it were made up by Joseph Smith.

John Lundwall [01:57:39] Yes. Right.

John Dehlin [01:57:42] Let's do the final slides. Just because I think they're good. There's two more slides.

John Lundwall [01:57:49] Okay, well, genres of texts and epistemology of truth. So you look at the Mesoamerican texts, They're sacred narratives.

John Dehlin [01:57:57] This is like the pulpol vu.

John Lundwall [01:57:58] This is the popovu.

John Dehlin [01:57:59] Yeah.

John Lundwall [01:58:00] It's a sacred mythic narrative that is being richly performed. It actually was in a text. It was a ritual dance. Right. It's performed in the place to see the temple, the ebal, which is the place to see where they give their astrological prognostications for the agricultural year. It's cosmology and astronomical. It's astrological and calendric. Historical only in the fact. As far as other Mesoamerican texts, Mayans

John Dehlin [01:58:32] had a calendar, right?

John Lundwall [01:58:33] Mayans had a very sophisticated calendar.

John Dehlin [01:58:35] Yeah.

John Lundwall [01:58:36] You know, the calendar in the Book of Mormon exists nowhere in history for 500 years. The calendar in the Book of Mormon is this many years since Lehi left Jerusalem. Calendars in antiquity are all created around kings, crops and cosmos, cycles of either regnal reigns. The Book of Mormon should be saying in this year of this king, in this month. That's what I should be reading to be reading an authentic calendar. The calendar in the Book of Mormon is a narrative device that's non abstracted, that's used only in the narrative and exists nowhere else in the world. There's no narrative calendar that celebrates a migration as a zero point calendar date. Okay. Even the Hijri, which is an Islamic calendar based off the migration of Muhammad, is a lunar calendar that's abstracted through the solar year. So even though it has like a migration behind it, it still has all the elements that you need to have have a calendar. Those don't exist in the book. Every motif has a problem, right. The calendar doesn't work. Kingship doesn't work. The wilderness doesn't work. Every motif has a problem. If you're comparing it to antiquity, not

John Dehlin [02:00:01] to mention Protestant frontier Christianity before Jesus was born. Right, yeah.

John Lundwall [02:00:08] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:00:09] Well, anyway, so the Book of Mormon, I have that on the right side.

John Lundwall [02:00:13] Yeah. Is history, Isaiah, allegory, sermons, letters.

John Dehlin [02:00:16] History is bad because they didn't.

John Lundwall [02:00:18] They weren't writing in modern history.

John Dehlin [02:00:21] Isaiah shouldn't be there.

John Lundwall [02:00:22] No one was quoting Isaiah. Not even Isaiah was quoting Isaiah. Okay, allegory, the olive tree.

John Dehlin [02:00:30] Why are you laughing at the olive tree allegory?

John Lundwall [02:00:34] Well, there were no olive trees in the New World. There were no.

John Dehlin [02:00:37] You talk about the Jacob 2.

John Lundwall [02:00:39] Yeah, Jacob's Jacob. Yeah. The big 80 verse allegory of the olive tree.

John Dehlin [02:00:44] I guess that doesn't make sense. If they don't have olives, there's no olive trees. Are there olives in native in Mesoamerica? What the.

John Lundwall [02:00:54] And Jacob.

John Dehlin [02:00:55] Well, that's A huge anachronism. Why don't I know about the olive tree of Jacob being an anachronism?

John Lundwall [02:01:02] No one would have known what it was. Why spend all that space on gold plates to tell an allegory? No one's sermonizing. No one's allegorizing, and no one's sermonizing, Allegorizing about something they have no idea about.

John Dehlin [02:01:17] Hey, Jacob, what's an olive? What's an olive? Jacob?

John Lundwall [02:01:24] There's no sermon culture in antiquity, not in the old world or in the new world. Where are these sermons coming from?

John Dehlin [02:01:30] Right, so Benjamin and Mosiah are preaching sermons. Yes. There weren't sermons 600 years before Christ.

John Lundwall [02:01:38] It's not what they did. There are letters, wars. This is modern historiography. Monotheism, again, that doesn't exist in. In our Mesoamerican text. So there's just huge mismatches.

John Dehlin [02:01:53] Wow.

John Lundwall [02:01:53] That are. You know. In my view, these are unscalable and

John Dehlin [02:02:01] devastating. Devastating to a historical Book of Mormon. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. All right, final slide.

Joseph Smith's Assumptions Revealed in the Text

John Lundwall [02:02:10] Joseph Smith's assumptions revealed in the text of the Book of Mormon. History is literate. All peoples read and write. This is incorrect. Religion is literate. The Lord commands people to write his revelations. This is incorrect. Biblical history is literal. You know, Tower of Babel, Flood, Adam, Eve. This is incorrect. Writing histories are commonplace. Actually, incorrect. Monotheism dates to the beginning of time. Incorrect. Ancient writing systems can encode vast amounts of information and small amounts of writing. Incorrect. All these assumptions which are embedded in some way into the text of the Book of Mormon are incorrect, which makes the entire text of the Book of Mormon anachronistic.

John Dehlin [02:02:58] And then if you add to that DNA shows that Native Americans come from Asia, not from the Middle East. You add to that all the anachronisms of steel and silk, and sure enough,

John Lundwall [02:03:10] you can't find archeology, anthropology, linguistics, or DNA to confirm the Book of Mormon. The apologists are always going to the text to show the complexity of the text. There's no way Joseph Smith could have done it. What I've done is I've gone to the text and I've shown actually, the text disproves the text.

John Dehlin [02:03:30] What about chiasm? Chiasmus?

John Lundwall [02:03:33] What about it?

John Dehlin [02:03:34] Well, I mean, John Jack Welch says that there's chismic literary structures in the Book of Mormon that proves that it's ancient.

John Lundwall [02:03:44] Well, unfortunately for John Welch, there's chiasmus in the Doctrine Covenants. There's chiasmus in Dr. Seuss. There's chiasmus in the late war. You might want to talk to Randy Bell.

John Dehlin [02:03:59] Actually, no, I have. There's chiasmus in the book. In the Bible, right?

John Lundwall [02:04:04] Chiasmus in the Bible. But they're arguing the Book of Mormon is a biblical text. I'm arguing the more biblical the Book of Mormon is, the less historical it is. It shouldn't be there in the Americas. But you know, chiasmus, by the way, is a oral performatory technique. This is how oral bards memorized information. They would telemotif one way and reverse it the other way. This is why it survives in Hebrew, because Hebrew is primarily a spoken language

John Dehlin [02:04:36] and that aids in memory, right?

John Lundwall [02:04:38] Yes. So it's used as memory technique. And that memory technique was used for centuries outside of the Hebrews. Right. So if there's a chiasmus is interesting in the Book of Mormon, but here's what we know about the Book of Mormon. It's not textual, it's oral performance. And if it's oral performance, Joseph orally.

John Dehlin [02:05:03] Orally narrated it.

John Lundwall [02:05:05] Yeah. So here's the rub, everyone. Both apologists and critics look at the Book of Mormon through the lens of literary technique and rules. Oh, no, if you're going to look at the Book of Mormon, you need to look at it through oral technique and rules because it's being orally performed. They're different rules.

John Dehlin [02:05:34] And we know that because Joseph. Well, because grammar, punctuation, spell, you know, capitalization was all added after, correct?

John Lundwall [02:05:42] Yes. That's not the point. First off, he's dictating it with his head in the hat. He's orally performing it.

John Dehlin [02:05:49] Yet the plates. Oh, we forgot. The plates aren't in the room.

John Lundwall [02:05:52] The plates aren't even in the room.

John Dehlin [02:05:53] He's using an artifact of treasure digging to channel it. Without the plates in the room, that's a problem.

John Lundwall [02:06:01] This is good news, actually, because you can therefore look at the Book of Mormon as an oral product and look at how one would have to compose the Book of Mormon using only oral rules. And one of the things people do is chiasmus. Right. They develop a story and repeat it one way and the other. And it's not just Joseph Smith. Joseph Smith could have done that and did do it. We know that, but people around him were doing that. So if it only appears in the Book of Mormon and in ancient Hebrew texts, I would find that very interesting. But that's not what we're getting. So remember, the Book of Mormon is an extraordinary claim and it requires extraordinary evidence. Chiasmus is interesting. But not extraordinary. What do I need? I need alphabetic, literate, Hebraic, Isaiah writing on gold plates in the Americas. That's what you're going to tell me, that you are the Lord's anointed and I owe you 10%? You owe me those things.

John Dehlin [02:07:21] Say it one more time.

John Lundwall [02:07:22] I need literate, historical, alphabetic writing on gold plates in the Americas in that

John Dehlin [02:07:32] time frame, in that timeframe 600 years before.

John Lundwall [02:07:36] Right. What is the extraordinary evidence they provide? It's chiasmus.

John Dehlin [02:07:43] It's really warm. Warm fuzzies. It's the Holy Ghost.

John Lundwall [02:07:46] Well, I understand that. Yeah, I understand that. But they try to be technical.

John Dehlin [02:07:50] It's Nahom. It's Nahom. Nahom is the extraordinary evidence.

John Lundwall [02:07:56] Isn't it interesting? The only archaeological evidence we can find for the Book of Mormon is in the old world amongst the people who are trying to hide. They're trying to hide from everyone. And yet in the old world, we keep finding evidence of them every time we pick up a rock. But in the new world, where there's billions of people, we can't find a single thing. I'm laughing again because it's a little funny, John. Enjoy it.

John Dehlin [02:08:21] I'm laughing. Just. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a level where this is all ridiculously hilarious. And for the people's lives that are impacted, if the Church isn't good, as you have concluded, then there's a level where it's tragic simultaneously for the people that.

John Lundwall [02:08:42] I've had plenty of tragedies in the church, John.

John Dehlin [02:08:45] Yeah.

John Lundwall [02:08:45] I spent two years in litigation with the Church, so I know many things. I've looked behind the curtain in the church, so I'm. I understand that people will struggle. I struggled. I walked into the desert metaphorically and literally, and had to rebuild myself. It's not easy. It's death, but there is rebirth. So if you're running away from that kind of transformation, you will struggle a lot.

John Dehlin [02:09:33] Have you found contentment or a form of happiness or health on the other side of that?

John Lundwall [02:09:39] You see those photographs I showed you at the top of this presentation?

John Dehlin [02:09:43] Those photographs aren't made by a sad, miserable man.

John Lundwall [02:09:48] Ironically, the desert has a lot of healing. I walk out and see wonderful things, beautiful things. And it's not just the Utah desert. You know, like I say, I travel, I go around the world, and I look at these things and it's. There's a lot of beauty. But, you know, I have a lot of trauma. I have scars. I'm not the same. You can't go through these kinds of things, and you change, and that's okay. Change is life. So you seek healthy changes. And as you know, it's hard. Right. You have a degree in psychology, right?

John Dehlin [02:10:41] I do, yeah. Yeah. Any final words? John Lundwall?

John Lundwall [02:10:49] Was it interesting?

John Dehlin [02:10:51] Yeah. So what about if somebody says, hey, the Book of Mormon provides me with good moral structure. I don't care if it's true. True, Capital T. It's got moral truths. It's got myths and stories to live. It's got heroes, moral principles. I don't care if it's historically true.

John Lundwall [02:11:11] It's true. That's correct.

John Dehlin [02:11:13] That's a valid. Is that a valid framework?

John Lundwall [02:11:15] Sure.

John Dehlin [02:11:16] Okay.

John Lundwall [02:11:19] That works.

John Dehlin [02:11:20] Yeah. That's simple.

John Lundwall [02:11:22] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:11:23] Okay. All right. So you can ignore everything we just talked about and just. Just enjoy the book for its moral value.

Closing Reflections on the Book of Mormon

John Lundwall [02:11:33] It does have. You know what? It has great sermons. I have a special relationship with the Book of Mormon. I've done a lot of reading of it. And how long did you believe it

John Dehlin [02:11:44] before you stopped believing in it?

John Lundwall [02:11:47] Well, I was, you know, I am out of the church only six, seven years ago.

John Dehlin [02:11:55] Oh, okay. So for at least four decades or so.

John Lundwall [02:11:59] Yeah. You were believing in the over 40 decades. 40, 40 years.

John Dehlin [02:12:05] You were believing the historicity of the Book of Mormon.

John Lundwall [02:12:09] Yes. I started building my shelf slowly, and that's what I did. I retracted to this can't be historical. I don't need it to be true. I just need it to be good. That's what I did. That was my compensation. And then it wasn't good either. So, you know, it was a little naive of me because actually, in order to be good, part of it's got to be true.

John Dehlin [02:12:43] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Lundwall [02:12:44] So you can't separate it.

John Dehlin [02:12:46] That's true for me.

John Lundwall [02:12:47] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:12:47] If it's not true, it can't. I mean, there can be value there, but it's different than structuring your whole life around it.

John Lundwall [02:12:54] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:12:55] John Lundwall, how do people follow you and plug your tour and books or anything else you want to plug?

John Lundwall [02:13:04] Well, you can go to my website, John K. Lundwall. I haven't updated it, but I will update.com.com.

John Dehlin [02:13:10] okay.

John Lundwall [02:13:11] And you can follow me there. I. That's where I post photos and announcements in my work.

John Dehlin [02:13:22] And this Egypt tour, can you find the info about that?

John Lundwall [02:13:26] You will in the next couple days.

John Dehlin [02:13:28] Okay, so you'll get that on your website.

John Lundwall [02:13:29] It'll be on my website.

John Dehlin [02:13:30] John K. Lundwall. All right. Well, thanks, John. It's been way too. It's taken me Way too long to get you on. But I'm so glad I did. This is paradigm shifting. This is a game changing analysis that I haven't heard from Michael Koh or Robert Rittner or Dan Vogel or Brett Metcalf or Richard Bushman or Grant Palmer. This is new and good stuff. Have you published this in Journal Mormon History or, you know, Dialogue?

John Lundwall [02:14:08] No, I haven't.

John Dehlin [02:14:09] Why not? Or written a book or.

John Lundwall [02:14:12] That's. I have, but it's. It's a good question. I only in the past couple years, I spent 10 years in litigation, so all my bandwidth was, was taken. And that ended right when Covid started. But only the past couple years have I been able to sit down and say, okay, I've got to. And in these past couple years, I've actually been working on a pretty heavy project which will be forthcoming this year. And it's good stuff.

John Dehlin [02:14:52] Is it oral or written?

John Lundwall [02:14:55] It is about the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [02:14:57] Okay.

John Lundwall [02:14:57] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:14:58] All right. All right. Well, Dr. John, John Lundwall, thank you so much for coming on Mormon Stories. Hope to have you back. I'd love to have you back just to tell your Mormon story. I don't know if you want to do that, but I'd love to hear it.

John Lundwall [02:15:11] Okay.

John Dehlin [02:15:12] What do you think?

John Lundwall [02:15:14] We'll talk about that after.

John Dehlin [02:15:16] Okay. All right. All right, John, thanks. And really quickly, we're like 300 people away from 300,000 subscribers on YouTube. So please take a minute to subscribe on YouTube. We would love to hit that 300,000 mark. That's good for the show in all sorts of ways. We're grateful to our donors that make Mormon Stories possible. And we lose donors every month. So if you value this type of content and you want to see it continue, all you gotta do is go to mormonstories.org donate, become a monthly donor, and we'll keep providing you with this content. You can also like and comment on these episodes. We love your comments on YouTube, on Spotify. You can email us@mormonstoriesmail.com and you can share these episodes with anyone you think would be interesting. We love your feedback. We would love to hear it. And yeah, we'll have many cool and interesting stories and episodes coming up in the days, weeks, months and years ahead. So thanks for joining us today. Be good to each other, be kind to each other, be literate, and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care, everybody.

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