Introduction and Episode Overview

Sandra Tanner [00:00:00] We went through the whole Book of Mormon because who knew, maybe there was some big change in there that we didn't know about.

Nemo [00:00:08] What was the prevailing narrative at that time?

Sandra Tanner [00:00:10] The Book of Mormon, unlike the Bible, came to us word for word from God. Well, then that becomes a problem when you find out they've made about 4,000 changes. Unlike the Bible, was the claim ours has never been tampered with. And then you start finding out, oh, well, yeah, we tampered with it a little, but, you know, really count. This isn't something that one could say, oh, well, the church just found it out, or they just found it in the back archives or something. No, they've always had Joseph Smith's Seer Stone.

John Dehlin [00:00:43] The Church is trying to make it more and more nebulous nowadays. They're sort of their backs are against the wall and they're just saying it was translated by the gift and power of God and we have no idea how it actually happened.

Sandra Tanner [00:00:53] The major Egyptologists were asked about the facsimiles, the photos in the Pearl of great price. They are on record at the time saying none of these illustrations have anything to do with what Joseph's talking about. This is all just coming out revelatory. And that sounds very close to Joseph Smith being an inventor of the text. When we start realizing the church has been tampering with all the documents. This apostle had seen a strange account of the first vision.

Nemo [00:01:26] You read it and it's. It does not make the claim that he sees two individuals.

John Dehlin [00:01:36] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It's March 6, 2025, and we have Nemo in the house. Hey, Nemo.

Nemo [00:01:46] Hi. Hi, everyone.

John Dehlin [00:01:47] For those who don't know, tell us who you are. Nemo.

Nemo [00:01:50] I'm the British guy that talks about Mormonism. That's all that I am.

John Dehlin [00:01:58] Yeah. And this is not your first time in the studio, but from what you. And it's not your first time by a long shot on Mormon Stories because you've been an integral part of the LDS discussion series as well as other episodes, but this is your first time to co host an interview in the studio, is that right?

Nemo [00:02:15] Yeah, it's my first time to co host an interview here in Utah.

John Dehlin [00:02:19] And is this your first time to meet face to face? The ex Mormon goat, Sandra Tanner. Hey, Sandra.

Sandra Tanner [00:02:26] Good morning or afternoon, whatever it is. Yes, hello.

John Dehlin [00:02:30] So glad to have you, Nemo. This is the first time y' all met in person.

Nemo [00:02:33] I got the pleasure of meeting Sandra at her bookshop a couple of years ago.

Sandra Tanner [00:02:36] Oh, wow.

Nemo [00:02:37] I came in and said hi.

John Dehlin [00:02:38] Then. Why'd you want to meet her this time, Nemo?

Nemo [00:02:39] Because I want to sit down properly, you know, talk to her in this context and find out a bit more about Sandra and her work and Gerald's work. And, you know, I'm from a newer generation of kind of critics of the church or commentators on the church, and we stand on the shoulders of the Tanner, but it's important to learn about what they did and get advice. All the advice I can get is what I'll be after today.

John Dehlin [00:03:03] I love it. Yeah, I love this framing because, of course, we've had Sandra Tanner on several years ago. Would it be 10 years ago? How many years ago was it? Sandra?

Sandra Tanner [00:03:13] 2014.

John Dehlin [00:03:14] We had Sandra on Mormon stories for one of those, what, five, ten hour. How many hours was it?

Sandra Tanner [00:03:20] I think about five and a half, I think.

John Dehlin [00:03:22] Yeah. Where Sandra just told her full story. Of course, that episode still stands as a classic. But, Nemo, I like the idea that you had of just reintroducing some of Gerald and Sandra Tanner's most important discoveries to the new generation. So that's what today's about, right?

Nemo [00:03:44] Yeah, yeah, that's what it's about. It's about knowing that, you know, the audience for this platform 10 years ago is very different to the audience now. And there's a lot of people here that this will be brand new for them and people like me who are but mere fetuses in this arena.

John Dehlin [00:04:00] I love it. Okay, so let me see if I can get these right. So the topics we're going to cover today, we're going to cover changes to the Book of Mormon. Many people don't know that the Book of Mormon has undergone several changes, and not just spelling and grammatical changes.

John Dehlin [00:04:15] The Tanner's discovering that. So Book of Mormon changes Book of Abraham issues. We're going to be talking about the Kinderhook plates and kind of telling the story of the Kinderhook plates as it relates to the Tanner's involvement. We're going to be talking about the Mormon Church kind of changing its history or its doctrine, you know, ways that the Tanner helped call attention to the church kind of changing its story. And then finally, we're going to talk about Sandra and Gerald's sort of counseling services that they ran out of Utah Lighthouse Ministry Bookstore for decades before it recently closed. And a shoot off of that will be Sandra still standing as a believer of Christ even after leaving Mormonism. Did I Forget anything, Nemo?

Nemo [00:05:05] Nope, that's all good. I went through the slides as you said them. We're all good.

John Dehlin [00:05:09] All right. All right, well, Nemo, let's. I'm going to kind of turn the time over to you and I'll jump in as makes sense. All right, Cool sand. Anything you want to say before we jump in?

Sandra Tanner [00:05:19] Well, I don't know. I'm waiting in anticipation where all this is going to go.

John Dehlin [00:05:25] All right, take it away, Nemo.

Changes Made to the Book of Mormon

Nemo [00:05:26] Well, our first jumping off point is about Joseph Smith and changes the Book of Mormon. So we've got here changes the Book of Mormon with something that you wrote, published in 1965, and you documented thousands of the textual changes between 1830 and later editions of the Book of Mormon, undermining the claim that it was a perfect translation. Where did you start with that? How did you first realize there were Differences between the 1830 edition and the Book of Mormon and then later ones?

Sandra Tanner [00:05:53] Well, my mother had started studying critically on Mormonism before I met Gerald. And she was aware that there had been those, what is it, four or five changes where the words the son of was inserted on verses that talked about like, Mary would be the mother of God. And then later it was changed to Mary will be the mother of the Son of God, which makes a change theologically. Well, we were aware of that, but the question then was, well, what else might have been changed? Has anyone really gone through and check to see how radical were the changes?

John Dehlin [00:06:34] And Sandra, what would your understanding have been at the time about why the son of changes were made?

Sandra Tanner [00:06:40] Well, when we read David Whitmer's pamphlet and address all believers in Christ, and he was one of the witnesses to the Book of Mormon, he tells about Joseph Smith changing the doctrines and theology of Mormonism. And so one of the early claims was that Joseph Smith went from believing in one God in the Book of Mormon to plural gods by the time he gets to Nauvoo.

Sandra Tanner [00:07:12] And so the switch is gradually. So the Book of Mormon preface still talks about that. The purpose of the Book of Mormon is to convince Jew and Gentile that Jesus is the Christ, the eternal Father. And so the witnesses, the three witnesses testimony talks about the Father, Son and Holy Ghost being one God.

Sandra Tanner [00:07:37] So when we were first struggling and leaving Mormonism, we ran across this little group in Independence, Missouri, Church of Christ, Bible, Book of Mormon, and they had given up everything but just the Bible and Book of Mormon. They had thrown out the Doctrine and Covenants and all those things.

Sandra Tanner [00:07:54] And their position was that the Book of Mormon teaches one God. And so all this other stuff needed to go by the wayside. And they pointed out to us, well, my mother had already pointed out, but they also pointed out these changes on the godhead that would show that originally the Book of Mormon was much stronger on its teaching of the one God of the Book of Mormon.

Sandra Tanner [00:08:20] And this started us on a number of quests. When you take the view that the Book of Mormon teaches one God, what do you do with the first vision? What do you do with other revelations, later teachings? What do you do with the Nauvoo period, where the Father, Son and Holy Ghost are three different gods?

Sandra Tanner [00:08:44] And so as a starting point, well, let's find out what all was changed in the Book of Mormon. And so we arranged with the University of Utah to get a set of photocopies of the 1830 Book of Mormon, because at that time there was not a photo reprint available.

Nemo [00:09:07] Right. Okay. So it wasn't that widely available.

Sandra Tanner [00:09:09] Not at all. I mean, you had to go to a library, university, and then probably look at microfilm. An 1830 Book of Mormon was very rare, and so the only way to see it would be at a library and maybe on a microfilm.

Sandra Tanner [00:09:25] But even the libraries would have been very few libraries that would have had a collection on Mormonism that would have had microfilms. So to research mormonism in the 1960 time period, well, to research everything was so hard. There was no Internet.

Sandra Tanner [00:09:50] You had to live in an area that had a collection of Mormon documents in some university holding or something to even research it. And even living here in Salt Lake, you had to go to the library to see these things.

Sandra Tanner [00:10:07] And when we first started out, I didn't really know that the Salt Lake library had a good special collections. We knew the University of Utah did. So we were going up the hill to the university to look at things.

Sandra Tanner [00:10:22] And so we arranged with them to get photocopies of their Book of Mormon. One of the values to us was that then when anyone asked us about our photo reprint, we could tell them who owned the original. Because the problem we had in talking with anyone about our problems with Mormonism was, well, did that come from an anti Mormon source? Everything was downplayed and questioned.

Nemo [00:10:54] And who were the anti Mormon sources of the day before you guys?

Sandra Tanner [00:10:59] Well, yeah, it would have been a very small collection of people, but there were a few people that. There was a guy named Mr. Bud Farson who ran a little thing called Utah Track Society, I think it was, and he put out some little pamphlets that told about a few different changes and problems, but they were only like 10 page little pamphlets. So you got little smidgens of problem areas in a few different pamphlets. Other than that, you had Fawn Brody. Brody's book was monumental. Came out in 1945 and that launched all of Mormon history that's going on today. Everyone works off from her. She mentions the changes in her book, but it's only some of the changes. It's just very brief. So we sat down and read the original Book of Mormon against a current one and marked all the changes on the photocopies.

Nemo [00:12:12] So can I just ask how that process looked sort of really specifically? Like, did you sit down next to each other? One of you would read one, one would read the other and compare, or.

Sandra Tanner [00:12:20] Yeah.

Nemo [00:12:21] Wow. Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:12:22] So you got one with one book and the other with the other book and you'd read along and then hopefully you both were staying awake. And along the way we evidently missed a couple of them. But. So it's a matter of your attention span when someone's reading to you, droning on through the Book of Mormon that you pick up every time there was a word difference.

Sandra Tanner [00:12:50] So wait a minute, I got to make a note. That's a change. Well, what kind of change? So we broke it down to spelling change, textual change, what was the other kind? Anyways? So we denoted doctrinal, maybe theological. I can't remember what the designations were, but so textual change was one, a spelling change. And so we coded it.

Sandra Tanner [00:13:20] And so I would put a circle on the 1830 Book of Mormon photos. I would circle the word that had been changed, or two or three words, or a longer section if it was several words. And then I'd have to write to the margin what the current reading would say and then coded to which kind of a change it was.

Sandra Tanner [00:13:47] And we worked through that whole thing. I think I spent a whole summer working every day on. Well, not Sunday. We didn't do Mormon stuff on Sunday, not just because we were Christians, but I needed a day off, a day of rest, my day of rest. Yes. And so we went through the whole Book of Mormon because who knew, maybe there was some big change in there that we didn't know about. We'd only had a few changes mentioned to us. And so you get the ones on the Son of God references that are added in to change the Godhead. But then there's some other ones that pop up.

Sandra Tanner [00:14:33] You find out that the kings names are changed, Benjamin and Mosiah, which becomes a problem in the chronology of the Book of Mormon because it originally said Benjamin and then it was later changed to Mosiah because someone paid attention to the storyline and realized, oh, wait a minute, Benjamin would have been dead at this point in the story. So we'll go back and, oh, well, we need to change that to Mosiah. So there are a couple places where they had to do that.

Nemo [00:15:04] And which edition were you working from?

Sandra Tanner [00:15:06] Like to Compare to the 1830, 1960, early 60s? I don't remember the actual date, but we published it in 65, I think.

Nemo [00:15:20] So it was from a contemporary one there. So contemporary one, you didn't go 1830 to 1837?

Sandra Tanner [00:15:26] No, we didn't know what happened in the meantime.

Nemo [00:15:29] Got you.

Sandra Tanner [00:15:30] But we knew from the first one to the current one, these were differences.

Nemo [00:15:34] So you didn't know how quickly it had changed? Because we now know that 1837 was when they started changing some of the theology around us.

Sandra Tanner [00:15:42] I think we'd seen Brody may have mentioned that some of the changes happened in 37, but we didn't know which ones. I think the Son of was mentioned as being changed in 37, but we didn't know any other details because that

Nemo [00:15:57] corresponds to the changes with the first vision as well.

Sandra Tanner [00:15:59] Yeah, the first vision affects the whole teaching on that. And then when you get into the further in the Book of Mormon, you have, besides the Mosiah, Benjamin ones, you have a place. Boy, my mind's rusty on this, where it talks about Jesus Christ and they realize they wouldn't have had the name Jesus Christ yet in the story, so they had to go back and change and they put in, I believe, Messiah.

Nemo [00:16:29] Right.

Sandra Tanner [00:16:30] And if a person is just reading that on their own, they might say to themselves, well, what difference does it make whether it says Jesus Christ or Messiah? It makes a difference when you realize, but they aren't supposed to know the name Jesus Christ yet.

Nemo [00:16:47] Well, it's the same as the whole thing where they don't know when Jesus is gonna turn up until after Mosiah. They're all like, oh, we don't know. But before Mosiah, they know exactly when he's gonna turn up. And it speaks to the way that the Book of Mormon was written, starting around Mos, then finishing up with the beginning sort of chronologically in the way Joseph Smith wrote it. Right, right.

Sandra Tanner [00:17:07] But we didn't understand all that at the beginning.

Nemo [00:17:10] But these are clues that point to that.

Sandra Tanner [00:17:12] Yes, they become clues. Why did they change that at that point?

Nemo [00:17:17] So

Sandra Tanner [00:17:20] we put out the. So it's the first Time that you have a full study, as far as I know, of the changes. Now, there may have been a thesis on it. I'm not sure what BYU would have done, but it wouldn't have been in any kind of general circulation.

Sandra Tanner [00:17:37] So there was a reprint of the first edition Book of Mormon done by Wilford Woodruff. I mean, Wilford Wood. Excuse me about that time, but his was just a straight photo. And so unless you took the time to compare it, you wouldn't have known where anything was changed.

Sandra Tanner [00:18:06] And one of the reasons we wanted to do our study with photos from the University of Utah was that you could point to an institution as having the original that you were using because of the question everyone brings out, you know, well, who's Mr. Wood? How do I know he's reliable? He could be putting out anything, you know. Well, you can go to the University of Utah and see their original and this is it.

Nemo [00:18:34] So was it. Am I right? 3913, is that the number?

Sandra Tanner [00:18:40] Right, Right. And I was later informed that we missed some and it's really more like 4,000. So sorry, people, I fell asleep a.

Nemo [00:18:53] I feel like 3913 is still a significant number.

Sandra Tanner [00:18:57] Yes.

Nemo [00:18:58] Certainly more than the none that we were taught. Because what was the prevailing narrative at that time through the church,

Sandra Tanner [00:19:06] what you were raised with was that the Book of Mormon, unlike the Bible, came to us word for word from God. God provided the translation to Joseph Smith. Well, then that becomes a problem when you find out They've made about 4,000 changes in the verbiage. Even if they're minor ones, they become significant when you are trained all your life that God gave every single word, unlike the Bible was the claim. Ours has never been tampered with. And then you start finding out, oh, well, yeah, we tampered with it a little, but, you know, that doesn't really count. And then I'm like, well, some of those changes look like they count, you know.

Nemo [00:19:52] Yeah. And did it start with this idea that, okay, well, Joseph just wrote it and wrote it and wrote it as one long sort of thing, and then the printers added punctuation. And was that fairly known at that time?

Sandra Tanner [00:20:04] Oh, yes, yes. That was commonly given as an excuse to us by Mormon apologists or people arguing against us. Was that it was all that bad Printer. He just messed it all up.

Nemo [00:20:18] The printer changed the theology of the Book of Mormon. Why would he do that?

Sandra Tanner [00:20:21] Yeah, there's no reason for him to change the son of.

Nemo [00:20:24] Yeah,

Sandra Tanner [00:20:26] so, yeah, but the excuse was that it was it was only mistakes that were done by the printer that had to be corrected.

Nemo [00:20:33] Right.

Sandra Tanner [00:20:33] Until we finally got a photocopy of the manuscript. And then we find out. No, no, you can't blame it on the printer.

Nemo [00:20:39] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:20:40] These were changes made deliberately by the people working on the manuscript.

Nemo [00:20:44] It is. Do you have any points on this, Sean?

John Dehlin [00:20:48] No, so I'm just looking at. So when I look at the summary, it's the trinitarian versus separate Godhead. Christ as the Eternal Father. The prophetic anachronism. Maybe that's one we didn't talk about. The original was murder against the Holy Ghost and then commit the unpardonable sin. Do you know about that one?

Sandra Tanner [00:21:11] I can't remember what that one was.

John Dehlin [00:21:13] So what it's saying here is that in the 1830 edition says that in Alma 39:13, that ye bring not yourselves into destruction, that ye do not murder against the Holy Ghost. And then that's what it said in the original 1830. And now it says that you bring not yourselves into destruction, that you do not commit the unpardonable sin. That's a substantive change.

Sandra Tanner [00:21:38] Yeah. Switching it.

John Dehlin [00:21:39] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then correction of errors in names. King Benjamin to Mosiah. And then the last one is clarification of who spoke. So the phrase waters of baptism was not in the original Isaiah 48. 1. So if Joseph's quoting Isaiah the first time he's quoting Isaiah, it doesn't include the words water of waters of baptism. But then later it looks like he added waters of baptism into the mouth of Isaiah.

Sandra Tanner [00:22:15] Right?

John Dehlin [00:22:16] Yeah. So those are some of the ones that I have.

Sandra Tanner [00:22:19] It's an interpretation that he brings to the text. I mean, nobody believes that it ever had anything about waters of baptism.

John Dehlin [00:22:26] And I think it maybe just remind people how we were told, those who were told about the Seer Stone being used and the Urimum Thummim and the verbal interactions between Joseph Smith with the alleged stone or Urimum Thummim and Oliver Cowdery. It wasn't mechanics that allowed for variation. Am I right?

The Seer Stone and Translation Methods

Sandra Tanner [00:22:51] When I was growing up, I only heard about the Urim and Thummim, these divinely preserved articles that were kept with the plates, preserved for the translator in the future centuries to. To be able to translate this unknown language.

Sandra Tanner [00:23:08] And I never heard that there was anything more than the Urim and Thummim. That was the only narrative I got. And that it was God breathed every word, correct? Directly. God ordained spoken. Joseph Smith got the revelation from God, read it directly to the scribe.

Sandra Tanner [00:23:31] And then when Gerald showed me David Whitmer's pamphlet, one of the Book of Mormon witnesses, he tells how, well, Joseph had this divine rock that had miraculous powers that he could put in his hat, and on the stone would appear the words, and he read them off. Okay, that introduced a whole new concept to me that besides the Urim and Thummim that was saved with the plates, he also had some sort of stone that he could put in his hat and the translation beyond the stone, but it still was said to be a word for word translation. So that's the way Whitmer tells it is that they couldn't even go on with the translation unless he said it right to the scribe. And so every word has to be right.

Nemo [00:24:26] Yeah, that's what I wanted to confirm, that they weren't allowed to move on with the translation until it'd been written and spelled correctly.

Sandra Tanner [00:24:32] Right.

Nemo [00:24:33] So how is there any room in that for then something to have been written down wrong?

Sandra Tanner [00:24:38] Right. And so when I'm reading Whitmer's pamphlet, it reiterates this importance of there can't be changes in the Book of Mormon printing. If God gave every single word and they couldn't even go on with the translation until it was written down. Right. Then how could you go back and make almost 4,000 changes in the text?

Nemo [00:24:57] The only way is to start questioning whether God would allow him to purposely make mistakes in some way to try and test people's faith or whatever. But that seems unreasonable behavior.

Sandra Tanner [00:25:08] Well, and it certainly fit anything I was ever told. And so, I mean, back in 1960, we all grew up absolutely knowing the whole thing happened through this Urim and Thummim, this idea today that they glibly talk about. Oh, well, of course, there was also the Seer Stone with the Urim and Thummim. But that wasn't how the narrative was told 60 years ago. It was very immaterial.

Nemo [00:25:37] It was told 20 years ago when I was a primary child and when I was in seminary. The Seer Stone still wasn't part of the narrative. We were still being told exactly what you've just described, which is the words were revealed to Joseph Smith via the Urim and Thummim. So he was directly translating a lost language, and he wasn't allowed to move on. You know, there's the quotes where Joseph would make sure words were spelled right because he would come across words he didn't know how to spell or pronounce. And there would be a couple of goes and they would make sure it was got right before they move on. That was all part of the dominant narrative even 15, 20 years ago.

Sandra Tanner [00:26:10] Yes. And the church always knew that there was a seer stone. This isn't something that one could say, oh well, the church just found it out or they just found it in the back archives or something. No, they've always had Joseph Smith's Seer stone. They've always known about the witnesses statements that describe the use of the Seer stone. They've always known about his magic money digging use of the stone. The very same stone that he later used to translate. The church just sat on the information and kept putting in their manuals this false narrative that they had to know was false.

Nemo [00:26:46] Well, because that pamphlet to all believers in Christ, it says that the seer stone was used. Right. Where did you come across that?

Sandra Tanner [00:26:53] Well, this little group in Missouri that Gerald had come across and also from the barber in Salt Lake City, James Wardle, a reorganized man that Gerald had become acquainted with. They had both shown us David Whitmer's pamphlet and James had given us, I believe, a copy of that. So people that were studying church history could stumble across these different references of documents. And if you stumbled into the back of Sam Weller's bookstore downtown, you could have seen a copy reprint probably in 1960 back in the back of his bookstore. But the average person didn't know about it and the average church publication never

Nemo [00:27:44] mentioned it and people outside the US never knew about this. And that's a thing that I think I like to try and tell people about sometimes is that if you happen to be someone that was really into church history, living in Salt Lake City, then you had access to these libraries. You had access to go and try and get a hold of an 1830 copy of the Book of Mormon. There just weren't any in the uk we had some old like I think you could get copies of like Mormonism Unveiled or whatever, but potentially or things like that in old books. Because I know Mark Hoffman used to try and find stuff in the north of England, but by and large we didn't have access to this sort of stuff.

Nemo [00:28:20] And international members would have had no idea about any of this because all they got was the correlated manual that would be brought to them. Particularly if you're outside of the English speaking church, once you go into the only materials you've got are in your language published for you by the church. You're completely at the mercy of what the church is willing to tell you

Sandra Tanner [00:28:39] about the history that's right. So it's only been in the last, oh, 30 years, really, that you start to see more mention of these things in church publications. But it starts off as a very small little trickle of a few little mentions. And now they make it sound like, oh, well, it's always been there.

John Dehlin [00:29:04] What do you make of when Blake Ostler comes out with this loose versus tight translation theory? So clearly the church, because of your work, the church has to sort of backpedal on how the Book of Mormon was translated. And so then this guy named Blake Ostler, who's an attorney, comes out with this idea that, okay, we don't know so much about the word for word, character for character thing. But of course, Joseph Smith would be mixing his own understanding of the world, his own 19th century sensibilities with then whatever is getting revealed to him through the Urim and Thummim. And whenever there are anachronisms or misplacements or errors, it's because it was more of a loose translation than a tight one. What do you think about the changing of that narrative?

Sandra Tanner [00:29:54] Well, when you see that your original narrative doesn't work, you've got to figure out some way to smooth it over and make it sound good. And people need to think about, well, what does that tell you? It tells you that the original story isn't plausible. It can't be. What the witnesses said reminds me, I think I saw Hamilton a couple years ago. And the one song talks about, I was in the room where it happened.

John Dehlin [00:30:27] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:30:28] And I sing that to myself all the time when I'm studying church history because I like the witnesses statements and that they were in the room where it happened. And they're the guys telling us every word came from the stone, every word was spoken exact, and they couldn't go on with the truth translation unless it was correct. Those are the men that are telling this. So how can a man today, an attorney, change the narrative to say, oh, well, no, there's all kind of influences of Joseph Smith in the Book of Mormon that came in because of he's speaking it through his own lived experience. That can't be according to the people that were on the spot. No one had that interpretation of the event.

John Dehlin [00:31:16] The church is trying to make it more and more nebulous nowadays. They're sort of their backs are against the wall and they're just saying it was translated by the gift and power of God and we have no idea how it actually happened.

Sandra Tanner [00:31:27] Well, yes, they're doing that on everything. The Book of Abraham all of the. Everything in Mormonism now is, oh, well, you know, yes, it was different influences of the day, but that's okay. You know, that works. That happens to everybody really quickly.

John Dehlin [00:31:43] It seems like in 2025, where the church has retreated to. And by the way, Richard Bushman, Patrick Mason, Spencer Fluman, they're all acknowledging that the Book of Mormon looks a lot more like a 19th century document borrowing from the King James version of the Bible than an actual historical record. That's where all the major credible Mormon history apologists are kind of moving now. They're moving to this explanation that the Book of Mormon is more of a revelation than a translation to end sort of this section. I'd love to hear. We'd love to hear your thoughts on just the Book of Mormon. It's a revelation. We don't know. It's just, you know, the plates may or may not have been there, but Joseph channeled it from God. And you know, who knows how it happened?

Sandra Tanner [00:32:30] When history doesn't match your narrative, you have to change the narrative.

John Dehlin [00:32:35] You have to change the history.

Sandra Tanner [00:32:37] Well, they tried changing the history and we caught them on that one and put out the original photos. So then they have to say, oh, well, it wasn't okay. It's not the problem of the printer. It's not the problem of wicked apostates that change things. It's oh, it was the natural influences of Joseph's life.

John Dehlin [00:32:54] Yeah, yeah. So, well, I'm going to just let people know for our newer generations, there's a website called utlm.org is that right?

Sandra Tanner [00:33:04] Right.

John Dehlin [00:33:05] And utlm.org, sandra has generously put up all the PDFs of all her publications for free. Is that right?

Sandra Tanner [00:33:13] Right. Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:33:14] So here is the copy of exposing Joseph Smith's changes to the Book of Mormon. So if any of you are new scholars or they want to go to the original source text to verify, we don't want you just to believe, Sandra. Believe Nemo. Believe me. You could download this PDF from utlm.org, julia will put it in the show notes and you can verify all this for yourself. Right, Sandra?

Sandra Tanner [00:33:39] Right.

John Dehlin [00:33:40] Okay. All right, Nemo, what's next?

The Book of Abraham and Original Papyri

Nemo [00:33:42] Well, speaking of original copies and whatnot, I think the Book of Abraham is. Your work on the Book of Abraham is undergirded, I would say, by original copies. Right. We don't have the original gold plates to look at and to study Joseph Smith's ability to translate. What we do have is the original papyrus. And in 1968, you guys published Some early critiques of the Book of Abraham. And you were looking at how the rediscovered papyri, the ones that were found in Chicago, didn't match what Joseph Smith said was on them. And that sort of laid the groundwork for a lot of exposes on this issue. This is one of the things, possibly the most publicly sort of debated parts of the church's truth claims. How did you get started with that, with finding the papyri, the originals?

Sandra Tanner [00:34:29] Well, the Church has known since the 1850s that they had a problem with the Book of Abraham, because early on, one of the earliest Egyptologists was asked about the facsimiles in the Pearl of Great Price and said, these don't make any sense. No, this isn't what these are about at all.

Nemo [00:34:59] That's 1850s.

Sandra Tanner [00:35:00] In the 1850s. And so the church was on notice something was wrong. And then you move up to the turn of the century, and in 1912, you have the Metropolitan Museum acquires the Metropolitan Museums in New York. And they acquire from descendants of people from the Smith family. Well, from the Bitumen family. Emma Smith married a guy named Bitumen, and down through different people, a woman ended up owning part of the papyri that belonged to Joseph Smith. And she negotiated with the Metropolitan to get the papyri and they just put it in the back vault or something. But in 1912, Egyptology had developed to such a point that you have the major Egyptologists of the day, Breasted Mace, Mercer.

Sandra Tanner [00:36:06] I can't remember all their names, but the major Egyptologists were asked about the facsimiles, the photos in the Pearl of Great Price. And they are on record at the time saying none of these illustrations have anything to do with what Joseph's talking about, has nothing to do with Abraham. This is all standard Egyptian burial documents. And so a publication was put out.

Nemo [00:36:35] Didn't the New York Times run something.

Sandra Tanner [00:36:37] The New York Times ran a big page, front page. Right, right. Museum walls declare fraud. Something like that. And. But there also is this little booklet, Joseph Smith's as a Translator, I think it was called, where these different Egyptologists give statements about the facsimiles. So at this point, the Church again, is put on absolute notice. The Book of Abraham isn't going to

Nemo [00:37:04] make it 40 years before you even start looking at it.

Sandra Tanner [00:37:06] Yeah. And so it's put back. They don't want to deal with it. And. Well, there's a long history of all the stuff that happens after that. In the church's archives, they always had Joseph Smith's working papers for The Book of Abraham. And so there's a volume called the Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar, which are working papers for the Book of Abraham. And in it you see part of the manuscript for the Book of Abraham where Joseph Smith and his scribes have copied off characters from the papyri and written them down the left hand side of pages and then put an English translation to the side of the little character. And so you have in one case a backward looking, if you thought of an E, capital E, only printed backwards. And from that Joseph's going to translate a whole paragraph with several proper words in it from just this simple little sign.

Nemo [00:38:10] Robert Rittner says that was a common belief at the time of Joseph Smith that these ancient languages would contain vast amounts of information per character.

Sandra Tanner [00:38:19] Right, yeah. So Joseph's just playing on what the current assumptions were of the day. He was wrong. But I mean, there's no way that backward E could contain a whole paragraph with proper names in it and it would all be encoded some way in these four different little squiggle lines.

Nemo [00:38:37] But then he had to believe that because that is what the Book of Mormon says of itself as well. They talk about that. Essentially the language they used was to save space and if they'd been able to write in Hebrew, then it would have been much more complete. Right, and so that belief trickles over into the Book of Mormon's narrative about itself as well.

Sandra Tanner [00:38:56] Right, yeah. So, yeah, right off the bat, Joseph under the impression that Egyptian can be written in much smaller space.

Nemo [00:39:03] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:39:05] So he works on this Alphabet and grammar. Well, the church sat on this. It was kind of like a secret document that only a few scholars got to even look at.

John Dehlin [00:39:16] Well,

Sandra Tanner [00:39:19] a friend was able to get a microfilm of the Alphabet and grammar. And so we printed that and we did a reprint of this, these Egyptologists statements in a little book we called why Egyptologists Reject the Book of Abraham. So in the mid-60s, we're already dealing with Book of Abraham problems. We just don't have the papyri to work with. Everyone's assuming the papyri have been destroyed in the Great Chicago fire in 1870s. I think it was. And no one expected them to still be around.

John Dehlin [00:39:59] And Sandra, just for fun, I'm going to show now people the actual New York times article from 1912, you know, just so that they have a sense.

Nemo [00:40:09] While you're loading that, I think it's important to say that it doesn't matter. Even if we didn't have the originals, it wouldn't matter because Joseph produced in The Pearl of Great Price, which I was at Benchmark Book the other day, and I saw a very early print of the Pearl of Great Price that was taken by missionaries out to England to show people. And there's a fold out of the facsimiles in there.

Nemo [00:40:28] And in there is all the labelings of what Joseph said each of those things was. And an Egyptologist will look at that and say, no, that's not God sat on his throne. That's not this, that's not that. You know, that's Min, the God of whatever, you know, they will look at it and know that Joseph Smith's interpretation was wrong. So we don't need the originals. We later discover that we can find them. But Joseph Smith produced these things. They were recognizable to Egyptologists as not what Joseph was saying they were.

John Dehlin [00:40:57] But it's important to show that the church.

Sandra Tanner [00:40:59] For me, they knew.

John Dehlin [00:41:01] Yeah, for me, the most damning thing is what did they know and when did they know it? And I like the 1912 New York Times front page article because it just shows the church has known about the problem with the Book of Abraham for

Nemo [00:41:13] so long, since around the time of B.H. roberts, who was also putting them on notice of loads of other issues.

Sandra Tanner [00:41:18] Yeah, right, right. And so then. Okay, so in the mid-60s, we're putting out a lot of different publications hammering on the Book of Abraham issue. Well, there were rumors at the time that part of the papyri might still be in existence.

Sandra Tanner [00:41:38] And no one knew, no one was talking about where they were at, but there was this rumor about them. Well, I think the church realized that they're going to have to be doing stuff on the Book of Abraham. It's becoming a public issue anyways. In the mid-60s, it's my understanding the Metropolitan Museum in New York was going through an expansion and remodel, and we're looking for ways to capitalize on whatever they can to raise funds.

Sandra Tanner [00:42:15] Dr. Attia from the University of Utah was Egyptian Coptic professor, and he was back at the Metropolitan doing research. So the metropolitan directors deliberately got out their photos. Well, I guess probably the originals of what they had of the Joseph Smith papyri and showed them to Atia. Now, the way the church tells the story today is as though Atia was back doing research and just stumbled and he made the discovery of the papyri. No, the Metropolitan Museum deliberately showed him the papyri and he realized it was the Book of Abraham stuff of Joseph Smith. And then they used Hatia as a bridge to the church to acquire Them.

Sandra Tanner [00:43:03] And this was all brought out in interviews with the directors of the museum in a dialogue, a Journal of Mormon thought. Early on, in one of their first issue or two, they did a special on Book of Abraham and they interviewed the director and tell about this coming out of the papyri.

Sandra Tanner [00:43:25] Well, as soon as the announcement was made, there was a scramble to get more information. And the question is whether the church originally intended to bring out photos of them. I think our publications challenging them on all this stuff helped to facilitate them bringing out the papyri photos early, before maybe they would have otherwise thought of it. Because if you look at the improvement era for I think it's the February of 1968 improvement era, they put in photos of the papyri and you can tell it's a rush job because the pages are inserted in the middle of the magazine and that not originally been planned on being in there because the numbering isn't right.

Sandra Tanner [00:44:17] So it goes from 40. Between pages 40 and 41 and 42, you get an insert of several pages that have the papyri photos on them. Once we got the photos, the rush was on to figure out how they related to the Alphabet and grammar.

Nemo [00:44:36] Just before we go there, just a quick question.

Sandra Tanner [00:44:38] Yeah.

Nemo [00:44:39] Why do you think the church felt pressure to release those? Because I know we've got pictures of these or these things you've been putting out where you've been challenging the Book of Abraham. What do you think? Do you think the church thought by putting out the originals that would somehow bolster their position? I'm trying to work out how the Church thinks publishing the originals helps that.

John Dehlin [00:44:59] What I heard was that they were excited thinking that Joseph Smith would be validated, vindicated.

Sandra Tanner [00:45:05] Well, for one thing, a friend of ours had Polaroid photos of the papyri that he had got through Klaas Baer, who was the curator at the University of Chicago, and Klaas Baer had been privy to what was going on at the Metropolitan. And so a friend of ours had gone to the Deseret News when the announcement was first made about the papyri. He had gone to the Deseret News and asked about getting photos. And they said no, they didn't know what they were doing with him at first. And he says, well, I wondered because I already have some photos, but they aren't very good.

Sandra Tanner [00:45:43] So I was hoping that you guys would put out good ones. So I think that helped to put the church on notice. Photos were out there and they might as well just go ahead. And if you Want to be the first to get them out there and have your copyright on them.

Nemo [00:45:57] Yeah. Okay.

Sandra Tanner [00:45:58] Get your photos out. Right out. So we can copyright them.

Nemo [00:46:02] Okay. Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:46:04] But I think there was also an expectation when the church agreed to get the papyri, I think somebody at the top thought this would really vindicate Joseph and if the church had the real papers to work with, they would come out some way to prove what Joseph Smith was doing.

Nemo [00:46:22] Yeah. And we kind of see that pattern later on with Mark Hoffman in that the church, through an intermediary, buys documents, thinking, well, if we have them, then we can somehow use them to vindicate our case or put them away so that they can't challenge our narrative.

Sandra Tanner [00:46:38] Yeah, they get to control the narrative better.

Nemo [00:46:40] As the case of the purported blessing of Joseph Smith III would indicate that you put that away. So that community of Christ or our LDS group at the time can't be like, hang on, we were right, right, right.

Sandra Tanner [00:46:53] So the church comes out with the photos. Once we have the photos, Gerald and our friends that were all working on this, Wes Walters and I don't remember if Mike Marquardt was working on this early or not, but different ones of us, our friend Grant Hewitt that were working on trying to figure out what Joseph was doing with the papyri.

Sandra Tanner [00:47:20] And the connection was finally found that the manuscript for the Book of Abraham was partly preserved in the Alphabet and grammar. And you could line up the Egyptian characters with a piece of the papyri to the translation of the Book of Abraham. So then we absolutely knew which piece Joseph Smith was claiming to translate. And as the little piece they call the small Sinsen text, that would have been the piece that came next after facsimile number one on the scroll.

Sandra Tanner [00:47:52] And once you know the piece he's trying to use and claim was the Book of Abraham, then you just need a translation of that and see what it really says. And the translation was done. It doesn't say anything about Abraham.

Sandra Tanner [00:48:08] We published a whole other story. A guy named D.J. nelson came to us, a Mormon guy that had studied Egyptology, and he had a translation of that piece of papyri that showed it had nothing to do with the Book of Abraham. It was from the Book of Breathings, a condensed version of the Book of the Dead.

Sandra Tanner [00:48:30] And then Nibley and different ones did their translations, but everyone's translation came out the same. I mean, they might use one or two word difference, but they were all the same message of the small sins and text being part of the Book of the Dead. So Then the church has to some way come out with, how do you explain this? How do we tell people that the papyri don't translate to the Book of Abraham?

Sandra Tanner [00:49:00] So all the scholars have to get together, real busy trying to figure out a good way to tell the story. And the Mormon historians come up with this idea. Well, it's a catalyst to coming up with the Book of Abraham. As Joseph Smith looked at the papyri, God chose to reveal to him at that point the Book of Abraham. And I guess Joseph leaped to a conclusion and made the connection that it must connect to the papyri. But they don't really people. They are just the catalyst to revelation. So that's the way they tell it today, is it just facilitated a revelation?

Nemo [00:49:38] Why is that wrong, Sandra?

John Dehlin [00:49:40] Or problematic?

Nemo [00:49:41] Or problematic, yeah. Sorry.

Sandra Tanner [00:49:44] Because then there's no basis to the Book of Abraham. It's just Joseph Smith's invention. It doesn't tie to anything historical.

Nemo [00:49:51] Well, and I would go one step further and to say that if it is the case that these objects allow Joseph Smith to receive revelation and he received a translation word for word, and then he wrote it down. Right. If that is the case, which we can see from the grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian language documents that he was trying to directly translate these things. So the catalyst theory doesn't work from that perspective for me, because Joseph Smith's intention is shown to be clearly a direct translation, with the word translation meaning what it would commonly mean to most people.

Nemo [00:50:24] But even if it is a revelatory experience, we've got the Book of Mormon, which we've just discussed, where Joseph Smith receives this revelatory experience. And then there's 4,000 changes and there's theological changes down the line. So it's not particularly trustworthy a method for Joseph to receive this kind of revelation and sort of translation by revelation that he got for the Book of Mormon, because we've shown that that doesn't produce very accurate results if you're having to change it 4,000 times.

Sandra Tanner [00:50:53] Well, and I was raised with this whole idea that the problem with Christianity is that through the centuries these wicked priests have tampered with the text and changed everything to where it doesn't have the right doctrines in it anymore. But we have the sure word of God because we have direct translation of these ancient texts so we can rely on them. And now suddenly we're finding out, well, wait a minute, it doesn't look like we got much to rely on. This is all just coming out revelatory. You can't even argue a bad priest gave a bad translation. You're saying it doesn't relate to any translation. It's just simply a revelation. And that sounds very close to Joseph Smith being an inventor of the text.

John Dehlin [00:51:46] Yeah. So it's. The Book of Abraham was problematic enough. If you add to it the problems that we just talked about, the Book of Mormon, that's like two strikes, Right. Big strikes.

Sandra Tanner [00:51:57] Right.

John Dehlin [00:51:57] Because Gordon B. Hinckley and other past Mormon prophets have all said that the Book of Mormon is what, the keystone.

Nemo [00:52:05] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:52:05] It's the foundation of our church.

Nemo [00:52:06] It's either all true or none of it's true. If it's true, it's the greatest work on it. If it's false, it's a fraud. If it's true, it's the greatest work on the earth. Or something like that.

John Dehlin [00:52:14] Right.

Sandra Tanner [00:52:16] So you look at the Mormon Church today and ask someone, what is the greatest thing that Mormonism gives to us today? It's that we have a living prophet. And that's the big emphasis now. Everything is today's prophet. We have a prophet that speaks for God.

Sandra Tanner [00:52:33] But then how do you know that he speaks for God? If the past prophets said, here is a book written about the early inhabitants of the Americas and none of it turns out to check out, so. Oh, well, that's a revelation. It doesn't have to be based on a historical document. Well, here's the Book of Abraham, another one of their scriptures. Oh, well, it's not necessarily connected to the pirate. It's a revelation from God. Well, sounding a lot like we don't have any real foundation for the claim of profit. What does it mean to have a prophet of God? He doesn't seem to have a basis for what he's doing.

Sandra Tanner [00:53:11] He could just pontificate whatever way he wants. And that's just. We all vote yes. And that's scripture then. But I was raised thinking there really was verifiable evidence for it.

Nemo [00:53:22] Well, yeah. And I believe It's D&C20 that Joseph Smith is called as a translator. That's one of his divine callings.

Sandra Tanner [00:53:29] Right.

Nemo [00:53:30] So. And that we can't get into the realms of what does translator mean? It has a pretty plain English meaning even back then. We're not applying a new meaning to it now. That wasn't there by then. That would have been understood even then. That he is someone that takes a language and puts it into another language.

Sandra Tanner [00:53:45] Right.

Nemo [00:53:46] And that's what we believe to as doing. But we've got two examples here of either the source material that we do have completely differing from the translated text even though we have evidence to show he was trying to translate it in that literal sense. And then we have one where we, we don't have the source material and we have changes and problems with the process there. And then we have a third if we are ready to go to the Kinderhook plates, almost Kinderhook plates, that's the third.

John Dehlin [00:54:15] Oh, just really quickly I like just in the show notes we want to encourage people to do their own research and to take advantage of this stuff. So I just wanted to show first quickly Julia was able to find the New Era article that literally shows, just so you know, we're not making it up.

John Dehlin [00:54:37] There's a fragment of the papyrus. There's Joseph Smith scribbling in likely Joseph Smith scribbling in of what he thinks is missing from the fragments. There's the article New light on Joseph Smith's Egyptian papyri. And you know, and there's again more of the papyri fragments. And you can read, if you go to the show notes you can click on this and read what the New Era printed about this back in the day.

John Dehlin [00:55:06] Part of me is like wanting to just ask again, does the church get credit for publishing all this in a church magazine back in the day? Does the church get honesty and transparency credit for this New Era article alone? What do you think, Sandra?

Sandra Tanner [00:55:26] Well, I am very happy they printed the photographs because that's how we were able to prove what piece Joseph Smith was using to claim he was translating the text and matching it with the manuscript for the book of Abraham. But they didn't end up telling us that. They just want to put in their spin on these are the basis for the revelation. But not explaining to us how then are we to look at the facsimiles with their explanations underneath that clearly are totally erroneous. The facsimile number one, we have the original for that and that is Osiris laying on the couch scene it's Anubis standing to the side of him. That's a standard burial document seen and Joseph gives a total different translation that's currently in their pearl of great price today.

Nemo [00:56:24] Even changes the head of Anubis right

Sandra Tanner [00:56:27] into he changed the head of Anubis the jackal headed God because evidently that little piece of the papyri was missing. And so he has to make up what he thinks would have been there and he doesn't understand that it would have been this dog faced jackal headed

John Dehlin [00:56:44] God and I'll just remind people that we. One of the moments I'm most proud of in the history of Mormon stories, we interview the late, great Robert Rittner, world famous Egyptologist for like 13 hours. Me and RFM to go over in detail an Egyptologist recounting of both the papyra and this entire story. And that's something that we want to make sure and include in the show notes. I think Brooklyn's taking over the show notes, but we'll include that. The only other thing I just wanted to mention, Nemo, before we move on, is that you published several articles in the Salt Lake City Messenger. That's the name of the newsletter you and Gerald put out, Right?

Sandra Tanner [00:57:30] Right.

John Dehlin [00:57:31] Did y' all end up putting out? And I'm showing a sampling of those articles here on screen. These are all downloadable, by the way, right?

Sandra Tanner [00:57:42] Yes, they're all on our website.

John Dehlin [00:57:43] You can look, you can just go to newsletters and find the issue.

Sandra Tanner [00:57:47] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:57:47] Did y' all end up, I think y' all ended up doing at least one book on the Book of Abraham too, Is that right?

Sandra Tanner [00:57:51] Yes, we did some pamphlets and a whole book on it. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:57:55] And that's all available online.

Sandra Tanner [00:57:56] And in our big Mormonism shadow reality, we have a big chapter on the Book of Abraham where we lay out the whole case on this. And I think anyone that reads our chapter will see that the Book of Abraham is just a total fabrication on Joseph Smith's part.

Nemo [00:58:16] Right. Well, speaking of fabrications, there were some men in Pike County, Illinois who fabricated some little bell shaped plates that I believe were published in the Times and Seasons. Says here, why does the circumstance of the plates recently found in a mound in Pike County, Illinois by Mr. Wiley, together with etymology and a thousand other things, go to prove the Book of Mormon true? Answer? Because it is true. That's times and seasons, volume five, page 406. But you guys published evidence that Joseph Smith attempted to translate the Kinderhook plates, proving he could be deceived, essentially. That was your kind of conclusion there.

The Kinderhook Plates Fabrication

Sandra Tanner [00:58:53] Right.

Nemo [00:58:53] But a lot of apologists will argue that he never really took them seriously or he never tried to actually translate them. What would you say to that?

John Dehlin [00:59:00] And just if you want to tell us the story of the kindergarten plates, we'd love to hear that.

Sandra Tanner [00:59:04] Well, these non Mormon guys got this brilliant idea. This is in the 1840s in Nauvoo, Illinois. Was it 44? 1844, I think just before his death. Short time before they're going to throw a mucking wrench in this whole Mormon deal.

Sandra Tanner [00:59:25] And so they invent these little brass plates and do a supposed unearthing and finding of this treasure trove. And they find these little plates and they get this Mormon guy all excited about it, so they bring him to Nauvoo to show to Joseph Smith, oh, we found in this hill these wonderful artifacts. What do you think they are? And Joseph gets all excited. And so they took it seriously enough that they did printings, copies, drawings of these plates in the different Mormon magazines in the Times and Seasons. And I think in what was the other one? Maybe the Nauvoo neighbor, I'm not sure.

Sandra Tanner [01:00:11] And the broadside that they printed up. So they were very proud of these plates and were using them at the time as a buttress to their claim of ancient writings found here in America on metal plates. And so Joseph Smith looks at them and he gives a comment and is it Clayton or Kimball that records this? Is it Clayton?

John Dehlin [01:00:38] I'm in a. My memory is Clayton, but I could be wrong.

Sandra Tanner [01:00:41] Clayton, I think, writes in his journal about what Joseph Smith said about them and he tells about that they're this guy that's. Now my mind's gone blank.

Nemo [01:00:59] Through the loins of Pharaoh or something like that.

Sandra Tanner [01:01:02] Yeah. Fellow was supposed to be. Oh, my mind's gone.

Nemo [01:01:09] John, look that up.

John Dehlin [01:01:10] I'm going to read you something that

Sandra Tanner [01:01:11] the text is supposed to say. Yeah.

Nemo [01:01:13] What it's supposed to say. While you look that up, I'm going to read you a quote from. From Mormonism Shadow Reality. I want to read you to yourself. How's that feel?

Sandra Tanner [01:01:19] Tell me what I said.

Nemo [01:01:21] This, I believe is a quote. It says if Joseph Smith had not been murdered In June of 1844, it is very possible that he might have published a translation of the kinderhook plates. On May 22, 1844, just a month before his death, the Warsaw Signal published the following statement. Joseph had a facsimile taken and engraved on wood. And it now appears from the statement of a writer in the St. Louis Gazette that he is busy in translating them. The new work which Joseph is, is about to issue as a translation of these plates will be nothing more nor less than a sequel to the Book of Mormon. That's from the Warsaw Signal and that's page 112 of Mormonism shadow Reality.

Sandra Tanner [01:01:58] Right. Well, so you have Joseph Smith in 1844 has been having all kind of church problems, all sorts of apostates claiming he was a fallen prophet, exposes about his polygamy and all of this. What a Great boost to his prophetic claim if he now could come up with a new book of scripture.

John Dehlin [01:02:19] I think I found what we were looking for. So it is William Clayton. It says here, although there is no complete translation, the best available record of what Joseph Smith or his associates claim the plates contain comes from William Clayton Smith's private secretary, who recorded in his journal on May 1, 1843, quote, I have seen six brass plates covered with ancient characters. I've translated a portion of them and find they contain the history of the person with whom they were found. He was a descendant of Ham through the loins of Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and that he received his kingdom from the ruler of heaven and earth. And that was not only published in William Clayton's journal, but also in History of the Church, Volume 5, page 372. And that's what the Internet is telling me. Does that sound right?

Sandra Tanner [01:03:12] Right, that sounds right.

Nemo [01:03:14] And it shows Joseph's understand of the word Pharaoh is flawed because he talks about Pharaoh, king of Egypt. Joseph, through the papyri, seems to think that the word Pharaoh is like a given name.

Sandra Tanner [01:03:26] Right.

Nemo [01:03:26] Not actually the word for the king. He doesn't understand that it's a title. He thinks it's a given name.

Sandra Tanner [01:03:33] Right. So the Mormons will argue that, well, he didn't really do a translation. Then what are we to say about this information that he's coming up with then? If you're saying he didn't translate, then he has to be sitting there inventing this whole paragraph about who this guy was. So that raises the question of what kind of guy is this? That at the drop of a hat, he can just start spouting off stuff about plates to any kind of story he wants. And they don't have to connect to the document, evidently. So it puts them on the horns of a dilemma of trying to dismiss Clayton's writing when Clayton is one of the trusted secretaries of Joseph Smith. At this time, he's following Joseph around practically daily, keeping a record of Joseph Smith's doings. So there's no reason, there's no incentive for Clayton to make this up.

Nemo [01:04:33] Yeah. And Joseph claimed that they were a record of the person with whom they were buried.

Sandra Tanner [01:04:38] Right.

Nemo [01:04:38] Then he made claims about that individual. Now, those claims just genetically aren't possible. It's not possible that there is a person with whom these would have been buried who would have that kind of lineage. As we know from the DNA evidence, problems with the Book of Mormon.

Sandra Tanner [01:04:55] Right, right, right. So the whole thing becomes very problematic. So the Church has Tried to downplay the whole Kinderhook thing as oh no, Joseph didn't take it that way. Serious? Well, it looks like it was a very serious undertaking at the time. But his life got too complicated and he was not able to get back to the project.

Nemo [01:05:14] I guess the point I'm making there, I suppose is that even if these fake plates were a sufficient catalyst for him to have this divine revelation, the contents of that divine revelation isn't possible.

Sandra Tanner [01:05:27] Right, right, right, right.

Nemo [01:05:30] Yeah, that seems pretty damn to me. Do you have any things to say on the Kindo plates, John?

John Dehlin [01:05:35] Let's see. Only that if we just want to pull it up really quick just so that people can see. Here we showed earlier, here's kind of a brief copy of what the Kinderhook plates look like. They're actually gold colored.

Sandra Tanner [01:05:52] No, they're copper.

John Dehlin [01:05:53] Copper, okay. Kind of a copper color metallic. These images don't quite reflect that.

Sandra Tanner [01:06:00] At first the church was claiming that they were authentic, but then one bell shaped tablet has survived. And so there has been tests on the metal which proves that the alloy used in the metal is a modern composition. The ancient brass plates would not have had the same kind of composite for the making of the metal.

Sandra Tanner [01:06:36] So that puts them into a modern composition. Not only that, eventually tests were done on the plate and they show that the thickness of the plate is uniform, which can only represent a rolled metal. To get that uniform. There's no way that an ancient plate could have that uniformity across a whole piece of metal material there and have that close a tolerance on the measurements going across. Also at the top of the plate there's a punch hole.

Sandra Tanner [01:07:13] And the punch hole has to be made by a modern day punch because of the way it pushes through the metal and the way it looks on the backside. So they know that it was a modern day metal piece that was used to make the hole in the plate itself.

Sandra Tanner [01:07:33] And also that the plates were etched. If they were of an ancient origin, they would have been carved, inscribed. And this was done with acid etching to make the image on them. And the Mormons were still arguing for some sort of. Well, we don't have all the data. Finally Guy was able to get permission to do a piece of metal sample off of the plate to prove that the metal composition was a modern alloy and couldn't possibly be ancient.

Sandra Tanner [01:08:15] And so the Mormon scholar Stan Kimball, descendant of Heber, he wrote an article for I believe the Improvement era Ensign, whichever one it was at that time where he did an article on the Kinderhook plates. But again, he's trying to distance Joseph Smith from taking them seriously. So he's admitting that, yeah, they look like they're modern composition, but that doesn't reflect bad on Joseph because he didn't really give a translation. Ignoring the problem of the historical record we have of Joseph giving a description of what the plates were supposed to be about and who they were made for.

John Dehlin [01:09:10] Nima, you read from Mormonism Shadow and Reality. I'm going to show a quick again visual of the COVID of Mormonism Shadow and Reality. Since we're trying to address new generations, is it fair to say Mormonism Shadow in Reality is your magnum opus? Kind of. You're Gerald's magnum opus. And can you just tell our new because it's downloadable for free, would say more comprehensive than the CES letter than Letter to My Wife to Mormon Think. Pick your favorite compendium, if that's a word of all the problems with the Mormon Church's truth claims, you might be able to argue that Mormonism Shadow and reality still in 2025 stands as the best compilation of historically based problems with Mormon Church truth claims. Can you talk about it? Just let people know why they should check that out as a resource.

Sandra Tanner [01:10:10] Well, the final date on it was 1987. It had gone through a number of editions before that, and it kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And I think that you will find we cover more topics in that than most any other book on Mormonism.

Sandra Tanner [01:10:31] Other books will do more thorough treatment on a given topic. For instance, like Rittner could talk for three years on Book of Abraham problems, but we give a good summary of the whole thing in our chapter on Book of Abraham. But you can just look at the table of contents and it covers just about all of the major topics of Mormonism.

Sandra Tanner [01:10:59] So you've got about 600 pages of all quotes, photocopies, all sorts of documentation on every aspect of Mormon history and changes and contradictions and how the Church has tried to suppress its records, all the fights that we had with them early on, trying to get photocopies of things, how they've suppressed their history, changed it, edited it, and backpedaled on all the claims.

Sandra Tanner [01:11:31] So it was an astounding work and I think that it still holds up today even though there are more research that's been done, for instance, on Book of Mormon problems. There's just a lot of new research, but they just reinforce what we did and expand on it. So yeah, it's our major work, famously

Nemo [01:11:54] featured in under the Banner Of Heaven.

John Dehlin [01:11:56] Right.

Nemo [01:11:57] Famously featured in under the man of Heaven.

Sandra Tanner [01:11:58] Oh yes. Under the manner of Heaven. When you see the detective sitting in his car and he opens this red book to read in it and he loses his faith. That's our Mormonism Shadow reality book that he's opening up to read.

Nemo [01:12:12] Yeah. How did that feel to see that on the big screen?

Sandra Tanner [01:12:15] I was very surprised. I didn't know that was coming.

Nemo [01:12:17] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:12:19] Yeah. And it's the book everyone, you know, if any of us were asking questions or learning about criticisms of the church in the 70s, 80s and 90s. It's the book all the leaders of the church said to just avoid at all costs.

Sandra Tanner [01:12:34] Right, Absolutely.

John Dehlin [01:12:35] I mean it's the example, the prototypical example of anti Mormon, quote, anti Mormon literature as told by the LDS Church. And I think the history has been proven across generations to be very solid, very credible. And if anybody has written larger books on any of these topics, there's a good chance they started with Mormonism Shadow and Reality or your newsletters and then built on top of the work that

Sandra Tanner [01:13:06] you and Gerald did. Many did. Yes.

Nemo [01:13:08] I think it is to Mormon analysis or Mormon commentary what Fawn Brodie's book is to biographies of Joseph Smith. It's that thing that even Richard Bushman will go to forme Brodie. Right. And he will vindicate some of her points and some of her sources. And it's similarly people are going to be working off and particularly now we're in 2025 and the church has admitted a lot of the things that are contained in Mormonism Shadow or reality. They've admitted that the papyrus don't have anything to do with Abraham. They've admitted that the Kinderhook plates were forgeries and on that point forgeries that Joseph Smith probably should have been able to detect or could have.

Nemo [01:13:44] You know, I don't want to besmirch Joseph Smith and say he ought to have, but he certainly would have been capable of realizing that these are a bit too uniform. They don't look hammered, which that seems a bit too modern or whatever. Certainly people in his day probably could have recognized them as forgeries, I would imagine. Would that be fair to say?

Sandra Tanner [01:14:01] Well, I assume someone that worked in metal I would think would have said, wait a minute, these look too perfectly made to be handmade.

Nemo [01:14:12] Yeah. And don't look sufficiently weathered or whatever. But yeah, go on, John.

John Dehlin [01:14:18] That's good.

Cover-Ups and Changes in Church History

Nemo [01:14:18] Okay. I was gonna take us on to just other cover ups, other changes and cover ups that the Church has done over time. I mean, cover UPS is quite a loaded term, but I think it is fair to say that there have been times when the church has covered up things they don't want in public view. Like, for example, the 1832 account of the first vision.

Sandra Tanner [01:14:37] Right.

Nemo [01:14:38] How did you guys discover. That's not, like a specific topic we've got here. But I do want to kind of ask. You first learned that there was a copy that wasn't available to anyone, that this existed, even that there was an account other than the one printed in the Pearl of Great Price, which is the 1838 account.

Sandra Tanner [01:14:57] Well, in Fawn Brodie's book, she mentions that she wasn't able to find any early church publications or diaries that were talking about the first vision. And so her question was, when did the first vision become important? When did it enter into the narrative?

Sandra Tanner [01:15:21] Because in Joseph Smith's story, at the back of the Pearl of Great Price, he says, I was persecuted from day one for telling about my vision, and all these ministers had come against him in all of this. Well, where's the evidence for this? And so she raised the question, why is it absent from the early narrative of the church?

Sandra Tanner [01:15:43] So that starts us on a quest for more information on how the first vision entered into the story. We went back and did a research on the journalist discourses and found there were different ones telling of Joseph having a vision experience, but they weren't putting it back to 1820, and they were only talking about it in terms of an angel. Now, when I would bring this up to Mormons, they would say, oh, well, that doesn't matter because we have the Times and Seasons printing of his story in 1842 where he tells about these things. But then the question is, what earlier accounts do you have than the 42

Nemo [01:16:33] printed 22 years after?

Sandra Tanner [01:16:36] What predates this? Is there no record earlier? Okay, so then when we start realizing the church has been tampering with all the documents, and this is back in the 195960 time period in the Dark Ages, when no Internet and you had to go to the library to see everything. We're trying to find out, well, what's the earliest account of the first vision that anyone has? And we can't get back past the latter part of Joseph Smith's life.

Nemo [01:17:15] Was that sort of 38 to the early 40s?

Sandra Tanner [01:17:17] Yeah. And so I'm in 59 and 60. I'm meeting with my bishop who's trying to help me save my faith. And so he volunteers to send a letter to Joseph Fielding Smith, who was church historian and Apostle. And so I said, well, I have questions about the first vision. And so I had some particular things about the first vision. I asked in the letter, but one of the things I said in there was, I would like a photocopy of the original Joseph Smith account of the first vision. Now, I didn't know that they were sitting on the 1842 account. I just assumed there has to be an early handwritten account.

John Dehlin [01:18:01] 1832 or 1842.

Nemo [01:18:03] 1832.

John Dehlin [01:18:03] Okay.

Sandra Tanner [01:18:04] 1832.

Nemo [01:18:05] So you didn't know that they'd taken the 1832 out and put it on?

Sandra Tanner [01:18:08] I didn't even know it existed. I didn't know anything about it. All I knew was you just wanted

Nemo [01:18:12] the original, whatever that was.

Sandra Tanner [01:18:13] Yeah. In 38, Joseph's working on this history of the church that eventually becomes published in the Times and seasons in 1842. Okay, okay. He's putting together his history in 38. What predates that. What manuscripts are there that he's working from?

Nemo [01:18:28] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [01:18:29] Where's the first time he writes it down? I want a copy the first time he writes it down. Can you give me a photocopy of that?

Nemo [01:18:34] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [01:18:35] Well, Joseph Fielding Smith knows that there are people who know about the 1832 account, because in the

John Dehlin [01:18:50] 18.

Sandra Tanner [01:18:51] Oh, excuse me. In the. All these statesman stuff in the 1950s, Levi Edgar Young, an apostle, was shown the 1832 account, and he told a friend of ours, Lamar Peterson. We didn't know Mr. Peterson at this time, but Mr. Peterson was told that this apostle had seen a, quote, strange account of the first vision. So obviously there would have been people around that Joseph Fielding Smith would know had seen this early account. And I think he assumed we had got wind of that.

Nemo [01:19:43] Right. That's why you were asking for it.

Sandra Tanner [01:19:46] And that's why I was asking for it, because I'd got wind of this, that there is this account that people are talking about. Well, that rumor hadn't come to me. I'm just assuming there's got to be a first. Where's the first account?

Sandra Tanner [01:20:00] So unbeknownst to us, which we now know, Joseph Fielding Smith had seen this 1832 strange account in Joseph Smith papers and had cut it out of the letter book that it was in and saved it separately so that people wouldn't stumble on it. I assume when the issue starts coming up about the earliest account of the first vision, at some point he evidently sticks those pages back in and they're taped back in to make the document complete.

Sandra Tanner [01:20:42] So when I write, I want to see the first vision. Joseph Fielding Smith's assuming I know about this, which I don't, but I just think there ought to be an account. And I'm assuming at that point he decides that he's been sitting on it too long and maybe they needed to get this out because he allows a copy to be given to a guy named Paul Chessman who was writing a thesis at BYU that his thesis, I think, is 64 about and allows him to have a copy of the 1832 account for his thesis.

Sandra Tanner [01:21:27] So it all comes out then. But. But the thesis was not publicly available. People didn't know about this. A student at BYU in the 1960s heard about the thesis, saw it, and saw that it Talked about this 1832 account and told us he could get us a copy of it.

Sandra Tanner [01:21:54] So he sends us in the mail a copy of Chessman's thesis, but he didn't include the appendix, which had the full text of the 32 account. The thesis only talks about it. It doesn't have the whole account. And we phoned the guy back, we said, wait a minute. Where's the appendix? We got to have the whole text. So then the guy's, oh, sorry, and didn't know that was important. So he goes back and gets a photo of that and sends it to us and, you know, like bombshell. Okay, here's the first account of the first vision. Now we know why Joseph Fielding Smith didn't want to send me a copy.

Sandra Tanner [01:22:29] Now I know why. He said to my bishop, what would it prove if I gave it to her? She wouldn't believe it anyways because he knows it won't convince me.

Nemo [01:22:38] Right.

Sandra Tanner [01:22:40] And in my mind, I'm just thinking, well, you're making a lot of assumptions. What do you mean? Why wouldn't it convince me? Only if it doesn't read like you think it should. But I don't know that he's speaking as a fact that. What would approve if I showed it to you?

Nemo [01:22:53] You wouldn't believe anyways, because he actually knows. Hang on. This is going to be deep, challenging to you rather than helping you, because it's strange. And I think that was the title of your book, Joseph Smith's Strange First Account.

Sandra Tanner [01:23:04] Strange Account of the First Vision. Yes, because that's the way it was first framed to us when our friend Lamar Peterson finally tells us, oh, yeah, I was told about that strange account by Levi Edgar Young, but I had to swear not to tell it to anyone while he was alive. And Levi Edgar Young, I think, dies in like, 63 I think. And so Lamar feels free to tell me then about this strange account.

Nemo [01:23:34] And so the 1832 account first meets the light of day with Chesham and his work as an appendix. But that's not widely spread at all. That's an academic.

Sandra Tanner [01:23:45] No, it was hard to get access to the thesis.

Nemo [01:23:48] Yeah. So you managed to finally get access to it, and then once you'd got that appendix, you published it.

Sandra Tanner [01:23:53] We published it. Oh, yes.

Nemo [01:23:55] What year was that?

Sandra Tanner [01:23:56] We're right out there putting out a copy, passing it out to everybody on block, you know, have you read about the 1832 account?

Nemo [01:24:04] And what year did that go out?

Sandra Tanner [01:24:07] 64.

Nemo [01:24:09] Okay.

Sandra Tanner [01:24:09] I think.

John Dehlin [01:24:10] Did it make a splash? Did people care?

Sandra Tanner [01:24:12] Well, our little handful of geeky Mormon students were all excited, but it didn't go, you know, broadcast around the world, but in the Mormon underground, it was all pretty exciting when it came out.

Nemo [01:24:31] The subtitle for this was important documents suppressed for 130 years now comes to light. This document, dictated by Joseph Smith, reveals that he did not see the Father and son in 1820. That's quite a powerful statement to make about this account. And I think it holds up. You read it, and it does not make the claim that he sees two individuals.

Sandra Tanner [01:24:53] No, he just sees the Lord.

Nemo [01:24:54] He sees the Lord, Yes.

Sandra Tanner [01:24:56] Which is obviously Christ because it talks about him being the Savior.

Nemo [01:25:00] And this is where we can start to see, or you can start to add up now that you know that there's been changes in the Book of Mormon, which you knew before this, and you can start to go, well, there was changes to the Book of Mormon. And then if you start to work out that some of those changes came in 1837 with the next edition. Okay, well, the 1832 account of the first vision aligns with the theology of the 1830 Book of Mormon. And then the theology changes in 1837, and the subsequent vision account in 1838 all of a sudden has two individuals. So this starts to paint a picture, to me at least, of an evolving theology of Joseph Smith.

Sandra Tanner [01:25:36] Right, Absolutely.

Nemo [01:25:38] Okay.

Sandra Tanner [01:25:39] And that's the problem with all of this history is that what you end up with is an evolving history. And the Mormons have tried in all of their publications to paint this picture of perfection. Everything is given from God direct. No need to revise.

John Dehlin [01:25:58] Nothing changes.

Sandra Tanner [01:25:59] Nothing changes. This is the way God had ordained it all to be. And it just unfolds in this beautiful, ongoing stream of revelation. And yet now we know it's a patchwork of documents that repeatedly get revamped and the funny thing in Mormon history and revelation is that the church since the turn of the century, the last turn of the century, 1900 on, has been to downplay specifics, whereas up till 1900 it was the ongoing work of God. They were all expecting Jesus to come back eminently and. But since then, modern day revelation seems to be detracting from what was given before not giving new revelations. Yeah, it's no longer additive, less specific, not more specific.

John Dehlin [01:26:57] Really quickly, I just wanted to show our audience the resources that are available. So here's a copy of one of the books available at utlm.org, falsification of Joseph Smith's history. That's a book worth checking out. Here's a visual of some of the verbiage from Joseph Smith's first vision as first published and then as published today. And you can see that it almost doubles in length, just one passage. And if it were just sort of adding or Claire, if it were just kind of adding more details to, that would be one thing. But it's literally adding characters, adding personages to the first vision and adding motives and changing motives and yeah, it's problematic. And you just have to check out the original sources to see that. Here is. Did we talk about Nephi versus Moroni?

Conflicting Accounts in Early Church Records

Nemo [01:28:04] No.

John Dehlin [01:28:05] Okay, yeah, let's talk about that really quick. Just because I've got the visual.

Sandra Tanner [01:28:08] Well, this is so funny that the question is, who brings the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith? Is it the first guy in the book or is it the last guy in the book? And so you have this confusion in the documents of whether it's Moroni or Nephi. And it seems like at first it was Moroni and then Joseph starts pinning it down that it's Nephi. So by the time Joseph Smith dies, the church newspaper and all is saying Nephi and now the church has changed it back to put Moroni. It shows that it's all invention, it's not real history. Because how could you confuse Nephi at 600 BC with Moroni at 421 A.D.

John Dehlin [01:29:03] and here I'll just show the visual as well. So we've got as first published in the Times and Seasons, Volume 3, page 753. He called me by name and said that his name was Nephi.

Sandra Tanner [01:29:18] And then as published, written above, the line is Moroni.

John Dehlin [01:29:23] Yeah. Oh, say that. What do you mean?

Nemo [01:29:25] That's why they've made that change.

Sandra Tanner [01:29:26] They made the change on the manuscript.

Nemo [01:29:28] You can see on the visual.

John Dehlin [01:29:29] Okay, so in the visual you've got

Nemo [01:29:32] where that little triangle is at the

John Dehlin [01:29:33] bottom, and it's basically saying it's not Nephi, it's Moroni.

Sandra Tanner [01:29:37] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:29:38] And so as published today, he called me by name and said that his name was Moroni. And I'm guessing that now in 2025, you could go to the Joseph Smith Papers Project and it would show this source document with the Moroni added in.

Sandra Tanner [01:29:56] Right.

John Dehlin [01:29:57] But again, would the Joseph Smith Papers Project even had happened if you and Gerald hadn't have shown the world that there were problems with the source documents?

Sandra Tanner [01:30:07] They might have eventually got around to publishing all of that, but I think it would have taken them longer. It's not like they ran out and immediately started opening the archives and showing people these things.

Nemo [01:30:18] But this speaks to an issue. Joseph seemed to have quite a lot with knowing who he was talking to and what angel, what heavenly visitors were called. You know, the Elijah Elias issue as well in Kirtland. Right. He's. He's got the, the Greek and the Hebrew name for the same prophet.

Sandra Tanner [01:30:34] Right.

Nemo [01:30:35] Thinking they're separate individuals. Right. I don't think that gets enough attention sometimes that Joseph's got this pattern of not always correctly identifying who he's talking to and to the point where sometimes he thinks two people can somehow be the same biblical prophet.

John Dehlin [01:30:51] And it's one thing if it's just someone in his neighborhood from 12 years ago, but if it's like angels or God beings God and Jesus, it starts to strain credulity. Here really quickly is another book that I think has already been mentioned, Joseph Smith's Strange Account of the First Vision. And that's also available on utlm.org and if all that weren't enough, what's the next topic?

Changes to the Doctrine and Covenants

Nemo [01:31:16] We have Nima, briefly, so briefly, briefly, we've got changes to the Doctrine and Covenants. We've got a couple of slides here.

John Dehlin [01:31:24] Tell us that story.

Sandra Tanner [01:31:25] Well, so then when I read Whitmer's pamphlet, well, in Gerald too, when Gerald read David Whitmer's pamphlet, he talks about how Joseph Smith changed the revelations from the Book of Commandments to the Doctrine and Covenants. So the Book of commandments done in 1833, the Doctrine and Covenants, 1835, and between those two years, you have major revision of the Revelations.

Sandra Tanner [01:31:53] And so we wanted to demonstrate to people how those changes happened. So in our books, we give a number of examples of the major changes. And so when you look at your Doctrine and Covenants today, and sections 2, 7 and 27, as I recall, all have to do with priesthood Restoration. But they weren't in the original. 27 was in the original, but it was shorter. And Joseph has expanded it to put in all kind of visions of different people in the revelation that weren't mentioned in the first printing.

Sandra Tanner [01:32:29] So it raises this whole issue of not only are his scriptures being changed and edited, you have his revelations are being changed and edited as the need arises. Like the change on Oliver Cowdery's gift of working with the rod of nature and to obscure the magic connotation and to make it the gift of Aaron. And the revelation that says the only gift and calling Joseph has is to bring out the Book of Mormon changed too. Well, that's just the first of his gifts that God's going to give him and then the addition of all the priesthood material that's added in later.

John Dehlin [01:33:13] Is it true that the Melchizedek priesthood, Whitmer, David Whitmer didn't remember that ever Peter, James and John ever giving the Melchizedek priesthood and that that didn't appear in the original Book of Commandments and that it was added later as one of these like modifications of revelation?

Sandra Tanner [01:33:31] Right. That's why, like that section 27, they modified that to add in all these different vision experiences. Peter, James and John come in in that edition. It wasn't there originally. So we were trying to show that Whitmer was right. These revelations have gone through modification to add in a priesthood concept that wasn't there at the beginning of the church.

John Dehlin [01:33:55] Is it possible Whitmer just was left out of the loop when Peter, James and John came into town and gave them. You're laughing, Nemo. Why are you laughing?

Nemo [01:34:03] Maybe you Whitman being sarcastic, but it felt a little bit.

John Dehlin [01:34:07] It was sad.

Sandra Tanner [01:34:07] Well, no, but the documents show that there was a change that you don't have the earliest printed documents of Mormonism talking about a priesthood, a Melchizedek priesthood like they would talk about today, that we can show through the additions of the Book of Commandments, doctrine and Covenants, the addition of these concepts into the text. So it isn't a matter of conjecture. And I think most of their scholars today would admit that Melchizedek priesthood doesn't really come in as a concept till 1832.

John Dehlin [01:34:43] It's not in the Book of Mormon, right?

Sandra Tanner [01:34:45] Nope, not there.

Nemo [01:34:47] And so we've talked a lot about some of these original documents. Right, You've talked about the early documents and things like the times and seasons seems to play a vital role in uncovering all this. Where did you get other than perhaps Just the library again. But where did you get all these copies of the times and seasons that you then painstakingly reproduced so you could then evidence these things?

Sandra Tanner [01:35:07] There was a microfilm company here in Salt Lake, Universal Microfilm, and they were involved in microfilming a lot of material for the church. And so they had their own archive at their company at Universal Microfilm, which was over on Pierpont Avenue in downtown Salt lake, off from 3rd West, I think, somewhere in that neighborhood.

Sandra Tanner [01:35:39] So we would go to them to see what microfilms they had. And so they had many of these microfilms of these early documents that we could then buy a microfilm. And then we had to send the microfilm to California to a company out there that could run them through a special process that would make paper master material to print from and send back to us this whole big roll of paper manuscript material that we would have to cut up to the individual pages for the printing. And then our offset press, we could put these paper masters on that were made from the microfilm that we got from Universal Microfilm.

Nemo [01:36:27] It's all a process, huh?

Sandra Tanner [01:36:28] Yes, it was a long process and expensive for two guys that were just struggling to make ends meet. So we were working on a shoestring. You look at our early newsletters, we're always going broke and having sales and begging people for a loan. And so we were not getting rich off of this.

Nemo [01:36:49] No, no, I can't imagine you were.

Sandra Tanner [01:36:51] No, no. But. But we survived.

Nemo [01:36:54] So the thing. The thinking was, okay, the church must have these early documents. They must have these early magazines, because we know. The thing we know about the church is they love to keep records. It's a very Mormon thing to keep records. Right. It's a very. It's a very us thing to do. So you. You had a really good reason to believe they would have these things, and so you found the company that was doing this for them and thought, right, well, we can get it through them.

Sandra Tanner [01:37:21] Yes.

Nemo [01:37:21] All right. Okay.

John Dehlin [01:37:22] Which of your books covers the changes to the Doctrine and Covenants, or do you remember?

Sandra Tanner [01:37:26] Well, when we first did our Case Against Mormonism Volume 1, we have the largest number of examples of the changes of the Revelations. And then when we incorporated the case material into our Mormonism shadow reality, we have a chapter on the changes in the Revelations where we give a number of examples, but we have more examples included in the Case Against Mormonism, Volume 1.

John Dehlin [01:37:55] Got it.

Nemo [01:37:56] Okay. Well, I mean, speaking of just all this material you produced, I have one

John Dehlin [01:38:00] question before we move on.

Nemo [01:38:01] It's going to kill my segue. That's all right.

John Dehlin [01:38:03] Oh, no.

Nemo [01:38:03] I had a beautiful segue, John. No, no, it. I'll let you go.

John Dehlin [01:38:07] No, I don't want to kill your segue.

Nemo [01:38:09] No, no, no. I can make it work. Okay.

John Dehlin [01:38:10] Okay.

Nemo [01:38:11] Go for it.

Evidence for Joseph Smith's Polygamy

John Dehlin [01:38:11] I have to ask this. We just did six hours with Michelle Stone, who she calls herself a Joseph Smith monogamy affirmer. Others refer to her and her followers as Joseph Smith polygamy deniers. She claims she had. If I'm. If I remember right, I believe she claims that she had a lunch with you recently where she kind of laid out her reasons for saying the documentation just isn't there to substantiate Joseph Smith in any credible way as being a polygamist. And I got the sense that what she's saying from her meeting with you is that you kind of conceded that the documents are relatively weak when it comes to Joseph Smith being a polygamist. And I just wanted to get your take on the solid or non solid nature of the evidence that Joseph Smith himself practiced polygamy. In terms of the documentation.

Sandra Tanner [01:39:14] If we look at the published material, it's clear that Joseph Smith was claiming there was no polygamy. And so it gets down to the problem of sources. She brought up a good point on, because Clayton diary is one of the main ones we look to for a contemporary account of Joseph's polygamy. And she brought out that it was what they call a clean copy. It's obviously been recopied from the original notes or whatever that Clayton had written down because it doesn't show any corrections or changes or anything. It's a clean copy. So. So her question is, when was the clean copy produced? Was it done in Nauvoo or was it done in Utah? Because if it was in Utah, she wouldn't accept it as a contemporary account.

Nemo [01:40:13] Is that the claim that there would be the influence of Brigham Young at that time to try and paint Joseph Smith as a polygamist?

Sandra Tanner [01:40:19] Well, also Clayton's. Clayton's a party to this. She has a conspiracy model that all of these polygamists that went west conspired to make a false narrative to support their claim of polygamy, which becomes a conspiracy theory so heavy that I think it falls under its own weight. But I had to concede to her. I don't know when the clean copy was made, and that would be something that, yes, historians need to look at. But I don't think that answers her theory. I don't think that's enough to carry the day. Simply because we don't have the original. Original of Clayton's notes.

Nemo [01:41:11] Well, because you've produced, famously, because you gave me a copy last time I was here, you've produced a big sort of broadsheet of the Nauvoo Expositor, a reproduction of that, which I assume you got from some microfilm somewhere.

Sandra Tanner [01:41:24] Right.

Nemo [01:41:25] And have produced that. And that still to me seems to be too similar to what's described in DC132 to allow DNC132 to be written off as a late revelation.

Sandra Tanner [01:41:37] In our lunch, we did not get around to talking about the Nauvoo Expositor. I was talking to her about things from the 1830s and the book of 1835, DNC, where they have to put in a denunciation of polygamy, the 1831 revelation to send Mormon men on missions to Indians to marry the Indian women, and the Fanny Alger situation and those kinds of areas which she has her own way of dismissing their importance. So I was not meeting with her to debate. I merely wanted to get a feel for how she presented her case and what made her think that it was this. Sure. So she may have felt that she made more points with me than I felt.

John Dehlin [01:42:44] And I'm not trying to put words in her mouth.

Sandra Tanner [01:42:46] She's a very lovely person. She's very sincere. Sincere.

John Dehlin [01:42:49] Agreed.

Sandra Tanner [01:42:50] And I appreciate her struggles. She does shows. She says she doesn't know at all. She's still learning. She's trying to figure it all out.

Nemo [01:42:58] And aren't we all? Right.

Sandra Tanner [01:42:59] And I applaud that. Look at the original documents. I still feel that the history will show it all originated with Joseph Smith. You have the Nauvoo Expositor itself, I think, is just absolute proof.

Nemo [01:43:16] But to a point you made at Thrive recently, John, is it's good that you sat down with Michelle and had a conversation, because it shows that two people who disagree on their takeaways from these source documents can still sit down and have a conversation. That's really important.

Sandra Tanner [01:43:30] Right.

John Dehlin [01:43:31] What do you say? Since Brigham Young was your ancestor directly, your blood descendant of Brigham Young, she feels very strongly that the scenario that I hear her painting is that Brigham Young was trying to defend the church's integrity. The Temple lot case was going on, and he needed a bunch of women to sign affidavits to testify that Joseph Smith married them, not just spiritually, but in the very deed that they had sex. So the way she paints the picture is basically they just come up with These templates of affidavits shove them in the faces of all these women that. That weren't Joseph Smith's wives. Or maybe they were only his wives, spiritually only.

John Dehlin [01:44:15] And Brigham Young and his goons just basically forced these many women to either just sign some affidavit that someone else wrote for them or pressured them to write their own affidavit to claim they had sex with Joseph when they didn't. Would you put that past Brigham Young and his Heber C. Kimball and his colleagues?

Sandra Tanner [01:44:39] No, I don't think that they would have made up that grand conspiracy against Joseph Smith. But I think that the evidence from the time period in Nauvoo shows the charges are all there at that time. It's not like the affidavits that are got together in the 1870s and 80s appear out of the blue and there's no history before that. I mean, if that were the case that just suddenly, bam, we have all these very late statements by these women, it might be something to think about. You know, how sure are we that they're telling the truth about something that happened all these years before?

Sandra Tanner [01:45:25] But when you have the accusations at the time in the 1840s, then of course, you would expect that some later statement might give you further light on those charges that were made in the 40s. I think Bennett's book and the novel Expositor are issues you just can't get around. The claims are all there for it.

John Dehlin [01:45:49] She'll say Bennett's a scallywag. You can't trust the thing.

Sandra Tanner [01:45:51] He says, well, he is a scallywag, and he makes stuff out.

Nemo [01:45:54] Doesn't mean he's wrong.

Sandra Tanner [01:45:55] But he's naming. He's naming the women. Women that we do know end up being Joseph Smith's plural wives. Is that just a lucky guess? I mean, he gives the first initials of the first and last name and then asterisks to fill out the rest of the letters. And we can plug in actual women's names into that list. And there's seven or nine that Bennett lists that we do know were associated with the polygamy charges.

Sandra Tanner [01:46:28] So to me, it's a conglomeration of a lot of historical data. Her theory would require not just Brigham young, but the 12 to be in some sort of mass conspiracy to put together this scenario, like the Clayton diary, Wilford Woodruff's diaries, all these men that are living through the Nauvoo period and then coming west to practice polygamy, that is their life stories.

Sandra Tanner [01:47:03] And it just is wishful thinking. And while I sat there talking with her, I kept reminding myself, this is me when I still believe the Book of Mormon, talking to my friend Lamar Peterson, who would kindly say to us, well, here's another document you might want to read and consider. And it finally worked.

John Dehlin [01:47:32] Yeah, yeah. I mean, she will acknowledge that if Joseph Smith didn't practice polygamy, but the next 10 Mormon prophets and revelators all engaged in a conspiracy to defraud or to fool or to Mislead God's restored one true church for 200 years, she'll admit that's a problem for the modern day LDS church. Right. It's kind of super problematic either way. Yeah, I think she'll admit that. Okay, well, now your magical segue now.

Nemo [01:48:09] Oh, I've got to try and find one from there. Well, okay. So speaking of reaching out to individuals and having. Spending a lot of time with individuals, you did spend a lot of time providing resources and support to thousands of people who doubted the Mormon Church. Is that a good enough segue?

John Dehlin [01:48:22] That's great. Fantastic. As long as you're happy with it.

Nemo [01:48:25] I'm happy. So the Utah Lighthouse Ministry, we've already spoken about the fact that all this stuff's available online free. Right. And the bookstore's no longer open, is that correct?

Sandra Tanner [01:48:35] Right.

Nemo [01:48:35] But it's all the website still running. People can get all this stuff.

Sandra Tanner [01:48:38] Right? Right. It's all up there.

Nemo [01:48:41] So it's one thing to discover all these things about the church, and it's one thing to go to all the effort of finding all these documents and trying to piece together this narrative for yourself. It's another to then go out there and share that with others and try and support others. And both in just publishing your materials, but also having personal conversations with people, support others. What do you feel drove you to do that?

Sandra Tanner [01:49:08] In our personal quest in trying to figure out the truth claims of Mormonism was also our effort to try to determine, well, if Mormonism isn't true, what do we believe? Do we believe Christianity? Do we chuck it all? Do we keep some of it?

Sandra Tanner [01:49:26] What does it mean not to be a Mormon and to be a Christian? So we felt that through our studies and experiences of studying the Bible, specifically the New Testament, the story of Christ, that we could believe that part of what we'd been raised with. But the rest of it, all of Mormonism, had to be set aside.

Sandra Tanner [01:49:57] And then the question was, where do you fit after you leave Mormonism? Which we didn't. We didn't fit because anyone leaving Mormonism knows it's going into a strange world because the Christian community has their own vocabulary, just like the Mormons have theirs.

Sandra Tanner [01:50:18] And so we were strangers in a strange world, wanting to be a part of this other Christian community, but we didn't exactly fit their mold. And of course, at first, when I first left Mormonism, we still believed the Book of Mormon for, well, three years.

Sandra Tanner [01:50:41] And then when we did finally set the Book of Mormon aside, then finding a church home was somewhat of a challenge because the Christian world was just so foreign to us at that point. We were living in Salt Lake City and the Christian choices here were pretty sparse. There's a number of churches now, but in 1960 there was a handful of churches, but none of them were really flourishing. Most were struggling with small congregations.

Sandra Tanner [01:51:19] But we started also reading books on biblical translation because we're looking at Joseph's translation, we looked at biblical translations, we looked at the reliability of the biblical text. Granted, we were reading Christian apologetics, not atheists material. And we became familiar with FF Bruce and Bruce Metzger, who were both prominent New Testament Greek scholars and felt we could have confidence in the New Testament.

Sandra Tanner [01:52:02] We knew that it was not like we were raised on the Mormon claim, you know, where every word is given by God. We knew that God didn't speak King James, right? So it wasn't that we were looking for a scriptural text that was word perfect through the centuries because we came to understand how translations worked. And in fact, one of the things I did in leaving Mormonism was trying to sort out what in the New Testament.

Sandra Tanner [01:52:40] Had I, Had I known the right interpretation or how much of it was tainted by Mormonism. So I went and bought a copy of the Phillips paraphrased New Testament to read because all I'd read up till then was King James.

Sandra Tanner [01:53:01] And that helped me to rethink all the verses. So it's one of my advices to people on leaving Mormonism. If you're only used to reading the King James, get a modern day translation. You can go back to the King James later if you're really in love with it. Most of us have a hard time anymore understanding King James.

Sandra Tanner [01:53:27] And by reading the Phillips translation, I would come along and I would hit different verses. And I think, I don't remember that. And I'd have to go, look, I'm like King James. Oh, that's what it was about. I had totally misunderstood what the conversation was because of coming at it from either a Mormon understanding or just a lack of simple understanding at all of Just the verbiage of King James was confusing.

Sandra Tanner [01:54:00] So through those studies we felt we could hang on to Christianity. And shopping around for church was a bit of a challenge because again, we had our own prejudices. Like serving coffee in the lobby was kind of a shock. And the more lax dress code was a shock. Of course, in 1960 it wasn't the shock that it is nowadays. For I think there's even a bigger cultural gap for the Mormon today than when we transitioned.

Sandra Tanner [01:54:38] We didn't have to try to decipher all of the modern day changes that have happened in evangelical worship services. That for a Mormon would seem a little too informal. But we, so for our driving force is, we felt an obligation to set the record straight, that the Mormon needed to know that there was a Christianity out there that was not Mormonism.

Sandra Tanner [01:55:08] Something that would give them a sense of forgiveness and not burden them with this treadmill of perfection that yeah, you screw up, then you come and ask forgiveness and you can go on with your life, you don't have to keep beating yourself up.

Sandra Tanner [01:55:26] And I know some Christians find that experience anyways through their own path. But we saw that there was a difference in the Mormon way of dealing with guilt and forgiveness that burdened you in a way that I felt Christianity could set you free from.

Sandra Tanner [01:55:44] So we wanted to share a more positive, helpful Christianity than what they were experiencing. And we felt that the Mormons were held prisoner in a series of texts that bound them to a false claim by a false prophet, that if they could just go back to the New Testament, they would find a much simpler, more direct access to God that would give them a happier life and the sense of security, of finding forgiveness through God. That this eternal stretch of trying to keep worthy of the temple ritual, that you have to keep all the commandments in order to get this prize at the end of the road was so exhausting.

Sandra Tanner [01:56:40] So part of our search was not just to undermine the claims of Mormonism, but to try to help people see a path through that to a life of worshiping God in a more wholesome, healthier way.

Nemo [01:57:01] Yeah, you didn't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, right. Which if you look at the ex Mormon community, by and large you will see an overwhelming sort of lean towards atheism. I would say you see a lot of people certainly more vocally will talk about just losing all faith. Faith. So it's, I think it's important to also talk to people like yourself who have maintained a Christian faith after leaving Mormonism. I have noticed you keep calling them the Mormons and, and well, no, you've been around long enough not to care what Russell M. Nelson wants or doesn't want. Right, but about what to call the church. But it's, it's interesting to me to hear you talk about the Mormons knowing that you're a direct descendant of Brigham Young, knowing that this is, it's almost always going to be a part of you. Mormonism.

Leaving Mormonism and Critiquing Christianity

Sandra Tanner [01:57:47] I'm DNA Mormon.

Nemo [01:57:49] Yeah, but yet you are at this point now where you can almost talk about detached sense and about the Mormons, but that isn't you. How did you come to that place? Because I imagine it's more than just deconstructing your belief system for you. It's your DNA, it's your people, it's all that. How did you get through that?

Sandra Tanner [01:58:08] Well, I think that a gradually shifting my friendships to mainly people who had no Mormon background. You come to seeing a separation between the two camps. Although I have to say at this point many of my close friends are former Mormons. Many of my church associations are former Mormons. But we don't sit around and talk Mormonism. So I have my historical oriented friends that we talk Mormon stuff but in day to day converse it's just not a part of my regular world.

Nemo [01:58:55] I've got a couple more questions but you jump in with what you have first.

John Dehlin [01:58:59] Are you going to leave Christianity or

Nemo [01:59:01] we can stay on Christianity?

John Dehlin [01:59:02] Oh, were those part of your questions?

Nemo [01:59:03] No.

John Dehlin [01:59:04] Oh, okay.

Nemo [01:59:04] So let's stay on that.

John Dehlin [01:59:05] So really quick. So Sandra.

Nemo [01:59:07] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:59:09] We talked about this in depth in my interview with you, but I'm sure you're familiar with the criticism. Sander and Gerald were great to deconstruct Mormonism, but they just were unwilling to apply that same criticism to the Bible and Christianity. What's your quick response to that criticism? I'm sure you've heard 20,000 times.

Sandra Tanner [01:59:29] Well, that assumes that if you had all this education and all of these documents that no one in their right mind would still believe. And I would say that I think there are thousands of professional biblical scholars that still believe in Christianity.

Sandra Tanner [01:59:49] Granted I have not read extensively. Gerald read far more extensively than I did on biblical problems and scholarship. But I feel that the historical record clearly shows there was a Jesus. You have to explain the explosive start of Christianity some way that this unknown guy in Nazareth, Jerusalem area run around Galilee could cause such an eruption in the order of things at the time. To me it makes sense that the followers firmly believed that they had witnessed a miraculous event that this man had truly resurrected and come back to them.

Sandra Tanner [02:00:41] And I felt the manuscript evidence for the New Testament is early enough to prove that it predates the single pressure of any one group or person to tamper with the text, that we have historical foundations for the story.

Sandra Tanner [02:01:03] And that's not to say that every single thing checks out exactly 100%. Of course, there's textual differences. There's issues between, you know, which came first, the chicken or the egg. Like in discussions of Matthew and Mark and Luke. And most scholars say Mark came first and Matthew and Luke are using Mark, but they're also using other sources because they seem to have parts that each other aren't aware of besides the parts they both have in common. So there are textual issues there. But I believe it still presents a story of this man who had this miraculous claim of resurrection that founded a movement that I believe bears historical underpinnings. So I haven't read it all, but to me, it's enough to secure my

John Dehlin [02:02:01] faith and is, I guess, a witness of the Holy Ghost still something you feel is also a valuable.

Sandra Tanner [02:02:08] Yes, I would feel there is a spiritual element to it. And I don't talk about that as much because I know that when you get into the realm of personal experience, everyone just writes it off as a Mormon testimony.

John Dehlin [02:02:21] But that's a part.

Sandra Tanner [02:02:22] But it is a part of my experience. Yes.

John Dehlin [02:02:24] Okay, cool.

Nemo [02:02:25] And I would say to that a lot of people say to me, or not necessarily to me, but certainly to people who, when they just choose to leave the church wholesale, they'll say, but what about your spiritual experiences? And I think an important thing to recognize is that those things still happened to you. You still had strong emotional feelings. You still have whatever you want to call it. Now you'll maybe frame it differently, but it doesn't mean it didn't happen and it doesn't mean we don't continue to experience those feelings. So if the way you frame that now works for you, there's no reason to dismiss you having those spiritual experiences, I guess, is what I would say to that.

Sandra Tanner [02:03:04] Right. And I think that when I look back on my life, granted, I was only a Mormon up through the time I got married, but I had spiritual experiences as a teenager, times when I felt that God answered prayer. And I look back on them and I still feel they were God answering prayer. It's just that I put a meaning on them that I didn't need to. It doesn't mean that answer to prayer proved that Mormon church was true or that Mormon priesthood Power healed that person. I can see it in a broader context of God's mercy and touching that person's life and healing them without having to attach to Mormonism.

John Dehlin [02:03:48] Do you ever add the number of angelic visitors that come to you in those inspirational.

Sandra Tanner [02:03:53] I don't have any angelic visitations. In fact, as a young person, I was so convinced that if you prayed sincerely, you got angelic visitations. I prayed as a young person that God wouldn't send me an angel because I was scared to death that if I prayed too sincerely, one would show up. And I was afraid of the dark and I didn't want any heavenly visits.

John Dehlin [02:04:20] Love it. Okay, Nemo, your turn.

Nemo [02:04:22] Yeah. So I just got a couple questions from the perspective of, I guess a young up and comer, I don't know, a whippersnapper or whatever you want to. And recent excommunicates and recent excommunicants. Yeah. So I was thinking before this, what lessons would you kind of pass on to people like me? Upcoming or younger commentators on the church or younger critics of the church from your years of going toe to toe with the institution? Any advice you would give someone like me or. I think I'm the youngest person in this space still, I think, wow, I

Reflections on Decades of Church Criticism

Sandra Tanner [02:04:57] don't know what I say. We probably did everything wrong in our approach to everything. We just went in like a bull in a china closet and just threw accusations at everything and threw all caution to the wind and we found out about a document, we published it. So we weren't the ones to talk about finessing the trip out.

Nemo [02:05:26] I don't know if that's entirely fair to you, but because I think back to the Mark Hoffman forgeries, which you mentioned a couple of times now, and it would have been really easy for you and Gerald just to jump on those and publish them, but yeah, they're credible. Great. These give us what we want. But you had the, you know, you had the integrity to sit back and go, I'm not sure I believe this.

Sandra Tanner [02:05:48] We had that hesitation all along in that sense of our writing and approaching things in that sense. When we first started to study, we did come across little tracts that would be just misrepresenting things about Mormonism, arguing that the Mormons believe in Adam, God or blood atonement, as though it was the current stand of the church. And we were upset that the Christian community wasn't careful enough of how they wrote things up to represent what the current status was or what was a past teaching or make the quote sacrifice. We Found some people that would give talks and they would get up and make reference to some talk and they'd say, oh, and Brigham Young said that.

Sandra Tanner [02:06:42] And I'm thinking, no, I think that was Orson Pratt. And things like that would happen enough that we were very careful always to want our material to be verifiable. That if I told you the document was at Thus and so place, if you went and looked it up, it would be there.

Sandra Tanner [02:07:04] So when the Hoffman stuff came along, at first we were excited about the whole thing. But when questions started to come up in Gerald's mind, then he was willing to step back and say, we need to take a second look at this. And just because it favored our narrative, that we weren't going to push forward on saying, oh, you've got to accept these.

Sandra Tanner [02:07:30] But we were always concerned with accuracy because we, in our own search had run across inaccuracy enough that we were disheartened by it. So we want to make sure that when we put out something, we get stamped behind it.

Nemo [02:07:44] And I resonate with that personally, and I think I've learned that lesson, which is why every YouTube video I make has all my sources listed in the description. Because I want people to be able to go and look at what I've read, and if they disagree with my interpretation, at least we're looking at the same source document that we're disagreeing over. They don't have to take my word for it or anything like that. But I am lucky to have all these source documents available to me now in a way they weren't available to you. And so I wonder, what do you think the future of sort of challenging the church and trying to keep the church honest is going to look like in this new period where the church is publishing the Joseph Smith Papers?

Nemo [02:08:22] What's the difference between a church that just isn't publishing anything and is trying to keep it all hidden to now dealing with a church that's publishing loads, but maybe not giving the most honest commentary to go alongside it.

Sandra Tanner [02:08:34] Right? So it's kind of like telling someone, oh, that's all in the Library of Congress. You know, they can put everything up in the Joseph Smith Papers, but it's like saying, oh, well, everything's at the library. All my references are at the library. You know, just go find them.

Sandra Tanner [02:08:54] And so it's going to continue to be an issue for people to sort out what the church has put up on their material to show where it's relevant, what things have changed, because just even the changes we're talking about today.

Sandra Tanner [02:09:10] They can be verified in a lot of them in the Joseph Smith papers. But you've got to know where to look. Mormons don't even know to ask the question, let alone where to look. So as the Church continues to modify how it presents a story into this marshmallow simplified narrative of oh well, it doesn't matter how it came to us, it came by revelation. It's all from God. Avoiding all the claims they made of specificity in all of this in past years that have been proven wrong. And they just want to dismiss it all as well. We've always printed that. Yeah, no, you haven't always printed that.

Sandra Tanner [02:09:59] You haven't always made it available. It was like pulling nails to try to get them to talk about the different accounts of the first vision. They haven't always said there were different accounts. This is in my lifetime. We have forced them to come out and talk about the different accounts. So I see as time goes forward, it's kind of like reinventing the wheel. You will continue to have the same issues come up. It will just be in a little different context of how they are spinning it today as opposed to how they were doing it 60 years ago.

Nemo [02:10:35] Right. Because you've got em Russell Ballard, who sat there with down their jokes and said, we've never tried to hide anything from anyone. It was published here in 1970 or whatever publication that's not available, that's not on the churches app. You have to go to the Internet Archive to find it.

Sandra Tanner [02:10:48] Right.

Nemo [02:10:48] Because they only put the enzyme up. They didn't put the Millennial Star or anything like that on their app. So, you know, unless members know to go looking for it, they're not going to find it. Which I think is a great point. And then I do have one more question, John, if that's all right, please. Yeah, yeah. So as a Christian yourself.

Sandra Tanner [02:11:06] Yeah.

Nemo [02:11:07] What do you think of the Church's increasing attempts to become more mainstream and Christian? So for example, Dan A Jokes just released a video talking about. About taking east, borrowing Easter traditions, which Holy Week wasn't a thing years ago, and now they've started talking about it at a conference. And he talked about that he is risen. And people would respond, he is risen. Now he got that wrong. They would respond, he is risen indeed, I believe is the correct response. But what do you think of the Church's increasing attempts to mainstream or that's what it certainly seems like they're trying to do.

Sandra Tanner [02:11:38] They've received so much pushback through the years of being Odd, different. Other than, well, they, I mean, Joseph centered, right? Joseph centered, yes. When I first left Mormonism way back in 1960, I was working at Sears and clerking there and a lady from my stake came through and saw me and she wanted to talk and oh, Sandra, I heard you left the church. How could this be?

Sandra Tanner [02:12:12] What is your problem? And well, I'm standing in a department store, I'm trying to figure out how to talk to her. And I said, well, one of the problems I had is the Mormons just don't talk about Christ.

Sandra Tanner [02:12:24] It's all just Mormon centered. It's not talking about Christ. And she says, oh, no, no, we talk about Christ all the time. I says, really? Maybe I missed that, you know. And I says, well, how? When you know? And she says, why we end every talk in the name of Jesus Christ. And I said, well, yeah, but that's not the same as talking about him. So I think she probably said prayers.

John Dehlin [02:12:50] Every prayer ends on Jesus Christ.

Sandra Tanner [02:12:52] Everything ends.

Nemo [02:12:52] But that's just using his name to try and consolidate your ideas, right. Rather than talking about him and his teachings.

Sandra Tanner [02:12:58] Right, right. And to her they always talk about Christ because they end all their talks with in the name of Jesus Christ. Oh my. And so through the years there has been this repeated accusation from the Christian world that Mormonism is all about man, all about Joseph Smith, all about this prophet, not about Jesus.

Sandra Tanner [02:13:22] And so in trying to offset that, they're trying to get away from this delineation that Christians have always had. There's Mormons and then there's Christians. That the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints may have the name of Christ in their title, but they are not truly a Christian denomination.

Sandra Tanner [02:13:42] And so more and more I see them trying to meld into the Christian world to where they can just be another name down the block. Well, that can get you more acceptance in certain ways. But the, the downside of that is once you start saying we're like the guys down the street, what's to keep the person from going down the street and keep coming to your place? If the guys down the street have better music and a shorter service and

Nemo [02:14:15] your place asks for 10% of your

Sandra Tanner [02:14:16] income and your church demands 10% to be active.

John Dehlin [02:14:22] I think our church has come to say that we've got the authority, our ordinances count. They don't have the keys, they don't have valid priesthood authority, their ordinances don't count.

Nemo [02:14:31] But Brad Wilcox said it like two years ago, right?

John Dehlin [02:14:33] Yeah, I think that's their answer. Yes, you need the authority from God. You need the franchise agreement.

Sandra Tanner [02:14:39] Yeah. And then you come down to history. Well, we have a little problem of that. What seemed to be a late thought into Mormonism, it wasn't there before the Church was founded. So it comes back to their truth claims don't check out.

John Dehlin [02:14:52] Yeah.

Nemo [02:14:53] Well, that's all I have to ask, John. It's your show, so I'll let you wrap it up.

The Church's Durability and Global Growth

John Dehlin [02:14:56] No, I have one more question, so I would wonder. I'm trying to put my mind in your and Gerald's head space in the 60s and 70s, and I can imagine you discovering this stuff about multiple accounts of the first vision or problems with the Book of Mormon or anachronisms or the DNA stuff when it comes out or. Or the priesthood stuff, or the changes to the Book of Abraham or the Kinderhook plates or the Book of Abraham or the polygamy stuff. Like, I would imagine that at some point in your minds you would think, you know, not only did your Mormon shelves collapse, but you would think, man, there's so much good stuff here.

John Dehlin [02:15:38] Certainly after we do our 50th newsletter, or our 75th newsletter, or our 100th newsletter, or our third book, or our fifth book or our third edition of Mormonism, Shadow reality that like the evidence would pile up to the point where the Church would kind of collapse. And yet it's now a $300 billion multinational corporation that is one of the most wealthy and powerful churches on the planet. Some would say richer than God. How do you explain the fact that your work didn't take the Church down and continues to not make huge dents in faithfulness of the average member? Especially now that Nemo and us, the LDS Discussion Series Jeremy Runnels CES Letter mormonthink We're all republishing your stuff now.

John Dehlin [02:16:36] All your stuff is available through utlm PDFs. You know, utlm.org if ever church members had the chance to learn the stuff you revealed, to come to understand it and to see the Church for what you think it really is.

John Dehlin [02:16:52] 2025 would be the time for the Church to collapse. And yet it's richer and more powerful than ever. How do you explain the resilience of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and its tenaciousness and unwillingness to collapse?

Sandra Tanner [02:17:07] They have better business managers. They know how to invest in the stock market and how to make money. So you see these two graphs. You see the graph on the money going up, but on the membership going down.

Sandra Tanner [02:17:26] So even though they are getting more wealthy all the time. They are not growing a bigger, stronger church. Now, I understand that demographics would show that this is a common problem across the board. Christian churches, or religion in general is going through a tough time with people dropping out. And the Mormons are on that trajectory. They're having problems with retention and their numbers are going down.

Sandra Tanner [02:17:57] We don't see it so much right here in the Mormon corridor of Idaho, Utah, Arizona, because there was such a heavy presence of Mormons to begin with, that it's just barely starting to show up of the change in our culture in the Mormon corridor, that it is getting less Mormon and it's less Mormon in the Wasatch front than it's ever been. So I see them losing ground as a church, but not as a financial institution.

John Dehlin [02:18:37] What do you make of the growth in Africa? I mean, as I understand it, the church would claim in the US at least like a 1% growth rate. And that's driven at least in part by birth rate. The church would say we're still growing in the US at 1%. And in Africa, we're going gangbusters.

Sandra Tanner [02:18:56] Well, is it going to become an African church? I mean, do we move the headquarters to Zimbabwe or someplace? So if that is the trajectory, they're going to have to be an international church, not an American church. So much of Mormonism is tied to America. I don't know how you become a intercontinental church, truly. Where are the blacks in the leadership of the church? Where are the foreigners in the leadership of the church? When you get up to the top 15, you only have a couple of non American people up there.

John Dehlin [02:19:49] It says, because there's one Brazilian guy, right?

Nemo [02:19:52] There's a Brazilian guy, he's a German guy and a Brit.

John Dehlin [02:19:55] And Gong is what?

Nemo [02:19:58] Gong is born in America to Chinese parents.

John Dehlin [02:20:00] Okay.

Sandra Tanner [02:20:02] We have seen a demise in maybe church leaders that have pioneer ancestry. So they broadened out a little in that sense, but they're still all Mormon people, Anglo Saxon white people leading this church. And if it becomes a predominantly darker ethnic church, how long can they maintain a white leadership?

Nemo [02:20:35] And how long can they maintain silence on the priesthood ban and the racist doctrines of the church and not actually apologize for the them? How long can they do that? I would love to speak with a missionary that's serving in Africa at the moment that I know about how they deal with that when they're teaching people. Is it just that they don't know? And what happens when they then discover it? Could that be a real thing? The church is building on an unsteady foundation there by just not teaching on the fact that for 150 years or so black people were second class members of the church, particularly African.

Sandra Tanner [02:21:12] I suspect some of them would just say that, but that is white people's problem in general. That would they just see it as we're just part of colonial representation and see Mormonism as any worse or better or anything than the same problem in white missionaries from the Baptists going to Africa. But it is going to be more and more obvious that ethnic mixes are not held in equal regard because they aren't coming up into the 12th.

Nemo [02:21:54] Well, the church is so America centric. As an international member, I observed that it's so America centric that, that, you know, the history of the church is the United States, but it's also Great Britain.

Sandra Tanner [02:22:07] Yeah.

Nemo [02:22:08] There's a huge part that was played by converts from the United Kingdom going over in droves to America. I think there was at one point there was more members of the church in the UK than there was in the States, like quite early on in the 1830s. And we've had one British born prophet of the church, John Taylor, we then

John Dehlin [02:22:27] had

Nemo [02:22:30] one apostle that was a Brit at one point and then the latest apostle, Patrick Kieran is a Brit. And you think we should have been, if we were just looking at representation, we should have been far more represented than that. So if they can't even represent the second largest sort of demographic within the church, English speaking Brits, the church in the UK has been an outlier in Europe for years and even now we've just lost four stakes. Four stakes. Four out of 44 closed in the past few years in the UK. So if it's dying there and they weren't able to represent us, how on earth are they going to adequately represent the members in Africa as they grow? Because they can't even get white Brits into leadership, how does that make sense? How are they going to then represent the African members in leadership?

Sandra Tanner [02:23:16] Yes, I think this is going to become the racial issue I think will be more and more obvious an issue as you have a darker following and a wider leadership.

Nemo [02:23:30] Yeah. And it's, and there's a lot of people have the words now for that kind of colonial behavior that they didn't have 50 years ago. So I think it's going to be a lot easier for people to talk about this look of, hang on, you've got a predominantly African church. They're telling people to go pay their tithing. They're telling people that tithing is the way out of poverty.

Nemo [02:23:50] Russell M. Nelson is telling people that. And this is a white leadership going into Africa and it's going to look a lot like colonial sort of exploitation. And people aren't going to stand for that in the way they would have.

Nemo [02:24:02] A long time ago. We had to protest in the UK of trying to tear down statues of Cecil Rhodes because of his part in slave ownership. Statues being thrown into rivers because of people's slave owning past. The world is different now and I think there's going to be a contention to be had there.

Sandra Tanner [02:24:17] No.

Final Reflections and Closing Thoughts

John Dehlin [02:24:18] Sandra, what's it like to see young up and comers like Nemo? Are you a Nemo fan?

Sandra Tanner [02:24:22] Yes, I watch Nemo. Yeah. Great. Yes. It's really exciting to be able to hear about Mormonism in other parts of the world. Yes. And I am so addicted to the word Mormon. I grew up in Hinckley's version of Mormonism and when we were proud of it.

John Dehlin [02:24:42] Yes.

Nemo [02:24:42] Yeah, me too. Me too.

John Dehlin [02:24:44] So, Nemo, just to be clear, Nemo the Mormon gets the goat. Sandra Tanner's endorsement, is that right?

Sandra Tanner [02:24:51] Yes, absolutely.

Nemo [02:24:53] I gotta be careful with that kind of power.

John Dehlin [02:24:55] Even though he eats Jammie Dodgers and Doritos on air.

Sandra Tanner [02:24:59] That's all right. We'll forgive him.

John Dehlin [02:25:01] Okay. How's that feel, Nemo? To get the Sandra Tanner staple approval,

Nemo [02:25:05] I'll have to take some time to sit with that. I'm not sure what to do.

John Dehlin [02:25:07] But you got all that ride back to the UK on your airplane.

Nemo [02:25:10] Yeah, I'm just gonna be sat on the plane like this, not sure what to do.

John Dehlin [02:25:14] All right, well, I think we did it. I think we got Sandra and Nemo together. So mission accomplished. I also think it was a great episode. Any final words, Sandra?

Sandra Tanner [02:25:23] Oh, no. Be kind.

John Dehlin [02:25:26] I love it. Any final words, Nemo?

Nemo [02:25:29] No, Just thanks for having me here. It's been great. Thank you, Sandra, for giving us your time. It's been a pleasure.

John Dehlin [02:25:34] All right. And Nemo, have you enjoyed your two weeks here in the us?

Nemo [02:25:37] Oh, I've loved it. I've loved it.

John Dehlin [02:25:39] Any highlights?

Nemo [02:25:41] Zion national park is a beautiful place.

John Dehlin [02:25:43] You checked it out?

Nemo [02:25:43] I checked it out. Hiked it in the snow.

John Dehlin [02:25:45] Yeah.

Nemo [02:25:46] But yeah, beautiful place. Worth a look.

John Dehlin [02:25:50] All right, well, thanks for joining us today. Thanks again to Sandra. You can check out all her and gerald's work@utlm.org also you can subscribe to Nemo the Mormon on YouTube. I think you also do, like, donations. How.

Nemo [02:26:06] Yeah, donorbox.

John Dehlin [02:26:07] Okay. Donorbox.org nevathemorman and then yeah. You can also please subscribe to the Mormon Stories Podcast YouTube channel. You can also subscribe to us on Facebook, on Instagram, on TikTok, et cetera. Like this episode? Comment on it. We love your feedback@mormonstoriesmail.com there's also a feedback form you can fill out at our website. And then we just live and survive by our monthly donors. So if you're a monthly donor, thank you. We couldn't do this without you. If you're not a monthly donor please go to MormonStories.org, click on the donate button, become a monthly donor and we'll be able to keep doing stuff like this in the weeks, years and months ahead.

John Dehlin [02:26:46] Thanks to Brooklyn and Julia and Maven and Gerardo and all those that help keep us running our staff. Thanks to our board, thanks to all of you, our viewers and listeners. Be good to each other, be kind to each other and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories Podcast. Take care.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.