Introduction and Guest Welcome

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It's February 11, 2021, and today we have in store for you what I think is going to be a really, really important, essential Mormon Stories interview that helps fill in the puzzle of how Joseph Smith created the Book of Mormon. If you remember, my interviews with Grant Palmer, my interviews with Dan Vogel, my interviews with John Hamer, my interviews with Michael Quinn, many others, Sandra Tanner, Terrell Givens, Richard Bushman, one of the things we've been trying to cover over the years in Mormon Stories podcast is how in the world did Joseph Smith create the Book of Mormon? Whether you're a believer, whether you're not a believer, it's still a puzzle. Even for orthodox believers. They're still trying to figure out how this happened. Even if you're Spencer Fluman or Patrick Mason or Richard Bushman, you're still trying to understand what translation meant. It's a really big problem for believers and unbelievers. And I am so ecstatic that I have discovered a scholar who has something really important to contribute. In addition to the contributions of Brett Metcalf and all the others, the author, the contributor, the scholar is William L. Davis. And the book is Visions in a Joseph Smith and the Making of the Book of Mormon, published by the University of North Carolina Press. And I promise you, this book is as important as any book you've read to try and understand the puzzle pieces that go into how the Book of Mormon is authored. William L. Davis is an independent scholar. He holds a PhD in theater and performance studies and has published in Dialogue, John Bunyan Studies, and lots of other. I'm sorry, I'm having a hard time reading this because my eyes are getting bad. Textual Culture and a lot of other important journals, I guess. Before I try and massacre any more, your introduction. William Davis, welcome to Mormon Stories, first and foremost.

William L. Davis [00:02:01] Well, thank you for having me.

John Dehlin [00:02:03] Your book is super important. Do you want to just tell us really quickly? Well, welcome to the show, but also let's just jump right into kind of your biography, your background, and any other introduction or background that you want to share with before we dive into this really important book.

William L. Davis [00:02:22] Just background, I mean, some of it. I outline in the opening of the book in the preface, where I talk about who I am, how I come to it. Basically, I was born and raised in Provo, Utah. I grew up there, spent some of my high school years, most of my high school years in Idaho. Came home, went on a mission, went to the New Zealand, Auckland Mission. But I spent most of my time in the Cook Islands. I came home and in the years after my mission, there were a lot of issues that started to crop up that I had questions about and things dealing with the history of the church, blacks in the priesthood, the role of women in the church, the treatment of the LGBT community, things like that, that caused me to have some concerns. And when I was in my twenties, this is about half my lifetime ago now, I'm 52, I drifted away and just haven't been an active member for quite a while, even though for a little while I did continue to visit occasionally. But it was in the course of doing, turning my attention elsewhere. I was working on Shakespeare and looking into Shakespeare studies quite a bit when things led me back to the Book of Mormon because I was interested in performance and, and I was interested in how performances and texts of performances relate to each other and the role of oral culture and how that's changed over time. And so ultimately, that's all what brought me back to doing a study on the Book of Mormon and the origins of the text, or at least the mechanics behind how it was produced.

John Dehlin [00:03:59] I love it. Okay. And by the way, the conditions of today's interview, of course, I like to do four or five hour interviews. That's not possible today. So for my listeners, you're going to perceive a slightly different style. For me, we're going to try and get right to the point, we're going to be super succinct, and I'm going to minimally participate in this discussion because of the constraints on time. And so I'm just warning everyone of that ahead of time. So, William, you're really good in the book about talking about why you didn't create the book and why you did create the book. And especially it's an important discussion in terms of navigating believers and non believers and all of the faith politics that sometimes infiltrate and affect Mormon scholarship. So can you address just right up front why you didn't and why you did create the book and how you think about this whole topic as it relates to both orthodox believers, nuance believers, and ex Mormon non believers?

How William Davis Came to Study the Book of Mormon

William L. Davis [00:04:53] Okay. There's a couple of different things that kind of brought me to that point. And the first one is when I, when I first started this project, I had no intention of taking anything out public or anything. This was a very much a personal project where I wanted to, when I was discovering more, seeing more things in the text of the Book of Mormon and what that meant in Terms of oral performance and the protection of performance, then that also made me have questions about what exactly is the Book of Mormon? How did the Book of Mormon come into being? And why that was important to me is even though I had drifted away from active participation in the church, I'd still grown up, all of my formative years were inside the church. And so my identity is deeply connected to and locked in with that Mormon heritage. And so for me, looking into the text of the Book of Mormon was really a way of trying to learn more about my own identity or the cultural forces that came together in order to create the LDS culture out of which I was born. So part of it was just a personal journey of just trying to understand my own identity and origins and in relation to Mormonism. And that in turn, the Book of Mormon became a central feature of that because so much of it, so much of the church and the culture of the church is based upon the Book of Mormon. And then there was two part to that question. I'm kind of drifted off, I think. Well, the other thing about this is because there are a lot of things about the creation of the Book of Mormon, how it was done, what that translation process entailed for me, part of discovering. And my own journey of discovering my own identity also dealt with trying to discover exactly what was happening, exactly what took place. And so when I it became a study of the mechanics of the book. What are the things that contribute, what does the text reveal about itself, about the techniques that went into its production? Because I believe that when it comes to things like faith and belief, or whether you're interested as a purely an academic or as someone who is a believer, that the more accurate information you have ultimately means the more accurate your academic understanding of the text, or I think if you have a more accurate understanding of how it was produced, that that actually for people who believe in the stories, can when you have accurate information, your faith is based on a stronger foundation, or for people who have other feelings, just having accurate information ultimately is the goal. And whether or not the devotional aspect of it, whether or not that increases belief or for some people might decrease belief, it's hard to say. Those are questions I don't deal with at all. What I want to do is I just want to lay the information out there and let people decide the devotional issues for themselves. But what I do is evidence based research and that's it. Not really interested in the devotional stuff.

John Dehlin [00:08:19] And so, you know, to put a really fine point on it. And I think you do a great job with this in the book. You basically. I think you bend over backwards to basically say, none of this is incompatible with maintaining a believing worldview. This book can totally fit within an orthodox Mormon standpoint. I would even maybe add to that kind of the tight translation sort of notions around reading things in a stone, that it can be. This whole book can be compatible with that approach. It can be compatible with kind of the progressive liberal Mormon loose translation. What is translation anyway? It can be compatible with that, and it can be compatible with ex Mormon, secular Joseph, you know, made it all up kind of thing. And so I guess to put a fine point on it, you're not here to take away faith or to add faith, to excuse things or to, you know, attack Joseph Smith. You just want to understand as best as you can what happened. Is that. Is that fair to say?

William L. Davis [00:09:25] Yeah. In fact, in the process of going through the draft and publishing the book, and I'll just keep this vague, but there were voices in that process who thought that I was trying too hard saying too much about how to help believing readers to accommodate this within their faith system. Because the book's an academic book, it's not devotional. But for me, I have a lot of friends, I have a lot of family, both my immediate family, my extended family, who are very devout. And the book is very sacred and very important to them and a big part of their belief and what they hold on to. And so I want, the whole time I wanted to be really sensitive to that. And so my way of being sensitive to that was showing people that wherever you are on the belief spectrum, that there is a way to look at academic studies like this and to see it for what it is, to see the information for what it is and to have an accurate understanding of that information, but you can still incorporate it into a faith belief system. And so I went further and I offered examples. So if someone believes that the words appeared on the seer stone, here's how to view it. If someone believes it was loose translation, here's how to think of that. And the process also allows for someone who doesn't believe it, someone who's just purely looking at it as a cultural 19th century phenomena could also see how this would also make sense as well. But I wanted people not to feel threatened, even though I know that some of the information challenges traditions, but traditions that are based on incomplete information. So we're just trying to add more puzzle pieces to the puzzle. And the devotional stuff, will I leave that for the reader to Decide on their own.

John Dehlin [00:11:26] I love it. So, William, one of the things that I, that I wanted to do before we get into the meat of your book, which is, which is so important, is I want to kind of up a few of the claims or the framings that are often made biologists say well intended general authorities or apologists. Because your book does a really good job of addressing some of these contextual claims or problems or framings that maybe aren't helpful. So the first one is, and I love the term that you use in the book, it's kind of this idea that Joseph Smith was just an uneducated farm boy yokel who could never have remembered, could never have created such a book. Could never have produced such a book. Would you mind starting with what you think about that claim and the elegant term that you used to describe that type of claim?

William L. Davis [00:12:28] I don't remember the term I used.

John Dehlin [00:12:30] The Haiti.

William L. Davis [00:12:32] The trope.

John Dehlin [00:12:33] The trope. Asiatic trope. Right. Yeah. What does Haitiatic trope mean for those who.

William L. Davis [00:12:39] Okay, so. And there's different ways to pronounce that word. I say hagiography, but you're right.

John Dehlin [00:12:44] That's right. You're right, I'm wrong. So.

William L. Davis [00:12:45] Hey, no, no, no. There's multiple ways to pronounce it. So you're not wrong. It's just a different tomato. Tomato. You know.

John Dehlin [00:12:52] Okay.

William L. Davis [00:12:52] But what happens is sometimes a hagiography or a trope, a hagiographic trope would be a situation where we try to set up when you. I'm over complicating it. It's when you tell somebody's story, but you use something like a stereotype. Okay. It's. It's a simplified description of a person that is used for quick understanding, but it really ignores and evacuates the actual complexities that contribute to that understanding. So when we're talking about Joseph Smith and when we say, oh, he's an illiterate farm boy, what that does is that essentially categorizes and puts him in a little box that wipes out a lot of the historical record that gives us clues to say, no, he wasn't so dumb as we like to make him out to be. He wasn't so ignorant or illiterate as we make him out to be. And the problem with it is in the time period, and it's not just the 19th century, but this is an age old trope when we're trying to. Oftentimes when you look into the past and you see how there were people who had special powers to prophetic powers or visionary powers. What made the vision, what made their utterances just exceptional to them was the. What would make people. They would say, like, if it was a child, oh, this child could know nothing about this information. But look at all the wonderful things that came pouring out of this child's mouth. It must have been inspired. And so it's evidence of divine intervention. And I. I'm kind of wondering here because there's so much to it. But anyway, what I'm trying to say is when you look back in the historical record to Joseph Smith and you see the activities he was involved in, you see references to where he was participating, whether it's within common schools or in juvenile debate societies. And when you look at. At what we have, and also during the time which there's not much evidence during his life, but later, as you see the types of projects that he was engaged in, this is someone who had a much more creative, imaginative, inquisitive mind, and not someone who was just skipping school to go fishing and had no interest in reading books whatsoever. The historical record just does not hold up to that. That trope. But it was a popular trope, especially later with spiritualism, where you would have people come and doing these trance lectures where they would get up and they would put out this huge lecture while they're seemingly asleep or in trance, and people would say, oh, it has to be divine, because this person only had five months of schooling and didn't know any and didn't have any education. And when they're conscious and awake, they. They're know nothings. But when they go into trance, the heavens open and out comes this pouring of divine utterances. So that's something that was very common in order to kind of downplay the person, to make them look as dumb as possible or as illiterate as possible, in order to pump up and highlight how wonderful and incredible this divine utterance must be.

John Dehlin [00:16:38] I love it. Okay, so. And you go into great detail in the book, and I love this, where you talk about, number one, the timeline. Because a second justification that some orthodox believers use that Joseph Smith could have never played a part in producing the book, I'll say it that way, is that the timeline is too short, that he only had a few months because it had to have happened between, I don't know, 1828 and 1829, whatever constricted timeline they want to put. But, but one of the points you make really elegantly in the book is that it. You. You could actually have a timeline of five or six years. Yes, of preparation. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Lucy Mack Smith and Origins of the Book of Mormon

William L. Davis [00:17:26] Yeah. I mean, when you look at it now, it's really common to look at Lucy's description of Joseph Smith, how after he had the visit from the angel Moroni that. That there were repeated family story recitals and where the family would gather around and. And she said, look, it is such this amazing scene to see the entire family gathered around this young boy telling us these extraordinary stories. And when you look at Joseph Smith's accounts and also accounts of people who were listening to Joseph Smith and describing what Moroni told Joseph, Moroni gave to Joseph an outline, basically a sketch outline of the Book of Mormon. That's what Joseph Smith was saying. And about the rise and fall of a people, the righteousness that fell away into obscurity. And so, and just to be clear,

John Dehlin [00:18:21] this would have been in 1823, right?

William L. Davis [00:18:23] This is in 1823.

John Dehlin [00:18:24] So seven years before the book is produced, Joseph already has an outline given to him. An outline given to him by Moroni, Correct? Correct.

William L. Davis [00:18:31] Right. And so and I put in the book a number of references to that where various people were either repeating what Joseph Smith said or telling it to other people. But we have a lot of sources that basically say from the very beginning there was some sort of knowledge of a civilization in the Americas that was righteous then fell away. And so we at least have a general broad stroke outline from the very beginning if what Joseph Smith said was true about the content of what Moroni told him. And then part of what I also address in that is when you look at what Lucy said, she's not actually describing some of the recognizable stories in the Book of Mormon, but she is describing elements that do appear in the Book of Mormon. And, and that's, you know, like the clothing, the mode of travel, that some of these basic details that don't coalesce into a story in Lucy's account. But what I am arguing the book is that gives us evidence when she wrote that she could have included things from the Book of Mormon, because when she wrote it, the Book of Mormon been out and available, but she didn't. And so that suggests the possibility that she was giving an accurate account of the types of things that Joseph Smith was talking about at that time. And if that's true, then it appears that these are. We're at the very beginnings and formulations of ideas and thoughts that would eventually coalesce into the stories of the Book of Mormon. And again, whether people want also, and I'm going to throw this in there for the believing listeners. I argue that that stage and the stages subsequent to that are part of the translation process because it can be,

John Dehlin [00:20:35] or can be viewed as that way,

William L. Davis [00:20:36] can be viewed as the translation process. And the idea being that Joseph Smith, after he received this information from Moroni, before he had the plates, he still would have had access through his Seer Stone or through divine revelation to those narratives, through listening to the Spirit, waiting for revelation, and trying to think about the history of this Israelite community in the Americas and trying to spiritually divine out what those stories were as part of the translation preparatory process.

John Dehlin [00:21:19] I love it. Okay, and so. And so basically what you do in this book is you say that he could have had five or six years to prepare. We know that he had the outline of the structure of the book seven years before it's actually produced. We know that he's sitting with his family by the fire, so to speak, able to tell 30 minutes, 40 minute hour, keep his family captivated, with extensive details about stories from what is likely the Book of Mormon years and years and years beforehand. So that's practice. That's. I don't want to say rehearsal, but that's evidence that he's got these stories early on and that he's able to speak or dictate for long periods of time from memory with great details about things that are probably, if not related to the Book of Mormon stories, the actual Book of Mormon stories. That's all. That's. And you have him, he's going to the Hill yearly, you know, to be instructed by Moroni. Who's to say that that's not either, of course, receiving revelation or writing notes. You know, I guess if I could summarize in your book, he could be making outlines for years and years in preparation for the actual transcribing or dictation of the book. And he probably is. Is your. Is your view, right?

William L. Davis [00:22:50] I think that that period was a time of preparation to begin to formulate just outlines, never writing out the book ever. And we'll get to the mechanics of that later, I guess, but just kind of doing, really sketch brief outlines about how each of the stories would progress through the episodes of the Book of Mormon and that that would give him time to. And that it was a process that again, was looking for spiritual confirmation. You know, he's studying it out in his mind, pondering, thinking about, waiting for some sort of spiritual confirmation to say, oh, yes, this is what happened. And that over those years, just eventually putting together these episodes into a long, epic narrative.

Challenging the Tight Translation Theory

John Dehlin [00:23:36] Okay, great, the next thing I want to address really quickly is just how you basically provide an alternative view. I don't want to say you kind of eviscerate the tight translation theory, but you really do spend a significant amount of time, I think, calling into questions, or at least I don't want to use the wrong words, but I want to say, casting some potential doubt on Emma and David Whitmer's sort of testimonies that have led some to have this expectation that, like, the words of the Book of Mormon were appearing on Joseph's stone and he was dictating as he read. Tell us why that. And that's called the tight translation theory, that basically Joseph's just being given the words without any of his own interaction. Tell us just briefly why we. We might not want to pin too much of our hopes on that tight translation, you know, approach.

William L. Davis [00:24:39] Yeah, when I look at the evidence that people use to support the tight translation theory, and it is a theory, it's not a doctrine, it's not a belief. It's just one of several theories about how Joseph Smith did it. But the evidence that's in the text, the manuscripts, that evidence in every situation, from my view, is too ambiguous to assign a single interpretation. And I realize that other people would prefer to see it that way, but it's just too ambiguous. Let me give you an example. Like, some people will say that, oh, the spelling of a name, because we see that the scribe, Oliver Cowdery, wrote out a name but then corrected it. That must mean that Joseph Smith was looking at the seer stone and somehow he had a connection or vision of what Oliver Cowdery was writing and saw that it was incorrect. And so he said, stopped him and said, no, you know, you need to correct that spelling. But that's not the only possible scenario in which you could see a correction from Oliver Cowdery. You could have a scenario where Joseph Smith said, coriantumr, and Oliver Cowdery writes it down. And then suddenly Oliver has the moment of hesitation. He says, I'm not familiar with how to spell that. Joseph, could you tell me how to spell that? And then maybe Joseph would say, oh, this is how you spell it. Or you could have a scenario where Joseph Smith says, coriantumr, Oliver Cowdery writes it down. And then Joseph says, how did you spell that, Oliver? Oh, I spelled it this way. No, you need to spell it this other way. And so those are different scenarios where, if we look at the textual evidence, the same exact textual evidence can support any one of those interpretations equally well. And so when it comes to the theory of tight control, all the textual evidence that I've seen, without exception, is too ambiguous to assign a single interpretation saying, oh, it had to have been read off the stone. I just don't see it. And so I think that we need to be careful about trying to. I just think that the idea of reading words off this ear stone just does not have enough support to argue that it's the exclusive way that things happened.

John Dehlin [00:27:23] Yeah. And we can't cover it all in an hour. Can't cover it all in five. But the book is amazing. So freaking buy this book. And I hope you don't hate me for saying this if you just buy it for chapter six. Right. Which is kind of your. Your summary of. Of maybe, you know, everything. You kind of pull it all together into a chapter entitled Constructing Book of Mormon Historical Narratives.

William L. Davis [00:27:53] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:27:53] No, no, no. Chapter seven. Sorry, A theory of translation. If you just buy this book for chapter seven, it will be ten times worth it. But you got to read the whole book to. To get the full value. But the. The point. Point being said is my takeaway is drop this idea of a tight translation. Even Bushman and Givens and Mason and Flumen have. That ship has sailed for a long time. Blake Ostler, that ship has sailed. Drop that expectation. It's either loose translation or something else. I hope you don't mind. I hope you don't mind me saying that. Okay. Okay, so really quickly, talk about. As a way to. There are a couple really important concepts that you introduce in this book that I think are important to set the context for your theory on dictation translation. And I'm just going to have you talk about a few of them. First of all, can you talk about what you wrote in the book about Sola Scriptura and Joseph's idea of, you know, what power you might have through the gift of the Holy Ghost and the Bible and all those things that would allow you to do things that you wouldn't think otherwise someone might be able to do. And that could help explain maybe what Joseph was thinking when he said translation, what translation really meant to him. Because I just have to say, when I was at Utah State, there was this huge seminar on what Joseph Smith meant by translation. And again, Bushman and Barlow and all the big names were there. And I'm like, this is ridiculous that we're spending two days in an academic conference trying to explain what the word is means. But in reality, what you argue is Joseph Smith probably understood the Word translation in a way that's very different from what we would expect. So can you talk about that? And I just loved what you wrote about Sola Scriptura.

What Joseph Smith Meant by Translation

William L. Davis [00:29:57] Okay, you might need to pull me back, because those are. They're related, but they're kind of different. But just quickly, on Sola Scriptura, that was the idea. I mean, it's really kind of a Protestant idea because before early on, you would have the Catholic clergy who was basically telling people this is what Scripture means. And then the Protestants kind of broke away and said, no, we can understand, and this is oversimplifying it, but it's kind of this concept of what they would call priesthood of believers. For example, it's related to that Sola Scripture. And what that meant is that people on their own could figure out what was true and what wasn't true by picking up the Bible themselves, reading it for themselves, and allowing the Holy Ghost to prompt them, to teach them what the doctrinal principle was. In other words, they had you Sola Scriptura, meaning you only need your Bible. And so you have that Bible, you read that, and with the help of the Holy Ghost, you can figure out what God's doctrine is. And so that introduces this concept of verification of truth. If the Holy Ghost is going to guide you to teach you something that is true in the Scriptures, then that is a way to discover truth. So it's not a large leap to say, well, if the Holy Ghost is going to verify the truth of something in the text, well, then the Holy Ghost can verify any kind of truth, even a truth outside of the text. And so if you're ever curious to know whether or not something is true, whether or not something is accurate, just turn to the Holy Ghost and to pray and that it can verify truth regardless of the source. And I think how that relates to translation then is when you're dealing with translation, as Joseph Smith saw it, it wasn't simply, you know, here's a text, and I'm going to convert these words in one language over two words in another language. It was a process that involved. How do I understand the truthfulness of this text and the true things it's trying to express? And this spiritual Holy Ghost process that allows you to convert that to another text. So the revelation and the Holy Ghost suddenly is part of that process. And so when you look at Joseph Smith and you. And I want to give a plug for a book, by the way, here, it's the one that just came out, producing ancient scripture, where they dedicate almost the entire book to exploring what translation meant for Joseph Smith. And it's fantastic. And the reason why is because there's a really great exploration of how translation from Joseph Smith's viewpoint involved revelation. It involved trying to connect to the ancient Adamic language, the language of garden in the Garden of Eden, because that was a powerful language. So it had layers of esotericism in it, it of, you know, spiritual communication and where translate. The word itself, even in the 19th century, carries a lot of baggage, a lot of connotations that. Not simply the converting of words, but the transformation of something, the movement of something from one place to another. And so the first time that I heard people trying to say that translation was more than just converting language from one to another, I thought this is just rationalization, this is trying to expand it. The first time I heard it, I. I frankly thought they're trying too hard to kind of fudge what Joseph Smith was doing. But, you know, if you don't listen to what people are saying and what they're trying to say, then you'll miss out. And so that was years ago. And after studying and looking what people are saying and going into the historical record myself and looking at definitions, looking at usages and whatnot, and looking at the way Joseph Smith actually applied it, you have. You have to come away from it saying that Joseph Smith's understanding of translation was quite profound. This kind of metaphysical, cosmic thing. Similar to what Sam Brown. Well, not similar to exactly what Sam Brown is describing. And also, Jared Hickman, I mean, it really is something way beyond the simplistic idea of just converting words from one language to another.

John Dehlin [00:34:47] Yeah. And if we look at. If we look at what he was able to do, where he talks in the Doctrine Covenants, where he's able to read a papyrus that's in a cave somewhere across the globe and somehow channel information from it, we know that he wasn't translating the Book of Abraham. This whole catalyst theory is required because he clearly wasn't reading and translating Egyptian. And then the Kinderhook plates, of course, were made up, but in all cases he was able to channel some type of revelation. I guess the point I'm trying to make is Joseph had this belief, you know, if you believe he was sincere, that he. That he was channeling revelation in the text and translation in a technical sense just were not required. Is that fair to say?

William L. Davis [00:35:34] Yeah. And I just want to point out that when it comes to the Book of Abraham or the Kinderhook plates, but especially the Book of Abraham, I Think that that process, he sincerely, genuinely was trying to figure out what the text meant and that he was listening to his spiritual impressions to do it. I mean, I just can't believe that all, you know, the, the Egyptian papers, the grammar and all of these things he created, which really weren't intended for the public to see, that he would go to such extraordinary lengths just to trick this small circle of people around him. I don't see that. I don't see him as, you know, trying to be conniving or fraudulent in that. But I think he sincerely was genuinely working at it and listening to impressions, listening to what he felt was divine inspiration in order to tease out the meanings of the hieroglyphs. And I think so when we talk about revelatory translation, which I use here, which is not original to me, other people have talked about that is whatever Joseph Smith understood of translation, what he was actually doing opened up just this world of imaginative creativity and it allowed a lot of things to be introduced into a text that simply wasn't on the parchment in front of him.

John Dehlin [00:37:10] And for a believer's perspective, it's what then explains anachronisms and 19th century isms and the Bible and sometimes errors from the King James Bible. If Joseph is required, kind of the Blake ostler loose translation theory, if Joseph Smith is an integral part of the revelation process that explains all the anachronisms for those who might be troubled by that. Okay, really quickly, a couple other foundational things before we jump to the main thing because I think these are just so crucial. You talk about Adam Clark's commentary and Dee and Kelly potentially introducing to Joseph Smith along with some folk music and folk songs of the day. Just the idea of scrying, using a urimum thummim or a peep stone to produce text. Just that meme. That idea was in the air and probably occurred to Joseph Smith from sources that we know he likely had access to. Do you mind just addressing that really quickly? And then I want to talk about one, one other thing before we jump to your main thesis.

Oral Culture, Folk Tradition, and Seer Stones

William L. Davis [00:38:18] Okay. Just briefly. And it wasn't so much a folk music. The dun was or dunciad. I'm blanking on the. But that was a long poem and a popular poem.

John Dehlin [00:38:31] A poem, sorry.

William L. Davis [00:38:32] Yeah. And where it talked about how Dee and Kelly would look on the seer stone and see all types of things. But the point of referring to that was one of. And I didn't go heavily into this, but because other people have. Have done that on the pervasiveness at least within the communities where they are looking at esotericism and looking at ways to try to find divine access to God through non traditional means. And John Dee was one of these known figures within that community who had tried to gain that access and who was apparently successful according to the lore. And so basically, so people know John Dee was a polymath in the Renaissance. He was alive roughly the time of Shakespeare. His life overlapped with Shakespeare's Prospero in the Tempest is supposed to be based on John Dee. So John Dee, he really was a fantastic mathematician as what he's probably best known for in terms of his actual work. But he also, he was, he had the largest library in Britain when he was alive. And he essentially had read everything and he still was needing to have more knowledge. And so he, because of the traditions, of the esoteric traditions, the were out there, he had decided that if there was some way to bypass mortal learning and get your learning straight from the angels, then you could gain this greater knowledge and greater power. And he comes off as a bit skeptical himself actually in this process. But there was this Kelly who, Edmund Kelly, who was a scryer who de hired to work for him. And Kelly would look into the Seer Stone and then just start to describe what he was seeing. And sometimes as part of that process, Kelly would also give signs and symbols of angelic power as well as translating texts or giving texts that could be translated to give this higher access of power. So when, when we tie that to Adam Clark and what Adam Clark is talking about, the gift of tongues and of angels, that is when Adam Clark has a footnote where he's talking about that scripture and what it means, and he refers back to John Dee and saying that's one of the things that was prompting John Dee to build a vocabulary of this angelic language. And the term with the language of angels, the language of Adam, oftentimes they were virtually the same. This idea that in ancient times there was this original language that had power to call down knowledge from heaven, call down ministering angels, that sort of thing. And so if you, if someone were reading Adam Clark's Bible and they were reading about the tongue of angels and they looked at that footnote, then they would see how translating through the process that John Dee was using with Edmund Kelly and the Seer Stone was one way of gaining access to that angelic language and translating it into a way that we could understand that. So the ability, you know, the possibility that that kind of information was available was out there. And but, you know, it as far as, like, finding actual proof, you know, you'd practically need a journal entry saying, oh, I was reading Adam Clark's note today, and this occurred to me. That sort of thing is. Rarely happens in historical research. But the point is, the idea of translating with a seer stone was available, and religious text, angelic text, that was available to someone who was interested in that and exploring that.

John Dehlin [00:43:14] Yeah. And I guess I just want to refer people to Haley Osment. I'm spacing on the name, but my interview with her where she talks about her work at BYU of demonstrating that, at least with the Joseph Smith translation of the Bible, it appears that the Adam Clark commentary is a clear source, likely source for that. And we've discussed on other episodes of Mormon Stories as well, that there's a pretty good likelihood that Joseph Smith referenced, told other people about and had access to this Adam Clark commentary. And it does influence what he says and does. Two other things I want to make sure we lay down as foundational, just because they're so important. There is the idea that there's no way that Joseph Smith ever had any notes. You know, that he never would have had any way to reference notes or to gather his thoughts, that this was just sort of like translation straight from the stone or straight from heaven. But there's no way that there would have ever been any references or notes or anything. Can you. Can you talk about that really quickly? Because I think it's important to dispel that or to give people a framing for why it's possible that references or notes or contemplative time could have been a part of his process.

Emma Smith and the No-Notes Argument

William L. Davis [00:44:39] Okay. Usually when people are claiming that what they're looking at. And it really boils down to Emma Smith's statement, because David Whitmer. His statements came long after Emma's. And David Whitmer actually is the first one who mentioned notes. Emma didn't mention notes when she said that he had no manuscripts or books to look at. The problem that I go into detail about in the book is the interpretation of what Emma is saying. When, if we pull that out of the context of her interview with her son, Joseph Smith iii, then you can apply that to any kind of text anywhere. But when you put it back into the context of the interview, they were specifically talking about any influence that Sidney Rigdon had on Joseph Smith for the production of the text, and that's specifically the Spalding manuscript. So when this interview took place,

John Dehlin [00:45:42] the

William L. Davis [00:45:43] Spalding manuscript theory was circulating wildly. It was the most popular explanation for how Joseph Smith, the illiterate farm boy, could come up with a story. And so they were saying, well, he just plagiarized it. He just stole this story, the Spalding manuscript, and he used that or Sidney Rigdon somehow got it to him. And so the context of the interview is talking about the possibility of Sidney Rigdon coming into Joseph Smith's life with this manuscript. And so Emma's saying, no, there was no manuscript, there was no book, there was no romance, there was no nothing that he was using to plagiarize to create the Book of Mormon. But she's not at all talking about did he occasionally open up a Bible? And people have expanded her comment to include the Bible or to include other possibilities. But she's not talking, she's specifically talking about a manuscript or a book either that Sidney Rigden brought or that had been written by someone else that Joseph Smith was plagiarizing. And that's it. That's. That's it. And so it's an interpretation to go beyond that to say there wasn't anything else going on. The other thing about Emma's statement is in, if we look at it as well, we have to be under the assumption that Joseph Smith 100% of the time, including when he went to the outhouse and sorry to be blunt, but that's true, that he was under surveillance by people and that were constantly watching him. Is he looking at any notes? Is he trying to figure things out? Is he meditating? I mean, and there are plenty of, you can think of all kinds of situations where someone would be alone and have alone time. And there are times too when people involved in the process, after they went up and were translating up in Fayette, for example, David Whitmer talks about times. There's the well known example that we hear about when Emma and Joseph had some kind of falling out. So Joseph had to walk out and go to the orchard and he was there for about an hour or so to calm his thoughts and then he came back and started the translation work again. Okay, well what was he doing out there for that hour? We can make assumptions. Well, maybe he was upset and he was just meditating, trying to calm down, had nothing to do with the Book of Mormon or maybe he was praying,

John Dehlin [00:48:21] maybe he was receiving divine inspiration or.

William L. Davis [00:48:25] And then, and then what? I now I offered up some different ideas about the production of the Book of Mormon. I mean, we really underestimate the types of memory practices and techniques that people use then within this oral culture that we don't use now. And so I really. I left that open to say it's possible that after five years of preparation or six years or whatever, that Joseph Smith had enough of this mental outline rehearsed and practiced in his mind that he wouldn't need any notes whatsoever. What I. I left that out there as a possibility. But what I really do think is that I think he probably had a small notebook that had just some of these skeletal outlines that he kept in his private papers. And. And I think that these times when he was by himself in preparation for one of the dictation sessions, that he would have had a chance to just look at the skeletal outlines, kind of refresh his memory, just kind of go over it to think about it. And then while he was in this, while that was all fresh on his mind, then he would go to the dictation sections, but wouldn't bring his notes with him and just go ahead and perform.

John Dehlin [00:49:45] Yeah. And if you think about the construction, there's often a veil between him and the people that are acting as scribe. Correct.

William L. Davis [00:49:53] I think that was just early on. I think that was actually in the beginning. Joseph Smith, he's trying so many different methods of how to do the translation. I think he hadn't worked things out yet. And I could be wrong. Wrong about this, but it seems to me the only times I hear references to Joseph Smith being behind a screen was at the very beginning with Martin Harris. Harris.

John Dehlin [00:50:21] Okay, But. But also, we don't know if he had, you know, RFM likes to say, and others have probably wondered if there's something in the hat. Right.

William L. Davis [00:50:31] But potentially you don't need it.

John Dehlin [00:50:34] You don't. You don't need it.

William L. Davis [00:50:36] No.

John Dehlin [00:50:37] Okay. But I mean, that's. That's a possibility. But then also these. These times when he goes off and asks for a break. Right.

William L. Davis [00:50:44] Yeah, but I mean, if something were in a hat, let's say just a small. Because. Because what some preachers use. And we'll maybe go into this a little bit later, but this is a really, really common technique for the preachers and how they would create these little short notes, skeletal outlines. So this is.

John Dehlin [00:51:01] Well, let's jump to that. Let's jump to that. I don't mean to interrupt you, but we're going right there. So I think it would be helpful just to talk quickly about his history with the Methodist Church. And. And I'm curious about whether his potential role as being an exhorter, if all of that was important background, that then helps him learn the techniques that we're now going to dive into, which is the meat of your, of your book and your presentation today. Okay, so give us that background and then lead us into your main thesis and we'll, we'll go to your slides as you want to use them.

Joseph Smith's Religious Background and Influences

William L. Davis [00:51:34] Okay, so Joseph Smith, and we know from not just his accounts but people around him that eventually he was partial. How did he say it? I became partial to the Methodist sect when he was recounting his history. Now let me backtrack just a little bit because the family, they were seekers, they were looking around, they were testing out a lot of different, you know, looking at the Presbyterians, we have one or two references where Joseph Smith participated in Baptist revival or joint revivals especially. And so you have the Baptist, the Methodists, the Presbyterian, and then you have the Congregationalists. And it's a little complicated because you had like traditionalist Congregationalists and then Congregationalists who were more open to influences of the spirit. And that just went back for centuries to Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield and the beginnings of Methodism. So what happened in the process of growing up both in the Connecticut Valley where there was a strong Congregationalist influence, The family was kind of, even if they weren't actively participating in the Congregationalist church, there was this real strong network of the Smith family and the relatives in that area who were dealing with this kind of, which a century earlier would be called the New Light Congregationalists. And that's where Morris Charity School, where Hyrum went to school, it was run by New Light, that New light Congregationalist philosophy. And that was this form of preaching that a lot of people were doing. And that style of preaching that way, even though each one of the denominations might focus on different doctrinal points, the actual structure and the way they approach sermon making for this particular evangelical group was this kind of semi extemporaneous style where ahead of time they would kind of sketch an outline of what they wanted to preach about and then they might take that outline to the pulpit with them just to glance at just like a three by five card. Or a lot of them would sketch an outline, kind of memorize the main points. And they'd usually not be too many, four or five, and then they'd just put it in their pocket and then get up and preach. And so that was a style of preaching that was around the Smiths from the time Joseph Smith was born up until even when they moved over to the burned over district in western New York. And then when you have all these other revivals, you also have the Presbyterian preachers who were doing the same thing. You have the Baptist preachers who were doing the same thing, and you have the Methodist preachers who are doing the same thing. And a lot of the reason why so much of this was going, why there was so much overlap, is because this really dynamic style of preaching, they could all kind of trace it back to George Whitfield, who was called the Grand Itinerant. And he had this enormous impact on preaching in this kind of extemporaneous or semi extemporaneous style in the First Great Awakening, which was in the early 1700s. And then the Second Great Awakening, where Joseph Smith was being exposed to all of these evangelical preachers, was kind of the second major re. Emergence of all of these Awakening revivals that were taking place. So Joseph would have been exposed to this religiously all over the place. And then he does. He decided to connect with a Methodist. They resonated with him the most and apparently joined a class meeting and became proficient as an exhorter. And the exhorters, they were not allowed to preach texts. And what that means is interpret a text, interpreting a text. You pretty much had to be a licensed preacher. And they wanted to control, you know, the message. They didn't want people, you know, being really enthusiastic and coming into Methodism and then suddenly preaching a whole bunch of doctrines that conflicted with the Methodist beliefs. And so exhorters were kind of preparatory. It was a preparatory stage for like a preacher in training. And that is an environment where the techniques of preaching not only would have been shared and discussed and talked about, but it would have been, you know, the hands on application. And that requires quite a bit of extemporaneous improvisational skill. Because what an exhorter. One of the ways that an exhorter would operate is that you would get up with the preacher. The preacher then would go, he would choose. Usually when they were following what's called a doctrine and use pattern, they would start with a text and then they would interpret the text and then they would lay out the main points or the heads of the sermon. They might tell the audience what those main points were. They might not. They might conceal it and not tell them, but they'd say, here's the text and here's what it means. And so they would go through and talk about the text, talk, talk about its application to the people, talk about how this was something that they needed to awaken from their sinful state and come to Christ. And then when that was done, the exhorter would take over and the Exhorter then would have to be listening to what the preacher was saying to follow up on it. And so the exhorter was really the one who would start telling the audience now, you need to get on board with this, you need to repent, you need to change your life, you need to come to Christ. And so it was part of it would be a generic come to Christ exhortation, but also connected to what the preacher was saying. And so this was a training ground. And because the exhorter couldn't prepare, it's not like he's sitting on the side writing notes what the preacher's saying, than getting up and trying to exhort. You just had to perform it off the cuff. And so it trained people into how to develop certain types of routines or sermon patterns. And they were flexible and because they always had to adapt to the circumstances in which they were delivering it. And that's the sort of thing that Joseph Smith was involved in with early Methodism. And that's exactly the same type of technique where evidence emerges in the text of the Book of Mormon. And so that's why that ultimate connection comes around to that. Oh, I can't hear you.

John Dehlin [00:58:36] So some who, who haven't been thinking about this, they're probably thinking, why are we talking about Methodism and, and pastors? And like, now we're going to get to the heart of it all. So I think what we're going to now be talking about is number, you know, a couple questions we're going to answer as we dive in is how did Joseph Smith, what's the theory for how Joseph Smith was able to produce a lot of text without a lot of notes through dict. Oral way? And what other evidence is not just in the titles of the books in the Book of Mormon, but even in the verses of the Book of Mormon itself? And we could also say in the, in the manuscript that was dictated, what evidences do we have that, that your theory kind of is super viable? So I, I think it might make sense to talk about laying down heads in written in oral composition and just kind of explain to us what that means. We jump to that. William.

Laying Down Heads: The Art of Sermon Structure

William L. Davis [00:59:38] Sure. Now I have in those few slides I gave you, the very first one, okay, so this is Jacob. And one of the reasons why I went this direction with the research is because the Book of Mormon flat out tells us the technique that was used in the construction of preaching, prophesying, revelation. And so right here we have Jacob. We'll just look at this. And Nephi gave me Jacob chapter One

John Dehlin [01:00:07] verses, two and four.

William L. Davis [01:00:09] Yeah, okay. And so it says, nephi gave me a commandment that I should write upon the plates, these plates, a few things which I considered to be most precious. And here it is. If there were preaching which was sacred, or revelation which was great, or prophesying that I should engraven the heads of them upon these plates and touch upon them as much as were possible for Christ's sake and for the sake of our people.

John Dehlin [01:00:36] So I just have to say, if you're reading that and you don't know any better, you're just thinking, well, that's some weird biblical language. Why are they talking about heads? It doesn't make sense. But then you just think, oh, it's flowery biblical language. But this might be a really important discovery. What you're thinking is that this might literally be the laying down heads approach, encoded into the Scripture. Is that right?

William L. Davis [01:01:00] Right, right. And. And not even coded. It's blatant, it's overt.

John Dehlin [01:01:04] Right.

William L. Davis [01:01:05] And it's something that, even though today we'd look at it and we'd say, I'm not sure exactly what that means for people back in the 19th century, they know exactly what that means.

John Dehlin [01:01:14] They've used those terms, laying down heads.

William L. Davis [01:01:17] Yeah, yeah. But it's one of. There are a lot of terms for it. And I think the. Another slide shows that, and we can look at in a second. But laying the heads of a sermon. So what would happen is you go to church on Sunday, right. And we have to really understand the mindset of this time period, because people were really savvy to the sermon patterns. You look at the notes of listeners, and a lot of times they would go in and they would write down the text, and even before they heard the sermon, they would be writing down, you know, we're going to cover this point, this doctrine that, doctrine that. But they would just put doctrine, doctrine, doctrine, and leave an empty space because they knew that there was a certain pattern of what was going to happen. They knew that the preacher was going to get up, was going to talk about a scriptural text and was going to talk about, usually on average, about three aspects. It might be only two, it might be four. Those were the most common. And so they just put a little blank spot in for each one of those points. Those main points, those were called the heads. And so you're listening for the heads. And so the heads of a sermon are the main points of the sermon. And that pattern was so deeply internal for centuries. I mean, that sort of a Style of preaching was here just as soon as the Puritans came over in the early 1600s. And so even though there were developments in certain styles and approaches, that basic structural component was there. And so when people at that time would say, what are the heads of the prophecy? What are the heads of the sermon? You know, exactly. They're talking about what are the main points?

John Dehlin [01:03:01] It's almost like a tldr, that's a term that's used today to kind of say, okay, you've written this big long blog post or Reddit post, what's the summary? Right.

William L. Davis [01:03:12] Yeah. And so that's what it be. If you go back to that.

John Dehlin [01:03:15] Yeah.

William L. Davis [01:03:16] Image. So when it says engraving the heads upon the plates and touch upon them and touch upon means exactly what it means today. To expand upon it to, you know, here's the main point. Now we're going to talk about the main point. So you go off on a 10 minute, you know, sermon about the first main point that's touching upon it. And we use it the exact same way today, but down at the bottom. Now, I included this. The reason why I focused on laying down heads is because that's the language that's used in the Book of Mormon. But there are other ways that it was described. So they would describe this in terms of dividing the text into heads or distributing the text into heads, cutting, dissecting into heads. And then they would, instead of just calling them heads, they'd also call them points, sometimes called them propositions. Very commonly they'd call them divisions. And so those are some of the other terms that people use, but all of it is referring back to the same process.

John Dehlin [01:04:11] Okay, great. Should we do the next slide?

William L. Davis [01:04:13] Sure. All right, so here when we talk about heads, we might be jumping ahead a little bit in heads. I might have had this out of order. So in laying down heads. So this is the written part.

John Dehlin [01:04:33] You can just tell me which slide to jump.

William L. Davis [01:04:34] I want to back up. Back up. I may have accidentally not included. So back up a little more. So that's print culture. Let's so stop here for a second. Go back one more. All right, so when, when we're talking about laying down heads here, this is about laying down heads during sermons, during oral performances. And so there are two different ways that people might. At least two different ways that people would experience laying down heads. So we're talking about sermon culture, but what I wanted to do is expand it out a little bit because this has more connection to the Book of Mormon and what laying down heads was something that would occur with preaching. But laying down heads was also connected to the ways that you would format books, formatting the Bibles, formatting reference books, formatting novels. And those two are really fundamentally connected. And the reason why we want to talk about the print as well is because the same sort of notes that preachers would use to create these skeletal outlines were often done in the same exact style as the formatting for headings of chapters and headings of books. And the reason why I say that is, I think when we look at the Book of Mormon and you see, for example, that opening in front of one Nephi, where it's this long list of what's going to happen, kind of an index of sorts, summarizing what's going to happen in the chapter. That is another form of laying down heads. And so I think that the reason why we have those.

John Dehlin [01:06:19] I think it's worth actually showing this.

William L. Davis [01:06:21] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:06:22] Because. And I actually pulled this up and I don't know that people are going to fully get it unless they see it, because a lot of times something that people aren't clear about. We have chapter headings, right. These little things here in Italicis, like at the beginning of First Nephi, Chapter 1, Nephi brings the record of his people. Lehi sees a vision, a pillar of fire, and reads from a book of prophecy. Those are not the heads you're talking about because as I understand it, that's like Bruce Armor Conkey in some committee that puts. Puts these chapter headings, right?

William L. Davis [01:06:57] Well, some of them, but some of them original to the dictation. And the one in First Nephi was original to the dictation.

John Dehlin [01:07:03] Okay. But it's this one. It's. It's what comes before that. That was in the original manuscript, right?

William L. Davis [01:07:10] Yeah, that right there, that was in the original manuscript.

John Dehlin [01:07:13] And. And read or describe to our listeners what. What we're showing here.

William L. Davis [01:07:17] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:07:17] So you can even read from it if you want.

William L. Davis [01:07:19] Yeah. In the first book of Nephi, you know, we have the title and then the subtitle, his reign and ministry. And then it goes into this kind of summarizing heading that actually covers the book, not just the chapter, and it's the one. An account of Lehi and his wife Sariah and his four sons being called, beginning at the eldest, Laman, Lemuel, Sam, and Nephi. The Lord warns Lehi to depart out of the land of Jerusalem. And then you go through. He taketh three days journey into the wilderness. Nephi taketh his brethren, return to the land of Jerusalem, the account of their sufferings, they take the daughters, you know, etc. So I have this in the examples I provided. But this section here, Joseph Smith dictated that, and he dictated it before. Then he dictated the actual narrative, which

John Dehlin [01:08:08] shows that he had the outline. You know, that he presents the outline before he presents the content. Right, right.

William L. Davis [01:08:17] So, I mean, depending on how people want to look at it. I mean, one is that it does show that Joseph Smith knew where the story was going before from the very beginning. But on the other hand, people would say that he was simply translating, and so he was just translating the words immediately in front of him, and he had no idea. But I address that. I mean, it would. It's a little more complex, but I address how Joseph Smith would certainly have to have had some sort of foreknowledge of the direction of the stories if his own statements are accurate. So.

John Dehlin [01:08:52] Right, right. And later you're going to tell us that this actual structure is anachronistic to Mesoamerican time periods. We'll get to that. But where should. Do you want to talk more? Should we go to a certain slide for the next book?

Sermon Formatting in Print Culture

William L. Davis [01:09:05] Let's go to the slide that talked about the print. And then maybe we could go through that quickly. Is that here a little earlier? I just want to. So here's print culture. All right. So laying down heads in print culture, those are oftentimes the short summarizing phrases that identify the main points in a passage. And when all of those heads are combined together into a series, they form the outline of an ensuing text. And it could be the chapter, it could be a book. And in many ways, they function as an index for the material that follows. It's just kind of a brief summary that helps you know where you're going. And in today's books, we don't see a lot of these. We might see something. The closest thing is you'll see a table of contents that might have a little more detail in it, but you hardly. Or you might see a single line heading at the start of a chapter or maybe a single line that shows the change of a section in the middle of an essay or something like that. But we don't see the really kind of long, detailed stories. And so if we go back to those. And this is what. These are just some of the terms that people call them sketch, plan, outline, heading, summary, or skeleton. And skeleton was really popular, but of course, sketch and plan and outline were too. So if we go to the next slide. So this is an example that I use in the book. And this is one of the publications of Robinson Crusoe. And so when you open up to the chapter, and I believe even in the table of contents, it had the same list. But when you. So you see the title, the Life and Adventures, Robinson Crusoe, Chapter one. And then right there where the box is around that is the listing of heads. And these heads.

John Dehlin [01:10:53] Read a bit of it just for our listeners that can't see.

William L. Davis [01:10:56] So it starts out, my birth and parentage. At 19 years of age, I determined to go to sea, dissuaded by my parents, elope with the school fellow and go on board ship. A storm arises, ship founders. And then it goes on to just kind of tell the rest of the chapter.

John Dehlin [01:11:12] So it's providing an outline of what the chapter is about to say at the beginning of the chapter, right?

William L. Davis [01:11:18] Yeah. And then most of the time, those phrases are not full sentences. Sometimes they are in novels, but more often than not, you see how my birth and parentage. It's not a full sentence. Where's the verb there? So you'll have different phrases, noun phrases, verb phrases. But there's. So there's these quick, truncated, just enough to remember. It's very succinct, but just enough to give a summary of what's going to come. But also, when they would do this with sermons, it was just enough information to trigger the memory. All right? And so having this little series in mind was just enough to trigger the memory, to then expand upon the whole story. So here, when you're looking at this plan or summary of heads, it's a series of short phrases that track the series, that tracks the outline of the chapter that follows. And they appear in sequential order. It works as an index. And then each one of those short phrases is. It's a cue. It prompts the memory. So those are mnemonic cues. And so if you go to the next one and, oh, one quick thing back there. So you see how at the beginning, I've highlighted the first phrase, the first head in the summary, my birth and parentage. So when you go to the opening of the narrative, that's where you start seeing the expansion of that. I was born in the year 1632 in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner or Brahmin who settled first at Hull.

John Dehlin [01:12:52] Okay, really quickly, we have an apologist challenging you, William Davis, Dr. William Davis Allen says those summary headings were added later by church leaders. They were not part of the original text. So he's schooling you.

William L. Davis [01:13:04] Yeah, yeah. Now you want to look back at the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon, because some of those headings were put in later. The headings that I talk about in the book are all headings that Joseph Smith dictated when he first dictated the

John Dehlin [01:13:20] book in the original manuscript.

William L. Davis [01:13:23] Yeah. When you look at a modern Book of Mormon, it doesn't say, this was original. This was later added. So you have to. So these are all going back to the original ones that Joseph Smith dictated.

John Dehlin [01:13:33] Okay.

William L. Davis [01:13:34] And they're not ones that were added later. So this is where that connection takes place. And this is basically. So once he finishes with birth and parentage, then the next head is, at 19 years of age, I determined to go to sea. So the story then we'll start picking up later where Robinson Crusoe says, okay, now I'm done with that. I'll start talking about why I went to sea at 19 years of age. And so these heads give you kind of track the development of the entire chapter ahead.

John Dehlin [01:14:02] Okay, excellent.

William L. Davis [01:14:05] And so here's what I wanted to do, just to give an example so people could see how these appear. So over here on the left, you have Adam Clark's commentary, and it's a series of heads. The only difference here is they have numbers, and those numbers are referring to the verses. So when we start out, this is Genesis, chapter one, and it says the first days were creation of the heaven and the earth, 1 and 2. So it's saying below in verses 1 and 2, it's talking about the creation. And then it just follows sequentially over here, a view of universal history. So here on the left, you have Scripture. In the center you have a history book, chapter one, Talking about England, William and Mary, Siege of Londonderry, Battle of the Boyne, origin of the public funds. And so it's just enough information to trigger, you know, along a longer discussion on what that's just the main topic or subject, but that's enough to trigger what's going on. Then finally, at the end here, here's a travel narrative, Travels in America. And here's letter one. And so this is a collection of Thomas Ashworth. It was a collection of letters that we're trying to tell these stories. And he also outlines the content of the letter with these heads in the beginning. So these were all over the place. This was kind of considered a standard print convention.

Anachronistic Formatting in the Book of Mormon

John Dehlin [01:15:31] And I just have to say, you know, and I'm not trying to go in this direction, but I can't suppress the fact that immediately for me, the skeptic jumps out and says, isn't it convenient or weird or strange or deeply anachronistic that as Joseph is translating plates, he's translating it into the most common structure for books in the 19th century, which is this format that we're exploring right now. Like, isn't it weird that Moroni or Mormon or whoever it was that abridged the plates happens to abridge them in the structure that would be the most common familiar structure for organizing chapters and headings. Now, in your book, you do a really good job of saying that you can still be a believer and incorporate the fact that this is the structure that the Book of Mormon is laid out in. But I just can't help but notice that that is a deep anachronism, that this structure appears in the very Book of Mormon, at least to me. And I'm not trying to get you in trouble here. This is just.

William L. Davis [01:16:35] No, no, it's fine. It is an anachronism. And that's. But I think that's the way we interpret the anachronism, right? If we think of Joseph Smith as an actual translator of an ancient text, and if the, if the ancient prophets were trying to get their message out to 19th century readers, then it would make sense from that line of thinking that they would try to package the text in a familiar format. So this isn't a type of anachronism that people need to feel is an attack of the faith. All it does is cause us to think about the process of translation and what it meant to translate an ancient record into a record that 19th century readers would recognize and be familiar with.

John Dehlin [01:17:31] But it would require one of two things. Either, and I think you talk about this in the book, Moroni or Mormon sort of saying, okay, I know how 19th century people, or 20th century people, actually, it's really 19th century people are going to be used to consuming books with this certain structure. So I'm going to do them the courtesy a thousand years ahead of time or 1500 years ahead of time to organize my writing based on my prophetic understanding of how they're most comfortable understanding the structure of a book. That's. It's a very generous thing you do. Well, that's one way to float that possibility, right?

William L. Davis [01:18:15] That's one way. Because you could say that there was some sort of intervention after Moroni,

John Dehlin [01:18:23] Joseph, maybe Joseph being in the mix, right?

William L. Davis [01:18:25] It could be Joseph. Or if you say that Joseph received everything from Revelation, was there a middleman? Was God somehow involved in inspiring Joseph into a certain direction. And so that even if Moroni did not package the text with this particular formatting and framework, there could have been some sort of divine intervention that kind of adjusted and repackaged. That's another way to think of it. And it's a legitimate way. That's what, you know, the type of thing that LDS scholars, some have argued. And so it's something that believers can hold on to. And I think the important thing to recognize here is I'm not interested, like I said before, in trying to debunk the Book of Mormon or to prove that it's really true. That's not the interest. But what I am interested in is that when we look at the text, we see it for what it is and not try to ignore it or push it aside because it doesn't fit some of our preconceived ideas. And so I think we need to look at this and say, these headings, these headings have a known history. They're in the Greco Roman textual tradition. And these particular headings, this style and this formatting did not develop until long after Lehi had left and come to the Americas. That's not to say, oh, now we get to attack the Book of Mormon and attack people. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that makes us stop and rethink. What could this process be for belief? What could this mean in terms of Joseph Smith's translation? And that my message to everyone is, at least for the believing reader so they don't feel threatened, is to know that there are answers for how that happens, that don't destroy faith. And just to be open to it.

John Dehlin [01:20:34] Sure.

William L. Davis [01:20:35] That's what I'm after.

John Dehlin [01:20:36] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think that's that. I think that just adds a level of excellence to this book, because it's not only groundbreaking scholarship, it's also working really hard to be a book that's of use to everyone and that's respectful of everyone, and I love that.

William L. Davis [01:20:55] So if we go to the next one, this is where we see the first book of Nephi and where I just put these up next to each other so you can kind of see how the formatting and the way it works. Now, when we see the first Book of Nephi where it says chapter one, you just want to know that Royal Skousen is saying that. He argues that chapter was not something that was in the original Book of Mormon text. But in terms of this particular set of summaries, this was part of the original dictation. And Joseph Smith dictated this before, and it's following the techniques. You'll have these truncated phrases. Some of them can be full sentences, short sentences, but some are truncated as well. So it's following a very common standard format that was ubiquitous in 19th century America. Now, I want to point something out here too. In reading the book, there have been some critics who have misunderstood what I said. When I'm calling these anachronistics anachronistic, I'm talking about the specific style and specific formatting that appears here. I'm not talking about any sort of summarizing preface in general. I'm talking about a very specific style that emerged in the Greco Roman tradition. And I know that there have been some critics who say, oh, Davis is saying that ancient writers never had any kind of summaries at all. Oh, he's wrong, but that's a misreading of my work. Because if we're looking for summaries, opening summaries, we can go clear back to Gilgamesh. And they have opening summaries. But it's a very different format. It's dealing. These are short narratives that will sometimes tell you what's going to happen in the story, but they're in a narrative setting. So you have like a tiny mini narrative that tells you what's going to happen before it explodes out into the main narrative. Homer does that. And we're dealing with a separate textual device in that case, and in Greek, and I'm going to badly mispronounce this, but the Proemian was what it was called, and that was an introductory sort of preface. And oftentimes it might just be a prayer to the gods or a prayer to the muses at the opening of a play or the opening of an argument. So there were summaries that would kind of give you an idea of what the following story was going to be about. But we're talking about a very different and distinct type of style with distinct formatting. And the formatting in the Book of Mormon did not emerge until after. I mean, the earliest. A quick diversion, and I don't mean to do this, but when you say laying down heads, why are they called heads? And the reason why they're called heads is because it's coming from the Roman. The same word where we derive the word chapter from the capitulum. Capitulum. It's the origins of where we get these head froms in the Greco Roman traditions. Some of the earliest ones we have go back to about 5th century or so BC and it was primarily in legal books, in Greek legal books. And the. And all it was at that time was. And the origins of all this is when you're looking at these manuscripts, you know, we don't have the modern paragraph breaks and punctuation and all that in a lot of these ancient manuscripts. And so when someone was reading one of these old manuscripts and they wanted to. And in the law books, for example, and when they were dealing with separate issues within the law, the way that they made it easy for the reader to be able to see when one topic switched to another topic is to put in what they. What was the kaput. The head. And what that was is it's, you know, when we start a paragraph, I'll tell you what, go. If you go back to. Okay, look, so now when. When we start a paragraph down at the bottom, say I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents. And see how that I, Nephi, it's been indented.

John Dehlin [01:25:36] Yep.

William L. Davis [01:25:37] So that's a modern one of the modern conventions. We have to make separate paragraphs, make it easier now. But when you go back and look at the top, see how it says an account of Lehi, it's not indented. Yeah, it's just the opposite. It's kind of pushing out into the margin.

John Dehlin [01:25:53] Yeah, that.

William L. Davis [01:25:54] That is what the original heads were. So it wasn't even a summarizing phrase. It was just the first couple words of a section were pushing out into the margin.

John Dehlin [01:26:05] Interesting.

William L. Davis [01:26:06] And then. So that eventually developed over time, and it's really messy, it's really complicated. But over time, that is what eventually developed into chapters, chapter breaks, chapter headings, chapter summaries. And it was entwined with these other forms, the proemion, which is actually more ancient. So it's a really complex tradition. But what we have showing up in the Book of Mormon is a very specific style that developed long after Lehi left to come to the Americas. So that is definitely an anachronism. And I'm sure there'll be lots of debates and arguments about that too. But the format, it has a known history and it's very definitely right. And so I'm not saying, oh, the ancient people never use summaries at all. That's.

John Dehlin [01:26:59] Yeah.

William L. Davis [01:27:00] I don't even know how people could actually. That's a straw man argument that's so big you can see it from outer space. I don't know how people could come up with that interpretation of my work. But, you know, you never know. You toss a book out there and you don't know how people will read it.

John Dehlin [01:27:15] And I'm going to say something so that you don't have to say it. And I have no idea whether you'd want this to be said. But, but you know, we've had Brian Hales on Mormon stories in the past. You know, we know that for many, many years polygamy was kind of all he wrote or thought about. What I think is a testament to the effectiveness and the power of your book and your scholarship, taking out intent or even faith politics. Apparently it impacted Brian Hales so profoundly that he in many ways has stopped even doing work on polygamy stuff. He's spent some extensive time trying to respond to your book, even though your book wasn't trying to be an attack of the faith. And now apparently he is even working on a book to try and address some of the things you discuss in your book because apparently this was so upsetting to Brian Hales. And I'm not asking you to respond to that. This is just some stuff that I've heard from others and I just want to throw that in because, you know, because that's the reality. And so for those of you who are interested in kind of that back and forth, there's going to be some stuff you can pursue. But I also want to say that what I love about you, Bill, or Dr. Davis, is that you're not interested in that game. You're not interested in faith politics. You're interested in evidence and scholarship. And I think that's to your credit.

William L. Davis [01:28:41] Yeah, if I could just follow up on that real quick. I don't know Brian Hills personally, but I have, I have quite a few friends who are friends of his and, and everything I've heard about him is positive. And he sounds like a really good person, human being. I, I mean he and I are doing different things. He is doing devotional interpretations and readings. And what I am doing is evidence based academic work. And those do overlap. But I have no doubt that Brian is. The church is clearly very important and he is doing what he feels is the very best thing he can do to defend the faith and to help people not lose their testimonies. And I think that people who spend a lot of time and effort trying to help other people, I think that's a noble pursuit. And I think even I don't know him personally, but I believe his heart is in the right place. But that being said, I mean, I can't help but think about Hugh Nibley who gave a speech on you know, being careful about being so zealous that we shortchange our research and preparation to step into certain arenas and make certain arguments.

John Dehlin [01:30:21] And is that zeal before knowledge or something like that?

William L. Davis [01:30:24] Yeah, zeal without knowledge or zeal before something like that, yeah. And Brian did write a review of my work, and in some ways I thought, you know, the opening and the way he summarized all the chapters was really nice, and I appreciated that. But then he went off into areas that really distorted what I was actually saying. And I don't know that it was intentional. I don't think it was intentional, but nevertheless, it misrepresented my work. And I thought about responding to that for a while, but then I thought, you know, then I'm starting to do exactly what I did not want to do, and that is to start getting in debates with the devotional apologetics. And so, you know, it's kind of hard to know that there are people who will read those reviews and get an inaccurate picture of my work. All I can say is I hope that people will read my book and go to the source directly to find out what I was saying. But. But I don't want to. I don't want to attack anyone. I mean, I think, again, I think Brian is. Is doing what he feels is really important. I believe that he feels that he's involved in saving people from losing faith and losing their testimony. And so, you know, that, that, that's really the gentle apologetics that tries to help people see and understand without trying to become brutalizing or dismissive of someone who's presenting new ideas. I think that is the sort of noble profession that people can be proud of and being involved in.

John Dehlin [01:32:12] So. And I just also want to say that, like, this isn't always salvific for Mormon apologetics, but I just have to say this is your scholarly area. Am I right, Dr. Davis? Like, it's one thing to have Robert Rittner, who's an Egyptologist, talking about Egyptology in the translation, or Michael Coe talking about Mesoamerican archaeology or anthropology, or even, I guess you could say John G. Or John Sorensen, but like, if someone's an anesthesiologist and then they've been doing Mormon history on polygamy, and then they're just going to jump into textual critic, 19th century textual criticism. You know, we should respect, if we're going to pretend to be playing in the academic realm, we should give preference or deference or extra respect to people that are actually scholars in the field in which they're opining. Is that fair to say?

William L. Davis [01:33:15] That's fair. But I would add a. Just a little revision to that in that I know of people who were not trained in textual criticism or not formally trained in historiography, who decided because of personal reasons or financial reasons or whatnot, to go off into the medical field or the law field, and then they will turn around and write really incredibly fantastic scholarly works.

John Dehlin [01:33:41] So even Juanita Brooks, right?

William L. Davis [01:33:43] Yeah. So it's not so much the formal training, it's actually the quality of the work itself.

John Dehlin [01:33:49] Yeah, you're right. You're right.

William L. Davis [01:33:50] And it's the quality of the work that, you know, we should judge works.

John Dehlin [01:33:54] That's true, that's true. Because I mentioned Guy and Sorensen and. Yeah, so anyway.

William L. Davis [01:34:00] Yeah, so. So I would just. Because there are a lot of people who. Who do not have formal training. LDS scholars as well as non lds, but some of them are just fantastic.

John Dehlin [01:34:12] Yeah, yeah.

William L. Davis [01:34:13] And so we just have to pay attention to the work and the quality of the work.

John Dehlin [01:34:17] I love it. Okay, well, let's make sure we get your slides in, if we can.

William L. Davis [01:34:22] What's the next slide? Okay, so this is where I was just reviewing what these outlines were. What touching on heads. We've kind of talked about that. So what I wanted to do is here is we're kind of switching back from the textual apparatus. The way a text is formatted. We're going back to how. Laying down heads, what that looked like for a preacher. And then also they had different types of notes. Preachers sometimes might write out their sermons with really long notes. A single sermon might take up 12 pages where they go into detail. But in the crowd that were the evangelical preachers, they often wrote out what were called short notes or short briefs. And this is an example of a Baptist preacher named Abraham Marshall. And after he passed away, one of his sons put together a biography. And in the back, he didn't really quite know what these were. He thought that they were sermon notes. But these are actually skeletal outlines of sermons. And this is an example of how short they could be. So on this one page that I took, we have five full sermons. Everything that Abraham Marshall would have needed to deliver a whole sermon that could last anywhere from a half an hour to three hours long. Everything he needed for five different sermons of that length was all on this single page. And so when it came to these short notes, sometimes.

Sermon Outlines and Dictation Speed

John Dehlin [01:36:06] And five sermons could be how many total minutes of speaking.

William L. Davis [01:36:09] Usually at that time, it might be half an hour to. If you had someone who's kind of a wind bag. Up to three hours or more for a single sermon. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:36:17] So five sermons could be how long?

William L. Davis [01:36:22] Well, if someone. And there were some ministers who really could go on and on. If you took say those five sermons there and then you just did it in three hours, then that's could be 15 hours of sermons.

John Dehlin [01:36:36] Just from a page of notes. Right. A page of. Of heads, so to speak.

William L. Davis [01:36:40] Yeah. And so if you go back to that, and I think I talk about the different ways, sometimes preachers would take that little note, kind of like a 3 by 5 card, and take it to the pulpit. And then every once in a while they'd glance down at it as they're preaching, just to keep them on track. A lot of preachers never took their notes to the pulpit. And so they kind of have the outline memorized and they might have written it down somewhere and kind of looked at it, refresh your memory in the week leading up to a sermon. But then they would put it away. And then some of the preachers never use paper or pencil or quill or whatever at all. And they would look at a verse that they found interesting and then they would think about it. And then in their mind they would kind of organize the main points that they wanted. And the whole time it was always in their head. And then they would use that. And as they preached, they would be going from town to town, preaching and preaching. And so what would happen is pretty soon someone who is an experienced preacher, for example, might have a whole series of sermons, all of the outlines memorized, and at the drop of a hat, they could go on to any topic or any verse that they had been working on and just spill out a sermon off the cuff. And just by practice, thought preparation. So now if you go to the

John Dehlin [01:38:09] next and what is. And again, just summarize. This explains potentially how Joseph Smith could dictate for 30 minutes or an hour just with just potentially either with a small outline or even with an outline that he had memorized. And that's. It just. It fills in an important hole there.

William L. Davis [01:38:26] Okay. Yeah. And to be specific, what would happen Now I just have these notes here. But what would happen with a lot of these preachers is depending on the preacher, they might have just a whole collection of separate little notes and things. Some people had a little note, they would stick it like a bookmark in their Bible so that they would have it at the location of the scripture they were preaching on. Sometimes there were just separate sheets of paper that they would hold in a Saddlebag. But a lot of times they would gather these together in notebooks, and they could be homemade notebooks where they just, you know, got 20 sheets of paper, fool's cap paper folded at the end and sewed together a binder, and then they would just write sermons down. And in the book, I think I mentioned how there was a Methodist preacher who was putting together something on the order of. You know, he. While writing on passage on a ship, he put together the notes for 50 sermons inside of this little notebook he had. And other people had them. So what for something like the Book of Mormon. When you look in the Book of Mormon and you look at the summarizing heads that we know were part of the original dictation. Now, those, I don't believe were all the ones that Joseph Smith had. Those are just simply the ones that he dictated. But when you think about covering all of the Book of Mormon, you could do that in a single notebook and probably within roughly 20 sides of pages where you could have the outlines to be able to then use as these short ideas to then go ahead and refresh your memory at each one and then go put. Put the notes away and then go into the dictation room and then just dictate the next episode or series of episodes.

John Dehlin [01:40:09] Okay.

William L. Davis [01:40:10] Yeah, yeah. It would be very easy to have that in a notebook of about that size.

John Dehlin [01:40:15] So if you're saying how many pages of. Of sort of heads.

William L. Davis [01:40:21] Guessing, because obviously it depends on the handwriting. You know, are you writing small, are you writing large? But I think on the average size handwriting that you could use on 20 sides of a piece of paper. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:40:33] So 10 pages, 20 sides. Joseph Smith could have probably a fool's cap. Joseph could have reasonably sketched out these heads or these outlines.

William L. Davis [01:40:43] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:40:43] That then would have given him plenty of material to dictate the number of hours that would have been required. And you actually break this down in your book, you break it down not just to hours of dictation that would have been required, but also the speediness of the transcriber being able to actually write down what's being dictated to them. Right. And so when people like Quentin Cook try and make the timeline impossible, you've kind of worked out the math, so to speak, to kind of decide whether or not mathematically, even if. Even if the transcription starts really late, whether mathematically it's feasible for Joseph to have remembered and dictated, giving enough time for the pauses for the bathroom breaks and for the transcriber to actually write out what's Being transcribed, correct?

William L. Davis [01:41:43] Yeah, and I'll go further on that point. Now, I didn't talk about this aspect in the book, but I did talk about it in my dissertation. This is the first time Joseph was actually doing this long process of dictating to a scribe. So there's a learning curve going on. And I know that people like to point out that, wow, he did this so fast. But from my point of view, after studying oral traditions and oral compositions, my question is, why did Joseph Smith do it so slow? And the reason why I say that is because we have instances of where there were people who, in oral traditions who have dictated to scribes, who were very familiar with the stories that they were doing, and they were skilled and they had been doing it for a long time. And so people studying them would then start to transcribe what they said. And in my dissertation, I talk about people. Millman Perry and Albert Lord were some of the first ones who were talking about oral formulaic composition. That's kind of a different subject. But they would study people who were telling these traditional stories and they decided they were going to record some of these stories, both using a recorder, but also with scribes by hand. And all the details are back in the dissertation. It's not fresh on my mind. I haven't read it in a while. But basically, one of these skilled singers, Avdo Medvedovich, I believe, is how you pronounce the name. But he was dictating at a speed twice as fast, basically, as Joseph Smith. I think if Joseph Smith had been doing this longer and had been more skilled, I think we could have expected, if he kept doing works, you know, if he kept dictating works, I think after a few years of further practice, that he probably could have dictated the equivalent of the Book of Mormon in half the amount of time that he did. The Book of Mormon itself.

How Long Did It Really Take to Compose the Book of Mormon?

John Dehlin [01:44:00] I mean, that's super bold because we've all been conditioned to. To just think, wow, how in the world this is such a miracle. Just so fast, superhuman speed. It really is. It's the first time anyone has ever said to me what you just said, which is, why did it actually take so long? That's. Yeah, that's kind of groundbreaking. I've never heard anyone suggest that before. I'm not as plugged into the literature as you, but that's. That in and of itself is kind of earth shattering to me.

William L. Davis [01:44:32] Well, one of the reasons why that can happen is because we're looking at something that is not a written production and that's a Huge mistake that people make when they say, oh, this happened in three months. Well, when I wrote my book, it took two years. But that's a totally different process. I mean, this comparing apples to oranges. When, when it's an oral production. I mean, you open your mouth and the stream comes out and it is what it is. You don't go back and you don't revise. You don't stop and think, oh, I need to. I'm going to go out of order and do things non linearly. When you're writing something and you're revising something. And there's another key in our modern conception of composition. We're thinking about how can I be original, right? How can I have that new turn of a phrase that expresses some idea in a way that no one else has ever done? And so we're spending a lot of time not just writing and drafting, but rewriting, rewriting, rewriting, to try to hone it down. And if we try to use that framework of composition to understand what Joseph Smith did, we will get it all wrong. It is a totally different process. If people want to compare the process to what it's really like. What you'd want to do is,

John Dehlin [01:45:53] you

William L. Davis [01:45:53] know, just compose something orally.

John Dehlin [01:45:57] I mean, what comes to my mind is how most books, most memoirs are written these days. You basically have a ghostwriter that sits down and tells the person, just tell me your story. They just go on and on and on. Verbally, verbally. They record it, they transcribe it. And then at the end there's a. There's a ghostwriter that kind of cleans it all up and maybe adds a few things. But if you really want to write the book fast, you dictate it what you can remember orally first. Is that a fair comparison or not?

William L. Davis [01:46:29] Yeah. And then the only other thing I would say in the case of Joseph Smith, that this just wasn't stream of consciousness. You know, you have to remember that there was several years of preparation.

John Dehlin [01:46:38] Potentially five, right?

William L. Davis [01:46:40] Potentially five. And then also after he started the dictation, they lost the 116 pages. There was still time to even go back and maybe make some additional changes and adjustments. And again, that's not to imply that Joseph Smith was faking it. It could just say that he's waiting for inspiration to know how to compensate for the last 116 pages. And that what came out after that was, you know, the development from what he felt was divine inspiration. But the point of that is there's a lot of preparation. He's very familiar with the stories. So when it comes time for the actual dictation, it's a matter of a quick refresher, looking at a note, putting it away, and then just telling the story. Think of it this way. If. If you have a child or a niece or a nephew or someone, they want you to tell them the story of Snow White and the seven dwarfs. And let's say that you haven't told that story for 10 years, but we would know how to go ahead and start telling it. And I bet you if we were record someone telling that story that the sentences will come out grammatically correct. We're not going to go back and say, oh, wait, wait, wait. What I meant to say was, no, cut that. That verb I chose. I meant this other verb. But people would just tell it in a constant stream and a clear story that would go through and hit the main points and get to the end. It wouldn't be the exact same as somebody else's. The words and vocabulary might be different. We might choose to add little events or we might have forgotten events, but eventually we get to the end of that. And that is a totally different process than trying to write down a story. It's a completely different process. And so people are trying to understand Joseph Smith and the production of the Book of Mormon within literary constraints, and that just doesn't work. It doesn't work.

John Dehlin [01:48:48] Yeah, I love it. Really quickly, something that I think is really important here, if you look at the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon, because what we, what we often are, what we are always most familiar with, is the. Not just the final product, but it's not the first edition. You know, it's all the, you know, we're most experienced with all the changes between the original manuscript and the actual printed first edition and all the changes that happened between that edition and the edition that we're most familiar with. Now, if you go back to the original, you know, handwritten transcription, can you tell us if the actual language or the syntax reflects more kind of a word for word translation style or if it supports this idea of a verbal oral dictation. And if you can, and this is asking a lot to give us a couple examples either in the types of words or actual phrases. And Grant Palmer, I remember him talking about this, that there's, there's kind of words like. And he was a go in, you know, the. Any types of words or signals that confirm the idea that this in fact was an orally dictated text and not an actual written transcription.

Evidence of Oral Composition in the Text

William L. Davis [01:50:14] Oh, My goodness. To come up with examples off the top of my head or even places

John Dehlin [01:50:19] to go to to learn about this question. Because it's an important question. Right.

William L. Davis [01:50:23] Well, I, I mean, I hate to send people to my dissertation, but that's. I do talk about some of it, but I'm not the first to talk about that. There are a lot of. There are a lot of people who have talked about oral creation in the Book of Mormon. Brent Gardner, I think, has. Has been doing work a lot.

John Dehlin [01:50:39] He's a believer.

William L. Davis [01:50:40] Yeah. Yeah. And I think he does a lot of great work.

John Dehlin [01:50:43] And we've had him on Mormon stories, by the way.

William L. Davis [01:50:45] Oh, okay.

John Dehlin [01:50:46] Just for listeners. Just for listeners.

William L. Davis [01:50:48] And he's someone who I think is really paying attention to the text. And while I might disagree with some of his interpretations, I think he's really working hard at what's there. And so when he talks about the oral aspects of the Book of Mormon, I think that's a place to go. There have been some earlier and I'll be forgetting some of their names. So I feel bad about this. But one thing that's an aspect of orality. I'll mention two things that come to mind. One is that there seems to be. And this is from. And I'm forgetting her name, but there was a lady who first pointed this out and it was fantastic. And she's LDS scholar. How there appears to be moments in the text when a dictation is occurring and then suddenly there's a correction. The corrective. Or I think, what's that scripture about? They buried their weapons of peace, or rather they're weapons of war for peace.

John Dehlin [01:51:52] Right.

William L. Davis [01:51:53] And there's a lot of those in. And, and, and I feel bad that I can't remember the name of the scholar. She was. It's fantastic to point that out. Other people have looked at more recently. I remember Sam Brown in his essay in Producing Ancient Scripture, he. He brings that up and he goes into more examples. So, so that's one. There are a lot of times when something happens where there seems to be like, oh, you know, I said one thing, but instead of just going and scratching it, there's. Or rather and then a rephrasal of it. And that's a suggestion of something being told in process as opposed to something you're reading. Another aspect would be there is an enormous amount of repetition. And if you were. I mean, you got to think if you're etching, engraving things on a plate, if there's a lot of unnecessary repetition, that's a lot of work to keep engraving things that ultimately didn't really need to be there. And it's kind of hard to explain that without showing examples. But there's an enormous amount of stylistically we would describe as tautology just too much unnecessary repetition taking place. But sometimes that repetition is exactly what occurs in oral presentations, because when you have a speaker and an audience, the audience can't. They don't have a text to look at again and again to re. To get certain ideas really captured in the mind. So the speaker might repeat things in order to help the listener to really grab hold of an idea. Also, another, more subtle aspect is when listing out sequences of events or describing how things progress in an episode is you'll have something that's called additive. And so what will happen is you'll see the beginnings of successive sentences begin with the word. And for example, I went to the store and I bought some butter and I found a toy and I decided to get some milk. And then I went and bought it from the cashier, and then I went home. And so each one of those ands, it's kind of like the idea is in the moment progressing, and so someone is adding on to it with yet another phrase. And that's something that's really, really common in oral performances. And you see that exact same thing all throughout the Book of Mormon. And it came to pass. And for behold, those are all examples of things that can be additive elements. And it's just riddled throughout the text. So there's a lot of evidence for orality being the mode of production.

John Dehlin [01:54:54] And I just have to. This is helpful. It's illustrative. But I also have to give a shout out to LDS discussions because they're doing some great work right now on the Internet. He's giving us some examples. And so shout out to LDS discussions. Check out their website here. He's got Alma 24:19. And thus we see that they buried their weapons of peace. And then he writes mistake. And then he has the correction that Joseph Smith would have given orally. Or they buried the weapons of war for peace, which is the correction. You mentioned that already. There's a couple others. AMMA 4338. They being shielded from the more vital parts of the body. Mistake. Now the correction or the more vital parts of the body being shielded from the strokes of the Lamanites. That's the correction. Helaman According to the word, the earth goeth black, and it appeareth unto man that the sun standeth still. Yea and behold, this is so. For surely it is the earth that moveth and not the sun. Are these good illustrations of what you're talking about?

William L. Davis [01:56:02] Yeah, yeah. And I think that, you know, a lot of LDS scholars have explored those too, and that's why they're recognizing that, you know, the role of orality played a much, much bigger role in the creation of the actual text. The words, the way that the stories were articulated were heavily dependent on an oral process, not a literary process. And even if, even if we want to look at it from a believing point of view, where there was a hard, fixed written artifact with a fixed text on it, when it came to the translation, that translation went through the means of a translator, an agent understanding it and then trying to articulate it through an oral mode of presenting the translation.

John Dehlin [01:56:58] I love it.

William L. Davis [01:56:59] So it wasn't a text to text. It was a text to this kind of oral mode and then dictation to a scribe.

Mormon Theological Themes in the Sermons

John Dehlin [01:57:08] This is all so great. There's something in your. That we have to cover, that's in your book that we have to cover before we end today, if possible. You talk about revival sermons in the Burnt over district. That's your chapter three. And these are. It's kind of the Methodist sermon culture. But then mind blowingly, you also talk about how these types of sermons appear in the Book of Mormon. So you know, it's something people need to think about that basically King Benjamin or Messiah or whoever it is that's given sermons in the Book of Mormon, just mind blowingly, they're giving these Methodist style sermons, or in other words, these structures that were saying, these Methodist structures that Joseph would have known about that inform the actual structure and flow of the Book of Mormon. They also appear as Methodist like sermons in content and in structure within the Book of Mormon itself. Am I summarizing that? Right? And what else would you want to say about that?

William L. Davis [01:58:14] Yeah, and that's not something that is original to me. I mean, Mark Thomas comes to mind who talked about that. Grant Palmer, I believe, talked about that too, and others have talked about that. But what I wanted to point out is how like the example I gave, a lot of times when we're reading the Book of Mormon, we are reading a passage that sounds a lot like the Bible, right. Kind of biblical style language. But then when we actually trace some of those things or try to trace them back to the Bible, they were not part of the King James version that was so enormously influential on Joseph Smith's religious register. But when we look at those same phrases and we look at them in the context of 19th century, some of those kind of revival style sermons. You find all of those, the language, the phrases, the concepts are just littered throughout the 19th century. And they show up in sermons, they show up in hymn books, they show up in the religious literature and the printed sermons. And so regardless who we say was responsible for the translation of the work, the translation clearly drew from 19th century vocabulary, 19th century patterns of sermonizing, and just a 19th century Christology or belief or a certain set of package beliefs that were often presented in the articulation of the Book of Mormon. And so, yeah, and again, we can explain that through the translation process. You know, if Joseph Smith was participating as a translator, then we would expect him to draw upon his own experience, his own vocabulary to try to articulate what he was experiencing with the text of the Book of Mormon, for example. But the point that I would say is it's not about proving or disproving again, whether or not the Book of Mormon is an authentic history. It's about looking at the text and saying, yes, these are definitely linguistic artifacts from a specific time and a specific place, and that is the second Great Awakening style sermons and exactly what's happening in Joseph Smith's environment. And so however we want to believe, how it got there, what's important to me is that we recognize that it's there and it is. And so that is important to our understanding of what it meant for translation, what Joseph Smith's life and background might have been in order to produce that kind of language in a translation, or any other questions that people might have that's related to that.

John Dehlin [02:01:15] And this is a point that I think you make in your book, but if you don't, other people have made this point to me in reference to this interview with you. It's, you know, for someone who's trying to really understand the creation of this book, and this is a bit, a bit summarizing, you just have to wonder, number one, why are, you know, why are Mesoamerican, you know, profits in, you know, from between 600 BC and 400 AD or is it 400 BC to 600 AD? Why are they giving Methodist like sermons? Why are they structured like Methodist sermons? Why are they giving sermons at all? But then why is it coincidentally that the topics that they're discussing in their sermons happen to be the topics that Joseph Smith would have been thinking about? Alexander Campbell, Sidney Rigdon, the burned over district? Why is it that it just so happens that Mesoamerican ancient prophets in content are discussing the topics that Joseph Smith would have been thinking about and that he would have been swimming in that also would resemble 19th century sermons in the burned over district during the time that Joseph Smith was alive. And then of course you have to also add, why is it also that none of those sermons were discussing LGBTQ issues or organic evolution or any of the issues that would have been, that have vexed the church since Joseph Smith's time, let alone eternal marriage or eternal sealings or the endowment ceremony? Why is it that all those sermons that Alma and Benjamin and Mosiah and others are giving really reflect all the stuff that Joseph Smith would have been concerned about in 1830 and or the years leading up to 1830, that, that is problematic for, let's just say a rigid, tight, orthodox view of Book of Mormon translation. Is that fair to say?

William L. Davis [02:03:26] Yeah, yeah. Well, what, what I mean, this is. I'm actually gonna dodge that question.

John Dehlin [02:03:33] That's fine. That's fine. I love dodges.

William L. Davis [02:03:35] The reason, the reason why I'm gonna do that because that, that is a question that's really considered with devotional interpretations and devotional aspects of the Book of Mormon and that really is moving in a direction that's outside of my area of interest. But what I would say again is that's something for people to consider and think about, but also to remember that if we are dealing with a translator who saw translation the way Joseph Smith did as a revelation, that could tell us something about the types of major interventions that Joseph Smith could have introduced to the text in the process of bringing this ancient scripture or text, a narrative, to the modern world. In other words, we see a lot of Joseph Smith's fingerprints all over that. So there are ways for want believers to incorporate that into the system. So that's my devotional, you know, response to that. But, but it's not, that's not really, you know what I do.

John Dehlin [02:04:45] Totally, totally. I'll just share this one quote because I love LDS discussion so much. Alexander Campbell, who was a contemporary of Sidney Rigdon, a well known preacher of the day, he read the Book of Mormon, reviewed it and the quote is quote, this prophet Smith, through his stone spectacles, wrote on the plates of Nephi in this Book of Mormon every error and almost every truth discussed in New York for the last 10 years, he decided all the great controversy, he decided all the great controversies. Infant baptism, ordination, the Trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the atonement, transubstantiation, fasting, penance, church government, religious experienced the call to ministry, the general resurrection, eternal punishment, who may baptize, and even the question of Freemasonry, Republican government and the rights of man. All these topics are repeatedly alluded to. And I'm not meaning to mock, I just, I, I, I think that's an interesting thing that, that we'll throw in there, but I'm not going to ask you to comment it on it anymore.

William L. Davis [02:05:48] Well, I, I will say though that I, I did pull that quote into the book and I did talk about it in terms of the type of training that early preachers went through and what was advised for them to learn about what to preach about or not to preach about. And so just so people know, I do discuss all that and there's always

John Dehlin [02:06:08] a possibility that God put those ideas into the brain of Nephi and Mosiah and Benjamin and Moroni and Mormon so that they could be addressed and, and speak to the issues of the 1800s. So I mean, there's always an apologetic response.

William L. Davis [02:06:27] You know, I'm going to talk about that, but just kind of back up a little bit. My first response to that, and this is moving into devotional stuff.

John Dehlin [02:06:37] Yeah, yeah.

William L. Davis [02:06:38] But my spur, my first response to that would be if that's what works for somebody, then, you know, I, I'm not gonna disturb that. And the reason why is because. The role of belief and the need for having that a belief system set up in order for someone to have comfort or strength or peace of mind or whatever it is, is really important to someone. And just from my own experience, when, regardless what I think about how true or how not true or something might be, yet when I see the lived on the ground religion, that's when I see some real beauty in Mormonism. When my dad died, for example, and I saw how people turn to their beliefs in the afterlife to hold on, That touched something, but how belief is so important to navigating life. And so that's why when it comes to a lot of issues, that's why I don't get involved in devotional apologetics or arguments because, because I know anti Mormonism, right? Yeah. Because in my life I know so many people who are devout Mormons who I love. Dear, Dearly. Sorry. And I don't want to, I want to help people have accurate information, but I'm not in the business of destroying safety nets for people. And, and so that's why I just keep it in the academic realm because regardless what people believe, regardless what system that someone has a belief in, inevitably people are holding to that and oftentimes holding desperately because there are challenges, troubles, pain, sorrow, loss, where those belief systems give them comfort that they wouldn't otherwise have. And so that's, that's why when it comes to, you know, some of the, the debates about, you know, how did ancient Nephites know about 19th century problems? That's why I avoid those.

John Dehlin [02:09:37] Yeah.

William L. Davis [02:09:38] Things because it ultimately comes down to a devotional thing about criticizing the authenticity of a sacred book for people. Right. And I just. I just don't. That's not what I do.

John Dehlin [02:09:54] And that's. That's partly what makes this book so amazing, is that it's so respectful and so thoughtfully done. I do have a couple quick questions I want to just get you on. You've been so generous with your time. Before we give you a chance to wrap up, can I ask her? And this could be done in the light of almost helping believers still believe, but I just want to ask you a few quick questions, if that's okay.

William L. Davis [02:10:18] Sure.

John Dehlin [02:10:18] Why go to the trouble of preserve, you know, getting brass plates, creating gold sheets of paper, engraving the plates, preserving the plates, hiding the plates, delivering the plates, protecting the plates, if the plates aren't going to end up being used? Maybe that's not in your. That might be going into the realms you don't want to go into. But do you have any thoughts on that? Because that's one question that comes up with if, if the plates aren't even really being translated from, and if they're not even in the room, which we know they kind of weren't, what do you say when people ask, then why were the plates even kept or delivered at all? You can dodge if it's not your wheelhouse.

William L. Davis [02:11:08] Well, I'm going to kind of dodge a little bit, but I'm really embarrassed because I'm mixing up first names with people and I'm going to get in serious trouble because this is someone who I like a lot and. But I'm one of the editors of producing ancient scripture. McKay. And I want to say Mike or Mark, but I. I'm blanking.

John Dehlin [02:11:31] I'm gonna look it up right now.

William L. Davis [02:11:33] Oh, please. Because this is really embarrassing because I. I think he wrote an essay where he talks about materiality.

John Dehlin [02:11:39] So there's Mike, There's Michael Hubbard McKay, Mark Ashurst McGee and Brian Hauglett.

William L. Davis [02:11:44] It's Mike.

John Dehlin [02:11:44] Okay.

William L. Davis [02:11:45] Okay. He's. He will never let me live this down.

John Dehlin [02:11:48] I do that all the time. I always. I know and love. Just because in the moment, my brain just. The names just leave so you're. You're on. You're in good company.

William L. Davis [02:11:57] Yeah. So he's.

John Dehlin [02:11:58] Or I'm in good company, I should say.

William L. Davis [02:12:00] He. He wrote this essay about how when we're talking about history, we're often dealing with things that are just in the mind, ideas, and we forget the really important aspects of the embodied experience, the materiality of plates. Why bother with that? And one of the things I took away from his essay, and it's a really great essay that addresses all of these things, and that is how that becomes a form of verification of authority. It plays a function that even if people can't see the plates themselves or hold the place or they just heard about them, the fact that they are treated as real and there, and containing these ancient things in a real material, embodied way, that adds a layer of authority and authentication, authentication and weight to the reality of that situation that you don't get with simply sharing ideas or telling stories. And so I think that that's a really important aspect of essentially providing evidence and proof through not necessarily a reasoned way, but actual, physical, tangible way, where there's confirmation, a double confirmation, both with knowledge of the presence of materiality as well as the idea of the materiality. I hope that makes sense.

John Dehlin [02:13:38] I'll accept that. Thank you. And I'll refer people to that book because I. Because I. Having you tell me it's a great book makes me care more about it, frankly.

William L. Davis [02:13:46] There. There are a lot of great essays, and I know there's a lot of people. It is a little bit of a mixed bag. I know that they were trying to make it, you know, an academic work, but it's. That's like trying to herd cats, really. It's almost impossible to get everybody kind of on the same page. And there are some of the essays that are clearly more devotional in their direction or with the topic that they deal with. But the one thing that everybody shares, though, is that they're bringing to it some really high quality scholarship.

John Dehlin [02:14:20] And it's got Grant Hardy in there, it's got Richard Bushman and Toews, Brian Hauglett, I mean, Mark Ashurst, McGee and Don Bradley. These are. These are names that people should respect, right? Yeah, yeah.

William L. Davis [02:14:36] And it's a fantastic work.

John Dehlin [02:14:37] Jared Hickman. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

William L. Davis [02:14:40] And I think what it's doing, not just because it's dealing with translation, but that this isn't a situation where they're providing answers for everything. What they do is by going back and tackling these issues and trying to figure out what Joseph Smith was actually doing. And then instead of compartmentalizing all of his translation projects, they're kind of bringing them all together side by side, so you can kind of build a better picture of what the entire thing meant to Joseph Smith. They're opening lots of doors for further questions that are really important. And this is, I think it's a landmark study that is really going to accelerate fantastic new information and new developments in the study of what Joseph Smith was, you know, trying to do as a prophet as well as producing new scripture.

The Catalyst Theory and Authorship of Scripture

John Dehlin [02:15:30] So when you think about the catalyst theory in the Book of Abraham, my understanding of that, which is that Joseph didn't translate the papyra, that the papyru were just, like, inspirational to him and the catalyst to help him channel the revelation. Part of what requires in that, adopting that theory is that it means that Joseph Smith in some sense didn't even understand what he was doing and. Or misrepresented to us what he was doing because the word translation was used. He said the papyrus was written by the very hand of Abraham, and he said he was translating with the gift of power of God into English. As it turns out, none of that's true. And. And so the catalyst theory, then, can help resuscitate or resurrect Joseph Smith by saying he channeled it, but he wasn't translating. But then that leaves us with the conclusion that Joseph Smith himself didn't even understand what he was doing and. Or that he misrepresented to us what he was doing. How do people grasp that? There's obviously a spectrum. Those who are frustrated with the church or angry are going to just say, well, it was a fraud. So that's really simple. There's also, you know, there's also other, maybe more charitable ways to interpret that. Is there anything you would want to say about that? Because it's a reasonable concern. Is that true?

William L. Davis [02:17:01] Yeah, I think so. The way I would approach it, and I'm sure people who are angry at the church might be frustrated with what I have to say, but I would not say that Joseph Smith misrepresented what he was doing, because I think when you look at all the texts he developed, the Egyptian vocabulary and grammar, he invested a lot of time in genuinely trying to tease out the meanings of these hieroglyphics. And if someone was, I just don't see someone who's a fraud or a con man doing that much work to impress such a small circle of insiders. So I would not say this is misrepresenting what I would say If I had to describe what I think was going on in Joseph Smith's mind is that he genuinely was trying to determine the meaning of the hieroglyphics and using a process of translation that he understood translation to be, which meant just like the scriptures say in dnc, studying it out in your mind, listening for confirmation of the Spirit. And then when you say, is this what it means? And there's this kind of good sensation and feeling that's like the spirit, well, that must be what this means. And so I think he was constructing and those interpretations based upon that process. And so I think that when he's trying to figure out what the papyru said, he was genuinely trying to figure out what the papyrus said and that he was simply there was a difference between what he thought he was doing and what he was actually doing and that he probably frankly did not understand what was going on inside of him during that process. I mean, that's kind of how I ended the book. Joseph Smith said, no man knows my history. But I think that, you know, he, he can include himself among the people who don't know Joseph Smith.

John Dehlin [02:19:18] That was so good. You also make the point at the end that he lists himself as the author of the Book of Mormon, which some apologists say that was just sort of a literary convention. But you mentioned that for what purpose?

William L. Davis [02:19:33] Well, I wanted to bring that up because when we talk about authorship of Scripture, then we're talking about a process of inspiration and we're talking about where when you look in the New Testament, the way that you can interpret some of the New Testament scriptures is regarding the construction of Scripture, that it's a situation where it's a collaboration between God and between an author. Author in the sense of co author. Author in the sense of I'm going to receive this inspiration from God. And then, and then what comes out of me is something that I'm. It's. God is making use of whatever's in my mind to communicate this certain message. So I'm participating in the authorship of this text. I might not be the originator of all the ideas, but there's divine information coming in and it's being articulated out of me. So the writer is not just simply a filter, but someone who is actively involved in the shaping of that text, which is co authorship. And I think that that is what Joseph Smith thought of himself. Now when it comes to him describing himself as author, I mean, people have talked about how if you list yourself as author on the copyright registration page, that's not the part I was arguing with, and I wasn't even describing where he had author on the title page. What I was talking about is how after we have author there and on the title page and in the registration of the copyright, Joseph Smith also refers to himself as authority at the end of the preface. But it's the same preface where he's talking about how he translated it with the gift and power of God. And the preface to describe himself of author. The law, the legal requirements for copyright registration did not require him to put author there. And so that was a choice. And it might have just been a convention, but it was still a choice. And that in combination with other things he said, and this will go off because then I have to go to some files that I don't have readily available. But the idea being that he saw himself as an active participant in the creation of new scripture. And so when you say author, if we think of it in the light of co author, I think we're getting closer to what Joseph Smith thought about his role in producing texts.

John Dehlin [02:22:05] Yeah, I think that's important. One thing that I don't think that we brought up, but that I just want to make sure and get in the record, this is just something very micro. But regarding the claims that Joseph Smith couldn't have had anything to help him with the dictation of the Book of Mormon other than the plates, is the reality that he certainly had the Holy Bible, the King James Version of the Bible as a source, because actually the very text of the book of, of the King James Version of the Bible not only appears in, in, in what becomes the Book of Mormon, but even the errors from the King James Version that we know he had appears in, you know, ultimately becomes the Book of Mormon. Now, you could say that an angel transmits the errors from that exact edition of the Bible that he had. But what's most likely is that when it came to the parts of Isaiah, he's got the Bible there and he's reading that, that Isaiah to the, to the scribe. And if he can have the Bible and be reading from the Bible, he can certainly have some notes that he might be referring to, although it's not required, as you've also highlighted. Is there anything you want to say about that? I just want to make sure that gets in there. Yeah.

Why the Seer Stone and Plates Both Mattered

William L. Davis [02:23:26] This kind of goes back to Emma's statement when her statement again is being pulled out of context, where she's saying, we're talking about Sidney Rigdon talking about how Joseph Smith was not using some purloined manuscript. He was not, you know, plagiarizing some novel. And that's what she was talking about. And not only do we know it from the context of that interview, but the follow up letter from her son who did the interview when he was clarifying that same issue in, about the possibility of Joseph plagiarizing in his letter. And again, what's happened is people are, it's a logical fallacy of overgeneralization. And what they're doing is. So Emma was clearly, from the context of the interview and the letter that followed, she's talking about Joseph Smith never referenced the Spalding manuscript or any other novel or romance to create the Book of Mormon. And so people are saying, oh, what she's saying is he did. There was nothing of any other kind of material there whatsoever at all. But that's not, that's not the context of those quotes. So they're being pulled out of context and saying, oh, a Bible couldn't have been there because Emma said this. And that's not what Emma was saying. And so that's the first issue with that. And the second issue with that is you have to think about the timing of the translation as well. When you look at the major sections of the Book of Mormon that are clearly dependent on the King James version of the Bible, those are taking place toward the end of the translation process. Those would have been taking place after Oliver Cowdery had taken over as scribes and then, and then especially the second Nephi. This is after they would have been in Fayette where they were actually off in an upstairs room during the translation where a lot of people weren't even there or participating. And we have documentation of people saying that Whitmer explicitly said, when I said that the people were all watching the dictation, I was not saying that they were there every single time, watching every single moment. And so when it came time in the process of dictation when they would have reached these passages, where there would have been large scale referencing and consulting of the Bible, there's a very good chance that Emma wasn't even in the room when that happened. And so that's another challenge with trying to use Emma's account, which was a very specific time in Harmony, Pennsylvania, and then trying to apply it to every other dictation session. And that's a mistake. And that we can't. We really. There is no historical account that definitively tells us yes or no of whether or not Joseph Smith used a Bible. And when you look at the text and the Alterations and what's happening. I think it's abundantly clear that when he reached certain passages, he opened up a Bible and then on the fly, made minor adjustments in the process in order to make it conform to the narrative that was unfolding in the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [02:26:50] Along that line of thought, if talking about whether or not the plates were necessary, some people are asking, why have a Seer Stone or the interpreters at all? And I. I think I know some of what you're going to say, but I'd rather hear from you, so I'm just going to let you answer.

William L. Davis [02:27:08] Well, again, this. This won't be original to me, but what I think about it is, you know, Joseph Smith, in his interest in gaining access to greater heavenly knowledge. And one of the routes apart from religious pursuit was also this esoteric pursuit dealing with, you know, can't really call it folk magic. Folk magic's part of it, but there's something deeper going on. This access to hidden knowledge and mysteries. And so at that point of his life, I think that he was still very much connected to the instruments and the practices that helped him connect with that mode of access to greater knowledge. And so at that point in his life, the Seer Stone was that point of access. And. And so it was something that for Joseph Smith was part of almost a ritual in a way, where that object needed to be there as allowing him, at that time and in his place of development, access towards the divine. And. And if we look at it outside of like a devotional type viewpoint, you could say that, you know, it might merely been something as a concentration device. It might merely been something that, you know, he could focus on and it would kind of get him to just clear out his mind of everything else and just to fixate his attention on one thing and then just to start letting the words flow. But I think it was more than just concentration. It's about what Joseph Smith believed that the stone was doing for him. And so there was. It wasn't just a way to, you know, focus, but it was something that, for Joseph Smith, allowed him to focus and then get into a mindset where he felt more open to inspiration. And so it was a help, right?

John Dehlin [02:29:28] Absolutely. Really quickly, one of the comments that I'm getting from a lot of people, and I want to thank everyone on YouTube and Facebook that have been sharing comments. There's kind of the Dan Vogel. A lot of people are surprised that Dan Vogel, who I don't think in any sense of the term, is kind of a believer in orthodox Mormonism, or even a believer at all. He came up with this term, pious fraud, meaning that, yes, people were in some sense fooled by Joseph Smith. But Dan Vogel also believes that in many ways, Joseph, if not in all ways, Joseph Smith, believed that what he was saying or doing was at least true, if not good or worthy. You. You began this podcast interview by. By saying you share in the sentiment that. That Joseph Smith, in many senses, if not in all senses, was sincere and not a blatant, overt fraud. I just want to sort of communicate to you a concern people have if they're saying, man, William, just, he seems to be giving Joseph Smith a little bit too much credit. The Occam's Razor sort of analysis of all this would be that Joseph Smith is literally perpetrating conscious fraud on people. They would then turn to kind of polygamy and the Kirtland banks scandal and all different things that would just sort of lead someone to think that there was just kind of blatant, conscious fraud going on here. What do you say to somebody that says, you're being too kind to Joseph Smith, you're being too lenient, you're bending over backwards to just not call it like it should be seen, which is just. This is some, you know, person with bad intent trying to fool people, pulling the wool over people's eyes. What do you say to people that are saying, you're just being too generous and kind to Joseph Smith?

Joseph Smith's Sincerity and the Pious Fraud Question

William L. Davis [02:31:26] Okay, where I would start with that is first, when, you know, you're laying out all the things Joseph Smith did over the course of his career. Right? His prophetic career. And what I'm talking about is not his whole prophetic career. What I'm focusing in on is a very specific action, and that is the production of a new scripture. All right? And so that's the limit of what I'm talking.

John Dehlin [02:31:52] Which ends before the church even begins. Right? Yeah.

William L. Davis [02:31:55] So. So how Joseph Smith felt or thought about polygamy is totally off. Off the table with what I'm doing. That's a. That's a totally different issue. And I think there are real problematic things that need to be addressed there where regardless if you know how he felt about certain issues with polygamy, even if you're a genuine sincere, that doesn't necessarily excuse all the behavior. But that's different than what I'm doing. What I'm doing is saying, when it comes to producing the Book of Mormon, when it came to attempting to translate the papyri, where was his focus? And I think that looking at the historical record, looking at what he did, how we approach things, the documents are left behind that Joseph Smith genuinely believed that there was divine influence informing how he created those texts. And, and then I'll say this. I mean, I don't know that I would ever use the word fraud to describe Joseph Smith because for me that's, that's, it's a combative word. It suggests that, that he knew exactly what he was doing all the time and he was intentionally trying to misrepresent and fool people. And I don't think that explains Joseph Smith as a whole human being. I think there might have been moments when he did intentionally misrepresent a mislead for various reasons. Like, for example, classically, I guess, talking about how he was not involved in polygamy, publicly stating that when in fact he was involved in. And several relationships. So there are times when he's trying to clearly deflect attention. But when it came to the text and when it came to his process of translation, I think he genuinely believed that he was tapped in to something. And so how do I think about Joseph Smith? I guess it's still kind of ongoing. But what I would say is if we look back and we look at, frankly, all the prophets in the history of the Bible and history of other people, we're dealing with people who are very complex, very contradictory.

John Dehlin [02:34:29] And

William L. Davis [02:34:32] sometimes I would have to say that occasionally we might be dealing with someone who isn't always aware of what the right hand and the left hand are doing. There's a certain kind of. A certain kind of fractured way of seeing the world. And that's why they, I think a lot of prophets get to where they are because there is a sort of vastly contradictory, inconsistent way of approaching and seeing things. And I think for Joseph Smith, for whatever reasons growing up or in his psychology, I think that he reached a point where this is just what I'm just speculating off the cuff here, but I would think that this is someone who grew up under extremely difficult circumstances. And one way of dealing with reality was not just to lay down and accept reality, but to create a reality and impose that around him to, to make the world better than, than, I think, a very painful world he was living in. And so it's very complex and that's beyond me.

John Dehlin [02:35:49] But I mean, there are listeners that are like, right now, they're making comments like, he was a con man, he was a charlatan, he was a narcissist. And I just want to highlight how impressive your thoughtfulness Your fairness, your demeanor, because I strive to want to be like your being. I fail all the time, but I recognize not just the value and the strategic intelligence, but also just the good hearted, good natureness of trying to really put aside the passions, put aside the emotions and be as thoughtful and as accurate and as fair as you can possibly be. That is really, really hard to do and it's really laudable. It's really notable and I just have to call it out and say even though a lot of my listeners are super angry because you're not validating a lot of their anger right now, it's really impressive what you're doing from my perspective and I just want to call you out on that. It's super cool.

William L. Davis [02:36:56] Well, if I could just do a quick follow up then because I can't see the comments. I don't know what people are saying. It's probably a good thing because didn't want to get sidetracked. I don't absolutely do not want to invalidate the pain that people have. There are because of the nature of an organization that once you once especially something that started it in the 19th century, firmly grounded in this patriarchal structure and the patriarchal structure where people feel that whatever their opinion is is exactly coinciding with what God wants. There is enormous potential for ecclesiastical abuse. There's enormous potential for that culture to be severely judgmental of people who don't fit into the mold. And that from what I've seen him, my life experience has caused excruciating pain. And, and, and it's even worse when people are going through such terrible pain and then to have it, to have people tell them, oh, you're just having a problem because you're sinning or, or oh, you know, if you, if you just pray hard enough, you'll, you'll stop being gay and you'll become straight or, or oh, you know, yeah, back then we did, you know, we were kind of racist and didn't let black people. But, but it's fine now and it never really was a policy. I mean that those things do not acknowledge the, the real severe pain, life altering pain that people have gone through where experiences that they had totally changed the direct, the, the trajectory of their lives and not always in a good direction because of the way they were raised and taught and the messages they received and how that turned around and really broke apart their foundation. And so when I'm looking at Joseph Smith and trying to figure him out and even I'm trying to describe what I genuinely see in this, I see him as a very conflict, conflicted person who was very contradictory. And a lot of times it just in many ways, someone trying to oppose his own reality and looking at life with a kind of fractured perspective. But that is not in any way meant to invalidate the pain because if anything, the work that I do is to bring accurate knowledge to the table about some of these sensitive questions in the hopes that ultimately, if we build on accurate knowledge, then we can build up to where things that are happening today in an institution, if they're founded on inaccurate information, that if we can correct our perspectives, that it might eventually ripple up up to the organization to where we can fix some of the problems that are still present.

John Dehlin [02:40:19] So, yeah, and I would just add that the smartest thing I believe to do if you want to help educate people who want to be educated, is to be balanced and fair. Stick to the evidence, to not be hyperbolic, to not use polarizing, extreme language. This is the way to not turn off and to attract and to educate the most amount of people and to do the most amount of good. And so I actually, I think it's a great approach and I love it. And I wish I was better at it, frankly.

William L. Davis [02:41:00] Well, I'm a firm believer in you just present the information and let people use it, interpret it and make their own decisions. I don't want to tell people how to believe totally.

Final Reflections and Closing Thoughts

John Dehlin [02:41:13] Okay, so for what, this is my last question, I promise. And then I just want to give you a chance to say anything you haven't said yet and then we'll be done, other than me promoting the book. But there are, there, there's this new turn that I kind of referenced earlier, whether it's Spencer Fluman or Terrell Givens or Richard Bushman, where the. I call them neo apologists, kind of the newer branch of faithful scholars, Maxwell Institute, where for the past several years they've been doing this. They've been moving away from calling the Book of Mormon a translation. They've been moving towards calling it a revelation. This may seem like a subtle or an unimportant distinction, but it's probably very meaningful. And I think your book reflects that because that is to say, let's stop calling it a translation. That's going to get us in trouble. Let's call it a revelation. And then it can maintain its divinity, but also reflect what it really was, which was more of a creative spiritual act in their mind than anything resembling an actual translation in any conventional sense of the meaning of the word. And then I Think we even had an apostle in a recent general conference. I believe it's the one from Brazil who actually literally use this term revelation instead of translation. Almost as if to start testing those waters and priming the membership. And the only reason I'm bringing all this up is to say there's a lot of people like me, a lot of people who are listening, a lot of people raised in the church that experience that as like a bait and switch or as gaslighting or as kind of of, you know, a move that doesn't have any accountability. Because if we were all taught breastplate, if we were all taught Urim and Thummim, if we were all taught Arnold Freeberg paintings, if we were all taught plates in front of them, if we were all taught translation, and then without any real explicit education, then the church just moves subtly and shifts to this idea of, of an inspired revelation. It leaves a lot of people feeling gaslit and. Or misled, without any apology and without any correction. I don't expect you to be able to talk much to this, but I at least wanted to articulate the frustrations and even anger that a lot of people are feeling and give you a chance to say whatever you wanted to in response, even if it's just to be empathetic for those who are frustrated.

William L. Davis [02:43:54] It. There are a few things that came to mind. One is when we get new information, we do see the goalpost shifting. And part of that is a redefinition. And I think there is, as an institution, there's an effort to kind of fix the little problems that come up and then just kind of, you know, hope things are better. I mean, when you look at the opening of the Book of Mormon, how earlier on it said the Native Americans are the principal descendants of the Book of Mormon people. And then all of a sudden, you know, we've got DNA studies that, you know, say that there are a lot of groups that have nothing to do with Israelite background. And so that there was this kind of shift, changing the language and kind of moving and hoping it goes away. So I. I can't speak to the motives of, of why people would make that. It does seem to be in response to more and more information coming. But so there, I think there is attempt to just kind of let things go and we'll just kind of forget about it in another generation or so. And so I do wish there were that, you know, the institution could just be a little bit more open about why they're making changes and. But it could be just A fear of being seen as fallible, which I think it would be better if we could all acknowledge more of our fallibility. And so. Yeah, now, there was another part of that. Did I answer all of that?

John Dehlin [02:45:45] Yeah. No, I mean, that. That's a great. That's a great answer. I. Yeah. I mean, I talked about the apostle. I talked about Flumen. I talked about, you know, gaslighting and people just feeling misled and. And no accountability. I'm just trying to say things to jog your memory in case there was something else you wanted to add. Yeah.

William L. Davis [02:46:06] See, I mean, and another thing, too, is just to remember that everybody involved, I mean, regardless whether they're a scholar at the Nellie Maxwell Institute, a church leader or average member or someone who's out of the church, someone who has walked away, every single person is going through their own personal journey of trying to make sense of everything, trying to reconcile everything. And so I think when we hear people using different types of terminology,

John Dehlin [02:46:40] I

William L. Davis [02:46:41] don't know how much of that is a reflection of an institution moving or a reflection of individuals who are working toward trying to come to a deeper understanding of what their faith is. And so, you know, but I'm on the outside looking in. I don't know what they're thinking, their intentions or thoughts or anything, but. But it is hopeful when things start to move toward more accuracy in any situation. And so I think that's a positive thing, even though it. It can be frustrating when people are changing the goalposts.

John Dehlin [02:47:13] And so kudos to Bushman and to Flumen and to, you know, Mason and to the Givens and. And all the other scholars, because even if some of us are frustrated that there hasn't been accountability or that we've been misled, at least the conversation's moving towards more accuracy versus less accuracy, right?

William L. Davis [02:47:35] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:47:35] And more truth versus less and more open discussion versus less open discussion. We can't deny that we're moving in those directions. Right.

William L. Davis [02:47:44] Yeah. And I think it's important and just for everybody involved, some of the debates that occur to the generations coming up, this just doesn't matter. They don't care. And so what happens is what. I think what's really important and what's really hard to do is to reassess and reevaluate our positions on various issues and to recognize when we're digging in our heels because we don't want something to change because we like it the way it is, regardless what's true or not true. And I think that's an important process for everyone involved to. And it's hard because your ego's on the line, your pride's on the line. Especially if you've been public about certain positions and all of a sudden they're not popular, people get defensive. But to just. If people can just sit back and reflect and just say it's okay, the world's not going to fall apart. If we look at this problem from a different angle, I think that opens the door for discussions and change and. And in situations to fix things, to make life better.

John Dehlin [02:48:53] Yeah. Well, I am just over the moon, grateful for your time, your generosity of time. I think we went a little bit over what we had planned. The book is Visions in a Seer Stone by William L. Davis, Joseph Smith and the Making of the Book of Mormon. Before we end, William, is there anything else you want to say about this book, about your efforts, how people can support you, how people can get in touch with you, what you're doing next? I want to give you every chance to leave everything on the table that you wanted to share today. You've been so generous and gracious.

William L. Davis [02:49:35] One thing I would say is that right now interest in the Book of Mormon in the scholarly community, the academic community, has been increasing. And we're finding out there's a lot of really interesting things to learn from the Book of Mormon that can tell us a lot about early 19th century culture, especially oral culture. But in today's publishing world, even the academic presses who are normally subsidized and they can publish whatever they want now, the pressure is on them to start producing almost like a commercial house. And so what I would say is for people who are interested in these things are interested in the academic pursuit, that those authors. The only way the press is going to know that people are interested and would like to see more studies done along those lines is whether or not people buy the book or not. And I'm not just talking about my book, but I'm talking about other academic books that are addressing important issues that are kind of trying to push the envelope or else to look at Mormonism and culture in a different way. And if. If the presses don't see any kind of interest or support which they see from sales, to be blunt, then the opportunities for having those kinds of studies grows less and less, and those voices either won't be heard at all or else they'll have a small audience. So I would just encourage people. If there's a book out there, it would be great if it were mine, but if it's somebody else's book that one way to show the press that this type of work is appreciated and that people want more is to purchase those books. So I hope that people will take

John Dehlin [02:51:25] that into mind and I'm going to take that even one step further and I'm going to put up on the screen right now and I'm going to paste into this conversation a link to this book and I'm going to put up a screenshot of how to purchase it on Amazon. Although Amazon. Is there a preferred way to purchase this book that's beneficial to the publisher and to you, William, or is Amazon okay?

William L. Davis [02:51:51] I think now I haven't looked recently at the University of North Carolina Press's website, but they were running a 40% discount. And if it's still there. Yeah, okay, right at the top. See this 40% on American history sale, you can get the book a little bit cheaper. Now you have to if you have prime membership on Amazon, you get free shipping, but you don't get free shipping through the unc. But I think overall you still save a few dollars. But one nice thing that people could do is there are several books published by UNC Press. I'm thinking of Spencer Fluman, for example. He wrote a book on the history of anti Mormonism, at least in the through the 18th century, 19th century. There's Taylor Petrie, Tabernacles of Clay. So if people purchased enough books that it came up to $75, then your shipping's for free. And so then the books are essentially you are getting them for 40% off. So that's another way to support. And Taylor's book, by the way, is fantastic.

John Dehlin [02:53:04] Yeah. And Spencer's no dummy. I mean he's super smart.

William L. Davis [02:53:07] So Spence, I was just thinking just the other day I was flipping through book books that I had on my shelves trying to reorganize some things. And I remember the first time I read the introduction to Spencer Fluman's book. I thought, oh my gosh, this is the sharpest, most sophisticated introduction that I have seen in Mormon studies for a long time. Just superior. And the whole book is great, but just the introduction I thought, oh my goodness, if you want to compete with someone like Spencer, you really have to up your game. So there are some great scholarships, scholars and great scholarship coming out from LDS scholars right now. And I think and also the people who are involved in and around Mormonism and Toews I think is fantastic. I better not start listening. I'll get in trouble by missing some people. But to look around because there's some great material.

John Dehlin [02:54:04] Yeah. And I'm just going to be very explicit and I'll make this promise to my listeners. If you will go buy William Davis's book right now, either preferably at uncpress.org, but if not at Amazon and. Or if you will go ahead and buy Taylor Petrie's book and Spencer Fluman's book and this. Get your discount, buy this book, support Mormon scholarship. I will hold a pizza party as soon as Covid's over. If I can get William out, I will. If not, we'll have him join virtually. But just like I said, you know, regarding Rick Jim Bennett, just like I said regarding Matt Harris, who's doing great scholarship, I will host a big party and thank all of you. I'll pay for the pizza, I'll host it, and I will reward you for supporting Mormon scholarships. So please, right now, buy this book, book, Visions in a Seer Stone. One of my listeners, Victoria, is saying, is it on Kindle? Is there an audio version of this book? I don't think there's. Is there an electronic version of the book?

William L. Davis [02:55:18] The Kindle I think you can get on Amazon.

John Dehlin [02:55:21] Okay, so there is a Kindle version,

William L. Davis [02:55:22] but I don't think there's an audio. So no.

John Dehlin [02:55:26] Okay. So please buy this book, please support Mormon scholarship, and most importantly, please support William Davis and UNC Press, because this is a. This is a very important book. This is not just kind of a, oh, what a nice little addition. This is a central book, I believe, and many people believe, to understanding how the Book of Mormon is put together. And if you haven't, you know, if you don't believe me, even Joanna Brooks, you know, has endorsed it, along with, as you say, you know, many other reputable, faithful scholars, such as you said at the beginning. Who was it that endorsed a review just came out. Bowman. Right.

William L. Davis [02:56:09] Matt Bowman came out with a really nice review.

John Dehlin [02:56:12] Yeah.

William L. Davis [02:56:13] And that was published in the Journal. I'm forgetting it. It's a religio new religion, but in Latin. I think so.

John Dehlin [02:56:22] But Matt sits in the chair of the Claremont in Claremont College, which Patrick Mason was in before he moved to Utah State University. All right, William, anything else you want to say before we close? You're just a treasure. You are literally a treasure that I'm so happy to have newly discovered. What else do you want to share before we end?

William L. Davis [02:56:42] Oh, this is way more than I thought we would do. I thought we were going to do an hour and now it's three.

John Dehlin [02:56:47] I'm sorry.

William L. Davis [02:56:48] I swear I would never do anything this long.

John Dehlin [02:56:51] I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Please forgive me. It wasn't intentional.

William L. Davis [02:56:57] It's all right.

John Dehlin [02:56:58] Well, all right, well, people are going to love that you did spend this time, but I'm sorry that we went over. I really am.

William L. Davis [02:57:05] Well, I enjoyed it. I appreciated it. So it was fine.

John Dehlin [02:57:08] And then. And then just. Many of my listeners are saying, please thank William. So, William, on behalf of me, on behalf of my listeners, on behalf of. Behalf of your readers, and just on behalf of the broader Mormon community, thank you for. For producing this book, Visions in a Seer Stone, and thank you for coming on Mormon Stories podcast. I owe you one. So I am. I'm in debt to you. You. You remember that. If you ever have any need, I. I will repay the favor in whatever way I can. Okay.

William L. Davis [02:57:40] Pizza? Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:57:41] All right. All right. I love it. That'll work.

William L. Davis [02:57:46] Okay, well, thank you very much. I mean, this was a great opportunity, and I hope people found something interesting.

John Dehlin [02:57:53] Oh, this is going to be a great top 100 episode, for sure.

William L. Davis [02:57:58] I hope so.

John Dehlin [02:57:59] Thanks, William. You take care and stay in touch, all right?

William L. Davis [02:58:02] All right. Thank you so much.

John Dehlin [02:58:03] All right. Take care, William.

William L. Davis [02:58:05] All right, bye. Bye.

John Dehlin [02:58:06] And to all our listeners, thank you so much for joining us today on Mormon Stories Podcast. Thanks to everyone who donates. Your donations make this possible. Huge thanks to Brooklyn Alden that does my audio and video editing. You're fantastic, Brooklyn. If you value this type of programming and you want to see it continue, please become a monthly donor to Mormon Stories Podcast. Click on the go to MormonStories.org at the top of the page. Click on the donate button. Become a weekly or a monthly or an annual donor. Your donations keep this alive as long as you continue donating. I will continue creating this type of content. Thanks to our board at the Open Stories foundation and our accountants and our lawyers that make everything legit and transparent and on the up and up. But. But thanks to you for listening. Thanks to your support. If you want to support us other than donating, which is huge, you can give us a positive review on Morm Stories podcast page. We always have haters give us negative reviews, so please counterbalance that with positive reviews. Please go to the Apple podcast app and give us a positive review there. Again, we always have haters that don't even listen to the podcast, drag down our average review score. So please donate. Please give us positive reviews there. Please share these episodes on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook, on YouTube. However, you can share through email with family and friends and if you need support, please join the Mormon Stories Podcast Facebook community. And to get the support that you need, just keep supporting us. Thanks for everything you do. Word of mouth is great and just your emails of encouragement mormonstoriesmail.com or your comments on YouTube, on Facebook, or on the mormonstories.org blog. They are all helpful to encourage us to keep continuing. Thanks to all your support. I love you guys. We've got an amazing episode tomorrow with Radio Free Mormons and we're going to be talking about John Gee and his battle against the Joseph Smith Papers Project. We're calling it Civil War. That's a little bit of artistic fun, but don't miss that episode as well as many great episodes. We've also will be interviewing Mark Naugle of Quit Mormon tomorrow afternoon as well. I'm addicted. I can't stop. As much as I want to slow down my Mormon Stories podcast episodes, I'm an addict and I can't slow down. So there's just much more good stuff coming in the days, weeks, months and years ahead. So stay tuned. Thanks for your support. I love you guys. And we'll see you guys all again very soon on another episode of Mormon Stories Podcast. Take care, everybody.

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