Scott Woodward:
Hi, this is Scott from Church History Matters. As we near the end of this series, we want to hear your questions about the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. In the final episode of this series, we will be honored to have with us a special guest to help us respond to your questions: Dr. Michael Mackay, a church historian and scholar of seer stones and all things related to the history of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. You can record yourself asking your questions anytime up to May 4, 2023, and send them to podcasts@scripturecentral.org. Let us know your name, where you’re from, and try to keep each question to about 20 seconds or so. Also, please transcribe your questions when you email them in. That helps out a lot. OK. Now on to the episode. What would you say if somebody told you that a 23-year-old farm boy dictated to a scribe a sacred text of 531 pages while looking down at stones placed in the bottom of his hat? And what would you think if they then told you that this book was dictated and written in one pass from beginning to end in approximately 60 days without any punctuation and with little to no revising? And what if they then showed you countless examples of how this book contains a high degree of literary and semitic complexity, suggesting highly skilled and detail-oriented authors who wrote in ancient Hebrew writing forms? Would you be open to accepting the proposition that this book was the product of a genuine miracle? If so, you’re not alone. And if not, you’re also not alone. In fact, several alternative naturalistic theories about the Book of Mormon’s origins have been put forth by those who reject the possibility of the miraculous. In today’s episode we examine all of this: the speed of the Book of Mormon translation, the complexity of the text itself, and the naturalistic theories of the Book of Mormon’s origins. All of this and more coming your way on today’s episode of Church History Matters, a podcast of Scripture Central. I’m Scott Woodward, a managing director at Scripture Central, and my co-host is Casey Griffiths, also a managing director at Scripture Central. And today Casey and I dive into our fourth episode in this series dealing with the marvelous, shocking, and utterly unique story of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. Now let’s get into it.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Hello and welcome back. I’m Casey. With me, as always, is the indefatigable Scott Woodward. Say hi, Scott.

Scott Woodward:
Hi, Casey.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And we are continuing our series on the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. Today, we are talking a little bit about how miraculous the coming forth of the Book of Mormon actually is: Some alternate explanations for how it could have come forward. What’s amazing about the timing and the actual content of the book itself. But first, let’s just quickly recap what we discussed last time.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, OK, so in our last episode we talked about the supernatural nature of the translation. We discussed how Joseph had grown up in a New England subculture where many people, including his own father, believed that divine knowledge could be revealed through objects such as rods and stones, similar to what had been done in biblical times. We touched on how Joseph had come upon or been led to two separate seer stones even before he had received the plates and the Urim and Thummim from Moroni. In fact, it was probably as early as 1822. After his encounters with Moroni, we talked about how Joseph soon learned to use his gift of seeing the unseen for the higher purposes of doing God’s work, primarily in translating ancient scripture. And in that regard, we discuss several of the first- and secondhand accounts of those who were involved in, witnessed, or were otherwise closely associated with the details of the process of the Book of Mormon translation. And the picture that emerges as we talked about that, and as you look at the historical records, the picture that emerges from their collective accounts is that Joseph translated—his favorite phrase was, “by the gift and power of God”—in the following way: The earliest accounts state that he would place the Urim and Thummim, the Nephite interpreters that came with the plates, at the bottom of his hat. We pointed out that much later recollections state that instead of the Urim and Thummim, he would sometimes place his dark-colored seer stone into his hat. Next we know he would put his face up close to the hat to block out extraneous light, and then writing would begin to appear in English, which Joseph would then read out loud to his scribes, who would then write it down. And if it was written correctly, then that writing would disappear and more writing would come, and so it would go. They would often take breaks after dictating for hours and hours, and then witnesses will say that when he comes back he could pick up right where he left off without having his scribe read back anything to him. He never had any outside books or manuscripts or reference materials with him, and the plates themselves were usually nearby on the table, wrapped up in a linen cloth. He apparently, according to the witnesses, didn’t need to look at the plates. Only looking at the Urim and Thummim in the hat, the seer stones, would be sufficient. But the plates always seemed to have needed to be nearby for some reason, maybe giving Joseph something to focus his faith on. But Joseph certainly, even by the time the Book of Mormon production was done, he could not read reformed Egyptian, but he could read English as it came through the stones. And so he never needed to look at the plates, but they needed to be nearby. Was that an OK review of last time? Anything you want to add?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Good summary, yeah, just that there’s multiple witnesses of this process. They all unanimously agreed this is miraculous, including those that were later critical of Joseph Smith and the church, like the Whitmer family. And so that’s one important thing, is that this isn’t something that just appeared out of nowhere. There were people that were there and witnessed the translation process and saw how the Book of Mormon came into being. Those people need to be taken seriously. Even if they don’t all agree in the minor details, they agree in the major theme, which is it was a miracle. So today we’re going to deal with some big questions. First, what’s the timeline of translation? Let’s put this whole thing together. Second, what is it about the text of the Book of Mormon itself that denotes some kind of greater complexity? And finally, there are some people that would propose some naturalistic explanations for how the Book of Mormon came into being. What are those theories, and how well do they hold up? So let’s dive first into timeline. And Scott, you’re going to take the lead on that and go right ahead.

Scott Woodward:
OK, well, yeah, let’s talk about what we know about the timeline of the translation of the Book of Mormon. And for the research on this, we need to give credit to the very careful, meticulous work of our friend Jack Welch, or John W. Welch, as his name shows up in the publications. He’s actually got two fantastic articles on this. The first is called The Miraculous Timing of the Translation of The Book of Mormon. It was actually part of a book piece that was a book-length volume that he edited called Opening the Heavens, Volume Two, published in 2017. And in that article, it’s over a hundred pages long. It’s got all of the firsthand accounts of every witness, and from that he pieces together the timing. And then one year later he published another article in BYU Studies called “Timing the Translation of the Book of Mormon: ‘Days [and Hours] Never to be Forgotten.’” And in this one he says he wants to be even more careful and really pin down all the anchor points of what we know and then to summarize, within a very small margin of error, how quickly did Joseph translate the Book of Mormon? So let’s draw on that work and talk about that. Here’s a few anchor points that he points out. And he’s actually got it charted out super nice in that second article, that 2018 article, which is very helpful at—kind of at a glance, day by day. What we know is that after the 116 pages of manuscript were lost back in June of 1828, and Joseph lost his ability to translate, lost the instruments of translation for a time until September 22, 1828, then we know he doesn’t translate much even after he receives those instruments back and the plates back from the angel Moroni after his season of repentance. We don’t have any record of him using that for translation until March of 1829. It appears that Emma helped briefly. There’s evidence that Emma helped with Mosiah chapter 1. They would have picked up right where the Book of Lehi left off in Mormon’s abridgment. Emma appears to have helped with that, and that’s it. Then, April 5, here’s a concrete anchor point with historical documentation. April 5, Oliver Cowdery arrives in Harmony, Pennsylvania. This is the first time Oliver and Joseph had met. Oliver had been involved with Joseph’s family as a school teacher back in Palmyra. He’d heard all the stories. He’d finally asked Joseph’s family about it, especially his dad, who finally told him what had been going on with Joseph. Oliver prayed about it, was convinced that God wanted him to be a scribe. So he goes down from Palmyra to Harmony with Joseph’s brother Samuel, and April 5 they meet for the first time. Two days later Oliver begins working as Joseph’s scribe, picking up, we think, in Mosiah chapter 2. April 7, 1829, they begin. And a few other anchor points we have that give us a sense of the speed for sure is May 15 we have the restoration of the Aaronic priesthood is going to happen that day. They were translating in 3 Nephi around when Jesus comes to the Americas. Remember chapter 11 where he calls Nephi up and gives him authority to baptize, and then gives others authority to baptize?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
This is gonna spark the question in the mind of Joseph and Oliver about the authority to baptize, in which they go into the woods near Joseph’s home there, pray, and John the Baptist will appear to confer that authority. Well, we know that’s actually May 15, and so we have April 7, they start in Mosiah 2, and by May 15 they’re already in 3 Nephi 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, somewhere in there. So we know that they’re flying, they are flying, zipping through the Book of Mormon. Jack Welch estimates somewhere between 8 and 10 pages per day, which is phenomenally fast, given that—you know, I remember Elder Maxwell was telling the story about this. He said that he asked the Japanese translator of the Book of Mormon, someone who spoke both languages fluently, English and Japanese, and was commissioned by the church to translate the Book of Mormon from English to Japanese, he had research assistants and whatever technology he needed. Elder Maxwell asked him, he said, “On a good day, how many pages a day can you do of the Book of Mormon?” And this Japanese translator said, “On a good day, I can do one page. I can do one good page.” Eight to ten pages a day! This is remarkable. A blistering pace. We know that another anchor point is—let’s see, May 25, when Samuel Smith was baptized. He had come down to Harmony to check up on the translation, and by that point Jack Welch estimates that they were in Ether, chapters one through three. Then we have on the 31st of May, Moroni 9 and 10 and the title page were translated. June 1, Joseph and Oliver pack up, move from Harmony to Fayette, New York. They’ll arrive in Fayette a few days later. And then on the 11th, here’s an important anchor point, the 11th of June, the copyright form was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of New York using the full title page as the title of the book on the copyright form. So we’ve actually got the title page in print, which has been submitted on June 11. And then we know by, let’s see, June 30 the translation was finished. So April 7 they begin, and then by June 30 they are done. That’s 269,510 words. That’s about, again, eight pages a day, and they’re not translating every day. We know there’s some travel time. There’s other days they’re working on the farm. There’s other days that other revelations are being received. And so given everything we know, Jack boils it down to about 60 working days at eight pages a day, 269,510 words. This is a blistering speed. This is a miraculous pace.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. And honestly, once you put the timeline together and take a look at how the entire book as we know it is just produced from that day in April, April 5, when Oliver Cowdery shows up to the end of June, it’s astounding. I mean, I’ve written a book. It’s not as long or as complex as the Book of Mormon. There’s no way I could have done that in that span of time, honestly, and have it be any good. The Book of Mormon, on the other hand, is beautiful and complex and amazing, and honestly we ought to emphasize more the speed at which the Book of Mormon was produced. I mean it just—wow, it’s fast.

Scott Woodward:
It’s an underemphasized detail that just again accentuates the miraculous nature of this translation of the Book of Mormon. Just for perspective, here’s a few books that some of our listeners might know about, and how fast it took to write or translate them. Let’s do the King James Bible. How about that? King James Bible took 47 scholars, theologians, and clergymen about seven years to translate from early Hebrew manuscripts and Greek manuscripts to get the entire King James Bible. About seven years. LDS Spanish triple combination, so Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price. When that was first done in Spanish it took six full-time general authorities, full staff and secretaries, and over a hundred return missionaries to help review the manuscript. Three years. Three years to do the LDS Spanish triple combination. Now, some people say, well, but the Book of Mormon was not a translation. It was fiction. It’s just made up from Joseph Smith’s brain. And we’ll talk more about some theories about that later. But to that I’d say, OK, well, let’s compare with some fiction. The Hobbit took J.R.R. Tolkien two and a half years to write. Lord of the Rings trilogy took 12 years for Tolkien. Did you know that Harry Potter, just volume 1 by J.K. Rowling, took six years? Six years to write Harry Potter volume 1. Victor Hugo wrote Les Mis, a fantastic piece. Took him 12 years to write that. Sixty days with the Book of Mormon. Sixty days from beginning to end. And then it’ll be published March of 1830. Like, again, the speed at which this comes—is suspicious. I say it’s very suspicious of miraculous aid. It smells miraculous. And what’s amazing is Joseph Smith is 23 years old, and, by the way, he never does anything like this again ever. That’s it. Five hundred and—what is it today? 31 pages? 531 pages. He’ll never produce another book of scripture like that. We’re going to get Doctrine and Covenants, which is individual revelations. We’ll get some Book of Abraham, super short translations that Joseph is going to receive, but nothing like the Book of Mormon. This is—he’s 23. He’ll turn 24 that December. I mean, Casey, what do we do with this?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. You and I work with a lot of 23-year-olds, right? And I remember what it was like to be a 23-year-old, especially, you know—the students we work with are at least high school graduates, but for them to produce a coherent four- to five-page paper—

Scott Woodward:
Oh, man.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
—you know, is pushing the limits of what they can do.

Scott Woodward:
I know, yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:

To produce a 531-page book is astounding. So I think age is another factor, too, that we need to take into account. He’s young.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. He’s so young.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
He doesn’t have a lot of training or education, and we’re not on the bandwagon of saying Joseph Smith was uneducated his whole life—he becomes very well-educated—but he does this at a point in his life when he really shouldn’t have the intellectual faculty to be able to do so.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, and just, so thinking about the speed and his age is one thing, and then you actually start reading the book. And my goodness, the literary complexity of this book. Let me just throw out a few examples. There are so many we could talk about. Let me just throw out a few that I like to highlight. One is geographical complexity of the Book of Mormon. There’s a perfectly consistent internal map in the Book of Mormon with elaborate descriptions—geographical descriptions of cities and their spatial relationships to each other. I think there’s over 120 specific places, but they’re brought up over 500 times. Some of our colleagues from BYU, Tyler Griffin and others in the animation department at BYU, have actually put together a quite impressive internal map that’s featured at Book of Mormon Central that just shows, again, the absolute internal logic, coherence, and consistency of this map. You can overlay the entire story of the Book of Mormon on this map that’s recreated from the text of the Book of Mormon, and everything plays out with perfect spatial consistency. It’s amazing. Another complexity is the chronological complexity. There’s three different time systems in the Book of Mormon. There’s the time since my father left Jerusalem, there’s the time since the reign of the judges, and there’s the time since the sign of the Savior’s birth. There is never a chronological error in the sequence of the Book of Mormon as it continues to drop very innocuously, just these little references, little time anchors throughout the whole text of the Book of Mormon, and there’s never a chronological inconsistency. He’s going eight to ten pages a day, he’s got a scribe he’s dictating to, he’s looking at rocks in the bottom of his hat, and for someone to say that he’s just coming up with this in his head would require a superhuman memory and ability to keep dates and places in check, right? And in perfect consistency with each other and remembering what he’s done, “What year was it, and now what year should it be” and add to that the complexity of the storytelling. In some places there’s some parallel narratives. There’s flashbacks, like in the Book of Mosiah from Land of Zarahemla. Meanwhile, what’s going on in the land of Lehi-Nephi? And there’s this flashback to King Zeniff and Noah and Limhi. We get the story of Abinadi. And again, all the dates are perfect. Even in the flashback they build back up to the moment of departure before the flashback. Let me throw out another one. The outline of the Book of Ether is a fantastic one. The literary foreshadowing of Ether, chapter one, if you’ll go and look at verses 6 through 32, you’ll see very boring verses, verses that say things like, “And Corianton was the son of Moron, and Shiblon was the son of Com, and Coriantom was the son of Amnigaddah,” I think is how you pronounce it. Now, as boring as that is, right? At first glance that just seems like a humdrum, spiritually worthless litany of people who beget other people. But it turns out, upon closer examination, to be an actual narrative outline of the entire book of Ether. So what ends in verse 32 of saying that Kib was the son of Oraiha, who was the son of Jared, then Moroni, who’s abridging this story, starts telling the story of the history of the Jaredites in reverse order, exactly backwards, and tells the story, using those names as the spine—kind of the narrative spine to then fill them in with all kinds of interesting details. So to anyone who wants to say Joseph is pretending to translate, I would just say, “All right, try this little challenge: Pretend to translate an ancient record while staring at two rocks in the bottom of your hat, and then rattle off 31 generations of uncommon names to your scribe, and then recount the story of those 31 names in reverse order, starting at the last person you mentioned, and then tell the story backwards until you get to the first person, and you can’t peek. And you can’t ask your scribe to tell you the name again. And you have to provide rich historical, geographical, faith-promoting details all along the way. Hold all that in your brain, as you’re going, I mean. So geographical complexity, chronological complexity, narrative complexity. And we haven’t even talked about Hebrew complexity, right? Semitic complexity. Should we talk about that, Casey? What do you think? Should we venture into those woods?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Let’s venture into those woods, but before you do that, I want to point out one other just real simple thing. He is not writing this. He’s dictating it. And on the one hand, when you’re writing, and you can go back and look over things, and see where things are at, you can start to produce complex things. On the other hand, I can’t imagine dictating something as complex as the Book of Mormon—Emmett Smith says he never reread, he never asked for things back, he would get up and take breaks and then come back and start dictating almost in mid-sentence. That is just another thing that we sometimes overlook is that all this complexity is also found in a work that is dictated to Oliver Cowdery, and Oliver Cowdery writes it down. So it’s one thing to say he could have written something as complex as this, but when I’m dictating, you know, without any script written down beforehand, almost all of us will tend to start to talk in circular phrases or make mistakes or say, “Ooh, I can’t remember. Did I already say this?” and move back. Just the fact that the Book of Mormon was dictated and it’s as complex as it is, is miraculous. Let’s talk about Hebraisms, too.

Scott Woodward:
One more thing. You mentioned last time the intertextuality. Do you want to make a comment about intertextuality from the standpoint of dictation, like, how remarkable that is?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, yeah, let’s talk about that.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, well what do you want to say about that? You mentioned last time there’s quotations, right? You’ll get quotations in, like, the Book of Helaman that quote King Benjamin’s speech, which happens hundreds of pages earlier, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
There’s a lot of those in the Book of Mormon. There’s a lot of people quoting previous people and getting verbatim quotes or even just little phrases or snippets. Yeah, the memory that that would require, again, is superhuman. Anything else about intertextuality you want to say? That’s just a thought.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Well, I mean, a glaring case of intertextuality is Isaiah. A lot of people criticize the Book of Mormon because there’s so much in it from Isaiah, but to say that Joseph Smith was memorizing these huge passages of Isaiah and then dictating them without mistake in as short a period of time as the Book of Mormon was dictated is really astounding, too. Like, if we’re getting into the supernatural, either way we go, if we’re trying to say Joseph Smith was making it up, he had supernatural abilities. If we’re saying it’s a revelation from God, he had supernatural abilities. There’s just not an easy way to explain where it comes from without bringing in the supernatural at some point.

Scott Woodward:
Amen. Okay, let’s talk about Hebraisms. Hebraisms are—let’s define them as literary features that are typical of ancient Hebrew language, literature, or culture. And in the Book of Mormon there are at least 50 different types of poetic, grammatical, or literary Hebraisms that have been identified. Many of them show up in the dozens. Others, like a really famous one called chiasmus, show up in the hundreds. We’ll link a video that Book of Mormon Central did in the show notes here. Just going over this, 50 different types of poetic, grammatical, literary Hebraisms, it’s phenomenal. Things that, you know—like repeated alternates, infinitives, plural amplification, parallelism of progression, merisms, construct states, metonymy—but the most famous one I think, some of our listeners might be familiar with is chiasmus, which is a pretty remarkable type of Hebraism, right, where Hebrew prophets would use a poetic balance, right? They would give an idea A and then idea B, and then they would repeat idea B and say idea A again, in kind of this nice, mirrored, parallel structure. The easiest chiasmus to recognize is when Jesus says, “He that finds his life shall lose it, and he that loses his life for my sake shall find it,” right? You see the find, lose, lose, find. A-B-B-A. And the thing in the middle is usually the most important thing. That’s the—that’s the major point, right, is the—the middle idea. So in this case, it would be losing your life for the sake of Christ, and so that’s a really simple one, A-B-B-A, but they can get really complex. They can go A-B-C-D-D-C-B-A. Actually, our very own Jack Welch, on his mission, there’s a—OK, we’re going to post another, on the show notes here, another video where Jack Welch talks about on his mission when he first discovered chiasmus in the Book of Mormon, a remarkable story that’s worth your time and listening to and reflecting on it, and then Jack has made this his life’s work to look at chiasmus in the Book of Mormon, among other amazing things he’s done, and he’s really just shined a light. The most complex one is in Alma 36, and that deserves a whole episode just to analyze that, but it actually goes from A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I. It goes all the way down to I. And then from I, back to A, where Alma the Younger is telling his conversion story to his son, and it’s in a perfectly balanced chiasmus. We know that Alma was super gifted with words even before he converted, but now he consecrates that literary gift to constructing his own conversion story in the most beautiful way he knew how, and right at the center of the chiasmus is the most beautiful piece. And I’m debating if I should spoil it for our listeners, but it’s verse 17 and 18. I’ll challenge our listeners to go look at Alma 36:17-18. That’s the balanced middle piece. And notice the idea that’s repeated twice there. The thing that changed Alma’s life. It’s amazing. But what’s wild is nobody in America even knew about chiasmus in Joseph Smith’s day. It wasn’t until 1957 that Jack Welch discovers it in the Book of Mormon while on his mission in Germany. And then this idea becomes a major source of scholarly interest for the next several decades and continues to be so. Again, just—so we’ve got narrational, chronological, geographic complexity. Now add to that Hebrew complexity. And all this is done in 60 days by a 23-year-old kid who’s looking at rocks in the bottom of his hat? I mean, come on. So Casey, are there any other explanations out there about the origins of the Book of Mormon?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Because there’s people out there that don’t believe in this kind of thing, right? There’s people who don’t believe in the miraculous, whose life premises don’t allow for divine dictation through rocks by 23-year-old farm boys. They say that surely there must be some alternate production narrative that can account for the origins of the book.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
So what’s out there? Can you give our listeners maybe a brief outline of what some thinkers have come up with?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. And I’m gonna point out a great article by Brian Hales. It’s from 2019. It’s about alternate naturalistic translation theories of the Book of Mormon. It’s from BYU Studies. I’m gonna run through these fairly quickly and then drill down in a few. So almost all alternate translation theories, so naturalistic, Joseph-Smith-didn’t-receive-revelation theories, boil down to basically five: One, and probably the most common one is that Solomon Spaulding wrote a manuscript that Joseph Smith plagiarized. This one has morphed and shifted to, instead of Solomon Spaulding, be A View of the Hebrews by Ethan Smith, and lately, The Late War, which is a history of the War of 1812. Second one is that Joseph Smith must have had some sort of collaborator. So a lot of the theories start out as “Joseph Smith didn’t have the capability to do this. He must have had somebody pulling the strings behind the curtain that did it.” Third one is that mental illness expanded Joseph Smith’s abilities to write the Book of Mormon. So Joseph Smith had some sort of manic episode that allowed him to run on higher octane fuel than we normally do.

Scott Woodward:
OK.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Number four is that Joseph Smith went into some kind of trance state and wrote in what we call automatic writing, and then interestingly, a lot of opponents of the Book of Mormon have circled back to saying, “Well, Joseph Smith was a genius. That’s the only way to explain the Book of Mormon.” So the arc is that they start out saying, “Joseph Smith was too dumb to have done this. What’s an alternate explanation?” to where we get to the point to where most modern opponents of the Book of Mormon are saying, “Joseph Smith must have just been a genius. How else could he have done this?” So let’s walk through each one, OK? Starting with the one that gets the most currency, which is the Spaulding theory. So this is by far the most popular theory that shows up in the 19th century. Apparently there’s a reverend named Solomon Spaulding who writes some kind of book about an early American civilization that’s linked to the Book of Mormon. And the reason why this one worked so well and gained so much press was because the manuscript was lost. Nobody knew where it was, and so you could basically project anything you wanted to onto the manuscript and say, “Yeah, Joseph Smith just stole from this.” Now, the theory was dealt a major blow when the manuscript was found. In 1884, it was found in Honolulu, Hawaii, of all places, and actually, that is the name of the manuscript when it was discovered. It’s called Manuscript Found. So today, I mean, the only organization that actually publishes Solomon Spaulding’s work is BYU—

Scott Woodward:
Ironically.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
—because it’s been so thoroughly disproved. But here’s just, in a nutshell, some of the problems. The Manuscript Found, Solomon Spalding’s work, is 50,840 words. That means it is less than a fifth of the actual length of the Book of Mormon. You’ve still got to come up with four-fifths of the Book of Mormon, even if you’re saying he plagiarized from this. The writing style and the composition of the two books are really, really different. For instance, the Book of Mormon follows this kind of King James language. The Spaulding manuscript does not. The Spalding manuscript and the Book of Mormon don’t have similarities in their storyline. The Spalding manuscript is about a Roman galleon that gets blown off course and lands in the Americas. The Book of Mormon is totally, totally different from that. And honestly, most people, when they have the chance to look at the Spaulding Manuscript and look at the Book of Mormon back off. For instance, Gerald and Sandra Tanner, who have been, like, the top opponents of the Book of Mormon for a long time and written a lot of critical stuff about Joseph Smith, said, “We do have the original Spaulding manuscript and the Book of Mormon, which do not appear to have enough in common to insist that the latter came from the former.”

Scott Woodward:
Wow.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So the worst opponents of the Book of Mormon have basically abandoned this. And when this was abandoned, in the early 20th century, a lot of attention shifted to another book called A View of the Hebrews. A View of the Hebrews, written by a guy named Ethan Smith, who lived in Pultney, Vermont, and he wrote a book basically suggesting that certain Hebrews migrated to the Americas and there set up a civilization.

Scott Woodward:
Well, that sounds familiar.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
That sounds familiar, right? And one of the things that makes this one more compelling is that he is contemporary with Joseph Smith. He doesn’t live that far away. At the same time, too, with all of these ones, I would say get a copy of the View of the Hebrews. Can you guess who the only people are that actually publish A View of the Hebrews?

Scott Woodward:
Is it us?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
BYU. Yeah. It’s us.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And that’s partially because if you read A View of the Hebrews, you start to notice immediately that there aren’t any parallels, except for the idea that the ancient Hebrews may have been among the ancestors of the Native Americans. A View of the Hebrews reads like a kind of thesis, where he posits ideas and puts them out there. And another thing that—that really pushes back against A View of the Hebrews is that Joseph Smith quoted it during his lifetime. He quoted it as evidence for the Book of Mormon in his lifetime. So in the Times and Seasons in Nauvoo, June 1st, 1842, he actually quotes Ethan Smith, saying, “Reverend Ethan Smith of Pultney, Vermont … [correction: Joseph Merrick,] a highly respectable character in the church at Pittsfield,” said that, and then he quotes A View of the Hebrews, basically.

Scott Woodward:
So if I was going to plagiarize from the View of the Hebrews, what I’d probably not want to do is draw attention to the View of the Hebrews, right? But now I’m thinking of Princess Bride, right? But you would have known I’m not a great fool, and therefore I can clearly not take the glass in front of you. So maybe Joseph cunningly, right, he drew attention to the view of Hebrews because everybody would know that if he plagiarized from the view of the Hebrews, then he would be a great

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, yeah. But the two works, just like the Spaulding manuscript, when placed side by side, don’t have any parallels, other than the general idea is the same. I mean, with all these, read them. I tell all my students, “Go get a copy of “View of the Hebrews” and read it and tell me if it’s similar to the Book of Mormon at all. Again, other than the general concept, no similarities. Now, one that’s popped up recently and gained some traction is a book called The Late War, which The Late War was a history of the War of 1812 written by a man named Gilbert Hunt that may have been in circulation in Joseph Smith’s day. By the way, the full name is The Late War between the United States and Great Britain is the full name. And this one gained a little press because two people basically said they had identified a number of parallels between the Book of Mormon and The Late War. Now, when that was examined closely, that kind of fell apart, too. For instance, seventy-five of the parallels that these two opponents of the Book of Mormon had cited as similarities between the Book of Mormon and The Late War were from the copyright page.

Scott Woodward:
Oh, boy.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So not even a page that’s part of the actual books themselves.

Scott Woodward:
Oh, jeez.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
The copyright page was a fill-in-the-blank kind of form. And that’s where 75 of their parallels come from. So they way over-exaggerated their claims by using these two documents that aren’t even actually part of the work proper.

Scott Woodward:
Wow.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And the rest of the similarities between the Book of Mormon and The Late War are basically because both of them use King James language. So The Late War uses King James language to describe the war between the United States and Britain in 1812, and almost all the parallels come from phrases that pop up in the King James Bible that are found in the Book of Mormon and The Late War as well. Again, I’ve just got to say basically, get a copy of The Late War. You can find a copy on Amazon on Kindle for really, really cheap and just read a couple pages.

Scott Woodward:
We don’t publish that one?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
We don’t publish that one—

Scott Woodward:
OK.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
—but it’s not hard to find. I have a copy on my Kindle, and I’ll just hand it to students and say, “You can read a couple pages and tell me if you think there’s similarities.” In concept, they’re not similar at all, but some of the language parallels come from just King James language being used, the “And it came to pass” and things like that.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So those are the three literary works that people say Joseph Smith drew from. Again, when you read those, those don’t hold up that well.

Scott Woodward:
And so those would all come under the heading of the first criticism or the first alternate theory, which is plagiarism.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, that he plagiarized it from somebody.

Scott Woodward:
And those are kind of the three.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, those are the three suspects brought up every time.

Scott Woodward:
OK, so plagiarism is number one. OK.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Now, theory number two is that Joseph Smith must have had some sort of collaborator. Like, it’s really popular for people to say Sidney Rigdon must have written the book. We don’t have any evidence that Sidney Rigdon was involved. Emma Smith, when she was interviewed right before her death, was asked, “Was Sidney Rigdon ever there?” She said, “I never met Sidney Rigdon until the church was organized, which was a year after translation took place.” I mean, this isn’t the sort of thing that takes place in a closet. Joseph and Oliver were translating with people around them. Nobody from Harmony, where the first phase of translation takes place, ever mentions Sidney Rigdon or any kind of outsider. Nobody from the Whitmers mentions Sidney Rigdon or any other kind of collaborator. The only collaborator you could feasibly come up with is Oliver Cowdery, and Oliver Cowdery himself insisted he didn’t, that he was the scribe, described the way that he wrote it down and wrote it out, and you’ve still got that timeframe. I mean, even if he’s collaborating with someone to get the Book of Mormon done in the timeframe that we have is astounding.

Scott Woodward:
A pretty glaring problem to indict Sidney Rigdon, right? Because we know that his conversion comes about because Parley P. Pratt gives him a Book of Mormon—

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
—which he then studies for two weeks, prays about, is converted, and then declares that to his congregation in Ohio.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Then he wants to go meet Joseph Smith. I mean, right, the chronology is way off for him to even have been involved. It’s extremely problematic and impossible, in fact.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, yeah, the missionaries first meet with Rigdon in the fall of 1830, which is way after the Book of Mormon translation is finished. Rigdon gets up and testifies to his entire congregation. He travels to New York with Edward Partridge. Edward Partridge. None of the people who knew Sidney Rigdon in Kirtland ever said he ever traveled east or had any kind of connection or spent any reasonable amount of time where Joseph Smith was while the Book of Mormon was being translated, so.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. So the only reason that Sidney is even brought up is because he was smart.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Right? Because he was Biblically and historically well-educated.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. But I mean, based on all the parallelisms you’ve brought up and all the complexity of the Book of Mormon, now you’re just saying Sidney Rigdon’s a genius instead of Joseph Smith.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
But the historical record just doesn’t suggest any kind of collaborator that had the know-how to do this.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Theory number three is that mental illness caused Joseph Smith to gain the abilities to get the Book of Mormon. This one is, I mean—the type of mental illnesses they’re suggesting are the sort of things that would have diminished Joseph Smith’s cognitive abilities. They’re not the sort of things that increased it.

Scott Woodward:
Like what?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
For instance, someone said maybe Joseph Smith was manic-depressive, that he was bipolar, OK? Symptoms of this include things like a decreased need for sleep, an increase in confidence or energy—that might have been beneficial, but some of the other things that are associated with bipolar [dis]order like racing thoughts, flights of ideas, psycho motor agitation, would have hurt his cognitive ability to have done this. There’s just not a psychological disorder out there that causes you to all of a sudden become a great writer.

Scott Woodward:
You know, grandpa’s not feeling very good today kids. He’s speaking in chiasmus again. You know how it is when he gets going. You know his bipolarism, it’s—you know how it is.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
That’s the manic-depressive thing. Another thing that gets brought up is that Joseph Smith may have had Dissociative Identity Disorder.

Scott Woodward:
Oh, boy.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Dissociative Identity Disorder results in multiple personalities, amnesia, depersonalization, and just straight-out fugue states where you don’t say or do anything. Again, all of these things would have impaired his ability to write the Book of Mormon, not increase it. So you can’t just say that he had some kind of mental illness that caused him to become a profound dictator of scriptural terms all the sudden. That’s just not consistent with any mental illness we’re familiar with today. Another one that comes up often is automatic writing—that Joseph Smith would shift into some sort of hypnotic state, and that would cause him to dictate. Again, that’s not consistent with what anybody says about the way Joseph Smith operated. Emma Smith, for instance, said he would dictate, he would stop, he would come back. He didn’t have to, like, take a minute and get in the zone or anything like that. They’d take breaks, they’d skip stones. There’s no mention of him being in some kind of hypnotized, automatic state. And the other thing is is the research on hypnotism and automatic state is that it just flat-out doesn’t increase a person’s abilities that are necessary to do something like dictate the Book of Mormon. For instance, Brian Hales quotes a psychologist named J. F. Kilstrom that said, “Hypnotic suggestion can increase muscular strength, endurance, sensory acuity, or learning, but it doesn’t exceed what a person can normally do when they’re not under hypnosis.” And another researcher, Patricia Bowers, actually says, “Hypnosis does not increase a person’s ability to create or be creative.” One last researcher, Graham Wagstaff, who said, “Hypnotic procedures do not reliably improve the accuracy of memory above non-hypnotic conditions.” So there’s no research that suggests if you’re in a hypnotic state, it increases your powers to do what you could do normally. You’re—you generally have the same abilities, even if your mind and body might be functioning differently for a short space of time. And again, hypnosis isn’t consistent with anybody that was there when the Book of Mormon was translated.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So we get back to the last explanation. You come full circle from “Joseph Smith is too dumb to have done this,” to “Joseph Smith must have been mentally ill,” to the place where a lot of opponents of the Book of Mormon are, which is “Joseph Smith’s a genius. Joseph Smith was smart enough to do this. The Book of Mormon is amazing.” One thing I suggest to my students is go and find something, besides the Book of Mormon that Joseph Smith wrote. Look up a letter, look up his 1832 history, which is good, the 1832 history is remarkable, but it’s not the Book of Mormon. It doesn’t have the same kind of cohesion or clarity that the Book of Mormon does.

Scott Woodward:
No.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And going back to what you said. OK, if you’re saying Joseph Smith did this just sheer force of genius, based on the timeline we used earlier, he works in dictations of 20 to 30 words at a time. The scribe reads the text back to ensure accuracy. All of them insisted there were no books, manuscripts, or other documents consulted during the dictation. So we’re saying that Joseph Smith could quote huge chapters of Isaiah and quote earlier chapters of the Book of Mormon Without any kind of prompting, without looking at anything They all emphasize he would stop and then after breaks not have to pick up where he left off—not say, “Hey, read the last sentence back to me.” He would just start dictating again. And the other thing is is there’s no rewriting. There’s no real major editing that happens to the Book of Mormon. During his lifetime he does go back and make minor corrections, like we said, but if you were dictating something, you would have to go back and really, really seriously revise the manuscript and the printer’s manuscript, which we have the whole thing of, and the portions of the original manuscript, which we have about 28% of, do not indicate there was any kind of reading back or rewriting. So you kind of come back to, “If Joseph Smith did produce this on his own, he’s a genius, but the sort of genius that again strains credibility that we can’t explain with anything we know of today.” So why not accept Joseph Smith’s own explanation, which is that he wasn’t a genius, that this was a supernatural process that he participated in. I mean, all the naturalistic explanations sort of fall apart, and you have to go back to saying, “I don’t know how he did this unless I accept some sort of supernatural explanation.”

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. I love in that article, Brian Hales, the one you’ve been citing. He says, you know what, given the technology we have today, if anyone would like to give it a try, you can do it. You don’t even have to have a scribe. He says, use your smartphone. You know that little microphone button that you can push, and, like, talk in and do a text—a voice text? He says, just push that. He says, here’s what you would do. “Using voice-to-text apps, recite a series of text messages of 20 to 30 words each to a recipient who would then compile them to create a manuscript. To more closely emulate Smith’s efforts, the text block should be consistently spoken in a vernacular that is different from the author’s daily speech. Then before hitting send, spelling and grammar could be corrected.” We know sometimes some eyewitnesses said that when they would read it back, if it wasn’t correct, it would stay. Sometimes spelling needed to be corrected, but then once it disappeared and the next text came, they never revised that other text that had already been written down, right? He says, “Then once you send it, the sequence and the meaning of the sentences would not be altered. After repeating this sequence around 10,000 times, to create a continuous string of words of about 270,000, the text would then be delivered directly to a publisher for typesetting and printing.” You know, if you wanted to give it a shot, you know, if Joseph Smith was a 23-year-old genius, then there’s never been another genius like him who’s ever lived that we know anything about. No one’s ever been able to do this.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
There’s been some pretty creative people, some very smart people, some very gifted literary people who cannot do what Joseph Smith did. Sixty days, in your hat, twenty to thirty words at a time, about 10,000 times. And then what you say and what’s been written down stands and goes to the publisher. And that’s what we get.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
So give it a try. If you think anybody could just do this, what he did, give it a shot.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, either way, you either start out believing that it was amazing and a supernatural process, or you end up saying it was amazing and a supernatural process. Even if you’re trying to explain it naturalistically, you just come back to that there’s no way that he could have done this. And can I take a moment and just quote the Book of Mormon here, too?

Scott Woodward:
Oh yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
The Book of Mormon itself sort of predicts this rush to come up with naturalistic explanations for it. This is Mormon 8:26. It says, “No one need say [that] they shall not come, for they surely shall, for the Lord hath spoken it . . . Out of the earth shall they come,” the words of the Book of Mormon, “by the hand of the Lord, and none can stay it; and it shall come in a day when it shall be said that miracles are done away.” So the Book of Mormon itself predicts that these naturalistic explanations are going to be used, but one of the purposes of the Book of Mormon is to prove that there still are miracles. And if the Book of Mormon is miraculous, then the Savior is miraculous. There’s resurrection, there’s divine power, there’s atonement and healing and all these things that assist and help people in their struggles with daily life.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So I totally understand why the early saints, when testifying of the Restoration, would go straight to the Book of Mormon, because when you examine closely the circumstances and the content of the book, it’s a miracle. There’s just no other way to really explain it.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, and that’s a wonderful verse. So that was Mormon 8:26?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And then there’s the 2 Nephi 27, right in context of telling the story of the unlearned boy who’s going to translate this book, He punctuates it by saying, “I am a god of miracles. I am a god of miracles.” He’s not just saying that abstractly, he’s saying that in the context of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. So, yeah, two places in the Book of Mormon testifies of this process itself. The time period in which it will come forth and the attitude of many, as well as the very clear, deliberate statement that this is a miracle.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
You know, just for fun, I like to, when I’m talking with students about this, usually in my Book of Mormon class, I will say, “Listen, you don’t have to do another piece of homework this entire semester if you’ll do an alternate assignment, OK? Here’s what you need to do:” And then I explain the criteria. I say, “You need to write a story of the ancient inhabitants of America. And you can’t use any outside source materials, and your book has to be 531 pages,” of course I’m doing this a little bit jokingly, but I just want them—show and say what the Book of Mormon is. And so I tell them that “your book would need to have more than 500 references to 150-plus geographical locations, which are internally and spatially consistent. You’d have three different calendar systems which are referred to consistently and without error throughout. You need to have efficient monetary system of weights and measures, authentic legal cases, realistic warfare, seventy-one chapters on doctrine and exhortation and twenty-one chapters on the ministry of Christ, clarifying and expanding upon but not contradicting biblical doctrine. And just for fun, I challenge you to write one chapter, 77 verses long, that describes an extended allegory about tame and wild olive trees, which cryptically expounds upon the scattering and gathering of Israel throughout all time, while agreeing absolutely with both true botanical principles and true biblical doctrine. One chapter, thirty verses long, which forms the most complete and complex chiasmus known in scripture, draw no attention to this fact, but let it be discovered

about 120 years after you die. Throughout the entire book, you must employ both ancient and original figures of speech: Similes, metaphors, parallel narratives, literary foreshadowings, oratory, typology, allegory. Invent places which will later be discovered as real, places like Nahum in the Book of Mormon. Introduce seeming anachronisms.” I think that’s the biggest criticism against the Book of Mormon is, “What about all the anachronisms? What about horses? What about barley? What about second and third Isaiah and these kinds of things?”

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Well, “introduce some of these into your manuscript which will slowly but steadily get authenticated over time.” That’s the interesting thing about the list of anachronisms in the Book of Mormon, is that over time, it’s shrinking. In Joseph Smith’s day, that list was very long. In our day, that list is shrinking. “Do all of this,” I tell my students, “in approximately 60 working days, with no punctuation and little or no review or revising, all while trying to provide for a family living in poor circumstances.” And then I say, “Extra credit, by the way, bonus points if you can actually get people to read your book or to say that it changed their lives, or to read it more than once, or to be willing to gather with you wherever you, the supposed author of this book of whatever your ancient record is called lives. And do it all while looking at rocks in the bottom of your hat.” I mean, seriously. Given what we know about the translator, his age, his learning, all that. Given what we know about the translation process, stones in his hat, and given everything we know about its remarkable content, the complexity and the beauty, not to mention the spiritual convincing power of the text itself that actually changes people’s lives, I submit in all soberness that we actually have a bona fide miracle.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
About as well-documented as a miracle can be, right?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I’d also just add in one last thing, and this is my wrap-up. Read it. I mean, read the Book of Mormon. Most people I know that that favor these alternate translation theories don’t seriously look at them or look at the book itself. The book itself is powerful and compelling, and I’ll just say played a big role in helping me come unto Christ and accept him. So one last thing we should point out is that the first two converts of the church in this dispensation were produced by this miraculous translation process, and that counts for something too, that they didn’t just bring forth the book: They believed in the book and thought that the book was genuine until the last day of their lives.

Scott Woodward:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Church History Matters. Next week we continue this series by discussing the three and eight witnesses of the Book of Mormon, which can be considered the final capstone to the story of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. We’ll consider why God would want Book of Mormon witnesses in the first place, and why three witnesses specifically, and then why eight additional witnesses after that. We’ll also discuss the most common argument leveled against the Book of Mormon witnesses, and how they themselves responded to this argument. Today’s episode was produced by Zander Sturgill and Scott Woodward, edited by Nick Galieti and Scott Woodward, with show notes and transcript by Gabe Davis. Church History Matters is a podcast of Scripture Central, a nonprofit which exists to help build enduring faith in Jesus Christ by making Latter-day Saint scripture and church history accessible, comprehensible, and defensible to people everywhere. For more resources to enhance your gospel study, go to scripturecentral.org, where everything is available for free because of the generous donations of people like you. Thank you so much for being a part of this with us.