Scott Woodward:
Hello, Casey.

Casey Griffiths:
Hello, Scott. How are you?

Scott Woodward:
Doing well, man. Welcome to the – what do we call them – these bonus editions.

Casey Griffiths:
Special bonus material. It was a genius idea, I think, to include these supplementary lessons where we get to dive a little deeper into the history surrounding the revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants. Today, we have a special guest with us, Dr. Daniel C. Peterson. Say hi, Dan.

Daniel Peterson:
Hello. Good to be here.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, so good to have you with us.

Scott Woodward:
We came locked and loaded today with Daniel Peterson, so we’re very excited to talk about Book of Mormon Witnesses together.

Casey Griffiths:
Dan, I want to point out that you’re special because I think you are our first repeat guest. No, we’ve had Brian Hales on twice. But you and Brian Hales, we interviewed you a couple months ago about succession in the presidency. We couldn’t think of anybody more knowledgeable than you about the Book of Mormon Witnesses. Here you are again, because you’re so good at what you do. Here’s a little bit about Daniel C. Peterson. He has a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a Professor Emeritus of Islamic Studies and Arabic at Brigham Young University, where he founded the University’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative. He has published and spoken extensively on both Islamic and Latter-day Saint subjects. He’s formerly Chairman of the Board for the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies or FARMS, and an officer, editor, and author for its successor organization, the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. His professional work as an Arabist focuses on the Quran and on Islamic philosophical theology. He’s the author, among other things, of a biography entitled Muhammad, Prophet of God. With his wife, he served as an executive producer for the films: Witnesses, that came out in 2021; Undaunted: Witnesses of The Book of Mormon, that came out in 2022; and the newly released, Six Days in August, which came out in 2024. Daniel Peterson, welcome back to our show. We’re so grateful you took some time out of your day to meet with us.

Daniel Peterson:
Thanks for having me. You are gluttons for punishment.

Scott Woodward:
Not at all. We know a great guest when we see one, so we’re happy to have you here. Maybe we could start out with that little tidbit that Casey just mentioned in your bio. You actually have not just studied the Witnesses of the Book of Mormon, you have actually directed an entire movie about the Witnesses. Tell us a little bit about the making of your 2021 film called Witnesses. What led you to make that film?

Daniel Peterson:
My wife and I were the executive producers on that film, and it evolved out of, as many of these things do, coincidences or maybe not coincidences. One of our neighbors, good friend, a member of our ward, was for years until his very recent retirement, the head of arts production at BYU, but he was also involved in a lot of filmmaking with Lee Groberg and people like that, and for for CBS and BYU television and so on. And we were talking at one point about, about filmmaking as a way of reaching audiences that maybe academic articles with footnotes and, and books even don’t necessarily reach and getting stories out there. And we began thinking, well, maybe we ought to try to do this. And the long story, I won’t tell you, but eventually we settled on the Witnesses. I gave them some reading to do for a project that we were working on, and they came back and said, this would make a great movie. Well, I’d always been really interested in the witnesses. I was influenced very much by reading, shortly after it came out, I think, Richard Lloyd Anderson’s book, Investigating the Book of Morgan Witnesses, which I still think is one of the great books ever written by a Latter-day Saint scholar.

Daniel Peterson:
It influenced me a lot, made me think that the witnesses were really, really important. And I thought, a lot of people don’t recognize how strong their testimony is and how reputable they were. Well, part of my concern was that I talked to members of the Church and realized that many of them didn’t know the story of the witnesses, didn’t realize how powerful the witness testimonies are. I would encounter people- I just began to ask. It just probably became irritating to my wife, but we’d get to talking, “Oh, you’re making a movie”, and I’d say “Well, yeah. Do you know much about the witnesses? Do you know who the witnesses were?” “And they’d say, Well, I think Sidney Rigdon was one of them and maybe Brigham Young…” And just any name they happen to recall from early Church history. So clearly, they didn’t know the names of the witnesses. They can’t have known much of their story. And then I began encountering even members of the Church who, they would run into critics and they would buy the criticism. “Well, you know, but the witnesses never actually would claim to see the plates with their actual eyes.” “They never claimed to actually touch the…”

Daniel Peterson:
They more said that they imagined, they envisioned the plates in their mind’s eye or with the eye of faith or something like that. I’d say, no, no, no, no, that is not true. This is one of the reasons we’ve got to make this film, is to tell that story. I’m really excited to say that Witnesses was completed and shown in 2021. It’s been available in DVD and on Blu-ray and for streaming. But for the month of February, I think we can, well, we can do this. We’ve checked the contracts and everything. We’re under some limitations with streaming services that we’ve given rights to, but we’re putting it up now in as many locations as we can for free. There will be a link to the Witnesses film. People want to watch it. They don’t have to pay a nickel, because we really want it to be seen. The Interpretive Foundation is a non-profit foundation, and so we’re not trying to make money off of this. So there’ll be no charge. People can watch it. The documentary that goes along with it, Undaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon, is going to be up for free in perpetuity.

Scott Woodward:
If anyone wants to watch Witnesses, they can do it for free, and you’re going to give us a link. We’ll just put it in the description of this video. If you want to pause this interview right now and go watch the video, you can. Then make sure you come on back, and we’ll keep going. But that’s so great. Well, thank you, Dan. That’s super generous.

Daniel Peterson:
Thank you.

Casey Griffiths:
The movie turned out really well, if I don’t say so myself. I think a lot of the team returned to make Six Days in August.

Daniel Peterson:
They did. It was the same core filmmaking team. We had the same person play Joseph Smith, and some carry over, the same Sydney Rigdon, the same Emma and so on. So it’s very much a successor to that film, as, of course, Brigham Young is the successor in the film to Joseph. It’s fun. Fun is not always the word, but it’s a challenge, but it’s satisfying to create something like that. I never imagined myself as a moviemaker, but here I am. And I do think it’s a powerful way of telling the story so that people will come away knowing more than they ever had known before. And I won’t say this for all, but probably some people who probably never would sit down and read a book about it or read an academic article about the Witnesses, but we wanted them to know the story.

Scott Woodward:
Well, and I just want to say two things about what you just said. So number one, if anyone wants some great supplemental material for this week, I mean, go get a copy of Witnesses, that movie. Watch it with your family. Watch it with your class. Show segments, show clips.

Daniel Peterson:
I might mention, too, that we are probably going to begin very shortly, possibly even…Well, by the time this comes out, certainly, we’re going to put our docudrama that we did, which was commentary on Witnesses, up online for free, just freely accessible. Where we do interviews with scholars and so on, and I think that’ll be good material. We want to think about the witnesses more. We decided we wanted to get it out there. We’re not looking to make money off it. We’re a nonprofit, but we want people to see these things and hear the stories.

Casey Griffiths:
Very good scholars. Gerrit Dirkmaat was one of the ones involved, and I love Gerrit and have a ton of respect for him. I’ll also point out, too, that when you say you’re a nonprofit, you’re talking about the Interpreter Foundation, which just has mountains of great material on the Restoration, on Restoration scripture. It’s all available for free. One thing the Interpreter does really well is, not only can you download a PDF, but you can usually listen to an article. It’s just there in ways that make it really accessible. We’ve used a lot of Interpreter research in our podcast on a number of different subjects.

Daniel Peterson:
Well, we’re trying to get the material into every medium that we can. We want to reach people where they are. If they prefer to listen, then we want to be there. If they want to read, we want to be there. If they like videos, we want to be there. So the idea is to get the word out. So, we’re trying.

Scott Woodward:
It’s wonderful. And that was the second thing I wanted to say was you mentioned Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses, that book by Richard Lloyd Anderson. We were joking before we pushed record today, that book reading has gone down in the world, and there’s bookstores that have been closing. But if there are any of you out there that still like reading books, like full books, that is one of the best. I one hundred percent agree with you, Dan, that moved me, it’s powerful.

Daniel Peterson:
I’ll tell a story. I’ll tell a story. I was sitting in the back of a… I hate to say this, but it was an exceptionally boring Gospel Doctrine lesson many years ago. A member of our high council came and sat back with me in the back, and I had a briefcase with me, and I had it open, and I was rereading Richard Anderson’s book, Investigating the Book of the Mormon Witnesses. This member of the high council, whose name many of you out there would recognize, retired now from religious education at BYU, sat down next to me and said, “What are you reading?” I told him, and he said, “Next to the scriptures, I think that may be the most promoting book I’ve ever read.” I thought that was quite an endorsement.

Scott Woodward:
I tend to agree.

Daniel Peterson:
For Brother Anderson’s Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses. I love the book. To me, it’s a basic introduction. He did other things and other people have written other things since, of course, about the Witnesses, but that’s a good starting place. That’s a very persuasive book.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, we mentioned in our last episode a book that came out a couple years ago by Larry Morris, called The Documentary History of the Book of Mormon. I can’t recommend that highly enough. I mean, it’s just the documents. Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses is maybe a little more user-friendly because Anderson puts it into a narrative. But Larry Morris’ book on the Book of Mormon Witnesses is amazing stuff.

Daniel Peterson:
That’s another really good book. I was so taken with Brother Anderson. We interviewed him not long before he died. I wanted to catch him on videotape before he passed away. He was in his 90s. When he did pass away, before our movie came out, I insisted at the end, the movie Witnesses is dedicated to Richard Lloyd Anderson, a Witness for the Witnesses. I felt so strongly about his contribution, which really was life-changing for me.

Scott Woodward:
Wow, tremendous. Well, great introduction. If you just pause the video there and you don’t see anything else that we say the rest of this video, you’ve got the resources you now need to just have a great experience with the Witnesses. But we would like to continue here and then actually get into the story of the Witnesses and a lot of what you have to say, Dan. And so, I don’t know, Casey, where should we go next? Throw him, throw him a good question here.

Casey Griffiths:
Well, Dan, I wanted to start with maybe you retelling an anecdote I heard on an interview you did where you talked about, I think it was a non-Latter-day Saint acquaintance, and he said something close to, I can dismiss everything about your Church, but sometimes the Witnesses still keep me up at night, or something like that. You remember that story?

Daniel Peterson:
Yeah, I do, I think. He said he just didn’t know how to get around them. I’m probably thinking of a couple of stories. I remember one friend who said, “Well, the plates bother me, the Witnesses bother me, the idea that there were literal plates there. But I don’t know what the function of them was because it’s not clear that Joseph…he didn’t translate them the way a modern scholar would with a lexicon there and furrowed brow and going line-by-line through the plates.” He said, “What’s the point of the plates?” I said, Well, I think for one thing, they’re an indigestible lump in the throat of people like you.” What are you going to do with them? The Witnesses say there were plates. There was an angel, but there were these physical objects there. We hefted the plates. And so the Eight Witnesses say. If it’s just Joseph making something up, which is what I think he thought, then that just doesn’t really fit your worldview, your model.

Daniel Peterson:
So I think the Witnesses are meant to be a problem for critics. I know a lot that just wave them aside. I think maybe we’ll come to that later in the podcast, but I just don’t think you can do that. They’re difficult to get rid of.

Scott Woodward:
They are a lion in the path to just a purely secular worldview. It’s like God dropped a bomb into secularism in the Three and Eight Witnesses to say, you got to deal with these. I’m speaking to people in the latter days.

Daniel Peterson:
You can say that it’s just Joseph Smith’s subjective experience. Maybe he’s hallucinating, maybe he’s lying, whatever. It’s just Joseph. You’re just depending on Joseph. But it’s not just Joseph. It’s Joseph and eleven others. Puts them together, that’s twelve. There may be significance in that number. But there are even the so-called, well, what I call the unofficial or informal witnesses, I don’t know how many, half-dozen of them. And they’re seeing and hefting and holding things and hearing things where you can’t just say, well, it’s just Joseph. He’s either lying or he’s just an imaginative boy. No, that doesn’t cut it. You’ve got to deal with these other credible witnesses. The First Vision, you can brush aside, I suppose, if you want to, and say, well, nobody else saw it, nobody else heard it. Okay. But you can’t do that with the experience of the witnesses. You just can’t. It puts the story into the world of objective reality. There’s not only the plates, but some other objects that people see and hold and touch and so on. They shouldn’t exist if it’s just Joseph making it up.

Scott Woodward:
It seems like Joseph was very aware of that. He doesn’t seem to lead out in the first decade with the First Vision experience. He seems to always lead out with the Book of Mormon. If you want evidence, you want tangible evidence that God is again revealing, then you need to read this text and you need to deal with these witnesses. It seems like that’s where Joseph liked to start the conversation.

Daniel Peterson:
To some extent, he may have thought of the First Vision, there’s reason to believe this, as a personal revelation to him. He was worried about… He had a conviction of his sins. He’d heard enough in the revivalist preaching around him and so on, that he was concerned about how to be saved. He went into a grove and asked which Church he should join. I sometimes wondered if he didn’t afterwards think, “All I wanted to know was, should I be a Methodist or a Presbyterian? I wasn’t expecting this.” But it was more for his personal guidance. It was not for leading a new Church or something. But then things change with the Book of Mormon and all of that. That becomes, in some ways, the beginning of the public ministry, not so much the First Vision, which then, as his understanding of it grows, and ours does, looms more and more important. We now think it’s extraordinarily important. Of course, it was, but important in a different way, maybe.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, the evidence. If you want evidence that there is a restoration underway, you go to the Book of Mormon, and you go to the Book of Mormon witnesses. You don’t necessarily reach first for the First Vision because there is no tangible, there is no external, right? But we have all of that with the Book of Mormon text and these witnesses.

Daniel Peterson:
People are saying, Look, it wasn’t just Joseph who saw that angel. I saw him, too. Or it wasn’t just Joseph who claimed to have plates. A whole bunch of us saw them and held them and turned pages in them. Then it takes it out of the realm of fantasy and into hard reality.

Casey Griffiths:
Empirical result.

Scott Woodward:
In our last episode, we did just a couple of days ago, we went through the history of the Three Witnesses. There’s that beautiful moment where Joseph lays on the bed next to his mom in Whitmer home and just says, Mother, you do not know how relieved I am. There’s now at least three people who know I do not go about trying to deceive folks.

Daniel Peterson:
That, to me, that anecdote seems so real to me. I can imagine exactly that reaction that everybody’s thinking, I’m a loon, I’m a fraud, I’m a con artist. But now at least three people know I’m not because they’ve seen it as I have. They will have to bear testimony to, I think he actually adds that note, they will have to bear witness. David Whitmer later said that he was told, Moroni told him that if you ever deny your testimony, you will be damned. No matter how rough it got, they couldn’t back up. They knew it was true, and they knew what the consequences would be. They’d been given this trust, but there’s a responsibility with it. You must bear testimony of what you’ve seen and heard.

Casey Griffiths:
Like you mentioned, Dan, they’re not as knowledgeable on the Witnesses as maybe the Witnesses warrant. We’ve shifted our tactics so that we focus on the First Vision when we’re introducing the gospel, and maybe the Witnesses are a stronger point to start. If you don’t mind, could we just go through each one of the Three Witnesses, and then we’ll bounce around on the Eight Witnesses. So let’s start with Oliver Cowdery. I guess we’re just going in alphabetical order. Give us an overview of Oliver Cowdery and his experience as a witness and what happens in later life to him.

Daniel Peterson:
Oliver was… I’m trying to remember what Richard Anderson told me once about him. He thought that the Three Witnesses represented three kinds of types of humanity in a way, and Oliver was the intellectual. Martin Harris was not an intellectual. David Whitmer was not an intellectual, but Oliver was. He had a kind of florid prose style. He eventually became a practicing lawyer. He was a bright guy, probably as bright as anybody in the early Church, I would think. And so he’s interesting from that regard. Richard thought there was a deliberate choice to get three representative specimens, if you will, to be Witnesses. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it’s a curious thought. Oliver was certainly that. Of course, he comes on as a scribe early on. Now, his spelling was not great. Probably nobody’s was in the early 19th century.

Scott Woodward:
They don’t have spell check or Grammarly.

Daniel Peterson:
No, they don’t. Things hadn’t been standardized. People would even spell their names in different ways, sometimes within the same document, just however the mood hit them and whatever it sounded like. You didn’t have Webster’s Dictionary yet or anything like that. But he was probably as good a scribe as Joseph could have found. He wasn’t the first one. There were others, Emma for a while and some of Emma’s siblings, and Martin Harris for a while. But Oliver then becomes the principal scribe, and he’s well-equipped for that and is very, very dedicated, becomes the Second Elder of the Church. Of course, he’s there for Priesthood Restoration, as well as the Book of Mormon experience. So he really is maybe the second witness in a way to Joseph Smith himself, to the events, the major events of the early history of the Church. Really impressive guy. But he eventually falls away from the Church, and it’s over issues like early plural marriage and things like that that Oliver just can’t put up with. He blows up with Joseph Smith. There are a lot of stresses and strains during the period when all of the Witnesses leave the Church, the collapse of the Kirtland Bank, the persecutions, a whole bunch of things happen. And Oliver leaves the Church. And I will say what a lot of people often say, and I agree with them, that the departure of the Witnesses from the Church is not a weakness in their testimony. It’s a strength in a way. It adds credibility to it.

Scott Woodward:
How so? Yeah, flesh that out. How is that?

Daniel Peterson:
Well, because at a certain point, Oliver could have said, Well, I always thought Joseph was a con artist. I think he fooled me on the Book of Mormon, there were props. I was taken in. He’s a liar. My testimony has been misrepresented, but he never does that. Even when he’s up against the wall during his non-LDS phase, if you will, he’s out of the Church for a while, most of his last years. There are accounts that show him, when he’s pushed, he will say, No, I saw what I saw, and I heard what I heard, and I know this is going to destroy my credibility, my reputation in this area, but I will not deny what I saw.

Daniel Peterson:
And so that, to me, makes him more impressive, not less. He’s not profiting from the Church. It damages him. He had political aspirations. Well, that was hopeless once the fact came out that he was aligned with the Golden Bible, the Mormon fraud, then he couldn’t be a political success. He really wanted that. I think he had real ambitions and might have been successful, but he was involved in newspaper publishing, but it always hurt him, and yet he never backed away.

Daniel Peterson:
And then ultimately, he does return to the Church, at a time when returning to the Church is not personally profitable. They’re being cast out. They’re headed westward. He joins the Church. He doesn’t make it westward because he dies before he can, but it’s not like he’s joining a triumphal procession. He’s, if you will, swimming toward a sinking ship, at least it might have looked like that at the time. To me, he’s very impressive, and he’s impressive almost precisely because of his period of disaffection. I’ve said before that I don’t care what his opinions are on theological issues. I don’t care what his opinions are on this or that. He disagreed with Joseph’s… Joseph was trying to have a Latter-day Saint economic policy. The Kirtland Bank and things like that offended Oliver. He wanted to be a frontier American businessman, an entrepreneur, you know, his own free market guy, and I’m sympathetic to that. But Joseph said, no, we don’t have private economics in the Church. The Church needs money, what we have and are belongs to the Lord, and we need to offer it. And that bothered Oliver. Some of his statements, he says, basically, I’m a free American citizen, you can’t tell me what to do economically. Yeah, well, the Lord can tell you what to do in any sphere of your life.

Casey Griffiths:
I’ve reviewed a lot of the documents surrounding Oliver’s excommunication, which are all on the Joseph Smith Papers site, by the way. And he was kind of grandiose, where I mean, it was kind of a “you can’t excommunicate me. I’m resigning.” And his primary reason is, you’re trampling on my rights as an American citizen by telling me what to do with my money. That was surprising. He does hint at stuff like plural marriage or doctrinal disagreements, but his big issue seems to have money. They were telling him what to do with his land and his money.

Daniel Peterson:
I understand that. I understand how it looks sometimes to people outside the Church. I remember a friend when I was younger in grad school who used to ask me questions about the Church. If the Church asked you to give up your graduate school, and go off and serve as a leader in Kazakhstan or something, would you do it? Yeah. Or a friend of mine who was called to be a General Authority, left a very promising Ivy League academic career to become a member of the Seventy. He said his friend, I asked him, “How do your friends react to this?” He said, “Well, it’s like I’d suddenly announced I was leaving to join a Buddhist monastery. Some of them said, ‘Well, can’t you just tell Mr. Hinckley, thank you, I’m very honored, but no?’” He said, “I don’t know how to answer that. I said, No, I really can’t, but not because I couldn’t. It’s because I won’t.” He said, It makes us look servile, like we’ve given up our freedoms as Americans. But he said, “Yeah, if the President of the Church calls you to serve in a position, yeah, my response will be yes.” And that looks un-American. It looked un-American to Oliver. I think the demands that the Church puts on us, it was hard in those early years for people who are used to being free American citizens to understand that there’s a law of obedience in the kingdom. And you may be at the height of your career, but if you’re called to go serve and preside over the mission in Mongolia, you go. And lots of members of the Twelve have given up promising careers to do just that. I understand. I have a friend that is related very closely to the late Elder Perry of the Quorum of the Twelve. And Elder Perry on occasion would think, well, I was just on the on the edge of achieving economic success in business. And I was called to be a General Authority. And he says, I’ve always wondered how far would I have gone? That’s water under the bridge. But people like that willingly give it up and go do what, go where they’re asked to go. And Oliver had a problem with that. But then he comes back and bears strong testimony at the end of his life and on his deathbed. And so he’s an impressive witness for that.

Daniel Peterson:
The deathbed testimony often has a special place, even in the law, that people who are about to die, if they say this happened or so and so is guilty or I did it, that’s taken very seriously.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. And Oliver, I think it’s 1848, he comes back into the Church. He spends ten years after he leaves outside, comes back, and then his deathbed testimony actually is linked to another one of the Witnesses. We don’t appreciate this, but Oliver is a member of the Whitmer family. He’s married to Elizabeth, and he goes to Richmond, where the Whitmers are based. And after he rejoins the Church. I’ve always assumed it was to try and get them to come back, too, but I don’t know if there’s documents that support that or not. And that’s where he passes away, with David Whitmer in the room.

Daniel Peterson:
And David says he died one of the happiest men I’d ever seen. Yeah. I know where I’m going, I’ve been faithful to my witness. And he said to them, be faithful to yours, you know what’s true, be faithful to it. That’s important on a deathbed, I think.

Scott Woodward:
And that’s a very curious thing to say if both of you are part of a conspiracy.

Daniel Peterson:
Yes.

Scott Woodward:
That you were in league with Joseph Smith, but now you’re out of the Church. I guess at that point, Oliver had come back, but David’s still out of the Church. He’s been out for ten years.

Daniel Peterson:
David is still out of the Church, and he stays out of the Church.

Scott Woodward:
He stays out of the Church, yeah. Let’s talk about David.

Daniel Peterson:
He’s the last surviving Witness. He lives until 1888, and the most interviewed Witness. A lot of people came. Apparently, there were periods where there’d be several a day who would come by to talk with him. He got to the point where he was kind of sick of it. I think that the actor who played the elderly David Whitmer in our movie, Witnesses, did a very good job because he comes across as a curmudgeon. Kind of, leave me alone. And that was apparently the attitude of the real David Whitmer.

Scott Woodward:
Just Google David Whitmer and you’ll see the picture of him. He looks grumpy. He just looks done.

Daniel Peterson:
He does. He does. And he had reason.

Casey Griffiths:
He has a very prominent frown in every picture I’ve ever seen.

Scott Woodward:
Yes, he will. Yes he does.

Casey Griffiths:
Just has a look like, Don’t mess with me, on his face.

Scott Woodward:
Smile, David.

Casey Griffiths:
And yet at the same time, Lyndon Cook put together a wonderful book that’s just interviews with David Whitmer. I think it’s over 250 pages.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, and that book, I wish were more widely available. I think it’s very hard to come by these days, but it’s impressive. The sheer monotony of the book is impressive in a way, in a sense that he tells the same story to everybody, whether they’re friendly or hostile or whatever. Over decades, he tells that story. He leaves the Church around 1838. He dies in 1888. It’s 50 years, half a century that he’s out of the Church, and yet he still bears his testimony, and actually has it engraved on his tombstone.

Casey Griffiths:
Oh, yeah.

Daniel Peterson:
Which is really fun. One of the explanations I’ve heard for his long-term faithfulness was that he was scared of Brigham Young, that Brigham Young would have had him done in, if he ever dared to spill the beans. But he dies eleven years after Brigham. Brigham dies in 1877, he dies in 1888. I would think by then, when you’re dead, why would you put your lying testimony up on your tombstone? You’re safe from Brigham now, but he has that on his tombstone. He has two books carved on top of the tombstone. Obviously, the Bible and the Book of Mormon, and it says, The record of the Jews and the record of the Nephites are one. Truth is eternal.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Daniel Peterson:
That, again, on his deathbed, beyond his death, he bears witness.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. I want to point out his tombstone isn’t hard to find. If you go to Richmond, Missouri, and find the cemetery that’s up on the hill, they’ve got signs out for it. His tombstone was replaced during the pandemic because it had started to weather. The Far West Stake in Missouri actually put a more permanent granite replica. Alex Baugh actually tells me that the one that was replaced actually replaced the first monument, too, and that everybody went out of their way to make sure that they were replicas, that they preserved that carving on the side that says, “The record of the Jews and the record of the Nephites are one. Truth is eternal.” Again, it feels like, boy, if a person’s carving stuff into their tombstone, they’re serious.

Daniel Peterson:
Yeah. So he was not light-minded. If anything, I say he was a curmudgeon. I think he was pig-headed. You get a little bit of that in some of the stories, for example, when he’s confronted in Missouri, and they tell him, deny your testimony or we’ll kill you. And he bears his testimony. I mean, he is stubborn. And so to me, that makes him a good witness, again, because if it were a lie, he would have nothing to do with it. He was pig-headed to the point of obnoxiousness, I think, Sometimes he would not back down, but he would never have knowingly lied. He comes to disagree with Joseph. It’s one of the reasons he leaves the Church. He converted to a small Church kind of meeting in homes, family, no hierarchy, and the Church changed. He didn’t like it. He liked the old days in 1828 to 1832 or thereabouts, where the Church was small and everybody knew everybody else. It couldn’t have lasted, but that’s what he loved. And so he stays out. But it’s interesting because he and his siblings, the Whitmer family, are absolutely devoted to the Book of Mormon, so much so that a tornado comes through and destroys much of their house, but the room where the Original Manuscript was kept, what they thought was the Original Manuscript, is preserved. They actually thought it was because of the presence of the manuscript there. It almost borders on the superstitious, but it clearly testifies to their belief long after they were out of the Church, long after he angrily opposed to some of Joseph Smith’s and Brigham Young’s practices and policies and doctrines. As I said before, I don’t care what his opinions are on the High Priesthood or whether there should be a First Presidency or not. He has no special authority on that, but he has special authority on: Were there plates? Was there an angel? Did I hear the voice of God? And that I care about. And he remains faithful to that, absolutely, to his deathbed and beyond. If it’s a person who’s inclined always to tell the truth to the point of pain, then he makes a very good witness for that very reason. There’s an interview with an unnamed Chicago man that I have read. I can’t remember the name of the paper it was in. It was a Chicago paper of 1888. And they say, look, You used to live near David Whitmer in Missouri. Can you tell us about him? He just died. He says, Yes, he was a man of absolute integrity. He said his testimony, this is an odd way of putting it, his testimony would have sent a man to the gallows faster than that of any other I’ve ever known. By which he means if he said this guy did it, the jury would say, well, then he did it. If David Whitmer says, I know he did it, that’s enough. He says, He was always a loser and never a gainer by his testimony of the Book of Mormon. Again, an interesting way of putting it. He says, Everyone relied on him. He had a good reputation. He was even the mayor of Richmond for a little while, which is amazing for a person who had been connected with the Mormonites in Missouri to be entrusted with that position, someone who’s unrepentant will not back down from the Book of Mormon. So they respected him. And he says, We were always puzzled because you could believe everything he said. But this thing about the Book of Mormon, that puzzled all of us. Well, it’s meant to puzzle them. They should draw the right conclusion from it.

Casey Griffiths:
Pretty good guy if it wasn’t for his weird belief in the Book of Mormon, according to them, right?

Daniel Peterson:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
I want to point out two things. One, David Whitmer, you don’t have to go far to find his thoughts. He published a fairly lengthy document called An Address to All Believers in Christ. I think it was the year before he dies. He goes through and has some unkind things to say about early figures in Church History, like Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon, but also an ironclad testimony of the divinity of the Book of Mormon and the translation of the Book of Mormon. It’s caused a little controversy because he talks about a seer stone, and some things that change the narrative a bit. The second thing is when you mentioned that manuscript, that’s the Printer’s Manuscript.

Daniel Peterson:
The Printer’s, that’s right. Yeah. Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
The earliest complete text of the Book of Mormon that we have. We have about 28% of the original manuscript.

Daniel Peterson:
I think that the Whitmers thought it was the Original Manuscript.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, I think they did. Yeah, I think that’s right. They sell that to the RLDS Church, and then it’s only been since I think 2017 was when it came back into possession of our Church, of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We owe him a debt for preserving that manuscript, too.

Daniel Peterson:
Yes, we do. Their dedication to it speaks eloquently of their faith and their commitment. They really believe this thing.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. It just strikes me how perfect of a witness David is because of how grumpy he was about Joseph Smith. In that Letter to All Believers, I remember he lambastes polygamy, of course. He hates polygamy. But he says, I think the very first evidence that Joseph Smith was a fallen prophet was in 1830 when he organizes a Church. I mean, how presumptuous is that guy? He starts complaining from 1830 on, and he’s no friend of Joseph Smith, which, again, stop for a second and think about that. If there were any people positioned to hurt Joseph Smith’s testimony, it’s Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris. If anyone could pull the rug out from underneath Joseph’s whole enterprise here, this whole chicanery, this whole charade that he’s doing, this fraudulent thing he’s hoisting upon mankind. If anyone’s in a position to do that, it’s those Three Witnesses, and they don’t. They have no problem saying things about Joseph that they didn’t like. But again, they have no skin in the game when they’re excommunicated out of the Church, and yet they continue vigorously to testify to the truthfulness of their experience. That’s got to mean something.

Daniel Peterson:
Yeah, I think it does. Because what would have profited them? Spilling the beans, telling the sordid truth about Joe Smith and his Gold Bible. They would have been on the lecture circuit. They would have been…

Scott Woodward:
People love that stuff.

Daniel Peterson:
…well received. But they don’t because they know it’s true. If David Whitmer is telling the truth about Moroni’s warning to him, he knows what the consequences would be. If you ever deny your testimony, you will be damned. This would be something like a son of perdition experience, I would think. You know that you had that experience with the angel and the voice of God, and for you to deny it, there’s no forgiveness for you.

Casey Griffiths:
I want to point out, when I talk about the Whitmers in classes, a lot of people say, Well, why did they leave? Again, it’s more complex than maybe we have time to deal with here, but just a sign of how high Joseph Smith held David Whitmer in esteem, we mentioned this last time, in 1835, he gives David Whitmer a blessing that David Whitmer will be his successor as the leader of the Church. At the time, there’s only two stakes in the Church, one in Ohio, one in Missouri. Joseph Smith is the Stake President in Ohio. David Whitmer is the President in Missouri. When people start to doubt Joseph Smith’s leadership surrounding the Kirtland Bank crisis, they turn to David Whitmer. This is one of the main things I think that drives a wedge between the two of them, is that there’s this meeting, apparently in the Kirtland Temple, where people say, David Whitmer is going to lead the Church. And that’s where Brigham Young gets up and says, you can’t remove the calling of a prophet of God. You can only cut the thread that binds yourself to the prophet and to God and seek yourselves to hell.

Casey Griffiths:
And it feels like from that point on, it’s not immediate after that meeting, but it’s a matter of months after where David is eventually excommunicated from the Church. Again, around the same time Oliver Cowdery, as they’re really close to each other and makes the decision. He never comes back. Neither do any of the Whitmers that I’m aware of.

Daniel Peterson:
No, they don’t. But they are faithful on their own. I mean, David lasts until 1888. That’s amazing to me. It’s fifty years separated from the Church, but he’s faithful to his testimony. I personally hope, I believe that he’s going to be okay. We’ll have some things to account for, but a faithful witness for a half century in isolation, that’s impressive to me.

Scott Woodward:
Which in a way only strengthens his witness. I mean, I don’t know the divine mind here, but it’s like, what a great choice for a witness. Someone who’ll be out of the Church for fifty years and has no skin in the game and continues to doggedly testify about like, great move.

Daniel Peterson:
How’s he operating from that? He’s not at all.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. And someone who the documents really show to be kind of a contrarian. It seems like whenever anybody objected in a meeting, it was David Whitmer. Like the records where they decide to create the Doctrine and Covenants, David Whitmer is the one standing up and saying, No, we don’t need to do that. Those are private revelations. We shouldn’t publish them. It seems like he didn’t have any problem speaking his mind, and that speaks to his integrity, I guess.

Daniel Peterson:
Yeah. That’s why I think if he had decided that the thing was a scam, he would have said it.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Daniel Peterson:
He never does.

Scott Woodward:
So, tell us about Martin Harris. Yes.

Daniel Peterson:
He’s a little different. He’s older than the other two. He was a pretty established farmer in the Palmyra area. And one objection that I hear sometimes to Martin, is that he was an unstable loon type, but he had a good reputation in Palmyra before he was involved with the Church. I don’t think that he was cut out to be a great leader at a high level. But he was a very successful, hard-headed farmer, and he was a judge at various county fairs and things like that. He was on, effectively, the road commission to maintain the roads and so on, which is an important thing in a frontier society. He’d been entrusted with a lot of responsibilities locally. He’d been very, very successful. And he was not gullible. He, he’s the one who goes and interviews the Smith family, wants to know, what’s the scoop here? Tell me. But he’s the one who switches out the stone. People asked us about the movie Witnesses, where Martin switches the stone that Joseph’s using for the translation, uses a similar-looking one that he got in a riverbed to see if Joseph could translate with something else, and Joseph couldn’t.

Daniel Peterson:
And then Joseph says, What on earth did you do that for? And he said, Well, to stop the mouths of fools, who said that you just memorized the text. Martin is not gullible. He’s the one who does all these tests. He takes the transcript to Charles Anthon and the others. He wants assurance, and he’s always asking Joseph, I would like a witness. I would like to see the plates. Please, I want to see the plates. And so, eventually, he is given an opportunity. But even there, he’s worried because no angel comes, the plates don’t materialize. And Martin decides it’s his lack of faith, not his gullibility. It’s his lack of faith that’s interfering with the angelic appearance. He moves away. David and Oliver have the experience with Joseph. Then Joseph goes and joins Martin, and they have the experience. And then Martin’s exclamation, “Tis enough, mine eyes have beheld, mine eyes have beheld.” And he is a faithful witness thereafter. Now, though, again, he leaves the Church. And with him, I think the issue is partly ego, damaged ego. Oliver Cowdery is made Second Elder of the Church. David Whitmer is President of the Church in Missouri. What is Martin Harris? He’s not much. And there’s a plaintive line in our film where they’ve been given high and holy callings, he says to Joseph, “and I, I have been stuck with the Church’s bills.” Which it must have seemed that way to him. He put up a lot of the money for the publication of the Book of Mormon. Hurt pride, that’s one of the factors, and of course, the financial problems in the Kirtland Safety Society, the bank. And Martin just decided he’s had it. But he remains faithful, almost obsessively faithful. He ends up living in Kirtland. Decrepit, run down, his marriage has fallen apart. He’s got no money. He’s a self-appointed guide at the Kirtland Temple. And then in the end, there’s a group from Utah that get money together to bring him out to Utah. He’s saying, I will not stay. I’m just going to come out and look. I want to see how things look out there. And then he’s rebaptized. But he looks over the Salt Lake Valley. This is 1870, I think, that he comes back and he says, Who would have thought that the Book of Mormon would have done all this?

Daniel Peterson:
Settlements up and down the Wasatch front, even in 1870, it was fairly impressive to him. Then he dies in full faith and fellowship, bearing his testimony to anybody who will listen. He’ll even call aside young boys and say, “Do you know who I am? I am Martin Harris. Do you recognize that name?” Well, you were one of the witnesses. Yes. Then he bears his testimony. I want you to know. Can you see that tree over there as clearly as I see that tree. It’s a signature. It’s always, Can you see X? Well, as clearly as you see X, whatever it is, the sun or a tree or something, I saw the angel.

Scott Woodward:
Great.

Daniel Peterson:
I saw the plates. There again, powerful, powerful witness over a lengthy time of angry disaffection from the Church. He really felt he’d been betrayed by the Church and abandoned.

Scott Woodward:
I remember his funny line is he says, I never left the Church. The Church left me. I was betrayed.

Daniel Peterson:
There’s a washed up fossil there on the beach in Kirtland when the Church is gone. But it’s still a really impressive testimony.

Scott Woodward:
I remember there’s an article on the National Telegraph, June 30th, 1841. I’m looking at it now. They interviewed Martin Harris. Now he’s out of the Church. Here’s their report. They said, Martin Harris believes that the work of Mormonism in its commencement was a genuine work of the Lord, but that Joseph Smith, having become worldly and proud, has been forsaken of the Lord. There again, Martin is not afraid to drag Joseph’s name in the mud and say, I think God is no longer with him. He’s forsaken. Well, what do you think about the Book of Mormon, Martin? That’s true, right? Yeah. He will bear witness to his dying day that that was an absolute 100% confirmed fact.

Daniel Peterson:
It would have been easy for him to say, Well, I think he was a con artist all along. I didn’t recognize it until later.

Scott Woodward:
Why not say that?

Daniel Peterson:
But why not say it? Because he knows it’s false. And so he stands by his testimony. These are impressive men.

Casey Griffiths:
Martin had this verbal thing he did, too, where it feels like most of his testimonies, especially after he gets to Utah, he would say, Do you see that ax over there? As well as you can see that ax, I know that I saw the plates and saw the angel, or do you see the sun shining out this window. As well as you can see the sun shining, I know I saw the angel.

Daniel Peterson:
It’s a recognizable Martin Harrisism, if you will. As soon as you see that kind of formulation, you know who it’s from.

Scott Woodward:
Signature move. Yeah. Yeah.

Daniel Peterson:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And that’s, again, just thinking about this as rationally as possible here. That is odd, odd behavior for someone who would be involved in a conspiracy or in a fraud. But it’s very, very reasonable behavior for someone who actually had a real experience.

Daniel Peterson:
I find the Witnesses almost impossible. Well, no, I will say impossible to get around. I’ve heard some just so stories. It used to be that they would say, Well, they were all hallucinating. Well, I don’t think anybody seriously maintains that anymore. I mean, we know a lot about hallucinations now. If you introduce gas into a room, the people in it will, the right kind of gas, begin to hallucinate. But they don’t hallucinate the same things. Based on their individual psychologies and backgrounds and histories, they’ll hallucinate different things. To have them all “hallucinating” in “the same thing.” Well, there’s an angel. He showed us the plates, a table appeared. The voice of God spoke to us. That’s a little out of the ordinary for hallucinations. And it used to be common to say, well, they were all scoundrels, scam artists, they were in on the con. I don’t think any serious writer claims that anymore. So people have had to go to more sophisticated and subtle explanations to maneuver out of the way of the Witnesses. But I don’t think they ever work.

Scott Woodward:
So, Dan, what are the biggest, more sophisticated, I guess, arguments against the Three Witnesses today? What’s still out there? And what do you want to say about those arguments against them?

Daniel Peterson:
Well, I’ve seen one argument fairly recently, that just seems to me not an argument at all. It’s just a counter-faith testimony where someone says, well, they’re not really talking about real events. They’re expressing their faith that they really believed in the Book of Mormon. No, they’re talking about holding a metal object in their hands. They’re not just saying, well, I feel really good about the Book of Mormon. I really believe that it’s from God. No, I saw an angel. I heard the voice of God. I saw a table with the plates on it. I held the plates in my hand. I turned the leaves. The plates weighed about so much. They had strange writing on them, that sort of thing. This is very specific. It’s no different in a sense, from any other ordinary mundane testimony that somebody would give. Did so-and-so have a gun? Yes, he had a gun. I held it. I can tell you what a gun it was. It weighed about so many pounds. It had a wooden stalk and a barrel, a gleaming bluish metal. Then you say, Oh, so you feel really strongly that he must have had a weapon?

Daniel Peterson:
No, I saw the weapon and I held it. This attempt to just brush the Witnesses aside seems to me silly, fatuous, absurd, almost desperate in a way.

Scott Woodward:
But on the other hand, you have to brush them away. If you don’t want to believe this, you have to somehow get rid of the Witnesses, don’t you? You do.

Daniel Peterson:
Yeah. The Witnesses are, again, an indigestible lump in the throats of people who want to dismiss Joseph as just as purely subjective, either deliberately lying or hallucinating. The Witnesses don’t permit that. But that’s one thing I’ve encountered. Another fairly recent one that I first heard twenty years ago or so was a person who spent a lot of time in the documents, but he’s absolutely not a believer, who says: Well, let’s just posit that all visionary experiences are hallucinations. Well, that’s kind of a big posit right there. And then let’s posit that the Eight Witnesses were having a visionary experience just like the three. Therefore, it’s all hallucination. Once again, I just don’t see how you get there. I nearly fell off my chair hearing that. This is doing history by assertion. No evidence. Just let’s posit that the people who saw John Wilkes Booth assassinate Abraham Lincoln were simply hallucinating. Okay, now that we’ve taken care of all that evidence, let’s speculate that it was space aliens or something. History is really easy if you throw the primary sources out.

Scott Woodward:
Let’s take my secular naturalistic worldview. Okay, let’s just say that’s true. Let’s therefore eliminate anything the Witnesses say that would challenge my secular naturalistic worldview out. Okay, and now what are we left with? It’s like, come on, you cannot do it that way. You can’t start with your worldview. You got to start with the documents, and you have to deal with these Witnesses directly. They will challenge your worldview.

Daniel Peterson:
You have to be open to things that might challenge your worldview. I mean, there’s no progress in science. If all scientists said, well, this phenomenon cannot have occurred because it doesn’t fit my current theory. Therefore, I will ignore it. Now, if something comes along that’s an anomaly and doesn’t fit your theory, you need to examine it. If it holds up, then you may need to adjust your theory. Not the facts. There’s a line in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, I think The Hound of the Baskervilles, where maybe it’s Watson who asked him, Well, what’s the secret of your detecting? What’s your method? And he says, Well, you just eliminate everything that’s impossible. And then what you’re left with, however improbable it may be, must be the truth. You have to look at this and say, well, this explanation doesn’t work. That explanation doesn’t work. What are we left with? I think we’re left with Joseph Smith’s explanation and the explanation of the Witnesses. And that may strike you as really improbable. But darn it, unless you come up with some better explanation, you’re stuck with that. You can’t go anywhere else. I think that’s the situation.

Casey Griffiths:
Let me bring up one thing that sometimes antagonists do use, which is the Three Witnesses didn’t touch anything. Their vision was spiritual. In fact, one of the more sophisticated attacks, and some good scholars, Stephen Smoot and Neal Rappleye, who work with Scripture Central have addressed it, is that there’s this letter from a disaffected member of the Church who said that Martin Harris told him that he saw the plates the same way you’d see Jerusalem from a mountain, or anything like that. How would you address concerns like that?

Daniel Peterson:
First of all, I don’t even know what it means to see Jerusalem through a mountain. But anyway, that reference has always puzzled me. As if that’s something obvious, we’d all say, oh, yeah, like that. I don’t know what that means. It’s an account from somebody who heard it from somebody who says that he heard it from Martin Harris, and it’s kind of an outlier. I mean, it’s third-hand at best, maybe fourth-hand.

Scott Woodward:
Isn’t it Stephen Burnett?

Casey Griffiths:
Yes. Stephen Burnett is the name. Yeah, the document’s on the Joseph Smith Papers site.

Daniel Peterson:
Yeah. You have others. I’m thinking the one that’s third-hand, is another one that’s meant to portray Martin as a loon where it talks about him walking along with a deer and talking with a deer. They say, see, Martin was crazy. Well, that story never shows up else. It comes from somebody, who heard it from somebody, who heard it from somebody, and it’s decades later, and I don’t believe it. I just don’t think it happened. That doesn’t sound like Martin Harris at all. Martin goes out of his way to talk about the literal reality of it. But I would also say this, the Eight Witnesses are there precisely to refute that kind of misreading. It’s one in the afternoon, somewhere around there. We don’t know exactly when, but sometime around one. They don’t have any experiences of the miraculous. They don’t see an angel. They don’t hear the voice of God. They simply are presented with this set of heavy metal plates, and they hold them, they pass them around, they turn the leaves a little bit and examine them. It’s as matter of fact and mundane as it can possibly be. To me, for a long time, I always thought, Well, why do you have, when I was growing up, Three Witnesses and the Eight Witnesses, what’s the point? Why don’t just make it eleven witnesses and have done with it?

Daniel Peterson:
I think the differing experiences are really important. The Three Witnesses have this Industrial Light and Magic thing, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg. And it’s magnificent, the voice of God, angels, miraculous tables, plates, everything. The Eight Witnesses have no experience, anything remotely like that. They are so different, that they reinforce each other. You can dismiss the Three Witnesses by saying, oh, they’re hallucinating. It’s some weird hallucinogenic mushroom or something. Although, again, I don’t think hallucination works for the reason I’ve already mentioned. Why do they all see the same thing? But let’s say, okay, it’s imaginary. It’s so weird. It can’t be real. Well, then what could be more real than people going out into a grove of trees and holding an object and passing it around? I’ve done that thing with all sorts of objects. When I’ve been out in the outdoors, people handed me something, and I don’t say, oh, well, this is a spiritual experience. This isn’t really a butane tank, or this isn’t really a Coleman Lantern, or something like that. It’s real, it’s material. I know it is.

Daniel Peterson:
The two sets of Witnesses are mutually complementary. They reinforce each other, because they’re so different that, if you try to dismiss it as just frontier yokels imagining something, that doesn’t work for the Eight Witnesses. Now, people have said, well, people in the early 19th century were…they were estranged from reality. They had a weird magical worldview and so on. Well, I think, look, right now I’m sitting in an artificially air-conditioned room and I’m speaking into a computer, a laptop, and you guys aren’t really in front of me. You’re on a screen. Who’s separated from reality? Nineteenth century farmers who spent their lives clearing tree stumps and moving rocks and so on, sowing seeds and harvesting them, who had to go to bed when the sun went down and got up when it arose. I mean, they’re in sync with reality in a way that I’m not. I don’t go by the by the motions of the sun. The seasons hardly matter to me. I don’t slaughter my beef, I get it at the supermarket, it comes wrapped up in plastic. I’m estranged from reality. To look back at the Eight Witnesses and say, well, they could hardly distinguish reality from fantasy, that’s the way those early people were. It seems to me just the opposite. You could take me in with some sort of AI deception, but not them.

Scott Woodward:
Far too dismissive to just paint it like that. It’s not honestly confronting the facts of the matter. That’s, again, what Richard Lloyd Anderson’s book does so well, Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses. He makes you confront all the facts of the matter, like you’re doing with us today, Dan. This is really fun.

Casey Griffiths:
We’ve tiptoed towards the Eight Witnesses a little bit here. Is there anything else major? It seems like they don’t always get their due, but the Eight Witnesses, talk a little bit about them and why they’re important.

Daniel Peterson:
Well, they’re important, again, because their experience is so very different. Because it’s as a matter of fact as it can be, you can’t just say, well, they’re imagining this thing. I mean, I could try that with my wife. There are always piles of books by my bedside. Sometimes it gets on her nerves that my bed is surrounded with papers and piles of books that have collapsed and they’re all over the floor and, “Oh, I’ll pick it up.” But I thought maybe I just ought to tell her, “Look, you’re having a vision. You’re having a spiritual experience. Those books aren’t really there. It’s not real.” I mean, one of the criticisms I hear of the Witnesses, I’ll try to get back to the Eight Witnesses, but is some people who will say, well, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, so the Witnesses don’t count for anything. I always find that very, very self-serving in a way, because we all believe in eyewitness testimony. I didn’t do that. I didn’t eat the last cinnamon roll on the plate. Yes you did, I saw you. Oh, well, no. What did you see? I mean, we all know that eyewitness testimony is unreliable.

Daniel Peterson:
So people will say of the Eight Witnesses, for example, that they just imagined this. It wasn’t real. And again, that they were 19th century fantasists and so on, it’s just the way early people were. They couldn’t tell reality from fantasy. I always take issue with that kind of thing. It seems to me very selective, very cherry-picked. We use eyewitness testimony for just about everything in our lives unless it seems to contradict our ideology. And then eyewitness testimony is ridiculous, it’s absurd. Who would depend on that? Who would give any credit at all to an eyewitness? But the minute it’s in your interest to agree, then eyewitness testimony is the gold standard. But I saw it with my own eyes. One of the Witnesses that most impresses me among the Eight and the Three, but certainly among the Eight, is John Whitmer, who was very bitter after he was excommunicated from the Church. There had been a real falling out. All the Whitmers left en masse. And so he’s angry. And at a certain point, Theodore Turley is sent back into Missouri. It’s a dangerous mission. I mean, it’s not the mission call you want to get. Go back in to Missouri, where the governor has issued an extermination order against Latter-day Saints, and try to sell the property there that the Saints held for as much as you can get, even if it’s pennies on the dollar, to help the Saints who are now refugees across Iowa and in Illinois. And while he’s there, Theodore Turley runs into John Whitmer and says, Brother Whitmer, you were one of the Eight Witnesses to the Book of Mormon. Do you no longer believe in the Book of Mormon? To which Whitmer responds effectively, I don’t know if the Book of Mormon is true or not. I couldn’t read what was on those plates. Now, I enjoy that because that’s the closest that I know of any Witness coming to denying his testimony. But even there, he doesn’t because he says, well, I don’t know if it’s true. Remember, the Eight Witnesses had not heard the voice of God certifying the truth of the book. They had not encountered an angel. They just saw some metal objects and hefted it, turned the pages. And he says, I couldn’t read the writing on the plates, I don’t know what it said. So I don’t know if it’s true or not. Well, he’s at a low point. He’s really angry at Joseph. He’s angry at the Church. He’s bitter over his excommunication. But he bounces back shortly thereafter and bears testimony to his dying day like the rest of the Whitmers. But at his lowest, he still says, well, I couldn’t read the writing on the plates. He could have said there were no plates. I didn’t get a real good look at them. I’m not even sure if they were gold, not sure if they were real plates or across a room, it was dark. He doesn’t say that. I turned the pages. They were heavy. The writing on them was really weird, and I couldn’t read it, so I can’t verify the translation. So at his worst, he says, I don’t know if it’s true or not. That impresses me. That’s impressive in a very different way than the Three Witnesses are impressive. There again, he’s tempted to just spew the whole thing out of his mouth, but he doesn’t. He says, well, there are plates, and that’s what I need him to say. I don’t need him to certify the translation, the Three Witnesses have done that. The spirit does that. The content of the book does that for me. But I need him to testify that there were plates, and he does at his worst, at his lowest, at his most angry, he does.

Scott Woodward:
So if I understand what you’re saying, Dan, the Three Witnesses have this visionary experience. And for people who don’t believe in visionary experiences, they can just sort of explain that away. But then you say, But there’s the Eight. The Eight have a very concrete, very tangible, very secular, if you will, very empirical, tangible experience, which was not visionary. So what do you do with that? On the flip side, you say, well, the Eight, they didn’t even know what the characters said. They don’t even know if it’s true. All they did was handle these plates. Joseph could have made them in his barn or whatever. And you say, but then there’s the Three. There’s the Three who had the visionary experience and the angel and heard the voice of God. Is that what you mean by they mutually complement each other, these two?

Daniel Peterson:
Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. They are very different, and they testify in a way to different things, or they confirm different aspects of the overall experience with the plates and the restoration of the Book of Mormon. I would even add that I think that I’ve come to appreciate the additional witnesses, what I call the informal or unofficial witnesses in a way. Somebody at one point objected to me that, well, the Witnesses went out expecting to have an experience with the plates, as if that somehow would explain a way hefting a heavy metal object or seeing an angel. It can’t do that much work, in my view. But okay, let’s assume. Okay, they went out with an expectation of having a miraculous experience, therefore, they did. I mean, I can go out with an expectation. Nothing will happen. But let’s play that game for a little while. The unofficial witnesses, in most cases, weren’t expecting anything.

Scott Woodward:
When you say unofficial witnesses, who comes to mind What experiences are you thinking about?

Daniel Peterson:
I mean, Mary Whitmer, Emma Smith, Lucy Mack Smith, Josiah Stowell. There are some others that have these experiences where they just see the plates. Josiah Stowell testifies under oath at one point, for example. Someone asks him during a trial, where he is under oath to testify the truth, and says, well, how do you know Joseph had the plates? Because I saw them. I mean, they were being handed out through a window. The cover came off, I saw a gleam of metal. He wasn’t expecting that. He wasn’t primed for a supernatural experience. That just happened. Or Mary Whitmer, who certainly is not primed. She’s in a foul mood, if anything, if I understand what happened to her. Think of Mary Whitmer, the mother of David. She’s having to do all the work while Joseph and Oliver are there at the Whitmer Farm translating dictating, taking dictation. It’s not only that, she’s having to feed them, but then all these gawkers come by to look. They want to know what’s going on. She’s having to feed people and extra guests. She’s having to do the farm work. She’s having to milk the cows because the men are doing the important stuff, right?

Daniel Peterson:
She ends up doing all the cooking, probably all the dishes, all the housework in the barn and that sort of thing. She’s pretty angry about it. Then one day, according to one account, she sees Joseph and Oliver, who have gone out and they’re skipping rocks on a pond or a little stream there. And she’s…I’ve had it. If they have time to go out and skip rocks on a stream or a pond, then they can darn well do the chores. I think what they were doing is that these were farm guys who were used to being outdoors, but they’d had to be indoors for hours and hours and hours in semi-darkness, taking dictation, dictating. They’re not used to that. They want physical activities. They have to get out and stretch their legs. I don’t blame them, but she was angry. It’s right about that time that according to the accounts, which come down from at least two lines of transmitters, David and one of her grandchildren, who say that she was very angry. She was going to probably invite them to leave. Get lost. Get off my property. I’m not doing this for you anymore. And a messenger appears to her with a knapsack who says, effectively, you’re really under a lot of stress, aren’t you? A lot of work you’re having to do and so on. It’s only fair there that you should have a view of the plates. And he takes the plates out and allows her to look at them and apparently turn the pages on them. And she may actually be, it’s not entirely clear to me, but she may actually be the first witness to the Book of Mormon outside of the Smith family, besides Joseph himself. She’s really early, and the record seems to show that she never complained thereafter. She was fine doing the dishes and doing the cooking because there is something obviously going on here. The messenger addresses her by name, which shocks her. She’s out doing farm work in the barn, I think, and the messenger says, Mary, and she’s basically, who are you? And he doesn’t explain who he is. She called him Brother Nephi afterwards, but he doesn’t say who he was. And shows her the plates. She wasn’t primed for a supernatural experience. She was primed to kick Joseph and Oliver out on their rear ends. You can’t say that she’d worked herself into some state of religious ecstasy to have this experience. She had not.

Casey Griffiths:
It’s remarkable to me, too, that a lot of these secondary witnesses are women. We had a conversation with Kyle Walker a couple of weeks ago, and it, it feels like we completely overlooked this, but Joseph Smith’s sisters. It doesn’t seem like, even though Joseph Smith had strict commands to not show the plates to people, that there was any problem with a person picking up the plates and moving them from place to place. Like Katharine Smith, Joseph’s sister, talks about moving the plates, and Emma Smith moves the plates. And it does seem really remarkable that there was that kind of freedom, especially with the number of people that were trying to obtain the record, or steal it, or any of those things.

Daniel Peterson:
If I’ve got a fraudulent object that I don’t want people to examine. I’m not going to leave it in the room just covered with a thin cloth and go wondering off. But Joseph did.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. He comes across as almost naive a little bit, with the freedom he had with some of the plates, some of the time.

Daniel Peterson:
Emma describes spending… I describe it as spending quality time with the plates when no one’s around. She runs her fingers along the edges of the plates and says they felt like the thick pages of a book or something. You could feel the different plates. You could feel the three rings on the side. You could hear the top plate rustle over the one below it making a metallic sound. She’s clearly spending some time feeling around those. I’ve always wanted to ask her, and someday I hope to, so, Emma, come on, fess up. Did you look? Because she said, look, I know my husband had the plates. And she described that experience. I know what I would have done I would have lifted the cloth. Okay, might strike me dead, but I got to see what’s under here. She says she didn’t, but she clearly came as close as she could to it by feeling along the edges. There’s an object in there that meets all the description of the plates. There’s something in there that’s real and solid and heavy. Katharine says she talked about how heavy the plates were. She had to pick them up and carry them and hide them so the mob didn’t find them. They were very, very heavy. And I think it’s significant that there are women involved in this. It’s puzzled me for a while. Why are there no women among the official witnesses? Three men, eight men, Joseph Smith, then it dawned on me, because the testimony of women wasn’t taken seriously in US courts or anywhere in the early 19th century. In fact, it was only almost at the halfway point in the 20th century when the last US state allowed female testimony in courtrooms. It’s amazing to me that went on as long as it did. It’s Alabama, 1947, if I remember right.

Daniel Peterson:
If you’d had women, the attitude among skeptics in the 19th century would have been, well, women are hysterical. They’re flighty. They’re not rational. They’re not permitted to testify in court, and for good reason. I actually, at one point, had accumulated a few cartoons on the idea of women being allowed to vote or being able to serve on juries. How ridiculous. I mean, women just aren’t capable of that.

Scott Woodward:
Oh, my word.

Daniel Peterson:
The Witnesses are all male, but the Lord didn’t neglect female witnesses. You look at the unofficial witnesses, there are a number of women among them. They had experiences in some ways much like the Three and the Eight. Hearing voice, seeing the plates, holding those miraculous objects. It’s amazing. So you’ve got, besides Joseph Smith, you have something like I really need to sit down and total them all up. I actually heard of one other witness who never joined the Church, had nothing to do with the Church.

Scott Woodward:
I can think of one, Isaac Hale, right? Isaac Hale certainly did. He never joined the Church.

Daniel Peterson:
Yeah, he’s one. No. That’s a different one, though. If you total them, there’s something like eighteen witnesses altogether besides Joseph himself, I think. 16, 18, somewhere in that range. That’s a lot of people to explain away. I once had an experience. Several of us were involved in a debate years ago with the Evangelical Theological Society in connection with the annual American Academy of Religion Society of Biblical Literature meeting. They put on a debate between a group of Latter-day Saints and a group of evangelicals. It was an experience on a whole lot of levels. One of the debating participants was a very prominent evangelical philosopher, who I actually respect a great deal, but he doesn’t return the favor for Latter-day Saints. That’s William Lane Craig. William Lane Craig stood up and said, Look, the fact is, Joseph Smith’s myth is a myth of Olympian proportions. There’s no witness support for it. He says, wherefore, Christianity and the resurrection of Christ, I have eleven credible witnesses. He’s written a lot on the resurrection of Christ, and I agree with him. I think they’re credible, and I think there’s a lot to be said for the witnesses of the resurrection. But I thought it was hilarious that he said, they don’t have any witnesses, and we have eleven credible ancient witnesses for the resurrection of Jesus.

Daniel Peterson:
I thought, not only do we have witnesses, we have eleven official ones. What are you thinking of? The moderator of the debate was Richard Mouw, who’s a very prominent evangelical theologian. I remember him looking at me when Craig made that comment. He just looked at me and rolled his eyes. It was like Craig had just placed a big kick me sign on his rear end because I was responding to him, and I did point that out.

Scott Woodward:
Good. That needed to be said.

Casey Griffiths:
I would have said, Hey, the eleven credible witnesses of the resurrection are on our team, too. Yeah, that’s true. We’re not contradicting them. We’re saying there’s more. But that’s an interesting experience.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. By the way, I think we only have two… Correct me if I’m wrong, I think there’s only two firsthand accounts of witnesses of Jesus in the New Testament. Isn’t it Paul and John and the rest are narrative? I’m a believer in the resurrection, but two firsthand accounts versus what we have with the witnesses.

Daniel Peterson:
We’re awash in documents from the Book of Mormon Witnesses, and it’s very powerful stuff.

Scott Woodward:
It ought to be taken seriously, even if it challenges people’s worldviews. The humble invitation is, look, if you haven’t investigated Latter-day Saints carefully, start with the Book of Mormon and the Book of Mormon Witnesses, and don’t leave that very soon. Stay there, and stay long, and marinate in those original documents and think long and hard about that. I mean, that’s, I think, the best place to start. I think that’s how God intended it. I think that’s how Joseph wanted it as well. That’s where he would always go, right? Let’s go to the Book of Mormon first and then go out from there. I think that’s the right way to do it.

Daniel Peterson:
I loved Elder Holland’s conference talk of several years ago about the Book of Mormon being something that is impossible to get around or over. You have to go through it. I don’t think you can get through it if you’re honest. It’s a very difficult thing to set aside. And I would say the Witnesses are right there. And so I just haven’t been impressed with arguments against the Witnesses. I have not seen a coherent counter explanation of the Witnesses that I find even remotely persuasive.

Scott Woodward:
It’s funny. I was just about to ask you, what’s the best argument you’ve heard against them? And I’m hearing you say none.

Daniel Peterson:
Yeah, I have to honestly say there’s somewhere I think, okay, that’s interesting, but I can respond to it. I haven’t found any that I thought were really threatening to the Latter-day Saint position or endangered the credibility of the Witnesses. They’ll bring up sometimes David Whitmer’s apostasy and his criticisms of Joseph. I don’t care about those. As I said, I don’t care about his opinions about things where he’s not a particular witness. Anybody can have opinions. If somebody sees an accident on a street corner between a Chevrolet and a Ford, I don’t care what his opinions are on Chevys versus Fords. What I do care about is what did he see? That’s where he has unique authority. But if he has opinions on makes of automobiles or Italian grand opera or anything else, I couldn’t care less. He has no authority there. But he has authority as a witness on what he saw or or did not see. And that’s where these have a weight with me. And if they later come to disagree with Joseph about this or that, well, that’s unfortunate, but it doesn’t matter to me. In fact, in some ways, it strengthens their credibility.

Casey Griffiths:
Well said. I wanted to add, we’ve been talking a lot about Richard Lloyd Anderson. He has a brother who’s just as remarkable, Karl Ricks Anderson.

Daniel Peterson:
Yes.

Casey Griffiths:
And Karl was the world’s expert on Kirtland. He’s still with us, fortunately. Karl took me to this little spot in the community formerly known as Orange, Ohio. It was there that probably for the last time, all of the Witnesses of the Book of Mormon were gathered together. We have the minutes of this meeting. It’s a document I wasn’t aware of until the Joseph Smith Ppapers published it, that all of the Witnesses stood up and bore their testimony. Boy, it’s not long after that that we lose Christian Whitmer and Peter Whitmer, and then the verities of life take place where Oliver Cowdery dies in 1850. Like you said, I think the last witness is David Whitmer in the 1880s. Just it’s remarkable that there’s no cracks in the armor, that there’s no place where any of them say, it was a joke we were playing. It was a fantasy. They’re all just dead set on saying, no, this is what I saw. People like John Whitmer being honest and saying, I don’t know what the, the characters meant, but I did see plates, or people like Martin Harris saying, I don’t know if I believe Joseph Smith stayed a prophet, but I knew that I saw an angel.

Casey Griffiths:
But that’s just remarkable. I think any religion would be grateful to have the documentary record that we do and the witnesses that we do.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, and I think it’s amazing that we have such witnesses and such corroboration. I mean, it’s been mentioned, it was mentioned at the beginning that I wrote a biography of Muhammad. And I take Muhammad very seriously. Actually, when people ask me, do you think he was maybe inspired? I say, yeah, I’m definitely open to the possibility there was inspiration there. I don’t know for sure, but I would have relatively few problems with that. But Muhammad and Joseph Smith make for an interesting contrast. Muhammad never has a shared experience with anybody else in terms of revelation. There are always private revelations to him. There’s no tangible object involved. There’s no corroborating external evidence for him. Joseph is very, very different in that regard. It’s amazing what we have that accompanies him. After the First Vision, a lot of his most important revelatory experiences are shared with Oliver, or Sidney Rigdon, or the Three Witnesses, or whatever.

Scott Woodward:
Well, this has just been fantastic just to soak this in together. You’ve given us a lot to think about today, Daniel.

Daniel Peterson:
Thank you for having me.

Scott Woodward:
We really appreciate it. I guess we would like to end with maybe one more question, if that’s okay. I think you’ve answered it very well the last hour and a half, but we just want to give you one last chance just to say, how has your study of the Book of Mormon Witnesses, and again, you’ve studied them as much as anybody has studied them, how has that strengthened your witness of the Restoration itself, of this movement, of the gathering, of the whole thing that the Book of Mormon proclaims is actually happening? How do the Witnesses anchor you in that?

Daniel Peterson:
I find them immensely testimony building. Obviously, a testimony comes from spiritual means. But if there’s a secular evidence for the Book of Mormon, I’d say the witnesses rank right up there among the most important secular evidences. Maybe the only secular evidence, I mean by that, that doesn’t involve the Holy Ghost. You can analyze these things by reason, just looking at the evidence, thinking about it, making logical analysis of it. It’s the only secular evidence, besides, I suppose, the presence, the existence of the Book of Mormon itself that the Lord has given us. I like discoveries like chiasmus and all the other things that have been discovered about the Book of Mormon, the ways that it fits the ancient world and so on. Maybe those have been given in some cases by inspiration to particular individuals. They’ve been led to find something. I could mention a couple of cases where thoughts came to me that I thought, oh, now that is really interesting. But the primary secular evidence, I think, is the Witnesses. It’s the only, in a way, academic evidence the Lord himself arranged for. He called the Eight Witnesses, the Three Witnesses. He arranged for their experiences. He obviously thinks they’re very important. And I’ve wondered sometimes, as President Benson used to say, that we’d neglected Book of Mormon, I’ve wondered if we’ve neglected the Witnesses. The Lord went out of his way to establish these two sets of official testimonies, and they’ve been published in every edition of the book since 1830, including every partial edition, every foreign translation, every partial foreign translation, they always include the testimonies of the witnesses. So we have to be paying attention to them. Their testimony ought to be proclaimed far and wide. And I don’t want to hear members of the Church say, well, gosh, I think Sidney Rigdon was one of them. I think Brigham Young was one. Maybe, I don’t know, John Taylor or somebody. That’s just sad. They have been amazingly powerful in my mind. When I’ve tried, and I think I’ve honestly tried to come up with a secular counter-explanation for the Book of Mormon. How can I explain it away? I can sometimes come up with a little argument where I could explain this little part or that little part, never come up with one that accounts for the whole thing. Sometimes if you buy into this one, boy, it wipes out your explanation for the other part. You know, it just doesn’t fit together. But I can’t come up with a good counter explanation for the Witnesses. I just can’t. Here are eleven, think of the official ones, eleven reputable, sane, sincere, consistent witnesses who stood by their testimony through thick and thin, through persecution, through periods when it would have been so much easier, if not more profitable for them to contradict their testimony, and they didn’t do it. Bear their testimonies to their dying days. That’s powerful stuff, and I can’t see a way around it. So that’s an anchor, one of the anchors of my testimony, if you will, in a secular academic way.

Casey Griffiths:
Well, you’re certainly doing your part to make sure the Witnesses are known. We just are really grateful for you, Dan, and all the good work that you do. So thanks for joining us.

Daniel Peterson:
Thank you for having me.

Casey Griffiths:
This has been wonderful.

Scott Woodward:
Thank you so much. Again, we would encourage everyone out there to go check out. If you haven’t seen it yet, go check out the Witnesses movie. So good. So good.