Jonathan Neville believes Joseph Smith often used words and ideas from 18th century theologian Jonathan Edwards. Who is Jonathan Edwards? Neville claims Edwards was sort of a Billy Graham figure of his day. Neville believes that Smith used phrases like “natural man is an enemy to God” and other Edwards ideas in the Book of Mormon. Are you convinced? We’ll also talk about why Neville thinks Joseph didn’t use a seer stone, but the Urim & Thummim to translate the Book of Mormon, and that the translation is a loose, rather than tight translation. Check out our conversation…
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Intro to Jonathan Edwards
Interview
GT 00:31 All right, welcome to Gospel Tangents. I’m excited to have Jonathan Edward Neville on the show. I don’t normally introduce people by their middle name. But I have a special reason for doing that today. Jonathan, for those who didn’t see the first interview, give us a little bit about your background.
Jonathan 00:48 Okay. Well, my name is Jonathan Neville. And again, I’m happy to be here on Gospel Tangents. But my background is by training and profession, I’m a lawyer, but I’m retired from that. And I’ve also been a businessman and educator. But in the last 7-10 years or so I’ve been doing a deep dive into Church history and Book of Mormon topics. And I’ve written several books, none of which I had planned to do. But there’s so much interesting information that I’ve stumbled across that I’ve written these books about them. And so, it’s been just an exciting thing for me to be able to talk about some new perspectives on Church history and Book of Mormon topics, Book of Mormon translation, Book of Mormon setting, whatever happened to the golden plates, those kind of topics. So today, do you want me to talk about why?
GT 01:37 Yeah, why did I introduce you by your middle name?
Jonathan 01:39 My middle name is Edward. And the topic we’re going to talk about today is Jonathan Edwards.
GT 01:45 You were not named after him, right?
Jonathan 01:47 Well, I don’t know for sure. Because my mother was from Connecticut.
GT 01:50 Okay.
Jonathan 01:50 And there’s no Edwards in our family name, really. And she was familiar with Jonathan Edwards, because he was from Connecticut. And so, whether she named me after him, had him in mind when she named me, I don’t know. She’s passed away. I haven’t been able to ask her yet. I will eventually.
GT 02:07 But that was a long time ago. When did he live and die? Do you have approximate dates there?
Jonathan 02:12 Okay, yeah. He was born in 1703, about 100 years before Joseph Smith.
GT 02:16 Okay.
Jonathan 02:16 And he died in 1758. When he died, he was the President of Princeton University. There had been a smallpox epidemic, essentially. And so, they wanted all the students and faculty to take the vaccine, and there were a lot of people were resisting it. So, to show that it was safe and effective, he took it himself. But he got an overdose and died from it.
GT 02:39 So it was not safe.
Jonathan 02:40 For him it was not. But it did save a lot of other lives, of course.
GT 02:46 And so you said he died in 1756?
Jonathan 02:48 1758.
GT 02:50 So that was before the revolution.
Jonathan 02:52 Before the revolution.
GT 02:53 It must have gotten a little bit better, because I know George Washington required his troops to get vaccinated.
Jonathan 03:00 Yeah. Well, smallpox, of course, decimated the Native Americans. Some historians say as many as 97% of the Native Americans were killed from smallpox. And so, it was a continuing scourge, even among the colonists. And they had this vaccine where they were given a small dose, but it was essentially live vaccine or live virus. And so, you would get a little bit. You would get sick, but then you build a natural immunity. But they didn’t have the technology we have today to make vaccines that didn’t kill people sometimes. And in his case, it was a tragic death. I think he was around 55 years old when he died. But during that time, he started off as going to Yale University. He married the daughter of the founder of Yale University.
GT 03:53 Yale-Princeton must have been quite the rivalry then.
Jonathan 03:56 He didn’t even want to go to Princeton. They prevailed on him. He was actually, at the time, a missionary and a minister to the Indians in Western Massachusetts. And they wanted him to come, to go and be the president at Princeton. He didn’t want to, but they finally talked him into going down to doing that.
GT 04:13 They’re both Ivy League schools.
Jonathan 04:15 Yeah. Well, I don’t think the rivalry back then was like it is today. In fact, he was the youngest commencement speaker ever at Harvard.
GT 04:24 Oh, wow.
Jonathan 04:24 And that was a big, big deal, at the time, because there was a Harvard-Yale rivalry. And the people at Harvard didn’t want him to come, but he was so prolific and well-known, and some historians say that he had the highest IQ of any American born ever. And so, they wanted him to come speak at Harvard. And they managed to have that happen.
GT 04:47 He was the Billy Graham of his day.
Jonathan 04:49 Billy Graham, but also he was considered a superior intellect, generally. He started off as a scientist. His first papers were naturalist papers that were published in the U.K. He did some studies. Boy, now I can’t remember exactly. It seems to me it was a microbiology thing, but I’m not positive. But he spent a lot of time studying Newtonian physics and that kind of thing as well. He wrote about those topics as well. But he graduated from Yale with his master’s degree when he was 19 years old.
GT 05:24 Wow.
Jonathan 05:24 And he was fluent in Greek, Latin and Hebrew. He had to defend his dissertation in Latin, both speaking and writing. And he was very well-educated, to say the least. His grandfather was a well-known minister in Connecticut. And so, he preached, I think, in New York for a while, but he ended up working with his grandfather. And when his grandfather died, he took over that church in New England, well in Connecticut. He eventually became part of the first Great Awakening with George Whitfield, primarily the two of them. I’ve found a lot of people in Utah have never heard of him.
GT 06:09 Until I met you, I hadn’t heard of him.
Jonathan 06:10 Yeah. But in New England, he’s well known. And you know, one of the things in American literature that in high school people often study is his famous sermon about the angry God. Now, I can’t remember the name of it, but I can look it up really quickly, if you want. But it was a sermon where it was all fire and brimstone. And he talked about God holding you like a spider over a fire, that type of thing. And that was his famous sermon. It represented the Great Awakening. And it was a text very common in high school English Lit courses. And so often, when I bring it up to people who have graduated from university, maybe have a little more familiarity. They say, “Oh, he’s the one that wrote that sermon about the angry God.”
Jonathan 06:58 I say, “Yeah, he did write that. But he wrote a lot of other things, too.” He wrote several long sermons, as well as entire books. Most of those he wrote when he was a missionary to the Indians in the 1750s.
Neville’s Case Against Stone in the Hat
GT 07:14 Well very good. Yeah, I read in your book, Steven Harper had referenced this talk you’re mentioning, so I’m sure we’ll get into that in just a minute. So, how does Jonathan Edwards relate to the Book of Mormon, especially, since he was born 100 years before Joseph Smith?
Jonathan 07:31 Yeah, yeah. So how this all got started, is I was curious in my work on the Book of Mormon–there’s a debate in the Book of Mormon about whether Joseph translated it or not. And whether it was translated by or whether Joseph Smith read words on the stone that were put there by someone we don’t know, a spiritual essence, which I call the “mysterious incognito spiritual translator,” the MIST, just for shorthand.
GT 08:01 I thought it was SITH.
Jonathan 08:03 SITH is the “stone on the hat.”
GT 08:04 Okay.
Jonathan 08:05 But the question of who put the words on the stone became an issue. Because if he just read words off the stone in the hat and didn’t use the plates, and didn’t use the Urim and Thummim, as some scholars say today, then these words appeared on a stone in a hat. And I actually have a replica of the stone I didn’t think to bring.
GT 08:24 Oh, dang it.
Jonathan 08:25 It is the same size. Someone made an exact one, 3d-printed it.
GT 08:29 Oh, really?
Jonathan 08:30 Yeah. Yeah, I’ve got one, but it doesn’t work, though. So, the theory is that he just put the stone in a hat and words appeared on the stone and he read the words.
GT 08:41 And you don’t like that theory.
Jonathan 08:42 Well. It’s not a question of liking it. To me it is implausible.
GT 08:46 Okay.
Jonathan 08:46 Now, but I find if people want to believe that, I don’t. I’m not trying to tell anybody not to believe it. For me, it doesn’t work. Let’s put it that way. And I think Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery were pretty clear that that is not how they did it. But that’s kind of another topic.
GT 09:03 I think we need to get into that, because I don’t think we covered that enough last time.
Jonathan 09:07 Okay.
GT 09:07 Because you have some real issues with the stone in the hat.
Jonathan 09:10 Yeah I do. Well, let’s come back to it after we talk about Jonathan Edwards.
GT 09:14 And oh, by the way, I should also mention, and maybe I should take a break and go grab it, but one of my listeners sent me a replica of the Urim and Thummim.
Jonathan 09:26 Oh really?
GT 09:27 I have it in my basement. I could go grab it.
Jonathan 09:28 I’d like to see that. Yeah.
GT 09:30 The weird thing is, like it doesn’t fit over your eyes. You would have to be a giant because they’re [wide.]
Jonathan 09:36 Yeah, they were built for someone that, by figuring out the width of the face, who’d be about nine feet tall.
GT 09:44 Right.
Jonathan 09:45 There’s lots of accounts of nine-foot tall skeletons in North America, but that is a little bit of a tangent. We’re talking about tangents.
GT 09:54 Exactly. We’ve got to get into all this fun stuff.
Jonathan 09:56 Well, I’d love to talk about this stone hat a little bit more. For me, it was an issue, because when I was reading what Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery said, they always said that Joseph translated the plates, even the engravings on the plates by means of the Urim and Thummim. And so, my basic philosophy is that I believe what Joseph and Oliver said, and if what they said contradicts what other people said, then I tend to think, well, the other people had a different agenda or observed something different or misinterpreted, whatever, but I stick with what Joseph and Oliver said.
GT 10:31 Doesn’t Bushman say that Joseph use the Urim and Thummim, for the lost 116 pages, and looking at my replica, I can see why that would be a pain in the butt to use.
Jonathan 10:46 Yeah.
GT 10:46 And so Bushman says the rest of the time he did the stone in the hat.
Jonathan 10:50 Right.
GT 10:50 And for what we have is stone in the hat.
Jonathan 10:52 Well, let me give a caveat there. Bushman doesn’t really say one way or the other. Bushman is reporting what other people said. Because I’ve talked with him about some of these things. The thing to be clear on is the difference between what someone says, and what really happened. And so, for example, Richard wrote in his book, that he used the stone in the hat, but he was relying on what other people said. So, it’s just like, I run into people all the time, that said, “Well, Joseph Smith used the stone in the hat.”
Jonathan 11:26 And I said, “Well, how do you know? You weren’t there.” They’re relying on what someone else said. So I go back to the original statements, to try to understand them, as if I was hearing them in court.
GT 11:37 And doesn’t Richard Bushman do the same thing?
Jonathan 11:40 Not really.
GT 11:40 No?
Jonathan 11:41 He accepts it pretty much on its face. I have a whole, I did a whole analysis of that segment of Rough Stone Rolling, to show what he wrote, and then the references that he didn’t include, and a different way to interpret it. So, I have a different way to frame all of those statements. And I’ve shown that he could have done it a little more objectively. This is one of the issues that–we’re kind of digressing here. But this is one of the issues with historians that I had never really had understood until I got into this. Because they’ll often report things as facts, which are just theory. And I’m used to more of a courtroom approach, where you say a witness says something, you don’t just take it on its face. You cross-examine the witness, if you can. Of course, dead people, you can’t cross-examine.
GT 12:31 Exactly.
Jonathan 12:32 But you can still look at the issues of motive, opportunity. Were they actually there? Did they report what they saw and add their own inferences to it, which happens all the time. I’ve given examples. For example, if there’s a car accident, the policeman comes up and says, “Well, what happened?”
Jonathan 12:54 The guy says, “Well, this blue car ran the red light.” You would write that down. Okay, that’s a fact. Right?
Jonathan 13:00 But the lawyer would say, “Well, were you there when it happened?”
Jonathan 13:02 He goes, “Yeah, I was there.”
Jonathan 13:03 “Did you see it?”
Jonathan 13:04 “Well, I didn’t really see it, but I looked up when I heard the crash.” And so, he didn’t really observe what he said he saw. He made an inference and reported it as a fact. And that happens all the time. That’s why we have cross-examination. And so, my own interpretation, and it’s a long discussion to go through each of the witnesses, is that I think David Whitmer and Emma reported what they observed, and they inferred that it was a translation. But it wasn’t. And I don’t think we have time to go through all the detail of that. But getting back to the stone in the hat thing. I think that, in my view, Joseph used the stone and the hat, which was a common practice in New England at the time, apparently, to demonstrate how he was doing the translation, because he had been forbidden from showing the Urim and Thummim, or the plates to anybody. And = people wonder, or at least I wondered, why would the Lord tell him not to do that? And why would he say, “The Lord told me not to do it,” unless he had a specific reason? And I think one of the reasons was to explain why he had to do a demonstration instead.
Jonathan 14:12 The other interesting thing about this whole stone in the hat theory is that no one wrote down what Joseph dictated on these sessions. And so, we have no idea if what he actually dictated during those sessions is actually in the Book of Mormon today. In other words, David Whitmer, Emma, they never said, “Well, when he was looking at the stone in the hat, he dictated Alma, chapter seven,” you know.
GT 14:35 Oh, I see.
Jonathan 14:36 So we have no idea. It’s just, it’s a huge assumption everybody has made all along. And so, I pointed out, we’re assuming that what he dictated on those sessions with the stone on the hat is in the Book of Mormon, but we have no way of knowing that. And so there’s no, what I call, a chain of custody. The other thing you mentioned is when Richard talked about, in Rough Stone Rolling, about the translation with the stone in the hat during the Book of Mormon we have today, and used the Urim and Thummim during the 116 pages, that comes partly from David Whitmer, who said that, and Emma said that. But the problem with both of that is we don’t know for sure whether Emma was a scribe during the post 116 pages. I think she was, for part of it.
GT 15:26 Oh, because I think, have we found any of her handwriting?
Jonathan 15:29 No, no.
GT 15:30 Oh, so why do you think she was, then?
Jonathan 15:31 Well, for a couple reasons. One is that the printer said she was, her handwriting is on the manuscript. David Whitmer said she was.
GT 15:41 On the printer’s manuscript?
Jonathan 15:42 Yeah, on the original manuscript.
GT 15:43 Oh.
Jonathan 15:44 And then also, before Oliver Cowdery arrived, Joseph had been translating for about four months, I think it was. And we don’t know, because the whole Book of Mosiah and the first few chapters of Alma are missing from the original manuscript, which would have been the part he was translating before Oliver Cowdery arrived.
GT 16:06 And that was because it was damaged when they put it the cornerstone and water got in.
Jonathan 16:11 Yeah.
GT 16:11 We’ve only got like, 28% of the original manuscript.
Jonathan 16:13 Exactly. And unfortunately, all of the book of Mosiah and the first few chapters of Alma are missing. I don’t remember exactly. It’s like Alma, chapter six or seven, something like that, is the first part of the original manuscript that we have today that was translated. Because remember, 1st Nephi, through Words of Mormon was translated in Fayette.
GT 16:34 Right.
Jonathan 16:35 So that was later. So, when I did this analysis…
GT 16:39 Let’s make sure people are clear on that. So, Joseph translated the Book of Lehi, which covered the same time period as 1st Nephi through Mosiah, chapter two?
Jonathan 16:51 Or chapter one, that’s an issue of whether we have, [if] our chapter one today is originally chapter three.
GT 16:57 Yeah.
Jonathan 16:57 Which is probably what it is. So, it would have been through King Benjamin, let’s say.
GT 17:02 Right. And so, Joseph didn’t retranslate that. He just started with what is our Mosiah, chapter one, but a lot of scholars think it’s Mosiah, chapter three, and then through the rest of the end of the Book of Mormon. And then after that was done, he went back and translated the small plates, which was 1st and 2nd Nephi, Jacob, and Words…
Jonathan 17:24 Omni, and Enos and, yeah.
GT 17:26 And then Words of Mormon, I guess.
Jonathan 17:28 Yeah, at least part of the Words of Mormon. And if we’re going to talk about that a little bit, just to make sure people understand, basically, he translated the abridged plates that he got from the stone box of Moroni, in Harmony, Pennsylvania. And that was Book of Lehi, as you mentioned, all the way through the title page. And he said, “The title page is on the last leaf of the plates.” Then, when he was in Fayette, he didn’t translate anything from the abridged plates. He translated the original plates of Nephi, which was 1st Nephi through, at least, part of the Words of Mormon. And that leads up to this whole issue of the two sets of plates, which I think we may have discussed before, but I’ll just summarize it really quickly for this.
Jonathan 18:13 This is the idea that when Joseph Smith got the plates out of Moroni’s stone box, all it was the abridged plates. And, like the title page said, it was an abridgment of the plates of Nephi, or the people of Nephi, and a record of the abridgement of the record of the people of Jared. And that’s all. It didn’t say, there were no original plates included in that title page, other than a sealed portion. And so Joseph took those abridged plates down to Harmony, translated all of them. And when he got to the end, he and Oliver said, “Okay, we’ve gotten to the end of these plates. Should we go back and re-translate the book of Lehi that had been lost, with the 116 pages?”
Jonathan 18:59 And that’s when the Lord told him in D&C 10, today, he said, “No, don’t go retranslate that. Instead, you have to translate the plates of Nephi.” And, in my view, he didn’t have the plates of Nephi at that point. That’s why the Lord told him, you’ve got to translate the plates of Nephi. In fact, in verse, in D&C 9, when Oliver Cowdery had tried to translate and was unable to, the Lord said, “Well, don’t worry, just continue with this record. And then I have other records that you can help Joseph translate.” And right in the very next section, in Section 10, it identifies what those other records were, which was the plates of Nephi. So, before Joseph left Harmony, he asked Lord what to do with the plates because he didn’t want to haul them, in case someone tried to steal them, like had happened when he went to Harmony the first time. And so the Lord said, “Well give them to this messenger.” And so he did, he gave the abridged plates to a messenger, who he said later was one of the three Nephites. So, he gave the abridged plates to this messenger. And then David Whitmer came down from Fayette to pick him and Oliver up, to go back to the Whitmer farm up in Fayette. And on the way back, they pass this guy on the side of the road.
Jonathan 20:13 And David Whitmer offered to give him a ride up to–well, first he said, “Hello, how you doing? It’s hot today.” They had a little conversation. And he said, “Would you like a ride?”
Jonathan 20:21 And the guy said, “No, I’m going to Cumorah.” And David Whitmer remembered that was the first time he ever heard the word Cumorah. Because he knew the area. He was a farmer in the area. He had never heard of Cumorah before. And so, the guy left and he asked Joseph who that was. And he said, “Well, that was the messenger who had the plates, and he was one of the three Nephites.”
Jonathan 20:41 And so they continued on. They went up to Fayette, and then this same messenger, who took the abridged plates back to the repository in Cumorah, and there, he got the small plates of Nephi and brought those to Fayette. And that’s why Joseph translated those plates in Fayette. And there’s lots of reasons why this scenario is important. But relevant to what we’re talking about today, it shows that Joseph was actually translating plates. He had to have the right plates to translate them. He wasn’t just reading off the stone in the hat. In fact, I remember I was at BYU Education Week, one time, and we had a, I won’t say who it is, but he was talking about Church history. And he said, “Well, Joseph never used the plates. They were under a cloth or out in the woods. He used a stone in the hat.” And he said, “But Joseph said something that we don’t understand. He said that the title page was on the last leaf of the plates, and we have no idea how he knew that, because he wasn’t using the plates.”
Jonathan 21:37 And I thought, “That’s exactly backwards.” I mean, you know– and so and the thing is, in D&C 10, when the Lord tells Joseph to translate the engravings on the plates of Nephi, he didn’t say, “We’re going to give you some different words to read on the stone.” So, the stone in the hat doesn’t fit any of the scriptural narrative at all. Joseph and Oliver never said anything about using a seer stone, that he found in a well, to translate the Book of Mormon. They never even alluded to it. In fact, here’s another example, when Oliver Cowdery rejoined the Church, in 18–, I’m going to say 1853, somewhere in there, and Reuben Miller wrote the account. And he said, he bore his testimony once again, of the Book of Mormon, and he said, “Joseph translated with the Urim and Thummin, and Sidney Rigdon didn’t write it. Solomon Spalding didn’t write it.” But when he was doing that, he had the seer stone in his pocket. He had it with him. And all he had to do is pull it out and say, “This is the stone that Joseph Smith translated with.” But he didn’t. He never even referred to it. He talked about the Nephite interpreters. So this whole idea of the stone in the hat thing, to me, doesn’t make any sense. And it contradicts the narrative. It, actually, was first published in a fairly comprehensive form in the anti-Mormon book called Mormonism Unvailed, 1834.
GT 23:01 E. D. Howe.
Jonathan 23:02 E.D. Howe’s book. And he talked about the stone in the hat as a scenario and kind of ridiculed it. And so now I read it in the scholarly works among some of our leading LDS scholars, and it’s just, “Okay, you can believe that if you want, you know, but it doesn’t makes sense to me.” So what this all led to was, I wanted to know Joseph Smith.
How Joseph’s Leg Surgery Helped Him
Jonathan 23:26 Well, let me back up. There was another strain of thought that Joseph Smith could not have translated the Book of Mormon, himself, because of the vocabulary.
GT 23:34 Oh, yeah. Brian Hales.
Jonathan 23:35 Brian Hales, but also, well, there’s a few others, where they said, Okay, the Biblical stuff we can understand,” because he said he studied the Bible, right? But there’s, I made a list of 700 words that are not in the Bible that are in the Book of Mormon, and some of them are pretty elaborate, sophisticated terminology.
GT 23:56 I think Brian’s done the same.
Jonathan 23:57 Yeah, he has. And so Brian is more of a stone in the hat type guy, though.
GT 24:02 Right. Definitely.
Jonathan 24:04 So he thinks that those words must have appeared on the stone. Since I don’t find that even credible or plausible, I thought, “Well, there had to be a way for Joseph to acquire that lexicon, before he translated the Book of Mormon.”
GT 24:17 But either way, even if you believe in the Urim and Thummim, don’t you imagine that the words appeared on the two crystals in the Urim and Thummim?
Jonathan 24:26 No, what I think happened and this is a topic of another new book that’s coming out, soon.
GT 24:32 A preview?
Jonathan 24:33 A little preview. What my co-author and I think happened is the Urim and Thummim would have given him, like, a literal definition. For example, when they did the Rosetta Stone, and they were trying to create the two forms of Egyptian and the Greek. You can go on the website and see what the literal translation of the words are. But, in English, it doesn’t make sense. You have to reformulate it and convert it into grammar that we can understand. Plus, you have an ancient word that has multiple meanings in English. So, you have to choose among those.
Jonathan 25:13 We do that today. When I lived in China, we would go up to a Chinese sign and put our little phone on, and it would give us the English interpretation, but it would flip around and have multiple words for one Chinese symbol. And that’s what I think the Urim and Thummim would do. It would give Joseph sort of a literal translation of it. Well, the first thing he did after he got the plates and went down to Harmony, he copied the characters. Right? And he translated the characters. So, he was translating these characters by means of the Urim and Thummim, he said. So, the Urim and Thummim was giving him kind of a glossary or a dictionary, let’s say. But it wasn’t really conveying a meaning that made sense to Joseph’s peers. So, he had to actually translate the characters into his own English, using his own lexicon. D&C 1 says, “After the manner of his language.” And that’s what I think he did. So, I guess we’re digressing a little from Jonathan Edwards.
GT 26:14 That’s ok.
Jonathan 26:14 But in my view, Joseph Smith was prepared from a young age to become the Prophet and translator, and that’s why he had the leg surgery. I don’t know if we’ve talked about this before.
GT 26:25 A little bit, but let’s do it again.
Jonathan 26:26 Okay.
GT 26:28 Because you’ve got some big issues with Brian Hales. I love talking about different perspectives.
GT 26:33 Yeah, sure. So well, come to think of it, I haven’t really ever, directly engaged Brian Hales on this topic. We’ve talked about other things. Anyway, so when he had the leg surgery, lots of people were getting sick. Other members of his family were getting sick, but he’s the one that got the leg infection. And it was a life-threatening situation. And he ended up having the famous leg surgery. Everybody talks about it because he refused to drink alcohol.
GT 27:00 Right.
Jonathan 27:01 But to me, that was a very minor tangent, let’s say. The real reason for that leg surgery was to incapacitate Joseph Smith at a young age, to give him this near-death experience. So that’s when he became a religious seeker more than the rest of his family. But, also, it incapacitated him for several years. He couldn’t work on the farm. His parents had to carry him around. Even when they moved to Palmyra, he was still on crutches. So, he had that period of time to really ponder and become a religious seeker and start reading Christian literature. And one of the things that I came across in this process, his Uncle Jesse took him to the coast down in Massachusetts near their ancestral family home.
GT 27:48 This is while he’s still injured?
Jonathan 27:50 Yeah, right, shortly after the surgery. Because they felt like, if you’re near the coast, it’s more healing, which it is. That’s why a lot of people come to my house up in Oregon. We have a lot of people who’ve retired there because of that idea that the seacoast is more healthy, and I certainly feel like it is. That’s another tangent. And we have a lot of tangents here.
GT 28:14 It’s an appropriately named show.
Jonathan 28:16 I know. It’s awesome. I love it. Then anyway, so his Uncle Jesse took him down there. And Jesse became famous later because Joseph wrote him a letter about the Restoration. This is before Joseph a translated the Book of Mormon, or about that timeframe, as I recall. I don’t remember the date of it now. But it was around that early time period. And Jesse made the comment that it sounded like it was written by a prophet, this letter that Joseph wrote, when Emma had said, supposedly, [that] he couldn’t even write a well-worded letter, which was a kind of a ridiculous apologetic thing that she said. And there’s other reasons why I say that. But one of the ones that he wrote was to his Uncle Jesse, and Jesse completely rejected this Restoration, because he was a very strict Christian. I don’t know if he was a minister.
Jonathan 29:07 So the point is, when he took Joseph Smith down to Massachusetts, I was researching, “Well, what would a boy Joseph’s age read in Massachusetts?” And I came across these four sermons for young men, written by a minister. His last name was Dean. And I read through those and there’s a lot of this non-biblical Book of Mormon language in those sermons. And they kind of come out. I don’t have time to give examples, but it gave me the idea of, “Well, maybe Joseph was being educated by the Lord through Jesse and other people, in how to articulate this ancient Nephite record in modern Christian terminology. And so, then I started thinking. I made this list of 700 words. And I wanted to find all of them. Because some of them, for example, Royal Skousen says were early modern English, and Joseph wouldn’t have known them and that type of thing. So that was on my mind, too. So, I started looking through the Palmyra newspapers from the early or late 1820s. And sure enough, there was a lot of terminology in there. On my list of 700 words, I found, maybe, let’s say 25 or 30, something like that.
GT 30:17 Okay, I just want to make sure our time period is right. Joseph was born in 1805?
Jonathan 30:21 1805.
GT 30:22 And he had his leg surgery. How old was he?
Jonathan 30:24 He was around six or seven.
GT 30:26 So 1811?
Jonathan 30:28 1811, roughly.
GT 30:29 Okay. And so, he’s hanging out with his Uncle Jesse 1812-1813?
Jonathan 30:35 Well, right at that same time. He was only there for six months.
GT 30:37 Okay.
Jonathan 30:38 At the coast. And then he came back to Vermont. And that’s when there were the accounts of his mother or father. In fact that there’s a Church film about Joseph Smith. It shows his father carrying him on his back as they’re running around. So, he just wasn’t able to walk with that leg. He had that limp his entire life afterwards. But at least, at that time, he was still unable to play with the kids and all that. So, what’s he going to do?
Jonathan 31:04 I’ve had some critics say, “Well, he was too young to be reading.” But not if you read what Parley P. Pratt wrote about, how young he was when he was reading the Bible, like six or seven years old. I think it was Eliza R. Snow who had memorized long passages of scriptures when she was seven or eight years old, too. So, it was a common thing in their day.
GT 31:24 Okay.
Jonathan 31:25 And it’s hard for us to relate to because our kids have video games and TV and everything else. They had the Bible to study in school. In fact, here’s a fun tangent. Do you know the book, The Late War, the book about the War of 1812, that was written in the biblical style?
GT 31:44 Okay.
Jonathan 31:45 And some of the critics say, “Well, Joseph plagiarized The Late War. Right?
GT 31:49 Especially in the Alma parts, or the war parts.
Jonathan 31:51 The war parts, yeah, which I think is ridiculous. We can talk about that, too, if you want. But the interesting thing about The Late War, it was written in the biblical style, because they wanted children to read it, because they were familiar with the Bible. And they figured, “Well, this is a way for them to become educated in biblical language.” And the reason– it was like a book about 9/11, would have been 20 years ago, because the War of 1812 took place right in that area of Vermont and northern New York. In fact, there’s a town called Poultney Ville, just north of Palmyra that was invaded by the British. They bombarded it. They stole stuff. And there were lots of veterans of the war, who lived in Palmyra when Joseph was a boy there. In fact, the cemetery that his brother Alvin was buried in, was named after a veteran of the War of 1812. Is it 1812 or?
GT 32:44 Yeah 1812. The War of 1812 lasted until 1814.
Jonathan 32:48 Yeah it did. That’s right. And it was very vivid when Joseph moved to Palmyra. And so, if he hadn’t read that book, it would have been surprising. But one interesting aspect of it is, there are a few editions of it. One of the editions of The Late War had an endorsement by Samuel Mitchell, who Joseph sent Martin Harris to go to, to get approval of the translation, the characters. And Mitchell endorsed the book, because it was written in a biblical style, and it would help the morals of the kids and that type of thing. So that’s kind of the environment that they were in. It was a very rich biblical environment to the point where people were writing books to try to imitate the biblical style. And if you read the Palmyra newspapers in the late 1820s, it’s very interesting there, because there were a lot of religious articles in there. They would have sermons and things in there published.
Jonathan Edwards
Jonathan 33:52 And so, as I was going through my list of 700 words, I kept coming across references or terminology and phrases and things that were from Jonathan Edwards. And I thought, “Well, I don’t know how Jonathan Edwards has anything to do with this.” And I had known a little bit about Jonathan Edwards, because of my family’s background, and Connecticut and some study that I had done of this. But then I had this idea of looking at what was for sale in Palmyra in the bookstore. And there’s a list of, I don’t remember how many, let’s say 50 books, that they would publish week after week, you know, these are on sale. And one of them just said Edwards eight volumes. I had never connected that to Jonathan Edwards, until I kept accumulating these references to Edwards-ian terminology. And I said, “Wait a minute, that might have been Jonathan Edwards.” And I looked it up, and sure enough, Jonathan Edwards had an eight-volume set of his works published in 1808, that was commonly for sale. And as soon as I saw that, I thought, “Okay, now that could be really interesting to go through.” And there’s a database at Yale University that they say has all of Jonathan Edwards works in it. But I wouldn’t find some of the terminology in that database. And so, I thought, “Well, I’m going to examine this 1808 edition.” So I went on eBay, and I bought an original 1808 set of the eight volumes.
GT 35:21 I’ll bet that was pricey.
Jonathan 35:23 Well, pricey. It was, like, $1,000 or something.
GT 35:26 Oh, my gosh.
Jonathan 35:28 That doesn’t seem that pricey to me. But I brought you one to show you.
GT 35:33 Oh, wow.
Jonathan 35:33 So this is volume three. And this, actually, was from the Diocese of Ohio. They put it on eBay. But I got these original 1808 books. It says, The works of President Edwards. And it says President Edwards, again, because he was President of Princeton University.
GT 35:56 Wow. Very cool.
Jonathan 35:58 Yeah, these are really cool. And it has–this is volume three of eight. It was published in 1808. And so I started, well, I realized at that point, this had to be what they were referring to, the eight volumes of Edwards that everyone knew about. It was very commonly known who Jonathan Edwards was. And the reason I got these is, I’ve always found that there’s databases, like, I could find this on Amazon, they had the 1808, someone digitized it. And I bought an Amazon version on the Kindle.
GT 36:34 Which is easier to search.
Jonathan 36:36 It’s easier to search, but it also has errors. Every single digitized database I’ve looked at has errors in it, transcription errors. And I found a few in this Amazon version of this. So, I always go back to [the original.]
GT 36:49 Don’t they use OCR[1] for those?
Jonathan 36:51 They use OCR.
GT 36:52 Oh, and that’s why the errors. Yeah, that makes sense.
Jonathan 36:55 And it’s surprising. You would think [that it would be more accurate,] but this is an old type font, maybe it’s hard for the OCR to get– it’s close to perfect. But every so often, there’ll be some small variations. Plus, I found as I was reading in these, I haven’t read all of them, all eight volumes, but I’ve read quite a bit of it. And it’s very interesting, because you can see the relation. For example, one of the sermons we might talk about is, men are naturally God’s enemies.
GT 37:29 The natural man is an enemy to God.[2]
Jonathan 37:31 Yeah, that’s all in here. But the sermon right before that is about the trials of Joseph. And I thought, well, that’s interesting.
GT 37:39 Joseph of Egypt.
Jonathan 37:40 Joseph of Egypt. And so, I read through that, and it has a lot of Book of Mormon terminology in that sermon, as well. I haven’t taken the time to do this, because I’m hoping that some energetic young scholar will do this so I can get back to my artwork. I don’t think Joseph sat and read all eight volumes of this. But I do think he read lots of it. There’s a proximity of the sermons in here that is interesting. Because some of them sound very much like the Book of Mormon. He talks in here about the restoration of the church in the latter days. There’s a lot of terminology we’re familiar with right in these books. And they were right on sale in that Palmyra bookstore, when Joseph Smith was there.
GT 38:24 And was he, was Jonathan Edwards, a proponent that the Native Americans were descendants of the lost 10 tribes?
Jonathan 38:30 Yes, pretty much. I haven’t seen him really talk about that. But it is interesting you bring that up because…
GT 38:38 It was common of the day.
Jonathan 38:39 It was common in the day, but his son, Jonathan Edwards, Jr.–this is an interesting little anecdote. I don’t think I talked about too much in here. Jonathan Edwards wanted him to learn the Native American languages. And so, he sent him downriver up the Susquehanna River, kind of, to live with the Indians for a while. He had, actually, I should back up. When Edwards was a missionary to the Indians, he was living in their village. And his children became friends with the Indians, went to school with them and stuff. So, they kind of learned the language that way. But he wanted him to really get immersed in it. So, he sent him with some other missionaries to another Indian village. And, of course, Edwards was training all his kids in Latin and Greek and Hebrew. And his son wrote a small book about how the Indian languages, were based on Hebrew. And he found all these connections between the Indian languages that he was learning and living among, and the Hebrew. And he sent it to George Washington. Jonathan Edwards, Jr. did send it to George Washington and George Washington wrote back and said, “Well, this is very interesting, but I’m not a linguist. But I know this guy in Germany, who’s linguist, that would be very interested in this. You ought to write to him.” And so, there was, there was a whole effort to connect the languages of the Native Americans with Hebrew, as well as their customs. So they–I don’t remember I…
GT 40:06 These are Indians in Pennsylvania, at the time, right?
Jonathan 40:08 Western Massachusetts.
GT 40:10 So, would they be Iroquois?
Jonathan 40:11 Well, it was Western Massachusetts, primarily.
GT 40:14 Okay.
Jonathan 40:14 Yeah, there were several tribes.
GT 40:16 I’m trying to remember, Mo…
Jonathan 40:18 There’s a long name for one of the tribes that I don’t have off the top of my head. I have to look it up.
GT 40:24 I’m thinking Mohawks or Mohicans, were in that area.
Jonathan 40:26 Well, the seven nations, yeah, there were those among those. The specific tribes that he went to, I don’t remember. I’d have to look into that. And I can look into it pretty easily. It’s right here. But it’s something that your listeners can research. Or we can put it in the notes or something. But it is an interesting little thing. Now, of course, some modern scholars say, “Well, he didn’t really understand Hebrew well enough to make that connection,” or whatever. But the point is that Jonathan Edwards’ son made a direct connection between the Indian languages that he thought were based on Hebrew because of these connections. And I’m not a linguist. I can’t say.
GT 41:07 I need to get Brian Stubbs on.
Jonathan 41:10 Yeah.
GT 41:10 He said that there’s some Hebrew ties with Uto-Aztecan, but that’s like Ute, Piute, kind of Southwest United States. So, it’s very different from the northeast.
Jonathan 41:25 Oh, he’s done the work on the northeastern, he just hasn’t published it yet.
GT 41:29 Oh, he has?
Jonathan 41:30 I’ve talked to him about that. He has some really interesting work on that.
GT 41:34 I know Brian lives in the four corners area.
Jonathan 41:37 I know.
GT 41:37 I hate Zoom interviews, but I may have to.
Jonathan 41:41 Yeah, and it’d be interesting to talk to him about that. I don’t know if he’s looked into what Jonathan Edwards, Jr. wrote. But it is an interesting book. But that gives you kind of a flavor of how they were seeing those connections. I just, I don’t remember if…
GT 41:57 So can you tell us this? Does Brian have some sort of a tie with these Northeastern Indians?
Jonathan 42:05 Yeah, totally.
GT 42:06 With Hebrew?
Jonathan 42:06 Yeah.
GT 42:07 Really?
Jonathan 42:08 Yeah, but you’d need to talk to him about that. Talk to him about that. That’s all I can say. Because I don’t want to…
GT 42:19 Steal his thunder.
Jonathan 42:20 Well, that or even say something that he would disagree with, because I totally defer to him on that stuff. I’m only saying that Jonathan Edwards son, was a real proponent of it. And Edwards, of course, talked a lot about the Indians. And there was a famous missionary to the Indians, named David Brainard. I think he was a graduate of Yale. He might have gotten kicked out of Yale, but he was a little bit iconoclastic. But he went up to live with the Indians and kind of become like them. And he lived with him for a long time. And he wrote. His journal was fairly extensive. And then he came to visit the Edwards family and stayed with him for a few months, and he ended up dying there. And when he did, he gave his journals to Jonathan Edwards, to kind of have or keep, and Edwards published those. He edited them, added some commentary and published them and they were Edwards’ best known work. It became a missionary manual for Christian missionaries for 100 years or so. And it was published, I think, in 1740-1750, somewhere in there. And it’s fascinating to read through that. I have that on my Kindle, as well.
Jonathan 43:34 And it’s not part of the eight volumes. The eight volumes have some references to it. So it’s a separate volume. And I haven’t found that that was being sold in the bookstore. But it was so common, it was a widely held book by Christian missionaries. I’m pretty convinced that Joseph read that, too, or at least part of it. But he talks about his missionary labor with the Indians. And that’s one I highly recommend. People have asked me, “Why don’t you do a book on Jonathan Edwards for LDS people?” And I thought, “Yeah, okay.”
GT 44:06 So, that’s what Infinite Goodness is all about?
Jonathan 44:08 Well, it’s a little bit of an introduction. There’s so much more. I have my database of the links between Edwards and Joseph Smith is as long as this, but it’s a separate, a whole separate thing. I just have a few allusions to it in here. There’s a lot to it. Well, in this whole process–so, I’d been working on this for, let’s say, two years, something like that. And I was telling a few people that I knew about it. They said, “Oh, you’ve got to write about this. You’ve got to publish this book.” The problem I had was threefold. One was time. But two was, I just kept coming across more and more and more and I felt like–it’s like when I used to make movies. A movie is never finished, because you can always tweak it. And I felt like, in a movie situation, you have a deadline you say, “Okay, that’s it.” Even though it’s not perfect. Right? And that’s kind of how I do my books, too. I could spend another year on them to make them all perfect. But I want to get them out there because I want people to learn about these new perspectives, and just consider them and, hopefully, do more research on it. And so, I had that problem of it, never ending it. In fact, in the last two weeks, I found even more Edwards allusions of the Book of Mormon. And it extends beyond the Book of Mormon to the Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price and Joseph’s private writings, as well. And so that’s a never-ending thing that I finally had to say, “Okay, at this point, I’m going to do the book.” But the third one was, I knew I’d have a ton of resistance to this. Because there was the frame, the stone hat people, of course, say there’s no way Joseph could have done all this. He had, he was a blank slate, the Lord just wrote on it and told him what to say, which I don’t agree with.
Tight vs Loose Translation
GT 45:55 Let’s talk about tight versus loose translation. So, tight is the words appeared on the stone or the Urim and Thummim, whatever it is, and Joseph just read them. Whereas loose translation is, Joseph used his own vocabulary to figure out certain things.
Jonathan 46:14 Yeah, and there’s, also another distinction, and that is that Joseph said that the title page was a literal translation. He didn’t say that about the rest of the book. And so, when they talk about tight and loose, I think you have, there’s a range within the text, as well. Some of it, I think, is more literal, like the title page. And some of it is more, kind of like Blake Ostler talked about the expansion of the text. For example, I don’t think King Benjamin used the words, “The natural man is an enemy to God.” I think he expressed that concept, and Joseph translated that into saying the natural man as an enemy to God, because it was an allusion, actually, to Jonathan Edwards.
GT 46:57 And that’s what Jonathan Edwards would say.
Jonathan 46:59 Yeah. Well I give this comparison. The Book of Mormon keeps talking about the law of Moses, but never explains it, right. I keep referring to China, because that was my most recent experience living over there. So, if a Chinese person picks up the Book of Mormon and reads it, it talks about law of Moses. They’ve never heard of that before. They don’t [know.] Is this a traffic law? Is it some kind of how the government’s run? It’s just a word to them, the Law of Moses.
GT 47:26 They don’t even know who Moses was.
Jonathan 47:27 Yeah, they’ve never heard of the Bible. So, in order to understand that reference in the Book of Mormon, it’s an allusion to the Bible. You have to have the Bible to understand it. Right? The Bible explains the law of Moses. So when King Benjamin said, “The national man is an enemy to God,” he doesn’t really explain it. But it’s an allusion to Jonathan Edwards’ sermon on that. I put the whole sermon in the book, because I wanted people to see how rich of an allusion that is. It’s just a simple phrase, the natural man is an enemy to God. But if you read it in light of what Edwards had expanded on that and explained it, then it has so much more meaning.
GT 48:03 Now, what was Edwards’ background? Was he Presbyterian?
Jonathan 48:07 Some people say he was Calvinist, but he later said, “Well, don’t hold me to anything John Calvin said.” He was kind of his own person, really. He was not Catholic. He didn’t like the Catholics, of course. Nobody in that part of New England did. He had his own church, his own kind of denomination. This Great Awakening was just a revivalist kind of a thing, trying to get everybody to return to God. And I’m sure some doctrinal or historical expert could say exactly what denomination he was in. But I don’t read his work that way at all. Because I see him kind of like he had said, he inherited Calvinism, but he didn’t want to be held to that, because he went far beyond that. And he was kind of his own person. And that’s where, when I read that, people would say people like Terryl Givens would say, “Oh, Jonathan Edwards was this kind of a person,” based on that sermon, the Angry God sermon or a few other things that he wrote. But that really confines him and pigeonholes him. I don’t think he intended to be that.
GT 49:21 Now, Calvinism–I wish Steve Pynakker was here, because he could tell me exactly.
Jonathan 49:25 Yeah.
GT 49:26 That’s once saved, always saved. Is that what that is?
Jonathan 49:28 Yeah, I don’t want to even try to describe Calvinism or Arminianism, or any of that stuff, because you get into a lot of doctrinal intricacies and distinctions that, to me are maybe historically interesting. But they weren’t interesting to me to understand Jonathan Edwards. And the reason is, I don’t think Joseph Smith adopted Jonathan Edwards theology at all. I think he used it as perspective. Edwards would explain the scriptures. In some cases, Edwards would say, “Well, the King James says this, but a better translation is this. And he would do blending. Edward would blend different passages together.
GT 50:11 It sounds like Adam Clarke.
Jonathan 50:13 Well, yeah. All of them do it. Every minister does it. Every sacrament meeting talk does it to some degree. But, Edwards, it would have a very, kind of an erudite approach where he was using his own translations of some of these things. And so…
GT 50:30 I mean, this brings up a whole other thing, especially, because it seems like it opposes Brian Hales quite a bit with this whole well, is Joseph Smith reading Adam Clarke and Jonathan Edwards and this Dean guy you mentioned earlier, and The Late War, like, is he just compiling? I talked with Bill Davis, William Davis.
Jonathan 50:54 Yeah.
GT 50:55 And he talked about how Robin Williams was a genius where he could pull out all these different references and tie them together. He said that while Robin Williams was a comedic genius, Joseph Smith was a religious genius, in that he could do the same sort of thing. But then we get into, “But he couldn’t compose a letter,” whatever.
Jonathan 51:23 Which I think is just a bogus thing.
GT 51:26 So does Davis.
Jonathan 51:28 Yeah, well, he wrote a letter to Oliver Cowdery which is in the Joseph Smith Papers, right after he finished the translation, and it’s very articulate. Now, you could say, “Well, he learned how to write.”
GT 51:37 His 1832 account is pretty bad, though. Pretty poor grammar.
Jonathan 51:42 Well, grammar is a different thing. I mean, he didn’t really learn grammar until he moved to Kirtland. This is an interesting point, too, that some people have overlooked. If you look in the early revelations in the Doctrine & Covenants, before they were changed, they’re very much like the Book of Mormon, grammar wise. Like, it would say…
GT 52:03 Like the Book of Commandments?
Jonathan 52:05 The Book of Commandments, yeah. Okay. And there aren’t very many that we have of the original handwritten ones. So, the Book of Commandments was the first publication of some of them. But between the Book of Commandments and the Doctrine and Covenants in 1835, a lot of those early revelations were changed, to change “which” to “who” for example. There’s a lot of those kinds of changes, which also they did in the Book of Mormon from 1830 to 1837, they made similar changes. And that’s because Joseph moved to Kirtland. They had the School the Prophets. Oliver Cowdery and who else was there? Well, Sidney Rigdon.
GT 52:43 Phelps, I think.
Jonathan 52:44 Phelps, maybe, but also his other counselor, Frederick G. Williams. They were educating Joseph more about grammar. I think that’s why he was…
GT 52:53 So, Joseph could read all this Jonathan Edwards, but he just couldn’t pick up the grammar?
Jonathan 52:57 Sure, yeah. Well, that’s how it is. I have a friend who’s an English professor at the U. And she says reading and writing are completely separate disciplines, and that they teach him separately. But even the way your mind works is completely separate. You can read all kinds of things, but you can’t write, unless you learn to write. It doesn’t transfer. To some degree, obviously, it does a little bit. But you can read Jonathan Edwards or the New York Times or whatever, it doesn’t mean you can write a coherent letter. Although in this case, Joseph could write a coherent letter. It doesn’t mean you’re going to have all the perfect grammar that you have in the published material. And so, for Joseph Smith, he never liked to write. He always had a spokesman. And that’s why Oliver Cowdery was–one of the reasons he was the Assistant President of the Church was to be kind of the one writing, doing the writing on behalf of the First Presidency. You had Sidney Rigdon doing some and Oliver Cowdery doing some. And so, for Joseph Smith to not be able to sit there and write out a long sermon, I’m told, I don’t know the details, but from the Church historians, that he only had one prepared sermon ever. He gave over 200 sermons, and they were all extemporaneous.
GT 54:17 Well, William Davis says that Joseph was trained as a Methodist Exhorter.
Jonathan 54:21 Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.
GT 54:25 I mean, he’s that whole laying down heads and all that.
Jonathan 54:27 Now you’re getting into the one of the reasons I delayed writing this book or publishing this book, because I anticipated that critics would say, “Well, now you’re proving that he was plagiarizing Jonathan Edwards.”
GT 54:37 Exactly. Exactly. Because I will tell you from our last interview, I don’t go on Reddit very often, but once in a while I do and then there was like, “Oh, can you believe this Jonathan Neville, oh the logic leaps these apologists do.”
Jonathan 54:52 Yeah.
GT 54:52 I mean, I chuckled. But yeah, I mean, that is a critical view of your work is that “Oh, Joseph’s plagiarizing all this stuff, and, therefore we’ve come up with a naturalistic explanation for the Book of Mormon.”
Jonathan 55:11 Yeah.
GT 55:11 How do you respond to that?
Jonathan 55:12 Well, twofold. One is I say any translator can only use the words in his lexicon, in his mind. So, however, Joseph–any translator–Well, let me back up. These critics, let me give you an example. I think it was the CES Letter, one of those had an explanation of how Joseph plagiarized from The Late War, for example. So, I took their paragraph explaining that, and I googled it to show how they plagiarized all these other sources. And the reason is, the fallacy of the plagiarism argument is it’s a common language. You can’t have a common language without borrowing from other sources you’re familiar with. But this gets back to the lexicon of the translator. A translator can’t write or say anything that he doesn’t already know. I’ve translated things into French and back. And I can’t use a French word that I don’t know. Right? So, if I come across an English word, I’m not sure what is in French, I have to look it up and learn the French word. Or if I’m reading French, and there’s a word, I don’t know, I have to look it up. But if I’m just translating from my own knowledge, I know French pretty well. But I can translate most things in English into French and vice versa. But that’s because I’ve learned it. But I can’t come up with a word that I’ve never seen or heard before. It’s like anytime you’re studying a foreign language or even English, the first time you learn a word, all of a sudden you see it everywhere, right? And that’s how the nature of language is in our lexicon.
Jonathan 56:43 Or you buy a new car, and then you see that car everywhere.
Jonathan 56:45 Yeah, exactly. So, when you have Joseph as a translator, he would naturally translate using the language he was familiar with. How else could he translate it? He didn’t translate it into French. He didn’t know any French. He didn’t translate it into Hebrew. He translated it into English. So, the question all along has been, “Well, did Joseph know this terminology well enough to translate the Book of Mormon.” What I’m saying is yes, he did, and he was prepared from a young age to do precisely that. Now, William, what was his last name again, on the vision?
GT 57:22 Davis.
Jonathan 57:23 William Davis. He thinks Joseph composed it, based on the headlines or the mnemonic devices. And I understand that, that’s a perspective.
GT 57:33 I mean, the one thing about William Davis is he says, “You don’t have to not have faith.”
Jonathan 57:41 Right.
GT 57:42 Like, Brian Hales hates William Davis.[3]
Jonathan 57:46 Yeah, I know.
GT 57:47 And Williams is like, “You can do this in a faithful perspective.”
Jonathan 57:50 That’s right.
GT 57:51 But most people who read William Davis, don’t read it from a faithful perspective, they read it from a naturalistic perspective, “And this is how Joseph did it.”
Jonathan 58:00 Yeah. Well, you know what’s hilarious to me about that debate? To me the stone in the hat, and William Davis is the same thing. There’s no difference.
GT 58:07 What do you mean?
Jonathan 58:08 Because if Joseph read these words off the stone, then they were provided there by someone else. Right? If Joseph composed it or kind of recited or performed it the way William Davis says, then the words weren’t part from an ancient text either. In other words, the stone of the hat doesn’t come from an ancient text. It comes from this MIST: mysterious, incognito spiritual, supernatural translator. It isn’t from the text. And William Davis’s approach is, it’s not from the text, but it could be based on faith or inspiration even. So, I think they’re saying the same thing. They’re just saying, when Davis is saying that it was in Joseph’s mind. The SITH[4] people are saying it was on the stone.
GT 58:53 Well, the other thing, because in a lot of ways you and William Davis are very similar in the fact that William says that Joseph was a lot more educated than people give him credit for. And you’re saying the same thing.
Jonathan 59:07 Yeah, I agree with that.
GT 59:08 And then, he was trained as a Methodist exhorter, probably studied Jonathan Edwards, as well as whoever else were the big people of the day.
Jonathan 59:16 But there’s a fundamental difference between me and William Davis.
GT 59:20 Okay.
Jonathan 59:20 Or me, and the SITH guys, what I call the SITH-sayers. And that is that I think Joseph was translating the plates. I don’t think he was imagining it or reading it off a stone. I think he had the plates in front of him. He would translate to the bottom of the plate, turn the plate, translate to the bottom of the plate. And that’s one of the reasons for…
GT 59:40 They weren’t under a cloth?
Jonathan 59:42 No, not when he was translating. He would keep them under a cloth, because he wasn’t allowed to show them to people. But not when he was translating. This gets back to this issue of the evidence of the stone in the hat. Let’s come back to that. I want to make sure this distinction is clear, because I think Joseph Smith had to have the plates when he was translating plates. I don’t even see how that’s…
GT 1:00:06 So, because here’s the thing. A lot of times with the old LDS art, and this is where the critics come by. Joseph’s got his finger, like he’s running across the page. Everybody’s like, “There’s no way that happened. They were hidden under a cloth. Joseph’s looking in a hat, blocking out all the light.”
Jonathan 1:00:23 No, I don’t buy that at all.
GT 1:00:24 You just reject that whole thing.
Jonathan 1:00:25 Yeah, I do, because I think…
GT 1:00:27 So, you like the old church art?
Jonathan 1:00:28 Yeah, totally. Well, the problem with the old Church art is he wasn’t using the Urim and Thummin in most of them. He was just standing there looking at it. But that makes sense, too. Because remember, he said that he copied the characters? How’s he going to copy the characters, unless he’s looking at the plates? Some people think he used the graphite thing and rubbed it, did a rubbing of the characters, which is possible. Maybe that’s what he meant by copying them. But a more ordinary use of the term would be to actually look at the character and copy it, right? And so, if he did a rubbing, let’s say he might have done a rubbing, but typically a rubbing, you have extraneous marks and different things. So, if you want to really study the characters, you have to copy them. And it’s also interesting in the Book of Mormon, it says that the interpreters enlarge the mind or whatever. I should have thought of that verse. Anyway, it’s possible to work like a magnifying glass, too, the Urim and Thummin, where it would magnify the characters. I think it was Orson Pratt who said there were very fine characters, so they wouldn’t be easy to read without some kind of magnification device.
Jonathan 1:01:38 I think Joseph Smith actually sat down behind a curtain, with Martin Harris on the other side, or Emma or Oliver Cowdery, until Oliver Cowdery was allowed to translate, that would have changed it. [I think he,] actually was going through the characters, because he had learned the characters. He said he studied them and translated the characters. So, he learned the characters, and then translated the text. And he used the Urim and Thummim, maybe there’s a magnifying glass, for one thing, but also because it would give him a literal interpretation of what that word meant. But he couldn’t just read what the literal interpretation was, other than on the title page. And it was a literal translation. But the rest of it, he had to adapt to our modern Christian or 1800’s Christian terminology, so that people could understand what it was saying.
Jonathan 1:02:34 I think so. They often said at the end of a translation session, he would come back and just resume where he was without having it read back? Well, that’s what you would do, if you were looking at the plates, you’d read to the bottom of the plate, “Okay, we reached the end of that plate. Let’s go take a break, come back, start at the top of the next plate.” He wouldn’t have to have it read back. That’s what a translator would do, if he was translating from an existing document. So that’s where I disagree with William Davis on his approach, as well as anybody who believes in the stone in the hat stuff. I think he was actually translating the plates. Think about it. There’s so many things that don’t make sense with this stone in the hat. Because Moroni said, “Look.” He was writing to the translator, Joseph Smith, and he said, “Don’t touch the sealed portion,” right? Well, why would he even have to tell him that if he wasn’t looking at the plates anyway? Why would Moroni have to warn him not to open the seal, if he wasn’t looking at the plates? He should have said, “Don’t let the stone read the sealed portion,” you know? It just doesn’t make sense.
Jonathan 1:04:43 The other thing is when the Lord said, “You have to translate the engravings on the plates of Nephi.” What kind of a commandment is that? He didn’t know what plates he was reading, according to SITH-sayers, he was just reading these words off the stone. So, why would the Lord say, “You have to translate these other plates?” The stone would just tell him what to say. So, the stone in the hat narrative, and William Davis’s narrative don’t make sense in light of what the revelations say. You can say, there’s all kinds of ways to use sophistry three to say, “Well, the revelations were wrong,” or whatever. But when you read what the revelations actually say and what Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery actually said, there’s no room in there for a stone at all.
Jonathan 1:04:25 So, then you get into, well, what is the evidence of the stone in the hat, and that’s what you were getting into a minute ago. So, the critics, including Richard Bushman, he was relying on what David Whitmer, primarily and to some degree maybe Emma, although Emma’s testimony is kind of self-contradictory and dubious to begin with, which we could get into if you want to talk about that. But primarily, David Whitmer is the one who was talking about the stone in the hat over his long course starting in the late 1870s, early 1870s, I guess, for the next 10 or 15 years of so.
GT 1:05:04 An Address to all Believers. Is that the one?
Jonathan 1:05:05 An Address to All Believers, that was one of his final publications, but he was talking about the stone in the hat experience. There’s no doubt about it. And what I pointed out…
GT 1:05:15 Didn’t he have his own stone?
Jonathan 1:05:16 A lot of them did, yeah. Yeah. I don’t know if he ever claimed to translate anything with it. I don’t think he did. But as I pointed out, Joseph gave that stone to Olver Cowdrey. And that’s one of the things that SITH-sayers say is that, well, he gave it Oliver Cowdery because he didn’t need it anymore because he had finished translating the Book of Mormon. My attitude is he gave to Oliver Cowdery because he didn’t need to use it to help the faith of his followers by doing a demonstration. Remember, there are accounts of people who asked Joseph for a revelation, and he was started dictating it and they would say, no, we want you to use the stone. Right. So the stone was like a talisman or something that they needed to have faith in. Because they believe that the seer stones were important to receive revelation, where Joseph didn’t need them. He knew he didn’t need them. But he used it anyway to help the face of people he was giving revelations to, I think it was even his brother asked him to use a seer stone on one occasion.
GT 1:06:20 Well didn’t Hyrum ask him to use it for the polygamy revelation?
Jonathan 1:06:22 Yeah. That’s the one I meant, because Joseph said he knew it by heart. He could recite it anytime. And Hyrum said no, “use the seer stone.” So Joseph said, “Okay, I’ll read it off that if you want.” But he didn’t need to because he knew it by heart. And there’s a very interesting article that may or may not get published. I didn’t write it. But it’s about Joseph having a perfect memory, a photographic memory. And there’s lots of evidence of it, not only in his own life, but also in the scriptures. I wish I could talk about it. But we’ll wait until that gets published. But it’s, yeah, I’ve heard people say…
GT 1:07:00 So there is an article coming out that says that Joseph had a photographic memory?
Jonathan 1:07:03 Yeah. And, but it’s important to think about Joseph Smith’s role is a prophet, because I think I’ve opened one of my books with what President Oaks said about President Nelson at the birthday party. And he said, he’s been around all the prophets, and he’s seen how the Lord has prepared him for the position that they’re in. Why would Joseph Smith be any different from that, if the Lord knew he was going to be a translator of the Book of Mormon, as well as a receiver of revelations? Why wouldn’t the Lord prepare him to do that by giving him the education that he needed? Not a formal school education, but by reading the Scriptures, the Bible, as well as the Christian writings that were in his area? But anyway, getting back to this, the premise for this whole thing, that was I knew that was going to be an objection to this book, which I thought, Well, why hassle it? I’ll just keep this to myself and love the Book of Mormon.
{End of Part 1}
[1] Optical Character Recognition.
[2] Mosiah 3:19
[3] Brian clarified my statement. “I want to clarify Rick’s comment that I (Brian Hales) “hate” William Davis. I expect Rick meant that I disagree with Davis’s assertions (made in his dissertation and book, Visions in a Seer Stone) that JS possessed the intellectual abilities needed to dictate the Book of Mormon. I do not hate William Davis and my brief interactions with him suggest he’s a nice guy. I count him as a pioneer. He is the very first author advancing the JS-was-smart-enough theory to try to tell us what was going on in JS’s mind while dictating. It seems that everyone else is just making the assumption without connecting the dots on the skills JS would have needed to successfully recite all 269,320 words.” See https://gospeltangents.com/2023/01/jonathan-edwards-influence-on-book-of-mormon/#comment-898
[4] Stone in the Hat.
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