Oliver Cowdery is famous for trying to translate the Book of Mormon in D&C 8 and 9. Did he try to use a dowsing rod to do so, or is there another explanation? Jonathan Neville & Jim Lucas are co-authors of “By Means of the Urim & Thummim” and say Oliver is the best witness for translation without a seer stone. Check out our conversation….
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Why Oliver is Best Witness Against Seer Stones
Jonathan 00:36 But let me just make a comment on that. We’re not trying to convince anybody of anything. We look at this and we say, okay. Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery were explicit. They said he used the Urim and Thummim that came with the plates. Other people had other versions of it.
GT 00:52 So since you mentioned Oliver, because D&C 9, “study it out in your mind.” Everybody is familiar with that. But supposedly, the original versions of D&C 9 were like, Joseph said to Oliver, well, you can use your rod because apparently Oliver had a dowsing rod.
Jim 01:09 That’s D&C 8.
GT 01:10 D&C 8.
Jonathan 01:11 That’s not what it says, that was referring to something else, not the translation.
GT 01:15 It was?
Jonathan 01:16 Yeah, using the rod. The Lord had told them I’ve taught you other things. In fact, we could pull it up and see. But you’re talking about the gift of Aaron. Now it says now says the gift of Aaron. Before it said to use of the rod.
GT 01:30 And it wasn’t the translation of the Book of Mormon?
Jonathan 01:32 He wasn’t using the gift of Aaron for the translation.
GT 01:34 What was it for?
Jonathan 01:35 He used that for other spiritual guidance and information that he was getting. It wasn’t the translation per se. It didn’t say you could use the gift of Aaron for the translation. We can look it up.
GT 01:46 I was just talking about that, and I said how was Oliver going to use a dowsing rod? Are the words going to appear on the road, or how does that work?
Jim 01:58 D&C 8, that was a different conversation.
GT 01:59 You don’t think he was trying to translate the Book of Mormon?
Jim 02:02 He was trying to.
GT 02:05 With the rod.
Jim 02:06 No, with the Urim and Thummim.
GT 02:08 You think he was trying to translate with the Urim and Thummim.
Jonathan 02:08 Zenas Gurley addressed this too. He said no one other than Oliver Cowdery ever saw the Urim and Thummim until the Three Witnesses.
GT 02:18 Until the Three Witnesses?
Jonathan 02:19 Until witnesses saw the Urim and Thummim.
Jim 02:20 In the angelic manifestation that made them the Three Witnesses.
GT 02:24 Well, if there was no curtain between Oliver and Joseph, wouldn’t he have seen the Urim & Thummim?
Jonathan 02:29 Yeah, that’s what I said. No one other than Oliver saw it.
GT 02:32 Oh, other than Oliver. I misheard you.
Jonathan 02:35 But go ahead and talk. I want to pull this up, because I want to show you it’s a different thing that he is talking about.
Jim 02:39 Okay, so that’s one thing from Emma, where she’s clear that she needs to go back and look at her Times and Seasons. It’s 50 years later, and she did see Joseph used the seer stone to do his demonstration. And David Whitmer said that she was there when that happened. So that would explain it, and for a short explanation to rebut the Spaulding theory it’s pretty direct and to the point, saying, Oh, no, no. There was no manuscript because he had his face in his hat, so he couldn’t be looking at a manuscript. So that’s a good rebuttal for the Spaulding theory which was the main thing that everybody was concerned about in the 1870s. Because it was universal by then. So, there are questions. We’re not saying that that letter is a phony letter. We’re not saying that she didn’t write that letter. But we’re saying you’ve got to look at it in its full context. People lift that one little sentence out of that letter, and then you’re taking it out of the much bigger context.
GT 03:51 Well these people are not just your average historians. These are like Richard Bushman. A lot of people are going to trust what Richard Bushman says.
Jim 04:00 Okay.
Jonathan 04:01 But here’s my response to all the historians. None of them are witnesses. All they’re doing is interpreting the same information that’s available to everyone. So, we look at it. I’ve been criticized because I’m looking at all this from a lawyer’s perspective. It’s inherent at this point, but I look at it as just analytical. When someone says something happened, how do they know that that happened? And when they don’t tell you how they know it happened, you can assume and infer that it was a rumor. It was secondhand. It was hearsay, etc.
Examining Oliver’s Rod of Revelation
Jonathan 04:33 So let me get back to this D&C 8 though, because you conflated a little bit. I wanted to make sure that everybody understands.
GT 04:39 I think it’s not just me conflating those together, because I’ve heard that from Clair Barrus and a lot of others.
Jonathan 04:43 If they are, then they’re all making an error because it says right here. This starts off talking about the spirit of revelation. Right?
Jim 04:53 This is D&C 8.
Jonathan 04:54 This is D&C 8. “Behold this spirit by which Moses brought the children of Israel over the Red Sea,” and so on. And this is thy gift and you should apply it. And then in verse 6, it says, “Now this is not all thy gift; for you have another gift, which is the gift of Aaron.” And originally it said, the gift of the rod or using the rod. “Behold, it has told you many things; Behold, there is no other power save the power of God that can cause this gift of Aaron to be with you. Therefore, doubt not.” But it says it’s another gift, a separate gift. And that it had told them things in the past. It had nothing to do with the translation of the Book of Mormon. And that is pretty explicit when you when you read the whole thing in context. That’s verse 6. “This is not all thy gift, the gift of revelation, for you have another gift, which is the gift of working with the rod” originally. Actually, they changed it twice. I don’t remember the interim one. But it was a gift of working with the rod and it was something else. And then Sidney Rigdon said, “Well, we ought to just call the gift of Aaron and that’s how it ended up. But it says, “Behold, it has told you many things,” right? And so, working with a rod is common practice even today. I mean, I have experience with that in my work when I was working for a landscaping company. That’s how we find water. So, it can tell you things in a lot of different ways. But it’s not the translation that it was talking about. It makes that pretty clear here at the distinction.
GT 06:23 See, wait a minute. Because I just pulled it up on mine. D&C 8 the preface says “revelation given through Joseph Smith, the prophet to Oliver Cowdery at Harmony, Pennsylvania, April 1829. In the course of translation of the Book of Mormon,” it says it right there. “Oliver, who continued to serve as a scribe writing at the prophet’s dictation, desired to be endowed with the gift of translation. The Lord responded to his supplication and granting this revelation.” So, I have a hard time believing you when you say this had nothing to do with the translation.
Jonathan 06:52 It’s right here. I’ll read it again. Because the Lord in the first few verses, talks about the spirit of revelation.
GT 06:57 But isn’t this the context we’re talking about? Isn’t that preface the context?
Jonathan 06:59 Yeah, it is. But that’s why it’s important. It says, “after Lord explains the gift of revelation that he would use for translation,” he says, “Now this is not all thy gift; for you have another gift, which is the gift of Aaron, which has told you many things.” It’s a separate gift. It clarifies the gift of translation is not your only gift. You also have this gift, the gift of Aaron, that says here, that has told you many things in the past. Right? So, it’s not talking about how he’s going to use that gift to do the translation. I don’t know how it could be any more clear. Because it says, this gift of using inspiration in connection with the translation is not all thy gift. You have another gift that you’ve used in the past. And then it says, the reason the Lord brought that up is he says there’s no other power other than the power of God that can cause this gift of Aaron to work with you. So, in other words, I used my power to help you with this gift of Aaron that you’ve used in the past.
GT 08:04 Or the gift of the rod.
Jonathan 08:05 Or the gift of the rod, of working with the rod. And then it says, doubt not about the gift of God that you can be able to use in the future with the translation. But he made it clear that he had another gift. This inspiration to translate is one gift I’m giving you now. You have another gift that you used in the past, and that was also my power.
GT 08:27 Then we get to D&C 9 and he’s like, Well, you misunderstood?
Jonathan 08:31 That’s right. He misunderstood.
GT 08:33 Study it out in your mind.
Jonathan 08:34 That’s right, because he thought all he had to do was ask. But Joseph had already told us that when he first got the plates, he had to copy the characters and translate them. It was an effort. He didn’t just ask.
GT 08:47 Well, that was one of the interesting things because we hear, concerning the Book of Abraham that there’s the Egyptian alphabet and letters and whatever. And then there’s a big controversy about that. I was surprised when I read Gerrit Dirkmaat’s book that he did the same thing with the Book of Mormon. They were trying to figure out an alphabet and that sort of thing.
Jonathan 09:09 Well, I mean, that’s right in Joseph Smith history. The first thing he did with him when he got the plates.
GT 09:14 I haven’t heard about the alphabet, or maybe I just didn’t remember.
Jonathan 09:16 It wasn’t an alphabet. It was characters.
Jim 09:18 He was copying out the characters.
GT 09:22 Well it sounded very similar to what he did with the Book of Abraham.
Jonathan 09:24 Yeah, although he didn’t have the Urim and Thummim with the Book of Abraham. I mean, we ought to talk about the Book of Abraham sometime. To me it was an entirely different process. But this one, he said with the Urim and Thummim, he translated the characters after he copied them. I know that the narrative that I’ve heard from church historians is, when he first started, he thought he could do it himself. And then after he lost 116 pages, he realized he couldn’t do it himself. So, he had to rely on the stone in the hat, which, to me is a non sequitur.
GT 09:54 I know that Richard Bushman his case is, he just found it easier to use the stone in the hat, rather than the Urim and Thummim. It just made it easier. In looking at those, they’re so big.
Jonathan 10:06 Well, we don’t know how big they were.
GT 10:07 I’ll have to put a picture where I have them up because one of my listeners sent me 3D-printed lenses or something.
Jonathan 10:16 People speculate on how big they are.
GT 10:17 But it’s very similar to what you have on your hat there.
Jonathan 10:20 Yeah.
GT 10:21 And so I was just like, these are so huge. It would be hard to use.
Jonathan 10:24 Well, you could speculate that they were really big or any size. They were just larger than normal spectacles. I have a pair of spectacles from the 1820s. And they’re much smaller than Jim’s, they’re really small. For someone in the 1820s Jim’s spectacles would look large.
Jim 10:44 Right.
Jonathan 10:45 So I think it was William that said that they were larger than a normal man today would wear. But when you look at what they were wearing in the 1820s, they were small. Think about it this way too. Moroni said these are prepared for you to translate the Book of Mormon. Would Moroni give him something that he couldn’t use? That doesn’t make sense.
GT 11:05 Oliver’s rod didn’t work.
Jonathan 11:07 Well Oliver wasn’t using the rod for that. That was a separate gift he had used before. Like I said, I can use a rod, and it works great.
GT 11:16 Really?
Jonathan 11:16 Yeah.
Jim 11:17 To find water.
GT 11:19 You’ve found water?
Jonathan 11:18 Oh, all the time. Yeah. Well, I used to do it as a job.
GT 11:21 I didn’t know that.
Jonathan 11:22 In landscaping, because we’d go to a project. There are underground sprinklers. You don’t know where they are. So, you have to use rods to find all the underground sprinklers.
GT 11:29 Wow.
Jonathan 11:30 I’ve had other experiences with a rod. We could talk about that some other time.
GT 11:34 I want to get a video of that.
Jonathan 11:35 But there are professional rodsmen.
GT 11:36 I know Wayne May supposedly uses them all the time.
Jonathan 11:38 Yeah. Well, okay, I’ll give you an anecdote just to give an advance on a future topic maybe. But I learned to use a rod at BYU because I majored in agricultural economics. When our professors was a professional rodsman that would find water.
GT 11:56 Really?
Jonathan 11:57 Yeah. And so, I’ve taken some of these BYU scholars out with the rods to show them how they work. And they worked for about half of them. They worked and they couldn’t believe it. They can find things in the ground with rods. And you may be a rodsman too. I don’t know. I’ve tried it with my kids.
GT 12:13 I’ve never tried.
Jonathan 12:14 Well, sometime we should do it because it is amazing how effective it is.
GT 12:18 You’ll have to teach me. You’ll have to make me a believer.
Jim 12:19 Okay. Just to give you another citation, Steve Pynnaker, he’s fine with the idea of rods. He says that his family used rods all the time when they were farmers in Indiana.
Jonathan 12:37 It’s a common practice. It’s just that they’ve done scientific studies of it.
GT 12:42 I’m surprised to hear it’s a common practice at BYU.
Jonathan 12:46 In agriculture. I was in agricultural economics.
GT 12:49 You and Ezra Taft Benson.
Jonathan 12:51 Yeah. The Ezra Taft Benson Institute was part of it. But farmers use it all the time. I mean, how else do you find water? We had a cabin up here in Big Cottonwood. And I wanted to develop a well. And how do you find water? Well, you use the rod. And I found water and dug a well and had water. So, I mean, it really is a common thing. Unless you’re living in the farm or in the wilderness somewhere where you need to find water, you may not know about it, but it’s a common thing. And it isn’t just water you can find, which I’ll tell you about sometime.
Jim 13:28 Okay.
Jonathan 13:29 We digressed quite a bit. But the point I wanted to make was that when you read the D&C 8, he says it’s another gift, the whole thing with the rod. It’s another gift. It’s not the one having to do with the translation. And I know people conflate it, and I don’t see how. Because I don’t know how it could be more explicit, that this was a gift he had that had told them things in the past.
GT 13:48 Do they need to rewrite the preface?
Jonathan 13:49 The preface is fine. Because it was talking about a gift of translation.
Jim 13:57 The first part.
Jonathan 13:58 But that was for perspective.
GT 13:59 So let me make sure. This is what I hear you saying. So, correct me if I’m making any mistakes here. Oliver wants to translate the Book of Mormon with the rod.
Jonathan 14:09 No. Already you’re off. He just wanted to translate the Book of Mormon.
GT 14:14 Okay.
Jonathan 14:14 He wanted the gift of translation. That’s one way to put it.
GT 14:18 And how was he going to use it? How was he going to [translate?] With the Urim and Thummim?
Jonathan 14:21 With the Urim and Thummim. And the Lord said, this is a gift of inspiration and so on. It was sort of like telling Oliver, look. You have another spiritual gift that I’ve helped you with in the past. This is an additional gift I’m giving you. Okay? And because Oliver may have said, well, how can I get spiritual gift? The Lord says you already have another spiritual gift that’s told you things in the past. This is an additional one. It works in a different way, so to speak. I’m actually surprised when people think that the rod has anything to do with the translation. Because it says right there, you have another gift you’ve used in the past. To me, I wouldn’t be so emphatic with David Whitmer.
Jim 15:06 He really hadn’t done any translating before that.
GT 15:08 I mean it’s such a famous scripture. “Study it out in your mind.”
Jonathan 15:10 Well, that’s in the next section when he is talking about the gift of translation.
GT 15:11 Well, 8 and 9 seem like they are brothers.
Jonathan 15:15 They’re connected. But the gift of the rod or the gift of Aaron was a separate gift that Oliver had before he ever met Joseph Smith, and that he had used in the past to learn things. So, he never used it to translate. It just said that he told them things in the past. Seriously, I had never thought that people would conflate those two gifts. So, I guess I haven’t read enough to see the rationale. But the wording is pretty clear, I think.
Jim 15:46 And to get back. Also, another thing that no one ever thought to conflate before was the seer stone and the Urim and Thummim.
Jonathan 15:55 Yeah, good point.
GT 15:58 I don’t say no one because I think a lot of people conflate those because that’s what the Church explains.
Jim 16:03 No, I’m saying now they do. But that was never done in the past.
Why Emma isn’t Reliable?
Jim 16:10 Emma wrote this letter, but she said the lost pages were done with the Urim and Thummim. She was referring to interpreters, because she then says, oh, but then they use the seer stone. She refers to the seer stone as a separate thing. David Whitmer, we have an account from Edward Stephenson when he visited David Whitmer, where Stephenson says that David Whitmer, this is an 1887, insisted that the interpreters be referred to as the Urim and Thummim. And then he referred to the seer stone as a separate thing. So even the two primary witnesses that are used to backup the stone in the hat account, made a clear distinction that the term Urim and Thummim only applied to the Nephite interpreters. And then when they refer to the seer stone, they referred to that as something separate. They did not use Urim and Thummim to describe that. And no one before then had ever thought to say that the Urim and Thummim is a seer stone.
Jonathan 17:23 Even in Mormonism Unveiled, it’s in two separate paragraphs. They said some people say was the stone in the hat stuff. Other people say he used the Urim and Thummim. So even in 1834, it wasn’t conflated. And of course, Joseph and Oliver always said, to make it crystal clear, they said, the Urim and Thummim that came with the plates. No one was saying the seer stone came with the plates. It was just Urim & Thummim.
Jim 17:48 The reason that modern scholars, and this is a very recent development have started to say that the Urim and Thummim could also mean the seer stone, that’s to get around the fact that they know perfectly well, that Joseph and Oliver repeatedly stated that the Book of Mormon was translated with the Urim and Thummim that came with the plates.
Jim 18:15 So, the scholars who advocate this stone in the hat theory, they know their sources. They haven’t missed those dozen references in the Joseph Smith Papers. They know perfectly well that they’re there. This is their way to get around them. It is to say, oh, when they said Urim and Thummim they also meant the seer stone. That’s a completely made up, bogus argument with no foundation whatsoever. Because like I said, even the stone in the hat witnesses like Emma Smith, and David Whitmer, were very clear that the term Urim and Thummim only applied to the interpreters that came with the plates. But it’s simply a dodge that the scholars have used to get around the fact that they know perfectly well that there’s a dozen accounts of Joseph and Oliver.
GT 19:08 So why are the scholars dodging then? What’s the advantage? Because I know in your book, you were like, why are they quoting all these anti-Mormon sources? I wouldn’t call David Whitmer anti-Mormon, but it sounded like you guys were.
Jonathan 19:23 Well he was saying Joseph was a fallen prophet.
GT 19:25 You’re saying, why are we quoting all this stuff? What’s the advantage for Church historians?
Jonathan 19:30 I want to answer that but let me come back to where we started with this Gospel Topics essay. They just did not put anything that Joseph and Oliver said about this, because anyone who reads that can see that they were crystal clear about it. So rather than address it head on, they use a euphemism. They say, Joseph said he translated by the gift and power of God. Period; which is false, basically. Because that’s not only said. He did say that, but that’s like taking the first half of a sentence and say that’s what he said. And whereas if they complete the sentence, it refutes our whole theory about the stone in the hat.
GT 20:08 And so, completing the sentence is?
Jim 20:10 By means of the Urim and Thummim.
Jonathan 20:11 That came with the plates; it wasn’t just the Urim and Thummim. He said, “that came with the plates.” And so why did they do it? I think they do it because the critics, the John Dehlin types, keep talking about how the true history is that Joseph Smith used a stone in the hat.
GT 20:31 Well that’s Richard Bushman.
Jonathan 20:34 Well, Richard Bushman to some degree; I mean, we’ll talk about him in a minute if you want. But again, it gets back to this idea that Richard Bushman was not a witness. All he’s doing is evaluating—
GT 20:45 [Chuckles] Neither was John Dehlin. I don’t know why…
Jonathan 20:46 No serious. I know, but Dehlin is using it as an argument because he’s making the claim based on what Richard said in his book, that the true history is Joseph Smith using a stone in the hat, and even Royal Skousen.
GT 20:59 Because that’s what Emma said.
Jonathan 21:01 Well, that’s why we talked about Emma at length. But the point is, Emma was contradicting her own husband. And she was doing that forty years after the fact. So, are we going to believe Joseph or Emma? I mean, it’s a binary decision. He can’t say they’re both telling the truth.
GT 21:18 See, I was waiting for you to go there. Here’s why. To me this is a false dichotomy, a total false dichotomy because and I don’t want to jump into Heartland versus Meso, but for just a moment, and you’ve got your new website about no more contention because you’re like, let’s allow multiple theories. But it seems like when you and Jim call David and Emma a liar, because-
Jim 21:50 We’re not calling them liars.
Jonathan 21:50 Now you’re putting words in our mouth.
Jim 21:51 Please be very clear.
GT 21:53 When you say they are not reliable witnesses, okay I’ll be more circumspect there. It’s hard for me, with all the things that David Whitmer did, and Emma, and even Oliver, because he had his showdown with Joseph in 1837 in Missouri and got excommunicated. It’s hard for me to call them, with all they went through unreliable. And so, I’m hearing you say, “Well, I believe Emma, when she said they use the Urim and Thummim for the lost 116 pages, and I believe Oliver and Emma were just wrong, to me you have to…”
Jonathan 22:34 No, this is a challenge that we face. Because when I look at it from a legal perspective, I’m not saying anybody was a liar. That’s the key point. People jump to that. My critics say, well, now you’re calling them liars. Not liars. What are they actually saying?
GT 22:50 They misremembered, to quote Roger Clemens.
Jonathan 22:51 No, not even. Not even. That’s why I talked about this demonstration. Because David Whitmer described them sitting around the table, etc. So okay, fine. There’s no reason for him to lie about that. Right? But when he reaches a conclusion that this is how the translation was done, when he never even looked in the hat to see what words were on there. He actually said, a couple of them actually said, what appeared on the stone. None of them looked on the stone. They weren’t witnesses of that. It had to be hearsay, or assumptions or inferences. It had to be. That’s the only explanation there is. So, in Emma’s case, if she was present at this demonstration, which she was in the Whitmer home at the time, she would have recounted that.
Jonathan 23:33 But you have to remember also that she was having to deal with the Solomon Spaulding theory, which was a prevailing narrative. And if Joseph was using the Urim and Thummim and the plates, he had to be behind a screen or a veil. And so this was the dilemma that Joseph was in. Here’s another question. Why do you think he kept emphasizing that the angel told him he couldn’t show the plates or the Urim and Thummim to anybody? That was almost a throwaway line. But there was a real reason why he had to explain that. Because he couldn’t tell everybody or he couldn’t show those items to people to explain how he was doing the translation. And yet, he had to have it screened off so that other than him and Oliver or maybe John Whitmer, who actually said Joseph used the Urim and Thummim and the plates. It was another scribe. Christian Whitmer never said anything, so we don’t know what he said. But you have Oliver and John Whitmer, who both said Joseph used the plates and the Urim and Thummim. And they were the scribes. Emma was an outlier, but she never talked about it in any detail. And by 1870, the narrative to refute the Spaulding theory was the stone in the hat idea that there was nothing between me and Joseph. He wasn’t reading from any book, and all that stuff. So, when she wrote that letter to Emma Pilgrim, which by the way, was never meant for publication because we don’t know what the question was.
GT 25:01 I don’t think anything they wrote was meant for publication except the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants.
Jonathan 25:05 Well, Joseph and Oliver’s accounts were published.
Jim 25:10 In the newspaper.
Jonathan 25:11 They were intentional. It was right in the Wentworth Letter. How much more official can that be? And the Elders Journal?
GT 25:17 There’s a lot of private correspondence that I don’t think they ever intended to get published.
Jonathan 25:21 That’s true. And Emma’s was one. But If Emma had been doing a formal statement for Church history, she may have worded that a lot differently. And so, for people to latch on to that little phrase in that letter, in the rest of the letter, she admitted she couldn’t remember a lot of stuff. So even when she was baptized. So, people latch on to that, as this is the more credible, more relatable, more true than what Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery said, at the time formally published. And so, the reason I think the scholars—
GT 25:56 Well let me ask you this, if Oliver had never returned to the church, would you consider him a “hostile witness?”
Jonathan 26:04 No, not at all. Because other than Joseph Smith, he was the only witness to the restoration of the priesthood, the restoration of all the temple blessings. He was the one who called the 12 apostles really and set them apart. I mean, he was integral to the whole thing.
Jim 26:21 He was the second elder of the church. Joseph was the first.
GT 26:25 Well David Whitmer was one of the three witnesses. Emma was his wife. You can make a lot of connections is what I’m saying.
Jonathan 26:30 No, no, no. Oliver Cowdery was a different category than David Whitmer. He was the assistant president of the Church, which was higher in authority than the first and second counselor. He was designated as a spokesman. He wrote all the those essays about Church history that we talked about in Letter Seven, and all the rest, but he was doing that in his official capacity as assistant president of the church. And he testified about the appearance of John the Baptist and so on. So, he was what made the restoration credible at all, and Richard has talked about this. So Joseph was unique because—
GT 27:08 Richard Bushman?
Jonathan 27:09 Yeah, he said, Joseph was unique because he had a second witness. It wasn’t just one guy saying, “I had a vision and everybody should do this.” He had someone else that also testified, and the fact that they had a falling out, but they continued to explain what had actually happened to them, is a further testimony of their veracity. Because typically, if people are lying about something that have a falling out, they start accusing each other of lying about what happened. But that didn’t happen with Joseph and Oliver. And so, Oliver Cowdery to me is, in some ways, even more credible than Joseph Smith because Joseph Smith already had an experience with Martin Harris. He had the reputation within his family and so on. Oliver Cowdery came from the outside, and he was part of this whole thing. He had no agenda. He wasn’t trying to form a church, or he didn’t have a reputation or any of that. He was just a guy who wanted to do what the Lord wanted and had these experiences. And he was really the first to talk about them publicly.
Jonathan 28:13 And so, when he came back to the Church, of course, he reaffirmed his testimony of all these things. But even when he wrote his first letter about the days never to be forgotten, that is in the Pearl of Great Price, that right there is a very firm, strong testimony of this whole thing, that he used what the Nephites would have called interpreters. I understand the question you asked earlier was, why are the historians conflating all this? And I think they’re trying to assuage the critics, like John Dehlin, who says, oh it was stone in the hat. He didn’t use the Urim & Thummim.
GT 29:52 I don’t care about John.
GT 29:53 But even Royal Skousen made a statement he’s retracted, I think. But I don’t know if it’s going to be in his final book, that Joseph and Oliver deliberately misled everybody when they talked about the Urim and Thummim.
GT 29:07 Oh wow. I would like to see that statement.
Jonathan 29:09 I can show it to you.
Jim 29:09 And he’s not coming out of crazy land. He’s following David Whitmer. Royal Skousen is following David Whitmer when he says that.
GT 29:18 I mean, does it boil down to you guys privilege Joseph and Oliver over everybody, and others are accepting Emma and David Whitmer? And you don’t think they’re as credible?
Jonathan 29:34 Yeah, when you say over everybody, I would say, you have John Whitmer, Oliver Cowdery and Joseph Smith, versus Emma Smith, and David Whitmer, and arguably Oliver’s wife on one statement that she supposedly made an affidavit that we don’t even know is legitimate, but it was basically those two. And Martin Harris is another case.
GT 29:53 And so the LDS historians are trying to bring everything together. And you guys are like, Joseph and Oliver are the bomb.
Jonathan 30:05 No we’re trying to bring them together. This is where I want to clarify for your audience because my critics have accused me incorrectly of this. I’m not saying anybody was a liar at all. Just like in court, you have all these witnesses. They’re all contradicting each other. None of them are lying. They’re talking about their own experience, their own perception, things they heard. They mingle it with their memory, and all that happens all the time. And so, I’m not saying David Whitmer is a liar. Now, when it comes to what he says about the priesthood and Joseph was a falling prophet, and all that stuff, maybe he was, let’s say, elaborating or accentuating problems that he had, embellishing.
Jim 30:44 Tailoring his memories to suit his later prejudices.
Jonathan 30:51 And I also want to emphasize that I’m not saying there’s only one possible interpretation of all this, because there’s multiple working hypotheses. If people want to believe it, and I have no problem with it, I don’t have a problem with Gerrit Dirkmaat’s book, except that he omits evidence that contradicts his theory. And that I think is inexcusable. We don’t do that. I put all the evidence in here, and I think the Gospel Topics essay is the primary culprit, let’s say, of misinforming members of the church. Because it doesn’t tell what Joseph and Oliver said, I’ve asked missionaries about this. They’ve never heard the statements from Joseph and Oliver about the Urim and Thummim. They’ve never heard it in seminary. They didn’t hear it in their missionary training. And so, they’re all told this stone in the hat. I said, what do you think of that? And they say, “Well, it’s kind of weird.” And older people, of course, who were taught what Joseph and Oliver said, are having a really hard time accepting that they were wrong.
GT 31:47 The stone in the hat.
Jonathan 31:48 Yeah. So, when Royal Skousen concluded that Joseph and Oliver deliberately were misleading people, that’s the inevitable logical conclusion of the stone in the hat. You can’t reconcile what Joseph and Oliver said, with a stone in the hat, other than by saying that Joseph Oliver misled everybody.
Jim 32:07 And to give you a very specific, factual issue. After the pages were lost, the plates and the interpreters were taken back from Joseph. And then David Whitmer says that that’s when he started using the seer stone in the hat. But Joseph, Oliver, and Lucy said that no, the plates and the interpreters were returned to Joseph. And that’s what he used to make the translation. Now, that’s just a factual contradiction. Both those things can’t be true, that the angel did give back the plates and the interpreters, and that he did not give back the plates and interpreters. Both statements can’t be true.
Jim 33:00 David Whitmer, who was not a witness, who was not present, who was 100 miles away when these events happened, who was not involved in any way for translation. He’s the source that says that the plates and interpreters were not given back. Joseph and Oliver, who were present at the time, who were involved in the entire process, and left contemporaneous written accounts, they said that plates in the interpreters were given back. And that’s what they used for the translation of the Book of Mormon that we have. Now, the two, you simply cannot reconcile. That’s a factual contradiction. And it’s either one is true, or the others is not true. So, we’ll take a step back and say this. Say that it’s not involving religion. This is not anything. It’s a question of some sort of other historical thing. What did some regiment do during the Revolutionary War? Why was a county formed? Just any historical fact, you have two witnesses who were present at the time, who were involved in the situation, who left relatively written, published statements that they themselves published during their lifetimes, stating their view of the particular historical event on the one hand, and then you have another person who came in, after the fact, wasn’t present for the event, was on the scene sometime after the event happened, and 40 years later, he says, oh, no. Abe and Elihu were wrong in their accounts, because this is what really happened. Who’s more credible? Who’s more credible? I have two simply contradictory statements. Which is the one that is more credible? As far as I’m writing my history. I’m going to say what happened, why this political event happened? Or what did this regiment do during the war, whatever, whatever the historical issue is, I’ve got two contemporaneous eyewitness accounts that were published close in time by the actual witnesses themselves. And I got something from a guy who showed up after the fact, and 40 years later, he contradicted what the other two guys said. I mean, that’s the argument now.
Jonathan 35:37 Let me say something about that, though. So, there are multiple working hypotheses. People can choose to reject what Joseph and Oliver said. I have no problem. If they want to reject that fine, because everybody can interpret the evidence.
GT 35:51 But they’re wrong.
Jonathan 35:52 No, I’m not saying they’re wrong. What I’m saying is that not including what Joseph and Oliver said in the discussion is wrong. Because the Gospel Topics essays just pretends Joseph and Oliver never said anything about this. In fact, it as much as states that when a misinterprets or misrepresents what Joseph said when he was asked about the coming forth of the Book of Mormon.
Jim 36:16 Where the only use half the sentence.
Jonathan 36:18 Yeah, he uses part of the sentence. But it says Joseph never said anything about translation, except that it was by the gift and power of God. That’s just a false statement. And it’s right in the Gospel Topics essays. So, it’s misleading members of the Church. It’s also misleading nonmembers of the church. And so, the challenge for us is to try to clarify our position. We’re not saying it’s our way or the highway. We’re not saying you have to agree with us at all. We’re saying, here’s all the evidence, and anyone who omits some of the evidence that contradicts their theory is misleading people. And so, I think John Dehlin started all this with his faith crisis report. And he called it a gap between truth and church history. And he said, this stone in the hat thing was in that gap, and the church leaders are misleading everybody and all that. Right? And the current critics have embellished that even more, because they’re saying that the real history was a stone in the hat. And everybody from Joseph and Oliver on that was faithful LDS was misleading everybody. And so that’s where I think the real emphasis that we’re trying to make is, we go with Joseph and Oliver. But those who don’t go with Joseph and Oliver don’t even know what Joseph & Oliver said. And so if we could do anything, to make a difference in the world, it would be to have the Gospel Topics essays actually tell members of the Church everywhere in every language what Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery actually said about the translation. And then it’d be awesome if Gerrit Dirkmaat would address this.
GT 37:59 So I put out a feeler to see if I can get him on, but I haven’t heard back.
Jonathan 38:03 We got to have a discussion together because I’d love to get his views on this.
{End of Part 4}
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