Hebrew Voices #203 – Revelation or Imagination: Part 1

Dr. Nehemia Gordon - Bible Scholar at NehemiasWall.com

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #203, Revelation or Imagination: Part 1, Nehemia interviews the top scholar in the world on the Book of Mormon. Although the original manuscripts of the Bible have been lost, the original manuscripts of the Book of Mormon have survived and provide fascinating analogies that highlight the similarities and profound differences.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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Hebrew Voices #203 – Revelation or Imagination: Part 1

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: This is amazing to me, because here we’re doing something I wish I could do with the Book of Exodus, which is… see, is this the handwriting of Joshua, and here’s the handwriting of Moses? And I don’t have that opportunity. And here we… it’s amazing that we can do this in the original manuscript.

Royal: Yeah, and it does turn out to be very important for this, this issue of easier and difficult readings, which we talked about.

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Royal Skousen. He’s the editor of the Critical Text Project of the Book of Mormon. He taught in universities for 50 years; 41 years at BYU, Brigham Young University, nine years at a variety of other universities including Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, Texas-Austin, California-San Diego, and a University in Finland I won’t attempt to pronounce the name of.

Before we get started, Royal, I want to try to convince my audience to listen. So, we’re going to talk today about textual criticism of the Book of Mormon, and the reason this should be important to my audience, to everybody who’s listening here, is that what I deal with is textual criticism of the Tanakh, of the Old Testament, and also of the New Testament. For textual criticism to be valid, there’s sort of this assumption that it should apply to any text. And here, we’re going to take an example that we don’t have in the Tanakh, or in the New Testament, where, with the Book of Mormon, we have literally the original manuscript, in English. And then we have a copy of the original manuscript called the Printer’s Manuscript, and then we have two editions that were made under Joseph Smith’s supervision, the 1830 and the 1837. And what Royal has done…

Royal: And 1842.

Nehemia: And the 1842; so we have three. So, we have an opportunity to do something we couldn’t even dream of with the Book of Exodus, with Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, which is to compare the original manuscript with a second manuscript, which was a copy, and then other editions, in this case printed editions, that were made under the supervision of, at least what I would say was the author, Joseph Smith Jr.

So, with that said, Royal, thank you for coming and joining me on this program. I’m so excited. And one last thing in this pitch; guys, just so you understand who we’re dealing with here, this is the Emanuel Tov of the Book of Mormon. I mean, I don’t think that’s an exaggerat… No, really. I mean, you’re the guy. So, the fact that you’re joining me on my program, I’m really honored. I did have Emanuel Tov on the program as well.

All right. So, let’s give the audience a little bit of a background, though, because I don’t know that everybody in my audience understands what the Book of Mormon is, and more specifically, how it was produced in 1828 and 1829 in manuscript form.

Royal: Well, I think it’s… basically, you can say it’s a religious history of some peoples that came from Jerusalem about 600 BC. And under the leadership of a man named Lehi, they broke into two opposing groups, named after two of the sons. One is called the Nephites, after Nephi, the other the Lamanites, after Laman. And the book basically describes religious aspects of the Nephites, plus the wars that went on between the Lamanites and the Nephites.

The Lamanites are cursed with a dark skin because of their evilness, and they ultimately end up conquering and destroying the Nephites at the end of the book, about 400 AD. So, we have about a thousand-year history here in the text, and I think it’s… there is some debate about the general Mormon interpretation that the American Indians, at least some of them, derive from the Lamanites, the darker-skinned people. So, it’s a very interesting history because Joseph Smith says that he received some gold plates from an angel, and his job was to translate a good portion of these plates. His translation, though, is not like what we would think of as a translation, which would be that you have this text here and you’re going to convert it into English, say. Instead, he received, it looks like, a revealed version of the translation, that it isn’t actually his translation. That it’s coming from the Lord is the way I would put it. He had a stone, which he used, the seer stone, and…

Nehemia: I have a picture of that, that I’m going to put that up there. And just for the audience to understand. So, I’m Jewish. I’m not a Mormon, but you are a believing Mormon, and part of what you’re presenting here… and in a sense, can I say you wear two hats? Because I say that about myself; I’m a believing Jew, but I also work as a textual scholar from, in a sense, a naturalistic perspective when I’m looking at the medieval manuscripts of the Bible. Would you say that’s how you approach it as well? That you have your faith aspect and your…

Royal: Well, yes. This critical text project is not some project of the religion faculty at BYU. In fact, for those 41 years I was in English and then in linguistics at BYU. So, I’m a linguist. I consider the text strictly from a linguistic textual point of view.

Nehemia: Okay. Alright.

Royal: But I do find evidence of what witnesses said, and what’s in the original manuscript, that indeed, the text was being, in some sense, dictated. It was being given to Joseph Smith, and he was dictating it to his scribes.

Nehemia: And let me show a picture here of…

Royal: It’s hard for some…

Nehemia: …of the stone. I’m going to show a picture here of the stone. So, this is the seer stone you’re talking about, and…

Royal: That’s right. That’s the one that was used. Now, the thing is, no one, as far as I know, has tried to use it lately.

Nehemia: Okay! But this isn’t just… I mean, so some people, I think, in the audience, who are Mormon… and for example, my wife has a work colleague who is a very devout Mormon. His wife does work in the temple. I don’t know exactly what that means. And I was talking to them about the seer stone, and they’re like, “Oh, that’s just what the anti-Mormons say. That’s not something Mormons believe.” But you’re a believing Mormon who taught at BYU, and this photo I just showed of the stone, that comes from the church, am I right?

Royal: That’s right. Yeah.

Nehemia: So, for the Mormons who aren’t in the, maybe in the loop… because this is a relatively recent thing the church published, I think 2015. Just talk a minute about the seer stone, and… That’s something that Mormons acknowledge. Am I right?

Royal: Well, no. A distinct group that believes that Joseph Smith did not use the seer stone…

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: … they believe that there was an apparatus that came with the plates, which was a breastplate and two silver bows, and they held two clear kinds of… I guess glasses, like, that the person could look through. And… the idea is that you would look at the plates and there would be then somehow a translation projected for you. And that’s called the Nephite interpreters. You had to use the plates. No one was allowed to see the plates at first, and so it had to be done behind a curtain. And there are a lot of people… this is the traditional view.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: But no one ever directly saw Joseph Smith doing this because they couldn’t see the plates. They weren’t allowed to. They would have been behind the curtain. But there is some evidence that in the very beginning, Martin Harris, one of the witnesses, did receive a sheet of paper with the characters on it, a translation, from around the curtain, and he took it to New York City to have it examined by Professor Anton and others. Well, that’s about the only account we actually have. It’s secondary of using this instrument. There are, though, nine people, and Dan Vogel, who you interviewed, I think…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Royal: Nine people who witnessed that Joseph Smith had the seer stone. He would put it into a hat, put his head up to it to obscure the light, and the descriptions are, that he gave, was that he saw on parchment the characters he was translating, and underneath, the English translation, which he read off. And that’s what… the nine can’t really testify as to what he saw, but they all say that this is what he did. He had the seer stone. He put it in a hat to obscure the light. He would dictate, the scribe would write it down as they would go along, and so… since you have nine witnesses, three of whom were never Mormons…

Nehemia: Really?

Royal: Yeah, three of them are non-Mormons, and they say this is what he was doing, and it was incredible. But he was doing it. And so, I believe he did do it, and it is miraculous. Yeah. But…

Nehemia: So, the seer stone…

Royal: But ultimately, I just want to say, so, ultimately… what we have to deal with is the manuscript, and text of the Book of Mormon, and that’s where we make our ultimate judgments as to this text, not the accounts of what might have gone on in the transmission of the text.

Nehemia: So, this is what I love about what you do, from what I’ve read and seen some of your videos… you talk about… or I guess most of what your research deals with is from what came out of Joseph Smith’s mouth to what people wrote down and then was transcribed. And you don’t have to be a believing Mormon to deal with that, because… I mean, that’s a fact that really isn’t disputed. That Joseph Smith dictated the Book of Mormon to a series of scribes who then wrote it down, and then a copy of that was made, and then it was printed. Right?

Royal: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, that’s within the… I guess you could say the naturalistic realm. What Joseph Smith saw in the hat, that’s a matter of faith.

Royal: That’s right.

Nehemia: What he recited, those are facts. Well, I guess we don’t know what he recited. We know what they wrote down from what he recited.

Royal: That’s correct.

Nehemia: Okay. And that’s what I love about this topic. You can be a believer and talk about what he saw. And of course, Dan Vogel would say he was lying, and he made the whole thing up, right? I guess. I don’t want to speak for him, but I think that’s what non-Mormons would generally say. And a Mormon believer would say, “No, he actually saw something in a vision.” Is that fair to say?

Royal: Well, that’s what I would say. Now…

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: Other people are having other viewpoints. There are some scholars that believe that he is getting ideas from this instrument, and he is putting it into his own language.

Nehemia: Really!

Royal: Yeah, that is the more prominent viewpoint in Mormon scholarship. Is that…

Nehemia: Ah, in scholarship. Okay. Is that what they’re teaching in Sunday school?

Royal: No, no, no. But they’re not teaching any of this, really.

Nehemia: Really? Okay.

Royal: They would just say we have the Book of Mormon, and here it is.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: And most Latter-Day Saints think that the Book of Mormon that’s printed right now is what Joseph Smith got. They just don’t have any conception of all the…

Nehemia: But there are differences, and we’re going to talk about some of those differences.

Royal: Right.

Nehemia: So, give us the process here. And what really surprised me when I spoke about this with Dan Vogel, and I think you agree with this, is that the Book of Mormon was dictated by Joseph Smith in a period of something like 80 or 90 days. Is that right?

Royal: Well, for the part that he did with Oliver Cowdery, beginning in March of 1829. He’d done the 116 pages that were lost, of the Book of Lehi, plus the beginning first two chapters, apparently, of the Book of Mosiah, which we don’t have either. People haven’t really recognized this, but those were lost. And he had a little bit of Mosiah done in 1828. So, the majority of what we have of the text was dictated from March through the end of June of 1829, and that’s pretty… it’s not disputed, I don’t think, by anyone.

So, if he is creating this text out of his own mind from ideas, it’s pretty miraculous. The dictation by the scribes don’t have him, and the manuscript doesn’t have him, making lots of corrections and revising and so forth, that you and I might do if we were translating from ideas. So, that’s one reason why I believe he was actually being given the text and he was reading it off. Now, some people don’t like this. They think, “Oh, that’s too easy.” But I don’t think… I don’t think you have anybody claiming that kind of revelatory nature, even of biblical texts… maybe there are some, but just the text is being given straight to the prophet to write down, you know.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm. Well, so, you know, what I was taught… I was raised as an Orthodox Jew, and what I was taught is, Moses went up to Mount Sinai for 40 days and 40 nights, and he came down with a scroll, and that scroll was the Torah. Now, that’s not about…

Royal: What about breaking the Ten Commandments?

Nehemia: Well, no. So, he also came down with the tablets, but he came down with this scroll. And there’s a description that, when he wrote about his own death in Deuteronomy 34, he wrote it with tears pouring from his eyes. Now, as an adult, I read that, or even as a teenager… meaning, I read the Torah, and I’m like, that’s not what it says. It doesn’t say that he came down with the scroll. It says he came down, like you said, with the tablets.

Royal: That’s right.

Nehemia: And you have the phrase that’s repeated throughout, particularly Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, which is, “And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying.” And the way medieval Jewish scholars described it was that each one of those sections where it says, “And the LORD spoke to Moses saying,” was a separate scroll.

Royal: Oh…

Nehemia: Being a separate piece of parchment, or leather, actually, probably not parchment. And that somebody came along, meaning somebody being Moses or Joshua, and sewed them together. And that’s why, for example, Numbers 9 takes place before Numbers 1, because they were sewn together maybe thematically rather than chronologically.

Royal: Yeah.

Nehemia: That’s like, for example, what Ibn Ezra in the 12th century describes. So, you have this sort of fundamentalist view, which is taught to children, and then you have Jewish scholars in the Middle Ages are like, “Well, we’re reading the Torah, and that’s not what it claims.”

Royal: Yeah.

Nehemia: Then you have the modern secular view that says… for example, Reform Judaism says that the Torah was made up of four different sources over hundreds of years that they assigned letters to; J-E-P-D. What’s amazing to me about the Book of Mormon is, nobody claims, today, that it’s made up of different sources written over hundreds of years, but it was dictated by Joseph Smith, whether through revelation or through his imagination, depending on who you are, over a period of a few months. So, that, to me, is amazing.

Royal: That’s right. That’s pretty well, I think, acknowledged. Trying to get a hold of that, and what it would mean for a human to do it, or for Smith to do it, or whatever, is a more difficult question. And I think the text is way too complex for it to have been Joseph Smith’s mind, particularly when Stan Carmack and I have found all this evidence for the language of the text, centering in the 1500 and 1600’s of English, and not King James English, but just 1500, 1600’s English, and it’s not upstate New York dialect either, you know. So, it’s a very… a lot of people have lots of opinions over this issue, I’ll say that much.

Nehemia: Well, and I think one of the things that, let’s say my non-Mormon audience won’t be aware of, is that the style of the Book of Mormon is not the English of the 19th century, of 1829. You have a lot of King Jamesian phrases, “and it came to pass” and “wherefore” and things like that.

Royal: Yeah.

Nehemia: But you’re saying there’s parts of it which aren’t the dialect of the 19th century and don’t come from the King James Bible as well. Is that right?

Royal: Right, there’s phrases… a lot of them have been removed because they didn’t make sense. There’s one place where “but if” is used, meaning “unless”. And in 1920 James Talmage replaced “but if” with “unless”, because he could tell from the context it means that. But if he had opened up the OED that was in the process of being published, he could find “but if” meaning “unless” up to the 1600’s, and it’s sitting there in the original text, and it’s sort of just, well, it’s sitting there.

Nehemia: Alright. So, I want to get into some of the nitty gritty here, because we have the original manuscript, which Joseph Smith dictated to a number of different scribes, and then we have a copy of that, like we said, called the Printer’s Manuscript, and then we have the first edition of 1830. So, I want to show here something that you’ve shared, which is the original… actually, before I get to the original manuscript, how do we have the original manuscript? Because that’s a story in itself.

Royal: Well, that’s why it looks like a Dead Sea scroll. It is fragmented and broken up because Joseph Smith put it in the cornerstone of the Nauvoo House, a hotel that was being built in Nauvoo in 1840.

Nehemia: That’s Nauvoo, Illinois.

Royal: Yeah, Nauvoo, Illinois. And it sat there for 41 years. And the seal had broken, and water got in, and mold. Mold ate most of the manuscript up, and there was probably 30% left. And Lewis…

Nehemia: And here we have a picture. Tell me if this is correct. This is the…

Royal: That’s right. There’s the cornerstone…

Nehemia: This is the actual stone in which Joseph Smith placed the Book of Mormon, and you’re saying water got in… the original manuscript, and water got in.

Royal: The seal broke, yeah. It was a hot lead seal they put around it.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: The real problem was that he… Well, he thought he was preserving it. Of course, he was guaranteeing its destruction by putting it in there. But Bidamon, after his wife died, who was Emma Smith, Joseph’s wife. After she had died, he said, “I’m going to finish that building out there,” and so he started tearing things apart. He came upon the cornerstone. He didn’t know it was there, opened it up, and found that some of the middle portion and the very top had been preserved in all this mass of being eaten away and so forth. He gave away most of it to LDS people. He wasn’t a Mormon, and he gave it away to LDS people that he thinks showed respect to it and weren’t just interested in monetary aspects of it. So that’s what he did. And most of that 25.5% have ended up in the LDS church archives. A lot of it is fragmented, and part of my job was to take some of the fragments that were owned by other people in the Salt Lake area and put them together.

We have about 3% were owned by the Wilford Wood family, and he, Wilford Wood, went back east and got those fragments from the son of Lewis Bidamon in 1937. So, some of the fragments were discovered only later. There’s some of the fragments from the last two leaves… the main owner that had received this material from Lewis Bidamon was going to give them to the church about 1950. And he lived in the Hotel Utah, and he was there talking to the housekeeper, who was LDS, explaining to her what he was going to donate. And two of the fragments fell on the ground from the last two leaves, and she picked them up and hands them to him. And he says, “Oh, you keep those. You keep those.” So, the family has these fragments, and they’ve been divided up amongst family members, five, six of them. But we’ve been able to track them down and photograph them, and everything, and some of them have been donated to the church. People have kept these things. So, the history of this is really… something. Something almost like some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, where…

Nehemia: Yeah. Well, it reminds me of, let’s say, like the Cairo Geniza or the Aleppo Codex, where… let’s say the Aleppo Codex, the most important manuscript of the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. We have two thirds of it at the Israel Museum, and a third of it was believed burned, but now it’s believed that it was stolen or taken, and it might be sitting somewhere in South America or in Europe.

Royal: Oh, no! That kind of thing.

Nehemia: There was a taxi driver in New York who was from Aleppo, and he was a Jew who fled from Aleppo. And he walked by the synagogue of Aleppo the day after it was ransacked in 1947 by Muslim mobs, and he picked up two pieces of the Aleppo Codex, and he walked around with them in his pocket for decades. And when he died, his wife sent them in to the Israel Museum. So, we have two fragments that were believed… of the section that was believed destroyed… that have survived.

Royal: And that, that gives it a track to it.

Nehemia: Oh… and they’re extremely important, because they’re from Exodus. And most of the Torah portion of the Aleppo Codex is missing. So, it’s… they’re a really important witness to the Aleppo Codex. And then we have a photograph from a guy who was traveling through Syria in the 1800’s, and he bribed the synagogue official in Aleppo and took a photograph and published it. And that’s from one of the missing pages. So, we have like… so there are some interesting parallels here.

Royal: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Alright. I want to show a page here. I’m going to do the share screen. So, here we have page four of the original manuscript. Tell us what we’re looking at here. I labeled the different scribes, but tell us, like, how do you know there’s different scribes here?

Royal: Well, Oliver Cowdery has a very fine hand. One particular characteristic is, he always writes out A-N-D with an ampersand, unless it’s an initial chapter one, which is a capital A, then he’ll will write out capital A-N-D, but otherwise it’s got that… And it’s… after you’ve studied his hand for decades, you know it. The next one down below took some time to identify. It’s John Whitmer. This means that the first part of the Book of Mormon is actually translated last, because it covers the portion that had been lost of the 116 pages. So, John Whitmer is one of the… the Whitmers were the people that Joseph Smith was staying with and doing the… finishing up the translation, and he acted as a scribe. And he begins… they always begin where there’s a break in the text. They don’t do it in the middle of a phrase. And it was, “And it came to pass.”

Nehemia: Let me zoom in here so people can see the transition. And this is the part when I looked at it, I got it wrong, and so now I’ve corrected.

Royal: So, the A-N-D is Whitmer. And it’s true. The first three words the quill isn’t giving out the ink properly. Probably… but the A-N-D is definitely his A-N-D. Notice the line right below it has “go” and “do” in that same kind of…

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: Whereas, if you look up at Oliver Cowdery, he’s got this wonderful ampersand. There’s 50,000 ampersands that Oliver Cowdery wrote, and he doesn’t deviate from this. So, anyway, that’s one thing. But notice, the “pass”, p-a-s-s, that P is a very open…

Nehemia: This one here?

Royal: Yeah, the elongated S, that’s a sign of the Whitmers. The Whitmers were of a German background, and they like to use this “double-S” like that.

Nehemia: So, this says P-A-S-S.

Royal: That’s right.

Nehemia: Okay, wow.

Royal: And you can go down below… look down about five lines and it says, “it came to pass”, is another P-A-S-S by him.

Nehemia: Okay. “It came to pass.” That’s almost like the German S that… is that kind of what we’re…

Royal: Yeah. That’s right. It’s being influenced by that.

Nehemia: Okay. Wow.

Royal: So, this is…

Nehemia: Why is this so much thicker? Why is John Whitmer’s writing letters… Is it a different pen they’re using or…

Royal: Well.

Nehemia: Or is it how he holds the pen?

Royal: I don’t know. Oliver Cowdery always liked a sharp quill, and you can see that.

Nehemia: So, it is a different pen!

Royal: Well, not necessarily.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: But I think the basic thing is that he’s dipping it with getting more ink on it than John Whitmer.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: And so, you notice the first three letters, first three words, “and it came”, are Oliver’s. That’s why you’ve interpreted it that way.

Nehemia: Right, right.

Royal: …level of ink. But that was probably because he was using the quill of Oliver to continue.

Nehemia: This is amazing to me because here we’re doing something I wish I could do with the Book of Exodus, which is… see, is this the handwriting of Joshua? And here’s the handwriting of Moses? And I don’t have that opportunity. And here we… it’s amazing that we can do this, in the original manuscript.

Royal: Yeah, and it does turn out to be very important for this issue of easier and difficult readings, which we talked about, I think.

Nehemia: Definitely get that. So, now that we have this up and we’re looking at the word “and”, I know that you talked in one of your lectures about… that there is a forgery of, I think it’s a bifolio or a leaf in, what is it, the University of Chicago?

Royal: Yeah. Two leaves from Chicago, and I was… it’s a very interesting document. It came out during the Mark Hoffman period of forgeries in the early 1980’s. But the church bought it for a considerable amount of money. I do not know the exact amount, so I’m not going to speculate. But they paid enough to keep you and I going for a while. And they believed it was legitimate because there were these provenance statements that went with the document suggesting that it had been donated. It had somehow got into the library in the 1920’s, but there was no actual donation information. Who gave it or anything, you know? So, the historians like it. It’s totally bogus because it is full of errors that… I won’t call them errors… let’s say “unique properties,” that I have never seen before. It’s in Oliver Cowdery’s hand. So, there I got the photographs of it, and I had it at home. My wife, who had worked with me on the Printer’s Manuscript in Independence and was really familiar with what it should look like, she looked at that document and said, “Oh, that’s a forgery.”

Nehemia: Wow.

Royal: Just looking at it.

Nehemia: You mean your wife could tell. But you’re saying it looked like Oliver Cowdery’s handwriting.

Royal: Yeah, it’s intended to look like it, but it overall didn’t quite look right, you know. And she immediately rejected it, because she had worked on every leaf of the Printer’s Manuscript and seen so many pages of Oliver Cowdery’s writing. So, I said, “Oh, no, it’s from the University of Chicago, it’s okay.” And I started transcribing. I got to the second line, and I said, “Uh oh,” because A-N-D had been written out.

Nehemia: Instead of the ampersand.

Royal: Instead of the ampersand!

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: I found two more of them in the whole document.

Nehemia: That’s amazing.

Royal: This part of the original manuscript… the Printer’s Manuscript is actually in the hand of Martin Harris, and he mixes his A-N-D’s with ampersands, and this forgery also mixes the ands with the ampersands. It isn’t Oliver Cowdery. And so, I went over… I identified all the unique spellings. When you get all these unique properties, you say, “It’s better that we not accept this until someone can really explain these unique properties as being Oliver’s.” And the Joseph Smith Papers came up with this brilliant thought. “Oh, well. He’s just starting out as a scribe in Alma 3-5, and he’s making all these kinds of errors.” But of course, that isn’t a theory at all, because it could be used to explain any kind of thing you might find in this document. It’s a nonprovable kind of hypothesis.

Nehemia: Are there some scholars today who claim that this is authentic?

Royal: Well, yeah. The Joseph Smith Papers.

Nehemia: Oh, they do. Okay. Wow.

Royal: So, let me tell you. I you get the big book out, the big book of the original manuscript published by… We had this debate, and I said, “It’s a forgery, and I’m not going to accept it. I don’t want this in the legitimate fragments because it’ll contaminate everything.” And they said, “No, the provenance statements.” So, I said, “Look, if you want me to be an editor of this thing, and you can’t use certain photographs of the original manuscript unless I am, so you’re going to have to agree that I will write up my own section against the two leaves, and you will write your own section.” And they said, “Oh, we’ve never done this before. We’ve always had the editors come to some kind of agreement.” I said, “Well, we’re not going to have that here. We’re going to bring the argument out to the readers and let them see it.” So, they did theirs, and I did mine. The review board thought it was brilliant that we actually allowed… the church doesn’t really like disagreement in its things.

Nehemia: So, this is a good opportunity to explain to the audience what a critical edition is. Because what you created is a critical edition, and some people think “critical” means you’re criticizing the text.

Royal: Yeah, I know they do.

Nehemia: So, explain what that means.

Royal: Well, it just means judgment. It comes from the Greek word krisi, meaning judgment. You’re making a judgment as to how the text should read. You’re also allowing… a critical text allows notes for the reader to see the alternatives so they can make a judgment if they wish to take a different position, you know, looking at the apparatus and what the variants are. So, a critical edition is one that allows the reader to see the evidence for the reading. One of the readings is selected in the text, but the other ones are in the apparatus.

Nehemia: And look, we have that for the New Testament. There’s the Nestle-Aland, I believe, who are…

Royal: That’s right.

Nehemia: Where you read the Greek text, and on the bottom there’s a bunch of notes that say, “In some manuscripts it has this word, and in some manuscripts…”

Royal: Yes, that’s correct

Nehemia: “…this verse is missing,” or this… let’s say… there’s what’s famously… the long ending of Mark isn’t in early manuscripts.

Royal: That’s right.

Nehemia: So, you did that for the Book of Mormon, and we have that for the Tanakh. We have the BHS, and now the BHQ, which, quite frankly, aren’t nearly as sophisticated as Nestle-Aland. We had somebody in 1776, Benjamin Kennicott. He’s the last one to do, like, a very thorough critical edition of the Old Testament. So, we’re a bit behind the times in the Old Testament studies, but…

Royal: Well, it’s a lot harder in many respects. I know, the Greeks have all these manuscripts and fragments and stuff like that, but…

Nehemia: Well, like the Hebrew University Bible Project is doing that for the Old Testament, but they started in the 60’s, and they’re like five books in out of 24, so…

Royal: Yeah, I know. The original editors won’t be alive!

Nehemia: No, they’re not alive, the original editors.

Royal: They’re already dead!

Nehemia: But like, just to give you an example, let’s say in the Old Testament… I was reading the other day in the Book of Zechariah, there’s a certain word that’s written with this vowel in every manuscript, but then there’s a rabbi in the 12th century who says, “Well, there’s this other vowel there, and here’s what it means.” Well, wait a minute. That means he had a manuscript that had that other reading, right? So, that’s an example in the Old Testament.

Let’s look at some… oh, I do want to look at this. So, Joseph Smith, he dictated the Book of Mormon to Oliver Cowdery and John Whitmer, and then… talk to us about…

Royal: And Christian Whitmer.

Nehemia: And Christian Whitmer… talk to us about what we have here at the top of this image. I’m going to share my screen.

Royal: Oh, yeah. Let’s go back to that.

Nehemia: Yeah. Because that’s what… in my field, we would call a paratextual notation. It’s not actually part of…

Royal: Yeah, they are… yeah, I call them extracanonical.

Nehemia: Okay, fair enough.

Royal: So, when Oliver Cowdery is taking down dictation, the first page here… actually, we’re missing one and two, the very beginning of I Nephi. Then we have… we’re in the middle of, I think, the second chapter and page 3. And it’s in Oliver Cowdery’s hand, the whole page, and he goes to here, on the 4th page. Then he stops, and John Whitmer takes over, for all we know, the first time.

Nehemia: Oh.

Royal: Now, it may not be the case, but it’s the first we have of John Whitmer, and he will go on to the bottom of the page. Now, he was supposed to write, when he was done, a notation at the top, the header, telling what this page was about.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: And he never did write them. His brother, Christian Whitmer, wrote every one of them. So, “Nephi goeth up to Jerusalem to bring…” probably, “back the plates” or something.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: So, he wrote it. So, Christian Whitmer, when he… The main thing that happens is, except for this exception, we can generally find the last person writing on the page writes the header.

Nehemia: Mm.

Royal: So, it means they don’t know in advance what it’s going to be about.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: They write it all down, and then the last scribe decides. But John Whitmer would not do it. And he was… I don’t, you know… there’s sort of a resistance. I don’t know what it is, but Christian Whitmer did it for his own stuff, and he does it for his brother. And Oliver Cowdery, if he ends a page, will write the header, even though there may be another scribe up earlier on the page.

Nehemia: So, you call this extracanonical. Is that you saying that these are Christian Whitmer’s words and not something dictated?

Royal: That’s correct. It’s Christian Whitmer. Now, the very first one, we could not read at first. We could not read it. It was so difficult. But finally, Robin Jensen, my co-editor, was able to get somebody to make an image that it actually read; we could read it. And he brought it down to me on his computer, and I read it off, and I have it. It’s actually… hold on.

Nehemia: Wait. So how do you know that Joseph Smith didn’t dictate those words at the top of the page? Do you have a hint of that somewhere?

Royal: Well, sometimes they put in unique things about the… that don’t exist elsewhere in the text…

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: For instance, there are these people called the Anti-Nephi-Lehies.

Nehemia: Right.

Royal: Never Lehites. You would expect maybe “Lehites”, given the Book of Mormon. Well, when Oliver Cowdery wrote the header for that page, he put Anti-Nephi-Lehites. So, it’s not Joseph Smith; it’s the scribe just writing down what he thinks it ought to be. Often, it’s “et cetera”. The only thing that’s in the header is “et cetera”. It means whatever they were talking about; the wars, usually the wars, et cetera, et cetera. So, I don’t think it represents in any way something Joseph Smith was telling them.

Nehemia: Are there some scholars who believe that that is part of the revelation? The thing…

Royal: Well, I haven’t heard of them.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: But you know, you never know what’s out there.

Nehemia: Right, right.

So, I want to show what’s on the website of the Joseph Smith papers. And you have something which is a better image, you’re saying. Kind of cool. So, this is page 3 at the top.

Royal: Well, there’s the top, where you can’t read it.

Nehemia: So, this is the one you can’t read, but you’re saying…

Royal: They did an image where you could read it, and it’s supposed to be put online now.

Nehemia: And it might be, and I just don’t know where it is. That’s possible.

Royal: I don’t know either. I haven’t even looked, but they keep…

Nehemia: So, this is the header that’s illegible, but you have a better photo.

Royal: No, I don’t.

Nehemia: Oh, you don’t.

Royal: The photo I took it off of, Robin Jensen had. It was another one they had taken under certain… you know, they try to do different ultraviolet settings and so forth. I’ll tell you what it reads. I put it in the book, “Nephi cries unto the Lord for his brethren.” And if you get into the text, it has that “Nephi cries unto the Lord for them,” and so, you know, the…

Nehemia: So, that’s with a different wavelength or something of ultraviolet. Is that what we’re saying?

Royal: Yes, yes, it had to…

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: I don’t know how he got it. Frankly… I had not been able to… I had only been able to read the word “brethren”. Only brethren. I really couldn’t read… So, my transcript in my book, in 2001, has “brethren”.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: But it turned out to be right, and… but it’s virtually… Oliver is just copying what he found something. It wasn’t really the main idea, even, on that page, but it was something he just… and he put it at the top of it.

Nehemia: Gotcha. Okay.

Royal: It’s done.

Nehemia: Well, let me go back for a second… to the leaves from University of Chicago. So, has anybody done a test on the ink to see if it’s the same ink that Oliver Cowdery used in other places?

Royal: Well, they test the ink for its time period and various things like that, and the paper, too, and it matches the time period. But Mark Hofmann, the forger, was well known to go into libraries and cut out end sheets from books that dated from the 1830’s and so forth. So, he would always pass the paper test, because that’s what he did the forgeries on. To get the ink right, in his forgeries, he was caught by this. He was heating the inks, and it would oxidize, and thus get an older time period. But the problem was, when he heated it, he did it too fast and caused the ink to crack.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: Those forgeries had cracked ink, which is not a characteristic of… It’s faded, oxidized ink, not cracked ink.

Nehemia: What about the University of Chicago pages? Do they have cracking?

Royal: No, no, they’re… it passes some of those aspects. But if you read my analysis, there’s all these misspellings, all these… it’s a bad text, almost. Everywhere else, the original manuscript is better than the Printer’s Manuscript. It’s a better text. Except for the Alma 3 thru 5 from the University of Chicago. It is a terrible text. It’s got all kinds of bizarre readings.

Nehemia: Oh, tell us about the unique name of the movement that’s based on the University of Chicago. Instead of Mormon, it has something else.

Royal: Oh, yeah, well. This is… every Hoffman… I’m saying it’s Hoffman. I believe it is. Every Hoffman document has a reason. And the reason for this one, besides just causing trouble, was… it’s not the earliest, but it’s the second and third occurrence in the text, the earliest we have of “Morman.” It is spelled M-O-R-M-A-N.

Nehemia: Okay.

Royal: It’s done in heavier ink flow. It’s going along and it’s fine, and then he takes his quill, and he doesn’t override it, he just writes it with heavier ink. MOR-MAN. MOR-MAN. He wants us to see this. And if we followed it, we would have to say we’ve discovered, from the original manuscript, that the real name of our… our nickname is MORMAN, you know…

Nehemia: So, do you think he was doing that to cause… and Mark Kauffman was this forger who actually, like, killed people, didn’t he?

Royal: Ultimately, yeah, to prevent people from revealing that he was a forger.

Nehemia: So, was he doing this to make it more valuable, do you think? Or really just to cause trouble or…

Royal: Well, both. If you’re saying this is a document that’s got the original spelling of Mormon, that will help. But I think a lot of it was pernicious behavior.

Nehemia: Like, for example, there’s…

Royal: I can tell you an example.

Nehemia: Yeah, go ahead.

Royal: There’s an 1830 Book of Mormon at the University of Utah, and I went and opened it up, and here’s this beautiful handwriting, “Joseph Smith Jr., Susquehanna, Pennsylvania”, written in it. And I look at the description of this, when it was given, and so there’s no notion that there was a Joseph… that he had written this in this book, that it was even his book. And then I looked at who had looked at this 1830 recently, and there was Mark Hoffman’s name on the list! So, the guy just goes in, and he’s going to cause real trouble by just signing Joseph Smith’s name. He can sign his name. He knows how to do it. And he signed his name, and I don’t think Joseph ever got a Book of Mormon down in Susquehanna anyway, it’s…

Nehemia: Yeah, but in that case, my guess… and I don’t know that much about the Mark Hoffman forgeries, but my guess is he had some other forgery, and he wanted someone to go compare it with a document that’s in a respected library and say, “Oh, it is the same handwriting and the same…”

Royal: Yeah, he did do that, quite a bit. He needed an independent handwriting of Martin Harris for the Salamander Letters, so he wrote a letter to somebody else with a poem of his, and it was in this handwriting. So then, then that was used. “Oh, well, you can check this handwriting because it’s in this letter he wrote.” Well, that was a forgery!

Nehemia: By the way, we have an example like this in the Dead Sea Scrolls. So there… and you talked about how he would take paper from the 1830’s…

Royal: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: That was blank paper… Mark Hoffman, you were saying did that. So, a lot of the Dead Sea Scroll forgeries, they’re tiny little pieces that came from the margins at the top and bottom of real Dead Sea Scrolls. And those might be worth a few thousand dollars, a blank piece of leather. But if you add ink to it, now all of a sudden, it’s worth a fortune. And one of them that is believed by many scholars to be a forgery is in California, I want to say. And there’s a place in the Book of Deuteronomy where it mentions Mount Ebal, and in this fake Dead Sea scroll, instead of Ebal, it has Grizim, which is what’s in the Samaritan version. Now, if he had just written Ebal…

Royal: Yes.

Nehemia: …yeah, that’d be worth a lot of money. But to say one of the original Dead Sea Scrolls has this textual variant, now, all of a sudden, it’s worth a fortune. So, you’re saying that’s what the MORMAN thing is… or, I’m wondering if that’s why he did it; to make it worth more.

Royal: Well, the thing is, the church knew about it, and they just ignored it.

Nehemia: Okay. Well, that’s an interesting question. So, what is the approach of the… and I guess the official name is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints…

Royal: Yeah.

Nehemia: …in Salt Lake City. What is their approach to what you’re doing, to your critical text project?

Royal: Well, I would say most of them are just ignoring it and stifling it. They do not cite the Yale edition. They do not refer to any…

Nehemia: Well, the Yale edition is… because we haven’t talked about that yet.

Royal: Okay, well the Yale edition is… I published the first edition in 2009. I published a second one in 2022. It is the original text of the Book of Mormon as I’ve been able to construct it. We don’t call it “the original text” because you really can’t be sure of that, even though we textual critics love to say, “I have got the original text.” So, I called it “the earliest text” because it was based on the earliest sources. And, at the back, it has an appendix of about 700 and some of the important variants in the history of the text. It isn’t a list comparing my edition versus the church’s edition. In fact, in many cases we agree. But it’s just, what are important variants in the history of the text? So, the Yale edition… it’s got all the bad grammar which people have complained about, and Joseph Smith tried to remove. And it’s all in there in the earliest text…

Nehemia: Tell us about the bad grammar, because I think the audience… like “in them days”. Tell us, what is that about?

Royal: Well, “in them days.” There are about two or three of these in the original text, and there’s “they was yet wroth”. “They was yet wroth” is in the original text and… they’ve been removed. And, for a standard edition… there’s no sense, people reading… for most people just to read something which will stop them and make them think about the language rather than what’s the story, what’s going on. So, the church has accepted Joseph Smith’s attempt to clean up the bad English. And he made, in 1837, he made lots of changes to the text; 2% of them removed bad English, 2% of his changes.

Nehemia: When you say bad English… so you’re a linguist. So, linguists don’t make judgments like that.

Royal: Well, it’s my neighbors that make the judgment. If they read “they was yet wrought”, they’d say, “What have you done, brother Skousen? You’ve put a bad English thing in our Book of Mormon!” And I said, “No, it was there originally.” It would be something that they would consider dialectal, yokel, country folk, whatever.

Nehemia: In other words, the Book of Mormon has forms of English that maybe that’s the way Joseph Smith talked. Like instead of “in those days” he would say “in them days”. Is that the explanation?

Royal: Well, that is how people have interpreted that. My colleague, Stan Carmack, as a linguist, started studying all the bad English, so-called, in the Book of Mormon, and discovered that it was all found in academic writing in the 1500, 1600’s. You get examples of “in them days” in academic writing in the 1500’s, 1600’s. So, we have come to the hypothesis that the text is not Joseph Smith when it says, “in them days”, but in fact, it’s reflecting this archaic English that would be prevalent in 1500, 1600’s. Even accepted. It wouldn’t be considered bad English.

Nehemia: And I want to give an example here. So, you’re the expert in English, so you’ll correct me if I’m wrong here. So, a lot of native English speakers in the United States, instead of “ask” they say “aks”.

Royal: Yeah.

Nehemia: But there was a time when “aks” wasn’t wrong, that was just a way that people spoke. Isn’t that right?

Royal: Well, yeah, in old English you had both of them, “ask” and “aks”. King Alfred used “aks”, and then it became… in the United States, it became isolated with speakers in Appalachia and so forth, and Black speakers use it. They didn’t invent it. Some people think that it’s Black English, but it isn’t. It’s just the derivative of this.

Nehemia: And when was King Alfred, who spoke that way?

Royal: He said “aks.” Well, there are lots of…

Nehemia: When was it? Like what century? I don’t know.

Royal: Well, King Alfred is about 800 AD.

Nehemia: So, in 800 people were saying “aks”.

Royal: And “ask”. It was a variation.

Nehemia: And “ask”, okay.

Royal: Some people would say “ask”. Orginally it was “ask”, and, in Old English it developed a variant, “aks”, which is easier to pronounce. So, for a long time in English you had both of them. But the Book of Mormon doesn’t have any examples of…

Nehemia: No, no, but when it says, “in them days”, it’s not that it was wrong, it’s just that’s how some people spoke. Is that fair to say?

Royal: That’s right. What I actually wrote… in the 1500 and 1600’s, and that’s really hard for people to get. The Helsinki people, when they did these big data studies and they came across “in them days”, they were shocked. They thought, “Oh, only hicks in America say, ‘in them days.’”

Nehemia: And that was one of the accusations. There was the guy in… I want to say he was in Ohio, who wrote the first critique of the Book of Mormon, and he says it was written in Yankee vernacular. Isn’t that…

Royal: Yeah. That’s right. And you see enough of those, you would say, “Oh, this is bad English, and it’s just Joseph Smith. It’s just Joseph Smith.” Stan Carmack and I have taken a really strong position that those don’t represent Joseph Smith’s bad English. There’s so much other of the archaic language that is Joseph Smith’s language, but it’s in the Book of Mormon. It makes us think we’ve got to accept these too.

Nehemia: Thank you so much for joining me in this fascinating conversation. There’s so much more we didn’t get to, and I hope we can do a follow up with other maybe…

Royal: Where are you? Where is this institute that you… of the Hebrew Bible? Where is it?

Nehemia: So, the physical location is in… or let’s say the mailing address is in Bedford, Texas, which is a suburb of Dallas, but we have people involved in the institute virtually.

Royal: I saw their names. They look pretty legit.

Nehemia: Oh, they’re very legit. We have someone at Cambridge University, in Jerusalem. Emanuel Tov is on the board of advisors. So, we’re creating a worldwide network of… and really, my dream for the Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscripts is to do for the Hebrew Bible what you’ve done for the Book of Mormon. I don’t know if we could… it may take generations to do that, because we have a lot more manuscripts. Right? But if someone is… I’ll look in Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, and it’ll tell me in the little note that there’s a dozen manuscripts that have a different reading. Really? Where are those manuscripts?

Royal: And what are the readings?

Nehemia: Well, it’ll tell me what the other reading is, and I’ll look at those manuscripts and it won’t say what they claim it says.

Royal: Yeah, I know.

Nehemia: And so, my dream is that somebody can pull up the biblical text, the Hebrew Bible text, the Old Testament, and click on a word, and see every manuscript that has that. And they can see it for themselves. And you’ll need to know some Hebrew for that, but you’ll be able to pull it up for yourself and see that. There’s a project doing that for the New Testament, and they have about half the manuscripts already. But we have nothing like that for the Old Testament.

Royal: You must transcribe every one of them separately.

Nehemia: Absolutely. Well, they’re working on…

Royal: … collation, putting them together, because otherwise you’re going to create a monster where you’re saying, “Oh, this is like this manuscript, and I’m going to just go through and find the differences.” I tried that.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Royal: I screwed up really bad, you know.

Nehemia: So, we have the monster. It was created by Benjamin Kennicott in 1776, and he compared around 600 manuscripts.

Royal: Wow!

Nehemia: He also included printed editions, so they’re not all manuscripts. And for every word, he’ll tell you, “These are the differences in these 12 manuscripts, and here’s the difference…” Now, he didn’t check all the manuscripts himself. What he did, in some instances… He sent a letter to Turin, Italy, to Torino, and he said, “Can you look in your manuscripts and send me a list of your differences?” Well, they sent him the ones that they thought were important. And did they transcribe those correctly? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Now we can check it. Can’t always check it, but a lot of times we can check it now. And that was 1776. He didn’t have access to the Cairo Geniza. He didn’t have access to the Firkovich Collection. He didn’t have access to what today we consider to be the most important manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible. So, someone needs to bring this into the 21st century, and that’s my dream. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. I really appreciate it.

You have been listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the text has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If you would like to support our efforts to transcribe the teachings on NehemiasWall.com, please visit our support page. All donations are tax-deductible (501c3) and help us empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!

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VERSES MENTIONED
Deuteronomy 27:4-6

RELATED EPISODES
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Support Team Study – A Karaite Jew on Mormonism: Part 2

OTHER LINKS
The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (Yale Edition)
edited by Royal Skousen

Book of Mormon images courtesy of:https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/media/images?lang=eng

Dr. Gordon’s PhD dissertation:
The Writing, Erasure, and Correction of the Tetragrammaton in Medieval Hebrew Bible Manuscripts

https://wordcruncher.com

Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research (ihbmr.com)

The post Hebrew Voices #203 – Revelation or Imagination: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.