0:00 when I was a member of the Mormon church I believed that this book was literally the most important book on the entire face of the planet and I grew up hearing that it was the most correct book that it was the Cornerstone of my faith that no one had ever been able to prove how Joseph Smith wrote this book that it was a miracle that it even existed some called it a marvelous work and a wonder and I have memories from my Mormon Mission and just my Mormon upbringing of tearfully testifying about how this book was the book that had brought me the closest to Jesus Christ in a nutshell what I believed about the origin of this book is that when Joseph Smith was a kid he went into the woods and he tearfully
0:48 also tearfully uh pleaded with God to know what church to join and this is the this is the sanitized version that I was taught uh and that as he was praying God and Jesus Christ two separate beings appeared to him and said that none of the churches were true and that they wanted him to restore Jesus Christ's true church back onto the Earth today a few years later an angel appeared to Joseph Smith and this angel's name was Moroni and he said that there were special Golden Plates golden tablets buried nearby and that Joseph Smith would be the one to get those gold plates into his possession and Translate them into English so that all the world could read what was on those plates
1:35 those tablets that Joseph Smith found are essentially believed to be ancient writings written by the Native Americans thousands of years ago which Moroni the character who appeared to Joseph Smith then buried before his death and Moroni then reappeared in Angelic form to tell Joseph Smith where he had buried the plates before he died so that Joseph Smith could translate that very important historic record and give it to modern-day people as a way for them to have another book of scripture very similar essentially to the Bible on top of the fact that Joseph Smith claimed that this book came from Native Americans the initial story of The Book of Mormon is actually that there were some people in Jerusalem who got on a
2:21 boat and sailed to the Americas and that's one of the pictures in the Book of Mormon so if I open up my Book of Mormon I can see uh them coming over on this big ship so the belief is that not just that the the Native Americans wrote this but that the principal ancestors of the Native Americans were this family that came over from Jerusalem which The Book of Mormon discusses this claim means that the prevailing belief was that this book is about not just the Native Americans but that the Native Americans originated from people in Jerusalem who came on a boat to the Americas the reason reason this matters is because Joseph Smith actually said the Book of Mormon on the gold plates was written in reformed Egyptian and so
3:07 that that's a madeup language it's not a real thing but basically because these people came from Jerusalem they brought their language with them so the the language this book is written in is not in an Aztec or Mayan or other you know those categories of native people in the Americas the this book on the gold plates was written in reformed Egyptian because they originated from over in Jerusalem and they to they brought their language with them so this adds another element of kind of dispro ability because he's making a major claim here he's not just claiming this book was written by Native Americans he's claiming this book is about the origin of the Native Americans stemming from this family that came from Jerusalem
3:55 that's a very brief summary of The Magnificent story that I once believed about the origin of this book uh if you actually have ever read the book of Mormon you'll know that similar to the Bible it can be a little difficult to get through Mark Twain famously called this book chloroform in print just the phrase it came to pass appears over 2,000 times in this book this video though is going to be dedicated to why I believe the Book of Mormon is merely a Bible fanfiction and is not the non-fiction historic record of ancient Native Americans that Joseph Smith said it was please consider this video to be a highlevel overview of all of the information I feel is most relevant to this subject many books have been
4:40 written about the Book of Mormon books have been written to try to approve the Book of Mormon is what Joseph Smith said it was books have been written to try to disprove and so because there are entire books many books dedicated to this topic this ultimately this video is an overview and I'm going to put a ton of links in notes below so that you can go and look and do your own research do your own reading and dig into this information as much more as you feel you want to or need to if you're coming to this video as someone who is a current member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints I definitely encourage you to do as much research and reading as possible you should never make any decisions based off a single YouTube video or a single conference talk you should always be taking the rein
5:27 yourself and looking and searching for as much information as you need to feel like you're well informed about the choices you make in your life for my current members of the church who are coming to this video If you're looking for a faithful resource the church has put out something called The Gospel topics essays and this is where they tackle the more difficult questions they have one about becoming like God mother in heaven plural marriage in Utah race and the priesthood and so if you're a member looking for a faithful point of view or if you're a non-member or ex-member looking for what the church is currently saying on this topic that's one thing I'll put in the link below which is the Mormon Church's explanation to some of these more disfavorable or critical topics if you're looking for a faithful point of view in this video I've broken down five major categories
6:13 of criticism so we're going to go over five different big buckets of reasons why I think this book is a madeup fantasy book and not something that Joseph Smith wrote himself and is a inspired record that is a history of Native American an whenever I call the Book of Mormon bible fanfiction many people will comment and say well the the Bible is a madeup fantasy book too and I have to say I actually disagree even as an atheist I'm not a Christian and I don't believe in God but the origins of the Book of Mormon and the Bible are very fundamentally different the Bible specifically the New Testament is about Jesus Christ obviously there is a full consensus that Jesus Christ was a real
6:58 person who existed in history as a real physical entity that is not to say that all those scholars believe he was the son of God or that he died for our sins or that he spiritually represents what many people believe he represents but they all concur that he was a real actual physical human being that existed in history comparing that to the Book of Mormon no scholar outside of the Mormon church has ever said that there is proof or evidence that Moroni Alma enus or any of the many many people mentioned in the Book of Mormon have been real historical figures while I do not believe in the faith claims in the Bible there's obviously proof that the place names mentioned in the Bible are real compared
7:45 to the Book of Mormon where none of the place names referenced in the Book of Mormon have ever been linked to actual geographic regions or areas of the globe While most Scholars concur that the Book of Mormon was penned by Joseph Smith he was the author not just the translator in the 1800s and the Bible is the product of a collection of many authors over a long period of time to say that these two books the Bible and the Book of Mormon belong in the same category of absolute fiction is just not true to history and it's not true to science now that I got that out of my system I'm going to establish just how important the Book of Mormon is to Mormonism as a faith tradition Joseph Smith taught that this is the most correct book that has
8:31 ever existed and that is a line that I pared all while I was a member of the church as well and they they also believe it's more correct than the Bible because the belief is that through many translations and through the fact that some of the Bible is Word of Mouth stories passed down from generation to generation the belief is that the Bible has missed translations and Joseph Smith after he finished the book of Mormon actually took it upon himself to start read retranslating the Bible because he was teaching his his Believers at the time that the Bible has so many mistranslations that it's essentially a corrupted text and that's why the Book of Mormon is so much more pure because it's a direct translation from the original Source text of the gold plates
9:18 while members would believe that the Bible has enough mistranslations and it's so mishmash together and corrupted over time that it can't be fully trusted as a pure source of scripture here's a clip from a speech in general conference where one of the 12 apostles is speaking to the church membership no Wicked man could write such a book as this and no good man would write it unless it were true and he were commanded of God to do so I testify that one cannot come to full faith in this latterday work and thereby find the fullest measure of peace and comfort in these our
10:04 times until he or she Embraces the Divinity of the Book of Mormon and the Lord Jesus Christ of whom it testifies if anyone is foolish enough or misled enough to reject 531 pages of a here toor unknown text teeming with literary and Semitic complexity without honestly attempting to account for the origin of those pages somehow especially without accounting for their powerful witness of Jesus Christ and the profound spiritual impact that witness has had on what is now tens of millions of readers if that's the case then such
10:51 persons elect or otherwise have been deceived and if they leave this church they must do so by crawling over or under or around the Book of Mormon to make their exit so many prepositions he might he he can't be lying that talk from Elder Holland was given when I was still a member of the church and it definitely loomed large when I was a Believer because instead of contending with any of the things I'm going to talk about today it feels like he's essentially saying this book and the truths of this book are so Ironclad that to even question that this book might not be what it proclaims to be or purports to be that to claim that you're
11:38 basically an a a lazy idiot who must be illiterate because it's so obvious on its face that this book is very pure scripture just exactly what Joseph Smith said it was that anyone who's questioning that you're just a dummy honestly even just this kind of logical fallacy to me that because millions of people believe something to be the case that that is enough to prove that it's objectively fact and true this type of rhetoric I think had a huge impact on me as a member because it is so powerful and it's so sure of itself that if you're already inclined to believe and if you're already part of this Faith tradition that when someone speaks with such confidence the impact on you is
12:25 that you feel that even asking questions is silly what's the point of asking questions if something is so absolutely true and accurate that someone has this much confidence about it even the idea that no Wicked man could write such a book as this and no good man would write such a book as this which is so funny because if you read the story of Joseph Smith he does seem like legitimately kind of a bad dude what with all of the child brides and all I'll link that whole talk below but my reason for including this clip is to just really prove just how important and fundamental and foundational The Book of Mormon is to Mormon belief and that when the Book of Mormon when you start looking into
13:11 the origins of the Book of Mormon or questioning the doctrines it teaches or thinking about the actual archaeological evidences or lack thereof of the Book of Mormon it's it's often one of the reasons people end up leaving the church because when you listen to a sermon or a talk like that you become so convinced The Book of Mormon is exactly what they are saying it is that when you start reading resources that are critical of the The Book of Mormon and you realize that there's a lot of evidence for those criticisms it's really hard to maintain your faith as a kid in primary I learned that the Book of Mormon was the Cornerstone of the religion and I even did little church activities I'm sure I'll be able to find something that I can put off to the side here where the
13:59 Cornerstone of an arch is is labeled The Book of Mormon and when you take the Cornerstone out everything else tumbles and falls to the ground and so when you're taught that you're expressly taught that if this book Falls the rest of it falls too and then you realize just how easy it is to knock this book over it's why a lot of people end up leaving the church over what they learn about the Book of Mormon you'll also see the Book of Mormon referenced constantly in more modern Mormon pop culture like there's this uh Tik Tok or I think is a YouTube shorts video I found they're playing basketball oo so cool they're really don't you want to talk to those guys they're good at basketball uh and they're you know having they're making
14:45 this little short about how the Book of Mormon and the Bible are in Harmony and I think it's it's a major reason why they have titled this another Testament of Jesus Christ on my mission I would say we have the Old Testament the new New Testament and another Testament of Jesus Christ because Mormons would like to place themselves as in close proximity to General Christianity as possible while still on the DL claiming they are the true Christians when you would ask a Mormon you know are you Christian they'd say yes we're Christians but what they don't say is we're actually more Christian than you because we believe we are Jesus Christ's true restored church as he taught it when he was on Earth Earth and you are living in apostasy and you will not be a
15:33 true Christian till you actually join our church and so I think that's been another careful marketing Ploy of the church which is to not just have the Book of Mormon as inspired scripture but to place that inspired scripture as closely to the Bible as possible sometimes literally in my in my my scriptures literally as close to the as possible to the Bible as here it is actually found in the same book this is the Bible Book of Mormon Doctrine and Covenants and pearl of great price which is just more more books of scripture which we're not getting in today but the pearl of crate price is actually crazy when I was on my Mormon Mission people would actually get upset seeing this which was always kind of funny to me they would get upset because if you are
16:19 a very strong believer in the Bible which a lot of Christians obviously are you probably don't exactly like what is inferred by uh having the book and Book of Mormon and the the Bible in the same bound book because what this suggests is that they are equivalents and what a Mormon missionary would tell you is not just that they're equivalent but actually the Bible is less important than the Book of Mormon The Book of Mormon is the true Book of Jesus Christ's scripture you'll also often hear people say that the Book of Mormon is true in testimonies you'll hear people say I know this church is true I know the book of Mormon is true and it this is kind of something unique to Mormonism from what I've gathered that uh people stand up in the front of
17:05 the congregation I used to do this and bear their testimony which is essentially speaking out loud your belief in the truthfulness of the church and something being true uh has many dimensions to it so when I say I know the Book of Mormon is true what I'm saying is first of all I know it's true spiritually I know that it teaches important spiritual truths and so that's why I testify I bear witness that this is a true this book is true because it's it teaches truths about Jesus Christ the other dimension though of what it means to say I know this book is true is to say I know Joseph Smith translated this
17:50 book from from Golden tablets I know that that proves he's a prophet of God I know this book is true because it is a nonfiction book it is a history it's essentially a history book it's a a diary of prophets that were Native Americans who saw Jesus Christ face to face in the same way Matthew Mark Luke and John did and that it's true because it is historic fact so there's the spiritual dimension of truth but there's also the you know this is scientifically true that what this book says it is as a non-fiction history book of native Americans that that is also true this back to the uh Cornerstone in the archway is why when the Book of Mormon
18:36 Falls the whole church falls with it and you you're taught since you're a kid this the existence of this book is proof Joseph Smith was a Prophet Joseph Smith as a prophet means we're the true Christians we're the True Church of Jesus Christ on the Earth today and the truth of this book and a scientific fact and an archaeological fact and a spiritual fact is proof and evidence physical evidence that's what Jeffrey Holland is saying in that talk evidence that we are what we purport to be which is the only true church on the planet today and that's why everyone should join it or they are lost now that I've given you a tiny Taste of just how important this book is to this religion let's get into that those five buckets of why I think it's a madeup fantasy
19:23 book the first bucket which I think personally is the most compelling is the absolute lack of archaeological proof of the of the places people battles Etc named in the Book of Mormon a lot of people like to get in the weeds of the timeline of Joseph Smith writing it between finding the plates Martin Harris Oliver cowry that is that's its own bucket that's coming um and that's often what in my experience the argumentation and apologists like to focus on but to me the most compelling evidence The Book of Mormon is just made up is the fact that there's never ever been a single piece of archaeological evidence from a sword a shield armor uh some pottery a grave
20:09 site literally nothing no single piece of archaeological evidence that has ever proved that the places and people described in the Book of Mormon were real people who legitimately lived on planet Earth at one point this is my book of Mormon from my mission and as you can see I read every single page uh multiple times and uh one thing I thought was interesting as I Was preparing for this video is just how often I'll let me get closer as you can see from this map that I have still taped into my Book of Mormon I received this map and it's titled significant Journeys in the Book of Mormon as you're looking at that map which I'll also put off to the side here you can tell that
20:55 it looks quite scientific it looks potentially you know especially if you are just kind of like a teenager that is encountering this map that you've been handed it looks realistic enough that you kind of get the sense that this is a real map this isn't you know Lord of the Rings you know how in Lord of the Rings and a lot of other fantasy books you open the cover and it'll have a madeup map that looks very realistic but obviously because you're reading Lord of the Rings or another fantas book you know it's a madeup map that is a f it's fantasy right but as you're a kid being told that the Book of Mormon is a real non-fiction book it's a history book uh you get a map like this and you really
21:42 start to kind of think okay this this feels this feels real this feels like it's a it's making a claim that this map is based in in something if you go in my Same Book You'll see that uh and I'll put a picture off to the side cuz it going to be a little to see I did have real maps in my scriptures so this is a map of the Holy Land This is a real physical place that exists on on planet Earth uh lots of different maps of different places described Syria Italy Asia Egypt you know these are real places described in the Bible that if I hopped on a plane I could go and go to this place it's a real place similarly when I go to the back of the Doctrine and Covenants because the Doctrine and
22:27 Covenants is is about Joseph Smith and his early church history where the church was founded he was in New York he was in Illinois uh so I see okay this is a map of Canada New York New Jersey Pennsylvania if I got on a plane I could go and go to these places so they they've provided in this book A book of New York and and connected it back to Joseph Smith they've provided a map of the Holy Land to connect back to Jesus Christ absent though is a a map provided by the church that map I showed you was a little handout given to me as a missionary as you know as the Mormon Church goes though they have not provided a map to show me where the Book of Mormon happened and that's because it
23:14 doesn't exist Mormonism though is very pseudo scientific there's a lot of evidence of the Book of Mormon that is based in kind of madeup science or science like that map I showed you that feels real but it doesn't withstand almost any scrutiny at all the church would say the reason they don't provide a map of where the Book of Mormon happened is because we haven't found it yet uh which we'll get into more of of that aspect of the Book of Mormon but that if you know just for anyone who's watching this video they're going to say oh well you're not being fair because the reason there's no map is not because the church is saying it doesn't exist the reason there's no map is because we just we just haven't looked hard enough yet yet and we're going to S find the sword of Laban
24:01 eventually uh so that would be their response to that argument the lack of evidence though is not because they haven't tried and BYU has its own lots of different obviously uh it's a university it has departments that that really do spend a lot of time looking into proofs of the Book of Mormon if you go and try to find academic papers about the Book of Mormon most of them are going to be produced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints using their science department at Brigham Young University I recall at one point I actually had a speech they're they're called fir sides where they have kind of special uh speakers who visit different congregations and I had a fir side a speech given by one of these people who
24:47 one of their research projects I don't know if it was funded by the church or BYU or if it was just something he had taken upon himself uh but one of his research projects was to find archaeological evidence of the Book of Mormon so he went to South America you know cuz the Book of Mormon it does describe things like a narrow neck of land it Des it it has enough uh descriptions that people have really tried to say okay what could be the narrow neck of land let's go and search across the Americas to find where matches the geography described in the Book of Mormon and anytime they find a place that maybe is is as it's described in the Book of Mormon they do a lot of digging to try to find evidence of then maybe the battles the people the
25:35 anything that is listed in the Book of Mormon to so that they can finally say look it's true it's it's true there is Real History here there's archaeological evidence of what's discussed in the Book of Mormon one thing this man talked about is an ancient Aztec deity called ketac cotle and Mormons say uh I I suppose this is all like pseudo science but apparently ketac cotle is a white bearded God uh who's descending so this is just what I was taught so you know this is just like I said it's kind of made up but basically what I was taught in this Fireside is that ketac cotle is often seen as descending so Jesus Christ descended to the people over here the
26:21 Native Americans um so they depicted Jesus Christ as ketac cotle essentially and so when they're going and looking for these real evidences one of their interpretations is that the manifestation of ketac cotle descending and potentially having a white beard apparently uh that that is proof in the archaeological evidence that Jesus did come down from the sky he descended and that because ketac cotle came down that then the Native Americans are inscribing this deity and this deity is actually meant to represent Jesus Christ himself and so it's not uncommon that members of
27:07 the church especially people who are being paid by BYU as professors to do research into these types of questions uh will take something that is already well documented like ketac cotle they will take it and say okay let's let's claim this for ourselves and and say that this is a way that we can give more legitimacy to the Book of Mormon and so me as a Mormon youth you know I'm sitting there in my chair and someone is coming to specially present to me the fact that ketac cotle proves The Book of Mormon is true and when you're a youth when you're a teenager it's pretty easy to just say well more evidence is great this is great news we we're F like I
27:53 remember when he was giving this presentation he was so excited and so animated that we found this this evidence and proof another thing he talked about is the three Nephites so in the Book of Mormon it talks about how there's three people who are transfigured so they will never die and the lore is essentially that they still walk the earth to this day they walk the earth back then and they kind of go around doing kind things like helping you change your tire this is a real story I heard change your tire when you have a flat and nobody's there to help you and so another piece of evidence that he gave in this Fireside about science he showed this slideshow of all these photos of times that he had seen three figures on um on Mayan temples or
28:39 in any sort of you know anything produced by the hands of ancient peoples if he found groups of three he basically showed this as evidence of the the three Nephites who were talked about in The Book of Mormon and I want to say there was even a time where he showed us an inscription of ketac cotle and then down beneath ketac cotle was the three Nephites because the three Nephites met Jesus Christ and he was like can you believe this and all us were like oh my God this is amazing and so you know now to describe it it sounds like I'm almost describing a parody to you but at the time it felt so real and it felt so exciting that the the work of of Joseph Smith the work of Jesus Christ the work of God is continuing to be revealed to
29:27 this day and I'm just part of this restoration of Jesus Christ Church and isn't this such an exciting thing to be a part of the Wikipedia page though not to be a downer says the majority of latterday saints believe the book to be a record of real world history independent archaeological historical and scientific communities have discovered no evidence to support the existence of the civilizations described therein the national Smithsonian in Washington DC actually got so many requests to look into the Book of Mormon as an a piece of real world history that they did ultimately uh release a statement about it the initial statement was released in 1980 but has been edited
30:13 and added to and changed a bit over the years but they've they've never changed the you know obvious message which is the Book of Mormon has no basis in archaeology they address many different portions of the Book of Mormon line by line so they have nine points in this this copy of the letter that I'm pulling from and I will link to below also say that no reputable egyptologist has discovered the relationship between archaeological remains to prove that this was a record of people from thousands of years ago they say iron steel glass and silk were not used in the New World before 1492 uh additionally they say Native Americans had no wheat barley oats Millet rice pigs cattle chickens horses donkeys or camels
30:58 which all appear in the Book of Mormon prior to 1942 so we'll get more into those anachronisms in a bit but essentially they just very thoroughly cover a lot of ground very quickly as to all the reasons The Book of Mormon is not a history book it is a book Joseph Smith penned himself maybe some would say um plagiarized himself we we'll get into that as well the next piece of this archaeological or scientific aspect this bucket is the aspect of DNA evidence so the Book of Mormon once claimed that the group of people who came from Jerusalem uh were the principal ancestors so that was the word they used the principal ancestors so for a while the church boldly made the claim that people from
31:44 Jerusalem were the ancestors of Native Americans and when the science of DNA arrived on the scene they anxiously ran to go check and see hey we can do some DNA testing on Native Americans and that will prove that Native Americans have DNA from Jerusalem and the Middle East so that will prove that the Book of Mormon is what Joseph Smith said it was however they had to change this bold claim to say that the these people from Jerusalem were among the ancestors this is a a much lower word on the rung of certainty they went from Principal ancestors to among the ancestors uh after it was proven that
32:29 Native Americans did not come from people of the Middle East modern scientists now believe that Native Americans descended from Paleo Indians who migrated from North Asia to Alaska via a land bridge not from the Middle East as claimed by The Book of Mormon there is a gospel topics essay published by the church about this topic of DNA uh they essentially say that because DNA science is so convoluted and they go into a very long and very scientific ironically explanation of this and they just say that they their their decisive summary at the end is essentially that it's inconclusive and we can't know for sure
33:14 but honestly to go from boldly claiming that the Native Americans are descended from people in Jerusalem and that's the primary ancestry to then saying result inconclusive is uh quite the walking back of that initial claim the hellur I think is another really interesting aspect of this archaeological evidence question so many different prophets claimed that the hill kamur which is the name of where Joseph Smith found those gold plates was the the the place where this massive battle happened so this this battle happened with Moroni he's the angel who told Joseph Smith where to find the plates and he was this battle leader he let a group of 10,000 men into battle and he was one of only 24
34:03 survivors in the Book of Mormon as The Story Goes and 230,000 Warriors died during this battle a side note that is that you can always tell if someone's not actually Mormon because people always say Moroni like macaroni but it's Moroni so uh sometimes I'm watching uh content produced by people who want to talk about the church but weren't actually raised in the church and they always say Moroni instead of Moroni so that's a dead giveaway and so with a number like 230,000 people dying that is a massive amount of people you'd think that when they go and dig up the hill kamora which is in New York and is right by where Joseph Smith grew up you'd think when they they dug up that area they would
34:50 very quickly find many many evidences of a massive battle where many people died they have found zilch at this hill kamora and it's kind of ironic because early church leaders actually claimed that this hill they said those were the two the same two things so they said it talks about kamur in The Book of Mormon it when Joseph Smith lived near the hill kamora so those are the same Hill and after they they didn't find any evidence because this is made up they said oh actually blah blah blah blah blah we're taking it back just like we took about took back the DNA thing actually it's referring to two separate Hills who happen to have the same name and of
35:36 course you know the irony of this is that it's obviously not that hard to find uh evidences of ancient people we can still find lots of evidences of the Romans uh the Mayans the Aztecs we we can easily find evidences that people of in history existed they don't just dissipate we can you know we can find ancient uh evidences of ancient people all over the place we've even found you know full fully preserved bodies in the ice so these things don't just disappear it's very possible to find evidences of ancient people we just haven't found evidences of these ancient people I do think one sad aspect of this is that if you would bring this up to a member of the church they of course would just say well we just haven't found it yet and
36:23 that to me is you know you could dig 50 ft below the surface of every inch of of Earth of ground above water you could dig you could go 50 feet down and just say we're just going to lower all Land by 50 feet because we are so sure we're going to find something and even if you did that they would still say well what about the 51st foot and that is just what faith is right you know it's not that they the the belief is not based trly on science though they would say it it is a history book the belief is based in faith which is just a believing in things that aren't seen and so when you know when when people sometimes will say
37:09 well does it like how does this not just make it so nobody believes anymore and it's because ultimately the belief isn't based in science it's based in their hearts and their feelings and their emotions and those things are not scientific that is uh based in the human urge to believe not in a empirically tested uh thing that exists in the real world basically their claim would be that the absence of evidence isn't evidence and people have said that in my my comments before but as Christopher hchen says that which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence and so ultimately for the people who don't believe the burden of proof is not on the people who don't believe the burden of proof actually
37:55 lies with the people who are proport that this is a history book that is non-fiction that is about Native Americans that really existed so the burden of proof is on them and currently the the proof that they have brought forth is not evidence enough that it is a universally accepted fact that the Book of Mormon is about things that really happened in places that are real compare that to like I said at the beginning the Bible where many scientists are atheist or do not believe in Divinity of the Bible but it is universally accepted that Jesus Christ was a historic figure that existed on planet Earth in real physical form if you're enjoying this video just a quick reminder to like this video subscribe to
38:42 my channel I release a new video every single week and talk about Mormon culture Mormon history Mormon Doctrine my personal experiences growing up in the church my mission Etc so if you want to get a new video every week don't forget to subscribe and hit that little bell button the second bucket I wanted to talk about is the process of translation how it was translated the timeline it was translated in and just also compare that with what the official or kind of whitewashed sanitized version of what I was taught as a member this clip to the side here shows what uh basically what I was taught what it looked like for Joseph Smith to translate the gold plates you'll see that he is looking at the gold plates reading you know like as if you're
39:28 reading from a book he's speaking English while someone else is off to the side translating and writing down the words he's saying as he's saying them which is if you're thinking of translating is essentially what you picture somebody has the source text in its original language the person sitting in the seat can read both the language It Was Written in and the language to translate into and is kind of comparing you know either writing it himself or or speaking it aloud so someone can transcribe the words so that's what I was taught this is the this is a little movie produced by the church I'll link it below so this is kind of the most sanitized Church version this is also reminiscent of uh like if I as a kid I would have had a story book like this
40:14 similar to this about Joseph Smith you can see uh similarly we have a sheet Joseph Smith is here holding the gold plates he's reading aloud from the text while a scribe is transcribing the word this is a book called preach my gospel this was my manual I used as a Mormon missionary and you can see this is lesson number one so this is the first thing I was ever supposed to teach people on my mission and here you can see Joseph Smith sitting there the gold plates are right here as someone else writes down the words he's saying this is another collection of images from the CES letter which I'll also link below the CES letter is a great synopsis of criticisms of a lot of the truth claims of the church this is the portion where he talks about the ation of the Book of Mormon and you can see it's not just in
41:01 this movie it's not just in a children's book it's basically whenever the translation of the Book of Mormon is discussed it's almost exclusively Illustrated like I've shown you in the last pictures now here is how South Park uh showed how this translation process happened Joseph Smith doesn't have the plates with him he drops a rock in a hat he puts his face in the Hat and begins to read aloud this uh this stone that Joseph Smith used was called a peep stone or also called a sear Stone here's my little example of my sear Stone uh so he initially used this Stone which this church still has to this day it looks like this uh he initially used this
41:46 Stone to find buried treasure but he later used this Stone to translate The Book of Mormon so often the gold plates would not even be in the same room room as he would be uh he would take his Rock and he would drop it in his hat and then he would put the Hat uh over his face so that none of the light would get through uh and his face would be in the complete dark so it would look like that after he put his face in the Hat he would then say words aloud which The Scribe would write down so nowhere near what uh was shown in illustrations here is a quote from one of the people who helped him
42:32 translate The Book of Mormon Joseph Smith he said would put the sear Stone into a hat and put his face in the Hat drawing it closely around his face to exclude the light and in the darkness the spiritual light would shine a piece of something resembling a parchment paper would appear and on that appeared the writing one character at a time would appear and under it was the interpretation in English thus the Book of Mormon was translated by the gift and power of God and not by any power of man you can read quotes from Emma as well Emma was also a scrib there were a few people who were scribes for Joseph Smith during this process and all of them say the same thing which is that the Hat was used the rock dropped in the Hat face in the Hat whatever for a very long time the church really didn't own up about this um but more recently people started
43:19 raising this as a concern they had kind of saying hey why am I always being shown pictures that look like this if uh this is actually what was going on and president Nelson who's the current prophet of the church sat down with a historian I don't know basically to be interviewed about this and this is the video of what that looked like basically she asks him you know can you show us the process by which Joseph Smith translated The Book of Mormon and my favorite moment of this video is that he goes and like slowly is lowering his face towards the hat and then he causes and you can tell that he doesn't want to go full face and hat and he just wants to gesture because he knows that if he
44:06 fully puts his face in the Hat like I just did that it makes him look so ridiculous that he just can't get himself to go full face and hat the church published a bunch of images of the sear Stone back in 2015 and so this was kind of their full coming out about the fa face and hat gate and I think the reason this really bothered people because when you think about it the idea that an angel visited someone and led them to gold plates and they translated those gold plates that's already a pretty Fantastical story so why is it why why lie about the face in the Hat situation if you're going to already have this very Fantastical seeming story I think one of the reasons is because stories of angels feels very approachable to the average you know
44:53 Christian person stories of a face being put put in a hat is much odder and stranger compared to a modern interpretation of religion and specifically Christianity I think for me as a member these types of moments really make you feel like if they're lying or misdirecting or concealing this truth or this aspect of this part of my religion what else are they lying about it makes you feel like you're not standing on Solid Ground when keep in mind as a Mormon you spend hours thousands and thousands of hours devoted to this church so if you can spend 20 years for me two decades in a church and not know how Joseph Smith translated The Book of Mormon it really makes you feel
45:41 like what else don't I know what else were they concealing what else were they lying about and it it really starts you down this Rabbit Hole of feeling like if I've been presented this very sanitized version of this there must be other instances of this so it really kicks off I think a Trust of the narrative you've been spoonfed and makes you feel like you have to seek other sources in order to find the truth you probably noticed when Jeffrey R Holland was talking he he mentioned you know how could he have done this so quickly that is something he he points to specifically as an Evidence of its Divinity and that's often tossed about in church in the Mormon church where they talk about Joseph Smith translated this in three months is the claim which is about eight pages a day and no no no one could
46:27 physically do that unless God helped them to do it so essentially the speed by which it was translated is used as a proof of its Divinity and and that Joseph Smith could not have physically done that and so that proves that God was involved members will say that the translation of the Book of Mormon happened in 65 days however this whole conversation around the 3mon timeline eight pages a day that's just the accepted timeline and if you look at other touch points of the timeline of the translation it may not actually be true that he did this project in 3 months I'll also share the reason I don't like this whole timeline or translation approach to disproving the Book of Mormon is that you're just relying on personal Witnesses or
47:13 personal testimonies or journal entries from people who are just human people who already had skin in the game for Mormonism to succeed or who had left and then wanted it to fail so this is just a grayer area to me than something like archaeological evidence where you're trying to prove or disprove something about the Book of Mormon but you're using just human testimony which is already just shaky your ground so one timeline which is the church's approved timeline is that this translation happened in 65 days however if you look at another version of the timeline Joseph Smith received the plates in September of 1827 and then he apparently started to translate some of those character characters by January
47:59 1828 uh then Martin Harris loses some of those pages in June of 1828 stay with me here Oliver cryy then helps with the translation in 18 April of 1829 and then the translation is finished by June 30th 1829 and type setting began August 1829 it was then published 8 months after that in March of 1830 so the reason all of that is important animportant is that I just wanted to establish the fact that from when Joseph Smith said he got the plates which I don't even know he got the plates but at least from when he's talking about kind of the Inception of this project to then publishing the book that is 891 days between receiving the plates
48:47 and fully publishing The Book of Mormon and who knows you know as far as going from even the days that the translation was finished and type setting began it's 8 months till it's published I don't think we could definitively prove because there were no video cameras back then if even still they're they're still working on it while the type setting is taking place because type setting is incredibly timec consuming they have to set one letter at a time in order to do this on an old printing press so I think that that you know that is one timeline I've always held in my mind as well that while the established timeline is that it took him 3 months from talking about getting the plates to then uh fully publishing The Book of Mormon was two years and five months so that as the
49:36 idea of the true timeline of when this project kind of originated to when it was fully concluded that is a much longer timeline where we don't we don't really know for sure that what Joseph Smith said is the timeline is the exact timeline I think there's also some people have also said that because Joseph Smith potentially plagiarized much of the book book both from the Bible but also from contemporary novels that were potentially available to him at the time that he didn't write a book write eight pages a day that he had much longer and that he was pulling from so many other sources that he's really just cobbling together a plagiarized version of something and isn't writing his own book word for word if you are in the process of leaving the church or struggling with your faith I definitely
50:23 suggest checking out my book how to leave the Mormon Church uh I wrote this over the course of about 2 years it is an exor's guide to rebuilding after religion and if you were like me at all and you raised in a hyper strict family that was incredibly devout even something like buying a tank top or wearing a tank top out and about to go grocery shopping can feel like a massive hurdle after leaving the church and so consider checking out my book if you're in the process of leaving and you're figuring out how to tell your family how to get into you know trying coffee for for the first time everything that I learned about leaving the church I put into this book our third bucket of evidence The Book of Mormon is not what I was taught it was is the evidences in
51:09 the text itself for this portion I'm going to bring back my Bible onto the stage and 30% of the book of Isaiah is found in the Book of Mormon mosiah 14 in the Book of Mormon is a reproduction of Isaiah 53 third Nephi 13 copies Matthew chapter six almost word for word and so essentially Joseph Smith borrowed a lot from the Bible and put it in the Book of Mormon sorry I'm holding it the wrong way the funny thing is is that Joseph Smith is treating this like this scripture so say Matthew 6 Matthew 6 is not in the Book of Mormon because the Native Americans had access to the Bible Matthew 6 is in the Book of Mormon because prophets received the same Revelation that you can find in Matthew 6 and that ended up word for word in the
51:56 Book of Mormon so it's it's not that the Native Americans had access to these religious texts it's essentially that they're receiving the same Revelations from heaven and writing them down in the same exact way the people in the Holy Land received those Revelations the ironic part about this though is that the errors that Joseph Smith had in his version of the King James Bible ended up in the Book of Mormon so what that means to me is that Joseph Smith is not staring at the gold plates and reading them aloud and is just translating aloud as he's reading blah blah blah blah blah this is what the book says Joseph Smith is standing up from his chair moseying on over to the the King James version of the Bible he has in his house and he is
52:43 copying word for word the words in the Bible and then putting them into the Book of Mormon which shows he's just plagiarizing from the Bible at that point he's not you know translating inspired words from prophets of old another irony that I thought was interesting is that as I said Joseph Smith after he finished the book of Mormon took it upon himself to retranslate the Bible but the the ways that he retranslated the Bible those trans those those Perfections those updates that he put in his Bible aren't in the Book of Mormon so he fixed the Bible but when he put his original Bible in the Book of Mormon he didn't fix it as he was doing it so the the errors that were in his King James version of
53:29 the Bible ended up in the Book of Mormon and then even those those words some of them he ended up changing the same thing happens with italicized words in the King James version the the words that Joseph Smith had italicized in his version of the Bible end up italicized in his manuscript of the Book of Mormon and so down to the the way the words are italicized he's clearly just copying from the the Bible he's not translating the words given by mosiah from the Native American prophet he is actually just stealing from the Bible in the CES letter he also has a good list broken down of place names and names and words that existed in the time of Joseph Smith that also come up in the Book of Mormon I'll put that list here and that is just
54:14 more evidence that Joseph Smith is kind of borrowing and taking from the things around him and is not translating a ancient book this chart also shows that there are a lot of similarities between a book book published in Joseph Smith's time called the view of the Hebrews uh that has a ton of similarities to the Book of Mormon and so this chart which I'll also include a link to below this list is basically proof of the theory that Joseph Smith plagiarized a lot of the Book of Mormon uh from a book like the view of the Hebrews similar claims are made about a book called The Late War the view of the Hebrews was actually written by a man named Reverend Ethan Smith and Oliver cryy was in his congre ation when that book was published and so there's a good chance it seems like
55:02 it it's feasible that Oliver cryy essentially got a hold of this this book view of the Hebrews and then brought it to Joseph Smith to Aid in Translation in addition to these two books the view of the Hebrews and the late War there was another book called the mound builder myth this book portrayed Native Americans as descendants of the ancient Israelites so this was a book that existed prior to the Book of Mormon and this was a popular uh Theory back then that Native Americans were from the Israelites so this idea that Joseph Smith had that is in the Book of Mormon which that is that someone came on a boat from Jerusalem and landed in the Americas and was the reason there were Native Americans here this was this wasn't just Ultra super random this is a
55:50 a very common myth or lore or story that was told that was even present in texts that suggested that this was the origin of the Native Americans and so once again I think Joseph Smith was just a master plagiarizer because he pretty consistently from masonry in the temple ceremonies to Isaiah in the Bible to the stories of the Native Americans I think he was just a master at taking from all these different ideas and cultures whether it was Egyptian or whatever and and making it his own in a way that he was charismatic enough to pass off as its own unique thing in addition to all of the errors in his Bible ending up in the Book of Mormon there were also over a 100,000 changes made to the Book of
56:37 Mormon since the initial manuscript now Joseph Smith did not put punctuation like no punctuation was in the initial manuscript he wrote Of The Book of Mormon so a lot of those changes are just grammatical changes where they're adding commas quotation marks periods Etc however there were also a lot of changes made over time to clarify Doctrine and so when you look and read apologists people who are trying to prove the Book of Mormon or answer critics of the Book of Mormon they will always lead with hey these are mostly grammatical changes punctuation updates so this whole you know Book of Mormon has been changed so many times you can just brush that under the rug it's not that big of a deal but they always lead
57:22 with that and then at the end we'll say you know there were a few changes made to clarify Doctrine they didn't change Doctrine it's just clarifying and I'll put those changes off to the side here some of them and so when you're researching this stuff as a member you feel very gaslit because you you see there were changes but they're telling you oh well don't don't overreact I mean they're they're just grammatical changes this isn't really that big of a deal because when you hear the number a 100,000 changes and you've been taught this is the most correct book that's ever existed it doesn't exactly align logically and so there are grammatical changes but there also have been changes or clarifications made to the doctrine
58:07 uh that is in the Book of Mormon another piece of evidence that Joseph Smith is the one who penned the Book of Mormon is the evidence of anachronisms so an the author is trying to claim the text is written in an example of this is that when Shakespeare wrote Julia Caesar there is a clock in the play and clocks would not have existed in the time period of Julia Caesar similarly if I'm writing a you know crime novel that's set in the 60s and someone pulls out an iPhone it would immediately feel to you off because you would know that in the
58:54 60s they didn't have iPhones so these elements that authors sometimes put in texts can feel quite natural because if someone's in a war they should be riding a horse because if I'm thinking of wars and I'm Joseph Smith seems like if I'm a Native American I should be depicted on a horse but when we uh investigate the text more thoroughly we see that a lot of the things that Joseph Smith chose to put in the text wouldn't have existed or there's no archaeological evidence to show they existed in the time period Joseph Smith is saying the book originated in like I said Wikipedia has a great list of this we have horses cattle oxen sheep uh swine goats elephants yes elephants Wheels chariots
59:42 wheat uh silk and steel and iron I remember talking to a church leader about hey it says there are elephants in this in the Book of Mormon I've never seen Native Americans depicted on elephants I've never heard Native Americans had elephants did they die out and I remember them saying Oh you know I I don't even remember what they said with whenever you raise concerns like this it's always they they just kind of dismiss your concern with as little Fanfare as possible um and I'm sure they just said something like oh they probably existed back then and then they all died out and I just as a kid was like makees sense to me there are tons of research papers written about these things and sometimes for example with steel uh there's been no evidence of
1:00:29 pre-colombian iron smelting in the Western Hemisphere but then sometimes they will change the goalposts so they'll say well it wasn't actually steel it was an obsidian blade and Joseph Smith wrote it down as steel so sometimes what they do instead of just saying well you know we don't there we don't know why that's there or this is you're right this is proof The Book of Mormon isn't real instead what they'll say is essentially well Joseph Smith used the word horse but he actually meant a toer or Joseph Smith used steel but he actually meant obsidian and they'll kind of rewrite it in a way where they're saying oh well this word was translated to be this but
1:01:15 if you look back far enough in the history or if you if you read a around or read between the lines it actually is referring to this and maybe I could maybe I could swallow that with if it was one word but there's so as I show said there's just an entire Wikipedia page with a lists and lists and lists and list uh saying here are all the the anachronisms in the Book of Mormon and so a lot of these evidences it's it's why as a member when you're having a faith crisis and you're reading all of these apologist voices it can actually damage your faith more purely because the explanations are so weak and thin and and illogical that you're like this is the
1:02:02 best we got this is the this is the best explanation for why this exists because this explanation is trash and if this is the best we got then we really are in hot water one common claim that I've heard as proof of the Book of Mormon uh being what it reports to be is called it's uh it's a claim about the stylometry of the Book of Mormon and this is apparently a type of science which is a way to statistically analyze the words of a book to to determine certain things about it so for example with the Book of Mormon some Studies have used stylometry to prove that the Book of Mormon has multiple authors because just like the Bible the Book of Mormon has many different books so
1:02:49 there's the book of mosiah The Book of Nephi there's the book of enus there's the book of Elma so they are trying to prove hey just like the Bible has lots of different authors The Book of Mormon has lots of different authors and the way that we can prove that is through something called stylometry here's a quick clip from a YouTube channel which tries to prove the authenticity of the Book of Mormon since its publication in 1830 many have wondered who wrote the Book of Mormon Believers claim it was written by ancient prophets Skeptics often assume Joseph Smith or an associate wrote it in order to shed light on this issue several studies have relied upon a type of statistical analysis called stylometry stylometry I love that they
1:03:34 show a smart looking man during that part because science will help us know the Book of Mormon is true unless it's all those damn archaeologists we need our we need the Mormon scientists on this stylometry measures linguistic patterns and can identify an author's unique writing habits it has most famously been used to help answer questions about texts with disputed authorship such as the Federalist Papers and some of Shakespeare's plays over the past few decades various stylometric Studies have been conducted on the Book of Mormon a 1980 study was the first by measuring patterns of function words it concluded that the Book of Mormon has multiple distinct authorship Styles and that none of these Styles match the writing habits of Joseph Smith or his
1:04:21 associates it can be responsibly concluded that the book of of Mormon is exactly what we wanted it to be so I did look into the stylometric studies that it discusses in this and I'm not saying stylometry is pseudo science because obviously it is a science that's that is legitimately used so this video also connects to this article which is an analysis or a kind of a deeper breakdown of some of these different studies and in it at the end it says basically while two of the studies each reached conclusions inconsistent with the book of Mormon's claims of authorship both were later found to be fundamentally flawed in contrast the Larson Hilton and field studies each produced sound
1:05:08 results so if you had to take a guess what would be the faith origins of the people who had the studies that were inaccurate versus the faith origins of the studies that were found to be structurally sound so if you look at Holmes he was not a Mormon not a sound study jockers X Mormon not a sound study lson Mormon sound study Hilton Mormon sound study Fields Mormon sound study so as they're breaking it down they're essentially making the claim that the people who have the bad studies we're not going to listen to if you research those people they're either ex Mormon or not Mormon and if you research the people whose studies were great work and just magnificently done those people
1:05:55 over Mormon to me it's the issue I have with BYU doing all of this Research into the Book of Mormon because if you go into a scientific Endeavor with the specific desire to find a an outcome that aligns with your bias you're not doing science that is not what science is science fundamentally is not meant to be approached from the perspective of trying to prove a preh held idea or conclusion scientific theory is meant to be approached with the idea that you should be able to really look into a question or a hypothesis without having a bias of trying to confirm something that you already believe which to me the idea that BYU is even doing these
1:06:42 research studies is anti-science because they're approaching this question trying to prove something they're not approaching this question with the uh even the ability these professors don't even they if they find evidence that proves The Book of Mormon is false they would just lose their jobs so that's that's not science that's not research that's confirmation bias which is why at the beginning of this video I said I'm an ex Mormon I don't believe in the Book of Mormon this is my bias because at least if you're willing to say and come forward and say hey I have a bias this is what my bias is then I feel like at
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