Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: In 1828, Martin Harris brought characters of the Book of Mormon to a university professor named Charles Anthon and came away from that exchange feeling like the Book of Mormon was true. However, that Professor Charles Anthon walked away from that experience, and he later told people that the whole thing was just nonsense. So who's right? Welcome to Informed Saints, where we study hard and believe boldly. My name is Jasmine Rapley. This is Neil and Stephen, and today we're talking about the Anthon transcript and Martin Harris's experience with this university professor and. And what it means for the authenticity of the book Mormon. So, to start off, I want to have you live react to a TikTok I found.
[00:00:34] Speaker B: Oh, boy.
[00:00:34] Speaker A: Describing this very experience.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: And so worst that could happen, this.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: Tiktoker is going to share this story with us, and then maybe we can react to or correct some of what this narrative actually says.
[00:00:45] Speaker C: Hello, Professor Anton. Oh, hello, Martin Harris. How can I help you today? I have some ancient writings I'd like you to verify.
Sure. Let's take a look. Hmm. Martin, I can tell right away this is just gibberish. I mean, that's just an obvious capital H and a capital D with some dice attached to it. And I even see a fancy capital B, and really everything else is just squiggly lines that looks like someone just made up.
Where did you say you got these? From an amazing man named Joseph Smith who's been called as a prophet to translate ancient golden plates.
Martin, please tell me you haven't given this guy any money. Well, I mean, I did mortgage my farm and gave him all that money so he could print the Book of Mormon. Damn it, Martin. I'll tell you what. You bring me these golden plates, and I'll tell you if they're legitimate.
Fine. But part of them are sealed. Okay, then I won't read that sealed part. Are you saying you can't read a sealed book? So then he said, I cannot read a sealed book. Just like Isaiah 29. He fulfilled Bible prophecy. The church is true.
[00:01:41] Speaker B: Whoa.
I had no idea that Martin Harris. Harris mortgaged his farm even before the book was being printed. Well, 1820, the things you learn on Exmo TikTok. The groundbreaking history that Martin Harris mortgaged his farm before he went to go see Charles.
[00:01:59] Speaker D: And yeah, I think that's.
We talk about anachronisms. Yeah, that was anachronistic. Okay.
And I think that's maybe worth pointing out first here is he had not mortgaged his farm yet.
And in fact, the case can be made that it was his encounter with Anthon that made him want to do it, that convinced him that this was legitimate and that he wanted to. In fact. Yeah.
When people argue about the different versions, like Anthon's version versus Martin Harris's version, that's something that gets brought up is Martin comes away from this and he has greater conviction and he's, you know, eventually, about a year later, he's willing to mortgages farm a year and a half later to get the book printed at. Why would he do that if this. There was like this resounding dismissal like Anthon would like you to believe?
[00:02:50] Speaker A: So what really happened? Should we talk through like, well, what's Martin's account? What's Charles Anthon's account here? Well, what's the story?
[00:02:57] Speaker D: Well, before. Before we do that, we probably should also clarify since he uses it as a prop in the. In the thing. The transcript that. That document you see, which is sometimes called the Anthem transcript, it's more properly known as the characters document, that is not generally believed to be the manuscript or the transcript of characters that Martin brought to Anthon. Okay. And we can maybe have a separate discussion or a separate video about that another time because it's. Yeah, it is a fascinating history and people like to do what he did there where it looks like a capital A. Yeah. You know what I can show you. I'm sure Stephen could show you Hieratic characters look like a capital H. Right. And so, you know, there are. There are some actually interesting comparisons with Egyptian characters that could be made, but that's for another time.
So this basic story of Martin Harris and Charles anthon is in February 1828.
Martin, Joseph Smith is now in Harmony. He's moved to Harmony, Pennsylvania to live near his in laws. And he's purchased from his father in law a plot of land.
[00:04:04] Speaker D: Martin is. Martin comes down from Palmyra to Harmony. And sources are a little bit conflicting whether it was Joseph Smith's idea or whether it was Martin Harris's idea to take the characters. Joseph Smith's 1832 history attributes it to Martin. He says. He says Martin came down and the Lord told him to take these characters to. But other sources, Lucy Mack Smith and other sources suggest that it was something Joseph Smith had been planning all along.
But in any case, Joseph Smith had made transcriptions of characters from the plates.
[00:04:39] Speaker D: And Martin comes down and he takes copies of those transcripts and he takes them to various scholars, not just Anthony, not just Anthon. We know of at least three people.
Luther Bradish, who was actually a Palmyra local.
[00:04:52] Speaker B: And was he like his cousin or something?
[00:04:54] Speaker D: I don't know if he was his cousin.
[00:04:55] Speaker B: Some kind of distant relation.
[00:04:56] Speaker D: I believe he had some connection, like he was someone Harris knew from growing up in Palmyra.
And then we also know Samuel Mitchell is someone that he visits with. But Charles Anthon is the one who's kind of been like the famous because.
[00:05:11] Speaker B: Well, what's funny is in Joseph Smith's history, the main emphasis is on Mr. Anthon, Charles Anthon. And then at the very end he mentions, oh, and Dr. Mitchell. Yeah, but just like, like, who's this guy Mitchell? Yeah. So there's multiple people Martin is consulting.
[00:05:24] Speaker D: And several historians have, have. Have put together all the sources and fleshed out the story. You know, we can maybe include some of the sources in, in our show notes or whatever. Richard Bennett and Michael McKay and Garrett Dirkmot, who we had on previously, have done some good research on this.
He went to some, you know, there's some accounts that say he went to Philadelphia. We don't know who he visited there, but yeah, Charles Anthon's kind of the main one. And as the story goes, he shows the manuscript to Charles Anthon and he initially affirms that, yes, they are ancient characters. He gives him a certificate certifying that. And then he asks, well, where did this come from? And Martin tells the story of this angel and the gold plates and.
And then Anthon is like, super sus, bro. Yeah, exactly. And so he's like, no, well, you know, and he says, bring me the plates and I can translate them. And Martin says, I can't, for they're sealed. And then, you know, Anthon infamously says, I cannot read a sealed book. And he tears up the certificate and Martin leaves. And that's kind of the story you may have heard in Sunday school or whatever. Yeah, primary.
That's the basic story. Now, obviously there are a bunch of store. A bunch of different sources that have different details and we can maybe get into some of that during this discussion, but that's the basic story.
[00:06:42] Speaker B: And that story, by the way, comes from the Pearl Great Price account in Joseph Smith history. That's. And what's interesting. And we can get into this if we want later. But the way Joseph Smith tells the story, it's in verses 63, 64, 65. It sounds as if though he is embedding Martin's firsthand account in this later narrative history, because it's. He even says, I refer to his own account of the circumstances as he related them to me after his Return, which was as follows. And then it's I went to New York City and so forth. So there's some questions. How much of this is Joseph Smith paraphrasing what Martin Harris told him versus Did Martin Harris actually produce some kind of a written account that Joseph has a copy of that he embeds? I happen to think that's probably the case, and I've said as much in my new study edition of the Pulgate Price. I think that this is an embedded document. This is how Joseph's history was made. Basically a big part of it was just embedding different documents into this sort of streamlined narrative, but we can't know for sure.
[00:07:40] Speaker D: And I actually, just a few weeks ago, I was reading the account and it kind, I had kind of a light bulb moment where I noticed probably for the first time ever, that there does seem to be a voice shift there as it takes over. And I meantric shift. I mean, I won't proclaim that statistically, you know, it's just like my own subjective sense as I'm reading the account.
It's not just a voice shift in the sense of like, oh, it's written first person in Martin's, you know, as if Martin's saying it. I, you know, went to New York City. Like, I genuinely felt like, oh, this is someone else writing now. And so I, I. And I was reading Stephen's notes that, you know, he thinks it's an embedded document. And I thought, you know what, I can actually see that.
Which is important because it does suggest that this is, this is a primary, like, this is a firsthand source, potentially, that works potentially very early and potentially very early.
The history is being compiled in 1839. But Martin has left the church at that point. And he's in Kirtland.
He left the church, he's not in Missouri, 1837. So it would be before 1837 that this account would come from.
[00:08:47] Speaker C: Interesting.
[00:08:48] Speaker A: So what's the difference between what Martin says about this experience? What does Charles Anthon say about this experience?
[00:08:54] Speaker B: Well, we have, as I understand it, two or three accounts from Anthony. We have three accounts.
The one that most people sort of point to was published by Edie Howe and Mormonism Unveiled. So this is 1834 at this point. Latter Day Saints are using the episode with Charles Anthon as evidence for the Book of Mormon. William Phelps especially is promoting this as evidence for the Book of Mormon. And so it would appear that Charles Anthon is receiving solicitations from people asking him, hey, is this actually what happened? Right.
Because tacitly it seems to be saying that Charles Anthon supports the Gold Bible. Right. The and claims of the Mormons or whatever. So Edie Howe writes to Charles Anthon, or was it Flastus Hurlbut? Dr. Hurlbut. But I can't remember who writes the letter, but one of them writes to him and it gets published in Edie Howe's book, saying, hey, man, what's your perspective on all this? And he gives this account and just sort of paraphrasing here, we can maybe throw the account on the screen here.
He basically says, Martin Harris came to me. He had this piece of paper that had these sort of scrawling jumbles of symbols and characters. And, and the way he describes it, he says they were arranged in columns and at the end of it was, he says it was like a crude representation of the Mexican zodiac, which is the Aztec calendar. Aztec calendar, right. But. But the point is, to him, it's all just a hodgepodge of gibberish. And in the 1834 account, he says, I warned the farmer not to be involved with this at all and that I refused to have anything to do with this. Right. And I told him that he's being taken in a con job, basically. So that's the, the 1834 account that's the most widely popular and circulated one among anti Mormons and critics and skeptics of the Book of Mormon to say that either Martin Harris is just lying or maybe Martin Harris, you know, I don't know, was misconstruing something. But they use that as evidence that we can't trust Martin Harris's own account.
[00:10:47] Speaker D: Right.
[00:10:49] Speaker A: I mean, as someone who does have a deep respect and admiration for scholarship, I could easily see how someone could look at these different accounts and be like, oh, yeah, this farmer was swindled and this professor, this esteemed professor could clearly see through the con. And I can see that. So I don't know why. Why should we take Martin Harris's account seriously?
[00:11:11] Speaker D: Well, that's a great question, and I think there are a lot of points to be made.
I think it is worth noting that, like, we. We don't actually think that Anthon's account is totally, like, fictional or made up. Right. In fact, it does, like, Martin does ultimately say that, you know, when he says he tore up the transcript, like it's. It's totally believable that by the end of the encounter, when he finds out the angel and the gold plates and he talks about in kind of mockery tones. He talks about the curse of God befalling you if you try to look at the plates and stuff like that. He hears Martin talk about some of these more, you know, supernatural elements to the story. It's totally believable that by the end of that encounter he's like, oh, no, this is. This is a bunch of nonsense. But I think there's a lot of good reasons to believe that he did initially get.
[00:12:02] Speaker D: A positive assessment from Charles Anthon, possibly from some of the other people that he visited as well.
[00:12:09] Speaker A: So it may not be like Charles Anthon lying about the experience or Martin Harris lying, but they're seeing the experiences differently, or maybe they're obscuring or rather.
[00:12:18] Speaker B: The narratives that they are crafting about it and remembering about it are serving different purposes. And I think that's where you get your wires crossed.
So on the one hand with Martin Harris, clearly he and other Latter Day Saints have a sort of vested interest in putting a. A positive sort of usage to this narrative or to this encounter. Right. So they clearly are seeing it as evidence of the inspiration of the Book of Mormon, the fulfillment of ancient prophecy with Isaiah 29. So there. There's motivated reasoning on their side. On Charles Anthon's side, there's clearly motivated reasoning to distance himself from this. Because the Mormon Bible, the Golden Bible, is sort of a national scandal and an embarrassment for a lot of people. And Charles Anthon's reputation is supposedly being enlisted, dragged into it. So you can very understandably see how he would not want any even if he did. Yeah, even if he perhaps did think that it was authentic in some way, the characters, the way that it was being used by polemicist, you could see how he would not want anything to do with this. I understand why academics are get really skittish when their views are enlisted by people on sort of the fringes. You know what I mean? And so there is this tendency to want to distance yourself from people that you perceive may be misusing your work. So I can cut Anthony a little bit of slack there, but only so much because again, he.
I'll mention, by the way, that he leaves two other accounts, one in 1841 and one in 1844.
In the 1841 account, he says that Harris requested me to give him my opinion in writing about the paper with which he had shown me. I did so without hesitation, partly for the man's sake. Well, the problem is, in the 1834 account, he says, I refuse to give him any kind of certificate.
[00:14:02] Speaker A: So there's a little bit of inconsistency.
[00:14:03] Speaker B: So he's inconsistent on if he's giving him a certificate saying it's real or not. Right. So there are some contradictions in his multiple accounts he gives, which I guess by ex Mormon TikTok logic means that he was just making it all up. Right. Or something. So. So you have to be careful there. The punchline here to say when you stack up the two accounts, I don't think either of them are, like, deliberately lying. I think that both of them sincerely kind of have vested interest for the way they tell the narrative and how they're using it. And that can, in a large part explain why we get a dissonance between these two accounts.
[00:14:34] Speaker D: And I think, to Stephen's point, by the time Anthon's been asked about it in 1834 and 1841, and then again in 1844, there's. It's kind of a national scandal. It's embarrassing. He wants to distance himself. But in 1828, when Martin Harris just walks into his office and has these transcripts, he. There's. There's no context like that. Right. And we know from other accounts that this kind of thing happens all the time. And in fact, not only from other accounts. Like, Stephen can probably attest, as a professor himself, like, people visit your office and want you to, like, give an opinion on something.
[00:15:10] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:15:10] Speaker D: And this was something that was actually really frequent in the 19th century with, like, you know, thought, you know, things that are thought to be antiquities of the Americas and things like that. And I know there are accounts about, like, Dr. Mitchell, one of the other people Martin visits, like, having, like, long lines outside his office that. From people wanting to visit him and things like that. And so he would have had no reason, like, when Martin initially brings us to be, like, suspicious about what's going on, like, he would have sincerely wanted to examine the manuscript. And so that's, I think, a first point.
I think we need to consider the fact, like, for me, at least, like the very fact that Joseph is willing to copy these characters and let Martin walk off.
[00:15:52] Speaker B: Right.
[00:15:53] Speaker D: And show them to people with expertise in languages.
Like, I think that speaks a lot to the sincerity.
[00:15:59] Speaker B: Or he's either a very audacious con man.
[00:16:03] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:16:03] Speaker A: Seriously.
[00:16:04] Speaker B: And he's breaking all the rules of how to be a safe con man. Right.
[00:16:08] Speaker A: Or forger.
[00:16:08] Speaker B: Yeah, forger. You don't want people examining your forgeries.
[00:16:12] Speaker D: Right.
[00:16:12] Speaker B: That's rule number one. Or it's. Since he's sincere.
[00:16:15] Speaker D: Yeah, right.
[00:16:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:17] Speaker D: And so I Think that's that, like, whether.
Whether it speaks to authenticity, it speaks to sincerity on Joseph and Martin's part that they're willing to have these experts examine them? I imagine partly.
[00:16:28] Speaker A: But, like, actively seeking out.
[00:16:29] Speaker D: Yeah, actively seeking it out. And I think, look, for part of it is like, okay, Joseph can't let people see the plates. And so what does he do? Right. How does he help people, like, get some kind of assurance that there's something legitimate here?
And then we talked about this a little bit already when commenting on the TikTok, but Martin comes back from the trip and he's confident. He's very confident. And this isn't just attested in the fact that he then supports Joseph Smith. We actually have Palmyra residents who talk about this. Pomeroy Tucker. Is that how you say Pomeroy? Pomeroy Tucker.
He says that when he came back, he was confirmed, not shaken in his belief.
And then John Clark, another Palmyra resident, said that when Martin came back, Martin had now become a perfect believer. He said he had no more doubt of Smith's commission. Now, both of those people spin it as like, oh, he was told it was all bunk, but he came back all the more convicted anyway. But they aren't eyewitnesses to what happened in Martin's meetings. They're eyewitnesses. What Martin came back and the confidence that he had.
[00:17:29] Speaker B: I would also add on that point, that sort of spin on it would make more sense if Martin Harris had already had this sunk cost fallacy of having put up money for this.
[00:17:38] Speaker D: Right?
[00:17:38] Speaker A: But this is kind of a test for Martin.
[00:17:40] Speaker B: Right? So. So Martin at any point can still back out here because he hasn't given. He hasn't mortgaged his farm yet. Despite what the XMO TikToker there said, he has not mortgaged his farm. If this is all super crazy, he has multiple people saying it's crazy. He has all the time in the world to back out and say, you know what? This isn't. This isn't a legit thing. And he doesn't, you know, no skin off my nose because he hasn't invested in it. So if Martin had put up some money, I could probably understand, okay, he has vested interest. He has skin in the game now. Sunk cost fallacy. But that doesn't really work because at this point, the only kind of support he's given him maybe is a little bit of money to move down to Harmony. Right? But he's not. Certainly hasn't mortgaged his farm at this point for it.
[00:18:18] Speaker A: And so this is. This experience convinces him to help more.
[00:18:21] Speaker B: Exactly. You have the cause and effect backwards in that TikTok that we saw.
[00:18:25] Speaker D: So in addition to all of that, we also have like. Like I said, there's other accounts that have various details about this and One of the one interesting detail that shows up in an account from W.W. phelps, who actually at the time he's writing this, hasn't joined the church yet.
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[00:20:03] Speaker D: But he's, he's an anti Mason in a neighboring town and he knows Martin Harris because he's also part of like the anti Masonic movement.
And Martin Harris, after he visits the scholars, he comes and he actually has a conversation with W.W. phelps and Edie Howe, also an anti Mason, by the way, who thinks, oh, Phelps will be an ally for me against the Mormons because he's a fellow anti Mason. So he, he writes to Phelps saying, hey, who are these Mormons? And.
[00:20:31] Speaker D: Phelps writes back and says when the plates were said to have been found a copy of one or two lines of the characters were taken by Mr. Harris to Utica, Albany and New York. And at New York, they were shown to Dr. Mitchell. He referred to Professor Anthon, who translated and declared them to be ancient shorthand Egyptian.
Now, that's a peculiar phrase because it's something that academics were using, starting with Champollion, I believe, maybe not starting with, but including Champollion, who had only just barely recently, like, deciphered the Rosetta Stone or was starting to decipher the Rosetta Stone.
[00:21:10] Speaker D: It's. It's kind of academic jargon, basically, like shorthand hieroglyphs or shorthand Egyptian is this academic jargon that was being used for hieratic at the time.
[00:21:18] Speaker A: Interesting. It's not shorthand. I'm like. So cursive Egyptian?
[00:21:22] Speaker B: Yeah, well, that's kind of what hieratic is. It's a curse of hieroglyphs, basically.
[00:21:26] Speaker D: So. But someone like, like Joseph Smith is probably not going to be familiar with it. Like, this is what's being said in, like, academic journals.
[00:21:33] Speaker B: That's what nerds like Charles Anthon would have called it, not what Joseph Smith.
[00:21:36] Speaker D: Would have called it.
[00:21:36] Speaker A: Parroting an academic term he heard.
[00:21:38] Speaker D: So he's somewhere. He's parroting an academic term as he goes around and tells people about this experience.
And he probably. If he didn't get it from Anthon, he probably got it from one of the other learned men that he chose.
[00:21:50] Speaker D: And they gave him reason to believe that. Yeah, the characters that they looked at were.
Looked like shorthand Egyptian. Right.
[00:21:59] Speaker A: As far as the script goes, I mean, shorthand Egyptian sounds like it correlates well with, like, what the book Mormon says. Even in first Nephi, it talks about. Nephi says what? Learning of the Jews, language of the.
[00:22:09] Speaker D: Egyptians, and.
[00:22:13] Speaker D: Then later reformed Egyptian. Right. But that actually does maybe relate to. So this, like, a new paper that came out earlier this year in this volume right here. Right.
A Record shall be kept. This was published by fair. I don't even know, just like, a few weeks ago at the time of recording by John Thompson. And he talks about, like, yeah, hieratic is actually. It's the script that we find attested in Jerusalem and Judah and other places. Scholars will call it Palestinian hieratic because there are some variants from normal, like scribal practice in Egypt at the time.
But hieratic is what's attested in Lehi's Jerusalem. And so, you know, this could be an indication that that's what was on the plates. And you can understand, Anthony wasn't an Expert in Egyptian. But he was. He did have publications from Champollion and others who in his library. And he would have been familiar with some recent developments in hieratic. And so he could have identified potentially things that looked like hieratic characters.
[00:23:17] Speaker A: But he probably couldn't have like translated Egyptian you're saying?
[00:23:21] Speaker B: No, not really. No, not so Young.
[00:23:23] Speaker A: Right?
[00:23:24] Speaker B: Yeah. People often make the mistake of thinking that like Champollion like decipher like crack the code of Egyptian. Basically what he did was he figured out how the language works. Right. So he was able to correctly he and others, Thomas Young and there were others in the 1820s. But it's. We mostly give credit to Champolion. He was one who figured out this is how the language works. It took subsequent decades of Egyptologists mostly over in Germany to actually like have a working like here's how we can actually translate this in a way that makes sense. Where we can Lexicons. Yes. We have a complex syntax and grammar and things like that. Right. This, this is decades later before we're that point. So you can get certain names, you can correlate certain words like to Coptic which, which they know in the 1820s. So you can translate in the sense that you can figure out on a very bare bones level how this language works. But we are nowhere near the level yet of like producing full bodied translations with complex syntax and grammar and things like that.
[00:24:21] Speaker D: Now, now that does though speaking to John Thompson's theory a little bit here because in. In Joseph Smith History where we get this account from Martin, he does it does have this sentence in there where I don't know, I don't have the language.
[00:24:35] Speaker B: I've got it right here.
[00:24:35] Speaker D: Okay.
[00:24:36] Speaker B: I went to the city of New York and presented the characters which had been translated with the translation thereof to Professor Charles Anthon, a gentleman celebrated for his literary attainments. Professor Anthon stated that the translation was correct more so than any he had before seen translated from the Egyptian.
[00:24:53] Speaker D: Is that the word you're talking? Yeah. And so, and that's something critics pounce on that precisely because of what Stephen just talked about that you couldn't really. Anthon couldn't translate Egyptian and he couldn't judge the accuracy of an Egyptian translation. And really no one at the time, not even Champollion could really translate Egyptian. What John Thompson actually suggests is that the Egyptian portion here was an Alphabet from the plates and that there was basically a character by character correlation to like English characters or Roman letters which.
[00:25:28] Speaker B: You could do in the 1820s. They were doing that Shampoo and others, they were able to have rudimentary, like sign lists or alphabetic lists for.
[00:25:35] Speaker D: And. And so what. And there are sources. Lucy Mack Smith talks about taking an Alphabet to scholars and Fayette Latham, which is a really late account. So you, you can't. And it's secondhand. If Latham says that.
That Joseph Smith Sr. Said that there was an Alphabet that Joseph Smith copied. And so there are some sources that suggest that part of what was taken to Anthony was an Alphabet. And so John Thompson kind of suggests maybe there was an Alphabet on there that had been translated. And it's, that's what he's. You know, maybe Anthon is pulling books off his shelf and looking at the work that's identifying characters. Yeah, identifying characters and saying. Yeah, these look. These look. Right.
[00:26:14] Speaker B: Yeah. If you look at Champollion's published his pressis, his, his little initial stab at Egyptian grammar and some of his letters he had written to the Academy of Sciences or whatever in France. So you, you do have rudimentary skills to at least understand how this works in terms of. Here's how the, here's how you vocalize these things. Here's the, here's very rudimentary words or, you know, here's how we can decipher names. Yeah. That much I. Is totally doable within the means that Anthon has at his disposal. Right. The very.
[00:26:46] Speaker B: Top shelf news breaking work coming out of France from Champollion.
[00:26:51] Speaker D: Yeah.
And so again, there's some plausibility here to this. And again, this idea that Martin must have, like. Martin would not have known shorthand Egyptian, you know, on his own.
W.W. phelps would not have known shorthand Egyptian on his own. This is something he got from either Anthon or maybe one of the other scholars. And that maybe leads into another. Stephen mentioned that there's this whole list of languages that gets mentioned in this account.
[00:27:17] Speaker B: Yeah. He mentions Egyptian, Chaldean, Assyriac, and Arabic. Yeah, we should take a second to identify which ones those are.
Egyptian. We all know what Egyptian is. Chalde in. Or Chaldean in Joseph Smith's day predominantly is used to describe Aramaic, what we do call Aramaic. Sometimes it's used to describe Syriac, which.
[00:27:36] Speaker A: Is relative of Hebrew.
[00:27:37] Speaker B: Hebrew, but Syriac is Christianized Aramaic. So Aramaic a Syriac is interesting because I have found sources from that time and in my Proge Price footnote, I say, I think he's describing cuneiform.
[00:27:49] Speaker D: Cuneiform.
[00:27:49] Speaker B: Cuneiform. So interesting. The, the. The. The language of ancient Assyria. Right. Assyriac.
That we have Cuneiform inscriptions being published as like facsimiles, but we don't have decipherment to like the 1850s, I think is when cuneiform finally is deciphered. But like they know that it exists. We have these bilingual Persian and Akkadian cuneiform texts that people are aware of, right? So it could be referring to a Syriac, could be that cuneiform, or it could be Syriac Syria.
So there's a little immigrant, but that's possible. And then Arabic, we all know what Arabic is, right?
[00:28:21] Speaker D: So here's what's, here's what's interesting to me about that, actually. There's a couple of things that I think are interesting there that, that I think lend authenticity to the account. And that's going to sound crazy to some people because critics love to look at this like it's an absurd list of languages, right? This mishmash of languages, very eclect and, and it seems like, you know, some, you know, making stuff up, someone just making stuff up. But here's the thing.
I don't see a motive like where are they going to get that list of languages from in the first place? Again, this is not the language of. Or in the, in the wheelhouse farmers in the 19th century, rural farmers in New York in the 1820s.
This is, this is the stuff of linguists like that. That, that should be self evident. But here's the other factor.
[00:29:12] Speaker D: These accounts are all coming after the Book of Mormon's published, right?
What reason do they have to identify Book of Mormon characters as Assyriac and Chaldaic and Arabic when the Book of Mormon never mentions those languages, Right?
[00:29:29] Speaker A: If Joseph Smith was making it up, why didn't he just, you know, say reformed Egyptian?
[00:29:33] Speaker D: If you're gonna attribute something to Charles Anthon retroactively, you have the text, you know what it says the language is supposed to be. Say that he said that, right? And this is something that's interesting to me because there's other accounts like Hyrum Smith and William McClellan as missionaries are quoted in a newspaper saying that they said Arabic characters were inscribed on the plates.
Again, the Fayette Lay from account that we mentioned attributes Joseph Smith senior as saying they're Arabic characters, one of those four languages. Why are, why are all these people saying Arabic characters? Like that's not coming from the text.
Someone with some kind of authority, knowledge about languages gave them reason to believe that the characters were Arabic, and so that's why they're repeating it. It doesn't make any sense. I can't make any sense of it any other way.
Another source that's interesting in this regard is there's an interview of Martin Harris in Tiffany's Monthly, which was a periodical back then by a guy named Joel Timpani.
And this is the only other source I'm aware of that lists all four of those same languages. So he's interviewing Martin Harris and. And he. He reports. Martin Harris is saying, you know, Joseph Jr. Found at Palmyra, New York, on the 22nd day of September, the plates of gold upon which was recorded. Arabic, Chaldeac, Syriac. He says Syriac in this one, rather than us, for what it's worth. And Egyptian. The Book of Life or the Book of Mormon. I don't know where the Book of Life thing is coming in. But basically, again, Martin Harris is identifying these same four languages as being the languages on the plates. That's not coming from the text of the Book of Mormon. There's no, there's no reason for them to make up this mishmash of languages that must have come from either Charles Anthony himself or maybe some of the other scholars he talked to.
And that does lead to a theory that I've actually put in print in my.
In the paper I published earlier this year with Fair, also in their other. In their Book of Mormon volume, Defending.
[00:31:28] Speaker A: The Book of Mormon.
[00:31:28] Speaker D: Defending the Book of Mormon. It's just in a footnote of that paper, but I propose the idea that this list of languages is amalgamation of things that Martin heard from different. Different people he talked to. So some of the accounts that talk about this trip, he goes to a guy named Luther Bradish who had just barely come back from. I don't know how just barely, but who had. Who had been on a trip to the Ottoman Empire.
[00:31:54] Speaker D: And had a Turkish passport. Well, Turkish passport is written in the Persian script or that some people call it the Perso Arabic script. Go look up Persian script. It looks like Arabic. Okay. And accounts say that he compared the transcript Martin had to his Turkish passport. And so could this be where this Arabic idea is coming from?
[00:32:19] Speaker B: I think it's very plausible.
One thing I know, being an ivory tower academic myself, is that you never want to look bad in front of the yokels when they ask you a question you don't know. So you will scramble for any kind of resource you can to answer. Right. And to kind of tread water and, you know, try to come up with a plausible. Now I'm being a little silly, but there is a kernel of truth to.
[00:32:40] Speaker A: Say that that's just human psychology. Everyone Wants to feel like, oh, you asked me a question. Let me see.
[00:32:45] Speaker B: I know how to answer it. So I could totally foresee a scenario in which, sight unseen, Martin Harris comes to these guys, hey man, what does this look like to you? And they immediately go to their immediate frame of reference of what they have on hand to compare it with like a Turkish passport. Like a Turkish passport. Luther Bradish looks at these squiggles and says, I've got a Turkish passport. Let's. Let's compare it. And there you go. Arabic. He goes to Samuel Mitchell. Well, I've got a copy of Champollion's grammar. Let me pull it open. There you go. Comparing with Egyptian. Maybe he has a. An early Hebrew Aramaic lexicon or something. Right. I, I can. This mishmash of Doc of language is described. I think you're right, Neil. We don't have to see this as they're just making it up. I think I can totally imagine a scenario in which these scholars, because they don't want to be caught without an answer to this weird random farmer that just came up to them, they're just going to go to whatever sources they have on hand and compare it to get an answer. Right.
[00:33:36] Speaker A: That's still like a speculative, hypothetical situation.
[00:33:38] Speaker B: It is hypothetical, but this would make sense of the language we have here.
[00:33:42] Speaker D: Right, right.
And I mean, Stephen kind of already alluded to, but there is an account from James Gordon Bennett that attributes the Egyptian comparison, in fact, specifically comparing the hieroglyphs discovered by Champollion to the document to Samuel Mitchell.
And then in Charles Anthon's own accounts, he does mention Hebrew and distorted, I think he says, mentions Greek. I believe he mentions Hebrew and Greek. He. He says rude imitations of Hebrew in his letter to Vibart. I think that's his 1844 account.
Or in another account he says more or less distorted version of Hebrew. And as we just talked about, like Chaldaic is the Aramaic script that Hebrew was offered in.
[00:34:28] Speaker B: Yeah, it's in the same script.
[00:34:30] Speaker D: And so we can account for three of these four languages potentially as maybe coming from different people that Martin talked to. But again, it's coming from an academic source. And then Martin is parroting what he's hearing and maybe it's all just getting conflated and attributed to Anthon.
[00:34:44] Speaker A: So that's all fine and good as far as how like Chaldean Assyriac could have been real things that these scholars actually said to Martin Harris, kind of bolstering his account of what happened, but from like an authenticity of the Book of Mormon standpoint, if the Book of Mormon is in Egyptian or reformed Egyptian, why are they mentioning these languages? What does that have to do with the language of the Book of Mormon?
[00:35:03] Speaker D: So that I think gets us a little bit more into the John Thompson theory. And John Thompson's theory is different from mine that I just tossed out there, for what it's worth.
But his theory is, as we mentioned already, that the shorthand Egyptian that got mentioned and it got compared to is the hieratic, the Palestinian hieratic that Nephi and other early small plates authors would have been writing in. But this mishmash of languages he proposes represents the reformed Egyptian. And so there was, he's proposing that there were maybe two transcripts, one of the, the small plate script and one of a sample of the large plate script.
[00:35:43] Speaker A: So are you saying that reformed Egyptian.
[00:35:44] Speaker B: Is different from Nephi is Egyptian. Nephi's Egyptian, absolutely.
[00:35:48] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:35:49] Speaker B: Nephi is writing circa 600 BC Mormon and Moroni circa 400 AD. Right. That's like a thousand years or so.
[00:35:57] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:35:57] Speaker A: Nephi never uses the word reform.
[00:35:59] Speaker B: That's Moroni is using that language at.
[00:36:01] Speaker A: The very end of the book.
[00:36:02] Speaker B: At the very end, yes. So we have to make sure we disentangle that. And probably the Egyptian that Nephi is using looks something comparable to late period, you know, Levantine Palestinian hieratic that we have attestation of in some capacity. It probably resembles that. Right. The Palestinian hierarchical we have is just little small notations. We don't have full text to compare it with. Right. But if Nephi is writing in hieratic, it's that version of it as opposed to. And that's in the old world. Fast forward a thousand years later on the other side of the globe, we're isolated from those old world and you have this reformed Egyptian that is being used by the Nephite scribes. Specifically, after centuries of transmitting both the plates of Nephi and the plates of Mormon with, and the brass plates, they have a version of Egyptian that's going to be appreciably different. Hence it is reformed Egyptian. Look up any Alphabet of any language and after a thousand years look at how that Alphabet or that script has changed.
[00:36:58] Speaker A: Just look at Beowulf with English. It's completely unreadable for a modern English.
[00:37:03] Speaker B: Even modern English has letters that dropped out from like old or middle English.
Like my favorite example, you know how like when people have like a bar, they'll put like ye old tavern or whatever and it looks like a Y, E that Y was actually an old letter in English and it made like the, the sound. Right. So it was the old, you know, but, but it looks like a Y to us. We pronounce it as a Y because it's kind of funny that I think it's called thorn in English. The letter it was actually dropped out of English because we stopped using it.
[00:37:30] Speaker A: So that was relatively.
[00:37:32] Speaker B: That's just a couple centuries ago, world history.
[00:37:34] Speaker D: So. So, yeah, so. So Thompson's theory, like we said, is that there's these two transcripts, that one is readily identifiable by Anthon as being shorthand Egyptian and, and that's the one where maybe there was an Alphabet and he was able to correlate some of that stuff. But then the other transcript is the reformed Egyptian and that is something that Anthon and probably the other experts Martin visits as well would have had a harder time pinning down because it would have, it would have undergone this thousand year evolution. And so then they're comparing it to Egyptian and maybe seen some similarities. But they're also comparing it to maybe Arabic, the Turkish passport, they're comparing it to maybe, you know, Chaldaic or Aramaic. Right. And seeing some similarities. Maybe, you know, maybe cuneiform as Stephen suggests, or maybe Syriac alternatively.
What I actually think is kind of interesting, Matt Roper, in a piece that was written for evidence central on the Anthon account, and we can put it on the screen here or we can have a link to it, but he actually identifies in Anthon's library publications that are talking about demotic, Egyptian and basically saying that they have at least that initial pass, they have a resemblance to Arabic and Syriac.
[00:38:52] Speaker D: And that.
[00:38:53] Speaker B: That brings up an interesting point, Neil, because I want to give a little more grace to Charles Anthon here. I'll read. I mentioned earlier his 1834 statement. He specifically said, containing Greek and Hebrew letters, crosses and flourishes, Roman letters inverted or placed sideways, arranged in perpendicular columns and ended in a rude delineation of a circle. Right. And so forth. That idea of Roman letters inverted like the tick tocker kind of made fun of this. But yeah, some of them do look like Roman letter, Latin letter H or whatever. So I could see if, if you are not a specialist in Egyptian in any of its stages, hieratic, demotic, hieroglyphic, just sight unseen. You look at this thing, you can see something. Yeah, that looks like it's, you know, sideways Latin, Roman script or whatever. So another part of why they're reaching, I think, for these different sort of languages or scripts to categorize this they probably aren't familiar with it themselves. Certainly not reformed Egyptian. That's sweet, generous. Right. It's a unique thing. But even other Egyptian, again, Egyptology is in its infancy in the 1820s.
[00:39:56] Speaker A: I mean, we've been talking about Palestinian hieratic a lot in this episode, but the reality is like, that was.
[00:40:01] Speaker B: We don't know about that.
[00:40:02] Speaker D: I mean, that was unknown in the 18 Charleston's time.
[00:40:04] Speaker B: I mean.
[00:40:04] Speaker D: Yeah, I mean that was only, that only came to like in the 20th century is when people first learned about.
[00:40:09] Speaker B: Yeah. So this is all to say, not to co opt you too much here, but just we can make sense of Anthon's account in a way that still I think, preserves the authentic core of what Martin Harris describes, which is that he showed him a certificate, a document with letters or characters on it.
Anthon, with the best resources available to him, compared it to stuff Anthon and others, Luther Bradish compared it to scripts that they knew about with the limited training they had in Egyptian and these sorts of languages. And Martin Harris takes that to the bank and he walks away convinced that this is a real thing.
[00:40:42] Speaker D: And, and I think it's worth saying that like, some of it may have even just been like, they're making a comparison and they're not even making a definitive judgment, like, oh yeah, this is, this is an Arabic character or this is an Egyptian character. But they, these are the languages they compare to. And Martin, that's what he's remembering. And, and Martin turns that into, oh yeah, they, it was, you know, he, Martin saw himself as they pulled out their lexicons or whatever, that there's some visual similarities.
And so he walks away like, oh yeah, this is, yeah, this is Arabic and this is Egyptian and this is Chaldean and Syriac. Right. Like, and that's totally within the norms of like, how memory works. Right. And he drops out like he doesn't remember every single language. And so I think, I think there's plenty of room to believe that, you know, the languages that Martin lists are among those that Anthon and maybe some of the others compared it to. But then the ones that Anthon mentions also are among those that he maybe mentioned and compared them to. And Martin just remembers certain languages. And then Anthon selectively chooses, maybe because he doesn't want to make the Egyptian association in public or whatever, but he remembers other languages, the Greek and the Roman letters and Hebrew he mentions.
[00:41:59] Speaker D: And it's just these different accounts of what happened.
And actually John Thompson even suggests that, you know, after.
[00:42:07] Speaker D: What may have Happened is after Anthony becomes persuaded that it's not, it's not legitimate because of these supernatural elements, he maybe talks himself out of these Egyptian associations that he initially saw. And he's like, ah, they're just, they're just squiggles and, and lines and it could be inverted, you know, Roman letters. And like he, he convinces himself that that's all it was all along. Right, okay.
[00:42:30] Speaker A: But in that TikTok, he also mentioned like Isaiah 29 and how there's this fulfillment of prophecy about I cannot read a sealed book. What's, what's going on there?
[00:42:38] Speaker B: Yeah, basically the Context of Isaiah 29 Is this prophecy about like the destruction of Jerusalem. Right. And how the words of the, of the, the words of God or the words of the prophet shall become like a sealed book to the people who they will say, I cannot read it. Right. I'm badly paraphrasing it, but you know, it's this well known. Just go read Isaiah 20, Isaiah 29. It's this well known biblical passage.
Martin Harris and Joseph smith in his 1838 and his 1832 history both mentioned specifically that Anthon mentioned. He remarked, I cannot read a sealed book. And they take that as indication of fulfillment of this prophecy in Isaiah 29. So that tick tock is touching on a kernel of truth that in some context or capacity Anthon seems to have mentioned or remarked about I cannot read a sealed book. And especially in the 1832 history, Joseph Smith like goes bananas about this. Right? Like saying like, and this proved that this was a prophetic utterance or whatever and that this book was authentic.
I could envision, I'm speculating here. I could very easily envision Charles Anthon maybe having said that sarcastically.
[00:43:40] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:43:40] Speaker B: And Martin Harris taking it seriously and going back to Joseph Smith and saying he even mentioned Isaiah 29. Maybe like totally missing the sarcastic intent. I don't know. Again, I'm speculating, but I, I think it's very likely he actually did in some capacity mention that because that's such a weirdly specific like biblical passage to like remember him saying, you know what I mean, that like, I think there has to be some significance there as well.
[00:44:03] Speaker D: I think I agree with that. And in fact, for what it's worth, if people want to check out Don Bradley's book, the lost 116 pages, chapter two is all. Well, it's not all about this incident. The last part of chapter two, read this, I pray thee, I think is the name of the subsection is about this. And he also goes through, like, a bunch of different sources.
[00:44:23] Speaker A: And.
[00:44:23] Speaker D: And he makes a really compelling argument. I think that Martin's version of events is pretty reliable, but we don't have to throw Anthony under the bus at the same time. And he suggests that, yes, Anthon probably did say that in a flippant or sarcastic manner, you know, as he's trying to dissuade Martin of the, you know, of the authenticity of this or whatever. And so as he's trying to backtrack on it. Exactly.
[00:44:47] Speaker B: Yeah. He feels he's been set up.
[00:44:48] Speaker D: And I think something that strengthens that possibility is there's an account from one of Anthon's students about, you know, he who said, like, Anthony would tell this story in class. Right. And in that account, not in any of Anthony's own firsthand accounts, but in the students telling of it, he talked about Anthon asking to see the plates in a flippant, sarcastic way, like, you know, oh, really? Well, why don't you bring the plates to me and show them to me kind of thing. And we. That shows up in Martin Harris's account as if it's a sincere, like, bring the plates to me and I'll translate them. And so you have them maybe putting different accents, if you will, on the events. Right.
And. But that suggests to me that other elements of Martin's account may also reflect, like, things that Martin or that Charles Anthon did or said sarcastically that Martin.
[00:45:34] Speaker B: Interprets as being sincere, which I think goes to speak, at the end of the day, whatever actually happened between these two guys, and there are only two people that we have record of who leave accounts of it. So it's. Which story do you choose? A.
[00:45:46] Speaker D: He said.
[00:45:46] Speaker B: He said. Yes, exactly. Whatever may have happened, and this is demonstrably, irrefutably true, Martin Harris leaves convinced that this is real.
[00:45:55] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:45:55] Speaker B: And he will dedicate his life and his money. He will put his money where his mouth is on this, literally, by mortgaging his farm after this happens. And he is totally committed to the Book of Mormon after that point. So whatever questions remain about this, that one cannot be gainsayed or denied, that he walks away a dedicated believer of the Book of Mormon. That. And we mentioned this before you mentioned it, Neil, I think that more than anything else, is good indication that whatever, like I said, whatever happened, something happened that positively pushed Martin in that direction.
[00:46:24] Speaker D: Something that's actually an interesting fact that I think very few people are actually aware of, is Martin actually has another visit with Anthon after the Book of Mormon is published. Really, his conviction is so strong after all of this that he actually goes back to Anthon with a printed copy of the Book of Mormon and tries to gift it to him. Anthon refuses to take it, but he tries to gift it to him because he basically is like, no, like, I.
[00:46:49] Speaker B: Want you to see it.
[00:46:50] Speaker D: Yeah, I want you to see it. I want you to have it.
[00:46:52] Speaker B: And the fact he refuses it again tells you something about Anthon's motivation here in wanting to distance himself from all.
[00:46:58] Speaker D: Yes. So, yeah, I agree with Stephen 100%. Whatever happened in that, in Martin's conversations with Anthon and also with Samuel Mitchell and some of these other people.
[00:47:10] Speaker B: Made.
[00:47:11] Speaker D: Martin walk away and say, oh, man, this is legit. This is. This is something I'm going to commit to.
[00:47:16] Speaker A: And what I love about this is that it really is a situation where Martin Harris isn't just using his heart to come to a knowledge of the Book of Mormon, but he's also using his head. He's wanting to use his rational thought to try to understand not just does it feel good, but does it make sense? And I think that's kind of part of the efforts that we try to do here, is that we think it's important to gain your witness of the Book of Mormon in the Gospel through testimony and through prayer and through Scripture study, but also to use your mind to wrestle with these questions. And if you want to wrestle with this topic more specifically, John Thompson's paper, within this book, a record shall be kept. You can look it up on Amazon or get it on the FAIR website. Remember, you can believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ and still study very deeply. We'll see you next time.
[00:48:05] Speaker D: Sam.
