Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Is the Micmac Native American language evidence for the Book of Mormon? A group has claimed that they've compared the characters document or characters from the gold plates with this Native American language called Mi'. Kmaq. But is it too good to be true? Jerry, welcome on the show. You are a Book of Mormon researcher and a geologist by trade, but you've also published a book on the character's document and you recently published a paper with interpreter all about this claim being made. Is Micmac evidence for the Book of Mormon gold plates characters. So what is this claim that they're making?
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Well, there may be other claim, but the one I had ran across was I was just going through at a used bookstore and ran into this book,
[00:00:40] Speaker C: which the annotated edition of the Book of Mormon.
[00:00:44] Speaker D: Right.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: And it does have a little section of one page that lists there that's just.
You can kind of see there's a cutout of just that page that had like a comparison between. They call it Nephite glyphs and then Micmac. Right. And so, and there's also in the book, there's a picture of the characters document, which we can talk a little bit.
[00:01:10] Speaker A: Micmac is the name of a tribe in what, the Midwest.
[00:01:16] Speaker B: It's northeast, Northeast up kind of main area. And it's.
I mean, that's kind of the name of the tribe and people kind of call Mic Mac, but it's actually macaw is the hieroglyphic. That's the proper orthography or, you know, what you refer to when you're talking about the glyphs of them.
So that's kind of how I ran across it. And as I looked at first, my first observation was, wasn't so much getting into the Micmac. It was, hey, the glyphs that they're listing from the character's document. Well, a bunch of them are not from the character's document. So that was like piqued my interest. What's going on here? What are they claiming? And so that's kind of what triggered me to start looking at this.
[00:01:57] Speaker A: Okay. So for the.
[00:01:58] Speaker B: It wasn't like, oh, I'm just beaming in on something. It was just like, oh, because I'm an independent researcher, so I don't really have to answer to editors or publishers. So I can something. I just kind of go there and I'm kind of like a cat with a little laser pointer.
Sometimes I'm following something, then I'll get distracted and go down another line of research. This was want to. Oh, okay. And then so I started looking at it, and anyway, so I ended up with a paper.
[00:02:22] Speaker A: So in this case, we've got, like, two sets of glyphs. We've got these glyphs that are being from Micmac, which is coming from this tribe in the Northeast United States, and then a set of glyphs that they're claiming are Book of Mormon characters or Nephite glyphs. And the idea is, well, they must be getting them from the character's document. What is the character's document?
[00:02:40] Speaker B: For those not familiar, it's a document. A lot of people thought it was the Anthon transcript for a lot of years, or a lot of years. I mean, 100 years.
[00:02:49] Speaker D: I think even today, it's still commonly called.
[00:02:51] Speaker C: Sometimes we'll still call it that.
[00:02:53] Speaker B: Yeah. And so kind of the premise was, well, this is the transcript that was brought, you know, to Charles Anthon. Right. Of examples of the Book of Mormon characters. We now know that. Well, looking at the description that was given, it's not the case. I mean, there's supposed to be a seal on the transcripts.
[00:03:10] Speaker D: Right. Not Rose. Right.
[00:03:11] Speaker B: And so this. There's actually some papers done by some BYU people and Church history kind of tracking what it really is. It was part of a larger paper that got separated. There's, like, a picture from 1887. So they know it wasn't.
That's not the problem. You know, that's not where it came from. So they've done a handwriting analysis. Looks like John Whitmer penned it. And it looks like there's another example of the characters in broadside from. From a newspaper in New York, LDS newspaper. And it has kind of the first four lines that match the character's document roughly. They flipped a few characters erroneously, I think, when they were doing the typesetting part of the line.
[00:03:58] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:03:59] Speaker B: Yeah. So. But most people could care less about that. But I'm looking and it's like, well,
[00:04:03] Speaker C: when you're trying to analyze those and figure out what they might be, it matters.
[00:04:07] Speaker B: Yeah. And actually, even the document we have now, if you look at the earlier picture, there's a couple glasses, glyphs that got kind of cracked, fell off on the corner. You can kind of see. So there's a. I kind of looked at everything. It's like, oh, actually, there's some glyphs that show up earlier in an earlier picture. So when I did my analysis, I looked at that. But essentially it is. Joseph Smith did say initially he copied off characters. Right. From the golf and translated a few of them.
And so purportedly. Okay, this looks to be one of those early.
[00:04:38] Speaker D: An early copy of it.
[00:04:39] Speaker B: Yeah. And. And I, I think the character's document, clearly, it's. Whitmer was not, you know, there at the first. At the time. So this is a copy probably of a copy of his. I mean, this isn't the Joseph Smith penned one, obviously.
[00:04:51] Speaker C: Right.
[00:04:51] Speaker B: And so. And it kind of looks like they would carry it out kind of the way that they. That broadside was just like an advertisement. Hey, come, we're going to talk about the Book of Mormon and these reformed Egyptian character. So it's almost like they thought the proposal is. They thought that, hey, they're bringing this along when they're doing missionary work or something as an example of the character. That's kind of where the thinking is.
[00:05:16] Speaker C: It's kind of being presented as evidence, if you will.
[00:05:19] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:05:19] Speaker A: So the character's document is not necessarily the anthem transcript, but it's reasonable to believe that these are legitimate characters coming from the gold plates in some fashion.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:05:29] Speaker A: Okay. So now that we've established what the character's document is, it sounds like the people who publish this book are comparing character's document glyphs to Micmac.
And you see that there's like a kind of a problem there. What is this Micmac language? Let's kind of break that down for a minute.
[00:05:48] Speaker B: Okay. That's the other issue that you run across is the Micmac language.
What's the genesis of it? Okay. Because if you're going to try to do a comparison to some Native American language, you got to at. Look. Look at, you know what it is. And basically the history of it is that There was a 17th century French Catholic priest who was teaching prayers and things to the Native American, the Mi' Kmaq Native Americans.
And he noticed that there was some birch bark. They had something on it, and they were kind of just like using it to memorize the Catholic prayers. And so he recognized, okay, there's some knowledge of something. Okay. But then he says he created a hieroglyphic kind of language which he then used to teach the Catholic prayers in the 1600s.
[00:06:42] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:06:43] Speaker B: And you can. We've got an example of it. And I've got. This is an example. Right. And so you can kind of see the construct of it. So the question is, first of all, was is this really a legitimate lang. It's way too, too recent.
[00:06:57] Speaker C: Right.
[00:06:58] Speaker B: But it's kind of like, okay.
And so people are claiming, well, this is the original Native American language. I think it basically if anything, maybe it incorporated a few cliffs that they were looking at. And there is birch bark records of this time frame. Not with the Mi', Kmaq, but with the Og. There's other tribes that did have some, but they were mostly like ceremonial, you know, demonstrating their ceremonial things or animals. They weren't like some systematic hieroglyphic type of system.
[00:07:27] Speaker C: So some, Some rudimentary use of signs of some kind.
[00:07:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:31] Speaker D: But not a full fledged language.
[00:07:32] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And so. And in my paper, I kind of look at that. I'm not saying. Well, there are. Some people think there may have been some incorporation, but the reality is, is this, like this script was taken to other areas within the Micmac area and they had to teach them. It wasn't something they, oh, this is our language.
[00:07:50] Speaker D: They just intuitively knew it.
[00:07:51] Speaker C: Yeah. It's really indigenous.
[00:07:53] Speaker B: Right. And so that's kind of evidence, you know, again, we only have just a few statements from the early missionaries, you know, that we're doing it. So it's so people.
If any, if you would say there's any element, it would just be a few. If he did incorporate some, that's possible. But you can see by the nature of the, you know, it looks very Catholic.
[00:08:13] Speaker D: Yeah.
On the top, that third one, it looks like sort of the Catholic orb, like the royal, you know, orb on a scepter or something like that. Uh huh. Yeah.
[00:08:22] Speaker A: Interesting.
So the heartlanders who'd like to kind of see Mi' Kmaq as evidence for the Book of Mormon. One of the big problems you're pointing out here is that it is probably not an actually ancient indigenous American language, but rather this is an invented language from a Catholic priest in order to help them like teach prayers and teach catechism. And so there's no way this even really dates back to Book of Mormon times in its form that we found in.
[00:08:49] Speaker B: Yeah. And I mean, there's a whole other issue. It's like, well, I think there's like, what, 4,000 of these hieroglyphs trying to do a comparison and picking out 10 or 14. That's not statistically significant really, to say. And especially if, if they're very simple forms, not complex, then you're saying, well, you know, you can.
That's why people like take the characters off and say, oh, you can, you can actually create like English letters, you know. Yeah. Which of course you can. But that's because Demotic or hieratic have thousands.
[00:09:19] Speaker C: Yeah, you can.
[00:09:20] Speaker B: Glyphs, you know, so, so I'm saying even the comparison. No I didn't get into the comparison.
Right. And because then the second level is. Okay, what is. What does that glyph mean in Micmac? You know, what, what. What would it have to do with the characters document? You have to start trying to match up meanings. It's not even. I'm just saying it doesn't really.
It's not a legitimate comparison that you could rely on academically to say there's
[00:09:44] Speaker A: any link from what you've been able to see, are there any characters that might match kind of what are in the character's document at all.
[00:09:50] Speaker B: Yeah. And it didn't take me too long. Meaning when I was. The book started looking at it and I'm looking closely, I'm thinking, because I do know the other Anthon transcript that's out there was the Hoffman forgery. All right. Which I don't have the full history, but I was alive when it happened. I knew.
[00:10:08] Speaker D: We can shout out Rick Turley's book, that's. That meticulously documents the origins of the Hoffman forgery. And yeah, one thing he did do, basing the description that Anthon gives in places like Mormonism Unveiled by Ed Howe, Hoffman took that description and we'll put an image of it here. He forged what was purporting to be the original Anthem transcript. Right. So you sometimes get your wires crossed, people when they do these comparisons because they may confuse the two documents. The authentic one from John Whitmer and the inauthentic one from Hoffman. Yeah.
[00:10:37] Speaker B: A few years ago, somebody called me from Brazil saying, hey, we want you to come authenticate our gold plates that we've got.
[00:10:43] Speaker A: You know, that's a pretty big claim.
[00:10:46] Speaker B: Yeah. You know, okay. I'm. Because I'm the independent researcher, Right.
I'm looking at it. I'm like, well, actually, those. All your. Most of your glyphs came from the Hoffman transcript from, you know, the online version of.
So I go, that's kind of. Let's forget about the metallurgy for a minute.
Yeah, that's probably your first problem.
[00:11:05] Speaker C: So this. So this Anthon. So this forged Anthon transcript from Hoffman, by the way, this is, if I'm remembering right, this is his first forgery that he.
[00:11:15] Speaker D: I believe so. Or an early one. The one that kind of put him on the map.
[00:11:18] Speaker C: Yeah, the one that put him on the map was the discover. The discovery of this document.
[00:11:22] Speaker D: He says he got it from like a Smith family Bible or something, as I recall, out of a Bible that I found. Yeah.
[00:11:27] Speaker B: And it was like glued in. He'd been very careful to like, oh, this is like stuck in there. Yeah. So, okay.
[00:11:32] Speaker A: You know, it was very convincing at the time.
[00:11:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
And I mean, in part of what he was, you know, at least the premise, a lot of what he was doing was trying to get to the point where he could, you know, pawn off 106, 116 pages. Right. And so you have this, you know, it was part of that whole kind of construct, kind of stab at it. Yeah.
[00:11:56] Speaker D: Test his feet in the waters.
[00:11:58] Speaker B: Right. So, but anyway, so I as. And we could probably talk about then. What I did was, okay, let's take what. Look at the sources that the annotated Book of Mormon, which is published, people call it Heartland. I don't know. It's firm foundation. There's lots of names for it. But I mean, it's an organization that promotes or makes money off of that model. Right. Is the one that produced this book. And then I went to the book, the Wayne May book, this Land, which is the other source there. You see the.
The comparison there. And that's where that comparison is coming from.
[00:12:34] Speaker C: Okay, but what you're saying is a lot of these characters that are being compared and are said to come from the Anthon transcript or the character's document or to be Nephite, aren't there on the character's document?
[00:12:49] Speaker B: So, yeah, the first comparison. And I just assigned. Because Wayne May look to be the source of. Of their source. Right. So I just called the different. I numbered the different characters for purposes of identification, for future, if people want, like.
[00:13:05] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:13:06] Speaker B: So the May one, May two.
[00:13:07] Speaker C: And so those look like they might be dates, but they're actually figure numbers. Yeah.
[00:13:11] Speaker D: Right.
[00:13:12] Speaker B: And so I just said, okay, here are the May glyphs, here are the characters, document glyphs. Some kind of. Can match. Right.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: Okay, I can see some of that.
[00:13:20] Speaker B: Yeah. And some. There's no kind of thing.
[00:13:22] Speaker D: Right.
[00:13:22] Speaker B: And so that was. That was saying, okay, here's. I'm just trying to narrow it down and say, okay, clearly, which ones are character documents or potentially character documents, and which ones have. No.
Are not in the character's documents. Kind of my first level of inquiry, what is not in the character's document then?
So you can go down there and you can kind of see.
[00:13:44] Speaker A: I mean, there's a lot that seems to be missing there.
[00:13:46] Speaker C: Right.
[00:13:47] Speaker B: Then the next level of inquiry is, okay, here is a copy of, you know, showing the Anthon, the fake one.
Yeah. So I'm going through that, looking through all the glyphs, seeing where they got it.
Okay. Because I knew some of them were like. Like the kind of the Z thing. I'm like, oh, that. That's the one. I said, I know I've seen that one before. That was the Hoffman transcript. And so. So then you. Then I have a table going through saying, okay, so here is the list of the May ones. Here are ones off of the fake
[00:14:25] Speaker A: ringers there.
[00:14:26] Speaker B: Yeah, all of them.
[00:14:27] Speaker C: All of them.
[00:14:28] Speaker B: And I also said, if you look closely, even the ones. If you look at the previous chart of the ones that were characters.
Matches.
These actually match. Yes, they.
Yeah, they actually. Some are kind of the same, but these.
So it's pretty clear, even probably the.
Because Hoffman was no dummy. Right. He put in his fake transcripts some
[00:14:54] Speaker D: authentic ones from the characters. Exactly.
[00:14:57] Speaker B: Right. And so that was part of, you know, he obviously kind of put down what people were wanting to see, sprinkle
[00:15:03] Speaker D: in a little bit of authenticity to make the forgery more appropriate.
[00:15:07] Speaker B: Yeah, that's why he was smart that way, you know, and so I guess the point here is, hey, it's pretty clear the source of this whole list is from the forgery, not the characters.
[00:15:23] Speaker D: Right.
[00:15:24] Speaker C: So bottom line then is, I think there's kind of two things. One, Micmac itself, as a script, there might be some indigenous origins to some of the characters or whatever, but as a script, the vast majority of it, it's developed in modern times, post Columbian times. So it doesn't really go back to Book of Mormon times anyway. But then the point number two is the comparison is not actually to the Nephite script from the characters.
[00:15:50] Speaker B: Right. So.
[00:15:50] Speaker C: But to a forgery.
[00:15:52] Speaker B: Forgery. Yeah. So maybe.
[00:15:54] Speaker A: Maybe there's problems on both sides.
[00:15:56] Speaker B: Yeah. I actually wrote a letter. It's not been. I don't even know if it made it, but I was just curious to see if Mark Kaufman had maybe, like, use Micmac or something, because he was a pretty smart cookie. And if that's what. Interesting. Yeah, I think try to use something that would also fool them.
[00:16:13] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:13] Speaker B: But, you know, that doesn't get through their screen.
[00:16:15] Speaker D: Well, that's what I wanted to ask what your thoughts are, Jerry, because I've heard this sometimes when forgeries are shown to be forgeries, people that really want to believe in the authenticity of the forgeries, they may say something like, well, but how do you know the forgeries aren't based on something real? Right. Maybe there's something authentic behind the forgeries.
And maybe. I mean, can you speak to that? Like, that seems like a pretty dodgy methodology to me. But is there anything we could say maybe by coincidence or happenstance, some of these characters in the Hoffman forgery are Mic Mac or something.
[00:16:46] Speaker B: That's why I thought, well, maybe somebody will think that he did that. So I thought maybe I'll just write a letter and see. See if he did, maybe he did use it. But I mean, the reality is we'll never know. Yeah, we'll never know. But it's. I think the point of the paper was simply this representation.
[00:17:01] Speaker D: Yeah. It's clearly not based on the demonstrable data evidence. We have hypotheticals of kind of constructing a brain to sort of salvage the forgery. Right. That we have on the ground.
[00:17:14] Speaker B: See, and I don't want to dump on any particular. You know, this book has editors. You know, I mean, they're listed in my page. Just because I don't know who did the review on this.
I don't know where the author.
The premise was he may. Did not give any citations in his book to any other sources.
So the presumption is he came up with it.
[00:17:39] Speaker C: Right.
[00:17:40] Speaker B: And if maybe he got it somewhere else, I don't know. But I mean, that's not really proper academic procedure either to produce things without citation.
[00:17:48] Speaker C: Right.
[00:17:48] Speaker B: And so, I mean, I kind of looked at it as far as I could and basically it was like, well, okay, you know, this is not a proper comparison. Now others, I think there's a few others out there that are kind of throwing some Mic Mac up and trying to doing it. But they look to be like, okay, they actually looked at Micmac. They don't cite it. So that was a problem. I was going to try to look at that. I was actually going to look at that at some point. I haven't yet, but they didn't give a citation. So I was like, okay, yeah, yeah, 4,000. They don't tell me where they're getting the characters. You know, I've got to like look through.
[00:18:24] Speaker C: You've got to go through the whole system.
[00:18:25] Speaker B: Well, migmac does not have or does not have like some organized, like dictionary.
[00:18:31] Speaker D: No Lexicon.
[00:18:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:33] Speaker A: So.
[00:18:33] Speaker B: So you're like, okay, I gotta look through four. Here's one glyph. I can look through 4,000 of them to find what the meaning is.
It'd just be better if people produce these kinds of things. They actually tell people, give the source. Yes. The source of where they got that Micmac character from.
[00:18:49] Speaker D: Well, I would certainly hope that the editors of the Annotated Book of Mormon will revise their latest edition or their next edition to remove this. I'm reminded of the fact that in the first edition of the Annotated Book of Mormon they included a picture of a giant skeleton that they were trying to juxtapose with kind of Jaredite remains of. Oh the Jaredites were mighty strong men or whatever. Turns out the skeleton was an Irish dude that suffered from gigantism, had nothing to do with any Native American or indigenous cultures or societies and they did remove that picture so kudos to them for that. Hopefully they'll do the same with this.
[00:19:22] Speaker B: Well I think Shiz had some Irish blood.
[00:19:27] Speaker A: If you want to dive more deeply into the comparison between the Micmac language and the character's document, you can read Jerry's new paper@the interpreterfoundation.org and you can also go to Jerry's website for all of his other research bmslr.org and we'll link all of that in the description below. And remember, you can study deeply, believe boldly and we'll see you next time.
