Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Is it possible that Joseph Smith just fabricated the gold plates? In fact, could you even make them in your garage? This guy seems to think so.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Golden plates are not a miracle. I can make golden plates in my garage.
[00:00:10] Speaker A: A lot of people seem to think that Joseph Smith could have fabricated the Book of Mormon gold plates based on the resources he had. So what do we think of that?
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Well, that's like. It's a nice, like, pithy response in a public debate setting or whatever that situation was there where he's talking. But like. Like, it's a whole different ball game when you try to actually look at what the historical record tells us and say, hey, is this actually plausible?
[00:00:34] Speaker A: Okay, so when I think, like, can I make gold plates in my garage? I'm like, okay, that's like a metal sheet that I'd have to punch holes in and then tie it together and maybe scribble some stuff on. Like, okay, that sounds reasonable. Like, what's the problem with that?
[00:00:47] Speaker B: Well, we have. The problem with that is we have historical descriptions, right? We have the witnesses. We can actually put up a table on screen that shows people like, this is how the witnesses describe the plates. These are the parameters. These are the dimensions, the physical properties that it had.
And in people who have, like, okay, he says he can make gold plates in the garage and makes it sound super easy. Why hasn't he done it? Like, why. Why doesn't he just do it? We actually know people. There are people who have made themselves replica sets of gold plates, and there
[00:01:18] Speaker A: have been people like David Baird who have made replicas who have been trying to be as authentic as possible, but even he can't afford to use real gold and real metals.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: And so. So there's. The first thing, right, Is, like, before we even get into, like, the actual skills and the process required to do it, it's a prohibitively expensive endeavor. Okay. And, you know, we have. It's kind of an infamous statement from Martin Harris in an interview he had with Joel Tiffany where he talks about hefting the box that had the plates in it and saying he could tell from the heft that it was either lead or gold. And he knew Joseph didn't have so much credit to buy or didn't have enough credit to buy so much lead.
[00:01:55] Speaker C: Lead, yeah.
[00:01:55] Speaker B: Right. And gold. You would need more credit to get the gold, right?
[00:01:59] Speaker C: So maybe Joseph Smith found gold while he was treasure digging and that's what he used.
That would throw a monkey wrench in the whole narrative, Right?
[00:02:06] Speaker A: Smith says it was gold, but, like, you can make metal that look gold. Ish.
[00:02:11] Speaker B: Well, I don't know.
[00:02:13] Speaker A: Right.
[00:02:13] Speaker B: Okay. Brass is brass. How cheap is brass in 1830 or the late.
[00:02:18] Speaker C: Where's he getting it from?
[00:02:19] Speaker B: And where's he gonna get.
[00:02:20] Speaker C: Nobody noticing. John Smith came home with a bunch of brass one day. It's interesting that nobody, none of his contemporaries, accused Joseph Smith of being able to make plates. As far as I'm aware, we don't have any of the neighbors in Palmyra or former, you know, friends or acquaintances that later sort of give these damning affidavits against the Smith family. And Joseph Smith. Right. Oh, he was a lazy swindler that he had that kind of stuff. But you never get anybody saying, oh, and he had, like, you know, this hoard of metal that was really weird. And he was, like, trying to make gold plates. Like, he came with a giant cast brass kettle one day. And I thought, that's kind of weird that Joe Smith is doing that. You don't get any of that kind of stuff from the affidavits.
[00:02:56] Speaker A: They seem to really believe that he had something valuable. That's why they try to, like, steal it.
[00:03:00] Speaker C: Yes, exactly. They think it's all, like, either superstitious or a con job or something, or they think it's just fake. He stole it from Solomon Spalding. But nobody is, like, able to think that, oh, he just, like, fabricated the plates.
[00:03:11] Speaker B: Just fabricated his own plates and. Yeah, and so we're talking about getting the metal, but let's. Okay, sure. Let's say he found a cheaper way to make replica gold plates. But you've got to make them in a way that's. That's gonna be consistent with what the witnesses say. Okay. There's a reason the most serious historian who doesn't believe in Joseph's narrative, his hypothesis is that they were tin plates. Okay. Because that's something that. I guess. I don't know. I haven't looked into the economics of it. But he obviously thinks that there would have. It would have been affordable to get enough tin and those kinds of materials. But tin doesn't look like gold.
He clearly fooled the witnesses, and the eight witnesses in particular, because, well, this guy Frank, he wants to.
[00:03:55] Speaker C: Frank Turek.
[00:03:55] Speaker B: Right, Frank Turek. He wants everyone to think it's not a miracle. Well, you've got to deal with the three witnesses, my friend, who said they saw an angel. But on the flip side, people like Dan Vogel, who are more secular in their thinking, he discounts the three witnesses anyway. But the eight witnesses who do have, by all Accounts contrary to what Dan Vogel and others have argued have a pretty natural, ordinary experience with the plates.
[00:04:20] Speaker A: Very tangible.
[00:04:21] Speaker B: Tangible. They describe them as having the appearance of gold. Okay. And so you've got to have. If you're gonna hypothesize tin plates or some other material, you've got to have a way to make them look gold.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: Just go down to, like, Hobby Lobby and get some of that gold paint or get some, like, gold leaf or something. Craft stores.
[00:04:39] Speaker C: Maybe now's the moment.
[00:04:40] Speaker A: Surely that was available to Joseph Smith.
[00:04:41] Speaker C: Maybe now's the time to mention the theory that it was recently promoted by Sonia Hazard in her article that perhaps Joseph Smith did not fabricate plates, but he found plates. And she has this theory that the gold plates, the descriptions given, including they're engraved in mysterious characters and things like that. Right. That these fit, like printing, stereotype printing plates. Right. And that's. And literally her theory. I don't want to straw man it. Correct me if I'm wrong, Neil, but her theory literally is like, maybe a wagon going past the hill into Palmyra bumped on the road and some of the plates fell off near the hill. Cumorah, these printing plates. And Joseph Smith found them, and he concocted this religious, imaginary idea of an angel, whatever, and he showed them people, and those are the gold plates. Am I misrepresenting her view?
[00:05:31] Speaker B: I mean, I don't know about the wagon, but I don't even know if she tries to explain how a collection of printing plates just somehow ended up in the hill or whatever. But, yeah, that's her basic theory, is that somehow Joseph Smith came across some.
A box of printing plates, and so
[00:05:51] Speaker C: maybe he just found them.
[00:05:52] Speaker B: He came up with this idea.
[00:05:53] Speaker A: I mean, I think that's just so remarkable that we're at a point where, like, hate to use the word, but mental gymnastics the critics have to go through in order to account for the witnesses instead of just taking the narrative at face value or at least taking seriously what the witnesses actually say happened.
[00:06:09] Speaker B: So that is, I think, absolutely a fair point. And it's something that I think is, I think, indicative here with people like Frank Turek and others.
Like, you're. When you say something like, well, gold plates aren't a miracle. I could make those in my garage. You are conceding at this point that the evidence that there were gold plates is persuasive, and you just aren't persuaded that it was somehow miraculous. Okay?
But getting back to this idea that Joseph Smith could have just made the gold plates in his Garage. Right.
Once you got the materials, it's not really that easy to make a set of plates that's consistent with what the witnesses describe. And it's not that easy to say Joseph Smith just found them either. Because this printing plate theory that Sonia Hazard has, well, printing plates, they don't really fit the description of the, of the Book of Mormon plates very well. They wouldn't have been bound by rings and they wouldn't have naturally had punch holes in them that, that would have like allowed you to bind them by rings. That would have required Joseph Smith maybe to make some effort. And if they were maybe lead they made, it might have been soft enough to, to punch. But if they're copper, which is what you need to actually maybe have perhaps a golden looking color there, they're a lot harder to punch holes in. But they're also thicker. They're a lot thicker than how the, the witnesses describe the plates.
[00:07:31] Speaker C: So I, I did find the quote from her, which we can read.
[00:07:33] Speaker B: Okay, sure.
[00:07:36] Speaker C: The third and final scenario is the most straightforward, the less probable.
[00:07:40] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:07:41] Speaker C: Smith really could have found printing plates not in a printing shop, but rather on, in or near the hill in 1823 or 1827, much as he said he did. Stereotype or copper plates might have been in the midst of being transported to a smaller printing office. And then she gives an example and then lost en route near the hill. As mentioned previously, a postal road linked the town of Canandaigua to south to the town in Palmyra about 13 miles north. That poster route hugged the western base of the hill about four miles south of Palmyra and nine north of Canandaigua. So she seems to think that's the.
[00:08:16] Speaker B: Okay, okay.
[00:08:17] Speaker C: Straightforward, but less probable that they fell off a wagon.
[00:08:19] Speaker A: At least she admits it's less probable.
[00:08:21] Speaker B: I stand corrected. That is her. That's, that's one of her theories at least.
[00:08:26] Speaker A: So you talked about, okay, what are the requirements for what the plates actually what the witnesses say the plates looked like. You mentioned the appearance of gold. You mentioned that there has to be holes, there has to be rings that bind them. And you've just mentioned like thickness. What are the other requirements that the witnesses say?
[00:08:41] Speaker B: So like I said, we can maybe put a table up on here that shows like all the physical description.
And I think Stephen has an. You did an article on Mormoner which collects all the witness statements. So we'll throw that up there. We can put that in the link if people want to go check that out. But they've got to have the appearance of gold. They've got to have rings. Those rings are D shaped, by the way. Pretty consistent with. We don't have a lot of statements, but we have a few statements from witnesses that describe them being as D shaped.
You have to have a portion of it sealed and there is some inconsistency as to what the ratio, the sealed ratio is. But you've got a third or a half, two thirds, maybe even in one source. But you've got to have a portion that's sealed. And so you've got to. You've got to have, you know what,
[00:09:28] Speaker C: a seal of some kind.
[00:09:28] Speaker B: A seal of some kind. And whatever kind of mechanism you're going to do to seal that. The plates have to be about 6 by 8 inches, basically the size of a book, more or less.
A book is six by nine, your average book size.
You've got to have a stack of them that's almost six inches tall.
[00:09:50] Speaker C: Witnesses stack that up six times.
[00:09:52] Speaker B: Most witnesses have, you know, have a six inch. Describe a six inch stack. There's a few that say four or five inches. But you've got to have a pretty substantive stack and you've got to. You've. They've got to weigh between 40 and 60 pounds, probably closer to the upper end of that, that weight scale.
[00:10:10] Speaker A: So taking a suitcase to the airport.
[00:10:12] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. If you're going to go flying Delta or southwest and you've got to have your 50 pounds, your bag's got to be 50 pounds or so.
And then they've got to be. The witnesses are clear that they have characters on them. So he didn't just have like blank sheets. And this is a big problem for the tin plate theory. It's hard to engrave tin.
In fact, that was.
[00:10:34] Speaker C: Can't puncture through it with your little stylus or whatever you use.
[00:10:37] Speaker B: It's not very easy to engrave tin.
But you've got to have characters on there. Those characters were described as being small and fine. So you've got to have a lot of pages with a lot of small characters on them. The pages are described as being covered with characters. So it's not like there's just like a few characters on each page or whatever. You've got fine engravings across however many pages.
[00:11:02] Speaker C: And in addition to engravings and shout out to our Martin Harris Charles Anthon episode, which we can link to. They have to be convincing enough to resemble actual ancient scripts.
[00:11:12] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:11:12] Speaker C: Other people are going to be like, yeah, this looks like it could be this language or that language. Right, exactly. So it can't just be squiggles.
[00:11:17] Speaker B: And, you know, I actually find it kind of instructive that like Oliver Cowdery, when, when the, when the papyri come into town in Kirtland and Joseph Smith buys the papyri, Oliver Cowdery, someone who saw the plates, says, hey, the characters on these papyri, he wrote a letter to, I think it was his brother. Maybe Stephen knows the sources on this better, but he wrote a letter and basically said, yeah, they resembled the reformed Egyptian characters on the gold plates. And so they, they had a passing enough resemblance. I'm not saying they were. They were totally. You've got to have.
[00:11:49] Speaker C: They're not exactly the same.
[00:11:50] Speaker B: They're not, but they had a passing enough resemblance that an eyewitness who saw both the hieratic characters on the papyrus and the characters on the plates could say, hey, these kind of resemble each other.
[00:12:02] Speaker C: Right.
[00:12:02] Speaker B: So, so those are. And then some of the witnesses, there are some accounts that mention black stain or cement that filled each character, which helped those characters kind of stand out against the golden background. Right. And so there are a lot of steps you've got to take if you're going to manufacture something that's going to be consistent with those statements. There's a lot of steps you've got to take and you've got to figure out, okay, if you can't afford the gold, how do you make something that's going to look golden? And by the way, you have to do this according to 1820s technology. By the way, you can't, you can't manufacture this in your garage with your machines and, and gold paint from Hobby Lobby. Hobby Lobby or whatever. Right. According to 1820s technology, how are you going to make them look golden? How are you going to get the engraving on there? How are you going to make those engravings have a blackened stain?
How are you going to make them thin and pliable, like thick paper, that's how.
[00:12:55] Speaker C: Or parchment.
[00:12:56] Speaker B: You have pencils the same thickness, you know, thickness of about common tin. That's part of why some people say, oh, it was tin, because it's.
[00:13:04] Speaker C: That's how thick it was. They described it.
[00:13:06] Speaker B: That's one of the problems with the printing plates theory is printing plates are actually much thicker than common tin of the time. They are not pliable.
They don't make a metallic rustling sound. They make a clanking sound when you stack them up and then flip the edges or whatever. They don't really work very well as an explanation for what the witnesses said they encountered.
[00:13:27] Speaker C: I'VE actually quick detour. I've seen printing plates some years ago when I was in Cairo doing some work with the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology, great Egyptological publisher of, you know, texts, critical editions of texts and so forth. And they showed us a tour of their little facility there in Cairo. And they have an old, an old school printing establishment, right. Like where they would hand carve these printing plates, hieroglyphs and, you know, Egyptian art and things like that. And so yes, printing, we kind of don't have any sense of like, oh, books just magically appear from Amazon on our doorstep. We don't know how they, how they're made. Like old school printing, it's a really laborious thing. And yes, those plates are big, they're clunky, they're cumbersome. They're not the fine little thin sort of things that our witnesses describe.
[00:14:12] Speaker B: Right.
[00:14:12] Speaker A: But not just like making a new artifact. But doesn't Josiah Stowell talk about how they have like a greenish cast? Like there's almost like an antiqueness to it that you would have to fabricate somehow.
[00:14:24] Speaker B: So yeah, Josiah Stowell described.
It's a really strange account in some ways. Right. But he described having the plates handed to him while covered and a corner of the covering slipping off. And so he just saw a corner. He didn't see a whole, like the whole plates, but he said he saw a corner. And he described him as having a greenish cast or looking like a stone of greenish cast. And what's compelling to me is if you were making up seeing gold plates, that's probably not how you would describe seeing them.
[00:14:53] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:53] Speaker B: And so he's probably authentically describing something he actually saw and encountered.
[00:14:57] Speaker C: And we think that's what the oxidation of copper oxidation in the tumbaga, in the algae.
[00:15:02] Speaker B: That's the copper. Right. So the leading theory for what the plates are in order to fit the dimensions we all, we just talked about and have a golden color is you have this alloy that's gold and copper, maybe with a little silver in there.
And, and when the copper underneath the gold, it would have been, it would have been treated. They ancient Americans did this depletion, gilding process where they treated it so that the gold would cover the whole surface.
But if the copper got exposed on a corner, for instance, or along an edge, it could have oxidized and it would have had this greenish, almost stony looking color. I mean, if you've seen the Statue of Liberty when I was a kid, I thought it was made of like greenish stone. Because that's what it looks like. Right. It wasn't until in school or something I learned, oh, it's actually made of copper. And the maintenance to just keep it from oxidizing was just absurdly expensive. So we stopped or whatever. I don't know what the reason was.
[00:16:01] Speaker C: Josh Kos estimates that the plates likely contained less than 20, 20% gold content.
[00:16:05] Speaker B: Right.
[00:16:06] Speaker C: And as I understand from both his experiments he's done in his workshop and from his calculations in his paper, you need like 70% silver and then 10% copper or something. Right. Or maybe I have those two.
[00:16:17] Speaker B: I think you have those mixed up. I think it's 70% copper, 10% silver, 10% silver or so, and then, and then 20% gold.
[00:16:23] Speaker C: But this being saying there's, there's copper in these plates, so that could account for the green oxidation and of those edges.
[00:16:29] Speaker B: And for people who might be like, oh, but Tumbaga isn't gold, we can actually put some images on screen that actually like, Josh actually has a great image in his paper where he shows you a pure gold sheet, a Tumbaga sheet that's been treated by this, this acid, this depletion gilding process, and then an untreated one. And if you don't think that depletion gilded sheet of Tumbaga looks like gold, if that's not how you would describe it, if you weren't told the alloy, let's do this, you're not a reasonable person. I'm sorry, let's do this.
[00:16:57] Speaker C: Let's put up on the screen, but we won't tell people which one is which. And let's see in the comments if they can actually guess left or right, which one is Tumbaga, which one is gold, based on Josh Coates reproduction here.
[00:17:07] Speaker B: But there are also, there are some interesting artifacts. Again, we can put some images on screen for this that actually show like it's got the golden sheen on it, but you can see some corrosion on parts where you can see the green oxidation and stuff as well. And these are artifacts right, from ancient America. And so if we're going to take all of these accounts seriously, all of this information seriously, not only does Joseph Smith have to have made plates and had them be golden looking and have them be thin and pliable and all this stuff, but he must have somehow like aged them or treated them to have this oxidation and aging on the surface.
[00:17:46] Speaker C: Yeah, throw some turpentine on it.
That's how he's got to be. It's that easy.
[00:17:50] Speaker B: I'm not Saying that's an impossible thing. I haven't looked into the chemistry that you would have to do. And I know, like, with the.
There's the Kinderhook plates, and they did,
[00:17:59] Speaker C: like, the acid treatment.
[00:18:01] Speaker B: Yeah. The people who forged those did some treatment on it to make it look aged and stuff. And so, again, I'm not saying it's impossible, but we, like, look at how complex the whole process would have been. And by the way, with the Kinderhook plates, much smaller, far less material.
[00:18:15] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, those things are tiny. People like to compare it. But look at the actual. They're like this big.
[00:18:18] Speaker B: It is.
[00:18:19] Speaker A: We're talking about a book this big.
[00:18:21] Speaker B: It's not nearly as comprehensive and large a project as we're talking. And so to just kind of offhandedly quib like, oh, well, you know, gold plates aren't a miracle. You can make them in the garage.
It's not really grappling with the historical realities of that claim.
[00:18:37] Speaker C: I again, come back to my point made earlier, which I'll just reiterate.
We have a deafening silence of contemporary accusations against Joseph Smith, that any of his skeptics or critics believe he was capable of fabricating gold plates if it's just that easy. And if you want to discredit Joseph Smith and the Smith family, you're their disgruntled, skeptical neighbors in Palmyra. Right. Three, four years later, and Falastus Hurlbut comes riding into town wanting to get these affidavits from you. It's. Oh, well, you know, it's really easy. One day I spotted Joseph Smith in the barn and he was hammering out some sheet metal. And, you know, I mean, like, they could come up. They're already making up certain stories about the Smith family.
[00:19:15] Speaker A: I mean, there were any evidence that Joseph Smith had any metalworking skills at all. I mean, he was a farmer.
[00:19:20] Speaker C: I know some. That point the fact that his dad is a cooper, which would have included, like, little barrel bands, the bands, the copper bands.
[00:19:26] Speaker B: Copper, whatever.
[00:19:27] Speaker D: Is that.
[00:19:28] Speaker C: I mean, is that nearly enough? I just. I'm highly dubious at this idea that, like, yes, maybe some rudimentary. I can hammer sheet metal into a ring to put on a barrel kind of stuff. But that's nowhere near accounting for what we're describing here. So look at the contemporary. My point is here, and then I'll leave it alone. Look at the contemporary accusations. You can learn a lot from them. And it's predominantly either this guy was. He just wrote it himself. That's Alexander Campbell. Right. And There were no gold plates. There's a silly talk about gold plates, right? He just wrote this book and made up the stupid story. That's Alexander Campbell. Or it's, well, you know, he stole it from Solomon Spalding and made up the stupid story with the help of Sidney Rigdon.
[00:20:02] Speaker D: Right.
[00:20:03] Speaker C: It's only much later that people. Well, maybe he fabricated gold plates.
Look, if he avoided detection, he did a pretty good job of it, right? That none of the neighbors, of all the accusations they can bring against him, they don't even think it's within the realm of plausibility to accuse him of being able to fabricate gold plates.
[00:20:19] Speaker B: Yeah, no, absolutely. And again, it's like it's not just us saying, wow, this would have been really hard. The people who have tried to make replicas interpreter did an interview with David Baird, and in that interview, they did that interview for their witnesses documentary.
And I don't think they've published the full interview. I don't know if this quote made the documentary or not, but I have a transcript. And so in that he was asked what the process would take to make believable plates. And he talked about how he would need to make pages of gold plates, regardless of whatever the metal was. To make it thin consistently, to cut it and shape it, and to engrave and etch on it would have been extremely difficult. If Joseph Smith was to make his gold plates, it would have taken him quite a while. I don't think there's any evidence that he had any of the skills required to do that. This is someone who's done it.
He's a metallurgist and he's done it. He did this himself. He's got a replica. We've actually seen his replica, which is. I think his plates are made of brass technically because he. He didn't use gold. But it's hard. It's not, I mean, think about that
[00:21:29] Speaker A: easy, like the time involved with that. We know people who have done this essentially part time, and it's taken them several years to do it. Joseph Smith as a farmer either would have had to have sequestered himself away for maybe several months full time to do this. And we would have seen something in the historical record to say, hey, Joseph Smith, like, wasn't doing his farm work and was hiding out for all this time or was doing it like secretly at night or in spare time for years and years and years in order to have made this possible. And yet we don't see that. What we do know is when he translates the book of Mormon. We have tons of documentation about how much time that took him to do.
[00:22:06] Speaker C: Yeah. Oh, but Jasmine, he was going to the hill once a year, every September, to meet with the angel.
Surely he had a kiln in the hill, Cumorah, where he was factory pressing out, you know, gold plates. I think I've actually kind of heard that. Well, just some random people on Reddit or whatever said he was going to the hill to secretly make his gold plates in the cave. In the cave in the hill.
[00:22:27] Speaker B: Cumorah in the cave. Well, the theory that I've heard is that, like, there's another hill nearby. I think it's called Miner's Hill, and there's a little cave there. And like, Joseph Smith was going there secretly once a year and working on this project.
Once a year.
[00:22:41] Speaker C: Apparently once a year, nobody finds it. Also, the other factor that we just need to mention here very briefly, ladies and gentlemen, the Smith family is dirt poor in 1920s. They are so poor that Lucy Maximus says they're like, selling like, little pieces of cloth, scraps of cloth that she can, like, do little paintings on or whatever to try to get extra income for the family. Right. So where's he getting the money? Oh, Martin Harris gave him the money. Surely, surely Martin Harris put up all the money to give him to get all the places, all the gold he needed. Like, come on. Like the compounding factors here make this so vanishingly unlikely.
[00:23:14] Speaker B: Yeah, interesting.
[00:23:15] Speaker A: Well, one other thing that people talk about when it comes to the plates is that there's like a lower bound and an upper bound. Like, okay, it's got to be 6 inches tall. Ish. And it's got to be less than 60ish pounds. But the Book of Mormon itself is pages and pages and pages long. How on earth does it fit within that? In fact, this one creator, Trent Horn, has made a video kind of critiquing that thing and I'd love to see, guys, what your reaction is here.
[00:23:36] Speaker D: The Book of Mormon is about 270,000 words long, but there were allegedly only 46 by 8 inch golden plates. How could that much information have fit onto such a small space? Space? If you tore out every page of the modern, finely printed 531 page book of Mormon and placed it on the ground, it would cover over 100 square feet of space. But if you place the golden plates on the ground, they'd only cover 27 square feet. The question then becomes, how could all of that information have fit under the much smaller alleged plates? My answer is there is no plausible natural way for this to have happened. If the text doesn't fit, then you must acquit the Book of Mormon. That is of the charge of being an authentic translation of ancient texts.
[00:24:15] Speaker A: Okay, so what's our reaction there? He says that, okay, there's over 500 Book of Mormon pages and it would have fit on 40 gold plates.
[00:24:22] Speaker C: Alleged by who? He said alleged. 40 pages. Alleged by who?
[00:24:25] Speaker B: Alleged.
[00:24:26] Speaker C: Question.
[00:24:27] Speaker B: Yeah, that's.
[00:24:27] Speaker A: Do we have record that it was 40?
Big.
[00:24:30] Speaker B: There is. So witness statements, eyewitness statements, never gave a number for the total number of plates. I think there's a few statements and if we find them, we can.
[00:24:39] Speaker C: Isn't there like this second hand account from Sidney Rigdon giving a few.
You probably know that one.
[00:24:44] Speaker B: There's Sidney Rigdon who says like there's a couple accounts that tie back 16 place 16 or 7 or whatever.
[00:24:54] Speaker C: Come on. He's not involved in this. Sydney. Rigging is not a good source.
[00:24:56] Speaker B: Well, actual witness statements, I think there's a couple that say there were many. And that's, that's as far as they go as there were many. If there were only.
I mean, I. That makes it sound like there, there wasn't enough for like there was more than what they were going to count right.
In, in the time that they had to engage with, with the artifact. But there's no, there's no specific number given by any witness statements. But we have parameters, we have numbers here that we can use to figure out, well, how many plates would fit there. Right. We have, we have a certain weight requirement which is going to prohibit how much gold, how much copper and how much silver we can actually have. Right. We have a certain height that they've got to be. And we've got statements about how thin the plates are. Right. And so small the characters are and how small the characters are. And so we've got that kind of data and different people have put, who have used those numbers to make estimates for the plates. Josh Coates, who we talked about earlier and he published a paper in Interpreter last year. He presented this stuff at fair last year.
And his estimate, off the top of my head, in fact, actually, let's just pull it up here. His estimate for the number of plates comes in at between 187 and 259.
[00:26:09] Speaker A: That's a lot more than 40.
[00:26:11] Speaker B: And that's based on. That's based on, you know, he did the research to figure out, okay, what's the thickness of common tin. That's the most common description.
What's the thickness of common tin in the 19th century.
I actually did, in the, in the paper I have in this book defending the Book of Mormon, I did a little bit of research along those lines as well. He and I came to pretty similar conclusions on that.
But you get the thickness of common tin, right. And then you, you have the, the weight and the height of the stack. He actually did an experiment in his garage. Thank you, Frank.
For, to, to determine how much void space there would be in between individual plates, he just, he stacked up some copper discs that were about the thickness of common tin in the 19th century. And then he literally measured how much space is in between those, those disks. Right. And so to determine how much void space there was, and that's how he came up with his numbers. Jerry Grover, who did a book earlier about, I think it came out in 2015 on the gold plates, and he's, he's a geologist and an engineer, so he approached this very scientifically as well.
He argues that they potentially could be thinner than, than the range that Josh Coates assumes for the plates. And, and, and he does some experimentation with, with copper plates that are very, very thin as well. And he comes up with estimates between 300 and 600 plates for the stack. Okay. And so when you, when you take what the witnesses actually described seriously and you try to, you try to determine based on those parameters, how many plates would have to be there, really, if you're going to fill a 6 inch stack, it's in the hundreds. You know, we can, we can confidently say the number of plates is in the hundreds, not around 40.
[00:27:50] Speaker A: So that's all fine and good, but the book Mormon is 500 pages of English text. That still leaves kind of a large number to scale down to. How could all of that English text fit down onto, let's say, 200 plates, being generous?
[00:28:04] Speaker B: Yeah. So basically there's been two methods that have been used to try and determine this.
Josh Coates, in his paper, what he does is he, he, he tries to calculate what he calls translation density. And basically what that means is he determined how many total English characters are in like, instead of counting by words, which is what Trent Horn does here, he counts by characters because words can be different sizes, different lengths. Right. Your average character, though, even though some different letters are going to be different shapes and sizes a little bit, your average character size isn't going to vary nearly as much. So he determined how many characters are actually in the English translation. Oh, and by the way, Trent Horn does not take into account the 116 pages. Josh Coates.
[00:28:43] Speaker C: He does.
[00:28:44] Speaker B: He does. I also do. In the, in the stuff I do. I do a different method in my paper here, but I actually think Josh Coates method is better. But we can talk about.
He uses translation density. So he determined, okay, there's this many characters in the English Book of Mormon.
What is the ratio of characters, English characters to Hebrew characters when you translate a Hebrew text? And so he just took English translation of Genesis, compared the number of Hebrew characters to the number of English characters, and he found that it's like, I don't know, we can put his numbers up. I think it's 2.4. 2.4 English characters to one Hebrew character. He then did the same thing with a Demotic text, Demotic being an Egyptian language and a hieratic text. And those two came out to be, I think, 2.6 and 3.1.
And then to just kind of get an upper bound, an idea of what the upper bound might be, he looked at Chinese. And Chinese was like 3.9 English characters per Chinese character. And so he assumed a range of a translation density range of between like 2.4 being your kind of low, lower bound. Because we know like they say at the very least that they're, at the very least their translation, that their, their original writing, their reformed Egyptian would have been as dense as Hebrew. But Moroni actually says it's more dense than Hebrew. So theoretically you need to bump it up a little bit. You're going to have a translation density higher than 2.4.
[00:30:07] Speaker C: Yeah, he has it right here. Each character represented about three to four English characters, similar to Demotic to English translations.
[00:30:14] Speaker B: And so, and so he assumed translation density around three to four characters.
I think he actually did go as high as five. But he uses a mathematical model to determine like how many different, like literally millions of possible combinations are possible. And there are many that are within the translation density of 3 to 4 characters per English character, where you could fit the entire text, including the lost 116 pages on the, you know, roughly 200 plates that he estimated the Book of Mormon would have required.
[00:30:44] Speaker C: In terms. Also we should mention the size of the characters. This is one of my pet peeves when I see replicas of the gold plates, either real ones in life or like digital artwork, replicas of them. These characters are giant. Right. Like in their 20s.
[00:30:58] Speaker A: Even Trent Horn uses an example of the plates of Darius to talk about the size of the characters.
[00:31:04] Speaker C: They're big and they're spaced out.
[00:31:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:31:06] Speaker C: And there's lots of space Josh was looking at. So, first of all, we have lots of ancient inscriptions, and I know both Neil and Josh have touched on this. So we can actually measure the size of the characters on these ancient inscriptions, including metallic inscriptions, and some of them come out to as small as, like, 2 millimeters. Like, they get really small.
[00:31:24] Speaker B: I actually, I have examples that are as small as 1.6 millimeters.
[00:31:29] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:31:29] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:31:29] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:31:29] Speaker A: How big are these characters in, like, a regular English book?
[00:31:32] Speaker B: So if that is 12 point font, and I don't know, we'd have to ask Jared, I guess, but if that is 12 point font, the average size of characters in 12 point font is 2 to 3 millimeters.
[00:31:41] Speaker C: Yes. Okay. It's about that. But this is to say it is attested in antiquity that you can write that small, these characters. So they're not these giant, you know, swirling, swoopy things like you see in replicas. Right. They're going to be very small, they're going to be very compact. They're going to be difficult to read and to be legible, which could also explain why they have to do that little blackening. Right. To make them really stand out.
This also actually accounts for, within the Book of Mormon itself, why Book of Mormon authors, both like Jacob and Moroni, both complain about how hard it is to write this thing, especially Jacob. Right. And then Moroni, the awkwardness of our hands and things like that, they are complaining. And it is like, you look at these, it's a marvel that they're able to get these characters that small by hand. Right. So we're looking at about 2 to 4 millimeters, which is about font size 12. So, you know, I have had the benefit of a computer to use font size 12 for Egyptian hieroglyphs in my dissertation, which was kind of fun. And those are. I have to kind of squint to make sure I'm getting them right. So you can appreciate the amount of labor that this went into. Let's going back to our earlier point, Joseph Smith has to engrave that, and he has to pack that in a plate to make them fine. You know, they're very fine characters. Right. Very expertly wrought, very small.
So that's what we're looking at. So we're looking three to four English characters per Book of Mormon. Reformed Egyptian character, if we use Demotic, is kind of our attested counterpoint or sort of reference point to it. And we're looking at about 2 to 4 millimeters, about font size 12 for how big they are. And we'll show up on the screen Here, Josh, I actually helped him with this because I got examples of hieratic and demotic, Egyptian. And we did a little computer mock up of what it would look like on the dimensions of the plates that Josh has, which is just shy of like six by eight. Right. So we can show right here what that would look like in your mind's eye. This is what you should be thinking about when you imagine the Book of Mormon plates and what we're looking at.
[00:33:32] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, Josh's work, I think, pretty compellingly shows, yes, the whole Book of Mormon could have fit on the plates. The other method that I mentioned that has been used to say whether or not the whole text could fit. And it's what Trent Horn is using and it's what other critics have used is translated words per square inch. Basically you say, okay, there's 270,000 words in the English Book of Mormon. And they'll take one or two examples of ancient metal plates. And I mean it, they'll take one or two and no more than that. Dryas plates, the driest plates, you know, and they'll say, okay, here's how many English words this translates to. And this thing is, you know, X number of inches.
So, you know, at that rate, you couldn't fit the whole Book of Mormon on, on the plates that we have. And so I guess it doesn't fit. Okay, we should immediately recognize what they're doing. Look, there are. There are thousands upon thousands, maybe even tens of thousands. I don't know, there might even be hundreds of thousands. I haven't done. I haven't like added up how many examples we have of ancient writing on metal plates, but there are thousands of examples of it. You cannot take one or two examples and make a sweeping generalization about what is actually possible or doable by ancient scribes based on that little sample.
So in my paper that's in this book, written upon gold plates, comparing witness descriptions with artifacts from the pre modern world, I have a section in here where I go through 24. Still a small sample. A small sample, but I felt like it was sufficient to demonstrate that the kinds of. The small kinds of writing that we were just talking about is quite possible. Like I mentioned, I found some examples where the writing was as small as 1.6 millimeters, you know, was the size of the characters. Others that I found going up to like 5 or 6 millimeters all. And this is all just engravings on metal. I tried to stick with Semitic or Egyptian or other ancient Near Eastern languages, stick as closely to Book of Mormon languages as I could based on the samples I could find. But I had to find samples that had the dimensions and information I needed to, you know, do the math. Right. But I came up with 24 different examples where the writing was small. And I was able to determine based on the surface area and the number of words on the text what the, you know, words per square inch in translation. Because we're only comparing, we only have an English translation to compare what the words per square inch was in translation and then determine. Okay, if we extrapolated that across the size of the Book of Mormon, including the last 116 pages and you can go look at my math for how many words that adds. I'm not, we're not going to waste time here. How, you know, how many plates would it require? And to just like highlight a few examples of what I did. The Ktef and Om inscriptions from the.
Which are From Jerusalem, they're 600 B.C. they're written in Hebrew, they're on silver, they're very small.
One of them has what has about 17 and a half words per square inch, which would require 199 plates. Okay, so right within our.
[00:36:44] Speaker C: That's what Josh is kind of, you
[00:36:45] Speaker B: know, our 200 range.
[00:36:46] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:36:47] Speaker B: The other one has a translate a words total words per square inch translated into English about 61 per square inch, which would require about 57 plates. Okay, so, so that gives you two different kind of polls there.
There are several more actually. If that 50 plates or 57 plates seems extreme, there are several other examples where I got similar numbers.
And so it's, it's not without outside the realm of possibility, but we really don't need it to be quite that compact because, you know, we're probably talking a number of plates, a number of total plates in the hundreds. So across the 24 examples that I found these, the average would be about 40 words per square inch and would require about 86 plates for the entire Book of Mormon text.
[00:37:36] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:37:36] Speaker B: So that's the average across the. And I did, I will admit I specifically was looking for texts that had small compact writing on them and were densely written because that's what the witnesses describe. You know, taking a plate that's like, you know, an example where it's really loosely written or there's lots of gaps in the writing, you know, empty space on the plate.
That's not how the witnesses described what they saw. So I was trying to conform to what the witnesses described. So I went looking for stuff that was compactly written. But across these 24 samples, like I said, you get.
You maybe need about 86 plates to make the text fit based on that kind of calculation.
[00:38:12] Speaker A: So while I'm sure Trent Horne was doing his honest best work, he ended up being mistaken about the number of gold plates that would have been required. The number of English pages, even that's required. The size of the characters, the translation density.
And so really, like, when you actually use the correct parameters and the correct data set, it sounds like the gold plates are entirely plausible from what the witnesses describe.
[00:38:33] Speaker C: And that's important to note. We're not saying this proves Joseph Smith had gold plates. Right. We're trying to address the claim that it would have been impossible. He said there's no natural way that this could have occurred. Right? So therefore it can't be a translation of ancient document. We're here to say that that criticism just doesn't hold any water. Now, Book of Mormon can still be made up, right? Can still be fake. We don't believe it is, but maybe it is, right? You don't have. So in other words, you can. For the critics. Here's your free advice, critics. You can just drop this talking point and the Book of Mormon can still be fake and you can just drop this. It's just a silly thing to try to criticize it for. So we're just showing that, yes, within the parameters described by the witnesses, it's plausible and, or possible that he could have made this. So this criticism is just kind of dumb.
[00:39:15] Speaker A: So it's one thing for the plates to be plausible, but since we know certain people who have tried to make the plates in their garage, what do we think? Could Joseph Smith have made the plates in his garage?
[00:39:24] Speaker B: I, I mean, I, I'm reluctant to say no. It's like, like, obviously impossible.
[00:39:29] Speaker C: Like, of course, within the realm of, like, what's conceivably possible. He could have.
[00:39:33] Speaker B: We don't, we don't want to make the same mistake Trent Horn made in the opposite direction.
[00:39:37] Speaker C: Right?
[00:39:37] Speaker B: Is it, like, hypothetically possible? Yes, but I don't find it remotely
[00:39:43] Speaker C: likely, plausible, plausible, or the best explanation for the data.
[00:39:47] Speaker B: You're right. I don't, I don't find it the best explanation for the data. And, and, and in my paper, I do way more than. I'm not just trying to prove the plates, that the text could fit on the plates. My paper is taking all of those dimensions of the plates that we talked about and comparing it to what we have in antiquity in metal plates and other Metal artifacts in some cases to determine like, okay, are these dimensions, are they consistent with what we know ancient American and ancient Near Eastern metalsmiths and scribes were could do with metal plates. And the answer I found is yes, all of those dimensions are consistent with actual ancient artifacts that we have. And I, I would even go so far as to argue that it's within, it's specifically within the purview of a pre Columbian metalsmith within the middle of the first century A.D. which is the artifact Joseph Smith held in his hands. That's when it was made. Right, the middle of the first century A.D. right.
So yeah, I think it's plausible within those, I think that's a plausible explanation for the data is it's an ancient American artifact made according to those specs. I don't find it very plausible that Joseph made them in his garage.
[00:40:55] Speaker C: I'll just add to that point.
There's an axiom that the Scottish philosopher David Hume came up with that's kind of famous. Right. He's an Enlightenment skeptic of religion, specifically miracles. And David Hume basically says, and I'm paraphrasing here, that you should only believe a miracle if the counter explanation is more miraculous. Right.
That's how I feel with this idea that you can make gold plates in your garage. Yes, you can, conceivably. But I think having Joseph Smith make gold plates in his garage is more miraculous than getting it from an angel in order to be consistent with the data that we've laid out here.
[00:41:27] Speaker A: Right, yeah, that is a fair point. Well, if you want to learn more about gold plates and the artifacts we have for them and the plausibility of the Book of Mormon, you can read Neal Rapley's paper in the volume Defending the Book of Mormon published by fair. And we'll also link in the description, the paper that Josh Coates wrote all about the combinatorial approach to the plates math. So remember, you can believe in the Book of Mormon and you can study deeply and the church is true. We'll see you next time.
