Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: If you don't believe the Book of Mormon is an ancient historical record, you've got to come up with some explanation for where it comes from. Right. And so a lot of people have pointed to that Joseph Smith plagiarized it from another book called View of the Hebrews by Ethan Smith. This is the most common explanation I hear for where the Book of Mormon could have come from if Joseph Smith didn't actually get it from ancient Nephites. And Stephen here, he has written a paper. In this book, a record shall be kept understanding and defending the history of the church. There's a paper in here about the connection between Joseph Smith, Ethan Smith, and this book, View of the Hebrews. So, Stephen, what is View of the Hebrews?
[00:00:39] Speaker B: View of the Hebrews is a book, and I have. No, that's a silly answer. I actually have an original copy of View of the Hebrews with me.
I like to affectionately call this the Mormon Necronomicon.
[00:00:52] Speaker A: In the sense that I had to define that one.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, you know, in the sense that I have been assured by more than one individual that the mere existence of this book, like, contains dark, hidden secret mysteries that disprove my religion, that prove the Book of Mormon's fake or whatever. It's really kind of funny. No, not really. It's not the Necronomicon. Shout out to H.P. lovecraft fans. No. So here it is. This is an original printing of View of the Hebrews, which I acquired for my library. Pretty fun.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: Cool.
[00:01:17] Speaker B: And what it is, this is another republication. Here's a third republication, which we'll talk about in a little bit. So no shortage of them, basically. In a nutshell, View of the Hebrews was first published in 1823 by a guy named Ethan Smith who was a Congregational reverend in a town in Vermont called Pulteney in Rutland county, which, fun fact is, was in my mission when I served in New England.
The Rutland branch was in my mission. So he was a minister there. He publishes this book, and it goes through a first edition in 1823, and then the second edition, and the one I have is the second edition two years later in 1825.
Initially, it receives kind of limited circulation, mostly, like in Vermont, New York. Right. It's a limited run, the first edition. The second edition gets more national distribution, and I've been able to track down book reviews, like, all the way down in South Carolina, like. Or advertisements. Right. Like people advertising for sale. View of the Hebrews by Ethan Smith. Right.
What is he arguing?
[00:02:13] Speaker C: Obviously, Joseph Smith then knew about it and was case closed.
[00:02:19] Speaker B: Yes, exactly. Right. Case closed. Right. Yeah. So what is Ethan Smith? Well, first of all, I want to introduce who Ethan Smith is, because when people talk about View of the Hebrews and Ethan Smith, they just kind of ignore who the guy was and they jumped to the book. So Ethan Smith is actually a very commendable and kind of reputable figure. He lived a storied life. He's born in, what, like 1762 or something like that. He fights in the Revolutionary War, and as a matter of fact, he is at West Point when Benedict Arnold betrays West Point to the British.
Right. So he's. Yeah, so he has excitement of the Revolutionary War.
He goes off to Dartmouth. He studies theology and classics at Dartmouth. Right. So he's. He's a egghead book nerd like me. So I can. I have a lot of affinity for Ethan Smith that way. Very learned. Right. Very bookish, has a big family. He goes to different. He goes all over, Vermont, New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, as a pastor in different churches. His life does parallel Joseph Smith in some ways.
[00:03:14] Speaker C: So.
[00:03:14] Speaker B: So Ethan Smith was alive during the First Great Awakening. Right. In colonial America. Joseph Smith is alive in the Second Great Awakening. And we have accounts that say that Ethan Smith was not very religious as a kid, but that he becomes super religious because of the First Great Awakening and especially because of, like, influence from, like, his mother and also from, like, a local pastor. Right?
Yeah.
[00:03:36] Speaker C: Did he read James 1:5?
[00:03:37] Speaker B: I don't know if we know that, but he did come from a kind of a.
An irreligious background, becomes super religious. Okay, so he becomes a pastor. He's a Congregationalist. Right. And he pastors different churches throughout New England. He's a prolific author. He does not just write View of the Hebrews. He also writes many other books. And in fact, what's funny about View of the Hebrews, too, among other things, this is not the book that he's most famous for in his lifetime. So in his obituary, they say that the Reverend Ethan Smith has passed away, who is most famous for his dissertation on the Key to the Prophecies.
[00:04:11] Speaker A: And interesting.
[00:04:11] Speaker B: It's a book he wrote on, like, Daniel in Revelation, interpreting. Exactly Right. Like, so that's funny that he's known for this one, when actually that's not the one he's famous for.
[00:04:18] Speaker C: He's really largely forgotten today.
You know, he's not.
I don't know, Adam Clark, I feel like from that era is a little more remembered.
[00:04:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:30] Speaker A: So the Book of Mormon is a book Of Scripture. What is view of the Hebrews? Is it claiming to be a book of scripture? Is it a novel?
What is it?
[00:04:39] Speaker B: Yeah. No, it is not claiming to be scripture and is not a novel. The reason why Ethan Smith writes this is because as a minister, he's also a domestic missionary, right? He is with various missionary associations and so forth. He's a reformer, an abolitionist, et cetera. And he has a concern for marginalized peoples, including, you know, African slaves, African American slaves, orphans, that kind of thing, children and Native Americans. As a domestic missionary, he has a concern for the welfare of Native American. Native Americans. So what view of the Hebrews is as a book? It is his argument that we know the origins of the Native Americans and that they come from. You ready for it? Wait for it. The lost tribes of Israel. Can you believe it?
So the way. The way Ethan Smith formulates It is the 10 lost tribes of Israel are carted off by the Assyrians, right? Destruction of Jerusalem, all that stuff. And they make their way over the Bering Land strait into the Americas, and their descendants are the modern Native Americans.
[00:05:43] Speaker C: So they crossed the Bering Land strait, like around like 700 BC or something like that.
[00:05:49] Speaker B: Yes, exactly.
Yeah. And they get into the Americas. And view of the Hebrews is Ethan Smith's argument that we know that Native Americans are descendants of lost tribes of Israel because when you talk to people who have lived among the Indians, they talk about, like, these Jewish customs and names and Hebrew words they have. Right. And they have, like, certain feast days and purification rites, and they practice circumcision and they have the name Jehovah in their language. Right? So he's making kind of an anthropological argument for why Native Americans are the descendants of lost tribes of Israel. And that's a view of the Hebrews is. It's not a book of scripture. It's not a novel. It's not a historical romance. It is an anthropological quote, unquote, scholarly quote, unquote, analysis of, like, indigenous cultures trying to tie them back into the biblical lost tribes of Israel. Why is he doing this? It's not just for funsies, and it's not just to solve the mystery of where did the Indians come from. Right. He is concerned as a domestic missionary and as a reformer. He is concerned to make sure that we can bring Christianity to the indigenous peoples of the Americas to restore them to, like, the lost knowledge of who their ancestors were as part of the second coming of the. Of Jesus Christ and the restoration of Israel in the last days. Okay? So it's very Much kind of missionary oriented. And he actually has, in this edition, he has a minister friend of his write a forward. Right. Kind of amping it up. Like this is so good for our missionary efforts. So it's kind of a.
[00:07:16] Speaker A: It's very functional.
[00:07:17] Speaker B: Very functional. It's partly anthropological, quote unquote, and it's partly theological. Right. And sort of a missionary proselytizing tool to help motivate white European American Christian missionaries to go to Native Americans to bring them Christianity to restore them to their knowledge of their ancestors.
[00:07:32] Speaker C: Well, and so if that sounds a little out there or harebrained to people, this is not totally a unique phenomenon within like the early 19th century, late 18th century. And that is part of the reason why people think there's relevance to the Book of Mormon. Because, you know, secular historians like to situate the Book of Mormon within this particular context.
And there are people who have talked about it, Latter Day Saints who have talked about it and why the Book of Mormon is maybe different and doesn't really quite fit that sort of context. Not the least of which being it's not really about the lost tribes of Israel.
But it is like Ethan Smith is not just like some radical weirdo for the period. Right.
It's obviously, it seems like, you know, crossing the Bering land Strait in 700 B.C. and like all. It seems a little crazy to us now, but it's. These are ideas that are not totally out of left field during the period.
[00:08:34] Speaker B: Yeah. So besides Ethan Smith and he cites these people in his book, you have guys like Elias Budino, James Adir, Noah. Oh goodness, I forget his last name. But there's. He's actually a Jewish American, Noah something. I'm sorry, I'm forgetting, but there's other.
Josiah Priest, I think Josiah Priest, he's part of these. These are contemporaries. They are circulating this idea of what's called the Hebraic Indian theory. Right. And this goes at least back to earlier, early colonial America, even earlier. Right. Sort of our first inclinations of this. Yeah. Ethan Smith is not just a one off here. He's not the only guy arguing for this. Also, it's worth pointing out because I've tracked down contemporary reviews of view of the Hebrews by people.
It's also not like a universal given. Like not everybody's buying this theory and it kind of has a mixed reception. There are people who are like, I don't know if I buy this theory about where Native Americans come from. Right. So it's very much a live discussion happening, but really at its Zenith. It's like in late 18th century, by the time, by the 1820s, when he publishes this, it's kind of waning. It is waning of how significant it is. So that's in a nutshell, who Ethan Smith is and what view of the Hebrews is. It is a manifestation of the Hebraic Indian theory that other American and European thinkers and authors were arguing to explain where Native Americans come from. They must be from the lost tribes of Israel or ancient Jews.
[00:09:56] Speaker A: So the genre is clearly very different from the Book of Mormon. But what do the critics claim is the comparison, like, what's similar between view of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon? That they would say that, like, oh, yes, of course, Joseph Smith must have stolen this from this work here.
[00:10:12] Speaker B: Yeah. So we can talk about some of the parallels. Perhaps they'll quote parallels. Right. Maybe before. If we do that, though, just to briefly kind of go through the history of the controversy. Right. Because people, you go on TikTok and Instagram today, YouTube, I guarantee you type in view of the Hebrews. And the first thing that's going to come up. Right. Is some anti Mormon or ex Mormon creator, content creator, saying he got all these parallels from Ethan Smith. So how did we get here? Basically? Maybe let's take a few minutes there and then we can look at some of the parallels. So, so the idea, the argument that Joseph Smith must have been plagiarizing view of the Hebrews in terms of like Book of Mormon criticism, that's a relatively new criticism.
[00:10:50] Speaker A: Oh, really?
[00:10:51] Speaker B: And what I mean by that is.
[00:10:52] Speaker C: Well, I mean, it's been around for almost 100 years.
[00:10:54] Speaker A: Well, Joseph Smith's day, were they comparing it to Hebrews?
[00:10:58] Speaker B: No, they were not. And that's what I'm getting at. Right. So there are no. I've looked for them, maybe there's one out there, but I haven't found it. And I've been looking. There is no contemporary accusation from any of Joseph Smith's contemporaries, any of his critics, not even Ethan Smith himself. By the way, he never goes on the record saying this. Right. As far as we can tell, there's no contemporary account saying we think Joseph Smith stole his golden Bible from Ethan Smith and got his ideas from Ethan's mouth. Right. So pretty much in Joseph Smith's day, the accusations are either like Joseph Rota himself or Solomon's balding. He stole this balding manuscript. Right.
[00:11:30] Speaker C: We can talk about the Spalding theory another time.
[00:11:32] Speaker B: Another time.
[00:11:32] Speaker C: But yeah, but yeah, there's nothing contemporary and that's Like, I think one of the first points that you've got to recognize is the immediate audience who would have been most familiar with things like Ethan Smith's arguments and the Book of Mormon.
They saw no connection between these two things.
[00:11:49] Speaker A: When did this criticism start popping up?
[00:11:52] Speaker B: It pops up for the first time in like 1902, where you have for the first time a direct claim, where an antagonist.
This time it was a guy who was a Campbellite, right? Disciples of Christ, another restoration group. He's in a debate with an RLDS elder on the origins of the Book of Mormon. And he says, we have this book called View of the Hebrews and other books like it that Joseph Smith must have plagiarized from. That's kind of our earliest that I can see attested, like black and white. Here's a critic claiming environmental dependence or that Joseph Smith is plagiarizing, right. 1902.
[00:12:26] Speaker A: You.
[00:12:26] Speaker B: You do get in 1887 this kind of weird account from one of Ethan Smith's unnamed grandsons, where the grandson claims that Ethan Smith, his grandpa, had a secret unpublished manuscript that Solomon Spalding must have taken and that Solomon Spaulding wrote his manuscript based on Ethan Smith's manuscript and that Joseph Smith stole that manuscript from Solomon Spaulding. It's all very bizarre.
[00:12:50] Speaker C: So it's like a merger of the two.
The Spalding Theory and the View of Ethan Smith.
[00:12:57] Speaker B: It's not a very credible report for a number of reasons, but the first direct one, yeah, 1902. So that's our earliest sort of seeds of it. We get this more environmental explanation for the Book of Mormon. So guys like Isaac W.
Riley. Sorry, yeah, Isaac W. Riley, Edward Meyer, they kind of posit the environmentalist theory for the Book of Mormon. Really, View of the Hebrews takes off as like a viable theory for skeptical writers with FOM Brody. So as. As with most things in this world, our problems start with FOM Brody because she like popularized this idea. She has like two or three pages devoted to View of the Hebrews. And she says things like, although direct dependence cannot be proven, the striking parallels cannot be a coincidence, right? Between View of the Hebrews and the Book of.
[00:13:46] Speaker A: And von Brody is 1940s.
[00:13:48] Speaker C: 1945 is when her biography comes out.
[00:13:51] Speaker B: And after her biography, when I look at anti Mormon publications, they all just are citing Brody like it's interesting. So she clearly kind of blows. To her credit, she also kind of just curb stomps the Spalding theory in her book, right, as not being credible, but she replaces it with View of The Hebrews. So in a punchline, right? That's where we're getting at. So we go from early claims, 1902, Fawn Brody, she kind of memorializes it. Kind of becomes a staple argument now for Origins of the Book of Mormon. Ethan Smith. So now today, when people are arguing about view of the Hebrews in the Book of Mormon, most of the time they're just like, piggybacking off of FOM Brodie. Right.
[00:14:27] Speaker A: Well, let's look at the argument. How does view of the Hebrews compare to the Book of Mormon? What are the parallels there?
[00:14:33] Speaker B: So we can look at the parallels. Maybe let's pull up a handy chart in our favorite thing, the orange PDF, the CES letter. So Jeremy Runnels, in the CES letter, he has a whole section and he talks about. Look, here's these parallels. He has these dual columns, right?
View of the Hebrews on one, Book of Mormon on the other. Jeremy Runels is getting this from an unpublished thing that B.H. roberts did. I don't know if in this episode we have time to talk about B.H. roberts. I'd like to at some point, but,
[00:15:02] Speaker C: I mean, yeah, I was gonna say, in that little history you just gave, there is this incident in between Fawn brodie and the 1902 reference where B.H. roberts does a personal study in 1922.
[00:15:15] Speaker A: Was the apostle of the church at the time.
[00:15:17] Speaker B: Well, he's a.
[00:15:19] Speaker C: And he does this private study where he analyzes view of the Hebrews in the Book of Mormon, and he never publishes it. There's a lot of controversy around it that, like I said, I don't know that we really want to get into that per se.
But it doesn't take off then because he doesn't publish it. Right.
It's just kind of a private thing. The, you know, the context around it suggests that he was doing it kind of as like a mental exercise. Mental exercise. Devil's advocate, like an attorney's brief where he would be prepared for, like, well, if this comes up, then I want to be ready for it.
But, yeah, that's a whole separate thing.
But that really takes off in, like, the 1980s when it's republished. Well, I say republished when it's actually finally published by Brigham Madsen, I think.
[00:16:07] Speaker B: University of Illinois Press.
[00:16:08] Speaker C: University of Illinois Press.
And that's something where a lot of people since the 80s will point back to that particular.
And so, yeah, like, these lists of parallels now are often dependent on what B H Roberts did, 1920s.
[00:16:24] Speaker B: So here's our list of parallels from the CES letter, right?
Where it was published, location. Again, this is coming from BH Roberts. Who cares where it's published? Whatever. Anyways, go here. Destruction of Jerusalem. So both books describe the destruction of Jerusalem, the scattering of Israel, the restoration of the ten tribes. Right.
[00:16:41] Speaker A: I mean, like every history textbook.
[00:16:44] Speaker C: Yeah, One of my. This is my favorite one right here is encountering seas of many waters.
[00:16:50] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:16:50] Speaker C: Ooh. Oh, man, what a striking parallel.
[00:16:53] Speaker B: This is a fun one from our DNA episode. America is an uninhabited land, Right? We've had a discussion about that. So people, if they want to, we don't have to go through all the parallels, but here's what you get, right?
You can go through. We don't need to mention every single one of them. Egyptian hieroglyphics, lost Indian records. Again, Elder B.H. robertson, he says here, right? He noted cause envy of the Hebrews. One of the kind of the proofs that Ethan Smith uses, right, Is that, oh, there was this farmer talked about finding a book of yellow parchment or whatever that had an Indian writing on it. Oh, my gosh. Right. Gold plates.
[00:17:25] Speaker C: Gold plate, yellow leaves in the sense that, like, it's old and aged and it's weathered and turned yellow, not that it's made of gold.
[00:17:33] Speaker B: We'll talk about this in a second breastplate. Urim and Thummim. That one gets my goat. But we'll talk about that. So, okay, so to distill this, all the main parallels you have are Native Americans are descendants of the lost tribes of Israel or ancient Israelites. They have wars and conflicts, right? They're destroyed. They need to be restored to a knowledge of their forefathers, right? And these sorts of things, Jewish customs among Native Americans and in the Book of Mormon, things like the Hurman and Thummim is mentioned in both, right?
So if people want to, they can go look at the list of parallels here.
The CES letter is a representative kind of example of what people point to.
I will mention if I want to steel man the argument a little bit. David Pursuit is an anti Mormon writer who back in the 1980s and then again in like 2000, published a book, Joseph Smith and the Origins of the Book of Mormon. That's like the best case for view of the Hebrews argument. I think he makes a sustained argument for it. And his parallels are at least way more in depth than just this kind of scattershot stuff here.
[00:18:32] Speaker C: Yeah, and that's something like, I remember when Fair responded to the CES letter and then Jeremy Runnels responded to it. He complained that they didn't go in depth to debunk every single parallel. And I just remember thinking, like, dude, you did absolutely nothing to establish the legitimacy of a single one of these parallels. If you don't, and this is just a general methodology point to be made here, is if someone puts up a list of parallels and does nothing to establish the legitimacy of those parallels. No textual analysis.
[00:19:06] Speaker A: Explain.
[00:19:07] Speaker C: Yeah. No explanation, then you have no obligation, like in responding to it, to make in depth counter arguments. And you as, like a reader should be skeptical of just a long list like this.
[00:19:21] Speaker B: So this one's fun here. Ethan and Ether. Okay, so what's fun about this? In the CEO yes. Letter, Jeremy Reynolds has this. No. Elder B.H. roberts noted Ethan is prominently connected with the recording of the matter in the one case and Ether in the other. Okay. What? Jeremy Reynolds does not quote in that same, like, literally in the next sentence in Elder Roberts's manuscript, he says, this, however, is not a serious suggestion. It's the only most bare possibility. I would not seriously consider it.
[00:19:49] Speaker A: He himself scraping the bottom of the barrel there.
[00:19:52] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:19:53] Speaker A: So, okay, we, I mean, we clearly, like, jested a little bit about, like, oh, it talks about the destruction of Jerusalem, like every history textbook about Israel would like. That's not really a big parallel. But still, you, like, you see this list and you say, wow, there's a lot there. So the question is, is there a lot there? What do we make of these parallels?
[00:20:10] Speaker B: So some of the parallels are genuine parallels in the sense that, like, yes, this is a convergence of sort of thinking. Again, the biggest one is that Native Americans have, like, Israelite ancestry. Okay.
Even though in the Book of Mormon they're not the lost 10 tribes. But, you know, but okay, broadly the
[00:20:27] Speaker C: parallels there, you get into the details on that one. And like I said, it doesn't really fit with view of the Hebrews or the broader, like, Indian Hebraic theory in general. Right. No one, to my knowledge, besides the Book of Mormon was arguing that, like, just a single little group of Josephites left right before the Babylonian destruction, like, it's the lost 10 tribes. Right? Is kind of the theory.
[00:20:53] Speaker B: Right? Yeah. So like, like, I will grant there are some, quote, parallels in the broad sense in my study of this and not just myself, shout out to guys like Jack Welch and Truman G. Matson, who back in the 80s, when this material resurfaced, they did a sustained study. I see kind of three categories of evaluating these parallels that to me, indicate that they are not strong parallels and that what we're dealing with here is the phenomenon of parallelomania. You've heard that term before, right? We studied it in A and Es classes at byu. The idea of like overseeing an abundance of parallels because you're like looking for them, it's kind of a confirmation bias thing. But most of them are kind of just illusory or kind of weak parallels.
[00:21:34] Speaker A: So have a hammer and everything looks like a nail.
[00:21:36] Speaker B: Exactly. So I see that happening here with these view of the Hebrews parallels. So let me talk about a couple of examples here. So in my study, I list category one parallels that are not actual parallels. Okay. So like the Ethan, Ethan and Ether parallel. Like that's not really a thing.
[00:21:52] Speaker C: Right.
[00:21:53] Speaker B: And even Beech Roberts says this isn't really a thing, it's just a bare possibility.
But what about things like, you know, the Urim and Thummim? So that's on, that's on the list there. And it's true. The Ethan Smith, in view of the Hebrews, he says, like, oh, the Indians have.
He calls it pontifical dress, like ceremonial clothing that resembles the Urim and Thummim of the Israelite high priest. Right. And people say, oh my gosh, there's a Urim and Thummim in the Book of Mormon.
Except what's the problem with that, Neil?
[00:22:23] Speaker C: There isn't a Urim and Thummim.
[00:22:24] Speaker B: There is no Urim and Thummim. The Book of Mormon never mentions the Urim and Thummim. It mentions interpreters that Latter Day Saints later called the Urim and Thummim as a conflation piggybacking off of the biblical Urim and Thummim, which is what Ethan Smith was talking about. Right. So Ethan Smith's point was the ancient Israelite high priest had a Urim and Thummim. Native Americans have a thing that resembles the Urim and Thummim, therefore they're descendants of the Israelites. But the Book of Mormon never goes in that direction. It never talks about this. It just says they have interpreters.
[00:22:52] Speaker C: It certainly never talks about high priestly clothing.
[00:22:54] Speaker A: Yeah. It never connects the interpreters to the.
[00:22:56] Speaker C: In fact, there's no Levitical priesthood in the Book of Mormon whatsoever.
[00:23:01] Speaker B: Right. Yeah. That they really mention or talk about. So that's an example of something that's like just not really a parallel. The other one on here is Quetzalcoatl. Right. So this is on the list. Messiah visits the Americas. Right. Quetzalcoatl, the white bearded Mexican Messiah. That's what B.H. roberts calls him, Right.
And Latter Day Saints. We are interested in Quetzalcoatl.
[00:23:20] Speaker C: It's been a big thing for, you know, amateurs and enthusiasts around Book of Mormon apologetics and stuff for a long time.
[00:23:27] Speaker B: The problem is, well, first of all, again, Book of Mormon never mentions the name Quetzalcoatl. He never shows up. Right. Second of all, in view of the Hebrews, Quetzalcoatl is not Jesus Christ, it is Moses. And Ethan Smith, he says, who else could this be but the great lawgiver Moses? His argument is that these ancient Mexican traditions about a wise lawgiver that comes and gives religious laws to the people, right? He thinks, oh, the legend about Quetzalcoatl, that's a corruption of the law of Moses being given by Moses at Sinai. Right. So again, it's just not a parallel.
[00:24:01] Speaker A: Let's.
[00:24:01] Speaker B: Sorry, I love Elder Roberts, but he was just stretching there, right.
[00:24:04] Speaker A: If Joseph Smith were plagiarizing this, he would have then used Moses as the example of Jesus Christ.
[00:24:12] Speaker B: Category number two, what I call superficial parallels. Okay? So these are parallels that like, yes, they are parallels, but they're so vague and broad as to just like, not really mean anything. My favorite ones from the list there, Pride is denounced in both books, for crying out loud. Every single cultural religious text in the world denounces pride and hubris. There are literal Greek myths about the dangers of hubris. Right. Like it's in the Quran, it's in the Bible, it's everywhere. So just, they're just superficial parallels. So that's kind of category two. I say super parallel.
Yeah. Again, they're so broad as to like, Joseph Smith could have gotten that from anywhere. If we're going to posit, like environmental sources, it doesn't have to have come from view of the Hebrews. So that's my category number two. And then category number three, basically like shared biblical sources.
So a big thing that like B.H. roberts and Jeremy Reynolds and people have latched onto is that Ethan Smith talks about the. The lost tribes of Israel wandering to a land where mankind had never before dwelt. Oh, well, Book of Ether. It's like an Ether Chapter two or something, right? The Jaredites go to that quarter of the country where no man had been or whatever.
[00:25:18] Speaker C: The Jaredites, mind you, not the Jaredites. Yeah, not the lost 10 tribes. Tribes of Israel, in fact, not even Israelites at all.
[00:25:24] Speaker B: Right, exactly.
But what people pointed out, like Blake Ostler and others when he reviewed this, he's like, guys, that's from the Bible that's from Ethan Smith is quoting Second Estrus. He's quoting the Apocrypha.
So, like, that's a shared biblical source. You know what I mean? So there's that. Even the Urim and Thummim example kind of qualifies under a sort of shared biblical source for both of them.
[00:25:45] Speaker A: Kind of reminds me of when people criticize, like, the temple being a plagiarism of Freemasonry. Like, a lot of those parallels we can talk about as seriously, but others are just like, but you also find that in the Bible, like, how is that a valid evidence that Joseph Smith plagiarized it?
[00:26:01] Speaker B: So basically, with these parallels, I think it's parallelomania. I don't think that there is any like. And this was a point that Blake Ostler also made. And I think he's right. If you want to deposit, like, direct dependence on two literary sources, like literary source A was directly drawing on literary source B, the only way you can get that to work with parallels is, is if, like, you can show no other potential parallels from other potential sources. Like, you have to have enough of a direct literary dependency that can only be explained as literary dependency by, like, no other potential sources. I don't think that any of the parallels that people pointed out between Book of Mormon and View of the Hebrews qualifies for that, or that there's a
[00:26:39] Speaker A: breadcrumb claiming or saying that there's evidence that, oh, person A knew about source B and, like, was very familiar with Source B and therefore had notes from Source B. Like, there's gotta be some kind of evidentiary breadcrumb trail.
Right?
[00:26:52] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:26:53] Speaker C: This is, in a lot of ways, like, the argument has evolved, right, because people have recognized this very problem. So they just say, oh, well, view of the Hebrews, as we talked about earlier, is just a manifestation of a particular, like, a common thing. And so it's just an example of this Hebraic Indian theory. And it illustrates that, like, the basic premise of the Book of Mormon, that the Native Americans are descendants of Hebrew people is common. But, like, once you've, once you've watered it down that much, right, it's just this generic concept that's all over the place. It's like, okay, this doesn't really have a lot of explanatory power for the Book of Mormon at all. And especially since we've already mentioned the Book of Mormon, if it is influenced by the Hebraic Indian theory, if it were a 19th century work and that were the case, like, it's It's a. It's like a very unique form of it because it's. It's different in, like, every respect. Yeah, I think it's what's kind of striking to me and. And other people have talked about this kind of stuff is a lot of, like, the kind of proofs that he uses to be like, oh, look, these, they. They knew Hebrew because, like, look at these Hebrew words that are in Native American languages. Look at these names that. That are Hebrew or whatever, right? Like, none of those things show up in the Book of Mormon, Right? And you'd think if you have someone like Joseph Smith who has this as a source in front of him, and he wants to make this a very believable account of Israelite people in the Americas. Well, here you've got some great material of Native American stuff that is Hebrew in origin or whatever, and he doesn't work it into the narrative at all, Right?
[00:28:36] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a point that Jack Welch made in his article, An Unparallel. Right. He noticed all these things.
[00:28:40] Speaker A: Instead, he chooses names like Sam and Nephi and Lehi, who we actually now have Hebrew attestation for, never showed up in view of the Hebrews.
[00:28:50] Speaker B: Right.
[00:28:50] Speaker A: So besides the parallels themselves, do we have any evidence that Joseph Smith would have been familiar with View of the Hebrews or anyone around him would have known about View of the Hebrews?
[00:28:58] Speaker B: Another very good question. And within the kind of broad conceptual realm of possibility, yes, it's possible that. That this book or a copy of this book ended up in Joseph Smith's hands at some point. Right. Like, within bare possibilities, it is being circulated in the United States. Right. There are reviews appearing in newspapers and advertisements in newspapers. So, like, we can't discount that. Right. We can't prove that he could never have had it. But bare possibility is not good enough if you want to argue, like, again, direct dependence. So is there evidence that somebody gets a copy in Joseph Smith's hands? This is where Oliver Cowdery steps into the picture. And so sophisticated theorists of the view of the Hebrews theory, they want to posit a link between Ethan Smith and Oliver Cowdery. And the link, the theory, the proposal goes like this. So Ethan Smith is a. Is a pastor in Pulteney, Right. That's where the Cowdery family is from. Or like, sort of nearby, like Wells, Vermont. Right. Where. Where Oliver was born. So. But Rutland County. So the families living in Pulteney are nearby.
And some members of Oliver Cowdery's family were Congregationalists. His stepmother and his three half sisters. They are attending the Congregational church in Pulteney that Ethan Smith will later become the pastor of. Okay, so they are baptized in that congregation in like the 1810s, I want to say like 18, 16 or 15 or something. Ethan Smith becomes the pastor in like the early 1820s.
So, like, people have said, okay, we have family members who it seems likely, are a part of Reverend Smith's congregation. I. I'm being really nuanced here because people kind of want to. They, they act like Ethan Smith himself baptized the family was like BFFs of the family. No, no, no. The records say that they were there before he becomes the pastor and perhaps they are still attending when he's the pastor. That's possible. Is Oliver Cowdery attending Ethan Smith's congregation? Again, it's possible, but we don't have any documentation for it. We do not. I'm going to be very clear. We do not have historical evidence that Ethan Smith was Oliver Cowdery's pastor. That's what I hear being said online. I hear it all the time. There is actually no historical evidence for that. It is, it is an inference we make because other members of the family at a certain time are going to the church. Maybe Oliver Cowdery was, and therefore maybe he knew Ethan Smith. Okay, so it's very tentative that Oliver Cowdery knew him. Again, it's possible, but we don't have evidence for it. So in addition to, like that bare bones possibility, some skeptical authors have even gone so far as to say that maybe Oliver Cowdery even helped print View of the Hebrews.
So the printer is Ethan Smith's son, by the way, his son and his business partner, they print the book. So it's in the family, little family business in Vermont. It's in Vermont. It's in Pulteney. Maybe Oliver Cowdery was an apprentice at the print shop. So Richard Van Wagner and John L. Brooks, you know, the refiner's fire from Cambridge University Express, early 90s, they both just sort of say that they just couldn't claim this. It's possible that Oliver Cowdery was a printer. Again, there's no evidence for that. There is no evidence that Oliver Cowdery ever was an apprentice in the Smith and Shute printing press print shop in Pulteney, Vermont.
[00:32:00] Speaker A: Right.
[00:32:00] Speaker B: What they've done is there are later sources that say that, well, Oliver Cowdery was a printer in New York. Right. But not Vermont. They're probably conflating him with his cousin who is a printer. In New York. Maybe Oliver Cowdery apprentices with him. Perhaps.
Oliver himself seems to indicate that the first time he gets publishing experience is with the Book of Mormon in Palmyra. Right.
[00:32:21] Speaker C: Well, and I think, if I'm remembering right, there's a letter from Oliver to Joseph Smith where he's just like. He's like.
[00:32:27] Speaker B: It's how recently I have become a printer again.
[00:32:32] Speaker C: You get the sense that, like, this is the first time he's doing it in his life. Right.
[00:32:37] Speaker B: So this is all to say people have tried to have these little breadcrumbs, kind of like a conspiracy theory, like the string on the pins on the board, Ethan Smith to Oliver to the print shop. It's just. It's so tentative. There's just no concrete data to connect these people. Right. Again, it's possible, but there's no evidence for it.
So that's part of the theory. The second part of the theory is that, okay, so what happens is Oliver Cowdery meets Ethan Smith and he gets a copy a few of the Hebrews, and he says, oh, my gosh, this is so awesome. And he goes over to Palmyra and he meets the Smith family, and he meets Joseph Smith and he says, hey, Joseph Smith, I have this book called View of the Hebrews. You should totally check this out because it talks about, like, the lost tribes of Israel, and we can, like, totally write a fake book of scripture about this and, like, use it. You know what? So they want Oliver Cowdery as the missing link to get the book into the hands of Joseph Smith, Neil and Jasmine. What's the problem with this theory? When does Oliver Cowdery first meet Joseph Smith?
[00:33:28] Speaker C: 1829. April 1820.
[00:33:30] Speaker B: April 1829, in Harmony, Pennsylvania.
And what has Joseph Smith been doing for the last two years, since 1827, with guys like Martin Harris and Emma Smith?
[00:33:39] Speaker C: He's been already translating the Book of Mormon.
[00:33:41] Speaker B: Yes, exactly. He's already producing content for the Book of Mormon narrative. So Oliver arrives too late to be the missing link. In other words, I maintain, not only
[00:33:49] Speaker C: does he arrive too late, but the book itself. I mean, if you take seriously the dates that we have in the origin story of the Book of Mormon and stuff. Joseph Smith is having visions about Moroni in 1823. I was about to say that is when the first edition of View of the Hebrews comes out. I don't know what month, specifically December, but okay, so December. So two months after Joseph Smith is already having visions of Moroni and being told there's a book in the Hill and even is saying, hey, I've been to the Hill, I've seen the book.
And then 1825 is when the second edition comes off the press. But Joseph Smith by then has already been telling people about this book and telling stories about the contents of the book and saying that it's gonna be about the inhabitants of the Americas and all of that kind of stuff.
[00:34:42] Speaker B: Right.
[00:34:42] Speaker C: And so if you think. I think that view of the Hebrews is gonna be. What's like, is what the inspiration behind the Book of Mormon. Like, it's too late.
And certainly any link through Oliver Cowdery is gonna be too late. Like, by then, Joseph Smith is already claiming to have the plates. He's already claiming to have translated as you.
[00:35:02] Speaker B: He's produced a manuscript. Produced a manuscript.
[00:35:05] Speaker C: There's just like, it's all too late.
[00:35:09] Speaker B: Right, right. So for these reasons and others that I get into and shout out to Larry Morris, who's done a lot of this great, great article on it, I just think the Oliver Cowdery lost connection, the missing link. Right. The pins on the conspiracy board with Oliver Cowdery, I just don't think it works. Again, it's possible.
Right. In the same sense that it's possible there's aliens on Mars, I guess. Right. But until you can have concrete historical evidence linking the two, it's all very tentative.
[00:35:34] Speaker A: So you'd have to have Oliver Cowdery sneaking down and being in cahoots with Joseph Smith years before he.
[00:35:39] Speaker B: Yeah, in like the mid-1820s. Yes, exactly.
[00:35:42] Speaker C: And that's often. I mean, we'll maybe do another episode on the Spalding Theory another time. But that's often how the Spalding Theory works too, is you've got this like secret, secret meetings between Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon before the Book of Mormon's written and stuff even later in order to pass the manuscript. But yeah, Sidney Rigdon, again, it's. It's all too late as far as these connections go.
[00:36:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:36:02] Speaker A: So critics clearly believe that this is really compelling. How have Latter Day Saints responded to this?
[00:36:06] Speaker B: Yeah. So what's funny about the sort of reception history of View of the Hebrews among Latter Day Saints is it starts within Joseph Smith's lifetime.
So in the Times and seasons, in like 1842, guess who is quoting Josiah Priest, who in turn is quoting excerpts of View of the Hebrews guy named Joseph Smith in the Times and Seasons, and he's citing it as evidence for the Book of Mormon.
[00:36:27] Speaker A: So Joseph Smith is citing View of the Hebrews as evidence for the Book Of Mormon. Yes, in the 1840s.
[00:36:33] Speaker B: Okay, so like you were.
[00:36:34] Speaker A: If you were plagiarizing from this book, you wouldn't be like showing your source.
[00:36:38] Speaker B: It's not what you expect in the behavior of a plagiarist.
[00:36:40] Speaker C: Yeah, so what? And what's also interesting about that is he's actually not directly engaged View of the Hebrews. He's getting it through Josiah Priest, which is also not what you'd expect from someone who was intimately familiar with the book itself.
[00:36:53] Speaker B: The book itself, if you're supposed to be influenced by it, yeah.
[00:36:57] Speaker C: His exposure to the book actually seems to come through is secondary.
[00:37:01] Speaker B: Right.
[00:37:01] Speaker C: Basically.
[00:37:02] Speaker B: But he starts the trend, Joseph Smith does as the editor of the paper in Nauvoo of citing View of the Hebrews positively as evidence for the Book of Mormon. So I have tracked down in the Millennial Star in the Deseret News and Book of Mormon apologetic and scholarship books and articles from the 19th century onward, most of the time in Latter Day Saints are engaging with it. It is to cite it as, hey look, evidence for ancient Hebrews in the, in the Americas or whatever.
[00:37:26] Speaker C: Right, Right.
[00:37:27] Speaker B: Once Von Brody again kind of ruins everything by publishing her book by making this a big deal, that's when it kind of shifts into an apologetic. Well, we're going to argue against the influence of the Book of Mormon. So we kind of. You occasionally get some amateur scholars or writers who are there, but the, the emphasis shifts from positively citing it to refuting the accusations of plagiarism. You know, the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, the Ensign Hugh Nibley. These guys publish these articles addressing this topic. This brings us to this fun edition of View of the Hebrews because again, I hear the conspiracy that like. And this is why I jokingly called it the Mormon Necronomicon. This, the dark secret book of Evil, like the Mormon Church is conspiring to cover up the existence of View of the Hebrews. They don't want you to know that this book exists and is full of these dark secrets. Right. Ladies and gentlemen, BYU published its own edition of View of the Hebrews. That's how much not of a thing. This is for like, like people who are locked in on like how non threatening this is for us. If you look at it sort of, you know, half. Seriously. So BYU did its own edition back in the late, in the 1990s. I almost did the late 20th century. That's kind of funny.
[00:38:32] Speaker C: I mean, yeah, late 20th century, in the 90s.
[00:38:35] Speaker B: Right. BYU does its own addition. And the whole point is now when Latter Day Saints talk about this. Like what we're doing now, it's like, look guys, yeah, people claim plagiarism, but like, just go read the book yourself. Here it is. It's not a deep dark secret. BYU has original copies, Church History Library has copies. It's out there.
[00:38:51] Speaker C: It's not. You know, they printed that in the 90s and now it's on the Religious Studies center website for free. You can go read it there. I know we had it put up in the Scripture Central archive as well because we know it's a source that people cite and use.
And we were again, we just were like, yeah, we're not worried about people reading this because we don't think it has any really seriously anything to do
[00:39:15] Speaker B: with the Book of Mormon and that kind of. Maybe we could wrap it up with this.
You know, I have this article I've written, I'm working on a book length manuscript on view of the Hebrews, right? My brain is so cooked for the fact that I'm writing a book about a book, right? Like that's super meta. Like you can get into these complicated historical questions and textual analysis or whatever.
My big kind of big picture takeaway here is like, look, this theory, it was never raised in Joseph Smith's lifetime. Ethan Smith is critical of another contemporary, William Miller. So Ethan Smith and William Miller, they go at it in the press, right? Arguing about end day prophecies and stuff. I have no record of Ethan Smith saying harrum that Joseph Smith stole my idea for his Book of Mormon, right? Like there's no contemporary accusation of plagiarism.
It appears much later. It's only gained popularity in the last like 50, 60 some odd years.
I think the parallels are all very superficial. There's no like, oh, this is, this has to be from view of the Hebrews. I once saw a guy online, online saying the Book of Mormon verbatim quotes view of the Hebrews. I'm like, bro, chapter and verse, man. Like this is, that's so absurd. That's such overreach, right?
And what you can do, you don't have to get in the weeds like I am, ladies and gentlemen. Just go read the book for yourself and ask yourself, first of all, is there anything in this book that could only be coming from this book in the Book of Mormon? Like it can't be explained from any other source or any other explanation. And could Joseph Smith have just gotten all the other stuff? Like maybe he gets all the idea of Indians being Jews or Israelites coming to America Maybe he gets that from view of the Hebrews. But what about the rest of the stuff?
You explain a very small fraction of the content of the Book of Mormon if you're going to appeal to view of the Hebrews. So it's, I think it's kind of a nothing burger. It's an interesting historical kind of debate and reception history for me. But like, guys, just read the book and I think you'll see like, yeah, the CES letter parallels, they're not very persuasive.
[00:41:03] Speaker C: Well, and I think it's actually instructive, like you talked about that for a long time actually before Fawn Brodie, a lot of Latter Day Saints were pointing to view of the Hebrews as evidence for the Book of Mormon, which means they were reading it and none of them were like, oh, oh crap, this looks like the Book of Mormon actually came from this. Like, and, and, and when they're citing it as evidence, they're again, they're, they're going back to that same generic point that we've already made that like they're citing as evidence that there were Hebrews in the Americas.
But you don't see them like being like, oh wow, look, there's this passage that is, there's this part of the book that describes this and that's like this exact thing in the Book of Mormon. Like it's, it's not so specific, it's not so tightly correlated there that, that you could think, oh, the Book of Mormon must have come from this. Right. It's just that there's, there's no there there, as they say. Right?
[00:41:55] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:41:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
If you want to dive more into this topic, there's a really good article on mormoner.org that covers it. But then of course, you can also read the paper that Stephen Smith has written on view of the Hebrews in the Book of Mormon. In a record shall be kept understanding and defending the history of the Church. Remember, you can study deeply, believe boldly. We'll see you next time.
[00:42:13] Speaker B: It.
