BoM 6 Translation of the Book of Mormon -- 170914 Tedgemontscripturestudy.com/000 BoM 6 General,...

Transcript of John Welch’s Classes on Book of Mormon (Sixth Series.). Sept 2017 to Oct 2017

BoM 6 Translation of the Book of Mormon -- 170914 T

The Different Accounts Add up(J. Welch) Tonight I thought we would talk about the translation of the Book of Mormon, partly because, as we mentioned last week, they have come out recently with a new edition of the Opening the Heavens book and there is a long chapter in there on the translation, the miraculous translation of the Book of Mormon. I will talk a little bit more about that as we go. But since that is new, and since I think everything we do when we read the Book of Mormon is built on, at least for me, a working assumption that every word in the Book of Mormon has come to us through a translation process of some kind, for us to understand this text the way it presents itself, we have to approach it as a translated book. And so the question is: how did it get translated? Why is it the way it is, and how can that help us as we read throughout the book in this coming year?

00:01:15 So let me just review some of the church history sites connected with the translation of the Book of Mormon. One of the things I want to emphasize tonight is some new developments in what we now know today that we did not know so well ten years ago. And other things have come along, but the story of the Book of Mormon translation really has to begin with the First Vision in Palmyra and so we have the Sacred Grove here. If any of you have been to the Joseph Smith cabin there south of Palmyra and not too far from the Hill Cumorah, this is where in 1820 Joseph Smith received his vision of the Father and the Son. And what a powerful vision that was.

Now the first chapter in Opening the Heavens goes through and gives you all of the different accounts that we have of the First Vision and there are about a dozen of them from the time period of Joseph Smith and you can put together a composite of those. And there is a second chapter on analyzing all of those different First Vision accounts and there is a chart section that we put together as a block of charts where you get columns. You can see which details are reported to us in each of the different accounts.

00:02:56 A lot of people have only worked with three or four of these accounts, maybe only a couple of them and if you do not have a full set of accounts, you can draw some false conclusions. One of the conclusions that you will read presented in a lot of places is that Joseph Smith changed his story, that as he got older, he modified the story of the First Vision, partly to make it more relevant to issues that he was facing, but also to expand and change the doctrine or the theology in ways. If you take the whole set, that assumption is not borne out.

In fact, what we now have, and we did not ten years ago, is that the last telling that we have recorded by Joseph Smith of the First Vision is in 1844 close to the end of Joseph Smith’s life. A group of converts had come to Nauvoo and as you can imagine, they had traveled a long way – one of them from Germany – and they had been waiting for the moment when they could finally meet the Prophet. Joseph, as he often did, invited this new group of converts into his home and there in the Mansion House, Emma cooked for them and they welcomed them and they sat and

BoM 6 Translation of the Book of Mormon 14 Oct 2017 File # 170914 T1


talked and Joseph let them ask any questions they wanted. As exhausted as one newly-arrived convert – and he must have been tired from the travel – but even after midnight when they finished, he sat up and wrote down what he remembered Joseph Smith had to say.

00:04:56 So we have a good account of Joseph Smith’s story in 1844 and guess what? It is the most like the earliest accounts. So the idea that somehow the story was going off in some different direction does not really add up.

The Location of the EventsNow this cabin, of course, was rebuilt but based on the original foundation so we know exactly the size of the cabin. It only has a couple of rooms on the ground floor and then upstairs a couple of bedrooms. The upstairs looks like this and it is kind of interesting, the girls slept here in the back and the boys, Joseph and Alvin who was alive then and Hyrum and all the boys out here. It is kind of a dormitory. But in 1823, this is the room, or a representation of it, where Moroni first appeared to Joseph Smith in the middle of the night. I have wondered about that because whatever was happening, either all the other boys were so sound asleep that it did not wake them up, or they had some kind of a veil of forgetfulness over their eyes so they would not experience it. It was not for them, or something, but you can imagine how all of this going on right there in that little space would have affected Joseph. Anyway, it is an interesting experience to be there. Question?

(comment) Why did it take over 150 years for these ten or dozen accounts to be kind of collated and collected and inspected? Was it that some of them were not known until these later –

Oh back on the First Vision accounts? Well, some of them were printed in newspapers that were really obscure and they were not thought of, I guess, as being that important until you put them all together, but many of them have been known. One of the accounts comes from Orson Pratt’s pamphlet that he published in Scotland when he was there as a missionary in 1840. Account of Remarkable Visions is the title of his pamphlet, and he gives a long account of Joseph Smith’s First Vision.

00:07:44 One little interesting detail in Orson Pratt’s account is that he says that as this light that began to descend came down upon Joseph, the light was so bright, and Joseph just tells it brighter than the sun at noonday. Well how bright is that? That is a lot of energy, and Orson Pratt says Joseph was afraid that the trees were all going to catch on fire and here he would be in the forest in the middle of a fire and he could be burned up. And there was also the overwhelming force of Satan that was involved in it as well so Joseph did not know how this was going to turn out while it was going on and he felt like he was going to be overcome, either killed by darkness or by light, one way or the other. Finally, you know what happened? The Father and the Son appear and even at that point, I do not imagine he would really know, who is this? But the first words in all of the accounts, are calling me by name, Joseph. I imagine Joseph



is thinking you know who I am! And he said it in a friendly way. Wow! That is going to change everything for him. But until then he really did not know.

So I am just saying these accounts were scattered in different places. The 1832 account, which is the earliest and probably the one that kicked off all of the desire on the part of historians and our Joseph Smith Papers team to find every single one, was not found until 1967 by a young Dean Jessee working as an assistant in the Church Historical Department. Why was it found then? That is when, you remember, they opened up the Church Office Building. They built the high-rise and they now have, on the 2nd floor of the east wing of the Church Office Building, a historical department for the first time.

00:10:12 Where had all these historical records been? They had been in the attic of what we now call the Church Administration Building there on East Temple and they were in crates and in trunks. They opened up one trunk and looked. Nobody had ever looked in this trunk for a hundred and some years; it was filled with Brigham Young’s correspondence and nobody had ever looked at that. How many of you remember Leonard Arrington’s biography of Brigham Young? It came out in the early l970’s. Why? They had all these letters and Spencer W. Kimball said to Leonard Arrington, I want a biography of Brigham Young and I want it right now. Go get to work on it with these new documents.

But it was in that sorting and moving everything from a really disorganized, non-library over into this new setting where they had to look at everything, catalogue it, organize it, that they found a lot of this material. Yes?

(comment) Hi, my name is Victor Alexis and I looked at these pictures of the log cabin of Joseph Smith house and where his sisters stayed and what came to me was, well how old was this house? And you answered that question, but also me being a young man, it came about when I asked myself, how long had log cabins stayed in use before we started to move to different types of houses?

Okay, well this cabin was actually built in 1818 by Joseph Smith’s father and his older brothers and it was just a temporary place where they lived until 1825 when they actually built what is called a frame house, and we will see that in a minute. The frame house is a little closer to the Hill Cumorah but as people moved west in the United States in this part of our history, they would just chop down trees and build log cabins. The young Joseph Smith spent a lot of time splitting rails and chopping down trees and clearing the fields. So that is when that was first built. Okay?

00:13:02 Alright. Well it was near here – I took this picture just walking out on the hillside of the hill Cumorah, I saw some rocks there and I thought well, you know, it does not look like the rocks that the plates were under, but close enough.



(comment) Did you look underneath?

I did not look underneath, no. But anyway, it was on this hillside or one of the sides of this hill where those plates were found, or where Moroni showed them.

Moroni’s Visits Coincided with the Jewish High Holy DaysOne of the things we now know about the Moroni visits is that they actually occurred – and there is a KnoWhy on this on Book of Mormon Central – on what we are now calling September 21st Moroni Day. And there were five times – five years that Moroni appeared: 1823, 1824, 1825, 1826, and 1827, all on the night of September 21st or the morning of September 22nd. And if you go and look – you do not have to look because the KnoWhy will tell you, but we looked – we wanted to know on the Jewish calendar on each of those five years, was there anything significant? Because that is right around the time of the Day of Atonement, Rosh Hashanah, and Sukkot. And guess what? The calendar changes, but on three of the five days – three of the five years – Moroni comes exactly on each of those three main, Jewish fall festivals and the last one is on Rosh Hashanah, the Feast of Trumpets. So we have Moroni with his trumpet and the angel flying through the midst of heaven with a trumpet to blow. So somebody upstairs has got a good clock. And it is interesting that these are, I think, the only days, the only time you have, that they all fall that way so consistently in a short time period when that could happen.

The Location of the Events00:15:20 So this is back in the cabin. Joseph would have returned after his initial visits to the Hill Cumorah to this cabin. He probably read the Bible here on this desk. They had one family Bible in the Smith family. Joseph Smith is still fairly young. How old is he in 1823? Seventeen years old. So he is still fairly young. How much schooling has he had? Oh, about one winter’s worth of elementary school education. They only went to school during the winter; the rest of the time they were out working the field. But there were no public schools in those days and so families had to pay tutors to come and teach their children or the parents had to teach them and in the case of the Smith parents, they were both working so hard to just put food on the table, there was not much education here and I think that is an important factor.

The most commonly expressed alternative to the Joseph Smith account of where the Book of Mormon came from was that Joseph Smith had all of the native intelligence and all of the knowledge anyone would need to write the book. It came from his genius and capability. They have given up on almost all other explanations. Like the Spaulding Manuscript, that was in the works for a while. You can go down through the list of one failed attempt at explaining the book after another. But if you look seriously at the facts of what we know about what was going on and the bare bones existence, the idea that Joseph could simply have come up with the Book of Mormon on his own is not very persuasive either. Another question?



(comment) Yes. Was Joseph Smith mentored, and do we have any record of that happening?

Joseph Smith was not mentored by anyone except Alvin, his older brother. He admired Alvin deeply but Alvin dies a tragic death in 1825, or something right in that range so when Joseph is 19 years old, I think. Alvin was the one that the family looked to, to be not only the strong, oldest son - and it is a large family – but he had the promise of really taking the family and working people hard and succeeding. But you know, working this raw land was a really hard existence. And losing Alvin, whom Joseph looked up to a lot, was a big loss for Joseph.

00:18:36 Now this is the Susquehanna River. It is in February so the snow was still there. Jeannie and I were there this last February, and this is about the natural size of the Susquehanna River. Right over here happens to be a sand bar and a little cove where the water is flowing this direction so there is a little, protected area there and when we were there, what was it Jeannie? Five years ago? We had one of our grandsons and the daughter of a niece and another son – three children who had turned eight within a week of our being there and we baptized them here in the Susquehanna River. It was warmer in May when Joseph and Oliver used it and when we used it.

Joseph goes down into that area, and of course, he marries Emma. Moroni will then deliver the plates to Joseph Smith and we have an amazing number of specific accounts of people who saw, handled, or were involved in the process of the translation. Joseph let people know what was happening if they were worthy, if they were supportive of what he was doing. In this book, there are over 200 accounts by people who either knew themselves, or knew second-hand from people who were involved in this process. We will talk about those in just a minute. But after the plates were first given, this is the frame house that they built and moved into in 1825. A nice little interesting detail here is that this home, of course, had been remodeled several times and updated. It was used as a mission home; it was used as a visitor center and now it is, of course, restored. They took off all of the modern drywall and wallpaper and flooring and went down to what was there when Joseph Smith was in there. This is the hearth of the fireplace, as you can tell, but you can see that when they took all the boards off they say well now we understand what Joseph was talking about because when he comes back with the plates, what does he do? He lifts up the hearth, he digs out a hole underneath and he puts the plates there to hide them. That would work with a hearth like this. That is not secure enough, and eventually, of course, they moved down to Harmony.

The Translation00:21:50 Now in 1828 Joseph will translate the 116 pages and that is beginning with the Book of Lehi, as we know from the 1830 edition preface. But for about two months Martin Harris acted as the scribe. We do not have much of Martin Harris’ handwriting but from what we know, it was not very good and he was pretty slow. Of course, I would be slow writing with a quill pen and having to sharpen it all the time and dip it in ink all the time. What a tedious process that was. But the work went slowly and then you remember the story about Martin Harris begging,



Let me take this so I can show my wife Lucy because I am getting no end of grief being involved in this. When I could show her what we are actually doing then she will be supportive. As you know, that did not turn out very well. And 116 pages are lost and you know what? Two weeks later when Joseph is not even at home, their first son who was named Alvin in Alvin’s honor, died. This is the little home that they actually bought. Joseph Smith bought this home from Isaac Hale. And as a part of the Joseph Smith Legal Papers Project we have found the deed that was recorded and this is very important because Oliver Cowdery tells us that he comes on April 5, 1829, and he arrives here in Harmony where he meets Joseph Smith, Jr. for the first time. He had heard a lot about him, and we now know why Oliver Cowdery came. Do any of you know why he comes 120 miles to work with this Joseph Smith that he has never met before?

(comment) He believed it is true.

Well, he has what?

(comment) His brother-in-law is David Whitmer.

Yes, but David Whitmer lives up in Fayette. David Whitmer knew nothing about this yet. Oliver Cowdery will write letters to his friends, the Whitmers, and eventually they will move up to Fayette. I will show you these pictures in a minute, but Oliver does not come because of the Whitmers. They do not know anything about this until they learn about it from Oliver.

(comment) Had Oliver been teaching school and staying with the Smiths?

00:24:48 He had been teaching school during the winter and he has finished with that now so he is out of work. He is unemployed and he had heard stories about this and he wondered about it. Is that enough for him to pack up and go? He knows that he cannot be employed; Joseph does not have a penny, but he comes to volunteer. Why? He had a vision. The Lord Jesus Christ appeared to Oliver Cowdery. Joseph Smith tells us this in his own 1832 history. Oliver Cowdery had a vision and he was called and told to go and work with my seer Joseph. Oliver tells Joseph Smith this and Joseph believes they now have a team. That explains why Joseph Smith would embrace Oliver Cowdery so completely, allow him into the process, even let him try to translate on occasion, and Oliver Cowdery will, of course, participate in the restoration of the Aaronic and Melchizedek Priesthood shortly afterward, and he will be known as the Second Elder of the Church.

Well, Oliver Cowdery will report all of this in a letter that he publishes in Kirtland, Ohio and he will say that he arrived here on April 5 and that they will begin translating on April 7. Now people say, Oh, how can you remember that? This is an important date because it pegs for us the beginning of the translation that Oliver works on. He starts with where they left off. They were



told Commence where you left off. So we know where they left off; it was with the Words of Mormon.

00:26:54 So Oliver and Joseph begin with Mosiah on day one or two or three, Oliver Cowdery is sitting there while Joseph Smith dictates King Benjamin’s speech. Phenomenal text! What an experience. But can we nail this down? Is Oliver really remembering this correctly? Well the deed, as I said, they began on the 7th, what did they do on April the 6th? The History of the Church just says, We conducted some business and then started translating. Well we found this deed and guess what its date is? April 6 and guess whose signatures are on that deed? Number one Isaac Hale, the seller, Joseph Smith, Jr. as purchaser and Oliver Cowdery as witness. I just illustrate this to say that we can go back and point after point the history is rock solid on what is happening, when, and to a large extent how.

Well, this Oliver Cowdery is a pretty amazing guy and his handwriting, by the way, is beautiful. The Lord needed somebody, and not that Martin Harris stuff, that did not work. Let us get somebody who really can write. And we have these dates, key dates in this translation. We will come back to this in a minute but beginning here, then the restoration of the Aaronic Priesthood, moving to Fayette, getting the copyright of the Book of Mormon, the three and the eight witnesses, and finishing.

This is how the translation table is presented at the Grandin building in New York. This is how it is presented by the Church in Harmony. Do you notice a difference here? What is not here? How is this thing not like the other? The hat. You have got the hat here, okay? I don’t know if they have put a hat here on this one now, they may have. But we know that Joseph had a white hat and it is a fur hat, very stylish in that day, but that would have been about the size of this hat.

00:29:40 How many of you have wondered what this is hat doing here? How is Joseph using it? Well again, in the historical accounts we get pretty clear descriptions of what was going on with the hat. Joseph had the interpreters, these were clear stones. Actually Oliver Cowdery once calls them clear pebbles so they are not big; they were held at first in some kind of a little frame, almost like spectacles, but certainly you could not look through them and see anything; they were clear pebbles, but what you saw, what Joseph was able to see here were words that were displayed almost as if on a monitor on your iPhone. I am sure he did not understand how it worked any more than you understand how your iPhone works. You push the button and it works.

But he would put the interpreter and initially, I think, was also putting his little seer stone in there, pulling the rim of the hat up around his face, he said, to block the extraneous light because you cannot see so well if something is being displayed on a clear surface like that if there is too much light in the room. Then he would look in there and while his face was in the hat, he would dictate with Oliver Cowdery sitting here with his quill pen and his inkwell, and maybe something



to drink every now and then, especially Joseph. Have you ever tried to dictate hour after hour? Oliver Cowdery says “Those were days never to be forgotten as the worlds fell from Joseph’s lips.” Day after day, word after word.

00:31:47 By the way, this is one room and then there is a bedroom right over here to the left and then there is a little closet and so on. I wonder what Emma is doing while all this is going on. Now it is April, May, June, and you are right, this is the summer kitchen and so she may have been out here cooking or working but I think she may have just been walking through. She had acted as scribe, she knew what was going on. It was her house, after all.

Back here is the bedroom that Joseph and Emma would have used and Oliver probably slept in the kitchen, the only other place that he could have. But it is a small room and just another part of the dynamic of what is happening here.

So this is, then, the Fayette farm. They will move up to Fayette after the Whitmers invite them to come and this is the main room in the Fayette home where the Church is organized in 1830 and upstairs was another room much like the standard, New York rooms here. A bedroom here and a back room there that looks like this and people assume that it was on a small table that here they finish translating the Book of Mormon. Now they began with Mosiah and went through to the end of the Large Plates in Harmony. They then finish the Book of Moroni by the end of May and in June, the first of June they move up to the Fayette farm, what does that leave for them to translate in June? The Small Plates. A lot of people do not understand this, but it is the Small Plates that get translated last and there are a number of reasons for that. But as you read the Book of Mormon and you realize the translation was done this way you see what a miracle it really was. For example, we have here a quotation where Alma in Alma 36 quotes Lehi, right? This is the middle of Alma’s own conversion story. This is that big, beautiful chiasm. And after he calls upon Jesus to atone for his sins, of course his pains go away and he thinks he sees even as our Father Lehi saw God sitting upon his throne surrounded with numberless concourses of angels in the attitude of singing and praising his God.

00:34:49 Well this is a quotation. Now we do not have quote marks because in the ancient world, there were no quote marks and, in fact, here we have a copy of the printer’s manuscript. That is Oliver Cowdery’s handwriting. You can tell it is the printer’s manuscript because you can see these heavy commas that have been put in. Those have been put in by John Gilbert, the typesetter because the original text had no commas, periods, question marks, or paragraphs. It was a steady flow of words from the beginning of the Book of Mormon to the end because it was dictated. Joseph is just dictating this. Now that is pretty amazing in and of itself but then when you think about it, that is why there are no quote marks here. Alma 36, you know, would have been translated probably somewhere around the end of April. We will come back to this point in just a moment. But when is 1st Nephi chapter 1 translated? Well it is about the 5th or 6th of June, so maybe six weeks later. And we now have the actual primary text translated that Alma knew



because he had the Small Plates. Alma is quoting it here, but now we see what he was quoting, and Lehi being carried away in a vision, he finally saw the heavens open and he thought he saw God sitting upon his throne surrounded with numberless concourses of angels in the attitude of singing and praising their God – just flowing right into this text.

00:36:48 We are here tonight to talk a little bit about the translation process. One thing I want you to see here is how precise this translation was. Some people say well maybe all the process was, was that he kind of got ideas, inspired ideas and then he put them into his own words. Well that is not what the historical documents tell us. And in particular, if you are going to have Alma quoting a text that has not even been written yet, and then when the text is written, you get twenty-one words exactly the same, not just approximately, this is pretty good evidence that the translation process is tight, it is controlled, it is precise, and it is amazing. Question:

(comment) Now Joseph and Martin Harris had translated 1st Nephi earlier –

No, they had translated the Book of Lehi.

(comment) Oh, the Book of Lehi. Okay.

But Nephi also kept a record of his own. First Nephi is actually not written until after Nephi splits from his brothers, after they move up to the new Land of Nephi, after they start building the new temple, and after Nephi is appointed king. Now Nephi says, I need to write my story for my people, and he goes back and uses records like Lehi’s record and others that he has. But there are the Large Plates of Nephi and then the Small Plates of Nephi. So Nephi is writing this and probably drawing it from the record of Lehi so it may have been already translated in the record of Lehi, that is possible.

(comment) I guess that was my point is that is it not possible he could have seen this quote earlier?

00:38:52 Could have. But Oliver Cowdery never would have seen it. Joseph Smith might have seen it in April a year earlier, maybe a year and two months earlier. But would he remember that? Could he quote it back? I have just read this to you twice; can you quote it to me? Can you close your eyes and quote it absolutely precisely? Your life depends on it. Anyway, there is more going on here than just somewhat vague oh yeah, we remember, Lehi had a vision and yeah, he actually talked about it. But notice that this is not Lehi speaking. Lehi does not say I was carried away in a vision and I saw the heavens open and I thought I saw – this has been put in 3rd person by Nephi.

But if you really want to know how it happened, it is this. When Joseph got to this point, he says, oh hey Oliver, you remember we had Alma quote a passage from Lehi, this would be a really



cool place to stick it in. Why don’t you just cut and paste what we put in and… Oh no, that is not what happened. Oh no. What happened was he said, alright Oliver, why don’t you read back to me what we had Alma quote so we can get it in here exactly. No. I do not think that happened either. Because why? For the first part of 1st Nephi, Oliver Cowdery was off doing other things. He was not the scribe for that text. So whoever was the scribe for this, and we do not know exactly, we cannot tell from the handwriting, but whoever was the scribe had never heard it before. But that is kind of interesting but not really here or there.

00:40:48 How does it all happen? Over and over again we are told that it happened as Joseph repeatedly said, “By the gift and power of God.” He said that in various ways but look at all of those different nine times we have in Joseph Smith’s own account and a tenth one that was given where God himself says and swears an oath, ”It is translated correctly by power from on high.”

Okay, well let us turn the lights on and let us talk about some other questions just for a moment. Let us go to the handout first. Thanks to Staci for putting this together. This is a shortened form of the five-page chart that is now here in this new edition. The five-page chart kind of looks like this: http://edgemontscripturestudy.com/000%20BoM%206%20General,%20Alma,%20Sept%20Oct%202017/RESOURCES/OTH2%20charts%201829%20translation.pdf

If you have the book, you can find it between the narrative and documents section of the chapter on the translation of the Book of Mormon. You have here the essence of it and let me explain it and then get some observations from you. What do you see here? Remember I have talked about beginning with Mosiah chapter 2, King Benjamin’s speech. What I have done is calculated, that I know that by May the 15th which is the Restoration of the Aaronic Priesthood, they have to have been already past 3rd Nephi chapter 11 and maybe already up to 3rd Nephi chapter 18. What happens in those chapters? Jesus appears, Jesus ordains the Twelve disciples and they begin to baptize people. Somewhere in that process in the middle of this amazing text about Jesus, a resurrected being, allowing people to touch him and to hear him and to have all of this outpouring of revelation, of doctrine, of ordinances – Joseph and Oliver looked at each other and they said, Wow, we have not been baptized like this. Now we know how to do it, we even know the words of the prayer that should be used! That is in 3rd Nephi chapter 11. But we do not have the power to do it so how can we baptize each other? How can anybody be baptized? It is not anywhere on the face of the earth, so what to do they do?

00:44:00 They go out into the woods and we now know they went up into and not down by the river. There is a reason probably why they did not go down by the river in May. The river would have been high, but more than that, this is a time when lots of river traffic was going down the Susquehanna river to get all the way down to Harrisburg and down into the Chesapeake Bay and so it would have been crowded and not private. It says they went up into the sugarbush. These are the maple trees that were on Joseph Smith’s property that they would go and tap to get maple


http://edgemontscripturestudy.com/000%20BoM%206%20General,%20Alma,%20Sept%20Oct%202017/RESOURCES/OTH2%20charts%201829%20translation.pdf

http://edgemontscripturestudy.com/000%20BoM%206%20General,%20Alma,%20Sept%20Oct%202017/RESOURCES/OTH2%20charts%201829%20translation.pdf


syrup. So they go up on the hillside just a little bit into a grove of trees, maybe like the First Vision grove, and that is where John the Baptist appears to them and gives them the power to baptize and then they go down and baptize each other.

So you see this on the right hand column, in the middle of all the day after day translating, there are other things that are going on too. This would have been, you would think, somewhat distracting. But Emma says, no matter what they were doing, they would go home – they would finish one night, they would get up the next morning and Emma said Joseph would simply begin exactly where he had left off the night before. Or they would break for lunch. Think of that as a process. You know when you write something you usually say, well where was I? Let me read maybe a page or so to get back into the feel of this but Joseph never did that. And you say, well, okay, maybe if there are no distractions you can do that, but there are so many distractions here, so I have simply taken the total number of words that you have to translate between April 7th and May 15th and then spread them out evenly, I have assumed that they translated every day including Sunday, maybe they did, maybe they did not. Maybe they rested or maybe they said it is the Lord’s work. We do not know. But if they did rest on Sunday then it changes the total number of days of translation work. This allows for 74 days of translation, and if they missed whatever it is here, I think it is 14 Sundays, you are going to drop down to like the low 60s for the number of days that are available.

00:46:53 And this allows for the least possible time for other things like writing to David Whitmer and traveling. They had to go 30 miles one day to Colesville and back because why? They ran out of paper and other supplies and food. And the Knight family loads them up and sends them back. Now if you have gone 30 miles, filled up a wagon, driven the wagon back, and unloaded it, I do not know about you but I would be tired. What does Joseph say? Oliver, let us get back to work. Sue?

(comment) I thought they went somewhere to get food like Colesville, and they did not have any, so (unclear) but Joseph Knight – filled them up at their home.

That is correct, that is how that worked. He learns that they had been there and needed it and then they come. Now that is a nice thing, but now that is even more interruption. They thought they had that all covered. On May 25 Samuel Smith, who may have been there for quite a while, says, I want to be baptized. He hears about this and they do baptize him.

(comment) I know time is short but I want to get this clear. That they never actually translated the plates, not in the sense that we think of translation; it was really dictation, it was not really translation. Is that correct?

00:48:27 That is right. It is not like he is figuring out this is what that character means, and after he has done it enough he now understands the vocabulary and the grammar and he can, by



the end, pretty much read it off directly. Several reasons why that is impossible. One is that everywhere you go in the Book of Mormon, you encounter new names, personal names, you encounter place names, you encounter new words. Every writer in the Book of Mormon actually ends up having a different vocabulary, different phraseology, some of them use long sentences and some use short. Some of them use lots of parallelisms and chiasms and some of them do not. Some of them will use words like omnipotent – the Lord, God omnipotent – that appears five times in the Book of Mormon. You would think that would be distributed evenly, right? It is kind of an ordinary sort of phrase. No. All five times where are they? King Benjamin’s speech as we have gone through before.

(comment) So why do we say translation? It seems misleading.

Well, it does seem a little. But what else would we call it? You know, I think Joseph understands the word translation. First of all, in a literal sense, he knows that what is on the plates he is reading through the interpreter.

(comment) Is he reading the plates?

No he is reading the interpreter. The words will appear on his stone or on the screen so to speak, and he reads them off, the scribe writes it down and reads it back and Joseph will then say, correct. And then he will exert effort and the next words will appear and he will read them off and it is coming in phrases of eight to ten words; how do we know that? We have the original manuscript for 28% of the Book of Mormon so Oliver Cowdery’s dictation version, 28% of that has survived through all of the Missouri persecutions and the winters and the rain and everything else. But we have enough to know when Oliver Cowdery dips his quill pen in the inkwell, because the words are heavy and then it gets lighter and lighter and lighter and at that point we assume we are at the end of the phrase, he reads it back, and Joseph says good. Sometimes Joseph will say, you misspelled Kishkumen. And Oliver will say how can you tell? How do you know what I have put down here? Joseph says, spell it this way. And you will see it in the original manuscript, the misspelling crossed off, the correct spelling written and then it goes on. This is not an after-the-fact correction; this is an in-process discernment of a problem.

00:51:55 So again, it is tightly controlled and one other point, back to the word translation. Trans-fero is the Latin, transfer is our word that we get from it. That is the present tense, trans-fer the past tense. The past participle is trans-latus. So to transfer something just means to ferry it, to carry it from one place across to something else. And something is trans-lated when it has been carried across from somewhere else by some force or some thing. So actually the word translated, if you understand the Latin, is a good description of what is happening. But we have narrowed its meaning to a technical language.



(comment) In (unclear) 17:6, God called it a translation (unclear) he has translated the book (unclear) and ask your Lord and your God (unclear) it is true. (overtalk)

Yes, from the very get-go it was called a translation and, in fact, Joseph is told, You shall translate it, your gift is to translate. But the point is, it is coming from some record, it is coming from somewhere that is an ancient record and the language that we have preserves all of these ancient elements and one of the points I want to emphasize tonight is, as you read the Book of Mormon, you always need to be asking yourself, I wonder what this was in the original? What range of meanings might this word have had? It is hard work to figure out how this might have originally been formulated. We cannot always tell. But you can often tell when you are reading a book that it was translated from German or from Russian, if it does not seem like a natural, English way of saying things. And with the Book of Mormon a lot of people will complain, it is weird. It does not read like Hawthorne or James Fennimore Cooper.

(comment) Could you just comment on what you have just said – in connection with the revelation to Oliver Cowdery when he could not translate is that you need to study it out in your mind. Where did that process occur for Joseph Smith in your opinion?

00:54:48 There are different ways of understanding that and in my opinion, Oliver never succeeds in translation and what Oliver wonders is, will I have this gift? He recognizes that it is a gift given to Joseph Smith and Joseph says, go pray for it and think about it. Is it really something that you should have? Do you ask for things appropriately? We do not want to ask improperly. We are told in the scriptures that we should not ask in vain or it is possible to ask improperly. And I think Oliver was then sent to think about that question. It is not that he is trying to figure it out and make it work by studying it out in his mind and somehow that is going to make it work. And I think there is another way to read that text but his way is pertinent to our seeking revelation because we need to apply thinking out to know what we should ask. Having the right question in your prayers is often the most important thing in opening up the feelings of revelation and inspiration that will come. So that is how I see that. Rita?

(Rita) Well, there is another side to that. I also think it is possible that Joseph was fully aware that it took a great deal of effort. It was not just he looked in there and it all just appeared. I believe it was in an altered spiritual condition and had to – I will call it focus and I do not mean his eyes –

Do we have any evidence for this anyone? Rita is absolutely right, but how do we know that? Could he be out of sorts and it did not work? Jane?

(Jane) His quarrel with Emma.



00:56:58 Yes. One time Emma burned the eggs or something and – or Joseph burned the eggs and Emma went hungry, but for some reason, if he was not in the right spirit of harmony and – that could be a problem. Where else? Do we have any other place where he has to be in the…?

(Rita) Well he talks about being exhausted when they have the vision with Sidney Rigdon.

That is right.

(Rita) And I am thinking –

And what I am thinking of there is that – I showed you the picture in the Whitmer farm and he said they translated upstairs. Why? Why do you think they translated upstairs? Well, of course, that was the most private part of the house. But we have an account of Mother Whitmer who, by the way, also had a vision where Moroni met her, remember that? We have actually commissioned a painting of Mother Whitmer, because we have never had a painting of that encounter, and that will be finished for Book of Mormon Day next March. But she once said that she saw Oliver and Joseph doing what? Coming down the stairs. They had been translating and they almost had an aura about them. So it is a kind of altered state in a way that allows it to happen.

(Rita) And I think that is possibly what he meant by, you cannot just look in there and see it.

That is right. Okay, a couple of other points and then you know, we are going to have a whole time for questions and that is why I am just kind of giving you some information and I want to conclude here. Go ahead.

(comment) Yeah, when you have the question and answer session I think, I would foresee you maybe addressing –

Write it down.

(comment) Okay. The comments of Truman Madsen that Joseph Smith was educated by the greatest teachers in the entire universe and those were his mentors and that would be interesting if you would maybe go into that just a little bit.

00:59:22 Okay. Alright. Well, let me just conclude on the chart, if you want to come back to the chart for just a minute. Few people can read the Book of Mormon as fast as Joseph Smith dictated it. So your Book of Mormon reading challenge is to figure out that if you have 74 days from right now, that would be about the end of November, on Thanksgiving. If you want to take a challenge to read it all between now and then, see how you do on that one. It would be good if we are continuing to work through all of this.



But the last point I want to make, while the hat is still on your mind. A lot of people are kind of nervous about the hat. Lots of people think well, this is really weird, he is pulling a book out of a hat. It is kind of he wrong kind of trick. But as a lawyer, I think Brother Buckley would agree, if you are presenting the evidence for the translation of the Book of Mormon and proving to a jury of the world that Joseph Smith did not simply produce this book out of his own intellectual horsepower or his own ability, I think we would want the hat as Exhibit A there in front of the jury box. Why?

If your head is in the hat, what is he not looking at? Anything else, which would include, possibly, a book? What kind of book? Well, the plates, but what kind of an English book? Maybe a King James Bible? He is not looking at a Bible. There is no room on that table and this is his standard procedure. You know if you imagine him kind of going along and coming to a place and saying hang on just a minute Oliver, I think there’s a passage somewhere in Isaiah 54 that it would be really nice to have Jesus quote here. Yeah, how does he remember where it is even? But then he opens up the book and he reads it, modifying it a little bit as he goes. But is that happening? No. Emma says, no book, no paper, no manuscripts, no notes. So now, and if that is historically solid, and I think it is, where does it leave people with other explanations for the translation? Well –

(comment) It came out of the hat.

01:02:47 Well, Jeannie remembers the time when we were in North Carolina where I presented some Book of Mormon information to a graduate seminar there at Duke University. Afterwards people were pretty astonished with what they had learned and the professor turned to them and told them even more astonishing things and then said, no question you ought to spend some time thinking, where did this Book of Mormon come from? And the graduate students then quibbled about it, tossed around a few possibilities and as the bell was ringing, they walked out and decided, I think Joseph Smith must have been a reincarnated Jewish Monk. So what did that explain?

Well, okay, Brothers and Sisters, I asked you a number of questions which we will continue to talk about but ultimately, I want to testify that knowing that the Book of Mormon is a translation, especially of an ancient record with Hebrew roots, changes the way I read the Book of Mormon, for the better. Things come alive in the book that I would normally not even think of. When you put together their language, their way of expressing things, it fits. What else does it do for you? To know that this Book of Mormon came forth by the gift and power of God, that it is a miracle, does it add validity to it in your mind? Do you say, if this book is here and if this is what it says, I need to give strict heed to this, this is not just a fable? This is a book that God wanted the world to have. Now it is my job to figure out why. And this is a book that God wanted me to have. It



comes with his stamp of approval. There is nothing in the world that has that kind of authentication. You can read it with confidence in a way that you otherwise absolutely could not.

(comment) You need to give that testimony on TV. That is powerful.

Would it be more powerful on TV? Knowing that it is given by the gift and power of God, does that help you to realize that there really was an Alma? That his experiences were real-life experiences? This is not The Lord of the Rings. These are real experiences and what is the most important of all of them? When you read about the appearance of Jesus Christ to the people at the temple in Bountiful, if that really happened, how does that change everything in the world: religion, ethics, politics, families, personal meaning? And if all of those prophets who spoke so clearly about the coming of Jesus Christ had those prophecies fulfilled? And that has the validation of a divine translator to bring it forth? Those prophecies are not just wishful thinking. Those prophecies are prophecies that came true. They came to pass. But do you see how, and maybe this is all taken for granted, but I think it helps to really focus on it. And why Joseph Smith said the Book of Mormon is the keystone of our religion and why President Monson, as we talked about the last time, how he implored us to read it and to know that it’s true?

I am so grateful for what Joseph Smith did, that we have this Book of Mormon and we will continue next week right here. So read the first four chapters of 1st Nephi and read it with some of these perspectives in mind, okay? I will see you then. Lord bless you and I testify to you that you are on the right path, that the Lord loves you and will bless and guide us all, especially as we give heed and diligent attention to the Book of Mormon, in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

Transcriptionist Carol H. JonesEdited by Michael J. Spencer


BoM 6 Translation of the Book of Mormon -- 170914 Tedgemontscripturestudy.com/000 BoM 6 General,...

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