To watch this video on YouTube, click HERE.
Video transcript:
I’ve been researching criticisms against Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon for a long time now, and I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon. Surprisingly often, I’ll be studying a claim that is meant to damage my faith, but the deeper I dig, I’ll find that the opposite happens. Sometimes, critical questions turn out to be opportunities for growth. So here are the top 10 criticisms that, for me, ended up backfiring and strengthening my faith.
Number 10: Joseph Smith made the Book of Mormon up all on his own. Now I know that’s super vague, but stay with me. What is noteworthy about this claim is that it has actually shifted a lot over time. When the book was first published, critics called it simplistic trash—exactly what you’d expect from someone with Joseph’s limited education. But as people recognized the book’s complexity, critics pivoted. It became a given that Joseph clearly didn’t have the brains to write the book, so Sidney Rigdon must have written the theological stuff, and the historical stuff came from Solomon Spaulding’s manuscript. Well, that theory eventually came crashing down, and interestingly, critics today are largely back where they started, saying that Joseph did indeed make the book up on his own. But this time, since the complexity of the Book of Mormon is now widely recognized, critics assert that Joseph must have actually been a lot smarter and well-read than his friends, family, and even foes claimed. I just think it’s kind of ironic, and the lack of a cohesive explanation that makes sense of all of the available evidence after almost 200 years strengthens my testimony. But let’s jump into some more specific claims. We’re even going to talk about hypnotism in a bit, so stick around:
Number 9: For almost 200 years, people have been mocking the idea that Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon by looking at a seer stone at the bottom of a hat. But the fact of the matter is that the Book of Mormon is either real or it’s not. And if it’s not, then there has to be an explanation for how it was produced. But if he rattled this dictation off day after day, all while looking at a rock in a hat … what realistic explanations does that leave us with? Where were those words coming from? Did he create a secret manuscript, tediously memorize all 269-thousand words of it, and then expertly recite it all to his scribe with no reference materials available? Or did he just make it all up in his head and somehow commit it to paper for the first time in front of witnesses in one try? Remember, this isn’t a children’s book. We’re dealing with multiple complex timelines, prophecies are given and fulfilled in different parts of the book; there are realistic political systems, genealogies, economic systems—the list goes on. Make fun of the hat all ya want, but the words had to have come from somewhere—and we’ll circle back around to this later in the video as well.
Number 8: Some people argue that Joseph Smith could have actually accessed whatever reference materials he wanted, because during the translation, he was separated from his scribe by a curtain. I ended up doing a whole video on this for Saints Unscripted, so you can go there for the details, but it turns out this claim is not supported by the evidence. Multiple sources indicate that he was in full view of the scribe and oftentimes other visitors during the translation—this is even more evidence that has to be accounted for if Joseph was a fraud. I think the “man behind the curtain” theory absolutely backfires.
Number 7: All those guys who claimed to have seen Joseph Smith’s golden plates? A bunch of them ended up leaving the Church. So much for witnesses! Actually, the fact that many of them left the Church only makes their witness all the more credible and believable. Despite many leaving the Church and falling out with Joseph Smith, none of them ever denied their testimony of the Book of Mormon. The more people you include in a conspiracy, the more loose ends you’ve got, and the harder it is to maintain the lie—especially if people start going rogue. When these people had everything to lose, they defended the Book of Mormon. And when they had nothing to lose, they still defended the Book of Mormon. Pointing out that the witnesses left the Church backfires big time.
Number 6: It’s really hard to build a case around the idea that the witnesses were in on a conspiracy. So, some critics, like the renowned Fawn Brodie, claim that Joseph Smith unconsciously hypnotized them into seeing the plates. That’s right, he accidentally made all of them hallucinate. Now, if this were just some random person on Reddit making this claim, that’d be one thing, but this is the OG Fawn Brodie we’re talking about here, and critic/author Dan Vogel more recently claimed something similar. We’ve done an episode on this topic as well. Needless to say, I think this claim backfires in a tremendous way. For me, it’s extremely faith-promoting to see that the best explanation that some of these critics can come up with to explain away the witnesses is hypnotism. At what point do you just say, you know what, maybe it’s all just real?
Number 5: A lot of people claim that Joseph was planning and preparing to dictate the Book of Mormon years before he actually did. Now, if you don’t believe the Book of Mormon is true, this is pretty much the route you’ve got to go, so I get it. But if he was scheming since he was a teenager, I wonder what the people who knew him best, his own family, thought of his prophetic claims? These were the people he grew up with, who knew him best. Were they suspicious of his motives? Did they believe he had the skills to create the Book of Mormon? As it turns out, every single member of his family believed him, and they believed that the Book of Mormon was real. Some of them had tangible experiences with the plates themselves. And despite poverty, persecution, and pain, they followed him to the end.
Number 4: In 1843, some pranksters tried to prove Joseph Smith was a fraud by asking him to translate some fake plates. Joseph agreed to give it a try, and a partial translation was recorded in the journal of William Clayton, which you can read here. Some critics claim that this clearly exposes Joseph as a fraud. But when we keep digging, we find that this was not by any means a divine translation. Multiple sources state that Joseph compared the characters on these plates to some real Egyptian characters he was working on understanding, and that’s clearly where his translation came from. Point being: These guys expected Joseph to come up with some miraculous, revelatory translation of the fake plates—but he doesn’t. He attempted a secular, academic translation, but obviously didn’t get very far, gave up, and no official translation was ever published. They tried to trap a conman, but Joseph didn’t respond like a conman, which strengthens my testimony.
Number 3: The Book of Mormon contains 86 geographic place-names. A critical work called the CES Letter points out that 20 of these names look roughly similar to places in Joseph Smith’s vicinity—suggesting that Joseph used local place-names to make up the Book of Mormon. At face value, that might seem concerning. But upon further inspection, several of these place names actually didn’t exist yet when the Book of Mormon was translated. Other place names were extremely obscure and remote at the time. We did a whole video on this as well, but long story short: It was such a weak argument that at one time even the author of the CES Letter was 90-95% sure he was going to take it out completely. Point being: Not only do I find this claim to be a nothing-burger, but when you get down and dirty with names in the Book of Mormon, you find some really cool stuff. Did you know that the Lamanite “land of inheritance” called Jershon seems to be based on a real Hebrew verb meaning “to inherit”? Studying criticisms about names in the Book of Mormon has actually strengthened my testimony.
Number 2: The CES Letter also suggests that Joseph Smith plagiarized from this book, the First Book of Napoleon, in order to write the Book of Mormon. I mean, look at how similar these sections from each book are—clearly this is evidence that Joseph was a fraud, right? Well, when you dig a little deeper, you’ll find that these are select phrases from the first 10 pages of the Book of Mormon, compared to phrases scattered across the first 21 pages of the First Book of Napoleon. The Letter claims that each of these phrases even appears in the same order. First, some of these phrases appear multiple times, which allows you to artificially organize them in a way that almost matches. But second of all, even then, they’re still not in order. Long story short, there’s no evidence Joseph Smith even knew this book existed, and I have a really hard time believing that he was stealing seemingly random phrases like “condemn not the,” or “the land,” or “Jerusalem.” To me, this one felt like such a stretch that it was a net positive for my testimony.
Number 1: But wait, critics might say, What about all of the parallels between the Book of Mormon and View of the Hebrews by Ethan Smith? I’m gonna be honest: I spent years hearing and investigating claims about View of the Hebrews, without ever actually sitting down to read it. Eventually, I bit the bullet and read every page, and I wish I had done it sooner because after reading it, I feel like it’s really not a threat. I think it’s much ado about nothing. It’s yet another one of those scenarios where it’s like, ok, after almost 200 years of trying to figure out how Joseph did it, if this is the best you’ve got … it’s just easier to believe the Book of Mormon is true. Good people can disagree, and you can come to your own conclusions, but if you’ve heard people talking about View of the Hebrews and you don’t have time to read it, at least go watch this interview we did about it. It will hopefully be the last piece of content you ever need to see on this subject. I’ll see ya there!