Dr. William Davis takes exception to the traditional timeline for Book of Mormon Translation. He says Joseph knew about it as early as 1823. He also says Joseph was trained as Methodist Exhorter, which helped him in translation. Joseph wasn’t as illiterate as some claim. We’ll talk about laying down heads, and criticism of William’s book. Check out our conversation….

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GT  51:43  So let’s jump back, because I know the thesis of your book is, there’s evidence within the Book of Mormon itself, that this was an oral transmission and not a written translation. Is that correct?

William  52:00  Yeah.

GT  52:01  I know that there are many defenders of the Church that would be threatened by that, because there are all these little tests. “Well, Joseph only had a third-grade education, and he didn’t read. How could he have synthesized all of these thousands of books?” So, I’d like you to kind of talk a little bit about that. I know, part of that is laying down heads, if you can explain what that means. Also, do you have evidence that Joseph Smith was a voracious reader?

William  52:43  Okay. That’s a lot of topics. Which one should I start on first?

GT  52:48  I know that was a lot of questions. I’ll let you take it wherever you want to go with that?

William  52:50  Okay.  If we want to look at–because we have Joseph’s education. We have the laying down heads. We have the oral presentation of the text.  We’ll just go back. What is this book about? And what this book is about is, I’m not dealing so much with the content of the Book of Mormon, the stories and explaining how Joseph Smith articulated the stories. That’s a different project altogether. But what this is, is this is talking about the mechanics behind the construction of the Book of Mormon. How was it kind of arranged and put together? Now we’ll talk about it from the point of view of Joseph Smith being a translator and loose translation. So, what happens with that, and what I’m proposing in the book, is that as part of the translation process–I’ll tell you what. The best place might be to start by looking at what was Joseph Smith’s translation like? What did that involve?

William  53:52  I’m going to go to the Doctrine and Covenants.

GT  53:59  Okay.

William  53:59  [Doctrine and Covenants] 9. This is Joseph Smith, and I’m going to go to it in my book here, because I have some commentary that was going along with it, where I’m talking about the translation. So, when we’re talking about the translation, what it is, when we’re talking about tight control or loose control, another way of saying that is, Joseph Smith was involved in the articulation of the text, or Joseph Smith was not involved. In other words, other than just reading words, or receiving words that he told Oliver to write down.

William  54:39  But then when you go to D&C 19, and here’s the story that everybody knows about. Alright, so, here we are. Here’s the scenario. We’re in Harmony, Pennsylvania. All right, and Oliver Cowdery has finally come. The 116 pages were lost. There’s a big blowout about that. Martin Harris, through whatever he did, they are lost. Then, the translation is on, halt, nothing’s happening. Then we go through this winter of just distress. Joseph and Emma, their child dies. He’s living on the Hales farm on a tiny little corner of it. I mean, this is about as low as you can get. He’s surrounded by relatives. Nobody likes him. Because he tried to join and be nice and go to the Methodist class meetings and one of the relatives, “Get him out of here. He’s a necromancer. Get him.”  So, this is miserable. So, finally, and I think that’s when he was just saying, “I’ve got to get this project done.”

William  55:45  So, anyway, spring comes around. Oliver Cowdery shows up, so then they start working on this. So, they’re working away. They’re doing the translation. How was he doing the translation? Well, Joseph Smith has got the seer stone, and he’s using the seer stone in the hat to kind of block out light. They’re going through and they’re doing this process. Now, in the middle of this process. Oliver says, “Wow, this is really amazing. I’d like to try this. Joseph, can I translate?” Joseph, who knows what Joseph’s thought is like.

GT  56:19  Sure.

William  56:19  “Why not, if I can receive inspiration from God, then why not you, too.” Then he, so, he goes to Oliver, and says, “Go for it.”  Now, presumably, then, Oliver has been watching Joseph with the seer stone, doing this work.  Presumably, Oliver, then, would have used the seer stone to make his attempt. Some people have tried to argue that Oliver also used a divining rod.

GT  56:55  Right.

William  56:56  So, maybe Oliver decided that he was going to use this divining rod. I don’t find that argument compelling because, well, first of all, if you believe in a tight translation, where Joseph Smith was reading words off the seer stone, there’s your screen. Divining rod doesn’t have a little, unless it’s a tiny little ant-like screen, that’s going to give you the words. I mean, it looks like Oliver was just trying to do what Joseph was doing. So, he’s like, give me the hat and the stone and I’ll try. It didn’t work.

GT  57:27  Well, I think the original versions of D&C 9 mentioned the rod.

William  57:32  Yeah, but not as the translation. It mentions the rod, but this is where your gift is, with the rod. But it doesn’t, it doesn’t say, “You know, when you were trying to translate with the rod, and it didn’t work, this is what happened.”

GT  57:46  “You should have used the seer stone.”

William  57:47  Yeah, you should have used the seer stone. But we’ll read through this closely, because this tells us about the translation. A lot of other descriptions of the translation process took place, 50-60 years after the fact, when you start getting these historical references. But then this is something that’s happening while they’re doing the translation. I mean, this is the closest thing we have to real time description of what that translation process was.

GT  58:13  Okay.

William  58:14  So, here’s what here’s what we’re saying, and I’m going to interject in here as I’m reading this. So again, we’re going, this is the Doctrine and Covenants, Section 9.

GT  58:25  If people want to follow along in your book, what page are you in your book?

William  58:28  In my book, I’m on page 168. I know that everybody is going to want to open up the books that they purchased and got for their own.

GT  58:37  By the way, I probably haven’t told people, but we’re going to give away an autographed copy of Visions and a Seer Stone. So there could be people that get a copy from you.

William  58:48  I didn’t know.  Well, hopefully people will participate.

GT  58:53  They’ll go rewatch this interview, and they’ll be like, “Okay, I’m on page,” 160, is that what you said?

William  58:58  [It’s page] 168. It’s under a heading called Dynamics of Revelatory Translation. Now, and if you’re following in Doctrine & Covenants, its Doctrine & Covenants 9, starting on, say, verse 7. Yeah, verse 7. So, this is the translation that comes. So, Oliver Cowdery gets the hat and the stone, he’s wanting to say, “Okay, now I’m going to try it.” So, he starts, and he starts, and he starts, and nothing’s happening. So, finally he gets up and he goes, “Oh, my gosh, what’s going on?”

Joseph’s going, “Well, let’s ask the Lord and get revelation.”

This is what comes, he [The Lord] says, “Behold, Oliver, behold, you have not understood. You have supposed that I would give it,” the translation. “You supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought, save it was to ask me.” So, in other words, he’s saying, “You thought I was just going to give you the words.  All you’d do–that’s not how translation works. You don’t come to me and just say, “Okay, Lord, translate it for me.”

GT  1:00:06  Let’s see what’s on the seer stone.

William  1:00:07  He said, “You supposed that I, you have supposed that I would give it unto you.” That means God is not giving you the translation. It’s right here. “And you took no thought save it…” And all you had to do was ask me. In other words, there’s no effort on the part of the translator. So, it’s all passive.

So, what happened here is Oliver got up to the stone, and he’s like, “Okay, Heavenly Father, give me the translation.” And there’s nothing there. It’s because he’s not participating. He’s just sitting back and saying, “Well, where is it? Where’s the screen telling me what to say?”

William  1:00:49  But he [God] says, “But behold, I say unto you that you must study it out in your mind.” You’ve got to think about it first. Then you must ask me if it be right. So, in other words, you’re not just thinking about it. But then you have to start thinking about, what’s happening here? Are the Nephites going to do this? Are the Nephites going to do that? And you’re waiting for a confirmation. So, that’s active thought. That’s active engagement. That’s trying to imagine that’s trying to get inspiration, to get some sort of idea in mind, and then say, “Is this how I say it? Should I say it that way?” And then, and if it is, right, if what you come up with is correct, I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you. So, when you’re thinking and trying to imagine, trying to be open to revelation, and you’re participating in this process, once you start to get it correct, your bosom is going to start to burn within you. Then you can say, “Aha,” and then that’s when you start giving the translation. “Therefore, you shall feel that is right. But if it is not, right, you will have no such feelings. But you shall have a stupor of thought that will cause you to forget the thing which was wrong. Therefore, you cannot write that which is sacred, save it’d be given you for me,” this inspiration. So, it’s this participatory process. Then he says, “Now, if you had known this, you could have translated.”

William  1:02:23  So, what we’re getting here is something–this scripture really militates against the idea of tight control. Because tight control is passive. Tight control is that the person just sits back and say, “Okay, I’m in tune with the Spirit, show it to me. Game on. Where’s my popcorn? I’ll just tell you, as I eat my popcorn, everything that’s coming off here. And the other thing, too, the process doesn’t seem to involve that. Because if the words were coming like that, where you didn’t have to worry about it, the transcription process would have happened so much faster, it would have been so much quicker than the 90-day period framework in which they dictated the Book of Mormon.

William  1:03:04  Here’s the other thing on the other side of the coin of that, though. When Joseph Smith was dictating the Book of Mormon, he wasn’t having these long pauses, where he’s thinking about whatever, and receiving inspiration, waiting till he gets [it,] and then talking.  Because otherwise, the descriptions say that he would start to say a sentence, Oliver would write it down and repeat it back to him. Then, once it was repeated back, if everything was okay, then he would say the next phrase, Oliver. So, they’re doing this back-and-forth phrase by phrase thing. There’s no one describing [that] he said a phrase, Oliver repeated, then Joseph Smith went off in five minutes meditation, then came out with another phrase. So, if this is what translation is, is and this is what is coming in the revelation, then that means Joseph Smith, if he followed this process, then he wasn’t studying it out in his mind and finding confirmation in the moment of dictation. That had to have occurred before the dictation session.

GT  1:04:16  Okay.

William  1:04:18  That’s D&C. That’s the description that we’re getting in the revelation from God. Now, if that’s the case, then when did he do that? And how long was he doing that for?

William  1:04:32  So, what I’m proposing in the book is when you go back, and you look at the history, from the moment in 1823, in September, when Joseph Smith, told the family, “This angel appeared to me with these plates, and told me about these plates, and said that there’s this history of ancient Americans and that, eventually, I’m going to be translating them.” That’s the point when we know that Joseph Smith was aware of these ancient people and that there are stories. Then, when you look at what Moroni said to him, even in in the accounts where it’s really brief, apparently the Angel Moroni gave him this overall arc of the story.  [Moroni told him] that there was a righteous nation where they came from. They went wicked, and they fell apart and they died. So, you have this kind of general outline about the story.

GT  1:05:23  And this is as early as 1823, right?

William  1:05:24  [Yes,] 1823.

GT  1:05:27  So, Joseph knew what was in the Book of Mormon in 1823.

William  1:05:31  In 1823, yes.  But, let’s go into more detail, because I know that when we talk about this issue, a lot of times what will come up is Lucy Mack Smith. [Lucy,] she was talking about how Joseph Smith, after he had this vision, all of a sudden, he came at night, and he was telling us stories about the ancient inhabitants in the Americas. We were all just sitting with bated breath on the edge of our seats, listening to him. And she said what a sight this was with the whole family sitting around this young man just listening to him tell stories.

William  1:06:04  That’s where people tend to go to try to show evidence of what Joseph Smith may or may not have been thinking about, at that time from 1823. But what often isn’t included in that is the Wentworth letter. Let’s go look at the Wentworth letter for a minute, because I think…

GT  1:06:23  This is 1843 when he wrote the Wentworth letter?

William  1:06:26  Yes, so the Wentworth letter, and just so people know, he was a Chicago editor. He wanted to know a little bit about Joseph Smith, and the Mormon movement. So, he wrote to say, “Hey, can you tell us about this?” So, Joseph Smith responded, and in his response, he talked about the visitation from the Angel Moroni. Let’s go look at that in a little bit of detail about what he said the angel told him at this 1823 period when he was first learning about it. So, now, according to Smith, and I’m going to read some of this. I’ll try not to be…

GT  1:07:12  That’s good.

William  1:07:13  I’ll try to be more lively when reading because sometimes it doesn’t get boring.  So, he, and this is quoting him. He said that there was a book deposited, written upon golden plates giving account of the former inhabitants of the continent, and the source from which they sprang. He also said that the fullness of the everlasting gospel was contained in it.” So, that’s something else we know. This book isn’t just a history of these people who came and rose up and then died out, but it also has their gospel as delivered by the Savior, to the ancient inhabitants. So, now he’s saying, “This is what…” now if what Joseph said, is accurate, right? If he’s giving an accurate account of what Moroni told him, then not only did Moroni I tell him about the ancient people and their lives, but he’s also told them that Christ the Savior even came to them, and it also talks about the gospel. So, there’s going to be talking about the religious history, not just… Oh, you know what? That was with Oliver Cowdery. I’m sorry. I’m coming to the John Wentworth letter, but that’s another account. That’s with Oliver Cowdery. So that’s his account with Oliver Cowdery.

GT  1:08:27  And when was this account with Oliver Cowdery?

William  1:08:29  In 1833, I think or 1835. That was a series of letters in the Latter-day Saints Messenger and Advocate. So, what happened is, Oliver Cowdery had written a lot of more detailed information about the origins of the Church, and he went into this, Joseph Smith at the time was the editor. So, he was previewing everything for publication before it went.

GT  1:08:51  Oliver should know, because he was a scribe.

William  1:08:53  Yeah. So, this was really close to the event. Joseph Smith, also, was the editor who was kind of approving what was printed.

GT  1:09:02  So, Oliver’s implying that Joseph knew, do we know, as early as 1823, or does he really specify?  But sometime before he wrote the Book of Mormon.

William  1:09:09  This was as the visitation of Moroni.

GT  1:09:11  Okay, so that could have been 1823, 1824, 1825, 1826.

William  1:09:15  Yes.

William  1:09:16  Yeah, we could [say that,] because there were supposed to be visitations after that, and also, when Joseph Smith first appeared, and then he started telling stories to the family about the ancient inhabitants. It wasn’t a one night, one shot deal. It was saying he was continuing to tell us these stories, and we would continually listen.

GT  1:09:33  So, the idea is Joseph could have been practicing translating with these stories, first? Is that the idea?

William  1:09:38  Well, that could have been part of the translation process, and that’s what I’m arguing in the book is that part of this translation process was this preparatory phase of thinking about the ancient inhabitants.

GT  1:09:52  It wasn’t just 90 days. It was seven years.

William  1:09:55  The prep, yeah, not quite seven years. But it was about five and a half years from the time that they started, the actual dictation of the final form of the version. It was about four years when they started. When they began the 116 pages, that was about four years from September 1823, because that was somewhere in late 1827, early 1828.

GT  1:10:15  Okay.

William  1:10:16  But, then the project got stopped, and then they started back up in April of 1829. So, that was then, also, a little more time to think about it. Anyway, when he wrote, and this is was a March 1842 letter to the editor, John Wentworth. These are some of the details that Joseph Smith said Moroni told him in 1823, that first visitation. Joseph says, “I was informed by Moroni, concerning the aboriginal inhabitants of this country, and shown who they were, their identity, from whence they came.” So, he knew that they were coming across from ancient Israel, or earlier, with the Jaredites. “A brief sketch of their origins.” So, where they’re coming from, a historical sketch. That means outline, by the way, that’s another word for outline at this time. “Their progress.” So, not just that they got here, but then how they started to develop their civilization.

William  1:11:25  So, he’s describing what’s going on, the type of civilization that they have, their laws, their governments.  What kinds of governments do we have in the Book of Mormon?  We have the Kings, the monarchies, but then we also have the system of judges. Then, the only other government that I think they mentioned is when everybody totally broke apart, and they were in separate tribes, so you would have tribal leaders. Those are being explained.

William  1:11:52  “Their righteousness and iniquity.” So, events of when they were righteous, events when they were not righteous. “And the blessings of God being finally withdrawn from them as a people.” So, this is actually pretty detailed. You’re getting some serious information. So, when Moroni appeared to Joseph Smith, he was telling him a lot of stuff.

He’s not just saying, “Oh, there’s a book, it has all the history, just wait for it, you’ll get to it, years from now.”  No, he was telling him all kinds of stuff right from the very beginning.

William  1:12:27  Then, in addition to that, and what I point out in the book is, Joseph Smith has a seer stone, right? One of the properties of the seer stone, is that you’re able to look into the seer stone, and through meditation, opening yourself up to the spirit, you’re going to be able to, just like the interpreter’s mentioned in the Book of Mormon, you can see the past the present and the future. So, if Joseph Smith, on his own, outside of these conversations with Moroni was curious and wanted to know more, to kind of see what’s going on, all he has to do is focus on the seer stone, and he can be taken away to see what these events are, even if he doesn’t have the plates. Now, he could have done that. Whether or not he did or not, of course, there’s no historical reference to him saying, “Oh, I was really curious to find out about Nephi. So, on my own, before I got the plates, I got the seer stone and looked into it.” But all the same, that power, that possibility was always there from the very beginning.

William  1:12:27  We also hear that every year he was going and talking to Moroni, and Moroni was preparing him, giving him information, preparing him for the restoration. So, there is preparatory stuff happening here. What I’m arguing is that all of that preparatory process involved preparation to do the dictation of the Book of Mormon. And what would that kind of preparation [be?]

GT  1:13:54  That would have been a lot more preparation than just the short days he was actually dictating it.

William  1:13:59  Yeah. So, I think that during that preparation time, that’s when the, “’Study it out in your mind,’ to see if it’s correct. And if it’s correct, I’ll give you a burning in your bosom.”

William:  Then, what I’m arguing in the book is that one of the things that Joseph did, as he was going through that process, is then as he’s studying out and trying to figure out what’s happening in these ancient civilizations, that he’ll just be taking little notes, and those little notes or little sketch outlines of what the stories were going to be. You can see evidence of that in the text of the Book of Mormon, itself.

GT  1:14:35  In the chapter headings.

William  1:14:36  In the chapter headings and it’s not just the chapter headings. You can also see outlines embedded into the story structures, themselves, where you get the succinct outlines of narratives that have not yet appeared, but then you’re getting kind of a story outline in advance. So, when you look at the headings, what these headings are, is they’re really succinct outlines with the short phrases. Oftentimes, they’re not even a full sentence. They’re just really succinct words and all you need. They can be, depending on the notes you look at, is they can be as simple as one or two words, being all you need to kind of cue the memory of the person for what they’re going to speak on. That kind of process is exactly what’s going on in the sermon culture of Joseph Smith’s day, when you have evangelical preachers and the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Baptists and the new light Congregationalists or the people who descended from the new light Congregationalists.

GT  1:15:33  My question is, don’t people even do that, now, today? Like if you’re speaking extemporaneously, you might have a little tiny outline?

William  1:15:40  Yeah, absolutely. But there is a difference. There is a difference. That’s where I’ve noticed that there is, where there has been–this is something that I think I could have done a better job of explaining.

GT  1:15:54  In your book.

William  1:15:56  Yeah, because, well, let’s go to the book. So, it’s this process. The technique of making these little outlines is called laying down heads. So, each one of these little cues, each one of these mnemonic phrases that you just look at that and say, “Oh, that reminds me of a whole bunch of information.” Each one of those things was called a head. So, “When laying down heads,” was creating the short outline.

GT  1:16:24  Kind of like an outline, right?

William  1:16:25  Yeah. Now, if you look at it, we know that this was–a lot of the structuring the Book of Mormon was based on this technique, and how we know it is the Book of Mormon itself mentions it. So, I’m going to go look at that really quickly. It’s in Jacob. And, in the opening, so Nephi has been in charge of everything. Then, everything gets turned over to Jacob. But Nephi when he’s turning over, he says, “Okay, here’s some things. I’m going to give you the plates. But, make sure that when you record the stuff, that you’re recording things that are really important.” And he tells him how to do that.

William  1:17:07  So, “Nephi gave me, Jacob,” and this is the Book of Jacob, Chapter one. I’m going to be reading through, verses one through three. So, “Wherefore,” going just further down in.  “Nephi gave me, Jacob, a commandment concerning the small plates upon which these things are engraven. And he gave me Jacob, a commandment that I should write upon these plates a few of the things which I considered to be most precious; that I should not touch, save it were lightly, concerning the history of the people.” So, here we’ve got the commandment. Older brother to younger brother, “Look, don’t waste your time on these small plates with all these stories, just talk about the doctrine.” And he said, “Because the history is going to be on these other plates, the large plates of Nephi.”

GT  1:17:58  Which get lost.

William  1:17:58  Yeah. Well, wait. Yeah, a portion of, well, some of the large plates, they’ll cover Alma.  So some of that– anyway, but the 116 pages, that portion of it was gone. So here, we get down to verse four. “If there were any preaching, which is sacred,” so sermons, “or revelation, which was great,” so any inspired revelation and prophecy, “or prophesying, that I should engrave in the heads of them, upon these plates.” What does that mean? We engrave the heads, engrave the main points of the sermons, of the prophecy, of the revelation, “And then touch upon them as much as possible.” So you engrave in the head, and then touching upon it, as much as possible is elaboration.

William  1:17:59  They called that amplification at the time. So, here’s the main idea, and then we’re going to elaborate on it and talk about that idea. So, in other words, if there’s any of the sermons that you give, write down the main points and then write and then fill, flesh it out with what those main points were. So, that’s what he’s telling him, and he’s using this language, ‘laying down the heads.’ That is, specifically, people who were born and raised in the 19^th century would know exactly what that meant. Because that’s the kind of language that they use when they’re talking about [speeches.] When you hit the main point of a speech, or the main points of any type of history or narrative, then hitting the main heads and then touching upon the heads or hitting on the heads and elaborating or amplifying the heads was this technique. It’s, essentially, the form of composition that kids were learning in common schools that you would be taught about in Sunday schools. You would learn about [laying down heads] if you’re in self-improvement venues, like juvenile debate clubs, or even domestic education. This is what you’d come across.

William  1:19:59  Every time you went to and listened to a sermon on Sunday, the preachers would be laying down the heads either overtly or concealed heads. I mean, this was all encompassing. You were exposed to this from the moment that you started going to church or started learning how to read or have any kind of instruction.

GT  1:20:17  So, that would be 19^th century lingo in the Book of Mormon, basically.

William  1:20:23  Yeah. This type of technique, it predated the 19^th century, for quite a while, quite a long while. That’s where some, I think there’s been some mistakes where people have said, “Oh, Davis is saying that this was something that just sprang up in the 19^th century.” No, no, no, that’s not what my book says. This is something that has a really long history. Anyway, I mean, there’s lots of stuff to talk about. When we’re coming back to, is it just following bullet points? It’s not just following bullet points. But this is where there is kind of a little bit of confusion. Laying down heads occurs in print culture and laying down heads occurs in the oral culture. In print culture, it is kind of a series of bullet points.  When you look at the headings, it’s kind of a sequence of events: t  is happened, then this happened, then this happened, then this happened.

GT  1:21:27  I know in–and I’m a math guy, I’m not an English guy. But I remember in high school, my English teacher would say, “Okay, when you write an essay, tell them what you’re going to say, say it, and then summarize what you told them.”

William  1:21:42  Yeah.

GT  1:21:42  I mean, is that kind of what laying down heads is, basically, as well?

William  1:21:46  That comes directly out of it

GT  1:21:48  Okay.

William  1:21:49  I mean, what we’re learning today has a history. And that history–so, what people kind of learn, whether someone’s extemporary high school debate, or somebody who’s, even, who might have come up with this on their own. I competed in extemporaneous speaking in high school, and then no one trained me in it. But I learned how to do it by just saying, here’s a few formulaic trick ways to open it up. But then all I had to do is, gee, you could give me any topic. I would take and sit with it for five minutes, and I could get up and talk about any of it. Part of it was, I would just say, here are the main points I want to talk about. Then, all I had to do is kind of remember that, and then I could just get up and go. All I had to do is reference that little outline and create it in my mind. That’s really similar to what’s going on here. But the problem is, it’s not just that that’s going on when it comes to sermons. When it comes to prophesying and these revelations, there’s something more complicated going on here. This is what I wish I could have gone into a little bit more is because seeing how…

GT  1:21:49  You can do a second edition, right?

William  1:23:04  Yeah, I’ll have to come out with a second edition. I put this down in here, because I was hoping to get back to it. Okay, so what happened is, we have here in the scriptures, we have Jacob saying Nephi told me to lay down heads, and then to touch upon them as much as possible whenever I’m recording these sermons. So, then the next thing in what I talked about in the book, and it’s a little bit later, and it kind of goes by, so people might miss it. That’s where I made, I think, the mistake of not banging people over the head with this more, is the question of not that he just laid down heads as part of this process of documenting sermons, and revelations. But how did he lay down heads? It wasn’t just bullet points. The way he laid it down, was following a very specific pattern of sermonizing called the doctrine and use pattern. So, it wasn’t just a list of bullet points, but it’s bullet points with specific categories of information or a specific focus on how we talk about this information.

William:  They called it doctrine and use, and it had different names. But I’m just going to talk about this just for a little bit. Okay, here we go. So, I’m going to read a little bit about this, and we’re going to talk about it a little bit because the doctrine and use pattern is something that is not an age-old, timeless pattern. It’s something that is fairly recent, in the whole course of history. So, when Jacob’s sermons follow this doctrine and use pattern, it’s something that’s very typical in 19^th century preaching. It deals with when you start out the doctrine and use, what would start out with this pattern is usually they begin with a text. And when they say the text, inevitably 95% of the time it’s a scripture.

William:  So what will happen is you start out and you’ll say, Okay, today’s sermon is going to be on this scripture. And then that’s followed by a bit of an introduction, where they try to contextualize the Scripture. It will have just preliminary information that people know to get the scripture in context. Like, here’s this scripture, and here’s the story context in which it occurs. It’s one of Paul’s letters, or it’s in the middle of the Exodus or something. So, they get people to know what that is. Then, once they have that, then they start to break it down and say, here are some of the doctrines that we can pull out of that. Then, they have something called the uses or the applications. What that was, is they would say, now that we pulled this doctrine out of it, now, here’s how it applies to you. Whoever’s listening to this, this is what this means in your life. This is how you apply it in your life. This is how it’s not just applicable, so, if we’re talking about an ancient scripture, the people in Exodus, it’s not just something that applies to them. It’s something that applies to us. So, it was also a type of interpretation that was based on the types and shadows. So, if you see something happening in the text anciently among the Israelites, well, we can use this as a lesson that was also about us today, how we apply that.

William  1:25:59  So, when he goes through, and then I kind of track this in the book, for those who want to read more closely about it, you might want to start at, say, page 94, and then read up at least through 97. But anyway, because that’s when I go into detail about how this works out. I’m probably spending too much time talking about this. But the point I’m trying to make, though, is that particular style of pattern.

William  1:26:48  It’s not just in Jacob, but you see the same type of sermon pattern appearing, again, and again, with all the sermons that stretch across the Book of Mormon. That’s a sermon pattern that was developed out of what’s called the Sermo modernus, and that’s among the medieval scholastics. So, what was happening is in the medieval period, the preachers were wanting to get information out to the masses. Because what was happening is a lot of people were preaching in Latin, and the common laypeople were like…

GT  1:27:23  “I don’t know what that means.”

William  1:27:24  “What are you saying?” So, what they started…

GT  1:27:26  I’ve been to Catholic mass, and I’m like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

William  1:27:30  So, what would happen is, part of the Scholastic movement, part of the sermo modernus, which means the modern sermon. Of course, it’s not modern for us now. But, for them, it was modern. It was new. It was exciting. It was different. It was different than anything prior to it. What they would do, then, is they’d say, “We want to teach these people who don’t know much about the gospel, but we want them to really understand it more. So, what we’re going to do is we’re going to take a scripture, and we’re going to break it apart.” And they break it apart in different ways. Some people would actually break it apart and say, “This word means this, and this word means this, and that they’d call it dissection, where one of the terms…

GT  1:28:08  I’ve seen seminary teachers do that.

William  1:28:11  So, they’re different approaches. But that’s one of what they would do. Then, by pulling it apart, then they’re trying to teach people what this all means, to give them a better understanding. Then, they’d also break it up into say, three or four main heads, and they wouldn’t go any further, because they’re trying to teach people in a way–you have people who, a lot of people were just simply illiterate. So, the only way they’re going to learn is by listening to a sermon. What they would do is, you don’t want to throw too much information at your audience. You want to break it down into a short, but logical sequence. Then, so that they’ll learn something, so that when they go home, they’re going to remember this. A lot of times people would go home, and then they’d have discussion.

William  1:28:53  Sometimes people who were literate would write it down. The way they’d write down the sermon is also by listening for the heads and writing down the heads. [It was a] really, super common practice. Kids in Sunday schools, they were taught that laying down heads.] When you listen to the preacher on Sunday, and by the way, you were required to go to church if you went to Sunday school. So, when Joseph Smith was attending Sunday school, he had to be going to church somewhere at the same time, because that was a requirement. Anyway, one of the things that would happen is, you’d be listening to a sermon. After the sermon was over, then a Sunday school teacher or parent might say, “Okay, what was what was the sermon about?” So, later on that evening, someone would say, “Okay, tell us what the sermon was.”

GT  1:29:30  We do that now and my kids say, “I don’t know.”

William  1:29:34  But what was common practice, the kids, then they would listen for the main point. What were the heads? Because sometimes the preacher would say, “Okay, we’re going to this point now when we’re going to do this,” and so kids then would have to recite back to a parent or recite back to a teacher, the main heads of a sermon. Anyway, I’m kind of going off…

GT  1:29:54  To prove that they were listening.

William  1:29:55  Yeah. All of this specific type of tradition goes back to this medieval time period with the Sermo modernus. That’s when it originated. So, we’re talking about a 13^th century onward 14^th 15^th. I mean, it was in development. It wasn’t always just for teaching the masses, because sometimes you do have this sermon format that’s still all in Latin. Because they would even use that in the early universities and whatnot. But that is the pattern that shows up in the Book of Mormon. And there’s no way that an ancient Nephite is going to be using that pattern.

GT  1:30:38  Why not?

William  1:30:39  Because it didn’t exist, yet, for most of the time. Then, by the time that, I mean, it just didn’t exist. It hadn’t been developed, it hadn’t been developed for several centuries, in another part of the country. So, how do we deal with that?

GT  1:30:55  Well, let me argue with that. Because we know so little, assuming the Book of Mormon took place in the Americas. And there’s a fun theory about Malay, which I think’s really fun. But anyway, I’m going to ignore that for now. Assuming it took place in the Americas, we know so little about the ancient inhabitants. How do we not know that they just used heads back in 400 BC or whatever?

William  1:31:19  We do have to have some kind of evidence. We can’t just say, “Well, they might have had it. So, they’re good.

GT  1:31:25  Well, but this may, I mean, the argument I’m trying to play devil’s advocate here. But the argument could be, “Well, maybe Nephi knew that in 600 BC or whatever. That’s just the way you did it.” Or I guess with the loose translation, Joseph converted whatever was on the plates to get these heads that you’re talking about? Would that be a better explanation?

William  1:31:48  Yeah, absolutely. That’s where we’re going. Because that’s one of the things I’m proposing. Then, right away, I know, some people say, “Uh uh. No.”

GT  1:31:57  “This is not what I leaned in Sunday school.”

William  1:31:59  Yeah. So, the way to think about that is to go back to the translation process. Now, one thing people could argue is, say Nephi, was given a vision of the future, and he saw how information was packaged for 19^th century audiences who listen to sermons. So, Nephi, when he wrote down on the gold plates, he decided to make his sermons conform to 19^th century conventions, because he’s…There’s a point that’s really — the issue here is, what God does and what God doesn’t [do.] I mean, if we take the position with God, anything is possible. So if God wanted to do it, it could have been done. That’s oftentimes a fallback. But the real issue isn’t what God could do. The real issue is, what did God actually do? Because, if we just say God can do anything, then any possibility is equally valid with any other possibility. But God has given us evidence. He’s not saying, shut off the mind. Don’t look at it. Don’t explore it. Don’t go deep. Because, if we do that, then we start to miss out on what’s really happening. We might miss out on the chance to understand Joseph Smith’s translation process. So, if we just say, God can do anything–BH Roberts talked about it this by the way, not this specific topic. But B.H. Roberts was getting frustrated with people who said, “Well, God could, if God wanted to give information to these ancient Nephites, knowledge about the Americas, he could have done it.”

William  1:33:41  B.H. Roberts, what he said, he said, “That is,”  and to quote, B.H. Roberts, “lazy.” That’s how he describes people who fall back on those arguments. The reason why he says that is because there’s a lot of information that’s given, that if we pursue it, and if we get out of our own way of feeling threatened with information that challenges our thinking, we might be able to discover some truths that are even deeper. So, this is going back to this theory. On the one hand, you could say, “Well, if God wanted to, all of these ancient prophets could have looked into the future and saw how we formatted our text and saw how we arranged our sermons and then they conformed everything about their lives to match for the 19^th century audiences.” That’s a stretch, and it’s not a stretch, even just from an academic looking at it. I mean from a theological position. That’s more of a stretch than if you say, if Joseph Smith were a translator, like he said he was, and he’s receiving inspiration about these ancient sermons. But he’s limited by his own experiences in life. Then when that comes filtering into his mind, it’s going to filter out through his translating brain into a form and framework that he’s familiar with. So, you expect to see 19^th century elements. You would expect to see 19^th century frameworks, because he’s a 19th century translator.

William  1:35:17  So, the fact that all of these Nephites are using a style, a sermon pattern that didn’t exist and wouldn’t exist for centuries after they were all dead, you could still say, Joseph Smith is a translator. This is evidence of him participating in that translation process, and [our] testimony is intact. We don’t have to feel threatened. What it does, though, is it helps us to gain a greater appreciation of what Joseph Smith was doing in the process of translation. If we weren’t willing to take that step, then that’s information about Joseph Smith, the history of the church and the history of the Book of Mormon, we would never know, because we refuse to consider that possibility.

William  1:36:08  So, that’s kind of what I’m doing with this book. In the opening of the book, I talked about how we have to be careful when we’re talking about these subjects. There are some things we’re talking about that are doctrines of the church and beliefs of the church. But there are a lot of things we’re talking about that are not doctrines. They’re theories. They are explanations that people are coming up with. Sometimes people who see themselves as defending the faith are not actually defending the faith. They’re defending their cherished theory. Sometimes that gets in the way of finding out more accurate information about our own past, because someone has a knee jerk, angry reaction, and then it shuts a door that should not be shut.

GT  1:37:01  So, when Joseph says he’s a translator, you take him at his word.

William  1:37:05  Yes.

GT  1:37:05  He just translated in the 19th century language. Is that right?

William  1:37:09  Yeah. Speaking of which, and then we talked about this earlier. I’m going to go to the scripture, because I don’t think people always recognize it. But when we’re trying to figure out what Joseph Smith meant by the word translation, and there’s a lot of different ideas, whether it’s revelatory translation, receiving inspiration, just trying to articulate things in his own words. He also did mean that he was actively participating in translating, and we know that because he used the word translate in the act of describing what he was doing while translating when he was working with the King James revision of the Bible.

GT:  Okay.

William:  So, that’s in Doctrine and Covenants, if people want to follow along, Doctrine and Covenants 128. Ultimately, we’re going to verse 18, or verse 17, before that. Joseph Smith is going through and he’s answering some questions, and he’s referencing some scriptures. First, he’s talking about 1^st Corinthians, Paul, where the scripture, “Else what shall they do, they which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all?”  [He’s] explaining the scripture and then he’s saying how that’s connected to the Malachi scripture, where, “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.” I can’t read. I don’t have my reading glasses on. It’s a little blurry. “And he shall turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.”

William  1:38:49  So, he’s explaining this. Now, in the process of explaining this, he gives us this wonderful thing, and this is verse 18. Joseph says, “I might have rendered a plainer translation to this.” So, he just gave us Malachi, and then he says, “I might have rendered a plainer translation of this scripture, but it’s sufficient, but it is sufficiently plain to suit my purpose as it stands.”

William  1:39:19  So, what he’s saying is when I could have given you a different translation of this verse, but it’s good enough, as it is, for me to explain what I need it to say. What Joseph Smith is [saying,] he’s used the word translate, “I could have rendered a different translation.” And he’s also saying, “I had options.” So, he’s saying, “This is one way to translate it. I could have translated it another way that might have been more specific to the purpose, but this one’s good enough.” So, what he’s saying is that the translator has options on how something is expressed.

GT  1:39:58  It’s not just a single option.

William  1:39:59  It’s not this one direction endowment of words, otherwise Joseph would have said, “I don’t know why the Lord did it that way. But he gave it to me word for word. But if I were doing that I would have…” He’s not saying that. He’s not describing translation as a process where everything is given to the translator, and they don’t do any work on their part. And that’s consistent with the Book of Mormon.

GT  1:40:23  Kind of consistent with what you were doing with the Māori translation of the Doctrine and Covenants, as well, right?

William  1:40:29  Yeah, so you’d have some idea, and then you’d say, “Here’s about four or five ways to do it. Which one do you think is the best?” And then having the native speaker choose or even for the revised. So, that’s what’s going on here. What that tells us is that Joseph Smith is involved in that process. The desire to see this hard rock, tight translation where the translator is fully passive, just, wow, what an uphill battle. Not only is it a harder apologetic stance to defend, it just really doesn’t match what we get from the text and also the historical record. It’s not the best option. So anyway, that’s my opinion.

Introduction

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Interview

GT  1:41:20  Very interesting. I was curious if you could talk a little bit about, you mentioned it earlier in the conversation that Joseph spent some time as a Methodist exhorter. In your book, you mentioned that they were expected to study certain things. So, first question, how long did he spend doing that and what are the types of things he would have studied?

William  1:41:44  Okay, Methodist exhorter–now, that’s kind of hard, because when you get into the Methodist class meetings, I mean, they had some general things in common that they tried to do. There were some rules and regulations on…

GT  1:41:57  They weren’t correlated, is that what you’re saying?

William  1:41:59  It was not correlated like it is [in our church] yeah, no. There was a lot of freedom. A lot of it depended on who was in the class, how sophisticated or unsophisticated were they? Or how familiar were they with all the doctrines? How long had they been a member of Methodism? There’s just so much. Anyway, so Joseph Smith, he joined a class meeting. This is when they were living in the Palmyra/Manchester area. He’s getting older. He participates in the class meeting.

GT  1:42:36  Do we know approximately what year, 1825?

William  1:42:38  He was a teenager, I would say. But I don’t think we’re given a specific date. The people who reference it just talked about him going, and joining the class meeting, but not giving us details about when exactly that took place. I suspect it would have been when he’s 15 to 17 years oldish.

GT  1:43:04  So, as early as 1821 , maybe.

William  1:43:05  Yeah. But that’s a guess, a total guess on that, because the historical record doesn’t really tell us. But what would happen is you would join this class meeting, and they have the texts called the doctrines and discipline. That was, essentially, like, here’s how we run the Methodist connection, what they called it. This is what we believe. Then, in that time period, you would go over that text. You would read from that text, virtually every week, because that was basically to give people an idea of what is the Methodist culture. What are the rules? How do we do things here? Then, and then also during the class meetings is when people would also share stories. It’s almost like a mini testimony meeting, you might think about it. People would share their conversions and their conversion stories or the conversion narratives. So, people would talk about their experience of being touched by the Spirit. Oftentimes, in, especially in Methodists, there’s kind of a before and after type thing.  So they say, “Oh, my life, I was just horrible. I was rotten. I was terrible. Then, all of a sudden, Christ came down, and wow, I was just, you know, life turned around, and then I’m just feeling all this love and joy.”

William  1:43:14  Would they use the term saved or not?

William  1:44:15  The term?

GT  1:44:18  I was saved?

William  1:44:21  My impression is yes. But that starts to get into doctrinal stuff. I’m more interested in the dynamics of these meetings and what these meetings meant for oral performance.

GT  1:44:34  Right.

William  1:44:35  So, what would happen is then people would also not just tell their stories, but then they’d also kind of encourage other people to obey the commandments or to do better and whatnot.  That was lay exhorting. The exhorting took place at all different types of levels where you might just turn to your partner and just say, “We can be a better person, embrace Christ. Just bring Christ into your life and you’ll be a better person.”

William  1:45:00  But then, it started to get a little bit more formal. This was what’s described as Joseph Smith going through, is where he actually started to exhort at these class meetings. So, the exhorter would get up, and then they would often just be kind of generic exhortations about you need–we’re all sinners, and we need to recognize that, Christ, in his great atonement has done such a wonderful thing for us. So, you need to awake from your sinful state. You need to embrace Christ, and you need to pull him in to your life and change your life. So, the exhortations were the sort of thing that–and the exhortations, learning those things was also what comes back to this process of laying down heads. It’s a similar type of thing, you have certain points that you’re hitting along the way. Exhorters were, it was kind of a preparation stage to become an early career preacher. That’s one way, because a lot of the class members, and this is in the doctrines and discipline, they would tell the leaders of these classes, once people start exhorting, with one another, kind of look and see if there’s anybody who’s kind of talented at this, and maybe we ought to encourage them to go further to become a preacher and then to actually become a licensed preacher, eventually.

William  1:45:00  But Joseph Smith, usually in those class memberships, when someone was just starting out, and they’re like the equivalent of what call an investigator, someone who’s just kind of coming in, and they’re not sure, but they just want to participate, and they want to see what it’s like. But then there comes a time when this probationary period of six months, and then once you get to the end of that six months, is usually when a decision was made whether or not you’re going to continue with it or not. From what we know, Joseph Smith, even though we don’t have all the records, it doesn’t appear that Joseph Smith joined. So, more than likely, his timeframe in there would have been six months or less. And who knows how long that was? But that’s certainly plenty of time to learn some of these sermonizing techniques, because some of these techniques, the laying down heads, you can take someone aside and teach that to him in 30 minutes. It doesn’t require some awesome order. It doesn’t require someone who is seasoned going 10 years into public speaking. It’s something you can teach someone in a few minutes, and right away, they can start using it. Not only that, you’re in a culture where people have already been submerged in these techniques, already from their childhood. All the places where the Smith family had gone, and where they had attended churches, whether it was Congregationalists, where they’re being exposed to the revivals, the joint revivals, where you had Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists all in same place, this is something that they immediately would have been familiar with already. So, when it comes to the training, the type of training that someone would have gotten to be an exhorter in a Methodist class meeting, all that would have done is just made more explicit stuff that they already had been exposed to for their lifetime.

William  1:48:09  So, to learn these things, or to have them more explicitly mentioned, it would have come really easily. Now, the other thing about the Methodists is they were known to be writing journals, and lots of study. One of the reasons why [we know this] is because John Wesley, who was, well, pretty much the one who started Methodism, he did help have help from his brother, and also from George Whitfield. But Wesley, he was really determined, because he was reaching out to all of these people who were not trained at Cambridge, or Oxford, or Harvard or Yale. So, he put together what he called the Christian library. It was enormous, forty-two something volumes of information, and it would be treatises by early preachers that Wesley agreed with their doctrine. So, it could be a short little reading, or it might be an entire book that he just kind of pushed in, edited out to make sure it conformed to his doctrine. So, what people would do, some people would try to read through it. Most people couldn’t.

William  1:49:19  But there was this real culture of self-improvement going on in Methodism. It also matched the culture of self-improvement going on outside Methodism. So, like when Joseph Smith joined a juvenile debate society, I mean, that’s an example of someone who was definitely trying to improve themselves in society. The way you did that was by education and the way that education, and you expressed that education, the way you got up in society in Joseph Smith’s day, was also making sure you could present. You could get up in front of an audience and speak. So, kids, even at the end, the way you did tests in common schools at the end of the year, and sometimes this would happen at the end of each week inside the classroom, kids would have to get up and recite. It could be a poem. It could be a speech. It could be part of dialogue. It could be an essay they wrote themselves. But that was exhibition day.  They’d have a great big exhibition day at the end of the school year. And then local dignitaries and local worthies would come. They would watch. The way you got graded was on how well you performed orally performed in front of an audience. You didn’t get letter grades at that time.

William  1:50:32  So, this is kind of this intensely oral culture that Joseph Smith is being raised in. So, when people, these lay ministers, they would, like the Christian library, going back to the Methodists in the classroom–so, they have this intense, intense culture of self-improvement, that was also part of a wider movement of self-improvement. So, people were always trying to read. Now we look at Joseph Smith. I know that people are saying that Joseph Smith, he didn’t care about books.

GT  1:51:00  He had a third grade education.

William  1:51:02  Third grade education—okay. I have to be kind of patient with some of this. I understand that people want to have Joseph Smith, as illiterate as possible, because the more illiterate you can make him, the more amazing the Book of Mormon is. But I think what’s happened in Mormon scholarship, to its detriment, is that people are so fixated on making this look like a miracle, that they’re shortchanging the history about Joseph Smith in his own life. They’re shortchanging the history of what he went through to improve himself in the circumstances. They’re shortchanging that story of someone who was born in extremely difficult circumstances, with the poverty and then also the dynamics at home, the financial destruction that had happened before he was even born, and then growing up in just enormously difficult [times], and he did a lot to improve himself. Some of his critics will say, “Oh, he didn’t care about school, he was rather off fishing.” But, if that’s the kind of person he was, he would have never