I'm a little surprised to hear Brant talk about the book Guns Germs and Steel for a point supporting the BoM. The main point of that book dismantles any claim for the BoM being historical.

Dear Mr. Gardner (and Murph), At 14:30 you portray the pre-Lehite Israelites as a literate society using Isaiah and Jeremiah as examples of fact-based history writing. This is either a deliberate mischaracterization of the biblical texts or reveals a profound ignorance regarding the historicity of the texts. The parts of Isaiah and Jeremiah written *before* the Babylonian exile were all written in poetic form. This aligns well with Dr. Lundwall’s thesis. The other parts of the text were added during later redactions that would have occurred *during* and *after* the Babylonian captivity. This directly contradicts your assertions. For further info, please see the Wikipedia articles for both books and follow the footnotes.

how much mental gymnastics do I have to do to comprehend the next hour and 18 minutes?

Can we get a thumbs up for the Murph, seriously. The church tells him not to engage with "anti-mormon" individuals. Instead, he has decided to use the brain that God gave him. Serious props, Murph. You're awesome bro!

At 9:48 “Estimates run about 10-18% for literacy in ancient Israel.” Some estimates go that high. The way they get that high is by excluding women, children below 7 years old, and “far-away farmers and […] non-educated people.” Per Wikipedia’s “History of education in ancient Israel and Judah”: “The total literacy rate of Jews in Israel in the first centuries c.e. was ‘probably less than 3%’". I’m sure there are estimates for previous centuries but I can’t imagine that they’re any higher than that.

Just because we conflate the "Great Tower" with the "Tower of Babel", does not mean that the Brother of Jared would have.

Mr. Gardner blurs the line between 2nd stage orality and literacy. If he had to answer the question "when were the Israelites writing actual history? as we define it, as the BoM implies, as opposed to writing in 2nd stage orality, which is writing only to support religious ritual, the timeline he uses regarding Lehi doesn't work. That type of literacy comes much later.

Looking forward to this one!

Wow I feel like I just won the gold medal in mental gymnastics. Obviously Brant is very smart but man I think the only way to resolve this is to get him and John Lundwall on a podcast together

Thanks for getting this together Stephen! I've been looking forward to this one.

Just embrace the facts. We can see some of the characters that Joseph said were on the plates and they don’t resemble Maya at all. (Or Egyptian). We know that Maya doesn’t relate to Semitic languages in anyway. As he said we can see their script from 3rd century BCE. None of it is related to Egyptian. He finally said, we shouldnt expect the Nephite culture to be the same as the Maya, ok, so stop cherry picking Maya culture and marketing them as hits for the Book of Mormon then.

Has Reformed Egyptian language been found anywhere else in the world?

Where's the Reformed Egyptian in mesoamerica? Everything found in Mesoamerica comes from Asia aa does the DNA. The "reformed Egyptian" has to be something of a secret code for the descendants of Lehi.

"Historical" means events and people were real, , plants, animals, and products described existed during the historical time and - important - experts in the field with education and experience concur. Many events for some reason have become common folklore - Franklin discovered electricity, Salem burned witches, Nero fiddled as Rome burned, popes in the first century, etc Historical events can "change". The Mesha stele contains the earliest reference to Israel and Yahweh, originally a Canaanite god, but unlike the Israeli victory in 2 Kings, Moab won. Some events were based on minor events - Trojan War, Exodus, Camelot, even the Flood, etc Many are universal myths - global floods, towers to heaven, talking animals, etc.

As I have said before, I do not think the argument between "tight" or "loose" is even meaningful. How could we even tell the difference? I think most of the debate ignores how the process of translation works.

Elder Bednar - "The Book of Mormon is not a book of history." Sure there are some history within it's pages like Christopher Columbus, and other historical events.

01:03 I want to hear more about this (atoning messiah vs king messiah).

Great discussion, guys! I love listening to Brant Gardner.. such a knowledgeable guy who has really done his homework :) Thanks for sharing it.

There are many accounts of the conquistadors destroying mountains of records that the natives had kept for centuries. In fact the native cultues had designated historians in their societies. There are still histories of these peoples that have survived, such as the Polpol Vuh, as well as others.

LOL Not a single response to my post about what "historical" meant in context to the Book of Mormon. Looks like FAIR has been teaching classes - concentrating on one minor point or questioning an entirely different situation. Par for the course.

It without a doubt isn’t historically accurate. Mormonism requires it to historically accurate to be real.

I wouldn't take John Lundwall too seriously. He only has a self-published book and a journal that's published by Createspace Independent Publishing. He graduated from Pacific Graduate School, which I accredited but I've never heard of it, and I'm sure most people haven't either. He does have a BA in English from BYU. I mean, not all English majors are less intelligent (my cousin was an English Lit major at Yale, and she went on to medical school).

The main idea your trying to counter with is that not everyone was literate ... only 10% or so. If that was the case we would still have the small percent of people who could write would still be writing. We would have at least some writings/carvings. But we don't even have some or even a little.

Having spent tons of time with Jerry Growers book and checking on his sources, I can say with high confidence that his translation of the characters document is on solid ground and the influence of the hieratic becomes soon obvious and the selective use of the demotic has sound logic. To call that document deformed english, makes the person look like an ignoramus and to claim it an alphabetic script is plain moronic. From the 200+ characters, over 90 are unique. These characters don't have to be toyed around to make them look like something in ancient language, most of them are near perfect match, and have only minor variations in comparison to either demotic or hieratic Also some mayan influence is exactly demonstrable. Also sumerian influence is found in these examples. So yeah, it is very convincing work, what grover has done, because it makes the translation very plausible and also it is something that echoes the book of Mormon content in a very unmistakable way with the very exact year counts with the right topics!

I'm not seeing anyway out on this one. I predict a ton of faith promoting, presuppositional, mental gymnastics.

The Book of Mormon does not depict a highly literate culture. Literacy seemed to be restricted to only the royal/priestly cast. There is no suggestion that the common folk, either Nephite or Lamanite, were highly literate.

LETS FREAKING GOOOOO!

So much conjecture.

If the Book of Mormon is not a historical document as the evidence, or lack thereof, seems to overwhelmingly suggest, would that change your opinion of the church?

At 23:52 you reference GG&S by Jared Diamond, pointing to his discussion that not all innovations persist-some technologies are discovered and subsequently abandoned and then later rediscovered-as reason for why no evidence exists for language diffusion and post-Book of Mormon literacy. This is a strawman. Lundwall is arguing that the text of the Book of Mormon begins with a fully literate culture in the founding group (as evidenced by the text itself), AND that this fully developed literacy persists for 1000 YEARS within a culture that ballooned into millions-millions who were all quite literate. Even if you ignore the text of the Book of Mormon describing widespread education in literacy amongst both groups of Lehites in favor of a twisted reading of the text to mean only a ruling and merchant class that were literate, that’s still a thousand years of a fully literate society. AND let’s recall a core apologetic for lack of an influx of 600 BC middle eastern DNA in ancient and modern Native American genetic samples is that the Lehites were intermarrying with local populations (also used to explain the extreme population growth rates and numbers seen in the text) so they weren’t isolationists and the other groups would have been exposed to advanced literacy for 38 GENERATIONS.

Trust me the Gospel is 100% Truth

This seems pretty similar to the DNA problem. It has less to do with the actual research and more to do with the critics insisting that the relevant passages in the Book of Mormon MUST mean only one thing.

I was disappointed. Murph paid only lip service to steel- manning.

A great deal of proverbial ink is spent on describing how Mahonri was worried about the confounding of languages. Unless the suggestion is that there is a separate event where that did occur, which, as Brant points, there was no such historical event, the historicity problems associated with Babel are still attached to the Jaredite story. That apologetic is the epitome of offensively bad Mormon apologetics, and it should have been dropped the instant it first appeared in an apologist's mind.

Yikes... on too many levels to engage. Joseph Smith Jr gave us an example of a regression of language from Alphabetic to pictorial. I'm going to have to see Jr's plates with Mayan symbols, not the "reformed Egyptian" along with a better origin narrative.

At 24:30 you say, “One of the things that Lundwall assumes is [that the Lehites bringing literate culture is] going to explode and effect everybody.” And then you state, “It just isn’t true in world history-it just doesn’t happen. It isn’t even true in Mesoamerica.” Then you use the Aztecs lack of writing system as an example of a group that didn’t pick up the nearby writing system of the Maya. 1. You *fail to point out* that the Aztecs did have pre-conquest pictoral “writing” with a number of pre-colonial codices that have been preserved: Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, Codex Vaticanus B, Codex Cospi, Codex Borgia, and Codex Borbonicus. What evidence do you have that this pictoral writing wasn’t a result of contact with the Maya? [ETA: it turns out that they evolved independently from different precursors, in different areas. More details after point 2] 2. Even more significant, within a mere decade of Spanish conquest, the Aztecs were learning Spanish and writing event-based histories in Latin alphabetic script, documenting their culture and heritage in this new, fully literate culture brought to them by an advanced literate society. IT EXPLODED! There are some 500 Aztec codices, most of which were written WITHIN A SINGLE GENERATION **after** Spanish conquest. And that’s just the ones that have survived time. UPDATE FOR POINT 1: I found a wonderful explanation of why the Aztecs didn’t adopt the Mayan writing system in an answer given by a Mesoamerican archaeologist in Reddit’s AskHistorians subreddit: “The most direct explanation I can give you for why scripts in eastern Mesoamerica (especially Mayan) appear far more language dependent and complex than their western counterparts is simply that the scripts have different histories. Mesoamerican scripts have their roots in Olmec and Zapotec. We know little about the former, but the latter appears to be predominantly logographic (words-as-symbols) with some pictographic/ideographic elements and a few phonetic elements. During the late formative and early classic periods these initial scripts appear to evolve along different trajectories east and west of the Isthmus. In the old Olmec heartland and the Maya world scripts become more language dependent, eventually leading to the Classic Maya script - arguably the only true "written language" in the pre-Columbian Americas. In the west, these scripts become more abstract and remain less language dependent.” “Part of this can probably be due to the different cultural contexts of writing in these regions. As said before, Maya hieroglyphics were both more prolific and more public than their western counterparts. The Classic Maya placed a heavy emphasis on divine kingship. Rulers were intermediaries between gods and humans, and public performances by rulers were a key part of legitimizing the king's authority. Erecting carved stone monuments listing rulers' accomplishments was a major part of this. At the same time, the Maya did not form large multi-ethnic empires. Some city-states conquered their neighbors, but usually their subjects all spoke their language. Maya writing was thus used for public display primarily towards other elites that spoke the same language. In this case, having a more language dependent script is beneficial.” “Western Mesoamerica, on the other hand, built large powerful multi-ethnic empires. Adding to that, it has a much higher linguistic diversity than the Maya region. (Note how the Yucatan and Guatemala in that map were all speaking languages from the same family, while Central/ Southern Mexico is a chaotic jumble.) Documents recording tribute, trade, etc, benefit from being less language dependent in this context.” “Of course, this isn't a perfect explanation. A lot of times things just happen the way they do and we can't really come up with a great explanation "why." And as I spent a lot of time explaining, there were a lot of important similarities between the two traditions of scripts. Both had pictographic and phonetic components, but to varying degrees. Mesoamerican people would have also seen these different scripts as roughly equivalent, so the debate is in some ways entirely academic.” “Maya hieroglyphics is ultimately designed to record spoken Mayan. The phonetic symbols in the script are all based on sounds used in Mayan. If you wanted to adopt a similar system for, say, Nahuatl (the Aztec language), you'd need to come up with entirely new phonetic symbols and grammatical conventions. You couldn't just copy and paste from Mayan. It would be more like inventing a new writing system based on Maya hieroglyphics.” “To invoke an axiom, people are unlikely to switch from one system to another if the one they have serves its purpose. (If it ain't broke, don't fix it.) Cultures west of the isthmus already had scripts that could record history, tax records, etc. Granted they couldn't record poetry or personal messages, but it worked for what they needed. Add to that linguistic difficulties of adapting Maya hieroglyphics to their language, and the fact that the script would become language dependent (and thus inaccessible to anybody who didn't speak your language), and it really just didn't make much sense to switch.” “A more practical solution would simply be to incorporate more phonetic components into existing scripts. Which they did. It does look like Aztec pictographic writing was becoming more phonetic in the century leading up to conquest. This page has a table of known Aztec phonetic symbols near the bottom. You can see they didn't quite have enough to spell out whole words phonetically, but the potential to develop it was there.” Sources: • Boone, Elizabeth. 2000. Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs. • Pitts, Mark. 2008. Writing in Maya Glyphs: A Non-Technical Introduction to Maya Glyphs. Accessible Online: [omitted] • Sampson, Geoffrey. 1985. Writing Systems: A Linguistic Introduction. • Urcid, Javier. 2005. Zapotec Writing: Knowledge, Power, and Memory. Accessible Online: [omitted]

I thought you meant the musical mate😝

It's all a bunch of nonsense...but fun none the less. Joseph Smith was a dark savant, total genius

So the metal plates, of which there were very few, survived, but the tens or hundreds of thousands of steel swords all disappeared. Solid

He says they were literate. They were not literate. Is he lying or ignorant?

The funny thing about the Book of Mormon is that you can never 100% disprove it because the claims will just always retreat to unfalsifiable territory. Stuff like this just makes it less and less likely. It’s like trying to 100% disprove Sasquatch. If he doesn’t exist, you’ll never find him but it literally impossible to search every square inch of the earth simultaneously to 100% verify he isn’t real. And even then a believer would find a way to belive. To me the nephites are in the same category as Sasquatch and alien abductions. Plenty of doggy “evidence” and testimonies but no solid positive case that would convince most people. But as the Book of Mormon musical goes 🎶“I guess that is sort of what god it going for” 🎶

The BoM is a clear work of fiction. I mean Murph it's a little much. The religious stuff is great- living clean, faithful to your wife and kids, not drinking- all very good stuff. But the book "Dracula" was written during the same time period as the BoM and its like you're going around highlighting where Dracula did this or that- it's as much a figment of one's imagination as is the Quran with flying horses or Hindu books with half monkey half human Gods. Murph- your country has a long proud history of scientists- don't fall into this make-believe. Science can be repeated, peer-reviewed, tested, and is evidence-based. Trying to say tapirs are meant to be horses or whatever is silly- The BoM is a beautiful religious text to millions of people, but it is not actual history.

OPEN YOUR EYES: The following evidence shows that Joseph Smith created moronism out of other peoples works: 1. Presence of KJV 1769 edition errors in the Book of Mormon 2. Presence of 17th century KJV translator's italics in the "ancient" Book of Mormon 3. Lehi's dream is just like Joseph's father's 1811 dream 4. View of the Hebrews parallels with Book of Mormon 5. "The Late War" language, themes, and parallels align with Book of Mormon's language, themes, and parallels 6. Joseph copied completely unrelated hieroglyphics from other papyri to fill in damaged parts of Facsimile 2 and other damaged sections 7. Book of Abraham contains many of ideas and themes from "Philosophy of a Future State" 8. Joseph used the same Masonic rituals and elements used in the Nauvoo Lodge he became a Master Mason in. Joseph introduced the LDS Endowment ceremony 7 weeks after he became a Master Mason. 9. Joseph derived "Moroni" and "Camorah" (original 1830 Book of Mormon spelling) from "Camora" and "Moroni" in Captain Kidd adventure stories. 10. Joseph's obsession with treasure hunting, gold being buried in the earth, Captain Kidd, etc. influenced his story of gold plates being buried in Hill Cumorah and "angel" Moroni introducing the buried gold plates to him. 11. Joseph borrowed concepts and ideas from Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg. Like Joseph, Swedenborg claimed visions and visitations from both God and angels. Joseph taught the "Three Degrees of Glory". Swedenborg taught that angels told him that "There are three heavens, entirely distinct from each other, an inmost or third, a middle or second, and an outermost of first." Swedenborg taught that there are variations between each heaven: "As there are societies in heaven and the angels live as men, they have also places of abode, and these differ in accordance with each one's state of life. They are magnificient for those in higher dignity, and less magnificent for those in lower condition." 12. Borrowed concept of "restoration" and "all creeds are an abomination" from the Campbellites and Sidney Rigdon.

At 30:30 your discussion of the Popol Vuh is inadequate and misleading and is a disservice to your audience. At 30:45 you state “[Lundwall says] that this is a mythical text. Well, it is at the beginning but then it turns to history.” But not exactly, right? There are historical elements in the latter part of the Popol Vuh but it’s not exactly a fact and event-based history-which is the whole point of Lundwall’s thesis. “The Popol Vuh does not contain what we would call ‘objective history.’ It is instead a collection of traditions, partly based in historical fact and partly based on mythic interpretation, to describe the rise to power of their own ancestral lineages, specifically that of the Cavec who came to dominate the highland Maya region in the fifteenth century.” (pg 20) -“Popol Vuh: Sacred Book of the Quiché Maya People, Translation and Commentary” (2007) by Allen J. Christenson (can be found published online at mesoweb). To leave the viewers with the impression that the Popol Vuh contains fact and event-based history is disingenuous. To leave out the evidence that it was solidly based in secondary oral culture is doubly so. The preamble itself sets the time period as post-conquest, and makes the point that the original work "takes a long performance and account to complete the lighting of all the sky-earth.” From the Newberry, which currently houses Ximénez’s manuscript: “The text, which almost appears to be free verse, was clearly designed to be presented orally. Ximénez’s transcription of the Quiché is studded with corrections. It is possible that the text was recited, possibly by as many as three people, which would account for some of the repetition and strike-outs.” “The intention of the original author seems to have been to preserve the experience of hearing the poem recited and, through the magic of the storyteller's art, to live the events personally as the tale unfolded. This practice is in keeping with oral traditions in other cultures such as those of ancient Greece and Mesopotamia, among others. Christenson notes: ‘The Popol Vuh is written in progressive tense, suggesting the narrator sees it before him as he writes. This is consistent with the way stories are told in contemporary Quiche households. The storyteller invites the listener to imagine the setting of his tale, and nearly always tells the story as if it were happening right then, even if it happened in the distant or mythic past” (World History Encyclopedia). Lundwall’s thesis is that Mesoamerica never had the type of full literacy that begets fact and event-based writing of history like we find in the Book of Mormon. Let’s concede that there are historical elements in the Popol Vuh. But we should keep in mind that the Maya had writing for nearly two-thousand years by the time our version of the Popol Vuh and other codices you mention were written. More to the point, the Popol Vuh and other documents you mention were written a thousand years *after* the Lehite narrative ends and the evidence demonstrates they were still in a stage of secondary orality, using writing to preserve religious tradition, even if they were transitioning toward fact-based historical writing. And all three documents you reference were written post-conquest. There is no way to be certain which parts existed pre-conquest in an older text or how much their cultural tradition had already changed because of their new environment and how much influence Spanish literacy had on these post-conquest texts, all of which were written in Latin script. Is it feasible that there was an original mythic text of the Popol Vuh but that the 1550s Kʼicheʼ writers added the historical elements and genealogy section as part of their national scramble to preserve their recent history AND to justify their claims to their lands in the presence of the foreign invaders? There are records of that very nature found in the post-conquest codices of the Aztec and many of the sources describe the “history”section of Polpol Vuh as more of a genealogy with land claims: “The Popol Vuh concludes with an extensive genealogy of the Quiché-Maya dynasty up until the 16th century, connecting the royal family with the legendary gods in order to assert rule by divine right.” (Ancient Origins) At 35:50 you claim that the amount of “history” vs the amount of mythology and legend in the Popol Vuh is “ballpark of half and half.” Please enlighten me as to how that calculation was made? I found Tedlock’s translation and started skimming through, trying to discern what parts are mythology/legendary versus what you’re calling “history.” I’m all the way through to page 186 out of 198 in this translation and here’s what I’m reading: “And when war befell their canyons and citadels, it was by means of their genius that the Lord Plumed Serpent and the Lord Noble Sweatbath blazed with power. Plumed Serpent became a true lord of genius: On one occasion he would climb up to the sky; on another he would go down the road to Xibalba. On another occasion he would be serpentine, becoming an actual serpent. On yet another occasion he would make himself aquiline, and on another feline; he would become like an actual eagle or a jaguar in his appearance. On another occasion it would be a pool of blood; he would become nothing but a pool of blood. Truly his being was that of a lord of genius. All the other lords were fearful before him. The news spread; all the tribal lords heard about the existence of this lord of genius. And this was the beginning and growth of the Quiché, when the Lord Plumed Serpent made the signs of greatness.” -Popul Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life. Revised Edition. Translated by Dennis Tedlock (available online at Yale). Out of 135 pages of translated text, there are 4 pages of genealogy at the end. Four. All the rest is myth and legend born out of an oral tradition. You know what all this reminds me of? It reminds me of what we now know about King David. If you read through the Wikipedia page on David, it’s very clear that the biblical text is based on an iota of historical truth. Much of what we read there was written during the exile and after, decidedly post Lehi’s departure. It was written during a time when the Old World was still in a stage of secondary orality. We now know the Pentateuch is entirely myth and the rest of the old testament is a combination of myth, legend, and grossly exaggerated historical truth compiled as a post-exile propaganda piece in the midst of Judah and Israel’s vying claims to their historical lands. The Old World was slowly evolving toward a fact and event-based literate tradition but it hadn’t happened yet…just like in Mesoamerica 1900 years later.

Sincerely the amount of mental gymnastics that is required to make this work is insane. That fact that you can make an argument for every anachronistic issue is pitiable. The fact that people like the murph and Grant exist that are literally here to help people gaslight themselves by doubting their doubts against ALL evidence literally teaches them NOT to trust themselves. SHAME on you two.

This arguments in this podcast are so weak and often completely back up the Mormonism podcast. I’m even more convinced it’s all made up.

As a non-Mormon unwilling to stake the historicity of the Book of Mormon on a warm and fuzzy feeling alone, I've investigated several podcasts in search of viable evidence either way. Compared with the veracity.of Lundwall's authoritative and factually grounded evidence, I found this episode to be a wholesale nothing burger, intentionally contrived to confuse and baffle your listeners with an unsubstantiated morass of apologetic gobbledygook . I respectfully submit that you do a defense of the Book of Mormon far more harm than good by opening your forum to such confusing and factually deficient content.

The book, dna, anthropology, etc all debunked. Nothing supports this fantasy tale and there’s the other lies. I usually listen to the end-not this time - sorry 🫤