The Sean McDowell Show - Book of Mormon vs the Gospels: Comparing the Witness Testimony

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

How reliable are the eleven witnesses who attest to the Book of Mormon? Dr. Rob Bowman, author of Jesus' Resurrection and Joseph's Visions, joins me to do a deep dive comparing them alongside the Gospel witnesses to the Resurrection of Jesus, asking questions such as: What did they really see? Can we trust their testimony? Etc. Let us know what you think! READ: Jesus' Resurrection and Joseph's Visions by Robert M Bowman Jr (https://amzn.to/4wMqmbn)  CHECK OUT: Logos Bible 60 Day Free Trial (https://logos.com/mcdowell) *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [smdcertdisc] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://x.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sean_mcdowell?lang=en Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org   Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

Life Audio Time and time again in conversation and online, I've had LDS friends I've talked to. I've had atheists discount the resurrection appearances and say evangelicals are inconsistent because we accept what's in the Bible but not the book of Mormon. The broader picture here is that, as you're mentioning here, on the one hand, Mormons are arguing that Christians are being inconsistent because they accept the testimonies of the Gospels that these various individuals saw Jesus alive after his death, but they don't accept Joseph Smith's claim that he saw the risen Christ in what is known as the first vision, or that

the 11 witnesses saw the gold plates. And so the Mormons argue, this is on the one hand, that all of this is just a gross inconsistency on the part of Christians who accept the New Testament accounts, but not that of Joseph Smith and his 11 comrades. Are the 11 witnesses for the Book of Mormon as reliable as the witnesses for the resurrection of Jesus? If we accept the biblical account that Jesus appeared to his disciples, do we need to accept the first witnesses to the plates? Both LDS and atheist apologists have called evangelicals inconsistent in their rejection of the 11 witnesses listed at the beginning of the book of Mormon. Our guest today, Dr. Rob Bowman is an expert on both latter-day. a saint theology and history and the historical Jesus, he's going to help us make sense of this.

Rob, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. You're the perfect person on so many levels to help unpack this with me. And so let's just jump right in. What are the golden plates and why are they so important for LDS origins? The gold plates are an artifact that Joseph Smith claimed to have, first seen in 1823 and taken temporary custody of in 1827 and translated his expression was by the gift and power of God into English, mainly in 1829, after which the plates were taken into custody

by the angel who had shown Joseph the plates in the first place. So the plates are no longer accessible or available for inspection or viewing. You can't go to a museum. You can't see them in Temple Square. You can see a model of them, but you can't see the actual plates. Nobody knows where they are. Presumably they're either buried somewhere again, which is one view Mormons have advanced, or they are in heaven.

But they're not available. However, and this is the interesting part that I know we're going to plan to discuss here, prior to the plates being permanently whisked away wherever they went, Joseph allegedly showed them to 11 of his family and friends, and they gave testimony that they had seen the plates, and those testimonies are written up. in a couple of documents that are in most editions of the Book of Mormon right up at the front, near the front to attest to the validity of the Book of Mormon.

Now, this is extremely important because the plates ground the whole LDS story in something physical, in something tangible, in something that is allegedly an ancient record that Joseph translated by a super, natural gift into what is called the Book of Mormon, and that that is the foundation of the LDS Church. Just a few weeks after he published the Book of Mormon in 1830, he founded what later became known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is regarded as the foundational text of the LDS religion. Now, of course, that is alongside the Bible and other modern scriptures. However, distinctive to the LDS movement, distinctive to Mormonism, broadly speaking, is this thing called the Book of Mormon, and its authenticity is dependent on the authenticity of the gold plates that Joseph Smith said he had and that he said he translated. That's why it's important.

If those gold plates were not real or if they weren't what he claimed to be, those are two possibilities, then Mormonism as such false. It can't be true. The LDS religion is based on a falsehood. If the gold plates didn't exist or if Joseph had plates but they didn't contain the book of Mormon, then Mormonism is not true. So it's make or break with this issue. It's a deal breaker if you don't believe in the authenticity of the gold plates. Now, there might be some other ways. We could test Mormonism, for example, like the book of Abraham or the origins of, say, the

Lamanites and the Nephites and the historical records. So there's other ways we could lean into this. But the primary test, often when you speak to somebody who's LDS, is read the Book of Mormon and pray about it. And it claims to be a historical record. Hence, it starts with witnesses. So it's not meant to be taken as a fictional account. It's meant to be taken as a historical account. And so given that's right at the beginning, so much is at stake for the story contained therein, Joseph Smith as a prophet and the Latter-day Saint Church today. Agree to that? Anything you would add to that? You're making a crucial point, which is that the Book of Mormon is in a very practical sense, the gateway into

the LDS religion. It is the focal point of the missionaries' message to prospective converts. They want them to read the Book of Mormon, pray to know if it's the Word of God, and to receive an experiential confirmation of that in some fashion. And they're coached to have that happen. They're encouraged to seek that. And so people, most of the people doing that, most people who are reading the Book of Mormon and praying to know if it's from God or not, already have some kind, at least some kind of nominal Christian faith. He has some kind of Christian background. They say they believe in Jesus, they may not know what they believe about him or they may not be firmly educated in their faith, but they profess to be Christians. And so the Book of Mormon is presented to them as,

hey, if you read this and you see God is behind it, then you'll know that the LDS Church is the true church. And Joseph Smith is a prophet of God. So all of this depends on the authenticity of the Book of Mormon. Well said. Now, we're going to get into who these witnesses are, what they claim to have seen, whether they're reliable witnesses or not. But anything else about the plates? You said we can't assess them today. They're either buried, taken to heaven is the story that's often told. But anything about how Joseph Smith got the plates, anything about how he translated them that's kind of relevant for our investigation at this point? Well, there are a lot of things that could be said about this. And I'm smiling not because I want to make fun of it, but because it's a really incredible story. And I'll just give you the bare bones. I've already mentioned a little bit of this already. Joseph Smith says that he first saw the gold plates in 1823.

He says that he was led to the silver. spot where the plates were buried inside a box along with some other paraphernalia. Most importantly, stones that he was told would be used to translate them or read them. But he wasn't allowed to take them at that time. And he had to come back once a year, every year. And it was on the, it was on or around September 21st, 22nd, something like the, the, what's it called the equinox, you know? And so he would come up back on this very special day on the calendar,

and he would be shown the plates again and be told, you can't have them right now, you can't take them now. And there were always, there was always some instruction that he failed to follow or some concern that was raised about him taking them. And then finally in 1827, he was a 11th. allowed to take custody the plates. He took them home without showing them to his wife, who was with him at the time, waiting in the wagon. She couldn't see them.

He took them home. He wouldn't show them to anybody. He had a farmer friend of his named Martin Harris agreed to take dictation of his translation of the plates, and I'm skipping parts of the story because it's just too long. And Martin Harris was not allowed to see the plates while he was taking dictation. There was something set up between him and Joseph for at least part of that time and other times later on when he or somebody else was doing the scribal work. They couldn't see the plates. Joseph wasn't even looking at the plates most of the time. He was dictating with his face buried in his hat,

with a stone inside the hat that was later called a seer stone, but in pop culture at the time, it was called a peep stone or some kind of, basically it was a magic rock you used to find buried treasure. And Joseph had been doing that. He'd been using a stone in his hat to look for buried treasure for over five years before any of this got started, about six years. And he was doing the same thing. I almost said the same trick, but I don't want to be too prejudicial here, but it was definitely just a trick when he was looking for buried treasure. I think I can say that without fear of contradiction. After all, he did it for several years and never found a thing, unless you count the gold plates. But he didn't supposedly find them, using it.

the sear stone or the stone in the hat. So then Joseph dictates the Book of Mormon. Again, no one sees the plates throughout the entire period that he's translating them. They may see them covered up on a table, but they don't actually see the plates. Then Joseph, and how Joseph was dictating the Book of Mormon with his face buried in his hat remains a bit of a mystery, I guess we could call it a puzzle. On the one hand, it's pretty impressive. He dictated 500 pages of text, you know, and most of it in two or three months' time, there's some wiggle room for the exact chronology there. But he dictated a lot of content in a very short period of time. There's a lot of things we could talk about with that that kind of explain at least that in some fashion,

but still pretty impressive. On the other hand, he's still. He's not using the plates. He's not looking at the plates. He's not reading the plates. And there's, you know, this common mythology in Mormonism of Joseph Smith with what looked like spectacles, big spectacles on his face with the stones set in wire rims so that he can use them as eyeglasses to read the plates. And he's looking at the plates and he's got his finger running along the hieroglyphs or whatever. That never. happened. He didn't use the plates. To be honest, he didn't need the plates. Okay. So Joseph later on dictated all kinds of revelations without using physical documents, without even using the rock

later on. So all kinds of questions come up at this point. And I'm just introduced. that that is background to, you've got this thing going on with Joseph and the stone in the hat and the plates that nobody's allowed to look at or touch. They could pick, his wife says she picked them up or lifted them up to sort of dust under them a couple of times, but she wasn't allowed to look at them. Joseph hid the plates when he wasn't dictating the Book of Mormon with them sitting on the table. He hid them in a barrel of beans or he hid them in a shed or he hid them various places. Supposedly people were trying to steal the plates because they were reportedly made of gold,

so they'd be worth something. And he had to go to all these extremes to hide the plates so that nobody would get them, which raises interesting questions later about the fact that the witnesses to the Book of Mormon had to have a prearranged meeting to be allowed to see the plates and whether they were going to see them was always a little bit of a question. So that's kind of the background. So he finishes dictating the Book of Mormon in June of 1829, if I remember the exact month correctly. And he at some point there allows these two groups of men, three and eight, to see the plates. then they're gone.

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Really well described. I had not connected for some reason, even though until I read the recent Joseph Smith biography by John Turner, that he has the plates, but it's not even technically translated them. present, but he's not even using them, even though we're often told that's the narrative. And then, of course, he got revelation later without the plates. But with that said, the witnesses claim to have seen or touched these plates. It's at the beginning of the Book of Mormon. And time and time again in conversation and online, I've had LDS friends I've talked to it. I've had atheists discount the resurrection appearances and say evangelicals are inconsistent

because we accept what's in the Bible, but not the Book of Mormon. So let's dive into that a little bit more closely. And maybe there's the three witnesses and there's the eight witnesses. So 11 in total. Let's take them one by one with the three witnesses. So who are they? Yeah, go ahead. If I could just back up a little bit on this.

The broader picture here is that, as you're mentioning here, on the one hand, Mormons are arguing that Christians, primarily evangelical Christians, that's what they're really targeting here, are being inconsistent because they accept the testimonies of the Gospels and of Paul that these various individuals saw Jesus alive after his death. They had experiences in which they sincerely believed they had seen the risen Christ. But they don't accept, the evangelicals and other Christians secondarily, don't accept Joseph Smith's claim that he saw the risen Christ in what is known as the first vision, or that the 11 witnesses saw the gold plates.

Three of them also said they saw an angel. And so the Mormons argue, this is on the one hand, that all of this is just gross inconsistency on the part of Christians who accept the New Testament accounts of these supernatural visions and experiences, but not that of. Joseph Smith and his 11 comrades. On the other hand, skeptics are using the same argument in reverse, whereas the Mormons are saying, if you accept Paul and the other appearances in the New Testament, you ought to be able to accept Joseph.

The skeptics are saying, you guys don't accept Joseph Smith, so you're being inconsistent by accepting Paul and the New Testament, other New Testament appearances. Now, it was seeing that this argument was being used by skeptics in this way, as well as by Mormons. And by the way, the Mormon use of this comparison goes back to Joseph Smith themselves. That motivated me to write a book that came out in 2020 called Jesus Resurrection and Joseph's visions, examining the foundations of Christianity and Mormonism. What I tried to argue in that book is that if you approach these two sets of claims, the New Testament claims and Joseph Smith's claims, you don't assume miracles can't happen.

You also don't assume that any miracle claim is as good as any other, but you look at the evidence for both sets of claims as a whole, as an aggregate, and you try to be as fair-minded as you can and apply the same standards and methods to both, not special pleading for one and, you know, not for the other. If you do that, I argue that the evidence for Jesus' resurrection in the New Testament and his appearances, especially that to Paul, but others as well, is very, very good. The evidence is excellent, and there's no really overriding big problem with these accounts. There's minor apparent discrepancies. But, you know, there's nothing that takes them out of the realm of history.

They're just, they're miracles. If you think miracles can happen, then there's nothing really wrong with these stories. Whereas in the case of Joseph Smith and his associates, we have serious historical problems that don't have anything to do with me, assuming theological, that an angel wouldn't appear to Joseph Smith or any, there's no theological question begging here. There's no dogmatic objections at all. It's just looking at the matter historically. We have serious reasons to question the first vision in which Joseph Smith said Christ appeared to him. And we have serious reasons to question the authenticity of the Book of Mormon. Not just the testimonies of the witnesses, although we do have reasons to question there.

testimonies, but also the internal evidence of the Book of Mormon is heavily stacked against its authenticity. So I try to take all of the evidence. So, for example, with Jesus' resurrection, I don't just appeal to the witnesses. I also appeal to the historical fact of the death of Jesus on the cross, which leaves a gaping hole in history if they went from that to a thriving movement of people believing Jesus was alive, and the evidence for the empty tomb, which is the closest thing to an artifactual, something comparable to maybe the gold plates, unless you count the shroud of Turin, which I don't really get into that, but that's another interesting question. But I try to look at all the evidence, the physical, historical, objective evidence

that isn't dependent on accepting miraculous claims, and then situate those testimonies in that context with what we know about the people involved. I try to do the same thing with the evidence as pertaining to Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, and the witnesses to the Book of Mormon. And the bottom line in my view is the evidence isn't very good for the latter. In fact, there's strong evidence against Joseph Smith's claims and the claims of the witnesses to the Book of Mormon. And so it's not that I have a bias against miracles or even that I have a bias against modern miracles. I have a bias against poorly evidenced claims, whether they're miraculous or not, and these are very poorly evidenced. Rob, that was beautifully stated. I'm glad you paused me to

clarify what's at stake. And that also explains why I asked you to come on to the show, because you've done a lot of work in the historical Jesus. You care deeply about LDS. people and the theology and the debates and invested yourself in this. So let's jump into the witnesses. And this is right at the beginning of the book of Mormon. And in some ways, it's powerful to start with somebody who's reading this thinking, wow, this isn't just a fictional story. In some ways, it's like jumping into the gospel of Luke, where Luke is like, we have,

you know, I've investigated this carefully. I've talked to witnesses. I've chronicled so you know the certainty of it. for the uneducated jumping into Luke, it feels very much the same jumping into the Book of Mormon, but rather than one person, you have 11. But the devil, so to speak, is in the details. So there's 11 witnesses. Let's take the three at first, if that's okay, and just who are the three, what claim is made, and what do you make of that claim?

All right. So the three witnesses are Martin Harris, who was Joseph Smith's primary. principal financial backer in the Book of Mormon project. He was financing the writing of the translation. And he even started doing some of the translation himself. He got fired from that part of the job. But that's a fun story as well. But he was the first scribe and the primary financial backer of the Book of Mormon. So he was heavily invested in the project from the get-go. The second person I'll mention is Oliver Cowdery. Oliver Cowdery became the primary scribe for the Book of Mormon. He wrote most of the manuscript of the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon, and then he made a

duplicate copy of it in his own hand, also in 1829. So he was very, very heavily involved in the project before he allegedly saw the gold plates. Then the third person was Martin, excuse me, was David Whitmer. David and his family housed, hosted Joseph and his wife for months while Joseph worked on translating the gold plates into the Book of Mormon. So they were very heavily involved in the project as well, very supportive of it, believed in it fervently, prior to seeing the gold plates. So those are our three witnesses. Okay, so let's talk about why you don't believe them and think their claims are credible

and maybe what they really actually saw. Because part of the debate is, was this just a spiritual scene or was it a physical scene? And then we'll get to the 11. So break those down for us, if you will. Sure. Now, I want to, I apologize if I keep taking the wheel here in a way I shouldn't. Take it away. Take us where we need to go.

I want to make something clear here. Do it. And that is that if we just look at each individual and their testimony or their contribution to the testimony that was written down that's in the front of the Book of Mormon now, You know, you could have questions, but, you know, there are reasons why Mormons feel that they can believe these people, and the fact that there's 11 of them seems to count for something. And so it's the big picture about these 11 witnesses that also disturbs me as on top of, or maybe even more so, than their individual stories. Now, with regards to the three witnesses, what happened was, as I mentioned, they didn't get to see the gold plates at first. They were not allowed to look at them, even though Joseph had them for various parts of a period of over two years, or about two years. And they desperately wanted to see them.

And at some point, Joseph delivered a revelation that God was going to allow Martin Harris and a couple of others to see the plates. That was eventually written into the Book of Mormon itself. There's a prophecy attributed to an ancient prophet in Israelite prophet in the book of Mormon narrative, predicting that the person to whom these plates are, would be entrusted, would be allowed to show them to three witnesses. And, of course, from an outsider's perspective, this is simply something Joseph introduced into the Book of Mormon narrative as a prophecy to tell his supporters, yeah, you're going to be able to see these. From a Mormon perspective, it's, you know, 2,500 years ago, God revealed this to the Israelite prophet living in the Americas.

So that's the two very radically different perspectives, right, on this passage. And this is going to come up hundreds of times if you're reading the Mormon scriptures. So anyway, Joseph told these three guys that we've mentioned that they were going to be those three witnesses. Now, later on, Joseph introduced the idea that there was going to be, a possibility that other people besides the three were going to be allowed to be the witnesses among the witnesses. At first, it was just three. It was going to be limited to three. And then it was expanded to possibly others that the Lord might so choose, you know, that kind of open-ended, you know, escape valve actually, escape clause. So the three witnesses were taken into a secluded

part of the woods outside one of the Whitmer's homes. And allegedly, a brilliant light came over them, bathed the area. And they, but only after, this is one of the weirdest parts of the whole story, only after Martin Harris said, you know what, I think I'm holding up the show here, because they were praying earnestly for this vision to come upon them. And not Nothing was happening. And Martin said, I think I'm the problem here. So he separated himself and went off somewhere away from the others so that they could be, they could continue praying and seeking the vision without any spiritual obstruction on his part. This is, everyone seems to agree this happened in some fashion. So then the other two witnesses, Oliver Cowdery and David Whitmer, were with Joseph Smith. And they reported this bright light coming over them and see. seeing an angel and the angel holding the gold plates and turning some of the pages so they could see that there were metal pages. And they also, and also on a table out there in the woods,

I don't know who put the table there. I've never seen any comment about where the table came from. But on a table, there was not only the gold plates, but there were other paraphernalia. the interpreters or Yeram and Thumbum, sometimes they got called later on, the stones that were supposedly set in wire rims to be used as spectacles. Those were on the table. And the sword of Laban mentioned in the book of Mormon is this very, you know, extravagant looking, apparently weapon that the hero of the first part of the book, Mormon Nephi takes off the dead man Laban.

That was on the table, and there were other things on the table. And so they saw the angel and they heard the voice of God, maybe, not just the angel, but also a voice of God, supposedly. Some of them at least said that was the case, telling them that this was true, that it was the word of God, and it's translated correctly and all that. And so later on, Joseph got together with Martin Harris, and they prayed separately, just the two of them. And Martin Harris reported that he had an experience that he understood to be a vision or revelation of the Book of Mormon plates and that satisfied him. So that's what that's, now the problem, a problem, not the only problem. with this story, other than it just being weird in certain ways that I don't know that has any good theological explanation, is that both Harris and Whitmer later on made statements indicating

that the experience was less than, shall we say, physical, that it was a spiritual experience or a vision. And the angel, according to David Whitmer, and I just found this statement more puzzling than anything. I don't even know what I'd want to make very much out of it. But look, this is what he said. He said, the angel didn't, he was asked to describe the angel. He said, well, I can't really describe him because he didn't really look like anything. And, you know, he was kind of nothing from your point of view. and, you know, it's kind of hard to, he basically didn't have an answer as to what the angel looked like. And they didn't touch the plates.

This is the general consensus of the import of the testimony that's in the Book of Mormon and of their later interviews that they didn't get to touch the leaves of the Book of Mormon gold plates at all. So does one? take this story seriously? Well, you take it seriously in the sense that, you know, these guys definitely claimed this happened, but what happened? And are we being given sort of the straight scoop here? Those are legitimate questions. This is not an obviously credible miracle account or visionary account. And there are a number of reasons why we can get into maybe after we talk about the testimony of the eight witnesses.

But the point is that the story has some credibility issues, even on the elements that I've described, not because I don't believe in miracles or visions or modern occurrences, but because the story just doesn't seem to fit well, either with biblical accounts of miracles and visions or even to make much sense on its own terms. That's really helpful. We'll circle back to some of your other concerns. On page 54 of history of the church, Smith wrote, not many days after the above commandment was given, We four, which is Martin Harris, David Whitmer, Oliver Caldry, the three you mentioned, and myself, Joseph Smith, agreed to retire into the woods, and try to obtain by fervent and humble prayer the fulfillment of the promises given in the above revelation that they should have a view of the plates. Now, I'll skip down. He says that we did not at the first trial, whoever,

obtain an answer on manifestation of divine favor in our behalf. We again observed the same order of prayer, each calling on praying fervently to God in rotation, but with the same result as before. And then they describe a light and kind of a vision that they had. But in an article on this, Bill McKeever, friend of both of ours, the Mormon Research Ministry, he says, praying to see the golden plates out in the woods seems rather odd. After all, Smith had already commenced translating the plates in a second-story bedroom in the Peter Whitmer cabin. Why not just allow the three men to see the gold record at the location?

Why was prayer necessary to see a plate if they were, in fact, tangible? Harris's behavior also seems strange if the plates actually existed. How would his doubt be a detriment to seeing a physical object? These are very fair questions, and we might certainly. back to this, but before we go on to the eight, any other thoughts on that are concerns you want to raise at this point? Well, I'm going to try to be scrupulously fair on this issue because a Mormon could object that, well, you had to have faith to see the angel. Maybe not to see the plates, but the angel showed them the plates. In order to be allowed to see the angel, you had to have

faith and you had to sort of make yourself spiritually ready. That might be, and I don't know how many Mormons would say that, but that might be one way of trying to diffuse the issue, but it doesn't work very well because nowhere in the Bible, no, I have to say there's one exception. almost everywhere in the Bible, when people see angels, they're totally unprepared for it. They don't know that they're going to see an angel. They're not looking to see an angel. In some cases, they don't even realize it was an angel until it's over.

There's one exception to that, and that's the story in the Old Testament historical books, about there was an army of angels that was there to protect the Israelites from a foreign enemy. and one guy couldn't see the angels until the other one said, yeah, the Lord will show you now, and boom, they saw all the angels. So that's the only exception. But he didn't need to spiritually prepare himself for it. He just need to be told, you know, this is going to be shown to you. So this idea that these three men had to spiritually prepare themselves through fervent prayer

and kind of worked themselves into a spiritual state, really, in order to see the angel and the plates is very suspicious. It does look like, in fact, that was the point. They had to work themselves into a spiritual lather in order to have the experience. That's what it looks like. And, of course, yes, I'm speaking about this from an outsider's perspective, but it makes sense in a way that the claim

that they really did need to have this kind of faith and fervency and prayer before they could see the plates. That theory is not only scuttled for the reasons that you mentioned from Bill McKeever saying, but also because, as Bill would agree, the thing that happened a day or two later completely disproves the whole thing. And that is that the eight were allowed to see the plates, and they didn't have to prepare themselves in any way, shape, or form. I don't understand why it was necessary for the three, but not for the eight. Now that's a great question. Let's go to the eight, but I would say in history of the church, Joseph Smith wrote that they would try to obtain by Furn Humble Prayer referring to that they should have a view of the plates, not the angel.

And if they're physical and he's translating it, we don't need an angel to deliver it. So it just adds layers in confusion. But with that said, let's shift to the eight right now and talk about who's. they are and what you make of that. Okay, so the eight witnesses, I'm going to rattle off their names, and just doing that will be informative. John Whitmer, Jacob Whitmer, Hiram Page, Christian Whitmer, Peter Whitmer, Jr., Joseph Smith, Sr., Hiram Smith, and Samuel H. Smith.

Now, all of these eight witnesses turned out to be members of either the Whitmer clan or the Smith clan because Hiram Page was married to David Whitmer's sister, Catherine. And so they were either Whitmer's or they were Smiths. And several brothers of David Whitmer, Joseph Smith's father, Joseph Sr., and two of his brothers, Hiram and Samuel. Those were the eight witnesses. Now, I say that this is already something that should be at least a bit of a yellow alert, you know, because it's, we talked about we were going to compare this with the resurrection appearances. Jesus' resurrection appearances were to men and women from at least a dozen different families, very likely a lot more families,

than that, but at least a dozen different families, no more than two or three from any single family. But Joseph's witnesses to his gold plates are all except one taken from the Smith or Whitmer families, because Caldery was a distant cousin of his, and a couple years later, he married one of the Whitmer's. And so he was already kind of ex officio part of the both families in a way. He was very close to both families, but technically not a close relative until he married Elizabeth Whitmer. And Martin Harris, the only outlier here for sure. He was never part of either family. But all the others are Smiths and Whitmer's. This led Mark Twain to caustically remark in his book, Ruffing It. I could not have been more satisfied if,

if the whole Whitmer family had testified. I didn't know he had said that. That's interesting. Okay. So now, please understand. There's nothing wrong with a family member being involved. The problem here is that we have virtually all of the witnesses mustered to provide testimony to the gold plates, being members of these two families, and all 11 of them already. heavily invested financially, logistically, emotionally, and, you know, or more than one of those ways,

in the success of the Book of Mormon Project. They were backing it financially. They were hosting Joseph in their home. They were, you know, they were part of his family, you know. So they were all heavily invested in it. And Joseph's selection of these 11 men from these almost all, from the two families and all of the eight from the Whitmer's and Smith families, raised some serious questions about the credibility of their cumulative testimony. Because we're really just having two small family groupings that are heavily involved in this project. And they didn't have to be convinced to be witnesses. wanted to be. They were already part of the project, and they wanted the honor of being counted

as among the witnesses to the gold plates. And that at least raises some legitimate questions or doubts about the value of their testimony cumulatively and not just individually. Okay, so you mentioned that you had some concerns about the 11 when they're kind of taken as a whole that we would circle back to after we looked at the eight. So for me, a couple things to jump out were there is an expectation built in to see the plates. There's a social expectation. There's already a belief that the plates exist and were translated. They had been told about the story. this is very different than the appearances of Jesus, where Jesus predicted, Mark 8, 9, and 10,

John 2, John 10 that he would die and he would resurrect, but they don't expect it. They don't understand it. They're caught off guard and still don't believe when they hear it and they see it. So one significant difference here is just expectation and surprise between the two that I think is significant. Now, any comments on that and then any other concerns as a whole you want to bring in? Well, you're making an extremely important point. There's a lot of subsidiary elements to the stories that I think would really strengthen the point that you're making. The apostles had lost faith in Jesus after his crucifixion.

Why? Because crucifixion wasn't just dying. It was dying an ignominious, hideous, horrific, ugly, shameful death. It was designed to do that, by the way, to be all that. The Romans relished, humiliating men and their families and compatriots in the culture by doing it. this. And so the fact that Jesus had been killed by the Romans in this horrific fashion was proof positive to everyone that he couldn't have been the Messiah. After all, the traditional conventional view in popular Judaism at the time was that the Messiah was going to be a latter day David or Joshua, and he was going to destroy the Romans. And he was going to destroy the Romans and set up the kingdom of God with Jerusalem as the capital city over the whole world. That was the hope. And instead of crushing the Romans, the Romans crushed Him.

They crushed Jesus. And so in doing that, they crushed the hopes and beliefs of the disciples as well. They had no reason to think Jesus could be anything significant other than a wonderful rabbi who, you know, ended up getting caught in the cogs of the wheel of the Roman Empire. But he certainly was not the Messiah. He certainly was not in any kind of cosmic redeemer type figure. They didn't think of him that way once he'd been crucified. An example of this where it becomes explicit is the two disciples on the road to Emmaus,

talking to Jesus, not knowing it's Jesus. are you the only person that hasn't heard this story? And they're telling him what happened. And by the way, they didn't recognize Jesus because the text says their eyes were kept from recognizing him. In other words, that's a divine passive. It's a way of saying God prevented them from knowing it was Jesus. It was Jesus.

It probably looked like Jesus, but they just couldn't tell. So the two guys say to Jesus, we had hoped, past tense, we had hoped that he was the one who would redeem Israel. The past tense is very tragic. There's pathos there. There's disillusionment and disappointment in those words. This is why the two are on their way to Amas. I don't think they had a big business deal going down in Amos.

they had heard that, you know, Jesus had just been crucified, and they'd heard that the tomb was empty, and they were worried that they were going to get blamed. It's probably what was going on. And they decided to get out of Dodge. You know, they didn't want to be around for whatever happened next. So here they are. They're running away from, really, from Jesus without knowing it.

And speaking a little bit metaphor. here. Jesus runs after them. By the way, forgive me for going off script here, but just quickly, this is a death knell to the Mormon interpretation of the passage, where later on, the two disciples, once their eyes are opened and they recognize that it was Jesus, say, didn't our hearts burn within us as he was opening the scriptures to us? And Mormons used that as a template for, here's how you know that Christianity is true. Here's how you know that Christianity is true. know that Mormonism is true. If you have this deep burning feeling, this warm certainty, emotional, spiritual feeling in your heart that it's true. But to get that in Mormonism,

you have to seek it, just like the three witnesses had to seek the opportunity to see the plates in fervent prayer, and it was questionable whether they would be fervent enough. You have to seek the experience of that burning in the bosom, as Mormons call it, based on this verse in Luke chapter 24, in order to get it. But the two disciples on the road to Emmaus were not seeking Jesus. They were not seeking a spiritual experience. They were trying to get out of town before something bad happened to them. And I just want to say to Latter-day Saints that are listening, the way God reveals truth is not to bypass the historical, physical, scientific, material evidences. But he reveals himself through those things.

He revealed himself with a mighty hand through the Exodus and the conquest. He revealed himself through the miracles that Jesus performed during his mortal lifetime and through his own resurrection from the dead. God is in the business of showing himself through these kinds of actions. and he provides a trail of clues that are left behind for people that want to know if these things really happened or not. And that's how we know that these things are true, not because we have a feeling in our hearts that tells us this is the right church to join or this is the right book to believe. I don't even do that with the Bible. I believe the Bible because I have reasons to believe that it's true and because it has proven itself to remain.

valuable, illuminating, enlightening, and powerful in people's lives, even after we've forgotten half of what was going on in the cultures where they were written. So there's a wealth of evidence in support of the Bible, but when it comes to Mormonism, if you want to believe it, you're constantly having to explain things away, like the problems that we've already been talking about. And so these two disciples on the road to Amaya, are an example of God intervening to provide evidence to people that weren't looking for it. And in Mormonism, the 11 witnesses were desperately seeking to see the plates to confirm to their minds that they were supporting something that was true,

but also because it was going to be a great honor to be witnesses to the gold plates. And in the case of Jesus' resurrection, he's constantly appearing to people out of the blue. They're not looking for him. They're not expecting him. Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene. She's confused and she's crying her eyes out and she thinks he's the gardener. What did you do with this body? Jesus appears to the disciples in the upper room.

They're startled and they think they're seeing a ghost. You know, Paul is on his way to persecute Christians, and Christ stops him on the road and says, Why are you persecuting me? These are the New Testament models or examples that we have of how people came to recognize that Jesus had risen from the dead. The witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus Christ were not people that sought to be those. witnesses, but they were pressed into service by the unprepared, unannounced, not prearranged appearance of Jesus to them, whereas all of the experiences of the 11, whether it's two or three,

however you want to count those, they're all prearranged by Joseph Smith. If you want to see the gold plates, you've got to come with me out into the woods. When I say, and then if you pray really hard for the first group for some reason, you can see the plates and an angel will show them. The eight, we don't know exactly what happened there. But they just, they had to go with Joseph. They had to be with Joseph. And they had to go when he said it was time to go with his permission. Jesus just appeared. Peter didn't do that. You know, Peter didn't, it wasn't even present at most of the appearances of Jesus in the Gospels. He, and And he certainly didn't prearrange any of them.

Peter never said to the other disciples, hey, would you like to see Jesus? He's in the other room, but he's kind of shy. And if you want to see him, you have to pray real hard and really show yourself spiritually worthy and focused. And then I'll let you see Jesus. That didn't happen. And that's a huge, tremendous difference between the appearances of Jesus.

in the New Testament and the encounters with the gold plates in the story of Joseph Smith. First off, Rob, you are not taking us off track. This is exactly what I was hoping you would lay out for us. And I want to emphasize in Doctrine and Covenants 17, Joseph Smith said he obtained a revelation from the Lord. He says, Behold, I say unto you that you must rely upon my word, which if you do with full purpose of heart, you shall have a view. of the plates. So full purpose of heart, trust on his word. It says again, that was verse one, verse two, and it is by your faith, you shall obtain a view of them, even by that faith, which was had by the prophets of old. And after you have obtained faith and have seen them

with your eyes, you shall testify about them. So it's built in before they even see it, that they're kind of called to this task of uniquely testifying like the prophets of old, which in some ways could land as like, wow, I uniquely get to see this spiritual, have this spiritual experience and testify of Jesus. Then really, this would take us aside. But verse four says, you shall do that my servant Joseph Smith, Jr. may not be destroyed. And talk about putting emotional pressure on somebody. Pray fervently to see this. And if you don't all be destroyed.

I mean, I don't want to overstate this, but it just, it smacks of. such manipulation to me to read this, frankly. I think it is. Now, to your point earlier, I just want to read a couple sources. Harris told skeptic Anthony Metcalfe that he, quote, never saw the plates except in a visionary or entranced state. He said, I never saw the golden plates, only a visionary and transstate. I wrote a great deal of the book more of myself, as Joseph Smith translator spelled the words out

in English. Sometimes a plates would be on a table in the room, which Smith did to translate and covered with a cloth. I was told by Smith that God would strike him dead if he attempted to look at them. And I believe them. So there's so many factors here that just add to it. And it kind of raises the question, do we have any actual witnesses of the plates? Now, by witnesses, I mean, the kind of witnesses we have in the Bible are clearly we saw Jesus.

He's been transformed, but it's the same Jesus. reach out and touch his ankles. Touch me. I'm not a ghost. He eats fish. Now, I know skeptics would come in and say that was added later, but that is a separate conversation. That is not the dialogue we're having here. When you take the appearances as a whole, it's not in a visionary state. These are genuine eyewitnesses. So we have all over the gospel, John, all over acts. We are witnesses of these things. We have seen it. And it's meant in the kind of sense, as our friend Jay Warner Wallace says, the kind of witnesses we would

have today to a crime scene. So are there any actual witnesses that can testify to holding and seeing the plates, not in an entranced state, but physically like we see something else? What's your take on that? Well, the conventional story based on the way Mormons usually read the testimony of the eight witnesses is that. the eight witnesses actually held the plates in their hands, touched them, were able to feel the pages, maybe turn the pages, and so forth. There's a little bit of confusion in the sources beyond the published testimony as to whether the physical manipulation or handling of the plates was on the same occasion as when Joseph allowed the eight witnesses to view the plates together.

And most of the sources agreed that it was together. John Whitmer at one point said that they were four at one time and four another time. Almost nobody believes that. So Joseph shows the eight guys, the plates, all in one, go on some occasion. We don't have the exact date. We can guess within a few days probably. But is that when they actually held the plates and physically touched, you know, the metal and all that? The source, the interviews that they did later are a little bit confusing on that issue. The few that talked about at all. Actually, none of the eight witnesses except John Whitmer ever said anything publicly that got written down after the testimony was published in the, the Book of Mormon. The other seven of the eight witnesses either died too soon or just never

said anything or didn't say anything because they were estranged, but they, you know, didn't come out and criticize the Book of Mormon. The three of the, so as I mentioned, John Whitmer, one of David's brothers, settled a very little bit, not much. At one point, he said, said something about being shown the plates by a supernatural power. Does that mean it was a spiritual experience? It's unclear. Then of the three witnesses, the first group, two of them gave extensive interviews, mostly in the 1870s. So that's, you know, 40 plus years later. They're talking to newspaper reporters and others about their experiences, and they talk about seeing the plates. And as you mentioned, several times they said things that seemed to indicate that the plates were

not shown to them in a physically solid, you know, form that they could, you know, that they could have reached out and touched or something. at one point David Whitmer compared it to or was asked if it was similar to a Quaker experience of something spiritual and he said yeah wow it was so um the the I'll just I'll just cut to kind of my where I am on the sort of on this issue I think the eight witnesses probably saw something okay I think they probably saw metal plates. At this point, and for several years now, I've taken this position. I took it in that book that I mentioned earlier that was published, gee, six years ago now.

Time flies. And my view is that more than likely, although nobody can prove that this is true or that it isn't true, more than likely Joseph had a set of metal plates he may have constructed them himself. His father's farm included a cooper shop. That's an old-fashioned term for a place where you worked with tin and copper and, you know, made things, made buckets or whatever, you know, that you needed on the farm. And he may have well made some plates out of the tin.

And there's a couple of interesting comments that Joseph and others made years later about the gold plates saying that they were at something. similar to 10, you know, or that the pages were almost the same thickness as 10. And maybe because they were, you know, we can't prove that because nobody can prove anything about the plates because they don't exist, at least in any form that anybody can find. But it's a reasonable hypothesis. So I'm willing to concede for the sake of argument, let's say, that Joseph may well have had some plates, and they may have looked like gold plates to the men in the eight witnesses. I'm less confident that Joseph showed actual plates to the three, but that's also possible.

Okay. Who knows? What I can say definitively is that none of them knew what was on those plates. They didn't know that they were written in any particular language or anything, any script that they could identify as to its linguistic nature. They certainly didn't know what it would mean if you translated it into English, if it was translatable. They reportedly saw, I'm going to use, I'm sorry if this sounds pejorative, I don't mean it that way. They reportedly saw squiggles on the metal plates that they took as ancient characters, but they couldn't reproduce them, and they didn't know what they meant. So at most, the testimony of the eight witnesses confirms for all, but, you know, the skeptic who just doesn't want to think that there were plates, that they very well may have seen metal plates, but that doesn't prove the Book of Mormon is true.

That's kind of where I land on this. I'm open to being corrected, but I don't know of any good evidence that he didn't have plates. and he may well have had some metal plates, and he may well have constructed them into a kind of a book like artifice with the rings that he said were bound them together. And so that may have been the case. But it's very peculiar that he didn't show anybody these plates for something like two years after he allegedly took custody them.

He never showed them to his wife. Not once. It's not that she wasn't around. I mean, she had to dust under them, reportedly. His first wife, Emma, is the key. He never showed them to his mother. She was one of his biggest supporters.

He never showed them to her. He never showed them to his wife. Of course, he wouldn't show them to Lucy Harris, who was Martin's doubting wife. who was very upset about the whole thing and upset about Martin wasting his time and money on it, he wouldn't show her the plates either. That I could kind of understand, but not showing his mother or his wife. What's wrong with this picture?

Then we have this story that comes up like 50 years later. Well, I'm sorry, I'm exaggerating, 40 plus years later from David Whitmer, that his mother, Mary, was out. in the barn, I guess, to milk a cow or something. And she saw this old man that turned out to be the angel Maroni, and Maroni showed her the plates. This is before any of the 11 witnesses got to see them, too. I don't really buy David's story about Mary, but it's one of those folkloric things that you can't prove or disprove. But why would the Lord have an angel show the plates to Mary Whitmer but not to Lucy Smith or Emma Smith.

It doesn't make any sense. They never did get to see the plates. They were taken away, and these faithful women that supported Joseph through thick and thin never got to see them. Rob, that's a good take. Let me read a couple things, and I'll have you kind of give some wrap-up thoughts here. This is in Bill McKeever's article on did the 11 witnesses see the plates. apparently on April 5th, 1839, Theodore Turley challenged John Whitmer

to either affirm or deny his testimony regarding the golden plates. Whitmer responded by saying the plates were, quote, shown to me by a supernatural power. This is the history of the church 3307. And McKeever asked, why would the supernatural power be necessary

if the plates actually existed? Again, super fair question. So Robert N. Hollinger, on page 133 of his book, Joseph Smith, the skepticism wrote, The written testimony of the eight witnesses differed from that of the three witnesses. They claim no revelation,

no voice declared to them that the work is true, no power of God showed them the plates, just Joseph Smith. No angel of God laid the plates before them, no voice of the Lord told them to testify what they saw. For that reason, Edward Meyer concluded the testimony of the eight witnesses

was written primarily to further evidence that Smith and Eid had the plates rather than as a demonstration of modern day revelation. However, the eight did. did claim revelation in their conversations with others subsequently. When David and Mark stopped at the Whitmer's on March 1830, the eight witnesses, quote, affirmed that an angel had showed them certain plates of metal,

having the appearance of gold that were dug out of the ground by one Joseph Smith, end quote. They explained to Marx certain basic points about the Book of Mormon and its contents, but claim to have viewed the plates in vision only. So minimally, the few times they've spoken, there's very contradictory testimony about what they saw, how they saw, whether it was physical or spiritual, also like the three, which calls it into question. In this new biography on Joseph Smith by John Turner, who I think is just a very fair historian, he says the people closest to Joseph Smith, his wife, his parents, his siblings, and a few friends all believed him.

at the same time because he did not show his family and friends the plates there aren't witnesses in the ordinary sense of the term that's a powerful distinction if he's right from the witnesses that we have to the risen jesus then you skip down he says along with the acknowledgment of the scanty evidence for this critical episode in joseph smith's life readers deserve an author's best sense of what transpired in this case it is that joseph smith did not have golden plates when solomon refused used to show a hidden valuable object to others. The simplest explanation is that he does not possess it. Now, that makes sense. That's a reasonable conclusion. But your point is, even if he had it, what would this prove? And I don't know why I don't hear enough people saying this. There's a qualitative difference between seen golden plates that by their very nature are not necessarily supernatural. Anybody could make them. We've seen replicas of these today, I've held them myself, seen it with my physical eyes, even if all of them saw the plates, that's qualitatively different than seeing a person alive who was dead three days earlier

and crucified and the wounds are gone. So in some ways, I'm super skeptical of the story. I'm super skeptical that they're witnesses at all, but even if they weren't witnesses, It wouldn't prove anything supernatural about the contents they're in. Do you agree with that assessment? Tell us what you think. Yes. Now, look, the testimony of the eight witnesses wasn't written by any of the eight witnesses. It was a document that was drafted for them, probably by Oliver Cowdery and or Joseph Smith. It's written in a quasi-legal style like an affidavit.

It's written like it's a legal document. document that they're going to sign as the signatories to this affidavit. So is the testimony of the three witnesses. I mean, there's religious language interwoven through it, but the style and a lot of the specific kinds of statements that are made are clearly in a legal cachet. And yet, neither of these two documents has a date. Neither of them says where they were when they had the experience, where they were or when they signed the document. Neither document gives any particulars at all about the specific occasion of the witnessing of the plates or the signing of the document. We don't have a copy.

We don't have the paper on which the witnesses allegedly signed the documents. We have handwritten copy of the documents all. in Oliver Cowdery's hand. He writes all the names of the signatories at the bottom of the document. Did they ever sign the document? Well, one or two of them said that they did, but they didn't draft it. Oliver Cowdery probably drafted it. Again, maybe with some input from Joseph Smith. It's a kind of a It's a boilerplate document with none of the elements that are supposed to make it an official

attestation to an event in 19th century way of composing such a document. Again, no date, no, you know, no, witnessed by, you know, some judge or something. This law clerk is nothing like that. that. It looks like a document that was drafted and the guys were told, look, sign this or say that you signed it, and then that can be included in the published Book of Mormon, and your names will go down in posterity as among these witnesses. Did they actually see something or not? It's hard

to know. That's why I say, I'm willing to concede that Joseph may have had plates. Very likely, it seems that he did, but it isn't necessarily the case. We don't really know. Some of these unanswered questions, and also there are unanswered questions about the contents of the Book of Mormon. Some of these unanswered questions are unanswered for one simple reason. Joseph Smith was secretive. He manipulated the circumstances so that he was always in control. All of the For all of the first generation miraculous experiences or visions that allegedly were foundational to Mormonism, the first vision, the appearances of the angel Maroni, and there were a bunch of those, over a dozen of those, the appearance of the angel with the three, with the plates to the three witnesses. the appearance of John the Baptist and of Peter James and John to Joseph and Oliver Caldry to establish the priesthoods. All of these, Joseph was present.

All of these, Joseph dictated when these would occur, or he alone experienced them, as in the case of the first vision. You're basically dependent on Joseph Smith for the whole shebang. Also, the vision of what was on the gold plates and what it meant. That's dependent on Joseph alone. He's got his head, his face buried in the hat, and he's dictating what supposedly the gold plate said in English. But nobody can see the stone, let alone anything else that might confirm this, except Joseph. So, see, Christianity does not depend on the testimony of one mortal human being in this fashion.

If you don't accept Peter, well, there's Paul and vice versa. And there's also John. And these are all eyewitnesses. And you're not being asked to accept anyone's word for anything. You're not being asked to accept anyone's experiences for anything. All of these appearances of Christ in the New Testament are on such varied occasions with varied individual. I count at least 10 different experiences or events involving at least 20 different people. And that's not even counting the appearance to the 500 mentioned in 1st Corinthians 156.

We just set that one aside and say, look, we've got something like 20 or more people. We can count them and we can name almost all of them that we are told had this experience of seeing the risen Christ on various occasions. None of them were there for even a majority of them. They were all unannounced. Jesus just shows up wherever he pleases, to whomever he pleases, whenever he chooses. And that is such a different situation than what we have in the case of the Book of Mormon gold plates and Joseph Smith. It all comes back to, do you believe Joseph Smith?

Do you trust him? Or was he a manipulator? Now, I have to be honest with you, when I first started really researching Joseph Smith in a very serious fashion, his whole life and all of these things, I didn't know what to make of Joseph. Was he telling the truth? Was he demonically inspired? Was he a deceiver, a con artist? I was willing to follow the evidence wherever it led. I'm honestly, if it led to me concluding that Mormonism was true, okay, well, then it's true.

That's how I felt about it. But I had good reasons already to think that wasn't the case, but I was still open to investigating whether Joseph was sincere or not. I came very reluctantly to the conclusion that he was not, that he was a con artist, that he was pulling shell games on people, that he was. manipulating people. Look, if you pray really, really, really hard, maybe God will let you see the plates. You know, this kind of thing creates an expectation and puts pressure on the person to feel that they're going to have this experience and sort of primes the pump so that they do. Just like children in the LDS Church being taught from the day they can start understanding words that you need to have this experience of the testimony of the Holy Ghost, that the Book of

Mormon is true, and that Joseph Smith is a prophet of God, and the LDS Church is the true church, because that's how you'll know, and that's how you'll become a strong believer and have a healthy, spiritual and moral life. You've got to have that testimony. And they're coached to learn how to do that. And naturally, a lot of people who are raised in the LDS Church end up having that kind of experience. I'm not criticizing those individuals or saying they're insincere, but I'm saying that they're in a system that is inherently manipulative, spiritually manipulative. And it started with the grand spiritual manipulator, Joseph Smith himself. I don't say that out of, to be unkind or hateful even toward Joseph Smith,

but reluctantly forced by the evidence to conclude that he knew what he was saying wasn't true. And I try to go into that in that book that I mentioned, Jesus' resurrection and Joseph's visions. I'd rather not think that of anybody. I'd rather think the best of them. I'd rather think Joseph was just mistaken, but the evidence just won't support that. Rob, your book is fantastic. Jesus' resurrection and Joseph's vision.

I've had you stream into my resurrection class in the past, and I don't remember if I forwarded this on to you or not. There it is. But my students really commented like, that was fascinating, and they loved it, and it was so interesting. And like this, it's a deep dive. It's very fair. It's balanced. You're informed. You took your time.

And so it's Jesus' resurrection, Joseph's visions, examining the foundations of Christianity and Mormonism. I have one last question for you. You've got just a couple minutes as you wrap up. We were chatting before, and you'd mention the death of the apostles and how that plays in here. Obviously, I did research on that. I have my two cents, but you didn't tell me how you see it weighing into trusting the witnesses or not. So I'd love to hear your take on it. Yes.

Joseph Smith, Jr., the founding prophet of the LDS Church, and his brother Hiram Smith, were killed in a blazing gun battle in 1844. They had been put in jail. A mob stormed the jail. A gunfire broke out. Joseph had a pistol of some sort that he used to shoot back, but he and his brother, Hiram, were killed. That was a terrible thing. The mob acted in an atrocious fashion. not have done that, not only because you just shouldn't do things like that, which I totally agree

you shouldn't do things like that, but because in doing that, they ended up making Joseph and Hiram into apparent martyrs. And Mormons to this day say the most, you know, I'm sorry, egregiously grand things about what wonderful martyrs Joseph and Hiram were. And supposedly they were killed because of their testimony to the Book of Mormon, or Joseph's testimony that he had seen Jesus. Nobody in 1844 really knew anything about that. They knew that Joseph Smith had been practicing polygamy, that he was planning to run for president, that he had a printing press in his town destroyed. They knew these kinds of things. that's why he got arrested. That's why he ended up getting killed. The polygamy issue was especially

bothersome to the populace. And he wasn't killed because of his faithful testimony to what he had seen, as Mormons would like to think. So, of course, the Apostles, on the other hand, the New Testament Apostles, were not accused of crimes of any sort, really, except the crime of preaching that Jesus was the real king of kings and lord of lords. Right. And so various apostles, at least four or five that we can be pretty sure about, James, the brother of John, sons of Zebedee, James got killed, Acts 12, Peter and Paul were put to death under Nero and his persecution around 64, 65, something like that.

James, the brother's, the Lord of the Brother's Lord, the Lord's brother, I can't talk now. I'm tired, apparently. James, the Lord's brother was killed in Jerusalem in AD 62. It's reported in Josephus' works. It's not something in the Bible. It's in Josephus. So there's four, and in each case, it's pretty clear that they were killed because of their stance as Christians, particularly in the case of the apostles for Jesus' resurrection and the truth of Jesus' claims. They were not killed because they were political rabble rousers or anything like that, certainly not because they were doing something immoral. So the fact that the Apostle, and there are other apostles we have pretty decent traditions about that very likely were also martyred, but the evidence falls short of the evidence for those four, I would say. I agree. And you have a wonderful book on this subject called The Fate of the Apostles.

Oh, thanks. I'm not just saying that, Sean. I've read several books on the subject. yours was by far the best. And if I could say this, and I don't mean this any other way except just flat out making the interesting observation, your approach to the evidence is basically the kind of approach I've advocated in this book on Jesus' resurrection and Joseph's visions.

Let's take a good hard look at the historical evidence. Let's not go beyond the evidence. let's be cautious where the evidence is less than, you know, proof. But let's see where it goes. And, you know, when you do that, you've got really good evidence for about four of the apostles being martyred. And then you've got plausible evidence for some of the others. And then there's some that you just, you have to say, we just don't know. That's right.

You know. So, but your even-handed evidential approach to the topic. makes your book by far, in my opinion, by far the best book on the subject. And I strongly recommend it to people. And I cited it in my book because it's important that people understand the issue accurately. It is a mistake for Christians to argue, well, all the apostles died for their faith. That's right. Well, we don't really know that. But we know that some of them did, several of them did, and none of them died for anything wrong they had actually done. Now, look, we didn't get into this, but more than half of the 11 witnesses got excommunicated or left the LDS Church.

Two of them ended up going back, but four of them didn't. They got into other crazy things. Five of them, maybe four or five, I think it was five. Five of them for a year or so were following. a man who claimed to be Joseph Smith's successor, James Strang, Strang claimed that he had ancient plates, that he had 11 witnesses supporting their existence too. Interesting.

David Whitmer and Martin Harris were among these people that were following string. They eventually went their own way, but as most people did, because String wasn't believable in the long haul. but they fell for straying story, and it was very similar to Joseph's story. On purpose, he even had the same number of witnesses. David Whitmer, toward the end of his life, published a little book in which he said, if you believe my testimony that the Book of Mormon is true, then you should also believe my testimony that God told me,

in the same voice that told me that the Book of Mormon was true, that Joseph Smith was a fallen prophet and that I should leave the LDS Church. what do you do with that if you're being honest and you're trying to assess all the evidence? I think it's very powerful. So the Apostles' death as martyrs, as people of genuine character, all the apostles remained faithful to the end of their lives after they had seen the risen Christ. The only one that never saw the risen Christ, that was Judas Ascariat. All the apostles who saw the risen Christ remained faithful. they lived exemplary lives, several of them died for their faith.

That is a dramatically different story than what we have with the 11 witnesses to the Book of Mormon. Robert, I love it. I'm so glad that I asked you that. In my first edition, 2015, I didn't talk about this, but the topic came up so many times in the 10 years before my update, people are like, what about Joseph Smith? So I did a deep dive, and in the back of the second edition gave a response to whether or not Joseph Smith is a martyr. very much in line with what you said. But that's a topic for another day. If people want to pick up that book, great. But right now what I want them to get is your book, Jesus' resurrection and Joseph's vision.

Jesus' resurrection and Joseph's vision. Very fair, very interesting, wonderful contribution. Rob, we will do this again. And by the way, if people respond here, maybe we'll have you back on, maybe Bill McKeever, maybe some others to respond. I've had people in the past, snarky, personal attacks on videos like this, I will ignore you if you do that. And I'm not even saying

most LDS would do that. The vast majority would not. But if there's a response where people push back, we would welcome that historical analysis. One of the things I like about this is it takes the Bible and it takes the Book of Mormon into the question of history. How does history weigh in on the truth or falsity of these claims? And that's a conversation that I would love to have. and I know you would as well. Rob, this is super fun. Yeah, go ahead. Let me just invite people, if they want to learn more about the book,

go to my website, Robert Bowman.net, Robert Bowman, B-O-W-M-A-N-E-T, and they have, that website has information on this and all my other books. Free samples, excerpts on the books, you know, all that kind of information, and where you can buy them. if you're interested. So, Robert Bowman.net. Awesome. It's a great book.

I believe I endorsed it. It's been five or six years. I don't remember. Now that I think I did, it's been a little while and happy to plug it here. Rob, thanks for your research on this. Thanks for your even-handedness.

Thanks for your obvious love for not only history in the scriptures, but LDS people in the truth. Just a wonderful model how to do this. And we'll definitely have you back. Thanks, my friend. Thank you so much. Hey, friends.

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