and Portugese: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=0C5211C2CF82B927&page=3

as well as our Spanish wiki: http://es.fairmormon.org/Portada

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiNgnk_L748

I did not do the filming and the one who did was without a tripod, so it’s a bit shaky.

Thanks for your comments. I’m not against any theories or ideas about how the Book of Mormon was produced (they are in fact welcome), and I realise that since Joseph himself gave no explanation, we are all left to speculate to some degree. Not that this will prove or disprove anything. I’m not satisfied with most of the theories, especially the bogus “Spalding Theory”, which makes little sense to me, given eyewitness accounts. I am convinced that Joseph, and Joseph alone, “produced” the Book of Mormon, and I don’t believe he had the “intellectual” capacity to do this like some kind of “inspired novelist”. Even Tolkien took years to produce his work, and he was a trained academic. In my blog entry “Is the Book of Mormon History?” I raise some points I feel are not answered. The anachronistic nature of the Book of Mormon, or rather, some BoM content, does not seem to justify it as a fully ancient text. That’s not a problem for me, by the way, only in accepting it as ancient, or exclusively ancient.

I’m not a literalist, and perhaps heretically, I can accept the Book of Mormon as a modern revelation, and I don’t fall into the either/or camps. I know Dr. Peterson does, and perhaps most Mormons do. So do most ex-Mormons. But what happens to a spiritual witness in this case? Are we going to walk away from the Book of Mormon if it’s not shown to be authentically ancient? Is archaeology going to determine this? What if, speaking totally hypothetically, God revealed a text that is both ancient and modern? Is this possible? Why not? Has the Book of Mormon changed lives? Has it spiritually impacted on people? No question about that. It is an extremely powerful modern revelation, and also the “Keystone” of Mormonism, love it or hate it. Agree or disagee with it.

Does it have to be “authenticated” by archaeology? In my opinion - No. If someone loses their belief in the Book of Mormon because of archaeology, what does that say about the spiritual witness they had? Void? Nullified? The concept of “waiting for evidence” doesn’t impress me either. If you’ve had a spiritual witness, what is greater than this? Could that be why Joseph said “the means” is not important? Was he thinking that the truth about the “translation” of “literal documents” would be too much to bear for the average person?

I’ll give you my wayward theory about why Joseph didn’t reveal the “means”. Because the “means” incorporated a modern redaction which Joseph included by the authority of God, so that it would be pertinent to our times, and this is why it’s a mixture of ancient and modern, which is too much for, excuse my prejudice, “simple minds” to understand, minds which must have an either/or dichotomy.

I personally see lots of problems in fully accepting Mormonism, but the Book of Mormon isn’t one of them.

Thanks for chiming in and I like your thoughtful blog. I think you are right that Dr. Peterson doesn’t speculate on what role the plates had in the translation process, but he does stress their importance in building up faith, whether Joseph Smith’s or the Witnesses.

My personal theory is that the seer stones or disassembled Nephite interpreters only worked as a translation device when the plates were in the vicinity. I have zero evidence for this other than an anecdote that Joseph could read words off the pages of an open book with the aid of his seer stone with his back turned. That comes from recorde of the 1826 examination hearing of Joseph Smith. An ability/spiritual gift like that could help explain how Joseph could utilize KJV text with no manuscript present at the translation venue.

Larry P

If I read Dan’s comments correctly, he doesn’t explain the presence of the plates either, and does seem to indicate they were in fact “props” of some sort, since Joseph didn’t use them, but used the seerstone. (?)