Introducing Bryce Blankenagel and Today's Topic

Part 1 of 2 · Ep. 1104

John Dehlin [00:00:31] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Delind. It's April 17, 2019, and today we are super excited to have with us someone that I've wanted to interview for quite a long time.

John Dehlin [00:00:48] Today we have in the house Bryce Blankenagel. And that is a name that some of you will be familiar with and others won't. Bryce is the host of three Mormon themed podcasts, but the one that's probably most popular and known to those in the know is the Naked Mormonism podcast.

John Dehlin [00:01:10] I've known about Naked Mormonism and Bryce for many years. We've. We've been missing each other quite a bit in trying to nail down an interview for Naked mormonism. And that's 100 my fault, but with no ill intent. It's just I have too many things going on sometimes.

John Dehlin [00:01:28] But. So even though I've known about Bryce for quite some time, it wasn't until my brother started really getting into studying Mormon history a few years ago that I. I sort of got thumped on the head and. And my brother said, hey, John, what the freak? Why haven't you interviewed Bryce yet? And I'm like, I don't know. He's a cool guy. And my brother really enjoyed Bryce's podcast, Naked Mormonism.

John Dehlin [00:01:55] So that was when I first had kind of a bit more of an in depth, substantive conversation with Bryce. Joel and I were driving back from St. George area and we called Bryce on the phone and talked, and Joel and I listened to several of his episodes on the Book of Mormon and I thought, wow, this is cool, fun stuff. And it definitely inspired me. The episodes that I listened to, I thought they were fun and interesting.

John Dehlin [00:02:23] And so Bryce and I have been planning to do this interview for a few weeks or months now. So without any further ado, Bryce, welcome to Mormon Stories podcast.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:02:35] Thank you, John. It's an honor and a pleasure.

John Dehlin [00:02:38] All right, so the main topic for today is going to be the Spalding Manuscript Theory of the Book of Mormon. Many of you will know that I've been covering truth claims as part of the Mormon Stories Truth Claims initiative. If you go to mormonstories.org truth-claims you can see a series of essays donated to me by an awesome novice amateur historian donor guy who just wanted to see more content on Mormon stories about truth claims.

John Dehlin [00:03:13] We've interviewed several episodes or people or scholars on some early Book of Mormon topics, including that massive series with Dan Vogel on the Book of Mormon authorship and also John Hamer, several episodes. Those are classics already. And they're just from this calendar year. But I strongly recommend you check out those interviews with Dan Vogel and John Hamer, both on folk magic and on Book of Mormon authorship.

John Dehlin [00:03:43] And, you know, we've talked to Sandra Tanner about the First Vision and others. But this, this episode fits into that series of exploring Mormon truth claims. And, you know, I'll have to sort of begin with the disclaimer as well that, you know, that John Hamer and others, Dan Vogel and, And Fawn Brody and, and the Tanners and pretty much any Richard Bushman, any reputable Mormon scholar you know of, is not big on the Solomon Spalding theory.

John Dehlin [00:04:15] But having said that, that doesn't mean it's not interesting or even worthwhile to talk about. And Bryce was like, john, we got to talk about Spalding manuscripts. So I'm like, okay, if that's a reason to get Bryce Blanken Eagle on Mormon Stories, I'll do it.

John Dehlin [00:04:30] So that's what we're going to be talking about today. We've got about, you know, 2 hours and 45 minutes to do it. But before we dig into the Spalding manuscript, Bryce and I thought it might be worth taking 15 minutes for Bryce to talk a little bit about his story. His story probably deserves more than 15 minutes, but since this is his first. No, he's shaking his head no. But because it's his first time, we're not gonna just, like, jump in without at least giving Bryce a chance to give us some personal context and to plug his podcasts. So, Bryce, anything I should have said in the intro?

Bryce's Background and Approach to Mormon History

Bryce Blankenagel [00:05:05] No, that was perfect. And to be clear, I'm going to do my best to, in our discussion today to represent the. The realm of Mormon history and how it views the Spalding theory as much as possible today. But, yeah, I guess I'll just kind of begin it, where it all began. I. I grew up here in Utah, Northern Utah, Davis county of Goodly, parents born in the Covenant, and, you know, grew up in the church, not, you know, really examining the foundations of it, not really caring. More than anything, it was just something that we did was go to church every Sunday, went through Eagle Scout, you

John Dehlin [00:05:45] know, all of the.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:05:46] The priesthood offices and everything. In teenage years around 16 or 17, I decided that I just didn't like going to church anymore. And I was very lucky to have an older sister who left the church before I did. And she. I say she probably trailblazed for me, so she had conversations with my parents that I didn't have to have. And my parents realized that if we try and hold on to him, if we try and force him to go to church when he doesn't want to, that's not going to do any good. So. My parents were very understanding and I, I'm, I'm very lucky in that respect. I have amazing parents who are very respectful and who've always respected my decisions and I'm, I'm very grateful to have the parents that I have.

John Dehlin [00:06:34] So you didn't feel they chose dogma over relationships with you?

Bryce Blankenagel [00:06:38] I've never felt that that's the case, yeah. Like I said, I'm very, very lucky. So around 16, 17, that's when I just kind of stopped going to church. And so I, I know that probably harms my, my, my ex Mormon street cred, if you want to call it that. Right.

John Dehlin [00:06:54] I didn't, I don't think so.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:06:55] I didn't get married in the temple, didn't go to byu, didn't do any of the temple ordinances. I didn't go on a mission. I didn't do a lot of those things. So, you know, but still I, I kind of understand from an intellectual perspective what happens there. And it's one of the main reasons why I like talking to ex Mormons, because we share so much in common and I can, you know, poke and prod and explore those topics of what their experiences were like going through all of those, you know, checking all those boxes that I never checked. So I graduated high school, graduated seminary, and eventually went into the workforce after attending a year at Weber State for computer science.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:07:35] And I was never really interested in church much or in belief in God and faith in God, anything like that. I was just a fairly apathetic when it came to the question of does God exist or, you know, is the church true? Is something that just, it wasn't a question that ever really bothered me, me much because it wasn't a large part of my life. It had been my entire growing up age. And now that I'm a teenager and, you know, young adult, I'm able to break away. It's like I want to stay as far away from it as I possibly can.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:08:05] So eventually I, I moved out to Colorado and I met, I met a world outside of Utah that I didn't know exist. And that world is that the entire world isn't Mormon, which is a fundamentally weird thing. When you're born and raised here, you think everybody in the world is Mormon, but when you begin living outside of Utah, you're like, oh, wow. It's actually a very Very small minority of people who actually go to this church. And I began having conversations with a friend of mine there about Mormonism because he was one of the. The stalwart Christians who had studied up on the history of the church and, you know, for the sole purpose of debunking Mormonism and showing how it's satanic and everything.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:08:51] And I'm like, man, of course, you know, of course it's Christian. It's Jesus Christ is in the name, right? We've all used that apologetic dodge. So he said, you know, you need to learn some. Some things and then come back and we can have this conversation again. And he gave me a couple of books and resources, and I began learning. And that's when I began tumbling down the rabbit hole of Mormon history.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:09:14] And I have been studying it rabidly now for five years. So I'm a baby in the field of Mormon history. And, you know, I quickly learned all of the CES letter stuff, all, you know, first vision account differences, issues of polygamy and Book of Abraham and all of these. These issues that drag so many people out of the church. And I'm like, wow, I didn't realize what I was in when I was in it. But now examining it through a critical scope, there's just a whole new world of interesting information out there.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:09:48] And, you know, it kind of engendered an interest in comparative religious studies as well, because, you know, Mormonism is one of the best documented early American religions that we have, and it has some of the largest amount of material written about it in comparison to any other Protestant Christian sect coming out of the 19th century America. And the amount of information there is just so incredible and just so fascinating. And, you know, I'm kind of of the opinion that you can't truly understand something if you don't know its history.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:10:23] So in order to try and understand Mormonism as much as possible, I sought to understand the history of it. So at this time, early 20s, I was listening to a lot of podcasts, a lot of atheists and skepticism podcasts, Science communication podcasts, Skeptics Guide to the Universe and Scathing Atheist Cognitive Dissonance, so on and so forth. And I said, you know what? I gotta find a Mormon podcast that just tells the history, just a serialized history, because I need to understand this from its foundation to understand how it got to where it is today. And I looked everywhere, I looked for weeks to find that podcast, and I couldn't find it anywhere. So I said, all right, I'm gonna make it. And I started it, I started making Mormonism and I.

John Dehlin [00:11:10] Did you listen to podcast, Mormon themed podcasts before?

Bryce Blankenagel [00:11:13] Very few, actually. Okay. I had listened to some specific episodes of like, Mormon Stories, specific interviews that you had done with, you know, with Dan Vogel and with John Hamer, and I listened to those, but I never really listened to the entire back catalog. Same with Mormon Expression.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:11:31] But also, five years ago, there were, there were significantly less Mormon themed podcasts than there are now. I mean, now there's. There's just this incredible wealth of amazing podcast content out there, but that didn't exist at the time when I began.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:11:47] Also, David Michael, my Book of Mormon, he had started up, he was somewhere in Alma when I decided to start. And I reached out to David and said, hey, I recorded a few podcast episodes. Can you listen to them, give me feedback and then, you know, I'll decide if what I want to do and how I want to approach this. And what it began with was I wanted to read the original 1830 Book of Mormon and compare it to the modern day Book of Mormon and just show the differences with. Well, it turns out, I mean, you can do that in, in a few hours you can talk about all of the differences.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:12:21] You don't have to read the whole thing from top to bottom to, to point out all the differences because it's a lot of repeat material. And the dude was already reading through the Book of Mormon, but I also recorded some segments on the history of the church and he's like, well, the Book of Mormon part was boring, but the history I found that was really interesting. You should do it on that instead. And I said, okay, yeah, I'll do that. That sounds good. So then I recorded a few episodes, aired them, and, and David invited me on when I was just, you know, I had, I think three or four episodes out and he invited me on to my Book of Mormon and we got together and had a good time reading through a chapter of, of Alma, I believe it was.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:12:57] And you know, everything just kind of. It all snowballed from there. So eventually he brought me on to my Book of Mormon to read through the Doctrine and Covenants, because if you read through the Doctrine and Covenants and don't know anything about Mormon history, it is God awful boring. It is an absolute grind. But if you're reading it to understand the history of the early Church, it's. It's required reading, in my opinion, to truly understand it. So he brought me on as kind of a history, a Mormon history consultant, as he was reading through the Doctrine and covenants. And then eventually I was covering news headlines that were coming out of the church as well on Naked Mormonism and that spun off into its own own show that I call Glassbox Podcast.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:13:39] So, yeah, that's just a very, very brief history and brief rundown. I've attended a lot of Sunstones, a lot of John Whitmer historical associations, and I found the. The community of Mormon history and Mormon ethnography is just so wonderfully fascinating and very inviting. And, you know, just plugging into those communities has been a very, very enriching endeavor. And I found it to be a fantastic replacement for. For the community that I experienced when I was actually in the church.

John Dehlin [00:14:10] And that's a good background. And I should note that we have had David Michael on Mormon Stories twice, and that was one of the most fun evenings I've ever had with Mormon Stories. Were you there?

Bryce Blankenagel [00:14:22] I was not there, no. But I watched the video of it and it was a riot. Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:14:27] We basically, for my second interview with David, I think we interviewed him at Squatters Pub in downtown Salt Lake City, and we sang hymns while everyone was drinking beer.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:14:41] We were kind of irreverent, as well it should be.

John Dehlin [00:14:44] But he's a great guy and I was sad to see him move on, but of course I understand.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:14:50] Well, yeah, he, he got a promotion at his job. He works in, you know, corporate America, so he kind of. His free time got soaked up into his new promotion, so he handed it off to my current co host, Marie Kent. And, and we've been having a lot of fun, especially because Marie is enjoying Mormon history a lot more than I think David ever did. And she's actually doing research beforehand. And now we're reading through the Community of Christ Revelations because we finished all the Brighamite doctrine and Covenants and it's just a lot of fun to learn Mormon history through reading these Revelations. Yeah, yeah, certainly.

Origins of the Naked Mormonism Podcast

John Dehlin [00:15:24] Okay, well, thanks for that background and maybe, maybe tell people a little bit about Naked Mormonism podcast. Yeah, I'll say a couple of things that are fun. You know, you go in depth there. There is swearing.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:15:43] Used to be, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:15:45] Oh, you stopped swearing? Well, in the.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:15:47] Well, let me, let me talk about that a little bit. So when I started the podcast, Naked Mormonism has been and always will be. This is going to sound selfish to say this, but let me qualify it. Naked Mormonism is and always has been an endeavor for myself to understand Mormon history.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:16:09] And how it began was learning the history that was hidden from me when I was a member of the church. And as I think a lot of people can empathize with, when you leave the church or when you begin learning the history that has been hidden, you become mad. There's a lot of anger, there's a lot of trauma, there's a lot of frustration because you've been lied to your entire life. You paid money to an institution that has systematically lied to you your whole life. And the responses of anger and frustration that we have, those are completely justified. And when people say, you can leave the church, but you can't leave it alone, it's like I was taught my entire life to formulate my life around this church, and.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:16:56] And now I realize that I've been lied to. That doesn't necessarily change when I leave. I'm still interested in the church, and especially when it's an institution that I know that, you know, most of my. My friends and most of my family are still paying tithing to. They're still going to. And I know that they are being lied to every Sunday. When the church is not transparent about its history, about its finances, about its business practices, about its politics. That's a huge issue for me. So, yeah, I can't leave the church alone because, well, it doesn't leave my friends and family alone. It didn't leave me alone for, you know, the first 2/3 of my life.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:17:33] You know, it's. It's something that had such a dramatic impact on my life. So when I began studying the history, I was mad, and it was very cathartic to get on a microphone and to scream into that microphone and to have, you know, an inbox full of people. Yeah. I was just as mad as you. Oh, I love what you said.

John Dehlin [00:17:52] Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:17:52] Boyd K. Fudgepacker.

John Dehlin [00:17:54] Ha ha.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:17:54] You know, because when Boyd K. Packer died, that was when I was getting started. I danced on his grave. I was so happy to see that old codger go because he was such a horrible, repressive, evil human being, in my opinion.

John Dehlin [00:18:10] And interestingly, my. My brother spent time with him and said he was lovely in person.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:18:15] I'm sure he is in person. But none of us get to know the person of Boyd K. Pac. We only get to know the church that he contributed to.

John Dehlin [00:18:22] Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:18:23] So.

John Dehlin [00:18:23] And his public statements.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:18:25] And his public statements.

John Dehlin [00:18:26] Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:18:26] The mantle is far greater than the intellect decrying those scholars who learn Mormon history.

John Dehlin [00:18:32] Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:18:34] So I was very angry. And that. That exhibited itself in ranting, in cursing, in possibly distancing people who may be interested in the history, but who may have sensitive ears and. And I just viewed that as collateral of getting these feelings out. Eventually I decided, you know what? That is alienating people who otherwise may benefit from this information. So it kind of tapered off, and it has been a clean show. Now for a clean show. Well, clean.

John Dehlin [00:19:08] No, no, no, no, no. I'm not saying it's not clean. I'm just saying it's funny to say that swearing makes it dirty. That's all I'm saying.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:19:13] Yeah. Yeah. Okay, That's.

John Dehlin [00:19:15] That's.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:19:15] That's fair.

John Dehlin [00:19:16] Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:19:17] So I have. I have made it because the swearing

John Dehlin [00:19:19] is fun, like my brother, but I don't want to disclose too much. But Joel liked. He thought it was fun and funny, and he's not like a big swear or anything, like.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:19:28] Right, right.

John Dehlin [00:19:29] It just adds, you know, it humanizes. It's good that you make it safe to maximize listenership, but it's also just fun. And you also give nicknames to historical characters.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:19:42] Right?

John Dehlin [00:19:43] Well.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:19:43] And that has been very divisive, I've found, actually, because I'll get emails from people who are interested in the academic side and want to understand it from an academic perspective, and they're like, why are you giving these people nicknames? It's disrespectful. It's childish. It's dumb. But then if I say, okay, John, if I say the name Sidney Rigdon, Martin Harris, Oliver Cowdery, you may have some kind of idea of who they are. If I say the names William Wines Phelps, Ezra Booth, Heber Kimball, Hiram Kimball, if I say those names, it's really hard to understand or associate why they were important in the timeline. So in order to designate them as individuals, in order to create a fictional person in the listener's mind that they can see, that they can tangibly see in their mind's eye, it's kind of important to give them a nickname that people say.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:20:37] Oh, yeah. So when you say that nickname, it invokes everything that you've talked about prior to that point that's associated with that nickname. Right. So calling Martin Harris not so smarty Marty, suddenly you're like, oh, yeah, he was that wild, crazy guy who, like, walked through the woods and talked to a deer that he thought was Jesus. Right. So if you hear that nickname, it invokes an entire body of knowledge about this person that you know. And it really helps to kind of build a structure and a foundation of the history that's easier to understand. Now, of course, historians who are listening to this hear those nicknames, and they're

John Dehlin [00:21:14] like, it's like, how dare you. Not so smarty Marty for, for Martin Harris. Yeah. What are some of the nicknames you.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:21:23] There's, there's quite a few of them. I have Heber the Creeper, Kimball, Bloody Brigham Young. There's, there's, yeah, I mean, Willie Goat, Wilford, Wilford Woodruff because of his, his big scruffy beard. You know, they're, they're fun names that are, you know, about their looks or about why they're important. And Bloody Brigham Young just because, of course, he was a tyrant.

John Dehlin [00:21:43] Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:21:45] So, you know, that's some of the names, but there, there are quite a few others and listeners will have to, to listen to Naked Mormonism to find all of those out. But I've also, you know, I've just found a lot of utility in that. And if you guys do go through the backlog, you'll notice that there's a major shift, because when I first started learning, I was learning popular Mormon history, but I realized that the popular Mormon history is distilled potent little arguments that are used as jabs against the truth claims of the Church. But that's not where real Mormon history lives. Mormon history is an academic field, and you have to plug into John Whitmer Historical Association, Mormon History Association, Sunstone.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:22:31] You have to come to know the historians and scholars on a first name basis in order to understand the important articles that are coming out in order to understand the cusp of where Mormon history as an academic field is. That's where the real level of Mormon history exists. And as I was shifting into the Nauvoo era of the podcast, you'll particularly notice that there's a shift away from the popular Mormon history and more into the academic field of Mormon historians. And it's, it's a very, it's a very subtle shift in the backlog, but you'll kind of notice it catalyze around episode 100 when I had Cheryl Bruno on to talk about Mormonism and Masonry.

John Dehlin [00:23:15] I know Cheryl.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:23:16] Yeah, Cheryl's a fantastic person. She's been extremely friendly and helpful in taking me under her wing in many ways.

John Dehlin [00:23:24] She's into polygamy, right?

Bryce Blankenagel [00:23:25] I, I don't know much about, I

John Dehlin [00:23:27] mean, history, the history of polygamy.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:23:30] She has written a few articles on that. Right now her studies are in Masonry and Mormonism. She took over Nick Letersky's research and is hopefully going to be publishing that seminal historiography of Mormonism and Masonry that all Mormon historians are looking forward to, because there hasn't been a truly Definitive work. Even up to this point. There have been, you know, a few small books and articles, but never a truly definitive work.

John Dehlin [00:23:56] So.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:23:56] Cheryl, I can't wait to read your book. I've seen a chapter or two of it that she sent over, and it's. It's incredible. But, you know, she's. She among a few other historians have really just been very inviting and helping me understand what the realm of Mormon history is and what arguments are persuasive, what historians to pay more attention to, why certain arguments are more important, why certain historians bicker certain ways over certain arguments. And those are just entire fields of knowledge that you need to understand in order to actually navigate the field of Mormon history. Because for all intents and purposes, it is a minefield in many ways. But it's interesting. Each mine you step on opens up a whole new rabbit hole that's just fun to dive down.

John Dehlin [00:24:46] Well, cool. All right, well, let's. That's a great intro. I could tell I need to have you on Mormon stories more just because you're so articulate and knowledgeable.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:24:56] Thank you.

Overview of the Spalding Manuscript Theory

John Dehlin [00:24:57] But let's do. So let's do the Spalding manuscript now.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:25:01] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:25:01] Before we do, I. I gave my little disclaimer about John Hamer and Dan Vogel and the Tanners and Von Brody and everyone sort of being down on the Spalding manuscript.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:25:14] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:25:14] Maybe tell us why we should care about it, even though super smart people that we know about, you know, say it's bunk.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:25:23] Yeah. I think the Spalding theory holds a very interesting utility to us because it illustrates points of Mormon history that are. Are very interesting when we compare it with the believing narrative. And we'll get into why that's important. But I. You know what? I'm actually just going to start into what I have compiled. My. The research that I have compiled for this because I think. Okay, very soon I'm going to speak exactly to why that is.

John Dehlin [00:25:58] Let's do it.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:25:59] But mostly it's a conspiracy theory.

John Dehlin [00:26:02] Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:26:02] Right. And anytime, you know, conspiracy theories are tough to deal with. So a lot of people don't like them. A lot of people don't like conspiracy theories.

John Dehlin [00:26:09] Sure.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:26:11] But I think there is a certain utility to it. And in order to understand the Spalding theory, you really have to understand a lot of Kirtland era Mormonism. And that explains why it's been. The entire theory has been suppressed by church historians. Because if you start unraveling, you start looking into, well, who is this guy? Philosopher Hurlbut. Who's Eberdy Howe, what's this book Mormonism Unveiled? It unwraps an entire field of very dark and interesting and history that is. Well, it reveals the skeletons in the church's historical closet. And the more that they can suppress that, the more that they can keep people from asking those questions, the more they have people not diving into the history.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:26:55] So there's a vested interest to keep the Spalding theory down, but I also think that it's important to understand the way that we do history. And Spalding theory is a great way to illustrate why history as a, as an academic field is important to us.

John Dehlin [00:27:11] And it's also one of the major components of attempting to understand Book of Mormon authorship. So.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:27:16] Sincerely. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:27:17] So I think it's really worthwhile to discuss regardless of the merits.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:27:21] Oh yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:27:22] So let's first, that's just my endorsement of the topic.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:27:26] Fair enough. Absolutely. So let's the. The Book of Mormon creation narrative. As believers go, it's Joseph Smith was visited by God and angels in the 1820s, 1827, received the gold plates written in Reformed Egyptian by Native Americans. And the reason I'm taking so long to say that is because if you're not indoctrinated, indoctrinated to believe that that's true. You say that to any outsider. They're like, what, what are you talking about, gold plates? Are there like repositories of Native American histories written on gold plates anywhere ever? No. No. Is Reformed Egyptian a real no? No, it's not.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:28:08] So it's, it's just, it's already. The believing narrative is a baffling concept to most outsiders and most critical thinkers. But then he translated them using the Urim and thummim. And March 1830, the first 3,000 copies of the Book of Mormon were created or were published. And then April 6, 1830, the church was founded. Then we have the non believer narrative, right? The Smith family were destitute and somehow by hook or hook or crook, they were able to make ends meet. A lot of it was through money digging and magic and occultism.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:28:39] Smith, Joseph Smith participated in these groups of folk magic and occultism, as well as the Wild west of the burned over district of Christianity. This Protestant crazy era of religions popping up all over, people declaring that they're prophets. It's a very interesting time in, in American history.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:28:58] Joseph Smith was attending revivals and he was watching preachers very closely to see how they operated and, you know, learn from their charisma. And of course his eyes were bugging out like a cartoon as they passed around the collection plate every time. Joseph Smith attended a few, you know, small stints of formal education, but largely he was completely unlearned.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:29:19] He, even though he had very little formal education, he was extremely bright. We know that Joseph Smith was clever. He was in some ways very devious, but he was very intelligent and he was a sponge. He could soak up information quickly.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:29:33] He gleaned knowledge from mentors, Lumen Walters, Joseph Knight, Samuel Lawrence, a number of other people. Eventually he contrived the idea of the Book of Mormon coming forth as a way to, to convince people that the Native Americans were actually descended from the Israelites and that they were Christians, so on and so forth. Then he hooked crooked and he swindled people into, you know, a few dozen people believing in what he was saying. Then he authored the Book of Mormon. With the help of some scribes. The Book of Mormon was published with a rate of dictation of, you know, about 500 plus pages. The 60 day dictation period.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:30:07] John Hamer illustrated beautifully. You know, when you had him on, it could have easily been done with just a few hours work every day. And then the Book of Mormon was born, Mormonism was created and then Joseph Smith was the first elder and of course the rest is history. So there's the non believer narrative and then the believer narrative that we have to compare.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:30:26] So we're basically left to determine the plausibility of these two different versions of early Mormon history. And in these, in this respect, the non believer narrative is going to win every single time because it doesn't require God. The thing is, is when a historian is positing that God or divine intervention is somehow an operative feature of their model of history. It's not history, that's theology. It doesn't belong in history because we have yet to demonstrate that A God exists, B, that God interferes with our lives, C, that God, you know, appeared to some random 19th century country bumpkin, and then that God gave Joseph Smith godly powers to translate these Native American plates.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:31:17] So we have yet to demonstrate any of those four points. So the non believing narrative is going to win the historical argument every single time. So with these naturalistic models, Joseph Smith had to have some level of conspiracy in order for the early church to function the way that it did. Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:31:39] There's the model of Joseph Smith was the only one who knew that this was all a con. And he swindled everybody, all of the witnesses and everybody, including Martin Harris, to sign Emma. Emma included Oliver Cowdery. Yep, Oliver Cowdery. The Whitmers, he. He swindled everybody. He was the only guy who knew that it was all a con. And he convinced them to sign the statements and then convinced Martin Harris to fund it and it was published. And that's fine. That's plausible. Absolutely. But then we have the, the possibility that Joseph Smith conspired with Oliver Cowdery and with David Whitmer, that there was a conspiracy among those three.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:32:15] They somehow swindled the eight witnesses to sign the statement and they all swindled Martin Harris or, you know, those three swindled Martin Harris to fund the Book of Mormon. So there's a conspiracy of the three of them. Then you also have the possibility that Joseph Smith was conspiring with all 10 witnesses. Witnesses who signed the statement, who held the plates, who saw the, the characters, the hieroglyphs, and they all helped to swindle Martin Harris to fund the Book of Mormon.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:32:44] And then there's also the possibility that Joseph Smith conspired with somebody else to help him author the Book of Mormon and they all convinced Martin Harris to fund it. And that's the final conspiracy theory.

John Dehlin [00:32:55] Meaning Sidney Rigdon.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:32:57] Possibly meaning Sidney Rigdon.

John Dehlin [00:32:59] And then sometimes people want to throw Hyrum Smith in there. Some people because of his, you know, exposure to Dartmouth and, and that sort of thing. And someone to throw Lucy in there. Lucy Smith, Joseph's mom. Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:33:16] Certainly.

John Dehlin [00:33:16] Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:33:16] Those are all plausible. Right. So the thing is, is like these were. We're expanding the level of conspiracy here when it comes to the naturalistic, the non believer model of early Mormon history. And some level of conspiracy is required. Now it's just a matter of what level of conspiracy we're willing to wait with.

John Dehlin [00:33:36] Does a lone gunman count as a conspiracy? I mean, if, if Joseph was alone,

Bryce Blankenagel [00:33:41] conspiracy, I guess requires more than one, at least two. So if it was just Joseph Smith, then that's not conspiracy. But every other possible model requires it.

John Dehlin [00:33:50] Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:33:50] At some level. And then if at any point, I

John Dehlin [00:33:53] think that's Hamer's point, is that it's just Joseph.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:33:55] And that's, you know, and that's, that's entirely possible. Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:33:59] But a lot of people don't buy that Joseph did it alone. That. Yeah. That really Oliver would have, you know, never caught on.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:34:08] Exactly.

John Dehlin [00:34:08] That Emma would have never really peaked behind the, you know, cloth or what a cheesecloth or whatever it was. Like.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:34:15] Well, and then we have the, the, the ouroboros of like, okay, we have these source texts. We have the late war is possibly a Source text we have view the Hebrews as these multiple different source texts. At what point were was Joseph Smith sitting there or was Oliver Cowdery sitting there possibly with one of those books open and just transcribing directly? There's very little actual textual plagiarism that we are able to prove from any of these documents. There are small artifacts from the late war.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:34:47] These, the Jaredite submarines, they sound a lot like the torpedoes that were conceived of in the late war. Same with the Jesus coming back and the destruction of one of the forts in the late war. There's a lot of linguistic looking plagiarism between the two of them and a lot of the descriptions of what happened sound very similar. When it comes to view the Hebrews, there's, you know, plagiarism of chapters of Isaiah just straight, straight taken from it. So if we're talking about Joseph Smith acting as a lone gunman, it becomes kind of hard to explain how Oliver Cowdery was able to buy into this sincerely when he knew that they were plagiarizing other texts, when other texts make their way into the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:35:28] Right, yeah, yeah.

Conspiracy Theories and Early Mormon Context

Bryce Blankenagel [00:35:30] So before really getting into Spalding here, a few precursors, right? Conspiracy theories are really tough to deal with. But in my opinion, I think early Mormonism requires some level of conspiracy among the witnesses, among Joseph Smith's earliest followers, among some of the few higher ranking officials in Mormon elites, as I call them in Mormonism. And also that not all conspiracies are alike, not all conspiracy theories are constructed similarly.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:36:00] However, the more people that are required to be looped into a conspiracy theory, the more likely it is to collapse under its own weight, right? So people are really bad at keeping secrets if they, even if their livelihood and their, you know, public reputation depend on it. So if you have tens, dozens, hundreds of people in on a big conspiracy, somebody's going to spill the beans sooner or later, right? So it's very hard. The bigger a conspiracy theory gets, the less likely it is to be real. So that's a very important thing to understand. And then also another major flaw with Spalding is conspiracy theories are almost impossible to disprove, right?

Bryce Blankenagel [00:36:45] Because you have conspiracy theories that can continually expand, just, you know, loop in more people. You have moving of the goalposts in, you know, by the conspiracy theorist. And then you also have, when you're trying to debunk a conspiracy theory, the theorist, the conspiracy theorist will vilify you and they'll question the person's motives. Oh well, you're paid off by the church to try and hide the conspiracy. Right. It just becomes an endless cycle of, you know, lack of disprovability and just ever expanding conspiracy theories. So they're really tough to deal with. Which is one of the main reasons why I think the Spalding theory is just people don't want to talk about it because it just becomes such a massive and painful and annoying issue to deal with.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:37:32] And a lot of people would think that it doesn't hold any explanatory power. But let's, let's try and discuss that. Right. So April of 1830, the church started. This is.

John Dehlin [00:37:41] Okay, wait, do you want to reveal your bias at the outset? Do you find plausibility or do you want to wait and reveal that?

Bryce Blankenagel [00:37:50] Let's discuss that at the end.

John Dehlin [00:37:52] Okay. Okay. Well, because suspense.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:37:55] If I say it without any context, a people might not listen to the end, like, oh, he's a theorist, whatever.

John Dehlin [00:38:00] So let you lay out your case.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:38:02] So let me lay out my case. Let me lay out the, the evidence that creates the Spalding theory.

John Dehlin [00:38:08] Okay.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:38:08] And then I'll reveal kind of where I come down on this.

John Dehlin [00:38:11] Okay, perfect. I like it.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:38:13] Okay, It's a teaser. Okay, it's a teaser. So this is. Here's the blueprint, right. April 1830, the church was started. The first missionaries were called to preach to the Native Americans in Missouri. They passed through Mentor in Kirtland, Ohio, and that's where they converted Sydney Rigdon. This, this is the historical blueprint for people who may not know kind of the early church history. Then Rigdon.

John Dehlin [00:38:35] And again, this is the official version. The official version, which, which the conspiracy theorists question.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:38:41] Yeah. So this is the official version. And then I'm going to give the Spalding theory in a nutshell.

John Dehlin [00:38:45] Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:38:45] And then we're going to go through the. A bunch of evidence.

John Dehlin [00:38:47] All right, got it.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:38:48] So then after Rigdon had his miraculous conversion, he couldn't put the Book of Mormon down. Couldn't, you know, he read it for three days or whatever, had his conversion. Then he traveled to New York to meet Joseph Smith. And that's where they began working on their Bible revision, the Joseph Smith translation of the Bible.

John Dehlin [00:39:03] And allegedly that's the first time they met.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:39:06] Allegedly. According to Joseph Smith. According to Sidney Rigdon, that's the very first time.

John Dehlin [00:39:10] And allegedly Rigdon had no knowledge of the Book of Mormon before those missionaries show up.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:39:14] He states it very explicitly. Very, very explicitly. And we'll go through that as well. Eventually, Joseph Smith gave the revelation commanding all of the New York Mormons to move out to Ohio or Missouri because that's where they were going to set up their new headquarters. And then Joseph and Emma Smith arrived in February of 1831 in Ohio and Rigdon and Joseph Smith began running the church as co presidents and then as an already successful preacher. Rigdon had a few hundred followers. He converted the majority of his followers to Mormonism which provided a much needed like membership injection in order to allow Mormonism to survive. Had Rigdon not converted, had he not converted his early followers, Mormonism would have just been one of these, you know, rising and dying religions that came out of the burned over district. We wouldn't be talking about it today.

John Dehlin [00:39:59] Possibly.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:40:00] Yeah, and that's. I did a presentation at Seattle Sunstone. I, I titled it Rigged in the Forgotten Hero of Mormonism. Because without that catalyzing event, Mormonism wouldn't be a thing. So likely it would be different. It would be largely different than we.

John Dehlin [00:40:14] No, it was hugely important.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:40:15] There's no question. Absolutely. So here's the Spalding theory in a nutshell. Solomon Spalding was a Revolutionary War vet. He attended Dartmouth Theological College. He even had an overlapping semester with Ethan Smith, author of View of the Hebrews. He attained his preaching license and he was a minister for four to five years before he gave it up. He failed in a bunch of business ventures including an iron forge. Then he turned to writing novels in order to pass the time and to hopefully make money as his physical ailments were taking over and he was on unable to physically work.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:40:48] He penned a few books including the Frogs of Windham which has been lost to history. Then he penned Manuscript story Conneaut Creek. Now this is important. He penned Manuscript story Conneaut Creek. That is an operative manuscript that we're going to be talking about a lot today. And it was written about the Romans being blown off course and discovering America.

John Dehlin [00:41:12] Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:41:13] He ended it. It's a terrible manuscript. You can find it online, you can read it yourself. It's been published by both the RLDS and the LDS churches as manuscript found. It ends abruptly. It's about 150 pages there. It's not written in the old English style, but you can find a copy of it. You can read it yourself. But then he terminated that project before it was completed. And then he wrote Manuscript foundation which is lost. Which is ironically manuscript found is lost. Yes, and we'll discuss that quite a bit as well. So the operative piece of the Spalding theory is that there are two different manuscripts.

John Dehlin [00:41:50] And just I know you're Going to do this, but describe it. The high level manuscript found.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:41:54] Manuscript found is. Well, we're going to discuss the. The actual witness statements from people who had read it, heard him talk about it, but it is essentially the Book of Mormon. But once again, it's a theoretical manuscript. Okay. It. It has been lost to history for all we know. So eventually he penned this manuscript found, and he left it at the Lambden and Patterson Printing Press in Pittsburgh somewhere between 1812 and 1813, and then he ended up dying in 1816.

John Dehlin [00:42:24] Okay, go ahead, keep going.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:42:25] Yeah. And I'm gonna go through it. Whatever you're about to say. Yeah, we'll get there. So eventually, at the same time, Sidney Rigdon was friends with two guys named Ingalls and Lambdon. Lambden. With the Lambdon Patterson Printing Press. Right. They were printer and clerk for this Lambdon Patterson Press. Rigdon was a bookworm. He was always known to have a book in his hands. He would stay up late reading by firelight and fall asleep with his head in a book. From a very young age, he was also working as a tanner, and he was probably selling bookbinding to this printing press in order for them to publish their books. He probably filled his library from their bookstore.

John Dehlin [00:43:05] That's.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:43:05] That's best guess anyway. So then in 1823, the Patterson Press and bookstore was closed. It was dissolved. They liquidated all of their assets. At some point between 1816 and 1823, Rigdon either stole the manuscript found or he purchased it from the liquidation of the business.

John Dehlin [00:43:28] It's.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:43:29] It's not known. Right. Then in the early 1820s, Rigdon attained his preaching license and he was mentored by Alexander Campbell, who. Which was one of the preeminent theologians and Bible scholars of the early 1800s. Him and his father were.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:43:45] And Rigdon and Campbell had this massive public debate, and their departure was very sharp. They disagreed about a few points that we find in the Book of Mormon, including communalism, people living with all things in common. Another few points.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:44:01] But then after he departed from Campbellism, he began his own ministry. And he probably had manuscript found. You know, according to the. The theory, he probably had manuscript found just tucked away in a trunk at this time, maybe working on it in evenings, whatever. Then Rigdon maybe met Joseph Smith during one of his preaching tours. Tours, because he was one of the traveling preachers. He had his. His church and mentor during Rigdon's preaching tours. Rigdon's preaching tours? Yeah. He would have gone to New York, Pennsylvania, probably. I don't think there has been Any documentation found that he ever preached in

John Dehlin [00:44:34] New York around 29ish.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:44:36] You're thinking maybe as early as 2223.

John Dehlin [00:44:39] But Joseph would. Joseph been in Pennsylvania in 2223.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:44:42] There's no evidence for it. But the thing is we don't have GPS tracking for Joseph Smith.

John Dehlin [00:44:47] Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:44:48] He there. We know very little about him before he enters the magic and treasure digging.

John Dehlin [00:44:52] I just knew for sure he was there around 29.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:44:54] So he was. Yeah, I mean he was living in Pennsylvania in Harmony, which is what, 150 miles from Ohio.

John Dehlin [00:45:00] But you're saying it could have been earlier.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:45:01] Yeah, but it very well could have been earlier. And the story of him, you know, meeting with the angel in 1823, this kind of was borne out after his church was started. But then the, the idea, the Spalding theory claims that Rigdon and Joseph Smith had annual meetings from 1823 to 1827 when Rigdon was working on the manuscript. Annual meetings, yeah, that would have been

John Dehlin [00:45:24] the, you know, Joseph's cover was meeting the angel every year. But in theory, when he was allegedly meeting with the angel, he was meeting with Rigdon. Exactly. Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:45:33] And that was just later mythologized after the foundation of the church to throw people off the tracks.

John Dehlin [00:45:38] Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:45:40] Then Joseph Smith acquired the manuscript that Rigdon had been working on for, you know, maybe as much as long as, you know, a decade. It's at this point he acquired the manuscript in 1827 and they began working on it first with Martin Harris, then with Oliver Cowdery and Whitmer's and other scribes, Emma Smith included.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:45:58] And then that's when they turned from 1829 on, or 1828 to 29, that's when they turned the manuscript found into the Book of Mormon that had all of Rigdon's theological underpinnings placed into it, edited into it. Now one thing that's interesting too is Rigdon was probably prepping his congregations for years prior to the Book of Mormon coming along. There are a few quotes we're going to read one of them at least of people claiming that he was prepping his congregations to accept the Book of Mormon once it came along. So it was like he was the John the Baptist character waiting for Joseph Smith to come along with his new Book of Mormon, his new scripture.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:46:37] And then they start the church. Right. So then they, they finally, after the church was created, they had the Book of Mormon. Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon began the church as co presidents and then they created this story that Rigdon had this miraculous Conversion. Parley P. Pratt is also looped into this conspiracy theory. Parley P. Pratt, you know, diverts the missionary troop through Ohio and says, hey, let's. Let's stop over at my buddy Rigdon's house and give him a copy. Rigdon reads it. And that was all just a ruse. Right.

John Dehlin [00:47:07] And the idea is that Rigdon would have needed some prophetic character to have produced the book, and that that's why he needed Joseph, certainly. Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:47:18] Well, and also, people may have known about Spalding and may have known that Rigdon was living in Pittsburgh or, you know, it was living nearby somewhere where he would have been able to attain this manuscript. They may have fingered him. If his name was on the Book of Mormon. It may have come to light earlier. But if he could use that degree of separation of Joseph Smith, publish it through Joseph Smith, then, hey, he has that degree of separation. He's insulated from it. So that's theory.

John Dehlin [00:47:46] And we may cover this. But why Rigdon didn't just claim to be the prophet who produced and translated the Book of Mormon.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:47:53] Yeah. And I think the Spalding theory would say that it was because he didn't want to be pinned with having stolen Spalding's manuscript. If he. Because people were paying attention to Sidney Rigdon, nobody knew who Joseph Smith was.

John Dehlin [00:48:08] Right?

Bryce Blankenagel [00:48:08] Right. Rigdon had hundreds of people who had seen him preach. Joseph Smith was a nobody. Nobody knew this guy. Right. So having him be the prophet and then once Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon team up together, they're basically co presidents of the church. They're both giving revelations, they're both directing the church. Sidney Rigdon is giving more speeches than Joseph Smith is. Sidney Rigdon is teaching in the school of the elders. Sidney Rigdon in many ways was doing more of the work of actually building the church up than Joseph Smith was. So that's kind of the theory in a nutshell. And I want to do my best to steel man this balding theory because.

John Dehlin [00:48:49] Did you get that term from. From Sam Harris and what's his name? Chris Peterson? No.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:48:58] Jordan B. Peterson.

John Dehlin [00:48:59] Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:49:00] No, I.

John Dehlin [00:49:00] That's where I first learned that term is from their public debate.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:49:03] No, I did not that for a long time. No, I don't pay attention to either of those guys for many, many reasons. I got that from. From my friend Andrew Torres. He does opening arguments podcast.

John Dehlin [00:49:14] Tell us what a steel man is just for those who don't know.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:49:16] So there's. There's a fallacy known as the straw man fallacy, where when somebody's Trying to criticize a person's argument, they present a very weak version of that argument, then seek to knock it down. They present a straw man version of that argument. So I, I want to try and steel man, create a, an absolute bulletproof version that somebody who truly sincerely believes that the Spalding theory is absolutely true would present. Because I think that's the only intellectually honest way to go about this, is say, this is the best evidence we have for it. Let's deal with that evidence.

John Dehlin [00:49:48] Okay?

Bryce Blankenagel [00:49:50] So with that in mind, everything that I'm going to say today, it's going to sound like I am a Spalding theory apologist. But at the end of it, we're going to get to where I land on this. So just keep that in mind, everybody. Like that's, that's the terminology that I'm going to be using as it's going to sound like I'm a Spalding apologist here.

Early Press and Sidney Rigdon's Role in the Theory

Bryce Blankenagel [00:50:11] So it didn't take long after Rigdon and Joe teamed up for, you know, astute observers to catch on. It was less than a year after the church was founded. The public accusations were made that Rigdon and Joseph Smith were conspiring. This is from an anonymous reporter in The Cleveland Advertiser, February 15, 1831. The church was founded less than a year before this. It was called the Grand Mormonism or Grand Pugilistic Debate. Quote, Rigdon was formerly a disciple of Campbell's and who, it is said, was sent to make out proselytes. But it is probable he thought he should find it more advantageous to operate on his own capital and therefore wrote, as it is believed, the Book of Mormon and commenced his pilgrimage in the town of Courland, which was represented as one of the extreme points of the Holy Land, end quote.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:51:04] So that's the first reference I can find in any, any newspaper of somebody accusing Sidney Rigdon of being the author before Hurlbut. That's long before Hurlbut came along, right? That is, that's February 1831. The church had been around less than a year. Joseph Smith hadn't even landed in Kirtland by February 15, 1831. He did at the very end of February, I believe.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:51:29] But this, this, this first being published in the Cleveland Advertiser, this was a sign of a coming storm because now the word was out, right? So a roaming reporter in 1831 named James Gordon Bennett published a massive expose on Mormonism later that same year in August and September of 1831.

John Dehlin [00:51:49] Because Kirtland, Ohio, is starting to Swell. And people are starting to talk about, yes, who is this Joseph Smith guy? What's going on in Kirtland, Right?

Bryce Blankenagel [00:51:57] Yes, exactly. So James Gordon Bennett is actually a really interesting figure in Mormon history because in 1831 he published this scathing expose about the early church, but by 1843 he had an honorary doctorate from the University of Nauvoo for a law degree. Right. I mean, he was a very interesting guy. He founded the New York Herald in 1835. He was the first person to interview a sitting U.S. president. I haven't found that interview, but I know that he was 1836. He interviewed Martin Van Buren.

John Dehlin [00:52:31] He's.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:52:31] He's just a really fascinating guy. But he published this article in August, September of 1831 titled Mormonism, Religious Fanaticism, Church and State Party. Now, this article was discovered in 1969 by Nancy Richards in a New York library. And then There was a BYU studies 1970 article by Leonard Arrington that reprints the article in its entirety and its typical Arrington apologist. It's a fantastic article. So search for if you want to read the entire article. It's, it's hilarious. But BYU studies 1970 Leonard Arrington about more Morning Courier and Inquirer from New York.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:53:14] I'm going to read a few extracts because it's really quite revealing, I think. He starts it out, quote, you have heard of Mormonism, who has not? Paragraph has followed paragraph in the newspapers, recounting the movements, detailing their opinions and surprising distant readers with the traits of a singularly new religious sect which had its origin in this state. Mormonism is the latest device of roguery, ingenuity, ignorance and religious excitement combined, and acting on materials prepared by those who ought to know better. It is one of the mental exhalations of western New York.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:53:49] He gives some some sketches of the Smith family that are just scathing. But then he goes on to say, Ringdon, the individuals who gave birth to this species of fanaticism are very simple personages and not known until this thrust them into notice. They are the old and young Joe Smiths. Harris, a farmer Ringdon, a sort of preacher on general religion from Ohio, together with several other persons equally infatuated cunning and hypocritic skating. Article he continues, Young Joe, who afterwards figured so largely in the Mormon religion, was at that period a careless, indolent, idle and shiftless fellow. He hung around the villages and strolled round the taverns without any end or aim, without any positive defect or as little merit in his character.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:54:35] He was a rather stout, able bodied fellow and might have made a good living in such a country as this, where anyone who is willing to work can soon get on in the world. Now, later on in the article, listeners may have read Obadiah Dogberry's book of pukei, if that rings a bell. It was published in the Palmyra newspaper by this guy, Abner Cole, who was writing under the pen name of Obadiah Dogberry. And he talks about this magic man from Ohio named Lumen Walters.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:55:08] James Gordon Bennett talks about a preacher from Ohio, but he names Rigdon specifically. It's quite interesting. He says, quote, after the lapse of some weeks, the expedition was completed and the famous Ohio man made his appearance. Among them, this recruit was the most cunning, intelligent and odd of the whole. Of course, he's talking about this in the context of the money diggers. They heard about this preacher in Ohio who was really good at magic. They wanted to recruit him, so they brought him out to New York.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:55:37] He had been a preacher of almost every religion, a teacher of all sorts of morals. He was perfectly au fait with every species of prejudice, folly or fanaticism which governs the mass of enthusiasts. In the course of his experience, he had attended all sorts of camp meetings, prayer meetings, anxious meetings and revival meetings. He knew every turn of the human mind in relation to these matters. He had a superior knowledge of human nature, considerable talent, great plausibility, and knew how to work the passions as exactly as a Cape Cod sailor knows how to work a whale ship. Now, why this is important is because this character sketch of Sidney Rigdon is so incredibly accurate.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:56:17] If you've read Rigdon's writings, if you've read Portrait of Religious Excess, Richard Van Wagner's book on Sidney Rigdon, this amazing biography of Sidney Rigdon, it is a perfect description of this guy. He goes on to say his name, I believe, is Henry Rangdon or Ringdon. And then Leonard Arrington editorializes, note how precise Bennett is in his reporting with an exclamation point or some such word. About that time this person appeared among them, a splendid excavation was begun in a long, narrow hill between Manchester and Palmyra. This hill has since been called by some the Golden Bible Hill.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:56:52] So what that 1831 article is saying explicitly is that this guy, Sidney or Henry Ringdon or Rangdon, he didn't know his exact name, came over from Ohio before 1830 and helped the treasure diggers excavate this hill in Manchester that is now known as the hill Cumorah.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:57:11] And I think it's also notable that James Gordon Bennett description of Henry or of Sidney Rigdon are very accurate. But he doesn't get the name right, which means that he didn't know the name Sidney Rigdon from what other people were telling him about him as a preacher. He knew it from what people in New York were telling him about this Rington character. Right. Because he went to New York. He interviewed the people who were neighbors of the Smiths in order to gain this information.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:57:42] A couple final points, there is no doubt, but the ex parson from Ohio is the author of the book which was recently published in Palmyra and passes for the New Bible. They were called translators, speaking of Harris and Joseph Smith. But in fact and in truth, they are believed to be the work of the ex preacher from Ohio who stood in the background and put forward Joe to father the new Bible and the new faith. After the publication of the Gold Bible, they began to make converts rapidly.

John Dehlin [00:58:08] Yeah, that's really early. Like, you know, when I'm reading the stuff in the 60s and 70s where people are remembering back what so and so may or may not have said, I'm like, well, that's like 50, 50 years removed or 40 years removed. That's.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:58:22] And a lot of them are antagonistic.

John Dehlin [00:58:23] This is months removed, you know.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:58:25] Yeah, exactly.

John Dehlin [00:58:26] And so it's, it's interesting. The other thing is I like, do we have any reason to believe other than this that Rigdon would have been on those folk magic sort of expeditions? Like in all that reading of Vogel, I don't remember anything insinuating that there's a chance he could have been there. So that's just foreign to my limited reading so far of that early, you know, what. Do you have any thoughts on that or. Other than it's being speculated on here?

Bryce Blankenagel [00:58:57] So as far as Rigden being associated with folk magic and occultism and Joseph's expeditions and Joseph's expeditions, there is no document, evidence that has come forward that connects Sydney Rigdon to the Smith family and their treasure digging whatsoever.

John Dehlin [00:59:16] Because you'd think all those estranged treasure diggers would have said, yeah, Rigdon was with us.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:59:20] You know, you would think, yeah, that's kind of. Kind of a thinker, isn't it?

John Dehlin [00:59:24] Yeah. Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:59:25] Which presents one of, one of the flaws is there isn't anything other than late antagonistic sources that explicitly say, I saw Sydney Rigdon with the Smiths.

John Dehlin [00:59:36] Okay.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:59:36] And those are very late. However, this is 1831, August and September, 1831, saying there were people around here talking about this Henry Rigdon guy, and he gives us A character sketch of Sidney Rigdon that is fairly accurate from how we understand Sidney Rigdon.

John Dehlin [00:59:53] Okay.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:59:53] So I think it's, it's pretty notable and it definitely introduces some cognitive dissonance like how do you deal with these two different camps? How do we deal with this. This lack of documentary evidence. Right. So one of the quotes about Sidney Rigdon priming his congregations for the Book of Mormon coming forward actually comes from Adamson Bentley, who was a good friend of Sidney Rigdon before Mormonism. I believe he was even a roommate of Sidney Rigdon. I think they were even related through marriage. So in an 1841 letter, Adamson Bentley said, quote, I know that Sidney Rigdon told me that there was a book coming out, the manuscript of which had been found engraved on gold plates as much as two years before the Mormon Bible made its appearance or had been heard of by me, end quote.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:00:41] That's one of about five different quotes of people saying that Sidney Rigdon was preaching about the Book of Mormon before the Book of Mormon made its appearance on the scene. So that's pretty interesting as well. So now let's talk hurlbut. Right. Dr. Fastus.

Philastus Hurlbut and the Spalding Investigation

John Dehlin [01:00:58] And just really quickly, as you, as you look at Fon Brody's criticisms of the, of the Spalding Theory, she talks about, you know, recovered memory or implanted memory or, you know, just this idea that people, when they encode and then, and then, you know, bring. Bring the memory out to working memory and then re. Encode it. Stories get mixed together. Right. And so the, you know, the quick explanation of that would be Somehow over that 10 years, he mixed whatever he remembered Rigdon saying with whatever stories you heard about Joseph Smith and then re. Encoded them together and that, that sort of implanted memory or tainted memory. Right. I mean, that's.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:01:42] Well, that's.

John Dehlin [01:01:43] I.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:01:44] Near the end of my notes here, I have the weaknesses of the. Okay, I'm gonna try and speak to that as best I can.

John Dehlin [01:01:48] Yeah, we'll get to it.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:01:49] But the point is, is that memory is terrible.

John Dehlin [01:01:52] Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:01:53] If I asked you to repeat one quote that I have read here, one thing that I have said that somebody else said without going back and reviewing the tape, you couldn't do it.

John Dehlin [01:02:00] Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:02:02] So to think that people remembered something from 20 years before.

John Dehlin [01:02:06] Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:02:06] Accurately, that's pretty tough.

John Dehlin [01:02:09] Right?

Bryce Blankenagel [01:02:10] Right. So, yeah, I'm going to try and speak to that a little bit as well. So enter on the scene, doctor, philosopher. But which. Best name ever. Right. He wasn't even a doctor. His name was Doctor. He was the Seventh son of his family, and that was pretty common in folk magic to name the seventh son Doctor.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:02:28] So he joined the church probably in 1832, before Hurlbut made his first sojourn out of Mormonism. Orson Hyde and Samuel Smith, which. Orson Hyde, we know that name, Samuel Smith. He was, you know, a member of the Smith family, one of Joseph's younger brothers. They had been preaching in Conneaut, Ohio, which is about 60 miles away from Kirtland. They were there as missionaries, and while they were preaching from the Book of Mormon, they heard some interesting accusations while they were reading from the Book of Mormon there. Notably, a judge stood up in the crowd and said, oh, come to passes, come to life again, referring to Solomon's balding. So Hurobut heard about these accusations and he himself went to Conneaut Creek to investigate what was going on there.

John Dehlin [01:03:10] He returned to Kirtland as an active, believing Mormon as.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:03:13] As a missionary. But I think he was like, what is going. Maybe a bit like Ezra Booth, right? So Ezra Booth published his letters after he had joined the church just to find out what was going on. Possibly he wanted. He heard these accusations after he had joined the church and was like, hey, hey, Joseph, can, can you send me on a mission to. To over in the northeastern area of the state? I'd like to see what's going on up there. There, you know, we don't really know. Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:03:38] So he headed up to Takana and he heard what people were saying about the Book of Mormon. He went there with a Book of Mormon. He read it, passages from it, and he returned to Kirtland after traveling to Kac Creek, and he was excommunicated from the church for unchristian, like, conduct with women.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:03:57] That can mean anything, right? That can just be used as a smear because of sexual slander laws. That was just a very broad term that could be used to accuse somebody of doing something. It could have been not even related to any conduct that he was doing with Mormon women. Who knows, right? It's just. It was just used as a term to excommunicate him. After he was excommunicated, Hurlbut began a smear campaign against Mormonism and against Joseph Smith. And that's when he got really quickly,

John Dehlin [01:04:27] I guess, in theory, and I'm just making this up. Tell me if it's totally off base, if he was investigating the church's truth claims specifically, you know, the origins of the Book of Mormon and potential involvement of characters that contradicted the official narrative, I guess in theory, they could excommunicate him and find any old excuse, including womanizing or whatever, is that.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:04:52] Well, grounds for excommunication could mean you made Joseph Smith mad. I mean, seriously, people were excommunicated. It wasn't, it's not seen back then. It wasn't seen as much of an event as it is today. Yeah, it was definitely treated differently. So he, he began his smear campaign and that's when he teamed up with some Ohio residents, wealthy Ohio residents, in order to fund his travels, fund this research campaign that he was going on. And this is when Eber Howe enters the scene. Eber Howe was editor of the Paynesville Telegraph. He was printing scathing articles about the Mormons. His sister, Harriet Howe had joined the Mormon sect and he was not happy about it. So he was very, very antagonistic. They called him the Mormon Eater.

John Dehlin [01:05:40] And that's Ed Howe, right? Ed How?

Bryce Blankenagel [01:05:42] Eber D. How? Yep. So I, I can't remember. I'm not sure if Eber Howe actually helped fund Hurlbut's research or if he was just saying that I would publish it once he gets it. I'm not sure exactly his role in Hurlbut compiling this research, but he was somewhere in the background there. So Hurlbut spent the majority of spring and summer of 1833 collecting information while Eber D. Howe was compiling research for his forthcoming book, Mormonism Unveiled, which that's the first anti Mormon book I ever read when I was first studying Mormon history. And it's an amazing book. It truly is amazing.

John Dehlin [01:06:18] Can I just say, one of the most brilliant things ever done by the Mormon Church was poison the well for all of us with these, quote, anti Mormon books.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:06:30] Anti Mormon lies.

John Dehlin [01:06:31] Yeah, because like forever. I just discounted them as, oh, well, we can't look at Edie Howe's book because he was an anti Mormon. But the truth is, number one, if they were mad, they probably had motive, they probably had reasons, maybe even good reasons to. Because who's going to spend time and money, collect, you know, traveling the country.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:06:49] Right.

John Dehlin [01:06:50] Collecting affidavits.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:06:51] Why couldn't just leave it alone?

John Dehlin [01:06:53] Like, yeah, if, if, if the church is hurting people and Joe Smith is hurting people, then it would make sense that those hurt people would try and stop him. And what are they going to do if they're, if they're, if they're hurt by him? You know, they're going to collect affidavits and run around and interview people and so like, and that, and again, that stuff is so close to the, to the actual events. Right. Like if we're looking for contemporary evidence, the closest firsthand accounts that we could have, that's what these, you know, that's what Edie Howe and Hurlbut are doing. They're exactly, they're getting first hand accounts or accounts closest to the actual happenings. Right. So they deserve to be taken actually most seriously, I think, in my view.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:07:38] Well, I would trust them being antagonistic towards the church. Well, I can't say more, but I would put more weight into what they say about the early church than I would what Joseph Smith said about the early church. Because Joseph Smith had a motive of scrubbing the record of any wrongdoing, of making sure that he presents his public Persona as the most holy and pious and revelatory visionary of his day. Right. Joseph Smith has a vested interest in seeing this happen. And sure, you know, Eber Howe had a vested interest in writing, you know, anti Mormon material. And I say anti Mormon in air quotes every time because it's such an interesting word in and of itself.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:08:17] But, but Ebert E. Howe, I mean, he was selling a lot of newspapers that had Mormonism in the headline, Right. So he had an interest in publishing about the Mormons and they were picking up headlines across the nation at this time.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:08:29] But the utility of the term anti Mormon, like my family today knows that I make my living off of anti Mormon propaganda. It's an extremely powerful word. It's, it is a mind control word and it's something that I think more people need to deal with because it's very powerful. So Hurlbut went and collected all these affidavits in Conneaut Creek in New York. You know, family, not family members, but neighbors of the Smiths.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:08:56] He, he also interviewed a number of family members and close friends of Solomon Spalding, in addition to neighbors of the Smith family. I already said that. He also found out that the original manuscript story was somewhere available to him. So he approached the widow of Solomon Spalding, Matilda, Matilda Davison, and said, hey, can I get this book from you? Can I get, you know, Spalding's manuscript from you? And she said, yes, but it's in a trunk in New York. So Hurlbut had to travel to New York with a letter from Davidson saying that I can access this hair covered trunk where he found manuscript story and possibly manuscript found.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:09:38] We'll get into that. It's pretty interesting here. Upon Hurlbut's return from New York, return to Kurland, a physical altercation happened between Joseph Smith and Hurlbut. Hurlbut got arrested by a Mormon constable and he was issued basically the equivalent of a restraining order by Joseph Smith.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:10:01] So it's interesting to know that there was some bad blood between Hurlbut and Joseph Smith at this time. Also, I should note, after he collected the manuscripts, he passed back through Conneaut on his way to Kirtland because it's right along the Great Lakes area. He passed back through and he showed the manuscript to a number of people and we're going to get into some of that as well. But we can't talk about Hurlbut and the affidavits he collected without reading a few of them. So I have just taken a small sampling of what they entail. I would encourage people to read Mormonism Unveiled for themselves.

The Spalding Affidavits and Manuscript Accounts

Bryce Blankenagel [01:10:35] Chapter 19 establishes the Spalding Theory in all of these affidavits or Read Naked truths about Mormonism 1888 expose that has a major expansion of all of this and we'll talk about that soon as well. This is from John Spaulding, Solomon Spaulding's brother. Quote he then told me he had been writing a book which he intended to have printed the veils of which he thought would enable him to pay all his debts. The book was entitled Manuscript Found, of which he read to me many passages. It was an historical romance of the first settlers of America, endeavoring to show that the American Indians are the descendants of the Jews or or the lost tribes.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:11:12] It gave a detailed account of their journey from Jerusalem by land and sea till they arrived in America under the command of Nephi and Lehi. Those names, proper nouns. They afterwards had quarrels and contentions and separated into two distinct nations, one of which he denominated Nephites and the other Lamanites. He's all talking about the Spalding manuscript found here.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:11:33] Cruel and bloody wars ensued in which great multitudes were slain. They buried their dead in large heaps which caused the mounds so common in this country which you know, you had Dan Vogel on to talk about the mound builder myth. The Book of Mormon was created partially to answer the mountain builder myth. Their arts, sciences, civilization were brought into view in order to account for all the curious antiquities found in various parts of north and South America. I have recently read the Book of Mormon and to my great surprise I find nearly the same same historical matter, names, etc as they were in my brother's writings.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:12:08] I well remember that he wrote in the old style and commenced about every sentence with. And it came to pass or now it came to pass the same as in the Book of Mormon. And according to the best of my recollection and belief, it is the same as my brother Solomon wrote, with the exception of the religious matter. By what means it has fallen into the hands of Joseph Smith Jr. I am unable to determine.

John Dehlin [01:12:29] So this is what, what year is. Is Solomon Spalding's brother being interviewed?

Bryce Blankenagel [01:12:34] 33. This is 33 affidavits.

John Dehlin [01:12:36] Okay, so three years after the creation of the Book of Mormon. Yeah. So you'd have to explain why the brother within three years is totally munging whatever memory he has of his brother's stuff with Joseph Smith. And what would his motive be to completely lie about it.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:12:54] Right.

John Dehlin [01:12:54] With his dead brother.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:12:55] You know, and, and we're going to get into that in the strengths and weaknesses Genesis portion of it. We also have Martha Spalding, who was Solomon's sister in law. I was at his house a short time before he left Conat. He was then writing a historical novel founded upon the first settlers of America. He represented them as an enlightened and warlike people, white skinned, enlightened. He had for many years contended that the Aborigines of America were descendants of some of the lost tribes of Israel. And this idea he carried out in the book in question. The lapse of time which has intervened prevents my recollection but few of the leading incidents of his writing.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:13:29] But the names of Nephi and Lehi are yet fresh in my memory as being the principal heroes of this tale. They were officers of the company, so on and so forth. He gave a particular account of their journey by land and sea till they traveled to America, after which disputes arose between the chiefs which caused them to separate into different lands, one of which he called the Lamanites, the other he called the Nephites.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:13:51] Another account, she also says the old obsolete style and phrases of and it came to pass etc are the same as in the Book of Mormon. Here's from John Miller, who is a business associate and who boarded with the Spaldings. While there I boarded and lodged with the family of said Spalding for several months. I was introduced to the manuscript of Spalding and perused them as often as I had leisure. So he's living with the Spalding. He, you know, sees Spalding's writings and he flips through them. There's no books in the house that he hasn't read. Whatever he had written two or three books or pamphlets on different subjects.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:14:24] But that which more particularly drew my attention was one he called manuscript Found from this he would frequently read some humorous passages to the company present. It purported to be the history of the first settlement America before discovered by Columbus. He brought them off from Jerusalem under their leaders, detailing their travels by land and water, their manner, Customs, law, wars, etc. He designed it to be a historical novel and after years it would be believed by many people as much as the history of England. He designed it to be a history book. He soon after failed in business and told me that in order to retire from the din of his creditors, he would finish the book and have it published, which would enable him to pay the debts and support his family.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:15:05] He also talks about Nephi, Lehi, Moroni. I have recently examined the Book of Mormon and find in it the writings of Solomon Spalding from begin, beginning to end, but mixed up with scripture and other religious matter which I did not meet with in the manuscript found. So that's John Miller.

John Dehlin [01:15:22] So how would he have memories, you know, in one direction, but also memories in the other. In other words, if he's. I, I'm. You're probably going to comment on this later, but that's interesting to me that he could all he can only remember what was in common with the Spalding manuscript, but what was left out. Right, Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:15:41] That's quite interesting. That's interesting to me. Yeah. And this is. All right, so we can discuss this a bit more as well. But when we're talking about memory fabrication and your brain subconsciously grabbing onto things and formulating memories around those things, you can remember something in your childhood that never happened. Your parents can remember something in your own childhood that you never remember that did happen. Right. Memory is such a fickle and tough thing to deal with. But unfortunately, when it comes to the Spalding theory, that's all we have is memories from these people. And granted they're talking about stuff that was going on in 1812, 1811, 1810.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:16:23] This is 1833, 20 years after the fact. Right. So that's something we have to contend with as well. One final quote here, this is from Aaron Wright. Read it as most modern history, if it is talking about the Book of Mormon, if it is not Spaulding's writing, it is the same as he wrote. And if Smith was inspired, I think it was by the same spirit that Spaulding was, which he confessed be the love of money.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:16:50] Right. I can read these, these, these affidavits for a long time, but I think you and the listeners really kind of get the idea. They're very consistent among all of These affidavits that Hurlbut collected, a criticism can be leveled that because there is so much consistency, right? It's like oh well obviously Hurlbut was guiding their affidavits and you know, helping them to formulate what they were going to say. But then the, the argument against that is like. But if they weren't so consistent, you'd say that they aren't accurate. So do you want more consistency or less consistency among multiple unconnected non family members or do you want, do you want more or less consistency among them?

Bryce Blankenagel [01:17:33] What, what are you trying to look for in order to say what's more historically reliable? Right, right. So it's kind of, it's kind of this weird world that this lived in. Another guy, Henry Lake, he was a judge, he talked about his wife reading to him the Book of Mormon and that's when he says she had, she had not read 20 minutes till I was astonished to find the same passage it in it that Spalding had read to me 20 years before from Manuscript Found. And all of them, none of them say manuscript story. All of them say manuscript found. Every single one of them title it Manuscript found.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:18:07] Right. And I also should note that almost all of them say that and it came to pass. Happens frequently. One of them said that he told Spalding that and it came to pass appears so frequently to render it ridiculous. The passage came to pass appears 1400 times, times more than 1400 times in the Book of Mormon. It was a start of a sentence for that writing style.

John Dehlin [01:18:28] How do we know if it was Hurlbut who called it manuscript found or Ed Howe who called it, I guess Hurlbut manuscript found in all the, you know, depositions he was making. And that's just how he consistently named it versus how they referred to it. I. Yeah, I don't know. I'm. I don't expect you to know.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:18:48] So we have. I'm going to read the intro to manuscript story here in a minute. Manuscript story. It's basically the premise of the book that Spalling was stumbling around in conneaut and he found these manuscripts and translated them from the Roman into English. And this is, you know, the manuscript story is the, the Biog or the autobiography of the author of those manuscripts. So that's the central premise is that he found the manuscripts. The manuscripts are therefore found. Therefore he titled it Man Manuscript Found. And it was just a working title, right? These weren't published. These were just working titles for the manuscripts. Had his editor told him to retitle it.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:19:27] It might not be called Manuscript Found, but you know, Manuscript Found is such an ironic name. It's like, yeah, maybe Hurlbut just fabricated it. Right, yeah, so I get that. So Hurlbut collected all of these affidavits along with a letter from John Spalding to Matilda Spalding, Solomon's widow, then living in Massachusetts. Massachusetts. That's when he interviewed Matilda Spalding, got her affidavit, and her affidavit is pretty similar, but it's also a lot more conservative because the way that I see it is her husband was at this time they were so destitute. She was just trying to make ends meet. Her husband was spending all of his time just writing in his den and she probably wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to what he was doing.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:20:11] Whatever. Before Horlbut returned to Kirtland, he published in December of 1833 in the Wayne Sentinel, which is the Palmyra local newspaper, that he had accomplished his object in learning the true history of the Book of Mormon. Quote, the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon was written some 30 years since by a respectable clergyman, now deceased, whose name we are not permitted to give.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:20:38] It was designed to be published as a romance, but the author died soon after it was written and hence the plan failed. The pretended religious character of the work was super added by some modern hand believed to be the notorious Rigdon.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:20:52] So the wording of that doesn't explicitly state that he had a manuscript found, only that he had discovered the origins of the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [01:21:02] And why didn't he want to name Spaldy?

Bryce Blankenagel [01:21:04] The way that that strikes me, and this is probably presentist in my opinion, the way that that strikes me is he was a researcher who didn't want to get scooped, so he was keeping all of his his work close to his chest.

John Dehlin [01:21:16] Interesting.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:21:17] And he was like, wait till my expose comes out. I'm going to blow people's minds with this. But I can't tell you because then somebody will come along and do all my work for me and scoop me. Right. That's how it strikes me. I'm sure there's probably alternate interpretation.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:21:33] So then he passed back through Ohio after collecting these manuscripts and showed the manuscripts to the people he had previously interviewed. This is from mormonism. Unveil chapter 19. Quote, this old manuscript has been shown to several of the foregoing witnesses who recognize it as Spaldings. He having told them that he had altered his first plan of writing manuscript story by going further back with dates and writing in the old scriptural style in order that it might appear more ancient. They say manuscript story bears no resemblance to the manuscript found. So Mormonism Unveiled is drawing a sharp line between manuscript story, conneaut Creek, and manuscript found. And that's something we always need to keep in mind.

John Dehlin [01:22:17] But it claims to have been, you know, the origins. The origin text of the first manuscript claims to be some scroll found somewhere. So again, it. You know it, and it deals with the migration that ends up in America. Like, that's interesting. Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:22:37] And of course, I'm going to read it really soon.

John Dehlin [01:22:39] Okay. Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:22:40] Because it is so fascinating.

John Dehlin [01:22:42] Yeah, yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:22:44] It's the first time I read it, I'm like, well, of course, of course. And I think when I read it to the listeners, I think you'll agree with me that's like, that can't be real. Right.

John Dehlin [01:22:56] But let's.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:22:57] Let's get.

John Dehlin [01:22:57] Okay.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:22:57] Let's get there.

John Dehlin [01:22:58] I'll steal your thunder.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:23:00] It's your. Your podcast. Steal as much thunder as you want. So there are subsequent affidavits from Aaron Wright and from John Spalding years later that just validate Mormonism Unveiled's claims. They saw manuscript story Conneaut Creek that Hurlbut had acquired and claimed that it was not manuscript found that they were so familiar with. So they designated the people who had heard Spalding read manuscript found, who had read it themselves, said manuscript story is not manuscript found. They explicitly, multiple times in later accounts, corroborate this detail because Fair wants to

John Dehlin [01:23:34] basically say it's one manuscript. There's. There was never even such a thing as the second manuscript.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:23:39] The.

John Dehlin [01:23:40] Well, right.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:23:41] And it's very effective, right? It's very, very effective.

John Dehlin [01:23:44] Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:23:45] Now this is. This is when we have Hurlbut and asking people whether Spalding's manuscript, it talks about a religious or an idolatrous people. Now, there's some disagreement about how to interpret this, whether religious or idolatrous people, but how I wrap my mind around this is whether the book itself talks about a people being religiously minded or secular minded. And unequivocally, everybody answered that they were an idolatrous people or they didn't know how to answer it. It.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:24:15] But of course, I'm sure there are other alternate ways to interpret that. I. I'm just not sure how else to that. And after that, of course, that's when Hurlbut was arrested for his altercation with Joseph Smith. And then because he was arrested, Hurlbut sold all of his work, all of his research to Eber d. Howe for $50 and 400 copies of Mormonism Unveiled. And then Hurlbut basically disappears and Eber D. Howe gives very, very brief mention to him in Mormonism Unveiled. But there's, you know, basically Hurlbut's name was scrubbed from the entire project of Mormonism Unveiled. And I think that's because there was also bad blood between Eber Howe and Flasus Hurlbut.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:24:59] And I'll get into that as well. So Mormonism Unveiled was published in late 1834. And the impact that Mormonism Unveiled had on the public mind cannot be overstated because from that time, publications throughout America ignited with these new revelations in the Spalding theory. Because after 1834, nearly every publication about Mormonism includes something about Sidney Rigdon about Solomon Spalding, about. About a stolen manuscript or about some kind of conspiracy. Right? Mormonism Unveiled shaped the public mind from 1834 on. And basically every expose of Mormonism that came after that time includes massive chunks from Mormonism Unveiled or at least pays homage to this balding theory. The prevailing theory throughout the entire 19th century was Sidney Rigdon stole manuscript, found he changed it, and conspired with Joseph Smith and then published it. That's what everybody knew about mormonism in the 19th century, unless they were Mormon, of course.

John Dehlin [01:26:11] So in theory, it could have poisoned the well.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:26:15] Exactly, exactly. Mormonism Unveiled in and of itself had a massive impact in shaping the public mind. So we can say that, that as anti Mormon propaganda, once again in air quotes, poison the well as well. But it's also worth noting that Mormonism Unveiled, the affidavits that are included in it by the Smith neighbors. Historians cite those all the time as, as character sketches of the Smith family, for sure. Right. It's just a matter of. Because the chapter 19 includes all of the Spalding theory, all the Hurlbut affidavits that, you know, those just aren't given as much credence because it, you know, it includes this conspiracy element.

John Dehlin [01:26:54] Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:26:54] And, you know, it's. Well, for, for every reason that, you know, Spalding Theory is kind of viewed as debunked today. You know, those, those affidavits aren't usually cited or discussed very much. So in the end, after, at the end of all of this, 23 different people gave 36 separate statements or affidavits claiming that the Book of Mormon came from Solomon Spalding's manuscript from the years 1833 to 1888. 23 people, 36 different statements. And what's important is none of these were retracted.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:27:32] None of the. These witnesses recanted their statements. And many of these statements were corroborated by later statements. They were not changed, they were not altered, but. But they corroborated their earlier statements. And that's something that historians like to see. If you have somebody who's making a statement about something that happened in 1815 and they're making the statement in 1833 and then they're making a subsequent statement in 1882, and there's a lot of similarity between those two statements about what was going on in 1812 or 13.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:28:03] That looks really good to historians. Right. So I guess maybe to end part one of our discussion, let's do a brief summary. Right. So Hurlbut did collect manuscript story Conneaut Creek. Spalding advocates would claim that this was the rough draft. Right. And that manuscript found was the final draft of Spalding's book. And that's the draft that Sidney Rigdon stole. Now there. And that's not crazy to think. Right. So there's the original manuscript and the printer's manuscript of the Book of Mormon. This is how books operate. You have multiple drafts as you move forward. So it's not crazy that there was that manuscript story Conneaut Creek was the original draft. Manuscript found was his second and final draft. Right.

Mormonism Unvailed and the Published Theory

John Dehlin [01:28:48] But that's a major plot changes if you're going to go from a Roman whatever to Nephites, you know, but the

Bryce Blankenagel [01:28:55] themes are still similar. You're still using.

John Dehlin [01:28:57] Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:28:58] You know, you're still using people from the Western world to explain the inhabitant, the white skinned inhabitants of Native America.

John Dehlin [01:29:07] Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:29:08] And the extermination of the white skinned inhabitants who built all of these amazing civilizations and all these mounds.

John Dehlin [01:29:13] Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:29:13] So the central theme is kind of the same. You're trying to explain the Native Americans and also the disappearing Native Americans, because that was a big question too.

John Dehlin [01:29:22] And for me, I'm having to go back to Dartmouth as the potential, you know, source of inspiration both for, you know, view the Hebrews and Solomon Spalding because.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:29:32] But we shouldn't relegate it to just Dartmouth.

John Dehlin [01:29:34] Right, right. These are whatever. Whatever's swimming in the air.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:29:37] Yeah, exactly.

John Dehlin [01:29:38] Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:29:38] And Joseph Smith absorbed all of these. Right, Right. Sole authorship advocates say that, yeah, these are all things that were very clearly written by people all over at the time. Joseph Smith was just writing. He was one more dude writing one more book in this entire milieu.

John Dehlin [01:29:53] And I have to say one of my favorite episodes of your podcast is where you read off all the different books, books like View the Hebrews and like the Book of Mormon that were written around the same time.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:30:02] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:30:03] With crazy coincidences.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:30:05] Yeah, I think. Well, that was probably half hour episode on the Book of Mormon or something.

John Dehlin [01:30:10] Yeah, yeah, It's.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:30:12] It's just, it's. The Book of Mormon is not, is not unique. It's not. Well, it's unique, but it's not anything new.

John Dehlin [01:30:19] It's predictable.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:30:20] It's stunningly predictable and also very simplistic. It's not literally profound or else people who are not Mormon would study it for its literary acumen. But it's not right. It's just not that complex. Is not that amazing of a book. It's just a dude who wrote a book. Right. Also, to. To wrap up, Hurlbut may have also had a first draft of manuscript found with him in addition to manuscript story Conneaut Creek, and we're going to discuss that in part two as well. Eber D. Howe continued to hold manuscript story Conneaut Creek that he purchased all the research from Hurlbut. While Hurlbut was arrested, he continued to hold manuscript story Conneaut Creek in his possession. Then the Painesville Telegraph, his newspaper, burned down in 1836. I think it was 1837. And then in 1839, a guy named L.L. rice purchased all of Howe's old work and moved it all to the Sandwich Islands to Honolulu.

John Dehlin [01:31:18] That's why it's also called the Honolulu Document or something.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:31:21] Yeah, yeah, it's the Honolulu manuscript and it's in the Oberlin College now. So it's called the Oberlin Manuscript as well, but I call it manuscript story Conneaut Creek for consistency. Just to know that that's.

John Dehlin [01:31:31] Where's Oberlin?

Bryce Blankenagel [01:31:32] Ohio.

John Dehlin [01:31:33] Ohio. Yeah. Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:31:35] So at. So this eventually. Did you know, it was eventually found. And I guess we'll, we'll. We'll call that part one, because then we open up into the modern Spalding theory after that. So that's kind of the foundation of how it all took shape in the 19th century.

Part Two: Examining the Manuscript Story

Part 2 of 2 · Ep. 1105

John Dehlin [00:00:31] All right, so we're back with part two, starting part two of our interview with Bryce Blakeneagle, the host of Naked Mormonism Podcast and of two other Mormon themed podcasts called My Book of Mormon

Bryce Blankenagel [00:00:47] and Glassbox Podcast and Glass Box Podcast.

John Dehlin [00:00:50] Our first part was giving, given the. A little bit about Bryce and his background and then providing some contextual information for discussion of the Spalding manuscript theory. And now we're going to dig into the documents themselves, is that right?

Bryce Blankenagel [00:01:05] Yeah. So we're going to really kind of discuss the apologetics around it, the history around this when the actual Oberlin manuscript itself, manuscript story Conneaut Creek, was discovered, rediscovered, and kind of the institutional response to what had happened at this time. Right. So the. At request, you know, LL Rice purchased all of Eber D. Howes documents from Paynesville Telegraph after his. His store burned down, after the press burned down, and that's when he moved them all out to Hawaii. And then at request, LL Rice allowed a guy named James H. Fairchild to pilfer through the documents. He was looking for some anti slavery documents that Howe had published and he stumbled on manuscript story Conneaut Creek. And this happened in 1885. And at request, he sent it to Joseph Smith III, then president prophet of the RLDS congregation, who published it under the title of manuscript found in 1885.

John Dehlin [00:02:08] Which was not helpful.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:02:11] It was very helpful to them.

John Dehlin [00:02:13] Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:02:14] The LDS Church republished it in 1910 under Manuscript Foundation Found.

John Dehlin [00:02:18] Okay. I thought it was a year later, but anyway, it doesn't matter. Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:02:20] Okay. So I. It has made appearances. It's been published many times by many institutions under this same name. Manuscript found.

John Dehlin [00:02:28] I'm just saying it wasn't helpful to our understanding of the documents, but it was understanding and confusing the story. Muddling the story. Is that what you mean? Yeah. Okay.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:02:36] It was very helpful to them. Yes.

John Dehlin [00:02:39] And because the Reorganized Church also wanted to discredit this story.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:02:43] Of course.

John Dehlin [00:02:43] Yes. Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:02:44] Because they believe in the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:02:45] Right. Historical book, at least in the late 1800s they did.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:02:48] Yeah. I mean, it was in the 1960s that they started reforming away from the Book of Mormon and they never canonized the Book of Abraham, so they didn't have that to deal with. So then once LL Rice and James Fairchild found the manuscript found or, sorry, once they found manuscript story Conneaut Creek, they examined it, they compared it to the Book of Mormon and I have a few quotes from, from Fairchild, quote, the theory of the origin of the Book of Mormon in the traditional manuscript of Solomon Spaldy will probably have to be relinquished. That manuscript is doubtless now in the possession of Mr. L.L.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:03:27] rice. There seems no reason to doubt that this is the long lost story meaning manuscript found. Mr. Rice, myself, meaning Fairchild and others compared it with the Book of Mormon and could detect no resemblance between the two in general or IND detail. There seems to be no name or incident common between the two. The solemn style of the Book of Mormon in imitation of the English scripture does not appear in the manuscript. The only resemblance is the fact that both profess to set forth the history of the lost tribes. Some other explanation of the origin of the Book of Mormon must be found, if any explanation is required. And that was published in overland, Ohio in 1880. 85, soon after they discovered.

John Dehlin [00:04:09] And I'm guessing you're going to tell me that overreaches.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:04:12] Well, the thing is, is rediscovery of the manuscript story. It reinvigorated the Spalding theory a lot. And I'm going to go through the apologetic responses to that as well, because Mormon apologists began touting these James Fairchild statements as proof that the manuscript story did not serve to be the foundation for Book of Mormon. Nobody is claiming that. Nobody is saying manuscript story is the foundation for the Book of Mormon. The Spalding theory advocates that manuscript found was the source.

John Dehlin [00:04:45] Yeah, right.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:04:45] For the book. Right. So Fairchild, let's see. In 1899.

John Dehlin [00:04:55] In other words, it's kind of a straw man. It is to really try and compare the two at all. It is because nobody's claiming that they're the same.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:05:03] Yeah. So that quote at the. That I read at the top, the theory of the origin of the Book of Mormon in the traditional manuscript of Solomon's Falling. He's talking manuscript story will probably have to be relinquished. That was printed in 1899 by James Talmage. And then James Fairchild, who initially wrote that, responded to Talmage in 1901. Quote with regard to the manuscript of Mr. Spalding now in the library at Overland College, Manuscript story, Conneaut Creek. I have never stated and know of no one who can state that it is the only manuscript which Spalding wrote or that it is certainly the one which has been supposed to be the original of the Book of Mormon.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:05:42] The discovery of this manuscript does not prove that there may not have been another which became the basis of the Book of Mormon. The use which has been made of statements emanating from me is implying the contrary of the. The above is entirely unwarranted.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:05:57] So even Fairchild, who made the statement that, you know, people saying that Manuscript Story is the foundation for the Book of Mormon will probably have to be relinquished. In 1901, he published that statement saying, I never said that this is the only book that Spalding wrote. I'm just saying that this is not the foundation for the Book of Mormon. And anyone who reads Manuscript Story can come away with that assessment. It's very simple. Manuscript story, Conneaut Creek is not anything like the Book of Mormon except for that central premise of explaining the Native Americans. Right.

John Dehlin [00:06:28] And some discovered source text that was then used to produce the book.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:06:35] Exactly. The introduction is very interesting. So Talmage continued to tout this same quote from Fairchild that Fairchild responded to in 1901. He basically ignored Fairchild's response to that's annoying. Well, it's James E. Talmage. What do you expect?

John Dehlin [00:06:53] Wait, he's a pillar of scholarly scholarship.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:06:56] He's also employed by the Church. Same with Leonard arrington. Read that 1970 article about the the James Gordon Bennett, the 1831 publication. You'll see. Like, they all have their vested interests, right? They all are paid by the Church.

John Dehlin [00:07:13] You're dashing my heroes. You're dashing my childhood heroes.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:07:16] I'm sorry. Maybe you should find better heroes.

John Dehlin [00:07:19] Sorry, not sorry. You're saying sorry, not sorry, Sorry, not sorry.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:07:21] Exactly. There are better heroes. But no. And like, I get it, like, these guys are. Are pillars. Same with B.H. roberts. Right. Like, I uphold B.H. roberts as one of the most intellectually honest historians who worked under employment of the Church of the the 20th century.

John Dehlin [00:07:37] Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:07:39] But that also is like, they all have a vested interest both in their career and in their belief system. They that requires them seeing a certain version of the Church. Even Fawn Brody, when she wrote no man knows my history. Granted, after she published it, she received a lot of pushback and flack for it. And Hugh Nibley's entire career was born out of a response to her book. But even she wrote her book in the purview of Mormonism is the true religion. Right? So we need to understand the perspective that most historians and most biographies that have ever been written about Joseph Smith and early Mormonism, they all come from the same perspective.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:08:16] That's just something we truly need to understand about the field of Mormon academia. Talmadge continued to quote that Fairchild 1885 statement. And as of September 2018, the Spalding manuscript Gospel Topics essay. There is a Gospel Topics essay for this quotes. In 1884, a man named L.L. rice found the manuscript among some papers he had purchased and he turned it over to Oberlin. College in Ohio. Rice and James H. Fairchild, President of Oberlin College examined the manuscript and both certified it could not have been the source of the Book of Mormon. The Church published the story in 1886.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:08:55] So the church today Gospel Topics essay that was last updated September 2018 still holds to the idea. Spalding wrote one manuscript, that one manuscript, his manuscript story Conneaut Creek and and it holds no similarity to the Book of Mormon. That's still the apologetic defense that is accurate.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:09:17] That claim that is in the Gospel Topics essay is accurate. But that's the problem is this one manuscript that was in the hands of anti Mormons. They also claim that, you know, they had the manuscript found all along and they never published it. Therefore, you know, these anti Mormons, they must have known that this one's in the source text for the Book of Mormon, which that's a fair criticism as well. Conneaut Creek doesn't look like the Book of Mormon at all, so why publish it, right?

Bryce Blankenagel [00:09:43] The essay never mentions the theoretical manuscript that we know is manuscript found. Never even mentions it. Instead they just use the manuscript story Conneaut Creek as their foundation for the debunking. And that's the straw man in the seven paragraph essay that they do that they deal with the Spalding theory.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:10:00] All that they do is just quickly dismiss it. They straw man the argument, they knock it down and then they attack the character of Falasis Hurlbut and those who are associ with Him. Typical lds.org gospel topics essay. I don't think we should expect anything else. Right?

Bryce Blankenagel [00:10:16] One more quote from L.L. rice. It is certain that this manuscript is not the origin of the Mormon Bible, whatever some other manuscript may have been. The only similarity between them is in the manner in which each purports to have been found. One in a cave in Conneaut Creek, the other in a hill in Ontario County, New York. There is no identity of names or persons or places and there is no similarity of style between them. As I told Mr. Deming naked truths about Mormonism, I should think that the Book of Revelation was written by the author of Don Quixote as the writer of this manuscript was the author of the Book of Mormon.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:10:52] So he said it's more likely that the author of Don Quixote wrote the Book of Revelation than it was that the author of the manuscript story wrote the Book of Mormon. Right? As to this manuscript, I cannot see that it can be of use to anyone except the Mormons to to show that it is not the original of the book of the Mormon Bible. But that would not settle the claim that some other manuscript of Spalding's was the original of it and that was published in True Origins of the Book of Mormon and indeed manuscript story Conneaut Creek. It's been very useful to the Mormons to show that it's not the original to the Book of Mormon. So do you want to hear the intro to manuscript story?

John Dehlin [00:11:29] Yes. All right.

Contents of the Manuscript Found Document

Bryce Blankenagel [00:11:30] Dying near the west bank of the Conneaut river, there are the remains of an ancient fort. As I was walking and forming various conjectures respecting the character, situation and numbers of those people who far exceeded the present race of the Indians in works of art and ingenuity, I happened to tread on a flat stone.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:11:50] So he's thinking, where did all the natives go? Where did all the engine? All the Indians, they disappeared. This was at a small distance from the fort and it lay on top of a small mound of earth, exactly horizontal. The face of it had a singular appearance. I discovered a number of characters which appeared to me to be letters, but so much effaced by the ravages of time that I could not read the inscription. So he stumbled on this flat stone with characters inscribed in it. What is this?

Bryce Blankenagel [00:12:18] With the assistance of a lever. That's very interesting. With the assistance of a lever just like Joseph Smith propping open the Book of Mormon stone box with the assistance of a lever, I raised the stone. But you may easily conjecture to my astonishment when I discovered that that it ends and sides rested on stones and that it was designed as a cover to an artificial cave. So he found the stone, propped it open. There's a cave in there. I found on examining that its sides were aligned with like taken out, not completed. Built in conical form with not completed down. And that was about. Not completed.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:12:55] 8ft deep. Determined to investigate the design of this extraordinary work of antiquity, I prepared myself with necessary requisites for that purpose and descended to the bottom of the cave. Observing one side to be perpendicularly nearly three feet from the bottom, I began to inspect the part with accuracy. Here I noticed a big flat stone fixed in the form of a door. I immediately tore it down and lo, a cavity within the wall presented itself. It being about 3ft in diameter from side to side and about 2ft high. So there's a stone box in here. My mind, filled with awful sensations which crowded fast upon me would hardly permit my hands to remove this venerable deposit.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:13:36] But curiosity soon gained the soon gained the ascendancy and the box was taken and raised to open When I had removed the COVID I found that it contained 28 sheets of parchment that when uncomplete appeared to be the manuscripts written in an elegant hand with Roman letters and. And in the Latin language. They were written on a variety of subjects, but the role which principally attracted my attention contained a history of the author's life and the part of America which extends along the Great Lakes and the waters of the Mississippi.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:14:09] It goes on. But he found parchments in a stone box in a cave that was covered by a flat stone in a hill in Conneaut Creek.

John Dehlin [00:14:22] Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:14:22] If you're a person who's taking a story and who's changing it, who's, you know, whether you're changing it, updating your previous manuscript or you're plagiarizing it. So maybe it's an earthen box. Let's change it to a stone box. So maybe not parchments, but maybe let's go with metal plates instead. Right. We can see how this story could easily be adapted to be something that you and I believed in from a very young age.

John Dehlin [00:14:45] Yeah. So am I to understand it that he's somehow claiming that Romans turn into Native Americans?

Bryce Blankenagel [00:14:52] Yeah. That the Roman, the. The parchment that he read that he translated into the manuscript story, Conneaut Creek was a biography of one of the soldiers who was on a ship that was blown off course into the American into the Americas, and that they separated into factions. They ward. But once again, the manuscript is incomplete. It's about 150 pages. It ends in a. It ends in the middle of a big battle. It's. It's.

John Dehlin [00:15:16] That seems to merit as at least as much of a place as view the Hebrews or the late war War Napoleon or whatever, in terms of just like odd similarity to some of the. To some of the narrative or at least the founding narrative of the Book of Mormon.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:15:34] Right. And we'll discuss the current version of the Spalding theory and where it comes down on manuscript story and what textual analysis has done, because I think that's quite interesting as well. But we also need to understand that is manuscript story Conneaut Creek. That is not the manuscript that everybody alleges was the foundation for the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:15:55] Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:15:56] Manuscript story, Conneaut Creek. The Spalding apologist would say. A Spalding advocate would say that was rough draft.

John Dehlin [00:16:02] Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:16:02] He had a second draft that was actually stolen by Sidney Rigdon that was waiting printing that he died before he could print the title page for.

John Dehlin [00:16:11] Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:16:12] So it's just interesting. In 1886, Mrs. McKinstry this is Matilda McKinstry. This is Solomon's daughter living at the time. She read manuscript story Conneaut Creek that was published by the Rlds Church under the title of manuscript found and wrote a letter to A.B. deming who was writing his 1888.

John Dehlin [00:16:34] And I'm guess she says that's not manuscript found. Stop calling it that.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:16:37] Dear sir, I have read much of manuscript story Conneaut Creek which you have sent me. I know that it is not the manuscript found which contained the words Nephi, Mormon, Moroni and Lamanites. Do the Mormons expect to deceive the public by leaving off the title page Con Creek and calling it manuscript found signed Mrs. Ms. McKinstry, daughter of daughter of Solomon. Right. And she was young when he died. Right. So she was a kid when she would hear her dad, you know, reading the. The manuscript to her. Her, you know, neighbors. But you know, it's memories as a child. They're, you know, like, like all memories. They're, they're fickle. They're kind of hard to nail down. But still, if his own daughter is saying that. Are the Mormons trying to deceive us by printing this under my manuscript found? This is not the manuscript. Yeah, I think we should take notice of that.

John Dehlin [00:17:30] Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:17:30] Right now we get into some interesting details. I should also say that letters. That is a letter that is touted by Spalding advocates that was not published in Naked Truths about Mormonism, but it was in AB Deming's possession when he published his book.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:17:48] So I don't know why it wasn't published in his book. Maybe the pedigree of that letter is actually disputed and I'm not aware of it, but I haven't seen any scholar calling a pedigree into question. So I'm not sure where to land on that letter, but I just think that the content is very, very fascinating.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:18:04] So then there's this idea. Manuscript found. If Hurlbut was able to collect manuscript story and manuscript found, maybe he sold it. Right. So during the years when manuscript manuscript story Conneaut Creek was suppressed by Eberdy Howe first and then by LL Rice unintentionally, there were many serious charges that were made by Mormons and anti Mormons. And then on June 28, 1841, John Storrs wrote a letter in which he stated, quote, Dr. Hurlbut took the manuscript meaning manuscript found, it is reported in Missouri and he sold it for $400 that the manuscript is not to be found. I am suspicious that a Deep and long game has been played by the Mormons to obtain and destroy the manuscript.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:18:49] Someone has got that manuscript and has got it secreted from the public eye. And if that manuscript cannot be found in, in my mind will be proved that the Mormons have conveyed it away. The burden of proof is on the Mormons. To them it belongs to produce the manuscript. If they have got the manuscript and will will not produce it, it is plain they fear its publication to the world will destroy their pretended revelation. That's published in A New Witness for the Christ so soon after speech Roberts book.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:19:20] I think so, yeah. That's where he, he quoted it from. But the, the initial, the actual letter is from June 28, 1841, and that's from volume two, page 176 as well. So soon after that.

John Dehlin [00:19:33] I mean, the, the idea there that I'm hearing is that maybe the Church, just like with Mark Hoffman, would have bought up the manuscript, destroyed it, because it threatened the Church's narrative. Yeah, that's the allegation.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:19:46] Would the Church do something like that? What's in that granite vault so soon after John Storrs published that statement? It should be noted that Joseph Smith buried his original manuscript in the cornerstone of the Nauvoo House. And there's a late account of somebody saying that they watched Joseph Smith walking towards the man or walking towards the Nauvoo House with the manuscript, saying, I've had enough trouble with this thing. Buried it. That was once again recovered when the Nauvoo House was dismantled by Emma and Louis Bitterman.

John Dehlin [00:20:22] That's interesting. So I wonder why Joseph would want to get rid of that.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:20:26] I don't know. Luckily for us, about 26% of it has survived.

John Dehlin [00:20:31] Well, I can see why it's so different from the final text, all the changes. And, you know, it's just like, let's just get rid of any, any reason why people would want to nitpick. Whatever. The original transcription was from the printer's version. Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:20:50] And there's a couple responses to that. Right. So Joseph Smith was notoriously protective of his documents. Right. So when he was in Liberty Jail, he had Emma, like, he charged Emma with being sure to protect his documents, and she had, you know, suitcases sewn together and tied around her belt so she could cross the Mississippi with, you know, a kid in each arm. Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:21:12] But in another respect, we have Joseph Smith deliberately burying the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon in 1841 in the Nauvoo House. Now, people would say that he did that because it's. It forms the cornerstone of our religion, therefore it should be the cornerstone of the Nauvoo House. You'd wonder why it wasn't put in the cornerstone of the Temple.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:21:30] I. I don't know. Like there's. There's a lot of questions out there. It's. It's just very, very interesting. And there's also no evidence to conclude that he deliberately buried it in response to John Storr's statement in 1841. Just the timing there happens to match up. So that's correlation without demonstrable causation.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:21:48] Now in 1881 Hurlbut was actually interviewed and he denied that he had ever sold or destroyed the manuscript. This is from Scribner's Monthly, October 1881. Quote, I found Mrs. Davison, late widow of Reverend Solomon Spalding. Of her I obtained a manuscript. So supposing it to be the manuscript of the romance written by said Solomon Spalding called Manuscript Found, which was reported to be the foundation of the Book of Mormon. I did not examine the manuscript until I got home when upon examination I found it containing nothing of the kind but being a manuscript upon an entirely different subject.

Hurlbut's Manuscript and Eber Howe's Account

Bryce Blankenagel [00:22:24] This manuscript I left with Eber D. Howe said Howe says the manuscript was destroyed by fire. And further the deponent saith not and quote so Hurlbut said, I left manuscript story Conneaut Creek. I got it and I was excited that I had the. The actual manuscript found. When I got home I realized it wasn't what I thought it was. Then I sold it to Eberd.

John Dehlin [00:22:45] How?

Bryce Blankenagel [00:22:46] And he has it with him and it burned down in his with. With the Paynesville Telegraph unbeknownst to Hurlbut and to how at this time when he gave that in 1881, four years later L.L. rice and James Fairchild rediscovered the manuscript with all of the old Painsville telegraph documents.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:23:09] Then A.B. deming says that Howe told him, quote he did not know what became of it. He supposed it was destroyed when the newspaper office was burned. The files of the Telegraph house paper in 1836-37-38. That's when they were burned. And that's out of Naked truths about Mormonism.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:23:26] However, Deming alleged that Howe was Howe. Eberdy Howe sold the manuscript to the Mormons. Now this is kind of interesting too because this reveals that there may have been some bad blood between Hurlbut and Howe. Quote, I wrote Several letters to L.L. rice of Honolulu and informed him that I had taken statements from 15 persons who had Heard Hurlbut lecture on the origin of Mormonism and read from Spalding's manuscript found and the same from the Book of Mormon.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:23:55] So after Hurlbut went and collected the manuscripts, he was on his way back to Kirtland, Ohio. He was lecturing and reading from manuscript found and reading the same passages from the Book of Mormon. That's what A.B. deming is alleging here in Naked Truths about Mormonism. That's quite interesting.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:24:17] I told Mr. Edie Howe, sorry, Mr. Rice did not receive my letter until he had committed himself somewhat favorably to Mormon theories. I told Mr. Howe that word had been received from the Sandwich Islands that Spalding's manuscript from which the Book of Mormon was made had been found there without mentioning Rice's name. Mr. Howe trembled and became greatly excited. So he's telling Howe, hey, we discovered the manuscript and Howe is surprised what's happening here, right? I told a clergyman in town that he could not have been much more so if the sheriff had read his death warrant.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:24:52] A few days later he said he was failing and wanted to die. Howe is saying this after he learned that the manuscript found or manuscript story Conneaut Creek had been rediscovered. For he said Rice used to edit the telegraph and probably had Conneaut's story, which proved to be correct. I have not the slightest doubt but that Howe and Hurlbut sold to the Mormon leaders the copy of manuscript found which Hurlbut had when he lectured on Mormonism, that the Mormons agreed to pay a blank amount, it's a redacted amount in the letter for it by installments and obtain possession of the manuscript found and probably destroyed it and they have never paid but the first installment and that was the reason how was so bitter against them and they called him the Mormon Eater.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:25:38] So Deming is saying that the reason why how was so opposed to the Mormons and the Mormons so opposed to him, maybe I don't know exactly the details of it, was that he and Hurlbut agreed to sell manuscript found to the Mormons. They paid the first installment, they burned up the manuscript and they said take a hike.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:25:58] That's the. The allegation that Deming is making here. I just think that's very interesting. There's a fair amount more that I could read, but it's not necessarily consequential. It's just more contextual than anything. But he talks about Ebert, Howe's connection with Harriet, how his sister joining the Mormons, her putting stock into the Kirtland Safety Society and Then her disaffecting when the bank collapsed.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:26:21] And that's all from page 102 of Naked Truths About Mormonism. There are other later statements from other people who said that Hurlbut had a copy of manuscript found, not manuscript story that he sold to how, but manuscript found. This is from James A. Briggs talking about comparing manuscript found with the Book of Mormon, quote, but I believe he had also with him, and we had before us in that investigation the original manuscript found written by Reverend Solomon's Pauling. I have said and believed for more than 50 years that I have seen and had in my hands the original manuscript found from which the Mormon Bible was made.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:27:03] I have no doubt that we had the manuscript found before us, that we compared it with the Mormon Bible, that the style in which the manuscript found was written was the same as that of the Book of Mormon. The names peculiar were the same, not to be forgotten, the names Lehi, Nephi, Moroni, etc. The expression and it came to pass so often repeated.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:27:26] And there are multiple other later accounts of people saying we put the manuscript found and the Book of Mormon side by side and compared them. And they were the same book and in. In the historical text. So I just think that's very interesting. Now, once again, most of these quotes are from the 1880s, more than 50 years after what happened.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:27:51] And people swearing by their memory doesn't mean anything. Right. But the accounts exist and I think that they're very interesting. There's an 1880 interview that Ellen Dickinson conducted with Eber D. Howe. This is what Ellen asked. This is the question, answer, exchange between Dickinson and Howe, quote, is there a possibility that the original manuscript will yet come to light? Howe's response, no, I don't think so. The Mormons had too much at stake to let it exist.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:28:28] Then do you think Hurlbut destroyed it? I believe he had two manuscripts, the original one and another, the one he gave me, which had no resemblance to the Book of Mormon. There are two other accounts. We read one of them that claimed that Hurlbut sold the manuscript found to the Mormons for four or five hundred dollars, which in the time. You're a Hurlbut, you're a dude who was just out for yourself, trying to make your own living in the world. There's just this wacky religious, you know, sect with a few hundred followers in the 1830s.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:29:02] Are you going to hold, stick to your convictions, to truth? Are you going to take 500 bucks? I mean, come on, we shouldn't hold any Pretensions that Hurlbut was some kind of white knight who was out on a quest for truth. He was looking for notoriety and money and he got some, right?

Bryce Blankenagel [00:29:21] And then maybe he sold it, maybe, maybe it was burned by the Mormons. Another plot twist. There's a mystery scribe to the Book of Mormon. There are 12 pages of the printer's manuscript of the Book of Mormon that are written in a still unidentified hand.

Handwriting Analysis and Wordprint Studies

Bryce Blankenagel [00:29:39] Wayne Cowdery and Howard Davis, they were compiling their research for this balding theory for their 1976 book who really wrote the Book of Mormon? Now this is a book that I read in prep for all of this among many other resources.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:29:54] But Davis was just reading through photocopies of the original man or the printer's manuscript of the Book of Mormon and he stumbled on 12 pages that were there and he thought that the handwriting looked similar to Solomon Spalding's handwriting. That would be very odd. The printer's manuscript of the Book of Mormon having Solomon Spalding's handwriting. It it very interesting.

John Dehlin [00:30:17] Right? That doesn't make sense.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:30:19] So he collected Spalding's probate file and photocopies of manuscript story Conneaut Creek in order to get a solid sampling of Solomon Spalding's handwriting. Then he sent copies of sp of all of these Spalding handwriting samples along with photocopies of the 12 printers manuscript pages that are still unidentified to three different handwriting experts in the 1970s. And a fiasco ensued.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:30:52] Two of the experts, Howard C. Dolder and William Kay, they certified that at their first examination of the photocopies of all of these, the 12 pages in the Book of Mormon were unequivocally Spalding's handwriting. These are two handwriting experts that made the assessment that this is Spalding's handwriting.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:31:09] Now these two guys were forensic handwriting experts with a combined 60 years of experience in the field of handwriting analysis. And they are frequently called to testify in California courts as expert witnesses on cases. The third expert, Henry Silver, made a preliminary examination of the documents compared and he chose to withhold making a full report until he could examine the actual documents as opposed to these 1970 Xerox copies. Right, we can understand that. 1970s copies of stuff. Okay, so then before their book, who really wrote the Book of Mormon was written or was published. Sorry. The authors wrote an article in an LA newspaper, the la LA Times I believe it was, which claimed that they had a scientific proof that the Book of Mormon was a forgery.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:31:58] And that blew the story up. And then began the onslaught against these three handwriting Experts William do. Sorry, Howard Doer, William K. And Henry Silver. Henry Silver was the first one to pull out of the fiasco. He was 86 years old when he did this. He had, I think, 45 years of experience in handwriting expert.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:32:21] And I'm taking a bunch of this from their page on it about. About this fiasco on utlm. Quote, the first expert to be consulted was Henry Silver. He told the LA Times, it is my definite opinion that all of the question handwriting were written by the same writer known as Solomon spalding, meaning the 12 unidentified pages from the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:32:42] Do you know which book they're. They're associated with?

Bryce Blankenagel [00:32:46] So they're just examining the. The handwriting of Spalding from manuscript story Conneaut Creek and from his probate file and then comparing that with the 12 pages.

John Dehlin [00:32:56] Right. Those 12 pages. Do you know what book they represent in the Book of Mormon? Is it Almighty Mosiah?

Bryce Blankenagel [00:33:01] I don't have that in my notes. I think it's out of Mosiah, but it said it in. In the book. But I can't remember what it is exactly. It is interesting. I do remember that it included some theological parts, which is very interesting because that runs counter to what people claimed about the manuscript. Found part was that there was no religious aspect that Rigdon added all the religious aspect. But there is in these 12 pages, there are points that talk about theology. So that is quite an interesting detail as well. Another plot twist.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:33:32] July 9, 1977, the Salt Lake Tribune reported, quote, that one of the three handwriting experts hired to check the authenticity of the Book of Mormon has withdrawn from the assignment. He said he decided to withdraw after publishing reports that he agreed 12 pages of the Book of Mormon were written by Solomon Spalding. That is not true, Mr. Silver said. I have told News representatives that I could not say that without examining the original writings of Solomon Spalding, not just the photocopies provided by the three California researchers. Researchers. So the original report that said Henry Silver claimed that, you know, this is all the same author could have been fake news at the time.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:34:07] It's kind of tough to tell what happened finally in Christianity for today, October 21, 1977. Quote, Analyst Henry Silver, 86, dropped out of the case without offering a final opinion. He had examined the Mormon manuscript, but withdrew without seeing the novel manuscript at Oberlin.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:34:25] Obviously disturbed by all the controversy surrounding the case, Silver claimed that he had been misrepresented in the initial press accounts, that he had not been told at the outset that the Book of Mormon authorship was involved and that Walter Martin, the person who financed the research had a vendetta against the Mormon Church and that's why he pulled out. And then some people also claim that Henry Silver withdrew because of influence from the church or possibly death threats. But he responded to these by saying no, that never happened.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:34:54] Eventually Howard Doler told the Times this is one of the other handwriting experts quote this is one in the same writer talking about all the manuscripts he saw assuming that the photocopy material he was furnished is a true copy of the original documents. In Salt Lake City, William K. The other doc, the third of the document expert wrote in 1976 it was his considered opinion and conclusion that all of the writings were executed by Solomon Spalding.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:35:20] So in the mid-1970s you have three different document handwriting experts saying that Solomon Spalding wrote these 12 pages in the Book of Mormon printer's manuscript that still described to this day is unidentified of now plot twist. Gerald Tanner was bereft of the whole situation. Right. Gerald Tanner actually called William Kay and said hey can you go down with me to the church archives and we'll review the 12 pages and compare it with photocopies of Spalding's handwriting. Let's look at it.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:35:53] This is from Gerald Tanner's report of the incident quote. At any rate, Mr. K and myself continued to examine the documents we were treated. With courtesy I began to note and discuss the important dissimilarities between the photocopies of the Spalding manuscript and the writing in the Book of Mormon manuscript. So Gerald Tanner is saying hey, this T doesn't look like this T. You said that these are the same handwriting but this T doesn't look like this T. So what's going on here?

Bryce Blankenagel [00:36:17] Then the final blow came to the California researchers theory. This was the revelation dated June 1831 known as Section 56 of the Doctrine and Covenants. The Church voluntarily produced this revelation and invited Mr. K to inspect it. The claim has been made that Mr. K did not see the original of this revelation. I'm absolutely certain this is incorrect. Both the original revelation and a photocopy were given to us for inspection. So they found that this, this Doctrine Of Covenant section 56 looks similar to the 12 pages from the original man or printer's manuscript. Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:36:50] I noted that the date of the top and the fact that the the paper appeared to be very old. After looking carefully at the revelation I became convinced that it was probably written by the same scribe who wrote the 12 contested pages in the Book of Mormon manuscript. Both manuscripts in turn differed from Spalding's work in important features. So Gerald Tanner, not a handwriting expert, is saying, hey, these don't look the same. But three different handwriting experts who are called to testify in forensic cases in California with a combined, you know, like 80 years of experience among all three of them said at their first assessment that they are the same handwriting.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:37:26] Quite interesting. Right after the story was published. This is from Gerald Tanner. We were met with some very strong criticism. Some Christians who had been working with the Mormons felt that we had betrayed their cause. They seemed to think that we were working against the purposes of the Lord and that we should keep quiet about our findings. We do not hold any bad feelings about this. We know that these people really believe the discovery is authentic and that we are misled in our conclusions. So Gerald and Sandra Tanner even received pushback that they were helping to debunk these three handwriting experts that were claiming that it was all Spalding's handwriting.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:38:06] So I, I, I gotta confess, I wasn't able to track down the conclusion of this whole fiasco. I hope that somebody listening maybe can help enlighten me, can teach me what exactly happened, because it's, it's all just very odd at face seeing it. I didn't read the 2005 version of their book. I read the 1976 or 78. Sorry, who really wrote the Book of Mormon? So I didn't see the conclusion of all of this. But I'd be willing to bet that maybe even Sandra Tanner's watching. Maybe there are some, you know, historians who lived through this who could tell me what was really going on. Because I'm just so curious.

John Dehlin [00:38:43] Has anybody explained why Spaulding's handwriting would have, would have appeared in the Book of Mormon manuscript?

Bryce Blankenagel [00:38:49] In the printer's manuscript is an interesting question because it was so quickly and haphazardly done by Oliver Cowdery and Hyrum Smith to compile it for the E.B. grandin printing press. That the timing that they were printing portions of the Book of Mormon, they were not able to keep up with the printer. The printer was working faster than they could. So a reasonable interpretation would be, well, they had these 12 pages from Spalding's manuscript that, you know, what, they just didn't have time to transcribe into their printer's manuscript. So they just gave him, gave the printer these 12 pages and then went and worked on their.

John Dehlin [00:39:23] Would have been different paper probably than whatever paper they use for the rest.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:39:26] Possibly. But there are quotes that claim that the manuscript story was written on fool's cap paper which the printer's manuscript was as well. So I don't know, I don't know what to make of it. Right. Like it's all, it's it there. I wasn't able to chase this rabbit hole to the, the dead rabbit at the end of it. So I hope somebody can teach me. But it, it's just very fascinating. Fascinating to me.

John Dehlin [00:39:48] Okay, so just, just checking in on time. We've got about 30 minutes left and I don't, I don't know how much you have left but I want to make sure we leave time for interpretation. So do whatever you have to do but let's make sure I want to hear your analysis.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:40:03] Yeah. So this Balding theory today, right. It remains a very convincing theory for hobbyists but it's largely regarded as bunk by Mormon historians. Right. And they regarded as bunk for completely rational reasons. And given everything we've discussed today, you know, advocates who are, you know, hobbyist historians who claim it and even accredited historians who claim that the Spalding theory is true, they believe in it for rational reasons as well. I presented a mountain of evidence today that is seems reasonable. So very briefly we'll talk about the jockers 2008 and 2010 wordprints studies and this is all done through MormonLeaks.com so

John Dehlin [00:40:46] wordprint which is not the same thing

Bryce Blankenagel [00:40:48] as not IO.com right. So this is Craig Krittle et al Jockers was the, the actual statistician that they, that Krittle hired to help with this research. So the term wordprint is basically like fingerprint but a person's writing style. Everybody has a unique wordprint and writing style. So basically crittle Jockers they compiled all of all of the pre1830 writings they could from Spalding, from Rigdon, from Pratt, from Cowdery and unfortunately not from Joseph Smith because the amount of pre1830 writings we have from Joseph Smith are almost non existent. I think there's one letter, maybe two letters. So that's it. Very little to ascertain his wordprint with a solid data set.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:41:34] So they examined this and they were able to determine that 72 of the 239 Book of Mormon chapters were written by Oliver Cowdery. 24 chapters were taken straight from the King James version Bible or slightly modified. They found that Spaldings plagiarized from earlier books make their way into the Book of Mormon especially in Mosiah, Alma, Mormon and Ether. But Spalding's signal of his wordprint is Nearly absent from first, second, third and fourth Nephi, which is quite interesting. And also from the minor prophets, Jacob, Jerem, Omni, so on and so forth. They also found unique words of Spalding present in Alma Maziah, Alma Mormon ether.

John Dehlin [00:42:15] And that's interesting. Sorry. Because if the 116 pages got lost and they had to rewrite something, then there's kind of. It's less likely that that would have come from Spalding. Did I get that right?

Bryce Blankenagel [00:42:27] That's exactly right.

John Dehlin [00:42:28] Okay. Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:42:29] Well, and it's also worth noting that the most autobiographical parts of the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:42:34] In other words, that would have come from Joseph's story.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:42:37] Exactly.

John Dehlin [00:42:38] Which is younger brothers, a younger brother named Sam, older brothers, you know, the Lehi's dream, which is, you know, Joseph Smith senior's dream. Exactly. All that stuff. Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:42:47] And Spalding series almost Non existent through 1st and 2nd Nephi and all those earlier books which were also the latest authored, those were the latest written. It also a Jocker study also attributed 76 Book of Mormon chapters directly to Spalding.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:43:04] The proper nouns. Now the proper nouns we find in the Book of Mormon, right. They show. The fluctuation of proper nouns shows a higher signal in the Spalding chapters as well. And now granted, these are all wordprint studies. We're going to talk about the, the faults of this study.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:43:21] But they showed a higher signal in Alma, Ether, Messiah and Mormon that are attributed more to Solomon's balding where he was coming up with his proper nouns. And that's when we have like Ammon and Ammoniha and you know, like all of these Mosiah, Mosaiha and Lehi, Lehigh, all of these things. Right. That's where we see that the preponderance of these proper nouns coming into play are in Spalding's more higher signal chapters as well.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:43:49] Now the refutation of this, and granted this is the 2008 data that they used that did not factor in Joseph Smith. So you can immediately see that there's kind of a problem here. But the problem is we don't have enough of Joseph Smith's pre1830 writings to ascertain his wordprint. So they did factor in what they could into a 2010 study and they reran it with very little difference in the actual results.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:44:16] Now the refutation of this Jocker's methodology that they used this nearest shrunken centroid method, which I can't begin to wrap my mind around, they also used it to not Jockers, but I believe it was fair Mormon Used their methodology to examine the Federalist Papers.

John Dehlin [00:44:35] Hamilton.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:44:36] Right, Or Hamilton. That's what it was. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:44:38] Of the Federalist Papers. He was one of the three authors.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:44:41] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:44:42] It was Adams, I think. Madison.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:44:45] Madison, Adams and Hamilton. Yeah, I think so. So they, they applied the same method and it turned out that Rigdon and Spalding came at out as the authors of the Federalist Paper papers.

John Dehlin [00:44:58] I think that if you left Hamilton out of the equation and they're basically saying who you leave out makes all the difference in the world.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:45:05] Exactly. And if you're leaving Joseph Smith out of the author pool of the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:45:09] Yeah, it's.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:45:10] Yeah, it's a little problematic.

John Dehlin [00:45:13] Not to mention who else you might be leaving out that you don't know.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:45:16] Exactly. Well, that's an interesting point too.

John Dehlin [00:45:18] Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:45:19] So the, the Jocker study could be a perfect example of garbage in, garbage out. Geigo, this is something that happens all the time in statistical reporting is whatever. If you put crap data in, you're going to get a crap results. Right. But that doesn't mean that it's flawed. That just means that it needs a lot of tweaking to not be considered statistical hacking.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:45:40] So you know, once again, because Joseph Smith didn't really. We don't have any of Joseph's writings prior to 1830 or very little of them, that really kind of denigrates the ability to plug him in as a possible author.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:45:52] So let's conclude we have the strength of the Spalding theory. Right. If Spalding theory is true, it explains the complex complexity of the Book of Mormon that apologists love to point to as saying that it's authentic and that it's divine. Right. Because that means that it was written by a Dartmouth educated Revolutionary war veteran in his 50s and it was added to by a preacher and theologian who was trained by Alexander Kennedy Campbell. Right. That could make, we would understand for quite a complex book.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:46:22] It also accounts for the consistency in historical matters and it explains why the theology reads differently and almost exists as like standalone insertions between chunks of history. Right. So when we're hearing theology in the Book of Mormon, it's usually like stuff is going on and then a prophet stands up and makes a speech and then more stuff goes on. Right. So that reads like it was just inserted. Right. Copy paste. It also provides a source for the cold plates buried in Hill Cumorah.

John Dehlin [00:46:51] Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:46:52] Because we read Cone Out Creek. The intro to reads somewhat similar to the general themes of the Golden Plate story. Right. So it provides that source. It provides a source for all of the unique names that are present in the Book of Mormon that multiple people attested to remembering from manuscript found.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:47:13] Also, Joseph Smith has no writings before the Book of Mormon that are, you know, complete writings other than like a couple of letters. So we can't sample his previous writings to see if the Book of Mormon is consistent with his theology, with his philosophy, with his personal beliefs. All we can do is use stuff like Making of a Prophet and Early Mormonism in the magic worldview to construct the mindset that Joseph Smith may have had or the family dynamics that Joseph Smith may have had or current events that were happening that may have influenced the early Book of Mormon text.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:47:48] Because we just don't know what Joseph Smith was like in his early years, aside from what his mom told us about him. Right. Whereas when it comes to Spalding, we have his previous writings, we have his probate file. We know that he was a Revolutionary War vet. We know that he read a lot. We know that Sidney Rigdon read a lot. He was a constant reader. He had a massive personal library.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:48:10] Joseph Smith's dictations are filled with corrections and changes. The Book of Mormon original manuscript has very few, like, big chunks that are blacked out and huge corrections. There's minor, like, misspellings and stuff that are changed. But in my opinion, that, and I'm probably woefully ignorant on this, but in my opinion, that makes it read like the original manuscript is more of a copy than it is like a direct dictation.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:48:35] But I mean, this is, this is making a foray into a field that I'm woefully under informed on. And of course, the refutation here is that the Book of Mormon is a simple and it's a terrible book. Joseph Smith could have easily had the mental capacity to author it. And that is true, okay, if it was literally complex or if it was profound, because people other than Mormons would study it. But that doesn't happen.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:49:00] Another thing about Spalding Theory, it's internally consistent. That's pretty awesome. Historical theories need to be internally consistent as well as holding up to outside scrutiny. And that's unfortunately where the Spalding Theory doesn't quite hold up as well as to outside scrutiny, especially because it relies on a conspiracy theory. Right. And then Mormonism Unveiled is used as a source for a lot of early Smith family dynamics from, from, you know, interviews with neighbors and so on and so forth. But a lot of these hurlbut affidavits concerning manuscript story or manuscript found, they're. They're really not discussed much because they are only relevant to the Spalding theory.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:49:41] The Spalding theory explains the statements from all of the Spalding witnesses. And if we're qualifying these statements, they are affidavits. They are affidavits that are sworn before justice of the peace. Most of them do not have familial connection with each other. Most of them are just neighbors.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:50:01] The people who are making those statements, they don't have any agenda other than, hey, we don't like Mormons. Which, whatever. They don't have anything to gain by making these accusations. They never retracted their statements. But later versions of their affidavits, later statements expand and corroborate those earlier statements.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:50:21] And those are. Sometimes those are given decades later. And historians like to see that. They like to see consistency across decades. Right. So if we're just comparing the Spalding witnesses to the three and eight witnesses in the Book of Mormon that came from basically two. Two families and the financer of the Book of Mormon, a small number of later testimonies from those same people, from very few of them never perfectly corroborate the witness statements in the Book of Mormon. Some of the statements from Martin Harris directly contradict what was said in the witness statements. And he's not exactly trustworthy when it comes to spiritual matters.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:51:01] None of them are affidavits. They all had a vested interest in seeing the Book of Mormon as a historical text and people from the outside believing it. They all had an agenda. And none of them were provided much detail of the plates. They were all very general descriptions. And even, you know, even Martin Harris said it was through their mind's eye that they saw the angel. And then also it wasn't. It was. They were not individual statements and individual affidavits. They were one statement that were signed

John Dehlin [00:51:31] by all of these people in the same handwriting.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:51:33] In the. In the same handwriting. Well, the copy that we have is right. The original that we. That doesn't exists. It's no longer extant. That was probably signed by all of them. But in that statement, it was crafted by Oliver Cowder and Joseph Smith. And they certainly had a motivation. Right? So if we're just.

John Dehlin [00:51:49] Wait, you forgot one thing. They were all kind of shady dudes.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:51:52] They were all shady dudes.

John Dehlin [00:51:53] They were all like, into folk magic or just. Just questionable behaviors. Most of their neighbors, by all standards, they weren't people of high repute.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:52:03] Exactly. Most of their neighbors held nothing but utter contempt for every one of those witnesses. So you're saying the Spalding witnesses most of them are, you know, justices of the peace and, you know, like, people of irreproachable character who don't have, you know, none of their neighbors had anything bad to say about them, you're basically

John Dehlin [00:52:19] saying the Spalding witnesses were way more credible than the Book of Mormon witnesses.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:52:22] There's also. There's also, you know, 36 individual statements. Yeah, right. And those are all individual statements spanning decades.

John Dehlin [00:52:32] Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:52:32] Not just a single signed statement that's in the same book that says, this is totes true, yo believe us. So if we're forced to choose between the believing narrative and the spalling, if those are our only two options, what are we going to pick?

John Dehlin [00:52:46] Unfortunately, we don't. We don't buy the believing narrative, so.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:52:50] Right, right. Well, we. You don't. I don't.

John Dehlin [00:52:53] Right, right.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:52:53] But if we are forced to pick between the two, if we're. If we have a scale of justice,

John Dehlin [00:52:58] one or the other.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:52:58] I mean, this. This the one of the believing narrative, the foundation that it's built on, I mean, it can't be proved to exist, so that the balance is always going to tip into the favor of the Spalding Theory.

John Dehlin [00:53:09] Right, but that's a false binary. But yes, you're right.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:53:11] It is. It is. Right. I'm saying if we're forced to choose between the two. Right. Also, the Spalding Theory satisfies all of these accusations. It accounts for all of the evidence that we have that concerns the Spalding theory.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:53:26] It satisfies accusations of conspiracy between Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon that were made by multiple contemporaries for their entire history together. And even. Even if some of those accounts are late and antagonistic, also, the institutional response to the Spalding theory has been first, absent, second, inadequate, and then third, deliberately dishonest. By. Since Mormonism Unveiled was published. Right. The first.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:53:56] The first refutation was published by Sidney Rigdon in 1839. We don't have time to go through it, but it contains demonstrable falsehoods. It's terrible. But also, Sidney Rigdon was in a fragile state of mind. In May of 1839. He had just broken out of Liberty Jail. And everybody knows that Liberty Jail was really hard on him. He was in spoonings and he was convulsing. He was having a really hard time.

John Dehlin [00:54:18] Time.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:54:18] He was sick, wasn't eating very well. But there are multiple falsehoods. We can maybe go through them at a different time. And then also, the modern apologetic defense of this, it relies exclusively on the existence of only one manuscript that was ever penned by Solomon Spalding, and that's just dishonest because that's not what is alleged by the Spalding theory, right?

John Dehlin [00:54:43] And that's.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:54:44] That's the institutional response of the entire field of Mormon history, academia, is that we don't have the manuscript found. We don't have the second theoretical manuscript. Therefore, that's the flaw. So let's talk about the weaknesses, because there are many weaknesses with it. It requires conspiracy, right? It is a conspiracy theory.

Why the Spalding Theory Collapsed and Final Conclusions

Bryce Blankenagel [00:55:04] Now, any historical model that requires conspiracy among many individuals, it's pretty quick to collapse under its own weight. So we have Rigdon and Joseph Smith working together, conspiring, right? They crafted the Book of Mormon, but who else? Oliver Cowdery, certainly. He has to be in on it. David Whitmer, probably the whole Whitmer family. Emma Smith, she had to be in on it. William Wines Phelps was probably in on it too, because he, you know, said, let's go convert Sidney rigdon, probably all 11 witnesses, except maybe Martin Harris, were the entire Smith family, all of the we family. How big does this have to get, right?

Bryce Blankenagel [00:55:40] Does the leadership know today and they try and suppress it? Did BH Roberts know about it when he was compiling history of the church? Did he know that it was true, and did he actively suppress it? Did Brigham Young know about this? Right? So conspiracy theories have this ability to expand and expand and expand and expand. And the more people that you. You incorporate under this umbrella, the more fragile it becomes. And the Spalding theory requires a massively expansive group of people to all be in on it.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:56:08] That's a major flaw. Also, it's almost entirely based on witness testimony. That's based on fallible memory, right? And those are remembering events nearly two decades in the past. That's a serious problem, right? Memory is really bad. The Spalding witnesses could easily have read the Book of Mormon. And the Book of Mormon shaped their memories subconsciously, right? The thing is, like Book of Mormon manuscript found, if it ever existed, their common books. This was an entire genre of pseudo history that was going on at the time. People were writing books like this all the time. People hearing passages like. And it came to pass a lot.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:56:48] That was a literary style. And then reading the book of Mormon 20 years after the fact could have easily shaped their minds. And that is the main accusation or the main refutation that historians make. And it. It is definitely a merited accusation or a merited refutation. I definitely think that that holds explanatory power.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:57:11] Also, we have that Spalding clearly wrote a book that was similar to the Book of Mormon. But because they were so common, you know, so what? So what? I mean, we have Elias Budino and James Adair's books, We have Ezra Stiles and William Penn, you know, early founders of the country. These people, they all believed in these similar ideas that these, that both books were purporting in order to explain the Native Americans.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:57:34] And the thing is, like, Joseph Smith was entirely capable of writing the Book of Mormon. Right. He was entirely capable of it. And then positing or at least of dictating it or dictating it. Right. When I say writing, I say dictating or using ghost writers. Right, Right. So positing conspiracy theories to explain the Book of Mormon, that A, denigrates his own intelligence and B, it creates unnecessary complexity.

John Dehlin [00:57:58] Yep. That's Hamer's argument.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:58:00] Well, that, that's the, the argument of all historians who think that Spalding theory is bunk. It's unnecessary complexity.

John Dehlin [00:58:05] Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:58:05] It is not the most parsimonious conclusion. The Spalding theory isn't most parsimonious, is Joseph Smith fabricated it. And full stop, one dude wrote a book, he made a religion about the book. We don't need any more explanation beyond that. Right. Historians can't actually document Rigdon and Smith being in the same place at the same time prior to 1830. All we have is accusations from eyewitnesses. Right. We don't have any single document that places them at the same place at the same time. If they were conspiring, they would have to be in contact probably pretty frequently throughout most of the 1820s. But the thing is, is like

John Dehlin [00:58:47] a

Bryce Blankenagel [00:58:47] month time was enough time for one of them to get to the other's place, stay a week and then come back. And there are plenty of month long holes in Joseph Smith's timeline, Anthony Rigdon's timeline in the mid to late 1820s. So that's not necessarily a problem. It's the fact that we can't document them in the same place at the same time that's a serious problem. Historians also have a hard time getting Spalding's manuscript into Rigdon's hands. We have the connection to the Patterson printing press, but we also have Rigdon's direct denial that he was ever there at the time when he could have attained the manuscript. So that's kind of a problem. Right. But we would also expect if it were true, for Rigdon to just blatantly out and out deny it. So that's something to deal with as well.

John Dehlin [00:59:31] And again, we know that sometimes he did dissemble Rigden did. Rigdon did, yeah. On other issues.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:59:37] Yeah, exactly.

John Dehlin [00:59:38] Well.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:59:39] And he was very. I would say that Rigdon had a very tenuous attachment to reality.

John Dehlin [00:59:47] Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [00:59:48] So in many, many respects. And that played into his charisma and his power of oratory, but it also made it so people thought he was crazy. And that very possibly was from a childhood head trauma. Right. The wordprint study refutations. Fairmormon did their own wordprint study.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:00:07] I thought this was hilarious. This is on FairMormon.com's As John Hilton put the matter, if wordprinting is a valid technique, then this analysis, their own analysis, suggests that it is statistically indefensible to claim that Joseph Oliver or Solomon Spalding wrote the 30,000 words in the Book of Mormon attributed to Nephi and Alma. The Book of Mormon also contains work written by more than one author.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:00:31] Critics who wish to reject Joseph's account of the Book of Mormon. Book of Mormon's production must therefore identify multiple authors for the text and then explain how Joseph Smith, how Joseph acquired it and managed to pass it off as his own. So that was a result of Fairmormon's own wordprint study on the Book of Mormon. They found that there are multiple authors, so in reality they shot themselves in the foot. Right. Because if Joseph Smith is the sole author, that's the believing or the non believers narrative. If the Native American ancient authors writing in reformed Egyptian are the actual authors of the Book of Mormon, the believing narrative, we would expect multiple different authors.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:01:08] But we don't have reformed Egyptian or gold plates to sample the wordprints of the Book of Mormon. Author historians in order to find their wordprints to ascertain if they are the authors of the books that claim to be written by them. Right. So the fair Mormon interpretation is just laughable of all of this.

John Dehlin [01:01:28] Plus it would have been all abridged by Moroni.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:01:30] Yeah, right. But we also would think that an abridgment isn't a complete rewriting. It would be like that's true, just distilling. Right. And distilling. We would think that the signals of those individual authors would come through might make. Yeah, yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:01:44] So also some people may consider that the entire thing is a conspiracy. That Hurlbut just disappeared for a few months and then manufactured it all and then he wrote manuscript story it. That's just laughable because that requires a massive, massive conspiracy that Hurlbut was carrying out for decades of anti Mormon propaganda. Once again in quotes.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:02:08] But the major flaw in that is also he would. It would require his conspiracy after his own death. So take that for what it is. And then the single greatest weakness of the Spalding Theory, we don't have manuscript foundation, the theoretical manuscript that the entire theory hinges on. We don't have it to examine it. Right. If it ever existed, we simply don't know what it contained. Which means that those who, those who hold to the Spalding theory, they can claim just about whatever they want to have existed in that book, which is not very usable. Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:02:42] And my friend Dan Weiss, I'm sure listeners have seen him posting up in Mormon Stories Facebook group. He's recently done a text analysis of manuscript story Conneaut Creek to the Book of Mormon. The similarities that he's found. He sent me his preliminary research and I find them to be superfluous connections. They're phrases like at the head of march towards the land, overthrow and destruction, immense slaughter, blood and carnage. Those are phrases that anybody in the 19th century could use for many purposes. So any connection to the manuscript story in the Book of Mormon as plagiaristically speaking, there's. They're, you know, they're just at face. There's nothing really to it. So where do I come down on all this?

John Dehlin [01:03:24] Tell us, Bryce.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:03:25] Why don't you tell me what you think?

John Dehlin [01:03:29] I was just thinking about this right now.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:03:38] I've buried you with information today. I'm sorry about that, but hopefully that was a steel man of Spalding. But how does it strike you?

John Dehlin [01:03:48] What's my view?

Bryce Blankenagel [01:03:50] Yeah,

John Dehlin [01:03:53] yeah, I don't think I. I don't think I have enough info to really come down on a conclusion. I mean, I think that on the one hand, all those early 1838 accounts give you pause to say, whoa, there's something there.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:04:12] Right.

John Dehlin [01:04:12] On the other hand, Edie Howe and Hurl a bit. You wonder how much they just poison the well with that theory. You know what I mean?

Bryce Blankenagel [01:04:20] Right. So because they hated Mormonism, they hated Joseph Smith and.

John Dehlin [01:04:25] And. But more importantly, they came out with a theory that then became very widely understood and pervasive, and who knows how much that affected everybody's accounts after that. Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:04:38] But it also doesn't explain the earlier accounts, the 1831.

John Dehlin [01:04:41] Yeah, right, right, right. Yeah,

Bryce Blankenagel [01:04:47] it is interesting.

John Dehlin [01:04:48] Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:04:49] I think we can both agree on that. Oh, yeah, interesting.

John Dehlin [01:04:51] Oh, I'm glad we did the interview for sure.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:04:54] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [01:04:55] If not just to show how brilliant you are.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:04:57] I, I appreciate that. Trust me. Anybody present and John Hamer presenting the Spalding Theory would have done a. A far better job and he would have done it with visuals.

John Dehlin [01:05:06] Yeah, You're. You're at a disadvantage there, for sure. Yeah. How do you compete with Hamer's visuals?

Bryce Blankenagel [01:05:11] No, nobody can. Nobody can.

John Dehlin [01:05:13] I mean.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:05:14] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:05:14] So.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:05:15] But needless to say, it is just interesting. And I guess, Mike, I'll share my conclusion. And I'm gonna read this because I prepared it along with my notes. So I'm gonna try my best to. To parrot it because I don't want to make a mistake here. I'm an example of somebody who started out with convictions, surety, and knowledge about the Spalding Theory. My early episodes reveal that

John Dehlin [01:05:44] for it.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:05:45] For it.

John Dehlin [01:05:45] Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:05:46] Advocating for it.

John Dehlin [01:05:47] Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:05:47] And totally believing. And I've had a lot of conversations with friends in the. The ex Mormon sphere talking about the Spalding Theory. Totally on the believing side of it. Right. However, after learning a lot more information, after doing a lot more reading, I have. I've transitioned into more of moderate uncertainty and healthy skepticism about it. Right. So the Spalding Theory is super fascinating and it's, it's, it's really persuasive, especially to those who are just learning about the history of Mormonism for the first time or who don't have their legs in the field of Mormon history. Right. But it's also important to understand that it's inordinately complex. It requires suppositions, it requires cherry picking, and it requires conspiracy, and that's not good history. Right. The most parsimonious conclusion is Joseph Smith was a dude. He was sole dictator with multiple scribes.

John Dehlin [01:06:49] Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:06:50] As for myself, I am more than happy to live in a world of uncertainty when it comes to the Spalding Theory because this is information, and our beliefs in that information don't matter. The information exists completely disconnected from how, what we believe in it. Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:07:10] I don't know of any historian. With all that said, I don't know if any historian worth their salt who, if the authentic manuscript found surfaced and it is what the theory claims it to be, who wouldn't immediately change to believing that the Spalding Theory is the most parsimonious conclusion? Because that's how science works. That's how history works. History is a social science. That's how history works. And any historian who wouldn't do that, well, they obviously have ulterior motives. Right.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:07:41] So one conclusion that we can all come away with is that the Spalding Theory is infinitely more plausible than the believing narrative that we know of today. Yes, infinitely. Because it doesn't require God in the equation, which can never be proven that can never be demonstrated. And that is just a concept that doesn't belong in history because that's theology.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:08:07] Some sources mormonthink.com solomonspalding.com and sidney rigdon.com those are just information repositories run by Dale Broadhurst, who really wrote the Book of Mormon was the version of the Spalding book that I read for this. But the Spalding Enigma is a 2005 update of that. Those are just some fantastic sources. And also mormonleaks.com not mormonleaks IO. You know, I'm friends with Ethan and with Ryan. That's not the same. MormonLeaks.com is where they have eight different slideshows that go through the entire evidence of the theory, along with the data from the Jockers 2008 and 2010 study. If you don't know anything about Mormon history and you watch those eight slideshows, I can almost guarantee that you'll come away believing that the Spalding theory is true.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:08:56] So understand that if you're going to go down the Rabbit Hole of MormonLeaks.com know that, you know, that's a fantastic conclusion of it. You're probably going to believe in the Spalding theory, but just know where the criticisms are of it. Right? More information is always more power.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:09:14] So with all of that, I really hope that everybody does just that. Make your own conclusions, make your own comments, draw your own conclusions, but do so with as much information as possible. Right? And of course, if you've enjoyed this deep dive, that's what you get every week on Naked Mormonism. And of course, John, I want to appreciate you, or I really appreciate you inviting me for this. I've really had a good time.

John Dehlin [01:09:37] Yeah, we've got to have you back. Okay, wait. I want to ask you this one last time. If I were to restate your theory, it's that you're comfortable living in ambivalence, not coming down on any side. Is that what I heard you say?

Bryce Blankenagel [01:09:50] Yeah, that's. That's the way that a proper skeptic should operate.

John Dehlin [01:09:54] No, but come on, I want to push you just a tiny bit.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:09:57] Feel free.

John Dehlin [01:09:57] Do you, do you lean towards sort of the Spalding theory as the best explanation as. As the explanation you feel?

Bryce Blankenagel [01:10:07] It's far from the most parsimonious and any, any judgments on what I believe in, what version of Mormon history? I believe in Spalding or soul authorship theory. My beliefs in it don't matter. And I. Yeah, but just what's your heart of hearts? I choose to withhold belief in any of them.

John Dehlin [01:10:28] Okay. You're willfully, intentionally suspending a conclusion. Exactly. You don't want to reach a conclusion. Yeah. Based on inadequate evidence.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:10:37] Yeah. And also I will say that the Spalding Theory, because of the way that the field of Mormon history has kind of seen it as like the. The bastard stepchild of Mormon historical studies, there really hasn't been as much attention paid to it and as much research done in it because most historians think that it's open and shut. False. And I'm always an advocate for more information, for more study, even if more study proves to be fruitless. So I think that it's important to just study to your heart's content and make your judgments based on as much information as you possibly can acquire. That's the only honest way to live your life.

John Dehlin [01:11:17] But maybe one conclusion worth noting is you certainly do not rule out the Spalding Theory.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:11:23] No, I would never rule it out. I also.

John Dehlin [01:11:25] Don't you think there's enough there to at least keep an open mind about it?

Bryce Blankenagel [01:11:30] Yes, but I also need to say that I also don't rule out the believing narrative, however.

John Dehlin [01:11:38] Okay. Those aren't in the same planet.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:11:40] Well, that's. That's the thing is, they're not on the same planet. Right. The chances that it is actually possible. Right. So it's plausible if you believe in God. It's plausible if you don't believe in God. But you first have to demonstrate that God exists, that God interferes in our lives, that God chose Joseph Smith, that God gave him the power. Right. You haven't even demonstrated the first premise. Right. So the chances that it's actually possible are so infinitesimally small that I don't ever see it being a possibility that I would believe that the believing narrative is the true version. Right. But I withhold a judgment on the sole authorship theory as opposed to the Spalding theory, because that's the way to live a skeptical life.

John Dehlin [01:12:23] I love it.

Bryce's Work and Closing Remarks

Bryce Blankenagel [01:12:24] Thank you.

John Dehlin [01:12:24] Well, Bryce, we gotta have you back. How does that sound?

Bryce Blankenagel [01:12:27] That sounds really good. I had a lot of fun today. Also, just if you don't mind me plugging one last final thing, I'm also listener supported all through patreon.com nakedmormonism and there's a whole bunch of extra content over there for anyone who wants to toss me a buck a show. So your patreon link is patreon.com nakedmormonism okay, so I do Mormon history and culture full time, just like you.

John Dehlin [01:12:51] Wait, you're A truck driver?

Bryce Blankenagel [01:12:52] I used to be.

John Dehlin [01:12:53] What?

Bryce Blankenagel [01:12:54] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:12:54] So you're going full. You're full time?

Bryce Blankenagel [01:12:56] Full time.

John Dehlin [01:12:57] That's awesome. Congratulations. Thank you. You deserve to be full time.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:13:01] I don't know about that. I'm very lucky to be full time. That's what I'll say.

John Dehlin [01:13:05] So where do you live?

Bryce Blankenagel [01:13:06] Seattle.

John Dehlin [01:13:08] And are you a non profit or for.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:13:11] For profit? I'm for profit because I don't want to deal with, you know, I don't want to deal with the crap. So yeah, I'm for profit.

John Dehlin [01:13:19] Wow. So are you wealthy?

Bryce Blankenagel [01:13:23] You're funny.

John Dehlin [01:13:23] Are you. Are you getting rich off this stuff? No. Well.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:13:26] And my Patreon page is transparent. I make. I don't make that much. I make minimum wage.

John Dehlin [01:13:32] You must be super frugal.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:13:34] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:13:34] Well.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:13:35] And also my partner is going through a fellowship doctorate program, so I do more of the chores around the house and she pays more of the bills around the house.

John Dehlin [01:13:45] I was gonna say you should be a freaking. You should be a PhD level historian is what you should be. You clearly have the intellect to be a PhD level historian. You do.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:13:56] It's not in the cards because of how much money and time investment is necessary to get a PhD in history

John Dehlin [01:14:03] that you won't get. You won't get a job for. Yeah.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:14:06] The dearth of actual jobs that are available for PhD historians, it's just not a feasible way to do it.

John Dehlin [01:14:14] Well, I think you're intellectually, you know, on par with a lot of the, the greats that we have on and

Bryce Blankenagel [01:14:21] talk about, so I would take great exception to that statement. But I really do appreciate, given how

John Dehlin [01:14:26] many years you've been doing this.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:14:28] Five years.

John Dehlin [01:14:29] Yeah. Think about Dan Vogel in his first five years or John Hamer in his first five years.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:14:33] Read any of their articles from then.

John Dehlin [01:14:35] I'm just saying you're a lot like

Bryce Blankenagel [01:14:37] my episodes right now.

John Dehlin [01:14:40] Yeah. I'm just saying that you're impressive.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:14:42] That means a lot. Thank you very much, John. I really.

John Dehlin [01:14:44] Or not that much coming from me, but.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:14:46] Oh yeah.

John Dehlin [01:14:47] Well.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:14:47] And when I talk to historians, they're like, he's that guy. He's the dude that studies psychedelics and Mormon and whatever. He's.

John Dehlin [01:14:54] So do you want to come back and do psychedelics another time?

Bryce Blankenagel [01:14:56] I would love that opportunity.

John Dehlin [01:14:58] Opportunity. Because so many of my listeners are either into psychedelics or into the theory that Joseph Smith or early Mormons use psychedelics in some way.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:15:06] Tell you what, I got a paper coming out with me and three other co authors in the Journal of Psychedelic studies. I'm not sure when it's coming out, but when it comes out, I'll let you know. We'll hook up again then. How's that?

John Dehlin [01:15:18] All right, Bryce, you're awesome.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:15:19] Awesome. Well, thank you.

John Dehlin [01:15:20] Thanks for joining us. All right, everyone, thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories. It's been great to have Bryce. Please, you know, comment on MormonStories.org please for those who support us. Thank you. We're also listener supported. So for those who enjoyed this content, want to hear more like it, Please go to MormonStories.org, click on the Donate button. 10, 15, 50, 100 bucks a month. Whatever you can afford will keep the nonprofit alive and keep us creating good content. Check out MormonStories.org Truth claims for lots of essays on all sorts of cool topics like this.

John Dehlin [01:15:57] We appreciate your support and we always appreciate Cody Layton who does our audio video production. So please, please stay tuned. Share this episode with everyone you can. You know, the more we get the word out, the better. So share this stuff with everyone and please give us your feedback@mormonstoriesmail.com if there are other topics or subjects you want us to cover. We really appreciate it. So without any further ado, thanks again, Bryce. And please join us again soon for another episode of Mormon Stories podcast.

Bryce Blankenagel [01:16:29] Look forward to it.

John Dehlin [01:16:30] Take care, everybody.

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