Chapter 1: A Tale of Two Historicities Part 2

| Part 1: My Analogy | Part 2: My Reality |

Meta-Mormonism

“Let’s not have any bizarre middle ground” – Jeffrey R. Holland
~~~~~~~~~~

Growing up Mormon

I was born and raised a Mormon, and that distinction has formed a part of my identity for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, we were not just the only Mormons, but also the only Americans in our Bavarian community. So I quickly got used to the sense of being very different from everyone else. Even after we moved back to the U.S. as I approached my teens, Mormonism was always one of the things that identified me as well as my family – thanks in part to this article that appeared in the Grand Rapids Press along with a caption on the front page of the paper:

My high school in the small town of Grandville, Michigan was located right between the world headquarters of several very devout, reformed Christian churches, and our rural home was just down the street from the Grandville farmhouse where the Zondervan brothers formed a publishing company – one that continues to churn out much of the anti-Mormon literature that is distributed around the world today. After the article featuring our family home evening was published, our Mormonism stood out to classmates and co-workers like horns on our heads.

Although very, very small in terms of membership, Mormonism in Michigan was also very prominent. The state had been governed by Mitt Romney’s father, George, who had also run some of the large automobile manufacturing firms that were the lifeblood of Michigan’s commerce. Michigan National Bank had been founded by another Mormon, Howard Stoddard, whose son had taken the helm of the bank and preceded my father as president of the Grand Rapids Stake. With this conspicuousness in a community that perceived Mormons to be either dastardly deceivers or tragic victims of deceit ourselves, my father was asked to appear on Christian radio interviews along with other LDS figures in the area. Unsurprisingly, they ended up playing defense most of the time. In listening to these interviews (including one with Ed Decker, the maker of the God Makers), I learned some very useful apologist tactics for myself; in my own dealings with classmates I grew accustomed to using euphemistic terms, focusing on benign explanations for complex questions, dodging uncomfortable issues and – as a last resort – casting them aside with an opportunistic change of topic.

Seminary

Every morning by the time the bell rang at Grandville High, my sister and I had already driven across town to attend seminary classes with other LDS students from across the Grand Rapids area.

One of the topics we covered during my freshman year of high school was the Pearl of Great Price, a set of LDS scriptures that draws its name from one of Christ’s parables about valuing the Kingdom of Heaven above all earthly possessions. I didn’t really know much about it beforehand, except that my father used to introduce our family with the groaner, “we’re the Price family…as in Pearl of Great!”

My grandmother had given me a set of scriptures for my priesthood ordination a few years earlier; I remember flipping through the pearly pages during church meetings and staring at the Egyptian hieroglyphics that form a focal point of the Book of Abraham:

In our seminary class, we were told that Joseph Smith had been granted special powers to translate the true meaning of the symbols. For years, it had all seemed very mysterious; now I was finally going to learn what it was all about.

Our teacher sure seemed to know his stuff; in fact, he used to appear on radio talk shows and in VHS videos defending the Pearl of Great Price and other Mormon scriptures as an apologist. In his seminary lessons, he would cite studies by the likes of Hugh Nibley and other LDS scholars who had written lengthy dissertations full of evidence that supported Joseph Smith’s ability to translate ancient languages. I didn’t understand much about it – and frankly my interest in the subject didn’t last all that long – but the message I took from the lessons was that the historical authenticity or historicity of the subject matter was at least defensible by people who were a lot smarter than I was.

When we covered the Book of Mormon during my senior year of high school, I had a different seminary teacher who was particularly excited about Mesoamerican archaeology. He would show us videos about the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas and used to give firesides presenting archeological evidence in support of the Book of Mormon. I still wasn’t all that interested in ancient artifacts, and between my late-night pizza delivery job, sports practice, and college prep exams, I ended up sleeping through most of the seminary lessons – but again, the message I received was that some form of evidence for the historicity of Book of Mormon settings actually existed. And given how much had already been unearthed, I assumed that further investigations would keep yielding even more convincing proof.

College

I headed to BYU after high school and started preparing to enlist as a missionary – which really made me wish I had paid more attention in seminary over the years. I definitely didn’t want to get called out trying to teach others something I didn’t know much about myself, so I decided to do a bit of studying on my own to try to catch up. In addition to the required Book of Mormon courses and my engineering workload, I signed up for some anthropology courses as well. I thought the course material might help me cover my bases just in case someone were to challenge me on the plausibility of the Book of Mormon or other LDS scriptures.

I felt lucky to get into an honors archeology class covering Mesoamerican cultures. The course was taught by Ray Matheny, a notable archeologist who had published quite a few articles in National Geographic and leading scientific journals.

Dr. Matheny and his colleagues at BYU’s New World Archeological Foundation were well respected in their field and had produced some ground-breaking research that was recognized for its thorough scholarship. The articles covering their findings became our texts, and I found these course materials to be absolutely fascinating; I especially enjoyed the field trips we took to dig sites and ancient ruins.

Most of the other boys in the class, like me, were about to depart on Mormon missions. On the last day of class, one of my classmates spoke up and said, “Brother Matheny, we’ve heard all of these lectures about ancient America, but not once have you mentioned the Book of Mormon. How come?”

His answer was simple and probably scripted from his previous classes; without even looking up, he said, “This is an archaeology class, not a religion class.”

I thought that would put the question to rest, but this particular prospective missionary wasn’t satisfied with the answer.

“But Quetzalcoatl –“

“Look, Quetzalcoatl was not Jesus,” Dr. Matheny said abruptly.

Like me, most of the students in the class had seen LDS videos claiming that the legend of Quetzalcoatl sprang directly from Christ’s appearance in America, so it was a bit disconcerting to hear that denial coming from a BYU professor.

“What about the Tree of Life stone?” the soon-to-be Elder asked, citing another example from Church-sponsored videos, “Isn’t that evidence for the Book of Mormon?”

“No, it’s not.”

“So in your eyes, is there any evidence at all?”

“Sorry, I can’t talk about that,” Dr. Matheny replied, “but I do think we should talk about the more pressing matter of your final exam.”

We all gave each other puzzled looks. Did he mean can’t or won’t?

This rather alarming revelation probably should have shaken me to the core, since I had been armed with this supposed proof since I was a kid. Let’s have a look at a photo taken in 1977 outside the rented space where our little church branch used to meet in Rosenheim, Germany, for example:

I was only six years old at the time of this photo, but I remember staring at the posters in the window for what seemed like hours while we waited for my dad to get out of his meetings. So let’s zoom in and see what this particular poster says:

Among other claims, under the caption “Archäologische Bestätigung”, which essentially means confirmation or proof, is a depiction of the “Tree of Life” stone. Given Dr. Matheny’s response, he was clearly convinced that it had nothing whatsoever to do with Lehi’s dream. As for myself, I really didn’t know what to think of it all.

Considering I was about to spend the next two years of my life trying to convince absolute strangers that Book of Mormon stories were real, perhaps I should have thought the crumbling case for Book of Mormon historicity through to its conclusion. But instead, I talked myself into the apologetic notion that the absence of evidence for a series of events didn’t necessarily constitute evidence of the absence of those events. Maybe we just weren’t very good at spotting the evidence!

The Kon-Tiki and Ra Expeditions had proved that Nephi’s voyage was at least possible, after all. [I had actually seen the Kon-Tiki raft and the papyrus boat Ra II in Oslo, and my parents told me at the time that Nephi must have sailed the same sort of craft!] With DNA ancestry, LiDAR imaging, and other sciences just getting off the ground, I trusted that – if real – the stories I had learned in the church’s primary and seminary programs would eventually be corroborated.

Although I was shocked at Dr. Matheny’s refusal to defend the historical authenticity of the keystone of all Mormon scripture, honestly, I probably only gave the subject about five minutes’ thought at the time. With the stress of finals week looming, I filed the question away for another day, dove straight back into my exams, and then headed home to Michigan to continue my mission preparations.

Mission

The Berlin Wall was disintegrating, and a few weeks after finishing my freshman year at BYU, I was excited to receive a mission call to East Germany, signed by President Ezra Taft Benson himself – a man who had dedicated part of his own ministry to the Church in East Germany before the wall went up.

Having grown up in Germany, I realized that many Germans knew more about Native American culture than most white Americans themselves. This rather odd twist is thanks to the fact that the widest-read German-language author, Karl May, devoted much of his writing to supposed travel reports of his interactions with Native Americans in the Wild West. I had visited the Karl May Museum as a child and had grown up reading his stories of Winnetou and other Native American heroes. May had begun spinning tales from an early age to lift himself from a life of poverty and delinquency, and his stories were so detailed and descriptive that when it was revealed that his accounts were, in fact, fictional – and that May had never even been to the Wild West – many Germans simply couldn’t believe it.

May’s birth home and the museum dedicated to his legacy were within my new mission boundaries; coupled with the fact that another very popular German-language author, Erich von Däniken, believed in the Book of Mormon migrations (but claimed in his books that the Jaredite barges were flying saucers piloted by aliens!) I knew I was going to be facing a whole lot of people who already had their own theories about the origins of the Native Americans. How was I realistically going to convince them that the inspiration for their folk hero, Winnetou, might have been a Lamanite with Hebrew ancestry?

Will the real Winnetou please stand up?

Just before I shipped out for boot camp at the Missionary Training Center in Provo, our family took a road trip to see the Nauvoo Pageant, a theatrical presentation of an episode of Mormon history presented in the shadow of the burned-out remains of the Nauvoo Temple. As we approached the gates, we passed picketers who were handing out books claiming to contain “the Truth about Mormonism.” Over the years, my high school friends had often handed me similar tracts, which I respectfully accepted…and then dutifully threw in the trash where I had been told they belonged. This time, however, I felt like I needed to know what everyone else was saying. I definitely didn’t want to find myself getting blind-sided by a well-read inquirer as a missionary, so I took a copy of everything they had – and then spent the 12-hour ride home sifting through things I might have to defend my faith against.

Some of the claims forced me to do a bit of soul searching over the next few weeks as my departure date drew closer, but I also took anti-Mormon citations with a measure of scepticism – thanks in part to the timing of the Hofman bombings that had tragically taken two innocent lives right in the middle of my seminary education. Mark Hofman, a master forger and con artist, had succeeded in proving that the LDS Church would pay very large sums of money to cover up embarrassing parts of its history; but the way it was framed in my own Sunday school classes, deceitful forgers such as Hofman must have been aided in their craft by the devil himself in order to fool the Lord’s elect. If the Salamander Letter was a forgery, for example, what else might be fake? Allegations that Joseph Smith had multiple wives; funerary scripts that bore resemblance to the Book of Abraham; Brigham Young’s rationalization of the Mountain Meadows massacre? Any document casting doubt on the official party line must have been forged with the assistance of Satanic forces who were prepared to fight the Kingdom of God by any subterfuge necessary!

I wasn’t sure which sources to accept and which to reject. Having heard the arguments both ways, though, I came to the conclusion that the gospel was meant to be taken on faith. So that’s just what I did: I “turned it off” and cast aside my analytical doubts, clinging instead to feelings – not just to my own, but also to the convictions of those people in my life and in my ancestry who continually testified of the spiritual witnesses they had received that the Book of Mormon and other LDS scriptures were absolutely and literally true. While this road-trip literature review opened my eyes to other sides of the dice, I still believed that a case could be made in defense of Mormonism’s claims – spiritually, philosophically, and historically.

On arrival in Germany, I spent much of my time in an administrative role as the mission office manager for a brand new mission, coordinating a team responsible for missionary transfers, housing, finances, travel, licenses, resident visas, and other logistics – all in a political system whose bureaucracy had just collapsed without a clear replacement; the transition from communism to capitalism sure made it an exciting time in history!

With the euphoria that accompanied the collapse of the iron curtain, many former East Germans were initially very excited to learn about new philosophies; after the office closed each afternoon, we would hit the streets to teach those who wanted to learn more about Mormonism. We primarily taught atheists who had been raised in a communist system and who were convinced of the fallacies of organised religion as a whole. Rather than covering individual tenets of Mormonism as many missionaries around the world do, most of our discussions ended up being philosophical dialogs about the existence or non-existence of a supreme being, an afterlife, or of anything supernatural or metaphysical at all. Sometimes the points we covered got me thinking deeply about my own upbringing and convictions, but I still needed to come up with some form of a response to relay in our discussions; in the end, each missionary – myself included – eventually assembled a combination of scripted answers, personal narratives, and convictions to respond to almost any concern.

When questions arose relating to the authenticity of the Book of Mormon, for example, we would dutifully haul along our portable TV/VCR unit and show videos like the newly released “Before Columbus”, substantiating the claims with archeological proof. With Dr. Matheny’s doubts fresh in my mind, I had to bite my tongue during the parts where the narrator claimed that basements were baptismal fonts, a tree carved into stone came straight from Lehi’s dream, a Mayan stela depicted the same flood that floated Noah’s Ark, and that the feathered serpent was Christ himself!

Carving of Izapa Stela 5 – the “Tree of Life” stone

Despite these incongruities, I still held fast to the overall message of the Mormon restoration; when doubts crept in, I fell back on the absolute miracles that followed us – things that to this day I can’t begin to explain any other way. Coupled with my own heritage and the conviction of those who came before me, I convinced myself that divine guidance couldn’t possibly intervene for a false cause. Given this overarching belief in our mission, the imaginative stretches and ludicrous little lies in our videos didn’t seem quite so wrong.

Back to College

When I returned to BYU after my mission, I was asked to teach church history and other topics as a Sunday school teacher. I was living in a foreign language dormitory at the time, and our stake presidency and high council included John Welsh, Steven Ricks, and other notable Mormon scholars and apologists. Due to their familiarity with foreign languages, they loved to visit the foreign language ward that I was a part of, and occasionally they would attend my gospel doctrine class.

So I found myself standing in front of a Sunday school class, freshly returned from my German mission, while sitting in the seat facing me was the guy who discovered chiasmus in the Book of Mormon as a young missionary in Germany himself. And next to him was the guy at the helm of the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS), a group of researchers whose mission was later adopted by the Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research (which morphed into the current center of Mormon apologetics, FAIRMormon). Who was I to teach them anything at all about the scriptures?

At every opportunity during a lesson, the stake visitors would raise their hands and tell the class about the Hebrew, Aramaic, or Egyptian translation of whatever scripture we’d be discussing. We students were all amazed at the depth of their knowledge; after all, their research was being presented around the church as absolute proof of Book of Mormon authenticity. While we were sitting in class, for example, new mainframe computers acquired by BYU were running “wordprint analyses” developed under their guidance to prove the independent authorship of each of the books within the Book of Mormon; graduate students under their command were continually discovering antiquated chiasmic patterns that matched modern-day revelations; and DNA studies were being launched by their partner institutes with the aim of conclusively confirming the ancestry of the Lamanites among us. I was definitely in over my head!

With these guys in my class, I certainly didn’t want to just recite my lessons from the standard manual, so in preparation for each class, I dug as deeply as I could into the real setting behind the stories. The recent September Six excommunications had been an effective warning against wannabe intellectuals who stray too far with their research, so I tried to stick with sanctioned sources from the official church history for my course material. Even so, I still ran across obscure accounts of events that I hadn’t ever heard in previous lessons. I found the details absolutely fascinating, and in the process I felt like I got to know Joseph Smith very closely – not just the deified depiction of him from the authorized lesson manuals, but the raw man himself…right along with all of his strengths and his flaws.

In reading journal accounts from himself, his family, and his followers, I felt his drive and his desperation in trying to hold his flock together: one day while on a journey with a group of his adherents in dire need of motivation, for example, a pile of bones was uncovered on the side of the road, and Joseph launched into a detailed story about how the bones belonged to a giant Lamanite warrior named Zelph. Later during a similar journey, a pile of rocks became a Nephite tower; a mound marked the spot where Cain killed Abel; and the remains of an old wall became the altar upon which Adam offered his first sacrifice to the Lord! I don’t know if he believed these stories himself, but far-fetched as they sound from today’s perspective, his followers back in the day sure ate it up! Like medieval parishioners who were awestruck at the splinter of Christ’s cross that had miraculously found its way to the display case in their very own cathedral, the Mormon militia carried Zelph’s oversize thigh-bone with them as a relic of their divine mission and as a trophy of their incredibly good luck.

I wasn’t quite sure what to think of these stories; I certainly didn’t possess the mental flexibility to take them literally, try as I might. In defiance of everything we know about human origins and migrations, did I need to convince myself that humanity had sprung from the North American continent, somehow teleported itself to Africa and the Middle East, and then returned to a Pre-Columbian New World where grand battles were fought to the last man, all within earshot of the same pile of rocks encountered by a 19^th century traveling band led by Joseph Smith? Or did the weary travelers just need a faith-promoting story, and Joseph Smith was there to oblige?

After reading enough of the many fantastic, eccentric stories originating from Joseph Smith, I began to see some of the same habits I recognized from Karl May – who was also incredibly gifted at coming up with detailed adventure tales to serve his purposes and get himself out of tricky predicaments. My apologies in advance for the Book of Mormon pun…but time and again, I kept finding signs of Joseph’s demonstrated ability to literally make Shiz up on the spot out of pure self-preservation – fighting to maintain his position, protect his reputation as a prophet, and keep his only publicly acknowledged wife by his side. At the time in my own life, though, I relied on the sliver of a possibility that these second-hand accounts were all misunderstood or perhaps originally relayed by Joseph Smith as a fallible man and not as a prophet. Zelph’s name was never spoken from the pulpit or canonized into scripture, after all!

When the Pearl of Great Price came up on my teaching roster, however, I found myself unable to make the same argument – given that the hieroglyphic characters and canonized translations had been accepted by every modern LDS leader to the present day. The problem, of course, was that the characters that were printed in my scriptures didn’t actually mean what my scriptures said they meant – an undisputable fact that had long since been acknowledged by Mormon and non-Mormon scholars alike.

I read as much as I could about the subject, including Hugh Nibley’s dissertations; I even went to see him speak in person whenever I could, searching for some trace of divinity to pit against the view that the parchments were nothing other than common funerary scrolls – and that the traveling mummies presented Joseph Smith with the opportunity to give his people a badly needed morale boost. To accept the Pearl of Great Price as scripture, however, I really had to stretch my brain to redefine commonly understood terms. “By the hand of Abraham” really meant “originating from the mind of Abraham but sacrilegiously altered over time,” for example, and what we were actually looking at in the facsimiles were copies of copies of copies of some long-lost sacred scrolls that couldn’t actually be substantiated – all as part of some intricate test of faith to set believers apart from soul-less sign-seekers. During the transcription process, of course, the pagan Egyptians had substituted images of the deceased in Abraham’s rightful place and put magic spells, liver jars, and phalluses in the place of divine symbols.

I found myself feeling a bit overwhelmed trying to prepare lessons that would pass the scrutiny of the church’s preeminent apologists. But I was an engineering student, after all, and not a religious scholar of any sort; given my workload, I really didn’t have the time to dig through all of the facts. So in the end, I just took the view that we only had a small snippet of the original materials, and that the scriptural text that had not the faintest commonality with the glyphs must have had its source in some lengthier record that only Joseph Smith himself had been permitted to see. Despite these imaginative stretches and in the face of his blatant mistranslations, I did end up finding a few apologetic arguments that I couldn’t explain away with any reasoning other than attributing the final product to inspiration – which is where I decided to park my thoughts.

Meta-Mormon

And so I kept teaching – and continued to experience miracles in my life – after I left BYU and got married. And when our kids came along I had even more deeply personal, spiritual experiences that were accompanied by absolute signs of divine intervention that I still cling to today. At the time I took those miracles as an indication that I was on the right track with the LDS faith, trusting that more truth would be revealed someday to explain the discrepancies I kept running across in Mormon doctrine, policy, and history.

Somewhere along the way, the RLDS Church that claims its roots through Joseph Smith’s son was renamed to the more ecumenical Community of Christ. Along with that change, they also began to officially adopt a non-literal interpretation of the Book of Mormon, allowing it to be seen as a 19^th-century religious text rather than an actual, ancient record. I had always preferred their presumption that Joseph Smith was just plain wrong about polygamy and a few other cringe-worthy doctrines that he introduced – and when I read about their changing view of the Book of Mormon, I realized that I was much more comfortable with that perspective as well; but I also recognized that the whole house of cards comes toppling down if you pull the Golden Plates – the cornerstone of all the cards in the foundation – out from under the structure.

I just couldn’t quite bring myself to take all of Joseph Smith’s claims literally, though, and over the years, I began to take on a more metaphorical view of Mormonism. Occasionally I would run into other “Meta-Mormons” along the way, and I recognized the familiar double-think dichotomy and cognitive dissonance they had chosen to live with. It seemed ridiculous when I saw others in that situation, but somehow I kept on adopting it for myself. And I kept right on teaching Sunday school from a figurative perspective for another twenty years, justifying my lesson material by never actually stating a conviction that the stories were real. Bilbo Baggins, Toto the Dog, and Charlie Brown have all made it into General Conference talks ahead of Zelph, after all!

I could teach a lesson about Aesop’s dog, for example, without literally having to believe that a real dog actually saw its reflection in the water and dropped its bone. I could rationalize presenting the story as lesson material by saying “Aesop taught…”, “As the story goes…” or adding other disclaimers. Maybe the fabled story did happen somewhere in the real world at some point, or maybe it didn’t – but does the reality of the tale really matter? At the risk of echoing Paul H. Dunn, whose recitations from the Tabernacle pulpit turned out to be greatly enhanced (to say the least), isn’t the moral of the story the whole point?

I wasn’t sure where to draw the line between fact and fiction, and I started taking the same approach with the Liahona, the Army of Helaman, and the Rameumptom, avoiding statements about my own convictions that might otherwise have been outright lies – or open dissent. If having a foot in each boat is a proper analogy, I was nearly doing the splits trying to use the moral of each story to justify teaching lessons about events that I was beginning to think of as being somewhere on the fictitious spectrum between parables and fables.

Always leaving a slim possibility for ambiguity in my brain, I began to treat the Book of Mormon and Pearl of Great Price as “inspired fiction” in my third-person lessons, recognizing some of their inherent truths and believing that Joseph Smith had been prompted to write those words in order to inspire us to be better people – without actually believing that Hor was Abraham or that Moroni was an actual, ancient Native American warrior with Hebrew blood.

Was I really so different from other Mormons after all? I mean, if you really pressed any other fully believing, rational-thinking Mormon, for instance, they probably didn’t actually believe that the actual thigh bone that the actual Mormon Militia actually had in their actual possession actually belonged to an actual giant Lamanite warrior who was actually named Zelph…or that they could actually trace their own actual DNA coded in their actual blood back through to an actual ancestor who pre-dated all of humanity and offered actual sacrifices on the actual rock that found its way into the actual wall that Joseph Smith actually pointed out to his actual posse…or that the actual piece of papyrus that actually found its way into Joseph Smith’s actual hands was actually the oldest written document ever actually discovered anywhere in the actual history of this actual planet!

Joseph Smith’s followers went to their graves believing every one of these things and more with an absolutely literal conviction – and with his full encouragement; do today’s LDS apostles believe all of these stories themselves? Literally? If so, their minds are more limber than mine. If not, why should I treat Joseph Smith’s claims about Moroni any differently than his claims about Zelph?

Of course, the standard LDS answer is to pray about it with the expectation that the Spirit of the Lord will burn your inner soul with the truth while you’re left with a stupor of thought in the face of falsehood. So if praying about Moroni feels good, but praying about Zelph seems a little weird (to put it mildly) does the answer have more to do with God or with the common consensus of ambient Mormonism? If I was really honest with myself about it, I realized that my own stupor of thought sure didn’t stop with Zelph!

With this dichotomy in mind, I kept wandering around in the no-mans-land middle ground of inspired fiction, meanwhile retaining my adherence to accounts of visions and angels and inspiration and revelation – not just from church history but from my own ancestors as well. These stories couldn’t be proven wrong, I figured, so I felt comfortable taking at least those personal accounts on faith.

All-or-Nothing

As I continued to serve as a teacher and in various other church positions over the years, though, I came to realize that there is no place in today’s LDS Church for a Meta-Mormon. Over and over again, I heard General Conference addresses focused on the black and white view that LDS theology – including a literal, historical belief in LDS scripture – is either all right or all wrong.

Jeffrey Holland, a sitting apostle, has stated that a figurative interpretation of the Book of Mormon is “an unacceptable position to take—morally, literarily, historically, or theologically.”

“Latter-Day Saints must reject these ideas,” states the BYU Religious Studies Center’s Historicity and the Latter-Day Saint Scriptures in the preface for the aptly named article “No Middle Ground.”

“There is no middle ground,” a number of LDS prophets from Joseph F. Smith to Gordon B. Hinckley have repeated verbatim from Temple Square.

Elder Oaks of the current First Presidency stated in that same BYU publication that those who “rely on scholarship” in determining whether the Book of Mormon is, in fact, an ancient record effectively “deny the Holy Ghost” with their actions. They deserve to be told, “Get thee behind me, Satan,” he said further, stating that bowing to scholarship on that matter is an offense to Jesus.

His further statements on the topic echo the Book of Mormon examples implying that those who can accept its truth without evidence are to be revered while those sign-seekers who ask for evidence are to be shunned and trampled underfoot as Anti-Christs. Joseph Smith himself said that a man immediately gives away his role as an adulterer by the mere act of asking for a sign!

Hearing these sorts of admonitions sent my mind spinning every time. Having been continually warned against the devils and demons who demand proof of sacred things, was I out of line in wanting to investigate claims of historicity? Did my scepticism constitute adultery? Was I mocking God with my questions, making demands that only a spooky son of perdition would dare to request? Was I committing sacrilege by assuming that some form of a fingerprint – even just a single footprint – would have been left by former empires with populations in the millions?

Over the years, I had heard many prophetic warnings against intellectualism – including the prediction that those who overanalyze the gospel will “think themselves right out of the Church” – and I genuinely tried to avoid falling into that trap. Frankly, I never even considered myself smart enough to be an intellectual – to this day I still don’t – but I certainly wanted my religious views to at least align with simple reason…and to be able to stand up to some basic questioning.

According to Elder Oaks, “Honest investigators will conclude that there are so many evidences that the Book of Mormon is an ancient text…”

I’m sorry, but I just don’t see it. So where does that leave me? As a dishonest investigator?

Honestly, I think he means that honest investigators should simply stop investigating in the traditional sense if they wish to find evidence in the traditional sense; from what I can gather, the only honest investigation that will lead to actual conviction comes in the form of feelings and spiritual witnesses. Any other form of inquiry will come up short – or will have to be propped up by unsubstantiated claims that have been effectively debunked many times over.

Elder Oaks argues that you cannot prove the Book of Mormon to be non-literal through scholarship; I guess I would agree that it is theoretically impossible to prove a negative – to prove conclusively that a recorded event did not occur. As far as the First Vision, the Priesthood Restoration, the Spirit of Fire in the Kirtland Temple, and other notable events in LDS history, nobody will ever prove that the eye-witnesses did not see what they say they saw; as a matter of fact, even a later denial wouldn’t actually prove anything at all. Likewise, as Oaks states, proving Moroni’s non-existence would require an absolute knowledge of every human inhabitant of the Western Hemisphere at the time. So he calls the matter a draw, stating that you’ll never be able to prove it one way or another – which leads him to the conclusion that you’re better off just taking the question of Book of Mormon historicity on faith.

[Although the phrase “Just because it’s made up doesn’t mean it’s not true” might be intended as a joke, you could legitimately apply it here in keeping with this chain of arguments; because in that spirit, nothing I make up can be absolutely proven to be false. That’s why court rooms have to employ the use of “reasonable doubt” rather than absolute certainty; otherwise there would be far fewer convictions!]

Lopsided as the factual arguments are, let’s go ahead and agree to call that one a draw and leave the question of Book of Mormon historicity open-ended for now; but in the case of the Book of Abraham, you most certainly can prove the positive, real meaning of the characters. There is no need to attempt the impossible by proving a negative in that instance. It certainly doesn’t take any advanced degree of scholarship to arrive at that conclusion; but it does require you to at least ask the question and look up the answer…which is precisely what I did when I was asked by my church leaders to teach lessons about symbols that I couldn’t make any sense out of – from a manual that made even less sense with its explanations.

Boyd K. Packer said that those who venture into teaching “advanced history” are covenant-breakers; in the same “milk before meat” talk about enemies of the church, he placed intellectuals third on the list of dangers to his Church (after the “gay-lesbian movement” and feminists). Shortly before these statements were issued, I met both Elder Oaks and Elder Packer in a question-and-answer session with the missionaries in my area. During the meeting, one of my fellow missionaries asked a question about the lack of congruity between ancient claims and credible clues on the ground. Elder Oaks pointed his finger directly at the missionary who had asked the question.

“Elder,” he replied sternly, “Let me warn you of the danger of asking that sort of question!”

He moved on without answering the question and left us all quaking in our Doc Martens, wondering if his apostolic discernment had uncovered a Judas in our midst.

This foreboding warning was still fresh in my mind as I prepared my gospel doctrine lessons many years later. Was I pushing things too far by delving into the origins of the facsimiles? Was I turning myself into an enemy of the Church, effectively joining forces with the Devil himself, by digging up for my own resolution the now well-known fact that the supposed translations of the Abrahamic facsimiles are in absolute error?

Before that truth had completely come to light, prophet after prophet had vouched for the authenticity of the incorrect translations. So what was I supposed to do when I ran across their contradictory statements asserting the truth of the translations under the pretence of speaking for God? From my modern-day vantage, could I question words spoken in a previous century and still keep my temple recommend? What about words spoken today by those currently at the helm? Could they possibly be off track with their own statements?

Defining Astray

Another sitting apostle, M. Russell Ballard, has echoed previous LDS leaders by stating, “We will not lead you astray. We cannot.”

Now I’ve never quite been sure how to rationalize those sorts of claims. I understand that quotes in that regard are not meant to infer infallibility, but I would be much more comfortable with a less totalitarian statement, for example, “We will always try our best not to lead you astray. But sometimes, history has shown that those in our role have done so. So please weigh anything we say against your own convictions and moral code. Don’t accept our words and act on them just because we said so; please think it through for yourself with God’s guidance before you decide where you stand!”

Because the absolute impossibility that those at the helm of the church might lead their members astray is canonized right into the Doctrine and Covenants, however, the only way to justify the otherwise authoritarian statements along those lines is to redefine the term to lead astray. To me the term means to lead someone off track, whether it’s a huge deviation or a minor departure from the correct path. But LDS lesson manuals redefine astray to mean complete apostasy, claiming that anything short of a return to the dark ages is just part of the everyday fallibility that is commonly acknowledged.

So when Ezra Taft Benson preached from the Tabernacle pulpit that the “so-called civil rights movement” was part of a Satanic, communist plot and that African-American reports of police brutality at the time were unfounded, where does that direction fall? In my eyes, he was trying to convince members of the church to adopt his biased position and to avoid supporting racial equality, leading to the complicity of many temple-going Mormons in prolonging the battle for equal rights – and some to actively oppose it. Were these followers not “led astray” in this instance by words that were spoken by one of their prophets “in the name of Jesus Christ?” Now that the church has officially acknowledged that no racist teachings or principles should ever have been promoted in the first place, wouldn’t that talk originating from Temple Square fall under the classification of having led its listeners astray?

“Oh, that’s just a minor detail,” faithful Mormons might argue.

Really? I would say this particular deviation from the truth counts…and very much so. Casting it into meaninglessness today condones the same falsehood Benson was promoting at the time in opposition to MLK’s speeches.

Shouldn’t God have removed him from the pulpit if the statements about the impossibility of being led astray were true?

“But that was nowhere near a complete apostasy!” believers might assert. Well, if astray indeed means complete apostasy for the entire body of the Church, maybe future statements along those lines should use the word apostasy directly and drop the use of astray altogether – I, for one, am more than a little confused on this play on words, and I would guess that I’m not alone!

So where does this whole circular line of thinking lead me? I know Benson’s 1967 statements are not true. You know they aren’t true. We can say that he was wrong today, and today’s Church leaders might be able to justify that dissent as something short of “evil-speaking”. Yet if Russell M. Nelson were to issue a statement today, and I were to tweet my disagreement on the spot, the temple-going crowd would likely consider my criticism to be a sordid, covenant-breaking crime: evil-speaking of the Lord’s anointed.

But what if fifty years from now we all end up agreeing that it probably wasn’t a great idea to restrict leadership roles for women or to banish kids from primary if their parents are in a homosexual relationship? Will we then be able to use the same disclaimer that President Nelson was simply swayed by the day’s culture – just like today’s LDS essay on racism asserts about Ezra Taft Benson’s words in 1967?

LDS leaders can lead people astray. They have led people astray. But even if I throw out the word astray and change the statement to say that leaders of the church can, in fact, lead their membership down errant paths, I’m still left with binary statements claiming that you’ve either got to be all in or all out.

For years I was unwilling to be all out, so my only option in the eyes of church leaders was all in. I attempted to reconcile the spiritual witnesses and good feelings that accompany some of the teachings in Latter-Day scriptures with the absence of any academic validity whatsoever. And every time I came up short, I felt a bit guilty for demoting my faith beneath reason. Was I letting my brain overrule my heart?

Well, for me all true is simply not an option; there are enough mutually exclusive, contradictory statements and events to make that point a thousand times over. The impossibility of an all-true view is very clear to me and leaves me with two alternatives: all false or partly true/partly false. I have tried my best to find a comfortable position in the middle ground; but if you try to pull the middle ground away as an option – try as I might to claim it back as a viable place to hang out – I will find myself stuck in the uncomfortable position of having to choose one extreme or the other, one of which I simply cannot rationalize. An all-out exit becomes my only choice.

Over the years, I have wished that church leaders would stop making all or nothing statements; perhaps they believe that this threshing will lead more of us fence-sitters to the all than to the nothing, but as I looked around at my former mission companions, BYU roommates, and childhood church friends who have recently resigned from the church, it has become apparent to me that many of those who honestly inquire will be forced into the all false option unless there is some RLDS/CoC-style concession on the middle ground.

If you do force me into the position of choosing between two absolutes, my faith in absolutely every fragment of the LDS restoration is then contingent on Zelph being a giant and Hor being a time traveler. Can I claim, on the other hand, that there is some truth in LDS scriptures while questioning the historical origins of those scriptures? Or does that essentially constitute the commitment of high treason? As it stands, the mere act of claiming that a metaphorical middle ground even exists defies the current LDS prophet; if you make that claim, you’re effectively saying that he is wrong about his own convictions.

In Russell M. Nelson’s first official address to the church he is now leading, he said, “Whatever your concerns, whatever your challenges, there is a place for you in this the Lord’s Church.”

Really? So what about people like me who just can’t seem to swallow the historicity of the Book of Mormon or the Pearl of Great Price? Do you need to believe these stories literally to have a place in the Church?

Russell Ballard mentioned in a 2006 PBS interview that there are plenty of people who question the historicity of the Book of Mormon that are firmly in the church (at least “in their minds,” he added). He also reassured any doubters that the church isn’t going to take action against them, so long as their disbelief isn’t seen as advocacy. [That sounds very conciliatory; the disbelief I have stated in this particular essay is benign, for example, as long as my words here are portrayed as my own opinion and not as an attempt to proselytize others. “Proclaim your faith from the rooftops,” so the mandate goes, “but keep your doubts to yourself!”]

He then said that such silent positions would be tolerated for now, but he defined the Church’s tolerance in this case to mean patience – under the assumption that the disillusionment is just a temporary ailment borne silently in bed that will pass in the morning like a flu bug or a runny nose.

Now I’ve heard some people say that a literal belief in Mormon historicity is not necessarily a pre-requisite for a temple recommend; Joseph Smith’s name isn’t even mentioned in the interview, after all. But with statements like those above, how can I and my fellow Meta-Mormons affirmatively answer questions sustaining the current leaders as prophets, seers, and revelators? Even if you only question things in private, the private temple interview will essentially lock the door to the temple for any Meta-Mormon who answers the questions honestly.

So sure, you’d be welcome to attend church meetings either way. But your daughter’s wedding? Sorry, if you want to see her get married, you’re going to have to say that you believe it all.

Does that mean you have to believe in the message of the restoration with 51% of your conviction? Or does it mean that any sliver of hope whatsoever that puts the probability above absolute zero represents belief? Over the years, I was able to realistically and honestly cling to some little snippets of historicity from Nibley’s papers and apologetic sources that seemed vaguely credible. So if I redefine “I believe” to mean “I consider it a possibility,” then I’m good for another two years! And barring that, perhaps I could take a multiverse view of worlds without number and bring myself to reason that there is a shadow of a possibility that the Book of Mormon stories actually happened somewhere in this universe or another!

These are some of the preposterous rationalizations I made in my head every time I was interviewed to renew my temple recommend; otherwise, I’d be sitting outside while my brother or sister or daughter or son got married – and I’d have to explain to my friends and family why I am choosing a path that in their eyes condemns me to an eternal separation from them and from God, which in the end is their definition of hell.

Seriously? If you honestly can’t bring yourself to believe that millions of armed warriors disappeared without a trace, burying their weapons and clothing and campsites and buildings and horses and chariots so deep in the ground that nobody would ever find a hint of their existence – if you simply can’t see the Book of Mormon timeline as an actual, literal, series of events that transpired on our actual, literal planet…well then you just don’t get a place at the table? If you can’t stretch your brain into imagining that the hottest debate on the American continent a millennium before Columbus was over infant baptism – or that the ink on the papyrus in Joseph Smith’s possession came from an actual quill held in the actual hands of an actual man named Abraham…you’ll have to wait outside?

I can’t seem to override my brain to accept these follies set in previous centuries, but my own inner conflict lay in the obvious implications of a non-literal belief on the modern-day prophet’s role as God’s sole mouthpiece on this earth – a belief that is not open for discussion as an entry requirement for any of the LDS temples dotting the planet.

I wavered for a while with these thoughts in my mind and then gradually did what many others in my position have done – settling for a mistrial based on a technicality in the face of overwhelming, incriminating evidence, using a hung jury to procrastinate the verdict off into the next life under the pretence of God’s mysterious ways, believing that all will be revealed someday to resolve the apparent discrepancies. If I can redefine the word “faith” in the context of a temple recommend question to encompass that contingency act, in the meantime, at least I’d get to see my daughter get married!

Talk like an Egyptian

I kept walking this inanely fine line during my temple interviews until July 8, 2014, the day the LDS Church published a nonsensical essay explaining away the inconsistencies in the Book of Abraham by redefining the word “translation” and attempting to refute the overwhelming evidence against its authenticity by making arguments for plausibility.

I found this new position to be horribly uncomfortable. The arguments themselves were so poorly constructed that they actually made the opposite case, each one constituting a contortion act that further amplified my discomfort. In essence, the essay claims that the Book of Abraham is not what it claims to be, but that it is still somehow divinely inspired. With that dichotomous divergence, the Church broke its own rule, entering the “bizarre middle ground” that its own standing apostles have derided as a non-existent fairyland.

I had been trying to wander around in that oxygen-deprived space myself for quite some time, but I had never run across official confirmation of its existence – and I certainly never expected it to become the new party line given the implications of that partial concession. For one, I realized that this new, precarious stance simply couldn’t stand – unless accompanied by a retraction of the vast statements to the contrary that have been issued over the years…yet here it was in print, with no acknowledgment that a long line of holy men had quite vocally and forcefully taken the completely opposite position.

For years I had gambled on the existence of some hidden knowledge lying just beyond my brain’s capacity that – if I could just manage to observe the universe with my spiritual eyes – would somehow allow this costly pearl to simultaneously be both true and false as the essay claimed. The concept that Schrödinger’s cat can be simultaneously alive and dead is beyond my own mind’s reach, after all, yet I accept that people a lot smarter than I am can comprehend the truth behind that conundrum. So why should I try to lift myself up to the level of an astronomer, pretending to be on par with those who can comprehend the mysteries of Kolob – like I have some place in the royal court of the Pharaoh, as depicted in Mormonism’s sacred scriptures?

Well, by publishing the essay, Church leaders had forced me to review my own indefensible, uneducated position. In a way, I had hoped they would just keep their mouths shut about it, leaving the Church’s current, official position as a mystery. Frankly, I had expected the facsimiles to conveniently disappear out of the next edition of the scriptures at some point. At least that silence would allow me to maintain my avoidance of the obvious dichotomy. That convenient option had now evaporated.

I knew the effort might culminate in a cowardly wave of a white flag, but I was expected to teach the material myself as an ordained teacher. So now that the Church’s vulnerable position had been exposed for the world to take aim at, I really needed to know for myself whether I believed the translations to be real or made up. Do I stand to the last man to defend the fortress, or do I run for cover?

I made a fateful decision to do a bit of fact-checking, hoping to buttress at least one of the claims of authenticity I had clung to since high school with some form of confirmation. Right at the top of my Google search results, I ran across “The Lost Book of Abraham” on YouTube. I could tell from the description that this 2002 documentary was not sanctioned material. My trigger finger hesitated a bit, but eventually it submitted to my curiosity, and I clicked on a little white triangle that would unwittingly change my life.

In the video, my very own high school seminary teacher appeared with other Mormons supporting a case for authenticity. In the opposing seat was the University of Chicago’s Robert Ritner, supported by a team of Egyptologists who laid out the real meaning of the characters in detail. The hour-long video exposed error after error in the Mormon version of the story; the case against authenticity seemed clear, and I found myself on the brink of surrender.

The video was over ten years old, though, so I hoped that a rebuttal had been posted in the meantime. I clicked around and found that, sure enough, the “anti-Mormon” video I had just watched could easily be debunked, at least according to the titles that showed up next in my suggested playlist.

“Come on FAIRMormon, give me something!” I said to myself as I clicked on what looked to be the most lethal weapon from the apologetic armory.

Well, unfortunately for my Mormon existence, the next video dropped a nuclear warhead on my medieval castle. The statements claiming historical authenticity and defending correct translations were so blatantly false, so obviously misleading, that not even my ignorance of ancient language could hide the fact that they were misfiring. They didn’t even need a re-rebuttal!

It took only a few loudly pounding heartbeats to flip my world upside down. Instead of pointing my Davidian finger at the lying anti-Mormons as I had been taught to do, Nathan had shown me my own treachery. I had been part of the deceit, and what I thought was a barrel of lies turned out to have been the truth all along. I recognized the unbiased logic in Dr. Ritner’s translation and the absurdity of trying to cling to a propped-up fabrication, patching the foundational defects with silly putty that had been stretched all the way from irrelevance to incoherence.

I was facing one simple, mind-bending conclusion that my Mormon piety wouldn’t even allow me to say out loud at the time:

“Holy shit, he made it up!”

What that revelation might mean for the remaining aspects of my faith was yet to be determined, but there was no going back from this pivotal moment. To this day I can picture the setting: the room, the posters on the wall, how my computer was oriented, the color of the chair I was sitting in. If anything as substantial as the First Vision had ever occurred, I’m now convinced there wouldn’t be ten versions of it. These sorts of profound, spiritual experiences get burned into your mind and become part of your own, single path of truth.

This was a watershed moment for me if there ever was one; in fact, now that I look back on it, I can divide my life up into BC and AD: There is Before Clicking and After Debunking. Up to that point I had been a practicing Mormon who wanted nothing more than to take a stand against those who were trying to tear down my own faith, so that I could firmly stand in front of a class, armed with at least a remote plausibility that the things I was teaching might actually bear some shred of substance. Now I found myself at the business end of a long string of dominoes, wondering if I should pull any of them out of the line-up to stop the cascading, snowballing chain reaction that was about to smack me down.

I can’t say I didn’t ever waver again. Hadn’t Hugh Nibley, who is trumpeted as the brainiest Mormon that Mormonism has ever produced, actually discovered hidden truth and light that the secular scholars couldn’t manage to refute? That’s what I had heard him claim not just in one video recording after another but in person with my own ears! Was he wrong all along?

After watching Egyptology 101 videos, I decided to look up each of the things I had clung to as arguments for the translation’s possible validity based on my previous, pre-Google research. Armed with nothing but a search engine, I went back to Hugh Nibley’s papers and found that he simply made up some of the sources for things that I thought represented a sliver of substantiation. Maybe he felt justified by his belief in the bigger picture, but I was surprised to find that what wasn’t completely made up was stretched so far down non-relevant paths as to be absolutely meaningless as an argument. There is no need to restate these individual points here – they are freely available to anyone with an online connection who bothers to look; I just can’t believe it took me twenty years to bother to look!

I also found that long after BYU’s own archeologists had determined the irrelevance of the Tree of Life stone and other supposed evidence, Church-sponsored videos making these claims were still being distributed and were allowed to remain in the hands of motivated missionaries like me who naively showed them to credulous investigators.

One by one, I saw that every point that my seminary teachers had attributed to an ancient setting for the Book of Mormon and for the Book of Abraham had long since been dismissed – and many of the points had been conclusively refuted decades before I ever saw them presented as evidence.

I went back to every point of justification I had previously accepted and questioned each one anew. In many cases, where I had previously let FAIRMormon and other apologetic sources have the last word in debunking claims against an ancient setting, I found that the debunking had itself been debunked with truths that had, in turn, been met with silence. In case after case on every issue I could possibly consider, the last word stood solidly against the case for historicity, and the correlations I had previously bought into were stretched so thin that each one snapped.

They say there are lies, damned lies, and Mormon apologetics. At least that’s what I say now. And I have found Mormon apologetic lies – Muhlestein’s in particular – to be the damndest of them all!

As far as chiasmus, for example, yes, you’ll find it in ancient Hebrew texts. And you’ll find it in the Book of Mormon. And if you stop there, that correlation might look significant. But if you don’t stop there, you’ll also find it in the works of Dr. Seuss. And in Lincoln’s addresses and in MLK’s speeches. Keep going and you’ll find it in Mein Kampf, Trump’s state of the union address, and even my latest environmental impact statement. If you run the same “clinically proven” laboratory analysis, you’re bound to find it everywhere – not because it’s Hebrew in origin, but because it’s simply an effective means of communication.

And the very scientific-looking “wordprint analysis”? Again, if you plug the works of C.S. Lewis or any other prolific author into it with the same settings and variables as the Book of Mormon analysis, I’m willing to bet that it will give you the same result: highlighting different word patterns that seem to suggest different authorship, even when written by the same author.

All of this speculation about the origins of the Book of Mormon aside, the reluctance of the Church to acknowledge the real meaning of the facsimiles in the Pearl of Great Price – and to inform the body of the Church of that consensus – ended up being the spark that lit the fuse tied to my own imploding conviction.

If you compare Joseph Smith’s translations to the real meaning of the facsimiles…well, I hate to say it, but they’re so ridiculous that they are actually really, really funny…that is, until you consider the unfunny implications! For one, Joseph’s racist and sexist bias is obvious in his interpretation of the facsimile in which the dark-skinned attendant (who in his mind couldn’t possibly have an official role in such a sacred matter) is called a slave (he’s not) and women that he couldn’t possibly imagine having a place in such a patriarchal setting are called men (they’re not…and they do play a role in the scene!)

And when you consider that within a year of having misidentified Hor as Abraham, Joseph Smith claimed to have seen Abraham in one of his interactive visions? Call me crazy, but if this were true, don’t you think Abraham would have tapped him on the shoulder and said, “By the way, Joseph, that’s not me there on the altar!”

When I was a kid flipping pages in my brand new scriptures during sacrament meeting, the Egyptian hieroglyphics all seemed very fascinating – especially those symbols that came with the caption that their meaning was not yet to be revealed! Would some future prophet unfold the true meaning behind the mysterious glyphs? Would additional records be unearthed someday in fulfilment of Joseph Smith’s prophecies? Little did I know, both Mormon and non-Mormon scholars had already agreed at the time that the captions were wrong and that Hor was not Abraham – yet not a single Church-sponsored manual included the real translation!

Now I have no problem at all adopting faith in the absence of evidence. But when I see the concoction of fabricated evidence, or the fabrication of concocted evidence to support a pre-disposed faith – and particularly when I witness the suppression of information that contradicts that hard-line faith, now that I have a problem with!

With revelation after revelation about the manipulation of available information by those who controlled the sources – not to mention the fact that knowingly incorrect translations keep getting printed as scripture year after year – even the ideas I had taken figuratively in the past began to take on a new meaning; without any clear end to my chain of dominoes, things I previously saw as inspired fiction were getting demoted to just plain fiction in my mind faster than I could fathom.

Within a few weeks of reading the essay, I made a consequential decision to seek the truth and to follow it, regardless of whether it led me toward the LDS Church or away from it.

So with this knowledge and newfound resolve – and with my own kids approaching missionary age – I asked myself a simple question: Is Hor Abraham? If not, would I want my kids carrying captions out into the world stating that Hor is, in fact, Abraham – bound together with “the most correct of any book on this earth”? Can I really support that lie?

Maybe I’m nit-picking, but as long as that known falsehood is being officially propagated, I just can’t seem to take any other official claims or denials seriously. If anyone wants to have a conversation about anything else in the LDS handbooks, how about we start by getting rid of the scriptural basis and claims of divinity surrounding the absurd translations first – then let’s talk! If Joseph Smith can dismiss an entire book of the Bible as non-inspired writing in Song-of-Solomon style, couldn’t his successors do the same to the facsimiles?

In this particular case I have to agree with Elder D. Todd Christofferson’s 2018 statement that “all truth, including the truth that governs our present sphere, exists independent and apart. It is unaffected by my preference or your opinion. It stands independent of any effort to control or change it. It cannot be lobbied or influenced in any way. It is a fixed reality.”

Here is a verifiable fact that in my opinion fits Elder Christofferson’s definition of truth quite reasonably:

This is Hor.

Hor is not Abraham. No essay, no vision, no revelation, and no apostolic preference is going to change him into Abraham. Hor’s identify is a fixed reality – a simple truth!

I don’t know if Hor would have been flattered by his likeness here, but in this case Hor is named in the accompanying text, so we can’t argue about his identity. When my daughter draws a flabby picture of me in pre-school and labels it “Dad”, I can claim all I want that she meant it to be someone else, but I’d have to go back and change the past to insert someone else into the scene. In the case of Hor’s breathing permit, inserting Abraham into the scene would likewise require the past to change – which stretches beyond the limits of any claimed miracle I have ever seen recorded.

Volumes of excuses have been published as to why Joseph Smith’s misidentification can still somehow manage to represent truth. But none of these arguments change the true fact that Abraham is entirely absent from the scene…that is, of course, unless we can change the meaning of the action verb “to translate” into the alternative infinitive, “to think about,” which is precisely the official position that the LDS Church is attempting to adopt, according to the current essay.

I’m sorry, but I just can’t play that game anymore! I claim Hor’s identity to be a truth just as I claim Newton’s laws to be true, and just as I claim that Elder Christofferson’s statement about truth is itself true; but does my opinion about the truthfulness or untruthfulness of a statement bear any relevance whatsoever as to its validity? What about my own standing in the LDS Church? Does that affect my own validity when I claim something to be true or untrue? For those who believe that when Russell Nelson speaks, “it is the same” as if those words were spoken by God’s own voice, my ability to speak on the subject of truth becomes inherently tied to my own status in the church:

According to that statement, the instant my questions constitute “disaffection” from the LDS Church, my validity evaporates and my words about truth become meaningless. For those who adhere to that statement, believing the scriptures to be God’s word, and God to be the arbiter – the final judge – of truth, please open up the Pearl of Great Price and stare at the caption that identifies Abraham on the altar. Ignoring my own lack of authority, go ahead and use Elder Christofferson’s definition and decide for yourself: True or False?

I, for one, have come to the conclusion that Joseph Smith was just plain wrong – dead wrong – with his supposed translation. And I am beginning to believe that those who claim that there is no middle ground are perhaps right after all. Whether or not Joseph Smith believed that Hor was Abraham at the time is irrelevant. We know now that he was wrong. The LDS Church now acknowledges that he was wrong. So can we please stop trying to defend it? It simply can’t be defended! And given that the interpretation is wrong, pardon me, but the facsimiles have absolutely no place in a book of scripture. Scholars on the Church’s payroll are frantically redefining the term translation using older lexicons that stretch it into including explanations. But these aren’t even correct explanations! If the only way to keep categorizing the facsimiles as truth is to change the definition of the word translate to mean think about, well let’s “think about” what that means to the claims that Joseph Smith “translated” the Book of Mormon!

Dominoes

The more I ask around, the more Meta-Mormons I find: people who don’t actually have a conviction of the literal truth of the Book of Mormon or the Book of Abraham but continue to fake it because they have been forced into a system that collapses with any shred of doubt – a system that will lock them out of their own kids’ weddings if they express their disbelief. Some of these people continue to serve in prominent positions, sending missionaries under their jurisdiction out into the world to preach things that they themselves don’t actually believe. In this process, I have met people who won’t even tell their own spouse, their parents, or their kids about their doubts for fear of the fallout! They Google the truth quietly in their basements and delete their browser history like a porn addict. You can substitute in whatever expletive term you feel comfortable with here, but I’m sorry, that’s just plain [messed] up…to put it politely.

Now I’m definitely no Egyptologist, and I don’t have the slightest clue about Egyptian hieroglyphics, but a language is a language, and I do understand the translation process. And to really comprehend for myself just how untenable the current LDS Church arguments are, I had to think up an analogy of my own. The story of the non-German-speaking Shamanites in the previous chapter is the closest thing I could come up with to relate the Book of Abraham’s translation process to a language that I do speak fluently. Like David recognizing himself in Nathan’s parable, when faced with my own analogy, my culpability in the Shamanite charade has become glaringly obvious!

In itself, maybe the mistranslation doesn’t really matter all that much; but the consequences of that preposterous stretch certainly do matter if you let the dominoes fall. Here’s my simple conundrum:

If Joseph Smith misinterpreted the real Egyptian characters that became the Book of Abraham, whether in error or by design, I question his claim to have translated the reformed Egyptian characters that became the Book of Mormon, the keystone of the LDS faith.
Joseph Smith admitted that he couldn’t discern between the good angels and the bad angels who gave him instructions. Take, for example, the angel who convinced him to try to sell the copyright to the Book of Mormon…whom he later determined to be a representative of the dark side of the force (after unsuccessfully attempting to follow his direction). When his wife Emma later discovered his secret relationships with other women, Joseph claimed that an angel told him to do it. Nobody can prove this claim one way or another, so we have to rely on his character. A man who claims that his secret affairs were sanctioned by the same God who guided his known mistranslations – and retroactively attributes bad decisions to evil angels and good decisions to angels of light – makes me question the source of his claims.
Joseph Smith and his successors taught and promoted racist and sexist principles. While sexist policies are still in place, the modern LDS Church has now denounced and disavowed all racist doctrines, practices, and policies as having been “led astray” by the cultures and customs of the day (admittedly using my own definition of the word astray). Hopefully there will be a similar declaration about women and LGBTQ members someday, but in this light, when the current LDS Church promotes exclusivity and implements discriminatory and sexist policies, given the fact that Joseph Smith’s views on the subject are now considered wrong by his very own successors, I’ll assume the trend will continue. In the meantime, I’ll trust my own conscience over the claim that Mormons will never be led astray by their leaders.

As for the rest of the dominoes, they’re still falling. Although it took a thirty-year process to completely knock over the first one, some absurdly translated pictograms are all it took to set the rest of the chain reaction into motion; in effect, my remaining conclusions about Mormonism all spring from the truth about Hor’s identity.

Dr. Matheny

So back to Dr. Matheny’s 1989 archeology class, I had no idea at the time just how deep his scepticism went. If Google had existed back then, I could have looked up exactly why he had to keep his mouth shut in front of our class: As it turns out, he had expressed his dissenting opinion at Sunstone conferences far too openly for the comfort of BYU administrators over the preceding years. His previous speeches included statements about the absence of any real evidence for the Book of Mormon whatsoever; he also ranted about the damage done by armchair archaeologists with a habit of churning out concocted evidence for Book of Mormon claims – often with the Church’s full support…and usually in collaboration with tour guides whose livelihood depended on believing customers.

Given the fact that every BYU professor must possess a temple recommend-style ecclesiastical endorsement, Dr. Matheny had to walk a fine line to preserve his academic integrity. A few of his off-campus statements are appended at the end of this chapter, including his conclusion that the Book of Mormon has “no place whatsoever” in its claimed setting. With these opinions in published print, his tenure at BYU must have been tied in with some sort of gag order preventing him from making further statements along those lines – at least while he was on campus. So when he told us, “Sorry, I can’t talk about that,” I think he really meant it!

Dr. Matheny spent most of his career working for the New World Archeological Foundation, an organization that originated with Mormons who thought it would uncover Zarahemla and other venues but soon had to change its mission to maintain its legitimacy; looking back at Dr. Matheny’s Sunstone statements now, it appears that he had gradually come to the same conclusion as the NWAF’s founder, Thomas Ferguson – and to the same apocryphal conclusion I ultimately reached myself. Here is Ferguson’s story.

Even though I knew about the overwhelming lack of evidence as I was preparing to serve a mission – Ferguson’s dilemma is nothing new, after all – I honestly expected at least the plausibility of substantiation to increase over time. But the complete absence of any further validation in the face of a massive increase in the reach of collaborative scholarship, archeological digs, DNA testing, ground-penetrating radar, and other advances over the last three decades since my mission leaves only two choices in my mind: either the Book of Mormon is fictional, or there has been a divine cover-up of unprecedented scale. In other words, given the likelihood that the populations in question would have left some hint of their presence, the lack thereof can only indicate either deliberate concealment or non-existence.

I’m trying to be open-minded enough to consider both possibilities, but I find deliberate concealment to be a very challenging exercise that pushes my brain beyond the realms of reality, especially as I begin to question every other aspect of my faith. In my eyes, whatever force managed to set the universe into motion would certainly possess the power to hide every trace of the Nephites, Lamanites, Jaredites, Mulekites, Hagothites, and every other society mentioned in the Book of Mormon from our probing curiosity. But why? What purpose would that sort of intervention serve?

Perhaps a divine force designed a deliberate cover-up as a trial for us humans in order to reward those who might be willing to take a leap of faith without evidence and to punish those who cannot bend their minds in that fashion? Is that possible? Remotely, I guess. Is it probable in the least? I seriously just can’t make that leap!

If this life is indeed a test, I, for one, believe that the creator of our souls and of this expansive cosmos would prefer to test us on something else – like whether we’ll be nice to the people we encounter along the way – rather than whether we can perform sufficient mental gymnastics to accept contradictory, flat-earth-style ideas that defy simple reason. I freely admit that I may be wrong, but at this point I’ll go ahead and grade my own take-it-on-faith exam and deal with the threatened consequences of giving myself a big, fat F on that test – which I hope from this day forward allows me to move on and turn my attention to what I believe to be the real test of this life!

FAIRMormon?

Having flunked the leap-of-faith test, I can’t help but to contrast Dr. Matheny’s statements about the lack of evidence with this FAIRMormon screen grab from January 2018, which includes a depiction of the Golden plates along with a headline referencing the abundant evidence:

Those who limit their information to LDS sources may look at that image of the Golden Plates coupled with the word “evidence” and – like I did over thirty years ago with the window posters and seminary videos – say to themselves without objectively exploring the claims, “See? There is evidence for it after all!” Then, whenever they get confronted with evidence to the contrary, they might say, “Well, there is weight tipping the scale in both directions, so in the end I guess I’ll just need to take it on faith.”

I find it a bit ironic that my own final push over the edge came not from enemies of Mormonism but actually from those who try to defend it. Maybe my time spent traveling behind the iron curtain has made me particularly sensitive to – and repulsed by – propaganda that skews the truth with attempted manipulation, but reading the apologetic responses to those who challenge the historicity of LDS scripture manages to give me nauseating flashbacks to the 1970s and the indoctrinating nonsense I saw being propagated in the school materials of my East German friends.

I honestly began watching FAIRMormon’s videos on the subject of Abraham with the original intent to buttress my own faith – not to discredit it – but some of the content literally made me shudder! I watched unnamed scholars – who right off the bat claim to be well published, well respected archeologists – state for the record that the latest scholarly momentum for the case of authenticity is in the opposite direction to what everyone has been told – actually supporting Joseph Smith’s translations! All I can say is WTF! [I recently heard of a teenager who, when caught using that common initialism, explained to his parents that it meant “Well That’s Funny!” While we’re skewing the commonly accepted meaning of symbols, I’ll claim a similar stretch in this instance lest I offend; after all, it’s accompanied by an exclamation mark rather than a question mark, so it can’t mean whatever expletive you might think it means!]

FAIRMormon’s YouTube video descriptions say that they feature “top Egyptologists, linguists, and historians” who corroborate this position. These scholars are willing to put their professional credibility on the line in support of Joseph Smith’s translation (knowing of course, that their church-sponsored educational institutions will protect their academic reputations – or at least their jobs – from the typical fallout that would accompany defamation). Rather than presenting evidence as the YouTube titles suggest, nonsensical cases are contrived against academics and secular learning as a whole. The videos abound with cautions, such as “Be very careful in believing what you read because 99.9% of it is wrong. There are too many bad assumptions.” [Yes, this is a direct quote!] This is followed by the admonition that there are “only a few people who really know both the historical and Egyptological sides of the issue. That’s where you should go to get your information.” [Another direct quote, presumably referring to the five LDS Egyptologists appearing in the video.]

The self-proclaimed Egyptologists state that there are “thousands of unpublished papyri in the back rooms of museums” and that thanks to the amazingly fluid field of Egyptology, “Five years from now, we’ll see that we were all wrong, dead wrong.” Viewers are told that what has been translated amounts to only “1% of the known material.” Given the recent discoveries and the new evidence that is sure to come forth in the near future, they state that it is “foolish to value what we learn in school – when we know much of that is wrong – more highly than what we learn from God,” which is obviously “much more reliable.”

I initially called up those videos looking for truth – truth that would allow me to point my finger at the naysayers and expose their lies. Instead I faced the uncomfortable awareness that the rest of my fingers were pointing straight back at me and the organization I had spent my life promoting and defending. Instead of truth I had found lies and manipulative tactics used in defense of indefensible claims. I had spent much of my mission feeling sorry for the East Germans who had been duped and deceived by Communist propaganda, claiming that I was there to help them replace their previous, phony ideology with absolute, God-given truth. To find myself as a source of similar tools and tactics was a disconcerting realization to say the least!

The characters in the apologetic videos believe that the more scholars learn about ancient Egypt, the more amazed we should all be at Joseph Smith’s translation skills – they feel entitled to claim that there is a growing momentum of supporting arguments on their side. That may seem true if you only listen to their side. I don’t need to state the obvious analogies to the propaganda spewing from German radio towers in 1944, but the FAIRMormon videos seem to give a similar impression that a cunning enemy is trying to deceive those who are fighting for their just cause. “Don’t believe the news reports,” those on the front lines are told, “Trust us!” The faithful fighters are told to only read orders that come straight from the top, and despite the overwhelming turn of the tide that would be obvious to any objective observer, the overall message of these videos is that “We are winning the war!” and that loyal patriots should “Keep up the fight!” because “Victory is right around the corner!” “…just as soon as we get around to sifting through the mounds of backlogged papyri,” of course!

In reality, the momentum has been in quite the opposite direction: Every discovery since the mummies passed through Kirtland has weakened the case for authenticity. The supposed evidence that was in some cases heralded as initial support has quietly been dropped from the agenda over time. The “growing momentum” referenced in the video comprises nothing more than new hypotheses that just haven’t had enough time to be proven wrong yet. Because a personal testimony trumps all evidence, however, in the end, the FAIRMormon videos conclude that the entire debate is in their words “a waste of ink”.

In my opinion, these videos and the web page headlines shown above lie somewhere between misleading and deceitful on the dishonesty scale. But just like the long-since discredited videos about Book of Mormon archeology that I watched in seminary and then obediently showed to investigators, they are being shown to today’s CES students, prospective missionaries, and prospective members without hesitation.

Now I have no objection to – nor any right to try to dissuade – anyone who chooses to take the restored gospel on faith. But let’s stop with the charade that there is evidence. Sure, there is conjecture and perhaps even a slim case for plausibility; but not a shred of evidence exists in the commonly accepted definition of the word. Granted, FAIRMormon doesn’t speak officially for the LDS Church, but the headline above restates precisely what Dallin Oaks and others at the helm of the Church have said about the mounds of evidence for historicity – which I have yet to find in published print anywhere. Perhaps the substantiation lies just beyond Google’s reach; but all things considered, I’ll have to side with Dr. Matheny on the credibility of the evidence uncovered thus far – unless, of course, we redefine the word “evidence” to mean “speculation”. And I do have to acknowledge that plenty of that exists!

El Capitan

When I met Russell M. Nelson many years ago, I was very impressed with his character, his humility, and his overall demeanor. Nothing about him has ever given me the impression that he is a con-man, a hypocrite, or a power-hungry charlatan of any sort.

Quote after quote from sitting apostles and previous LDS prophets tell us that Joseph Smith is one extreme or the other: he is either second only to Jesus in his character and in his accomplishments, or he is a complete and utter fraud – as devious and deceitful as they come. I’m not sure whether I can entirely buy into either of those extremes – I guess I’m still looking for that elusive middle ground – but I do hope nobody tries to force me into taking that same sort of all or nothing position with Dr. Nelson.

I believe he takes his role as the “Old Ship Zion’s” captain absolutely seriously. His wife, in fact, has said that he wakes up from dreams, grabs a pen and paper, and jots down what he sees as direct revelations intended not just for the body of the church but for the world at large. These visions of his can in a single pen stroke undo decades of concerted marketing efforts – such as with the name of the church – or free up millions of man-hours for Sunday leisure, charity work, or personal study, as in the implementation of the two-hour block. Much as I question the priorities of a Supreme Being that would place these items highest on a divine to-do list, my limited interactions with him lead me to conclude that he actually believes that God is speaking to him – and through him to us.

When I look back at my mission photos with that perspective, I have to wonder whether he was just as clueless about the real meaning of the facsimiles as I was at the time:

Missionary photo-op with Russell M. Nelson, Dresden, 1991

“Of course he knows the real meaning,” my Mormon friends might challenge, “What, do you think you’re smarter than him?”

Dr. Nelson is a brilliant man, and I hope I don’t sound patronizing when I say that I wouldn’t claim to possess his intellect, his level of commitment to his career, nor his dedication to his life’s calling; in fact, I owe my own son’s life to procedures that he helped to develop as a surgeon and as a research scientist. I respect him as a man, as a father, as a physician, and as a human being. My disagreement with some of his current opinions doesn’t change that impression.

So why would I be so blunt and apparently condescending as to insinuate that he doesn’t actually know the truth behind the Book of Abraham? Well, I’m making that leap precisely because I believe him to be a man of honor and integrity. And I have to believe that if he knew that Hor wasn’t Abraham, as the man at the helm of an organization that holds the dissemination of truth as its highest mission, he couldn’t possibly allow that false claim to remain in print or to be reproduced and distributed around the world as purported truth.

If, on the other hand, he knows full well that the translations are false and refuses to correct the error, well then it would seem that he is just as culpable as Joseph Smith in making the erroneous claims.

Perhaps I’m missing some sort of reconciliation here – some other explanation that might account for Hor’s misidentification? After all, LDS scriptures are full of deliberately withheld mysteries that “ought not to be revealed at this time” or are only given as far as the prophets are permitted to print. In other words, President Nelson and his predecessors may know the real answer, but the missing link is locked away in Cumorah’s cave or in the sealed rooms of the church’s granite archives or perhaps just beyond the reach of his prophetic vision.

Under that pretext, we’re not yet worthy to see the proof, and we need this thresher to separate the wheat from the tares in the meantime. In expressing my concerns to those who have accompanied me on my Mormon journey over the years, I have found that most of those who stand behind the current prophet temporarily take this middle road, accepting two dichotomous views simultaneously: that the translation is in error but that Joseph Smith was right. They believe that someday the whole truth will be revealed, and that they will be blessed for having just believed it in the meantime. At that point it will be too late for the rest of us sign-seekers who flunked the test and will thus writhe away in eternal anguish knowing that we should have just taken the prophet’s word for it.

Well, if I am wrong in this case, “Lord help thou mine unbelief!”

I would certainly welcome any other insights that might shed some further light on the subject; but in the meantime, I’m back to my inability to accept divine concealment as the underlying rigging, and I can’t see the supposed translations as anything other than an error. I don’t know if this choice can be simplified into an either-or statement, but the way I see it, the further propagation of that mistake by the church webmaster and by those in control of the printing presses has to be either deliberate or inadvertent. So which is it?

In referring to a surgeon’s choice between breaking bad news to a patient by stating the cold, hard facts versus telling the patient a sugar-coated version of the truth, President Nelson said, “Some truths are best left unsaid.” That quote has been used by Dallin Oaks and others to try to justify the omission of uncomfortable, potentially faith-destroying stories that make up a substantial part of Mormon History. In some cases, perhaps the damaging details are irrelevant, and the impulse to bury those facts might be understandable. But when you’re speaking of the truth about the real meaning of symbols that are contained in a book of sacred scripture? To me that is a truth that ought to be told…or the symbols ought to be removed. It’s one or the other; but leaving admittedly false statements in a book that is going to be handed to my children as truth, and then asking me to ask them, in turn, to suit up, put on a nametag, and proclaim the conviction of that truth to the world? Sorry, I just can’t!

Impacts

In the end, to most Mormons, Mormonism is about eternal families, clean living, and a good, honest work ethic. These days, how many Mormons honestly care about the temporarily indecipherable Egyptian hieroglyphics that sparked mysterious speculation in a relatively short-lived, 19^th century fad? So does any of this really matter? Is the mistranslation actually dangerous or damaging to anyone at all in our world today?

I would say yes, most definitely! This sort of dichotomy separates conviction from truth, prioritizing the act of stating one’s adherence to the party line above the actual truth of whatever lies behind that conviction. With the mere fact that the LDS Church puts a book of scripture in missionaries’ hands, telling them to testify of its truth, while at the same time acknowledging that it contains blatantly well-known untruths, you effectively grant church members an officially sanctioned certificate to live a double-think life.

On the one hand, we have the statement that “This book is absolutely true.” On the other hand, we have the admission that “This part of the book is false.” Many people who say the first phrase openly believe the second phrase inwardly. Those two statements cannot both be true at the same time, and trying to accept both simultaneously is the very definition of the term cognitive dissonance. Claiming to be able to concurrently walk both sides of the fence is just the beginning of justifying all sorts of other dichotomous ideas and doctrines.

A popular quote that has been included in previously published missionary manuals and paraphrased by Elder Oaks in General Conference states that, “A testimony is to be gained in the bearing thereof.” In proper context, I think that statement is intended to mean that if you muster up the courage to open your mouth about your convictions, God’s Spirit will help you fill it with the right words to express those actual, inherent beliefs. In practice, however, to many missionaries who first encounter viewpoints that contrast with the standard lessons that their parents have taught them – such as the idea that the facsimiles are fake – it means, “Don’t worry whether or not you actually believe this is true, just say it enough times and eventually you will!”

“I know the scriptures are true,” is a phrase repeated a thousand times over by LDS children, youth, and adults every fast Sunday, often followed by the conviction that “I know that Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon.” If you took a random Sunday morning poll of those making that claim and asked them if they also believe that Joseph Smith translated the Book of Abraham, I am assuming that a statistically relevant proportion of the respondents would answer yes. Their scriptures say so, after all! [At least the older copies did, and many members may not be aware of the subtle changes in wording in the latest printing that begin to open the door to some officially acknowledged uncertainty.]

Without a knowledge of these recent concessions, some unwitting gospel doctrine teacher might even stand up in front of their Sunday school class and testify that they know with every fibre of their being and beyond every shadow of doubt that Joseph Smith indeed translated the Book of Abraham and that God has revealed that fact to them through His Holy Spirit. But what if in that instance the bishop were to intervene, put his arm around the teacher’s shoulder and whisper, “Sorry, these symbols in your scriptures weren’t actually translated per se…I meant to tell you that before you prepared your lesson but just never got around to it….OK, pardon the interruption, but let’s back to what you were saying!”

Well, the teacher might be a little surprised – like I was when I first stood in front of my new class as a freshly returned missionary trying to shed light on the subject – to discover that the interpretations that are called translations in the lesson manual are not actually translations if your English language is governed by any sort of lexicon.

I’m sorry, but changing the definition of the word translate and inserting your alternate reality in place of every dictionary on the planet just doesn’t count. By doing that, we open the door for anybody to testify of anything they wish, whether or not they actually believe it under the commonly accepted definition of their words. The underlying caveat is that anything you say can be considered true, so long as the wording is subject to a whole new set of ambiguous meanings:

“Joseph Smith saw God the Father and His Son.” OK, but most adherents of that conviction have to redefine “to see” to mean “to perceive through spiritual eyes.” Ditto to the Book of Mormon witnesses.
“I know that the Church is true.” OK, but what if your actual level of conviction requires you to redefine “know” to mean “have no doubt” or “don’t question” – and to redefine the word “true” to mean “a very good thing?” With those substitutions, a whole range of convictions can come across as absolute!
“Joseph Smith’s prospective wives consented to his advances.” OK, but only if we redefine the word consent…

[I’ll have to stop with that one, since the definition of consent takes me down a tedious tangent that I’ll cover in its own chapter altogether. Among the most important lessons I can teach my daughters and my sons is to have a clear, unambiguous understanding of the meaning of consent; Joseph Smith’s subjective ambiguity around that subject gets me a bit irate, to say the least, so I’ll save that discussion for later and get back to wrapping up the subject of his translation skills…or rather the lack thereof!]

Alternative Essay

So there you have it; this is my Tale of two Historicities – one of which (Abraham’s) can be proven wrong, the other of which (Mormon’s) I am simply inferring to be non-literal by association with a common source.

My point here is not to dissuade those who have explored the available truth around the issue and have come to the conclusion that these records were divinely dictated; rather, my point is to encourage a more tolerant stance that allows those who have come to the opposite conclusion to both 1) be authentic and 2) feel welcome in the LDS community – instead of having to choose between those two options.

I have no problem with mistakes; I don’t expect infallibility from anyone. But continued cover-ups of those mistakes, and stubbornly clinging to your position when caught in a red-handed lie is just absurd. Knowing that the translations are erroneous, you might think that Church leaders would have to concede that fact, perhaps demoting the Book of Abraham – or at least the facsimiles – from its canonized, scriptural repertoire. Instead, the current essay tries to convince readers that heart-warming inclinations should guide their choice, given that there is evidence on both sides of the argument.

I used to believe that there were two sides, each with their own discrepancies, but a little research can easily reveal that there are, in fact, no discrepancies related to the real meaning of the papyri that might indicate any possible ties to Abraham.

“Let me be clear,” as Dr. Ritner prefaces a number of his conclusions on the topic, there is NO evidence for its authenticity, not a single shred. That is, unless we start redefining the term evidence as has been done with the term translation.

In order to lay the issue of historicity to rest in my own head for now, I thought I’d end this chapter with an alternative essay to the one published on the official church website here. Given the true meaning behind the hieroglyphics – here’s what I wish the 2014 LDS essay on the subject said:

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“We, the brethren, recognize our responsibility to disseminate truth to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. With that purpose in mind, we acknowledge that the translations of the facsimiles that have been included in previous editions of the Book of Abraham are incorrect; as such, we have decided to remove the facsimiles from the Church website and from future editions of the printed scriptures. In light of these errors, Church members are free to take a literal interpretation of the historicity of Joseph Smith’s translations, or to take a figurative interpretation of their contents as they see fit.

“Our own mothers and fathers taught us that the facsimiles were written by Abraham himself, and frankly, we never questioned them. Now that our grandchildren have access to Google and have informed us of the true translation and origins of the facsimiles, we are obliged to inform the body of the Church of their actual meaning, and we recognize that the previous translations have no place being promoted by our missionaries as scriptural truth.

“We grant all members of the church the freedom to believe or to doubt Joseph Smith’s ability to translate ancient languages without having to be shut out of your kids’ weddings. We welcome you to worship with us in full fellowship and without consequence if you adopt a metaphorical belief in the contents of the Pearl of Great Price, the Book of Mormon, or any other scriptures. No matter what interpretation you accept, please continue to join with us in following our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and in doing your best to implement His teachings in your interactions and in your service to others.”

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Yes, I understand that the words above would open up the scary middle ground that has previously been banned as no-mans-land – but in which Church leaders have now parked themselves with the current essay. Some, like me, will enter that hostile zone only to realize that Elder Holland was right after all: Trying to classify errors as inspired is as bizarre as a middle ground can possibly get, and when it comes to Joseph Smith’s explanations of the facsimiles, I can make no case for inspiration. Others may find some way to simultaneously accept the true and the false – the yin and the yang – and continue their LDS lives; but I have found that it’s no place for me.

If a statement like this were ever to be issued by the First Presidency, many might fear a mass exodus; but I actually believe that in the long run, telling the real truth – perhaps obliterating the false case for historicity – would slow rather than hasten the exodus that is already occurring.

I also understand full well that a faithful Latter-day Saint doesn’t get to send ark-steadying requests up the chain. With that in mind, feel free to take this substitution to mean whatever you like on the spectrum between heretical opinion and amiable advice – and perhaps pardon the wee bit of sarcasm that has been interlaced just for fun!

So where do we go from here? As time goes on and the hard-liners pass on, I suspect the strict adherence to a literal interpretation of scriptural historicity will gradually change. The transition away from that indefensible position is slow, but steady, and its cumulative effect becomes obvious when observed over decades of time. The manuals for my BYU religion classes include claims that would never be authorized for printing today, serving as an indication of the tremendous shift just in the time since I left Provo in the mid-90s. The ranks of those who believe in “non-objective” plates, as Church Historian B.H. Roberts called them, are likely to grow each year as the trend continues. At some point, Mormons will be free to accept objective or non-objective interpretations of their scriptures without consequence; perhaps it will take many decades or generations, but I would expect a future day when only an orthodox minority will cling to the literal segments, having lost the explicit support of the original cover story by the institution itself.

So can’t we just try to speed that process up a bit? Is it really such a scary place to end up? For those who believe the Book of Mormon is historically accurate, there are a thousand internal statements claiming that the whole movement would collapse if it turned out to be inaccurate. I don’t believe it; I think the movement will survive just fine with or without tangible plates just as the bulk of Church membership stayed on board when blood atonement and other accepted practices and doctrines were demoted to figurative, mere-mortal hypothesizing.

For those who maintain an absolute conviction in the palpability of the plates, let’s try a hypothetical exercise, imagining just for a moment what would happen if the plates “poofed away” into the thin air of nonexistence, taking with them the entire Nephite civilization. If that were the case – if the Book of Mormon turned out to be fictional – how would you fill in the blank in the sentence below:

If there were no Nephites, _____[Fill in the blank]_____.

For anyone possessing an unquestioning faith in the existence of the Nephites, that may be a difficult scenario to envision; but Church leaders themselves have answered the question many times over, so adherents ought to be able to at least take that speculative journey in their minds. How many dominoes would you stack up on that blank line? Does the whole enterprise disintegrate in the fission of an all-consuming chain reaction? Or would it get a big “so what?”

LDS prophets and apostles have placed all of their chips on that far-fetched bet, filling in the blank with phrases like, “the Church ought to be harmed,” “Joseph Smith is the greatest fraud the world has ever seen,” “the Church is nothing,” or “both man and book are consigned to Hades.”

Well, I’m sorry, but there were no Nephites. You can choose to accept that fact now, or you can wait until the official stance gradually catches up with reality. If it sounds pretentious of me to state that conclusion firmly and objectively, I am merely reciprocating the countering, reverse argument that is proclaimed on a daily basis – with just as much unaltering conviction – thousands of times the world over every time a missionary rings a doorbell.

I’m happy to fill in the blank with any middle ground statement that provides a place for an institution built on a fabrication. I’m open to suggestions as far as the reaction to the stubbornly unfolding truth, even if it’s to keep on trucking like the latest inception of the RLDS Church has done; but there simply were no Nephites, so whether it’s “who cares” or “the tower is toppled,” whatever phrase filled the blank above can be repeated below as an imperative statement of fact. This road sign can then map the way, the truth, and your life ahead for any Orthomormon who has not yet joined the ranks of the Metamormon movement:

_____[Fill in the blank]_____!

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Footnote: Selected statements by Dr. Ray Matheny

“While some people choose to make claims for the Book of Mormon through archaeological evidences, to me they are made prematurely, and without sufficient knowledge. I do not support the books written on this subject including The Messiah in Ancient America, or any other. I believe that the authors are making cases out of too little evidences and do not adequately address the problems that archaeology and the Book of Mormon present. I would feel terribly embarrassed if anyone sent a copy of any book written on the subject to the National Museum of Natural History – Smithsonian Institution, or other authority, making claims that cannot as yet be substantiated…. there are very severe problems in this field in trying to make correlations with the scriptures. Speculation, such as practiced so far by Mormon authors has not given church members credibility.”
– Ray T. Matheny, Mormon scholar and BYU professor of anthropology, letter dated Dec. 17, 1987

“In my recent reading of the Book of Mormon, I find that iron and steel are mentioned in sufficient context to suggest that there was a ferrous industry here…. You can’t refine ore without leaving a bloom of some kind or impurities that blossom out and float to the top of the ore… and also the flux of limestone or whatever is used to flux the material…. [This] blooms off into silicas and indestructible new rock forms. In other words, when you have a ferroused metallurgical industry, you have these evidences of the detritus that is left over. You also have the fuels, you have the furnaces, you have whatever technologies that were there performing these tasks; they leave solid evidences. And they are indestructible things…. No evidence has been found in the new world for a ferrous metallurgical industry dating to pre-Columbian times. And so this is a king-size kind of problem, it seems to me, for the so-called Book of Mormon archaeology. This evidence is absent.”
– Ray Matheny, Speech at Sunstone Symposium 6, “Book of Mormon Archaeology,” August 25, 1984

“And I have real difficulty in trying to relate these cultural concepts as I’ve briefly discussed here with archeological findings that I’m aware of…..If I were doing this cold like John Carlson is here, I would say in evaluating the Book of Mormon that it had no place in the New World whatsoever. I would have to look for the place of the Book of Mormon events to have taken place in the Old World. It just doesn’t seem to fit anything that he has been taught in his discipline, nor I in my discipline in anthropology, history; there seems to be no place for it. It seems misplaced. It seems like there are anachronisms. It seems like the items are out of time and place, and trying to put them into the New World. And I think there’s a great difficulty here for we Mormons in understanding what this book is all about.” – “Book of Mormon Archeology,” Response by Professor Ray Matheny, Sunstone Symposium, August 25, 1984

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Next: Chapter 2: Age of Accountability