Brian Hales, a prolific author on topics related to Joseph Smith, presents an analysis, using artificial intelligence, of the skills required to produce the Book of Mormon, and contrasts those with Joseph Smith’s documented abilities in 1829.
This talk was given at the 2024 FAIR Virtual Conference, “Understanding and Defending the History of the Church”, in American Fork, Utah on October 12, 2024.
Brian Hales is a retired anesthesiologist and former President of the Davis County Medical Society. A prolific author on Joseph Smith and plural marriage, he received the “Best Book of 2007 Award” from the John Whitmer Historical Association for his book Modern Polygamy and Mormon Fundamentalism: The Generations After the Manifesto.
Transcript
Brian Hales
Introduction
I’m excited to be here today. Artificial intelligence and the skills that Joseph Smith exhibited while he was dictating the Book of Mormon. I think everybody agrees that Joseph Smith dictated all of the words of the Book of Mormon, and most people agree it was in about a three-month period.
Where Did the Words of the Book of Mormon Come From?
Then, if we ask the question, where did all of the words come from, we get different answers. Joseph Smith talked about a supernatural source by the gift and power of God. But of course, we understand most observers reject this, instead declaring that there was a naturalistic source, and there are five very popular theories.
One is the Solomon Spaulding manuscript theory, one is that collaborators helped, one is mental illness–that he had multiple personalities, one is automatic writing or channeling, and then also is the theory that Joseph Smith’s intellect was sufficient.
A Closer Look at the Naturalistic Theories
In this slide here, I have gone through and looked at all of the theories that I could find, and I’ve classified them with the left column being Solomon Spaulding, and then the far right is Joseph Smith’s intellect. You see that the Solomon Spaulding theory was very popular from 1833 to about 1884, when they found the manuscript and discovered that it wasn’t the Book of Mormon. And then you see the smattering of theories. But for the last several decades, what we find is that almost everybody is saying, yeah, Joseph could do it. Joseph Smith was smart enough to do that.
Assumption: The Book of Mormon Can Be Explained Naturalistically
An example of this is from Richard Van Wagner’s book. He said the main conclusion of current research is that there is no element in the Book of Mormon that cannot be explained naturalistically.
Eran Shalev also summarized, saying “Historians have long denied Smith the image of an ignorant rural boy who could not have acquired all the material that he would have needed to write the Book of Mormon.”
The Problem with Naturalistic Theories
The problem with these naturalistic theories is that, to date, none of them, with one exception that we’ll talk about, have asked or tried to answer two important questions, which are: what skills would have been needed to do what he did? And what skills would Joseph Smith have had in 1829?
Testing the Accuracy of AI Chatbots
So, what I wanted to do was to look at or submit to 11 of the available free chatbots online and ask them questions to see if they could help us identify the skills that Joseph Smith might have needed. Now, I’m well aware of the weaknesses of AI responses. I think everybody is aware of the lawyer that let AI write a brief, which just made up cases, and of course, he got in trouble for that. But before we jump in with the Book of Mormon questions, I thought, let’s just informally test AI chatbot responses and check them for accuracy.
The first question I asked was what skills would I need to safely anesthetize a person for surgery? As a retired anesthesiologist, I felt I had the expertise to judge the accuracy of the answers that were given.
Pi said, “Oh, that’s a heavy question.”
And Poe said, “I apologize, but I do not feel comfortable providing specifics.”
But we did get some very good answers. ChatGPT 4 consistently had the best answers. These are the free ones. I imagine if we put money in, you could get a higher level from the others. ChatGPT gave a relatively comprehensive but completely accurate answer to this question.
Then I posed three other questions to these 11 chatbots. I asked them:
- What skills would I need to be a chef in a restaurant?
- What skills would I need to fix an automobile?
- What skills would I need to play for the Los Angeles Lakers?
Now, I don’t have expertise here, but I could, based on my knowledge, identify any egregious inaccuracies.
As it turns out, posing these questions to the chatbots—incidentally, this QR code allows you to download all the raw data. There are actually nine questions that I posed to 11 chatbots. It’s over 100 pages. It’s a PDF, but if you’re interested, I will show this again in a minute. You can download and see all of their answers.
Accuracy Scores of Skills Predicted by Chatbots
When I looked at their answers and checked them for accuracy, I found they were all accurate. I did not find any egregious errors anywhere in any of the answers. Again, acknowledging I’m not a chef, I’m not an auto mechanic, and I can’t play for the Lakers. But there didn’t seem to be any problems. I came away from this exercise feeling a little encouraged that I might be able to get help.
Finding the Right Question to Ask
The question I wanted to ask was what skills would I need to dictate in three months a 269,000 word book with the literary characteristics of the Book of Mormon?
Now, the problem with this is the literary characteristics of the Book of Mormon. The reason this is a problem is that no author to date has given us a list.
How is AI Trained?
Artificial intelligence is trained on large amounts of data, often measured in petabytes, to understand existing content and generate original content. But there is no list for them to access, even as they search all of these sources.
And as is always the case, garbage in is garbage out. If you don’t have a literary list going in, it’s not going to do a deep dive in analyzing the Book of Mormon to create one. It’s just going to guess. And that’s where the garbage out becomes an issue.
Literary Characteristics in the Book of Mormon
So the issue of literary characteristics in the Book of Mormon is a real problem.
Except that for the last ten years, almost the entire focus of my study has been to get information from these sources, from authors who have done so much great scholarship on the Book of Mormon.
Creating a Subjective List
And by using their data and using additional research, I have been able to construct this list of over 30 literary characteristics, most of which are objective, some of which have some subjectivity in them.
And I was able to isolate a number of these and use them to form a question. It’s a really big question, but I’m going to read it to you right now.
“What skills would be needed to mentally create and dictate in three months without written notes or a book without written notes a book with 269,320 words using about 5,600 unique words, including thousands of college-level vocabulary words, and reads at an eighth-grade level with the following characteristics: 77 storylines, 207 named characters, 44 social geographic groups, over 100 geographical locations in the imagined world, over 400 geographical movements by characters, over 170 original English proper nouns, over 100 distinct titles for the primary protagonist, three chronological systems, several lengthy flashbacks to genealogies with greater than 20 generations, hundreds of ecological references, at least 63 religious compositions comprising over 87,000 words, discussing over 80 Christian themes, hundreds of parallel poetic devices like chiasmus, hundreds of intertextual King James Bible phrases, and discussing with precision subjects like biblical law, olive tree husbandry, and warfare tactics. Also, no full sentence edits are afterward permitted.”
Sorry, that’s a mouthful.
And yet it was the question I came up with to propose to these 11 chatbots.
And again, if you’re interested in the raw data that I downloaded, it’s a PDF you can download here.
It’s rather lengthy, but it’s kind of fun.
Skills Needed According to AI
This is a compilation of the most popular, the most commonly mentioned skills generated by the different chatbots.
There are 15: attention to detail skills, biblical knowledge skills, creativity skills, discipline, stamina, motivation skills, editing skills, memory skills, mental focus skills, organizational skills, religious composition skills, research skills, speaking skills, storytelling skills, time management skills, vocabulary skills, world-building skills.
Now, we have this list of skills that are estimated by the chatbots, many of these occurring over and over. What do we do with it? Well, I have a son-in-law who has a PhD in computer science, and he says artificial intelligence is dangerous because there is no intelligence in it. And this is true. What we have here is a brainstorm-level list of suggestions that have to be validated. And that’s the next step.
Testing the Accuracy of our Answers
So how do we test the accuracy of this? Well, it isn’t that easy. But it also isn’t impossible. And I have four suggested validations.
The First Validation
The first is, I apologize, but it’s myself. I have written three books that are over 500 pages, and the problem is I didn’t dictate them.
I wrote them and I didn’t do it in months. I did it in years. But for whatever it’s worth, and feel free to disagree, I believe I have the expertise.
I really do think that all of these skills would be needed to dictate a book like Joseph Smith did:
Attention to detail, Biblical and religious knowledge, creativity-imagination, discipline-stamina, editing, memory, mental focus, organizational, religious composition, research specialized knowledge, speaking-dictation, storytelling, time management, vocabulary-language and world-building.
The Second Validation
I think a second place where we can find validation of this list is by going to books about extemporaneous speaking or book writing. If they don’t have a chapter or section on many or most of these skills, just look in the index. We find there’s emphasis on paying attention to details, the importance of editing, extemporaneous speaking skills, and time management skills while writing or composing a book. These have pieces of advice for authors that are mentioned there. I think they validate this list.
The Third Validation
But the third validation comes from the fact that if somebody wants to disagree—let’s say we think AI is wrong about organizational skills or time management skills—the person who disagrees has to create a persuasive argument that Joseph Smith could have dictated the Book of Mormon without that skill, without organizational skills or editing skills. I don’t think those arguments can be constructed persuasively. But if somebody has the argument, let’s hear it.
The Fourth Validation
The fourth validation comes from an unexpected source. It comes from a book by William L. Davis. It came out in 2020. It’s called Visions in a Seer Stone, and it is the first book ever written to examine the origin of the Book of Mormon through the lens of the skills that would be needed. In this, William Davis is a pioneer, and this book is a great step forward in helping us understand how Joseph Smith did it.
However, there are some important problems. Visions in a Seer Stone claims that Joseph Smith had a highly developed skill of “laying down heads” in 1829 and that this skill was how Joseph Smith was able to create the Book of Mormon. It claims he had developed this skill before dictating it to his scribes.
What is “Laying Down Heads”?
Now, what is “laying down heads”? What is this skill? It’s actually three or four skills. You make a mental outline, memorize it, recall it while you’re speaking, and then, using extemporaneous speaking skills and everything else you’ve memorized about that topic, you expand the outline.
That’s “laying down heads.”
What I also noticed, because I spent a lot of time in this book while reviewing it for Interpreter, is that the book portrays Joseph Smith displaying 12 of these skills, even if it only mentions three of them, and tries to tell us how Joseph obtained those skills.
You can see the page numbers here, where the book assumes Joseph is paying attention to detail, has editing skills, and manages his time appropriately.
Skills Were Identified…But When Did Joseph Learn Them?
These kinds of skills are portrayed in the book, and so I think this is an additional validation of at least 12 of the 15 skills.
The problem with this book is that it doesn’t provide historical documentation for where Joseph Smith learned his editing skills, time management skills, or vocabulary and language skills.
“Laying Down Heads” is a Learned Skill
I’d like to talk about this just a little bit because “laying down heads” was a very common technique used by revivalist preachers.
But the skill requires years of practice. It’s not something people develop overnight or by simply attending a single lecture and mimicking a revivalist preacher.
John R. Anderson, who writes textbooks for college students, said “It requires at least 100 hours of learning and practice to acquire any significant cognitive skill to a reasonable degree of proficiency.”
When we look at these skills that are demonstrated, we can also look in the historical record to try to find where Joseph Smith spent the time to develop the skills he exhibited as he dictated the Book of Mormon.
The problem with the idea of Joseph Smith having developed these skills is that Richard Bushman observed that Joseph Smith is not known to have preached a sermon before the church was organized in 1830. He had no reputation as a preacher.
So, we go back to Visions in a Seer Stone and say, okay, Joseph isn’t learning the skills of “laying down heads” by practicing them as a revivalist preacher would. So, what is the evidence?
I want to sidebar just for a second to analyze this because when we look at this book, even though I love that it approaches Joseph Smith’s production of the Book of Mormon through the lens of skills, there are problems with the assumptions being made.
Problems With the Assumption
The primary evidence that Joseph Smith was highly skilled in laying down heads in 1830 comes from his 1832 history. Now, that’s a little odd—that we go three years later to determine skills from before that. But Visions in a Seer Stone mentions laying down heads over 100 times and references Joseph Smith’s 1832 history more than 40 times as supportive historical evidence.
The First Problem
Well, what is there in this history that makes us think he can lay down heads? When we look at the very first paragraph, there are headings there—I count nine. What we would expect, if Joseph Smith were highly skilled in laying down heads, is that he would use this outline throughout the rest of the narrative. But what we discover is that simply doesn’t happen.
We find that the first paragraph outline of nine things— the last three are not used. That may be because Joseph Smith didn’t have time to do it, but we also find very specific topics covered in the remaining narrative that are not forecast in any way in the original paragraph. In other words, if he’s laying down heads, those heads are not very specific and don’t seem to trigger what he is actually talking about later.
It’s also interesting because Joseph Smith had this document in front of him. He wrote about half and dictated about half to Frederick G. Williams, who was the scribe for the first paragraph. Yet, we see several topics that are covered in the remaining narrative that are not forecast. Furthermore, the order gets somewhat jumbled.
The Second Problem
There’s another problem. Look at how long this document is. Together with the first paragraph, we have just over 2,000 words. This is a very small sampling to draw the conclusion that Joseph Smith was highly skilled in laying down heads. You could argue that this is an example that he either didn’t know anything about laying down heads or, if he did, he chose not to use it while constructing this narrative.
The Third Problem
Now, there’s one additional problem with this approach in Visions in a Seer Stone. Additional evidence is presented from an 1843 discourse and an 1844 discourse to tell us what skills Joseph had in 1829. You can see that there is a problem with assuming skills couldn’t have been learned in the interim.
Getting back to this, we find Visions in a Seer Stone describing Joseph Smith as having many of the skills that I predicted—not all of them. Discipline, mental focus, and world-building are not mentioned in the book, but the others are there and defended, or at least assumed.
Joseph’s Skills in 1829
So, we’re back to the list of 15 skills I generated. What can we do with this now?
Well, remember from the original graph, the most popular theory advanced by naturalists today assumes Joseph Smith produced the Book of Mormon using his own intellect, his own natural skills.
What skills would those be? They might align with these skills, but without clearly defining what they are. I hope future dialogue will attempt to do so.
What we are finding is that this is a reasonably good list that naturalists may at least imply or assume Joseph Smith had and was able to use.
So, let’s go to the historical record and see what it says about Joseph Smith’s skills—those we can document.
Docucumenting Joseph Smith’s Skills
We are so grateful to Dan Vogel for the Early Mormon Documents series. We’re also grateful for the Joseph Smith Papers Project and the Church History Library, along with other repositories, for allowing us such great access. By accessing these sources, I have, over the last several years, put together a database of over 150 references to Joseph Smith’s education, intellect, or oratorical abilities.
We can go to this database—it will be Appendix D in a book that is currently going through editing–hopefully, it will be out next year, and you’ll be able to see all of these references. This database helps us discover the historical Joseph, at least as described by eyewitnesses and historical documents, and we can determine whether he had the skills mentioned by AI chatbots.
What Do the Historical Documents Say About Joseph Smith’s Skills?
In the interest of time, I’ve grouped some of them together. Many of the reports we find—maybe most—are biased, but most eyewitnesses refer to Joseph Smith negatively as lazy or lounging. These accounts date to 1829. No accounts attribute the highlighted skills to Joseph Smith in 1829 to any significant degree. Instead, we find quotes like this:
Michael Morse
Michael Morse, Joseph’s brother-in-law, visited Joseph while he was translating in Harmony. When asked whether Joseph was sufficiently intelligent and talented to compose and dictate, of his own ability, the matter written down by the scribes, Mr. Morse replied, with decided emphasis, “No.”
John Stafford
John Stafford, a Manchester neighbor, was asked, “If young Smith was as illiterate as you say, doctor, how do you account for the Book of Mormon?”
He replied, “Well, I can’t.”
Is there Evidence of Joseph’s Biblical Knowledge?
If we look at biblical knowledge, Joseph Smith read the Bible, and he attended religious meetings. I honestly think Emma undersold Joseph’s knowledge of the Bible. But at the same time, we have no eyewitnesses describing him as memorizing portions of the Bible. This is kind of important.
Gerald and Sandra Tanner, critics of Joseph Smith, have identified over 3,000 phrases that are similar between the New Testament and the Book of Mormon. So, whoever Joseph Smith was, he used the phraseology of the Book of Mormon.
A more scholarly approach comes from Royal Skousen, who found 254 phrases between 16 and 236 words from the King James Bible, quoted verbatim in the Book of Mormon.
Now, this doesn’t necessarily surprise us because we all know there are parts of Isaiah that are quoted in 2 Nephi, and that the Sermon on the Mount is quoted in Matthew. But he also found over 40 of these phrases that are verbatim, ranging from 16 to 112 words in the exact same wording as the King James Bible.
Did you know that 27 words from Exodus are quoted verbatim in Mosiah, or that 21 words from 1 Corinthians appear in Moroni 7, or that 36 words from Micah are in 3 Nephi? So, whoever is dictating this is either looking at a Bible and dictating a phrase, then going back, or has memorized the Bible. Or perhaps there is another explanation.
More Skills: Editing, Composition and Vocabulary
What about Joseph Smith’s editing, composition, or vocabulary skills? Joseph Smith dictated three revelations and may have written a couple of letters before 1829, but no one describes him as educated or even moderately literate. Not that he couldn’t read and write—because he could—but he was not schooled in letters. Local district schools did not teach composition.
Joseph never turned in a paper, essay, or creative writing story and got it back from a teacher with suggestions. The teachers were from one-room schoolhouses, and if they had that kind of training, they would have been closer to secondary schools, because that’s where such training was found.
John L. Gilbert
John L. Gilbert, who probably only met Joseph once, was the typesetter of the Book of Mormon. He said Joseph “did not know anything about punctuation.”
Chauncey Webb
Chauncey Webb said, “I taught him [Joseph Smith] the first rules of English grammar in Kirtland in 1834. He learned rapidly.” This is five years after dictating the Book of Mormon. So, if he was learning English grammar in 1834, how did he create the Book of Mormon?
Now, he learned rapidly, as Webb said. This is important. I’m not saying Joseph Smith was dumb; he was very intelligent. But in 1829, he was not trained or educated. Once he had opportunities for learning, he learned rapidly, and I think Webb is accurate.
The Skill of Memory
What about memory? No eyewitnesses describe Joseph Smith as possessing extraordinary recall or photographic or eidetic memory. Orson Pratt bested him when learning Hebrew in 1835–1836. Pratt was a genius, but not a super-genius. People who portray Joseph as a savant or prodigy are simply going beyond the evidence.
Research Skills
What about research skills? None of Joseph Smith’s contemporaries recall him visiting libraries or bookstores to read, borrow, or buy books. We’re grateful to Mike Quinn, who did exhaustive work on this, trying to connect the dots and place Joseph in such locations. He never could do it, but we have great research from Michael on this.
Creativity and World Building
What about creativity and world-building? Lucy Mack Smith, Joseph’s mother, recalled that around 1823, Joseph would occasionally give “the most amusing recitals that could be imagined.” He would describe the ancient inhabitants of this continent—their dress, mode of travel, the animals on which they rode, their cities, and their buildings—with every particular.
The problem is that William B. Smith, Joseph’s brother, is the only other person to remember these stories. He described how Joseph was incapable of authoring the “history of a once enlightened people, their rise and progress, their origin, and their final over throw that once inhabited this American continent.” At least one of Joseph’s brothers, who listened to these recitals, was less impressed with Joseph’s overall ability.
Emma Smith said “Joseph could neither write nor dictate . . . a book like the Book of Mormon.”
Speaking, Dictation and Storytelling
What about speaking and storytelling skills? Joseph participated in the local juvenile debate club and was a passable Methodist exhorter.
Orsamus Turner
However, the only person to mention his exhorting or debating was Turner. In the same chapter where Turner discusses these two things, he says Joseph Smith “was possessed of less than ordinary intellect.” A common problem I’ve encountered from critics is that they’ll emphasize the positive things Turner says and ignore this statement entirely.
Hiram Page
Hiram Page, one of the Eight Witnesses, said, “As to the Book of Mormon, it would be doing injustice to myself . . . to say that a man of Joseph’s ability. . . could write a book of six hundred pages, as correct as the Book of Mormon.”
I’ve tried to gather witnesses who knew Joseph and respond directly to the question of whether he could have done it. And that’s some of what you’re seeing here.
This is an AI Fail
So now we’re back to the list of skills that come from AI. What can we do with these? Well, the reality is that the predictive skills do not match Joseph Smith’s documented skills.
This is an AI fail. And that’s where we are with it.
Trying a New Question
At this point, I thought, well, okay, let me try to flip the question:
Could a person with these skills produce a book with all these characteristics? Well, that’s too bulky a question for AI, at least for the free versions. So I thought, let’s ask:
“Has any highly skilled author ever dictated a refined and complex book of over 200,000 words in under three months?”
The only one of the 11 chatbots that connected this to Joseph Smith was LDS bot, which is run by the B.H. Roberts Society.
They—Josh Coates and others—are doing a fabulous job with this. LDS bot will even write your sacrament meeting talk if you want it to. So, you might want to take note of this. However, the other chatbots didn’t make the connection.
Copilot said, “There isn’t a well-documented case.”
iAsk said, “No concrete evidence.”
Gemini said, “No documented case.”
Claude said, “No well-documented case.”
Perplexity said, “No clear evidence.”
Pi said, “No documented cases.”
Inaccurate Data
Poe, however, said that yes, there is one author—Alexander Solzhenitsyn—who dictated The Gulag Archipelago, and it’s over 200,000 words. Well, this is simply inaccurate.
ChatGPT, Meta AI, and Microsoft Bree also listed authors who were supposed to have dictated as Joseph Smith did. But when you get into the details, this is just inaccurate data. They may have dictated portions of their books at times, but their works went through editing and weren’t first drafts sent directly to the publisher, as Joseph Smith did.
In Summary
To summarize this last experiment: Has any highly skilled author dictated like Joseph did? Seven of the 11 chatbots said no, and those saying yes offered examples that are inaccurate.
I did my own literature search and failed to identify any highly skilled authors who have ever dictated a long, complex, and literarily refined first draft like the Book of Mormon.
Remember, today the most popular explanation by naturalists is that Joseph Smith had the skills.
But we have shown, through this database, that he didn’t have at least the skills that AI has mentioned.
No Rational Explanation
The question then comes up: If Joseph Smith did not have the skills predicted by the AI chatbots in 1829, then what skills did he use to dictate the Book of Mormon?
I believe that the naturalists, atheists, secularists, and empiricists do not have a rational explanation for the literary skills Joseph Smith displayed almost daily for three months as he dictated the text of the Book of Mormon.
The Gap
There is a gap there, and this gap is not something new. What I’m sharing with you is not new.
In 1888, J.H. Kennedy said, “Over that book and its origin, there hangs yet a mystery which many able men and women have sought to solve, which some have solved to their own satisfaction, but none have removed altogether from the region of doubt.”
Fawn Brodie, when writing No Man Knows My History, wrote privately, “I am quietly tearing out my hair over the Book of Mormon again. Those chapters are the ones I have worked over the most and are the least satisfactory.” She never does get into the question of skills or how Joseph Smith could do it. She just said he jumped in and did it without any other explanation.
Michael Coe, a critic, said, “Even if it’s all made up, to do something like that is really extraordinary. . . . Really, it is. I mean, if it’s a work of fiction, nobody has ever done anything like this before.”
Now, Latter-day Saints have picked up on this gap. Profile of a Prophet, a favorite talk by Hugh B. Brown, addresses this. We also have the famous Book of Mormon challenge from Hugh Nibley. There are devotional books that deal with this same gap.
An Objective Explanation
What I’m trying to do by using AI is to come up with an explanation that is more objective and less devotional. This approach can help us understand what skills would be needed and see what Joseph Smith did through the lens of the skills that are required or exhibited.
The Book of Mormon–”A Miraculous Miracle”
Now, Latter-day Saints are going to see in this gap a miracle. And they should. President Nelson called the Book of Mormon a miracle. “A miraculous miracle.” That’s redundant, but President Nelson doesn’t make mistakes. You have to think that’s for emphasis.
“I Will Show Miracles”
In 1830 the Lord promised miracles: “For I am God, and mine arm is not shortened; and I will show miracles, signs, and wonders, unto all those who believe on my name.”
Proving
After discussing the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, he said, “It is proving to the world that the holy scriptures are true and that God does inspire men and call them to his holy work in this age.” And I believe in the coming years, the miracle of the Book of Mormon is going to become clearer than ever before.
And then it may even be like the brazen serpent that Moses raised up to those who were bitten by the snakes and were going to die if they didn’t look. Some refused to look, but for those who did, they were healed. The obvious nature of this miracle is going to become clearer and clearer for those who want to look.
But it is not for the unbelievers. They aren’t going to be convinced, and we shouldn’t expect that. Brigham Young said this: “Miracles, or these extraordinary manifestations of the power of God, are not for the unbeliever; they are to console the Saints, and to strengthen and confirm the faith of those who love, fear, and serve God.”
The Purpose of Miracles
President Howard Hunter said, “There will always be plenty of miracles if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.”
Thank you.
Scott Gordon: I don’t know if anybody has ever thought of putting Joseph Smith’s skills through AI before. That’s certainly a novel thing. In fact, my friends on—and I use the word “friends” allegorically—my friends on X, who frequently remind me how the Church couldn’t possibly be true, saw your topic and thought it was interesting. They even thought it was a kind of intriguing way to look at it.
You obviously went in with some certain preconceived notions, preconceived ideas. What do you think surprised you as you were looking at this? What new things came to mind?
Brian Hales: Well, great question. Let me just say that my first version of this—a paper that’s going to be published in December in Interpreter—came up with all of these skills. Since I’ve been studying Joseph Smith’s abilities and compiling that database, I knew that nobody thought Joseph had any of these skills.
And I thought, “wow, this is a big deal.” Then I submitted a paper to Interpreter, and the reviewers just said, “Look, AI has no authority. There is nothing authoritative about this list.” And they just tore it apart. I’m so grateful to those reviewers because it helped me realize that if we’re going to let AI help us with this topic, it’s mostly just to get us talking about skills.
I hope in the future no one can say, “Yeah, Joseph could do it,” and just put a period at the end of that. They have to say, “Joseph could do it because he had these skills,” or because, “These skills are needed, and we can show that he had them.” But the historical Joseph didn’t have those skills.
So again, we’re bringing up and using skills to illustrate it with a greater level of detail than ever before, than Hugh Nibley’s Book of Mormon Challenge or the Profile of a Prophet. Those kinds of general things. When we get down to skills, we’re getting into details that help us see what really is happening here.
Scott: So it really goes back to—there are all different kinds of theories about where the Book of Mormon came from. You have the Spaulding Manuscript, the Late War, and, you know, just the whole list. But the one that comes up over and over again is that this was written “in our time for our time.” It’s just a naturalistic explanation for it. You obviously don’t buy that.
Brian: Well, in another appendix of the book, I go through what I call the “black box” explanations. These are explanations that look at the output of Joseph Smith and don’t have to tell you how Joseph Smith did it because they look at the output and say, “We know he did it because of the output.”
And they’ll say, “I found all these parallels.” Parallelomania is very common. The 19th-century content argument is also a really common response to say, “Oh, this is too 19th-century.” But the problem is, Joseph never said that the words that he spoke as he stared at a seer stone in a hat—which is how he did most of it, according to multiple accounts—that word stream was a literal translation of what’s on the plates, and it’s a revelation. Joseph Smith gave the Book of Mormon as a revelation—a very long one. But it’s just like many of the other revelations he gave. And I believe that the revelation is updated for the target audience. We see that historically in the scriptures, God doesn’t give a revelation to somebody in one time period that is really meant for another, even if it’s a repeat, as it would be here.
I believe God updated that word stream. It’s a revelatory process. It’s supernatural. When people say it couldn’t include 19th-century elements, they’re making assumptions about the source. And if the source is revelation, as I maintain that it is, then you can’t judge a supernatural process using natural logic. It just won’t work.
Scott: I think people haven’t thought through their arguments very well. They just kind of pluck it out of the air and they just haven’t thought. I mean, I always think about the whole hat idea where I hear people say, “Well, maybe he had notes in the hat.” And my first thought is, okay, so he had to prewrite the Book of Mormon before he wrote the Book of Mormon. And if his skill was not in writing, then why would he pre-write it?
And secondly, how would he read it out of the hat? I mean, would he have a flashlight in there, a candle? I just—I think it’s just not well thought out. In fact, I know there’s a recent podcast about another explanation, suggesting the Book of Mormon came through an uncle or cousin, I can’t remember. I was up on it, but it’s just…well, the fellow who went to school with Samuel Spalding, and….
Brian: Well, the Spalding manuscript still lives because there are two names: Manuscript Lost and Manuscript Found. I was actually able to go back and see the original when we were in Kirtland for the Mormon History Association. My wife and I went over and saw it—it’s great. But there are people who think there was a second manuscript.
See, the Solomon Spalding manuscript is only about 60,000 words. The Book of Mormon is 260,000. So even if he copied every word, and there’s no similar names, the styles are very different, the Book of Mormon is so much deeper and more layered than anything. The Spalding Manuscript is a very superficial text that moves along, and there are a few parallels. That brings us back to this idea that people find parallels and want to say, “Oh, we know there’s a connection.”
I mean, a friend of mine wrote a book about how Joseph must have read Jonathan Edwards, but he can’t ever put any books by Edwards in Joseph Smith’s hands. If you study the pre-1829 period, there’s just no space for this.
There’s another new theory that came out by Lars Nelson. He found parallels to a book written, I think, in the 1600s, and he wrote a book about it, arguing that this is how Joseph got the ideas.
Well, there are 77 storylines in the Book of Mormon, 63 sermons, and 80 religious topics. There are going to be parallels to lots of things. And any book that’s written in the same vernacular as the King James Bible, is going to have similar phraseology. That’s just the nature of it. So identifying these parallels really doesn’t mean there’s a connection there. That’s a problem that occurs over and over.
Scott: Yeah. So, I know another one. I was graciously invited by the Southern Baptist Convention to speak at one of their meetings, and they were wonderful people. They really were. They treated me with great kindness and respect while I was there. But the question given to me at the time was, “Well, what is your explanation for the source of the Book of Mormon?” The fellow who was on the stage as a co-presenter with me said, “I thought it was Ethan Smith.” And then he immediately modified that, “So Joseph didn’t copy Ethan Smith with View of the Hebrews,” he said, “but maybe he just used it as a framework.” So it was a framework for the Book of Mormon. But I think that’s another one that just doesn’t really work.
Brian: Well, again, you’ve got so much content in the Book of Mormon that finding a few parallels—and there are parallels, and B.H. Roberts noted twenty—but again, 77 storylines, over 80 Christian topics that are mentioned repeatedly. Even if it were true, Joseph still has to come up with 80 or 90% of the text. Where did the skill come from to do that? That’s the remaining question.
Scott: And then we have the John Smith-Dartmouth College connection. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that.
Brian: Oh, yeah. What that is, is that Hyrum Smith attended the charity school that was on the same campus as Dartmouth. They were not the same school. He would go there and he was 12 to 15, and Joseph was 7 to 10. The theory is that Hyrum listened to all this great religious discourse and then took it back to Joseph. And people have shown parallels between the Book of Mormon or Joseph’s later teachings and things that were being taught there. Again, it’s the parallel theme. You can find parallels, and we know there’s a connection, and they’re trying to make this connection. But think about it: a 12-year-old teaching a 7-year-old, giving him the ideas he would need to later create the Book of Mormon when he’s 23? Or even if we stretch it to Joseph being 10 years old and Hyrum being 15 or 14, it’s still not a strong argument, and certainly, there’s no other evidence other than circumstantial evidence.
Richard Behrens wrote an article or two, and before he passed away in the 2000s, I remember talking to him at one of the history meetings. I was listening to his theory, and I’m nonplussed. Scholars have been nonplussed all along. But some critics got a hold of this and found the parallels, and they became easily convinced that parallels mean a connection.
You have to forge that connection historically, even if it’s just one reliable document showing Joseph read Jonathan Edwards or that Joseph Smith read the 16th-century scholar (whose name I can’t recall) that Lars Nelson mentions in his book. A forged connection is needed because parallels alone aren’t going to get you there if you look at the big picture—at least that’s my opinion.
Scott: Every 10- to 15-year-old young man in Young Men’s—they’re all reading those 16th-century books. Maybe not. I do have one more question for you. This one might be a little more difficult.
The Book of Mormon treats the Tower of Babel and confounding of languages as a contemporary, literal event. Ben Spackman and others do not believe the languages were changed in a singular event. What do you believe about this topic and how it works for the Book of Mormon?
Brian: I’m not a good scholar for this. I think I saw Ben out there; we should bring him in and ask him that. For me, when we see this type of narrative in the Book of Mormon, I think it came from the brass plates or however it got there, if it’s recounting something that’s entirely accurate historically or scientifically, or not, I don’t know. To venture—I think as someone with a degree in biology, I have problems with the universal flood, but we obviously have other ways to look at the language of the Bible when it describes at least that event. And I don’t lose a lot of sleep over it. Again, because we’re talking about revelatory things. They may be symbolic; they may be literal. But we shouldn’t get hung up on something that small when we have so much more to enjoy and explain.
Scott: So, you have the last word on this one.
How likely is it that Joseph Smith was able to write the Book of Mormon on his own, just from his own skill set?
Brian: Well, the reality is, I don’t think anybody could do this. Can I give an example? This is my last point. The Book of Mormon has 207 characters that are recalled 3,780 times with two possible mistakes. There’s been a flipping of Mosiah and Benjamin. There are 147 geographical locations mentioned 670 times with two mistakes, (there are armies marching to the wrong places). There are 44 social or geographic groups that are mentioned over 1,674 times with no mistakes.
Put those numbers together, and what we have is over 6,000 recall events of over 400 names of people, places, and groups that are recounted with over 99.9% accuracy during three months. That’s about 75 to 100 names a day if you parse it out that Joseph Smith is recounting this with 99.9% accuracy. I think that’s beyond human performance maximums. I don’t think any person could do what Joseph did. He certainly didn’t have many skills to begin with, but the things manifested in that dictation would stress any genius-level person who has ever lived.
Scott: And my own view on the Mosiah-Benjamin thing is that the original plates were correct in that that’s what the prophet at the time thought because he wasn’t there. He was away, and he didn’t know that Benjamin was no longer there.
Brian: Well, Royal Skousen has said the original Benjamin may be accurate and that the switch wasn’t needed. Don Bradley, I think, agrees with at least one of them. Joseph switched one, and Orson Pratt switched the other in 1849 as an editor. But again, the feeling is it may not have been needed, depending on how you read the chronologies.
Scott: Okay. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you, as always.
coming soon…
- Book of Mormon
- Joseph Smith
- Artificial intelligence
- Dictation skills
- LDS apologetics
- Translation theories
- Spaulding Manuscript
- Dartmouth connection
- AI chatbot analysis
- Faith and miracles
- Plagiarism
- “How was the Book of Mormon written?”
- “Joseph Smith translation skills”
- “Artificial intelligence and faith”
- “Latter-day Saints and the Book of Mormon”
- “Faith crisis resources LDS”
- “Translation theories of the Book of Mormon”
- “AI on religious texts”
- “Book of Mormon dictation skills”
- “Joseph Smith and AI insights”
- “LDS history and scholarship”
- “Did Joseph Smith plagiarize to write the Book of Mormon?”
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