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CES Letter

The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 10

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Part 10: CES Letter Book of Abraham Questions [Section A]

by Sarah Allen

 

The Book of Abraham is perhaps our most controversial book of scripture, maybe even more so than the Book of Mormon though it is less well-known. It is a complicated, messy subject with a lot of different parts to it. This is something I’ve studied a fair bit over the years, and it’s actually one of my favorite things to study. I know enough about the subject to talk about the various theories and viewpoints, but I suspect a lot of people won’t agree with my stance on things and that’s okay. We all need to come to our own opinions about these sorts of things. I’ll try to keep from getting too esoteric in my comments, but please understand that some of the current controversies involve minor details that seem silly to quibble over, but which end up making a rather large difference once you get deeper into the study of this book.

Perhaps even more than the translation method, this subject bothers Jeremy Runnells the most. I believe he even says at one point that the Book of Abraham is what officially broke his testimony, which is unfortunate. He makes a lot of misstatements throughout this section, so I’m not sure if the issue is that he just doesn’t understand the Book of Abraham and its scholarship, or if he’s doing it deliberately. The critics of the Church have been particularly successful in framing the arguments on this topic in such a way that it really hurts a lot of people, so I’m willing to give Jeremy the benefit of the doubt regarding this section and believe that he just doesn’t know enough about the topic. If so, it’s especially sad that he let it destroy his testimony when some further study might have saved it. I may be wrong; maybe he knows exactly what he’s doing when he makes those misstatements and frames things incorrectly. He certainly does that knowingly in other sections of this Letter.

Either way, this is a difficult subject for a lot of people, so I’m going to try to break it all down in such a way that it makes sense, and that it helps you guys see that there are faithful explanations out there. We’ll go slowly and I may have to break some questions into multiple parts because he covers so much ground in a single question. I don’t want to skim over anything too lightly because it is such a controversial subject. If anything isn’t clear as we go along, please let me know in the comments and I’ll do my best to clarify. I love the Book of Abraham and I think its doctrine is beautiful, so I hope you guys come away with that feeling, too.

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The CES Letter Rebuttal, Part 9

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Part 9: CES Letter First Vision Questions

by Sarah Allen

 

Like last week, this is another section with just one main question, the multiple accounts of the First Vision.

There are at least 4 different first vision accounts by Joseph Smith, which the Church admits in its November 2013 First Vision Accounts essay

Yep, and there are also five secondhand accounts written by people who heard the story from Joseph, too. First, though, I have to object to the fact that he’s saying the Church “admits it” in the essay, as if it’s the first time the Church has ever made mention of those other accounts or something. They’ve been published repeatedly in Church magazines and other publications, comparing and contrasting all of them together since at least 1970, and at least a few of them were published many times over apart from that. Add this item to the list of things that Jeremy Runnells could have known, even if I don’t necessarily think he should  have known it.

Here they are, in case you guys want to read them for yourselves and make your own comparisons:

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The CES Letter Rebuttal, Part 8

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Part 8: CES Letter Book of Mormon Translation Questions

by Sarah Allen

 

This section really only has one question/point in it. There are maybe a few different parts to it, but it’s all basically one question and it’s one that comes up over and over and over and over again throughout the rest of the CES Letter. Honestly, I think this the first of only two major hang-ups—the other is the Book of Abraham—and everything else was just Jeremy Runnells throwing everything he could find at the wall and hoping something else would stick. He seems to have a very real problem with the translation method for the Book of Mormon. Few other issues in the Letter receive as much call-back attention as this one particular issue. I’m talking about, of course, the infamous “rock in the hat.”

Unlike the story I’ve been taught in Sunday School, Priesthood, General Conferences, Seminary, EFY, Ensigns, Church history tour, Missionary Training Center, and BYU…Joseph Smith used a rock in a hat for translating the Book of Mormon.

First of all, Ensigns absolutely should not be on that list, because guess where I first learned about Joseph putting his seer stone in his hat to block out the light? Yep, the Ensign. More on that later, though.

Jeremy doesn’t actually say what he originally believed the translation method was, and that’s a little problematic because people seem to vary on the exact details when you press them. Was there a curtain between Joseph and his scribes? Were the plates on the table beside him, or kept out of view? Did Joseph wear the spectacles with the Nephite Interpreters and basically “read” the translation from plates themselves? Or did he look in them and see the words without looking at the plates through the Interpreters? Did he attach them to the breastplate, or wear them separately? Did he take the Interpreters out of the spectacles, or did he try to wear them the entire time, despite the widely acknowledged fact that they didn’t fit him properly? If he took them out, what did he do with them? Did he hold them in his hands, or place them on top of the plates, or what? Etc.

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The CES Letter Rebuttal, Part 7

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Part 7: CES Letter Book of Mormon Questions [Section F]

By Sarah Allen

 

In this one, we’re going to discuss possible sources for the Book of Mormon that critics love to throw out: View of the Hebrews by Ethan Smith, The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain by Gilbert Hunt, and The First Book of Napoleon by Michael Linning. I spoke last week about how these types are arguments are really weak and badly presented, which I hope will come to be obvious by the end of this post. Just to get this out of the way up front, here are PDFs of each of the books in question if you want to compare them for yourselves:

To begin with, back at the 2014 FAIR Conference, Matt Roper and Paul Fields gave a presentation talking about the “pseudo-Biblical” writing style and how the Book of Mormon compares to both the KJV and to other books from the same period, including The Late War. (Stanford Carmack wrote a similar article for the Interpreter here.) They demonstrated pretty aptly that the Book of Mormon and KJV writing styles are very, very similar, and that other attempts at imitating it, such as The Late War and The First Book of Napoleon, are actually not very similar at all. It’s an interesting presentation that is well worth your time if you’re inclined to check it out. (There is also a funny chart showing the extremely high correlation between the divorce rate in Maine and the consumption of margarine in the US over the same time period.)

One of the things they noted in that presentation was that this style of writing was pretty popular from approximately 1750 to approximately 1850, about 100 years, with the Book of Mormon falling toward the later middle of the period. As such, there are a lot of books and newspaper articles imitating this same style of KJV-like writing that are bound to have some turns of phrase in common, particularly those phrases rooted in the Bible.

Going along with this, Jeff Lindsay offers a pretty hilarious parody of this type of argument on his website, where he declares Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass the very best possible inspiration for the Book of Mormon, despite it being first published in 1855. The reason these claims are so easy to parody is because they’re ridiculous reaches in the first place.

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The CES Letter Rebuttal, Part 6

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Part 6: CES Letter Book of Mormon Questions [Section E]

by Sarah Allen

 

I was originally hoping to finish all of the remaining Book of Mormon questions in this entry, but when I started compiling it all, it was just way too long. So I’m going to jump around a little bit on this one. I’ll tackle the View of the Hebrews, The Late War, and The First Book of Napoleon stuff in the final entry for this section next week, and talk about the Vernal Holley maps, Comoros/Captain Kidd, and Trinitarianism in this one.

The ones about the Vernal Holley maps and the ones about the supposed sources for the Book of Mormon crack me up. They’re just really, really bad questions, and so very dishonest in their framing.

Book of Mormon Geography: Many Book of Mormon names and places are strikingly similar to many local names and places of the region where Joseph Smith lived.

Jeremy Runnells fully admits that this is the weakest section of the CES Letter, and at one point, he was almost positive he was going to remove it. However, other members of the Exmormon subreddit convinced him to leave it in because they somehow felt it was effective.

The thing is, he wasn’t wrong. It’s pretty weak.

The first thing he does is post two maps made by Vernal Holley:

The first map is the “proposed map,” constructed from internal comparisons in the Book of Mormon.

Nope. The first map is just the second map with Book of Mormon names scattered around, and they’re in the wrong places they’d need to be in if they were actually “constructed from internal comparisons to the Book of Mormon.”

As Scott Gordon says in “CES Letter: Proof or Propaganda?”: “It isn’t constructed from internal comparisons in the Book of Mormon. Nothing is in the right place from internal directions. This is not a Book of Mormon map. This is a map of upstate New York and Pennsylvania with some Book of Mormon names pasted in on locations that start with the same few letters. It doesn’t even include Zarahemla or Bountiful.”

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The CES Letter Rebuttal, Part 5

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Part 5: CES Letter Book of Mormon Questions [Section D]

by Sarah Allen

 

I originally thought I was done with the archaeology section, but while I was going through my sources to figure out which ones I wanted to use this week, I came across a presentation by Neal Rappleye from a FAIR Conference a few years ago that I’d forgotten existed. Neal Rappleye, for those who don’t know, is one of the hard-working team members at Book of Mormon Central, and his presentation is entitled “Put Away Childish Things: Learning to Read the Book of Mormon Using Mature Historical Thought”. I felt very strongly impressed that I should highlight this presentation and discuss it with you guys before moving on to the next questions in the Letter. I linked to both the video and the transcript of the presentation, so you can choose the medium that best suits your learning style.

This talk is all about grappling with and overcoming the more simplistic narratives you were taught as a child and learning to understand that history is messy and incomplete, and how new discoveries and understanding can shift your perspective if you allow it to. It’s something we all need to do as we grow older, or it can lead to problems down the line when our assumptions are challenged.

One of the main flaws in Jeremy’s perspective is that he doesn’t do this. He rigidly holds onto the idea that things have to be exactly what he thinks they are, or they can’t possibly be true. He never allows for the possibility that his assumptions about various things might be what’s wrong, rather than those things themselves. We saw that last week, in his belief that the Hill Cumorah had to be the hill in New York and couldn’t possibly have been anywhere else (which is ironic considering the upcoming Vernal Holley map section), and we’ll see it again and again and again throughout the rest of the Letter. It comes up during the Book of Mormon translation section, the section about prophetic abilities, the Book of Abraham section, etc. He refuses to allow for the possibility that his assumptions might be wrong, and seems to believe that anything that doesn’t conform to those assumptions must be proof that the Church isn’t true.

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The CES Letter Rebuttal, Part 4

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Part 4: CES Letter Book of Mormon Questions [Section C]

by Sarah Allen

 

Diving back in, today we’re talking about archeological evidences. I’ve been looking forward to this one. We’ll get to discuss some of the coolest evidences we have supporting the Book of Mormon’s authenticity.

Archaeology: There is absolutely no archaeological evidence to directly support the Book of Mormon or the Nephites and Lamanites, who were supposed to have numbered in the millions. This is one of the reasons why unofficial apologists have developed the Limited Geography Model (it happened in Central or South America) and claim that the Hill Cumorah mentioned as the final battle of the Nephites is not in Palmyra, New York but is elsewhere. This is in direct contradiction to what Joseph Smith and other prophets have taught. It also makes little sense in light of the Church’s visitor’s center near the Hill Cumorah in New York and the annual Church-sponsored Hill Cumorah pageants.

Every sentence in this paragraph is incorrect, so let’s go through them one at a time.

There is absolutely no archaeological evidence to directly support the Book of Mormon or the Nephites and Lamanites, who were supposed to have numbered in the millions.

False. There’s actually quite a lot of archaeological evidence that directly supports the Book of Mormon and the Nephites and Lamanites. In a previous entry, I mentioned the LIDAR scans of Mesoamerica, which show that its populations did in fact number in the millions during the time periods in question.

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The CES Letter Rebuttal, Part 3

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Part 3: CES Letter Book of Mormon Questions [Section B]

by Sarah Allen

 

Now that we’re getting deeper into the content of the CES Letter itself, you’re all going to start to see the way that I research the answers to my questions. I draw from a lot of different sources, and each one is like a different puzzle piece. I start adding the pieces to the board and slowly start to fill in the image, but there are gaps I don’t have pieces to fill yet. As I go on, more and more of the picture is revealed until the missing pieces are so small, they don’t really matter. Eventually, for some things, the puzzle gets fully complete. For other questions, some holes still remain. But in every case, no puzzle is finished just by looking at one single piece of it.

That’s something many people don’t fully grasp, that sometimes, getting answers takes real work. I hope, by the time we’re done with this thing, you guys can start to realize how many different sources are out there that you can turn to for your own answers. That said, let’s get on with the questions/concerns.

DNA analysis has concluded that Native American Indians do not originate from the Middle East or from Israelites but rather from Asia. Why did the Church change the following section of the introduction page in the 2006 edition Book of Mormon, shortly after the DNA results were released?

It’s always confused me why this is an issue, and I’ll explain why. We don’t have any idea what Jaredite DNA would have looked like. We don’t know where they came from, who they mixed with along their journey, or where they ended up, or if any of that DNA spread to existing populations. We don’t have any idea what Sariah’s lineage was, or Zoram’s, or Ishmael’s wife’s. All we know is that Lehi is from the tribe of Manasseh and, as explained by Don Bradley, Ishmael was from the tribe of Ephraim. We don’t know what Mulekite DNA would have looked like, as we have no idea who helped him escape Jerusalem or what route they took along the way, or who may have been added to their group during their travels. We have no idea which native populations any of them intermingled with, or to what extent. And that’s even assuming his story in the Book of Mormon is an accurate description of what really happened to him and wasn’t distorted over the centuries before his people were discovered by the Nephites. Given all of that, we have absolutely no idea what the genetic makeup of the groups in the Book of Mormon even looked like to begin with, let alone what it might look like when it’s mixed with existing Native populations.

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The CES Letter Rebuttal, Part 2

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Part 2: CES Letter Book of Mormon Questions [Section A]

by Sarah Allen

 

When I prayed about how best to start these, the answer I received was to lay a foundation first. If you know up front that the author of the Letter is telling one story to the public and another story to his friends in private, that it was specifically arranged to be as manipulative as possible, that it was not one man’s quest for answers to unanswerable questions but a group effort to collect every criticism they could find against the Church, and that the author is doing his best to purposely overwhelm you and destroy your faith, it helps you frame the information and process it more rationally than you would otherwise. When you’re aware of the slant, you can mentally guard against it.

Now that the foundation has been laid, it’s time to jump into the questions/concerns themselves. Before I do, though, I just wanted to say one thing: I’m just one person putting these posts together. I’m not a scholar, I’m not an apologist, I’m not a professional, and I’m not an expert. I’m just a girl who likes theology and history, particularly Church history, and wants to help support people in their faith. These posts are far from perfect, and they are not all-encompassing. I miss stuff. I read a lot, but there are a lot of things out there I haven’t read, and there are a lot of sources I haven’t come across. You’re all going to find sources I haven’t, and in some cases, you’ll come to different conclusions than I do. That’s great! As long as we’re all asking questions, searching for the answers, and relying on God for understanding, differences of opinion don’t matter.

Having said all that, let’s dive in.

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The CES Letter Rebuttal, Part 1

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Part 1: Manipulations & Dishonesty in the CES Letter

by Sarah Allen

 

Editor’s Note: This post introduces a long series of rebuttals to the CES Letter. New parts will be forthcoming on this blog. You may notice this post is largely the same as the post that appeared last week.  This post is an updated version of the Reddit post specifically updated to appear on this blog. The original Reddit post was loaded inadvertently. We appreciate Sarah’s effort in preparing this excellent rebuttal.

 

On Reddit, I’m a moderator at the LDS subreddit or forum. While I had heard of the CES Letter and had read it years ago, it wasn’t until recently that I began to realize just how prolific it was. So many of the comments and questions we were seeing on our subreddit were influenced by the Letter. I knew of popular responses to it by Jim Bennett, Michael Ash, Brian Hales, Scott Gordon, and an entire section here at FAIR, and I often referred questioners to those responses. At the same time, I noticed that many of those replies only provided brief overviews of the issues or were somewhat light on cited sources. There was room for a detailed response full of citations and sources showing the readers where to research the answers for themselves. I felt impressed to try my hand at filling that space myself, and also felt that, because the CES Letter was crowdsourced and born on Reddit, a comprehensive reply should also come from Reddit. That’s where I began this series, and FAIR has kindly offered to host them here as well.

When I prayed about how best to start this series, I felt strongly that it should start by highlighting the manipulation techniques and dishonesty of the Letter itself and of the Letter’s author, Jeremy Runnells. I’ll dive into the content of the Letter next week, but this week, I wanted to lay some groundwork.

If you understand that he misrepresented his story and told one thing to the public while saying something completely different to his friends on the Exmormon subreddit, and that he specifically organized the Letter to be as manipulative and overwhelming as possible, it helps you put the Letter’s questions and accusations in the proper context. This first post is not meant to be an attack on Jeremy’s character. It’s merely meant to show that he’s not “just asking questions,” the way he’s claimed. It’s to show that the entire premise the letter, a public cry for help from a floundering member who desperately wanted to save his testimony, was false. In fact, Runnells was already mentally out of the Church, trying to devise the best way to lead away the rest of his family, and actively helping others push their own family and friends out of the Church as well. That information is important because it sets the stage for what follows and helps you gauge the truthfulness of the document itself.

I’d like to start by explaining what the CES Letter is and how it came to be, and then I’ll move into some of the manipulations found in the Letter and in the responses by the Letter’s fans.

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