I spent 4 hours listening and re-listening to this video. I have 3 pages of notes. Lundwell and Murphy have opened my eyes to things I never knew. Their evidences are clear, convincing and overwhelming. Lundwell who lays out the written language impossibilities and Murphey who shows numerous local occurances that were occurring in Joseph's local area, that match my favorite BOM characters and stories. I spent 4 hours (MBR) on that video as well with Murphy. Sad-sad-sad. The good news?? We don't need Joseph or the BOM to get to Jesus. We just need Jesus. And, we get a 10% raise.
This is exactly where Mormons got it wrong. Talked to a missionary about Noah's ark and how it is a myth. He answered he believed it's literal history, and I asked him how he would get all animal species onto one boat and how the kangaroo would get to/from Australia. Besides I pointed out that Mormons believe the Garden of Eden is in Jackson county, Missouri ("It's in the musical!"), which he denied, but his companion admitted 😊. It was great fun to point out that all the apologetics he has faintly heard of do not fit together at all.
I would love to hear his view on all the points. This is an angle and technique of looking at the BoM I have never heard. Good job finding this gentleman.
These facts about the oral culture of the ancient world confirm much of the way that both Judaism and Catholicism have functioned throughout the centuries. In the Catholic Church we use the term "Tradition" to designate truth that is passed down orally. "Scripture" is simply Tradition that has been committed to writing. The most important thing to remember about the theories of textual criticism is that "myth" does not mean fabrication. Myths were passed on to describe reality and convey "truth." Thank you for sharing! 😊😊😊
It goes well beyond art like pottery. They supposedly used gold and silver coins, metal objects of all kinds, and built giant buildings within large cities. All those things would have lasted thousands of years. We still find ancient coins to this day in the middle east and throughout the Roman empire. Stone buildings last enormous amounts of time since stone does not just disappear. The Book of Mormon claims they had metal helmets, body armor, swords, chariots, etc... We can find the stone buildings and temples of the Maya, Aztec, and Inca but nobody can find the buildings of the Lamanites or Nephites.
Then how do account of Hebrew poetry known as chiasms in the bible and in the book of Mormon. Ray treat explains this in the Restored Covenant Edition of the Book of Mormon.
Yes! The key is the independent disciplines! You have hit it on the head! Thank you so much for watching! We’ll be having him on again soon! Stay tuned!
Google Mormon doctrine vs Christian doctrine. You'll see the LDS have scripture together better than the other churches. This is proof that Latter Day Saint scripture is from above. This alone debunks the above bigoted video. Care to refute?
@@richardholmes5676 1. How would you even quantify “have their scriptures together” I’m not sure what that even means. 2. What does that have to do with BoM historicity? Do you have anything to add to the arguments or ideas presented in the presentation?
That's because the Adversary is working harder than ever to dissuade people from humbly seeking the truth and gaining a testimony of The Book of Mormon - Another Testament of Jesus Christ. He wants us to remain in darkness and not draw nearer to our Heavenly Father by embracing this sacred book of scripture. Moroni 10: 4 tells how we can know of its truthfulness for ourselves.😊
This chapter I can’t recommended more! This was amazing and so much to learn from! I will watch it again and take notes! This is a peace of gold knowledge!
I was so solid on the B of M that it was the last thing I studied when I was finally open to fully scrutinizing LDS truth claims. The JST was the first because I didn't know that much about it. I was able to let go of the B of M when I became aware of anachronisms. That's the equivalent of an iPhone found in a claimed Shaekespear diary.
I’m so glad you enjoyed the episode! We were really excited to have John on to share his research! We’re planning on having him on again very soon to go through some of his other points! Thank you so much for watching!
It's logical, when you think about it. There were very few written languages, and almost everyone was illiterate, until Gutenberg invented the printing press and people started learning to read. Almost all primitive cultures had their own creation myths which were passed down orally. Even today, some false folk tales and old wives' tales which were passed down orally for hundreds of years are still repeated by lower-educated people. So the idea that there was this highly advanced Judeo-Christian society in Pre-Columbian America where all of these people could read and write and hear all of these speeches by kings and sermons by prophets and write things like a "title of liberty" are just not realistic. It all makes perfect sense if you view the BOM as being written in the 19th century by someone who didn't know anything about the history of America before the Europeans came over.
Being excommunicated over the peep stone story years ago, is BEYOND offensive! Think of the lives that were messed with! The divorces, families torn apart, the humiliation of the poor individual, and yes, suicides over losing one’s family! And now?! It’s suddenly okay to not only talk about the peep stone, but it’s being PROMOTED?!!! IT’S ALL A LIE! What a massive case of gaslighting!!!
Thanks for your feedback! We really appreciate it! We’ll be doing another episode on more of John’s points very soon! He’s fired up and ready to go! Haha!
The Prophet Joseph Smith didn’t write the Book of Mormon. Neither did any of his associates. Anybody who thinks somebody just made up the Book of Mormon has more imagination than I do (a writer who knows what writing a novel is like). The Book of Mormon was written by the Prophets we say it was written by.
@@herbofallon965so says someone who just believes. And you also believe that the “Laminates” got their darker skin because God changed their DNA within a generation or two? I could say more about this.
John, I gave my understanding of the BOM problems on The Backyard professor, episode 125. I wonder if you would check it out for me and tell me if I am in the historical ballpark. I'm a retired college professor in Spanish and English, who has lived in Europe, Mexico and the heartland. My podcast is nothing more than sharing my observations from my travels.
1:47:19 not only the fact that there is no linguistic evidence of a nephite civilization anywhere but also, there is no military evidence of a nephite civilization anywhere which would have left 1-5% of the swords and shields in chariots and skulls and hair, and other items of battle
I joined the church 50 years ago, not in America. The book of Mormon speaks about, living and following Jesus Christ. I was raised Protestant so I have always loved Bible I Have never heard anyone say the Bible has been corrupted Those who follow the Bible, I think it is wonderful, however some people don’t believe in baptism like my mother etc etc. everybody sings from a different hymn book (Bible) We don’t have prosperity pastors either. I have only ever learned to do good and be good. The Bible is full of history and stories from Abraham down. I believe we live the gospel of Christ fully and Equally with any other Christian church. We are taught not to criticise others beliefs, I can say I’ve nearly been killed in a 1 car accident. And have damage in my brain from the second accident.I have damage also which effects my nervous system the most painful condition on earth, it has the highest suicide rate in the world, I have had many Priesthood blessings, The only thing that would reduce the pain enough After the first accident Doctors Did not know if I was brain-damaged or paralysed, I was given a blessing from the priesthood And told I would recover, I was not brain damaged or paralysed, from the first accident. No one ever tell me that I do not follow The Lord Jesus Christ. When I was lying there in the hospital close to death, The Lord Jesus Christ was there with me.
I am Dr. John's older brother. WAY older brother 😀. I've had the opportunity to talk with John one-on-one for years about the orality of cultures gone by. I wish everyone had this opportunity to do so as I have learned so much. We, as people who are born in a "literary" society have no clue as to how and why people thought before the printed page.... so don't feel bad Rebecca on feeling the way you do. This conversation is a completely different way of understanding people. Heck... I was taught in school that the peoples who lived 10's of thousands of years ago were mindless Neanderthals who grunted and fought dinosaurs in order to get something to eat. Nothing could be so removed from the truth. When John was developing his book, Mythos and Cosmos: Mind and Meaning in the Oral Age, he let me proof read it. THAT was my first exposure to this type of thinking. Can you say, "Mind blowing"?!! But understanding this is SO important as this goes to the very foundation of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon. Understanding this concept is vital in understanding the truth of the BoM... or lack thereof. There are dozens and dozens and dozens of podcasts, TH-cam videos, and other sources that talk about the BoM and how it has problems. These people deal with word analysis, linguistic issues, etc. in order to deconstruct the BoM. As good as all this analysis is, we are talking about the CONTENT of the BoM. For me, it makes ZERO difference of what the content of the BoM is IF the entire text itself is anachronistic. Case closed. Period. You don't have to do any further analysis because right off the bat you've proved that it would be impossible to write a history, put that history on plates, carry the plates around to give it to the next guy, and ultimately compile the numerous plates down onto golden plates, bury them in a hill with stones, and wait until a 14 year old find them and starts a church... EVERYTHING after the "write a history" proves that any of this couldn't have taken place simply because THEY DIDN'T WRITE HISTORY. Period. We're done. This same logic holds true as to my first real dilemma I had with the church... that of the SEC scandal. If I did what Gordon Hinkley did, I'd be in prison. You don't get to tell me that a "prophet" can be a felon and still be a prophet. Sorry. I'm digressing.... sorry. I loved this entire series, so please keep bringing people like John in to tell their tale. VERY INFORMATIVE!! Thank you Mormonish Podcast!!
Hands down, best podcast disproving the Book of Mormon. Why nitpick over steel and horses when the entire linguistic style is impossible? In 1 Nephi 19 the island kings say, "The god of nature suffers." But oral culture being polytheistic, they should have said, "The gods of nature, war, harvest, etc. . . . suffer." Joseph Smith projected his monotheistic worldview onto his fictional characters. Thank you for this brilliant, groundbreaking presentation.
Tremendous episode that taught the diff between oral people and literate peoples. Fascinating. My brain is at peace now. I used to try and reconcile what I had studied about mesoAmerica civilization and what the BoM records about its civilization. Real history is tangible (excavations of mesoAm), fictional history can leave no archeological evidence because it isn't real (BofM). Thank you! But this knowledge makes the apologists into intellectually dishonest players (example: concocting this idea of 'loose' v 'tight' translation). So sad for them but destructive to their readers. This youtube should be the Sunday morning session of Oct Gen'l Conf...! I want more of John Lundwall's knowledge. Make a series, John!
Astoundingly informative! Thank you. I am so close to leaving the Church, this is so helpful to support the other information I have learned over the last year.
It will be a definite negative event in your life if you should leave the Church. The Church is true. I know for a fact it is. Satan is working overtime to try to pull members away. He knows his time is short.
@@KyleTheDalek where do you encounter that? When I look at critical channels such as exmormon Reddit or post Mormon TH-cam channels, it seems everybody and their dog are leaving.
We hope so too! we are already working on getting him scheduled to go on some other podcasts! Thank you so much for watching! We really appreciate it!!
I could admire Joseph Smith, Jr.’s creativity in writing the Book of Mormon, if he had not pretended it was revealed Hebrew scripture. I think I have appreciated this the most of all of the Mormonish videos/podcasts.
this is really exciting. I’m excited to watch this for part series. I was a member for 40 years and one day decided to read the church history essays during Covid. I started with the book of Abraham one and then I went to the book of Mormon translation, because as a linguistic major I have always had a fascination with Egyptology and how it was tied to Mormonism. Fast forward three years, and I am no longer in the church, and I am now on a quest to understand ancient origins of Christian beliefs, not just Mormonism, where these concepts came from such as Satan and Christianity and the modern-day concept of Jesus, etc. This is exciting to watch. Subscribed!
Only 1% of people in 1st Century Palestine were literate. Why didn't I transfer any of my existing knowledge to my study of the BOM. In my head the BOM people were as literate as we are. Thankyou for educating me.
I know exactly how you feel! When John first outlined his concepts while we were on a field trip to look at rock art, I thought about what he said for days! And then I realized that we need to put this into some kind of formal presentation! We’ll be having him on soon to go through some of his other points! He told me he was sorry that the presentation had gone so long but I assured him that all of the viewers and listeners would really appreciate the time he took to explain the overall concept and then move to the finer points!
If you want to have your mind blown, read the Book of Mormon, which was translated in 65 days by a young farm boy who had two years of formal education. Dr. Lundwall doesn’t know diddly that will prove either Joseph Smith false or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints false. This channel is no more than the other anti-LDS channels that seem obsessed in trying to prove Joseph Smith and the Church false. Haha That was pretty funny. There is chiasmus in the Book of Mormon, as there is in the Bible. Joseph Smith knew nothing about chiasmus, but the Prophets of God who wrote the Book of Mormon did! The Savior raised at least one individual from the dead through the Prophet Joseph Smith. After Joseph Smith fell from a second story window on the day he was killed by a mob in Carthage, Illinois, one of the mobsters pulled a sword, thinking to cut the prophets head off. As he raised the sword in the air, a bolt of lightning came out of the sky, instantly killing that mobster. So the real facts of it all FAR OUTDO these three chuckling obsessionists.
You people are talking about Mayan writing, etc. Then I’m sure you know about the Temple of Kukulkan at Chichen Itza in Yucatán, Mexico. The Feathered Serpent that goes down the steps of that temple. Where did the idea of the feathered serpent come from? It came from the Savior’s teaching Be ye suchandsuch as doves, but wise as serpents. Jesus Christ visited His “other sheep” in ancient America in 34 A.D. and taught the same things in ancient America as He did in Palestine. My son is part Mayan because of his mother, who is from Merida, the capital of Yucatán.
They danced the cosmos ~46:00....truly mindblowing as Rebecca said. Native peoples still keep remnants of this. Modern memory tips & hacks include creating imagery & stories. This presentation explains that as a moden attempt to rexapture ancient knowledge transmission. Absolutely fabulous insights.
Wow, great stuff! Please bring John back for some more episodes on the things he said “we don’t have time for!” Each time I was like, “No! Tell me! I want to know!” 😆 like the popol vuh!
Absolutely fascinating!! Thank you Rebecca and Landon for making this possible. Awesome time travel-trip to the origins of civilization, religion, and writing. I can see the connection now! Love it!! Yes, we need to have John back. His arguments are well founded and make perfect sense. What a brilliant mind! You guys rock :)!!
I’ve been thinking about this. When did people really start writing and reading? I just finished the New Revised Edition of the Old Testament. I loved reading it as literature rather than scripture. Thank you for your work to share the TRUTH.
Great question! The Sumerians invented the first writing system in 3000 BC. Which by the way is prior to the date of the Tower of Babel so if the languages were not confounded until that date Sumerian must be the pure Adamic language!
Actually Adam & Eve were taught to keep a written record. These and many other ancient scriptures will be brought forth by the hand of God, after we have humbled ourselves and embraced The Bible and The Book of Mormon.
I really enjoyed this lecture. Thanks for giving us another angle from which to evaluate BoM historicity. The problems that intellectual history poses to BoM historicity are, in my estimation, insuperable. I love the discussion of how writing changes society and am eager to read more about this. That said, I have some questions about the specifics of the model. I'm not convinced secondary orality replicates the thoughtworld of orality. Are we saying people in Chinese and Japanese cultures are unable to think abstractly because their scripts aren't alphabetic? (Surely not!) I'm also not persuaded that the alphabet is correlated empirically all that closely either with abstract reasoning or with monotheism. On the one hand we have the Romans continuing to worship a plethora of gods centuries after the invention of the alphabet (or much longer, if you count abjads, which are consonantal alphabets), and on the other hand we have the Mesopotamians, with a ludicrously difficult script, applying Pythagoras's theorem a thousand years before Pythagoras (although implicitly), solving quadratic equations, and making astronomical discoveries that wouldn't be rediscovered until the high Middle Ages, as well as creating a text-centric (elite) culture in which texts alluded to other texts, commentaries on texts were written, and incipient monotheism was not uncommon in the latest period. Just conceptually, I also don't see why the alphabet necessarily would lead to linear or abstract or non-cosmological thinking. It's a fantastic technology that facilitates literacy and can thereby restructure society; I can completely accept that it had social consequences that may even have laid the groundwork for intellectual discoveries. But I couldn't follow the claim that it should lead ineluctably to cognitive changes, abstract thought, or monotheism, let alone that it did. I'm also not sure the alphabet even catches on immediately once it's introduced, or that it couldn't get lost. You have moments in time like the Late Bronze Age in which Ugarit is using a cuneiform abjad (virtually--there are three syllabograms in an otherwise consonantal script), where the empires around it are using very difficult scripts, especially Hittite, Egyptian, and Akkadian. It would have been the perfect chance for people using the other scripts to simplify drastically. Instead, the Ugaritic script was completely lost and forgotten, and in Akkadian, the script got increasingly complicated as the number of values, or ways of reading, each sign exploded in the first millennium BCE, and the use of CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) signs became increasingly popular, adding to the total number of signs in common use. In other words, a complicated script got increasingly complicated exactly as they were making more and more discoveries we would call "scientific" and conceptualizing the gods more often in monotheistic-adjacent ways. I'm also not sure why someone writing in 600 BCE wasn't active in an "alphabetic" culture. They'd had an abjad for centuries and centuries by this point; even if we don't want to draw a straight line between Canaan with its Paleo-Hebrew (basically Phoenician) script and the Semitic-speaking miners in the Sinai who were adapting Egyptian graphemes in the Middle Bronze Age to develop a proto-alphabet, we have epigraphic evidence in Canaan taking us back at least to Iron Age I. Why did it take so long for "alphabetic" thinking to "embed"? The Levant as a whole had been awash in abjads for a very long time in 600 BCE. On the other hand, in Greece we have the converse problem: After they adapted the Phoenician script to their language and (probably inadvertently) invented symbols for vowels, they made a number of intellectual advances fairly soon after, but without embracing monotheism--this in spite of the fact that they weren't marinating in abjads for centuries but instead had used an absurdly cumbersome script in the Late Bronze Age, Linear B, a script so ambiguous that it wasn't capable of recording complex texts, and had then reverted to a strictly oral culture for centuries, as evidenced by Homer. There also seems to be an implicit assumption that monotheism is intellectually superior to polytheism, since it's being associated with "abstract" thought. But is that true? By positing a fundamental unity in the cosmos, monotheism raises issues like the problem of evil that polytheism doesn't have to contend with. I would love to read something that spells out in more detail what qualifies as monotheism and why it's rational in a way that polytheism is not. I hope I don't come across as overly negative! Thank you for a stimulating interview.
Hi Lilith, Thank you for such a well thought out thread with questions. As this is not the place to have a full conversation (which I would be happy to do) I will just write a few notes about your observations. I would be happy to DM or discuss elsewhere. 1) Alphabetic writing did not create abstract thought. It created a new layer of abstract thought. It is much easier to de-couple thinking from nature when using abstract symbols instead of picture symbols. There was plenty of abstraction in both orality and secondary oral worlds, but in these worlds religious thinking and writing is always deeply tied to the observations of nature and cosmos and this interplay is the backbone of the metaphors used in the religious system. This is very different than the theology of the Book of Mormon, which is created from centuries of literate thinking. 2) I never said that alphabetic writing created the thinking behind mathematics, Pythagoras’s theorem, geometry, trigonometry, pre-algebra, etc. which we do find in secondary-oral systems. I’m not sure where you are coming from with these comments? 3) The alphabet was invented by polytheistic peoples, just like writing was invented by oral peoples. In addition, monotheism is an adaptation from polytheism. There is an ideological trajectory in many polytheistic systems towards monotheism (i.e., one central creator deity who has divine subordinates) but in all societies before alphabetic writing there is no monotheism that ever takes hold. There appears to be a few forays into monotheism in logo-syllabic or oral systems (14th cent. BCE with Atenism, monism in the Vedas, and maybe one tribe in Africa, but Atenism lasted one lifetime and all the other systems appear to be a form of monism with pantheistic qualities, or later adaptations of such). But I did say that there were no tight lines between categories, and that there is overlap. 4) Alphabetic writing is much easier to learn. In previous systems, it could take years to train a proficient scribe. In that same time, you could train a hundred scribes with an alphabet. It takes time to do this as in fact in most towns and cities there weren’t a hundred scribes to be trained. Still, the more people read in your society the more society will be changed by reading. It should be rather obvious, but the alphabet provides the structures that allow for the expansion of literacy. In addition, an alphabet helps de-couple the reader from the observations of nature which was the memory reservoir in prior systems. So, while the alphabet does not create abstraction or monotheism, it provides the channels that help establish new abstractions and staying power for monotheism. In other words, there is a sympathetic relationship between alphabetic literacy and monotheism. 5) Clearly there are other forces in play. The first true monotheism in history is Judaism. It formed after their religious cult center was destroyed. It appears therefore, that the greatest pressure to change the religious system was not in alphabetic writing but in the complete destruction of their way of life. Changes had to be made. The Jewish scribes made a bold move; they decided to make their religion portable, decentralized, therefore de-cosmologized, by writing the Torah. In order to make that stick, to convert the people to Torah, you have to train people to read Torah. The more people who read Torah the greater the chances your new religion will endure. Thus, alphabetic script is the tool you want. And the tool they used. And it worked. 6) I never said that monotheism is more rational than polytheism. 7) The thought-world of the Book of Mormon has been de-cosmologized. This is not the thought-world of any culture in the Americas. You cannot get the thought-world of the Book of Mormon from the thought-world in the pre-Colonial Americas. The cosmo-vision of the Book of Mormon is the result of centuries of abstract literate thought that has created a strict form of monotheism and historicism, which does not exist in the Americas. 8) I know of no example of a logo-syllabic system creating a monotheistic sermon culture or a linear historicist framework of thought. If you can point that out to me, I would be thrilled. Thanks. I look forward to your response should you choose to make one. I am happy to discuss. And thanks for watching the podcast.
@@TheAmeled "The thought-world of the Book of Mormon has been de-cosmologized. This is not the thought-world of any culture in the Americas. You cannot get the thought-world of the Book of Mormon from the thought-world in the pre-Colonial Americas. The cosmo-vision of the Book of Mormon is the result of centuries of abstract literate thought that has created a strict form of monotheism and historicism, which does not exist in the Americas." This entire subject is way over my head intellectually, but as I read this comment, I thought of Alexander Campbell's critique of the BOM which he wrote in 1831: This prophet Smith, through his stone spectacles, wrote on the plates of Nephi, in his book of Mormon, every error and almost every truth discussed in N. York for the last ten years. He decides all the great controversies - infant baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the atonement, transubstantiation, fasting, penance, church government, religious experience, the call to the ministry, the general resurrection, eternal punishment, who may baptize, and even the question of freemasonry, republican government, and the rights of man. All these topics are repeatedly alluded to. How much more benevolent and intelligent this American Apostle, than were the holy twelve, and Paul to assist them!!! He prophesied of all these topics, and of the apostacy, and infallibly decided, by his authority, every question. How easy to prophecy of the past or of the present time!! But he is better skilled in the controversies in New York than in the geography or history of Judea.
@@TheAmeled Hi John, Thanks so much for taking the time to write a very thoughtful, kind, and detailed reply, and for clearing up several misconceptions. (And thanks again for a very enjoyable lecture!) I definitely think the alphabet, especially an ideal alphabet, provides a much faster route to high literacy (if not the only route), and that has enormous consequences for a society. Just a couple of thoughts: You write, "It is much easier to de-couple thinking from nature when using abstract symbols instead of picture symbols." It seems like the way the graphemes in a script function is a separate issue from the degree to which they continue to resemble objects or phenomena in the world, though, since an alphabet can have graphemes that resemble things, like an ox, and a logosyllabographic script can have graphemes that, over time, have essentially become abstract. In Mesopotamia, where our earliest extant writing appears, the earliest graphemes are famously pictographic (as I'm sure you already know.). But as the system turns into cuneiform (based on the type of object they used to incise the symbols), the resemblance of the graphemes to objects in the material world, whether natural or humanmade, becomes increasingly fuzzy, and already in the third millennium BCE it's difficult to see what many of the graphemes were intended to represent; by the first millennium, the script is very divorced from its pictographic origins. The fact that they changed the direction of their script 90 degrees at some unknown point contributes to that. But the script continues to be polyphonic and logosyllabographic. Ugaritic and Old Persian are cuneiform scripts that function largely alphabetically, and I wonder whether the graphemes of those scripts are qualitatively different in form (not function) from the Akkadian script. From my perspective, almost all cuneiform looks equally abstract, whether it's from an alphabetic script or a logosyllabographic script. You write, "I know of no example of a logo-syllabic system creating a monotheistic sermon culture or a linear historicist framework of thought," and "There was plenty of abstraction in both orality and secondary oral worlds, but in these worlds religious thinking and writing is always deeply tied to the observations of nature and cosmos and this interplay is the backbone of the metaphors used in the religious system." I suspect I'm just misunderstanding what "historicist" means or how a logo-syllabic "system" relates to a culture using a logosyllabographic script, or what constitutes religious writing, but my initial impression is that there are scads and scads of religious texts in Mesopotamia that have nothing to do with observations of nature, and some that are potentially even historicist. What about the Babylonian Chronicles? (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_Chronicles) They're famous for having a detached tone that's not overtly propagandistic, although I realize they're written very late in Babylonian history, and the culture is besieged by alphabets by this time (especially Aramaic). But what about the much earlier Weidner Chronicle? (www.livius.org/sources/content/mesopotamian-chronicles-content/abc-19-weidner-chronicle/) It recounts actual historical events in Babylonian history by explaining them as the god Marduk blessing or punishing people for sacrificing to him or failing to sacrifice to him (admittedly this is completely anachronistic, since Marduk was not an important god in the periods being described). What about Ludlul bel nemeqi as an example of a religious text that's not a ritual and not about nature? (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlul_b%C4%93l_n%C4%93meqi) It describes someone suffering every conceivable problem before being saved by Marduk. I realize your interview was very condensed and you didn't have time to go into a lot of particulars in detail, so I'm sorry if I come across as nitpicking. I'm in complete agreement with you that the Book of Mormon absolutely cannot be historical, and it's not just because of the material culture and the DNA. The thoughtworld of the Book of Mormon is fundamentally 19th century American Protestantism. The apologists don't need an attestation of the name Nahom in Yemen; that's not sufficient. They need an entire alternative intellectual history that's plausible, and they simply don't have anything close to it. I love any discussion of these issues.
This was excellent. Most above my head and definitely needs to be listened to twice, but Dr L breaks it down to a mostly understandable way. WOW. Great research.
As Dr. Lundwall said this is a graduate level college course taught in 2 hours but he does a great job explaining this information. We have learned so much from our friend!
We knew when we discussed these concepts with John while out exploring Native American rock art that everyone needed to hear this! He does a great job explaining the concepts and is so knowledgeable!
I mentioned the idea that written language of the BOM was anachronistic in the America’s , my TBM husband said that lehi’s family brought the knowledge with them . How do I respond ?
This presentation was so interesting and informative! I’m learning so much! I don’t know a whole lot about the Book of Mormon, I just find it interesting, but it was my understanding that no one knows what area the book speaks about, just that it happened in the Americas. So I was wondering why you focused so heavily on the Myan culture and not other areas as well? Id be curious to know what you think of the Mi’kmaq writing? I have ancestors who were Mi’kmaq and there is a legend of one of my great great…who recognized the crosses hung around the necks of the first Europeans who made contacts and because he already knew the meaning of that cross he was not afraid and the people were all able to be peaceful together.
In the presentation John specifically talks about this. Meso America was the ONLY group of people that had ANY TYPE of writing system. There were no peoples in the north or south that had a writing system. That's why Dr. Lundwall specifically centers his talk around the Meso Americas. Regardless... the SAME logic is held to any peoples anywhere in the world as far as how pre-literate people thought and lived their lives. Does that make sense?
When I was teaching art at the Circle school in San Antonio Texas I was introduced to paula Underwood, who authored the Walking People and native American oral history that I think your guest would be very interested in the stories begin with the Ice Age and the cave paintings and follow their walk across Europe, and across the Land bridge, they called walk by waters along the Rockies and the west coast across the great plains up the eastern seaboard settling in the Great Lakes area. Every people they met, they gather stories of the people and their history.
I liked the way he described how he had a spiritual experience reading the Book of Mormon at the age of 16 I was 20 years old. I think it’s because I wanted it. I had a lot of trauma during the 4 years before and I was born into the church although inactive. I was 56 years old when my shelf broke due to the false translation of the book of Abraham that began my search for what else are they lying about. I have found So much it’s incredible.
And all this time, the reasonably well supported conclusion that Smith plagiarized some dude’s novel was good enough for me. 😂 Seriously though, I’m a major nerd of religion and astrology of the Hellenistic world. (I have obscure hobbies.) And this video is an amazing compliment to understanding one of the most significant and transitionary points in world history. I’m genuinely floored by the scholarship presented here. (Mormonism aside.) At the same time, using a full historical-linguistic deconstruction of the BoM as a tool to understand these concepts is fascinating AND hilarious. Who said learning can’t be fun? Thank you.
John, this is me and my Inuit sis'n'law, driving around together: Me__So, do I turn north in 1 km? Her__You'll come to two tall buildings, the first one is taller than the 2nd, and the smaller one has white brick. You don't turn right at those buildings; you turn right one block after that. Me__So, do I turn north ? ☺
Not only do even Fremont leave a fingerprint in their petroglyph/pictograph panels and pottery, they're existing at the same time, in parallel, with the Book of Mormon cultures. Moroni visited right into Fremont heartland (Manti) even. American archaeology must have produced a signal of the BoM world by now, somewhere, and yet it's completely missing still...
2.5 hours just went by in a flash. I loved this episode. The information was so clear and we'll presented. Definitely have him back as soon as possible.
Where can we go to find the sources around when literacy started in Israel? What I’m seeing online says much further back then 4th or 5th century BC. I just want to understand if there was literacy in Jerusalem in 600BC. It’s hard to know which sources to trust.
Started rather early. There were literate scribes running the city state during King David. It is suggested that Solomon was known as the wise king not because he was wise (just read the biblical text to see he was somewhat of your average aristocrat) but that he built a library to gather the collective wisdom of the people. Literacy begins with the invention of writing. Alphabetic literacy takes off at the end of the second millennium BCE and is fully established a thousand years later.
Cuneiform, the first writing system started in the 3rd millennium BCE and spread throughout the Middle East. Writing systems improved and developed but Hebrew didn’t develop as a language until around 1000 BCE and that is the oldest known Hebrew writings but like Dr. Lundwall points out these oldest writings were songs and psalms based on oral traditions.
@@mormonishpodcast1036 Thought that was implicit in whole notion of bom. Or at least what js was counting on. I realize those "expectations" were of 20th-century grammar-school educated America; I failed to consider that perhaps most of js' audiences would not likely have known this. Now I can better understand how he got away with the initial sham. Still can't grasp how it not only continued but also continued to inflate. 🥵🥵🥵
My 3rd time watching. I am completely intellectually inspired. I am so grateful for the wisdom , knowledge and time John put into his studies and love for truth!!!!
Very important episode. Funny(ish) sidenote. I started listening to this on Apple Podcasts and thought they were talking to Adam Corolla at first. John Lundwall sounded so much like him (to my ears). I was thinking, "When did Adam become an expert on this stuff?" LOL
Funny story we tried to get Adam Corolla on to discuss this find but he wasn’t available so we got John to do it!!! Glad we did! Lol We didn’t catch that but now that you mention it we’ll listen for it. Thanks for the comment and thanks for listening!
Such an awesome episode! I love your approach of comparison… Like before watching your episode, I’ve been thinking “How outrageous to engage a psychic!” Now I’m like, “Well, hell yah! Let’s go!” 😂😂😂😂😂😂
At 2:20:12. Yes, they are moving in that direction, which is what I was referencing in my comment about Jesus' use of parables and THE FACT THAT an effective parable has to have A LITERAL BASIS IN A LITERAL REALITY. And, BRAVO, Dr. Knight, to your reply on that topic. AMEN TO THAT REPLY. They have already brought them- selves to the reeds' edge of the pus- pond.
It was pretty amazing! We are planning another trip with John in September to go look for some elusive Fremont Indian petroglyphs! Will also be having John on again soon to go through some of his other points!
@@TheAmeled Your comments about the style and purpose of ancient MesoAmerican writing reminded me of something that some Book of Mormon apologists were asserting on another TH-cam video a few weeks ago. One of them said that some of the "caractors" from Joseph Smith's alleged sample of the writing on the golden plates have been found in ancient Mayan sites. I asked the guy, if those "caractors" were "reformed Egyptian" as Joseph Smith proclaimed, and written by descendants of Hebrews, then why would we find those characters in sites of people who had no relation to ancient Hebrews or the writing on the golden plates? If the "Book of Mormon people" interacted with ancient Mayans to the point of their language and writing being shared, then shouldn't all of the other culture and technology detailed in the BOM also be found all over Mesoamerican sites? He didn't respond to me. This is one of the problems with Book of Mormon apologists in general: when they cite one item of alleged "Book of Mormon evidence" in a specific New World area, then if that item is truly legitimate, then we should find hundreds or thousands of similar items in that given area which also supports the BOM story. For example, these apologists who continue to cite the "Bat Creek Stone" found in east Tennessee (which has been debunked for decades), then they should also be able to find evidence of Hebrew/Semitic DNA, Christ worship, horse and chariot usage, metal tools and weaponry, etc., in that same area. When the apologists cite possible items of evidence from areas ranging from New York state to the Yucatan peninsula, they're really saying that they don't have enough evidence in any given locale to even be able to theorize where the events occurred.
Interestingly, many of the Polynesian cultural dances performed by Mormon students at the Mormon-owned Polynesian Cultural Center are about worshiping their island gods as well as channeling the spirits of their ancestors.
Hi Dr. Lundwall, thank you for this fantastic presentation. I really want to show this to my TBM family, but I have two questions, if you wouldn't mind answering them, to help me steel-man your premise: 1) in looking at Wikipedia, the dates of writing for most of the books of the Old Testament are after 600BCE, which aligns with everything you said (including what you noted about Psalms and other songs that are earlier). One exception seems to be Isaiah chapters 1-39, which are said to be written around the 8th and 7th centuries BCE. Those chapters seem like they contain material other than just ritual text (i.e., some narrative history and some doctrine, although I could be wrong there). Could those chapters of Isaiah be used as a counterargument to your main premise? And 2) the Book of Abraham is said to be from scrolls which we know are about 1500 years too late to be authentic. But, in your knowledge, are there any Egyptian hieroglyphics pre-600 BCE that depict narrative stories or teach religious principles? I feel like, for me, if those two things can be squared away, opponents to your arguments would not have any ground to stand on. Thanks for any response here--I really appreciate your work!
Hello and thank you for your questions. The short answer is yes and no. There are no tight lines between the categories I discussed (primary orality, secondary orality, and literacy). There is overlap between the categories. King Solomon was known as a wise king according to tradition, but if you read the Bible, besides that moment when he saved a child between two arguing women, he was mostly a dullard. Several Bible scholars have noted that the tradition of the wisdom of Solomon most likely came from the library he built as part of his city building program. He collected in texts the wisdom of the region and of his own traditions. What those texts looked like is unknown, but the vast majority of literature at this period comes in the form of wisdom texts, mythological narratives, and religious rituals. It appears, however, that by the late 8th century and early 7th century BCE you do have a fully literate scribal cast writing in Jerusalem who produce the Isaiah texts. However, the Isaiah texts are nothing like the Book of Mormon or the New Testament. The vast majority of First Isaiah (chpts 1-39) are prophetic utterances that amount to both political and cultural commentary divulged in poetic stanzas, hymns, and prophetic statements. This is not an objective history such as we are given in the Book of Mormon. There is no known text to exist that would constitute the Brass Plates, nor was there a genre of historical narrative laying out an objective, fact filled story of A leads to B leads to C, etc. Isaiah does not qualify for this kind of text. Second and Third Isaiah present an even more difficult situation, as they are written as prophecies for the post exiled Jews. When the early Christians (who at first were all Jewish) adopted the Hebrew Bible as their sacred writ they reinterpreted these latter chapters of Isaiah as prophecies of Jesus. This makes sense as Isaiah is really a prophetic book, but those prophecies of Jesus were originally written as praise for Cyrus who redeemed Israel by returning them to their homeland. Those chapters were not written until the late sixth and fifth centuries BCE and could not have been in the Brass plates (the deutero-Isaiah problem). Could there have been a historical narrative of the people of Israel in the temple library of Jerusalem at the time of Nephi? Well, it's possible, but nothing like the Book of Mormon text has ever been found, which means the Book of Mormon is a first or a complete anachronism (hint: it's a complete anachronism). In order to have the idea of the divine wed to history one has to decouple the idea of the divine from sacred place and sacred cycles (that maintain your agriculture for example). This only occurrs after the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of the Jews. Yes, there is Egyptian religious literature before 600 BCE that teaches religious ideas and written as narratives. Again, this is wisdom literature (think Proverbs, Psalms, or even Job). By the early second millennium BCE you get an uptick in Egyptian literature, but again this is mythological or folk narrative or wisdom texts. You don't get anything like the Book of Abraham, or the Book of Ether, or the Book of Mormon. On this point the book of Job in the Bible is an excellent example of what we are talking about. Job is not a history. Job is not a historical figure. Job is a wisdom text. A few scholars have noted that the opening of Job reads like a prologue of an ancient drama (literally a play) where God and the Adversary cast lots over a righteous man. The book of Job is largely a long poetic treatise on theodicy and there is a related Egyptian text known as The Conversations of a Man with His Ba that has a very similar theme of unjust suffering and the trials of life. Again, these texts are nothing like the genre presented in the Book of Mormon. In short, I am not arguing that there was not literacy, historical writing, or religious teachings in texts written before 600 BCE. I am arguing that the genre of historicism (writing a history as objective linear facts) did not exist until very late (we see it begin with Herodotus and flourish in the late Roman period, and the Christian New Testament is a vibration of this genre mixed with religion, though not as historical as most Mormons think), I am also arguing that the Christology of the Book of Mormon does not exist in 600 BCE. Actually, it did not exist in 33 CE. Nope. It did not. How it gets in the Book of Mormon is a real conundrum. And how it fills the pages of the Pearl of Great Price (the days of Adam and Enoch for example) is another conundrum. These are deep anachronisms.
I agree more people need to hear this! I’m hoping that some of my other bigger podcaster friends will pick John up and have him on their program! Thank you so much for watching!
Excellent presentation! Thanks! One question that has always bugged me like tiny rocks in my socks is why, in the first place, it would ever be necessary to have an ancient record of God's dealings and revelations to an ancient people in order for a modern people to know what God wants. Obviously, in the case of Mormonism, that arrangement simply means that God's will is being communicated to us as second-hand, third-hand and fourth-hand information transmitted through a rock that functions like a Mattel magic 8-ball, and the accuracy of the information that is sort of being communicated that way is also totally dependent on the limited comprehension of a failed 19th century treasure finder...and all of modernity simply has to trust the word of that kid as to what he was really doing and just trust that he wasn't lying his posterior off. Why can't God just have direct dealings with modern people that are clear, plain, logical and unmistakable? None of this "is it God or is it Fraud?" uncertainty, please. How incompetent or lazy is God that he just can't be bothered to do anything other than provide a weird book that is supposedly based on records kept by some guys in an ancient civilization for which there is no reasonable evidence, all transmitted through a shady 19th century character who seems to have always been more of a scammer than a saint? "Oh look, Molly, how wonderful this book is. Here it tells us about a guy who chops off a drunk man's head in order to steal some brass plates. Here it tells us about how that same guy single-handedly built a trans-oceanic ship out in the middle of the desert. Here it tells us how the brothers got into a lot of fights with each other, so God split them up and cursed all the descendants of two of the brothers with dark skin in the hopes that the extended family would remain permanently divided and not be confused as to who their enemies are. Here it tells us about how a guy impressed a king by single-handedly chopping off the arms of 100 guys. Here's a story of a 'Daughter of Jared' who danced for a decapitation just like the 'Daughter of Herod' and that even rhymes! And here are a bunch of theological preachings that are basically the same things that many 19th century protestants were talking about. What a great book! Now I know why we don't really need God or Jesus to communicate directly with us and appear to us. We have this book!"
They need the murky, convoluted scriptures to cause confusion and produce several different interpretations in order to get more people to feel they need some bearded wonder guy in the sky to set them straight in their search for truth.
@TEAM__POSEID0N , Here is some food for thought for you. Why did Joseph Smith need to get the gold plates if he didn't even know how to read them or even use them during the translation process? Joseph Smith got the "translation" by looking at a rock in a hat. The gold plates were not involved at all. Also why did the angel take the gold plates away after they were "translated"? Wouldn't it have been beneficial and a testament to the world if some of the gold plates were shown publicly? Joseph Smith supposedly struggled to get the gold plates which included digging up the body of his dead brother Alvin but never used them for the translation or showed them publicly.
@@isthechurchtrue Certainly. I actually at one point or another asked myself all of those questions. Ultimately, those questions helped me realize how silly Joseph Smith's stories are at the most basic level. In other words, the whole idea that any of those stage props (in the drama that Joseph Smith just made up) would be necessary for anything was ludicrous. If God had an important message or book's worth of messages to deliver, God could just deliver it all in perfect form. All of that nonsense about visiting the Hill Cumorah at special times over four years, retrieving golden plates with undecipherable ancient writings on them, magic stones, an angel taking the plates up to heaven so that nobody could examine the evidence, hats and magic rocks, breastplates and magic spectacles... and yadda yadda yadda....all that nonsense, in retrospect, was obviously just a farrago of religio-occult-magic nonsense used as a marketing narrative to sell a crappy book. The only reason I ever took any of it seriously in the first place was because, as a child, I was surrounded by adults telling me it was all true. It was like being surrounded by adults telling me from early childhood that Santa Claus was real...only the adults actually believed that Santa was real and told me that people who don't believe in Santa are bad and defective people.
I am blown away. I listened 2 times already. I found the information in showing JS took from his world but this shows it is not Linguistically possible!!!!!! I want to know more!!!!!!
Amazing! Just finished and it blew my mind! More of this please!!! I can’t believe how every word, every sermon, every historical reference in the BoM is anachronistic. Great job bringing him on and distilling it so I could follow. Also, haha great little joke about the baboon being a tight translation. I caught that and genuinely lol! 😂
Interesting video that anyone can learn from. It should be noted, however, that the BOM verses that you cite about records are specifically referring to the brass plates, which Moroni states in Ether 4 are hidden and only to be revealed to the faithful. Moreover, Mormon hides other records in Mormon 6:6. The records were passed down through the patrilineal line of the Nephite prophets going back to Lehi himself. They were shared and used to convert the Lamanites, but they were still only kept and passed down through the generations of the Lehite line of prophets. So, I don't see how the passages you refer to in the video would necessarily entail an entire literate society.
@@mormonishpodcast1036You're welcome! Also, even though I imagine John would need more than a couple of days to research it, could he at least touch on the sunken cities of Meso America and the sunken Nephite cities in 3 Nephi 8? Deniers never really address this, and it would be good to hear a critical perspective from an expert. Thx.
I am always amused when this type of "experts" are so very certain, except when new or current information comes along (or existing information they have ignored), We often dumb down civilizations because "there is no way the could have been so advanced" It is almost as if the want to insult our intelligence.
John welcomes any peer reviewed evidence to counter his claims. He studies these cultures for a living and he does not dumb down these civilizations. He fully respects and understands them more than any of us and is an expert even living in the field where they lived to better understand them. He has devoted his life to researching these incredible civilizations, but just because they’re intelligent does not mean they have a writing system. As a scholar, John is willing to change his mind when new information comes out and update that information. Unfortunately, religionists believe despite any information to the contrary, which is what is really amusing!
The program keeps going on. You mentioned what you've been taught in you life time. I would like to sometime somwhere share my growing up and living in Mormon culture for 82 years: my life time.
Thanks so much for watching! I'm sorry that you found our interaction to be distracting. John had asked us as the hosts ahead of time, to make sure to ask questions that an every man would ask so that more people could have an understanding. We were following the instructions of our guest as we always do. We want everyone to feel comfortable on our podcast.
The problem with that statement is that the Book of Mormon doesn’t contain any of the doctrines that are uniquely Mormon. No priesthood, no temple ceremonies, no three degrees of glory, no Baptisms for the Dead, no Laying on of Hands, no three unique individuals in the godhead, no garments, no Word of Wisdom, condemns polygamy, etc, etc, etc….it doesn’t even get the doctrine right!!!
@@krismurphy7711 Sure. The word "priesthood" is mentioned, along with the term "high priest" and IIRC even the name Melchizedek is mentioned once or twice. But the mention of those words is quite different from setting out the doctrines related to priesthood that characterize the LDS church. Nothing is really said about the organization of the priesthood or the specific offices and their functions (deacon, teacher, priest, elder and so on). Nothing about the Aaronic Priesthood...and nothing about the Melchizedek Priesthood being a specific order of priesthood. Nothing about priesthood blessings or who can hold the priesthood. The references to "high priests" and "priesthood" are vague and simply seem to be nothing more than an attempt to imply that the Lehites are living like Old Testament people. Mormons have to work backwards to "find" their doctrines about priesthood in the BoM, like: "Look! It says 'priesthood'! That must be talking about all the same complicated doctrines about priesthood authority that we believe in now!"
I spent 4 hours listening and re-listening to this video. I have 3 pages of notes. Lundwell and Murphy have opened my eyes to things I never knew. Their evidences are clear, convincing and overwhelming. Lundwell who lays out the written language impossibilities and Murphey who shows numerous local occurances that were occurring in Joseph's local area, that match my favorite BOM characters and stories. I spent 4 hours (MBR) on that video as well with Murphy. Sad-sad-sad. The good news?? We don't need Joseph or the BOM to get to Jesus. We just need Jesus. And, we get a 10% raise.
And if you notice, the struggle Jesus or Yeshua goes through in the NT matches that mentioned by Lundwall concerning Ramses2 and Israel.
This guy needs to be on every single podcast 😂❤ his voice and passion for his work is epic 🙏🏿😂
Agreed. His passion comes thru and is contagious.
"to oral people, truth is cosmic fact. to literate people, truth is historical fact."
this is a great episode!
Agreed Moe..this is a great statement!
This is exactly where Mormons got it wrong. Talked to a missionary about Noah's ark and how it is a myth. He answered he believed it's literal history, and I asked him how he would get all animal species onto one boat and how the kangaroo would get to/from Australia. Besides I pointed out that Mormons believe the Garden of Eden is in Jackson county, Missouri ("It's in the musical!"), which he denied, but his companion admitted 😊. It was great fun to point out that all the apologetics he has faintly heard of do not fit together at all.
i watched all 4 episodes and am now starting over.first it's fascinating and second the lecture is very easy to listen to.
thanks so much
Having a spiritual experience can occur reading great literature, looking at epic art, loving a child, and many other ways.
I would love to hear his view on all the points. This is an angle and technique of looking at the BoM I have never heard. Good job finding this gentleman.
These facts about the oral culture of the ancient world confirm much of the way that both Judaism and Catholicism have functioned throughout the centuries. In the Catholic Church we use the term "Tradition" to designate truth that is passed down orally. "Scripture" is simply Tradition that has been committed to writing. The most important thing to remember about the theories of textual criticism is that "myth" does not mean fabrication. Myths were passed on to describe reality and convey "truth." Thank you for sharing! 😊😊😊
It goes well beyond art like pottery. They supposedly used gold and silver coins, metal objects of all kinds, and built giant buildings within large cities. All those things would have lasted thousands of years. We still find ancient coins to this day in the middle east and throughout the Roman empire. Stone buildings last enormous amounts of time since stone does not just disappear. The Book of Mormon claims they had metal helmets, body armor, swords, chariots, etc... We can find the stone buildings and temples of the Maya, Aztec, and Inca but nobody can find the buildings of the Lamanites or Nephites.
Rod Meldrum can!!! Lol. Thanks for the comment!
Freaking horrible liars. 😮
This was fantastic information and an excellent presentation. Thank you thank you
Mormonish has come a long way in a short period of time --- I hope you guys win a bunch of awards for this episode.
Oh so kind…maybe we’ll win an Emma award!! Lol. Thanks for watching!
Our viewers and listeners are what inspires us! You guys are just awesome! Thank you so much for watching!
Just like all those journalists who won Pulitzers for Russian collusion in plain sight. 😆
Then how do account of Hebrew poetry known as chiasms in the bible and in the book of
Mormon. Ray treat explains this in the Restored Covenant Edition of the Book of Mormon.
@@davidholmes1233 by their claims Joseph Smith was a genius
It’s crazy how many different and independent disciplines all strongly point to the Book of Mormon not being historical.
Yes! The key is the independent disciplines! You have hit it on the head! Thank you so much for watching! We’ll be having him on again soon! Stay tuned!
Google Mormon doctrine vs Christian doctrine. You'll see the LDS have scripture together better than the other churches. This is proof that Latter Day Saint scripture is from above. This alone debunks the above bigoted video. Care to refute?
@@richardholmes5676Or ...you could actually watch this upload itself instead.
@@richardholmes5676
1. How would you even quantify “have their scriptures together” I’m not sure what that even means.
2. What does that have to do with BoM historicity?
Do you have anything to add to the arguments or ideas presented in the presentation?
That's because the Adversary is working harder than ever to dissuade people from humbly seeking the truth and gaining a testimony of The Book of Mormon - Another Testament of Jesus Christ. He wants us to remain in darkness and not draw nearer to our Heavenly Father by embracing this sacred book of scripture. Moroni 10: 4 tells how we can know of its truthfulness for ourselves.😊
This chapter I can’t recommended more! This was amazing and so much to learn from! I will watch it again and take notes! This is a peace of gold knowledge!
I was so solid on the B of M that it was the last thing I studied when I was finally open to fully scrutinizing LDS truth claims. The JST was the first because I didn't know that much about it. I was able to let go of the B of M when I became aware of anachronisms. That's the equivalent of an iPhone found in a claimed Shaekespear diary.
@Quinn. 🌈🌈🌈🌈
STANDING OVATION 👏
This was a brilliant episode. Lundwall's explanations of how pre-literate societies operated was tremendously insightful. Subscribed!
I’m so glad you enjoyed the episode! We were really excited to have John on to share his research! We’re planning on having him on again very soon to go through some of his other points! Thank you so much for watching!
It's logical, when you think about it. There were very few written languages, and almost everyone was illiterate, until Gutenberg invented the printing press and people started learning to read. Almost all primitive cultures had their own creation myths which were passed down orally. Even today, some false folk tales and old wives' tales which were passed down orally for hundreds of years are still repeated by lower-educated people. So the idea that there was this highly advanced Judeo-Christian society in Pre-Columbian America where all of these people could read and write and hear all of these speeches by kings and sermons by prophets and write things like a "title of liberty" are just not realistic. It all makes perfect sense if you view the BOM as being written in the 19th century by someone who didn't know anything about the history of America before the Europeans came over.
Being excommunicated over the peep stone story years ago, is BEYOND offensive! Think of the lives that were messed with! The divorces, families torn apart, the humiliation of the poor individual, and yes, suicides over losing one’s family! And now?! It’s suddenly okay to not only talk about the peep stone, but it’s being PROMOTED?!!!
IT’S ALL A LIE! What a massive case of gaslighting!!!
Thanks John for the well-prepared presentation of some big ideas. Very interesting. Look forward to more.
Thanks for your feedback! We really appreciate it! We’ll be doing another episode on more of John’s points very soon! He’s fired up and ready to go! Haha!
Thanks Dan. I'm very late to this table, and am reading your work. I have questions. Maybe we can chat sometime....
Absolutely amazing discussion many kudos indeed. Can't wait for part 2.
I"m so excited to let everyone know that we'll be getting Part 2 out next week!! Stay tuned!!
the most significant podcast I have ever listened to !
Wow. Thanks for that comment.
I would never have felt comfortable testifying to Joseph using a stone in a hat. I had to suspend enough disbelief to stay on my mission.
The Prophet Joseph Smith didn’t write the Book of Mormon. Neither did any of his associates. Anybody who thinks somebody just made up the Book of Mormon has more imagination than I do (a writer who knows what writing a novel is like). The Book of Mormon was written by the Prophets we say it was written by.
@@herbofallon965so says someone who just believes. And you also believe that the “Laminates” got their darker skin because God changed their DNA within a generation or two? I could say more about this.
Same here. After a couple of months, had to suspend the disonance and just enjoy the ride and the people. I had fun and learned. Dont regret it.
John, I gave my understanding of the BOM problems on The Backyard professor, episode 125. I wonder if you would check it out for me and tell me if I am in the historical ballpark. I'm a retired college professor in Spanish and English, who has lived in Europe, Mexico and the heartland. My podcast is nothing more than sharing my observations from my travels.
Hi Barry. I will watch it. Probably on the weekend though. Can you send a link in this thread?
I just can’t get enough of this!!! It’s so good!!!!!!! ❤
One of the most informative and interesting things I've heard in a long time
That was fascinating! I really learned a lot. Thank you.
1:47:19 not only the fact that there is no linguistic evidence of a nephite civilization anywhere but also, there is no military evidence of a nephite civilization anywhere which would have left 1-5% of the swords and shields in chariots and skulls and hair, and other items of battle
Best presentation I’ve heard in a very long time!
I joined the church 50 years ago, not in America.
The book of Mormon speaks about, living and
following
Jesus Christ.
I was raised Protestant so I have always loved Bible I Have never heard anyone say the Bible has been corrupted
Those who follow the Bible,
I think it is wonderful, however some people don’t believe in baptism like my mother etc etc.
everybody sings from a different hymn book (Bible)
We don’t have prosperity pastors either.
I have only ever learned to do good and be good.
The Bible is full of history and stories from Abraham down. I believe we live the gospel of Christ fully and Equally with any other Christian church. We are taught not to criticise others beliefs, I can say I’ve nearly been killed in a 1 car accident.
And have damage in my brain from the second accident.I have damage also which effects my nervous system the most painful condition on earth, it has the highest suicide
rate in the world, I have had many Priesthood blessings, The only thing that would reduce the pain enough
After the first accident Doctors Did not know if I was brain-damaged or paralysed,
I was given a blessing from the priesthood
And told I would recover, I was not brain damaged or paralysed, from the first accident.
No one ever tell me that I do not follow
The Lord
Jesus Christ.
When I was lying there in the hospital close to death,
The Lord Jesus Christ was there with me.
I agree with you. I will pray for you.❤😊
@@shadowgirl8038thank you very much❤
I am Dr. John's older brother. WAY older brother 😀. I've had the opportunity to talk with John one-on-one for years about the orality of cultures gone by. I wish everyone had this opportunity to do so as I have learned so much. We, as people who are born in a "literary" society have no clue as to how and why people thought before the printed page.... so don't feel bad Rebecca on feeling the way you do. This conversation is a completely different way of understanding people. Heck... I was taught in school that the peoples who lived 10's of thousands of years ago were mindless Neanderthals who grunted and fought dinosaurs in order to get something to eat. Nothing could be so removed from the truth.
When John was developing his book, Mythos and Cosmos: Mind and Meaning in the Oral Age, he let me proof read it. THAT was my first exposure to this type of thinking. Can you say, "Mind blowing"?!! But understanding this is SO important as this goes to the very foundation of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon. Understanding this concept is vital in understanding the truth of the BoM... or lack thereof.
There are dozens and dozens and dozens of podcasts, TH-cam videos, and other sources that talk about the BoM and how it has problems. These people deal with word analysis, linguistic issues, etc. in order to deconstruct the BoM. As good as all this analysis is, we are talking about the CONTENT of the BoM. For me, it makes ZERO difference of what the content of the BoM is IF the entire text itself is anachronistic. Case closed. Period. You don't have to do any further analysis because right off the bat you've proved that it would be impossible to write a history, put that history on plates, carry the plates around to give it to the next guy, and ultimately compile the numerous plates down onto golden plates, bury them in a hill with stones, and wait until a 14 year old find them and starts a church... EVERYTHING after the "write a history" proves that any of this couldn't have taken place simply because THEY DIDN'T WRITE HISTORY. Period. We're done.
This same logic holds true as to my first real dilemma I had with the church... that of the SEC scandal. If I did what Gordon Hinkley did, I'd be in prison. You don't get to tell me that a "prophet" can be a felon and still be a prophet. Sorry.
I'm digressing.... sorry. I loved this entire series, so please keep bringing people like John in to tell their tale. VERY INFORMATIVE!! Thank you Mormonish Podcast!!
Thank you so much for watching and commenting! We love John! He has told us a little about you and you have a very interesting story yourself!!
This, Dr. John, isn’t long enough!! This is great!!!
There’s 3 more parts already released and a fourth on the way. Look at our playlist for all the John Lundwall episodes!
Fascinating perspective! I thought that Christianity was the biggest anachronism in the Book of Mormon, but it goes far deeper than that!
Turns out even the anachronisms in the Book of Mormon are anachronistic!
Hands down, best podcast disproving the Book of Mormon. Why nitpick over steel and horses when the entire linguistic style is impossible? In 1 Nephi 19 the island kings say, "The god of nature suffers." But oral culture being polytheistic, they should have said, "The gods of nature, war, harvest, etc. . . . suffer." Joseph Smith projected his monotheistic worldview onto his fictional characters. Thank you for this brilliant, groundbreaking presentation.
We humbly agree! Thank you for listening!!
Tremendous episode that taught the diff between oral people and literate peoples. Fascinating. My brain is at peace now. I used to try and reconcile what I had studied about mesoAmerica civilization and what the BoM records about its civilization. Real history is tangible (excavations of mesoAm), fictional history can leave no archeological evidence because it isn't real (BofM). Thank you!
But this knowledge makes the apologists into intellectually dishonest players (example: concocting this idea of 'loose' v 'tight' translation). So sad for them but destructive to their readers. This youtube should be the Sunday morning session of Oct Gen'l Conf...! I want more of John Lundwall's knowledge. Make a series, John!
We are planning to have another episode with John next week. Stay tuned!!!
@iamjust. X 93 million. 🌈🌈
Astoundingly informative! Thank you. I am so close to leaving the Church, this is so helpful to support the other information I have learned over the last year.
Thanks for listening and keep up the critical thinking and analysis. Good luck and thanks for listening.
It will be a definite negative event in your life if you should leave the Church. The Church is true. I know for a fact it is. Satan is working overtime to try to pull members away. He knows his time is short.
Good luck. It is a tough step, but you will enjoy the freedom outside of the "salvation by works" church of Mormonism.
I donno what to do I’m seeing more people finding info that gives credits to LDS.
@@KyleTheDalek where do you encounter that? When I look at critical channels such as exmormon Reddit or post Mormon TH-cam channels, it seems everybody and their dog are leaving.
I hope Dr. John Lundwall goes viral in all TH-cam channels. I am going to subscribe to this channel.
We hope so too! we are already working on getting him scheduled to go on some other podcasts! Thank you so much for watching! We really appreciate it!!
This is THE BEST episode!!!!
I could admire Joseph Smith, Jr.’s creativity in writing the Book of Mormon, if he had not pretended it was revealed Hebrew scripture.
I think I have appreciated this the most of all of the Mormonish videos/podcasts.
It’s one of our favorites too!
Joseph Smith didn't write the Book of Mormon.
this is really exciting. I’m excited to watch this for part series. I was a member for 40 years and one day decided to read the church history essays during Covid. I started with the book of Abraham one and then I went to the book of Mormon translation, because as a linguistic major I have always had a fascination with Egyptology and how it was tied to Mormonism. Fast forward three years, and I am no longer in the church, and I am now on a quest to understand ancient origins of Christian beliefs, not just Mormonism, where these concepts came from such as Satan and Christianity and the modern-day concept of Jesus, etc. This is exciting to watch.
Subscribed!
Loved this! Thanks for the lesson!
Only 1% of people in 1st Century Palestine were literate.
Why didn't I transfer any of my existing knowledge to my study of the BOM.
In my head the BOM people were as literate as we are.
Thankyou for educating me.
We agree!!! It’s amazing how many things we know but never make a connection! John did a great job pointing out the obvious!!
Great episode! I’m leaving a comment to help the algorithm 😊
Very interesting interview!
Having my mind blown by John Lundwall… awake half the night, hanging on every word!
Thank you!
I know exactly how you feel! When John first outlined his concepts while we were on a field trip to look at rock art, I thought about what he said for days! And then I realized that we need to put this into some kind of formal presentation! We’ll be having him on soon to go through some of his other points! He told me he was sorry that the presentation had gone so long but I assured him that all of the viewers and listeners would really appreciate the time he took to explain the overall concept and then move to the finer points!
If you want to have your mind blown, read the Book of Mormon, which was translated in 65 days by a young farm boy who had two years of formal education. Dr. Lundwall doesn’t know diddly that will prove either Joseph Smith false or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints false. This channel is no more than the other anti-LDS channels that seem obsessed in trying to prove Joseph Smith and the Church false. Haha That was pretty funny. There is chiasmus in the Book of Mormon, as there is in the Bible. Joseph Smith knew nothing about chiasmus, but the Prophets of God who wrote the Book of Mormon did! The Savior raised at least one individual from the dead through the Prophet Joseph Smith. After Joseph Smith fell from a second story window on the day he was killed by a mob in Carthage, Illinois, one of the mobsters pulled a sword, thinking to cut the prophets head off. As he raised the sword in the air, a bolt of lightning came out of the sky, instantly killing that mobster. So the real facts of it all FAR OUTDO these three chuckling obsessionists.
You people are talking about Mayan writing, etc. Then I’m sure you know about the Temple of Kukulkan at Chichen Itza in Yucatán, Mexico. The Feathered Serpent that goes down the steps of that temple. Where did the idea of the feathered serpent come from? It came from the Savior’s teaching Be ye suchandsuch as doves, but wise as serpents. Jesus Christ visited His “other sheep” in ancient America in 34 A.D. and taught the same things in ancient America as He did in Palestine. My son is part Mayan because of his mother, who is from Merida, the capital of Yucatán.
This was your best episode yet guys! Thanks so much for this, it’s such wonderful information.
Glad you enjoyed it!
They danced the cosmos ~46:00....truly mindblowing as Rebecca said. Native peoples still keep remnants of this. Modern memory tips & hacks include creating imagery & stories. This presentation explains that as a moden attempt to rexapture ancient knowledge transmission. Absolutely fabulous insights.
Very interesting stuff. I’ve not heard the language theory before. That’s cool.
Wow! This is mind boggling!
This was great! Thanks, John!
Mind blown away! Feel like I'm getting my PhD!! Great show!!
Wow, great stuff! Please bring John back for some more episodes on the things he said “we don’t have time for!” Each time I was like, “No! Tell me! I want to know!” 😆 like the popol vuh!
Please!
This was so well done
Thanks to everyone
Keep it coming
Please watch Dr. Lundwall’s other episodes! So good!
Absolutely fascinating!! Thank you Rebecca and Landon for making this possible. Awesome time travel-trip to the origins of civilization, religion, and writing. I can see the connection now! Love it!! Yes, we need to have John back. His arguments are well founded and make perfect sense. What a brilliant mind! You guys rock :)!!
Thanks Robert! John is just so knowledgeable on all of this we knew it had to get out!
@@mormonishpodcast1036 Truly an eye opener!! This definitely needs to get out!
really really great stuff! This has been one of the most interesting podcasts I've listened to. thank you all very much!
We agree. We think this is the most important podcast we have done to date! The information is invaluable!
I’ve been thinking about this. When did people really start writing and reading? I just finished the New Revised Edition of the Old Testament. I loved reading it as literature rather than scripture. Thank you for your work to share the TRUTH.
Great question! The Sumerians invented the first writing system in 3000 BC. Which by the way is prior to the date of the Tower of Babel so if the languages were not confounded until that date Sumerian must be the pure Adamic language!
Actually Adam & Eve were taught to keep a written record. These and many other ancient scriptures will be brought forth by the hand of God, after we have humbled ourselves and embraced The Bible and The Book of Mormon.
I really enjoyed this lecture. Thanks for giving us another angle from which to evaluate BoM historicity. The problems that intellectual history poses to BoM historicity are, in my estimation, insuperable. I love the discussion of how writing changes society and am eager to read more about this.
That said, I have some questions about the specifics of the model. I'm not convinced secondary orality replicates the thoughtworld of orality. Are we saying people in Chinese and Japanese cultures are unable to think abstractly because their scripts aren't alphabetic? (Surely not!) I'm also not persuaded that the alphabet is correlated empirically all that closely either with abstract reasoning or with monotheism. On the one hand we have the Romans continuing to worship a plethora of gods centuries after the invention of the alphabet (or much longer, if you count abjads, which are consonantal alphabets), and on the other hand we have the Mesopotamians, with a ludicrously difficult script, applying Pythagoras's theorem a thousand years before Pythagoras (although implicitly), solving quadratic equations, and making astronomical discoveries that wouldn't be rediscovered until the high Middle Ages, as well as creating a text-centric (elite) culture in which texts alluded to other texts, commentaries on texts were written, and incipient monotheism was not uncommon in the latest period. Just conceptually, I also don't see why the alphabet necessarily would lead to linear or abstract or non-cosmological thinking. It's a fantastic technology that facilitates literacy and can thereby restructure society; I can completely accept that it had social consequences that may even have laid the groundwork for intellectual discoveries. But I couldn't follow the claim that it should lead ineluctably to cognitive changes, abstract thought, or monotheism, let alone that it did.
I'm also not sure the alphabet even catches on immediately once it's introduced, or that it couldn't get lost. You have moments in time like the Late Bronze Age in which Ugarit is using a cuneiform abjad (virtually--there are three syllabograms in an otherwise consonantal script), where the empires around it are using very difficult scripts, especially Hittite, Egyptian, and Akkadian. It would have been the perfect chance for people using the other scripts to simplify drastically. Instead, the Ugaritic script was completely lost and forgotten, and in Akkadian, the script got increasingly complicated as the number of values, or ways of reading, each sign exploded in the first millennium BCE, and the use of CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) signs became increasingly popular, adding to the total number of signs in common use. In other words, a complicated script got increasingly complicated exactly as they were making more and more discoveries we would call "scientific" and conceptualizing the gods more often in monotheistic-adjacent ways.
I'm also not sure why someone writing in 600 BCE wasn't active in an "alphabetic" culture. They'd had an abjad for centuries and centuries by this point; even if we don't want to draw a straight line between Canaan with its Paleo-Hebrew (basically Phoenician) script and the Semitic-speaking miners in the Sinai who were adapting Egyptian graphemes in the Middle Bronze Age to develop a proto-alphabet, we have epigraphic evidence in Canaan taking us back at least to Iron Age I. Why did it take so long for "alphabetic" thinking to "embed"? The Levant as a whole had been awash in abjads for a very long time in 600 BCE. On the other hand, in Greece we have the converse problem: After they adapted the Phoenician script to their language and (probably inadvertently) invented symbols for vowels, they made a number of intellectual advances fairly soon after, but without embracing monotheism--this in spite of the fact that they weren't marinating in abjads for centuries but instead had used an absurdly cumbersome script in the Late Bronze Age, Linear B, a script so ambiguous that it wasn't capable of recording complex texts, and had then reverted to a strictly oral culture for centuries, as evidenced by Homer.
There also seems to be an implicit assumption that monotheism is intellectually superior to polytheism, since it's being associated with "abstract" thought. But is that true? By positing a fundamental unity in the cosmos, monotheism raises issues like the problem of evil that polytheism doesn't have to contend with. I would love to read something that spells out in more detail what qualifies as monotheism and why it's rational in a way that polytheism is not.
I hope I don't come across as overly negative! Thank you for a stimulating interview.
Ahhhh…I think we’ll let John answer this!! Great questions!!!
Thank you for the reply, Lilith. It alone was very stimulating.
Hi Lilith,
Thank you for such a well thought out thread with questions. As this is not the place to have a full conversation (which I would be happy to do) I will just write a few notes about your observations. I would be happy to DM or discuss elsewhere.
1) Alphabetic writing did not create abstract thought. It created a new layer of abstract thought. It is much easier to de-couple thinking from nature when using abstract symbols instead of picture symbols. There was plenty of abstraction in both orality and secondary oral worlds, but in these worlds religious thinking and writing is always deeply tied to the observations of nature and cosmos and this interplay is the backbone of the metaphors used in the religious system. This is very different than the theology of the Book of Mormon, which is created from centuries of literate thinking.
2) I never said that alphabetic writing created the thinking behind mathematics, Pythagoras’s theorem, geometry, trigonometry, pre-algebra, etc. which we do find in secondary-oral systems. I’m not sure where you are coming from with these comments?
3) The alphabet was invented by polytheistic peoples, just like writing was invented by oral peoples. In addition, monotheism is an adaptation from polytheism. There is an ideological trajectory in many polytheistic systems towards monotheism (i.e., one central creator deity who has divine subordinates) but in all societies before alphabetic writing there is no monotheism that ever takes hold. There appears to be a few forays into monotheism in logo-syllabic or oral systems (14th cent. BCE with Atenism, monism in the Vedas, and maybe one tribe in Africa, but Atenism lasted one lifetime and all the other systems appear to be a form of monism with pantheistic qualities, or later adaptations of such). But I did say that there were no tight lines between categories, and that there is overlap.
4) Alphabetic writing is much easier to learn. In previous systems, it could take years to train a proficient scribe. In that same time, you could train a hundred scribes with an alphabet. It takes time to do this as in fact in most towns and cities there weren’t a hundred scribes to be trained. Still, the more people read in your society the more society will be changed by reading. It should be rather obvious, but the alphabet provides the structures that allow for the expansion of literacy. In addition, an alphabet helps de-couple the reader from the observations of nature which was the memory reservoir in prior systems. So, while the alphabet does not create abstraction or monotheism, it provides the channels that help establish new abstractions and staying power for monotheism. In other words, there is a sympathetic relationship between alphabetic literacy and monotheism.
5) Clearly there are other forces in play. The first true monotheism in history is Judaism. It formed after their religious cult center was destroyed. It appears therefore, that the greatest pressure to change the religious system was not in alphabetic writing but in the complete destruction of their way of life. Changes had to be made. The Jewish scribes made a bold move; they decided to make their religion portable, decentralized, therefore de-cosmologized, by writing the Torah. In order to make that stick, to convert the people to Torah, you have to train people to read Torah. The more people who read Torah the greater the chances your new religion will endure. Thus, alphabetic script is the tool you want. And the tool they used. And it worked.
6) I never said that monotheism is more rational than polytheism.
7) The thought-world of the Book of Mormon has been de-cosmologized. This is not the thought-world of any culture in the Americas. You cannot get the thought-world of the Book of Mormon from the thought-world in the pre-Colonial Americas. The cosmo-vision of the Book of Mormon is the result of centuries of abstract literate thought that has created a strict form of monotheism and historicism, which does not exist in the Americas.
8) I know of no example of a logo-syllabic system creating a monotheistic sermon culture or a linear historicist framework of thought. If you can point that out to me, I would be thrilled.
Thanks. I look forward to your response should you choose to make one. I am happy to discuss. And thanks for watching the podcast.
@@TheAmeled "The thought-world of the Book of Mormon has been de-cosmologized. This is not the thought-world of any culture in the Americas. You cannot get the thought-world of the Book of Mormon from the thought-world in the pre-Colonial Americas. The cosmo-vision of the Book of Mormon is the result of centuries of abstract literate thought that has created a strict form of monotheism and historicism, which does not exist in the Americas."
This entire subject is way over my head intellectually, but as I read this comment, I thought of Alexander Campbell's critique of the BOM which he wrote in 1831:
This prophet Smith, through his stone spectacles, wrote on the plates of Nephi, in his book of Mormon, every error and almost every truth discussed in N. York for the last ten years. He decides all the great controversies - infant baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the atonement, transubstantiation, fasting, penance, church government, religious experience, the call to the ministry, the general resurrection, eternal punishment, who may baptize, and even the question of freemasonry, republican government, and the rights of man. All these topics are repeatedly alluded to. How much more benevolent and intelligent this American Apostle, than were the holy twelve, and Paul to assist them!!! He prophesied of all these topics, and of the apostacy, and infallibly decided, by his authority, every question. How easy to prophecy of the past or of the present time!!
But he is better skilled in the controversies in New York than in the geography or history of Judea.
@@TheAmeled Hi John, Thanks so much for taking the time to write a very thoughtful, kind, and detailed reply, and for clearing up several misconceptions. (And thanks again for a very enjoyable lecture!) I definitely think the alphabet, especially an ideal alphabet, provides a much faster route to high literacy (if not the only route), and that has enormous consequences for a society.
Just a couple of thoughts:
You write, "It is much easier to de-couple thinking from nature when using abstract symbols instead of picture symbols." It seems like the way the graphemes in a script function is a separate issue from the degree to which they continue to resemble objects or phenomena in the world, though, since an alphabet can have graphemes that resemble things, like an ox, and a logosyllabographic script can have graphemes that, over time, have essentially become abstract. In Mesopotamia, where our earliest extant writing appears, the earliest graphemes are famously pictographic (as I'm sure you already know.). But as the system turns into cuneiform (based on the type of object they used to incise the symbols), the resemblance of the graphemes to objects in the material world, whether natural or humanmade, becomes increasingly fuzzy, and already in the third millennium BCE it's difficult to see what many of the graphemes were intended to represent; by the first millennium, the script is very divorced from its pictographic origins. The fact that they changed the direction of their script 90 degrees at some unknown point contributes to that. But the script continues to be polyphonic and logosyllabographic. Ugaritic and Old Persian are cuneiform scripts that function largely alphabetically, and I wonder whether the graphemes of those scripts are qualitatively different in form (not function) from the Akkadian script. From my perspective, almost all cuneiform looks equally abstract, whether it's from an alphabetic script or a logosyllabographic script.
You write, "I know of no example of a logo-syllabic system creating a monotheistic sermon culture or a linear historicist framework of thought," and "There was plenty of abstraction in both orality and secondary oral worlds, but in these worlds religious thinking and writing is always deeply tied to the observations of nature and cosmos and this interplay is the backbone of the metaphors used in the religious system." I suspect I'm just misunderstanding what "historicist" means or how a logo-syllabic "system" relates to a culture using a logosyllabographic script, or what constitutes religious writing, but my initial impression is that there are scads and scads of religious texts in Mesopotamia that have nothing to do with observations of nature, and some that are potentially even historicist. What about the Babylonian Chronicles? (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_Chronicles) They're famous for having a detached tone that's not overtly propagandistic, although I realize they're written very late in Babylonian history, and the culture is besieged by alphabets by this time (especially Aramaic). But what about the much earlier Weidner Chronicle? (www.livius.org/sources/content/mesopotamian-chronicles-content/abc-19-weidner-chronicle/) It recounts actual historical events in Babylonian history by explaining them as the god Marduk blessing or punishing people for sacrificing to him or failing to sacrifice to him (admittedly this is completely anachronistic, since Marduk was not an important god in the periods being described). What about Ludlul bel nemeqi as an example of a religious text that's not a ritual and not about nature? (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlul_b%C4%93l_n%C4%93meqi) It describes someone suffering every conceivable problem before being saved by Marduk.
I realize your interview was very condensed and you didn't have time to go into a lot of particulars in detail, so I'm sorry if I come across as nitpicking. I'm in complete agreement with you that the Book of Mormon absolutely cannot be historical, and it's not just because of the material culture and the DNA. The thoughtworld of the Book of Mormon is fundamentally 19th century American Protestantism. The apologists don't need an attestation of the name Nahom in Yemen; that's not sufficient. They need an entire alternative intellectual history that's plausible, and they simply don't have anything close to it. I love any discussion of these issues.
This was excellent. Most above my head and definitely needs to be listened to twice, but Dr L breaks it down to a mostly understandable way. WOW. Great research.
As Dr. Lundwall said this is a graduate level college course taught in 2 hours but he does a great job explaining this information. We have learned so much from our friend!
only halfway through - & I got to say this is absolutely fascinating! Pls pls more of this
We knew when we discussed these concepts with John while out exploring Native American rock art that everyone needed to hear this! He does a great job explaining the concepts and is so knowledgeable!
amazing episode with a wealth of knowledge
can I get a copy of these slides?
Fantastically informative and powerful
I mentioned the idea that written language of the BOM was anachronistic in the America’s , my TBM husband said that lehi’s family brought the knowledge with them . How do I respond ?
This presentation was so interesting and informative! I’m learning so much!
I don’t know a whole lot about the Book of Mormon, I just find it interesting, but it was my understanding that no one knows what area the book speaks about, just that it happened in the Americas. So I was wondering why you focused so heavily on the Myan culture and not other areas as well? Id be curious to know what you think of the Mi’kmaq writing?
I have ancestors who were Mi’kmaq and there is a legend of one of my great great…who recognized the crosses hung around the necks of the first Europeans who made contacts and because he already knew the meaning of that cross he was not afraid and the people were all able to be peaceful together.
In the presentation John specifically talks about this. Meso America was the ONLY group of people that had ANY TYPE of writing system. There were no peoples in the north or south that had a writing system. That's why Dr. Lundwall specifically centers his talk around the Meso Americas. Regardless... the SAME logic is held to any peoples anywhere in the world as far as how pre-literate people thought and lived their lives. Does that make sense?
When I was teaching art at the Circle school in San Antonio Texas I was introduced to paula Underwood, who authored the Walking People and native American oral history that I think your guest would be very interested in the stories begin with the Ice Age and the cave paintings and follow their walk across Europe, and across the Land bridge, they called walk by waters along the Rockies and the west coast across the great plains up the eastern seaboard settling in the Great Lakes area. Every people they met, they gather stories of the people and their history.
Great episode!
I loved it. I love digging deep into history. Looking forward for parts 2,3, and more
Great program ❤
Thank you so much! We really appreciate our viewers and listeners! Thank you for watching! Stay tuned for more!
This is a fantastic episode that grounds us in reality! This shows the force behind literacy and text. Great presentation!!!
I liked the way he described how he had a spiritual experience reading the Book of Mormon at the age of 16 I was 20 years old. I think it’s because I wanted it. I had a lot of trauma during the 4 years before and I was born into the church although inactive. I was 56 years old when my shelf broke due to the false translation of the book of Abraham that began my search for what else are they lying about. I have found So much it’s incredible.
Our stories are similar. I was 50 and Book of Abraham did me in as well! Thanks for listening!
And all this time, the reasonably well supported conclusion that Smith plagiarized some dude’s novel was good enough for me. 😂
Seriously though, I’m a major nerd of religion and astrology of the Hellenistic world. (I have obscure hobbies.) And this video is an amazing compliment to understanding one of the most significant and transitionary points in world history. I’m genuinely floored by the scholarship presented here. (Mormonism aside.)
At the same time, using a full historical-linguistic deconstruction of the BoM as a tool to understand these concepts is fascinating AND hilarious. Who said learning can’t be fun? Thank you.
John, this is me and my Inuit sis'n'law, driving around together: Me__So, do I turn north in 1 km? Her__You'll come to two tall buildings, the first one is taller than the 2nd, and the smaller one has white brick. You don't turn right at those buildings; you turn right one block after that. Me__So, do I turn north ? ☺
Not only do even Fremont leave a fingerprint in their petroglyph/pictograph panels and pottery, they're existing at the same time, in parallel, with the Book of Mormon cultures. Moroni visited right into Fremont heartland (Manti) even. American archaeology must have produced a signal of the BoM world by now, somewhere, and yet it's completely missing still...
Knight presents a huge wall of logic.
1:04:35 was a total lightbulb moment for me. This totally explains why the old and New Testament seem like two different worlds sometimes.
This is awesome! Thank you!
2.5 hours just went by in a flash. I loved this episode. The information was so clear and we'll presented. Definitely have him back as soon as possible.
We will actually be posting another episode with Dr. Lundwall on Friday! Stay tuned!
Where can we go to find the sources around when literacy started in Israel? What I’m seeing online says much further back then 4th or 5th century BC. I just want to understand if there was literacy in Jerusalem in 600BC. It’s hard to know which sources to trust.
Started rather early. There were literate scribes running the city state during King David. It is suggested that Solomon was known as the wise king not because he was wise (just read the biblical text to see he was somewhat of your average aristocrat) but that he built a library to gather the collective wisdom of the people. Literacy begins with the invention of writing. Alphabetic literacy takes off at the end of the second millennium BCE and is fully established a thousand years later.
Cuneiform, the first writing system started in the 3rd millennium BCE and spread throughout the Middle East. Writing systems improved and developed but Hebrew didn’t develop as a language until around 1000 BCE and that is the oldest known Hebrew writings but like Dr. Lundwall points out these oldest writings were songs and psalms based on oral traditions.
@@mormonishpodcast1036 Thought that was implicit in whole notion of bom. Or at least what js was counting on. I realize those "expectations" were of 20th-century grammar-school educated America; I failed to consider that perhaps most of js' audiences would not likely have known this. Now I can better understand how he got away with the initial sham.
Still can't grasp how it not only continued but also continued to inflate. 🥵🥵🥵
My 3rd time watching. I am completely intellectually inspired. I am so grateful for the wisdom , knowledge and time John put into his studies and love for truth!!!!
Wow three times, that is incredible. But we don't blame you! Thanks for watching!
Very important episode. Funny(ish) sidenote. I started listening to this on Apple Podcasts and thought they were talking to Adam Corolla at first. John Lundwall sounded so much like him (to my ears). I was thinking, "When did Adam become an expert on this stuff?" LOL
Funny story we tried to get Adam Corolla on to discuss this find but he wasn’t available so we got John to do it!!! Glad we did! Lol We didn’t catch that but now that you mention it we’ll listen for it. Thanks for the comment and thanks for listening!
Fantastic job!
Such an awesome episode! I love your approach of comparison…
Like before watching your episode, I’ve been thinking “How outrageous to engage a psychic!” Now I’m like, “Well, hell yah! Let’s go!” 😂😂😂😂😂😂
Fun to see such an animated character!
Ha! He’s so awesome! I really hope he gets a chance to go on some other podcasts! This info is fascinating!!
At 2:20:12. Yes, they are moving in that direction, which is what I was referencing in my comment about Jesus' use of parables and THE FACT THAT an effective parable has to have A LITERAL BASIS IN A LITERAL REALITY.
And, BRAVO, Dr. Knight, to your reply on that topic. AMEN TO THAT REPLY.
They have already brought them- selves to the reeds' edge of the pus- pond.
All I say is WOW! 🎉
Love this! Wished that I could have been part of this field trip! What a treat! ❤
It was pretty amazing! We are planning another trip with John in September to go look for some elusive Fremont Indian petroglyphs! Will also be having John on again soon to go through some of his other points!
I’m listening to this over and over! Brand new info for me and it’s fascinating! Thank you, John!
Thanks for listening Kathy.
@@TheAmeled Your comments about the style and purpose of ancient MesoAmerican writing reminded me of something that some Book of Mormon apologists were asserting on another TH-cam video a few weeks ago. One of them said that some of the "caractors" from Joseph Smith's alleged sample of the writing on the golden plates have been found in ancient Mayan sites. I asked the guy, if those "caractors" were "reformed Egyptian" as Joseph Smith proclaimed, and written by descendants of Hebrews, then why would we find those characters in sites of people who had no relation to ancient Hebrews or the writing on the golden plates? If the "Book of Mormon people" interacted with ancient Mayans to the point of their language and writing being shared, then shouldn't all of the other culture and technology detailed in the BOM also be found all over Mesoamerican sites? He didn't respond to me.
This is one of the problems with Book of Mormon apologists in general: when they cite one item of alleged "Book of Mormon evidence" in a specific New World area, then if that item is truly legitimate, then we should find hundreds or thousands of similar items in that given area which also supports the BOM story. For example, these apologists who continue to cite the "Bat Creek Stone" found in east Tennessee (which has been debunked for decades), then they should also be able to find evidence of Hebrew/Semitic DNA, Christ worship, horse and chariot usage, metal tools and weaponry, etc., in that same area. When the apologists cite possible items of evidence from areas ranging from New York state to the Yucatan peninsula, they're really saying that they don't have enough evidence in any given locale to even be able to theorize where the events occurred.
Interestingly, many of the Polynesian cultural dances performed by Mormon students at the Mormon-owned Polynesian Cultural Center are about worshiping their island gods as well as channeling the spirits of their ancestors.
Mormons are pagans, but they just don't realize it yet.
Awesome guest! Thank you for the enlightenment.
This is amazing He is so right. Thanks
How often will I continue to find myself saying, "How did I not notice this, before!!??"🤔🤦🏼♀️
Totally agree!
Hi Dr. Lundwall, thank you for this fantastic presentation. I really want to show this to my TBM family, but I have two questions, if you wouldn't mind answering them, to help me steel-man your premise: 1) in looking at Wikipedia, the dates of writing for most of the books of the Old Testament are after 600BCE, which aligns with everything you said (including what you noted about Psalms and other songs that are earlier). One exception seems to be Isaiah chapters 1-39, which are said to be written around the 8th and 7th centuries BCE. Those chapters seem like they contain material other than just ritual text (i.e., some narrative history and some doctrine, although I could be wrong there). Could those chapters of Isaiah be used as a counterargument to your main premise? And 2) the Book of Abraham is said to be from scrolls which we know are about 1500 years too late to be authentic. But, in your knowledge, are there any Egyptian hieroglyphics pre-600 BCE that depict narrative stories or teach religious principles? I feel like, for me, if those two things can be squared away, opponents to your arguments would not have any ground to stand on. Thanks for any response here--I really appreciate your work!
Hello and thank you for your questions. The short answer is yes and no. There are no tight lines between the categories I discussed (primary orality, secondary orality, and literacy). There is overlap between the categories. King Solomon was known as a wise king according to tradition, but if you read the Bible, besides that moment when he saved a child between two arguing women, he was mostly a dullard. Several Bible scholars have noted that the tradition of the wisdom of Solomon most likely came from the library he built as part of his city building program. He collected in texts the wisdom of the region and of his own traditions. What those texts looked like is unknown, but the vast majority of literature at this period comes in the form of wisdom texts, mythological narratives, and religious rituals. It appears, however, that by the late 8th century and early 7th century BCE you do have a fully literate scribal cast writing in Jerusalem who produce the Isaiah texts.
However, the Isaiah texts are nothing like the Book of Mormon or the New Testament. The vast majority of First Isaiah (chpts 1-39) are prophetic utterances that amount to both political and cultural commentary divulged in poetic stanzas, hymns, and prophetic statements. This is not an objective history such as we are given in the Book of Mormon. There is no known text to exist that would constitute the Brass Plates, nor was there a genre of historical narrative laying out an objective, fact filled story of A leads to B leads to C, etc. Isaiah does not qualify for this kind of text. Second and Third Isaiah present an even more difficult situation, as they are written as prophecies for the post exiled Jews. When the early Christians (who at first were all Jewish) adopted the Hebrew Bible as their sacred writ they reinterpreted these latter chapters of Isaiah as prophecies of Jesus. This makes sense as Isaiah is really a prophetic book, but those prophecies of Jesus were originally written as praise for Cyrus who redeemed Israel by returning them to their homeland. Those chapters were not written until the late sixth and fifth centuries BCE and could not have been in the Brass plates (the deutero-Isaiah problem).
Could there have been a historical narrative of the people of Israel in the temple library of Jerusalem at the time of Nephi? Well, it's possible, but nothing like the Book of Mormon text has ever been found, which means the Book of Mormon is a first or a complete anachronism (hint: it's a complete anachronism). In order to have the idea of the divine wed to history one has to decouple the idea of the divine from sacred place and sacred cycles (that maintain your agriculture for example). This only occurrs after the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of the Jews.
Yes, there is Egyptian religious literature before 600 BCE that teaches religious ideas and written as narratives. Again, this is wisdom literature (think Proverbs, Psalms, or even Job). By the early second millennium BCE you get an uptick in Egyptian literature, but again this is mythological or folk narrative or wisdom texts. You don't get anything like the Book of Abraham, or the Book of Ether, or the Book of Mormon. On this point the book of Job in the Bible is an excellent example of what we are talking about. Job is not a history. Job is not a historical figure. Job is a wisdom text. A few scholars have noted that the opening of Job reads like a prologue of an ancient drama (literally a play) where God and the Adversary cast lots over a righteous man. The book of Job is largely a long poetic treatise on theodicy and there is a related Egyptian text known as The Conversations of a Man with His Ba that has a very similar theme of unjust suffering and the trials of life. Again, these texts are nothing like the genre presented in the Book of Mormon.
In short, I am not arguing that there was not literacy, historical writing, or religious teachings in texts written before 600 BCE. I am arguing that the genre of historicism (writing a history as objective linear facts) did not exist until very late (we see it begin with Herodotus and flourish in the late Roman period, and the Christian New Testament is a vibration of this genre mixed with religion, though not as historical as most Mormons think), I am also arguing that the Christology of the Book of Mormon does not exist in 600 BCE. Actually, it did not exist in 33 CE. Nope. It did not. How it gets in the Book of Mormon is a real conundrum. And how it fills the pages of the Pearl of Great Price (the days of Adam and Enoch for example) is another conundrum. These are deep anachronisms.
Thank you for your thorough response. It was very helpful!
👌🏻 wonderful information. Thanks for this episode.
i love every part of this presentation and John is a great presenter
This was soooo awesome! I want to listen again. Mind blown! More people need to hear this!
I agree more people need to hear this! I’m hoping that some of my other bigger podcaster friends will pick John up and have him on their program! Thank you so much for watching!
Excellent presentation! Thanks! One question that has always bugged me like tiny rocks in my socks is why, in the first place, it would ever be necessary to have an ancient record of God's dealings and revelations to an ancient people in order for a modern people to know what God wants. Obviously, in the case of Mormonism, that arrangement simply means that God's will is being communicated to us as second-hand, third-hand and fourth-hand information transmitted through a rock that functions like a Mattel magic 8-ball, and the accuracy of the information that is sort of being communicated that way is also totally dependent on the limited comprehension of a failed 19th century treasure finder...and all of modernity simply has to trust the word of that kid as to what he was really doing and just trust that he wasn't lying his posterior off.
Why can't God just have direct dealings with modern people that are clear, plain, logical and unmistakable? None of this "is it God or is it Fraud?" uncertainty, please. How incompetent or lazy is God that he just can't be bothered to do anything other than provide a weird book that is supposedly based on records kept by some guys in an ancient civilization for which there is no reasonable evidence, all transmitted through a shady 19th century character who seems to have always been more of a scammer than a saint?
"Oh look, Molly, how wonderful this book is. Here it tells us about a guy who chops off a drunk man's head in order to steal some brass plates. Here it tells us about how that same guy single-handedly built a trans-oceanic ship out in the middle of the desert. Here it tells us how the brothers got into a lot of fights with each other, so God split them up and cursed all the descendants of two of the brothers with dark skin in the hopes that the extended family would remain permanently divided and not be confused as to who their enemies are. Here it tells us about how a guy impressed a king by single-handedly chopping off the arms of 100 guys. Here's a story of a 'Daughter of Jared' who danced for a decapitation just like the 'Daughter of Herod' and that even rhymes! And here are a bunch of theological preachings that are basically the same things that many 19th century protestants were talking about. What a great book! Now I know why we don't really need God or Jesus to communicate directly with us and appear to us. We have this book!"
They need the murky, convoluted scriptures to cause confusion and produce several different interpretations in order to get more people to feel they need some bearded wonder guy in the sky to set them straight in their search for truth.
@TEAM__POSEID0N , Here is some food for thought for you. Why did Joseph Smith need to get the gold plates if he didn't even know how to read them or even use them during the translation process? Joseph Smith got the "translation" by looking at a rock in a hat. The gold plates were not involved at all. Also why did the angel take the gold plates away after they were "translated"? Wouldn't it have been beneficial and a testament to the world if some of the gold plates were shown publicly? Joseph Smith supposedly struggled to get the gold plates which included digging up the body of his dead brother Alvin but never used them for the translation or showed them publicly.
@@isthechurchtrue Certainly. I actually at one point or another asked myself all of those questions. Ultimately, those questions helped me realize how silly Joseph Smith's stories are at the most basic level. In other words, the whole idea that any of those stage props (in the drama that Joseph Smith just made up) would be necessary for anything was ludicrous.
If God had an important message or book's worth of messages to deliver, God could just deliver it all in perfect form. All of that nonsense about visiting the Hill Cumorah at special times over four years, retrieving golden plates with undecipherable ancient writings on them, magic stones, an angel taking the plates up to heaven so that nobody could examine the evidence, hats and magic rocks, breastplates and magic spectacles... and yadda yadda yadda....all that nonsense, in retrospect, was obviously just a farrago of religio-occult-magic nonsense used as a marketing narrative to sell a crappy book.
The only reason I ever took any of it seriously in the first place was because, as a child, I was surrounded by adults telling me it was all true. It was like being surrounded by adults telling me from early childhood that Santa Claus was real...only the adults actually believed that Santa was real and told me that people who don't believe in Santa are bad and defective people.
I am blown away. I listened 2 times already. I found the information in showing JS took from his world but this shows it is not Linguistically possible!!!!!! I want to know more!!!!!!
We’re going to get John back to finish his points!
Amazing! Just finished and it blew my mind! More of this please!!! I can’t believe how every word, every sermon, every historical reference in the BoM is anachronistic. Great job bringing him on and distilling it so I could follow.
Also, haha great little joke about the baboon being a tight translation. I caught that and genuinely lol! 😂
Sphincter babonis sacer est.
Holy sacred baboon anus, Batman!
Interesting video that anyone can learn from. It should be noted, however, that the BOM verses that you cite about records are specifically referring to the brass plates, which Moroni states in Ether 4 are hidden and only to be revealed to the faithful. Moreover, Mormon hides other records in Mormon 6:6. The records were passed down through the patrilineal line of the Nephite prophets going back to Lehi himself. They were shared and used to convert the Lamanites, but they were still only kept and passed down through the generations of the Lehite line of prophets. So, I don't see how the passages you refer to in the video would necessarily entail an entire literate society.
Dr. Lundwall will explain this on his next episode coming out on Thursday. Thanks for the comment!
@@mormonishpodcast1036You're welcome! Also, even though I imagine John would need more than a couple of days to research it, could he at least touch on the sunken cities of Meso America and the sunken Nephite cities in 3 Nephi 8? Deniers never really address this, and it would be good to hear a critical perspective from an expert. Thx.
Amazing!!!!! Thank you
I am always amused when this type of "experts" are so very certain, except when new or current information comes along (or existing information they have ignored), We often dumb down civilizations because "there is no way the could have been so advanced" It is almost as if the want to insult our intelligence.
John welcomes any peer reviewed evidence to counter his claims. He studies these cultures for a living and he does not dumb down these civilizations. He fully respects and understands them more than any of us and is an expert even living in the field where they lived to better understand them. He has devoted his life to researching these incredible civilizations, but just because they’re intelligent does not mean they have a writing system. As a scholar, John is willing to change his mind when new information comes out and update that information. Unfortunately, religionists believe despite any information to the contrary, which is what is really amusing!
The program keeps going on. You mentioned what you've been taught in you life time. I would like to sometime somwhere share my growing up and living in Mormon culture for 82 years: my life time.
Thank you so much for watching! It really blew our minds too! We plan to have John on again very soon to continue talking about his other points!
Please do.
Fascinating. Hosts kept getting in the way.
Thanks so much for watching! I'm sorry that you found our interaction to be distracting. John had asked us as the hosts ahead of time, to make sure to ask questions that an every man would ask so that more people could have an understanding. We were following the instructions of our guest as we always do. We want everyone to feel comfortable on our podcast.
I prefer the quote from Richard Bushman where he claims the Book of Mormon is doctrinally correct, but not historically correct.
That is an interesting take on The Book of Mormon.
The problem with that statement is that the Book of Mormon doesn’t contain any of the doctrines that are uniquely Mormon. No priesthood, no temple ceremonies, no three degrees of glory, no Baptisms for the Dead, no Laying on of Hands, no three unique individuals in the godhead, no garments, no Word of Wisdom, condemns polygamy, etc, etc, etc….it doesn’t even get the doctrine right!!!
@@mormonishpodcast1036 Priesthood is mentioned. FYI
@@mormonishpodcast1036 Plus all the passages from the Bible inserted into the BM. But I do like King Benjamin's speech.
@@krismurphy7711 Sure. The word "priesthood" is mentioned, along with the term "high priest" and IIRC even the name Melchizedek is mentioned once or twice. But the mention of those words is quite different from setting out the doctrines related to priesthood that characterize the LDS church. Nothing is really said about the organization of the priesthood or the specific offices and their functions (deacon, teacher, priest, elder and so on). Nothing about the Aaronic Priesthood...and nothing about the Melchizedek Priesthood being a specific order of priesthood. Nothing about priesthood blessings or who can hold the priesthood. The references to "high priests" and "priesthood" are vague and simply seem to be nothing more than an attempt to imply that the Lehites are living like Old Testament people. Mormons have to work backwards to "find" their doctrines about priesthood in the BoM, like: "Look! It says 'priesthood'! That must be talking about all the same complicated doctrines about priesthood authority that we believe in now!"