Audio only:
In this episode, Trent responds to a Mormon apologist who critiques one of his arguments against the Book of Mormon.
Transcription:
Trent:
Mormons believe that God inspired Joseph Smith to translate a set of golden plates that allegedly contained the records of ancient Jews immigrating to America and founding massive civilizations that were eventually visited by Jesus Christ after his resurrection. The translation of these plates is called the Book of Mormon, and I’ve previously argued that there are many reasons to doubt this claim. Recently, a Mormon apologist named David Snell criticized one of the reasons I gave for finding this implausible. So in today’s episode, I’m going to engage his arguments and the arguments of other Mormons on this question. The reason I gave was that the Book of Mormon is about 270,000 words long, but there were allegedly only 46 by eight inch golden plates. How could that much information have fit onto such a small space? If you tore out every page of the modern finely printed 531 page book of Mormon and placed it on the ground, it would cover over a hundred square feet of space.
But if you place the golden plates on the ground, they’d only cover 27 square feet. The question then becomes how could all of that information have fit onto the much smaller alleged plates? My answer is, there is no plausible natural way for this to have happened. If the text doesn’t fit, then you must acquit the Book of Mormon. That is of the charge of being an authentic translation of ancient texts. Now, Mormon apologists typically offer two ways of addressing this problem, shrinking the words, or expanding the translation in his response. To me, Snell endorses the former approach. Before I address his arguments, though I will make one concession and I misspoke. When I described how much would have to be represented on the original golden plates, I said each character on the plates would have to contain the equivalent of 80 English words when I should have said that each square inch of the plates would have to contain 80 words.
Snell’s math in his video parallels mine, and that if there were 40 double-sided six by eight inch plates, then there would’ve been 3,840 square inches of writing space. If that space had to contain 270,000 words, then we get about 70 words per square inch. Some scholars increase the number to 80 to account for the three holes in the plates for the binding rings, and for as Mormon scholar Bruce Dale notes the free space around the edges. So the engravings did not fill the entire plate. My estimate of about 4,000 square inches per plate corresponds to Dale’s lower, more reliable estimate of 30 square feet of total plate space. So that’s why I said 80 words per character when I should have said 80 words per square inch, but that’s still a lot of words. For such a small space. For example, a quarter is about 0.7 square inches.
Do you think you could write 50 to 60 words on a quarter even if you could, could you engrave that many words onto a quarter with primitive tools? And while some ancient artifacts have a low character density of one to 1.5 characters per square inch, which could translate to 80 words per character, the golden plates could have had a higher character density or more characters per square inch. But as you’ll see, this doesn’t solve the problem. The majority of Snell’s reply concerns this minor point. I’m not going to belabor it. Even if I granted his claim that up to 230 characters could have been on each plate instead of a much lower number that still doesn’t allow the golden plates to have been engraved in a real language that contained what we now call the Book of Mormon. As I said earlier, there are two options for Mormon apologists shrink the words or expand the translation. Snell offers a defense of the shrink the words approach. Basically he says that if the original scribes wrote small enough, they could have fit the equivalent of 270,000 English words onto the 40 double-sided plates.
CLIP:
Let’s address the real question. Could the Book of Mormon have plausibly fit on the plates? As it turns out, this is not a new question. In fact, Latterday Saint Scholar Janna Shal largely answered this very question over a hundred years ago. In 1923, he took a piece of parchment seven by eight inches and had a friend of his translate the book of Mormon into Hebrew. Within that space, he was able to write 14 English pages of the Book of Mormon by hand onto this one page in Hebrew.
Trent:
Now, this solution can work in theory based on the idea that if you write anything small enough, you can fit it anywhere. This is the Microform Bible and it contains the entire King James Bible printed on a piece of microfilm the size of a postage stamp. All you need to view it is a low power microscope, and in 2012, the Hebrew Bible was printed on a microchip the size of a grain of sugar, but the solution doesn’t work in practice because Mormons claim the golden plates were natural artifacts of an ancient civilization. Mormon authors like Paul Cheeseman compare them to other metallic written plates from ancient civilizations. But when we compare the alleged Mormon golden plates to real ancient metallic plates, we see they’re very different. The Bible says, and you shall make a plate of pure gold and engrave on it like the engraving of a signet holy to the Lord.
Exodus 28 36, which may be where Smith got the idea about writing on golden plates. We don’t have any biblical gold plates today, but we do have other ancient metal plates for our comparison. This is one of the plates of Darius. It’s about 169 square inches, contains about 600 characters, and translates to about 60 words of English text that comes out to 0.35 words per square inch. And this is one of the per gee plates written in Venetian. It’s 27 square inches, has about 150 characters and translates to about a hundred English words that comes out to five words per square inch. But the Book of Mormon plates would be unlike anything in antiquity. The Miller text would require 120 words per square inch. Each character needs to be less than a millimeter, tall and wide, smaller than the graphite tip of a pencil. That might be possible for a modern person with expert writing tools to delicately write on paper, but not ancient engravers to carve onto metal.
Now, Mormon apologists like to say that reformed Egyptian, the alleged language of the original golden plates was a compact script even smaller than Hebrew. But no matter how a script is, it must have a variety of distinguishing marks in order to get different characters and the size required to write these distinguishing marks is just too small for it to exist on such small plates. Even the Mormon Egyptologist, John Gee, who Snell cites in his video noted this problem in an article called Epigraphic Considerations on Yan Udall’s experiment, you wrote the following. A major issue however, is the size of the characters used, which made an even greater difference in the space required for the sample text to modern readers. The characters that Miller used looked too small to be readily legible. Would ancient scribes of used such minuscule letters? A casual look at Hebrew papyrus manuscripts, most of which date to after the Babylonian exile shows that the letters were written much larger than those that Miller rendered.
Miller reproduced his experiment in 1927 this time writing just seven pages of second nephi in Hebrew, which were mainly quotations of Isaiah. So it’s not too hard to translate an English copy of the Hebrew Bible. Setting aside the problem of translating the non Isaiah parts of the Book of Mormon into Hebrew and keeping the same economy of space, we still have a problem at this rate. 40 double-sided plates would still be needed and the characters would still be tiny about 1.2 millimeters tall and wide to record 3,300 words per page. Gee doesn’t try to defend the original 14 page Miller translation, but thinks the 1.5 millimeter square characters in the seven page translation are possible and tries to provide examples of ancient engravings this small, but his own research contradicts his claims. For example, he lists inscriptions on the co collect weight, a small weight about a cubic inch in size, but they are still twice as large as Sal’s text.
In fact, 11 of his examples are larger than 1.5 millimeters square. The rest come from just five examples in this anthology about Hebrew bole. Small clay discs used to make seals when they’re pressed in a wet clay that are approximately 10 by 10 millimeters. When we look at typical engravings in the ancient world, we see they’re much larger than Udall’s estimate based on miller’s writing. I’ve included pictures with objects for size reference. You can see the characters on these artifacts are not 1.2 millimeters. Even with the naked eye, you can tell that metal plates use larger characters and it isn’t feasible to write on these metal plates with the size of text that Miller used. You can perform this experiment yourself as I did with $15 worth of sheet metal in some simple tools from Amazon, try to fit 80 English words in a square inch of sheet metal.
Or if you feel real adventurous, try to copy miller’s tiny Hebrew text on the same size engraving, making sure all the Hebrew characters are legible. If you try this feat, I think you’ll soon become very pessimistic about the historical claims involving the Book of Mormon. So we’ve seen the vanishing plausibility of the shrinking the writing strategy, but maybe you could just expand the text. This is option two and it can be split into two sub options. Sub option one is that the alleged reformed Egyptian of the book of Mormon’s original golden plates contained all the information we now have in the book of Mormon’s, 270,000 words. But it was encoded into characters that each represented many words. So as I noted earlier, Snell says in his episode description that if the plates each had 230 characters, then every character would only have to represent 14 words.
The Mormon Apologetics organization, fair Mormon says perhaps the best answer to this is that Egyptian and Mesoamerican languages are primarily Logographic languages. Logo graphs can represent a word or phrase. Perhaps little Mormon was composed in a language that incorporated both Egyptian and Mesoamerican logo graphs to give us the reformed Egyptian large amounts of the translated Book of Mormon text could have been contained in the logo graphs of this Egypt Mesoamerican Logographic system. But the problem with this approach is that this is not how any natural language works, including hieroglyphic ones. We saw with the Darius and Perge plates that the number of words being translated ends up being less than the number of characters being used. So the characters don’t contain multiple English words. Now, there may be rare cases where a logograph or a hieroglyph represents a stalk phrase, but there is no language where a single character represents all kinds of regular sentences.
One of the most compact natural languages is Mandarin Chinese. For example, the phrase I don’t eat meat requires 16 characters to write in English, but only four characters to write in Chinese. These four to be precise. But even a script as compact as Chinese does not give you an entire sentence per character. It just gives you a word or a single unit that linguists call a morphine. If a language had characters that could symbolize sentences containing a dozen words, then you’d have to have millions of them or maybe more to express inexhaustible human concepts contained in sentences. It couldn’t be a workable language. That’s why pictorial scripts don’t have these kinds of characters. On the 13th century BC Meep still one of the oldest artifacts describing the people of Israel. There are numerous hieroglyphs that form the phrase, Israel is laid waste. His seed is no more not a single hieroglyph.
To express this phrase, a pictorial language with single characters representing sentences would have to be so ornate that they would just be word mosaics that combine many smaller characters into a much larger one. The closest thing to a language like this would be circular gifan, a fictional language of the time lords in the TV series. Dr. Who this is the single character in circular gallian that is required to communicate the following 12 word sentence. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. If the golden plates contain 230 characters per page on a 48 square inch space, then each character would take up 0.2 square inches. It could only be half an inch tall and half an inch wide. This is what that character would look like printed onto a half square inch piece of paper. Could you engrave that complex symbol into 0.2 square inches of metal?
This couldn’t be engraved a single time in that space, let alone the other 18,000 times that would be needed to translate the entire book of Mormon onto the golden plates. And even if there were 50 or 60 plates, the problem is still intractable because it would still be too small, and this is not how languages based on pictorial writing even work. So option two, sub option one is a dead end sub. Option two, however, would just bite the bullet on all of this. It would say The Book of Mormon is a non historical expansion of an ancient text. The ancient text did not contain all the 270,000 English words in today’s Book of Mormon. It just contained something which by the power of God, Smith was able to fully extract through divine revelation. Mormon scholar Blake Osler proposes this theory, which he says solves many problems related to claims of anachronism in the text, but it comes with a heavy price.
He writes, some may see the expansion theory as compromising the historicity of the Book of Mormon. To a certain extent it does. The Book of Mormon is not a history it was not meant to be. It is revelation of the experiences of God and the salvation history of an ancient people. In fact, Mormon apologists take a similar approach with the book of Abraham saying, Joseph Smith did not translate a papyrus actually written by Abraham. We now know that that papyrus is really a part of an ancient Egyptian ary text called the Book of Breathings. John Gee says the Egyptologists and the apologists say the same thing. The document of breathings made by Isis is not the book of Abraham. In 2018, documents from the Joseph Smith papers project were finally released, including ones about the book of Abraham. Here is Mormon scholar Robin Scott Jensen admitting that the book of Abraham is not a translation of an ancient Egyptian text
CLIP:
When it says that they made a translation of the next page in some of the copies of the characters. And we look to that translation, we realize that is not according to what Egyptologists say. It is clear that Joseph Smith and or his clerks associated the characters from the papyri with the English book of Abraham text. It’s pretty clear here. It’s a very small red circle, but if you see the one here next to the character and the one here implying that they belong together or two and two, so where does this leave us? These are some implications that we need to talk through. This is not something to sweep under the rug. This is not something to say, oh, you have questions about the book of Abraham? Are you praying hard enough?
Trent:
Jensen goes on to say that God could have given Joseph Smith a miraculous revelation, even though Smith engaged in a false translation project. God just used a miracle to overcome that and give him the truth. You can see this similar approach being used in a debate between James White and a Mormon apologist on the question of the Book of Abraham
CLIP:
By saying that the book of Abraham is one of the clearest evidences that the Book of Mormon is a fraud.
No, it’s not because I think the book of Abraham is beautiful and true, and we think we have great evidence of that with the plaintiff leshem and with the manner in which Egyptians were sacrificed. We know those things are both true when we’re verified, think all you want. It’s true. It’s fact. It’s fact. It’s fact.
Allow Egypt. And two, when you turn an Egyptian ary document into, you believe in a talking snake. Sir God can work miracles. You believe in a talking donkey, God can work miracles. I’ll allow that statement to stand because there is absolutely that. Can God work miracles? Can God work miracles? I didn’t pay you to say that, did I? Can God work miracles? Can God work miracles? Can God work miracles to identify the fraudulent utilization of an Egyptian figure?
Can God work
Miracles as a miracle? Similar to what God would do, is unfortunately a level of deception that is very, very frightening to me.
Trent:
For Mormon apologists, this ends up being the refuge of last resort. Perhaps there is no natural way the Book of Mormon could have been written on a small number of golden plates. Maybe God performed a miracle. Maybe God helped the ancient authors write possibly small letters. Maybe God inspired them to write in a language that can’t naturally exist. Or maybe God just gave all of this information to Joseph Smith by divine revelation. But this still doesn’t solve the problem because that revelation could be superhuman but not divine. It could be demonic rather than inspired. Now, one might ask though, why would Satan inspire all of this to cause people to become wholesome Mormons? Well, you can be wholesome and still have a false religion. The Amish are very wholesome people, but Mormons and Catholics agree they have a false religion. Catholics just say the same thing about Mormonism.
The father of lies wants to lead people away from worshiping the true Christ, the God man, the creator of the universe and second member of the Trinity to lead them instead to worship something else. And he might choose a variety of ways of doing that, be it the Unitarianism of Islam, the modalism of one to theology, the Arianism of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the pantheism of new age religion, or the exalted man of Mormonism who is equally a father to Jesus and Satan making the two brothers even fair Mormon admits that quote, it is technically true to say that Jesus and Satan are brothers in the sense that both have the same spiritual parent, God the Father. Of course, a Mormon might say, well, by this logic, how would you answer? People who say Jesus’s resurrection from the dead was just a demonic deception. The answer is that demons can perform wonders, but they cannot perform true miracles.
The Book of Mormon may be a wonder, as in one may wonder how Smith wrote this book, but it isn’t a miracle because it doesn’t violate any natural laws. That means a wide variety of natural or even paranormal factors could explain it. The resurrection of Christ, however, is a miracle that only God can perform because only God the author of life, only God has the power to create life or restore life to the dead. In the Summa theologians, St. Thomas Aquinas answers the question whether demons can lead men astray by means of real miracles. He writes the following, if we take a miracle in the strict sense, the demons cannot work miracles nor can any creature but God alone since in the strict sense, a miracle is something done outside the order of the entire created nature under which order every power of a creature is contained.
But sometimes miracle may be taken in a wide sense for whatever exceeds the human power and experience. And thus demons can work miracles. That is things which rouse man’s astonishment by reason of their being beyond his power and outside his sphere of knowledge. For even a man by doing what is beyond the power and knowledge of another leads him to marvel at what he has done so that in a way he seems to that man to have worked a miracle. It is to be noted however, that although these works of demons which appear marvelous to us are not real miracles, there’s sometimes nevertheless something real. We have good reason to believe that Jesus Christ was and is the God man, and that means we can trust what Jesus Christ taught, including his teaching, that the gates of hell would not prevail against the church. Mormons believe the gates of hell did prevail, however, in an event called the Great Apostasy, which is why Joseph Smith had to restore the church that Jesus founded in the 1830s. And to a certain extent, Protestants believed this visible, authoritative church defected in some way. But if Catholicism is true, then both of these groups are wrong, and this includes Mormonism claim that God had to reestablish his church through Joseph Smith’s impossible translation of the Book of Mormon. So I hope this was all helpful for you and I hope that you have a very blessed day.