How Can We Know?

Intro Welcome to the Standard of Truth Podcast. In this podcast, Dr. Gerrit Dirkmaat and Professor Richard LeDuc explore the early history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the life and teachings of Prophet Joseph Smith. They examine the original historical sources and provide context for events of the past. They approach the history of the Church with faith, expertise and humor.

Gerrit Hi, welcome to another episode of the Standard of Truth podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Gerrit Dirkmaat, and I'm joined by my friend, Professor Richard LeDuc.

Richard Hello, Gerrit. In this week's podcast, we're going to go through a couple of emails and answer some of the questions that are in those emails.

Gerrit As opposed to every other week, when we answer no emails and answer no questions.

Richard A couple shameless plugs to get in really quick. As we mentioned last week, we also have a large group that isn't going to be able to go on the tour, several people. And so there are still some open and available spots. And so if you're interested in joining us in some time in October, no, it's June 5th through the 11th.

Gerrit Wow, Richard, that's the first time.

Richard It's the first time I got it right. So if you want to join us, please go to the website, sign up. We'd love to have you.

Gerrit That'll be butting up fairly close to our anniversaries.

Richard It will be. That's fine. So that's one of my favorite things about Gerrit and his wife, is that they were married on June 15th, and my wife and I were married on June 16th, same year. And Gerrit always likes to say, when you've been married as long as we've been married, then you'll know.

Gerrit Literally, anytime he's talking about any kind of discussion, like, well, Becky and I just don't agree on this. I always say, well, you know, when you and Becky have been married as long as Angie and I have been married, you'll know how to resolve this.

Richard By the way, oftentimes, he just will say, well, then you'll know. Well, then you'll know what? Everything.

Gerrit You'll know everything. I can't give it all to you.

Richard Yeah, that's right.

Gerrit I need you to work for it.

Richard So want everyone to be aware of that. That'd be a lot of fun. We still have some open slots. I'd love for you to join us. Also, the free newsletter, we'd love for you to sign up for that. Gerrit's going to be sending one out.

Gerrit I may have already. By the time, I feel this enormous weight of pressure.

Richard Yeah, come on, get on it.

Gerrit I think the first newsletter will be, how many guns do you really think Willard Richards had in Carthage?

Richard Yeah, it'll be a short newsletter.

Gerrit Yeah, it'll be a news flash. No, you didn't have a gun at all.

Richard We might have a Richard business corner where I talk about boring academic articles.

Gerrit Yeah, we like to have half of the newsletter be how you can improve implied referral sales numbers at your particular startup.

Richard That's right. So anyway, we'd love for you to sign up for that. That's a free newsletter. And Gerrit may or may not be sending that out sometime between now and our tour sometime in November.

Gerrit And also the premium content.

Richard Premium content, please do sign up for that as well. Well, usually we pick emails that mention those things. So it doesn't have to be quite as shameless in terms of the promotion. But we have many emailers tell us, by the way, I feel like they're giving us or they're trying to give us a compliment. Really like the content. It just takes about 15, 20 minutes to get to it, which is about the time that I stopped talking, which there's a direct correlation.

Gerrit I feel like there's kind of a bell curve of, if we were to chart it out, it's Richard's talking and then, you know, that's right. Well, we're doing more than just address it. We're also talking to these topics and, you know, some of these emails we can read and address them relatively quickly or at least say we're not going to answer them because they have something to do with polygamy. And others, you know, that we make them the focus of our show.

Richard And these, the two that we'll read today. And again, thank you to all those that send the emails. Please keep them coming. Promise that we read all of them, even though we're not able to read them all over the podcast here. But the first email comes to us from Chris, Dear Gerrit and Richard. Just like to say-

Gerrit I noticed he did not give you a title.

Richard I'm just, you know what, at this point, I'm just glad that my name is mentioned. It's just an honor to be nominated. I'd just like to say I appreciate all the work you put into this podcast. It has been wonderful to learn more about the sources that we have and the genealogy of ideologies. My young kids find it enlightening. It puts them to sleep every time in the car. Your voices soothe the babies to sleep. I assume especially, by the way, that's Gerrit's raspy anti-Mormon voice.

Gerrit I'm sure that nothing puts children to sleep like, well, how do we know what happened after Joseph got the plates?

Richard The following is going to be a dump of question thought stuff, so hopefully it makes sense. A couple of years ago, I was invoited, I was invited to, I think maybe, you know, I was invited.

Gerrit You know what?

Richard I was. I was invited to the Phil Davis group. Now, Garnet, who is Phil Davis?

Gerrit Well, why are you calling me Garnet?

Richard Well, so this is, I actually, I don't call Gerrit. The only place I call Gerrit, Gerrit is on this podcast. I generally call Gerrit Garnet.

Gerrit Well, which is better than what he could call me.

Richard It's true. And the majority, so it's a, it's a mildly funny story of, so you got to, you have a super Dutch name. No one can ever pronounce it correctly.

Gerrit Because my first name is Gerrit, but spelled the Dutch way and in fact pronounced, so good luck with that. You know, I mean, I go by Gerrit, but if I ever go to like any Dutch family reunions, everyone is, oh, Gerrit, it's good to see you.

Richard You know, And Dirkmaat has got two A's next to each other that never meant to be.

Gerrit Yeah, anytime you put two vowels together in front of an American, you might as well just, just shut the conversation down. And it doesn't matter if you spell it all out. I mean, you know, I've talked to Angie about this, you know, since we've been married, she's always spelling our name out. It doesn't matter.

Richard No, it matters not at all.

Gerrit You spell it out and they're just like, so, so three t's then? Three t's, whatever it, you know, how do you spell it? It's D-I-R-K-M-A-A-T, okay? D-E-R-M-O, yeah, it does it.

Richard Oom-wad.

Gerrit Throw an oom-wad in there and then you know you've got it covered. Well, when I was in high school, I was a part of the robust and, you know, just powerful investigative journalism arm of the Shelley High School newspaper.

Richard What was the name of the paper? The Russet Times or something?

Gerrit I think it was something Russet. I can't remember. You know what? I'll have to go back and look.

Richard Yeah.

Gerrit But I'm sure it was, I'm sure it was terrible.

Richard I'll get our correct research staff on it.

Gerrit Our mascot was a potato. So what do you think?

Richard Were you the fighting Russets?

Gerrit No. No, we weren't even fighting. We were just laying there Russets. We were just ready to be sautéed and boiled. We weren't anything other than just prostrate potatoes ready to be mashed, which of course the teams we would play, they had a field day with that, like, mash those potatoes. Oh, we're going to boil them up, things like that, which, you know, at least it was a plant, but it's not like they were talking about murdering a cougar or something like that. But no one ever stole our mascot, or at least if they did, it was just like French fries or something. At any rate, I was on the school paper and we and a bunch of my friends, we did a lot of sarcastic editorials. If you can imagine, we did sarcastic editorials and one of that which I apparently was good enough that we went to some journalism conference in Boise, which was the big city, or as Richard called home.

Gerrit He didn't live in Boise.

Richard No, I was about 40 minutes out.

Gerrit He lived in a cow pasture outside of Boise. But for all of our listeners in Nampa, how many listeners do we have in Nampa?

Richard My family's mostly moved from Nampa, so that's a little...

Gerrit None of them listen anyway. That's true. Makes it very easy. A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country. So we go there and I won an award and there's this... I don't know who it was. I'm assuming, I don't know, the editor of the Idaho Statesmen or some person, maybe the head of some educational board. He was, to my 18 year old self, because I turned 18 when I was a senior in high school, he seemed super old. Okay.

Richard He was like 38.

Gerrit Yeah. He was 27 and I was like, what is this old codger? But no, he was very old and he was reading the names. And you know, look, I'm here with all these other schools. Of course, me and my friends are like, hey, you see those girls over there? I mean, there's a lot of ladies there. We're hopeful that we're going to be able to just find some and dance the night away. And so I'm going to win this award. I'm going to have to walk up in front of this giant auditorium to go get it. And this guy begins to read my name. And for whatever reason, Richard thinks this is the funniest thing he's ever heard in his life. Really?

Richard I just love it so much.

Gerrit He says, an award for best satirical editorial goes to Gerrit Dirkmaat. Now that sounds like I stuttered a lot. That is legitimately, I've got a friend, Jared, he doesn't listen to this podcast because he has better taste, but we could bring him on here. And he would say, cause he was there, and he called me stuttering it, Gerrit Dirkmaat was my name. Now I don't know how that happened. I don't have an N in my first name. I certainly don't have an F, which you would think would have to be two terminal Fs, right? If your name's Genrith, and I could see that the R you might think is a C in the second, cause you can't see obviously, cause again, I'm hoping it was just cataracts. At any rate, my hopes of impressing the entire group of coeds gathered there was dashed as I walked to the front with my head hung low with all of them thinking, that guy's got the stupidest name I've ever heard in my life.

Richard So the reason that I love the story as much as I love the story is because my last name is LeDuc. And no one has ever pronounced that correctly either. It has a capital D in the middle of it, which causes a rare form of American dyslexia.

Gerrit Where it's DeLucci, DeLuke, LeDuc, LaDouche, somewhere in that realm is what I'm going to be asking.

Richard DeLucci is far more common than you would expect.

Gerrit Which DeLucci is not a very normal American name. I mean, I apologize to all of our Italian American listeners.

Richard Yeah, DeLucci. Yeah, it sounds very Italian.

Gerrit I mean, but I don't think we have any Italian American listeners.

Richard So part of the reason that it's additionally funny to me is when he told the story, for some reason, as he's telling me, Gerrit is telling me that they called him Gennriff, I heard Garniff. And so in my phone, I have Garniff Dirkmaat as Gerrit's name.

Gerrit Is that what you tell Siri to call me?

Richard Every time.

Gerrit You say call Garniff?

Richard Garniff. And it knows you.

Gerrit It's great. Well, now we've just opened this up to an entire listener base.

Richard By the way, all of the criticism that we get of skipping 15 minutes in to get to the content, you know what?

Gerrit It's pretty valid.

Richard Yeah, you're right.

Gerrit We also have people who email and say, if you guys stop telling jokes, I will stop listening immediately. So, yeah. We'll let you know when we tell one.

Richard So by the way, it looks like the Shelley High School newspaper is called The Shelley High School News, which is pretty good.

Gerrit I think that's actually what it was.

Richard And your mascot, the potato, is named Boomer.

Gerrit He did not have a name when we were there. Yeah, they're stealing that from Oklahoma.

Richard Where was I?

Gerrit E-mails? Boomer the Russet?

Richard Yeah, that's pretty good.

Gerrit Boomer the Potato?

Richard Yeah, that's pretty good.

Gerrit Boomer the Potato?

Richard Anyway, so Phil Davis.

Gerrit Yeah.

Richard So that was the whole point. Garniff, who is Phil Davis?

Gerrit So he is someone who is the leader of an apostate group that claims that one of the fundamental aspects of their claims is that all of the prophets following Joseph Smith are all false prophets. But luckily, they know. So that's, whoo, luckily, God waited 200 years to let us all know. And they highly prioritize, essentially, they essentially use the fact that there's uncomfortable aspects of our history to gain followers, right? So we all know, if you're listening to this podcast, one of the reasons why people have difficult times with church history is they can't reconcile the idea of plural marriage being taught by God, even though the Bible literally exists. So it makes it pretty hard to figure out how a Christian can understand how God has ever taught that. So well, what if Joseph never taught plural marriage? What if he never practiced plural marriage?

Gerrit What if all of the people, all of the women who said that he practiced it, all of the men who said that he practiced it, every document that says that he practiced it, every journal that it's recorded in, every letter that it's talked about, what if every single one of them are liars, all collectively and over the course of the space of 200 years? Then I don't have to deal with the fact that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy anymore, do I? Because Joseph Smith was still a good, it was Brigham Young, ah, Brigham Young, ah, Brigham Young, always entering into evil and bringing that into the church. Because people have testimonies on the basis of the fact that Joseph Smith saw God, right? So it is always a very odd thing when someone desperately struggles over the fact that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy because there isn't anyone on earth that doesn't know that Brigham Young practiced polygamy. And yet among members or non-members, everybody knows that.

Gerrit You only have to tell someone who's not a member on a plane flight somewhere that you're not a member, and you'll know the question is how many wives do you have or which wife number are you if they find out you're a Latter-day Saint. You know, so you mean one of the Mormons, so part of this is very attractive to members. And that's part of his speech. Part of his claims are to have a special connection to God, to have been given special anointings from the Lord, things like that. There's a lot of things in there. At any rate, this listener attended some of his School of the Prophets meetings. No man taking this honor into himself, except for Phil Davis, apparently. And he is recounting that in this email. And he's talking about some of those historical things that are presented because they do present things as if they are just obvious facts.

Gerrit I mean, it's clear that Joseph Smith didn't practice polygamy. As we'll get to part of this question, he's going to ask the question, well, wait, do all scholars really agree on that? You can't find a PhD historian who deals with Latter-day Saint history who does not believe that Joseph Smith taught and practiced plural marriage. You can't, even among the community of Christ, who for 180 years, their official church position was that Joseph Smith never practiced polygamy. Even their scholars now will say, well, he did, but he shouldn't have. So, that's still saying that he did, right? So well, I guess we'll go back to, we need to read some more meat of the email or we kind of cover it.

Richard Yeah, yeah. No, you covered some of it, but he's got a couple.

Gerrit But I didn't do it very well.

Richard No, you did it poorly.

Gerrit Yeah, I did it poorly. Yeah, just like everything else we've done on this podcast.

Richard It was on brand. A couple of years ago, I was invited to the Phil Davis group. Don't stop reading here.

Gerrit We did stop.

Richard We completely did stop.

Gerrit We did a FBI background check on you, because we will not be tainted.

Richard The story leading up to that is long, Grant. I won't go into that very much, but suffice it to say that right before COVID, I started making a serious study of the scriptures and the gospel to really figure out what I believe. It was an honest effort to really dig in, and that is where things got a little dicey. And while I felt at the time that most things I understood still stood up, there were some things I felt scriptures were very clearly saying that I was taught differently or maybe incorrectly. Now, I realize the teachers and the church are all lay, and that comes with its own set of challenges sometimes. None of them are perfect and have the same knowledge and background to teach everything equally well. Nor is there enough time in a church setting to really discuss the important topics deeply. So, that means that we are left studying and learning outside of that on our own or in small groups of people who are also interested.

Gerrit Or perhaps listening to podcasts.

Richard Anyways, well, so by the way, as a quick aside to that as well, so one thing that our ward is doing this year is going through the Institute course, Answering Gospel Questions, for the very reason that you talk about here, where there isn't enough time and now the two-hour block for sure, and these questions abound and trying to take, the Church is trying to provide more and more resources to be able to help people to answer these questions.

Gerrit In response to, you know, President Nelson and other apostles have been saying that you need to take responsibility for your testimony. And the Church is providing resources to do that. I mean, if you are an adult member of the Church who is not doing anything outside of just going to Church on Sunday for whatever your spiritual nourishment is, well, I think that you'll find that that's a little lacking. I mean, and that's, especially now it's only two hours. I mean, if you think about it now, your, your gospel doctrine instruction is now less than two hours a month. I say less because it is always gospel doctrine that gets the, it gets the shiv. If they need to have a meeting that month or because of general conference following on the first Sunday, you don't actually have, you know, two gospel doctrine classes every month. You generally do, but you, you don't actually always have them. And so what we're saying is that a deeper study of the scriptures, if you even happen to be able to attend gospel doctrine, there's probably like 4,700 primary teachers listening to me right now.

Gerrit Oh, really? Gospel doctrine? Thanks. Why don't you tell me more about Elders Corbin Relief Society while you're at it? Last week, I was pasting marshmallows to a picture of the cloud Jesus was riding on, you know, but the reality is already your chance to dig deeper into the scriptures is two hours a month if you're only going to do it at church, and that's if you were even in that class.

Richard So we did it in kind of a linger longer setting, or we are doing it in that, where it's easier for us because we're the last ward in the building, but the ward members kind of selected topics from the Gospel Topics Essays and from this Institute course, and then we look to invite in different experts to be able to go through that. But anyway, anyway, I met with Phil via an introduction from a former neighbor and ward member, a couple of times and attended his School of Prophets meeting once at an early hour on Sunday. His message and interpretation of historical events was very attractive, Gerrit, to your point. And in the sense, it made a lot of logical sense to me, but since I had not personally read up on the things he had, I couldn't verify it. It sounded good, and he was a great storyteller. At the end of that School of Prophets meeting, I felt a darkness come over me like I've never felt before or since. It was that feeling that stopped me from my continued association with that group, but I was left with tons of questions.

Richard I felt that although this group was definitely not for me, some of the questions raised in my mind as a result were good questions. One of the things this group did was create a Joseph Smith in their own image. Again, Gerrit, to your point. One who never practiced polygamy, one who always made the right choice, one who is going to come back and straighten the church out. And this group is preparing to be his acolytes. I bring all this up because it feels like many people, including those in our church, aggrandize history and use it to spin a tale to prove a point. At the point is usually something that justifies their belief and position in life. It's a great feel-good-about-myself exercise. At the end of the day, we have the historical sources that we have, and after that, it is then has to be interpreted by a historian reader to give the so-what, if you will. And it is very hard to have a disagreeing voice many times without being criticized socially since a lot of our personal identities are tied up in believing things happened in a very specific way.

Richard So, for example, when you challenge the anti-Joseph taught polygamy-ites, and to be clear, I believe the evidence overwhelmingly points to polygamy coming from Joseph Smith. It's very good.

Gerrit But you thought the cutoff was the Phil Davis, that was the cutoff.

Richard I will say, he's the king of parentheses here. He's really making sure to, he's doing a great job to get PhDs to agree with them. That only works if PhDs agree with each other in the first place. And also assumes that we have enough historians with enough expertise in the time and place in question to weigh in on it. And I assume that the field of history is not so special as to be one where evidences are so clear and all PhDs agree all the time. Sometimes when I listen to podcasts and include interviews with quote unquote experts.

Gerrit So this is probably a dig at us.

Richard Oh, a hundred percent. Well, mostly me. Well, I am not a PhD.

Gerrit So-called.

Richard So it's not.

Gerrit So-called.

Richard So it's not.

Gerrit He didn't say, so-called PhDs. Why don't you call yourself a professor while you're at it?

Richard I get the sense that underneath they think that if everyone knew what they knew, then everyone would see things how they see them. And I just don't think that is true. How do you approach historical topics where experts don't agree? And are there any topics in church history besides polygamy since season 38 is a ways out, where views are different? Anyways, if you got this far, I appreciate your reading all of this. I've just found that I'm in this mode of searching. I'm interested to know how we know where we are. I found that historical claims and faith claims are often conflated together, and that often times the faith of some is based on a particular view of history that is often oversimplified and or wrong. I'm finding that understanding history, whatever that really means, leaves a lot of room for nuance in belief and faith, and that is unavailable in black and white views of things.

Richard But that also leaves me feeling like, what the heck does all this mean then? Thanks for all you do, Chris.

Gerrit Well, Chris, first of all, you succeeded in getting Richard to read your email, even though you didn't address him as Ark Duquaduc.

Richard He did mention my name, so you know what, that's all it takes. Also, the content was good and it was a sincere question, but other than that.

Gerrit I mean, this is really kind of the point surrounding all this. Now, let me say a few things. You've rightly hit upon the fact that people often make historical sounding claims to make their viewpoints, which is clearly what Phil Davis is doing, because the next time he shows you the Ph.D. from the university he got it from will be the first time because he doesn't have one. And he wouldn't get it in history making the types of arguments that he's making. I've tried to point out on these previous podcasts that there are two different fields that are connected to one another, but they are not the same thing all the way back to our very, very, very first podcast. And that is the difference between what a historian can know as a historian and what a believer believes religiously.

Gerrit They often use similar phrases like, when Paul saw Jesus is a statement about the past, but it's actually not a historical truth claim that a historian can prove or disprove. All that historian can do is say, Paul left records in which he said he saw Jesus. Luke, if it is Luke who is the author of the book of Acts, also says that Paul saw Jesus. Whether or not Paul saw Jesus, it's also clear from all the other letters that Paul left that Paul certainly believed in Jesus. So is there a historical consensus? Look, there are Baptist and Catholic and atheist and agnostic and Latter-day Saint and Eastern Orthodox historians of the Apostle Paul. They are all well published. They all have put out some little nuance of Paul's life.

Gerrit Are there any of them that say Paul didn't believe in Jesus? Not that I'm aware of. I don't know of any PhD historians who claim that Paul didn't really believe in Jesus. So there is a historical thing we can know, right? What first? Paul existed. Paul claimed to have had an experience in which he saw Jesus. Now, again, a historian can't prove that he did, but certainly a historian can say very factually, Paul said that he did, and that Paul seemed to be sincere in that experience. And he believed in that faith because of all of his letters and all of his actions. That's what a historian can know. Now, once we start to get into theology, we then might start having arguments about what did Paul mean when he said X and Y? Latter-day Saints, for instance, certainly disagree with other historians when it comes to what does Paul mean when he talks about, else what shall they then do that are baptized for the dead?

Gerrit If the dead rise not at all, why are they then baptized for the dead? Other historians have really struggled with this. Christian theologians have pretty commonly dismissed it as well Paul's talking about being dead in spirit. Agnostic historians will say, we don't really know what Paul is talking about there, but he clearly thinks it's related to a resurrection. Latter-day Saints, of course, will say, well, this is clearly a reference to the baptismal practices of Latter-day Saints and the idea that you can baptize people who have already died, which of course Latter-day Saints do. So there is a dispute, but you'll notice that the dispute, even though it's following a historical line, is actually theological in nature. In this wise, it is sometimes helpful to approach more atheistic or agnostic historians when you're doing New Testament stuff, to see how they read the documents without any idea of faith behind it, if you're trying to get to what did this mean originally.

Gerrit But in the end, as a Latter-day Saint, we also don't believe that Paul had everything in the world revealed to him. We have a revelation. Joseph Smith has received that says that in Nauvoo, that God aimed to reveal things that had never been revealed since the foundation of the world. We believe that God has revealed and will yet reveal many things. What does that mean? It means that no matter how much we know right now, there are true things that will at some point be taught that we don't know. And it is very starkly different from other Protestant Christians who believe that all truth is already contained in the Bible, and therefore the reason why you don't agree with me is you aren't reading the passage in the scriptures correctly. When it comes to some things, like for instance plural marriage, yeah, I mean, even if you were to find a single historian, PhD historian, who argued that Joseph Smith never taught or practiced plural marriage, even if you were to find that person, they would absolutely be a lone person in the wilderness.

Gerrit I think it's very important that we don't conflate what we can know by history and what we can know by the Holy Spirit. Very profound that you had that spiritual experience, right? What you were hearing in the meeting was things that you kind of wanted to believe. It was a great story, and it was being told in a way you wanted to believe it. But it was the Holy Spirit that spoke to you and made you feel like, yeah, this isn't right, this isn't for me. And I really think that I can't give you an easy answer in the sense of what do you do if there's disputes? Well, first of all, we have to make sure we're comparing apples and oranges. I mean, well, we're not comparing apples and oranges. We're comparing apples to apples rather than apples to oranges. If someone who has a YouTube channel who thinks they know what the fourth feather Daniel saw means about when the Second Coming is happening, that's not the same thing as someone who's devoted their life to the reading and understanding the Bible and the Book of Daniel.

Gerrit Now, that doesn't mean that that scholar who's well published on Daniel is right about every single thing that Daniel has to say. But he certainly has earned more gravitas than someone who heard something from someone on a subreddit and then put together a video clip on a YouTube. And I don't mean to be too trite, but often that is really what it is. It's astounding to me that the earliest anti-Mormon book, Mormonism Unveiled, has again and again and again simply been regurgitated over and over and over. Even though the primary truth claim of that book, the primary claim, was that they had the actual Solomon Spaulding manuscript that proved that the Book of Mormon was written by a pastor and that Joseph Smith just stole it, put his name on it, and that's where the Book of Mormon came from.

Gerrit That is the primary truth claim of that book. And yet, we find the Solomon Spaulding manuscript and has nothing like the Book of Mormon by independent scholars looking at it. Why then do people still continue to use the attacks on Joseph Smith that are found in Mormonism Unveiled? Well, because they're interested in winning the argument, not because it's a historical truth claim. Again, you won't find historians who will argue. You might, again, find a stray PhD historian, but you won't find the consensus among non-Latter-day Saint historians that Joseph Smith was, as one listener emailed us, a con man and a liar. That he made the whole thing up. Why? Well, because we have 10,000 documents from Joseph Smith where it demonstrates that he absolutely believes what he's teaching. Now that doesn't mean from a historian's perspective that what Joseph is teaching is absolutely correct.

Gerrit Historians don't make determinations like that. But if you're asking, was Joseph sincere in what he taught? You are hard pressed to find a historian who doesn't believe that Joseph thought he was called by God. Doesn't mean that he was, but there's a very big difference between someone who is deliberately attempting to deceive everyone, who never had any religious experience but wants people to think that he did, and someone who really sincerely believes they're called by God. Those aren't even the same person. You can be, and part of your question, Chris, is about people that feel really strongly about some aspect of history. And that can cause them to err. You see this both inside and outside of the Church. As the Church published its Gospel Topics Essays in order to help people better understand some of these issues from our past, as they created the Church Institute class called Answering My Gospel Questions, there are absolutely fully active, fully faithful members of the Church who say, well, that is not what I've always thought.

Gerrit I don't like that. I don't feel comfortable with that because that's not what I've always thought. You'll notice that a lot of that really comes from assumption. As you said, you know, as I studied some things, there's, you know, there's things in the scriptures that I just don't really feel like that's, you know, I don't feel like they're being represented the right way. When we get to things like scripture and prophetic utterance, those are things that often all a historian can do is tell you what was originally said and how it was originally interpreted. But that is not the deciding factor on how that is intended by God. It doesn't matter how many Joseph Smith Papers, documents I've read. None of those can define for me whether or not President Nelson, when he speaks, is speaking by the power of God as a prophet.

Gerrit Yes, I've studied all those Joseph Smith paper sources, and Brigham Young sources, and all kinds of early sources. But my belief that President Nelson is a prophet of God comes as a testimony that the church is God's true church. And frankly, for people like Phil Davis and Denver Snuffer, who make the argument that Joseph was absolutely a prophet, but the people who followed him weren't, that's certainly not how Joseph describes this stone that's cut out of the mountain. Joseph explains that God will not allow a prophet to fall. Instead, the last thing they'd be able to do is appoint someone else. No man taketh this honor unto himself, except for apparently anyone who decides they're going to start their own apostate group. The reality is all of these people make the same claim.

Gerrit They make a claim that actually I'm the one who has the true self. We've demonstrated that throughout this podcast. Whether it is people claiming that, you know, the Brewsterites claiming that they are actually the new prophets that are rising up. Whether it's people in Utah territory claiming like the Godbyites that they have the truth about God and that God's given them a special conduit. Joseph Smith makes it very clear in the letter he writes to John Sims Carter that God has a way of giving doctrine to the church. And he does not give it in secretive Sunday school, source-appropriated School of the Prophets meetings. He gives it to his prophets on earth. If the claim is going to be made, oh, well, the church went into an apostasy after Joseph was murdered, someone can make any kind of a claim they want to make religiously.

Gerrit You can always say, I believe X and I believe Y. Where you come into a problem is when you make the argument, I believe X because Y happened. Well, then you have to actually demonstrate that Y happened. We talked about in a previous podcast that we don't have a contemporary journal account of Peter, James and John appearing to Joseph Smith. We have Joseph Smith multiple times saying that Peter, James and John appeared to him, but we don't have someone who is standing nearby watching on the banks of the river going, and jotting it down and then publishing it in the newspaper. We don't have that. Nor do we have that for the resurrection, nor do we have it for Jesus walking on water. We have people later writing down what they experienced or what they heard or what they saw. So there is this separation.

Gerrit I would say that as you're trying to sort things out, as you're trying to find things, of course people are always going to claim, experts are always going to come across, I mean, for us, right, experts with a small e probably, that they know what they're talking about. Otherwise, there'd be no point in having them talk. Of course, they believe that if everyone knew what they know, that they would change their opinion. But that's really the case of any person who has an opinion about anything. No one deliberately maintains an opinion that they know is false. That's like the dumbest thing in the world, right? If you do, if you know, like, I know that the Bengals already lost to the Chiefs, I'm certain that the Bengals are going to the Super Bowl. You may not want to be as certain about that anymore. No, I'm certain it's still going to be the Bengals in the Super Bowl. Okay, it literally can't be. Well, we'll wait and see.

Gerrit You know, I mean, let's see if Joe Burrow shows up and we'll see what happens. So in that regard, you know, obviously scholars can be very arrogant and come across that way. And frankly, some of them do a poor job where they're talking down to people. At the same time, if someone has spent a considerable amount of time and not amateur time, not just, hey, I had some fun on the weekend reading this, but they're well published, that they have spent a lot of time on the topic, it doesn't mean that they're right. They might very well be very wrong. But they are probably entitled to us investigating their claims. Read their footnotes, read their sources, see why it is they say what they say. I have this happen to me all the time, that I read something from a well respected historian, where I don't really agree with what they say.

Gerrit Okay, wait a minute, you're saying that this happened? And I'll go and I'll read their article, I'll see why they're saying it, I'll then go look at their footnotes and say, okay, he's saying that this source means this. But you know, as I look at the source, it doesn't actually say that, it says something similar, but it doesn't say what he is saying. And that happens a lot. I think we're all affected by the things we want to believe. Obviously, I am affected by the fact that I am absolutely certain that Joseph Smith saw God. If we want to know what my bias is, it's that I believe that Jesus is the Savior because I know that Joseph Smith saw him. Now, that's not a historical claim. When I make that claim, I'm not making it as a historian. I am a historian who's making it, but I'm making it as a believer. So I think that's an important thing, too. As you wade through these things, the scriptures matter because they're the Word of God to us.

Gerrit But as a Latter-day Saint, living prophets matter, and they always matter. As I've told this story before, there is a time when there's a group of people who are opposed to Joseph's teachings in Nauvoo. And it's not just polygamy. Boy, we love to believe that the only reason why anyone had a problem with Joseph Smith was because of polygamy. But there are a lot of things that Joseph was teaching that people had a really hard time with, like the idea that marriage could last forever at all is already a completely anti-Christian teaching. The idea that God progressed to become God is a completely heretical Christian teaching. The idea that we could become like God, the idea that you could perform baptisms for the dead is in and of itself a wildly radical belief that causes all kinds of people to struggle with their faith. And you know that it's radical because after Joseph is murdered, all of the groups that do break away and break off almost immediately throw away the idea of baptism for the dead because it's so hard to comport with a Protestant Christianity that believes the moment you die, you instantly go to heaven or hell.

Gerrit There is no salvation after this mortal life. How do I make baptisms for the dead comport to that? Well, what if they didn't exist? And so even these groups, even these groups that are break offs from Joseph will abandon that as a doctrine. Why? Boy, it does not fit very well. So you see that among these various things. As Joseph's teaching those things, people have many different reactions to them, including things like plural marriage. They are radical. They are not accepted by most people. The fact that prophets teach things that are radical and not accepted by most people is not evidence that they are not true prophets. In fact, I would argue from the historical record, go back and find me a prophet that everyone agreed with what they had to say.

Gerrit Go back and find me the prophet where most people agreed. Go back and find the prophet where even many people agreed. Frankly, you are hard pressed to find a prophet where even some people agreed. Most prophets are spitting into the wind. Most prophets are desperately trying to get people to believe something that they don't want to believe, because it would cause them to have to change their life. Because it would be a really difficult thing for a 21st century American. Again, it's very ethnocentric. It's Americans who really struggle with the idea of polygamy. Saints in South Africa don't, right? It's an American thing that we struggle with. That this idea would be so much easier if Joseph just never practiced it at all. Well, now I don't have to do with it at all. If I have a really hard time with the fact that there was priesthood restriction in the church and temple restriction in the church, was a very, very, very difficult topic.

Gerrit How much easier it would be I could maintain my belief in the Book of Mormon and I could maintain my... If I just said, well, all of that came later. It makes it easy. It makes it easy to shelve things and say, well, only Joseph was right and everyone was wrong. Those kinds of pithy explanations are pithy because they're leaving out all of the other sources that make arguments the other way. Now, I think I've made the point on this podcast multiple times, that all sources are not created equally. Joseph Smith saying in a letter that he writes to Hiram something is very different than someone in 1885 saying, I remember I heard Joseph one time say that there were Quakers on the moon, even though that was 1881. The one is coming directly from Joseph without the filter of how did I hear this?

Gerrit How did I interpret this? The other is going through however many dozens of filters as well as however many dozens of years. So I think that's when you approach people that are arguing different aspects of Joseph Smith's history from a more lay and amateur perspective, I think you hit the nail right on the head that it's mostly people arguing what they want to believe. And you will find like you do among anti-Mormons, that they will take any negative source and elevate it to, you know, I Nephi having been born of goodly parents. If it's a source that says what I want it to say, then I elevate it as the most important source that ever existed. Now, do believers do the same thing? Sure. In fact, we just talked about that on some of these previous podcasts that maybe the way things are remembered, even in a positive light, you know, are not always 100% accurate.

Gerrit So that's what I would say. That's a long answer, you know, the entire podcast basically of talking about this, but it's such a big issue that it keeps coming up over and over and over again. And it all goes back to that, you know, epistemological question, which I'm using that big word, just so you can think that I'm smart and I'm not. But how do you know what you know? When you say, I know that Brigham Young believed X, how do you know that? Do you know it because someone told you that? Do you know it because you read one quote of him from someone on a TikTok wearing temple garments? Do you know it because you've read hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of things that Brigham Young taught or wrote, hundreds of pages? The question of how do we know is at the heart of belief and it's always in this realm of history and religion that the waters get muddy.

Gerrit You hear people, we get emails to the podcast all the time where people say things like, well, we know that Joseph Smith did this. So what do you think about that? And my first question is, well, how do you know that Joseph Smith did that? Well, he clearly taught that there were Quakers on the moon. Well, did he clearly teach that? Do you find it repeated in his teachings? Do you find it in his journals? Do you find it in his letters? Do you find it in his revelations? Do you find it in his sermons? So at best, if he did ever say a word on the topic, he certainly didn't spend a whole lot of time on it because he never mentioned it in anything else. And I think that's a really important thing. Oftentimes, these groups want to grab a single statement from somewhere, elevate that statement to the most important part of belief, and then try to obfuscate the fact that there were other things that were said.

Gerrit For instance, the Denver Snuffer group, I've heard Denver Snuffer answer a question in which someone asked him, you know, I love the temple. What do I do about the temple? I mean, I want to go to the temple, and I really love all the things you're teaching, and yes, I think the church is corrupt, but what about the temple? What about Baptisms for the Dead? And Snuffer, I mean, frankly, couldn't have been more condescending. I mean, if you think I'm a condescending, arrogant person or that Richard's even worse, which clearly he is, it was the most, I mean, just he.

Richard First of all, I remember this. I remember, so one of the things that Gerrit and I like to do other than watching Presbyterians debate Methodists.

Gerrit Which is really one of our favorite things. A Calvinist-Arminian debate will get some popcorn.

Richard Yeah. And now how many of you want to come on the tour, by the way?

Gerrit The entire tour will be a Calvinist-Arminian debate.

Richard Well, I remember watching, one of the funniest things watching these kinds of things with Gerrit, and so Gerrit and I watch a lot of these apostate groups or people that are making claims who watch a lot of these videos.

Gerrit Please don't get worried about us.

Richard Yeah, no.

Gerrit Tell our stake presidents.

Richard Yeah, no.

Gerrit Tell our stake presidents.

Richard Well, but I think when we watch this, I think you had to pause it at least 10 times and yell at the TV.

Gerrit It was bad. And I have to say, and I've tried to express before that, first of all, obviously not perfect. I make mistakes speaking all the time. I mean, you can obviously make a man an offender for a word, but I'm also doing this completely extemporaneously. There's a reason why our wives are asleep on the floor in Richard's... Oh, Angie's signaling that she's actually awake. But she was snoring earlier. We're doing this extemporaneously, in part because we want that to be the flow of the podcast. We want this to feel more comfortable and conversational. I mean, I could, if you want, we can read the whole thing, and I'll put in my best monotone voice when I do it. But as we're watching it, I mean, it's one thing to say, look, it's a religious belief that I will honor if you want to say, I do not believe in baptisms for the dead. Welcome to the entirety of the Christian world.

Gerrit None of them believe in baptisms for the dead. But when you attempt to make a historical argument, to the reason why you don't believe baptisms for the dead, well, now you've crossed over. Now you've gone from, this is what I believe religiously. I mean, look, if someone says, as someone might, and I've listened to people say, I believe that we wouldn't need to perform some kind of ordinance for people that God's going to save in the next life. God's just going to save them anyway. Right?

Richard Well, I was just going to say, in my mind, I have you essentially Ben Stiller from Happy Gilmore saying, you're in my world now, grandma. Yeah, right.

Gerrit He helps me sleep before bed. You will go to sleep or I will put you to sleep. Essentially right. I mean, look, if you're going to say, I don't believe Baptisms for the Dead were supposed to be, which is what he said, the argument made by the Denver Snuffer Group, or at least then, I mean, maybe he's changed it. I look, I'm not a member of the group, so I mean.

Richard You're not getting their free newsletter?

Gerrit Well, things seem to be changing fast and furious for them as well, but at least for this interview, he made the argument that Baptisms for the Dead was never intended to be for people like ancestors. It was only supposed to be for people that you knew personally.

Richard And the reason that it was for people that you knew personally is because it was only to be performed by people that you knew would have accepted.

Gerrit Right. It was only to be for people that you personally know would have accepted the Gospel. And if you didn't think they would, well, then you wouldn't have baptized for them. Which, first of all, holy cow, the level of judgment that's going on, right? But he made it as a statement of historical fact. Oh, yeah, no one was ever baptized for anyone that they didn't know personally. And he acted very disgusted with the questioner. Oh, baptisms for the dead. I mean, it was only supposed to be for the people that you knew would accept. Look, is there a Joseph Smith letter in which he says that the saints have the opportunity to be baptized for those of their relatives who they believe would have accepted the gospel? Yeah, but he took that and took the emphasis on that they believe would have accepted, right? Instead of you can be baptized for your relatives as the emphasis. As if there were literally nothing else ever spoken on the topic, or as if there weren't any other baptisms that then took place.

Gerrit So why didn't he talk about the other baptisms that then took place? Because they would have disproved his point. Why didn't he talk about the other sources of those baptisms? Because they would have disproved his point.

Richard Is it possible that he doesn't know that they exist?

Gerrit It's entirely possible that he doesn't know all of the sources, in which case, if you know that you don't know all the sources because you haven't read them, and you would say, well, how would someone know they haven't read all the sources? Well, you would know that you haven't read all the sources if you've only read one source. I don't know. I can't get inside someone's head to know whether or not they know it, but clearly they discount it. And look, that does happen, and that's part of the problem when we start to muddy the waters between what is religiously true and what a historian can prove. I will always go back to the fact that, look, the moment you say that you're a Christian, you have at some point bid the fond farewell, the brethren adieu, so to speak, to a completely logical and rational belief.

Gerrit You have. You're never going to be able to find enough sources or enough historians with PhDs who agree to prove the resurrection. Now, you can find lots of very believing Christians who believe the resurrection occurred, but they believe the resurrection occurred not because they can prove it. They believe it because they believe. That kind of sounds like a tautology, but it's also the truth. And the sooner we realize that ultimate truth can only come from the Holy Spirit, not from shallow and pedantic podcasters like myself, but only from the Holy Spirit, which, you know, the great part about Chris' question, he demonstrated that, that it was the Spirit that told them that the things he kind of liked hearing were false. So even though they sounded good, even though a lot of people there agreed, even though there were reasons to, it was false.

Gerrit And I really think that we all have to get somewhere like that in our testimonies. And then we aren't driven by every wind of doctrine or every crashing wave of adversity. Once you have the Holy Spirit speak to you and tell you that this is God's true Church, will that answer all of your historical questions? It won't even answer some of them. There are of course so many historical questions that we won't ever have an answer for. But we won't be able to prove that Joseph Smith's not a prophet or Brigham Young's not a prophet either through those historical sources. Because we would be the ones setting the terms of the debate. Well, I just don't believe that God would have had his prophet Joseph teach the practice of polygamy. Well, you know, you started that sentence with I.

Gerrit I mean, that's the problem with it. You've set the terms of debate, and the terms of debate are anything that prophets teach that I don't already believe, I want to reject, and I'm going to find a way to reject them. Well, if that's the terms of debate, then that's, it readily becomes the self-fulfilling prophecy. Now does that, I mean, obviously, I mean, I think Chris has a wider question like, well, of course, there's things that we once thought were true that we don't believe anymore. I mean, a great example of this, I mean, I just published with Mike McKay a book on the translation of the Book of Mormon in the Let's Talk About series. There will be fully active, faithful members of the church who will send me streams of vitriol-filled hate mail from that book. And I've already had, but I'm anticipating, you know, hopefully no, well, who am I kidding?

Gerrit No one's going to read it. But if someone read it, then they'll be mad. Why? Because I'm saying that Joseph isn't a prophet? Clearly not. Anyone who argues that I don't have a testimony of Joseph Smith hasn't ever talked to me ever. But because part of what is part of the historical record of translation is that Joseph Smith used multiple seer stones in the translation. We have it from multiple historical sources. We have it from literally every single scribe he had. From Oliver Cowdery, from Martin Harris, from Emma Smith. We have it from all of them. We have it from people who witnessed it, like David Whitmer and Newell Knight. We have multiple witnesses that say Joseph used multiple stones. And in fact, we have one of those stones in the possession of the First Presidency in Salt Lake, in the First Presidency vault, that we have pictures that were taken and displayed in the Church's magazine.

Gerrit It is not a false doctrine to state that the Church possesses one of these stones. The Church published those images in their magazine, saying, here's one of Joseph Smith's seer stones. But that may not be what someone wants to believe, in part because the fact that Joseph Smith used seer stones is used by antagonists to make fun of us. Oh, really? Put some rocks in that hat? Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb. That fact that it's being used against our testimonies causes some people to say, well, that must not have happened, especially if you haven't heard of it before. But it's that way with a lot of things. The followers of Christ were readily, repeatedly parodied and mocked and blasphemed by the Roman world around them who claimed that these Christians are so crazy.

Gerrit They eat the flesh of a dead man in their worship services. Is there some truth to that? Obviously, anyone who's a Christian listening to me knows that what the Lord's Supper, you know, take, eat, this is my body, this stew in remembrance of me, right? But Romans made fun of and mocked it for a couple of reasons. First, the fact that Christians had a god that they believed was killed by them made Romans make a lot of fun of that. So, let me get this straight. Your god we killed. What a wonderfully powerful god you have. Do you have any other gods that we could also kill? To the Roman world, the whole point of a god was that god was immortal, god had all this power that he could give to you, and you're arguing that you had a god that we killed. And then also when you worship, you eat his body and you drink his blood of your dead god.

Gerrit Now, that sounds very blasphemous, but that's exactly what Roman critics intended to do. They intended to mock what were legitimate beliefs, and the very fact that they were mocked certainly dissuaded some people from joining Christianity. Oh, what do you mean you guys really do drink the wine and the... No, no, it's symbolic, it's in remembrance, right? And so that's an important thing to understand, that people sometimes feel very passionately about things, but they're very passionate without actual knowledge. I have absolutely been guilty of this in my life. I well remember things that I really believe were the case, and I found out that they weren't true. Now, you can take those moments and say, oh, that means nothing's true, everything's false, or you can take them and say, of course, there are things that we all believe that aren't quite 100% right.

Gerrit Chris brought up the fact that we have lay teachers in the church. Yeah. So if you're 17-year-old Sunday school class teacher who also happens to be a dental hygienist as her career doesn't exactly know how Joseph Smith used seer stones in the translation of the Book of Mormon, well, maybe we can cut her some slack, right? If the woman teaching your gospel doctrine class is a surgeon who can take out your appendix but hasn't read every single source of the First Vision accounts, that's called normal. That's called what you should expect. We shouldn't seek to put down our lay clergy. And I know, Chris, you aren't doing this. I'm saying that you'll often see this from these groups. Oh, look at all the things that they're hiding. Look at all the things that are negative.

Gerrit You know, Chris was very gracious in his email. But often people will say things like that, like, oh, how come I wasn't ever taught this in Sunday school? Well, you weren't taught it in Sunday school because a plumber was teaching. But you know what? That plumber had a testimony that if you were really listening to, it would have changed your heart and it would have changed your soul. I had a gospel doctrine teacher in Colorado, a lovely woman by the name of Sister Rockmore. I very much doubt that she's listening, so I think I just said her last name, so I apologize to her and all of her family. And honestly, the greatest gospel doctrine teacher I ever had. And she certainly studied. Oh boy, she put in her time. She spent all week preparing for her lessons and she would read those scriptures backward and forward, and she would read everything she could get her hands on. And as the discussions sometimes got deeper, this is back when we had three hours, so you could really get in there.

Gerrit There were all the time questions that arose. You know, sometimes in my mind, I'd be sitting there thinking, well, I'm actually working on this part of Joseph Smith's journal for my dissertation because it was back when I was in graduate school. She would really readily say, you know, I don't know that. And not in a way to deflect the conversation, she would say, but you know, we can talk more about it. I can see if I can find some more things. But always willing to admit what she didn't know, but boy, a more powerful, pure testimony, you wouldn't find. I miss the days of sitting in that gospel doctrine class because it didn't matter that she didn't have all the worldly knowledge she could have had. Now, she was more well-educated than many gospel doctrine teachers in the church, but the Spirit spoke to our souls when she bore testimony. And I honestly think, going back to your entire email, Chris, that's, I think, the part that we should focus on most.

Gerrit When you say, how do you sort through the things, I feel like the Holy Spirit's already trying to help you sort through things. It's also important to know you and I, and maybe even Richard, will never get to a point where we know everything definitively. Not in this life. Joseph Smith says it will take a long time after this life before you fully understand eternal progression. Well, if it's going to take a long time after this life, and that means in this life, I don't have a prayer. So, we can't look at acquiring knowledge as some kind of shelf that we get to, or ladder room that we get to, and then when we get to that point, we don't need to know anymore, or we can't know anymore. We really do have to focus on, is Jesus my Savior? How do I know that Jesus is my Savior? I felt the Holy Spirit tell me that Jesus is my Savior.

Gerrit Did Jesus have a church restored? Did Jesus have a church restored? Go through all the process of having that church restored just to have it completely fall apart and be brought about by hundreds of thousands and then millions of apostates following Brigham Young by the allegations that are made by these groups. Well, Joseph said that it wouldn't, and there really isn't evidence of that. But only the Holy Spirit can tell you whether President Nelson is a prophet. So I encourage people to ask. I believe President Nelson is a prophet of God. I believe he speaks the will of God. Does that mean he's a perfect man? No, because God has told us that no man is perfect. Everyone has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But I also don't believe that it is my prerogative to try to determine what it is that prophets say that I think is right or that I think is wrong.

Gerrit Because that would make me the prophet, and I certainly am not. I am just a follower. I am just someone who has a testimony, and now I'm someone with a microphone in front of me against my will, thrust in front of me. And I'm wrong about all kinds of things. But I'm not wrong about Jesus being our Savior. I'm not wrong about Joseph Smith being a prophet. I'm not wrong about Brigham Young being a prophet, and I'm not wrong about this being God's church. Can I prove that as a historian? No. And frankly, no one else can prove their points historically either in that case. So thank you so much for your question.

Richard We said there were two emails, and to remain on brand, we covered half of one. So we'll get to the next one next week.

Gerrit Well, we assume that everyone stopped listening halfway in.

Richard Oh, for sure.

Gerrit Yeah. I mean, probably even Chris didn't listen. Probably not. Chris, if you're still listening, we know that you're not. Thank you and we'll talk to everyone next week.

Intro Thank you for listening to the Standard of Truth podcast hosted by historian Dr. Gerrit Dirkmaat. If you know anybody that could benefit from the material in this episode, please share it with them, and for more resources, visit standardoftruth.com. Until next time.

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Matthew 13:57

Hebrews 5:4

Answering My Gospel Questions (Church Institute course)

Gospel Topics Essays

Chris, listener email

1 Corinthians 15:29

D&C 124:41

E. D. Howe, Mormonism Unveiled (1834)

Daniel 2:34-35, 44

Joseph Smith to John S. Carter

Joseph Smith letter on baptism for relatives who would have accepted the gospel (not named on air)

Gerrit Dirkmaat and Michael Hubbard MacKay, Let's Talk About the Translation of the Book of Mormon

Church magazine photographs of Joseph Smith's seer stone

1 Corinthians 11:24

Romans 3:23

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