Jonathan Neville vs. Royal Skousen

Royal Skousen’s latest volume from the Critical Text of the Book of Mormon endeavor is now available for purchase, and Jonathan Neville doesn’t like Skousen’s theory on how the translation was accomplished:

I’ve often expressed my respect and admiration for Brother Skousen’s work on the Book of Mormon. I rely on it all the time for understanding the details of the Original Manuscript and the Printer’s Manuscript. However, I think his Early Modern English theory is misguided and has unfortunate repercussions.

Based on reports from friends of mine who attended Skousen’s lecture this week at BYU, Skousen, when asked point-blank about his beliefs said that he believes God is directly responsible for the translation. (We’ll need to wait for the video of the presentation to be released to hear his exact quote.)

What bothers Neville is the following passage from page 6 of Skousen’s book, which addresses the quotations from the King James Bible that are found in the Book of Mormon:

All of this quoting from the King James Bible [in the Book of Mormon] is problematic, but only if we assume that the Book of Mormon translation literally represents what was on the plates. Yet the evidence in The Nature of the Original Language (parts 3 and 4) argues that the Book of Mormon translation is tied to Early Modern English, and even the themes of the Book of Mormon are connected to the Protestant Reformation, dating from the same time period. What this means is that the Book of Mormon is a creative and cultural translation of what was on the plates, not a literal one. Based on the linguistic evidence, the translation must have involved serious intervention from the English-language translator, who was not Joseph Smith. Nonetheless, the text was revealed to Joseph Smith by means of his translation instrument, and he read it off word for word to his scribe. To our modern-day, skeptical minds, this is indeed “a marvelous work and a wonder.”

Neville claims:

As near as I can tell, all the M2C intellectuals agree with Brother Skousen’s views of the translation, at least in part. It fits the M2C* narrative that Joseph was an ignorant speculator who misled the Church with the New York Cumorah, his claim that he translated the plates with the Urim and Thummim, etc.

Sigh. “M2C” has evolved from Neville’s term for Latter-day Saints who believe the Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica to Neville’s term for Latter-day Saints who believe anything he disagrees with.

In any case, his accusation that “all the M2C intellectuals agree with Brother Skousen’s views of the translation” is yet another overstatement on Neville’s part. There is, in fact, rigorous debate among legitimate Latter-day Saint scholars (of which Neville is not one) about Joseph’s translation method. For example, Brant Gardner, a prominent scholar and author whom Neville mentions in his blog post and whom he certainly considers a leading “M2C intellectual,” disagrees with Skousen on numerous points. (Gardner has written an entire book that sets forth his views on the translation.)

Neville further claims that “It is standard M2C doctrine that Joseph did not provide a literal translation of what was on the plates,” which is why (according to him) “M2Cers” teach that towers in the Book of Mormon were made of stone, the destructions at Christ’s death involved volcanos, etc., even though these things aren’t explicitly mentioned in the Book of Mormon. This is more than a little hypocritical of Neville, for he and other Heartlanders have made interpretive claims that are not directly stated in the text that are far more egregious than anything claimed by “M2C intellectuals.”

In any event, what Neville seemingly fails to comprehend is that there is no such thing as a literal translation of a text—any text. Every translation is a “creative and cultural translation” (Skousen’s phrase), to a greater or lesser extent. There’s no way to translate any text without injecting meaning into it that the original speaker or writer did not intend. A “literal translation” is not only impossible, it would be gibberish to the intended audience.

The biggest problem with Neville’s blog post about Skousen is that he falls back on his usual stock-in-trade: Claim that Skousen’s work is good and that he’s a faithful member of the Church, etc., but dismiss his conclusions because they rub him and his fundamentalist views the wrong way. “All the M2C intellectuals agree with Brother Skousen,” he asserts; therefore Neville’s Heartlander audience can safely disregard what he has to say.

But here’s the thing: Skousen deserves to be taken seriously.

Royal Skousen’s curriculum vitae is 50 pages long. He received his B.A. from Brigham Young University in 1969, with a major in English and minor in mathematics. Within less than three years, he received both his M.A. (1971) and Ph.D. (1972) in linguistics from the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign. After being employed for seven years as a professor of linguistics at the University of Texas, in 1979 he became an an assistant professor of English and linguistics at BYU; he has been a full professor there since 1986. He has been a visiting professor or research fellow in linguistics at the University of California at San Diego, the University of Tampere, Finland, and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in The Netherlands, where he did work on analogical modeling and quantum computing. He’s consulted for numerous corporations and organizations, including WordPerfect Corporation (he developed the first spell checker for version 4.0 of their word processing software in 1984) and the Scripture Committee of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (1989–1999). He is fluent in Finnish and has reading knowledge of German, French, Koine Greek, Latin, Old English, Swedish, and Hebrew. He has been the author or editor of nineteen books (with three forthcoming) and seventy-seven published scholarly articles.

Since May 1988, Skousen has been the editor of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project—now a nearly thirty-two-year endeavor. By my count, since 2001 he has produced, through that project, 10,462 printed pages on the text of the Book of Mormon, including The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text, published by Yale University Press, and the two-volume photographic reprint of the printer’s manuscript, published the Church Historian’s Press.

Needless to say, Dr. Skousen is one of the most informed and accomplished scholars currently living and working. He knows more, from a scholarly standpoint, about the language of the Book of Mormon than any human being who has ever lived.

Now, Professor Skousen’s credentials and achievements do not automatically guarantee that his hypotheses on the origins of the Book of Mormon text are correct. He could be the world’s most educated and experienced scholar and still come to incorrect conclusions. But the length and breadth of his scholarly work on the text of the Book of Mormon simply require one to take him seriously, engage his arguments in good faith, and—if one disagrees with his conclusions—come up with alternative hypotheses that fit the mountain of evidence that Skousen has assembled.

Has Jonathan Neville done any of that? No. Instead, he’s simply dismissed Skousen’s arguments by falsely implying that Skousen is just another intellectual who rejects Joseph Smith’s prophetic gifts and Oliver Cowdery’s witness. Neville has responded to Skousen’s mountain of evidence by erecting a “Bandini Mountain” of assertion.

—Peter Pan

* “M2C” is Jonathan Neville’s acronym for the theory that the Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica and that the hill Cumorah in the Book of Mormon is not the same hill in New York where Joseph Smith received the plates of Mormon.

Someone should really bring Jonathan Neville up to speed

In dozens of blog posts dating back to at least September 2018, Jonathan Neville has relentlessly criticized Royal Skousen and Stanford Carmack’s theory that the syntax of the Book of Mormon matches structures and patterns found in Early Modern English.

Neville incorrectly ascribes this theory to “LDS [sic] intellectuals” who are part of the “M2C* citation cartel.” He insists that these intellectuals (which include people associated with the Interpreter Foundation, Book of Mormon Central, FAIR, and religious instructors at BYU/CES)

are telling us that Joseph didn’t really use the Urim and Thummim, didn’t really use the plates, and didn’t really translate anything. Instead, according to them, Joseph merely read words that appeared on a seer stone he put in a hat (or read words that appeared in vision). They’re trying to persuade us that the “actual translator” was some unknown supernatural being who, inexplicably, used Early Modern English combined with early 1800s expressions, complete with anachronisms that critics have long claimed are evidence of 19th century composition.

Neville, as usual, is simply wrong about all of this. His claims are misrepresentations.

There are two corrections that he should immediately make to his claims:

First, as I explained over a year ago:

[Neville’s] accusation that “all the M2C intellectuals agree with Brother Skousen’s views of the translation” is yet another overstatement on Neville’s part. There is, in fact, rigorous debate among legitimate Latter-day Saint scholars (of which Neville is not one) about Joseph’s translation method. For example, Brant Gardner, a prominent scholar and author whom Neville mentions in his blog post and whom he certainly considers a leading “M2C intellectual,” disagrees with Skousen on numerous points. (Gardner has written an entire book that sets forth his views on the translation.)

Royal Skousen

Far from being some monolithic theory that dominates the discourse among Latter-day Saint scholars, the translation method of the Book of Mormon is, in fact, a point of ongoing debate. There are scholars in the “tight control” camp (e.g., Skousen), scholars in the “loose control” camp (e.g., Gardner), and some scholars who take a hybrid approach.

But Neville shows no evidence of even being aware that there are multiple views held by the broader scholarly community. He’s so hyperfocused on defeating the dreaded and dangerous “M2C citation cartel” that he’s left himself ignorant of what the people in that supposed cartel actually say and write and believe.

Second, Neville’s claim about Royal Skousen’s theories are both fallacious and out of date. Skousen himself has publicly stated that he’s abandoned a theory he unwisely floated early on his research into the text of the Book of Mormon.

This example is from an answer Skousen gave at a conference panel in August 2017:

[Question:] Can you share any thoughts you might have on why the Lord chose Early Modern English?

[Royal Skousen:] Well, I don’t know. A lot of people want me to answer that question, and I’m studying it. And Stan Carmack is helping me, and we’re going to publish a book in next few months, part 3 of the Critical Text of the ,Book of Mormon—part 3, volume 3—that will go through the whole language, showing all the phrases, the words, and some of the syntax that all derives from Early Modern English, not from Joseph Smith’s time.

Joseph Smith is not the translator of the text. The evidence is really very strong for this. A lot of people want me to explain why, and one time I foolishly suggested there was a “translation committee.” That was a mistake, because, first of all, it gets in the way—everybody wants to know who’s on the translation committee.… The real question is, what’s this language of this text like? So that’s what we’re studying, and it’s going to be made available, and you can study it yourself. And a lot of people have a lot of views, but they’re not studying it. Someday you can ask the Lord; he’ll tell you how he did it. But I myself don’t know, and I think it just gets in the way, and so I take back my statement. I put it in print, even. “The Lord or his translation committee”—it was dumb, dumb.

[10:13–12:12]

In a more recent interview an interview recorded a few years ago and released on March 22, 2021, Skousen again clarified his view on a “translation committee” and what he meant by “Joseph Smith is not the translator of the text.”

The following is a long extract from his interview, but I believe it’s worth quoting because it gives Skousen the opportunity to explain his views are and shows how complex and nuanced they are—far from the oversimplistic caricatures that Jonathan Neville continually gives us:

Some people have said—I even entertained it a while—“Well, maybe God didn’t do the translation of the Book of Mormon.” That he had a committee. I’ll state it—I’ve stated it once; I don’t state it anymore because I don’t believe it—and God had a committee, though, of Protestant Reformers, you know, in England—English guys that had died—and got them all together and said, “Here’s the translation; I want you to do this Book of Mormon for me, and we going to give it to Joseph Smith down the road,” or something. [Laughs]

So this is the “committee” idea, and these guys are from the 15 and 1600s. Now, first of all, the committee has to go from before 1540, and it’s got to go up to 1730, because you’ve got vocabulary that some of it’s coming in and so forth, so it’s a mix—that’s one of the things. But you can imagine lots of things; just because I can imagine it doesn’t mean it happened this way.

But then there’s one real problem with this theory of the “committee.” So, this is the problem: Stan [Carmack] and I were sitting there studying Early Modern English writers, and we’ve got this guy, [Nicholas] Harpsfield who wrote the life story of Sir Thomas Moore. He wrote it in about 1557 or so. And Stan is reading it to me. It’s in the time period of the kinds of things we’ve been seeing in the Book of Mormon. And about every other sentence, Stan reads a word that I don’t understand at all. So, there’s something like ween—it doesn’t mean “to wean a baby”; it’s just in there.… So we stop, we get out the Oxford English Dictionary, and say, “Okay, let’s find this word.” We don’t know it. We go down another couple of sentences and we find another word. We don’t know it; we gotta look it up. So, if we have a group of guys [in the] 15- [or] 1600s who are putting together a text, there should be words in there that we don’t understand—at all. Well, we have that in the Book of Mormon when Isaiah is quoted: carbuncles, the besom of destruction. We get words, in fact, [that] we have no idea what they mean, and we have to look them up.

But when we get to the Book of Mormon, we don’t get that kind of vocabulary at all. We may get errand, which originally means “message” but now means ”task,” but it’s still in English. So when Joseph Smith says “errand,” the scribe is going to recognize the word, [and] he’ll write it down. Even though the meaning may have changed, the words are still the same. This is true of virtually every word in the Book of Mormon—they’re all understandable to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery as far as words go; they haven’t dropped out of the language. Whereas if I read a 1570 book, I’m going to find, “Oh, I don’t know this word,” “I don’t know that word,” “Stan what is this? We’re going to have to look it all up!” And when we read Isaiah in the Book of Mormon, we’ve got to look up all these words that irritate us—all these women with their wimples and all the paraphenalia [that] they’re wearing. “What are these things?” We’d like some notes; we gotta be told. But you don’t have to do that with the rest of the Book of Mormon.

What does this mean? Well, it means that the translation is being prepared for Joseph Smith so that he can read it off, and the scribe can write it down, and they will recognize the words, even though they may not recognize their meanings quite right.… So, however this text is being prepared, it’s being prepared for Joseph Smith’s time. It’s being sort of “filtered,” so there won’t be the besoms in there and the carbuncles and the wimples. So it can’t be that there’s some committee that just got together and put it all together and said, “Okay, we’ve done our job; now we’ll just wait for Joseph Smith.”

So, I think it shows, however this translation is prepared, it’s been prepared for Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery and the other scribes. And the Lord has his hand in it; he’s overseeing it.… When you get this idea of a committee, you sort of think, “Oh, it was done, and it’s just sort of sitting there, and now we can just wait for Joseph Smith.” Well, no—no, the Lord just doesn’t let this thing go; he’s preparing it, he’s working with it.

Ultimately, we’re just finding evidence that this text is well-crafted; it looks like it was worked on, beginning in the 1500s, but it’s been worked on—the translation—for a long time, and it’s been worked on going towards Joseph Smith. So we’re talking about a long period of time. It’s very well-controlled.

It’s got things in it which aren’t Early Modern English, too—it’s got these Hebrew [artifacts?], these extra ands, which we’ve never found: “If you come / and surely you should / and I will come” we haven’t found in any dialect of English anywhere. But there are lots of them in the Book of Mormon; I’ve got a whole list, ten pages of them in the original text. They’re in the Book of Mormon. So, we’re not going to just dismiss them and say, “Joseph Smith had too much beer that day,” or something. People come up with all kinds of crazy theories to explain anything, but what we want to do is say, “What’s actually in there? And what does it mean?”

The conclusion is, it’s a text that looks like it’s controlled, word-for-word, down to the ands. Those extra ands are being put in there. All those and it came to passes are there for reasons, and all the ors—correcting ors—are there for reasons, but they’re there. Before we jump off the cliff with theories of why they’re there, we want to know what exactly it is and where they might be coming from and whatnot.

That’s what I do, and I think too many people have already figured out the Book of Mormon. I gave a talk, “A Theory! A Theory! We Have Already Got a Theory, and There Cannot Be Any More Theories!” And I’ve given another talk where I’ve changed my mind on ten different things, because evidence, evidence, will make you change your mind. When I started out this project, I thought Joseph Smith got ideas, and he put them into his own language; it was the only way I could explain the bad grammar. That’s what I thought. But the evidence is becoming, to me, overwhelming that, no, that isn’t the way it occurred. So I think that we have to be able to be willing to change our mind; we have to look at the evidence. And I may change my mind again on various things, but I’m not going to hide it—if I discover I’ve made a mistake, I’m gonna say something, and I’m gonna put it in writing.

[45:15–54:13]

Notice how Skousen’s explanation sounds nothing like Jonathan Neville’s distorted summary of it? Skousen’s theory of translation is complex and rich and full, but Neville doesn’t seem to deal well with complexity or nuance.

What Skousen appears to be saying, if I’m interpreting him correctly, is that the translation of the Book of Mormon came by revelation from the Lord. Joseph Smith didn’t “translate” the Book of Mormon in the usual sense of a translator who uses his intellect to convert the meaning of a text in one language into another language; rather, the Lord gave Joseph the translation by inspiration.

That explanation should be thoroughly uncontroversial, but Jonathan Neville insists, for reasons that are not clear to me, that Joseph was the translator in the sense that he controlled the language of the English Book of Mormon text and that text reflected Joseph’s grammar. Skousen’s work contradicts that hypothesis.

Neville is certainly welcome to advance his own explanations for how the Book of Mormon was produced. He’s not, however, going to misrepresent the arguments and the characters of those who disagree him without getting some pushback. (Hence this blog’s raison d’être.)

—Peter Pan
 
* “M2C” is Jonathan Neville’s acronym for the theory that the Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica and that the hill Cumorah in the Book of Mormon is not the same hill in New York where Joseph Smith received the plates of Mormon.
 

Another round of Jonathan Neville vs. Royal Skousen

On February 8, 2021, Jonathan Neville lobbed another dreadful volley in opposition to the work that Royal Skousen has done on Early Modern English in the Book of Mormon. This time, his remarks were in response to something written by Daniel Peterson about Skousen’s research and the supposed “arrogance” of the very name of the Interpreter, the foundation Peterson created and heads.

Neville opines:

We assume that members of the credentialed class of LDS scholars have the qualifications and expertise they claim. But none of us have voted to sustain them in any capacity related to their credentials. Deferring to them on these issues is as foolish as deferring to non-LDS scholars. We have the right and responsibility to think for ourselves.

Candidly, it’s hard for me to conceive of anything more obtuse or asinine that Neville could have possibly written. No one has ever even so much as suggested that scholars should be “sustained” or “deferred to” on any matter whatsoever, whether those scholars are at Brigham Young University or the Interpreter Foundation or any other private organization. Of course every person has “the right and responsibility to think for” for himself or herself; the point of scholarship is to introduce new evidence and stimulate new ways of thinking.

Even the pseudoscholarship done by Heartlanders benefits us by prompting responses from more competent and responsible researchers who clarify and correct the false information and erroneous conclusions they sell to unsuspecting Latter-day Saints.

And I should add that no one has voted to sustain Jonathan Neville as a corrector of living prophets, neither has Letter VII been sustained as part of the standard works.

As far as Neville’s critique of Royal Skousen’s work and theories, the comments I made on January 19, 2020, still apply:

Professor Skousen’s credentials and achievements do not automatically guarantee that his hypotheses on the origins of the Book of Mormon text are correct. He could be the world’s most educated and experienced scholar and still come to incorrect conclusions. But the length and breadth of his scholarly work on the text of the Book of Mormon simply require one to take him seriously, engage his arguments in good faith, and—if one disagrees with his conclusions—come up with alternative hypotheses that fit the mountain of evidence that Skousen has assembled.

Has Jonathan Neville done any of that? No. Instead, he’s simply dismissed Skousen’s arguments by falsely implying that Skousen is just another intellectual who rejects Joseph Smith’s prophetic gifts and Oliver Cowdery’s witness.

—Peter Pan
 

Jonathan Neville and the importance of reading comprehension

Jonathan Neville, advocate for the Heartland hoax, has a singular ability to misread the texts that he uses. His March 3, 2019, blog post, “The M2C hoax – Part 8 – impact on Church history,” contains some prime examples of this.

In his post, Neville quotes from Oliver Cowdery’s “Letter IV,” one of a series of letters that Oliver wrote for publication in the Latter Day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate containing his record of the early history of the restored Church. This portion of Letter IV contains Oliver’s description of the angel Moroni’s first appearance to Joseph Smith in September 1823:

He [Moroni] then proceeded and gave a general account of the promises made to the fathers, and also gave a history of the aborigines of this country, and said they were literal descendants of Abraham. He represented them as once being an enlightened and intelligent people, possessing a cerrect [sic] knowledge of the gospel, and the plan of restoration and redemption. He said this history was written and deposited not far from that place, and that it was our brother’s [i.e., Joseph Smith’s] privilege, if obedient to the commandments of the Lord, to obtain, and translate the same by the means of the Urim and Thummim, which were deposited for that purpose with the record.

Neville then states his belief that, “to accommodate M2C*, our LDS scholars and historians are teaching that this story is impossible” (outside of the fact that Moroni did appear to Joseph Smith, he grants). What are the scholars and historians teaching, pray tell? Neville informs us:

According to the intellectuals, the history referred to was not of the aborigines of this country; it was a history of a still-undiscovered group of Hebrew Mayans, living in Mesoamerica.

Since, by the time of Joseph Smith, virtually every Native American had Lehi for an ancestor, the Book of Mormon is a history of the ancestors of “the aborigines of this country,” whether you define country to mean the United States (as Neville does) or a much broader swath of territory (as Joseph Smith did).

They were not literal descendants of Abraham; their ancestors migrated from Asia thousands of years before Adam and Eve were created.

The DNA evidence for the origins of Native Americans is much more complex than Neville lets on. But Lehi and Sariah are “are among the ancestors of the American Indians,” as the current introduction to the Book of Mormon published by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints indicates.

The history was not “written not far from” Joseph’s home; instead, it was written thousands of miles away in Mesoamerica, and then Moroni hauled it to an obscure hill in New York where Joseph found it.

Not so fast, Brother Neville! We’ve noticed how you edited the quote to make it say something that it doesn’t! Oliver actually wrote: “[Moroni] said this history was written and deposited not far from that place.…”

There are two equally-valid ways to read Moroni’s statement:

1. The history was written not far from Joseph’s home and deposited not far from Joseph’s home.
2. The history was written and the history was deposited not far from Joseph’s home.

Neville believes Moroni meant it the first way. Most other Latter-day Saints believe he meant it the second way.

(All of this assumes, of course, that Oliver was directly quoting Moroni, not paraphrasing him. Like Lucy Mack Smith, Joseph Smith didn’t have a tape recorder or write down what Moroni said to him.)

Joseph did not translate the record with the Urim and Thummim; instead, he put a stone in a hat and read the words that appeared.

Actually, Joseph used both the Nephite interpreters and his seer stone to translate the Book of Mormon. Both instruments were later referred to by early Latter-day Saints as “Urim and Thummim.”

For that matter, Joseph never even used the plates; they remained under a cloth or outdoors the entire time he was reading from the stone.

Neville apparently doesn’t believe the eyewitness testimony of Emma Smith, who assisted her husband as he translated.

(It must be nice to simply ignore or toss out any evidence that contradicts one’s personal theories.)

Joseph couldn’t have been the original English translator anyway because the language in the text is much too sophisticated for Joseph and statistical analysis shows it is a form of Early Modern English that had to have been somehow translated in the 1500s. Joseph was not the translator; he was merely the transmitter of someone else’s translation.

This is a gross distortion of Royal Skousen’s conclusions, based on over two decades of painstakingly reconstructing the original English text of the Book of Mormon. Skousen writes: “Evidence from the original manuscript supports the traditional belief that Joseph Smith received a revealed text through the interpreters. This idea of a controlled text originates with statements made by the witnesses of the translation. The evidence from the original manuscript, when joined with internal evidence from the text itself, suggests that this control was tight, but not iron-clad.”

Not all Book of Mormon scholars agree with Skousen’s “tight translation” theory, but one thing is certain: Royal Skousen has forgotten more about the early text of the Book of Mormon than Jonathan Neville knows.

In his blog post, Neville also goes on to (again) quote Joseph’s 1834 letter to Emma in which Joseph expressed (perhaps poetically) his belief that he and Zion’s Camp were wandering over “the plains of the Nephites” as they made their way across Illinois. Neville has yet to demonstrate that the contents of this letter were received by Joseph as a revelation and weren’t just his assumptions and interpretations of the Book of Mormon narrative. (Unlike Neville, I and many other Latter-day Saints don’t believe Joseph Smith was omniscient. And neither did Joseph himself.)

Neville also (again) claims that “Joseph and Oliver (and others) actually visited the depository of Nephite records and artifacts in the hill Cumorah in New York” and that ”they spoke about it to Brigham Young and others.” I’ve already demonstrated on this blog that there’s no evidence whatsoever that Brigham Young learned about the account of the cave full of plates from Joseph and Oliver; rather, the evidence seems to indicate that he received his account (perhaps a garbled oned) from Heber C. Kimball, who received it from W.W. Phelps.

The more I read Jonathan Neville, clearer it has become to me that he lacks the ability to critically read and understand the texts he cites. This is one reason, I believe, why he’s fallen so hard for the Heartland hoax.

—Peter Pan

* “M2C” is Jonathan Neville’s acronym for the theory that the Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica and that the hill Cumorah in the Book of Mormon is not the same hill in New York where Joseph Smith received the plates of Mormon.

Jonathan Neville defames people he admires and wins arguments in the shower

Captain Hook and I have been busy in our personal lives this week; as a result, we’ve let several blog posts by Jonathan Neville slip by without a response. In this summary post, I’ll note just a few of the fallacious arguments he’s made recently.

In his criticism of Book of Mormon Central’s KnoWhy #520, “Did Jesus Bleed from Every Pore?”…

(Has anyone else noticed that Neville has finally stopped referring to these articles as “No-Wise”? We’ve criticized him about that on this blog; good for him for dropping the childish name-calling.)

…Neville informs us that Book of Mormon Central’s scholars “are unaware of important sources Joseph drew upon.” He tells us about one of these supposed sources:

As near as I can determine, the first Christian writer to claim that Christ sweat actual blood from every pore was James Hervey, published in 1764 and subsequent editions.…

Why is Hervey important? Because his books were on sale in Palmyra in 1819, and Joseph donated a Hervey book to the Nauvoo Library in 1844. Hervey was a significant influence on Joseph’s vocabulary, as I’m showing in an upcoming book.

This is an exceptionally unusual claim for Neville to make, because it sounds an awful lot like the one he himself argued against in his previous blog post: “Critics claim Joseph and/or co-conspirators wrote the entire [Book of Mormon], drawing from their experiences and sources available to them. The language [of the Book of Mormon] is that of Joseph and/or his co-conspirators.” Yet here we have Neville claiming (perhaps unconsciously) that a book on sale in Palmyra in 1819 is the source Joseph drew upon for the idea and specific language that Jesus bled from every pore. (I thought it was supposed to be the “M2C”* that’s causing people two disbelieve in the historicity of the Book of Mormon!)

It will be interesting to see how Neville threads this needle in his upcoming book.

Speaking of his previous post (“M2C impact on Church history,” June 20, 2019), in addition to Neville again preaching his bizarre “two sets of plates” theory, there are two things he does in it that caught my eye:

First, Neville rejects the testimonies of David Whitmer and Martin Harris that Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon using a seer stone that he placed into a hat. He, instead, prefers to the statements of Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery from the early 1830s that Joseph used the Urim and Thummim (a.k.a. the Nephite interpreters) and dismisses arguments that Joseph and Oliver were, by that time, referring to any seer stone as “Urim and Thummim.” So here we see Neville rejecting first-hand testimony of two of the Book of Mormon Witnesses because it is late—yet he himself freely accepts third-hand, late testimony about the “cave of plates” in the New York hill Cumorah. (I’m quite sure Neville would agree with Emerson on the senselessness of consistency.)

Second, Neville makes this sweeping claim without (as usual) any support or evidence:

Because the stone-in-the-hat scenario [of Book of Mormon translation] has been embraced in today’s Church, the concept of translation has evolved to the point where most LDS intellectuals now think Joseph merely transmitted (transcribed) words that appeared on the stone. They claim the language is not Joseph Smith’s because he was unschooled and didn’t know big words, the grammar of Early Modern English, etc. [In other words], our LDS scholars now teach that Joseph didn’t really translate the text. He simply read out loud the words that appeared on the stone in the hat.

Setting aside Neville’s nonsensical claim that a translation isn’t really a translation (!), he appears to be completely ignorant of the debate between those who side with Royal Skousen and Stanford Carmack in arguing that the words Joseph dictated were, word for word, what he saw in vision (a so-called “tight” translation), and those who side with Brant Gardner and Jack Welch and argue that the Book of Mormon contains words and phrases drawn from Joseph Smith’s own vocabulary and understanding of whatever he saw in vision (a “loose” translation).

Instead, Neville wants to fallaciously frame the debate so that it’s between the “M2C” scholars who argue for a tight translation and Neville’s loose translation theory (publication pending). To do so, he has to ignore the long, rich history of the (friendly) debate between Book of Mormon scholars, all of whom he would include in the “M2C” category. For Jonathan Neville, the debate hasn’t begun until he has spoken on the subject!

Next, with regard to his June 21, 2019, blog post, “Dan, BMC, and deferring to scholars”:

Neville is continually stating in his blogs that he “admires and respects” the “fine young scholars” involved with what he (pejoratively) calls the “M2C citation cartel,” yet his complete and total lack of respect is evident from statements like these:

• “We love all the people at [Book of Mormon Central], but seriously, they’re the last ones people should listen to regarding the [Book of Mormon] witnesses.”
• “[Book of Mormon Central and the Interpreter Foundation] are the least credible organizations imaginable to support the testimonies of the Book of Mormon witnesses.”
• “The strongest attacks on the credibility of the Three Witnesses come directly from within the Church—from the M2C citation cartel, including Book of Mormon Central, the Interpreter, FairMormon, and the rest.”
• “[Book of Mormon Central] has zero credibility when it comes to supporting the testimony of the Three Witnesses. Why does anyone pay them any attention at all?”

And Neville concludes with this absolutely mind-boggling statement:

I’m told Dan Peterson—a wonderful, faithful, smart, and all-around great guy— has been complaining about my criticism of the Interpreter. Maybe someday I’ll read what he has to say, but it doesn’t matter because he has had emotional reactions like this for decades, from the FARMS days through the present. He’s taken what he perceives to be a lot of arrows for what he perceives to be his defense of the Church. If he has a problem, I’m always available for a meeting. I’ve never turned down an invitation to meet with any of the M2C intellectuals, but Dan has declined my invitation to meet. Now he’s producing the Witnesses film through the Interpreter Foundation. We can be confident he’s not going to allow viewers to know what the witnesses said about the New York Cumorah.

Then we have Book of Mormon Central, which is pretty much the same story. I’m told one of their employees is also complaining about my criticism of M2C, but that doesn’t matter, either. He’s just another employee doing a job. His bosses insist the witnesses and the prophets are wrong about the New York Cumorah because of M2C, so he’s doing everything he can to support M2C. I have no problem with that.

I would argue that the scope and scale of Neville’s chutzpah has never been demonstrated as clearly as this. These two paragraphs feature the following:

• A thoroughly disingenuous compliment directed toward Daniel C. Peterson.
• An acknowledgment that Peterson has responded to Neville’s criticism of Interpreter, but a refusal to read what Peterson has written so that Neville can perhaps revise or explain what he wrote about it.
• A dismissal of Peterson’s response as an “emotional reaction,” similar to other “emotional reactions like this” that Peterson has supposedly had “for decades.”
• A claim that the calumny and defamation that has repeatedly been heaped upon Peterson by critics of the Church (within and without) is just Peterson’s “perception”—in other words, it’s all in his mind.
• Neville’s willingness to defame Peterson publicly, but only to actually engage with him privately.
• A dismissal of Stephen Smoot as “just another employee doing a job.” (Smoot doesn’t really believe the things he’s written about the Heartland hoax, you see—he’s only paid to write them!)
• A faux indifference to Smoot’s criticisms, because he has “no problem” with him “doing everything he can to support” what “his bosses” tell him to do.

Brother Neville, it’s completely acceptable for you to believe that the Interpreter Foundation, Book of Mormon Central, and FairMormon represent some kind of “fifth column” of conspirators who operate inside the Church to promote heresies and suppress the truth as you understand it. You’re welcome to that opinion (although I and many others would, of course, argue against it). What’s really weird, though, is your constant refrain about how much you “respect” and “admire” these people who are, in your view, trying to “censor” the historical record so that members of the Church don’t learn about what you consider to be revealed and inspired teachings on the location of the hill Cumorah. So, please drop the pretense. You clearly don’t respect and admire them because you think they’re damaging testimonies and causing a decline in Church membership growth. The two paragraphs in the preceding quote demonstrate how you truly feel much louder than any dishonest claims of admiration.

Another item from his June 20th post that I found curious:

[Book of Mormon Central] expressly rejects Oliver Cowdery’s statements that he and Joseph visited the depository of Nephite records in the Hill Cumorah on multiple occasions.

Which “statements” made by Oliver Cowdery would those be, Brother Neville? The third-hand ones that don’t appear anywhere in the historical record until twenty-five years after the event supposedly took place (and five years after Oliver Cowdery’s death)? And how can you claim that Book of Mormon Central “expressly rejects” these statements when their own KnoWhy on the sword of Laban concludes that the “cave of plates” account was either “a somewhat symbolic vision, [or] a vision of a real location with real items, or an actual cave which [Joseph and Oliver] visited in upstate New York”—three options, none of which rejects that something actually did happen?

Finally, in his June 23, 2019, post, “Working with M2C believers,” Neville gives his readers another example of how to have a conversation with someone who disagrees with the Heartland theory of Book of Mormon geography:

If you know any believers in M2C (the Mesoamerican/two-Cumorahs theory), ask them one question:

I accept the teachings of the prophets and apostles about the New York Cumorah. Can you help me understand why you disagree?

CAUTION: Usually, they will become defensive. If they work for the M2C citation cartel, they will become angry. You will see their response boils down to [“because the New York Cumorah doesn’t fit my interpretation of the text”], but they resist this reality as long as they can.

Neville’s post should be an entry in the multivolume series Hypothetical Arguments I’ve Won in the Shower. It’s a textbook example of the Strawman Fallacy in action.

First, what evidence does he have that someone who believes in a Mesoamerican Book of Mormon geography will “usually…become defensive” or even “angry” at this question? Neville doesn’t give us a shred of evidence that that is the “usual” reaction, and there’s no reason to believe that he has any.

Second, notice how he again not-so-subtly defames Book of Mormon Central, Interpreter, etc.? They don’t just get defensive, “they will become angry”! (This is, of course, because they’re paid to promote “M2C”.)

Third, there’s absolutely no reason to get defensive or angry when asked this question by a Heartlander, because the answer is simple: There is no revealed declaration that the New York hill is the hill Cumorah. Certainly, many prophets and apostles (including Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery) have called the New York hill “Cumorah,” and some (including Oliver Cowdery, in Letter VII) have directly stated that the final battles described in the Book of Mormon took place there. But assertion is not revelation.

As I wrote in a blog post just over a week ago, most believers in a Mesoamerican geography would respond this way:

“I reject the premise of your query because you are simply begging the question: You presume that statements made by prophets about the hill Cumorah being the hill in New York are based on revelation, rather than on commonly-held belief. If you can point to a statement about the location of the hill Cumorah that has been presented to the Church as a revelation, then we can have a discussion on your terms. Until then, I prefer to follow the published statements of living prophets and apostles who have affirmed that ‘the Church does not take a position on the specific geographic locations of Book of Mormon events in the ancient Americas’—a statement that includes the location of the hill Cumorah.”

Defaming people he asserts that he admires and claiming to win hypothetical arguments that misstate what his opponents would actually say are both indications that Jonathan Neville is disconnected from reality in some way. In his mind he’s fighting a battle for the soul of the restored gospel, when in reality he’s simply demonstrating his preference for the teachings of dead prophets he agrees with over the living prophets he disagrees with.

—Peter Pan

* “M2C” is Jonathan Neville’s acronym for the theory that the Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica and that the hill Cumorah in the Book of Mormon is not the same hill in New York where Joseph Smith received the plates of Mormon.

Neville-Neville Land 2020 year in review

2020 was the second year of operation for this humble blog. This year we published 74 posts (75, including this one) examining the heterodox beliefs and assertions of Jonathan Neville and his comrades in the Heartland Book of Mormon movement.

Among the most significant developments this year, I would include the following:

• The Neville-Neville Land blog demonstrated that Jonathan Neville’s claims about how Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon are in opposition to the public teachings of President Russell M. Nelson, President M. Russell Ballard, President Dieter F. Uchtdorf, Elder D. Todd Christofferson, President Wilford Woodruff, President George Q. Cannon, and Elder B.H. Roberts. Neville’s continued insistence that Joseph Smith never translated by placing a seer stone into a hat—which Neville ominously began calling “SITH” this year—ignores the context of Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery’s statements in the 1830s and rejects the teachings of living prophets and apostles as well as the testimonies of Church leaders who knew Joseph Smith personally.
• Neville continued to openly criticize apostles and other general authorities this year, including Elder Gerrit W. Gong of the Quorum of the Twelve (see here and here for context), Elder LeGrand R. Curtis Jr. of the Seventy, and pretty much all Church leaders who have spoken in General Conference since 2007.
• Neville also continued to attack the Church’s official magazines for not teaching Heartlander beliefs. He literally accused the editors of the Ensign of using Orwellian methods to cover up the truth and recommended that investigators and interested nonmembers stay away from official Church publications because they supposedly teach falsehoods. He also continued to attack Saints, the new official Church history with a foreword by the First Presidency, for not teaching that the hill Cumorah in New York is the same hill Cumorah in the Book of Mormon. He told his readers to not give credence to Saints because the Brethren supposedly don’t know what it contains.
• Neville also inexplicably defended critics of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints like Wayne Cowdrey and John Dehlin. I’m seriously inclined to ask him whose side he’s on in the war for the souls of God’s children.

In keeping with the tradition set last year, here are the top ten Neville-Neville Land posts for 2020 by number of views:

1. FIRM Foundation accuses the Church of deceiving the elect (February 18, 2020)
2. Jonathan Neville still doesn’t get it (March 3, 2019)
3. When Heartlanders are unintentionally hilarious (February 29, 2020)
4. My latest example of “outrage theater” (May 15, 2020)
5. A response to Opie regarding Wayne May (July 26, 2020)
6. Jonathan Neville vs. Royal Skousen (January 19, 2020)
7. Wayne May and the apostasy of the Heartlanders (July 11, 2020)
8. President M. Russell Ballard, M2C/SITH intellectual (April 20, 2020)
9. Come, Follow Me 2021 doesn’t care about Jonathan Neville’s opinions (July 21, 2020)
10. Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf, SITH intellectual (April 21, 2020)

Hopefully, 2021 will see Jonathan Neville back away from his extremist views and bring himself more in line with the teachings of the prophets regarding the Book of Mormon and how the Prophet Joseph Smith translated it.

—Peter Pan

An open reply to Jonathan Neville

On March 31, 2023, I received the following email from Jonathan Neville:

Hi Mike. People have been sending me excerpts from your blog. Seems like it would make more sense to communicate directly. As you know, when I was on Kerry’s podcast [see here—ed.] someone asked if you and I would have lunch and be friends, despite our different views. I’m happy to do that if you are. It turns out, I’ll be in Southern Utah ████ ██████ (███ ██).

I remembered that about 6 years ago you wrote to me suggesting a correction to one of my charts.

I want to accurately represent the position of the M2C/SITH believers. Could you let me know if there is anything in the table below that is incorrect?

Thanks in advance.

All the best,

Jonathan

At the bottom of his email was a table with a side-by-side comparison of his beliefs with his version of the beliefs of those who disagree with him about the location of the hill Cumorah and the means of translating the Book of Mormon. (I’ve included his table below, with my corrections.)

I was happy to have a discussion with him—this is, until I saw what he posted on his “Interpreter Peer Reviews” blog the same day. I have my differences with Jonathan Neville, but I have never called him names as he did by referring to Daniel Peterson—twelve times, no less!—as “Slander Dan.” Likewise, he again stooped to using language from the temple endowment to imply that Peterson is somehow like Satan. (This is a repeat of the same reprehensible behavior he engaged in last December.)

So, after reading his blog post, I’m afraid lunch won’t be possible. If he wants to engage in a free and open dialog, it must be done without name-calling, misrepresentation, and disrespectful use of the temple to disparage those he disagrees with.

Regarding the feedback he requested: I’m being as charitable as possible when I say that the second column in his comparison table grossly misrepresents the views of the people he names at the top of column two. His degree of misrepresentation is so extreme that the second column could only have been written in ignorance or in bad faith.

His comparison table is an example of dichotomous thinking that he regularly appeals to. Framing the debate as “Joseph and Oliver either told the truth or they didn’t tell the truth” leaves no room for complexity, nuance, or ambiguity. In doing so, he has cast aside critical analysis and replaced it with the logical fallacy of the false dilemma (“either A or B only”). By characterizing others’ beliefs in the worst light possible—something he does regularly—he can dismiss anyone who disagrees with him as being unfaithful and motivated by prestige, status, or money. This is not an honest or considerate way to approach any debate or discussion.

My suggested corrections to what he wrote in the second column (in red) can be found in the third column (in blue) below. I can’t speak for the other people named in the heading to the second column; I only speak for myself. (Please also note that Stephen Smoot has never used the abbreviated name “Steve.”)

Jonathan Neville	Jonathan Neville’s synopsis of Dan Peterson, Mike Parker, Steve Smoot, Jack Welch, Royal Skousen, and their followers and donors	Mike Parker (who has neither followers nor donors)
Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery told the truth about the Hill Cumorah in New York. Extrinsic evidence corroborates their teachings.	Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery did not tell the truth about the Hill Cumorah and the translation of the Book of Mormon. Oliver Cowdery invented the New York Cumorah, but he was speculating and was wrong. Joseph Smith passively adopted Oliver’s false theory about Cumorah.	There has been no divine revelation that identifies the hill near Joseph Smith’s home as the hill Cumorah of the Book of Mormon. Claims that Moroni called the New York hill Cumorah are late and secondhand and should therefore be treated with caution. Early Latter-day Saints believed that the two hills were the same. That belief was based on assumption, and we cannot and should not fault them for coming to that conclusion. They, of course, did not realize their own assumptions, which is an extremely common human tendency. Extrinsic evidence does not confirm that the New York hill was the hill Cumorah of the Book of Mormon, and internal evidence from the text also strongly suggests that it was not.
Their faithful contemporaries and successors in Church leadership reaffirmed the truth about Cumorah in New York, including members of the First Presidency speaking in General Conference.	Their faithful contemporaries and successors in Church leadership, like Joseph Smith, passively adopted Oliver Cowdery’s false theory about Cumorah and thereby misled everyone for decades until the scholars found the truth.	Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery’s contemporaries and successors shared the same assumptions about the text that they did, and they taught and testified in good faith based on these assumptions. These assumptions became traditions, but just because something is traditional does not make it true (as has been seen in the Church’s recent disavowal of theories that for over a century were used to explain the priesthood ban). The location of the hill Cumorah is not a matter that pertains in any way to salvation; therefore, no one has been “misled” by general authorities who expressed their belief that the hill in New York is the hill Cumorah of the Book of Mormon.
Origin of M2C. Scholars starting with RLDS scholars Stebbins and Hills, and continuing with LDS scholars Sorenson, Welch, Peterson, et al, decided JS, OC and their successors were wrong about Cumorah. Instead, these scholars determined that the real Cumorah is somewhere in southern Mexico (Mesoamerica). Hence the Mesoamerican/two-Cumorahs theory, or M2C, which repudiates the teachings of the prophets about Cumorah and is merely the speculation of intellectuals.	Origin of M2C. Scholars starting with RLDS scholars Stebbins and Hills, and continuing with LDS scholars Sorenson, Welch, Peterson, et al, decided JS, OC and their successors were wrong about Cumorah. Instead, these scholars determined that the real Cumorah is somewhere in southern Mexico (Mesoamerica). Hence the Mesoamerican/two-Cumorahs theory, or M2C, which repudiates the mere false speculation of the prophets about Cumorah and is the truth that must be defended against those who still believe the teachings of the prophets.	Framing the issue as “scholars decided the prophets were wrong about Cumorah” both dishonestly misrepresents the people involved and unfairly accuses them of “repudiating the teachings of the prophets.” No one began or ended with the conclusion that “the prophets were wrong” about anything. Since there has been no revelation about Book of Mormon geography—including the location of the hill Cumorah—the question has been entirely one of finding a location in the Western Hemisphere that best fits, geographically and anthropologically, the descriptions given in the Book of Mormon. Beginning in the late 19th century, careful readers of the Book of Mormon began to realize that the action it describes could not have taken place across the entire Western Hemisphere and must have happened in a much more limited area. Latter-day Saints and members of the Reorganized Church were working along parallel lines (similar to how Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz both independently discovered calculus), but there is no evidence that Saints in Utah were aware of RLDS publications. In 1880, Latter-day Saint George Reynolds proposed the first limited geography model, with Desolation—the land where the hill Cumorah was—located in Central America. (This was published by the Church in their periodical The Juvenile Instructor.) The anonymous 1886 Latter-day Saint publication Plain Facts for Students of the Book of Mormon situated the entire text of the book in northern South America and Central America. In 1909 Elder B.H. Roberts wrote, “The question of Book of Mormon geography is more than ever recognized as an open one by students of the Book,” and that the lands of the Book of Mormon might “be found between Mexico and Yucatan with the isthmus of Tehuantepec between.” During the 20th century, many Latter-day Saint scholars and students of the Book of Mormon developed and refined several competing Mesoamerican Book of Mormon geographical models. (Daniel Peterson and John W. Welch are not key individuals in this and haven’t published any independent research on Book of Mormon geography.) None of these scholars and students has ever written or spoken anything resembling the assertion that a Cumorah in Mesoamerica “is the truth that must be defended against those who still believe the teachings of the prophets.” Those who favor a Mesoamerican geography remain open to serious, reliable evidence that it took place elsewhere. The fraudulent artifacts and implausible geographical models proposed by followers of the Heartland movement fail in every way to meet that standard.
Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery both told the truth about the translation of the Book of Mormon; i.e., that Joseph translated the plates with the Urim and Thummim that came with the plates.	Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery both intentionally misled everyone about the translation because in fact, Joseph never used the plates or the Urim and Thummim to translate the Book of Mormon (at least the text we have today).	Framing the issue as “Joseph and Oliver intentionally misled people” dishonestly misrepresents the views of those who accept that Joseph also used a seer stone to translate the Book of Mormon. Martin Harris—Joseph’s first scribe in translating the Book of Mormon—testified that Joseph used both the Nephite interpreters and a seer stone in the process. The historical record suggests that early Latter-day Saints referred to both items as “Urim and Thummim.” And it’s more than a little disingenuous for Jonathan Neville to accuse others of claiming Joseph Smith “intentionally misled everyone about the translation” when he himself has used his “demonstration theory” to argue that Joseph Smith did exactly that. (See below.)
Witnesses who rejected the leadership of Brigham Young, such as David Whitmer and Emma Smith, are less credible than what Joseph and Oliver (and their successors) said, so even if Joseph Smith dictated words while looking at the stone in the hat (SITH), this was a demonstration, not the translation of the Book of Mormon.	Witnesses who rejected the leadership of Brigham Young, such as David Whitmer and Emma Smith, are more credible than what Joseph and Oliver (and their successors) said, so we know that, instead of using the U&T and the plates, Joseph Smith merely read words that appeared on the stone in the hat (SITH).	What eyewitnesses to the translation of the Book of Mormon believed about succession in the presidency of the Church is immaterial to their credibility as witnesses of the translation process. (The same principle applies in the law: A witness to a crime cannot be ignored or rejected just because he is a communist, a MAGA Trump supporter, or a flat-earther.) Not one single eyewitness to the translation process ever denied that Joseph Smith was inspired by God to translate the Book of Mormon. The witnesses—Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris, Emma Smith, David Whitmer, and others—are equally credible, and their statements must be examined and understood in the context of when, how, and why they were made. Dismissing an eyewitness’s testimony because the content of that testimony does not fit one’s hypothesis is a fatal error that reflects a biased, prejudiced methodology. No one who accepts the overwhelming number of eyewitness testimonies that Joseph did use a seer stone to translate has ever claimed that Joseph “merely read words that appeared” to him; rather, Joseph’s early revelations clearly indicate that the translation process also required study, prayer, and spiritual confirmation, as described by the revelation to the Prophet Joseph in D&C 9. Also, no one is claiming that the seer stone was not a sacred consecrated object at the time the Book of Mormon was translated, nor is anyone asserting that the translation could have been accomplished without the gift of seership from God. On the contrary, both the interpreters and other seer stones worked through the gift and power of God. No firsthand eyewitnesses or secondhand accounts (or any later Church leaders, for that matter) have ever suggested that Joseph Smith “demonstrated” the translation process to curious individuals by using a seer stone in a hat. Jonathan Neville’s claim that Joseph did this is an ad hoc hypothesis, completely lacking in any evidence whatsoever and invented solely to resolve the problem of the multitude of eyewitness statements that Joseph used a seer stone to translate the Book of Mormon in Harmony and in Fayette.

Jonathan Neville claims to want to “accurately represent the position of the M2C/SITH believers.” It will be interesting to see if and how he modifies the table in his blog post based on my feedback.

—Peter Pan (Mike Parker)
 

Jonathan Neville’s unheard-of “faithful” explanation

The Interpreter Foundation gave Jonathan Neville the opportunity to respond to Spencer Kraus’s reviews of Neville’s two books, A Man that Can Translate and Infinite Goodness, that were published in Interpreter last June. Neville’s reply was published last week as “A Man That Can Translate and Infinite Goodness: A Response to Recent Reviews.”

Neville’s reply is interesting for what it says and what it doesn’t say. Kraus’s rebuttal—published in the same issue of Interpreter as “A Rejoinder to Jonathan Neville’s ‘Response to Recent Reviews’”—brings up most of the key issues, but there’s one thing Neville wrote in his response that struck me as particularly odd. Neville writes:

There are three basic explanations for the Book of Mormon. Proponents of each find support in historical documentation, which indicates the evidence is inconclusive and can support multiple working hypotheses.

1. Joseph Smith translated the ancient engravings into English, using “translate” in the ordinary sense of the word of converting the meaning of a manuscript written in one language into another language.
2. Joseph Smith (and/or confederates) composed the text and Joseph read it surreptitiously, recited it from memory, or performed it based on prompts or cues.
3. Joseph Smith dictated words that supernaturally appeared on a seer stone he placed in a hat.

Until recently, explanation 1 was the “faithful” explanation, while explanations 2 and 3 were the critical or unbelieving explanations. Lately, explanation 3 has been embraced by many believers (including Kraus) as a faithful explanation that replaces explanation 1.

In the considerable time I’ve spent as an active member of the Church and student of Church history—not to betray too much about myself, but let’s just say that I’m older than 45 and younger than 70—I have never heard Neville’s explanation 1. Not even once. I have always been told or have read that Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon by miraculous means by seeing words in the Urim and Thummim—the Nephite interpreters—or in a seer stone (explanation 3). The claim that Joseph translated “in the ordinary sense of the word” is something I’ve never encountered until I began reading Jonathan Neville’s writings.

Neville’s claim that “Lately, explanation 3 has been embraced by many believers…as a faithful explanation that replaces explanation 1” is clearly and patently false. As I wrote in April 2021, “eyewitnesses to the translation process, early Latter-day Saint publications, Church leaders in the 19th through the 21st centuries, and official histories published by the Church have accepted and taught that Joseph Smith used a seer stone that he placed into a hat—along with the Nephite interpreters—to translate the Book of Mormon.”

This method of translating the Book of Mormon was taught by then-Elder Russell M. Nelson in 1992 and published in the Ensign in 1993.

This method of translating the Book of Mormon was included in the six-volume Comprehensive History of the Church, edited by Elder B.H. Roberts and published by the Church in 1930.

This method of translating the Book of Mormon was repeated by Apostle Orson F. Whitney in his 1921 book, Saturday Night Thoughts.

This method of translating the Book of Mormon was affirmed by Joseph Knight Sr., one of the Prophet’s closest friends and an eyewitness to the translation process.

This method of translating the Book of Mormon was corroborated by a Shaker in northern Ohio who heard Oliver Cowdery preach in 1830.

This method of translating the Book of Mormon was reiterated by Hugh Nibley, who wrote in 1975:

Nothing could be less like the normal ways of scholarship than the inspired mood and method in which the Prophet Joseph did his translation. “In the darkness the spiritual light would shine. A piece of something resembling parchment would appear, and under it was the interpretation in English. Brother Joseph would read off the English to Oliver Cowdery, who was his principal scribe, and when it was written down and repeated to Brother Joseph to see if it was correct, then it would disappear. Thus the Book of Mormon was translated by the gift and power of God and not by any power of man.” If all the Prophet had to do was to read off an English text, why did he need the original characters in front of him? He didn’t! “I frequently wrote day after day,” Emma Smith recalls, “often sitting at the table close by him, he sitting with his face buried in his hat, with the stone in it, and dictating hour after hour with nothing between us.… He had neither manuscript nor book to read from.… The plates often lay on the table without any attempt at concealment, wrapped in a small linen table cloth.” David Whitmer confirms this: “He did not use the plates in the translation, but would hold the interpreters to his eyes…and before his eyes would appear what seemed to be a parchment, on which would appear the characters of the plates…and immediately below would appear the translation in English.”

[Nibley, The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri, 1975, p. 51 / 2005, p. 59; ellipses in the original]

The question of how much of what Joseph saw in those stones was directly revealed by God and how much of it was Joseph’s own language remains open. (As I explained in January 2020, Book of Mormon scholars Royal Skousen and Brant Gardner disagree on this matter.) But no one, to the best of my knowledge, has ever claimed that Joseph Smith translated “in the ordinary sense of the word,” as Jonathan Neville has asserted.

If there is any evidence of a Church leader or recognized scholar teaching what Neville is claiming, then I would be very interested to read what they said or wrote. Please leave a comment below.

—Peter Pan