All Posts

I. The Source Problem: No Vorlage, No Translation The most fundamental defect in Smoot's comparative model is one he acknowledges but refuses to treat as fatal: Joseph Smith did not work from an ancient-language source text. Every Targum in the Aramaic corpus[1] — Onkelos,[2] Pseudo-Jonathan,[3] Neofiti[4] — exists as a linguistic bridge between Hebrew and Aramaic. The Targumist's creative latitude, including expansion, paraphrase, and harmonization, operates within the const

In 2006, without announcement or explanation, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints revised a single sentence in the introduction to the Book of Mormon. Where the 1981 edition had identified the Lamanites as “the principal ancestors of the American Indians,” the 2006 edition changed this to “among the ancestors of the American Indians.”[1] No General Conference address explained the revision. No press release accompanied it. Old printings continued to circulate alon

Part I: The Culture of the Glass Looker For decades, LDS historians denied that Joseph Smith Jr. ever stood trial for treasure seeking. The denial was not quiet. Hugh Nibley, the Church's most prominent mid-century apologist, went on record declaring that an authentic 1826 court record would be 'the most damning evidence in existence against Joseph Smith.'[1] The institutional position held that accounts of the trial were fabrications circulated by enemies of the faith, men l

Abstract This study reframes Doctrine and Covenants Section 132 not as a purely theological artifact but as a document within a recoverable manuscript tradition, demonstrating that methods typically applied to ancient texts can yield meaningful results when applied to modern religious sources. Employing textual criticism, source stratification, independence of attestation, and chain-of-custody analysis, this paper argues that the documentary record reflects a stable textual t