The Lost 116 Pages, by Don Bradley

[_the narrator]

What are the chances that losing the pages was intentional on the part of Joseph Smith?

It's quite possible that the lost portion ended up being less satisfactory to Joseph or was headed in a direction he regretted. Suppose the initial request of Martin Harris prompted ideas in Josephs' mind? If he could "lose" the pages with minimised blame, then he could reboot his translation.

After all, Joseph was accostumed to "looking for lost things" at the time. He might have gone to the Harris place himself, or sent someone (among the people who just passed by who were shown the papers) found them without disclosing he did, and then hidden them away, or even sent them off separately to a publisher.

Just speculative of course, but in my opinion an interesting line of thought.

Martin lived a few days away from Joseph, and the manuscript went missing while Joseph and Emma were mourning the loss of their stillborn son. The chances of Joseph going to Martin's to make it disappear is pretty much zero.

[Guest]

We do have a few data points:

1. Emma reported "hour after hour" of translation work, "returning after meals" to pick up where they left off. This implies a whole day affair, spanning across "meals".

2. Hart's About the Book of Mormon quotes David Whitmer, recalling the work of translation, "it was a laborious work for the weather was very warm, and the days were long and they [Joseph and Oliver] worked from morning till night. But they were both young and strong and were soon able to complete the work"

While I'm an optimist about what we can know from the historical sources, you are reading way more in here than we can really do. There is nothing about "hour after hour" or meal breaks that need imply all-day work. It may be that they simply translated three hours, breaking for a single meal when necessary in the middle.

And the David Whitmer statement is a single very late source at a time when journalists tended to be very free with how they reworded interviews. Whitmer was present for only a small part of the two-and-a-half weeks of June 1829 that Joseph was working on the translation. Even if I took this statement as something solid, it would point only to what Joseph Smith was doing in June 1829 while being taken care of by the Whitmers, not what he was doing through spring 1829 while having to care for his own farm.

Joseph himself stated, in the 1830s, that the translation work during this period was frequently interrupted by visitors inquiring about the book, and so on. I can also document that it was an insanely busy time, so it may be that Whitmer is recalling that they started the translation work early in the day and ended late in the day, but it would not follow that they spent essentially the entire time in between those points working on it.

If there are more data points to help nail down how much time per day they spent, on average, across the translation period, I'd be delighted to see them. As is, you're trying to create very precise calculations from very vague, indefinite information. It doesn't work like that.

It would be silly to insist that we know how many wpm they were doing based on this incredibly thin data. I'm an optimist about what we can know, but that shouldn't be confused with supposedly already knowing based on such poor evidence.

I've provided a more exact data point we could use for further analysis: we do have an exact timeframe given for one of Joseph Smith's revelatory texts--it took three hours to produce D&C 132. A simple word count divided by 180 would give us a wpm. Thus far this sort of more specific data has not seemed to interest you, which doesn't exactly make me want to continue the conversation.

I'd be happy to keep digging along with you and see what emerges. I'm not sure we're interested in a similar approach, but if it turned out we were, I'd be very, very happy to dig with you and see what we can figure out.

Candidly I tire of the "studying it out" explanation. It's kind of a cop out, a convenient exit door when one explanation of Joseph's translation projects contradicts another explanation.

Yes, we should ignore Smith's own contemporaneous revelatory description of the revelatory process.

It was supposed to be an unknown language, on plates he didn't have in front of him. What was there to study out?

That is a fantastic question!

You asked me to chime in on it already but seem to have missed or ignored my answer: I think Joseph Smith used what was going on around him as part of his revelatory, studying it out process, on the idea that God providentially shaped surrounding events for that purpose.

Was Joseph obedient or not?
Was he translating a record, or not?
Did he wait for God to show him the next words, or not?

[/quote]

If your idea of progress in the discussion is reverting to the most simplistic dichotomies possible, there won't be anything for us to discuss.

If you want a real discussion here, you are free to do more than 1) sighing loudly about what you tire of, 2) ignoring my actual answers, and 3) insisting that your thin data was actually dispositive of the issue.

I tire of "discussion" like this and if this is really where you want to take it, I'll probably bow out now.

Don

[_Jersey Girl]

Hell, Jersey!

Hell! Congratulations on your new book, Don Bradley. You have always been one of the most admirable and authentic people I've known in or out of Mormonism. I pray your book does well as it should and that you and yours have a wonderful year ahead filled with spiritual richness and contentment.

I love you, my friend.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

A snowflake melts when subjected to heat. :/

[_DonBradley]

I should mention that the late David Whitmer report isn't irrelevant; it just isn't very useful or specific, for the reasons I gave above. If there are more accounts like it, they should all be put into the hopper to see what comes out.

The most concrete datum I can think of is William Clayton saying it took 3 hours for Joseph to give D&C 132.

The earliest manuscript of D&C 132, via the JSP website, has about 3300 words. Taking Clayton's memory that the text's dictation and recording took some 3 hours - 3300÷180 minutes - renders about 18.33 words per minute.

That would mean about 3.27 seconds per word for Joseph to speak the word, the scribe to record the word, and Joseph to read the word back - assuming Joseph is having the scribe read the words back. That this was Joseph's usual process for his revelations, as well the Book of Mormon, is indicated by William McLellin: “Joseph would deliver a few sentences and Sydney [sic] would write them down, then read them aloud, and if correct, then Joseph would proceed and deliver more.”

However, Clayton's account doesn't mention Joseph having him read the material back until the whole document was complete, at which point Joseph had him read the whole thing aloud and then pronounced it correct.

Here is Clayton's account:

When the revelation was written there was no one present except the
Prophet Joseph, his brother Hyrum and myself. It was written in the
small office upstairs in the rear of the brick store which stood on
the banks of the Mississippi river. It took some three hours to write
it. Joseph dictated sentence by sentence, and I wrote it as he
dictated. After the whole was written Joseph requested me to read it
slowly and carefully, which I did, and he then pronounced it correct.
The same night a copy was taken by Bishop Whitney, which copy is now
here (in the Historian's office) and which I know and testify is
correct. The original was destroyed by Emma Smith.

Based on this, it may well be that the 3.27 seconds per word was just the time required for Joseph to dictate the revelation and the scribe to record it, without double checking. Hopefully additional Clayton sources can clear this up.

And there may well be other concrete time frames offered for the production of early Mormon revelatory texts, and I'd love to see more of these identified and taken into account.

Such time frames would indeed, as Dr Moore suggests, have implications for understanding Joseph's process. So the more exact the time frames we can develop, the better we will be able to assess what Joseph would have been doing in that process.

Don

[_DonBradley]

Hell, Jersey!

Hell! Congratulations on your new book, Don Bradley. You have always been one of the most admirable and authentic people I've known in or out of Mormonism. I pray your book does well as it should and that you and yours have a wonderful year ahead filled with spiritual richness and contentment.

I love you, my friend.

Awww thank you, Jers!!! <3

Much love to you as you celebrate Christmas, go into the new year, and always! =)

Don

[_Dr Moore]

For example, I believe William Clayton said it took Joseph about three hours to dictate D&C 132. We'd want to double check that and see if Clayton indicates that he read each phrase back to Joseph after recording it. If so, then this would be a comparable process to that of the Book of Mormon translation and we could then use the episode to get an average wpm estimate.

D&C 132 was given in 1843. I suspect by that time, Joseph was far more practiced with his prophetic voice than in 1829 during the Book of Mormon translation. Taking place 14 years later, it doesn't strike me as a good comparison. But for the sake of putting the numbers together, here's what I found.

3,265 words, revealed and transcribed in ~3 hours = 18.1 words per minute. Right at the upper limit of sustained human hand writing ability, per the Wikipedia link above. From Clayton's memory, it would seem that the 3 hour estimate implies words being written consistently as streamed from Joseph's mouth, with very little time for breaks. I would argue, this does not leave time for reading back to verify accuracy.

[_DonBradley]

D&C 132 was given in 1843. I suspect by that time, Joseph was far more practiced with his prophetic voice than in 1829 during the Book of Mormon translation. Taking place 14 years later, it doesn't strike me as a good comparison. But for the sake of putting the numbers together, here's what I found.

3,265 words, revealed and transcribed in ~3 hours = 18.1 words per minute. Right at the upper limit of sustained human hand writing ability, per the Wikipedia link above. From Clayton's memory, it would seem that the 3 hour estimate implies words being written consistently as streamed from Joseph's mouth, with very little time for breaks. I would argue, this does not leave time for reading back to verify accuracy.

I wouldn't assume that Joseph got greatly faster with time. Most of his "practice" dictating revelatory texts came quite early - with the Book of Mormon itself. And we could just as well argue that Joseph was very much out of practice in 1843, since he had basically stopped dictating revelatory texts years earlier. This is the most concrete data we have on the timing of his process, so I'd be very slow to dismiss it on an assumption that it was unrepresentative.

Not that it makes much difference, but the JSPP text would be the best one to use, but it needs a little cleaning up (removing insertions from the JSPP editors).

We crossed posts above - and I agree there that Clayton appears to not be including the reading back of the revelation in the three hours, so that would give us about three hours of dictation-and-transcription.

Don

[_DonBradley]

Well done, Dr Moore. This is a credit to Cassius U!

Wikipedia, citing Bledsoe Jr., Dave (2011). "Handwriting Speed in an Adult Population". Advance for Occupational Therapy Practitioners. 27 (22): 10, has this:

For an adult population (age range 18–64) the average speed of copying is 68 letters per minute (approximately 13 wpm), with the range from a minimum of 26 to a maximum of 113 letters per minute (approximately 5 to 20 wpm).

So you are likely right that the limiting factor here may have been Clayton's speed as a transcriptionist. Clayton was quite experienced in that, and so a speed near the upper end of the range would not be surprising. But the fact that this speed is near that upper end would suggest that it was Clayton's speed, not Joseph Smith's, that was the primary limiter. Also, I suspect the words used in D&C 132 were longer than average, since it uses a number of King James terms, legal terms (e.g., verse 7), and so on. We could probably figure out the number of letters in D&C 132, and I suspect that doing so might put the speed up around the maximum speed of skilled transcription.

Don

[_Dr Moore]

So you are likely right that the limiting factor here may have been Clayton's speed as a transcriptionist. Clayton was quite experienced in that, and so a speed near the upper end of the range would not be surprising. But the fact that this speed is near that upper end would suggest that it was Clayton's speed, not Joseph Smith's, that was the primary limiter. Also, I suspect the words used in D&C 132 were longer than average, since it uses a number of King James terms, legal terms (e.g., verse 7), and so on. We could probably figure out the number of letters in D&C 132, and I suspect that doing so might put the speed up around the maximum speed of skilled transcription.

3-hours isn't exactly a burst, so 18 wpm, allowing for ink-dips and shaking out the cramps, actually seems heroic. But it isn't apples-apples.

Using www.wordcounttools.com, I see that D&C 132 has an average of 4.3 letters per word.

My short Book of Mormon verse above, Alma 5:26, has 3.7 chars per word. However, when I copy longer sections of the Book of Mormon, the tool comes back at about 4.4 characters per word. About the same as D&C 132. I suspect the full volumes will asymptote around that number.

The 13 wpm average assumes 5.2 letters per word (68 lpm / 13 wpm = 5.2 lpw). If we go with 4.4 lpw for Joseph's dictated scripture, then we need to adjust the expected writing range by 18% -- the difference between 5.2 lpw and 4.4 lpw.

So in theory, if Clayton sustained 18.1 wpm of D&C transcription, this is equivalent to 18% less, or 14.8 wpm, of normal English transcription. Closer but still better than the mean sustainable level of 13 wpm.