Philo Sofee wrote: ↑Mon Jun 13, 2022 12:29 pm
Dear Don,
I have enjoyed thoroughly your correction to my presentation, and, indeed, will relook at materials and make sure my audience understands your points of view clearer. I meant no offense to either you or Mark and am looking forward to reading more. I was the one who went into apologetic mode and probably read my own thinking into your work, for which I will correct in a future podcast. Thank you for calling my attention to this! And I look forward to conversations with you and George on the Book of Abraham timeline!
All the best!
Kerry
Thank you, my friend!
You actually shouldn't take the blame for thinking the paper's point was apologetic. That's actually my fault (along with Mark). Because the Kinderhook plates has mostly been an issue of interest to people because the plates are fake but Joseph Smith translated from them (which is really an issue of apologetics and criticism, rather than of history as such), Mark and I decided to spell out and emphasize for readers how our discoveries had implications for that issue that we assumed we be of interest to most of them. The thing is, I didn't realize just how much that made the paper
look apologetic in purpose until I heard you go through and quote all those parts. I was a bit mortified, since I then saw how much it made our research look like it was aimed at something it was not. In reality, I should be thanking you for bringing that to my attention, since now I can better understand why some people are reading the paper that way.
That said, this really was not the intent. What Mark and I hoped to do (and which I
think we did) was to write the definitive analysis of the sources on the Kinderhook plates and on how Joseph Smith arrived at the translation text William Clayton said he did. Hence, we tried to contextualize each relevant historical source, and to place Smith's engagement with the Kinderhook plates in the context of his overall interest in the subject of translation. Probably one place we could have done that more would have been looking further into his Kirtland work with the GAEL, but given that this topic is so complex, that may have taken us far afield.
In any case, I guess my overall point is, that while it's quite understandable that you would have read the paper as apologetic because of the emphasis we placed on how our discoveries are relevant to questions involved in apologetic-critical debate, our primary purpose was just to present what happened, much of which I had figured out while an ex-Mormon atheist, when I clearly had no stake in making an apologetic case for Joseph Smith.
I appreciate you be willing to clarify that for your audience.
I'll looking forward to talking with you and George!
Don