First, here are the links to my two review videos, in case some might want to catch up.
Part 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWkjGZ8R1gg&t=2896s
Part 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsT32kVxSjQ&t=133s
Now, here is the link to Nielsen’s response to me. It is almost four hours long, but he talks so slowly that it sounds normal when you speed it up to 1.25.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8boa0EOJVo
Dan Vogel Responds (Part 1)
So much to talk about. General impression. As with your book, your presentation here is deadly dull, excruciatingly slow, and largely tangential. The nearly 4-hour video could have been half the length if you had exercised a little discipline. It begins with an attempt to poison the well and ad hominem in the form of accusing me of bias and lack of charity, which are irrelevant.
You claim that your theory isn’t a conspiracy theory. Nonsense. You claim Prof. Smith and Spalding conspired to write a book that would at first fool Christians that they would eventually expose themselves to teach them not to be so credulous. This is a conspiracy of two. By the way, this plan makes no sense. It also makes no sense to suggest that they intentionally put the names of two notable frauds in their own fraudulent text (Nephi and Mormon). To suggest that they were merely doing what other authors have done, by way of irony, is also nonsense. These other authors were not trying to write pseudepigrapha. They were intentionally being transparent and ironic.
You think that because you theorize that Rigdon believe the MS he had was a real translation, it exempts him from being in a conspiracy with Joseph Smith. That’s a non-sequitur. How do you explain the fact that, according to you, Rigdon rewrote the MS to add his own theology and invented another set of plates to replace the so-called lost 116 pages? Do you not see that this is a second conspiracy between Smith and Rigdon to deceive?
I note that you didn’t go through all the Kircherisms, but defended only two: the name Nephi and the brass ball. I never said where Joseph Smith got the idea for the Liahona, only that there were possible sources of inspiration in his environment. I certainly didn’t imply that there was a direct source, that is, other than an actual compass, which operated through faith. Given the Smiths’ use of divining rods and seer stones, an object like the Liahona can be easily explained as an invention independent of Kircher. The text calls it a compass, so it had two pointers; only the second pointer worked by faith (like a rod) and writing appeared on the pointers and the ball’s surface (like a seer stone). This is closer to Joseph Smith’s world than Kircher’s, Prof. Smith’s, or Spalding’s.
Many of your counterarguments are flimsy and misrepresent my position. Several times you sidestep my arguments by saying Spalding was the better candidate. It is more likely that Spalding knew the Bible and Apocrypha, and therefore Joseph Smith didn’t get the name Nephi and the concept of abridging records from Maccabees. In your book, you said Nephi didn’t appear in the Bible or Apocrypha “as person names” (p. 49), which is why I mentioned that both Nephi and Lehi appear as place names in those two sources, but that in the Book of Mormon place names are also names of persons. Your comments that Spalding did the same are irrelevant.
Several times you appear to contradict yourself. For instance, you argue that Spalding could have gotten the name Nephi from the Arabian Nefi or from the Apocrypha, and you offer an elaborate explanation for how he could have invented the name Mormon.
My Google search in books printed from 1700 to 1830 for “Kishkemenetas” yielded 0, while “Kiskiminitas” got 291 results. So you found a 1770 map with the name spelled with “Kish.” That doesn’t mean it took 100 years to “linguistically drift.” It seems more like a map anomaly. Spalding would have been writing around 1812. Still, I think it’s not worth arguing about since the connection to Kishkumen in the Book of Mormon is a stretch anyway.
Unlike your book, your response to my review leans heavily on the unpublished manuscript “Romance of the Celes,” which you assume was authored by Spalding. You owe it to your readers to discuss the provenance of this document. You fail to mention that according to Dale Broadhurst, it is written in the handwriting of Arvilla Ann Spalding, the wife of "Doct. Solomon Spalding" (1797-1862), who was the second cousin of our Solomon Spalding.
Unlike the older Spalding, this Spalding lived near Batavia, NY, the heart of the post-1826 anti-Masonic excitement following Morgan’s alleged murder. Your comment that the Smiths were pro-Masons ignores Joseph Smith’s 1831 letter to Hyrum, who was still in New York and preparing to relocate to Ohio, to “Beware of the Freemasons.” Even in Nauvoo, he called them an apostate priesthood.
The manuscript was kept by this branch of the family and donated to the Library of Congress in 1946. The catalogers at the Library of Congress apparently mistook Dr. Spalding for the older Spalding. However, both the title page of the manuscript and the “Prospectus” state that it was authored by “Dr. Solomon Spalding.”
In one place, Broadhurst speculated that the manuscript was written before the 1832 marriage of Arvilla Ann and the younger Solomon, although it was “largely based upon the plurality of worlds notion championed by the Rev. Thomas Dick during the 1830s.” I think he meant to say that the MS was written after their marriage, as he elsewhere dates it to the “1830s.” The MS even mentions Dick in its preface. He also speculated that it “may have been based upon an earlier literary work by Dr. Spalding's cousin, Solomon Spalding of Ashford.” I don’t see any reason for this speculation.
At the end of your video, you engage in an extended name game using both Spalding and the Celes MS, which, from my perspective more than justifies my statement that I was utterly unconvinced by such unfettered speculation. If others are impressed by it, so be it.
Finally, you accuse me of being unprofessional because my review of your book used direct and critical language, while you do the same. I won’t whine about it. You pretend that your critical tone is isolated to a side bar and that your response is strictly professional and dispassionate, but it wasn’t. Give me a break. I think you need to listen to yourself more carefully. I don’t think you hear yourself the way your audience does. I know you try to be precise, logical, and “dispassionate,” but you should learn that this is only a caricature of scholarship and that it’s not really possible to “check your biases at the door.” That you think this is possible, especially in an exchange of competing ideas, only shows your naiveté.
My suggestion is that you should take my criticisms to heart and write a better version of your theory, one that pays close attention to sources and documents them in footnotes.
I have written more than I intended, but here it is. Perhaps I’ll come back and add other observations.
