H:

Yeah, you know, honestly, the number one thing for me, I

want to make sure that everybody knows that this isn’t about us. It’s not about

me, it’s not about you. It’s really just about making this content for people

to enjoy, to not have to worry about what our story is necessarily, but to

really just lay it out there so that people have that in front of them with no

regard to who we are.

M:

One of the one of those things, too, when we are talking

about the historical content of the church, we may be bringing up some things

that’s that are kind of controversial, because we still have connections and

relationships that are that are solid believing members. We don’t want them to,

to be swayed by the things that we talk about. We want to we want to maintain

that anonymity for ourselves, as well as for family members and friends that

that still are super faithful that are not aware of the full history of the

church.

H:

Absolutely. Absolutely. With regard to that, want to kind of

give you just a little bit of background on who we are. We’ll call it sort of a

redacted history, personal history or bona fides if you will. I personally grew

up in the church. I was baptized eight years old. family was all men. Members

of the church Deacon’s quorum president at 12. Teacher’s quorum president at

14, you know, assistant to the bishop when I was a priest, I’ve had pretty much

a standard or if anything very involves history with the church, served a

mission in Europe for the full two years came back, and I’m married in the

temple with my wife, and for several, several years now. And so, there’s a lot

of history there. I don’t want people to be any in any way, dissuaded in or

anyway think that we don’t have what I would call an insider’s viewpoint. We

very much do. Moses wanted to tell him about your background as well.

M:

Absolutely. So, I was born into the church as well. I grew

up through believing I was baptized at eight, just like Hosea, but probably

didn’t hold as many leadership positions as you have.

H:

Maybe you’re lucky.

M:

Yeah, no, I’m okay with that. Trust me. So, I was also I

think the highest calling I’ve ever held was Second Counselor and the Elder’s Quorum president.



H:

Yeah.



M:

So, I mean, I’ve served a mission I’ve, I’m married in the temple as well. And, and I have very dear and very close friends that that have helped me along the way that are still just super, super strong members of the church.

H:

Thank you for that. And one of the things, the reasons that

we’re doing this podcast, there’s a number of them, honestly, one of them is,

we really believe that there’s a need, just looking through some of the

material. This is a this is a journey that I’ve been on for many years now.

I’ve been on for over a decade now. And in that time, a lot of things have

changed. Really just a lot of things. There were a couple of things podcasts to

begin with. There were maybe some blogs to begin with when I first started

having some questions about church history, really not so much questions as

just an interest in church history. And, and I suppose it’s a good idea to tell

you now as well, that as I was going down that path, my intention was always to

try to defend the church in all cases, and to always try to find reasonable

answers to some of the questions that were present. As I was going down that path, my intention was always to try to defend the church in all cases, and to always try to find reasonable answers to some of the questions that were present. Click To Tweet And I never thought in any

case that I would ever come across a result or an answer that didn’t make

sense. And so that’s kind of what I’m bringing to the table here as well saying

that, while today there are a lot more resources available, including the

church’s own essays that have been published on the church’s website,

including the Saints

book, which is the primary thing that we’re going to get into here as we go

along, including just a number of different things, podcasts out there, there.

Just to name a few. There is the Sunstone history podcast. There’s obviously

you Mormon Stories is a big one

there’s Radio Free Mormon and Bill Reel, Bishop Bill Reel’s

podcasts what I have found it and Moses you can kind of correct me on this if

I’m if I’m wrong or if you see it differently, what I found is that there’s not

really that many out there that are sort of serial podcasts. You know what I

need to actually mention? Naked

Mormonism is a great one from Bryce Blankenagel and it goes well, there’s

not a whole lot of serial podcasts out there that that go through the history

chronologically, and topic by topic, and do a deep dive into source material

essentially, which is really what we’re aiming to do here.

M:

One thing to point out with that as well as Bill Reel’s I

mean he’s an expert in the in church history as well. Radio Free Mormon, he

does more interviews with believers and non-believers alike, where John Dehlin

does, but the thing the biggest thing that the all of these lack I mean, they

maybe touch on the history throughout their throughout their podcast episodes.

But there’s really nothing that actually focuses on the church’s version of

church history versus what other sources there may be out there. Now, we don’t

want to focus solely on one source of information or source of, of historical

material. By that, I mean, we don’t want to focus on just what is the approved

corollary within the church, and we don’t want to focus on anything that may be

construed or viewed as negative towards the church. We’re trying to be as

unbiased with us as possible, just so that there’s a well-reasoned, and well

narrated history of the church.

H:

As mentioned before, as well, we plan on providing as many

links to our sources as possible, annotating as many things as possible. And

when we do that, we may miss things. So please reach out to me to us at nomanknowsmypodcast@gmail.com

or the website, www.nomanknows.com

let us know, we’re always open to criticism, whether it be constructive or not,

whatever you want to throw our way, we’re all ears. So just as you listen, let

us know because we’re listening to you.

M:

And the other thing to remember with that, when we’re providing these sources, we want you to go out, educate yourself to if you want to examine the sources, try to read a little bit more in depth, and then provide that feedback. That would be wonderful. And we don’t want to discount your opinion, or what your viewpoint is simply because it may be in in contradiction to what we’re saying. We want to hear your honest opinion.

H:

Okay, so a couple of ground rules, some things to expect

from us as we go along. First, we’re going to use the term Mormon and

Mormonism. I don’t know how that’s gonna affect some people. But we really hope

that that will be accepted for the reason that we’re using it. And namely, it’s

to save time, it’s really kind of arduous to say, members of the Church of

Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, every time we’re referring to somebody. I’m

personally going to refer, and I think I can speak for Moses on this, we’re

going to refrain from using the term Saints to describe the early members of

the church probably as much as possible that may slip in from time to time. But

again, we really kind of want to keep a balanced conversation going forward.

That doesn’t necessarily preference one side or the other. In addition to that,

we’re going to be using proper names we’re going to be using, instead of the

Prophet Joseph Smith, we probably would say something like Smith Jr., Smith

Sr., Harris, etc. In any case, where it’s going to be a little bit confusing as

to who we’re referring to, we’ll make that clear. But we’re wanting to be

somewhat academic in our approach here.

H:

And so, speaking of academic approaches, I want to briefly

discuss a little bit about historical methodology and historiography.

Once again, we’re not historians, however, Understanding the process of

history, the writing of history, the selection of sources, understanding confirmation bias, these things really help us in, deducing what history means. It’s not so much as recitation of facts, which facts by the way we can get into our tricky things. Sometimes. It’s also just understanding how to critically look at the

historical documentation, the historical literature, and understanding how to

interpret that in a in a way that is both reasonable and also understanding and

I’ll say kinds to the people who were living that we’re actually going to come

back to that concept here in just a second.

H:

So basically, I mentioned two things I mentioned historical

methodology and historiography. historiography is kind of an interesting word.

I think a lot of people may know it, but historiography means the writing of

history over time. So basically, a good example of historiography in Mormonism

would be we have several different histories that were written. The first would

be some of the journal

accounts that were written by the scribes of Joseph Smith. Eventually Wilford

Woodruff and then B H Roberts ended up compiling a version of history in the turn of the 20th century; early the 20th century.

That’s a difference of historiography, that’s people progressing

through different timelines and relating historical events to their time. And

that’s typically what does happen is that the further we get from an event, or

every stage along the way, I should say, we’re always relating it to ourselves

in some way or another. We’re always relating it to our current circumstances.

However, the further we get from events, a lot of times, the clearer it gets.

And that’s a kind of a tricky concept, because you would think that maybe it

gets a little bit darker. But a lot of times, we actually come up with more

material the further away we get. So, it’s important to understand that we’re

at a pretty good time right now to be able to understand a lot of what happened

in early Mormonism in early American history, in general, but certainly in

early Mormonism.

H:

So what can we learn from historiography in Mormonism, we

can learn the historians have portrayed history in different ways, just based

on their interpretations, which can and often does change as more information

comes to light, just like I was saying. History tends to be written by the

winners as well. So, in this case, it’s not like the Civil War. It’s not like

the Union was writing the history and in the south, you know, was kind of

relegated to their corner of the world. It’s that the dominant version of

Mormonism being what we’ll refer to as the Brighamite

church, which is the church in Salt Lake has the majority of the history

that’s written has the majority of the people has majority and pretty much

everything. And therefore, there tends to be a little bit of a bias that comes

out from that, from that point of view. I can’t wait to get into that because

that’s such an interesting topic, but just know that there’s always a prism

that we’re viewing this through.

M:

And through that prism, I mean, we have biases that are

introduced, whether it’s intentional, or whether we’re aware of it or not. So,

on our end, when we’re, when there’s a possibility of bias, we’ll try to bring

that out and, and, and talk about that bias as much as possible. But in

addition to that, we want our listeners to be aware of biases that they may

hold. That could be that could be changing the narrative based on that bias.

H:

Absolutely, and biases that we, your benevolent hosts, Hosea

and Moses, have ourselves, because nobody is truly free of bias, but it’s in

the coming together of these different viewpoints that we start to really see

clearly. And that’s what we hope to do here.

H:

A brief little foray into historical methodology. I’m sure

to put a few people asleep here, but I think it’s extremely important to

understand how sources are selected. There’s a difference between what are

called primary and secondary sources. Primary sources are typically journals,

meeting minutes, etc. These are first-hand accounts typically concurrent to the

events that are that are occurring. In the in the Joseph Smith Papers,

for example, we have a lot of primary sources and I will, I’m looking forward

greatly to referring to some of those and having all of you kind of dive into

it if you want to and if you have the time, because that’s kind of a an issue

in and of itself. Secondary sources would include things that were written by

historians or otherwise people who were not in involved in the event directly,

not really directly eyewitness accounts, but about the event. And we have these

with books that we have today we have Saints would be considered a secondary

source, Rough Stone Rolling, which we’ll get into some of the other sources

that we’ll be using. Books essentially written by historians; these are

secondary sources.

M:

One thing to note is the significance of primary and

secondary sources or how to use it. Those primary sources are good source for

what the author was thinking at the time or, or what the events that were

happening at that time. So, they’re great for portraying what’s happening. The

secondary sources, they provide more of a context they give they give more of a

background, what are what are some of the, what are some of the cultural things

that were happening at that time or, or other events that could be affecting

what’s happening with the author of the primary source, those Taken together,

provides a more complete and a better picture of what is happening during that

time.

H:

Absolutely right. Absolutely right. In addition to primary

and secondary sources, we have to understand how we’re how we need to look at

them, how we need to investigate them, so to speak in with that some of the

techniques that we would use our internal or external criticism. In this in

this context, criticism

is a funny word. A lot of people think criticism is inherently something

negative, it’s something that is, is mean. It’s what you would do when you have

your sibling and you criticize them for the way that they, you know, laugh or

something like that. In this case, criticism in an academic sense means to

critically examine something to look through and it really, it’s an it’s, it’s

respecting the document itself to understand both how it internally works, and

how it should be found in its in its environment. And so that’s where we get

the difference between external and internal external typically being the first

mainly because we want to make sure that it is actually a valid document.

A great example of this would be in the case of forged documents that came out as a result of Mark Hoffman’s forgeries[i] a lot to be said about that this isn’t the time, but just know that. In particular, there was an individual named Mark Hoffman that was coming up with some very interesting Mormon documents that were based, really on actual verified documents, that turned out to be forgeries turned out to be false.

Big story behind that, I hope that we can get to that at some point, really not in

the, in the criteria as of right now. So external verification, meaning we need

to know if it’s actually a real document, we need to know to whom it was

belonging to, to whom it was written. And we also need to understand the

accuracy of that document in particular, basically, for its own right, is this

document in any way reliable from an external viewpoint? Then we start to look

inside the document itself, we start to ask the questions, was it mean, you

know, words are constantly changing, we need to understand that, that there are

words that mean something different now than they did before. A good example of that, in one of the history textbooks that I’ve been referring to, and I’ll

actually reference in our in our source documentation says that a great example

is the word gay whereas several years ago, you know, even 30-40 years ago,

somebody could have used the term gay to mean something completely different to mean somebody who was happy or jovial or excited. Whereas today, it is almost ubiquitously somebody who is homosexual. That’s a totally different meaning and that can really change the meaning of the documents, so we have to understand how words mean different things as time goes on. We’ll refer to that as much as we can. There’s a couple different… I can give you an example right now off the top of my head of a word that is included in one of the first vision accounts.

And it’s referring to how Joseph Smith was able to find the verse, James 1:5

and he says that he was looking through the Bible and found it promiscuously

I’m paraphrasing a little bit. promiscuous today obviously means and I’m just

reading from Google you’re having or characterized by many transients, sexual

relationships, licentious, immoral, moral unchaste that doesn’t seem to apply

to what Joseph Smith was saying I don’t think. Now promiscuously

in the 1828 Webster’s dictionary meant, essentially, random It was a random

occurrence random event. Random confused mixture, it says; indiscriminately. In

this kind of plays into another concept called bibliomancy, which we will

get into as we start to discover some of these pseudoscientific origins, pseudoscientific worldview of the early Americans; in particular: early

Mormons.

H:

So, changing words, that’s a totally different thing. We

have to understand the author’s credibility as well. I mean, who are they? Did

they have any kind of special knowledge? Were they Joe Schmo? Or were they

somebody that was very critical to the event that’s happening very, very tied

to the event, or were they somebody completely on the sidelines? That’s

important. We need to know when, how, and to whom the document was made. We

need to understand the bias both of the individual author and we also need to

know the bias of the overall time that maybe the whole era, or maybe even just

that community. Finally, we understand in this place in continuity in

cooperation with other records, is this record that reading, in line with other

records that were that are extant in line with other records that we can go

find right now and we can say, yes, this story aligns. Because of this, this and

this, we’re looking for corroboration, or we’re looking for the stories to

match up.

H:

And on the subject of sources, really, when we come into the

scholarly debate, and we’re talking about some very heated debates going on in

Mormon literature, in particular, the issues of selection of sources are really

at the heart of most debates. We’re talking about people who may say this

source here, is credible, as reliable, and we’re going to use it to frame a

narrative here, whereas another person another group may say, “um, it’s

not, and here’s why we think it’s not.” and they may make their

assumptions based off of that. But what we need to understand with that is that

if there’s a consensus in the historical literature of a particular source

being reliable, that’s what we’re going to go with. Because we have already

been through that debate. And we know that that’s what we’re going to rely on

going forward.



H:

I want to actually include really quick a quote from Steve

Harper or Steven C. Harper. He’s actually the Managing Historian of the Saints book. He, in several different places, top of mind right now is a podcast that he did regarding the Saints book, has quoted, a quote that’s used by

some historians that goes, “the past is a foreign country. They do things

differently there.” When they are using this quote, which is actually from

a book called The Go-Between, written in 1953 by LP Hartley, they’re referring to a concept called presentism.

And presentism is basically thinking about the past in terms of how we live our

lives today. A good way to think about that would be we would maybe be judging historical characters in early American history that were slave owners on

today’s standards of we were we would know that slave ownership, that slavery

in general, just the whole thing is a completely abhorrent idea.

H:

We have to understand that at the time, the predominant idea

wasn’t what we think it is. Now. That’s not to say that what those people were

doing is excusable. It’s just to say that we really need to put our heads in

the time. So, we can’t judge the past by our present. But I will submit and

we’re going to examine how we can judge the past in comparison to their

contemporaries. We can certainly judge the past by the people who were in the

past. And so that’s something that we will look at going forward.

M:

And I think the main thing with that is just to just to

remember to take into take them into account the content text by which these

opinions or these documents reproduce.

H:

Exactly.

H:

Okay. I think that pretty much sums up some of the

introductory periods. We appreciate you hanging with us for this little bit. I

think it’s gonna be really helpful as we keep going forward. But we’re going to

go ahead and dive into some of the first little bits here of the Saints book.

And we’re going to start with a brief history of what I what I like to call it

a brief history of church history, or maybe the historiography of Mormon

history. I mentioned before that Saints isn’t the first attempts to come up

with a consolidated history. The first attempt to really compile everything

together was by a gentleman named BH Roberts. He was actually president of the

of the Seventy back in 1902. He created a volume set; six volumes. It’s

actually six or seven, depending on which edition you have. Six volumes set of

the compiled history of the church. This was a monumental effort. I think we really need to show some appreciation to BH Roberts for his ability to kind of pull all this stuff together from just 100 different sources. A lot of it was Wilford

Woodruff’s journals, a lot of it was conference recordings of talks, just

and individual journals as well. The man did an amazing job bringing everything

together and is a major reason why we know so much about our early history as

we do is because he put the work in early on. Prior to that we know that the

church has established the need for historian as far back as 1830 Joseph Smith

received a revelation in 1830 to record the history of the church that’s actually included in Section 21 of our current Doctrine and Covenants, and in which Oliver Cowdery began that as a scribe. It took several different hands after that.

And, you know, in the meantime, after BH Roberts compiled everything back in 1902, there really hasn’t been any concerted effort to do a complete history from the very beginning to the current day, up until now. I’ll say that with a little caveat, because I’ve actually got a couple of resources that I use, and we’ll be using as we go along. One is called Essentials in Church History is written by Joseph Fielding Smith. That one was done in the 60s. And that one is, I would say, a very brief version of a compiled history. But really, there’s been nothing like Saints for about 100 years or a little over 100 years.

M:

Or at least, there hasn’t been anything since BH Roberts efforts within the church are on right out of the church.

H:

Right. Now, I will say this: there actually was an attempt by Leonard Arrington, who will was the… shout out to Leonard Arrington. He was the first church historian to actually be a professional historian. He was an economic historian. But nonetheless, he was a professional historian who took over the church historian’s office and really kind of opened things up to everybody. It was a very good period of time, the church state. It’s actually referred to these days as the Camelot years of church history. Kind of a fun little reference there. But anyway, he’s he put together a volume, him and a few others. Davis Bitton, I believe, was part of that project, put together another book called The History of the Latter-Day Saints[i]. And that one is a great version as well. Some interesting things in that one. And I think that we’re going to refer to that a couple times as we go along, because they tend to be pretty open with the history in that book as well.