Well, you know, I've always put things on the shelf when I was doing my Ph.D. work.

I ran into some interesting researchers, one of them did research for Truman Mads, and I got to know Truman Mads and through that source, and just we would swap material, and this was when I zoomed my Ph.D. at BYU, and plus my studies in the history of religion, I mean, for example, I began to study the second grade awakening discourses by Methodists and others at camp meetings,

and I was struck of how similar those sermons and the doctrine, the Protestant doctrine, and the form, and the conversion pattern, and all of the things that's in my, today in my chapter 4 in an insider's view, and how struck I was with how similar that was to the mainline preachers in the Book of Mormon, say, was starting with Enus and going right up through Alma 2,

and there was Discord, Benjamin, and Amulac, and there's a lot of similarity, I thought, my gosh, that's striking. And so, you know, I just put that on the shelf. I knew there's a lot of Bible in the Book of Mormon, and the more I studied the Bible, and learned the Bible, the more I saw the Bible was in the Book of Mormon.

Yeah, at least people are not truly aware of how much Bible is in the Book of Mormon.

Yeah, and we'll cover that when we actually dig into the book.

So we had the Bible, we had the evangelical influence there, the Smith family dynamics of his introduced a view of the Hebrews, those kind of things.

But I really didn't do much of anything until I came back to Salt Lake, and I was at East Seminary for one year.

This was in 1980, up through about 1987. I spent seven years at Brighton High School, which is to be close to my home.

And that's when I participated more in MHA, and the Mormon History Association, and the sources were here, but the thing that really triggered me was, my interest in this was Mark Kaufman in the Salamander.

What year was that? It was 1984.

To give our listeners a brief history of, you know, a lot of people might know the name, some note in depth, but probably few know the basic history of what happened there.

So tell us real quick what happened as you were experiencing it. So you were in Salt Lake when Mark Kaufman...

Yes, I'd met Mark Kaufman like four days before the bombings, and when the bombings started, we were all opening our mailboxes with a stick and looking underneath our cars.

We wondered if they were out to get historians or what.

How'd you meet Mark Kaufman? What were the...

I met him from Brent Metcalf. Brent Metcalf wrote a book called New Approaches to the Book of Mormon, and he worked, did research for Mark Kaufman, and I met...

But Brent hadn't published that book at the time, right?

No, he hadn't. So what was he doing at the time?

He was working for Mark Kaufman.

Just as a researcher? Yeah, as a researcher and whatever.

How did you, like, how did you meet Brent?

...