Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I am one of your hosts for today John DeLin.

It is November 17th, 2022 and we are here in episode 30 of an amazing series on LDS Church Truth Claims with Mike from LDS Discussions.

For those of you who don't know, there's this amazing website called LDS Discussions.com where my friend Mike has spent

untold hours reviewing and discussing Mormon Stories Truth Claims from as neutral and as dispassionate of a perspective as as possible.

Mike himself is a convert. He's in a mixed faith marriage right now and he is a great guy and he's really super almost just freakishly smart.

Anyway, today we're going to be covering the episode LDS Discussions.com slash Abraham Dash translation.

That's the location for the text version of this essay and of course we want to remind everyone that we've assembled all 30 at this point LDS Discussions episodes on Spotify in both audio and video format.

So you can share them with other people or watch them all or listen to them all in sequence.

You can also find them on YouTube under Mormon Stories podcast in the LDS Discussions playlist and of course it's also available on you know Apple podcasting app under LDS Discussions or wherever you get your podcasts and of course it's integrated into the Mormon Stories podcast feed.

No discussion of the book of Abraham would be complete without mentioning Dr. Robert Rittner.

Here's a photo of Dr. Robert Rittner for those of you who are watching but Robert Rittner sat in an endowed chair of Egyptology at the University of Chicago for multiple decades and one of the honors of my professional life was doing like a 13 hour series with Dr. Robert Rittner and the great radio free Mormon digging into the book of Abraham in depth with a real live Egyptologist.

And again the only endowed chair of Egyptology in North Central or South America that's who Robert Rittner was Robert Rittner literally passed away in the past year along with Dr. Michael Co a real loss to all of us but just a shout out to Robert Rittner and a link to Dr. Rittner series with me and RFM can be found at Mormon Stories.org will include a link to that in the show notes.

And of course that begs the question is we bring on our beloved fearless leader Mike Mike why in the world do we even need to include the book of Abraham in this amazing series if we've already got 13 hours of Robert Rittner and I don't want you to shy away because I think this is going to be an important series we do.

Yeah and actually that's a great question because if you've listened to the 13 hours with Dr. Rittner that you had done there are countless other podcasts that have been done I know RFM has done a bunch on the book of Abraham so there's a lot out there.

I would argue the reason that these are important is because we're trying to cover kind of the truth claims of the Mormon church and we're trying to cover all of them and the book of Abraham is the most important way that we can really discern whether or not Joseph Smith had the ability to translate ancient language.

And I think what will make these podcasts maybe a little bit different is that we're going to tie them back into what we've already done in the previous episodes to really kind of drive the point that we've been making this whole series which is that when you look at all these problems and totality.

These are common threads these problems are isolated the book Abraham Joseph Smith as we know the translation doesn't match the scrolls well you would sit there and go well that that's a one time thing but as we've talked about in our previous episodes there are a lot of details in the book of Abraham that I'm going to talk about.

Abraham that are going to mirror some of the problems we see with the book of Mormon the doctrine and covenants put you know DNC one 32 as we talked about and so to be able to bring it I think back to our earlier episodes to really drive home the fact that these are not isolated issues as we'll see as we go through the apologetics will be important I think combined with the fact that this is the one area as we'll go through with this presentation that we could show source material for what Joseph is translating and so with the book of

Mormon we don't have the ability to do that because obviously the gold plates if they ever existed in the form Joseph said they did we can't look at so being able to do that and evaluate his claims is very important but obviously if you really want a fuller picture the interviews with Dr. Rittner the RFM podcast with David Bachboy all of those are great series that you'll want to do in addition to this to get an even deeper view into the book Abraham as a whole.

We also should mention Dan Vogel has an amazing series on on YouTube where he also goes into the book of Abraham in depth and Dan Vogel of course is a scholar of Joseph Smith probably the world's foremost scholar on Joseph Smith and shout out to Dan Vogel we love him and of course my breath mecca episode with Mormon stories also covers a lot of it so lots of different ways and angles that you all.

Can get up to speed on book of Abraham really quickly we also want to bring in for today's discussion the one the only the great and Nimo the famous hey Nimo hi John is it okay if I introduce you as is Nimo the famous you don't mind right sure.

Nimo is obviously is joining us from the UK and he's got a wonderful channel on YouTube called Nimo the Mormon and he is one of the Brit Vengeurs which is a group of UK YouTubers and Nimo you really wanted to do book of Abraham is that right yes.

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