Welcome to another episode of Mormon Discussion Podcast. I'm your host Bill Real, and I'm grateful for the chance to be with you today.

Today we're going to talk about the 116 pages, the Lost Book of Lehigh. And I'll just note that this is one episode in a series of maybe about 30 episodes where we'll take issues and we'll explain that the logic in them

just doesn't hold up and we'll do so pretty quickly. And so this will be a series. There should be

a playlist out there that has all of these in it. So if you did listen to this one and you enjoy it,

you'll want to find the rest of those. So let's talk for a moment. Again, Joseph starts translating the gold plates

that go to make up the Book of Mormon. And when he starts that process, Martin Harris is his first

scribe. They get 116 manuscript pages into the translation. And Joseph Smith allows Martin

Harris to have those 116 pages and they disappear. And Joseph Smith allows Martin Harris to have those 116 pages and they disappear.

And Joseph then and D&C 10 gives an explanation for why those pages can't be reproduced,

what would happen if they were, and hence what he's going to do,

what God would have him do to deal with that issue. And so knowing that, let's just get into this. So in the early months of 1828,

Joseph Smith began dictating what he said was a translation of an ancient record written upon

gold plates. He dictated while his scribe Martin Harris wrote,

producing what became known as the Book of Lehigh, the opening portion of what would later be

published as the Book of Mormon. Joseph did not claim to be guessing or paraphrasing or interpreting loosely,

which apologists require, and we'll get into that here

in a minute. Rather, he claimed it was a tight translation. He claimed he was translating by divine

power of God, the gift and power of God to be exact. The words he said came from God, and his

role as prophet, was simply to read them aloud as they were revealed.

But something went wrong. Joseph allowed Harris to take the completed manuscript home to show his

family. The manuscript contained 116 pages. It was the only copy they had. And soon after, it disappeared,

and it was never recovered. Now, this created a serious problem. If Joseph truly had the ability

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