Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of the Joseph Smith podcast, brought to you by Mormon Stories Podcast.

I'm your host, Dr. John DeLinn. It is May 27, 2025. And today we are continuing with part two in this brand new series where we're starting this podcast series with the book, Joseph Smith, The Rise and Fall of an American prophet by Dr. John G. Turner.

For those who didn't join us already, this is part two in a series.

Last episode, we met with Dr. Turner to talk about, or John, to talk about his reasons for writing this

biography, his motives. And then we talked about sort of Joseph Smith's family, his ancestors,

and his upbringing prior to, you know, I guess we could say 1820-ish timeframe. So today,

we are going to be covering first vision kind of stuff,

Joseph Smith's first vision and his treasure digging. And if we have time, we're going to talk

about his, you know, Moroni story and his claim to be promised plates and his attempts to get the plates.

Everything sort of preceding the translation of the book Mormon.

And again, the value I see in having John Turner on is it's, you know, number one, he's a great historian.

Number two, this is a great book that we're covering in number three.

He's never been Mormon.

And so unlike Fom Brody or Richard Bushman, we're getting an outsider's view with a credible

top-notch historian like Michael Coe or Robert Rittner in their respective fields.

We're getting a top-notch historian, getting their

views calling balls and strikes on Joseph Smith. We've told all of you that the way that we can

afford to do this, we want to pay John for his time. We also have production costs. So the way that

we're doing this is we're asking those of you who value this content

to support it financially. So we're happy to announce that nine of you so far after episode

one donated to this project. We're grateful for those of you who donated. If you want to see this

project continue or if you value it, all you have to do is go to donorbox.org

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