You can listen to or download the March 11 broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show below. It will also be included in our podcast feed (https://interpreterfoundation.org/feed/podcast). This broadcast features Allen Wyatt, Martin Tanner, and Kevin Christensen discussing the CES Letter — what it is, how it came about, approaches used within the letter, Kevin’s response to the letter, and responses to Kevin’s response. It also discusses various questions raised in the letter and how people can find answers if they are disturbed by any of the questions brought up in the letter.
The Interpreter Radio Show can be heard Sunday evenings from 7 to 9 PM (MST) on K-TALK, AM 1640, or you can listen live on the Internet at ktalkmedia.com. Call in to 801-254-1640 with your questions and comments during the live show.
Original air date: March 11, 2018. This recording has been edited to remove commercial breaks.
Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:33:57 — 21.5MB)
The Interpreter Radio Show is a weekly discussion of matters of interest to the hosts, guests, and callers of the show. The views expressed on the Interpreter Radio Show are those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Interpreter Foundation, nor should statements made on the show be construed as official doctrinal statements of the Church.
Nibley makes several powerful points. My favorite is below:
Actually the Bible passages quoted in the Book of Mormon often differ from the King James Version, but where the latter is correct there is every reason why it should be followed.
When Jesus and the Apostles and, for that matter, the Angel Gabriel quote the scriptures in the New Testament, do they recite from some mysterious Urtext?
Do they quote the prophets of old in the ultimate original? Do they give their own inspired translations? No, they do not.
They quote the Septuagint, a Greek version of the Old Testament prepared in the third century B.C. Why so? Because that happened to be the received standard version of the Bible accepted by the readers of the Greek New Testament.
When “holy men of God” quote the scriptures it is always in the received standard version of the people they are addressing.
https://www.fairmormon.org/answers/Source:Nibley:Church_News:29_July_1961:How_else_does_one_quote_scripture_if_not_bodily%3F
In my opinion, the guests on the show never quite address the question of the one caller who asked about KJV errors showing up in the Book of Mormon (in the passages that match the KJV). The FairMormon articles don’t quite answer the caller’s question either.
It is clear that some 50% of the Book of Mormon quotes of the Bible match precisely with the 1769 King James Bible. Some of these matching words include what some will say are translation errors in the 1769 KJV. Yet it is also evident that Joseph Smith did not consult any other materials while dictating the Book of Mormon text.
The caller wants to know how this could be.
The answer is not, “Well, despite the errors the meaning is still there” or “In some cases the Book of Mormon was more correct than the KJV.” Those answers don’t explain how the 1769 KJV text got into the Book of Mormon. It is not, as some in the FairMormon materials suggest, that though no one saw him, Joseph must have been glancing at a Bible for those quotes. How would he know when to quote or when to alter the Book of Mormon language?
So what is the answer? First, we need to recognize that the KJV language translation was published, available, and the Bible of record for English speakers of Joseph Smith’s day. So the text was available. Secondly, the text was delivered to Joseph Smith via the seer stone or interpreters. As Joseph was NOT consulting outside materials, the Bible quotes, whether matching with the KJV or not, were given to him to dictate.
All this means is that whoever it was that rendered the text from the plates into English largely DEFERRED to the extant KJV text, making some alterations. In other words, the person or group or persons MAKING THE TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH are the ones responsible for the KJV language there. Knowing where Bible quotes were being made, THEY rendered the English version by using KJV language.
FairMormon mentions this somewhat, but attributes it to Joseph Smith himself. But Joseph did NOT take anything from one language into another, nor was he the one deciding when to use the KJV. He read what was given to him and dictated it to the scribe.
The question now becomes, “Who actually DID the translating from the plates themselves into English?” We don’t know. Most may initially say that God did it himself. Nothing wrong with that. God could have used any language He wanted. But there is another possibility. God could have assigned others to do the actual translating into English. That translation process could have begun as early as the 1500s, accounting for the Early Modern English Royal Skousen and Stanford Carmack have found, with revisions later on to update spelling and Bible quotes to conform to what was in standard use at the time of Joseph Smith.
Joseph Smith said the transmission of the Book of Mormon text came through the “gift and power of God.” Nowhere can we negate that the English translation was not already done in the years leading up to the Restoration, and that the already existing translation was then miraculously delivered to Joseph Smith by him reading it off a stone in the darkness of a hat.
I aggregated a bunch of the replies to the CES Letter at this site below:
http://whytheldschurchistrue.com/responses-to-the-ces-letter/