Hello, welcome back to Scripture Central, where we build enduring faith in Jesus Christ by illuminating the scriptures.

We try to make them accessible and defensible and comprehensible.

And that's why I would like to invite you to come follow church history.

I want to address some hard questions today with some honest answers.

I'd like to jump right in to the translation of the Book of Mormon.

As we follow along, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Scripture program, we'll be looking at the historical background

from section 6, 7, 8, and 9.

And this is a very important topic to me. I had mentioned earlier, I discussed this,

did a lot of research on this from my dissertation, and I just love this period of history. So

welcome back to 1829. And boy, are there a lot of hard questions in these sections. We have

Oliver Cowdery arriving, and he comes from a great background where he has a lot of

questions as well.

And how can you expect to open the canon is one of his questions.

How in the world can anyone in early Americana dare tread on the sacred ground of the canon and rip it open?

This was highly offensive to them.

And another question, how did the process of translation actually work?

You know, Joseph said it happened by the gift and power of God,

but we need some details. Why did Joseph look in a hat? Where were even the plates sometimes?

All these are very good questions, and I hope to address lots of them as we go through.

But I'd just like to start out with my main thesis that Joseph was not a product of his environment in his doctrine, but he was in other things.

And the Protestant thought, remember at this time, the Bible is where all authority is.

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