For a hundred and a hundred years, Joseph Smith looked like an idiot. Yeah. He looked like a fool. He got it wrong. Got the dates wrong.
Rookie mistake, kid. But now he's vindicated because of the ascension of Isaiah. Because the gospel, these apocryphal texts show that Isaiah had lost prophecies and one of them was exactly what the Nephites inherited. Isaiah that we have left in the canon has this kind of breadcrumbs that he leaves for us.
It's impossible. Like, we have to make sense of this. How could Joseph have known these things?
Nephi maybe knew a different version of Isaiah than we have, right? That maybe included the ascension of Isaiah. Yes, 100%. The Book of Mormon is absolutely an authentically ancient book.
The Apocrypha come out after the Book of Mormon, after the Book of Mormon's been laughed at, and supports all these things that the Book of Mormon claims. The brass plates that were taken by Lehi predate the Old Testament. If there is a single apocryphal book that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints should read, it's the Ascension of Isaiah.
The Ascension of Isaiah This video is brought to you by ScriptureNotes.com. For a free trial of Description Notes, please make sure you check out the link in the description. Ladies and gentlemen, back to Ward Radio.
I'm your host, Cardinalus. Today I'm joined in the studio by Dave Butler, author of In the Language of Adam, as well as by Jonah Barnes, who we have previously called the Associate Professor of All Things Apocryphal, but now has a new book coming out called The Key to the Keystone. Which, Jonah, how would you describe it?
It's paper. The papers are all bound together on one side. So you can just easily flip from one page to the other page.
And then it has this black stuff. It looks like letters and you read it and it's words and it's really, yeah. Okay.
Well, basically it talks, if I understand correctly, it kind of recompiles like the Lost 116 Pages did. A lot of the lost lore in Lehi's apocryphal Genesis. Uh-huh.
And basically states that the most important book. that of our religion is a book that nobody's ever read yes ever read very it's what was on the brass plates yeah so so it uses kind of the Q source hypothesis if you have two documents that share these similarities they they you can tell if they've come from a parent document kind of uses that with apocryphal texts and Book of Mormon to triangulate what was on the brass plate so it's reconstructing recreating the brass plates and so if you want to read the most important book in Mormonism that no one's ever read It gives you kind of a guide to do that. Okay. And in this lost book we have, and this is going to be super cool.
I am so stoked and excited for this episode. It's got some lost prophecies of Isaiah here that we're going to jump into and you're going to describe here in this episode. So anyway, Jonah Barnes, author of Key to the Keystone, who's recompiling all of the lost stories of the apocryphal Genesis that Lehi used. You please tell us now, right now, what are some of the lost prophecies of Isaiah that we have now in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints via the Book of Mormon that we don't have in the Stook of Judah?
Yes. Yeah. Well put. Very well put. Yeah.
So one of the things that I discovered as I'm reading through apocryphal texts was the ascension of Isaiah. The Ascension of Isaiah is an apocryphal book. It was a kind of a forgotten Latin manuscript that was rediscovered in 1522 and translated into Italian and then eventually made its way into English. I think the first English edition was 1912. I think it went to German in the mid 19th century and then only in 1912 was it put in English. But the Ascension of Isaiah purports to be a story of essentially.
Isaiah is death, actually. It's kind of why he was killed, because he's in the court of the king. He sees a heavenly vision. He ascends to heaven and gets this vision.
And because of what he saw, because of what he declared, what he saw, he was killed for it. Okay. So what we have in the Old Testament, we have lots of Isaiah.
It's a very large book in the Old Testament, but there's no ending. Isaiah, it's great. I mean, Isaiah is some of the most beautiful poetry and imagery and a prophecy in all of the Old Testament, but has no ending to it. And the ascension of Isaiah kind of closes that loop.
Now, the ascension of Isaiah was not included in the canon. for reasons that will become quite clear as we talk about it. Ah, okay.
But honestly, I'll say that if there is a single apocryphal book that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints should read, it's The Ascension of Isaiah. Really? I'd say it's the number one.
I love it. I think it's so good. It is a hybrid.
It's pretty obvious there were several authors who kind of put things together. Oh, not like Kwaku's human-animal hybrids? oh okay cool so like it's not like anarchy mating with the watchers yeah it's got like the the the hooves of a lion the paws of a lion and it's got the tail no no okay but it's it's been kind of cobbled together a lot of apocryphal books are like that but i don't see that as any reason to be scared of it i just care about the content i just care about the content it's like with the book of mormon people only want to talk about how it came to pass and want to actually read the stinking book if you read the ascension of isaiah you're like this is great um you And OK, so let's dive into there's a lot of evidence that it's true in the in the Book of Mormon. So E.D. Howe, the O.G. great grandfather of anti-Mormonism.
OK. Dusted the Dorito chips off of his wife, Peter, and wrote in more Mormonism unveiled. He said he's talking about the Book of Mormon and one one part about the Book of Mormon that really chafed him.
Really bug, it bugs people to this day. It's the most offensive thing to Christians that you could possibly do. It is, yeah, talk about the Messiah.
Yeah, bugs the crap out of them. Talking about Christ all the time. Nothing chafes those Christians like talking about Christ all the time.
They just can't stand it. Because they believe that you can't talk about Christ before Christ, right? That pre-Jesus Christ, talk of the Messiah. You know, it's too, it's too Messiah.
It's too churchy. It's too, too Jesus fan. In the Book of Mormon.
Because remember, the Book of Mormon pulls from Old Testament traditions, right? Lehi and Nephi were living centuries before Jesus came. So when they're talking so clearly about a suffering Messiah, about the sonship of Jesus Christ and the Messiah, all these things, that is offensive because they say, ah, we didn't have that. We didn't have that. You can't talk about that in the Old Testament time.
So E.D. Howe says, the Jews have ever held their prophets in the highest veneration, particularly those who spake clearly. Of the coming Messiah. So early in the Book of Mormon, Lehi says, I'm preaching about the Messiah and they want to stone me to death. In 1 Nephi 1, verse 18 and 19, he tells them Jerusalem's going to be destroyed.
He says, your whole city's going to be destroyed. You're all wicked. You're all going to be annihilated. And they go, oh, go on.
They don't even care. Yeah. They laugh at him. But then he says, and there's going to be a Messiah and then they want to stone him to death. If you read it carefully, he says, oh, the city is going to be destroyed.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's going to be this Messiah. And they're like, you can't say that. And they pick up stones to kill him. Now, E.D. Howe reads this and he says, oh, come on.
The Jews have ever held their prophets in the highest veneration, particularly those who speak clearly of the coming Messiah. They wouldn't kill somebody preached about the Messiah. This is ridiculous fan fiction Joseph Smith is making up.
Right. So the story of the ascension of Isaiah is. Exactly a prophet, one of the greatest prophets who was killed exactly because he talked clearly about the Messiah.
Well, and now we know from the revolutionary, dare I say, work of Dave Butler and our friend Mike Day and our friend that wrote all the books on the Deuteronomists, you know, that that was actually a big controversy in the sixth century B.C. The revisions that all the Deuteronomists took out from. what now is the Torah or the Old Testament, uh, concerning, uh, the Messianic prophecies and, um, actually all kinds of lore, uh, that they just didn't like and kind of edited out. I think in another previous, uh, episode, you said most of those Deuteronomic reforms, I got to remember to say that word, right? One of those Deuteronomic reforms was done in, uh, 5.50.
BC, you said, and we know that Lehi would have left Jerusalem with his family sometime around 600 BC. So his version of the Old Testament would have been spared these Deuteronomic reforms, correct? So the Deuteronomic reforms were going on before 550 AD, BC.
They were going on a couple centuries before that. They were going on right as Lehi is saying these things. It was a split.
In the in the in the crowd. OK, cool. So if you're if you're living in Lehigh's day, you hear people saying, I.
Really think that you're hearing people say don't talk about the messiah don't talk about the messiah We don't need the messiah all we need is the law all we need are the words of moses And we're good to go and the words of moses is the first that is literally the first line of deuteronomy It's these are the words of moses and so they actually called it the devarim Of the words of moses the words right so they say all we need are these words It's the title of the book all we need is deuteronomy and lehi is saying Oh, there's going to be a Messiah. And they all flip their lid. You can't talk about that. So that was going on before 550 BC. But 550-ish BC is when most Bible scholars will agree that the Old Testament canon was kind of compiled.
They get back from the Babylonian captivity and the Jews all look around at the ruins of Jerusalem and they say, how could this happen? How could this happen? How do we explain this? And the scribes get together. And they go, yeah, how did this happen?
And I think the truth of it is the scribes are kind of why it happened. And so they're like, we got to come up with a story. Quick, mom's coming home.
Oh, I was with you all night. I was with you all night. Right. And so they come up and they compile the Old Testament to say the real reason that we were all destroyed was because we didn't listen to the scribes enough.
Yeah, yeah, that's it. Yeah, we weren't scribe enough. And they kind of recast.
the God of Israel in their own image and made themselves into the saviors. And so when you read in the Deuteronomic history, which is what Dr. Martin Noten and these guys have kind of gleaned, is that the whole theme is you disobey the scribes, you disobey the law. And bad things happen. So they're like the original church office building bureaucrats of the 6th century BC. Is that what we're saying right here?
Well, I'm not ready to say that they're apostate scribes. Sanitizing our Sunday school of faith into LDS feelings barn and chicken noodle soup for the soul and all that other stuff. Well, it's what they did. They went so far as to actually, and my book, I think, tries to demonstrate this.
They ripped out. Line to line references to the Messiah. They had no scruples.
They went through this holy writ that they respect so much, and they were tearing out, making changes like it was going out of style. They had no fear of changing those old texts. There's a little graphic I just threw in the Discord. It's the newest thing in the Keystone here that kind of helps explain a little bit of what we mean. Now, Isaiah lived in the 8th century B.C.
Okay. We think around that time. This shows, so he would have preached before the brass plates were yoinked. If you can see there, the yoinking takes place right around 600 BC.
That's a good word, yoink. It is. It's Yiddish. It's very good.
It's Yiddish. So the Israelites are sharing this common tradition. Then they come to about six, and then there's this schism that starts to happen. People are, the Messiah or not the Messiah, or Deuteronomy or not Deuteronomy, all these kind of reforms.
We're going on and the Lord says get out get it out get the plain and precious things out Because they're gonna mess it up and then it breaks off and you get this this bifurcation the separate thread that remember the scene where Hulk is talking to the ancient one right infinity war people people you with me And it splits the timeline splits gay the ancient one is like yeah, you got to bring the stones back Are you picking up what I'm putting down here? Guys, not a big MCU universe guy. It's like, how am I supposed to tell you of heavenly things when I can't even tell you about the MCU?
Our Lord and Savior Thanos. Anyway, so this is where it breaks off. And the Nephites steal away the plain and precious things.
Then, after a century later, is the Old Testament kind of officially canonized, we think. It's obviously drawn from things that are ancient or whatever. But that's when it's really kind of compiled and put together.
So, the Book of Mormon... The brass plates that were taken by Lehi predate the Old Testament. Okay.
Let me say that again. The brass plates predate. They're a purer form of the Old Testament. The Old Testament was then later taken, changed by these scribes and Deuteronomists. Wow.
Okay. All right. So, anyways.
The comparison to the sort of church office building is apt, at least in this, that the Deuteronomists are scribes and lawyers, and what they praise is the law. So, for them, wisdom. is statutory law.
That's in Deuteronomy 4. Famously, Deuteronomy doesn't seem to know anything about the inside of the temple or the temple. It's not priests. The priests, in fact, really what we seem to have, interestingly enough, dating back to the time of Isaiah, there's Isaiah.
Isaiah the man, Isaiah of Jerusalem, and he has a school of disciples that pass on his traditions and his modes of prophesying, etc. And his career starts mid-8th century BC, which is about when the Deuteronomists seem to start also, right? So you seem to have had for 150 years maybe kind of a prophetic priestly group and a lawyerly scribal group.
who were in some sense in competition. Yes. And effectively, the lawyerly scribal group wins the kingship, and then the kingdom is destroyed, and the prophetic priestly group survives underground.
And then with people like Jonadab and Rechab or Lehi who flee. And so the story in the Ascension of Isaiah says, Isaiah and his little entourage flee to a little town outside of Jerusalem. This tiny little town.
and they subsist on roots and berries. They're hiding from the King Manasseh and his cronies. So it's like all of the authors that won't get published in Deseret Book because they're too busy actually publishing silly little cookbooks that don't matter and or we need gay temple ceilings books, you know what I'm saying? Because they got to make room for that.
Dang it, our new authors have to come over here. Okay, cool. Interesting.
A little too accurate, actually. Okay, cool. Yeah. Yeah, right, right.
So they're the exiled guys, right? So Deseret, both over-They have to come to Ward Radio to, you know, be heard. So are we like the Nag Hammadi feeding off of roots? You know what I'm saying? Yeah, so what we are is Bethlehem.
So Isaiah and his entourage, they go to Bethlehem, this little town, Bethlehem, which was the home city of Jesse. The Jesse, the father of David. So they go to Bethlehem and they're chilling in Bethlehem. And it's interesting because the prophecy that the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem comes from Isaiah.
He says, you know, in Bethlehem, will the Messiah come forth? And that comes from him. No, he's in Bethlehem. This is so intriguing. So then he has his little entourage.
So what happens is he's in the court of the king. You read this in the Ascension of Isaiah. And he says, He says, oh my gosh, I'm getting a vision.
And apparently right in front of everybody, he looks up in the heavens and he receives some kind of vision, some kind of ascension. If you read it with your temple ears on, it's a hundred times more interesting. But even if you don't, let's say you don't. And you're just reading it to, what does he say, just on the first layer.
I suggest everybody who's been endowed. Please go read the Ascension of Isaiah. It's open source.
Go Google it. You can read it. Okay.
And it's kind of crazy. But anyways, he goes, he does this Ascension. An angel gives him a tour, a guided tour.
We're walking. We're walking. We're walking. We're stopping. Okay.
This is seventh heaven. If you look to your left, you'll see it gives him kind of a guided tour of heaven. And in it, he sees some things that are very controversial.
He says, I see a virgin. And she'll conceive a son, and that son will be the son of God, and that son of God will come down on earth. He will suffer at the hands of lawless, wicked men. He will be crucified on a tree.
Okay. Now, we know that story. That doesn't seem unremarkable.
But consider. That you're talking to those very people. You're talking to the priests, the lawless men. And you're saying, someday you are going to murder God.
You people are going to be responsible for murdering God. Okay? It's hard to imagine a prophecy more, like, less market friendly, you know, like, less appealing than turning to the court of the king and saying, you're the guys who are going to kill the son of God someday. That's like, well, like, no wonder they didn't appreciate this prophecy. So he gives this prophecy the details I have in the discord.
What's funny is if you read. In the language of Adam. And then you read that. There it is.
You read 1 Nephi 11. The parallels are like kind of crazy. You're reading Isaiah's vision from the ascension of Isaiah, and you read it parallel to Nephi's vision of the tree of life. He gets a temple guided tour, right, of his vision. Okay.
And I've highlighted here in my book, in this table, some of the correspondences. And you see that they start off. talking about the only begotten, the son of the eternal, the sonship was...
A very controversial thing that was not welcome talk to say that God will have a son, that the Messiah will be the son. The Spirit of the Lord resembles a man. It looks just like a man.
It isn't a cloud. It looks like a man. He'll be the son in this world. He'll descend from heaven.
He'll go forth. Excuse me, the world will stretch forth their hand against the sun. They'll take him and they'll raise him up the lawless men the wicked men it follows The the Virgin will conceive the Virgin will be in Nazareth once as Bethlehem was as Nazareth You follow these parallels tick tick tick tick tick tick tick and you almost start to think did I say it did Nephi get the exact same ascension vision as Isaiah.
Yeah, that's astonishing It makes you think that maybe something might underlie these visionary experiences that was repeatable or even institutional, right? or modular right and i actually i was talking to dave about this as i was writing the book and i said i don't get is it like a like on a dvd like can you replay yeah like like isaiah sees this vision and then they stop rewind and then two centuries later a century later they give it to nephi like how does this happen and dave gave me this kind of two by four up the side of the head and he goes unless it was a temple ordinance and i'm like oh duh of course it's a temple ordinance like Duh. Like, yes, of course.
It's some kind of a right that an angel is walking Isaiah through and walking Nephi through. So the angels used to do the endowment and not just like the cotton top that retired. a decade later and they're one of your wife forced them to get out of the house and go down and volunteer at the temple.
Those could be the same thing. There's some basic pieces of vocabulary that you should have when you're approaching the scriptures. One is that the temple and heaven and a mountaintop are the same thing. But another one is that angels or priests are stars.
So it's exactly right that Book of Mormon opens with a vision of the throne of God and stars descending. Stars equals angels equals priests. So it's exactly right that when Nephi is getting his vision, 1 Nephi 11 to 14, and after an initial conversation with the Spirit of the Lord, it's an angel, which of course just means messenger in Hebrew or in Greek, right? That's right. That could be...
Again, a visionary version of an ordinance where the angel is a priest. Okay. Yeah. So notice.
So the big controversy, if you look at the. So my mission president's wife was a marvelous scriptorian. And she gave this word of advice that I've always remembered.
She says, read every page of scripture and ask yourself, what is the question this was supposed to answer? Okay. And I. I've tried to keep that. And if you look at the reaction of the angel in first Nephi 11, so he's given this tour and he says, so the angels like, so, uh, heard this crazy stuff from your dad, right?
And if I was like, yeah. And then just like, so what do you think about that? And Nephi's like, I mean, I think it's, I believe it. He's like, you believe all of it? And Nephi's like, yeah, I do.
And the angel's like, oh. And he just, in verse 6, he says, he freaks out. The angel's like, Hosanna to the Lord, the Most High God, for he is God over all the earth, yea, even above all.
And blessed art thou, Nephi, because thou believest in the Son of the Most High God, the Sonship, the Begottenness, that the Messiah is the Son of God. This was something that was not... You're not allowed to talk about Isaiah saw the exact same thing.
And it was he's going to be the son of the and then the spirit goes on. This version is going to give birth. The virgin is in Nazareth. He's going to go forth.
He's going to have 12 disciples and follows Isaiah's vision almost perfectly. It's almost like the question that this was supposed to answer. It's almost like there's this terrible loss, this apostasy going on.
And people are fighting against that idea, the sonship of the Messiah and the angel. has found someone who believes it. And he's just relieved that this doctrine will be preserved.
That Nephi says, yeah, I believe that. And the angel's like, oh, thank goodness somebody believes this. Because it's being lost. It's not been lost. It's been destroyed.
It's been destroyed. This is the characteristic ideology of the Deuteronomic reformers, is Yahweh alone-ism. Yes, yes. Okay. Yes.
Now. My question is... I can see why in, for example, the great apostasy after Jesus Christ, a lot of the plain and precious truths that we have in the Book of Mormon were lost in all of these ecumenical councils and these meetings where they had to argue about everything from the nature of God to the nature of the canon and so on and so forth.
One of the first things that they argued about was, you know, the nature of God. And you can tell there was this like Greco-Roman influence. The Greco-Roman culture that didn't like corporeal godhood and this, you know, fallen and dark and filthy mortal thing ever being worthy of, you know, being a tabernacle of clay for a divine being because that was not shared with the greater kind of Hellenized culture around them.
And we still have echoes of Greek culture in our society to this day. Like, for example, we worship people that look like Greek gods like you. I mean, that's true.
Whereas, you know. I get it all the time. Thank you for that, John.
The tubby king Noah. It's kind of exhausting. They don't, they don't. Yeah, exactly.
Like, like me, we don't get venerated. So anyway, I can see why an outside culture that is a little bit more Greco-Roman that dislikes a corporeal God, okay, would want to have that taken away. And so that's why, you know, Protestants kicked God out of earth.
before the atheists kicked him out of heaven, you know, I could see why these ecumenical councils ended up coming up with a hypostatic union and all these unintelligible Trinitarian beliefs trying to keep the ship together. Yeah, it almost doesn't make sense unless you have outside apostasy constantly warring against truth. Yeah, so if kind of like the Greco-Roman influence was what caused the great apostasy after Jesus Christ, and...
It was the Greco-Roman influence that motivated all of that in that apostasy. Now we're talking about the earlier apostasy 600 years before Christ. That needs another name.
Doesn't it? Doesn't it need another name? Yeah, like the first apostasy, the pre-Christ apostasy. So this is another podcast. Well, so the pre-Christ apostasy, what was the overarching influence?
Because the Greco-Roman influence wasn't as... As large, was it the Assyrian influence? Yes, you're on it. This is, yes, you get it.
You get it. This is so great to hear somebody get it. Are you like the angel where you're like, so do you believe in the great apostles?
Kind of, yeah, right? Yes, because that poor angel must have been so frustrated watching it all crumble. But yeah, so this I refer to in the book, in chapter six, as the great forsakening.
And It comes that comes from the book of Jubilees. So the book of Jubilees has a verse where it says that they will. And I can actually read it here for you. Wait, the great forsaken.
That's the name of that first apostasy. That well, that's a word that I gave it. And then we're running with it, bro.
So the problem is that we got to be able to talk about it easily. It needs to be in some kind of a soundbite that we can kind of like Mormon. But what we need is when we talk about the great apostasy, the word apostasis, that's Greek. And so you say the great apostasy, it makes sense because it was Hellenization coming in and kind of poisoning Christianity.
So that makes sense. But when you talk about the pre-Christian apostasy, first of all, way too long a word. No one's going to say that. And then apostasy, it wasn't Hellenization that got it.
It was the scribes forsaking. It was the original correlation department. Well, well, I mean, you got a point. So here's the verse in Jubilees.
This comes from Jubilees chapter one, verse 13. Okay. Where the Lord is prophesying to Moses and he says, someday they will forget. I didn't put this up there.
I didn't know we were going to talk about this. But he says the people will forget. all my law and all my commandments and all my judgments and will go astray as to new moons and Sabbaths and festivals and jubilees and ordinances. So he's saying the thing that they're going to lose are laws, commandments, judgments.
They're going to lose festivals, jubilees, ordinances. The book of Jubilees or the author is talking about the importance of rites and ordinances, temples, festivals, saying they're going to lose all of that and replace it And pervert the law. They're going to forsake it. And the word that he uses to forsake is shikikach.
And I'm saying this in front of Dave Butler, so I'm very nervous because my Hebrew is not up to something. But it's shikikach. And the, or the sheeheehoo, they're going to, they're going to forsake it.
And so I think-Wait, wait, wait. Did you say it's sheeheeha or sheeheehoo or sheeheeha? That's good.
Good. That was a good catch. Solid meme. Solid, solid reference. So, so I call it the great forsakening.
And I think that if we, if you try to understand the great apostasy without the great forsakening, it's- You can only get so far. Because if I remember correctly from a super chat we had on a live stream a while back, the person who super chatted said that Jesus Christ came to restore the church of the patriarchs after what you now call the great forsaken age. Paul Carden, yes! Whereas Joseph Smith came to restore the church of Jesus Christ that was lost after the great apostasy.
Yes! Oh, this is so, oh, you get it. It means that I actually know how to explain it because you're totally getting it. Yes.
So, yes. So the great forsaking happens with this kind of reform, 700, 600 ish kind of B.C. And that's when the Lord says, get the plain and precious things out. OK, now, Isaiah in the eighth century B.C. has this vision of the sonship of the Messiah that he'll suffer.
He'll suffer at. the hands of you guys he's in the court and he's like y'all are gonna murder god right bro like isaiah read the room bud read the room okay so it's sort of weird because it sort of makes me see him like lenny bruce or somebody like he's sitting there attacking the audience you know or like a really aggressive george carlin isaiah was george carlin there's a thumbnail but uh so so he so he gives this prophecy And the ascension of Isaiah says his entourage, there was a split. And it's funny, the phrase, the translation is kind of funny, but it says there are those who believed he did.
So he says, I saw what I saw. Those who believed he did see, those who believed he did go with Isaiah. Those who believed that he did not didn't go with Isaiah. There's this big split. He offends a lot of people, runs off to Bethlehem.
He's kind of living in hiding. And then finally, a false prophet convinces the king to go get him and kill him. Isaiah is dragged before the king. He said, you better rescind what you said. You better take it all back.
He won't take it all back. And he is, there's different accounts of different things. He escapes into the hollow of a tree trunk, by one account. And he's hiding in the tree trunk. And they want to kill him.
And so they just take a saw and they cut the tree. down now so he's sawn in twain is how it reads now this is not in the traditional canon this comes from these apocryphal texts that he's sawn in half and there's one verse and uh i i wish i could um remember it but it says it says uh he he he didn't even open up his mouth he he beheld the glory of god as he was killed and he spoke not a word or something and you're like Whoa, dude, that's heavy, man. That is heavy.
Now, the symbolism of cutting down a tree as you're killing Isaiah, I'm sure doesn't ring any bells for Dave Butler. Yeah. But you get you get. So Isaiah that we have left in the canon has these kind of breadcrumbs that he leaves for us.
Kind of these hints, almost like he's blinking SOS, right? Like a Vietnamese prisoner of war. In Isaiah chapter 30, verse 9 and 10, and I have this in the Discord, gives you a hint at this. He says, this is a rebellious people, lying children, children that will not hear the law of the Lord, which say to the seers, see not.
They're telling prophets, see not. And to the prophets, prophesy not unto us right things. Speak unto us smooth things. Prophesy deceits. So what Isaiah is lamenting is he's saying, you know, as he's alive in the 8th century B.C., these people won't listen.
They don't want hard prophecies. They only want smooth prophecies. Any time that we're really comfortable in our testimony, we should be worried.
Okay. Word up. Word up. Because a true testimony of Jesus Christ is just inherently uncomfortable. It means we need to be repenting all the time.
It's kind of hard. Anyways, so he gives this kind of clue in Isaiah chapter 30 in the canon where he says, people don't like what I'm saying. They're trying to censor me.
They're trying to shut me up. Micah says the same thing. Amos says the same thing. All these prophets kind of are saying.
You know, we're not being well received. Now, one last little tidbit here, the lost prophecies of Isaiah. In the Book of Mormon, okay?
Oh, man, I really love this. In the Book of Mormon. Rock on. Okay. Abinadi, who is the biggest Isaiah stan ever, by the way.
Okay, you got a scriptural reference? What's scriptural reference? I'm going to pull it up in scripture notes.
Sure, we're going to go to, let's go to Alma 22. Okay, Alma 22. Abinadi starts in the court of... Noah, and he talks about the sting of death. That's the first appearance of that phrase in the Book of Mormon, that imagery, the sting of death.
Okay. Well, obviously, Joseph Smith Jr. didn't realize that that was coined by Paul 175 years later. Oh, yeah, I know a lot of anti-Mormons try and say that, oh, Joseph Smith was just stealing from Paul.
But you say that it actually shows up. in books that predate either one of them in the Apocrypha. Oh, keep going. Refresh my memory. This is great.
Yes. So Abednego brings it up. Joseph Smith doesn't learn his lesson.
Okay. Now Aaron says the same thing in Alma 22, verse 14. Okay, rock on. Here it is. Now, if you're familiar with Isaiah and with Paul, you read this and you go, oh, this is total plagiarism. He says, he breaketh the bands of death, that the grave shall have no victory, and that the sting of death.
Shall be swallowed up in the hopes of glory. Okay, yeah. Oh, clearly he's stealing from Paul. Joseph Smith, come on, man.
Don't you know that this is supposed to take place 200 years before Paul wrote that letter? And here you make this rookie mistake. Well, and it goes on.
And it's quoted four or five times in the Book of Mormon, this imagery. Swallowing up, you know, sting of death, grave, having no victory in these things, right? Okay.
Well, so then there's this little... Book that gets discovered, the Gospel of Nicodemus. Okay.
Okay, yeah. And the Gospel of Nicodemus is a vision of the land of the dead, of Sheol. When Yohanan the Immerser, or John the Baptist, goes down to Sheol, he's killed. He kind of meets all the prophets down there because all the dead people are there.
And Isaiah is one of them because he was sawn in half. Okay. Okay, yeah.
And he's talking to Isaiah and Isaiah says, You know, look, Joseph Smith couldn't have known this. There's no way he possibly couldn't have known this. In this apocryphal book, Isaiah shows up and he says, Did not I, when I was alive on earth, foretell unto you that the dead shall rise?
Death, where is thy sting? Hell, where is thy victory? And they heard this and all the saints said, Yea, hell, open up thy gates. Isaiah, in this apocryphal book, comes out and says, I am the origin of the sting of death. prophecy i'm the guy wow who said it first and he's saying it in the 8th century bc so paul wasn't making it up paul was quoting isaiah he was quoting this common israelite tradition that was the predated the yoinking of the plates yeah interesting and so so bennett i can quote it and alma and aaron and mormon you know what else i just noticed too is i didn't see this before they're improving so fast but scripture notes now literally has the ascension of isaiah Oh, yes.
It literally has all eight chapters in here. And yeah, and it came to pass in the 26th year of the reign of Hezadiah, king of Judah, that he called Manasseh his son. Now he was only his one. And they have the whole thing here with all of the links set up and everything. So you can actually just read the ascension of Isaiah on scripture notes.
And you should. Yeah. Everybody should.
Everybody should read. So Isaiah is killed because he saw God separate from the sun. Because he saw the virgin, because he saw the corporeal incarnation of the Lord, because he saw the wicked men killing the Messiah. And so he was killed for that.
Then his book was not canonized for the same reasons. The irony is thick. His book isn't put in the canon because he's saying anti-Trinitarian stuff. Guys. Isaiah was murdered, was killed by cretists in the 8th century BC, and now cretists in the 4th century AD aren't including his stuff for the exact same reason.
It's like, guys, are we the baddies? You're the baddies. You're the baddies.
You're doing exactly like you are the villains that you're reading about. It just blows my mind. So anyway, sorry. The sting of death prophecy.
So this shows. that Abinadi and Aaron and Alma and Mormon and these guys had this. Lost prophecy of Isaiah.
It's not in it's not in Isaiah anymore, but it's in scripture notes, but it's So it's so for for a hundred and a hundred years Joseph Smith looked like an idiot Yeah, he looked like a fool. He got it wrong got the dates wrong rookie mistake kid But now he's vindicated because of the ascension of Isaiah because the God yeah Because the gospel, these apocryphal texts show that Isaiah had lost prophecies and one of them was exactly what the Nephites inherited. Okay.
That Paul was quoting. Now, Dave, Jonah, I'm going to come down from Mount Olympus with all of you scholars here for a second. Wow.
And I'm going to ask the obvious that hasn't been asked yet. I can hear. All of the Dan McClellan stans and the Bartney Ehrman stans and all of the, you know, scholars at UCLA who are studying the Dead Sea Scrolls, booting up their laptops and sharpening their pencils to write blog posts and also to do TikTok responses to your bold claims here and begin using sentences that start with actually, you know. Um, however, there is a legitimate concern here.
Um, I can hear a bunch of people right now probably screaming, oh yeah, well the Ascension of Isaiah, when did the Ascension of Isaiah come out? Like don't a lot of people have a legitimate concern that, okay, maybe this was somebody connecting the dots later because we know there was all kinds of pseudepigraphal writings floating around the Mediterranean in which people are trying to figure out, oh, who was the young man in the book of Mark that ran away naked? Oh, who really was, you know, Lazarus's brother that is mentioned in this one book? Oh, look, we there's like 15 different versions of people that found the first book of Corinthians written in the 1800s. You know, so like, how do we know that this isn't just some kind of post hoc creation?
OK, so gotcha. So the so here's the problem here, I think, is really the problem is that, OK, if we're going to play that game, how much of the Bible are you willing to throw out? Right. OK.
So from a believer's perspective, you're saying evangelicals shouldn't do it or, you know, anti-Mormons that are coming from a supposedly Christian background should really kind of take that attitude off the table, because if you start doing that, you're left with nothing. You're left with nothing. So if the if the Old Testament was compiled around the sixth century or fifth century B.C., talking about things that happened a millennia before that.
I mean, come on. When's our oldest copies of the Ascension of Isaiah? The oldest.
Well, let's see. The oldest copies, how do you date something? So the ascension of Isaiah, sorry, go ahead.
I was going to say that gets you to an interesting point, right? So prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest Hebrew text of the Bible was dated about the 11th century, the Leningrad Codex. So that doesn't mean that anyone thinks that the Old Testament was written in the 11th century.
Yeah. Nor was it written in the first century when the Dead Sea Scrolls date to, right? The idea.
ideas, and their expression, the words are written down and are clearly older. So the challenging thing is to date the idea. So I have read commentaries on the Ascension of Isaiah that say, hey, maybe some of this is Christian, right? Maybe James, the brother of Jesus, is really being described in his career here. But even those commentaries will say, but there are clearly some older ideas that go back that are Jewish texts, right?
You're trying to figure out how old is the idea. And the great peril that you run into is that you impose, that you just use your own understanding. It's like saying, this is what I've compared it to, and tell me if this is a good comparison just for our audience and the layman. It's like somebody 100 years from now saying, Kanye West didn't start his career in the early 2000s because the- the beats he was coming up with yes in 2006 and 2004 those were beats that we weren't hearing until easily uh 2020 2019 so anybody that wants to say kanye west actually came out of the late 90s or early 2000s they're mistaken they're stupid they don't know their mmd musical manuscript dating dating you know what i'm saying they're like you So with HMD, to me, it basically relies upon scholarly consensus, which is always what they're saying.
But when everybody's consensus is based off of being a lemming that is afraid to leave the group. It just means the school of lemmings has gotten bigger. And the school of fish has gotten bigger and they're all still going the same direction.
And it doesn't mean truth has been established. It just means we have a really, really big mistaken consensus. Yeah. And you'll find that with every text is that you start looking through it and you find that these texts borrow and share. Paul was quoting from from Greek poets from centuries prior.
Pagan Greek poets from centuries prior. Does that mean that Paul's illegitimate? We've got to throw it all out.
Well, no. You know, so. The Ascension of Isaiah clearly has, it's a bit of a Frankenstein.
Okay. But if you're going to throw out anything that's a Frankenstein, well, then you throw out the entire canon. Everything's out. So, you know, one way that I put it in my book is that if you were to date something, so you were to date something on the material, you would take Elvis Presley's You Ain't Nothing But a Hound Dog playing on an iPhone.
in 2024 and you'd say well clearly you know elvis lived in 2024 okay you'd say no he wrote it the medium on which it is written is different than the ideas written upon it so the the the the manuscripts if you're dating the paper the actual papyri you're going to get what you're going to get and that's the physical things but the ideas that they came from must have predated it and you can't it's really hard to date those things so so So according to Wikipedia, I'll just put up on the screen and we know Wikipedia never lies. True. But anyway, it says, OK, nib thus dates.
The whole text is written between 80, 150 and 200. It seems like there's a spread of several hundred years in either direction, which could put it at the time of Christ or up to two centuries after him, which is kind of interesting because like the book of John, I don't think we have our first copies of the book of John that. are the same as the ones we're reading now in the king james version with the story in the place that it is now and not later on eight chapters later or added to the original manuscripts we have that don't have the the story of the woman taken in adultery for example okay yep those didn't come out until what like 500 600 years after christ i think there's uh the earliest uh Codex that has a story and I think was from the 400s if I'm not mistaken century Yeah, and so you kind of like I believe that story's true Okay of the woman taking adultery you don't you don't throw it out. You don't throw it out Just because there isn't a date stamp well, and it's also it's it's to me.
It's completely plausible This is something that existed in the oral tradition that wasn't codified until several hundred years later Yeah, and just because it wasn't really codified until several hundred years later Doesn't mean that it wasn't preserved properly in the oral tradition because ancient Israel was a heavily oral society and literacy was a different thing back then than it was now. So, yeah, I'm going to I'm going to slam dunk this. Oh, slam dunk this. OK, put this to bed.
All right. OK, this is this is true. As I was writing this book and researching these things, I was I'm always I'm typing in scripture notes and LDS dot org.
I'm looking for scriptures. And I wanted to go look at 1 Nephi 11. Okay. Right?
And I put in 2 Nephi 11 on accident. Okay. And I started reading it because I'm going a mile a minute. And I'm like, wait, what the?
And I read this line. 2 Nephi 11, verse 2. Now I, Nephi, write more of the words of Isaiah. For my soul delighteth in his words. For I will liken his words unto my people. And I will send them forth unto all my children.
For he verily saw my Redeemer. Even as I have seen him. Oh, wow. Okay, so hold on a minute. Even as I have seen him.
And the next verse, my brother Jacob also has seen him as I have seen him. Even as I have seen him. Interesting. So I read that phrase and it just popped out at me. And I thought, holy cow.
He's reading this ascension of Isaiah, the vision of Isaiah, seeing the Redeemer. And he has the exact same experience in 1 Nephi 11, the exact same ordinance, whatever modular rite this was, and sees the Redeemer in the same way. He doesn't say he saw the Redeemer, I saw the Redeemer. He says, even as I have seen it, in the same way that I saw it, he did the exact same thing. So Nephi and Jacob are implied to have had an ascension experience like Isaiah.
And in the traditional canon, there is no... You might, and some people will look and they'll say, well, he sees the throne and the pushback on that among, in the Jewish community, oh, he was talking about Hezekiah, he was talking about, you know, the servant is Jacob or whatever. It's not super clear. Here, Nephi is saying, he saw him even as I saw him.
And then, and he has this first vision in first, this vision of the tree of life in first Nephi chapter 11, that parallels the ascension of Isaiah almost verse to verse. Wow. I think the evidence is far too compelling.
I think that the ascension of Isaiah, when it was written or if it was corrupted, whatever. I think that it comes from a real experience that Isaiah had, an actual vision that he endured. And it.
It tells a true story about how he was killed and why he was killed. He was killed because he saw the messianism, the sonship, the corporeal nature, the virgin, the persecution by the lawless and wicked men, and they killed him for it. Wow.
I think that it's pretty clear. So to reorganize some of the data you've given us here, right? You said these things, but I'm going to make some connections. Joseph in 1829 publishes an account in which Nephi has a particular visionary experience.
in which he says he sees the Lord. He says of Isaiah, Isaiah saw the Lord just as I did. Then subsequently, published first time in English in the 20th century, another book comes out, which is the Ascension of Isaiah, which shows Isaiah having substantially the same vision that Nephi did.
Exactly. This is the big theme, or the big problem, the big question to be answered by the key to the keystone, which is, Hey, there's, you know, there are the Deuterocanonical works we've had for a long time. And first Enoch shows up just before the Book of Mormon, almost like the morning star, like, or the evening star, like, it's just, it's the first. But we don't really have it in the U.S. until after the Book of Mormon's published.
Then there's the Book of Mormon, and then there's a flood of all these other documents that agree with the Book of Mormon in doctrine, and sometimes in kind of these sort of narrative details. Yep. And the question, and you had to explain that.
Like, why is that? Right? How is that? And, you know, in this particular case, what you're saying is Nephi maybe knew a different version of Isaiah than we have, right, that maybe included the ascension of Isaiah.
Yes, 100%. Yeah. I mean... You look at, if you were to ask the canonizers, so what are the books that didn't make it in? Oh, here they are.
And you go through all these books and you go, every one of these talks about sonship, begottenness, the virgin birth, persecution of the Messiah. You know, and you're like, do you have something against the sonship of Jesus Christ? Oh, no, no, no, of course not. Those are all just unreliable.
And you're like, are you sure? It kind of looks like you just hate. We might have to choose a different name.
canonizer because that's the name of jim bennett's website is canonized what it is yeah canonizer.com is no but it's website oh jim i'm so sorry you're gonna hate my book it's just like those filthy canonizers oh no i like jim oh i'm sorry you might as well be a progressive democrat calling you know them colonialists or something that's funny well dave dave sums it up real well the the apocrypha come out after the book of mormon After the Book of Mormon has been laughed at and supports all these things that the Book of Mormon claims. And so my book is pointing out a lot of these things to show it's impossible. Like we have to make sense of this. How could Joseph have known these things? Either he's the luckiest guesser in the history of guessing.
He hit a flea off a turtle's back walking in a crater on the moon with a BB gun. I mean that accurate of bullseyes again and again. Or he was a prophet of God.
And. I've never been more convinced after writing this book. The Book of Mormon is absolutely an authentically ancient book.
Joseph Smith got it from somewhere. He got it from somewhere. And I believe he absolutely got it from an angel. And it's perfectly consistent with all these ancient writings that he didn't have.
He didn't even know it. It breaks my heart. Just like Isaiah being sawn in half, talking about the sting of death. I mean, you know the kind of cojones it takes to say that.
When you hear a saw coming through at your abdomen and you say, death has no sting. Death has no sting. Joseph went to his death not knowing that in the next century, thousands upon thousands of books would come forth supporting all these things he was ridiculed for. He was laughed at for. They would all come forth from the ancient world saying, yes, actually, Isaiah had a vision like this.
Yes, messiahship, corporeal nature of God. It was. it predated Christ.
Yes, there was a forsakening. Yes, and agreeing with all these things. And he went to his death without any of that, those reinforcements called in yet.
Okay, there's a Little more point here. There's a there's a big point. There's a big kind of meta point comma. He said boost ruffa dantik Lee No, just kidding. Wow Naturally backwards for that to be true.
So Sometimes we treat the Book of Mormon like Hey, I'm gonna I'm gonna prioritize his primary the conclusions of some biblical scholar. Okay? Not the questions they're looking at, not the analysis, not the data, but the conclusions. And then say, does the Book of Mormon have permission to exist based on the conclusions of this scholar? A million percent.
Now, there's all kinds of things wrong with that. One is conclusions are ephemeral. Okay?
They're temporary. What Unibely famously said, I forget what I say, but something like, what care I for my ideas of yesterday, right? Like, we learn and we grow, and scholarship learns and grows. a big influential book of 50 years ago, is not the consensus today. It may have influenced the consensus today, right?
But another problem is that the Book of Mormon is a datum, okay? It's a primary datum. And so when you're trying to figure so one way to think about this is, when does the ascension of Isaiah date to according to Schneemilch or whatever? Oh, can the Book of Mormon exist? Or Another way to think about it is to say, all right, the Book of Mormon has Nephi saying about Isaiah, we've had the same vision and reporting a vision.
And that is a datum that should make us think about, well, how do we date the ascension of Isaiah? Now, that may mean that we reach different conclusions than Schneemelker or whoever, okay? Because he doesn't have the Book of Mormon as a datum.
So be it, right? If that means we have to have a different understanding that then what is in the introductory essay in the anthology of the pseudepigrapha, I can live with that, right? So the high-level point is, hey, the Book of Mormon doesn't need permission from a scholar to be real. It is a datum we need to incorporate into our understanding of what all of this family of documents is. I mean, the whole premise, duh, are we listening?
The whole premise is it was going to be corrupted, so the Lord prepared a metallic contingency plan. To preserve truths, not through one apostasy, but through two apostasies so that it would come forth. So we're surprised that it can conflict with the canon? We're shocked that it restores these truths? People say, oh, don't you know that's not in the canon?
Yeah, that's the point. That's kind of the point of the Book of Mormon is that it's restoring things that were excised from the canon. Why can't we get that through our heads?
We've spent 200 years apologizing. for the book of mormon because it doesn't it doesn't play well with the bible of course it doesn't play well the bible of course it doesn't it's restoring all the stuff that was taken out like duh why why have it at all if the canon's perfect why have the book of mormon at all stop apologizing for the for the book of mormon so dude i am video switching the crap out of this look at this i got all three of us on here and i'm taking us home baby i am totally i'm talking right in your head here i am taking us home right now uh guys if you haven't yet please um i well first off i'd like to thank three people i'd like to thank three people first off jonah barnes for writing this book and then bring in all of this info with us this is awesome if you guys want to purchase his book if i'm not mistaken it's through plain and precious right yep plain and precious publishing longest url in the planet You know what I'm saying? But I love it because it's easy to remember. It's a precious URL, but it's not a plain URL.
Yes, exactly. And it's an alliteration. It's a tri-literation, right?
Plain and precious publishing. It's beautiful. I absolutely love it. So anyway, yeah, it is not yet on their website, but go to plainandpreciouspublishing.com.
You'll be able to buy Key to the Keen Stone. While you're there, though, check out Dave Butler's book In the Language of Adam by... D.
John Butler, which is super cool and can be purchased there. And then also, if you want to read the Ascension of Adam, make sure you guys check. Sorry, the Ascension of Isaiah. Make sure you guys check out Scripture Notes. Scripture Notes, you can sign up for free, although they have a very affordable professional option that includes an entire library of the Book of Mormon, of the Bible, Apocryphal, Bible.
uh writings all kinds of supplemental things there's a great ai search engine how do you use it jonah exactly i'm so mad that i'm only discovering scripture notes after having written this book you know how much time and research it would have saved me if i'd had scripture notes i was doing this old school i thought i was all advanced using website here website their website here website there yeah this stuff puts it like column to column like dang it oak you know when he couldn't just let me know so anyways but yeah this is this makes it a hundred times faster yeah so make sure you guys uh sign up for scripture notes and as always for this and more please make sure you guys check us out at ward radio.com Hey guys, thanks for watching the video. We hope you liked it, so please share with your friends and subscribe to our channel. Also, if you want to support us, please consider purchasing a copy of The Key to the Keystone, Jonah Barnes'latest book. It's available to Ward Radio listeners only for the first two weeks of pre-sale via the links in the description below, okay? You can always go to plainandpreciouspublishing.com and get your own copy of the book, or you can actually go to...
the kind of launch event that we're cooking up here. All the guys from Stick of Joseph, Quick Media, Jacob Hansen, many of us here at Ward Radio, we're actually going to have a launch event for this book in Utah. You can buy tickets for it as well.
And your ticket's going to be the book. So you get a book as your ticket coming in. It's actually going to be a lot of fun.
So if you want to support the channel and you can't help us out with Zelle or with Venmo or with the Cash app, please consider purchasing your own copy of The Key to the Keystone. by Jonah Barnes, so you can be up on all the latest super cool associate professor of all things apocryphal happenings. Remember, the first two weeks only, Ward Radio listeners get a unique link and unique access to the purchase of the pre-sale of this book. So, make sure you check it out in the links in the description below. And as always, for this and more, please check us out at wardradio.com.