106: The Historian’s Craft – My Second Conversation with Don Bradley

Interview number two with Don Bradley! Don tells us about his history, experience and training as a historian, and gives us all tools to help us be the best historians we can be. Another great conversation! And I’m really looking forward to part three!

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Transcript:

[00:00] Michelle: Welcome to 132 problems revisiting Mormon polygamy, where we explore the scriptural theological and historical case for Mormon plural marriage. I am so excited to be bringing you my second conversation with Dawn Bradley. This time we talked about the work of a historian and I thought it was a very valuable conversation. I have to say this is actually this Sunday is supposed to be my two year anniversary episode. But because of a series of events, including me being very, very sick still right now, that one is being released next week and we’re releasing the Don Bradley episode a week early instead. I hope you will thoroughly enjoy it and I hope you will all tune in next week as well for that very special episode. But for now, thank you so much for joining us as we take a deep dive into the murky waters of Mormon polygamy. Welcome again to this very special episode. I am so excited to be here for the second part of my discussion with Don Bradley who has kindly agreed to a series of discussions to try to get our way into these topics. And so, Don, Thank you so much for, for coming and talking to me again.

[01:27] Don Bradley: Thank you Michelle for having me on and thank you so much for all the work that you do. I actually was thinking about this a lot earlier today. I was thinking, you know, there are difficult topics in the history of the church. This is among the most difficult and the usual response to difficult topics that we make is ignore them, And you’ve done just the opposite of that very courageously. You’ve engaged with this topic. You’ve done anything but avoid it. So I just wanted to give you at the start a hat tip of respect for that and appreciation. Thank you. Thank you.

[02:05] Michelle: Thanks. I really appreciate that. Don, that means a lot. So, I guess we’ll go ahead and um let our audience know what just happened. We just had a false start. We just um barely were getting into the beginning of our introduction when there was a loud, a very loud crashing sound and on to show them what happened

[02:27] Don Bradley: Yes. So I had notes that I wanted to use to kind of guide some of my thoughts in the conversation. I had the notes sitting up on a shelf next to me here. And so as I was adjusting those notes, I actually knocked something else over, a Joseph Smith death mask.

[02:50] Michelle: So of course, Don Bradley has a copy of the Joseph Smith Death Mask, Death mask. And at the very beginning of our conversation, it crashed to the floor and we’re trying to decide what the symbolism there is. I don’t know if I know

[03:06] Don Bradley: Hyrum is fine. Hiram was fine but, and Joseph was unscathed. Maybe that’s part of the Joseph comes out. Well, this Joseph comes out of this discussion unscathed. Michelle.

[03:19] Michelle: It could be that I just had a thought. It could be telling us that we need to be willing to break apart our perceptions about Joseph Smith. So we can put them back together again. So that’s what I’m taking as the symbolism. And, well, you can let us know what you guys think it. But anyway, we’re excited. So our first conversation, I hope you’ve been able to watch. That was about faith and navigating faith in, in this difficult topic. And this time, Don wanted to talk about sort of his history as a historian and also the work of historians, how historians approach history. And we kind of wanted to talk about that to some extent. So we could hopefully have a good discussion, ask good questions and hopefully, Don can give all of us amateur historians more understanding of how the pros do it and, and how we can understand that a little bit better. So I hope I introduced that. All right, Don, you add anything. Yeah. And

[04:14] Don Bradley: I wanted to say I have been in both categories that you just mentioned, you know, as if we treat them as categories. I, an amateur historian and a professional historian, right? And for me, there’s actually been a lot of continuity between those two categories. And so I can kind of talk about that as I, as I discuss, like, because in, in bringing up what it is that historians do, I’ll be talking about that methodology, but also be talking some about my story. Sort of how did I become a historian and what was that process like and so on? Yeah. And you know, in our, in our first episode, so I do hope that people have watched that as a kind of backdrop. And I wanted to mention too that, that Michelle and I, you know, so we’ve talked about like we’re going to be doing another episode, right? Where we’ll dive more further into like really into the nitty gritty, right? So the sources, the things that people argue about, you know, what do the sources mean, what’s the validity of different sources, what sources should we rely on and, and how should we treat the sources and so on. I wanna broach that today by talking about historical methodology. So this will be talking about sources on kind of a higher level, right? Rather than getting into more of like into so much the nitty gritty of these sources. But before I launch into, you know, our, before we launch into our discussion on that, right? And I talk about sort of how I became a historian. And so I’m gonna say, like, from our last discussion for anyone who hasn’t watched it, or who, like, maybe they, they watch it, but they don’t fully remember because they watch a lot of different podcast episodes. Um So a couple things that we talked about, one thing that we end a note that we ended on and that we Michelle we agreed on quite a bit is our relationship with God is, is direct, right? As individuals. And so we, we are Children of God. And so we don’t, our, our relationship to God is, it’s because of that. Uh because we are God’s Children, like our relationship to God is not mediated by other fallible humans, right? So it’s not my relationship to God doesn’t go through my bishop who lives down the street here or through my stake president or, or other church leaders. It doesn’t go through historical figures, right? And it, and it doesn’t, our relationship with God doesn’t go through scholars either, right? It’s, it’s direct, right? And so nothing that we talk about here, right? When we talk about, you know, figures from the past, when we talk about historians or scholars, none of that should get in the way of people’s direct relationship to God or should be perceived as threatening that that’s, that’s something that we have independently as God’s Children. And then, we talked a lot about could, what, to, what extent can prophets be mistaken. So, you know, um, somebody started early Mormon polygamy. Right. And like, um, whether we’re taking the position that Joseph Smith started it or whether it’s taking the position that Brigham started it or for that matter, maybe someone else. Right. Um, does that if, if people disagree with polygamy, if they think that was a mistake, do they then have to reject whoever started as having been a prophet? And so we talked a lot about that and how Joseph Smith being a prophet or Brigham Young being a prophet is not at stake here, right? We’re talking about historical issues and today and next time we’ll be getting into the nitty gritty, right? That will bear more on that question of who started polygamy and, and so on today, we’re taking a high level approach, but that’s just a glance back at what we talked about. Last time.

[08:21] Michelle: I do, I do have to fill in one spot because that was, we agreed on all of the first parts, that last part I think we disagree on, on the um what a prophet, what it means to be a prophet and what the behavior of a prophet can be. And so, so where I disagree on that is that I think that the president of the church isn’t just automatically a prophet in my opinion, necessarily, especially in everything that they do. Right? And so the question for a lot of people comes down to authority and one thing I just, um, mention briefly, but that I, that I’ve thought about quite a bit is I love that we have the story of King Noah because I think that King Noah and Brigham Young, when I look at them, they have a lot in common. Right? And, from my perspective and in the descriptions of what King Noah did and when we read about the lives of the life and the sermons and you know, the teachings of Brigham Young, there’s a lot of overlap. But the thing that I think is so fabulous is that Alma was able to continue on with the church. He didn’t need to be re ordained. He didn’t need to be given any power or authority or keys. Right? And so when Abinidi, I came, if King Noah and the leaders had at that point, all said, hey, Abinidi and I thank you so much. You are exactly right. We see it and had turned around what they were doing, they would have had everything they needed. So I guess that’s how I view it. I think that people can go very far astray and still be an institutional leader, but that doesn’t ruin and the access that anybody in this institution may

[09:55] Don Bradley: let me, let me check that and make sure because I think I’m understood. So, um in the book of Mormon, we have King. So, so Daniel Peterson has actually written about authority in the book of Mormon. And questions are sort of like how the kings priests in the Book of Mormon are ordained either by other priests or they’re ordained by kings. Kings were considered to have religious authority. Their, their ordination as a king, their anointing as a king gave them the authority to ordain priests. Priests are consecrated by Nephi as King by Noah as king by others as king. So Alma, the elder, he got his authority as a priest from King Noah. But that authority was still legitimate authority that he used to baptize and to start the the church of Water Mormon. And so it didn’t matter that King Noah was off way off base because that legitimate authority still came from him is that, did I understand right.

[10:55] Michelle: That’s how it appears to me, whatever. I’m not exactly, I’m not clear in my own mind about authority. You know,I have episodes I want to do about our claims about keys and all of all of those things. But, the story we have in the book of Mormon makes it very clear that although King Noah did not do what was right in the sight of God as it explains the priest that he or he ordained Alma as a priest or called him as a priest. However, that worked. And Alma went on to establish the church of God that wasn’t filled with corruption. So I think that that’s something that we can all pay attention to. I think it goes along with the idea that our connection is to God. Right. So,

[11:36] Don Bradley: yeah, so we can agree. Our connection is to God and that there, that everything doesn’t necessarily need to be staked here on polygamy that there can be genuine authority and so on in the church today, in spite of historical issues,

[11:54] Michelle: I think so. That’s how it looks to me. Yeah, Fallible leadership doesn’t, all leadership is fallible. The question is how fallible, right? Fallible leadership doesn’t need to affect our, our connection to God or our connection to the institution. What really matters is where God wants us to be individually. So

[12:14] Don Bradley: yes,

[12:15] Michelle: we’re on the, we’re on the same page

[12:17] Don Bradley: there. So in Justice Smith’s very first written Revelation D&C 3, it tells him to that he’s, he’s gone on, on the persuasions of man. It tells him beware, you know, you can fall if you’re not following my spirit and, and so on. So so even with Joseph Smith from the outset, there’s this idea of prophetic fallibility, right? And one of the things Joseph Smith taught repeatedly was that he was giving people authority. They, they received the gift of the Holy Ghost when he was asked if um when he was asked if he was a prophet, he said once, yes. And so is everyone who has the testimony of Jesus. He’s, he’s alluding there to a New Testament passage where it says the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. So he’s saying anyone who has a testimony of Jesus Christ has it through the spirit of prophecy to that extent, they are a prophet. He s he talked about how Moses goes up on Sinai. He sees God. God wants all the people to see Him. The people are like, no, please please don’t make us see God. They’re scared. And so Moses says, I would to God that all Israel were prophets. He didn’t just want to be a prophet himself. He wanted everyone to be a prophet. This is what Joseph Smith wanted. Now, there are of course, in a community in any community, including the church, there is a structure to the community, right? So it’s not just everybody running willy nilly doing their own thing. There’s some kind of structure, but the idea of the restoration was supposed to be an empowering idea, not a disempowering idea, right? It’s supposed to be that people themselves could experience spiritual gifts, that people themselves, they didn’t just have to read about people receiving revelation in the scriptures that they can receive revelation for themselves. And so to use one analogy that I’ve seen like it’s not the, the restoration is like a banquet, it’s like a feast where we’re invited to participate in the feast, not just to read about other people having a feast, right? And so yes, this, this is supposed to be empowering to us, the restoration itself. We’re supposed to experience the spirit. We’re supposed to have that direct relationship. That is, that is a big part of what the restoration is about.

[14:42] Michelle: Ok, I love it. I often have said all of those things that no calling gives us no calling gives us better access to God than any other. Everybody has the same access to God, right? We might have different keys to different closets or different things that we are authorized to manage or be in charge of. But that doesn’t mean that we’re on different spiritual levels or that we have different access to God based on any calling. And that goes all the way up

[15:09] Don Bradley: so that any person can have within their calling, they can have the influence of the spirit just as much as anyone else within any other call,

[15:18] Michelle: right? And we all have the access to God. We all have the invitation to come into the presence of God. So, yes. Ok, let’s get into it then. That’s great.

[15:26] Don Bradley: So getting into history, so how did I start doing history? What was this path like? So I was 17, the first, the first time that I went to, I started reading church history stuff when I was 16, I actually encountered polygamy stuff really early at that point. I um read early, I read, um my dad got me, I think for my 17th birthday, he got me the book, personal writings of Joseph Smith. It was just, you know, letters that Joseph wrote and his 1832 history and things like that. So I started trying to understand Joseph Smith teaching, started, started trying to understand him as a person. I became interested in things like the priesthood restoration events. How to, how did those things happen? I was interested in Justice Smith as a revelator for the very reason that we talked about just now. I thought, well, I want to receive personal revelation and Justice Smith seems to have been a master of receiving revelation, right? He, he received so much revelation. I want to understand more about how he did it. So I had not just curios, I did have curiosity motives in doing church. I had spiritual motives. I wanted to understand spiritual things better. That was kind of a pathway into starting to study the history of the church. Um I went, started going to the church archives when I was 17, looking up historical sources, I was actually following up on things that so I was reading books, but I was also reading like um articles, historical articles in dialogue, journal of Mormon, thought the Journal of Mormon History Journal of the John Whitmore Historical Society. And so I was curious about the sources that these scholars were citing and So I started going to look at the sources for myself, so I could make sure that their transcriptions were accurate. I could see the context, I could gather these things so I could see for myself instead of just seeing what they were telling me. And so, I was open as far as what I would find in this process. Obviously, we all have, we’ve all been told things about the history of the church and so on. But I, I want, I was curious, I wanted to discover, I wanted to explore, I did, uh I did, like I said, start to encounter things regarding polygamy really early. And I talked about that some in our last episode. You know, I talked about how like my, my mom had come to discover that more about how polygamy had been practicing in a church that was troubling to her. And so I was able to see polygamy in some way through kind of like my mom’s eyes, how that it was painful to her. I thought about like when I read, I didn’t fully understand at the time, but I read ideas that Joseph Smith had practiced polyandry, right? That he married women were married to other men. I later, I, I thought about this, I started thinking about this on my mission. Well, what if the roles were reversed in Mormon polygamy? And I thought I was required by God to share my wife with another husband or husbands,How would I feel? And that felt excruciating. Right. And, and it’s something that I’ve given thought to more recently to try to understand other, the experience of people who have had to, had to live in this and the experience of women who contemplate in the church, what it would be like to have to live this way. So, so I feel invalidated, disregarded, betrayed, just like helplessly trapped in pain, thinking about this, you know, and so I, I started engaging with these issues, learning about things that had been written about the history and engaging them intellectually and also like emotionally and spiritually, right? And I talked in our last episode about why, you know, some people, if people watch that episode or if they know more about me from other episodes on other podcasts and whatnot, they know I left the church for a while. I, I eventually had a lo a collapse of my faith in the Restoration. And when I wrote an exit letter and, and I came back five years later, but when I, at the time that I left, when I wrote a kind of letter, resigning my membership, polygamy and polyandry were things that I put in there because there were things that it was hard for me to stomach what I understood about how these things had been practiced. The, the inequalities in them, the pain and so on um but I, um nonetheless I was open to what I might find right in the history. And so I started doing,

[20:19] Michelle: can I ask you? Yeah, I just am curious when you started um going to the archives and when you started looking into history, were you um, like, I find that usually that comes because of a motivation of some sort, you know, like, like, were you just a really sort of geeky kid? And I want to learn everything or were you or were you like, really a fan of Mormonism or were you, like, there are some things that aren’t making sense and I want to understand them better, you know? I don’t, I don’t mean to, I consider myself a geek, but my study has been motivated by like, what’s going on here, you know.

[20:54] Don Bradley: So, it was multiple things for me. So I, uh I just inherently was a curious kid. My, my mom really instilled that when I was really little, I don’t remember this, but I remember her telling me about it later that she would always ask me why she would, we’d be outside looking at, you know, we’d see a bee land on a flower and she’d say, look at that bee. What, what do you think? What do you think she’s doing? Why do you think she’s going from this flower to this flower? She, she taught me to ask why. And I just never stopped. So I wanted to understand why and, and, and she had a big focus on the past as well. And that got me, I was just like a science kid. So I was very curious about science. But eventually that turned into kind of a focus of, well, why are things in the world the way that they are? And so I started getting more into the study of history. And then when I was 16, I actually encountered some sort of quasi fundamentalist literature. It wasn’t actually written by like practicing Mormon fundamentalist polygamist, but it was written by people in the church who like, we’re sympathetic to like the Adam God theory and things like this and polygamy. And so I started, I just was given copies of these unpublished writings through a mutual friend in high school. And that actually got me curious about doctrine. Well, was polygamy, like, what was the status of polygamy as a doctrine? Was the status of, you know, sort of Brigham Young’s Adam God uh teachings. And then, and then I started to become so so initially my interest was actually doctrinal on those questions. So I was reading scholarly publications on this, like in in dialogue, right? And then I started trying to look up, started going to the archives to look up the sources that those historians were saying. So I could see for myself what was taught because I wanted to know on some of these doctrines, where did they come from? So for instance, Adam God idea that the there were claims that this went all the way back to Joseph Smith. I want to know did it. And if it did, I wanted to know that if it didn’t, then I wanted to know how did this develop, if Brigham Young developed this, like how and why and at what point did he develop it? And then I asked someone to know kind of like how and why did it disappear? Why did it stop being taught? And so some of the same questions, I guess that people have about polygamy. I was also wrestling with regarding the Adam G idea, like, did it really come from Joseph Smith or was it Brigham Young? Right. Like how did this develop? Why did this disappear from the church? Those, those two things are parallel in some ways? Right. Yeah, for sure.

[23:48] Michelle: I assume, I assume that you came to the same conclusion I have because Brigham Young himself said, if no other, no one else has ever proclaimed this, I’m proclaiming it right now. He kind of wanted to own Adam God, I think, and he wanted to attribute divine racism to Joseph Smith, which, which was Brigham’s we know. And um and I think he also, you know, in my opinion, well, blood atonement was his, he owned that one pretty well. But I think he also wanted to attribute you know, I guess that’s the question of polygamy. Is it one of Brigham’s original doctrines? Like all of the other Brigham doctrines that we have discarded or did that one? Was that one uniquely started by Joseph Smith? But we’ve discarded it because I don’t know of many other Joseph Smith doctrines we’ve discarded, but continue there. It seems to fit in that category to me.

[24:36] Don Bradley: So, so Adam God and some of these other topics would be whole podcasts on themselves, right? I definitely did. Um like I saw that there were times when Brigham said that Adam God traced to Joseph and so I was trying to understand, did it trace, did he think it traced to Joseph in the sense that he thought Joseph had directly said it or did he think that it traced to Joseph in the sense that Joseph had said things that helped trigger it? And right? And I actually think it was the latter, right? Um But as I was looking at this, the the origins of some of these things were harder to tease out, but the the demise of them was actually easier to figure out, right? Like how did Adam God stop being taught? And when I was researching that I realized that by looking at the primary sources and analyzing them, I was seeing some things that the the published historians weren’t seeing and that gave me some confidence. I mean, I’m 17, 18 years old at this point. But that gave me some confidence. Hey, I can, I can do this. I can, I can, this is something where I can not just review what other people have done, but I can start to find new things myself, make

[25:59] Michelle: sure.

[26:00] Don Bradley: Right. Exactly. And so, one issue that I know comes up and that I do that I want to address a lot more. Right. Later in this episode is kind of like, um, professional history versus more amateur history. Um And so I, I wanna acknowledge up front that much of my work. I actually did as what would be called an amateur historian because I just started engaging with the sources, right? And trying to figure things out for myself. Um, later, I, uh, several years later I got a bachelor’s in history, right. Um, then it wasn’t for a good while after that, that I went, I decided to go back to grad school and I got a master’s which then, and I did paid work as a historian and so on and I spoke at conferences. So that would, that moved me into like the professional historian category. But there’s a real continuity in the work that I did as an amateur historian and as a professional historian. Right. We’ll, we’ll talk more about that. Right. I don’t want to have this idea, this sort of elitist idea that, well, we just dismiss everything that quote unquote, amateur historians do in favor of what professional historians do. Right. So I want to talk about that dynamic and what is the value of that said, what is the value of the expertise, the training and expertise that professional historians have? Right. And sort of how do we engage with, how do we engage with that most usefully? Right. And so, um uh I, so I wanted to know early on what is it that historians do and like, why do they do it that way? Right. How do we reconstruct what happened in the past? I just, I wanted to understand, I was, I was literally a kid at the time, right? And I was just curious and studying these things. And so I was reading the work of published historians and I started picking up like by osmosis kind of the professional standards in history, like, like things that um uh many of which most of which you’re familiar with, right? So like

[28:20] Michelle: that first hand sources go ahead

[28:24] Don Bradley: is generally preferable, not always, but generally a firsthand source is better than a second hand source or generally, uh other things being equal, a source that’s closer to the event, is superior to a source that’s further from the event or other things being equal, a source that is less biased is preferable to source, that’s more biased or a source that uh this one took me a little longer to understand. But in general, a source that’s saying something that cuts against its own bias is preferable to a source that’s saying something that’s, that goes along with its own bias. Right? So, if someone is acknowledging something, even though they have a bias against it, that’s better evidence than someone who’s saying something that they have a bias for. Right. Because the person has a bias against it. Why would they be saying it? Why it’s, it’s obvious why someone has a bias in favor of something would be saying it, right? So I started picking up um like like historical standards of avalanche and and yeah, like you said, like citation, citation standards, right? Like Chicago manual style or whatever they were using, I started to pick up just by looking at what they did, how you do it, right? And so, so this was um a big influence on me was just um reading other historians, right? And so um the way that I have come to see it, right? Is that um historical method, it’s like it, it’s something empowering, right? Historical method would be, we could liken it maybe to like good communication skills, right? Like good listening skills, right? It’s it empowers us to better understand other people, right? And historical method empowers us more to understand what happened in the past and what other people were thinking and doing and that in turn enables us to better understand the world in which we live because the world we live in now was shaped by its past. Right. And so, um, I, uh, do you, um, I, I’ve talked for a bit. Do you have before you can keep

[30:35] Michelle: going? Yeah, that’s fine.

[30:36] Don Bradley: So, um, when I, uh, went to BYU, I started, I started out as a psychology major with a history minor but with just, with a passion for Mormon history. And before too long I switched to majoring in history, I thought, no, I, I can’t not do history, right. And so um in my first class, in the history major, they called it the historians craft. It, it’s a class that was, it’s designed to introduce students to the practice of history. And so we read a book um that quoted from extensively for another book written by a guy named Robin Collingwood. He was a philosopher of history. He wrote a book called The Idea of History. And like the, the main part of the book is sort of like a history of how historians have seen history, right? But the end of the book, the epilogues in the back of the book are all about historical method. They’re more about what, what is history. And I would actually really highly recommend this to anyone, those epilogues in the back of the idea of history to anyone who’s really interested in digging into kind of historical method. And I started to recognize that some of the things that I had already started doing and analyzing the sources were what he was saying to do. So, for instance, um he talks about what is the nature of historical sources, how should we use historical sources? So I think that often when we think about historical sources, and I think when I thought about historical sources, before I started doing history, I think what I thought a historical source was is that it was something that was written in the past, about the past, like a kind of account of things in the past. So kind of like you think about um Well, here’s a a controversial one because of um the ways that it was kind of rewritten in certain ways. But Justice Smith’s manuscript history, right? The, the actual history that Joseph Smith himself was producing, that is a historical source that is, it’s about the past where he was in the past, writing about the even earlier past, writing a narrative of the events right now. So, uh and he in 1832 he had written a little autobiography, right? Where he talked about the first vision he talked about um Moon. I, right. So that, that is a historical source that where it’s about, they’re writing about the past, they’re writing stories about the past. That is a tiny fraction of the historical sources that we have most historical sources that we have are not about the past. They’re pieces of the past, they’re fragments,

[33:28] Michelle: letters and census. OK.

[33:32] Don Bradley: So a letter if Joseph Smith writes a letter to someone else. It’s not an account of the past. It’s a piece of that past. It’s a piece, it’s a fragment of communication between two people at the time. Right. We have meeting minutes of the meeting that Joseph Smith was involved in where there’s a conversation between people. That again, that’s not about the past. That’s a piece of the past, right. Joseph Smith’s revelations. Um They’re not, sometimes they mention things without explaining those things often they mention them. So, so they’ll talk about. Um So DNC 28 for instance, where Hyrum Page has been receiving revelations through a Sear stone and Oliver Cowdrey is like going to correct him about the nature of these revelations and so on. Well, that’s not a, that’s not a narrative about those events because the people involved didn’t need a narrative about the events Oliver already knew what was going on, right? They did, right? It’s just a piece of the past. And so um this, this author Robin King, he really explains a lot about the nature of historical sources. And then he says, um we can treat our historical sources in one of two basic ways. OK. We can treat our historical sources as authorities or we can treat them as evidence. And this to me was really a key point, right? So what does it mean to treat a historical source as an authority? Right? So take that approach, what, what the questions we would ask would be like, so we’re thinking, well, this person who wrote in the past, they knew the past in some perfect way or nearly perfect way. And when we are like, looking at what they have to say, we’re assuming that their memory is just right.

[35:37] Michelle: We’re just not looking at, we’re not allowing for any critical approach to it. We’re just saying this is absolutely 100% factual everything it says, period. OK.

[35:47] Don Bradley: So when we treat our historical sources as authorities, then our question is, well, we have two, let’s say we have two historical sources and they don’t, they talk, they’re referring to the same events, but they talk about them differently. There’s some differences or contradictions between the two. If we’re treating our sources as authorities, then what we ask is which one is more authoritative and then we go with that, that one, we just sort of cut and paste that person’s part of the narrative and we ignore this person’s part of the narrative that they’re giving, right? That would be the authority approach. So the other approach he gives is we treat our historical sources as evidence. Hey, so if we’re treating our historical sources as evidence, then what we’re trying to do is acknowledge that there are different perspectives, there are different biases and so on. And we think, well, maybe there’s truth in both of these, but how do they fit into a bigger picture? Right? What’s the best explanation that takes into account all these different sources rather than saying, well, this one trumps that one. So we go, we totally go with this one and we totally ignore these others, right? And so, um, he talks about how historical, what a historian does is like, what a detective does. And I wish I could remember like his exact story here. But he actually gives an example of detective work where all of the witnesses, he gives like a story of like a murder, right? It’s fictional, but like he gives an exa as an example and he gives an example of how one of the witnesses could be lying about what happened. But people don’t lie randomly, people lie based on their own interests. So when we recognize the person sit the witnesses situation and their self serving motives, then the detective can actually look at the lies told by every one of these sources and figure out what happened and figure out who did it, right? This is the way detective work works. What doing history, history is detective work. But all our witnesses are dead and we have to use the different sources that they created to piece together what happened. So when I was at BYU, um

[38:03] Michelle: can I pause you for a quick, can I pause you for just a quick second? Because this is fascinating, but it’s so interesting hearing you talking about it because I’m assuming that um people on different sides of this question are hearing this different ways and I don’t want to make us get into it yet. But I do, I just a couple of the thoughts that are going through my mind and, and we don’t have to debate them or anything. I just want to let you know how I’m hearing this if that’s ok because, because I do really like these, these, um, approaches of authority versus evidence. But what I hear is we take all of the pro Joseph’s polygamy sources as authority and ignore like we’re not looking at them equally because Emma denied it multiple times. Joseph denied it multiple times. Hyrum denied it multiple times. Many, many other people in that community did and we ignore them and take the others as authoritative. So I wanted to point that out. And then the other thing that I’m hearing is um the last thing that you were saying, oh, remind me what it was detective work. Yeah. Yeah. Looking at the bias, I apologize that I had my brain left for a minute. But um that’s really interesting as well because again, I’m seeing all of the massive motive in Utah, you know, in 1869 and beyond to create this body of evidence. So and then also the pieces of history I think that we also learn from pieces that aren’t there, you know, like pieces that you would expect to have be there. Um That aren’t, there also tells us something. So, anyway, keep going. I didn’t mean to interrupt you. It’s interesting because I’m assuming I’m hearing this maybe differently than you, than you’re thinking about it as you’re saying it. But I, I,

[39:39] Don Bradley: I think that you’re hearing it with a specific application, but I don’t think you’re hearing it so much differently than I, it, because I’m, I’m just talking here about what, what, what does his brains do? What is historical method? How do we figure out the past? And so then different people are coming from different angles. So they’re gonna start applying that in different ways. But then the hope is that if we’re using method well, and having a larger conversation, eventually there will be more and more of a convergence in views rather than a divergence. If there’s more of a divergence, it sounds like maybe we’re doing it wrong, right?

[40:14] Michelle: Something’s going wrong. I agree.

[40:17] Don Bradley: Right. So, so yeah, just I, but I think you are understanding uh from what you said, right? What I’m saying? And so you mentioned like uh where we might expect to have certain pieces of evidence or, or whatever certain things sources that are absent. So there we’re talking about like inference, right? So detective, a detective will use inference, right? So, so a historian’s job is not just to um say, well, this source says this happened or this didn’t happen and I believe this source is more authoritative than that source, whether it’s sources, talking about Joseph practicing polygamy or whether the sources saying Joseph didn’t practice polygamy. The point isn’t to say, well, this is more authoritative. So then we can dismiss all these sources. The point is to, to create a larger picture where we see where the different sources plug into a larger narrative because

[41:16] Michelle: picture explains and incorporates the most sources the best way, right? Like the model,

[41:24] Don Bradley: what model and I’ll come back to models. But yes, thank you very much on the same line. Absolutely. So in Collingwood’s approach to historical sources, in some ways, it’s like putting together puzzle pieces, you want to see how do, how does everything fit, right? And um same kind of thing, it’s, and it’s like detective work. So I, I’ll, I’ll, as I’m going on, I’ll give some examples of um like how I see like from my own work of how, what does this mean to me in practice? Right. But another thing that Collingwood said is that our knowledge of history advances not so much by finding new historical sources, by learning to use as evidence, the sources that we already have, that other historians have thought useless to them. OK. So, so let me give an example of this. So when I was at BYU, I was 23 or something, and I had this curiosity question emerge in my mind about the Justice Smith translation of the Bible. So I looked at how in the book of Mormon, you have lots of chapters of Isaiah quoted. You’ve got like one third of the book of Isaiah is quoted in the book of Mormon. And I noticed that there’s a lot of, and it has variations from the King James, right? There are changes or variations or differences between book of Mormon, Isaiah and King James. Isaiah. I noticed in reading the Justice Smith translation of Isaiah that most of those same book of Mormon Isaiah variants appeared in the JST of Isaiah. So then I had a question. Curiosity is Justice Smith having this like re revealed to him this, this much of the same Isaiah text as is in the book of Mormon. Do you see what I’m saying? Like, like these ISIS where the Isaiah text in the book of Mormon and the JST both are the same, but they’re different from the King James. Are these independent revelations to Justice Smith where it’s in, it’s revealed in the translation of the book of Mormon. But then it’s re revealed to him in doing the JST or when Joseph Smith is doing the JST of Isaiah, is he just looking at the book of Mormon text and using Isaiah text and using that, is that where is that why they’re the same? Which is it? And so I had these two competing hypotheses in my mind and what I needed to do is find a way to test the hypothesis. Well, so I was, when I talked to different professors at BYU about this question and how I wanted to explore it. I came up with ideas for how to figure it out. But as I talked to my professors, I was often told, go, go talk to a particular scholar, I, I won’t name him because this would not, he’s not living, but this would be embarrassing about him. It’s not positive. OK? But like I was told, go to this guy, he knows everything about the JST, right? So after I heard this from like half a dozen professors, I went to this guy, I went to his office on campus and I told him what I wanted to know. I said, you know, I’m wondering when Joseph Smith did his revision of Isaiah in the JST. Did he use Book of Mormon Isaiah or did he just have it revealed? Reeled? And he said, oh, I don’t think we can ever know that. I don’t think we can second guess the prophet Joseph Smith. Um You can guess what I thought of that. Like, I, I actually already had figured out a method for answering the question. And here what I was being told is we can never know. Right. So why did he think we couldn’t know because we don’t have any historical sources as authorities telling us there’s no historical source that says when he got to the Isaiah chapters of the JST. Joseph Smith didn’t use the Bible, I mean, didn’t use the book of Mormon or when he got to the Isaiah chapters of JST, just as Smith did use the book, there’s no historical source that says that. So there’s no one we can rely on as a kind of authority on this question. But do we have evidence on this question? Ok. So what I realized that I could do, I realized that there were variants in different book of Mormon manuscripts that the original book of Mormon manuscript is the stuff as it’s dictated by Justice Smith while he’s translating, that’s the most accurate, that’s the first layer. Then they copied that manuscript, right? They made a copy, Oliver cry makes a copy to give to the printer for him to typeset from well when he’s copying necessarily, he makes mistakes, humans are foul. So he makes mistakes in the copying. So he introduces errors. Then when the typesetter at the grand and presses typesetting, he introduces a whole other set of errors. So what I did is I compared the original manuscript of the book of Mormon and what we have about the Isaiah chapters. I compared that with the printer’s manuscript of Isaiah. I compared that with the 1830 edition. And what I found is if I remember the numbers right, Oliver in copying from the original manuscript and in typesetting the book of Mormon, the people creating those additional versions of the book of Mormon Isaiah text made at least 22 errors in how they copied the text. Then I looked at the JST of Isaiah to see were those errors present in JST Isaiah or not? Do, do you follow what I’m what I’m gonna ask like, yeah. So if Joseph Smith had the J the Isaiah text independently re revealed to him when he’s doing the JST, it’s not gonna have the errors that crept into the book of Mormon text. But if he’s using the published book of Mormon text, it’s gonna have those errors, right? 22 errors that had been introduced by the copying and types. So 21 of them appeared in the JST of Isaiah.

[47:29] Michelle: OK. So that answers your question. So that

[47:32] Don Bradley: identifies as surely as a fingerprint, right? This is like a textual fingerprint. You’ve got the fingerprint of the 1830 book of Mormon Isaiah text on the JST of Isaiah, Joseph Smith. Absolutely opened up the book of Mormon and used that he’s thinking to himself, hey, I already translated this stuff in the book of Mormon. I can just use that instead of having to redo it. That’s what he does. Nobody tells us that, but nobody has to tell us that because we can see it for ourselves, right? So our, our historical sources don’t provide anything in the way of authorities here, but they provide evidence. And if we think like Collingwood says, we advance in our knowledge of the past mostly by getting at what’s already in the sources we have under the surface by inference, not necessarily just by finding new sources. So even if there had been a source, suppose there had been a source where Sidney Rigdon said, when Joseph Smith got to the Isaiah chapters, he didn’t use any other source but immediate revelation, he would be wrong. I would reject. He said, because the 21 errors don’t lie. They’re, they’re, they’re a fingerprint. So even though Sydney Regan would seem like he’s an authority on the subject because he was described for these chapters, I would still reject what he said because the evidence in the sources is stronger than his statement we can get for ourselves, right? So that would be an example I think of the kind of thing that Collingwood, the kind of approach Collingwood is talking about, right? So um with uh with time also I developed a hefty res respect for the historical sources that even though the historical sources do vary a lot, there are often errors in the historical sources. I started to see with time that there was less that that even where they had substantial errors, they usually or often, I think usually but often at least there was some grain of truth in what they were saying. So an example of this actually my my best example of this maybe comes from later in my evolution as a strange. So this would be several years later, when I had stopped believing in the restoration for a while. When I left the church, I was reading um a uh an account given by Diedrich Willers Junior. So he was actually, he knew the Whitmer family um in New York, he, his father was their minister in their church. Diedrich Willer senior. So he left this account. He was saying that the Whitmer were like superstitious, uneducated people and so on. And then to kind of give an example of this, he says, um when Joseph Smith came up from Pennsylvania is during the translation of the book of Mormon, right? When he came up from Pennsylvania back to New York, uh He, he comes and he’s staying with the Whitmer family and he says, the messenger appeared the angel, right at the Whitmer. Well, after Joseph gets the Whitmer home, and Jo, he says, Joseph had said that because this was the 12th appearing of the angel that was a sign that he was supposed to stay there until the translation of the book of Rhyme was complete. Now, I remember even though I didn’t believe in Joseph Smith at this point, I remember thinking, well, this plays so much into this guy’s biases. He’s trying to portray the Whitmer as sort of gullible. And then he’s giving this story seemingly in the spirit of showing that they were gullible, right? And so I, I didn’t believe it, right. Well, uh later I was creating more of a chronology of the translation of the book of Mormon, the early revelations from 1829 this time period. And I was thinking about how we do know that the messenger appeared at the Whitmer home. Shortly after Joseph arrived there, he appeared to marry Whitmer, right? Mother Whit. And so, um that there was a kernel of truth there for sure. But then I started to realize, well, DNC 18 was given right around the time that he showed up there. And DNC 18 talks about how for the first time about how there would be 12 disciples called in the restoration. And then I was looking at first Nephi chapter one which is where Joseph Smith picks up the translation at the same time after he gets, after he moves to the wimm, he finishes the book of Moon I down in Pennsylvania. He moves up to Fayette. He begins at first Nephi 11 and immediately he translates the part where Lehi has a vision and he sees, he thinks he sees God sitting on his throne and then a heavenly being like as bright as the sun descends. And he’s followed by 12 others. And I was like, wait a minute, the number 12 actually keeps popping up in the revelations and translations that just doing at this exact time. Maybe I was too quick to dismiss Deedrick Willer account because it actually fits so well with what’s going on. So it was like there were adjoining puzzle pieces that fit here. And so even though I could see that Willers had a bias, his bias didn’t make me ultimately like throw out his account. I saw that there was a kernel of truth there that fit with other sources, right? And so um so this again goes to treating our sources as evidence, not as authorities. So I don’t treat Deri Roers as an authority. I don’t follow down whatever he says just because he said it, I’m skeptical of what he says, but where the things that he says fit with other data points, they, they connect, well, they fit together into a cohesive whole. Then I’m like, OK, he’s presenting something valid evidence that we can factor in in a larger picture, right? Um So um one of the biggest, like I studied, not only like polygamy, like in justice Smith’s time, I was also studying the demise of polygamy and sort of the continuation of polygamy after the manifesto. Did you mention to me before William G Sears as an answer to that? Yeah. OK. He entered into polygamy or took a plural wife in like 1906 or something. This is after the second manifesto. So for, for those who probably most people know it 1890 manifesto formally ends polygamy in the church, but then it’s still being secretly authorized by church leaders. Then 1904 was, is seen usually as this. Well, now the gates really shut. Now we’ve locked that door. No, no more authorized polygamy. And yet there are people like William Sears who are still going into it where there’s a question? Was this actually still secretly being authorized? That was a question that fascinated me, right in my twenties. And so I was exploring this and I found that I was so puzzled because I gathered a lot of evidence on the question. Did Joseph Smith authorize some plural marriages after the second manifesto in 1904?

[54:45] Michelle: I can say yes because in my family history, yes, sorry, you go ahead.

[54:50] Don Bradley: So here’s what I was seeing if I just looked at the evidence against him authorizing. So there was evidence against it. So for instance, there were people writing him letters after 1904 saying something about him authorizing plumber and he seemed offended. He seemed mad you’re questioning my integrity and so on. And I came across, I came across other sources that were, it seemed like if I just took them at face value, seem like no, he wasn’t authorizing these marriages after that point, right? And so if I just looked at the evidence that he didn’t authorize pages after 1904, then I thought, no, he he didn’t authorize and look at all this evidence that he didn’t. But then if I looked just at the evidence, he did authorize them after 1904, I thought, yeah, he did look at this evidence that he did. And so I got it so confused, it gave me literally gave me headaches. So I was like, why is the evidence so contradictory? Because there’s there was only one reality here of what happened, why does it look like two realities colliding? And so I came to realize very strongly that just because we have evidence on one side of something doesn’t mean that thing is true. What we need is what you were saying earlier. What we need is to construct a model that takes into account all the evidence that as best as possible and then we have to come up with criteria. Well, what do we mean by as best as possible? What makes one explanation better? What are the criteria that we measure one explanation? So, so in the sciences, you have parsimony, this would be the simplicity of the model Ockham’s razor, right? So, so the the the model that makes the fewest questionable assumption that that has the fewest improbabilities, that’s basically the simplest in its ability to account for the data. But that’s the catch it has to account for the data. So Einstein said things should be made as simple as possible but not simpler, right? Like like we have to act or our our account can’t be too simple to actually explain the data has to explain the data. That’s what, that’s what an explanation has to do is they actually explain, right? But but other things being equal, if there are two explanations that equally well accounted for the data, but one was simpler than the other, that one has the advantage, right?

[57:19] Michelle: And so

[57:20] Don Bradley: sure. So what I’m saying is just there we deal with models, there are different kinds of criteria. And so then, then like questions of how do we use evidence sources as evidence in coming up with these models and explaining things, those become real live questions. So we’re using something that’s also called inference to the best explanation.

[57:42] Michelle: OK. I do want, I do want to pause you for a second. So I, I I’m fascinated by how you talked about the Joseph F Smith question. And I think it’s really an important one and an interesting one. This is what I’m gathering because it’s a kind of, I guess something I haven’t heard you talk about yet when we’re qualifying or, or, um you know, evaluating evidence. And so my guess is that you looked at Joseph F Smith’s words and people who were angry that he didn’t approve uh marriage or let you know people that um were like, how can you be turning it back on polygamy, whatever it might be, right? So you’re looking at that, but on the other side, I’m guessing you didn’t have like a letter of Joseph F Smith writing. You didn’t have like what, what showed you that Joseph did lie about it were things like, hey, there’s a marriage here and there is Children and he’s, he’s serving in high callings throughout the rest of his life. And he like, obviously, this is an approved plural marriage. So I’m guessing that it was more the hard evidence that made you realize that the claims that Joseph Smith made were not true. Am I

[58:45] Don Bradley: Joseph Smith? Yeah, that

[58:48] Michelle: Joseph F Smith said he wasn’t doing it and you can find letters about that. But then you can find these marriages that obviously were approved because of the evidence you can see with, with their life events in the paper trail. Right? I’m asking if that’s how you,

[59:02] Don Bradley: so there is, right. So we have direct denials from Joseph Smith. He’s allowing these, that he’s authorizing these poor marriages. But then we have inferential evidence that he actually is and this inferential evidence can take the form of patterns and you’re right, part of it would be patterns of church discipline. So people who went into these marriages at a certain point, were they disciplined or not disciplined? And there, there seems to be some evidence that he’s actually shielding some of these men for a while. He’s from discipline if they’re going rogue and doing these poor marriages like against his. Well, why would he show them from discipline or, or things like this? Yeah. And it’s honestly, it’s been long enough um since I’ve been in the headspace of exploring this specifically, that details would be a little slower for me to pull forward as far as laying out some of those evidences. But one of the things I saw was that there seemed to be patterns where the performance of these marriages was sort of pushed further and further from the center of the church, more to the periphery where there was more plausible deniability. So there were, there were larger patterns in the evidence and there were in, there was inference like you’re saying, uh we do have people who were saying directly Joseph Smith authorized this marriage and, and, and such, and there’s even one kind of explosive case of this where the Hawaiian Mission President Samuel E Woy uh entered into a late floor marriage and he ends up directly telling the K of 12 that Jo Smith had authorized the marriage with the K of 12. They express shock and disbelief at this, but they decide not to insult President Smith’s integrity by asking him about it. But they let Samuel E will without any discipline, right? That seems like they know that he actually authorized it, but they don’t really want to know that they don’t

[1:01:08] Michelle: want to know, they want to give him plausible deniability. So, so in my family history, I just think this is an interesting story. Um my great grandfather was told by Joseph F Smith to go to Mexico and take another wife. He and his first wife were unable to have Children. So, um and in and in the story that we were told because, um, like, um, like they had to often defend themselves. No, we’re, we’re authorized, we’re authorized, right? Because they lived in Mexico to get married. But when they moved back, they lived the rest of their lives in Salt Lake. And I believe that, um, my grand great grandfather worked at the church building, like, worked at the church office building. I know he served as mission president many times. I know that, oh, I won’t remember which Apostle church president spoke at his funeral, but he was very, very much um in favor of the church and what he was told, at least what we’ve been told coming down the family story is that he, that um my great grandfather said, I thought you, I thought we weren’t doing that anymore. And Joseph F Smith said, I’m not calling you as the president of the church. I’m calling you as the president of the priesthood. And so that’s an interesting data point of how he was differentiating that, you know. So that’s an interesting story and then whatever people want to say about it. The fact is we can show that he took a second wife in 1906 that they lived in Utah. He had, but he was told when he was called to be the mission president in Tonga, he was told he could only take one wife. So he took his first wife without like so they issued the call and said, hey, we can’t have a visible polygamous. So you have to just take one of your wives. So my great grandmother, the one with all of the Children was left alone to provide, right without, with her husband gun. Anyway. So I guess what I’m saying is the hard evidence, the all of the Children. My my grandmother is the oldest child of William Galley’s years. And so she had to provide anyway, so we know all of those birth dates, the church callings the records, the marriage dates, we can show all of the hard evidence. So for me, 11 of the weighing points that I didn’t hear you mention was like testimony versus hard evidence, right? And I think that’s one where I, I really do prioritize hard evidence over claims if that makes sense because anyone can say anything, especially if they have the motives, but we need to show the hard evidence, right? So I think that’s one thing I wanted to add to that to that how we differentiate evidence.

[1:03:39] Don Bradley: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think we there are there’s a range of different types of evidence, right? And so all of them need to be taken into account,

[1:03:51] Michelle: I guess I, yes they do. But like the piece of history, evidence is pretty good evidence. A letter is pretty good evidence and a testimony might be, you know, maybe we should look at the like like, it always depends. You always have to look at the bias or what the people are trying to accomplish. Like you said, like for my, for my grandfather, um, Bill, Bill, you know, like I exist so it can’t be doubted, you know what it is. Marriage can’t be doubted. Right?

[1:04:21] Don Bradley: The marriage can’t be doubted. You’ve got hard evidence there. Still the question of Justice Smith authorizing it. Right. Is it?

[1:04:28] Michelle: And I guess that’s where we look at the dates and the church, church involvement,

[1:04:32] Don Bradley: look at, he was not disciplined. He was kept in high callings and things like this. And so that becomes part of part of the, the inferential case, right? The inferential evidence that we would analyze here. Now, now testimony, I think in some ways I’m not disagreeing with you because like I, I gave the example of like the JST and the Isaiah and the JST. There’s no testimony about it one way or the other.

[1:04:59] Michelle: I would call the evidence. That’s how I use that terminology, whether it’s right or wrong, you can look at the pieces and see what actually is there. So if someone said something different, sorry, I can see it. Yeah.

[1:05:10] Don Bradley: OK. So one way where testimony, sometimes we can sort of test testimony, so to speak, right? So for instance, um there are people who knew the Smith family in New England and who knew them in New York and who knew them in Ohio uh, there are people who knew Joseph Smith both down in harmony. Pennsylvania end up in Myra Manchester, New York. And so where those people say the same e even if they have a bias, they didn’t believe in Joseph Smith’s prophetic claims if they’re saying the same things independently, even though they wouldn’t have had communication between each other because of geographical distance. Right. If they’re saying the same thing, we give it more weight than if just the people here are saying or just the people here because the two testimonies are interlocking. How would these people have gotten the same idea as these people over here or people that cut against their bias? So let’s say that we had people who didn’t believe in Joseph Smith’s prophetic claims, but they actually acknowledged that he predicted something that came to pass. Well, why would they have a reason to acknowledge that because it cuts against their bias? And so I’m just saying the same sort of process of inference that we use and with hard evidence as you’re calling it, we can sometimes use not always, but we can sometimes use with testimony sure and validate it. And so the same sort of process of inference that applies to one type of evidence can be applied to others as we try to sort of do the detective work, connect the dots, put the puzzle pieces together, come up with a model that best explains. Right.

[1:06:53] Michelle: Right. And I do want to add with, with like, um, pieces of evidence, like, like testimonies that seem to align from divergent sources that, you know, the other question we need to ask is, is there, uh, is there something that we’re not yet aware of, is there a newspaper article that made these claims? Is there some reason that they both would make these claims other than that? Do you know what I mean? Like, quite done? We’re never all the way finished, right? So, OK, there, there’s always a possible explanations that we haven’t found yet.

[1:07:24] Don Bradley: OK. So um a couple of examples of for me, of historical methodology and practice would be um so I’ve done work on what we can know about the last 116 pages of the book of Mormon. Both. Well, I wrote a book about it that’s published. Um So the first part of the book is what we can know about the history of the lost pages. And the second part is what we can know about the history in the lost pages, the missing narrative. And so we have different historical sources that we have to piece together again, like like puzzle pieces, right? That tell us things about the coming forth of the book room. Uh Sorry, the last pages of the book w and the theft of the lost pages and the contents of the last pages. So in one of these, so, so one of the methodologies um that I really stressed quite a bit in my work and I’m talking to other people of history is that much of history is just getting the events in the right order that once we have the events in the right order, we can see the cause and effect relationships between them. But if we don’t have the events in the right order, we really have no way of getting the story right. It’s like if we were trying to do science, but we didn’t know in which order physical events happen, we could never establish cause and effect. Once you get the events in the right order, you can watch the Dominoes fall. So a good example of this would have to do with Martin Harris. And this question of like, you know, when he was, when he wanted to borrow the book of Roman manuscript, the initial manuscript and take it home to his family. He was really pushy about it, right? Like he, he asked if he can, Joseph gets a revelation saying no, he asks again, Joseph gets a revelation saying no. So he asks again, why is he pestering God? Like where does he get, where does he get off pestering God? Right?

[1:09:16] Michelle: Because his wife is pestering him, sorry.

[1:09:20] Don Bradley: So so so we have uh a narrative where we think, well, we know his wife was involved in this, right? But then like why? But why specifically? And do we have anything that can shed light on this because we don’t actually have a source that really says that spells it out there isn’t a source that says, well, the reason he was so insistent was his wife was so insist we don’t have anything that says this, right? So can we know this? Can we know why? So something that I did, I was laying out a chronology. Joseph tells us that when Martin was taking dictation form, when they, when they’re translating, what becomes the lost pages that Martin is taking vacation from about April 12th, 1828 to about June 14th. Ok. So mid April to mid June. So what I started looking at what was happening at that time in Martin harris’ life, what was happening back home? Well, if you so Martin Harris, we all know he was a farmer. He was a very successful farmer. That’s why he was able to assist Joseph in translating, provide resources for Joseph to be able to translate. That’s why he was able to, you know, provide the money for the printing of the book, right? Martin was an expert farmer. When was the planting season in upstate New York? It turns out it was mid April to mid June. The exact time that Martin was gone, his arms up in Palmyra, he’s down in harmony, Pennsylvania 100 and 50 miles away taking dictation to write out this manuscript right on May 8th. So remember he’s gone mid April to mid June on May 8th, right in the middle of that period. There’s a uh there’s a notice just after that in the palmy paper saying that on May 8th, Lucy Harris Junior, this is not the wife, the daughter. Lucy was married in Palmyra, where was Martin? Not in Palmyra? He’s in Pennsylvania. So guess who in order to describe for that manuscript not only missed the entire planting season on his farm, but his own daughter’s wedding, aren’t you? So he felt now his motives become clearer. He had made Ha’s family go through so much sacrifice to produce, help Joseph produce this manuscript describe for this manuscript, he felt he could not go home empty handed. He was not gonna go home and say, Lucy, if you could just see this manuscript, then you’d understand. He felt like he had to have something to show for all that sacrifice. So we don’t have a historical source that tells us this is why he did it. But once we lay out the chronology, it becomes obvious why he did it. We don’t need someone to tell us why he did it because it it becomes evident. So this puts Martin in a more sympathetic light. It also puts his wife in a more sympathetic life. She’s been kind of treated like by in latter day saint circles as sort of a shrew, right or whatever. Well, look at the sacrifice level sacrifice. Her family is being put through for this book, we also know from Lucy Max Smith that uh Lucy Harris had was becoming hard of hearing. Well, there is psychological research that shows that people with progressive hearing loss tend to develop paranoia because your whole life, imagine if your whole life you’ve been able to hear the people, you know, talking behind you and so on and, and suddenly it seems like people are talking quieter and quieter like they don’t want you to hear. And so she has reasons to be paranoid about this. And so once we put these historical events in the chronology, once we understand other things that are going on in these people’s lives, they become much more human. There aren’t villains here with black hats, right? They’re human beings acting out of very understandable motivations that when we piece things together, that those stories become clear.

[1:13:22] Michelle: Ok? I like I like what you’re saying and I think that this is useful. I do want to point out and this isn’t connected to Joseph Smith’s polygamy in any way. And just as I’m hearing you say this, I still think there’s a lot of inference there, right? Because there could be other like, like we don’t know if it’s possible that Martin Harris had someone hired to do his farm. It’s possible that no, no, no, you know, like there are so, so I just want, I like I’m not arguing with your conclusions. I just be careful to not overstate how certain we can be because there still could be other possibilities. Do you know what I mean?

[1:13:53] Don Bradley: That there were other factors? But, but don’t misunderstand me. I think the planting still happened on Martin Harris’s farm. Ok. I think he had hired hands. However, if you look at the later testimony from PMY residents, when they’re asked about the early mormons, including Martin Harris, they tend to say negative things about Martin Harris when it comes to religion. But they say very positive things about Martin Harris as a farmer. They say he was an expert farmer. They say he knew everything about exactly when to plant this, exactly when to do that. It was his farm. He was the expert, he should have been there to manage it that he wouldn’t have had a hired hand, would have had his level of expertise. And so I still

[1:14:36] Michelle: think I didn’t want

[1:14:38] Don Bradley: his wife would have been upset with him for not being they’re missing the daughter’s wedding. I think that’s, I think those are high level like like solid level kinds of influences in terms of probability, right? We don’t have direct access to the past. We access the path through historical sources that then we have to piece together into a comprehensible picture. So it’s kind of like if we had a picture puzzle, 1000 piece picture puzzle and we have 100 and 20 pieces left the other somehow got lost. We piece together the ones that we do have that we can and then we can see what the, it’s a picture of. And so we can fill in to some extent the gaps not perfectly, but we can, to some extent fill in the gap in that right, through inference. And that’s, that’s, that’s what I’m talking about here. I’m just using that as an example of historical influence based on getting the chronology done. So, so another, I think much more consequential example of this and, and a more involved example, right? Would be um I, I’ve done a lot of work on the Elect Lady Revelation.

[1:15:55] Michelle: OK. I can I, before we move on, can I just add one more thing? I’m sorry. I, I really like the puzzle analogy and um and I think it’s a good one and every time you’ve talked about it, it’s, it’s brought a couple of things to mind that it just seems to be talked about it again. But I think it’s really interesting because we are, we are going OK? We have a couple of pieces of this puzzle. Let’s put it together the best we can, right? And I think that one thing I just keep thinking about is if we come and like go, hey, look, you have this piece backward or sideways. If you flip this around, it fits way better and it makes a different puzzle. So one thing I’m concerned about is that there’s a tendency it feels to me to get the puzzle laid out. Say, OK, we’ve superimposed the rest. We’ve inferred it. We know what this story is. Don’t mess with our story. We, we overstate how much is there when there, when there’s a possibility that it’s like, hey, first of all, you’ve left out these dozen pieces I have right here and look, they all fit in right here and look if you have this piece turned this way and this piece turned this way. There’s a whole other picture but people sit there and go, don’t bring those other pieces, don’t bring, you know, I think that’s interesting. So that’s one of the things that I find happening and in his. So that’s the only reason I’m like, we need to still be like, go, oh, this seems like a good explanation but still be open to going. Oh, I hadn’t considered that explanation and those other pieces. So we always need to be

[1:17:17] Don Bradley: a man. I love that because for me, I mean, this is much of how I would see what I like to do as a historian, right? Is like, like you’re saying, kind of turn the pieces in different ways to see how else they might fit. If, if history were just as simple as well, we already see how it all fits together. There wouldn’t need to be historians, either amateur or professional because we’d already know it all right. We know it imperfectly it’s sort of like Paul said, we see through a glass darkly, right? And so because of that, there’s always going to be room to refine what we understand. And that a lot of times involve major shifts, usually more minor shifts, right? But it does come a lot from playing with the different pieces to see how they fit doing that in an open minded way. Using the best inference, we having criteria for what constitutes a good explanation. And yeah, so, so having both creativity in how we play with the pieces, but having rigor, right, high standards and criteria for how we assess the explanations. So it’s kind of like um in the sciences, I remember hearing people come up with hypotheses, but the hypotheses have to be tested and passed the. And so I remember hearing where um I think it was a great scientist had said something. Uh There goes another beautiful theory, murdered by a brutal gang of facts, right? So we, we need both the creativity on the one hand and then the rigor, creativity in developing hypotheses and potential explanations and a very high standard of rigor in assessing those explanations. I

[1:19:10] Michelle: completely agree. And from my perspective, the rigor is what I and others are trying to provide because we see a puzzle that’s missing a whole lot of pieces and has a lot of pieces twisted the wrong way. So that’s why we’re trying to have the discussion. So that there can be more rigor because I feel like there’s a lot of um sloppiness in, in, in this picture. So OK, continue. OK. Thanks for letting me add that.

[1:19:38] Don Bradley: I I’m not, I mean, well, we’re not coming from the same place on the specifics, right? That’s something that I completely agree with the kind of perspective that I completely agree with. So one of the things that I’ve examined, trying to look at the chronology, a lot, look at things in con in, look at historical source in its historical context is the Elect Lady Revolution. So this is Joseph’s Revelation for Emma in July of 1830. So that’s just uh three months after the church is organized. This is very early in the restoration. This is very early in the history of the church. And you know, the Elect Lady Revelation, it speaks very positively to Emma and of Emma, it tells her she’s an elect Lady um which is why people call the like Lady Revelation. Um It tells her that she’s going to be and, and here we get, I don’t want to go fully into the controversy. This terminology triggers, but it tells, it says explicitly uses this word, it says she will be speaking of Joseph and Emma and it says she will be ordained under his hand to exhort the church and to expound the scriptures as it shall be given you speaking to Emma by my spirit. OK. And so Um So I wanted to understand better. What is this revelation mean when it’s telling these different things to Emma, when it’s giving her sort of ministerial responsibility, what does it mean? And so I realized I really needed to look at the contacts when I did, I realized part of the contexts was there’s another revelation that’s given at essentially the same time for Joseph. So there’s this Elect Lady Revelation as they call it for Emma DNC 25 given in July 1830. Immediately before this, there’s a revelation given for primarily for Joseph. And then part of it for Oliver D that we have is DNC 24. These two revelations I can show they’re given in tandem, they intertwine in a bunch of different ways. And so I realized if I wanna understand what the Elect Lady Revelation is saying to Emma, I need to understand what this, what I’m now calling. The leading elders revelation is saying to Joseph and Oliver and then look at the side by side, look at them in tandem with each other. And then I’ll understand both of those revelations better than if I just look at one of them alone, right? So this is this is getting things in the right order, looking at a historical source in its context. So when we look at this historical source, this revelation, the Elect Lady Revelation in the context of this other revelation, what do we see? And now and And um another context that I’ll mention here is the, like I said, the church was organized in April. This is July. There’s a revelation given at the time the church is organized DNC 20. It’s known sometimes as the constitution of the church, the articles and covenants of the church of Christ. So it lays out what were the different offices that were supposed to be in the church uh that people were ordained to? What were the responsibilities of these offices? How do you do the sacrament? How do you run church meetings? Things like this. It’s like a revelatory version of like a church handbook of instructions or something. Um Sort of that kind of a higher level and revelatory. Well, that was given in April of 1830. It was voted on by the church accepted by the church in June at the church’s first conference, June 1830. This is just the next month. This is just the month after that, this Elect Lady Revelation is given for Emma. So that articles in covenant church is another context that we would want to understand the Elect Lady Revelation in, right? And so, uh but mostly I focused on, I have a paper on this that I need to submit for publication. It’s pretty much done. But like um when it, when I put these two revelations uh side by side I saw in the first of these revelations, uh the one for Joseph and then secondarily for Oliver is talking about how Joseph had a divine calling in office. Major part of his calling was to bring forth a sacred book. The book of Mormon talked about how he suffered and would suffer many afflictions. He was forgiven of his sins. And the revelation uh told him he was to visit the local congregations of the church to confirm the members in those churches, those branches. It told him he was to expound the scriptures to these people as led by the spirit. Um oh, he was to confirm the members of the churches. It said he should dictate written revelations as they were given to him by the spirit. It said the church would support him financially. It said Oliver Cry was to go on missions to serve as a spokesman to preach the gospel to the world. So when I looked at the revelation given for Emma at essentially the same time, just after this, what I saw is, it actually says Emma had a divine calling in office. She has the office of Elect Lady, right? So people have noticed before scholars have noticed that the term Elect Lady comes from the New Testament. This revelation is not getting that term from nowhere. It’s from second John chapter one verse one. It’s the very beginning of Second John. So second John is a letter right that’s um attributed to the apostle John. Um and it says it begins the elder to the elect lady. So John here um is addressing so we have like a male um spiritual figure, right? Giving scripture to an elect lady, right? He’s an elder giving scripture to an elect lady. Well, so something that I noticed in trying to understand why, why is Emma being called an elect lady? Why is it alluding to this passage in Second John? I thought about, well, who’s giving the revelation for her was just right? What was his office in the church at the time? First elder?

[1:26:12] Michelle: Ok.

[1:26:13] Don Bradley: Ok. In 1830 if you look in the articles and come into a church, it gives Joseph’s office in the church as first elder. So we have the elder, the presiding elder giving revelation giving scripture for the Elect Lady. It’s the same dynamic that you have in Second John one, right? You have a, a male spiritual figure who has this ministerial responsibility and authority giving this revelation, the scripture for this female spiritual figure who has her own role in the church, has her own ministry. So it’s setting up a kind of parallel between the two male spiritual power and responsibility, female spiritual power and responsibility. There’s something in tandem here, right? Very cool. Um The um you know, it, the revelation for Emma goes on, it talks about how she can comfort Joseph in his afflictions with his revelation, talked about how he had afflictions and would have many afflictions. It says part of what she’s going to do is to be a comfort for him in his affliction. So you see, there’s something here that’s being given in tandem that the revelations are addressing the same thing, the trials that they’ll go through the affliction. But it’s, it’s talking about him and it’s talking about her in parallel to him in, in DNC 24 leading elders revolution tells him he’s forgiven of his sins in the Elect Lady Revolution. It tells her she’s forgiven of her sins. Another parallel, right? Um It tells him you’re supposed to visit the local branches of the church. It tells him to go to these branches. It tells her you shall go with him at the time of his going. So then there’s a parallel, there’s a connection, there’s an intertwining of the two revelations, right? It tells him he’s supposed to expound the scriptures as it shall be given him by the spirit. Tells him you shall expound my scriptures as it shall be given you by my spirit. It tells her you shall expound the scriptures as it shall be given you by my spirit. It tells them the exact same thing. Do you know how many people in the church were that there was in the articles and covenants. It did talk about different authors of the church like elders expounding the scriptures. But do you know how many people it specifically said in the early revelations up to this point? We’re supposed to expound the scriptures to the church by revelation. I

[1:28:42] Michelle: was just wondering that just those two, hey, I was wondering about

[1:28:47] Don Bradley: husband and wife elder and elect Lady in these, right. So she’s being given a ministry, ministerial power and authority that overlaps with his. Right? So it’s hitting them up in tandem in parallel with each other, right? So then um it talks about how he’s supposed to confirm the people in these different branches. But this time, Emma had not yet been confirmed, she’d been baptized but not confirmed. So the Elect Lady Revelation actually talks about how she is going to be confirmed, right? He’s going to be one of these members who will be confirmed. It tells Joseph he will dictate written revelations. It tells her she’s supposed to scribe for him for these revelations, right? It tells her, it says Oliver Cowdrey is supposed to go on a mission to be a spokesman. So he’s vacating the role of scribe because now he’s going to go out as missionary and it says Emma will act in that role now. So Emma Shep stepping into Oliver’s shoes now. Actually, there’s a larger history here where originally Oliver had stepped into Emma’s shoes, right? I talk about this in my book on the last pages when we, we can use inference to see Emma’s Joseph’s first scribe. He’s the first scribe for the book of Mormon. How do we know this? Well, they don’t say no source says Emma was Joseph’s first scribe. But here’s what does happen. Emma writes a letter later in her life where she says what I scribe for your, for, for I scribe for Joseph while he was translating. And she says that um he didn’t know well, she might actually say this in her interview with Joseph the third. I, she says pieces of it in different at different times. But she says that when he was uh dictating the book of Mormon to her, he could not pronounce the name Soraya. And she also says he didn’t know that Jerusalem had walls. Where would the name Sariah have first appeared in the book of Mormon? It would have appeared in the book of Leigh the opening narrative of Lehigh that’s been lost. We know described first Nephi. It was Oliver because we have most of that manuscript that wasn’t Emma. OK. And that’s not when the name Soraya would have first appeared. It would have first appeared in the original story of Lehigh and the lost pages. So if Joseph couldn’t pronounce that it was first encountering the name Soraya couldn’t pronounce it. This is at the beginning, very beginning of the translation. Also, when would Joseph have encountered the walls of Jerusalem? Well, this is when Nephi is going to get the brass plates, right? But that version of the story in first Nephi was described up in Fayette by Oliver Cowdrey and members of the Whitmer family. Not by Emma. It was first, the first Leigh version. I mean, the original version of the story was in Leigh. So Joseph was dictating the very beginning of the book of Mormon to Emma, she was his first crime. So then later Martin Harris steps into her shoes, then Oliver steps into her shoes, then Oliver goes off on a mission. She steps back, she’s not really stepping into Oliver’s shoes, she’s stepping back into her own.

[1:32:00] Michelle: It’s also when she was on her deathbed after the loss of Alvin, she, when she finally was coherent enough, she was actually maybe more concerned about the, the, the manuscript than Joseph was she, she’s the one that told him to go get it. So she had a lot invested in it. Yes,

[1:32:18] Don Bradley: he was very invested in it. Very invested, right? And so um

[1:32:23] Michelle: that’s fascinating. Thanks for sharing that.

[1:32:25] Don Bradley: Yeah. And so point by point, there are other points here but, but point by point, these, these revelations, this revelation for Joseph in July 1830 this revelation for Emma in July 1830 parallel and earned her twine and they have overlapping um ministries and responsibilities and, and the most fascinating, at least to me, OK, is that at the beginning of this DNC 24 what I’m calling this leading elders revelation? It mentions to Joseph that he had been called to bring forth the book of Mormon. Now, it’s interesting that it mentions that because that’s that’s, that was already he translated, finished translating that like over a year earlier, right? He’s in a different space now where he’s now the leader of the church. The book has been print, finished, printed, published, right? He’s not a leader of the church, but it brings that up in Emma’s revelation. So it, but it’s highlighting that part of his big part of his calling was bring forth a sacred book. The book of Mormon. In the Revelation. For Emma, The Elect Lady Revelation, it talks about her bringing forth a book, the hymn she’s supposed to make a selection of hymns for the church as it shall be given you by my spirit. So and it says the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me. So it’s saying hymns are not just songs that we sing because they’re nice to sing, they’re prayers, they’re an act of worship. And so for Emma to be given the responsibility, the calling to bring forth a songbook was for her to be given a responsibility to bring forth a book, to help guide worship in the church, right sing. And how is she supposed to do it as it shall be given her by my spirit by the direction of revelation. So like just in parallel to how Joseph had brought forth the book of a sacred book of Scripture, the Book of Mormon by Revelation. And that’s mentioned in his revelation in July 1830 as elder her revelation as Le Lady is telling her that she’s supposed to bring forth a sacred book through inspiration by revelation to help guide the church and worship this hymn book. Right? So point by so once we, so if we take the historical source on its own, the Elect Lady Revolution without context, there’s a lot that we don’t see that we suddenly do. See when we put it in the flow of the chronology, we put it in context and examine it more closely. And there’s more that I can go into that. I’ve gone to in this paper about what does it mean for her to be ordained at this point. It turns out the same exact blank phrasing that’s used for her being ordained had been used in other contexts just right before the the there’s overlap between the ministerial responsibilities that are spelled out for her and those of the ordained male officers of the church in the articles and covenants that have been voted on the month before. So without trying to weigh in on incredibly controversial questions about women and ordination and stuff, I would say this revelation in this context is clearly relevant to those conversations and might bring a different angle to understanding female spiritual ministry and power in the restoration and what that ultimately is supposed to look like, right? But we don’t get there very fully unless we use good historical method. Unless we create a chronology, we analyze the source in it chronological context in the context of these other texts and so on. So much of history is getting things in the right order, but then drawing out the implications of that order, connecting the dots, putting the puzzle pieces together so that we see a fuller picture.

[1:36:23] Michelle: I love it. Yes. OK. That’s great. Thank you for going into that. That was, that was, that’s I’m gonna have to go read through those again. So, thank you.

[1:36:35] Don Bradley: So I wanted to ask questions about. So something you asked me once on the phone, uh when we were very first talking, you asked me, why should we believe the historians? Like we all have the historical sources in front of us, we can all read them for. I

[1:36:51] Michelle: think, I think what I said is, I think what I ask is, why do we, because we were talking about interpretation? And I think what I ask is, why do we need to prioritize historians interpretations if we’re all looking at the sources, why do historians, why, why, why isn’t everyone interpretation potentially valid? OK. Right. Right.

[1:37:13] Don Bradley: Right. Right. Right. And so my first answer to that would be everyone’s interpretation is potentially valid. OK. And to point out that when I first started doing history, I started actually doing history and making findings before I went back and got a master’s before I even went and started a history major to get My Bachelor’s. Right. Yeah. You

[1:37:37] Michelle: did your, your research for Brian Hills after your Bachelor’s. But before, after

[1:37:41] Don Bradley: my ba and before a couple of years before my masters, before I started my master’s work. Right. And so I definitely was finding a lot of things both in terms of finding new sources and documents, but also connecting a lot of dots. Right. I would not, I would have been, when I had my Bachelor’s, I would have been considered trained to some extent, right? But I wouldn’t have and I was acting in a professional capacity because I was paid as a historian, a historical researcher, right? But I hadn’t achieved the sort of professional standard of like master’s degree. I think generally is more considered to divide professional historians from non-professional if you want to use that educational degree, as I’m sure there’s

[1:38:28] Michelle: always a hierarchy because I’m sure a phd would look their nose at,

[1:38:33] Don Bradley: it would be right higher, right? And so um like, so I definitely do see that um it doesn’t, it doesn’t require like training as a historian, it doesn’t require a sort of professional designation or lots of experience in order to dive into historical sources to start working with the puzzle pieces, to start making connections, right, to start making assessments. And um so I, and so I want to first just like, really fully acknowledge that, right. So I’m I’m not saying there’s just like this here where it’s like, well, here are the professional stories and everyone else shut up and phone line, I, I do, I, my own personal experience is an absolute refutation of that. I, I don’t believe that if I had believed that I wouldn’t have been doing history for years before I had credentials. Right. I would say in that line, um, that there’s value in historical training and there’s value in getting increasing amount of experience using that kind of training. Right. And so when I was a teenager, I was kind of cutting my teeth by reading the historians and just trying to understand what is it that they’re doing and why are they doing it that way? How do historians think and why? Because I figured if I can understand why they’re drawing the kinds of conclusions that they’re, then I could see like I could understand reasoning, I could understand principles that might have application to help me might give me tools, right? So I was sort of reaching around for different potential tools, experimenting with using. And eventually I came up, I started creating some of my own tools for analysis, using things that I had seen others do, but building on that, right? Um And so like I would say, I think one reason why this kind of question comes up, why should we privilege the historians? Is history is not like a technical discipline obviously. And so it’s not like um we would, you and I would both recognize that in order to do nuclear

[1:40:59] Michelle: architecture or surgery,

[1:41:02] Don Bradley: we need to, there’s this whole base of like complex information that has to be mastered in this exact way or you just can’t do that field at all. And history is not like that because history deals with human beings and we all have experience being human beings, right? And it deals with understanding human behavior and motives. It deals with piecing together narratives, it deals with weighing the credibility of different things, but more than just that uh because that I, well, it does deal with that, but I also want to avoid falling into the trap. I laid out earlier, like treating sources as authorities rather than treating them as evidence. A source could have lesser credibility overall but still provide a valuable piece for our puzzle. Right.

[1:41:54] Michelle: Right. Absolutely. Like for my, for my interpretation, sorry, I’m throwing this in because I thought this every time too, like the, the 1869 affidavits all filled out by Joseph F Smith in his own book. Right. I don’t think that those are valid, but they do provide us with, with important information because they tell us what was happening and what the motives were and what the, how the efforts that we’re gone to, to try to claim a narrative. So from my perspective, I agree with you on that, I might just see it differently than you do. We would

[1:42:24] Don Bradley: see it differently in the details. But,

[1:42:28] Michelle: but the same methodology applies.

[1:42:30] Don Bradley: We would both see the there are multiple stories here or, or a big story. And that story is that when we talk about the historical sources, we’re not just talking about one context or other, we’re not just talking about NAV Vu or Utah. We have to be talking about Nauvoo and Utah. So we have to be putting together a right, a total explanation, a total model here would have to take into account Nauvoo data and Utah data to say what did happen in Nauvoo? What did happen in Utah? How were what actually played, how did polygamy originate? So, so rather than asking a question, I think that the questions that we ask guide our attention in different directions, questions can be more useful or less useful because they can focus us too narrowly or focus us more broadly and uh sometimes more constructively or less constructively. So if we’re just asking, did Joseph Smith practice polygamy? That’s a yes, no question,

[1:43:35] Michelle: right? The

[1:43:38] Don Bradley: better question would be, where did Mormon polygamy come from? How did polygamy start? And how did it really get going? And where does our corpus of historical documents about it come from and how did it develop? Right. And so that’s the kind of question where we would we’d be coming at it from different angles, but we’d both be exploring the same phenomena, right? There’s this thing, Mormon Polygamy. It started, we’re both exploring how did it start, we both have models for that. There’s this question, where did the corpus of sources talking about Justice Smith and polygamy come from? How did it develop? Why was it created by whom, out of what motives, what things were going on in the background of the CRE the creation of these sources? And it gets. So there’s a story there. Now again, we have different models for how that happened, but we’re exploring the same. But if we’re both looking at this question of where does Mormon polygamy come from? And where does the corpus of historical sources on it come from? We’re trying to create models to explain the same set of data. And so that our models are going to have points of connection, overlap difference and those models, then we and others would want to assess the different models based on criteria and so on. But that then that will get us into our, our discussion for next time about the sources and how do you um draw those kinds of connections? The um as I have learned more um like had more training in doing history, had more experience with doing history. Like that has been a huge plus, I do better work now than I did early on as a historian. It’s not that I wasn’t able to get my foot in that door and start making discoveries pretty early. I was, but I feel like the, the things that I’m finding now are bigger, right? They, like, I recognize an evolution in myself. And so if I were to think about, even though history is not a technical discipline, right? Um, you have, you have several Children? I know that I can’t recall how many, but like, um, if I were, I have a couple of sons, right. But if I were parenting for the first time and I wanted to know more about how to parent my child. Well, right. Parenting is not a technical discipline, right? Where you have to do this training and memorize all these facts and so on. But I would still see the value in talking to an experienced parent of several Children over just asking my neighbor who has, doesn’t have experience or doesn’t have much. Right. So there’s, um, and, and, and, and, and I don’t, I don’t fully like that analogy. Ok. But I’m just saying that even outside of technical disciplines, we, we generally recognize that there’s value in experience that there’s value in training. And so I wouldn’t want history to be seen as something that’s an exception to that because I think it’s not an exception to that.

[1:46:56] Michelle: So I actually do like that analogy. I think it’s a very good one because, because parenting certification isn’t a widely recognized thing, right? Like many of us read a lot of books and maybe went to a lot of different clinics or courses or, you know, we tried to learn what we could about parenting and then we tried to do our best and then I do think experience absolutely comes into play. Right. But, um, you, your work is also probably better because you have that many more years of experience. Right. And I do think that getting training is that people, I’m not ping it all I’m saying is I don’t think that we should say like, oh, she has not only her ba Bachelor’s but her master’s. Oh OK. I’ll claim I have my phd in parenting with the family that I’ve raised, you know, that I’m raising. So therefore, do you know what I do? You know what I mean? Like, therefore I’m the one with all the answers. Even like we recognize that that’s not how it works. And even in parenting we recognize we, we see, oh, that’s good parenting because I’m seeing it happen. It’s not based on a certification or a degree or uh you know, a hierarchy. It’s just like I see good parenting and I see not so good parenting. And I think that does play in a lot with history like we see, oh, that’s good historical work. That’s a good source brought. Or that’s a really good argument made and backed up well, or it’s not and it, it shouldn’t matter as much who’s doing it as what it is they’re doing. That’s what I’m like, the proof is in the pudding, not in the certification of the chef

[1:48:29] Don Bradley: you know exactly. I, OK. That final analogy I, I love OK, perfect. OK. And so what I would, what I want to do in this kind of discussion from my angle, right? Is not to come at it from an angle of sort of disempowerment and say, well, so and so is not a trained historian. And so they don’t have anything valid to contribute to this conversation, not at all, pointing again to myself that I was doing history before I was a trained historian, right? Um And so I actually want to pressure from a vantage point of empowerment, right? I see part of that empowerment as trying to understand historical methodology. What is it that historians, not just in the space of Joseph Smith and polygamy, but historians general, what is it that they do? How do they do it and why do they do it that way? And I think that that is an empowering thing because it gives people more tools and more perspectives that they can use, whether they’re professional historians or not. That, that the more that there’s an understanding of that, that they can engage with, that it enhances their own toolkit in order to do their own work and see things for themselves and not feel like they just have to rely on people who are considered experts or whatever, right? But like, and I value expertise, but I don’t, do you see what I’m saying? I’m trying to, it’s

[1:50:03] Michelle: the difference between evidence and authoritative. Your expertise doesn’t make you authoritative. It does make us say, oh, you might have something good, then we’ll look at it and see if it’s good. Right. Your, your expertise is evidence but it’s not authority, I guess.

[1:50:18] Don Bradley: And I think that one of the things that professional historians tend to have an advantage on is that they have been taught a lot about, well, some concrete things they understand about different types of documents from a certain era and so on that people wouldn’t otherwise understand that they understand the context of the era.

[1:50:37] Michelle: So that’s your expertise where your expertise comes into play because you’ve studied a lot.

[1:50:42] Don Bradley: So one area where expertise could particularly help is in rigor, right? Or where it should help at least, right is we need to have um professional history community has developed a set of standards, right? For assessing evidence, right? And so um I new interpretations need to be generated. That’s the creativity aspect, which is vital to advancing in our knowledge of history. If, if, if, if we’re not going to exercise creativity, basically, all we can do is just repeat what people said in the past, right or wrong, right. So the creativity plays a real role. But then rigor just like in science, right, we develop creative hypotheses, we have to test them against a high level of rigor, a high standard of criteria. And so something that um else that I want to say is for people who are skeptical, those who are skeptical that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy. I would actually like to see where these people enter into and, and I know that I realize that there are barriers, but there are barriers maybe from different directions. OK to enter into like a larger conversation of um scholarship on this. But with the recognition that what that means is that scholars actually have to be convinced of the arguments, right? And so, um I think I can’t remember who I was talking with because I’ve actually talked with um uh with Jeremy. Please help me with Jeremy’s last name. Jeremy. Jeremy Hoop. That’s right. Um Talk with Jeremy. I’ve talked to uh

[1:52:31] Michelle: a

[1:52:32] Don Bradley: little bit, I need to talk significantly more with him. Hear more of his story and approach. Um I, I, I thought, I think I, I heard from someone in discussing this was that um historians are just kind of professional. Australians are just kind of set in a certain narrative. And so it’s sort of impossible to sort of break them out of that. I think if you actually look at the academy, the academy thrives on novelty. If, if, if someone’s an up and coming scholar, let’s say they’re fresh out of graduate school and they want to make a splash, they want to establish themselves in a career track in their discipline, including history. What they really want me to do is to come up with something original, to come up with something new. So the very fact that there is a um sort of established academic narrative about Justice Smith and polygamy, that’s not actually a bar for someone coming in with a new narrative. That’s actually something that if the opportunity of rigor it would be an opportunity because the academic, the academy thrives on that. That’s how people break through in their careers, they come up with something new, right? The thing is that it would have to just have to be done in a way that it would actually convince people in that community, right? So I’m kind of laying out an opportunity and the challenge, right? And saying this is fully possible, right? For people to do. But it’s, it’s important, I think for various reasons to try to understand what are the historians doing and why are they doing it that way? Why do the historians see things the way that they do because clearly there’s value in it, historical training and experience and so understanding as I was trying to do earlier in my life, what are the historians doing and why helped me to better do what historians do to try to better reconstruct the past. But it’s also going to be necessary if people coming from any angle of new interpretation want to, if they want to be given, if they want to have a place at the table, right? They would need to show to the community, the scholarly community, hey, we understand, we understand the, the methodology, we understand what you’re doing and here’s how, what we’re doing fits into that. You see what I’m saying?

[1:55:06] Michelle: Yes. And I love it. I have a couple of maybe tricky questions for you. Is that OK? Yeah. Sure. So, just as I’m, so, it’s interesting to me because the Mormon polygamy is a tricky tricky topic because there’s more motivation in it than there is in a lot of other history. Right? I, I mean, I mean, of course, there’s motivation in terms of like was Thomas Jefferson sleeping with Sally Hemings, right? Because people want to make him a hero or make him not a hero, right? So there can be motivate, there can be emotion involved and motivation. But Mormon polygamy, like it’s hugely motivated people on both sides desperately need Jo Joseph Smith to be the originator and for many ways for a variety of reasons, it does provide an additional challenge. And so what I find interesting is that the experts on Mormon polygamy, at least from what I have seen generally are considered to be at least in the church. Um um, well, I was gonna say Don Bradley, yes, but Brian Hall and, um, Todd Compton, right? Those are the books that you’re told to read Brian Hall and Todd Compton and so Todd Compton did not have expertise or specialty and, and even American History let alone Mormon History. He was an ancient historian, right? Who was given a grant. So he even said this is, that wasn’t my field, right? And then Brian Hall is not a trained historian, right? So, so that’s why and, and yet those books are just taken as authoritative when, when I read through them, I, I feel like I do have actually quite a good grasp of historical methodology. A lot of it is somewhat common sense. And then as you start doing work and as you, like you said, as you read, like, just so you know, like very little that we’ve discussed here has surprised me or has been like, oh, I didn’t anticipate that, right? That that’s the methodology I do my best to employ. So my really, well, I’ll ask the easier of the two tricky questions first if that’s OK. My first question is when people say, OK, Michelle, I hear that you’re saying this, but all of the historians say, Da Bradley says, Brian Hill says, Todd Compton says, so I don’t need to think anymore. The experts have spoken. We’re done. You’re wrong. What would your response be to that for people who aren’t even in interested or open to the evidence that I’m trying to show because the experts have spoken.

[1:57:36] Don Bradley: OK, I have different thoughts kind of going different directions on this. So we live in a world of specialization and exchange. Our modern world is really built on that. So we have billions of people hooked into a larger market, right? Where some people specialize in one thing, some people, people specialize in another. And ultimately, we’re all beneficiaries of that. If we each had to do each thing ourselves or specialize in everything, to specialize in everything is to specialize in nothing, right? And so no one would become really good at anything. So we thrive in our society, our, our lives, the quality of our lives on all different levels, not just like um in terms of like the material objects that we have, but the the quality of medical care that we get, the quality of um service, we get on our cars, the quality of service that we get um from counselors or whatever, it’s all built on this. So I I do tend to think in terms of at least a sort of provisional. Um but in our society in general, we tend to give a sort of provisional grant of um weight to expertise, right? So where I would disagree. So, so I see that I would disagree with the criticism that you’re describing for you is that it’s taking that and it’s making it into an absolute right? That just because there’s value and expertise, that expertise has absolute value, the experts are always right and and so on, which obviously isn’t the case. And there is also value in seeing in understanding why expertise is valuable and what the experts do particularly for areas that we’re very, very interested in, right? So if I, um, let’s say that I want to know how to eat more healthily. And so I consult um dieticians and then it turns out that there are a lot of conflicting views even on healthy eating, right? But like, um, let’s say I consult dieticians and so on, medical people have written about healthy eating. Um I can get, I could go at this on the level of very basic advice, I could say, well, they say eat more vegetables, they say do this that and then I’ll just do that because they say to do it. And they’re the experts right now. I think there’s validity in, in doing that. And nobody can look deeply into every subject that impacts our lives, right? But there could be an advantage for me and actually learning more about nutrition, how the body works, how the things that I eat actually are processed in my body, how they, how they affect my health. So I could go with just like the the surface level advice from experts in this area and that benefits me. But I could also go to a deeper level to understand why do they give this advice? What, what actually is healthy about eating in a certain way? And that actually could help me to make better choices in my eating because I understand the principles underlying the advice rather than just a to do list on the advice. Right. And so, um I think that uh in various ways in dealing with experts, like we don’t neces and sometimes experts are wrong and that’s another thing. Right. Um And they put the complexities about how much weight do we give to expert opinion, when do we differ from expert opinion? Um And so on. And, and I think those are complex questions that are actually a big deal in our society right now because I think that we’re experiencing a time right now when there’s more of a sort of populist understanding that’s sort of against elites or experts, right? And calling them into question,

[2:01:40] Michelle: I think that comes around when we have individual people claiming to, for example, be the science, you know, we famously have Anthony Fauci said I am the science, which is an utterly ridiculous claim. All it means is you have all of the power which isn’t good, right? And, and, and so, so I think that when we like, I guess from my perspective, I do think that specialization is a really important thing, you know, like even M DS physicians, if they do a specialization, that’s more years of training into a field, right? And so like, anyway, so I think it’s interesting because um, II, I guess I just always wish we would talk about sources, not, not people you, you know, and so so it’s, it’s really, anyway, so I, I guess, I guess that’s an interesting answer. I guess. I’m always thinking, just look at the evidence, don’t name a person, look at the evidence, right? And so if there’s like a medical hierarchy or scientific hierarchy and they’re claiming one thing, but then we look at the evidence and it’s just, they’re just wrong. Right. That happens. And so anyway, so, yeah. OK. So I guess because, yeah, that’s an interesting question. I just, I think it’s um yeah, I might have a slightly different answer but I appreciate you working with me on that. Now, I have a harder question and um as we’ve talked about all of this historical practice and methodology and, you know, and rigor and all of these factors, I just uh I’m sorry, I have to know how you think Brian Hale’s narrative does on that because it’s hard. It’s, it’s that and I, and I don’t want to pit you against him. I know, you know, and I’m not asking you to condemn him just I find it to be extremely problematic. I, I will say, well, anyway, that I’ve, I’ve been treated with like what has felt to me, like mass a massively condescending attitude, you know, and I’m not just talking about in our interview, it’s gone way beyond that on, in exchanges and I really appreciate the work you mean in

[2:03:48] Don Bradley: your interview with Brian? Yeah.

[2:03:50] Michelle: Not, not just in like I I’m saying it’s gone way beyond what was just in the interview. Just the ma like, like I’ve tried to engage so many times and there’s never an engagement. It’s always just massive condescending, like condescension, you know. Who do you think you are? I’m the expert and it basically, and you need to be quiet or you need to be excommunicated, you know. And so anyway, so I guess I’m just wondering because I feel like we take these, like, like I think that both of like Todd Compton is such a nice guy. I don’t want to, you know, but when I read his narrative, the rigor is not there, it just isn’t. And you know, and, and, and definitely the same thing with Brian. And so, so what do we do about that with everything you’re laying out? Do you find it in those other sources? Do you find those qualifications that rigor and that approach?

[2:04:39] Don Bradley: So I think this probably gets more for me into our next discussion where we’re going to go more into the nitty gritty. I mean, I, I will say that like, II, I definitely agree with you that like we’ve said that, I mean, like, like, OK, let me use an analogy for how I think about this, this kind of thing, not that not specifically about Brian or Todd, both of whom I know very well, particularly Brian, obviously. Um

[2:05:10] Michelle: And I’m sorry to ask that, I mean, I know this puts you in a tough spot. So thank you go ahead.

[2:05:15] Don Bradley: Sure. Sure. So, uh I mentioned earlier that I’d done a book on, in trying to piece together what we can know about the last 116 pages that coming forth. I talked about Martin and Lucy as one example of that. And then we have different sources about what was in them, which is in the second part of the book. But in, I think I put this in the intro of the book, I put it somewhere. I talked about how I said this book. I said something like this book should not be understood as the final word on the last 116 pages. It should be seen more like a first word, the beginning of a discussion because the fact is there’s been basically no scholarship on the subject before that book, right? So I wasn’t going to claim to be the final word. I’m opening up, I was opening up sort of a niche area for scholarship, right? But, but one of the things that I said after that was there will be many people who will make further advances in understanding this to help refine interpretations here, add things, change things and whatnot. And I said this will be done by a number of people in the future, including by readers of this book. So what I was trying to do there and I don’t know how many readers picked up on this. What I was trying to do was invite readers in to the conversation rather than push readers out. Right. I wasn’t ready to exclude the reader from the conversation. I was trying to invite the reader. I was saying I’m doing something here. You’re gonna see what I’m doing. You’re gonna see my methodology. You’re gonna see how I’m taking these puzzle pieces and putting them together. I hope that others who read this will pick up on that and carry this forward. And I’ll, I’ll be doing a few more work on it in the future too. But I don’t want to be alone in that. I want other people to be doing that.

[2:07:07] Michelle: That’s exactly what I’m doing in my podcast as well as I’m always asking. But I do feel the exact opposite coming from, particularly those two narratives and those books. It’s like here’s the information it’s done, sit back, read what we tell you and take it. So it’s over, it’s finished.

[2:07:27] Don Bradley: Yeah. And, and the thing is that it’s history is never finished, right? It’s never finished. Um We’re gonna know a lot more in the future. So one thing, OK, so something that I talked about in our first episode that Brian did that, I think I hear so much criticism of Brian House. I talked in the first episode about my personal interactions with him. He’s trying his, his deep kindness to me. Um and other things like that. And I talked about how his faith in the restoration and his perspective as a latter day saint was so much of what drove him to be willing to engage with these topics, right? This is not a comfortable subject for anybody, but like he went out, he, he had me mostly do this. He did some himself, but he mostly had me do gather, trying to gather every source that had ever been cited in anything that’s ever been written about Justice Smith and polygamy. And then see what other unpublished sources could be found. And in his books, he cites some 1500 sources, right? And he’s made those available on the internet. So there’s this treasure trove of information. And, and so he did a lot of grouping of sources. He, he did a lot of work on like identifying in that mass of sources. Well, which ones are talking about Ruth Vo Sayers and her, which ones are talking about John C Bennett. And so he pulled them together and he wove narratives from them. He made interpretations. Sometimes he would send me back to find more sources or do analysis, more analysis on a source or who was the author of this source? What was their bias? What was going on with them? And then I went into his hopper and, and the actual writing and crafting of all that was him. Occasionally. He used little bits from me where he had me analyze the source. Then I emailed him my analysis and he was like, well, that was so good. Would you mind if I just popped it into the manuscript? So there are little bits that I wrote. But overall, this is Brian’s product, right? And so that’s why it says on the title page as author like Brian, he helps with the assistance of Don Bradley because I did research and some source analysis, right? But like um so sorry, I’m trying to remember why I was going with all. I think

[2:09:50] Michelle: you just don’t because we were just asking like, how you think the narrative, like I’m not questioning Brian’s Brian’s um motives or his goodness. You know, I’m questioning his, his a historical, his rigor as a historian. So

[2:10:06] Don Bradley: particularly what I was gonna comment on there is you were saying that the, the sort of impression that you’ve gotten from how those are written and what’s been said about those books, Todd’s book and Sacred Loneliness and Brian’s Joseph Smith’s polygamy volumes. The impression you’ve gotten is this is the narrative, this is the kind of it’s settled. And so um what I was gonna say is if you go back earlier in our conversation today where I was mentioning uh someone again whom I would highly recommend, right? This book, the, the epilogues to this book, the idea of History by Robin Collingwood, for people who are really interested in historical method doing history, right? He says in there that our knowledge of history does not advance so much by finding new historical sources. But by learning to use better the sources that we have by finding evidence that’s in those sources that we haven’t thought was evidence. And so I gave the analogy early example, earlier of like the book of Isaiah and the Book of Mormon and Isaiah and the JST the evidence of the manuscripts themselves. We didn’t need new historical sources to tell us this. The evidence was already in the manuscripts. It just needed to be mine out. We have like 1500 sources or more the evidence is there. We need to mine it out, we need to make better use of it. So, so what I’m saying is that the the work of pulling together all these sources in the research and then doing like interpretation on the level of that has been done so far is actually a beginning point rather than an end point, which doesn’t mean that I’m saying, um I come from my perspective, I’m not saying I think what this means is, well, Joseph Smith didn’t really practice polygamy and that’s the narrative that I expect to ultimately come out. That’s not the narrative. I expect to come out, right? And we’ll get into nitty gritty about sources and why I think what I think on different things next time, what I’m saying is the kind of research that Brian and I, that I did and that Brian built on in crafting, you know, piecing things together, the way that he did and crafting things that’s really based on the way that Collingwood describe these things. That’s like, that’s the great deal of future work that will flesh this subject out much more. Will we take the sources that we’ve gathered? We take the sources that Brian was able to group together in different topics and different narratives to show how these sources fit together into a narrative about John C Bennett or, or about a certain about

[2:12:56] Michelle: William Clayton because when we’re talking about using the sources better and you know, like, like just I have to keep wanting to say when we talk like one source that isn’t cited is the deed that William Clayton wrote to Hiram on July 12th, 1843 right? And that’s a pretty big source. That’s like, that’s a pretty big um disruptor to the standard narrative, right? And so so anyway, so, and we, and I’m sure we’ll get into some of those things in the next conversation. So I don’t want to go too much. But, but, but if we talk about using sources better, like I found that source on the Joseph Smith papers, but the Joseph Smith papers, historians knew about it before I did, right? It just hadn’t been connected to this, to this question. And so, um so I think that that kind of, and that’s just one piece, but I think that’s a pretty important puzzle piece saying that that should go into the puzzle and it should, I guess that’s what, let me, let me just ask this and we’re probably getting about ready to wrap up, you know. But, um, but let me ask this, like, what would be required to make you reconsider your model? And I’m not talking about in a, in a scholarly approach. I’m just saying personally, like, are you open to reconsidering, what would it

[2:14:15] Don Bradley: in my notes? Um that I, that I put together for, you know, what to go over with you today? I actually put that question for me and for you. Um But then I didn’t raise the question because as we were going along and I was thinking about it, it seems like that actually my answer to that would necessarily take me into the very nitty gritty that we’re going to get into next time. Um So I, I my, instead of answering like with um specifics, what I will say is that I am open to, OK, I’m open to a variety of possibilities. I’ve changed my mind about so many things in the history of the church across time that should be evident from even just the fact that like, I left the church for a while. I thought that Joseph Smith during that time, I thought he was a scoundrel. I don’t think that now, right? And so on some very basic points of interpretation about Joseph character, what he was doing and so on, I’ve held radically different viewpoints at different points in my life. So then the question with regard to anything specific, any specific area of interpretation comes down to, how well do I see the data points locking together? How well do I think those puzzle pieces fit together? Right. And so if I think that if I’m looking at puzzle pieces and I see them really interlocking the way that I’ve pieced them together for myself, regardless of how other people may have piece them together. If the way that I’m seeing is that they fit so well and the picture that’s coming out of them is so clear, then I’m, I consider if you were actually doing a puzzle, right? If you had a bunch of puzzle pieces and you start piecing them together and like they, they fit perfectly and you’re starting to see an image of a red barn, right? And then somebody comes and says, well, no, you’re doing it all wrong. This is a picture of, you know, this is actually supposed to be like a Monet painting or something of, you know, a river or something like I’m gonna be like, I don’t think so because I see these fitting together and I see a red barn, right? So, so how much evidence it would take for me to shift my view on something depends on how well I see the pieces interlocking and and so on in my current view, right? And so then that would get us into questions about how well did the different data points and sources fit together in? What sort of picture would be a question that for us to explore regarding the sources? Right? Because I, that that is the kind of question that I want to get into. And it’s the kind of question where I wanna hear, I wanna offer my perspective on that, like what, what would it take for me to change my mind on specific questions here regarding Joseph Smith employ me including the most basic question is where does Mormon polygamy originate? Does it originate with specifically with Joseph Smith? I and where I would be very interested in hearing more of how you piece together the sources, your view of them and what it would take to change your view. And I know you have changed your view on this and we’ve discussed this right that you initially thought and had practiced polygamy. But I think that’s a very valuable question for a dialogue and also for other people to hear and to engage with. Um as far as this, the larger conversation on this. And I’d love to talk with you about that next time. And it is a question that specifically I I’ve had in mind for us to discuss.

[2:17:55] Michelle: That’s excellent. OK. Well, II I think we should probably wrap it up here. We’ve been at it for a little while, but thank you. So much don. And I hope our next discussion will be able to be sooner rather than later. I’m really looking forward to this

[2:18:09] Don Bradley: and, and just if I could just, on a closing note, I do want to reemphasize that. Like I, I, what I want people to see is that I don’t want people to feel like, um when it comes to spirituality that somehow other people are getting in the way between them and God, right? There is a, there is a structure to things as far as the church community is concerned, right? But like people have direct access, right? And so uh people and certainly of all people, scholars should not be getting in the way of that, right at all. That’s personal, that’s direct. And like people also like need to be able to understand if, if they’re going to rely on experts, then I think it’s valuable for them to understand why they’re relying on the experts and not just to rely on the experts without some understanding of why. And so again, my point here, like with what I put in my last pages book is actually to empower people not to tell them why they should feel disempowered. And so if, if our conversation on this helps in that regard, right? If people come away from hearing us talk, feeling more empowered spiritually and intellectually, that to me is a success in this conversation as opposed to trying to convince people of a particular viewpoint or not.

[2:19:41] Michelle: I love it. That’s beautiful. Thank you for adding that at the end. And I do just want to remind you that I think that um Joseph’s masks, mask shattering is something we can pay attention to. So, no, I didn’t. I actually wanted to say that. I think this is my, forgive me for being so um bratty and forward. But you have the idea. Almost perfect, almost perfectly. right. There’s just part that’s around the edges that maybe need to be re the puzzle can be reinvestigated, right? So I wanna keep that is not, I that was rude to say it was to you. I just say that’s to all of us to this entire discussion. We need to be willing to reconsider the mask that we’ve created for Joseph Smith. So thank you, Don, I really appreciate it one more huge. Thank you to Don Bradley for being willing to give us so much time and to engage on these difficult topics. I really appreciate his thoughtful, careful approach to these conversations and I am so looking forward to our continuing conversations going forward, remember to tune in next week for the two year anniversary episode and then there’s a lot more really challenging and hopefully very valuable content coming, coming after that. So thank you so much for being here and I will see you next time.