Abstract: Jonathan Neville has offered a response to my two recent reviews of his works; however, in his response, Neville offers a poor defense regarding what he wrote and misrepresents my reviews of his works. As such, I present the following rejoinder in response to Neville’s concerns.

Jonathan Neville has offered some thoughts regarding my two recent reviews, and I am happy to discuss and defend what I wrote. In Neville’s response, he claims that I offered “caricatures” of his arguments that are “inaccurate” and that I “omitted” context in my reviews.1 I do not believe this is an accurate assessment, and Neville misrepresents what I wrote and ignores citations that he himself included in his books to which I responded. Ultimately, his response fails to defend his works.

After offering a brief overview of his Demonstration Hypothesis (which I will discuss shortly), Neville states the important context to be aware of is the competing claims regarding the origin of the Book of Mormon. This is true, and it is context with which many believers in the Restoration are intimately familiar. Neville cites Eber D. Howe’s Mormonism Unvailed as proof for his view of competing origins, but misunderstands and misappropriates Howe’s arguments to apparently make this an issue regarding how the Book of Mormon was translated. This is not the issue for Howe, however. The issue for him—and the entire basis of his book—is not how the Book of Mormon was translated, but whether it was translated at all.

[Page 186]Howe believed that Joseph Smith was a fraud and the Book of Mormon was false. Latter-day Saints claim otherwise. Howe, in his work, relates two different options for the translation of the Book of Mormon, but as I discuss in my review of Neville’s work, he attacks any and all forms of translation and revelation in modern times. It is disheartening to see a response defending one’s work avoid dealing with the points raised in my reviews regarding Howe’s work, and does not bode well for the rest of Neville’s response.2

In fact, Howe was not the first to claim that a hat was used in the translation process, with this detail found as early as 1829.3 Another important witness to the translation of the Book of Mormon came in 1830 from Josiah Stowell, a faithful friend of the prophet Joseph who staunchly defended the young prophet and never lost his faith in Joseph’s prophetic gifts. In 1830, as Joseph was (again) on trial for allegedly being a “disorderly person,” Stowell testified of the translation of the Book of Mormon in defense of Joseph, stating that: “as aforesaid, the prisoner [Joseph] said he translated the book of Mormon, prisoner put a certain stone into his hat, put his face into the crown, then drew the brim of the hat around his head to prevent Light—he could then see as prisoner said, and translate the same, the Bible, got from the hill in Palmyra.