The full title is: “Seeing the light: Parallels in Mormon Conversion and De-conversion Stories.”

Rosemary Avance is a non-member and the first non-member to speak at a FAIR conference. She is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania and a scholar of Mormonism.

She wants to understand the plurality of experience of Mormons. She started out with Dan Peterson’s quotation:

Peterson’s First Rule for the Study of Other Religions: “If a substantial number of sane and intelligent people believe something that seems to you utterly without sense, the problem probably lies with you, for not grasping what it is about that belief that a lucid and reasonable person might find plausible and satisfying.”

She said it is important for Mormon scholars to take seriously the perspective of dissenting and former Mormons.

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John Gee is a professor of Egyptology and a senior research fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute at BYU. He previously taught at Yale and worked in the Department of Egyptian Art at the Met in New York. He is one of the leading Egyptologists.

The relationship of the papyri to the Book of Abraham.

1)Book of Abraham was translated from the papyri. Almost no knowledgeable people in the Church believe this. This is a straw man.
2)Book of Abraham was translated from papyri that we no longer have. This seems to be the most likely.
3)Book of Abraham was translated using revelation only. This has less evidence.

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The entire title of this talk is: “From the East to the West: the Problem of Directions in the Book of Mormon.”

Brant Gardner has written for FARMS review and is the author of “Second Witness: An Analytical and Contextual Commentary of the Book of Mormon.” He is an expert on Mesoamerican history.

He reminds that the Book of Mormon can plausibly be placed in Mesoamerica (southern Mexico and northern Central America). See John Sorenson’s work.

There is a problem with the directions. The references to East and West are skewed. One analysis says Sorenson’s claims have the sun going up and setting in the north and south.

Gardner has a possible solution to this issue.
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The entire title of this talk is: “45 Years of Chiasmus Conversations, Criteria and Creativity: What Chiasmus Proves and Does Not Prove.”

Jack Welch is a professor of law at the J. Reuben Clark Law School. He is the founder of FARMS and is the editor of the BYU Studies Quarterly. Welch is the person who discovered and popularized the idea of Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon.

(Note: Chiasmus is a form of Hebrew poetry that clearly exists in the Book of Mormon. How did Joseph Smith, an isolated relatively ignorant farm boy, learn about Hebrew poetry?)

“I’ve not made a career of chiasmus, but
chiasmus has made a career of me.”

“That was a chiasmus, by the way.”

Thus Welch began his talk. He told how he discovered chiasmus in the Book of Mormon when he was a missionary in Germany 45 years ago. He studied under Hugh Nibley at BYU. On his mission in Germany, he was at a lecture given by a Catholic scholar who mentioned chiasmus in the Bible. The scholar mentioned a book by Paul Gaechter on the book of Matthew, in which the author mentioned chiasmus in arguing that Matthew was writing for a Hebrew audience and used Hebraisms. Welch then bought Gaechter’s book.
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Ugo Perego has a doctorate in Genetics and Biomolecular Sciences from the University of Pavia (Italy). He has given more than 200 lectures on DNA topics. He has authored and co-authored many publications, including several on Book of Mormon genetics. He lives in Rome, Italy with his wife and children.

Perego says it is very common for people with a shallow understanding of genetics to make sweeping statements about DNA issues in Latin America. He used a recent example from Sunstone that made a sweeping claim about native American DNA that is clearly wrong in a variety of ways (including a claim that certain science is settled). Sunstone cited an eight-year-old paper that Perego says does not make the point that Sunstone claims it does.

Perego then cited a new study from a few months ago. This paper says central questions regarding native American DNA have not been resolved. This paper says people in the Americans came from three different Asian gene flows. In summary, Perego said issues regarding native American genetics are still being studied, and new discoveries come about all the time. Very little is “settled.”

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