An Insider's View of Mormon Origins

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History at Brigham Young University,
• There is a lingering distrust of anything that hasn’t come directly from, or with an endorsement by, the church leadership.
• We now have a body of authentic, reliable documents and a near-consensus on many of the details. From this base, the overall picture of Mormon origins begins to unfold. This picture is much different from what we hear in the modified versions that are taught in Sunday school. But demythologized—placed in its original time and place, amid all the twists and turns that exist in the real world—it rings true.
• That said, I have wondered how I should introduce my work. How should I convey what I feel in my soul? First, this book is not intended for children or investigators. So much of our attention is directed toward children and potential converts that long-standing adult members rarely have an opportunity to speak freely to each other. We worry that tender ears may overhear. I am a fourth-generation Mormon, and I want to address this discussion to other second-, third-, and fourth-generation Mormons who will better understand where I am coming from. Lest there be any question, let me say that my intent is to increase faith, not to diminish it. Still, faith needs to be built on truth—what is, in fact, true and believable. After that comes the great leap. We too often confuse faith with knowledge. Faith has to do with the unknown, not about what can be proven or can be shown to be reasonably based on the evidence. I have always thought that an unwillingness to submit one’s beliefs to rigorous scrutiny is a manifestation of weakness of faith. Otherwise, everything becomes a matter of orthodoxy rather than truth.
• Now that I am retired, I find myself compelled to discuss in public what I pondered mostly in private at that time.
• I hope my survey will be enlightening and useful to anyone who has wanted to understand what has been termed the New Mormon History.
• Wallace B. Smith, president-emeritus of the RLDS church (now the Community of Christ), writing about “the foundation experiences” of Mormonism, observed: “One thing is clear. The genie is out of the bottle and it cannot be put back. Facts uncovered and the questions raised by the new Mormon historians will not go away. They will have to be dealt with if we are to maintain a position of honesty and integrity in our dealings with our own members as well as our friends in the larger religious community.”[1]
• I also agree with Thomas Jefferson who taught that however discomfiting a free exchange may be, truth will ultimately emerge the victor.[2]
• President Hugh B. Brown, a counselor in the LDS presidency during the 1960s, echoed on behalf of the church: I admire men and women who have developed the questing spirit, who are unafraid of new ideas as stepping stones to progress. We should, of course, respect the opinions of others, but we should also be unafraid to dissent—if we are informed. Thoughts and expressions compete in the marketplace of thought, and in that competition truth emerges triumphant. Only error fears freedom of expression … This free exchange of ideas is not to be deplored as long as men and women remain humble and teachable. Neither fear of consequence or any kind of coercion should ever be used to secure uniformity of thought in the church. People should express their problems and opinions and be unafraid to think without fear of ill consequences. … We must preserve freedom of the mind in the church and resist all efforts to suppress it.[3]
• As English philosopher John Stuart Mill said, any attempt to resist another opinion is a “peculiar evil.” If the opinion is right, we are robbed of the “opportunity of exchanging error for truth.” If it is wrong, we are deprived of a deeper understanding of the truth in “its collision with error.”[4]
• Shortly after becoming Joseph’s full-time scribe in April 1829, Oliver Cowdery learned that just as the plates were not necessary for translation, other source documents could be read without being present. In a disagreement between the two men over whether John the Revelator was on earth or in heaven, Joseph, through a stone, “translated” the answer from “a record made on parchment by John and hidden up by himself” somewhere in the Middle East (D&C 7, headnote).
• The same information was also conveyed under oath at Joseph’s second July 1830 trial in front of Justice Joel K. Noble of Colesville, New York. Noble wrote: “Jo. was asked by witness [Austin] if he could see or tel[l] more than others[.] Jo. said he could not and says any thing for a living. I now and then Get a sh[i]lling.”[24] Isaac Hale, Alva Hale, and Peter Ingersoll each signed affidavits stating that Joseph said the same to them.[25]
  • Feels like a genealogy fallacy. If he was faking stone looking to find money and he used a stone to translate then he must have been faking translation?
• Although Joseph said he was a reader rather than a literal translator of the Book of Mormon, it has become clear that he was also a participant in the book’s creation. He made textual alterations in 1837, changing passages that described the Father and the Son as one God to a description of them as distinct and separate beings.[28]
• No nineteenth-century church member mentions that Joseph used notes or books, but scholars have determined that he consulted an open Bible, specifically a printing of the King James translation dating from 1769 or later, including its errors.[31]
• Chapters 4 and 5 of Abraham reflect Joseph’s changing theology on the godhead. From 1820 to 1834 he believed that there is one God, as seen in the Book of Mormon, the testimony of the three witnesses, the Book of Commandments 24:13-18, the Book of Moses, the JST, and the 1832 account of his first vision.
• Klaus Hansen, an LDS scholar, has written: “The progressive aspect of Joseph’s theology, as well as its cosmology, while in a general way compatible with antebellum thought, bears some remarkable resemblances to Thomas Dick’s Philosophy of a Future State, a second edition of which had been published in 1830.” Joseph Smith owned a copy of this work, and Oliver Cowdery in December 1836 quoted some lengthy excerpts from it in the Messenger and Advocate[53]
• Many of the astronomical and cosmological ideas found in both Joseph Smith’s environment and in the Book of Abraham have become out of vogue, and some of these Newtonian concepts are scientific relics. The evidence suggests that the Book of Abraham reflects concepts of Joseph Smith’s time and place rather than those of an ancient world.
  • You would assume that, if ideological ideas are compatible with science then they would increasingly sound more modern than ancient.
• With this perspective, when I read the Book of Mormon or Pearl of Great Price, I harbor the suspicion that they represent a nineteenth-century encounter with God rather than an ancient epic. This is enlightening on a spiritual level but of no value in trying to learn more about ancient America or the Middle East.
• J. Reuben Clark, a counselor in the First Presidency, expressed the same attitude in a provocative epigram. He stated that “If we have the truth, [it] cannot be harmed by investigation. If we have not the truth, it ought to be harmed.”[3]
• The evidence indicates that the Book of Mormon is in fact an amalgamation of ideas that were inspired by Joseph’s own environment (new) and themes from the Bible (old).
• We may assume that God reveals similar concepts to different people at different times and that such similarities in theme are to be expected. The lingering question is whether such concepts could be expected to be found in identical sequences of ideas, phrases, and sentences.
• The following is a plausible scenario for how the Book of Mormon came to be. After Joseph’s marriage to Emma Hale in January 1827, he promised his father-in-law that he would give up treasure hunting. Influenced by the revival fervor and by his mother’s piety, his mind began to fill with impressions that blended his familiarity with Indian lore and his conviction of biblical promises. Perhaps the outline of a book began to form sometime before Martin Harris became his scribe in April 1828. He had already experimented with seer stones, and perhaps he thought that through greater faith and concentration, God would open to his mind a vision of the secrets of the artifacts being discovered in upstate New York. The dictation proceeded, and after Martin lost the first 116 pages of transcription in mid-1828, this may have been fortuitous. An apprenticeship had been served, and the vision that was unfolding in Joseph’s mind may have become more clear. The dictation probably progressed haltingly at first, perhaps as a kind of stream-of-consciousness narrative. Before Oliver Cowdery became his new scribe in April 1829, the prophet had had nine months to ponder the details of the plots and subplots and to flesh out the time line. Given his familiarity with the Bible and with American antiquities, it would have become progressively easier for him to put form to the vision. He dictated the final manuscript in about ninety days.[50] Over the next eight months, before the book was published in March 1830, he had the opportunity to make textual refinements.[51] He thus had three years to develop, write, and refine the book—six years from the time he told his family about the project.
• The modern reader is unaware that he or she is reading revival literature in the Book of Mormon because it recasts and gives it a different setting. The advantage is that it removes the stigma often attached to evangelical meetings but allows the religious message to work upon readers’ minds and emotions, bringing them to repentance and Christ. This is the wellspring of energy and warmth of the Book of Mormon—something that is felt by both member and convert. I think it will long be the book’s primary value.
• Both evangelicals and the Book of Mormon view man as more sinful than good—not as a child of God but as God’s “creature,” thus emphasizing dependency upon God.
  • This feels inaccurate
• William James in his classic work, The Varieties of Religious Experience,
• Moreover, how could Joseph control the many detailed events and descriptions that are clearly beyond his power to duplicate and which are common to both narratives? It would stretch credulity to believe that this could be a coincidence, and I therefore think that a debt is owed to E. T. A. Hoffmann and the European traditions for at least some of the details that passed from the Smith family to neighbors and from there to outsiders.
  • He imagines a grand conspiracy that everyone went to their grave standing by, despite unending suffering.
• Harris testified in the Salt Lake Tabernacle in September 1870, “I would rather have my right hand cut off than deny the knowledge of seeing and handling the plates, and hearing the words of the Angle [angel] regarding the truth of the Records.”[68]
• When asked about his vision, David Whitmer told RLDS member J. W. Chatburn in 1882: “These hands handled the plates, these eyes saw the angel, and these ears heard his voice.”
• On 25 March 1838, Martin Harris testified publicly that none of the signatories to the Book of Mormon saw or handled the physical records. His statement, made at the height of Ohio’s banking-related apostasy, became the final straw that caused Apostles Luke S. Johnson, Lyman E. Johnson, and John F. Boynton, and high priest Stephen Burnett and seventy Warren Parrish to exit the church.
• On 11 August Parrish wrote in a letter: “Martin Harris, one of the subscribing witnesses, has come out at last, and says he never saw the plates, from which the book purports to have been translated, except in vision and he further says that any man who says he has seen them in any other way is a liar, Joseph [Smith] not excepted.”[84]
• Ironically, Hurlbut’s, Rigdon’s, and Joseph Smith’s speeches all became advance publicity for E. D. Howe’s scathing Mormonism Unvailed