Destruction of documents

I can’t find any sources and don’t know of any.

That doesn’t mean anything one way or another, but the only sources I can find are references to the allegation – and threads where nobody provides sources.

The church seem very loath to destroy documents, even potentially incriminating ones. The 1833 version of the first vision has challenged many a testimony and yet it was owned by the church and not destroyed. There’s a story that it was put in a safe/vault for a while by Joseph Fielding Smith, but even then it survived.

There will always be conspiracy theories. That said I wouldn’t look at the survival of a document that stated a different version of the first vision to be evidence that the church wouldn’t destroy documents.

1) The alternate first vision (AFV. no, not America’s Funniest Home Videos) document still had faith promoting material. That would be very different than say a document from Sidney Rigdon to JS that said something like “lol, we really pulled the wool over their eyes.”

2) Timing. If the AFV document already went public in some fashion destroying it wouldn’t be of any benefit. The cat was already out of the bag. Now if they were sitting on documents that had not yet went public on the other hand…

I’m not saying that there are secret documents that have been destroyed; I’m just pointing out why there might be some documents that are potentially incriminating that we all know about and how there may be documents that were destroyed that only the people that did it would know about.

I remember learning in recent months that the church has possession if Joseph smiths seer stones, I had NO clue. I am very bothered by the notion of undisclosed information. Knowing that president hinckley bought the document(s)? From mark Hoffman true or untrue is bothersome in that they weren’t purchased with the intention for it to be published in some form or for the public to have access. I guess it’s idea that there is a monopoly on evidence. I understand preservation of historical documents, but why not let there be more accessibility? I guess I don’t know too much surrounding the Leonard Arrington era that I always hear referenced. But it sounds like fawn Brody was the first to really get access and publish (with bias). And then everything was closed off.

Ok, now I’m just rambling. Maybe my problem is I don’t understand all the context around church “vaults” and such, is there a good podcast or semi short (not a novel) article that can chronologically help me understand the circumstances? Or is someone willing to give a cliff notes version?

I understand the concern. The church today is doing more than it ever did in the past. The josephsmithpapers.org website is an incredible online library of information. It is being opened up to historical analysis and is leading to a changing perspective of certain historical events and assumptions. It’s got the church stamp of approval. They’re funding the process. They recently announced the Council of 50 vault being opened up too.

cwald, I simply want to see a primary source, since I haven’t seen any.

I remember learning in recent months that the church has possession if Joseph smiths seer stones, I had NO clue. I am very bothered by the notion of undisclosed information. Knowing that president hinckley bought the document(s)? From mark Hoffman true or untrue is bothersome in that they weren’t purchased with the intention for it to be published in some form or for the public to have access. I guess it’s idea that there is a monopoly on evidence. I understand preservation of historical documents, but why not let there be more accessibility? I guess I don’t know too much surrounding the Leonard Arrington era that I always hear referenced. But it sounds like fawn Brody was the first to really get access and publish (with bias). And then everything was closed off.

Ok, now I’m just rambling. Maybe my problem is I don’t understand all the context around church “vaults” and such, is there a good podcast or semi short (not a novel) article that can chronologically help me understand the circumstances? Or is someone willing to give a cliff notes version?

I don’t have an answer to your question. I am aware that the “vault” (I’m not sure it is an actual vault as opposed to a depository) for decades had very limited access, and as others point out here that is changing. I think putting the stuff online is great for several reasons, one of which is that it allows access without fear of damage or theft of the documents themselves.

But that’s not the reason I wanted to reply to this post. I had never heard before that the church has Joseph’s seer stone(s). Is there a reliable source that they really do?

A bit difficult to find so I’ll post the text I found. It was Grant Palmer:

In 1965, my professor James Clayton at the University of Utah in history, he says “why don’t you join us? We’re having a seminar on mormon stuff, and Leonard Arrington,” who used to be our church historian, “is organizing it,” and it was, like, six weeks, guest speaker. Well the last speaker was Earl Olson. He was at the time assistant church historian. Leonard Arrington was not yet our church historian. And, right at the end he says “Earl, how about going down to the archives and maybe you could open the First Presidency’s vault and we could see some artifacts.” He says “okay.”

So thirteen of us went down and I think most of them are dead. I was about the youngest guy in that session, and I didn’t know the significance of it at the time, but he brought out some handwriting of Joseph Smith, some of his hair, and three seer stones that belonged to Joseph Smith.

One of them was a little white stone, about like that, and it was shaped like a baby’s foot, and for years I thought “what does that mean?” Well you know when you stamp a baby’s foot on a blessing book, or a baby book, it’s kind of narrow at one end and then as it gets up to the toes it gets wider, and that’s what it looked like – a white stone, small, about the size of a baby foot, and shaped like a baby’s foot.

And then there was another stone that looked like milk chocolate. It was the size of a softball, about like that. And it’s like someone had molded mud and had dried mud in a ditch or nearly dried and put it together, and you could still see the finger marks to mold that stone that had become extremely hard. In fact I tried to, you know, test the end of one of the, and it was, I couldn’t even break it, not that I was trying, but it was just solid rock, and it had a handle on it so you could carry it. They had molded the stone and then added a little cup-like saucer handle on it so you could carry the thing around. That was another seer stone of Joseph Smith’s.

And then of course the third one was the one he used for the complete translation of the Book of Mormon, the one we have today – very significant stone – almost black with white streaks in it, bigger than a chicken’s egg, smaller than a turkey egg, about like that. He found it in a well in Clark Chase’s property, which is very close to the Smith family, and of course being curious I got right up to it, and I couldn’t see a thing in it.

But I didn’t know how significant that was. I had just graduated from the University of Utah in history, and I’d seen all three stones, and come to find out that’s almost unheard of. There’s just no one. And so I thought “wow” because I didn’t think that much of it at the time. I thought everybody got to see that.

So when I did my book Insider’s View I tried to get a picture of it. There are no pictures of that stone. Joseph Smith does not mention that he used that stone in the official history of the church. I suggested they may want to take a picture in case the stone disappeared, at least they’d have a picture. That argument went nowhere. But that stone helps you understand early mormonism, and if you don’t understand their mindset, you really don’t understand early mormonism.

Take it for what it’s worth.