Joseph and Authorship

[Anonymous]

Fwiw, I have NO problem with Muhammed being a prophet.

[Anonymous]

Euhemerus wrote:

Here are some additional questions that arise for me:

1. What about Muhammed? Do you feel a need to account for the origin of the Quran? It is not obvious to me that the origins of that book are significantly different than the BoM or D&C (especially if one takes the “channeled” approach as has been described here). I see little reason to believe in the divinity of the BoM and not the Quran. Having said that, I think the Quran contains a lot of “inspired” things. I just finished reading a biography of Muhammed and I was blown away at the similarities to Joseph and the early church.

…if ever there was a case for a prophet, he makes a very strong on. But then again, so does Muhammed.

I read an article somewhere comparing the claimed transcendent experiences of the Apostle Paul, Muhammad, and Joseph Smith. The author who researched these cases believed Muhammad had genuine supernatural experiences in part because of “numerology” in the Quran that was supposedly unlikely to occur by chance and hard to fake. He came to the conclusion that Muhammad’s experience probably involved a demon of some sort and that Joseph Smith was probably just a “pious” fraud in his opinion but he believed Paul’s experience was authentically inspired by God.

In fact, I have seen many traditional Christians make similar claims about Joseph Smith and Muhammad that they had to be liars, crazy, and/or demon-possessed but maybe this just shows their bias in terms of what they want to believe. Personally, I don’t know what to think about Muhammad but we have seen people make all kinds of crazy claims throughout history. If many people believe in something that turns out to be nonsense mostly based on what other people have told them it wouldn’t be the first time and probably won’t be the last.

[Anonymous]

The biggest problems with the Rigdon-Spaulding theory are very hard to work around, in particular:

1. Sidney Rigdon would have had to secretly write the BoM based on the Spaulding work, not let anyone know, and somehow sneak it several hundred miles to New York, and then give it to Joseph and Oliver without anyone knowing. There’s no evidence that Rigdon (living and preaching in Ohio) knew Joseph and Oliver before missionaries showed up in his congregation.

2. All three of them would have had to stage a fake conversion for Sidney some time later, pretending they never knew each other.

3. Sidney Rigdon had to resist EVER acknowledging having had a hand in making the Book of Mormon — through all the controverial periods in the Church when he gained and lost status in the organization, always be willing to prop up Joseph as his “puppet,” and never try to take credit after Joseph’s death when he formed his own short-lived offshoot during the succession crisis.

The time line doesn’t work, and it would require an amazingly cool and calculating Sidney Rigdon that stretches belief in normal human nature.

[Anonymous]

This is absolutely NOT church doctrine, but many historians believe that Joseph Smith suffered from a type of epilepsy that later leads to Geshwind’s syndrome, a post-seizure condition that causes the brain to be exceptionally sensitive to spirituality and is manifested by prolific spiritual writing.

As a person with epilepsy, I have had to except that their are periods of my life where I just have to live half way between the living world and the spirit world. If a seizure lasts more than 4 1/2 minutes, I can almost feel myself passing across into a different realm. When I return to earth, there is a great need to write about my experiences. My brain possesses a certain clarity that it normally does not. They problem with Geshwind syndrome is that if epilepsy is not treated and controlled, it will surely lead to permanent brain damage and insanity later in life. Thank God for anti-epileptic drugs, none of which JS had access to when he was alive.

JS is now formally listed amongst others who had this, “gift”. Take a look at the list, it includes Saul of Taurus (Apostle Paul), the Prophet Ezequiel and many more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_epilepsy

Here is a brief description of Geshwind’s Syndrome (also known as “Midnight Disease”) taken from Wikipedia

Geschwind syndrome, also known as Waxman-Geschwind syndrome or “Gastaut-Geschwind” is a characteristic personality syndrome consisting of symptoms such as circumstantiality (excessive verbal output), hypergraphia, altered sexuality (usually hyposexuality, meaning a decreased interest), and intensified mental life (deepened cognitive and emotional responses), hyper-religiosity and/or hyper-morality or moral ideas, that is present in some epilepsy patients. This syndrome is particularly associated with usually left-side temporal lobe epilepsy. For identification, the term “Geschwind syndrome” has been suggested as a name for this group of behavioral phenomena.

I have collected some writings about the possibility of JS having severe Grand-mal seizures later in life. I think he hid it because people associated seizing satanic possession in those days.

[Anonymous]

I might be tempted to buy into the epilepsy theory if JS were the only person experiencing spiritual manifestations at the time.

What about, for instance, Oliver Cowdrey…? He was with JS standing in the presence of resurrected beings.

I don’t think you can have seizure-by-association

I could be wrong, of course…

[Anonymous]

Brian Johnston wrote:

The biggest problems with the Rigdon-Spaulding theory are very hard to work around

…The time line doesn’t work, and it would require an amazingly cool and calculating Sidney Rigdon that stretches belief in normal human nature.

That’s why I like the Spalding-Rigdon authorship conspiracy theory so much, because it doesn’t really make that much sense but some people still believe in it anyway. It’s a persistent rumor that just won’t go away. Just when I think I’ve read everything there is to know about this theory something else turns up like the Stanford wordprint study.

The involvement of the official witnesses, Emma, etc. complicates almost any Book of Mormon authorship theory other than that everything happened almost exactly the way they said it did. Like Bruce pointed out, if Joseph Smith simply had temporal lobe epilepsy then how did he get Oliver Cowdery to share/support some of his most important experiences and claims?

All it would have taken is for one of these key witnesses to go to the newspapers and deny their testimony to really expose Joseph Smith as an impostor once and for all. Many of them had every reason to do this at different stages in their life and yet none of them did. Meanwhile other ex-Mormons such as Ezra Booth did publicly oppose Mormonism but as it turns out none of them were listed as direct witnesses of the gold plates or Book of Mormon translation process.

[Anonymous]

I did a couple posts on the Spaulding Theory, the Spalding Manuscript, and the Stanford Wordprint study, if anyone is interested. They’re on my blog as well as Mormon Matters. Some of these are cross posted at both Mormon Matters and Mormon Heretic. My site has more details than MM, and I even had the 2 biggest Spalding Theory proponents, Craig Criddle and Dale Broadhurst stop by my blog, though MM generally had more overall comments.

Spalding Theory (also spelled Spaulding)

http://mormonmatters.org/2009/05/04/debunking-the-spaulding-theory/

Part 1 (of 3) on the Spalding Manuscript (note Dale Broadhurst commented like crazy, and made some amazing concessions)

http://www.mormonheretic.org/2009/10/11/introduction-to-spaldings-manuscript-found-part-1/

Stanford Wordprint Study

http://mormonmatters.org/2010/03/06/dueling-wordprint-studies/

I think my thoughts are most similar to Ray’s #2 comment, and I also believe that Muhammed was probably a prophet.

[Anonymous]

I don’t know about other people, but I think Joseph Smith’s “illiteracy” has been exaggerated. He could read the Bible well enough, which is more than many people could do at the time. To present him as a completely illiterate oaf may actually be counter-productive.

I am currently fascinated by 2 Nephi, because a lot of its concepts are startlingly original, and if they’re not, I couldn’t imagine them coming from any book he could have got hold of at the time. What I do find puzzling though, is why so many references are made to Egyptian, and abridgements. The other thing I find difficult are some of the repeated names, e.g. Nephi refers to two separate people. While some of it obviously ties in with the Bible, not all of it does, and although I find it very hard going to read and stylistically heavy (especially some of the historical stuff), now and then it does amaze me.

I admit I’ve had big problems with the archaeological side of the BOM, but then again, I’ve long felt that there was more travel across the Atlantic, and maybe even Pacific, than people traditionally realise. At least two of these migrations appear to be fairly well supported by mainstream archaeology now, the Norse settlements in north east America, and the Clovis culture. I doubt these were regular round trips, but there are bits and pieces that suggest that not everyone reached the Americas through Alaska and Siberia.

The FARMS stuff (from what little I’ve read of it) is interesting, but occasionally it does overstretch a bit in my view. If the Nephite culture existed, I’m not sure why it had to be related to the Mayans specifically.

[Anonymous]

I am sorry. I still can’t figure out how to copy and past a comment from someone else so I can respond to it.

One postee wrote that none of the witnesses to plates ever renounced their testimony of their experience, but I am not sure that is true. BY is quoted in the Journal of Discourses as saying something to the effect that “some of those who touched the plates and saw the angel later renounced their belief.” It isn’t clear, of course, what he meant by this exactly. Their faith in the church or in the vision/experience they had, so hard to say. Others have pointed out that the three main witnesses were not exactly reliable men. Martin Harris changed his religious affiliation at least thirteen times in his life. He went on a mission to England for the Strangites, followers of a man who claimed also to have an ancient record that the translated with use of the UandT. He even joined the Shakers at one point after breaking with the church. Whitmer never came back to the church and never renounced his testimony of the BofM but he was kind of kooky too. Cowdery, well, who knows. Close as he was to Joseph, major scribe of the book, falls out with the “prophet,” becomes a Methodist. Yes, he later rejoined but hardly a compelling witness.

[Anonymous]

SamBee,

Regarding illiteracy, I don’t think anyone is claiming Joseph was illiterate. He only had a 2nd or 4rd grade formal education, but he was very well read. In the King Follet sermon, he refers to reading the German Bible, and took how Hebrew classes with the School of the Prophets, so he was no dummy, but he didn’t have much formal education.

A little know fact is that Brigham Young had even less formal education than Joseph. Brigham fought against the idea of public schools because he didn’t see the value of them–funny that a 3 universities bear his name…. Some people believe his introduction of the Deseret Alphabet was one of the worst educational experiences ever, because it harmed immigrants ability to learn English.

As for archaeology, that’s a favorite topic of mine. I haven’t seen any BoM geographers propose an Atlantic crossing (though there may be some.) Everything I’ve seen is a Pacific crossing. John Sorenson has well documented many Pacific crossings in his book, and the Chinese may have crossed the Pacific to trade. Sorenson believes the dates of the Maya most closely match the BoM time period (800 BC-400 AD I believe). There are some Tree of Life motifs that seem a bit similar to Lehi’s vision, but the language similarities aren’t there. I’ve heard Uto-Aztecan may have some similarities with Hebrew but I’m not sure how strong they are. As I understand it, the Aztecs are from the Southwestern US rather than Central America, and I’m not sure how well the Aztecs fit the BoM timeline.

There has been some good BoM Old World archeological work. George Potter seems to have documented an ancient frankincense trade route in Saudi Arabia that Lehi probably followed, and believes he has found the River Laman along the trail. His website is http://nephiproject.com I also did a post on Nahom, which looks very promising. See http://www.mormonheretic.org/2009/01/28/nahom-archeaological-evidence-of-book-of-mormon/

Potter and another researcher (Ashton I believe) have found 2 very promising sites for Nephi’s Harbor. Potter’s site is a well-known shipping harbor dating to the time of Nephi, and has iron ore easily found for making the tools Nephi records. The site is called Khor Rhori in Yemen. The Ashtons have another site nearby in Yemen that has a cliff overlooking the sea where Laman and Lemuel threatened to throw Nephi off. Recently iron ore was found there as well. I can’t recall the name of Ashton’s harbor site.

[Anonymous]

Curt, to quote somebody, just select the text you wan to copy and press CTRL-C. Then press CTRL-V to paste. When you’re typing a comment, look for the Quote button, and it will add the tags to highlight the quote.

I’d like to see that quote in Journal of Discourses where Brigham Young said some “renounced their belief”. I have a feeling Brigham didn’t use those exact words. I know Grant Palmer says some of the men weren’t reliable witnesses, and I think there is some validity to that, I don’t think any of them every denied the Book of Mormon. Yes some witnesses left the church, such as Oliver Cowdery and the Whitmers, and perhaps they “renounced their belief” in the organized church. David Whitmer liked the lack of hierarchical structure of the priesthood in the early days of the church (pre-1834) and expressed some dismay when the priesthood became more hierarchical in 1834 and beyond, and many had a problem with Joseph’s leadership following the Kirtland Bank Failure in 1838 and resigned church membership or were excommunicated. But Whitmer never denied his role as a witness of the plates. I suspect this Journal of Discourses may be conflating some issues here, or there may be some important info missing from the quote. The church and the testimony of the Book of Mormon may be 2 different things in the eyes of some of these early church members.

[Anonymous]

Quote:

As for archaeology, that’s a favorite topic of mine. I haven’t seen any BoM geographers propose an Atlantic crossing (though there may be some.) Everything I’ve seen is a Pacific crossing. John Sorenson has well documented many Pacific crossings in his book, and the Chinese may have crossed the Pacific to trade. Sorenson believes the dates of the Maya most closely match the BoM time period (800 BC-400 AD I believe). There are some Tree of Life motifs that seem a bit similar to Lehi’s vision, but the language similarities aren’t there. I’ve heard Uto-Aztecan may have some similarities with Hebrew but I’m not sure how strong they are.

At the risk of veering completely off topic (if I haven’t already). I think it did happen, although the Atlantic route was more used than the Pacific because of practicalities. I don’t think it was regularly crossed, as some have claimed, but I think some boats may have made it.

I heard somewhere of a story of a possible Mayan boat which had reached Iberia (the Mayans apparently used to sail around the Caribbean trading), and a few years back there was the story that a head off a small Roman statuette had been found inside a Mesoamerican ruin, in a location that it would have been difficult to plant it.

Columbus definitely wasn’t the first. Some folk think he wasn’t even the first Spaniard. The Basques claim that they were fishing and whaling in the Newfoundland banks before he reached Hispaniola. He’s probably the most significant voyager though, because he led to a mass colonisation by Europeans.

Quote:

As I understand it, the Aztecs are from the Southwestern US rather than Central America, and I’m not sure how well the Aztecs fit the BoM timeline.

Mostly in Mexico – Mexico City was founded by them and is an Aztec name. I think some related tribes can be found in the south west states. A very bloodthirsty people!

Quote:

There has been some good BoM Old World archeological work. George Potter seems to have documented an ancient frankincense trade route in Saudi Arabia that Lehi probably followed, and believes he has found the River Laman along the trail. His website is http://nephiproject.com I also did a post on Nahom, which looks very promising. See http://www.mormonheretic.org/2009/01/28 … of-mormon/

There’s somebody claiming that they’re found an altar of Nahum isn’t that right? I heard about this in the last few weeks, and it’s actually one of the more impressive pieces of evidence for the BOM IMHO.

The one question for me is where would the river be? I think there is one thing that we probably should bear in mind here. Desertification and climate change. At some points in history, North Africa and the Middle East have been milder and had higher rainfall. Intensive grazing in recent years has made the situation worse.

Either that or it was a wadi (temporary watercourse) rather than a year-round river.

Quote:

A little know fact is that Brigham Young had even less formal education than Joseph. Brigham fought against the idea of public schools because he didn’t see the value of them–funny that a 3 universities bear his name…. Some people believe his introduction of the Deseret Alphabet was one of the worst educational experiences ever, because it harmed immigrants ability to learn English.

English spelling is horrible, and I can understand why he did this. Unfortunately it also holds the language together. Otherwise it would split into several. It actually anticipated George Bernard Shaw’s ideas –

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet

The book I was reading on Brigham Young recently (pretty anti, but not completely) mentions that he retained certain Yankee-isms into his old age, particular features of dialect etc. I wouldn’t hold that against him at all. My own accent and speech are a bit “country”, and I think it adds color.

[Anonymous]

curt wrote:

One postee wrote that none of the witnesses to plates ever renounced their testimony of their experience, but I am not sure that is true.

Maybe you’re referring to the following comment that I made:

Quote:

All it would have taken is for one of these key witnesses to go to the newspapers and deny their testimony to really expose Joseph Smith as an impostor once and for all. Many of them had every reason to do this at different stages in their life and yet none of them did.

I wasn’t trying to claim that this really proves anything by itself. Sure Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris were all excommunicated and had their disagreements with Joseph Smith but as far as I’m concerned that just makes it even more unusual that they didn’t just come right out and publicly deny that they ever saw an angel or the gold plates if they didn’t really believe this. The closest thing to any denial that I know about are some reports that some of them later said this was more of a vision seen with “spiritual eyes” rather than a physical experience.

My main point was that the involvement of these other witnesses of the plates makes it harder to try to claim that Joseph Smith was simply delusional, misinterpreting some experiences like temporal lobe epilepsy, or writing inspired fiction through automatic writing or some other form of channeling, etc. The fact that so many witnesses mentioned seeing and/or touching the plates and consistently stood by this testimony makes me think that the most likely naturalistic explanation for the Book of Mormon would have to be some level of conscious fraud and probably a full-blown conspiracy involving at least Oliver Cowdery as well.

Maybe Joseph Smith really believed that the Native Americans were descended from Israelites and that they should have had their own prophets but that the details of telling this story were secondary. Maybe he really thought he was inspired and called by God to restore the true Christian church but that making up a few stories about angels and buried plates was justified if it would help him build up his vision of the kingdom of God. The idea behind this alleged motive is that some people think that telling “pious” lies is not that bad if they produce desirable results in the end and they will do whatever it takes to convince people to agree with them.

There are many apocryphal religious books that look like people simply came along and wrote their own ideas but claimed that it was actually Moses, Enoch, some Apostle, etc. that wrote it. It’s almost like they thought this is what these men should have said if they had time and I guess they thought it would sound better if people believed it was some ancient prophet saying it instead of them. So maybe Joseph Smith did the same kind of thing in part because he thought it would help him improve on the existing religions of the time.

[Anonymous]

Here is the quote I am responding to:

Quote:

“I’d like to see that quote in Journal of Discourses where Brigham Young said some “renounced their belief”. I have a feeling Brigham didn’t use those exact words. I know Grant Palmer says some of the men weren’t reliable witnesses, and I think there is some validity to that, I don’t think any of them every denied the Book of Mormon. Yes some witnesses left the church, such as Oliver Cowdery and the Whitmers, and perhaps they “renounced their belief” in the organized church. David Whitmer liked the lack of hierarchical structure of the priesthood in the early days of the church (pre-1834) and expressed some dismay when the priesthood became more hierarchical in 1834 and beyond, and many had a problem with Joseph’s leadership following the Kirtland Bank Failure in 1838 and resigned church membership or were excommunicated. But Whitmer never denied his role as a witness of the plates. I suspect this Journal of Discourses may be conflating some issues here, or there may be some important info missing from the quote. The church and the testimony of the Book of Mormon may be 2 different things in the eyes of some of these early church members.”

My response:

The quote from BY is “some of the witnesses of the Book of Mormon, who handled the plates and conversed with the angels of God, were afterwards left to doubt and to disbelieve that they had ever seen an angel” (JD, Vol 7, p. 164).

Two of the witnesses did claim that they saw the plates and the angel with their “spiritual eye.” This caused several high-ranking members of the church to leave in 1838. Certainly, it leads less credence to their claim. There is also this problem: The way JS tells the story of the Three Witnesses, the four of them were praying for a revelation but it wasn’t working. Harris then departed from the group claiming it was his fault. After Harris left, the angel appeared to Smith, Cowdery, and Whitmer. Then, Smith went to where Harris was praying and shortly thereafter they both had the same visitation by the angel. This would have us believe that the two visions happened on the same day. However, Harris said on another occasion that he did not see the plates until several days later.

The witnesses were certainly of questionable mental stability. Or, if that seems to strong a charge, then at least gullibility (although Cowdery might be a co-conspirator but that is not my claim). As mentioned in an earlier post, Harris changed his religious affiliation numerous times and went on a mission to England for the Strangites, followers of Josiah Strang, who also claimed to have translated ancient documents using the Urim and Thummim. This AFTER his association with JS and the BofM. Not exactly the kind of guy I would want to cite as proof that the BofM is true. Much is true of the other two witnesses (of the main three). I don’t have time to get into that right now.

As to why the three did not renounce their testimony, this is not surprising. Having claimed as much, in writing no less, to deny that testimony, which, t cannot be denied, did give them a degree of notoriety, would be akin to admitting to being a liar and a cheat. Plenty of men have gone to their graves without admitting to falsehoods they have created.

[Anonymous]

Curt, might not Harris’ continued search for another religion he could accept fully, inlcuding one similar to Joseph’s group, give a degree of credence to the idea that he really did believe he had experienced the mystical and divine and wanted to do so again – that his dissatisfaction was with Joseph rather than the experiences he continued to say he had?

Iow, there is nothing to indicate Martin Harris ever came to disbelieve he had had an amazing spiritual experience – and the fact that he appears to have kept searching for more denominations where he might have others doesn’t seem to be a weakness, at least not for me. I can see how you might see it that way, but it’s just as easy to see the opposite in it.

Fwiw, in all discussions I have a hard time accepting as the strongest argument the one that relies on a reason why there is not direct evidence to support it. I don’t mean that to be insluting in any way, Curt. Truly, I don’t. It’s just that without any direct statements by Harris and/or the others denying their belief that they had wonderful spiritual experiences concerning the Book of Mormon, all that is left is supposition as to why they didn’t deny those experiences and the book itself. When we start down that road, almost any possible explanation is as stong as any other – since there is no objective evidence in play.

Again, I’m not saying this proves anything one way or another. Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not trying to prove anything in my comments in this thread. I’m simply sharing why I personally don’t give much weight to the idea that everyone who once claimed to have seen the plates and who accepted them as real didn’t deny it later simply because they were unstable and ashamed of their former claims. Plenty of people left the Church and piled on Joseph for lots of other things; I think it’s striking that nobody in that category piled on him over Book of Mormon authorship.

[Author]

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