ACT 1
FIRST VISION (1820)
Placement of Ken Verdoia's statement about revivals and religious controversy in the "Burned Over District" implies that was a motivation for Joseph Smith's 1820 vision.
Dan Peterson, Jeffrey Holland, and Marlin Jensen all describe 1838 version of vision with two personages without any qualifying phrase like Joseph Smith "claimed" or "said." It is described ahistorically as fact. Holland says that God and Jesus appeared to Joseph Smith "with all the biblical features, the way Moses said he saw them, with eyes and ears and hands and faces." Moses saw the Father and Son? However, this claim that Moses saw God as a man goes unchallenged.
Marlin Jensen: I've always been struck honestly with the question he posed: "Which of the churches is true?" He thought there was a true church. That would have been the logical thing to think. And so he asked that: "Which of them all is true?," not "Is there a true church?," which, even in that question, I think, tells us something about his sincerity, his honesty. The answer was that none of them were. I mean, that was an earthshaking answer. I'm sure that it came as a very big surprise to him.
Surprise! Not according to the 1832 version, which states that prior to his vision--
... by Searching the Scriptures I found that mankind did not come unto the Lord but that they had apostatised from the true and living faith and there was no society or denomination that built upon the Gospel of Jesus Christ as recorded in the new testament ...
In this 1832 account, the question of which church is true was not even asked. Why would it? Joseph Smith had already concluded the Christian world were in a state of apostasy. So he went directly to God for forgiveness, and obtained it, according to this version. He was even told by the one personage who appeared--Jesus--
I was crucifyed for the world that all those who believe on my name may have Eternal life behold the world lieth in sin at this time and none doeth good no not one ... I come quickly as it [is] written of me in the cloud clothed in the glory of my Father ...
Thus Joseph Smith didn't need organized religion, because he was saved by believing in Jesus. Also, since Jesus appeared, there was nothing in Joseph Smith's theology in 1832 about God the Father being a corporeal being. The "Lectures on Faith" included in the 1835 D&C said the Father was a "spirit"; the concept of God's corporeality came later.
The PBS documentary mentions various versions of the First Vision, but makes it sound as if these later versions were merely embellishments.
Gregory Prince: The first version of [his First] Vision was written in Joseph Smith's own hand in 1832. It was personal, it merely dealt with his sinfulness and he going to the grove to ask God for forgiveness, end of story. Subsequently over the next 12 years, there were other versions that emerged from Joseph Smith where the story got more detailed, more colorful, and one of the later versions became the official version. ...
Contradictions are not mentioned, especially the fact that the 1832 version did not mention the Father (which was consistent with Joseph Smith's theology at that time).
Ken Clark's comments on the 1832 account, which undoubtedly mentioned the contradictions, are deleted, and begin abruptly:
... finally in 1838 we have God the Father and the Son visiting him telling him to join none of the churches. And it begs the question: was Joseph Smith building a story as he went, because the story certainly evolved and the story took on more miraculous and remarkable characteristics; and he certainly became a greater character with greater status in God's eyes in each of these stories with a greater work to do in each of these stories.
I suspect Whitney edited out the specifics of the evolution to avoid having to have a response from believers. Such as Terryl Givens's response in the transcript of his interview:
... The story of the First Vision has been told many different ways. Even Joseph himself told many different versions of it. I don't find that surprising when one sees the story of Christ in the New Testament is narrated in very, very different ways by his own followers.
[url][url=http://www.pbs.org/Mormons/interviews/givens.html]http://www.pbs.org/Mormons/interviews/givens.html[/url]
With the suppression of the details of the "different versions," non-Mormons will conclude that the differences are not serious and on a par with differences between the Gospels, which they are not. Not only is this comparison highly questionable, it's irrelevant. It is typical apologetic designed to exploit the beliefs of potential critics--namely the Evangelicals--on the defensive. In effect, Givens is saying: "If you believe the Bible, and the Bible has contradictions, then you can't criticize Joseph Smith and early Mormons for telling the First Vision story in different ways." This is an ad hominem, or tu quoque ("you too") fallacy.
Richard Mouw, Evangelical theologian, comes on and says that he doesn't believe the content of the vision, but instinctively believes Joseph Smith was telling the truth. He doesn't think Joseph Smith invented the story to manipulate people and get power over them. "And so I live with the mystery," he says. Well, it's no mystery to those acquainted with Mouw's recent public apology for misrepresenting Mormon beliefs "without making a sincere effort first of all to ask [Mormons] what [they] believe." I guess living with the mystery is preferable to calling Joseph Smith a liar or something worse. If Mouw doesn?t believe Joseph Smith lied, perhaps the mystery lies in his inability to decide if Joseph Smith was deluded or demonically driven.
TREASURE SEEKING
Ken Clark gives a good description of the process of seeing (or scrying) with a stone, except that it lacked the theory of how it was supposed to work. Rather than images appearing in the stone like a crystal ball, images appeared on the surface, which for the adept was luminous in the darkness of the hat. A black top hat was shown brim down, and never with Joseph Smith's face in it. One clip even contradicted this by showing Joseph Smith reading from the plates that were partially covered by a cloth so that the scribe (Oliver Cowdery?) could not see them, although he was seated at the opposite end of the table from Joseph Smith.
Simon Worrall, who has written on the Mark Hofmann forgery murders, introduces the subject of Joseph Smith's 1826 court hearing in South Bainbridge, NY. Then Ken Clark mentions those who swore under oath that Joseph Smith had the ability to see treasure slipping away under the ground or where they were buried. I'm not sure the average viewer will understand the folk magic belief that some treasures were enchanted or guarded by spirits or other beings that could keep the treasures moving away from the diggers. No connection was made to how this carried over to the story about the "angel" and the plates.
ANGEL AND PLATES
As with the First Vision, the story of the angel and plates is told as later sanitized to exclude any allusions to treasure lore. Most of the story of the vision is told by performance poet Alex Caldiero, rather than a historian. No mention is made of the oddity of calling a dead mortal an "angel."
Daniel Peterson mentions both the seer stone and the Urim and Thummin. Peterson says, "it was called the Urim and Thummin." By whom? Not the Nephites, and not the angel. Early Mormon missionaries connected the magic "spectacles" with the Old Testament "divination device" to give the Nephite/Jaredite instrument a biblical rather than magical context.
The stone shown with the black top hat (Joseph Smith was said to have had an old white top hat) appears to be the green seer stone allegedly given to Joseph Smith in Pennsylvania by Jack Belcher, which is now in Princeton University's Collection of Western Americana. The one Joseph Smith used most of the time was a brown-colored stone about the size of a hen's egg now in possession of the LDS church, access to which is extremely restricted. Peterson finally gives a more detailed description of the mechanics of using the stone:
It seems to be a stone that was found in the vicinity, and I can't say exactly how it would have worked. It may have been a kind of a concentrating device or a device to facilitate concentration. He would put the stone for most of the concentration period in the bottom of a hat, presumably to exclude surrounding light. Then he would put his face into the hat. It's kind of a strange image for us today ...
Poet Alex Caldiero comes on and says he hears the voice of Joseph Smith in the Book of Mormon, but it's a mixture of human and divine. Then foremost Mesoamerican archaeologist Michael Coe expresses disbelief in the book's historicity, as he has done for decades.
I really think that Joseph Smith, like shamans everywhere, started out faking it. I have to believe this -- that he didn't believe this at all, that he was out to impress, but he got caught up in the mythology that he created. This is what happens to shamans: They begin to believe they can do these things. It becomes a revelation: They're speaking to God. ... Joseph Smith had a sense of destiny -- and most fakers don't have this -- and this is how he transformed something that, I think, was clearly made up into something that was absolutely convincing, convincing to him and to a lot of people, and he never could have convinced a lot of people if he hadn't been convinced himself.
I think this analogy is appropriate with Joseph Smith, and I made it in the introduction to Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet. While many former Mormons believe Joseph Smith was a fake from beginning to end, I happen to think he was much more complex.
Terryl Givens mentions the embarrassment of some Mormon intellectuals over Book of Mormon historicity, but dismisses the notion that the faith could survive without it. He declares that the book is "inseparable from the heart and soul of Mormonism, that one could no sooner divorce the historical claims of the Book of Mormon from the church than one could divorce the story of Christ's resurrection from Christianity and survive with the religion intact." Maybe Mormonism would become a religion with a different story and less apologetic force.
The narrator states that the story of the gold plates and First Vision are foundation events, that it is no middle ground for Mormon leaders. But that was once said about polygamy. However, the First Vision was not foundational. In 1832, the vision was only a personal event dealing with forgiveness of sins. Only later did the vision take on prophetic aspects. Early Mormons pointed to the angel and plates as the foundational event, not the First Vision. President Hinkley overstates the significance of the vision:
Our whole faith rests on the validity of that vision; it either occurred or it did not occur. If it did not then this work is a fraud. If it did, then it is the most important and work under the heavens.
But since it was a personal revelation that did not inaugurate the restoration, then this is a false dichotomy that Mormons may one day find too confining. In the same vein, Givens argues:
There's no question that the church rises or falls on the veracity of Joseph Smith's story. ... history as theology is perilous. If it turns out that the whole story of Christ's resurrection is a fabrication, then Christianity collapses. That's the price we pay for believing in a God who intervenes in human history, who has real interactions with real human beings in real space and time. That makes it historical, and that's a reality that we just can't flee away from.
I think Givens underestimates the resiliency of faith and its ability to adapt to changing times. However, believing that the Nephites were real people isn't necessary to believe God intervenes in human history, even for Mormons. Faith is required whether one believes God intervened in the form of an angel and gold plates or a direct revelation to Joseph Smith. Mormons find it difficult to give up what they think is compelling evidence for their faith.
Harold Bloom comes on to say that he thinks anyone who believes in the supernatural shouldn't criticize Mormons for believing in their miracles. He says, "It makes little sense to present arguments against Joseph Smith and early Mormonism that would extend equally well to what we are told about the origins of" any revealed religion, such as Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. There's that argument from personal circumstances again. The problem with this thinking is that arguments against Mormon scripture don't "extend equally well" to other faiths for the simple reason that the Book of Mormon's historicity can be tested, whereas we are not in a position to test the foundational claims of these other religions. By the same token, Joseph Smith's claims to revelation can't be tested anymore than Moses' encounter with God, or Mohammad's encounters with the angel Gabriel, or the apostles' encounter with the resurrected Jesus. Bloom doesn't seem to grasp how Mormonism presents a different situation. While the revealed or inspired status of the Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham can't be tested directly, the historicity of these books can be tested. The historicity of the Bible isn't connected to its religious claims in the same way that it is for the Book of Mormon. So, if scholars conclude that they are not historical documents, then certain claims about angels and plates become suspect. Thus, when Bloom concludes--"If you wish to be a hard rock empiricist, then you should not entertain any religious doctrine whatsoever"--he greatly mischaracterizes the issue. Arguing that Mormon revelations can only be consistently rejected by a "hard rock empiricist" (such as myself) is not only a subtle ad hominem but wrong. Perhaps Bloom could tell us why he chooses this argument to defend a revealed religion that declares all other revealed religions are false?