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To quote Tertullian:

"And the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd. And he was buried and rose again; the fact is certain because it is impossible."

C.S. Lewis made a similar argument in his "trichotomy." Christ's claim to be God's only begotten son is true BECAUSE it is preposterous. The only other options are that he was a lunatic (which Lewis dismisses because Christ said things that make sense) or a liar (which Lewis rules out because Christ encouraged people to be good).

I have heard the latter statement applied by mopologists to Joseph Smith. He can’t be a liar because he encouraged people to tell the truth, as though liars and lunatics are magically prevented from encouraging people to be virtuous like vampires can't go into the sunlight.

What Turtullian, Lewis, and mopologists forget is that there is the longstanding tradition of the pious fraud. From the many peudopigraphical books of Bible the Joseph Smith's brazen fraud concerning the Book of Breathings, many "pious" people justify lying about spiritual experiences in order to convey what they believe to be their important spiritual insights.

Panopticon wrote:
What Turtullian, Lewis, and mopologists forget is that there is the longstanding tradition of the pious fraud. From the many peudopigraphical books of Bible the Joseph Smith's brazen fraud concerning the Book of Breathings, many "pious" people justify lying about spiritual experiences in order to convey what they believe to be their important spiritual insights.

I spent the weekend looking at Ritner's book "The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri" along with Marquardt's book on the KEP "The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papers". It is easy for me to to look at him as a religious fraud when I read about most of his revelations, predictions and prophetic announcements. He liked to perform, he enjoyed the attention that would result from a public proclamation of a divine event, he went out of his way to make up ridiculous stories on the spur of the moment to impress the crowd, such as Zelph, Adam-Ondi -Ahman, Kinderhook, the Greek Psalter and so on. But when you look at the time and effort that went into the Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham, and how interconnected they are to what went on around him at that time, pious fraud just seems too simplistic. Why would he spend all that effort on the Book of Abraham if he thought he was just making it up. Why not just create it like he did the Book of Moses? I am convinced there are times when he truly believed what he was doing was inspired.

By the way it looks like after spending months on the KEP and just getting a few verses out of that effort, making it up of the fly is what he turned to to finish the Book of Abraham.

George Miller (just found out who the real George Miller was, the namesake of this guy's avatar, and it's a pretty cool one) said in his Mormon Expression podcast that a lot of themes from the Book of Abraham and even the Book of Mormon appear to have been taken from Masonic pseudohistorical texts. I think Joseph Smith believed that these Masonic pseudohistories of the ancients were true, and that by including the material in the scriptures he was producing, he was passing on ancient wisdom, but with his name attached to it.

So yes he was a fraud in that he was saying that he got stuff from sources (the Egyptian papyri for instance) that he didn't really get it from, and he wasn't really translating as he said he was, but he did think he was passing along historical truths. It was a pious fraud in a very real sense.