Huh? Horny Holy Joe Shallow? (link)

[_The Mighty Builder]

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/8655 ... -task.html

Those who reject the claims of Joseph Smith often dismiss him as merely a shallow fraud who lurched from one crisis or opportunity for exploitation to another, improvising as he went. His unbelieving 1945 biographer, Fawn Brodie, set the tone with her depiction of him as (in Hugh Nibley’s summary of her position), a “chuckle-headed, pipe-dreaming, glory-mongering” charlatan.

“Brodie's Joseph picks up ideas like a thieving magpie,” says Nibley, “throws them together haphazardly, and sells them from the pulpit.” But Nibley is surely right to observe that “Brodie’s Joseph is decidedly not the man who produced the Book of Mormon; for the former is wildly imaginative, undisciplined, lazy, and short-sighted, while the Book of Mormon is the work (even if you take it as fiction) of an exceedingly sober, self-controlled, incredibly industrious, and well-organized brain.” (If you disagree, consider — among other things — Grant Hardy’s 2010 Oxford volume “Understanding the Book of Mormon.”)