Kishkumen wrote:My hypothesis for his motivation is that it was less religious than it was mercenary. Joseph Smith was seeking to create a tourist destination for travelers taking trips down the Erie Canal. One of the primary goals of this hoax, which would have been an obvious hoax to this target audience, was to draw the interest of Freemasons. It could be that Smith was originally making a bid to make Palmyra the western center of New York Freemasonry. Unfortunately, however, by the time his plan came to fruition, he had to abandon his original Masonic project and replace it with a church project. The kidnapping of Morgan and the subsequent anti-Masonic hysteria scotched the original plan.
So, the hoax was no longer a hoax with winking approval from Freemasons. Now it was something else entirely. And yet I think something of the original plan survived in the insistence on the hard materiality of the plates themselves. At some point, however, Joseph decided he would not be able to use his fabricated plates in the way he hoped, and so he had to get rid of them. No two bits a gander after all. That would have to wait until Joseph's young church purchased the mummies and papyri. Then people actually were charged two bits a gander to see the artifacts. I see no reason to think that the Book of Mormon wasn't originally intended to be a similar thing.
There is a touch of brilliance here, Reverend, in the suggestion of Mormonism starting out as a tourist venture. I have learned from your posts over the years to think of Mormonism as, among other things, a mechanism by which the Smith family gained respectability and social prestige, at least from their followers. That is a persuasive line of thinking because it fits a general pattern that we can connect to evidence. I find the suggestion here persuasive for the same reason: it fits a pattern that constructed from the evidence (one thinks, for example, of the tourist attraction made out of the mummies in Kirtland). I truly hope this becomes a book someday. I am a bit surprised that more hasn't been made of the Masonic influence (I first heard about it in a multi-episode podcast on Mormon Expression about ten years ago).
One area where I am skeptical is the use of the language of "hoax" and "fraud." You obviously know the source material far better than I ever will and have thought about these problems more deeply than I have, so I can only apologize for finding this an incomplete and distracting way to think about it. I have no problem charging Joseph Smith with this sort of thing on one level, but on another I feel it is insufficient as a way to understand what's going on. Partly there is the issue raised by MG, though I understand the rationale for seeing that as a secondary development and thus postponing it; but also I think it isolates into categories features of a kind of thinking that can't really be broken into categories, or perhaps shouldn't be if we want to understand our subject's thinking as much as possible. When I think of fraud and hoax, I think of someone who both knows while concealing the truth and at the same time does not believe what they say and does all this for purely utilitarian reasons, whereas Joseph Smith always strikes me as someone who believes what he is saying and committed to something far bigger than a series of cons. I've always found it hard to doubt his sincerity, though I don't think sincerity is useful gauge for determining whether or not something happened. Ultimately, my hesitation with this kind of language is connected to a hesitation about epistemological assumptions we make about other people, particular people in pre-modern societies or social environments where old and new ways of thinking and knowing are in tension (as the early 19th century frontier was). There is an assumption about knowledge when talking about hoaxes and fraud that relies on an accepted public meaning of the word and a publicly accepted method for acquiring or discovering or constructing (whichever you prefer) that knowledge. Joseph Smith strikes me, like many believers I have known, as someone who had great confidence in a private understanding of knowledge that is not accessible through the means that are publicly accepted.
This is how I think of someone like Hugh Nibley, and I use him as an example of what I mean: the important fact is that he has the truth, and his job is to promote it, so if he slightly misquotes this or that Church father or fragmentary Coptic text in a way that distorts the meaning of the original text, it is immaterial so long as the aim of confirming the truth is achieved. That is why he was a sloppy scholar but a brilliant thinker; a man with Kolob on his mind doesn't care about a petty ant game like footnote accuracy. A lot of the deceptive actions of the Church make sense to me in these terms (the ethics are another issue for another discussion): Joseph Fielding Smith knew that he was a prophet of God or whatever, so while there might have been this or that detail that made Joseph Smith look bad according to the publicly accepted understanding of acquiring and processing knowledge, such an understanding resides at an inferior level of understanding to the private knowledge that a small group of elect Mormons possess, and it is therefore justified to hide the Niebaur account (which was given to him by Hugh Nibley). Knowing the truth is secondary to having it.
That is how I have always seen Joseph Smith: he knows and believes all kind of lore connecting the indigenous people to ancient Israel, but what distinguishes him is that he believes himself to have access to another layer of knowledge through a private source, and some people around him also believed that, not only about him but about themselves; as an intra-group epistemology, it was knowledge acquired in private way (just as subgroups and subcultures will have their own private language with private meaning sometimes at variance with public meanings and thus unintelligible to outsiders). Now, if that private source tells him that this pile of stones in Missouri is the altar of Adam, why should he think otherwise no matter how absurd it is? If he is convinced that there are gold plates with records about Nephites—if he knows through this private form of knowing that it is true—then there is nothing wrong with forging a secondary imitation of the unfound plates for the purposes of promulgating the truth that he alone possesses. Such forged object would have a function of confirming, not persuading. Now, Physics Guy will rightly come in and ask about the objective fact pattern: no plates, so he makes up some object, hides it under a cloth, and lies to everyone that they are the plates. Isn't that a hoax? I would say no, because that would depend not only on motive but also on mind. Emphasizing that we are interested in how something like Mormonism came into being and not in trying to prove something about Momonism's claims, someone who does this solely to extract money from other people is different from someone who does in service to a grander vision that attracts others. The one is very easy to understand and thus easier to detect; the second is harder, more complex, and harder to explain. Joseph Smith has always been in that second group.
I think is why the magic angle was so helpful, at least for me, in understanding Joseph Smith and early Mormonism, especially the earliest Mormonism. It also explains the very polar reactions to Joseph Smith: the kinds of people who were a part of that subculture, with its group-internal epistemology (that is, an essentially private way of knowing shared only by the members of the group and at odds with the wider public epistemology) were the kind of people who joined up with the new Church (the Whitmers and so on). Those people saw nothing wrong with Joseph Smith, and David Whitmer's lifelong belief in his project, despite breaking with the Church, is best explained by understanding him as someone who shared an epistemological outlook similar to Joseph Smith's. The trouble is that the wider culture of the 19th century had long moved towards an objective or empiricist epistemological mode as the only valid means of knowing; from that perspective, Joseph Smith is an obvious fraudster engaged in a gigantic hoax, and the reactions from this angle are predictable in their contemptuous dismissal. I think that is right on one level, but for me I need the evidence that Joseph Smith was knowingly engaged in hoax, not inferences based on circumstantial evidence or witness testimony, which is as useless to me as the Whitmers as far as that goes. Absent that, an overly empiricist understanding of Joseph Smith, which is what a hoax/fraud model implies, answers this by saying, basically, that he was just an extremely effective an imposter as evidenced by the fact that he left no evidence of his being a knowing imposter. That is basically circular. I think he really believed his own story.
I have long thought and said many times that Mormonism is premodern in its theological claims and in much else, and I suspect you and others here would agree. I also think it is premodern in its epistemology in some sense. The materiality of the plates was not to establish the hard reality of his claims, in the sense that they were meant as instruments of persuasion: they did not convince the Whitmers but confirmed, just like a crying testimony or stories about three Nephites or lost keys confirm what believers already think but are pretty meaningless and bizarre to outsiders. There is a lot more that could be argued and discussed about that distinction, but suffice it to say that Joseph Smith had expectations of what these objects would do that were rooted in the essentially private epistemology of frontier people who believed in spirits and magic. His met frustration when he presented them to a wider culture that used objects as epistemological devices in a totally different way.
I say Joseph Smith's was premodern because I think this tourist scheme using objects was supposed to work as it did for people who found Lichas's discovery of Orestes's bones believable. Any bones that fit the the expectation would do. The same sort of thinking underlies the
omphalos at Delphi, the Black Stone in the Kaabah at Mecca, the Stone of Scone, or any number of medieval reliquaries. We thus complete our circumambulation of your magnificent thesis here and invoke again the notion of pattern-fitting, I think this notion that Joseph Smith originally saw the tourism opportunity here to be a brilliant insight, but I see this less as a deliberate hoax and more the product of the kind of thinking that has long been feature of religious shrines, from Delphi to Mecca to Temple Square. The tourism gambit failed, but the epistemological assumptions that that set the project in motion in the first placed continued to direct Joseph into something more recognizable as religion.
"As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them."
—B. Redd McConkie