(But...but...Mr. Scratch! You don't know anything about l-skinny! DCP won't tell you anything, and the multiple l-skinny postings available for our reading pleasure across the web are... Well, okay. I admit it. We know that the l-skinny people are real bastards. Honesty is always the best policy, after all.) So, it would make sense that the FARMS Review would launch a full-blown nuclear strike against anything which would even remotely try to posit the Three Nephites as a legitimate doctrinal truth. While Lamanites and golden plates are a-okay in the world of Internet Mormonism, things such as the Three Nephites get ridiculed in much the same light as bat babies in the latest issue of the National Inquirer.
Of course, I am speaking of Richard L. Hill's piece on About the Three Nephites. As DCP has admitted elsewhere, virtually all of these reviews are commissioned, so one can just imagine The Good Professor yukking it up, and drooling over the delicious thought of the authors of About the Three Nephites getting the "l-skinny treatment". (Hey, now, Mr. Scartch, er, uh, Scratch... I told you that you didn't know anything about that!) But, the conspiratorial antipathy is quite obvious:
About the Three Nephites broadens the body of Latter-day Saint rumor, folklore, and apocryphal stories. Despite its stated objective in the Preface of "dispelling some of the rumor and myths which circulate from time to time" and "to quash rumor and untruth" (p. vii), this amateurish book carelessly and commercially propagates faith-promoting rumors, myths, and folklore under the guise of religious scholarship.
Gee, couldn't this be a self-description of the FARMS Review? But, it gets better, and even more conspiratorial:
But more disturbing yet, About the Three Nephites appears to be a blatant and disgraceful rip-off of two earlier out-of-print books, The Three Nephites by the prolific and prominent polygamist author Ogden Kraut,2 and The Three Nephites: The Substance and Significance of the Legend in Folklore by professional folklorist Hector Lee.3 About the Three Nephites appears to have copied a substantial part of its chapter 1 from Kraut's work. In addition, this book appears to have copied almost all of its chapter 6 from Lee's work.
However, it does not stop there!
No, it sure doesn't! Indeed, the FARMS snowball rolls on, accumulating all manner of crap in its rolling. No doubt this Hill piece received the same "careful" commissioning, vetting, administrative debating, and publishing that every piece in FARMS Review has received. I must say, I am in awe of the administrative and editorial acumen on display here.