harmony wrote:...
They bore testimony of the truth of what they saw, yes
...
If future Book of Mormon word-print analysis supports the 2008 findings of the team
of researchers at Stanford University, we may have to exclude Cowdery
from the list of dupes and move him over to the list of conspirators.
Perhaps there remains some ill-defined middle-ground, wherein Cowdery
was both a perpetrator of religious fraud and a dupe who believed other
parts of the fraud to be true.
I'm having a difficult time envisioning just what parts of the Book of Mormon compilation
Cowdery might have believed to have been "truly Nephite" and what parts
he knowingly wrote and added to the text himself.
If that is what truly happened, I would like to know whether Cowdery fully
believed in LDS dispensationalism -- wherein each of the first six "gospel eras"
was essentially the same as the seventh and final dispensation. If that was
Cowdery's conviction, he might have "worked out in his mind" the actions
and words of long-dead Nephites, based upon some combination of his
utilization of a divining rod and mental deduction.
Sounds like something only a half-crazed fanatic would have believed.
Lee Yost's early recollection of Oliver Cowdery is further detailed in his May 18, 1897 letter to Diedrich Willers, (EMD 5 287-291) where he says: "Oliver Cowdery taught School in our district before Joe Smith said he found the golden plates [Sept, 1827?]... it was the winter school... Cowdery was in the habit of staying in the school house late nights writing about something, no one knew what." -- See David Whitmer's interview in the Chicago Daily Tribune of Dec. 17, 1885 where it is stated: "The father [Peter Whitmer, Sr.] was a strict Presbyterian, and brought his children up with rigid sectarian discipline. Besides a daughter, who married Oliver Cowdery, the village schoolmaster, there were four sons -- Jacob, John, David and Christian..." -- In an article published in the Kansas City Journal of June 5, 1881, David Whitmer reported an early familiarity with Oliver Cowdery: "I first heard of what is now termed Mormonism in the year 1828. I made a business trip to Palmyra, New York, and while there stopped with one Oliver Cowdery.... Cowdery and I, as well as others, talked about the matter."
The implication provided in these two interview reports, is that David and his sister knew Oliver Cowdery at an early date, because he had been a "schoolmaster" in their "village," (or perhaps in some other nearby village in the Waterloo-Fayette area). The publication of an unclaimed letters notification, in the Lyons Advertiser of Oct. 17, 1827, in which a letter for "Oliver Cowdery" is listed, shows that some correspondent expected Oliver to be picking up his mail in that place (Arcadia and/or Lyons townships of Wayne Co., where Oliver's father and brother lived). The close proximity of the Waterloo-Fayette area and the Arcadia-Lyons area, is a further indication that Oliver Cowdery could have lived close enough to the Whitmers, c. 1826-27, for David and his siblings to have known Oliver as "the village schoolmaster." See also Larry E. Morris' 2007 JBMS paper, "The Conversion of Oliver Cowdery," where he dates Oliver's arrival in western New York to "the mid-1820s."
In his 1938 book, The A. B. C. History of Palmyra, Willard Bean speaks of the young Oliver as having "canvassed the vicinity of the Smith home in Manchester, to get up a subscription school" "where the 'little red' cobble-rock Armington school now stands" in November of 1828. Oliver's educational career activity during "the mid-1820s" may also explain the seemingly strange chronology provided to Thomas Gregg by Lorenzo Saunders in 1885: "Oliver Cowdery, he came from Kirtland [sic - Kirtland Tract?] in the summer of 1826 and was about there until fall and took a school in the district where the Smiths lived and the next summer he was missing and I didn't see him until fall and he came back and took our school in the district where we lived and taught about a week and went to the schoolboard and wanted the board to let him off and they did and he went to Smith and went to writing the Book of Mormon."
If Oliver, on different occasions, went about soliciting students "to get up a subscription school," then his activities may account for the report from David Whitmer, of Oliver teaching in the Waterloo area, as well as Lorenzo Saunders' memory of Oliver teaching at both Manchester's Stafford School, "in the district where the Smiths lived" (Ontario Co. District #11) and the Armington School (Ontario Co. District #10) on Canandaigua Road, where the Saunders family lived.
http://olivercowdery.com/smithhome/smit ... m#1900-051
UD
