Below is from FAIR, on anti-mormon stuff. I got the story originally in Priests quorum meetings as well as in Seminary during High School. Panguich, Utah seminary classes were not too bad and the instructors we had were generally decent folk, most ended up quitting to get real jobs so they could afford to live.
http://www.fairlds.org/FAIR_Conferences ... urces.htmlIn light of these and other testimonies, how should a person react to the claim that Joseph Smith was so violently inclined as an adult that he once beat up a Baptist minister simply for doubting that he had seen Jesus Christ? Answer: with a heavy dose of skepticism! On this slide you will see a quotation from Jedediah M. Grant.34 One anti-Mormon publication has recently used this quote in an attempt to give substance to the myth that Joseph Smith was a violent man. I have highlighted important parts of this quotation so that the next time critics of the Church read it they will perhaps have a better chance at comprehending what it says. When this quotation is read with care, it is clear that it has absolutely nothing to do with Joseph Smith beating up a Baptist priest. It is talking, in rather colorful frontier phraseology, about piety and how the Baptist priest's piety got bent out of shape over the Prophet's invitation to wrestle with him. It is true that Joseph Smith defended himself on occasion with physical force and even kicked a man out of his house—literally—for insulting him and the Lord's latter-day work. But an 1834 proclamation published by Joseph Smith needs to be taken into serious consideration whenever it is claimed that he was habitually inclined to violence. Joseph stated that it could not be sustained, in truth, that he had been guilty of "injuring any man or society of men."35 And Oliver Cowdery amplified this statement, just one year later, by declaring that Joseph Smith "never injured any man in either property or person."36
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Benjamin F. Johnson recalled how Joseph Smith sometimes lost his temper and resorted to physical violence:
And yet, although so social and even convival [sic] at times, he would allow no arrogance or undue liberties. Criticisms, even by his associates, were rarely acceptable. Contradictions would arouse in him the lion at once. By no one of his fellows would he be superceded. In the early days at Kirtland, and elsewhere, one or another of his associates were more than once, for their impudence, helped from the congregation by his foot.... He soundly thrashed his brother William.... While with him in such fraternal, social and sometimes convivial moods, we could not then so fully realize the greatness and majesty of his calling. But since his martyrdom, it has continued to magnify in our view as the glories of this last dispensation have more fully unfolded to our comprehension (Letter by Benjamin F. Johnson, 1903, as printed in Testimony of Joseph Smith's Best Friend, pp. 4-5).
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Calvin Stoddard once testified that "Smith then came up and knocked him in the forehead with his flat hand—the blow knocked him down, when Smith repeated the blow four or five times, very hard—made him blind - that Smithafterwards came to him and asked his forgiveness..." (Conflict at Kirtland, p. 132).
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Mormon writer Max Parkin quotes Luke Johnson as saying that when a minister insulted Joseph Smith at Kirtland, Ohio, Smith "boxed his ears with both hands, and turning his face towards the door, kicked him into the street ..." (Ibid., p. 268).
In Joseph Smith's history for the year 1843, we read of two fights which he had in Nauvoo: "Josiah Butterfield came to my house and insulted me so outrageously that I kicked him out of the house, across the yard, and into the street" (History of the Church, vol. 5, p. 316).
The reader will remember also that some material appears in JosephSmith's diary that has been suppressed in the History of the Church. Under the dates January 1 and 2, 1843, Joseph Smith related that he had "whipped" seven men at once and on another occasion had "whipped" a Baptist minister "till he begged."
http://www.utlm.org/onlinebooks/changech17.htm