John Gee, Historian

[_the narrator]

Faith Promoting Rumor just posted a brutal dismantling of Gee: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/faithpromotingrumor/2015/03/a-recent-anti-mormon-essay-trying-to-understand-gees-response-part-i/

[_Kevin Graham]

“In a father's blessing given to his son in 1834, Joseph Sr. remarked, 'Thou hast sought to know his ways, and from thy childhood thou hast meditated much upon the great things of his law." (Quoted in Dan Vogel, Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2004), 27)

“I was born…of goodly Parents who spared no pains to instructing me in the christian religion.” (Joseph Smith's 1832 handwritten account of the First Vision).

Kish already provided the rest, where Smith explicitly states that he had been "searching the scriptures" since the age of 12.

According to Philip Barlow, “young Joseph probably knew the Bible better than Pratt and others have guessed.” (Philip L. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 13)

[_Kevin Graham]

The above quote is all I need to know that Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon (perhaps with some help). The entire book is one giant run-on sentence and perfectly matches the above Joseph Smith writing style. My goodness he was a yapper!

Yep. Sometimes I think the only reason Joseph Smith wanted to hire a scribe was so he wouldn't have to explain why God constantly misspelled words, as he frequently did.

[_Kishkumen]

Faith Promoting Rumor just posted a brutal dismantling of Gee: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/faithpromotingrumor/2015/03/a-recent-anti-mormon-essay-trying-to-understand-gees-response-part-i/

Many thanks, the narrator. They do a fine job over there.

[_Kishkumen]

The fact that a leading LDS scholar attacked Owen in such a personal way that entirely mischaracterizes the essay is not going to invite other non-LDS scholars to join in the discussion as well.

My only bone to pick with this article.

[Guest]

The Faith Promoting Rumor Essay on Gee was very interesting. It clarified for me what I have been harping on for years, that Mormon apologists will do anything to discredit anyone they perceive as an "Anti-Mormon", use deceptive tactics in doing so, and that this playbook is still their primary way of going about it. The first thing I thought of was what the author of that article did, investigate the different editions of the Bible available to Smith when he was growing up. The author did outstanding work there. Gee's attempt to paint Smith as an ignorant idiot was almost shocking, and very pathetic. It only underscores the nature of Mormon apologists as being so driven to discredit those they feel threatened by, that they become desperate enough to foist such ridiculous arguments on the public. And Gee's arguments are ridiculous. We've seen that here. Anyone who has studied Mormonism for even a short time could easily rebut his foolish claim that Smith never read the Bible.

His witness David Whitmer spent his last years lying to the public about everything connected to Joseph Smith. His "insights" are a made up narrative, crafted after Joseph's death to make him out to be just an ignorant and "unlearned" boy who was given all his acumen by way of God, that he just magically produced the Book of Mormon with a rock in a hat, because he could not do it himself. It adds to the myth. It is the central tenet of the myth. And it is false. Whitmer lied that he had the original "Caractors" document that Harris took to Anthon. He lied that he had the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon [even after being presented with evidence by Orson Pratt and Joseph F. Smith] he continued to lie about it. He lied about the account of his fields being plowed by an angel the night before he supposedly saw the plates [he gave Lucy Smith a totally different account with no angel].

Mormon apologists like John Gee will go to the late evidence, the crafted narrative about Smith because this is the idealistic Joseph they worship and must be defended at all costs and in whatever dishonest manner they can invent. I think that a lot of the Palmyra residents thought "Young Jo" was just like his father, described here by Peter Ingersoll in Mormonism Unvailed:

Palmyra, Wayne Co. N. Y. Dec. 2d, 1833.

I, Peter Ingersoll, first became acquainted with the family of Joseph Smith, Sen. in the year of our Lord, 1822. -- I lived in the neighborhood of said family, until about 1830; during which time the following facts came under my observation.

The general employment of the family, was digging for money. I had frequent invitations to join the company, but always declined being one of their number. They used various arguments to induce me to accept of their invitations. I was once ploughing near the house of Joseph Smith, Sen. about noon, he requested me to walk with him a short distance from his house, for the purpose of seeing whether a mineral rod would work in my hand, saying at the same time he was confident it would. As my oxen were eating, and being myself at leisure, I accepted the invitation. -- When we arrived near the place at which he thought there was money, he cut a small witch hazle bush and gave me direction how to hold it. He then went off some rods, and told me to say to the rod, "work to the money," which I did, in an audible voice. He rebuked me severely for speaking it loud, and said it must be spoken in a whisper. This was rare sport for me. While the old man was standing off some rods, throwing himself into various shapes, I told him the rod did not work. He seemed much surprised at this, and said he thought he saw it move in my hand. It was now time for me to return to my labor. On my [Mormonism UNVALIED, 233] return, I picked up a small stone and was carelessly tossing it from one hand to the other. Said he, (looking very earnestly) what are you going to do with that stone? Throw it at the birds, I replied. No, said the old man, it is of great worth; and upon this I gave it to him. Now, says he, if you only knew the value there is back of my house (and pointing to a place near) -- there, exclaimed he, is one chest of gold and another of silver. He then put the stone which I had given him, into his hat, and stooping forward, he bowed and made sundry maneuvers, quite similar to those of a stool pigeon. At length he took down his hat, and being very much exhausted, said, in a faint voice, "if you knew what I had seen, you would believe." To see the old man thus try to impose upon me, I confess, rather had a tendency to excite contempt than pity. Yet I thought it best to conceal my feelings, preferring to appear the dupe of my credulity, than to expose myself to his resentment. His son Alvin then went through with the same performance, which was equally disgusting.

Another time, the said Joseph, Sen. told me that the best time for digging money, was, in the heat of summer, when the heat of the sun caused the chests of money to rise near the top of the ground. You notice, said he, the large stones on the top of the ground -- we call them rocks, and they truly appear so, but they are, in fact, most of them chests of money raised by the heat of the sun.

At another time, he told me that the ancient inhabitants of this country used camels instead of horses. For proof of this fact, he stated that in a certain hill on the farm of Mr. Cuyler, there was a cave containing an immense value of gold and silver, stands of arms, also, a saddle for a camel, hanging on a peg at one side of the cave. I asked him, of what kind of wood the peg was. He could not tell, but said it had become similar to stone or iron. [Mormonism UNVAILED, 234]

The old man at last laid a plan which he thought would accomplish his design. His cows and mine had been gone for some time, and were not to be found, notwithstanding our diligent search for them. Day after day was spent in fruitless search, until at length he proposed to find them by his art of divination. So he took his stand near the corner of his house, with a small stick in his hand, and made several strange and peculiar motions, and then said he could go directly to the cows. So he started off, and went into the woods about one hundred rods distant and found the lost cows. But on finding out the secret of the mystery, Harrison had found the cows, and drove them to the above named place, and milked them. So that this stratagem turned out rather more to his profit that it did to my edification. -- The old man finding that all his efforts to make me a money digger, had proved abortive, at length ceased his importunities. One circumstance, however, I will mention before leaving him. Some time before young Joseph found, or pretended to find, the gold plates, the old man told me that in Canada, there had been a book found, in a hollow tree, that gave an account of the first settlement of this country before it was discovered by Columbus.

Smith's father hated organized religion and drew Young Jo into his world of moneydigging. This was after he became disillusioned with organized religion, and Young Jo wrote down some of what he had experienced in 1832. In that account Jo states that “at about the age of twelve years” (1817-1818) his mind became “seriously imprest” and that led him to “search the scriptures”. Then from “the age of twelve years to fifteen” Joseph “pondered many things” in his heart as he studied the Bible. There is no mention of a revival or camp meeting, and he doesn’t say he was influenced by one. Instead Joseph says that “I become convicted of my sins and by searching the scriptures” found that “mankind” had “apostatised from the true and living faith”.

I believe that Joseph was obsessed with religious fervor. But I do not think that he had a vision, instead he was disgusted with everyone associated with the “religious excitement”, in the place where he lived, describing them as pretenders who never really had any good feelings about any of it. It is a dismal view of the Great Awakening and echoes the sentiments of his father who felt much the same way. After the death of his brother Alvin and when the rest of his family joined the Presbyterians is when Young Jo fully embraced his father's obsession with moneydigging. Orsamus Turner writes,

But Joseph had a little ambition; and some very laudable aspirations; the mother's intellect occasionally shone out in him feebly, especially when he used to help us solve some portentous questions of moral or political ethics, in our juvenile debating club, which we moved down to the old red school house on Durfee street, to get rid of the annoyance of critics that used to drop in upon us in the village; and subsequently, after catching a spark of Methodism in the camp meeting, away down in the woods, on the Vienna road, he was a very passable exhorter in evening meetings.” [..] History of the Pioneer Settlement of Phelps and Gorham’s Purchase, 213.

Dale Morgan with great foresight wrote,

Lucy Smith had always been attracted by formal religion, and more, perhaps, than anyone in her family, she was stirred by the awakening. Being, as her son William says, "a very pious woman and much interested in the welfare of her children, both here and hereafter, [she] made use of every means which her parental love could suggest, to get us engaged in seeking for our souls' salvation.…She prevailed on us to attend the meetings, and almost the whole family became interested in the matter." It was to the Presbyterian church, the oldest and the most numerous in Palmyra, that Lucy and the elder children were drawn. Unfortunately, it was the minister of this denomination, the Reverend Benjamin B. Stockton, who had preached Alvin's funeral sermon a year or so before and been so intemperate in his language as to intimate strongly that Alvin, not being a church member, had gone to hell. This had enraged the elder Joseph, and though Lucy says that to gratify her he attended two or three meetings, he then "peremptorily refused going any more, either for my gratification, or any other person's."

Whether because he shared his father's feeling or because he had been deeply impressed by the Methodist circuit rider, Joseph also resisted the general movement of his family into the Presbyterian fold. There is no doubt that he had been aroused under Lane's preaching to "look about him for safety"; it is to Lane that Oliver Cowdery, speaking for Joseph, accorded the credit for the providence that his mind "became awakened." Joseph himself says that he "became somewhat partial to the Methodist sect," and "felt some desire to be united with them."

In this general chorus of agreement the non-Mormon sources join. Orasmus Turner remarks that Joseph caught "a spark of Methodism in the camp meeting, away down in the woods, on the Vienna road," to the point of becoming a passable exhorter in the evening meetings, while Pomeroy Tucker says that Joseph went so far as to join the probationary class of the Methodist church and make some active demonstrations of engagedness, though his convictions were "insufficiently grounded or abiding to carry him along to the saving point of conversion," and he soon withdrew.

Tucker's further remark, that the final conclusion announced by Joseph was that "all sectarianism was fallacious, all the churches on a false foundation, and the Bible a fable," may be received as gratuitous, but there is nothing inherently improbable in it. Within a few years after 1825 Joseph was apologizing for his "former uncircumspect walk, and unchaste conversation," and his skeptical cast of mind is evidenced as well by the fact that he was finally converted to no church as by a conversation his mother's memory preserved. When she persisted with him on the subject of religion, he said to her, "Mother, I do not wish to prevent your going to meeting, or any of the rest of the family's; or your joining any church you please; but, do not ask me to join them. I can take my Bible, and go into the woods, and learn more in two hours, than you can learn at meeting in two years, if you should go all the time."

The exact date Joseph turned his back on the high promise the revivals had held out to him can only be guessed, but most probably by the early summer of 1825 he had withdrawn altogether from the embrace of the Methodist church. When he went off to the Susquehanna country that fall, he could take up his glass-looking again with an untroubled heart.

Joseph had not easily been persuaded to yield up the details by which the integrity of his account of himself may be appraised. To importunate followers in 1831 he said shortly that "it was not intended to tell the world all the particulars of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon; and…it was not expedient" for him to relate these things. Joseph would best have held to that ground. The progressive enlargement of his story, climaxed finally in the breathtaking vision of the Father and the Son, involved him in difficulties that ended by setting reality at complete defiance. He committed himself very early to the thesis that he had been visited by an angel in 1827. When Joseph shifted his ground in 1834-35, drawing upon the troubled emotions of the revivals to give verisimilitude to his account of his visions, the revival of 1824-25 was wrenched out of its proper context and dated back to 1823, for it was logically impossible that Joseph's awakening to religion should have been delayed for months after the Angel Moroni appeared to him. From this position it was only a step to the final ground he occupied, the revival moved back in time three more years, and his sanction found in the Father and the Son themselves.

How is it possible that Joseph's followers accepted all that he chose to tell them, never doubting, deaf to inconsistency and blind to impossibility? A Mormon authority has given an answer of a kind: "Our fathers and our people in the past and now, were and are uncritical. They have been and are now—and to their honor be it said—more concerned with the fact of the divine origin of the Book of Mormon and the great work it introduced than [with] the modus operandi of its translation. Overwhelmed by a divine testimony of its truth they have paid little attention to the precise manner by which it was brought forth." It was emotionally impossible for the Saints to challenge the integrity of their prophet, in the matter of his early life or anything he chose to tell them. If deceived in anything, it might be that they were deceived in everything. The whole power and discipline of their faith conditioned them to belief. Yet their own responsibility in the make of their prophet, in the proliferation of his legend, is not to be dismissed. Their hunger for miracle, their thirst for the marvelous, their lust for assurance that they were God's chosen people, to be preserved on the great and terrible day, made them, hardly less than Joseph, the authors of his history. His questionable responsibility is the faithful image of their own. [..] John Phillip Walker, Dale Morgan, p.258-260. The Western Farmer 1 (23 Jan. 1822): 3, Palmyra, New York, contained the following: "NOTICE. The young people of the village of Palmyra and its vicinity are requested to attend a Debating school at the school house near Mr. Billings' on Friday next." Notice dated 19 Jan. 1822.

The conundrum of Joseph Smith is really his transformation back to religion. The failure of his moneydigging ventures probably had a profound impact on him in 1826. It was then, I believe that he resurrected his ideas about the American Indians and the Lost Tribes of Israel, and crafted the story of the Book of Mormon which he put in motion the next year, kicking it off with his marriage to Emma Hale and his brief foray into organized religion shortly after his marriage. But he was not welcome in their world, so he invented his own, interweaving the religious learning of his youth with his money digging schemes, to turn a bleeding Spanish Ghost into the angel that delivers to him the plates of gold.

[_Equality]

I just want to interject that I have thoroughly enjoyed both the discussion of the original topic and the tangential discussion on the Isaiah passage. I used to justify the time I spent on the boards debating obstinate apologists by imagining the lurkers and hoping that even if the person with whom I was debating appeared incapable of or unwilling to consider he might be wrong, at least there might be open-minded folks reading the exchange. I don't know if that was ever actually the case, but if it is any consolation to you, Symmachus, your time spent trying to teach Tobin might have been wasted on him, but it was not wasted on me. That particular passage is one that I used to hang my hat on as a believer--one of the "bull's-eyes" in the Book of Mormon text proving Joseph Smith could not have made it all up. I later learned that it was bogus, but I did not know all the reasons why. Thanks for illuminating the subject; I really appreciate it. (And to get educated while watching Tobin get Superfly Jimmy Snuka'd in the process is just icing on the cake.

[_grindael]

I too learned a whole lot from Symmachus. Thank you.

[_Kishkumen]

“In a father's blessing given to his son in 1834, Joseph Sr. remarked, 'Thou hast sought to know his ways, and from thy childhood thou hast meditated much upon the great things of his law." (Quoted in Dan Vogel, Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2004), 27)

“I was born…of goodly Parents who spared no pains to instructing me in the christian religion.” (Joseph Smith's 1832 handwritten account of the First Vision).

Kish already provided the rest, where Smith explicitly states that he had been "searching the scriptures" since the age of 12.

According to Philip Barlow, “young Joseph probably knew the Bible better than Pratt and others have guessed.” (Philip L. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 13)

Excellent contributions, Kevin. Many thanks for adding these to the growing list.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Jesus