grindael wrote: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.
This point is, I believe, worth dwelling on a little longer. A historian would pay extra attention to the earliest account of the First Vision because it is closer to the event in question and may better reflect Smith's state of mind before the concerns of running a church and city had transformed markedly his sense of the importance of his image within the context of those responsibilities. grindael is absolutely correct in his assessment of Gee's enterprise here. Gee is not defending history; Gee is defending Smitholatry. And this is where he departs from the responsible practices of scholarship and jingoistically defends the misconceptions of the tribe.
Faithful Mormon have much to gain from seeing Joseph Smith in a more realistic light. The 1832 account of the First Vision is an excellent resource for cultivating such understanding. Do I say this because I believe it is necessary to show that Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon? No. I say this because too many Mormons falsely believe that Joseph was utterly naïve and innocent in the mode of a Disney princess, and that God reached down and miraculously poured knowledge into his empty head. Such a false narrative informs the expectations of good Mormons who imagine such things as their leaders conversing personally with the resurrected Christ like I hold my office hours with students.
And this kind of false impression is too easily taken advantage of. It cultivates a cult of God's chosen leader. Those who are the least bit savvy know that LDS leaders have at times expressed concerns about this being the case, but most of the leaders are ill-equipped to do the work necessary to disabuse the membership of these mistaken views. Well executed scholarship from the faithful and sympathetic outsiders can do such work without the leaders having to intone risky pronouncements that would, after all, effectively undermine the point anyway.
On another note, there is an ongoing discussion on Facebook regarding the distinction between scholarship and apologetics. Kevin Graham has been pointing out the problems with trying to draw too hard of a distinction between then two, when, depending on how one defines terms, they can overlap quite a bit. In the case of Gee's bitter attack against Owen's piece, which is motivated, it seems, by his anger regarding changes at the Maxwell Institute, I do not hesitate to disqualify his writing from the realm of scholarship. It is not even an attempt at scholarship. We know that Gee the Egyptologist is capable of high-caliber work, but no honest assessment of these blog posts aimed at Owen show anything of Gee the scholar. They show a bitter polemicist who willfully ignores good scholarly practice out of spite.
Gee is probably a fine Egyptologist. He is a deplorably bad representative of the scholars of Mormonism in his Church.