Rules of Patheos: Midgley appears to violate TOS 10x

[_moksha]

In a February 15-16 Facebook post, Dr. Colvin shared her thoughts about her husband’s visit at church with Dr. Midgley. The comments are also worth reading.

Could you post a link?

[_Tom]

It probably won't work:

https://www.Facebook.com/gina.colvin/po ... 0456749954

[_I have a question]

It probably won't work:

https://www.Facebook.com/gina.colvin/po ... 0456749954

It doesn't. Can you give a flavour for what she posted and the comments?

[_moksha]

It probably won't work:

https://www.Facebook.com/gina.colvin/po ... 0456749954

Yeah, it said it was not available. So were the Colvins happy with the visit? What was their reaction?

[Guest]

I have added some annotations to Dr. Midgley's recent posts:

Dr. Midgley:

Or to write a book review without reading more than four and a half pages of chapter 33 of the second volume of Saints.1 My own reason for considering doing this is that the first those four and a half pages (and the related end notes) of that chapter are awful. So I am tempted to draw attention to a huge mistake on what I consider an important issue.

This might also give me the opportunity to correct some mistakes I have made a few times, since I have discovered that there is information available about which I was not previously aware.

What troubles me is that this volume was the product of a small army of presumably professional historians with the resources to track every bit published and unpublished material about a crucial topic and they botched it. Instead of drawing upon a very detailed and well written contemporary diary,2 they drew upon something written fifteen or more years after the event they describe. (This is, however, not nearly as bad as relying upon a letter wriiten seventy years after those events by someone who had just turned 12 when those events happened. And who was not a witness to those events.3

I just came back from a Q&A about the forthcoming film that Professor Peterson has had a team busy filming on the Witnesses, all of which was very encouraging. After the meeting in Orem ended, I met several others who had served as missionaries in New Zealand, and who who were also furious about other problems in that volume that were much like what I discovered when I saw what that team of writers had included. I was also stunned to discover who they had vet what they had written. They could not have picked a less qualified person. For further reading they cited her work4 and another fellow who has been hostile to the Church of Jesus Christ for a very long time.5

Dr. Midgley:

I also had several people complain to me about the first four and a half pages of chapter 33 of the second volume of Saints. This is a very brief and somewhat (and unnecessarily) garbled account of how Maori came to become Latter-day Saints. In the middle of this seriously garbled account of how William Bromley, the Mission President, and two other recent European converts to the Church of Jesus Christ were confronted by Hare Teimana, who had a visit by the Apostle Peter, who showed him in a vision those three European Latter-day Saints, and indicated that they were his authorized agents, they have exactly two brief sentences about a document dictated in 1881 by Paora Potangaroa to a scribe, that fit exactly our missionaries and their message that brought many Maori in one place in New Zealand into the Church of Jesus Christ.

Potangaroa was a famous Maori matakite (seer) who passed away in 1882, and then in 1883 our missionaries, who could not then speak or understand a word of Maori, and had never heard of Maori seers, turned up in that very area and were immediately seen by many who were aware of Potanagroa's famous "covenant" as bringing the Maori the true version of Christian faith.

Since the second volume of Saints ends in 1893, this is probably the only opportunity for that series to even mention the fact that nine Maori seers played an important part in bringing certain Maori into the Church of Jesus Christ. This has to be one of the most truly remarkable events in our entire history. ...

I also had people mention that they were deeply troubled by other very serious flaws in the second volume of Saints. I am now trying to figure out exactly how I will respond to the botching of what appears to me to be the only opportunity to set out the role of Maori seers in the amazing story of Maori becoming Latter-day Saints that will be possible in this projected four volume narrative history of the Church of Jesus Christ.

Dr. Midgley:

I have written rather extensively on Potangaroa and his "Covenant." The item in the Saints cites Ian Barber's essay in the issue of the Journal of Mormon History that Gina Colvin put together.6 And that essay was an effort to call into question and challenge core elements of what Robert Joseph7 and I call the Maori Latter-day Saint historical narrative. And in the most recent Mormon History convention in Salt Lake Barber was back presenting a paper in which he argued that Matthew Cowley got a key word in his translation of the "Covenant" wrong that undercuts the claim that our message fit the meaning of that famous document.8

Rob Joseph has twice sought the opinion of the Maori scholar who is best able to say if the Cowley translation fit with how Maori was translated back then and he has both times affirmed that Cowley was correct.

In addition, I went after Barber9 by pointing out that those who had heard Potangaroa dictate that document very soon saw our missionaries as having been bringing them what was set out in the "covenant." Barber was not able to make this fact square with his claim that Cowley had mistranslated it when he was presented with a photography of the original document10 that had simply melted away in the place where it was presumably being preserved.

So I am ready to respond to anything Barber publishes; perhaps both Rob Joseph and I will respond, if that is necessary.

1. See "Until the Storm Blows Past," in Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days, Volume 2, No Unhallowed Hand, 1846–1893, available at https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/stu ... t?lang=eng.
2. Midgley is presumably referring to the diary kept by William M. Bromley, president of the New Zealand mission. See "Until the Storm Blows Past," chapter 33, footnote 1.
3. Midgley is alluding to his criticism of Marjorie Newton, who cited a 1957 letter from Samuel Cox telling the events of Christmas 1882 in her book Mormon and Maori and in her PhD thesis. See "Marjorie Newton’s Account of the Faith of the Māori Saints: A Critical Appraisal," Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 30 (2018): 196-97.
4. Midgley fails to identify this individual. In any case, it is arrant nonsense to charge that the historians and writers who worked on Saints "could not have picked a less qualified person" to review the chapter.
5. Midgley is referring to Professor Ian Barber. See https://www.otago.ac.nz/archaeology/peo ... 02452.html. Footnote 2 to chapter 33 of Saints, Volume 2 cites an article by Barber, “Matakite, Mormon Conversions, and Māori-Israelite Identity Work in Colonial New Zealand.” Journal of Mormon History 41, no. 3 (July 2015): 167–220. Barber is also named in the Acknowledgments section of Saints, Volume 2 as one of a number of "experts [who] reviewed chapters."
6. See https://mormonhistoryassociation.org/wp ... MH-web.pdf.
7. See https://www.waikato.ac.nz/law/about-us/ ... ic/rjoseph. Joseph is the author of "Intercultural Exchange, Matakite Māori and the Mormon Church,” in Mana Māori and Christianity, ed. Hugh Morrison, Lachy Paterson, Brett Knowles, and Murray Rae (Wellington, New Zealand: Huia Publishers, 2012), 43–72
8. Barber presented a paper at the 2019 Mormon History Association conference titled "“‘A Strange and Interesting Document’: the Latter-day Saint Shaping of a Prophetic Māori Covenant." Here is the abstract:

In 1950, the official Latter-day Saint periodical Improvement Era published Apostle Matthew Cowley’s account of the discovery of a document identified as a New Zealand Māori ‘covenant’. Headed ‘He Kawenata’, this document was associated with 19th century Māori prophet, Paora Potangaroa. Cowley advised that the covenant had been “concealed from public view” until a Māori Latter-day Saint presented it to him in New Zealand in 1944. The covenant as translated by Cowley recorded the “hidden words” revealed to Potangaroa by “the spirit of Jehovah” on 16 March 1881. It set out a timeline of yearly events between 1881-1883 that Cowley interpreted as a prophecy of the Latter-day Saint mission to Māori. Cowley also read text and imagery from He Kawenata as prophetic anticipation of architectural elements of the Salt Lake City temple.

This covenant as delivered to Cowley is available now to scholars as a result of its acquisition by the Church History Library after 2013. In this presentation I consider New Zealand Māori and Latter-day Saint culture histories of the covenant. I compare Cowley’s text and my own translation of He Kawenata from the library copy, and the implications of Cowley’s particular shaping of He Kawenata’s text and iconography.

9. Midgley does not fully explain what he means by "went after." However, he has a well-known history of confronting individuals at conferences, book signings, and bookstores. For example, in an email describing his actions at a 2002 book signing by Grant Palmer, Midgley wrote: "I asked a few questions. I was aggressive. I would insist that I raised a bit of hell with Palmer." See Midgley, "Prying into Palmer," FARMS Review 15/2 (2003): 403.
10. See Cowley, "Maori Chief Predicts Coming of L.D.S. Missionaries," Improvement Era 53 (1950): 755. Barber offered earlier comments on Cowley's translation of He Kawenata in “Matakite, Mormon Conversions, and Māori-Israelite Identity Work in Colonial New Zealand," p. 189-191.

[_Tom]

It probably won't work:

https://www.Facebook.com/gina.colvin/po ... 0456749954

Yeah, it said it was not available. So were the Colvins happy with the visit? What was their reaction?

She chided her husband a bit, listing three "reasons to go the LDS Church on Sunday (these are not a direct quotation but a close paraphrase, as Dr. Peterson would say):

1. Louis Midgley might be present and my husband might think again about becoming a new friend of Midgley's.
2. I would remind my husband that Midgley is "mean and has publicly said cruel things about me" and rather than nearly inviting him to have dinner at our home, he might have defended me.
3. I could also prevent my husband from disclosing personal information that Midgley "might use in his rudeness."

Her husband responded that he "had no idea." He saw Midgley's name badge, thought the name was "really familiar," and thought Midgley was one of his wife's "mates." "Guess not," he added (with a sheepish smile emoji).

She later noted that her husband "clearly missed the name" when she read "the rude troll things" that Midgley has said.

He subsequently said that he viewed Midgley at the time as a very friendly and interesting person. Midgley apparently asked him for his card to stay in contact. Then, he wrote, he got home and excitedly told his wife about his meeting and found out that "perhaps I shouldn't have."

[_Lemmie]

She chided her husband a bit, listing three "reasons to go the LDS Church on Sunday (these are not a direct quotation but a close paraphrase, as Dr. Peterson would say):

1. Louis Midgley might be present and my husband might think again about becoming a new friend of Midgley's.
2. I would remind my husband that Midgley is "mean and has publicly said cruel things about me" and rather than nearly inviting him to have dinner at our home, he might have defended me.
3. I could also prevent my husband from disclosing personal information that Midgley "might use in his rudeness."

Her husband responded that he "had no idea." He saw Midgley's name badge, thought the name was "really familiar," and thought Midgley was one of his wife's "mates." "Guess not," he added (with a sheepish smile emoji).

She later noted that her husband "clearly missed the name" when she read "the rude troll things" that Midgley has said.

He subsequently said that he viewed Midgley at the time as a very friendly and interesting person. Midgley apparently asked him for his card to stay in contact. Then, he wrote, he got home and excitedly told his wife about his meeting and found out that "perhaps I shouldn't have."

Wow. So apparently, Midgley hunted down Gina’s husband, then pretended to be a friendly person so he could pump him for personal information about her, which he has already re-written and posted in his fantastical and mean-spirited way (see gemli for how Midgley turns innocuous information into fake nastiness).

This is a new low for Midgley. What lack of character does it take to do crap like this? How does he preach to those he calls the “gone missing” the Christ-like religion he supposedly follows while being this much of a prick?

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. Maxwell Institute dodged a huge bullet by getting rid of this guy. What a complete and utter embarrassment it would be to have your Institute’s name associated with behavior like this. I have a great deal of sympathy for those who have to deal with him in person, once this little prick has decided you are no longer worthwhile (a.k.a. any person not Mormon or who disagrees with him). He is nauseating.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

"perhaps I shouldn't have."

[_Lemmie]

I have added some annotations to Dr. Midgley's recent posts:

Dr. Midgley:

Or to write a book review without reading more than four and a half pages of chapter 33 of the second volume of Saints.1 My own reason for considering doing this is that the first those four and a half pages (and the related end notes) of that chapter are awful. So I am tempted to draw attention to a huge mistake on what I consider an important issue.

This might also give me the opportunity to correct some mistakes I have made a few times, since I have discovered that there is information available about which I was not previously aware.

What troubles me is that this volume was the product of a small army of presumably professional historians with the resources to track every bit published and unpublished material about a crucial topic and they botched it. Instead of drawing upon a very detailed and well written contemporary diary, they drew upon something written fifteen or more years after the event they describe. (This is, however, not nearly as bad as relying upon a letter wriiten seventy years after those events by someone who had just turned 12 when those events happened. And who was not a witness to those events.

I just came back from a Q&A about the forthcoming film that Professor Peterson has had a team busy filming on the Witnesses, all of which was very encouraging. After the meeting in Orem ended, I met several others who had served as missionaries in New Zealand, and who who were also furious about other problems in that volume that were much like what I discovered when I saw what that team of writers had included. I was also stunned to discover who they had vet what they had written. They could not have picked a less qualified person. For further reading they cited her work2 and another fellow who has been hostile to the Church of Jesus Christ for a very long time.3

Dr. Midgley:

I also had several people complain to me about the first four and a half pages of chapter 33 of the second volume of Saints. This is a very brief and somewhat (and unnecessarily) garbled account of how Maori came to become Latter-day Saints. In the middle of this seriously garbled account of how William Bromley, the Mission President, and two other recent European converts to the Church of Jesus Christ were confronted by Hare Teimana, who had a visit by the Apostle Peter, who showed him in a vision those three European Latter-day Saints, and indicated that they were his authorized agents, they have exactly two brief sentences about a document dictated in 1881 by Paora Potangaroa to a scribe, that fit exactly our missionaries and their message that brought many Maori in one place in New Zealand into the Church of Jesus Christ.

Potangaroa was a famous Maori matakite (seer) who passed away in 1882, and then in 1883 our missionaries, who could not then speak or understand a word of Maori, and had never heard of Maori seers, turned up in that very area and were immediately seen by many who were aware of Potanagroa's famous "covenant" as bringing the Maori the true version of Christian faith.

Since the second volume of Saints ends in 1893, this is probably the only opportunity for that series to even mention the fact that nine Maori seers played an important part in bringing certain Maori into the Church of Jesus Christ. This has to be one of the most truly remarkable events in our entire history. ...

I also had people mention that they were deeply troubled by other very serious flaws in the second volume of Saints. I am now trying to figure out exactly how I will respond to the botching of what appears to me to be the only opportunity to set out the role of Maori seers in the amazing story of Maori becoming Latter-day Saints that will be possible in this projected four volume narrative history of the Church of Jesus Christ.

Dr. Midgley:

I have written rather extensively on Potangaroa and his "Covenant." The item in the Saints cites Ian Barber's essay in the issue of the Journal of Mormon History that Gina Colvin put together.4 And that essay was an effort to call into question and challenge core elements of what Robert Joseph5 and I call the Maori Latter-day Saint historical narrative. And in the most recent Mormon History convention in Salt Lake Barber was back presenting a paper in which he argued that Matthew Cowley got a key word in his translation of the "Covenant" wrong that undercuts the claim that our message fit the meaning of that famous document.6

Rob Joseph has twice sought the opinion of the Maori scholar who is best able to say if the Cowley translation fit with how Maori was translated back then and he has both times affirmed that Cowley was correct.

In addition, I went after Barber7 by pointing out that those who had heard Potangaroa dictate that document very soon saw our missionaries as having been bringing them what was set out in the "covenant." Barber was not able to make this fact square with his claim that Cowley had mistranslated it when he was presented with a photography of the original document8 that had simply melted away in the place where it was presumably being preserved.

So I am ready to respond to anything Barber publishes; perhaps both Rob Joseph and I will respond, if that is necessary.

1. See "Until the Storm Blows Past," in Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days, Volume 2, No Unhallowed Hand, 1846–1893, available at https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/stu ... t?lang=eng.
2. Midgley fails to identify this individual. In any case, it is arrant nonsense to charge that the historians and writers who worked on Saints "could not have picked a less qualified person" to review the chapter.
3. Midgley is referring to Professor Ian Barber. See https://www.otago.ac.nz/archaeology/peo ... 02452.html. Footnote 2 to chapter 33 of Saints, Volume 2 cites an article by Barber, “Matakite, Mormon Conversions, and Māori-Israelite Identity Work in Colonial New Zealand.” Journal of Mormon History 41, no. 3 (July 2015): 167–220. Barber is also named in the Acknowledgments section of Saints, Volume 2 as one of a number of "experts [who] reviewed chapters."
4. See https://mormonhistoryassociation.org/wp ... MH-web.pdf.
5. See https://www.waikato.ac.nz/law/about-us/ ... ic/rjoseph.
6. Barber presented a paper at the 2019 Mormon History Association conference titled "“‘A Strange and Interesting Document’: the Latter-day Saint Shaping of a Prophetic Māori Covenant." Here is the abstract:

In 1950, the official Latter-day Saint periodical Improvement Era published Apostle Matthew Cowley’s account of the discovery of a document identified as a New Zealand Māori ‘covenant’. Headed ‘He Kawenata’, this document was associated with 19th century Māori prophet, Paora Potangaroa. Cowley advised that the covenant had been “concealed from public view” until a Māori Latter-day Saint presented it to him in New Zealand in 1944. The covenant as translated by Cowley recorded the “hidden words” revealed to Potangaroa by “the spirit of Jehovah” on 16 March 1881. It set out a timeline of yearly events between 1881-1883 that Cowley interpreted as a prophecy of the Latter-day Saint mission to Māori. Cowley also read text and imagery from He Kawenata as prophetic anticipation of architectural elements of the Salt Lake City temple.

This covenant as delivered to Cowley is available now to scholars as a result of its acquisition by the Church History Library after 2013. In this presentation I consider New Zealand Māori and Latter-day Saint culture histories of the covenant. I compare Cowley’s text and my own translation of He Kawenata from the library copy, and the implications of Cowley’s particular shaping of He Kawenata’s text and iconography.

7. Midgley does not fully explain what he means by "went after." However, he has a well-known history of confronting individuals at conferences, book signings, and bookstores. For example, in an email describing his actions at a 2002 book signing by Grant Palmer, Midgley wrote: "I asked a few questions. I was aggressive. I would insist that I raised a bit of hell with Palmer." See Midgley, "Prying into Palmer," FARMS Review 15/2 (2003): 403.
8. See Cowley, "Maori Chief Predicts Coming of L.D.S. Missionaries," Improvement Era 53 (1950): 755. Barber offered earlier comments on Cowley's translation of He Kawenata in “Matakite, Mormon Conversions, and Māori-Israelite Identity Work in Colonial New Zealand," p. 189-191.

Wow, fascinating, Tom, thank you. That’s a tremendous analysis of the situation. So apparently, the official lds church version doesn’t coincide with Midgley’s “lds Maori narrative” either. Everyone is wrong, except for him!

[_Tom]

So apparently, the official lds church version doesn’t coincide with Midgley’s “lds Maori narrative” either. Everyone is wrong, except for him!

I don’t doubt that there are errors in the Saints narrative. However, Dr. Midgley also seems to be irritated that the narrative wasn't told the way he understands it, wasn't reviewed by himself and/or Robert Joseph, and cites scholars he vehemently disagrees with.

He writes: "In the middle of this seriously garbled account of how William Bromley, the Mission President, and two other recent European converts to the Church of Jesus Christ were confronted by Hare Teimana, who had a visit by the Apostle Peter, who showed him in a vision those three European Latter-day Saints, and indicated that they were his authorized agents, they have exactly two brief sentences about a document dictated in 1881 by Paora Potangaroa to a scribe, that fit exactly our missionaries and their message that brought many Maori in one place in New Zealand into the Church of Jesus Christ."

Fit exactly? Saints says:

The year before [1881], in fact, Māori leaders had asked Pāora Te Pōtangaroa, a revered matakite, which church Māori should join. After fasting and praying for three days, Pāora had said the church they should join had not yet arrived. But he said it would come sometime in 1882 or 1883.

To its credit, Saints cites here, among several LDS sources, an entry on Pāora Te Pōtangaroa published in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (linked below):

Greenwood, Journal, Apr. 5, 1883; Meha, “A Prophetic Utterance of Paora Potangaroa,” 298; Cowley, “Maori Chief Predicts,” 696–97; Underwood, “Mormonism and the Shaping of Maori Religious Identity,” 117–19; Ballara and Cairns, “Te Potangaroa, Paora.”

Greenwood, Journal, Apr. 5, 1883

A Prophetic Utterance of Paora Potangaroa

Maori Chief Predicts