why me wrote:
Harris still believed because he could not deny the vision he had with Oliver and Joseph.
He could, actually. And he's the most doubting witness.
I recommend the
History of the Church for an insight into this. He was the most unstable witness.
For more insight into his chracter:
Ronald W. Walker, "Martin Harris: Mormonism's Early Convert," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 19 (Winter 1986): 34-35. "Once while reading scripture, he reportedly mistook a candle's sputtering as a sign that the devil desired him to stop. Another time he excitedly awoke from his sleep believing that a creature as large as a dog had been upon his chest, though a nearby associate could find nothing to confirm his fears. Several hostile and perhaps unreliable accounts told of visionary experiences with Satan and Christ, Harris once reporting that Christ had been poised on a roof beam."
And:
John A. Clark letter, August 31, 1840 in EMD, 2: 271: "No matter where he went, he saw visions and supernatural appearances all around him. He told a gentleman in Palmyra, after one of his excursions to Pennsylvania, while the translation of the Book of Mormon was going on, that on the way he met the Lord Jesus Christ, who walked along by the side of him in the shape of a deer for two or three miles, talking with him as familiarly as one man talks with another." According to two Ohio newspapers, shortly after Harris arrived in Kirtland he began claiming to have "seen Jesus Christ and that he is the handsomest man he ever did see. He has also seen the Devil, whom he described as a very sleek haired fellow with four feet, and a head like that of a Jack-ass." Vogel,EMD 2: 271, note 32.
Contradictory statements:
In March 1838, disillusioned church members said that Harris had publicly denied that neither he nor the other Witnesses to the Book of Mormon had ever seen or handled the golden plates—although he had not been present when Whitmer and Cowdery first claimed to have viewed them—and they claimed that Harris's recantation, made during a period of crisis in early Mormonism, induced five influential members, including three Apostles, to leave the Church.[28] Even at the end of his long life, Harris said that he had seen the plates in "a state of entrancement."[29] Nevertheless, in 1853, Harris told one David Dille that he had held the forty- to sixty-pound plates on his knee for "an hour-and-a-half" and handled the plates with his hands, "plate after plate."[30] Even later, Harris affirmed that he had seen the plates and the angel with his natural eyes: "Gentlemen," holding out his hand, "do you see that hand? Are you sure you see it? Or are your eyes playing you a trick or something? No. Well, as sure as you see my hand so sure did I see the Angel and the plates." [31] The following year Harris affirmed that "No man heard me in any way deny the truth of the Book of Mormon [or] the administration of the angel that showed me the plates."[32]
Wiki.
I'm not encouraging Wiki as a reliable source here, but it does encapsulate Harris's doubts. The simple fact is that he was an unstable person. The
History of the Church gives the explaination that Harris was not able to view the plates with the other two witnesses, "because of his doubt", and Joseph had to take him aside, alone, to "convince" him that he "saw something". He did not "see" what the other two witnesses "saw", "because he lacked faith", and Joseph took him aside to try to convince him that an "angel really did appear". Apparently Joseph's "persuasions" (not what he saw) convinced him. Refer to the HC for verification of this. Even as a believer, the Harris experience bothered me, because it really seemed like Joseph was engaging in manipulation.
Sort of reminds me of when Loren Dunn was in Sydney. In one meeting, Dunn proclaimed that "angels were present". No one saw them, but at Dunn's
suggestion, many believed that this was indeed the case, and it later became known as the meeting "at which angels were present".
