Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!psuvax1!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Book of Mormon Witnesses (was Multiple Isaiahs) Message-ID: Date: 4 Oct 90 03:27:21 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Software Engineering Institute, Pittsburgh, PA Lines: 31 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes: >Given that Oliver Cowdery was excommunicated (as were most of the >witnesses listed at the beginning of the BoM), why is his testimony >taken seriously? In article hall@vice.ico.tek.com (Hal Lillywhite) writes: >True most left the church but that's not the point. The important >point is that even outside the church they remained faithful to >their testimony. Not quite. In fact, all of the three witnesses (Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, Martin Harris) later denied the key part of their sworn testimony: that they had physically seen the gold plates and the engravings thereon. Their persistence in this denial prompted Joseph Smith to call them "counterfeiters, thieves, liars and blacklegs" - not, one feels, a remark calculated to enhance either their credibility or his. In addition, if one counts Smith himself as a witness, four out of four changed their testimony. Smith's first account was that he was led to the plates not by an angel but by a dream, which is confirmed in a holograph letter from his mother written in 1829. He also claimed he was told how to obtain the plates by a glost: "like a Spaniard having a long beard, with his throat cut from ear to ear, and the blood streaming down." It was only in 1842 that he drafted the account that we now find in copies of the BoM, where he has replaced a story very like a contemporary gothic romance with a different story very like the Masonic legend of the Book of Enoch.