Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!usc!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: wcsa@cbnewsc.att.com Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Book of Mormon Witnesses (was Multiple Isaiahs) Message-ID: Date: 7 Oct 90 03:19:47 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories - Indian Hill West - Naperville, IL Lines: 77 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article , firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth) writes: > > 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. Approximately two years ago, on t.r.m, Joe Applegate made this charge. I demanded exact citations to support this view, and he supplied, from the standard anti-Mormon literature, several references. When those references were chased down, they fell into one of three classes: either they were third hand accounts that led nowhere, because someone in the chain back to the witnesses was unnamed, they were forgeries that even other key anti-Mormon writers have since acknowledged, or they seem to be bothered by the witnesses insistance on stating that they saw the plates through the eye of faith. At the moment I am assuming that Robert's charge that they denied that "they had physically seen the gold plates ..." is related to the last class, "the eye of faith." The witnesses insistance on using this statement is based on something they all heard at the time they were shown the plates, a voice from heaven declared that they had been shown the plates "by the power of God." Whitmer and Harris both commented later on the usage of this phrase when an early writer of anti-Mormon literature, named Deming, attempted to claim that they had not physically seen the plates because they had used this phrase. Their response was essentially that Deming didn't know what he was talking about. As for Robert's suggestion that Joseph Smith called the witnesses liars and blacklegs because they denied their testimony of the BoM, I think that closer examination will show that this angry exchange had nothing to do with their testimony of the BoM, rather with charges that Joseph Smith had supported Samuel Avary's para-military movement in Missouri. >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. Well, we can all see that the standard anti-Mormon literature has not caught up with the rest of the world. The 1829 letter referred to by Robert was actually a modern forgery penned by Mark Hoffman. The Spaniard with the long beard statement comes from an early anti-Mormon source (I think E.D. Howe). Most critics admit that it can't be traced back to any Mormon source, but it was one of the things that influenced Hoffman's later forgery "the Salamander Letter." As for the current standard version, I should point out that it was actually written in 1837, not 1842, as Robert suggests. But if Robert is really interested in the early versions of the coming forth of the BoM, perhaps I might point out a few versions that were written by JS in 1831, 1832, and 1834. Some of them were actually published in the early 1830s and throw a lot more detail on the sequence of events then the 1837 version, and have nothing in common with the "Spaniard." Perhaps, it might also be useful to point out to Robert that E.D. Howe was also an active member of the "anti-Masonic" league in Kirtland, Ohio. -- Willard C. Smith att!iwsgw!wcsa wcsa@iwsgw.att.com "It's life, Captain, but not as we know it."