If Joseph Smith supposedly saw the plates in Sept. of 1823and didn't receive them until 1827 does not that give this very creative person four years to vividly conjure up a story and book?
Let us look at this thing rationally. His mother told of his creative stories of ancient American indians, there customs their dress and many other things about them several years before he claimed to have received the metal plates.
Solomon Spalding's Manuscript found, Ethan smith's View of the Hebrews and several others were available to him at that time.
It seem logical to me that he did in fact plagiarizer many of the ideas presented in the Book of Mormon from these sources.
The descriptions of his “translating” methods cause one to wonder what was really going on?
You have here a very creative,if somewhat devious, mind operating. He was the classic narcissist and he played it to the hilt.

I really don’t much care if JS cooked up the BoM from scratch, plagiarized it, got it from Oliver or Sidney or whomever, or found it on the kitchen floor.

What matters is what it is not. It is not a historical account of events that actually took place. The actual evidence of the history of American First Nations contradicts the narrative eight ways from Sunday. If it came from God, then God writes second-rate fiction, and had better not give up his day job.

Come to think of it, he’s not that good at his day job either,

The contents are what is important to me too. It doesn’t matter how the book was synthesized, only that there’s nothing actually ancient in it. I mean, there are a few pearls of wisdom that were already 19th century memes, but there’s absolutely nothing that has panned out as actual ancient America has revealed itself. On the contrary, the book is riddled with impossibilities and absurdities. It’s like really bad Tolkien.

“The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so 'slow,' so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle — keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate.”


― Mark Twain

Oh, but it makes such a lurid tale of having to visit the site of the plates every year at a certain magical time "while the Lord prepared Joseph to receive the plates." It's closely related to his "slippery treasure" scam and the story of the three guys trying to knock him down to steal the plates.

Any good con-man is not going to tell a simple, straight story--it has to be embellished and dramatic.

the FIRST 8 witnesses wrote - in their testimony - that JS was the AUTHOR of the BOM...

then along came ChurchCo who altered their testimony & changed it to 'translator'...

After the 116 pages were lost, and JS couldn't replicate them, doesn't that show that he was ad-libbing? I've heard children tell a long involved story that they are making up as they go along.

If JS had copied it from the Bible, Spalding, Ethan Smith, whatever, did he write it as a manuscript, calling up those various ideas and then read it into the hat? Or was he such a gifted storyteller that he could just recite off the top of his head the story he'd constructed from the stories he'd heard and read.

That he couldn't reproduce the 116 pages tells me the he was making it up as he went and speaks to his verbal ability to spin a yarn.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/09/2021 05:08PM by Twinker.