I enjoyed Daniel Peterson’s latest Deseret New article. I know, I know. But I stopped reading before he actually made his point. I enjoyed the comments made by some early readers of the Book of Mormon.

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“That spindle shanked ignoramus Jo Smith,” as Abner Cole would shortly describe him.

The Methodist preacher John P. Greene quickly dismissed it as a “nonsensical fable.”

It was a “miserable production,” sniffed the Ashtabula (Ohio) Journal in 1831.

The editors of the Brockport (New York) Free Press pronounced the Book of Mormon “a fiction of hobgoblins and bugbears.” The volume is “a bungling and stupid production,” said the Religious Herald in 1840. And, in their 1841 "Historical Collections of the State of New York," John W. Barber and Henry Howe described it as “mostly a blind mass of words … without much of a leading plan or design. It is in fact such a production as might be expected from a person of Smith’s abilities and turn of mind.”

In 1842, Daniel Kidder found it “nothing but a medley of incoherent absurdities,” and J.B. Turner called it “a bundle of gibberish.” In 1930, the literary critic Bernard DeVoto declared it “a yeasty fermentation, formless, aimless and inconceivably absurd.”

"Medly of incoherent absurdities" Kidder nailed it on the head.

And yet mormons use the (fallacious) argument for its veracity -- that it would be impossible for Smith to produce such a literary wonder.

I had someone use that argument on me once. I let them know that not everyone considered it such a literary wonder. And I quoted Mark Twain ("chloroform in print").

The response I got was, "Only anti-mormons say things like that."

Sigh.

As someone said:

"If anyone is foolish enough or misled enough to accept 531 pages of a mostly plagiarized text, teeming with blatant racism, disturbing God-sanctioned beheadings and gross inaccuracies in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, genetics, biology, demography, geology, history, linguistics, physics, without honestly attempting to account for these issues - especially without accounting for the book's "discoverer" being a convicted conman, child-rapist, polyandrist, adulterer and magic rock enthusiast - if that is the case, then such a person, elect or otherwise, has been deceived; and if he or she stays in the Mormon Church, it must be done by crawling over or under or around concrete scientific evidence and objective reality itself to do so."

Oregonboy quotes:
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> As someone said:
>
> "If anyone is foolish enough or misled enough to
> accept 531 pages of a mostly plagiarized text,
> teeming with blatant racism, disturbing
> God-sanctioned beheadings..." et cetera.

Why blame spindle-shanked Smith for the mess?

His scrutators and handlers were likely the ones who pilfered the school-book skillfully analyzed below:

https://wordtreefoundation.github.io/thelatewar/

But, but, but, but the chiasms! How could they not be inspired???

As all authors do, the "spindle shanked ignoramus Jo Smith" would have been eager to read the reviews of his novel. Upon coming across "a fiction of hobgoblins and bugbears" he immediately had the book edited to say cureloms and cummims. It was an expensive edit but he didn't care--it wasn't his money anyway.

I love the terms a "blind mass of words" and "a bundle of gibberish," although I like what we call the same thing today--"word salad."