Posted by:
randyj
(
)
Date: September 04, 2016 09:45PM
I appreciated the Widtsoe quote at the beginning. That was back in the days when church leaders and apologists steadfastly denied all of the accounts of Joseph Smith's fraudulent money-digging practices---even though Smith himself admitted to it:
"'Was not Joseph Smith a money digger?' Yes, but it was never a very profitable job for him, as he only got fourteen dollars a month for it."
And even though Smith admitted in his 1838 autobiography that he went to Pennsylvania to work for Josiah Stowell specifically to look for an "old Spanish silver mine"; and his mother, Lucy Mack Smith, wrote that Stowell hired Joseph "on account of having heard that he possessed certain keys, by which he could discern things invisible to the natural eye"---those "keys" being his seer stone(s).
I also appreciated the quote from the 1831 "Palmyra Reflector":
"It is well known that Jo Smith never pretended to have any communion with angels, until a long period after the pretended finding of his book, and that the juggling of himself or father, went no further than the pretended faculty of seeing wonders in a 'peep stone,' and the occasional interview with the spirit, supposed to have the custody of hidden treasures." (THE REFLECTOR, Feb. 18, 1831)
I note that most of the other quotes in the article were from sources decades after the events occurred. Many Mormon apologists, of course, reject a lot of those sources, on the grounds that they're either too far removed and too late, or that some of them were obtained by the anti-Mormon researcher Philastus Hurlbut. That's why I always try to cite the pre-Hurlbut sources, which are 1833 and earlier. For instance, Mormon apologists discount the late accounts of Smith's 1826 court hearing. But the one written by Abram Benton in 1831 cannot be so easily dismissed:
http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/dbroadhu/ny/miscnyse.htmTo read it, scroll down to the "Evangelical Magazine And Gospel Advocate" of April 9, 1831.
Also, many years ago, when I was researching these issues, I compiled some of the early published accounts regarding Smith's money-digging, which also related how he and Sidney Rigdon "invented" Mormonism:
http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1506373,1506777#msg-1506777This kind of early information should be factored into articles written on this subject.
One more item: even though most Mormon apologists have traditionally rejected all of the reports of Smith's money-digging which were collected by Hurlbut, two of those testators were Isaac Hale, Joseph's father-in-law, and Peter Ingersoll, who was a young man that Joseph had hired to truck Emma's belongings. But an article in the February 2001 Ensign magazine cites Hale's and Ingersoll's affidavits as credible historical sources:
https://www.lds.org/ensign/2001/02/joseph-smiths-susquehanna-years?lang=engIt's kinda difficult for Mopologists to reject Hurlbut's affidavits, when the church's official magazine quotes from them.