Doesn’t the 116 pages count as an early draft? Didn’t they take lots of breaks incudling hiatuses lasting for months and months? Didn’t Joseph often work behind a sheet where no one could see what he was doing? Was his every waking moment documented in between translation sessions? Where does this incredible number, 60 days, come from?
This comes from what they said they did. An Address to all believers contains much of the story up until Joe put the rock away. This is when Christian Whitmer believed mormonism began to fall. It's for sale for $2.50
Mormon Enigma the story of Emma Smith, contains what she had to say about the event. She wrote down a large part of the BOM as well. And also Days never to be forgotten by Oliver Cowdrery has info on it as well.
really only got underway when Oliver Cowdery arrived in 1829. Supposedly, they then worked tirelessly for a few months finishing the translation. Then got to work on getting it published in 1830 as the "Book of Mormon". (A decision that would later cause one Russell M. Nelson to feel much sadness because it should have been called the "Book of Jesus Christ".)
Even that timeline is suspect. It's a tautology. The miraculous "translation" timeline claimed by Joe and Ollie is true because Joe and Ollie claimed that it was a miraculous translation timeline.
Back to the real world, we should note that Joe started talking about the golden plates as early as 1823 and claimed to have received possession of the plates as early as 1827. So the project was being cooked up for a period of at least 7 years in one form or another. I suspect that the contents started taking shape around 1827 (as the Book of Mormon contents refer back to certain high-profile events that occurred in the New York region in 1826). When Ollie came, they actually spent several months with Ollie polishing and editing Joe's turds and maybe adding some of his own turds. If anyone goes and actually views the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon, it's easy to see that it still wasn't very polished. There were lots of hillbillyisms in it, it was not divided into numbered verses, etc.
The look and feel of the modern editions is very different from the 1830 edition. They were obviously hoping to sell it for a profit. When that didn't work out, they used it as a gimmick for getting into the business of organized religion.
William Morgan was a Freemason/whistle-blower who published books detailing the inner workings of the secret society. Shortly after the publication of his last book, he disappeared and many people in the region believed that he had been killed by Masons, who took their bloody oaths of secrecy seriously.
The William Morgan Affair gave rise to a popular "anti-masonry" movement, based on allegations of secret combinations involving corrupt judges, politicians, law enforcement officers, businessmen, etc. who did favors for each other at the expense of non-members.
The Book of Mormon has a number of references to secret combinations, corrupt judges and other related themes. It's also plausibly argued that Joseph Smith was so obsessed with the William Morgan Affair that many of the made-up names in the Book of Mormon are derived from that--particularly all of the names that are essentially the phonetic equivalent of Mor(g)an minus only the "g", such as Mormon and Moron. There's even an Ammoron and Amoron in the Book of Mormon, which can be seen as taking the last syllable of "William" and combining it with "Mor(g)an" (minus only the "g").
This connection is further reinforced by the fact that Lucinda Morgan (William Morgan's widow) subsequently became one of Joseph Smith's wives.
Also, the temple endowment ceremony "revealed" by Joseph Smith contain many Masonic elements that are identical to items that were included and illustrated in William Morgan's books, including the handshakes, costumes, penalties and the "Five Points of Fellowship."
I wrote a book in two and half months. It just spilled out of me. I wasn't writing by hand though. I had Word on my computer and I type 90 words a minute and some days would go for eight or then hours straight. It was like a fever.
I had over 600 pages at first. The manuscript had good bones when I finished but it was a mess. It took another year to edit, cut, revise, and get it right. Then two editors had a go at it. Joe and Oliver shouldn't have skipped that edit part. But they did. A good editor might have done wonders--so glad they didn't have one.
I always picture Joseph and Oliver sitting there, quill in hand, with a scant number of pages saying, "Man, if this is going to be a companion with the Bible it's got to be four times this thick. Got any ideas Ollie how to plump it up?" And yea, verily, it came to pass that Ollie did.
I'm not ready to reveal myself here, but I have no problem with CZ giving you my email if you would like to check out the book. It is the best thing I have done in my life.
Done & Done Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I'm not ready to reveal myself here, but I have no > problem with CZ giving you my email if you would > like to check out the book. It is the best thing > I have done in my life.
Yes, I would like that very much. CZ just asks that you email him and give him the go-ahead.
This may be somewhat unrelated, but does Mormonism ever attempt to reconcile the obvious anti-masonry found in the BoM with the fact that he became a mason and the Masonic tenets of the temple ceremony?
effort to account for either the anti-masonic themes in the Book of Mormon or the subsequent obvious masonic symbolism and themes incorporated into the temple rituals, symbols etc.
The closest they ever got was just the ambiguous claim that Joseph Smith restored pure masonry, just as he restored the pure Gospel. The idea being that the Freemasonry that existed at the time outside of Mormonism was a corrupt and fallen system, just as the Catholic Church was a corrupt and fallen church.
But I don't think any authority figure in the LDS Church ever attempted to explain the particulars of any of that. Like so much in Mormonism, they just asserted some simplistic claim as a fact and expected the sheep to swallow it without hesitation.
I always heard the "restored Masonry"thing too with this added detail:
That Masonry was a religious rite practiced by Solomon in his temple and that Joseph was restoring it to its unsullied form that the Masons had bastardized. I guess Masonry's pure form was the blood oaths and the Methodist minister and then the new prophets had to un-restore the pure Solomon thing and get rid of the blood oaths and the Methodist minister so someone needs to restore it all over again to its pure form. Apparently they have got the clown costumes right---they can stay.
But Solomon lived before Jesus and if it was so important to God why didn't Jesus give it a booster shot while he was here. Seems the least he could have done in between casting demons out and making fish dinners.
Well, you start with a handful of existing texts, like Spalding's manuscript, or View of the Hebrews, and old sermons, and you have someone off site, like Rigdon, working who knows how long beforehand compiling/plagiarizing while you put on a dog and pony show for your marks. Two, three months later, presto!