I have never understood why Oliver and Joseph were able to write the BOM more than three times faster than Martin Harris and Joseph were able to write the first 116 pages. If Joseph's silly story of the stone in the hat is true--which only a religious ignoramus could believe--the reformed Egyptian characters appeared on something resembling parchment and then the English translation appeared sentence by sentence underneath so Joseph was just a reader and there is no reason the translation should have gone faster with Oliver than with Martin unless Oliver had magical speed writing abilities, which no one ever claimed.

If Joseph was the author and just dictated to both Martin and then Oliver, it doesn't make much sense that he could do it so much faster with Oliver just because Joseph had become more adept at dictating with his experience with the 116 pages or because Oliver could maybe write a little faster.

The difference could be explained if Oliver brought text with him that he had written over the previous several months or if he brought View of the Hebrews with him which Joseph and Oliver then used to speed up the writing or if Oliver wrote text at night after the "translation" sessions were over.

I have prayed about this, but Zeus has not given me a burning feeling in my heart. Anyone have any ideas?

Because they were liars.

We have no idea how long it took them. Also we don’t know what format Salomon Spalding’s manuscript (that Smith et al stole) was in. They may have used those very pages complete with old Soloman’s notes in the margins.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/16/2022 10:28AM by Kathleen.

"Translated" by the gift and power of. ..fraud.

Remember at the time this was being done there was a huge revivalist movement in the United States. Therefore creative novelists such as the aforementioned group were able to perpetrate frauds on a very large scale.
When you consider his tendency toward fantacizing coupled with the general trending it becomes understandable how such deception could occur.
It became a matter of taking advantage of the situation and capitalizing on it.
I think Joe Jr. got caught up believing his own bullshit and paid the price for this with his life!

Somewhere there is an eyewitness - a neighbor who dropped in the Smiths house that said he saw a stranger (thinking it was Rigdon) gathered with Joseph Smith and Oliver with many open books on the table.

It was early "copy & paste."

It’s a good point. I wonder if any scholars out there have better answers.

There could be different reasons.

One is that the “method” or circumstances changed.

One that makes sense is that Oliver Cowdery was in on it and Harris wasn’t. And/or it had to do with Spaulding Theory.

Or maybe Smith was making it up as he went with Harris but with Cowdery he took that year gap to write or come up with the material and storyline and then had more ready with Cowdery.

I’m not really sure. That’s a good question though and I’m curious if someone has a good answer to it.

As someone pointed out above, they could have been lying--on purpose or inadvertently, as the tale of "translating" the BoM passed by word of mouth. Or, if the timeline is truthful, JS might have gotten his story firmed up and was able to spit it out faster and more concisely for Oliver than Martin, where he might have been more wandering and detailed in his inventions. Or JS might have changed his mind after the "loss" of the 116 pages and specifically decided on a different story/story elements, hence the attribution of the current books of Nephi to "abridged" plates, deliberately leaving things out he had previously included when Martin was writing.

Not to defend the fraudsters, but comparing numbers of days doesn't account for how many hours each day were spent "translating." And Harris could've been a very slow writer.

I think you're probably right that Harris was a slow writer. He certainly wasn't an intellectual, seeing some the other rubbish he also believed (and claimed to have experienced).

If you want to go down this rabbit hole (which is indeed a VERY interesting one ;-), visit the site put together by a team including Craig Criddle, who sometimes posts here - Hi Craig ;-).

It's at https://mormonleaks.com

(and no, it's not the one that leaks anything à la wikileaks which I think is a dot org...).

There, you'll learn learn a lot about the pre-BoM period, the production of the BoM, and detailed stylistic comparisons using sophisticated software (the details are on the site which show how the BoM MIGHT have been a collaborative effort by a sort of cabal of people who coincidentally became early mormons while dowbplaying their prior links (family but not only...).

There isn't of course the smoking gun that we'd all love to find, but it does present some very interesting evidence, notably about the replacvement of the 115 pages. Like I say, no smoking gun, but a superb presentation of what they've found and a convincing possible explanation of the troubled birth of the BoM.

And yes, Anziano, it's all lies anyway ;-) but they're quite interesting lies.

Have a great weekend everyone :-D

Thank you,SM,for your endorsement! Your support means a lot to me.

While the pandemic has slowed us down, I am hopeful we can publish new material this summer. A teaser is a new episode - "Lost Episode Found" - that ties together the Book of Ether (in the Book of Mormon) and the Book of Moses (in the Pearl of Great Price). This missing episode includes information on the origins of Royal Arch Masonry, secret combinations, the story of Enoch, and the Adamic language,including "tongue singing" and its interpretation by Rigdon and Pratt, CC

That witness, if that’s true, seeing Joe, Ollie, and Marty sitting around with reference books out, makes helluva lot more sense than Joe shoving his head in a hat and making shit up.

He was a professional scribe, and it averages out to eight pages per day. Certainly not anything that would qualify as miraculous, or even outside of the normal range for someone who was a professional scribe in the 1800s.

Remember!
The First Edition of the Book of MORMON witness statement reads the Joe was the AUTHOR of the book…

When was it changed to ‘translator’?
Did all the witnesses assent to that change?

We, dear readers, will Never Know…

First we ditch the myth that Joseph wrote the book of mormon in a short period of time.

Joseph's own mother wrote that even at a young age Joseph told his family tales of the early inhabitants of the Americas to include their manner of dress, agriculture, buildings, warfare and religion. Hence Joseph had a lot of background material in mind for at least ten years.

Second. How many years did Joseph "visit" the plates? Do you really believe he hadn't worked out a fair portion of the story by that time?

How much of the text is copied from the bible?

Lastly, Cowdrey was a school teacher. I'm sure he was able to write at a good speed.

Lastly and to me most incredible, supposedly there was no punctuation used. Not sure what to think about that.

This is all correct.

The family stories around the hearth, the biblical plagiarism, the 116 pages of first draft, the later editing by Orson Pratt and Franklin Richards and others: JS had worked on the BoM for many years, and at least some of the contributions by others are well documented and even acknowledged.

>>Lastly and to me most incredible, supposedly there was no punctuation used. Not sure what to think about that.

It's developmental in writing. At the elementary school level, we see it a lot -- perfectly good sentences with no punctuation. What was the educational level of these people?

Interesting that all the witnesses signatures were in the same handwriting.

https://debunking-cesletter.com/witnesses-1/missing-original-8-witnesses-document/

That's an amusing document, Kathleen. The church would have us believe that the eight witnesses were present but asked Cowdery to sign for them.

Yep. They dressed up, brushed their hair and traveled to the site but then were too tired to sign their own names to what was by far the most important document of their lives.

If I recall correctly Harris was a somewhat dim witted Farmer ( as testified by his wife). Cowdery was a somewhat educated ( for 1820s rural America) school teacher. I have read some things he wrote and I suspect he was much better at generating the fraudulent documents.