There is very strong evidence to suggest that some historical records have intentionally been altered to change the meaning.
https://uncorrelatedmormonism.com/most-of-church-history-is-suspicious/

However, the claim is made that records in private journals, public meeting minutes, and sworn statements are either purposefully deceptive or have been altered in a way to reach a given conclusion. These alterations were purportedly done at some future time to establish a narrative in the past. Of course, it would be natural to assume some are, however, are they all?

The question though, is since Brigham was essentially king then why would he feel the need to execute a massive conspiracy to alter records that essentially no one would read for 100 years? How could he get a conspiracy to involve so many people? How could his conspiracy be remarkably consistent so early in the timeline?

It is suggested that these were either forged or intentionally written to be deceptive.
Examples:
HCK journal suggesting there was a special group (Anointed Quorum) (May or June 1842)
https://catalog.churchofjesuschrist.org/assets/ea3055f9-c274-4988-8815-eba70af1007d/0/114

HCK letter to Pratt suggesting Joseph thought Freemasonry was linked to priesthood (June 17 1842)
https://catalog.churchofjesuschrist.org/assets/707c7146-38a5-41e6-98d8-1cad8d89bcc5/0/0

Council of Fifty meeting minutes suggesting Joseph wanted secrecy (March 11th, 1844)
https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/council-of-fifty-minutes-march-1844-january-1846-volume-1-10-march-1844-1-march-1845/28
https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/journal-december-1842-june-1844-book-4-1-march-22-june-1844/33
https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/minutes-14-march-1844/2
https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/council-of-fifty-minutes-march-1844-january-1846-volume-1-10-march-1844-1-march-1845/298

The church collected early journals by telling members they were important records to be archived only for them never to be seen again. The ones that still exist were cherry picked, so why does it matter if they are authentic when beliefs are entirely subjective? I can believe I saw Elvis dining with Tupac. Should you believe my account?

To me the church rewriting history is what cultures are supposed to do. A culture that does not lie eventually disintegrates. The purpose of a living prophet is to maintain the fabric of lies.

When I figured out the church was made up, it blew my mind. Everything I believed was a lie. Well, dumping the church did not solve that problem. Every human cultural belief is essentially a lie. And it's the truth, if you believe it. That's what "the world is maya" means. Which is fine because, as Donald Hoffman has demonstrated, evolutionary biology has left us unable to process reality.

Mormonism's value proposition, direct experience of spirit and personal revelation, has been strangled by rigid control structures. It could be made to work, but the leaders have failed at that as well as failed to adequately maintain the fabric of lies. They did not lie enough. Their job is to create fantasy.

Although the church is very wealthy, it's piss poor in terms of culture. It has stopped serving its members and uses them instead. So no thanks, I'll get my fantasies elsewhere.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/11/2024 07:31AM by bradley.

A lot to think about in your post. Nice slant. Lies need tending to, haha.

Makes me think too many people do not understand the difference between information and fact. There is a lot of "information" about the Mormon church for example.

When I left the Mormon church I left belief and faith behind with it. I assume nothing is what it seems but hopefully will be revealed. Even then, revealed, is it true?

For me it has been a great advantage to navigate life in that way. I don't get disappointed much as expecting the worst leaves you no where to go but up. I hate that song "High Hopes" and all the other sugary songs and memes.

And the church being "piss poor in terms of culture"? You nailed it. Funny to think now in the fifties as a kid about all the good stuff our little mountain ward had in the way of culture and real friendship.


I do understand how traumatizing it is for many to realize the Mormon church is a fraud. For me, it is still all these years later, the best moment of my life because it made the rest of my life possible. I felt like I was floating on air when the truth struck. And that is one of the few truths I never had to reassess.

It had been reported that GBH's favorite film was Pollyanna.

Now it's been suggested that Gordo couldn't stand actress Hayley Mills and never went to see the movie.

That's a testimony breaker right there.

“Most” of church history has been altered?

I would say it’s more like some parts of church history have been conveniently ignored. Some of it is heavily spin-doctored. But actually altered? Maybe some, but hardly “most”.

Surely there are two forms of history here.

The first is the fraud itself, with false history of JS's spiritual life, the fraudulent history in the BoM, the D&C, and the PoGP, the lies about the origins of polygamy, all the way through the crickets and Packard's lies about the spirit whistling through the building when the church decided to lift the priesthood ban. All of these are historical lies and they are the very foundation of the religion and community.

The second is the secular history of the movement: the birth and growth of the movement, its political troubles and migrations, Deseret and Utah, the internationalization of the church and religion, etc. That history is indeed generally available (although the parts of it that approach the first category, like activity and growth rates, are falsified).

In other words, I think the church's history is both true and false depending on what sort of "history" one has in mind.

Given the suppression and alteration of Lucy Mack Smith's history, we know the Church both omits and alters.

Here is some additional confirmation of the same lifted from https://proveallthingsholdfasttogood.wordpress.com/the-hiding-of-church-history/:

I notice the interpolations because having been employed in the Historian’s office at Nauvoo by Doctor Richards, and employed, too, in 1845, in compiling this very autobiography, I know that after Joseph’s death his memoir was “doctored” to suit the new order of things, and this, too, by the direct order of Brigham Young to Doctor Richards and systematically by Richards.

Inez Smith, “Biography of Charles Wesley Wandell,” J of His 3 (Jan. 1910): 455-63.

I do think it must be a big job navigating all the areas that have been "clarified" or contradicted by prophets and GAs over the years. They deemphasize what they want to go on the back shelves of history. The diehard historians might bother to know the details, but the rank and file membership won't really care about the history.

They may not actually alter many documents, but they definitively alter the perception of what happened. They always have the trump card of saying the CURRENT prophet can transcend anything from the past.

When you study mythology, you often find several variations of the stories passed along. Religion, like you pointed out, tries hard to control the variations for the times.

Imagine if you will a young missionary who spends two years knocking on doors and testifying that in the Spring of 1820 a young boy named Joseph Smith wanted to know which church was true and went into a grove of trees to pray (you know the rest).

Then imagine that years later that former missionary reads a Gospel Topic Essay on the church website that admits there are multiple accounts of that event. No matter how much the church tries to say these accounts somehow complement each other, they very clearly are conflicting stories.

What is that former missionary supposed to do?

If the former missionary has integrity, with that awareness, he resigns from the churhc.

HA. Good one!

EOD's answer may work unless the hypothetical missionary is a heterosexual 'sister'

David Whitmer in his pamphlet "An Address to all Believers in Christ" details changes made to revelations before they were printed in the Book of Commandments.

He details events he was eye witness to that were altered by the church before publication.

Of course he may be brushed off as an unreliable witness but....how does that bode for the church to discredit the "testimony" of one of the three witnesses to the book of mormon?

  
  

I relate this to the re-telling and re-interpretation of the JoD; those 'notes' were taken and distributed by ChurchCo, but now the 'most controversial' passages are being disclaimed.

Yup, that's how ChurchCo operates.

My mom was very active in Daughters of the Utah Pioneers. She always had a big beef with church historians because they whitewashed the real history because it didn’t match up to the official narrative.

"History is a set of lies agreed upon" – Napoleon

A nevermo perspective: what would make you think this organization would keep accurate records and make them available?

Is this organization known for its integrity and scholarship?

Well, when you put it that way...no!

They are completely untrustworthy from the start to present.

Which church hasn't altered history? Starting with Constintine and the NT cannon.

Polishing one's resumé,
either plumping it up
or thinning it out, is
par for the course.

It is an exceptional
person who does not
try to hide his or her
prior failings.

I'm afraid it's not comparable.

It's absolutely comparable. Traditional Christianity underwent radical changes starting with the writing and compilation of the four gospels, then through the Pauline revolution, the assertion of control by the early church fathers, etc.

Christianity in Constantine's day differed radically from what that poor rabbit taught illiterate Jews in the dusty countryside. Jesus never intended that "render unto Caesar" would be applied to his little apocalyptic movement that he said was Jewish and not for the non-Jews who were but dogs eating the table scraps,

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Christianity in Constantine's day differed
> radically from what that poor rabbit taught
> illiterate Jews in the dusty countryside.

Rabbi? Jews were actually highly literate back in that day, much more so than other peoples of the ancient Roman Empire. In fact, learning to read Hebrew may have been a central part of their education both then and now.

Untrue.

Women had zero chance of attaining literacy and the few men that learned to read were those working for the religious and secular authorities.

That's why Jesus's appearing among the wise and lecturing on the Torah was so shocking.




ETA: And the lingua franca of Palestine in Jesus's day was not Hebrew but Aramaic. That was the language in which he and his apostles conversed.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/21/2024 04:50AM by Lot's Wife.

Thank you, LW, for re-establishing the facts, although I admit to rather liking the idea of Jesus being a "poor rabbit" (please don't go back and "correct" it or buck-toothed Jesus will weep;-).

You are a great guy, Tom, even if you did go to posh schools!

Stop it, Gladys!

I think Tom is a prefect example of why Britannia once ruled the waifs!




(Sometimes when I stretch this far, I worry about snapping...!)

Soft Machine Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Thank you, LW, for re-establishing the facts,
> although I admit to rather liking the idea of
> Jesus being a "poor rabbit" (please don't go back
> and "correct" it or buck-toothed Jesus will
> weep;-).

No facts "re-established". The lingua franca was GREEK not Aramaic, with Latin being used by the occupation forces. Jews would talk in Greek to Romans, Egyptians, and other peoples from the region. Some expatriate Jews spoke Greek with the Jews still living there.

Aramaic at the time had some mutual intelligibiity with Hebrew. The Old Testament contains Aramaic scriptures as well as Hebrew. Most male Jews would learn to read Hebrew as part of their religion and both men and women would hear the language every Sabbath at the synagogue.

Repeating a false claim does not make it true. If you want us to believe what you assert, provide sources.


--------------
> No facts "re-established". The lingua franca was
> GREEK not Aramaic, with Latin being used by the
> occupation forces. Jews would talk in Greek to
> Romans, Egyptians, and other peoples from the
> region.

Are you telling us that Jesus spoke Greek and Latin? That his disciples did?

Prove it.


------------------
> Some expatriate Jews spoke Greek with the
> Jews still living there.

Sure, the religious and political elite in Palestine spoke Greek and so did those very rare upper-class Greeks who lived elsewhere in the empire. But that has zero to do with the dirt farmers, manual laborers, and impoverished fishermen who followed Jesus.

Have you even read the gospels?


-----------------
> Most male Jews would
> learn to read Hebrew as part of their religion and
> both men and women would hear the language every
> Sabbath at the synagogue.

Where do you get this stuff? You're reading modern Christian behavior into a religion that functioned radically differently. First, it's not even clear that synagogues existed in Jesus's day. Archaeologists argue over whether 6-9 sites could be described as such, and synagogues didn't become central to Judaism until the real center of the religion--the temple--was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. Synagogues were a REPLACEMENT for the temple, not a Mormon/Christian concomitant thereof.

So no, in Jesus's day Jews did not dress up in their Saturday Best and sit down in pews to listen comprendingly to lectures in a liturgical language that had been extinct for five centuries any more than medieval Catholics understood the Latin to which they were weekly subjected.

I agree with Lottie. There was a really wide divide between the poor Jews of the countryside and the more prosperous Jews of the cities and the priestly class. The poor Jews got it coming from all sides. Their meager temple offerings (if they could afford to go at all,) were looked down upon. If they suffered from a serious illness they were considered "unclean" and forbidden from the temple altogether. Not only were the poor Jews subjected to the 10% tithe (for services that they could not use anyway,) but they also had to pay the Roman tax. They were getting squished hard.

These were the people that Jesus was embracing. Jesus had no time for the priestly class *or* for the gentiles. He effected a cure on the one gentile woman, comparing her to a dog begging for table scraps (as Lottie stated.) He cured another only at the insistence of the Jewish town elders, because the gentile had helped them.

"Christianity underwent radical changes"

And that history wasn't hidden or rewritten.

Which is why you know it.

And that's what's not comparable.

You'll have to help me with your logic here, Eric3.

-----------------
> "Christianity underwent radical changes"
>
> And that history wasn't hidden or rewritten.

You concede that Christianity "underwent radical changes" but then say the history was not "rewritten." How exactly does the history get revised without being rewritten?

Also, you seem to argue that if something is subsequently discovered, it "wasn't hidden" in the first place. By that reasoning, Richard Nixon didn't hide Watergate because ultimately everyone found out. Thomas Jefferson didn't hide his relationship with Sally Hemings because we learned the truth two centuries later. Bernie Madoff didn't commit fraud because the court system eventually uncovered the lies.

Are you sure you want to continue with that argument?


------------
> Which is why you know it.

My knowing the history is irrelevant. The question is whether the Anatolian farmer knew the truth in the second century CE, whether the German peasant knew the correct history in the decades before Luther, whether Joel Osteen's followers today are fully informed about the fact that the resurrection story was not in the Gospel of Mark until it was tacked on several decades later.

What do you think? Did--do--those people know the truth? Did--do--their leaders tell them about the fundamental changes that occurred under the aegis of church leaders at various points of history?


------------
Christianity's history was radically and tendentiously revised several times in order to enhance the power of the church/es. The vast majority of religious leaders today do their best to keep those changes secret.

The fact that some people learned the facts long after the events in question does not change the reality that it was, and remains, hidden from the vast majority of believers.

You concede that Christianity "underwent radical changes" but then say the history was not "rewritten." . . .

Changes and the hiding of changes are not the same thing.

Yeah, that's what I just said. You were the one who elided the two terms, not I.

"You were the one who elided the two terms, not I"

Perhaps you mean conflated the two things? If you're going to accuse others of what you're doing, try to use accurate terms.

Have it your way.

You have now admitted to conflating two very different actions: changing something and then hiding it. It's good to get that straight,

So what do we do? Do you have anything substantial by way of sources to add or should we stand pat on your saying that in Jesus's time Jews were highly literate, spoke Greek and Latin, and worshiped in synagogues that would not be built for several decades?

Do you always put words in other people's mouths, or am I favored for this?

I missed the part where it says the history was hidden or rewritten.

Eric3 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I missed the part where it says the history was
> hidden or rewritten.

Sorry, reply meant for anonynon.

"Christianity underwent radical changes"

And that history wasn't hidden or rewritten.

Which is why you know it.

And that's what's not comparable.

"Christianity underwent radical changes"

And that history wasn't hidden or rewritten.

Which is why you know it.

And that's what's not comparable.

You're wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Christianity

Let me take you down
'Cause I'm going to strawberry fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Strawberry fields forever

“All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust.” - Peter Pan



And in the end, Joseph got what he wanted. He never grew old.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/17/2024 04:57AM by bradley.

"And in the end, Joseph got what he wanted. He never grew old."

Harsh but yep.

Eric3 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> "And in the end, Joseph got what he wanted. He
> never grew old."
>
> Harsh but yep.

And had some fun along the way.

Hey I'm all for his fun as long as it's not at the expense of others.

I've always been skeptical about much of church history. I don't even believe some of the accounts by opponents of the church either because they had an agenda too. One thing I'm skeptical of on that side are the treasure digging stories about young JS — I've always felt there was some sensationalism in there.

The treasure hunting is well documented. Michael Quinn, among others, produced the goods.



ETA: https://www.amazon.com/Early-Mormonism-Magic-World-View/dp/1560850892



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/20/2024 01:02PM by Lot's Wife.

Quinn's fascinating book reveals significant amounts of occult beliefs and practices by the Smiths. Quite an eye opener - and of course, Quinn was excommunicated for it (although he remained a believing mormon...).

It wasn't as good a book as it should have been.

Recall the dates. The Salamander letter was published in 1984, the Hoffman murders occurred in October 1985, the trial came in 1986, and Hoffman admitted his forgeries at the turn of 1987. Quinn's book was published later that year.

The original draft took the Salamander letter seriously; it was almost the unifying theme across the work. As the trial progressed, though, its forgery became clear and Quinn, working under a deadline, must rapidly excise the bits and pieces of his manuscript that discussed the letter. The result was a book that contained a trove of valuable facts but had a weak overall structure.

I wish he and his publisher had agreed to take another year to revise and improve the text before printing it.

I don't think the Salamander Letter is the only problem. A lot of early anti-Mormon literature is based on rumor. I'm not sure I believe it more than Joseph Smith himself.

Most of the early stuff is documented by Leonard Arrington, Quinn himself, Brooks, Bagley, the Tanners, and many others.

If you were to read those sources, you'd know quite well what happened and what did not.

Livid Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I don't think the Salamander Letter is the only
> problem.

And my point was not general. I was recounting what Quinn experienced and did when writing his book. Whether other documents are fraudulent is beside the point.

But but but mah reformed Egyptian….it’s a big job just keeping up to an imaginative scammer….think Missouri and the pile of rocks besides the big skeletal remains and Joey just magically called down the answers….the poor dupes that followed him just sucked it up and many journals likely recorded it….anything too imaginative is likely archived in the top secret files under I’m not sure we teach that…I’m not sure we emphasize that

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTGyhwvdY6k

Lucius Hunt: I am not the one with secrets.

Alice Hunt: What is your meaning?

Lucius Hunt: There are secrets in every corner of this village. Do you not feel it? Do you not see it?

"Secrets sauce the goose
whose gander, and her best
friend, pander to slander."

                    --True Story!

The problem with M. Night's movies is that they rely on one secret.

History is rewritten and much of what people think is history is folklore.