Regarding mark Hoffman-he would steal blank pages from old books (so the paper would be authentic), then forge the documents he wanted. what surprised me was the fact that the LDS church never hired a competent expert to authenticate the stuff that Hoffman was selling. Which leads me to suspect that the church is hiding a lot more unpleasant details about smith and his activities. At any rate, the “seer stones” make sense-mediums of Smith’s time often indulged in “scrying” (staring into a crystal ball, or rock, or some such object. His treasure finding activities were well known-only he never seems to have found anything.
Is the joke that Hoffman forged the pardon, or am I not getting it?
Regards,
Shodan
I believe that the Church did hire experts to authenticate Hoffman’s documents – the hitch is in the “competent” part. But I point out that there were plenty of other cases of examined forgeries that were initially passed as “authentic”, such as Clifford Irving’s forged Howard Hughes autobiography.
It’s been a while since I read the books on the Hoffman Documents Scandal (there have been a LOT of them, and for a while I tried to read each new one as it came out), so my recollection isn’t great, but I do recall them pointing out that the forgeries were obviously that – in retrospect. When they were new and Hoffman had no obvious weak points, everyone took them for the real thing, including the hired experts.
Interestingly, one of the first to sound a warning was Gerald Tanner, of the Utah Lighthouse Ministries, a group of former LDS who self-published books that challenged the LDS Church and its interpretations. They published many pieces with cites from old church histories and documents, and Hoffman undoubtedly mined their publications for information on forging his stuff. You’d think that Tanner would be happy with Hoffman’s often scandalous spin on LDS history, but he was bothered by the “Too Good To Be True” nature of Hoffman’s documents. And he seemed to be bothered that so much of it seemed to incorporate material related to specific things the ULM had recently published (and which he, of course, was very familiar with). His was the first skeptical piece about Hoffman that I read, suggesting forgery. I have to admit that I, following what had been going on, was surprised. I thought that the MacLellin documents stash would turn out to be real. It wasn’t (although a stash of MacLellin’s documents DID turn up in the wake of Hoffman’s claims – in Texas, and unrelated to Hoffman’s work). Forging an entire collection must have looked too large and outrageous to forge, and to maintain the pretence, so Hoffman started setting his bombs.
No one else saw the Gold Plates. When they were on the table or shelves, they would always be covered. A few people hefted the covered plates but no one was allowed to see them.
After the book was finished, 11 witnesses, all members of the inner circle and mostly those of close family or similar ties, were shown the plates in a vision. Dan Vogel, the historian, has said that this was a guided visionary experience. The point is that no one but Smith ever saw the plates.
The only ones who believe there were actual plates are Mormons (a term which encompasses not only the LDS faith but other branches).
The witnesses’ testimony is such that it sounds like they actually saw the plates. However, in 1837 and 38, there was the Kirtland Bank Scandal in what is called a Ponzi scheme, Smith and close associates set up a bank which although it was not chartered, it issued notes and went bust, leaving a lot of people angry at the founders. Smith and his right hand man Sidney Rigdon (the key leader in the CT of the origin of BoM) had to flee Kirtland in the middle of the night.
In the aftermath of the mess, many of the members started to doubt Smith. During one meeting, the aforementioned former farmer and BoM witness Martin Harris admitted that they had not seen the Gold Plates with their natural eyes, but had in a vision. The two related scandals caused a schism and many of the followers broke with Smith. One predominate leader claimed that there were only 20 people left who called Smith a prophet.
(Confusing yet? The point is that one of the chief witnesses acknowledged that no one but Smith had seen the plates.)
Back to the translation. The room would not be darkened. Smith would just put his head into a hat with the seer stone in it, and draw the hat to his face like this.
He would dictate and the scribe would write down what he said. It wasn’t really a trick unless one believes he was reading something, rather than simply making up stuff as he went along.
Don’t encourage me, I’m blowing off enough housework as it is. But thanks.
Yip, you got it. The joke is that Brigham Young is long dead.
My bolding.
As CalMeacham says, they did hire experts, but without the red flags then the testing wasn’t as rigorous as the testing done after it became clear that they were forgeries.
One of Hoffman’s former personal and research assistants Brent Metcalfe gave an interview to MormonStories and talks about how the LDS church were a bunch of amateurs who were eager to get the documents out of sight. Brent was in my congregation growing up and my mother was his cub scout leader.
For your question if the LDS church was hiding a lot more details, then yes. A case in point is the seer stone, which they could have shown years ago. The reaction to the Salamander Letter which Tanner of the Lighthouse Ministry questioned, as relayed by CalMeacham, was vigorously defended by the top church leaders leading many of us to believe they were hiding a lot more.
Yes. It was only after they were examined after the bombings that it became obvious. One point is that the type of ink used by Hoffman matched the time period so without more sophisticated testing, that passed, along with the authentic paper.
The forensic testing afterward revealed, for example, that all of the forgeries had been hung up to dry with slight running of the ink.
The interview with Brent may be interesting to you. The whole series is hours long, but the part about the bombing is at the 1 hr 25 min. mark. Brent was a potential target of Hoffman.
Hoffman had borrowed a great deal of money from church leaders ($170,000 in 1985 dollars) and from banks with the guarantied by church leaders and they were pushing him to sell the collection quickly. Brent goes through the details. Hoffman had forged a copy of the Oath of a Freeman and was in negotiation with the Library of Congress to sell it for $1.5 million. Hoffman had been bankrolling himself with loans and they were all coming due.
Devout members of any of the denominations may be interested in the fact I can offer exact replicas, entirely stone-made. of these stones post-free from Hong Kong for $2500 each [ 15% off for 3+ ] as numbered Heritage Legacy Wonder Stones, finely wrapped in acid-free parchment straw in cedar-wood boxing; along with a descriptive illustrated booklet and signed guarantee that it is a stone.
If a hoard of genuine Joe Smith documents were discovered, that stated:
-Smith was a fraud, took money from people to find buried treasure
-made up the BOM from books he had read
-defrauded investors in the bank he set up
-lied about his “revelations” (i.e., they never happened
What would the old guys (apostles) who run the church do?
You don’t need a hypothetical. We have examples of what they did do with things that put the church and its founder in less-than-favorable light. As TokyoBayer has pointed out, although I didn’t state it, the Church wanted to get hold of Hoffman’s documents in order to sit on them and keep them out of public view*
So when the Joseph Smith papyri I mentioned above as forming the basis of The Book of Abraham came out, the Church minimized any statements about them or anything referring to them. In particular, they downplayed the significance of a document that provided a translation of the papyri, giving the original text and the English equivalent. This was particularly embarrassing to the Church, since the original engravings of the papyri included in the BoA were somewhat obscure and difficult to read, but the actual papyri removed all doubt about what the original Egyptian script was. And, now that hieroglyphics and hieratic can be read, a translation by an Egyptologist could be made. Comparing this with the Church’s character-by-character translation showed that they did not agree. The LDS Church couldn’t suppress the translation – it had been printed, and was available in the public domain, but they downplayed it, saying that there was no evidence that this supposed translation was the work of Joseph Smith or authorized by him.
One reason Gerald Tanner was annoyed and suspicious of Hoffman’s “Too Good To Be True” documentary finds was because non-LDS researchers had just before that had successes in unearthing genuine documents that called the LDS interpretation of Church History into question, and Hoffman’s documents, if forged, would have the effect of lessening confidence in these actual finds. One example was the then-recent discovery of accounts of Joseph Smith’s trial for fraud in Bainbridge NY – a case where, appropriately for this thread, he had apparently used his seer stone to look for buried treasure (He is reported to have put it into his hat to divine the location of the treasure, just as he was later said to put it in his hat for translation):
For an opposing view:
http://shields-research.org/General/LDS_Leaders/1stPres/Joseph_Smith/1826_Trial_Walters.htm
Here’s the Wikipedia page including it:
- Not the “Anthon Transcript”, though – they were proud of that. I have a reproduction of it I got at the LDS History Museum, from before its fraudulent nature was revealed.
It’s a pretty rock.
But I’d be more impressed with the wreckage of one of Xenu’s interstellar DC-8s. :dubious:
In retrospect, you never know why you believed such things so fervently. We knew that Joseph Smith received the Golden Plates with the actual history of the Israelites in the New World and translated them with the Urim and Thummim spectacles, just like the Church had said he had. It was as common knowledge as we knew that the sun would rise again in the East and set in the West.
I was wondering why this mattered so much. On the face of it, the story itself is such that changing a little of the detail shouldn’t matter, right? If you accept the notion that Santa Claus exists, that he is able to fly around the whole world in one night, why do kids get caught up with the minor detail that the house doesn’t have a fireplace?
Growing up as Mormons, we were taught that it was important, that things like this mattered. Santa’s method of entry into the house was important, and Smith did not use common stones to translate the word of God. This is why people are leaving over minor details such as these.
Most people wouldn’t know them, but the Tanners were the first people to really start to look into the truth claims and to publish the facts, but without the exaggerations of the old anti-Mormons. They had been Mormons themselves, but had been troubled with what they were finding out. They began their multi-decade mission of research and publishing back in the 60s. I didn’t hear their names until after I had parted ways with Mormonism, but we all believed they were of the devil.
The Tanners were among the first to uncover evidence that the large portions of the Joseph Smith official history was compiled after his death and that the portions written by Smith were made years after the fact. For over 150 years, those quasi-canonized volumes were accepted as the, well, gospel truth.
I’m thinking of parallels with another religion and another book. The book may well start with the letter “B”.
In most cases, those parallels are quite valid, I think. The main differences are that the historical revisions in Mormonism happened so relatively recently, where there are so many contemporaneous accounts from both within and without the Church that contradict them; and that the vast majority of devout Mormons took them literally and at face value. With mainstream Christianity, it’s a relatively small group of fundamentalists who believe the world was literally created in six days, and practically nobody believes that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John each sat at a desk and wrote his gospel out personally. But Mormons, at least in the 80s though early 2000s when I moved among them, believed all the aspects of the Joseph Smith story to be literal truth, and believed the BoM to be a literally perfect book.
Regarding the “apostles” who run the LDS church-are they not continually receiving new revelations? If major parts of Smith’s writings were to be rejected, what would the LDS church be like? i suspect it will evolve into another protestant sect, with no more golden plates, BOM, except as folklore.
The LDS Church is led by a prophet, called the President of the Church, who is selected from among the apostles. LDS belief holds that a living prophet trumps a dead one, so if the current prophet said tomorrow (as prophet) that certain parts of Joseph Smith’s story or writings were specious and to be disregarded, that would be the new doctrine. Whether that would be unanimously accepted, or would create a schism where more self-described “Mormon fundamentalists” left to start their own sects, is anyone’s guess.
Looks like the church spent a lot of time, trying to refute the evidence (of the 1826 trial). I notice that the church doesn’t try to find evidence for the BOM in Central America anymore-so i conclude that there is very little there that supports the BOM.
But there’s a big difference between the Bible and Book of Mormon: In the Bible, most of the facts are correct.
I’m talking about the basic, dry, physical facts: (not the miracles and theology)
The geography of the land of Canaan and Palestine, the names of the cities and tribes living nearby, the languages spoken, the technologies ,the money used, the types of weapons, the names of Babylonian kings and Roman caesars,etc …are all verifiable by objective historians.
I don’t know about that; I would argue that the biggest purportedly historical events of the Old Testament (i.e. the Exodus) and the New Testament (i.e. the trial and execution of Jesus) are very much in dispute.
Your use of this idiom in this thread now has me wondering about the etymology of the phrase (and its variations) “talking through his hat”. I’m wondering if it came from the Joseph Smith story. Google isn’t much help with this.
I have always believed so.
That depends pretty heavily on which part you’re reading. Everything previous to saaaay Rehoboam is probably pretty fictional, in the OT, veering into legend and fairy tale as you go farther back. And while a lot of the names are real, they’re not things that existed at the time they’re spoken of and/or didn’t mean what the writers of the Bible thought they did. The Canaanites, for example, weren’t a different group than the Israelites and the two never fought each other. The Israelite kingdom was, probably, a break off group of Canaanites that adopted some Midianite customs, then over time those people migrated back North and, over even more time, became the dominant people on the Jewish lands and were able to successfully shout out other competing Canaanite peoples (like the Edomites and Moabites), and force their religion on the rest of everyone. The conquest of Canaan, so far as archaeology tells us, is fictional.
In the NT, the fact that Jesus and everyone accepts the fictional parts of the OT is probably one of the best pieces of evidence against his divine knowledge. But since they did that, there’s not a lot of new material that was introduced that can be shot down.
To fulfill the “messiah” tradition, the Nativity was created from whole cloth.
Obviously, the magical acts (feeding the multitude, changing water into wine, etc.) should be considered to be fiction.
I’d personally doubt the veracity of the story of Peter going to court to watch Jesus’ trial.
But mostly the NT omits information or portrays things in a way that is misleading. On the whole, I think that what is there, that isn’t magical, is reasonably true. But, to get to the point where everything that they said could be true, they probably had to cut out 7/8ths of everything which could have been included that was also true. So I’d still call it a work of questionable reliability.