Mormon Beginnings - Part 2

Mark Dunagan
12/14/03 - Sunday Evening

Angel or Angels?

For Mormons the visit of an angel to Joseph Smith during the night of September 21, 1823, signaled the beginning of Mormonism.  The modern version of this story says that the angel Moroni (pronounced “more-own-I”) appeared to him.  This claim not only brings condemnation from Scripture (Galatians 1:6-9), but it also contradicts what Joseph Smith previously claimed.  In 1852 he said, “I received the first visitation of angels, which was when I was about fourteen years old” (Deseret News, May 29, 1852).  The 1851 edition of the Pearl of Great Price, which is also different from the modern edition, states that the angel who revealed the golden plates to Joseph Smith was Nephi and not Moroni.  Joseph Smith’s mother, Lucy Mack Smith, wrote a book called “Biographical Sketches”, published in 1853, that states also that the angel’s name was Nephi.  The church’s statement today says that the name Nephi was a misprint and it should have been Moroni.  Yet, this is the same religion that claims that the Bible has been inaccurately translated and that many precious things have been removed from it (1 Nephi 13:26 “for behold, they have taken away from the gospel of the Lamb many parts which are plan and most precious; and also many covenants of the Lord have they taken away”).  This claim also contradicts the clear and precious promises that exist in Scripture concerning the integrity and durability of God’s word (Matthew 24:35; 1 Peter 1:23-25). 

Missing Pages

By June 14, 1828, Joseph Smith had dictated 116 pages of manuscript to Martin Harris from behind a curtain erected to isolate Smith and the supposed plates and the supposed Urim and Thummim from Harris.  “Details of the actual process of translation are unclear.  The only statement by Smith himself, contained in a revelation dictated in 1829, indicates that the process of translation was not automatic, but required considerable thought, and was ultimately governed by a feeling-state verification”(The Mormon Experience, p. 13).  Yet this is contrary to the Biblical instruction on the unreliability of feelings (Proverbs 16:25; Jeremiah 10:23; Acts 26:9 “So then, I thought to myself”).  After the 116 pages were composed, Harris obtained permission, to take them and show them to his wife, yet the manuscript disappeared.  The fate of the lost 116 pages has never been determined.  Smith claims that he then received a revelation in which he was severely chastised, but that the work would go on. Rather than attempting to retranslate the lost portion, he was to render an alternative account of what had been revealed to him.  Compare this story to the Biblical record.  A manuscript that Jeremiah dictated is destroyed by Jehoiakim king of Judah(Jeremiah 36:23), yet Jeremiah is told, “Take again another scroll and write on it all the former words that were on the first scroll which Jehoiakim burned” (36:28).  The second scroll was to be identical with the one that was destroyed.  The reason that this is not the case with the book of Mormon and the lost 116 pages, is because Joseph Smith realized that he would be unable to duplicate precisely what was on the 116 pages (since he was not inspired), and if the lost portion was ever found, it would obviously prove that God was not speaking through him. 

Inspiration or Divination?

“A blanket was hung to divide the room.  On one side of the blanket, Smith would work with the Urim and Thummim as a king of magic spectacles, his favorite seer stone, and the golden plates, and the hat, while the scribe worked on the other.  Smith would bury his face with the seer stone in the hat and then dictate the words to the scribe” (Mormon America, p. 26).  In contrast to the Bible, God is not directly communicating with Joseph Smith, as God spoke through the prophets and apostles, neither is he merely translating the supposed golden plates into English.  He is burying his face with a stone into a hat!  What a contrast! In the Bible God directly speaks to the prophet (Jeremiah 36:2; Hebrews 1:1-2; 2 Peter 1:20-21; Ephesians 3:3-4). 

Money Digging

“Joseph had been busy in the years between the visions.  He was a part-time but active participant in folk magic, using divining rods and ‘seer stones’, or ‘peep stones’, to find buried treasure.  Both father and son, from about 1819, were active in such treasure-digging and achieved something of a mysterious local reputation in the profession—mysterious because there is no record that they ever found anything despite the readiness of some local residents to pay for their efforts.  Joseph Jr. had several seer stones; after placing them in a hat, he would gaze at them, rather like looking at crystal balls to guide in seeking treasure.  Such activity was illegal, and in 1826 young Smith was hauled into Bainbridge, New York, court and found guilty of disorderly conduct for his money digging.  In his own scriptural history, Smith was less than forthright, depicting himself as a day laborer hired to locate an old mine, but Mormon historian D. Michael Quinn has carefully detailed Smith family activities in ritual magic and ownership of various occult objects and talismans, documenting the influence of this folk religion in early Mormonism” (Mormon America p. 25).  In 1827, Joseph Smith had to elope with Emma Hale because the bride’s father, Isaac Hale, objected to Joseph’s occupation of looking for treasure with magic stones instead of working the land.  As noted above, Smith claimed that his attempt to help an old gentlemen find a silver mine, it was fueled the very prevalent story that he had been a money-digger.  Yet Joseph Smith’s mother wrote a diary that Brigham Young attempted to suppress in which she note that Josiah Stoal, “came for Joseph on account of having heard that he possessed certain keys by which he could discern things invisible to the natural eye”.   This demonstrates that Joseph Smith had a reputation as a “gazer” prior to 1825.  “The gazing which Joe took up is one of the oldest, perhaps, the oldest form of alleged human divination, and has been called ‘mirror-gazing’, ‘crystal-gazing’, ‘crystal vision’, and the like.  ‘Gazers’ use different methods.  Some look into water contained in a vessel, some into a drop of blood, some into ink, some into a round opaque stones, some into mirrors, and many into some form of crystal or glass ball” (The Story of the Mormons p. 16).  The reader should note that the Bible condemns such practices(1 Samuel 15:23; Galatians 5:20; Revelation 21:8).  In addition, the reader should realize that Joseph Smith is engaging in all these occult practices during the precise time that he claims that the angel is appearing to him.  By 1841 Joseph Smith will claim that every person was entitled to such a stone, but that his own revelations and translations had long since ceased to require such physical aid.  Mormons for years had denied the story of Joseph Smith’s money digging, they said that it was a fictitious fairy tale invented by the enemies of the church.  They had claimed that if such records were ever found, it would be very damaging evidence against the church.  “One Mormon scholar, F. W. Kirkham, put it this way:  ‘A careful study of all facts regarding this alleged confession of Joseph Smith in a court of law that he had used a seer stone to find hidden treasure for purposes of fraud, must come to the conclusion that no such record was ever made, and therefore, is not in existence.  If any evidence had been in existence that Joseph Smith had used a seer stone for fraud and deception, and especially had he made this confession in a court of law as early as 1826, or four years before the Book of Mormon was printed, and this confession was in a court record, it would have been impossible for him to have organized a restored church’ (A New Witness For Christ in America, Vol. 1, pp. 385-387).” (Mormonism:  A Way That Seemeth Right pp. 32-33).  On July 28^th, 1971, Wesley Waters found the actual court record of Joseph Smith’s trial, in a back room of the basement in the Chenago County Jail in Norwich, New York, while doing research on Mormonism.  The records have now been proclaimed authentic, and even Mormon historians concede these facts.  Columbia University’s Richard L. Bushman (a Mormon historian), wrote:  “There has always been evidence of it in hostile affidavits from the Smith’s neighbors, evidence which Mormons dismissed as hopelessly biased.  But when I got into the sources, I found evidence from friendly contemporaries as well, Martin Harris, Joseph Knight, Oliver Cowdery, and Lucy Mack Smith.  All of these witnesses persuaded me treasure-seeking and vernacular magic were part of the Smith family tradition, and that the hostile witnesses, including the 1826 trial record, had to be taken seriously” (Mormon America p. 25).  Thus for all practical purposes, Mormonism rests upon the foundational claim that the Bible had been corrupted and that a new revelation was given through the process of basically looking to a crystal-ball.

Settling the Authority Issue

“The question of religious authority had to be settled at the outset when Hiram Page claimed that he, too, received revelations through seer stones.  Joseph Smith issued a divine revelation to make it very clear that he alone held ‘the keys of the mysteries’ and that only his utterances carried authority for the church” (Mormon America p. 29) (Doctrine and Covenants 28:2, 11 “And again, thou shalt take thy brother, Hiram Page, between him and thee alone, and tell him that those things which he hath written from that stone are not of me and that Satan deceiveth him”).  It is noteworthy that when others in the early beginnings of Mormonism do basically the same thing that Smith did, and tries to share power with Smith, that he claims that their revelations originated with Satan and not God. 

On the Move

In 1831 Joseph Smith received a revelation to move the church headquarters from New York, to Ohio.  A group of Mormons left Ohio in the same year and migrated to Missouri.  When Smith visited in 1831, he proclaimed Jackson County as being “the land of promise, and the place for the city of Zion”, with the town of Independence the “center place” (Doctrine and Covenants 57:2.  He also taught that this was the site of the biblical Garden of Eden. This site became the focus of the future return of Christ.  Smith laid a cornerstone on the exact location for the temple where Jesus would one day reign, and in this area Adam would return to prepare for Jesus’ Second Coming (Doctrine and Covenants 116:1).  Smith claimed that on December 25^th, 1832 he was praying very earnestly to know the time of the coming of the Son of Man (Doctrine and Covenants 130:14).  This is an example of a prayer that is not according to God’s will (1 John 5:14), for God had already clearly revealed that the time for the return of Christ will not be given (1 Thessalonians 5:1-3).  From 1833 to 1836 the Mormons in Kirtland Ohio worked to build a big stone temple, when it was dedicated, it was the site of speaking in tongues, traces and visions.  In 1836 Smith purchased some papyri and four Egyptian mummies from the traveling showman Michael Chandler.  Smith claimed that the papyri he purchased were actually writings of Abraham while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham.  Economic problems surrounded Smith.  In 1836 he left for Salem, Massachusetts, hoping that the use of his seer stone might produce treasure that he had been told lay under a house.  He established the Kirtland bank, and seeing that he did not have the capital to establish a licensed bank, he printed his own money.  “For a brief time in 1837 everyone seem to have lots of money, but it soon became clear that the notes were worthless paper, and merchants in places like Cleveland were not amused.  When a warrant was issued on January 12, 1838, on a charge of banking fraud, Smith and First Counselor Rigdon fled on horseback in the middle of night, one step ahead of the law” (Mormon America p. 32).  Compare all of this with the character demanded of Christians in the New Testament (1 Peter 2:1-3).