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Odd that there don’t appear to be any books. Am I just missing them? I see he left copyrights to books he authored. I do not see his personal library here. Yes, it is odd. Perhaps any books he had at home were considered to belong to the Hanover Bookstore, which he maintained at his house and "was ...

I'd like to see evidence of a copy of Oedipus Aegyptiacus existing anywhere in the United States before 1809. I haven't found any yet.

Anyway, here's the full inventory of John Smith's estate at his death.

One of the closest possible links between John Smith and Kircher is the appearance of Kircher’s work in a list of books in the Dartmouth library from about 1850. So it may be that Kircher’s work was available for John Smith to read and maybe he read it. Maybe. That mention in Bibliotheca Sacra and ...

If you want to see what Kircher documents the Church has "hidden" in BYU Special Collections, you can find the list on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/athanasiusk ... 1/mode/2up

I can see some 19th-century cultural influences in the Book of Mormon for sure. I mean, apart from big ones: Christianity and a concern with Native American origins. For example, I think Dan Vogel is correct that anti-Universalist rhetoric is present in the text. On Reddit, I recently came across an...

The last time I expressed my skepticism in these parts regarding the "Dartmouth Connection," I was chided for materializing out of the blue to mock people (in that instance, Randy Bell) and for not keeping an open mind. I thought my emphatic rejection of Nielsen's theory on the other board as "utter...

I know that's going to trigger Kish. But it's true, I'm not persuaded by the "Kircher-Nephi" theory. There is no evidence that John Smith ever read anything by Kircher. And it's not reasonable to assume that he would have. Kircher was hardly mentioned in North American scholarship in Smith's lifetim...

Yes, it has been discussed. It's completely inane. It has as much credibility as the theories that Kennedy was shot by his own Secret Service agents or his wife.

At least a reminder that some education was not out of reach for the family. Education was not out of reach as long as money was not a concern. Hyrum attended Moor's Charity School as a charity scholar. In 1814, he was one of 17 charity scholars out of 61 students, supported by funds from the Socie...

He could have been the kind of narcissist who was convinced that he really was a great prophet, and that God Almighty was totally backing him up But aren't all prophets "narcissists" to some degree? In the essay I quoted yesterday, Richard Bushman also wrote: "Prophets are immensely confident, egot...