Dan Vogel Responds to Lars Nielsen (Part 10) – Origin of Cumorah

[dan vogel]

Did Cumorah come from James Macpherson’s Carmora? More wild theories from Nielsen.

Beginning at 3:04:00, you discuss James Macpherson’s literary works and the way they seem to lend themselves to your method of creating name clusters, unlike more masterful literary giants of the day. I would expect really bad authors to use such a crutch. But your reliance on the Celes MS to make your case complicates your argument. I just have to shake my head and laugh when you argue that Macpherson’s “Carmora,” should be pronounced the British way. Then you point out that Cumorah in the printer’s MS of the Book of Mormon was first written “Camorah” and then crossed out in one place, and “Cumorah” was inserted supralinerally. It is widely known among students of the Book of Mormon that Cowdery’s “u” looked like an “a” because of the way he formed his letters and that it was even misread by typesetter Gilbert for the first edition, where it appeared as Camorah. [Editorial comment: by the way: In his book, Nielsen supported the Camoro Island theory.]

“This is a detail that is directly borrowed from Macpherson’s Mora, the ‘great land’ of the kings. Spalding, of course, changes the ending to -on in his Manuscripts Found because it sounds more biblically derived, like Sidon, Zion, etc.” (3:09:52) Are we to take these wild speculations seriously? This is where your own cleverness gets in the way of actual evidence. To me, all your speculations dealing with Macpherson read like faux scholarship in the way that I would imagine one would do when you put dialogue into a fictional character’s mouth. Doesn’t this excessive speculation undermine and discredit your work? Hamer would probably think so.

Was Joseph Smith stupid?

“Smith was not a composer; he was an appropriator. He took things from other places, mutated them, and made them his own, but he was not very original, not very hardworking, and not very creative. And no one who knew him thought he was.” This is merely an assertion, and not a very accurate one. The balance of his life after June 1829 contradicts your caricature. Joseph Smith was not creative, but he took things and mutated them and made them his own? Not a composer, yet he dictated the Book of Moses, revelations in the D&C, the Book of Abraham, and other texts and letters? He wasn’t a composer in the sense of sitting down and writing well-crafted texts. He was an orally- or rhetorically-oriented person such as one might expect of a charismatic leader. And the Book of Mormon is largely an oral text. He was lazy? He didn’t like manual labor like farming and digging holes, but he put a lot of energy into being president of the church.

If you read the introduction to my new biography, “Charisma under Pressure,” you will read plenty of testimonies about Joseph Smith that completely contradict your assessment of his personality and creative abilities. For example, Smith’s lawyer in Missouri, Peter H. Burnett, observed that although Sidney Rigdon, a counselor in the church’s presidency with Smith and a former Campbellite minister, “was a man of superior education, [and] an eloquent speaker, ... he did not posses the native intellect of Smith, and lacked his determined will.” (Peter H. Burnett, Recollections and Opinions of an Old Pioneer (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1880), 67.)

More wild theories about Book of Mormon names from the wrong manuscript.

Beginning at 3:27:04, you connect the definitions that Macpherson gave to parts of words to the Book of Mormon based on the assumption that Spalding was influenced by Macpherson, which you base on the problematic Celes MS. You might want to rethink this.

Your Liahona etymology is interesting but speculative, but, even if partly true, it doesn’t mean Joseph Smith couldn’t have made similar associations given the fact that Book of Mormon’s author, whether Joseph Smith or Spalding, knew most of the parts.

At 3:33:29, you quote me: “Incidentally, there are no names beginning with ‘Mor’ in Spalding’s manuscript.” And then respond: “Here Mr. Vogel implies that if Spalding had composed both the Mormon story and the Fabius story and if Mor- is present in the Mormon story, then we should expect to see ‘Mor’ in the Fabius story, too. And if we don’t, then the texts were probably written by different authors.” Not exactly. This is only one of several striking differences in the types of names between the Fabius MS and the Book of Mormon. You state: “no one should expect all syllables from one story to appear in another story by the same author.” Mor- in the Book of Mormon is a major feature of name creation, which Prince noticed. Its absence in the Fabius MS isn’t definitive, of course, but it shouldn’t go unnoticed.

You dramatically reveal that Mor- appears in the Celes MS and suggest that I would merely say it’s a coincidence. Beginning at 3:35:01, you introduce evidence from the Celes MS: “If the syllable ‘mor’ were to appear as part of a proper name in The Romance of Celes (in addition to obviously appearing in the Mormon story), then would that favor Spalding subtheories at least a little bit? What if that proper name also contained the syllable ‘mon’? Surely then Mr. Vogel would update his priors in a truly Bayesian way?” I’ll wait to see what you do about the probable date and authorship of the Celes MS. The same for your long, rambling commentary about the Gadianton robbers and Don Quixote and Mount Mors. by the way, the “works of darkness” was part of anti-Masonic rhetoric.

You even suggest that my coincidence barometer needs to be recalibrated. But if the Celes MS is not Spalding’s work, then it must be a coincidence. I’m just not impressed when you cherry-pick matching three-letter prefixes and suffixes and imply Spalding was unique in making names in this fashion.

At 3:53:52, you state: “The way to truly understand The Book of Mormon is to really get inside the mind of its most-original author, who was Solomon Spalding, not Joseph Smith. We need to study all of what Spalding wrote so that we can fully glean everything that influenced him and why.” Of course, we can’t really get inside the minds of historical figures, especially when we have the wrong sources. I tried to use the Book of Mormon to understand Joseph Smith’s thinking.

Spalding versus Joseph Smith

At 3:54:39, you assert that “flawed reasoning” from Prince and Brodie “derailed” the Spalding “authorship question.” On the contrary, flawed testimony from Spalding former friends and family derailed the Joseph Smith authorship question raised by Alexander Campbell’s 1831 critique of the Book of Mormon. The diversion lasted more than 100 years, and still it won’t die and probably never will, but we can at least push it to the fringes.

At 3:55:11, you state: “No, Fawn Brodie. That is not what the Mormon story reveals. Smith was denied these because he did not have them. At best, Joseph Smith was a plagiarist; he plagiarized from Rigdon-slash-Spalding; he plagiarized from Adam Clarke. All the evidence shows that it was Solomon Spalding who had many measures of learning and a very fecund imagination.” Although Spalding apparently borrowed from the story of Helen of Troy, I don’t see him plagiarizing the Bible like Joseph Smith did in the Book of Mormon. Joseph Smith didn’t plagiarize from Clarke’s commentary but apparently used it to formulate his revisions.

You attempt to build up Spalding, saying: “Smith was not one-hundredth of the man that Solomon Spalding was. That goes for education, imagination, creativity, ability to write, love of literature, love of linguistics, love of history, kindness to others, fidelity to his wife, and all the rest.” Except, according to your theory, he was in a conspiracy with Prof. Smith to deceive the Christian public. However, I sense that you are pulling away from that theory, possibly because you now realize you have grossly misinterpreted the Cleveland Plain Dealer article.