Roger,
I don't know, but it seems odd that Clark would confuse autumn 1827 with winter 1828. Possible, I suppose, but questionable. Harris could have visited Clark in 1827 and Anthon in 1828.
I’m not saying he confused years; I’m saying that Clark had at least two interviews with Harris, one in 1827 and another in 1828 after Harris returned from his visit with Anthon. It is quite possible, even probable, that Clark conflated the two visits.
But this is easily reconcilable. In the second letter Anthon is specifically referring to the fact that LDS missionaries were using his name as "an auxiliary" and, until now, no one had asked him personally to comment on that issue. Howe's inquiry was about the characters. Coit raised the issue of Anthon's name being used to promote Mormonism.
I wish it were that easy. He clearly says “no one, until the present time, has ever requested from me any statement in writing”—and continues: “I have not deemed it worth while to say any thing publicly on the subject.” I think he just a ditz. There no reason for him to be deceptive about the matter.
Correct, and as it turned out, the characters on the Detroit manuscript were genuine. If Smith had copied and modified some of those characters, Mitchill might have seen a resemblance (but noticed the apparent corruptions as well) and may have suspected something was odd, but could not come to a conclusion either way.
I wouldn’t make too much of the Detroit MS, especially since we don’t know if Joseph Smith knew about it let alone copied parts of it in disguised form. That will take a lot of proving. It would have to be very clear borrowing to rule out random similarity made closer by surmising intentional modification. I’m skeptical.
Sure, but again, I don't think Anthon was so caught off guard that he would indicate to Harris that the characters were genuine. That's contrary to what he explicitly states. Hence my conclusion that whatever his initial reaction, it was not positive but was taken by Harris to be so.
I doubt Anthon could tell it was a fake at first glance. He would have to study it. He would first look for characters that were more or less familiar to him, and indeed according to his own account, there were. But as he studied it further, he knew it couldn’t be translated by him and was apparently a fake. This conclusion was confirmed when Harris told him of the provenance of the characters. The positive I mentioned was Anthon’s probable preliminary observations about some of the characters being familiar to him. I agree that his assessment was negative, but Harris didn’t care about that. If Anthon would have been on his guard, he probably wouldn’t have spoken his preliminary observations.
Anthon is obviously stating that although some of the characters were based on real characters, they were, in fact corruptions of the real characters and therefore a hoax. Harris was already convinced that was not the case, so, of course, he accepts what he wants to hear and rejects the hoax part. He can explain the discrepancy as being the result of presenting the learned with true characters that were heretofore unknown, but still genuine.
I agree more or less.
Correct. Chandler obviously had a financial reason to agree with Joseph Smith.
Assuming his certificate is genuine, I agree.
There are several issues here that would be nice if we could hash out civilly.
First, with regard to Harris, I still don't think you fully understand my position on the early Mormon witnesses. You want to seize on the term "liar" as if calling them liars is a terrible, uncalled for thing... as if people don't lie. They do. But in this case, I'm not saying whether they (and I'm using "they" generically at present) were intentionally lying or not. I think in certain cases they probably were, but I can't say that for sure because that would require that I read their minds and I can't do that.
All lies are intentional. They are intentional misrepresentations of what a person knows and believes to be true. Webster’s Dictionary:
. A falsehood uttered or acted for the purpose of deception; an intentional violation of truth; an untruth spoken with the intention to deceive.
The proper notion of a lie is an endeavoring to deceive another by signifying that to him as true, which we ourselves think not to be so. S. Clarke.
It is willful deceit that makes a lie. A man may act a lie, as by pointing his finger in a wrong direction when a traveler inquires of him his road.
If Harris didn’t see Joseph Smith with head in hat, but heard Joseph Smith dictating from behind a curtain instead, that would be a lie. It’s not the kind of thing that one’s memory can play tricks.
What I do say, however, is that religious fanatics do indeed give testimony that is favorable to the cause they deeply believe in. That can easily be observed today. In so doing they will omit damaging details and embellish others while, in some cases, simply lying to bolster the claims.
Yes, and how do you know this if you don’t catch them? You don’t just assume all religious people lie, especially when there are other independent witnesses. I think you are justified in being skeptical about interested testimony that stands alone or is uncorroborated.
Harris falls into that category. He is a radical fanatic who deeply believes in the cause enough to omit damaging details and embellish others while, in some cases, lie to bolster the claims. Here is the key point you still don't seem to understand: I am saying that even dupes will do that. Even bona-fide dupes are capable and sometimes willing to lie in support of the cause that has them duped. So, yes, they are still dupes, but they also do what you seem to think dupes don't do.
Harris was fanatical and hence an interested witness and all the things implied by that. A fanatic might lie, but that’s not the issue—which you are avoiding. Either Harris saw Joseph Smith translating with head in hat or not. This is not the type of lie that a dupe would do. Like lying about seeing Joseph Smith drunk while translating the Book of Mormon or his trying to seduce Eliza Winters. This lie puts him in the know about the true origin of the Book of Mormon, and makes him a conspirator. You can’t have it both ways.
As I subsequently learned, Mr. Harris had always been a firm believer in dreams, and visions, and supernatural appearances, such as apparitions and ghosts, and therefore was a fit subject for such men as Smith and his colleagues to operate upon.
That is my point in a nutshell. The kind of people who ended up testifying on behalf of Joseph Smith and his plates and his method of "translation" were fit subjects from the get-go because they were all believers in dreams, and visions, and supernatural appearances, such as apparitions and ghosts.
Clark’s statement is evidence for the dupe-thesis, and explains how he could eventually have a vision of the plates and angel. It doesn’t really support a knowing liar-coconspirator Harris.
How far Harris was duped by this imposture, or how far he entered into it as a matter of speculation, I am unable to say. Several gentlemen in Palmyra, who saw and conversed with him frequently, think he was labouring under a sort of monomania, and that he thoroughly believed all that Jo Smith chose to tell him on this subject.
So again, to my mind, Harris was likely a dupe... but a dupe who would feel more compelled to give positive testimony in support of the cause than to be an honest, objective reporter. You see your dupes as honest, objective reporters and I think that is a serious mistake.
I’m quite aware that dupes can lie or distort—just like any interested witness. If Harris was really interested in supporting Joseph Smith, one should expect him to give the party-line story of the spectacles. Instead he described the head in hat and helped anti-Mormons link the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith’s treasure digging. Add to this that other witnesses described the same thing independently.
And that mistake leads to erroneous conclusions of which the blanket/curtain is a good example. The blanket/curtain was obviously used to conceal something from view. That is so glaring it is just obvious. It serves the same purpose as the newspaper in your Blaine analogy. It was used for a specific purpose and the purpose you come up with is just silly. To give privacy to Smith but not to conceal something!?
You seem to overlook the blanket-theory works for everyone writing from a naturalistic perspective. I could claim that Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon in secret and then read it from behind the curtain. That would be easier than trying to deal with the head in hat situation. But the evidence is just not there.
And whether or not "Anthon and Clark are referring to a period before translation had begun in earnest," is irrelevant. Notice you had to include the phrase "in earnest" because we just established that Smith had claimed to have translated something before the Anthon visit, otherwise Anthon could not have pronounced it genuine! And Anthon mentions a blanket, so it has to apply to Smith and Harris. The blanket was used to conceal something from Harris, Dan. There is NO WAY around that. And yet you claim that what Smith did behind the blanket was nothing different from what he did in front of witnesses at places like Badger's Tavern and the Whitmer residence. If that's the case, then there was no need for a blanket.
In earnest is just an acknowledgement that it’s possible that some preliminary translating had been done prior to Harris’s return from visiting Anthon, which is when traditional chronology begins the translation. If Joseph Smith translated from behind the curtain prior to Harris return from New York City, that doesn’t mean that it was the only method used. You have to go with Harris earliest description in the 1829 newspaper accounts, which is supplemented by his later statements to Edward Stevenson. You have to account for all the evidence. Both timing and source of the blanket statement is relevant. It explains the temporary use of the blanket. More importantly, all the witnesses tell you there was no blanket.
Whitmer was indeed clear that the purpose was to conceal the proceedings from the eye of the public! Like I said, that's about as close to a confession as we'll ever get! It's like Blaine admitting the newspaper conceals a crucial element of the trick.
You are assuming that Whitmer was withholding information you need. It was so the work on translation wouldn’t be disturbed by the curious calling at the door. When the work moved upstairs, there was no blanket used. And it’s not like Blaine at all—Whitmer didn’t say the blanket was used to conceal a crucial part of the deception; it was just the opposite.
I’m now commenting on a previous post I didn’t finish:
If Joseph Smith had Isa. 29 in his mind, he apparently didn’t intend to capitalize on it until he did the rewrite of the opening portion. I find that odd.
How do you arrive at that conclusion? How do you know it wasn't in the Book of Lehi?
If he had made some kind of Isaiah 29 fulfillment insertion into the Book of Lehi, then it makes perfect sense that he would not go back to it until the rewrite which was supposed to be a retelling of the same story in different words.
The lost 116-page MS was Mormon’s abridgement of the Book of Lehi, which was less religious and didn’t contain Nephi’s prophecies and extracts from Isaiah (1 Ne. 9).
I think he knew all about the Detroit manuscript.
I don’t know, but can you demonstrate that?
Whether or not he knew at first glance is somewhat irrelevant. He certainly is not going to trust Harris right off the bat but will instead be suspicious--and that's exactly how his own account describes it. I can't imagine him saying anything positive about the characters, when he flatly denies doing so, and we know there is no such thing as reformed Egyptian. The notion that he gave a favorable opinion and then changed his mind comes from an unreliable, biased source which was rewritten (in a contradictory manner!) for a specific purpose... that of claiming that even the learned secretly knew these were true characters but their anti-Mormonism (which wasn't even in existence yet!) prevented them from admitting it. The whole 1838 account is nothing but blatant propaganda. And the 1832 account is about the same except that it attempts to capitalize off the learned's inability to read the characters.
The reliable sources here are Anthon's and Clark's.
I’m relying more on the first newspaper accounts mentioning Harris return from Anthon and believing Joseph Smith’s gift was superior to Anthon’s learning. I’m also emphasizing Anthon’s own admission that there were true characters in Joseph Smith’s facsimile as a possible reason for Harris’s encouragement.
Harris's reasoning skills were indeed weak. But what is even more clear is that Joseph Smith was willing to use whatever he could to get what he wanted. In some ways he was pretty cunning and in others he seems incredibly naïve. Did he simply forget that he had written a contradictory account 6 years earlier? Apparently so.
That's why to me, his evil-men who want to steal his Lehi book in order to alter the words is pretty stupid--unless he knows the manuscript already had blatant alterations on it. In that case, we could agree that your boy-genius was using his head.
I’m sure the 1832 account wasn’t a problem in his mind as it was unpublished. Discrepancies between the Anthon stories are minor compared with the First Vision. I don’t think he worried himself over apparent contradictions. For some people, facts never get in the way of a good story.
On the lost MS, I don’t follow your logic. Joseph Smith claimed if he tried to produce the same text, it would read different in the places where his enemies had altered the text. This was just an excuse, because he had no intention of trying it. If the MS had the alterations on it already as you suggest—enough so that it would be embarrassing and possibly suggest a non-inspired translation--I don’t think Joseph Smith would have let Harris take it, and I don’t think Harris would have wanted to. There is no reason to believe the 116 pages were any different than the extant MS we now have, which has alterations and corrections.