Arthur Chris Eccel, a former Latter-day Saint who is now an atheist and critic of the Church, wrote the following against the Spalding (alt. Spaulding) theory of Book of Mormon origins and the (lack of) credibility of the witnesses Doctor Philastus Hurlbut, collected for E. D. Howe’s 1834 book, Mormonism Unvailed:
Rumor dynamics have been studied for many decades. The classical study is the 1947 Psychology of Rumor, by Gordon Allport and Joseph Postman. They identified three processes: leaving, sharpening, and assimilation. In the first, there is a loss of detail as a result of the process of transmission facilitating the spread of the rumor. Sharpening involves the selection of the key elements to be included in its transmission. The process of assimilation refers to distortion as a result of subconscious motivations and the intrusion of extraneous information. There can be considerable competition or one-upmanship. A stereotypical example is a housewife saying to her neighbor over the clothesline, “Very interesting. But wait till I tell you what I’ve heard she did.” Those who had known Spalding were ideally situated to participate. “I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, and suddenly, I remembered . . . “
The importance of rumor in this discussion is that it provided an important backdrop for the process of memory reconstruction. Suggesting this process is not an accusation directed at any individual. It is the way memory works for us all. In this context, it means that the process of memory reconstruction was already underway even before Hurlbut came along. To complete their qualifications for participation in the rumor mill, even those who had a claim to having had an association with Spalding should have some knowledge also of the Book of Mormon in order to say that they had noticed a similarity. At least they should have read the first ten or twenty pages. This provided the occasion for the more salient details of the BOM narrative to be subconsciously incorporated into and shape their own and faint memories. This is not simply speculation: a statement collected from John N. Miller refers to this phenomenon: “The names of Nephi, Lehi, Moroni, and in fact all the principal names are bro’t fresh to my recollection, by the Gold Bible” (Howe, Mormonism Unvailed, 398).
In the International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences we read:
Cognitive processes are active. When we perceive and encode events in the world, we construct (rather than copy) the outside world as we comprehend the events. If perceiving is a construction, then remembering the original experience involves a reconstruction. Reconstructive memory refers to the idea that remembering the past reflects our attempts to reconstruct the events experienced previously. These efforts are based partly on traces of past events, but also on our general knowledge, our expectations, and our assumptions about what must have happened. As such, recollections may be filled with errors, when our assumptions and inferences, rather than memories—constitute the prime evidence for reconstructive processes in remembering. Several different sources of error (inferences during encoding, information we receive about an event after its occurrence, our perspective during retrieval) exist. Contrary to popular belief, memory does not work like a video-recorder, faithfully capturing the past to be played back unerringly at a later time. Rather, even when we are accurate, we are reconstructing events from the past when we remember. (H.L. Roediger III, “Psychology of Reconstructive Memory,” International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences [Amsterdam: Elsevier B.V., 2001], 12844-12849).
Simply accessing one’s memory many years later is one thing. Doing so at the behest and under the influence of an interviewer is another. At this point memory reconstruction is influenced by the questions. This introduces the issue of the leading question. Have myself taught survey methods at the university level, I can assure that one of the most common mistakes of untrained interviewers or questionnaire designers is to ask leading questions. It is not only possible, but even probable that Hurlbut committed this fallacy, with or without conscious intent of coaching the informant. For example, instead of asking, “Do you remember any of the names in the manuscript Spalding read from?” he might very well have asked, “Now try hard. Did the name ‘Nephi’ occur or Lehi? How about ‘Laban?’” In this manner, an informant’s statement can be influenced, even coached. Usually a long discussion ensues, and then the interviewer draws up a draft statement and asks, “Is this a fair summary of what you have just told me?” We have all seen this in CSI documentaries.
Furthermore, even though John and Martha Spalding knew Solomon very well, it is his widow Matilda who actually lived with him throughout the period that he worked on his romance, and she could not remember anything about the contents.
Spalding died in 1816. He moved to Conneaut to Pittsburg in 1812. By 1833, the statements listed supra would have been made circa twenty years later. The now considerable physiological evidence regarding memory, especially over time, informs us that normally it is impossible to access a memory without altering it. The act of trying to remember and old and faint memory is itself a process of memory creation. Reading the Book of Mormon feeds details into the mid, to supplement memories.
. . .
When Names are a Double-edged Sword
The most damning aspect of the statements is their feature that Howe thought to be one of their strongest points: “most of the names” of the Book of Mormon were found in the Spalding manuscript (Howe, Mormonism Unvailed, 405). In fact, we find only Lehi, Nephi, Laban, Nephites, Lamanites, Moroni and Zarahemla in the foregoing statements. Aaron Wright stated, “the names more especially are the same without any alternation” (Howe, Mormonism Unvailed, 399). The specificity here, after two decades, is indicative of reconstructive memory. We are asked to believe that the Smiths and Cowdery were so stupid that in plagiarizing Spalding’s work, they did not even think to change the names of the most important protagonists. Since the Spalding-origin claim is usually argued in the form of the Spalding-Rigdon origin, we are actually asked to believe that Sidney Rigdon was so stupid as to retain the most obvious evidence of his plagiarism. (Arthur Chris Eccel, Mormon Genesis [Hilo, Hawaii: GP Touchstone, 2018], 312-14, 315-16, emphasis in original)
Concluding his chapter (pp. 304-27) examining the Rigdon-Spalding theory of Book of Mormon origins, Eccel discusses the statistical impossibility thereof:
A Multiple-Contingency Hypothesis: Beware the Weakest Link
The Spalding-Rigdon argument is a multiple-contingency hypothesis, dependent on the following contingencies:
1. Did Solomon Spalding write not just one but two historical romances on pre-Columbian migration to America, the Oberlin manuscript featuring a party of Romans, and a second history featuring Israelites? (This might be inferred from the follow-up interviews done by Hurlbut.)
2. Did Spalding take a manuscript to a publisher in Pittsburg, possibly Peterson & Lambdin, hoping to get it published? (Hurlbut’s statements.)
3. If so, was the manuscript taken to Pittsburgh the Israelite one, not the Roman one? (Totally unevidenced.)
4. Although the publisher did not undertake to publish it, did Spalding simply leave it there, rather than reclaiming it for submission elsewhere, or to keep it with his prized manuscripts out of pride of authorship? Did this manuscript languish with the publisher after Spalding’s death, even for years? If so, did it stay there until Rigdon showed up in 1822? (Totally unevidenced.)
5. Did Sidney Rigdon gain sufficient access to the publisher’s office to rummage through the accumulated papers and discover this manuscript? The time window is very narrow, since his release from the Pittsburgh congregation was near the end of 1823, he became a journeyman tanner in 1824 and moved to Bainbridge at the end of 1825. (A late statement suggests a possibility, but his having done so is totally unevidenced. This would be nearly a decade after Spalding might have left it there.)
6. Did Rigdon, who had never shown any interest in the claim that pre-Columbian populations are of Israelite origin, or interest to gospelize them, nevertheless take interest in this manuscript? (Totally unevidenced.)
7. Did Rigdon get possession of the manuscript, either by theft, purchasing it or receiving it for free? (Totally unevidenced.)
8. In spite of his difficult circumstances, dedication to Campellism and work as a tanner to support his growing family, did Rigdon get the many months free that would be required to plagiarize Spalding’s work to produce that would become the precursor to the Book of Mormon? (Totally unevidenced, and seemingly impossible.)
9. Did Rigdon, living in Ohio, have some sort of encounter with either the Smiths or Oliver Cowdery, or both? (There is a vague report of contact with some stranger, but actually contact with Smith or Cowdery is unevidenced.)
10. Overcoming his own pride of authorship or personal agenda, did Rigdon provide this manuscript to the Smiths, with who he could only have had the slightest acquaintanceship, but probably none at all? Was Rigdon the sort of man to just give his work away? (Totally unevidenced.)
11. Did Smith decide to plagiarize this work? If so, in the process, were he, Cowdery or Even Rigdon not even clever enough to change the names of the principal protagonists? (Totally unevidenced.)
12. Did Rigdon provide a replacement text for the 116 lost pages? (Totally unevidenced. This suggests a scenario where Smith or Cowdery approach Rigdon to say, “Sidney, my friend. It seems I have lost the first quarter of my work, and need a replacement text with less history and more religion. Can you help me out?”)
13. Would Rigdon keep this secret all his life, even after leaving the LDS Church, and in his lowest and bitterest moments?
One might be tempted to treat this as a simply multiple probability problem. Just for illustration, however, let us reduce the first eleven contingences to only six, with each an independent probability of fifty-fifty (p=.5). Then the probability is .56 (i.e. .5X.5X.5X.5X.5X.5), which yields .015625, or less than two chances in 100.
In fact, the Spalding-Rigdon hypothesis is more complex. It hangs from a chain of contingencies, and even if just one fails, out of at least the first eleven, the hypothesis falls entirely. To simplify matters, assume there are nine contingencies, and liken this to throwing a single die nine times. In three cases you allow a “success” to be any number but three, or 55 changes out of six, with probably (P) equal to .83 (eighty-three chances out of a hundred). In two cases, a “success” is scored with any even number (3 out of 6, or P=.5). In two cases you need to get either a three or a five (2 out of 6, or P=.33). And finally, in two cases either a one or a two or a four or a six is needed, or four chances out of six (P=.67). Just as order is essential in the eleven contingencies above, these must occur in a particular order.
Nine throws, their order and probabilities: .5|.83|.67|.83|.33|.5|.33|.83|.67
This yields only seven chances out of a thousand. Strictly speaking, the probabilities of getting any given face of a die are not mathematically analogous to the assigned probabilities of these nine events. This has been addressed by assigning them probabilities that are much higher than my own personal estimates. Even so, there are two features that are totally valid. First, the combined probability of the nine events is significantly smaller when required to occur in a fixed order. Second, the house rule for the die toss is that on any throw of the die, if the required number fails to come up, one loses the entire game. Thus, on your first role of the die you have a fifth-fifty chance for a success. If you get it, you move on to the next throw. If not, it is game over and you lose your entire stake. You can only win if you get all nine “successes.” The same is true of the nine hypothetical historical events. If just one failed to occur, the Spalding-Rigdon conclusion fails. Of course there is no game like this in Vegas. This is because no gambler would play it, even when well oiled with booze. (Ibid., 325-27)
For more refuting this theory of Book of Mormon origins, check out the various materials listed at:
