Christina Darlington Embarrasses Herself on the Nephi/Moroni Issue

The question of the name of the angel who appeared to Joseph Smith (the Nephi/Moroni problem, as I call it) has been addressed rather competently by LDS apologists, including the late Matthew B. Brown (see Matthew B Brown on the angel Nephi/Moroni Question), so I will not be answering this charge in this post. However, I do wish to show how this issue, as treated by Christina Darlington, self-professed expert on “Mormonism,” proves that she is deceptive and disingenuous. In her book, Misguided by Mormonism, we read the following:

Joseph Smith couldn’t even keep his own angel story straight. The official account published by the Mormon Church teaches that Joseph Smith was visited by the angel Moroni who buried the gold plates of the Book of Mormon. But in Joseph Smith’s handwritten version of that account, he wrote that the angel Nephi visited him (see the image on the next page). (Christina R. Darlington, Misguided by Mormonism But Redeemed by God’s Grace: Leaving the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for Biblical Christianity [2d ed.; 2019], 65)

The image (taken from my phone, so apologies for the quality) on p. 66 reference above is the following:

In spite of Darlington's confident claim that this was in the very handwriting of Joseph Smith, had she bothered to actually read the Web page she linked to (LINK), the document was not written by Joseph Smith; instead, it is in the handwriting of Howard Coray:

Darlington obviously is ignorant, deceptive, or both.

There is a rather odd (and theologically problematic) comment from Darlington on this issue:

Yet the angel Nephi could not have shown Smith the location of the plates because, according to the Book of Mormon history, he died several centuries before the plates were even written. Since the Book of Mormon teaches that Moroni buried the plates when he was alive on earth, the angel who showed Smith the location of the plates was later changed from Nephi to Moroni. (Ibid., 65-66)

While I agree that it was Moroni, not Nephi (the son of Lehi; there were many Nephis in the Book of Mormon [though it doesn’t really matter which Nephi is in view here]), the reasoning Darlington gives is, well, stupid. Just because Nephi died centuries before Moroni buried the plates could not mean that he could not, as an angelic being, show Joseph Smith their location. Could not God communicate this information to him? Seemingly, Darlington does not believe that the dead can learn new things in the intermediate state and/or have things communicated to them by God. This, I will admit, it a rather odd statement, and only shows how shallow a thinker she is, as well as her being theologically inept.