For years, astute scholars like the
Tanners, Wesley Walters, Walter Martin, and others have tried to find the
source(s) of the 1830 Book of Mormon. However, until now, we have been unable
to find the source of the book of Ether, a book in the Book of
Mormon. However, today I would like to present the source for the book of
Ether, one that provides stronger parallels than those proposed by Persuitte et
al for Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews and Varnick et al. re the
Spalding Manuscript(s).
In Ether 14:1, we read the following:
And now
there began to be a great curse upon all the land because of the iniquity of
the people, in which, if a man should lay his tool or his sword upon his shelf,
or upon the place whither he would keep it, behold, upon the morrow, he could
not find it, so great was the curse upon the land.
Joseph Smith, being the plagiarist he was,
cribbed the above from the following source:
There
shall, in that time, be rumors of things going astray, and there shall be a
great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know
where lieth those little things with the sort of raffia work base that has an
attachment. At this time, a friend shall lose his friend's hammer and the young
shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their
fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o'clock . . .
This parallel alone is more explosive,
more explicit, than many of those between the Book of Mormon and other sources
(e.g., The Late War). The source? A work called “Bloody Boring
Prophets,” a scene from the greatest movie of all time, The Life of Brian.
Now, some will bring up the fact that The
Life of Brian was released in 1979, and the Book of Mormon was initially published
in 1830. While some desperate apologists like Dan Peterson and Stephen Smoot
will raise objections like this, it is nothing but a smokescreen—Joseph Smith
obviously had access to the same manuscript John Cleese et al used to write The
Life of Brian, a “Proto-Life of Brian” of sorts. I am sure Dr. Michael
Quinn, when he examines this issue in detail, will prove that, just as they
possessed medieval parchments discussing magical practices, possessed such a
manuscript, too (expect an appendix in a future [3rd] edition of Early
Mormonism and the Magic World View). Indeed, what Jeff Lindsay, wrote in his Was the Book of Mormon
Plagiarized from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass? also applies to The
Life of Brian and Joseph Smith’s plagiarism thereof:
Mormon
apologists will immediately nitpick at the slight problem of publication dates
(Whitman's first edition of the Leaves of Grass in 1855 appears to postdate the 1830 Book of Mormon by about 25 years),
but such arguments are mere smokescreens that can be readily blown away. The
simple fact is this: Walt Whitman is surely the best nineteenth-century
candidate ever proposed for Book of Mormon plagiarism, offering parallels far
richer than other writers and scholars have proposed using other texts. The
details of how such an early copy of Leaves of Grass fell into Joseph's hand may require further
investigation, but with the evidence I present below, the case for Joseph Smith
as a plagiarist should be greatly clarified.
