Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Excerpts from Gregory Steven Dundas, Explaining Mormonism (2022)

  

I will not pretend to have found compelling answers for all of my questions regarding the Book of Mormon. But after all, it is rare that a lawyer can hope to build an absolutely airtight case. There are almost always unanswered questions—at least a few loose ends. But I do claim that compelling overall case can be made that Joseph Smith’s story of the book’s origin—no matter how implausible it may seem at first blush—is in fact the most plausible account.

 

Indeed, I view the very concreteness of the Book of Mormon as the most solid piece of physical evidence for the reality of Mormonism. If it were not for the Book of Mormon, it would be easy to conclude that Joseph Smith was merely another religious visionary who experiences some type of mystical encounters with angels, but which have no connection with reality. But the Book of Mormon takes the story out of the realm of the vague and mystical and places it dead square in the real world. (Gregory Steven Dundas, Explaining Mormonism: A Believing Skeptic’s Guide to the Latter-day Saint Worldview [Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf and Stock, 2022], 197)

 

But what would happen the next morning when he went to fetch the plates? He could have dug up the entire hill and never would have found anything. At that point he might have had second thoughts about his dream and decided that it was a mere dream after all and dropped the whole matter. Or, if he had a particularly strong conviction that the dream was truly from God, he might have reimagined it in his own mind, concluding that perhaps God would reveal the content of the plates to him if he were able to return to his trance. He might then have been able to draft a few pages of some type of divine message and then present it to others as a divine revelation to the world.

 

But Joseph did nothing of this kind. Instead, he claimed that he went to the hill and actually found the plates, but that the angel forbade him from taking them out for several years. That might sound at first like a clever ploy on Joseph’s part to avoid having to produce the goods, yet at the culmination of the four years he went with his wife, Emma, to the hill and retrieved the plates. The translation process initially went very slowly. Joseph spent most of his time in gainful employment and had very little time to devote to the plates, although at the beginning he had to keep thieves from stealing the plates. He and Emma were finally forced to move to Harmony, Pennsylvania to avoid the aggressive treasure seekers. For months he translated only in fits and starts, preoccupied as he was by the need to earn a living. At first he used his wife as a scribe to write out his dictation, and later an associate named Martin Harris. After more than a year of effort with only limited results, a schoolteacher named Oliver Cowdery moved into the area and began working as Joseph’s full-time scribe. From that point the process took a huge leap forward, and nearly the entire book was completed in a period of two to three months. Although exactness is impossible to achieve, a reasonable reconstruction of the actual time of translation shows the whole process of translating a book of over 500 pages (the original edition had 590 pages) and over 250,000 words took place during 63 working days. The book was then printed and published, much to the scorn of many of his neighbors. (Ibid., 199-200)

 

Another oddity is that Joseph did not shy away from revealing his own divine reprimands. On one occasion, before he actually took possession of the plates, he reported that Moroni told him that he had not been sufficiently engaged in the Lord’s work. Afterwards he described this as “the severest chastisement I ever had in my life” (HOTC 1:18). (Ibid., 201)