NOM

Did you guys see this Dartmouth connection to early Mo'ism? Someone on reddit bought scans of the original docs and posted. I believe this ties back to the Lucy Code and the JD interview Melonakos post but I haven't followed those closely.

Every time I think I've read everything something else comes along. Smith literally stole all of his ideas from somewhere else.

https://www.reddit.com/r/mormon/comment ... m_behrens/

https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comme ... n_vermont/

Thanks for the links, RR. There was some discussion about this here:
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=3208

I look forward to reading the Behrens paper.

Me too. Can't believe the more I study the more I'm convinced JS and the foundation of the LD$ church has very little original material. Just last week I was listening to a Radio West podcast on the Salem Witch Trials and it was mentioned that at Harvard they had a program for Native Americans in the 1600s and there was a belief circulating that the natives were one of the lost tribes of Israel. Here' we were taught this was some great JS revelation and the main premise of the BOM.

http://radiowest.kuer.org/post/judge-se ... h-trials-1

It's a great podcast.

Looks like the idea of of the Native Americans being a lost tribe started in 1650 with a Jew, a Dutch rabbi, Manasseh ben Israel in his book The Hope of Israel.

I wonder if FairMormon has staff meetings where the latest faith challenge comes up. "How are we going to talk about this latest historical issue!?" I prophesy that it will largely be written off as coincidence or the zeitgeist of the age as God's spirit was being poured out on New England to prepare a young prophet like Joseph Smith. These kinds of ideas were there along with folk magic and divine visitations that let Joseph realize the greater manifestations he would eventually proclaim.

I wonder if FairMormon will pay me for ghost writing breezy apologetics for them?

Yeah, I thought I was past the point of being surprised by historical stuff, but that connection really blew my mind.

Thanks for the link Hagoth! How did I miss that back in June? Probably because I don't dig through the doctrinal discussion forum enough... My brain defaults to garment humor, emotional sadness, and "what the fnck am I still doing here" moments captured in eloquent NOM pixels.

I need to walk away from everything mormon but every time I try, I get sucked back in.

The one thing I want to do someday when I have more time is to try and read more of the scanned writings just to verify that these summaries are fair to the lectures.

If they are, this is a potentially massive deal, but if the lectures don't really make the points that are assumed here it leaves a lot of room for apologists to claim it's out of context/being misrepresented/etc. And they are really, really good at finding those tiny points to blow up an entire argument (look at how they do it with the CES Letter and the parts where the CES Letter tries to show the BoM stole phrases from the Late War)

Just hard to find time to spend on this stuff, which is probably for the best in a lot of ways.

Some of the John Smith papers: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... x5mNSuAy7x

This site has links to pdf scans of some of the letters/lectures. I thought some of the parallels were a bit stretched.

http://www.mormonorigins.com/ProfessorJ ... tings.html

FiveFingerMnemonic wrote: ↑Thu Oct 25, 2018 10:09 am This site has links to pdf scans of some of the letters/lectures. I thought some of the parallels were a bit stretched.

http://www.mormonorigins.com/ProfessorJ ... tings.html

I was thinking there was a chance that some of the parallels might not be as strong as it would appear from the summary.

Thanks for the links - I need to read them and see which ones might be strong and which ones are weak before I run my mouth off about them to anyone.

http://www.mormonorigins.com/assets/fil ... ezidik.pdf

Interesting. There seems to be some strong parallels with temple endowment language in the above lecture:

"I shall explain to you the covenant of grace..."

I struggle to read that cursive. If someone can read Smith's hand writing easy enough, would love to see some transcription of this.

One phrase that stuck out to me immediately is used at the beginning of the discussion of the creation and the Universe.

It states:

"And here a spacious field, a spacious field do I say! An infinite Universe is presented to our contemplation!"

This is quite prosy and creates a visual imagery that would lodge in an imaginitive mind.
For comparison see 1Nephi 8:9.

"And it came to pass after I had prayed unto the Lord I beheld a large and spacious field."

I haven't read this entire thread (yet) but if one of the Smith family is supposed to have read John Smith's work, then the use of this phrase "spacious field" would seem more than a coincidence.

Joseph seemed to be more of an idea snatcher and phrase borrower than how we would concieve of a plagiarist today.