NOM

How come nobody is talking about Kathleen Melonakos' book Secret Combinations? She seems to have uncovered a far more convincing story of how Joseph Smith came up with the Book of Mormon than anything I have ever heard from non-Mormons trying to understand how he wrote the book given that we don't believe the official story. In her rendering, the Book of Mormon was likely a project in which many persons were involved. She ties this back to the Smith family's and Cowdery's family involvement in counterfeiting, which apparently was a quite common scam back then. Also, closely tied to this was frauds posing as seers who could find buried treasure. It was a racket. Joseph Smith was brought up using a seer stone. From 14 to 21 he honed his skills. One skill he learned in particular was convincing people to still believe his seership powers even when he didn't find any buried treasure. Ultimately, he would use these skills for the church. He was making it up as he went along, that is, with the D&C and the rest leading up to the Council of Fifty when he proposed to his followers that he should become king and they went along with it. This is, to me, so amazing. I am just shocked I haven't seen more discussion of it. Am I missing something?

There was a post back in October.

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=3588

I loved her book, struggled to listen to her. She's a lousy interview. If you combine her book + the Lucy Code you start to see connections to Dartmouth than were new (to me). I believe this area of history, when fully fleshed out, will unlock some of the links that are now missing re: the creation of the Book of Mormon.

I own the book. It's on my read list.

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I was good until she started spouting off faith in other, Books with just as doubious of origins.