Where did the Book of Mormon Take Place?

[Calm]

4 hours ago, the narrator said:

My daughter had created an entire culture in Realm, with its own religion, myths, histories, clothing, and several dozens of names.

Was this all retained in her head or at least some on paper?

I did the same with a Tolkien adjacent world as I had hours in bed before I fell asleep (everyone else in my family apparent went to sleep with the chickens since no one ever commented about me prowling the house in the dark) and I filled it with stories of this fantasy world.  The stories weren’t written down except for one or two, but I did the names and drew detailed maps, even a poster size version to mount on my wall…which is somewhere around my house still along with a few other remnants of my creative efforts.  I never got the dialogue to satisfy me, so gave up on actually writing a story.  The habit lasted until the drugs interfered with the process of drifting before actual sleep (so 40s), though the writings stopped in my teens.

IOW, there was always something that showed what I was working on in detail when actively working on it.  Granted, I doubt my parents and siblings ever went looking through the stacks of paper and the map was in a tube to avoid teasing, so they likely didn’t have a clue (it wasn’t considered normal to be into fantasy back when I was a kid, so I did intentionally hide it), but the hours I spent alone in my room were noted and if paper had been expensive, I suspect my parents would have registered how I was constantly asking for more.

Edited April 24 by Calm

[the narrator]

12 minutes ago, Calm said:

Was this all retained in her head or at least some on paper?

As far as I'm aware it was all in her head. I did record a couple of her story-tellings and had them auto transcribed, but I don't think I have them anymore. I don't know how much she could even recall from that now, but it was quite impressive when she was still playing it with her friends.

Edited April 24 by the narrator

[Calm]

58 minutes ago, the narrator said:

As far as I'm aware it was all in her head. I did record a couple of her story-tellings and had them auto transcribed, but I don't think I have them anymore. I don't know how much she could even recall from that now, but it was quite impressive when she was still playing it with her friends.

Impressive.  I could not have kept track of the language without writing it down.

 I am grateful such things are seen as acceptable these days rather than a waste of time or worse.  Kids should feel comfortable embracing their creativity and sharing adds more opportunities.  I had a lot of wonderful hours, at least thousands, if not tens of thousands (since it was a nightly effort for at least an hour as the only competition was reading under the covers with a flashlight).  I did share in my senior year of high school some world making with my best friend of a science fiction genre, but that was pretty limited as we didn’t go to the same school, met through work and could only get together on occasion.  So much fun.

I wrote a play once about Japan.  So wish I still had that as that was a summer’s effort.  Probably ten.

Edited April 24 by Calm

[Kevin Christensen]

Regarding the quotes Plains offers, Bob Crockett used to line these and others like them up against the notion that the New York Hill must be the Book of Mormon hill.  One thing that all these statements, and others like them, such as the Joseph Fielding Smith quote from the 1930s, reprinted in the 1950s, and the authorities who present them have in common is that none of deal directly with the Book of Mormon statements regarding the location of the Hill.  All presume that the tradition, as tradition, must be correct.  No further inquiry is necessary or desirable.  Rather like Bacon on earth centric cosmology:

Quote

Bacon, the philosopher of science, was, quite consistently, an enemy of the Copernican hypothesis. Don’t theorize, he said, but open your eyes and observe without prejudice, and you cannot doubt that the Sun moves and that the earth is at rest.  (Karl R. Popper, The Myth of the Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality (New York: Routledge, 1994), 84–85, https://books.google.com/books?id=Ye2tAhDX7agC&pg=PA82&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false ). 

The formal statement of "mine authority and the authority of my servants" has this:

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these commandments are of me, and were given unto my servants in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding.

25 And inasmuch as they erred it might be made known;

26 And inasmuch as they sought wisdom they might be instructed;

27 And inasmuch as they sinned they might be chastened, that they might repent;

28 And inasmuch as they were humble they might be made strong, and blessed from on high, and receive knowledge from time to time. (D&C 1:6. 24-28)

Not discussing this formal statement masks the essential issue of whether the notion that "they must have known!" is built on a firm foundation, or upon sand.  And I can think of one self-proclaimed authority who as a notable tell regarding a lack of careful and attentive research that goes "A lot of people are saying."  I am far more interested in what the best informed and most insightful people are saying.

I also notice that Jesus states that all judgement should begin by being self-critical.  Removing the beam from one's one eyes first.  "Then shall ye see clearly."  It is that point at which the Father of the Scientific Method, Bacon, went wrong in debating with Copernican Theory.  His "Don't theorize!" declaration is telling.  Especially since that shows a determination to not bother to imagine how might things look to an observer who happened to live on a tilted and rotating earth that orbited a sun, and how that view might better explain planetary motion.

The problem is "all theory is data laden."  And if we are not aware of how our theories affect the selection and interpretation of data, we tend to be blind to other possibilities.  

Historically, the identification of the New York hill as Cumorah, came out of popular culture Latter-day Saint readings, not from any early statements from Joseph Smith, either as revelation from an angel, a subsequent revelation, or from a close reading of relevant Book of Mormon passages.  And just because early Latter-day Saints after several years, began to re-use a name for the New York hill, one very notable fact of their human culture is that names get reused.  Joseph Smith himself was a junior Joseph as well as a Smith, a notably common name.  I grew up in Bountiful Utah, which I never mistook for either the Bountiful on the South Coast of the Arabian Peninsula where Nephi built a ship, nor with the Bountiful location discussed in 3 Nephi where the Risen Lord visited a temple.   No one has fits over whether there is more than one Bountiful.  All that is necessary is to pay attention to context, and to not assume that names uniquely emanate from things and are subsequently both unique and the same to all observers.  Names, rather, are social conveniences. 

The notion of whether the Book of Mormon Cumorah/Shim may not be the same as the New York drumlin where Joseph got the plates came from close readers of the Book of Mormon.  The Washburns offered a proposed internal map in 1937, drawing the ire of Joseph Fielding Smith, a notable scriptorian who never supported his defense of the traditional readings by addressing the Book of Mormon passages that raised the issue in the first place.  Rather, he deferred to tradition.  He did not re-examine the key sources to understand or defend the tradition.  BYU's Sidney Sperry wrote an essay titled "Were There Two Cumorahs?" which actually does discuss several the scriptural passages that raise questions about the accuracy of the traditional identification, as though the eye-witness accounts from Book of Mormon prophets might be more reliable than Kirtland and Nauvoo interpretations or subsequent repetitions of a conclusion that obviously never bothered to cite or account for those passages. 

Sorenson's An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon is an important book, but is low resolution compared to his culminating Mormon's Codex.   And we also have things like Gardner's books, Poulson's work, Jerry Grover on Geology, Brian Stubbs on linguistic influence, and such, that improve and refine his book on some key issues.  Notably directions.  Plus we have the competing Heartlanders, and Baja, Florida, Delaware, Malay Peninsulas, and so forth, none of which I see as serious competitors.  All paradigm debates involve deciding "Which problems are more significant to have solved?" and "Which paradigm is better?"  So I find it important to consider how do competitors decide "which problems are more significant to have solved?" and how do they measure "Which paradigm is better?"  Those questions are decided in a large measure by theory and preconception, rather than completely by evidence.

And we have things like the LiDAR surveys that revolutionized Mesoamerican Archeology overnight, in the direction of the Book of Mormon depictions, rather than undercutting them.

As to "Joseph had years to build his Lehite paracosm", in connection with the Lucy Mack Smith paragraph that many people use to portray Joseph as being an imaginative story-teller.  First Samuel Taylor wrote in Rocky Mountain Empire how his BYU teacher, Wilfred Poulson, privately managed to collect copies of every book listed in the Manchester Library, that would supposedly allow him to reconstruct Joseph Smith's intellectual environment, and show how he managed to compose the Book of Mormon.  A problem with that is, the collection is not sufficient to account for the Book of Mormon, even if the Smith's were members, which they were not.  It was not a public library, but a subscribers library.  Most of the translation was done in Harmony, which had neither library, nor book store.  And as William Hamblin showed, books were expensive, and the Smith's were hard pressed and busy with physical work.  When chopping down trees, pulling out roots, splitting rails for fences and constructing fences, along with planting, harvesting, making maple syrup, digging wells, etc, they could not be reading. We have accounts of Joseph's money digging neighbors, who clearly believed he had something worth ransacking the house to find, but they never reported finding stacks of books, note books and paper drawings.  Indeed, from the Book of Pukei, Abner Cole's contempory and local parody of the Book of Mormon, we get a view of what his neighbors imagined he would produce, most notable for being nothing like the Book of Mormon. And even Cole named Joseph Smith an "ignoramous"< not a "notorious bookworm."  I know from personal experience that book worms are recognized as such by non-reading school mates and neighbors.  And it happens that the famous Lucy Mack Smith quote, Ann Taves wrote:

Quote

Lucy Smith similarly attests to the vividness of Joseph’s “recitals” in which he described the “ancient inhabitants of this continent” to his family after his initial discovery of the plates in 1823. According to Lucy (EMD 1: 295– 96), he described “their dress[,] their maner [sic] of traveling[,] the animals which they rode[,] The cities that were built by them[,] the structure of their later buildings[,] with every particular of their mode of warfare[,] their religious worship — as particularly as though he had spent his life with them[.]” 

The problem is that the Book of Mormon has no detailed descriptions of their dress, manner of traveling, the animals on which they rode, nor details of their cities or details of buildings.  Why not?  The Book of Pukei has more details of dress, traveling, and animals, and even diseases.  If you look closely something seems off.  And while the Book of Mormon does describe their mode of warfare and manner of worship, we have no record of Joseph giving such recitals to anyone for the rest of his life on any of these topics.  Why not?  If he could do it as a teenager, why not as adult, particularly if his audience was so  appreciative and spell-bound?  And if his family had eye-witness experience of Joseph transparently inventing stories, why would they go along with him. as though it were all real, at such great personal cost?  I often imagine Joseph Smith in Liberty Jail in the winter after months of privation and isolation, saying to a co-conspirator, "Tell me again how much money we will make."   I do not have to imagine Joseph and Hyrum reading the Book of Mormon while in Liberty Jail, facing death, because they actually did it.

Quote

 I must consider that, even though a first-hand account, [Lucy's book] is not an autograph account, and it is late,12 dating to an 1844 dictation in Nauvoo to the 24-year old Martha Jane Coray regarding events in Palmyra 1823 and then not published until 1853. 

And there is this:

Quote

Sharalynn D. Howcroft (an editor of Oxford University Press’ forthcoming Foundational Texts of Mormonism) stated “For example, Lucy Mack Smith reportedly dictated her history to Martha Jane Coray; however, the extant manuscript doesn’t show evidence of dictation and there are other clues in the manuscript that suggest what we have is a few generations removed from a dictated text. Additionally, scholars have presumed the fair copy was a contiguous history, but physical clues indicate it was two separate copies of the history that were combined. This kind of analysis and discovery extends our understanding beyond what the content of a historical source divulges.” 

So, the claim that Joseph Smith was capable of spinning stories and constructing a personal mythology does not have contemporary evidence.  Just a late report with evident editorial influence, which leaves important unresolved tensions in the claims it makes.

Taves combines her claims about the Smith household experience with judgements from neighbors.

Quote

Accounts of neighbors from the early thirties refer to his “marvellous stories” (EMD 2: 27, 60– 61) and later accounts describe his “fertile imagination” (EMD 3: 211) and ability to “utter the most palpable exaggeration or marvellous absurdity with the utmost apparent gravity” (EMD 3: 93). 

But it seems to me that these are judgements about stories of the Book and the Angel and his visions from the period when it was all scandalous, and not about Book of Mormon stories.  Taves misapplies them by combining them with the later comments attributed to Lucy Mack Smith about family gatherings discussing what Joseph learned and experienced in his sessions with Moroni.

If the Book of Mormon claimed no direct ties to Old World cultures via Nephites, Mulekites, and Jaredite voyages, I might have issues with relevant Old World evidence, I might worry about Roper using Old World sources.  But it claims them, and that means such evidence deserves to be weighed.  Or to use the Parable of the Sower,  am not adverse to planting the seeds in the best soils I have available, nurturing them carefully over time, and considering the ongoing harvest. I don't see any profit in putting them down on rocks, scorching them with a magnifying glass under a hot sun, and saying, "See!  I told you the seeds were bad."

FWIW

Kevin Christensen

Tooele, UT

 

[Zosimus]

4 hours ago, Kevin Christensen said:

Wilfred Poulson, privately managed to collect copies of every book listed in the Manchester Library, that would supposedly allow him to reconstruct Joseph Smith's intellectual environment, and show how he managed to compose the Book of Mormon.  A problem with that is, the collection is not sufficient to account for the Book of Mormon

I've loaded all the books in the Manchester Library into a tool for parsing contents, and am convinced there was more than enough there to account for the Book of Mormon AND early Mormon doctrine. Hannah Adam's Dictionary of all Religions alone could account for most early doctrine. And then there's Tytler's General History and Ramsay's Travels of Cyrus. Much of what we usually consider to be unique to Mormonism was already published before 1830, and was being debated at the local social clubs:

Joseph Smith and Abraham Lincoln

"While taking divergent paths, Joseph and Lincoln passed through the same dark plain early in life. They both struggled with skepticism about the scriptures and the Christian religion. Lincoln’s encounter is more fully documented and had a more lasting effect, but there is good evidence Joseph also had a bout with what was then called “infidelity.” The term referred to a conglomerate of beliefs put forward by Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason, Ethan Allen in Reason the Only Oracle of Man, David Hume in On Miracle, C. F. Volney in Ruins of Civilization, and other works in a similar vein."

The works of Paine, Allen, Hume and Volney alone are a significant foundation for a restoration movement. Paine talks at length in his Theological Works (Origins of Free-masonry) about how King Josiah's reforms pushed true believers underground into secret groups that eventually became the freemasons who adopted the lost symbology of the First Temple in their lodges. We know Paine was being thrown around the Smith home. But then there's Volney's Ruins, which itself covers enough ground to become a foundation for a restoration movement. 

We haven't yet done enough work to establish that the material was not sufficient to account for the Book of Mormon

4 hours ago, Kevin Christensen said:

Indeed, from the Book of Pukei, Abner Cole's contempory and local parody of the Book of Mormon, we get a view of what his neighbors imagined he would produce, most notable for being nothing like the Book of Mormon. 

Given the environment, the Book of Mormon is exactly what we should expect someone to publish around 1830. There's a long lineage of these kinds of texts, almost every Christian kingdom since medieval times has "recovered" a manuscript linking their heritage to Noah and the Biblical chronology. There are literally dozens, some honestly more elaborate than the Book of Mormon. One such history (which linked a character named Ethor to the sons of Noah) written in mysterious characters was pulled out of a cave in Ohio, the same year Joseph Smith learned about the gold plates. Whether the neighbors recognized it or not, the Book of Mormon was inevitable

4 hours ago, Kevin Christensen said:

we have no record of Joseph giving such recitals to anyone for the rest of his life on any of these topics.  Why not?  If he could do it as a teenager, why not as adult, particularly if his audience was so  appreciative and spell-bound? 

"One Sunday when the marchers were trying to disguise their Mormon identity before a crowd of curious onlookers, Joseph spoke for an hour pretending to be a “liberal free-thinker.” According to George A. Smith, “Those present remarked that he was one of the greatest reasoners they ever heard.” - Joseph Smith and Abraham Lincoln

If Joseph was able to speak convincingly to an audience for an hour about skepticism, deism and freethinking, this is far more telling than him giving recitals about the American natives

[Calm]

44 minutes ago, Zosimus said:

One Sunday when the marchers were trying to disguise their Mormon identity before a crowd of curious onlookers, Joseph spoke for an hour pretending to be a “liberal free-thinker.” According to George A. Smith, “Those present remarked that he was one of the greatest reasoners they ever heard.” - Joseph Smith and Abraham Lincoln

If Joseph was able to speak convincingly to an audience for an hour about skepticism, deism and freethinking, this is far more telling than him giving recitals about the American natives

When did this occur in his life?  Do you think training and experience would have had an effect on him?

Edited April 25 by Calm

[Zosimus]

2 hours ago, Calm said:

When did this occur in his life?  Do you think training and experience would have had an effect on him?

June 1834

”Sunday, June 1, the camp settled about a mile from Jacksonville. Fredrick G. Williams announced to the people of Jacksonville that there would be preaching on the Sabbath. George A. Smith noted that two to three hundred of the local inhabitants came to hear. The Prophet (who was called “Squire Cook” by the men of the camp that day) spoke, professing to be a liberal free thinker. [23] The crowd listened to his remarks with great attention, and many noted he was one of the greatest reasoners they had ever heard. ” Source

What I gather from Bushman’s paper is that Joseph learned all this during a crisis of faith before he translated the gold plates. So even if he learned his oration skills after, he was deep in the discussions well before. 

The Book of Mormon is a remarkably sophisticated response to Paine’s theological works. Not only does it provide a clever response to his criticism of Josiah’s reforms (Lehi fleeing Jerusalem) but it also responds to Paine’s attack on the Pentateuch being a pious fraud orchestrated by Hilkiah to justify Josiah’s reforms (brass plates containing the original 5 Books of Moses)

The Book of Mormon looks like a direct response to the deists like Hume, Paine and Volney using the same playbook (arkite myth-making) that Biblical apologists like Bryant and Faber used to respond to the same deists. Joseph could have got all that material easily through books and social clubs, as it was one of the hottest topic of the day. The origins of the moundbuilders being another

its unconvincing to say that Joseph Smith was unfamiliar with moundbuilder speculations, or of Paine and the responses to Paine simply because he did not have a subscription to the Manchester Library. The whole church v. freethinker debate was dramatized within his own home, according to Lucy Mack Smith herself 

Edited April 25 by Zosimus

[Zosimus]

22 hours ago, Calm said:

When did this occur in his life?  Do you think training and experience would have had an effect on him?

"But Joseph had a little ambition, and some very laudable aspirations; the mother's intellect occasionally shone out in him feebly, especially when he used to help us to solve some portentous questions of moral or political ethics, in our juvenile debating club, which we moved down to the old red school-house on Durfee street, to get rid of the annoyance of critics that used to drop in upon us in the village; amid, subsequently, after catching a spark of Methodism in the camp-meeting, away down in the woods, on the Vienna road, he was a very passable exhorter in evening meetings." Source

If we consider Joseph's (with Moroni's instruction) ability to entertain his family with stories of ancient civilizations alongside his (without Moroni's instruction) public speaking abilities on theology, free-thinking, moral and ethical issues, we're pretty close to understanding how he would have been able to dictate the text of the Book of Mormon.

[Calm]

10 minutes ago, Zosimus said:

f we consider Joseph's (with Moroni's instruction) ability to entertain his family with stories of ancient civilizations alongside his (without Moroni's instruction) public speaking abilities on theology, free-thinking, moral and ethical issues, we're pretty close to understanding how he would have been able to dictate the text of the Book of Mormon.

Feebly, very passably sound more like faint praise to me than labeling him exceptional.

[Zosimus]

6 minutes ago, Calm said:

Feebly, very passably sound more like faint praise to me than labeling him exceptional.

He's referring to his mother's intellect shining through feebly, not to his public speaking skills.

Also Orasmus Turner's account is hostile, so we should expect some effort to continue portraying Joseph in a negative light. When he says "Joseph had a little ambition", it feels to me like he's underselling Joseph's ambition, in line with the previous sentence portraying Joseph as being "lounging, idle, (not to say vicious,) and possessed of less than ordinary intellect"

In any case, Joseph went from being a "very passable exhorter" able to help solve "portentous questions of moral or political ethics" to "one of the greatest reasoners" the crowds around Zions' Camp in 1834 had ever heard. The dictation of the Book of Mormon occurred at some point along that spectrum

[Calm]

13 hours ago, Zosimus said:

He's referring to his mother's intellect shining through feebly

Which implies there’s not a lot of intellect there.

Not saying this means he was stupid, just saying I don’t read that comment as him being that bright, though it does suggest he picked up what others taught him quickly and could incorporate it in new ways.

Given Tucker’s style in that quote, he seems sarcastic.  The “portentous” comes across as self deprecating, mocking the “juvenile debate team” as thinking of themselves as world fixers or something…a debate team that avoids debating with critics sounds more like a group wanting to pat each other on the back with how smart they are. 

Edited April 26 by Calm

[InCognitus]

On 4/24/2026 at 1:13 PM, theplains said:

Let me add my comments.

See Kevin Christensen's response above.

[InCognitus]

On 4/24/2026 at 11:07 PM, Zosimus said:

I've loaded all the books in the Manchester Library into a tool for parsing contents

If only Joseph had such a tool in his day.

Joseph Smith Sr.:  "Why isn't Joseph doing his farm work?"  

Alvin: "Oh, he's been down at the Manchester Library day after day doing some kind of research".

Lucy Smith:  "Oh really?  That's strange, at eighteen years of age Joseph never read the Bible through in his life and was much less inclined to the perusal of books than any of the rest of our children, but far more given to meditation and deep study.  Why is he at the library?"

[Zosimus]

1 hour ago, InCognitus said:

If only Joseph had such a tool in his day.

the tool I’m referring to is simple, you load a pdf of a book into it and ask questions about the contents, and discuss in more detail the responses. In a similar way,Joseph would have been able to ask questions to people who had read the books in the Manchester Library, and then discuss in more detail the responses. It seems like this is exactly what would have been happening in the debate club on Durfee Street when Joseph was helping to solve moral and ethical questions being discussed 

1 hour ago, InCognitus said:

Lucy Smith:  "Oh really?  That's strange, at eighteen years of age Joseph never read the Bible through in his life and was much less inclined to the perusal of books than any of the rest of our children, but far more given to meditation and deep study.  Why is he at the library?"

Good example of how I imagine things played out. Lucy mentioned in her account that the neighbors accused them of stopping their farm work to win the Faculty of Abrac. Her response was something like the family did in fact endeavor “to remember the service of & welfare of our souls”, but not to the neglect of their farm.

So let’s say Joseph spent the majority of his day working on the farm and then set an hour or two of his day to learning more about Abrac. He would go to Durfee Steet to discuss such questions. Let’s say someone at the club had checked out Hannah Adam’s Dictionary of All Religions at the nearby Manchester Library. They could have shared that Abraxas was the chief angelic spirit of a vast multitude of beings in the religious system of Egyptian Christians in the second century. These beings then formed a heaven for their own habitation and brought forth other beings of a slightly inferior nature.

Then someone could say, hey, that sounds like the doctrine of order out of chaos I read about in Ramsay’s Travels of Cyrus down at the Manchester Library. Then they could debate whether or not angels and spirits preexisted and whether or not beings and creation emanated out of God, or were created out of nothing

Joseph could then take those learnings back to the farm and ponder them for several hours while working in the fields

Also, Lucy doesn’t say Joseph couldn’t read, only that he was less inclined to reading than his siblings. My sense is he preferred to do things like solve questions “of a religious nature” (as Lucy phrased it) from discussions he’d have at places like the debate club, and then ponder them in deep study, as Lucy herself suggests 

 

Edited April 26 by Zosimus

[InCognitus]

1 hour ago, Zosimus said:

the tool I’m referring to is simple, you load a pdf of a book into it and ask questions about the contents, and discuss in more detail the responses. In a similar way,Joseph would have been able to ask questions to people who had read the books in the Manchester Library, and then discuss in more detail the responses. It seems like this is exactly what would have been happening in the debate club on Durfee Street when Joseph was helping to solve moral and ethical questions being discussed 

But this approach assumes that Joseph's group of friends were also devouring every relevant text in the Manchester Library, and Joseph happened to ask about just the right things to compose the Book of Mormon, the little details that have held up to the test of time.  That's a pretty far out theory. 

[Zosimus]

31 minutes ago, InCognitus said:

But this approach assumes that Joseph's group of friends were also devouring every relevant text in the Manchester Library, and Joseph happened to ask about just the right things to compose the Book of Mormon, the little details that have held up to the test of time.  That's a pretty far out theory. 

You think its far out that young boys are meeting at a debate society to discuss articles from a dictionary about the religions of the world that they found in the local iibrary? 

When exactly did Joseph learn enough much about freethinking deism to convince two to three hundred people over the space of an hour that he was one of the greatest reasoners they had ever heard? We need to explain where he picked up all that knowledge. I seriously doubt he was reading Paine, Hume and Volney after he restored the Gospel. I seriously doubt Moroni taught him enough freethinking deism that he could convince hundreds of people that he was one.

The simple answer is, as one of the most respected Mormon scholars argues, he learned it while discussing books like Hume, Paine and Volney at the debate club. If those books were known to the youth at the club, why couldn't they also know the books like Dictionary of all Religions and Travels of Cyrus which were available at the Manchester Library? Both these books were widely circulating and popular. How is this far out?

[Zosimus]

10 hours ago, Calm said:

Which implies there’s not a lot of intellect there.

Not saying this means he was stupid, just saying I don’t read that comment as him being that bright, though it does suggest he picked up what others taught him quickly and could incorporate it in new ways.

Turner was clear, he thought Joseph was lacking in intellect and ambition. Which makes it all the more convincing when he admits Joseph had enough intellect to help solve questions at the debate club, and that he had enough ambition and skill to very passably exhort on theological topics at the camp meetings. 

10 hours ago, Calm said:

Given Tucker’s style in that quote, he seems sarcastic.  The “portentous” comes across as self deprecating, mocking the “juvenile debate team” as thinking of themselves as world fixers or something…a debate team that avoids debating with critics sounds more like a group wanting to pat each other on the back with how smart they are. 

Portentous had a more specific meaning between 1830s and 1850s. This is how Turner used the word in a different context in the same book:

"In 1786, '7, a boy, I saw the Revolutionary fathers in their primary assemblies. The scene was solemn and portentous! They found their common country without a constitution and govern- ment, and without a union. The supposed oppressive measures of an adjoining State had so alarmed the people of a portion of it, that open resistance was made for self-protection, and the protection of property." Source

Regardless of any intended sarcasm, Turner is saying that Joseph Smith participated in discussions of topics that would have certainly required some overlap with texts that were sitting right there on the shelves of the print shop and of the old red school house on Durfee Street. I find it unthinkable that Joseph Smith wouldn't have picked up any of those books, and even if he didn't, that he didn't ponder deeply the questions others were discussing at the debate society. 

It raises another question. If Moroni had been instructing Joseph Smith on so many topics from theology to the ancient inhabitants of the Americas since 1823, then wouldn't Orasmus Turner have seen some of that learning sneak though? Why would Joseph be able to tell so many wonderful things to his family about the ancient inhabitants of America, but then Turner didn't notice anything remarkable? I think Turner was actually impressed by Joseph, and was simply underselling his intellect and ability

[Calm]

2 hours ago, Zosimus said:

You think its far out that young boys are meeting at a debate society to discuss articles from a dictionary about the religions of the world that they found in the local iibrary? 

Does that knowledge show up among the locals later on when they are older?  
 

Quote

When exactly did Joseph learn enough much about freethinking deism to convince two to three hundred people over the space of an hour that he was one of the greatest reasoners they had ever heard?

How many others besides Turner reported hundreds were convinced by Joseph and viewed him as one of the greatest reasoners etc?  Others who were there and not just repeating Turner’s or another’s claim? (Not a challenge, serious question)

[Zosimus]

1 hour ago, Calm said:

Does that knowledge show up among the locals later on when they are older?  

I don't think we know the names of any other local youth who participated the debate club. There were the Lapham brothers, Increase Lapham (b 1811) went on to become an accomplished antiquarian and scientist. He was the first to excavate the burial mounds of Aztalan, Wisconsin, thought to be the location of the Aztec homeland at that time. So at some point he was able to become one of the leading experts on the moundbuilders. His brother Fayette would interview Joseph Smith Sr. in 1829. But they were a few years after Joseph and moved around a lot, so they don't fully represent the learning available to a young man in Palmyra in the 1820s.

There's also Luther Bradish, who at the time Joseph would have been participating in the debate club, was traveling deep into Egypt/Sudan and was riding camels into Jerusalem and Syria before continuing on through Europe to Scandinavia. Bradish wasn't in Palmyra between 1820 and 1826, but since his parents lived in Palmyra at the time, I imagine his travels were closely followed and discussed by the locals. Bradish would of course become the first to give his opinion on the transcript of the gold plate characters.

It was possible for a young man from Palmyra to access the outside world.

1 hour ago, Calm said:

How many others besides Turner reported hundreds were convinced by Joseph and viewed him as one of the greatest reasoners etc?  Others who were there and not just repeating Turner’s or another’s claim? (Not a challenge, serious question)

That account was not Turner's, it was George A. Smith, Joseph's first cousin (source)

Edited April 27 by Zosimus

[Calm]

1 hour ago, Zosimus said:

That account was not Turner's, it was George A. Smith, Joseph's first cousin (source)

I am not the best tracker of details these days.

So only him?

[mbh26]

On 4/21/2026 at 3:20 PM, Analytics said:

In my "Impressive Evidence" thread, the model treated one of my pieces of pro evidence differently than I intended. The evidence in question was phrased thusly:

Limited geography models — Internal consistency when the text is mapped to a constrained region (e.g. Narrow Neck of Land, Siden)

My intention was that this was referring specifically to John Sorenson's Mesoamerica theory and not merely that the geographical features described in the book are internally consistent. GPT interpreted it as mere internal consistency, not consistency with Mesoamerica.

Just to flesh this out, in the final pages of An American Setting, Sorrenson said:
 

In a later essay, he made the point more sharply: "In addition to writing, other social and cultural conditions required by the scriptural text to be present in the Nephite homeland area confirm Mesoamerica as the only plausible location of Book of Mormon lands." (https://scripturecentral.org/archive/periodicals/journal-article/dna)

Should Sorenson's Mesoamerican arguments in An American Setting be included in my analysis, or is this now a theory that has seen its time go by? This one is important and I think consequential, and I don't want to misrepresent what believers believe about the alleged basket of "impressive evidence" I am evaluating. 

 

A pretty straight forward piece of evidence is the fact that central and South America are not nor were they ever a promised land.  Zarahemla was located in Jackson county MIssouri where the garden of Eden was.  The area is still a fertile and promised land today.  The midwestern United States could literally feed the entire world if we chose to do so.  The temples were what we often refer to as the mound builders in the American Heartland.  The land northward where Hagoth's ships set sail were the great Lakes.  That's also where the narrow neck of land was, not Panama.  The original land of Nephi-Lehi was around Tallahassee.  And the final battle was in upstate New York.  Why were there no swords or metal armor laying around.  The Lamanites likely looted and carried those away.  You're probably not going to find hebrew DNA in mesoamerica.  But you will find it in Algonquin, Cherokee, and Hopi Indian tribes.  Will everything match up perfectly?  Perhaps not, but I contend that this is still possible.

[webbles]

8 hours ago, Zosimus said:

That account was not Turner's, it was George A. Smith, Joseph's first cousin (source)

Are you sure it is George A Smith?  That source indicates that it just from the "History of the Church".  I looked in Joseph Smith Papers for the source of the information and even though I found the text itself (https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-1838-1856-volume-a-1-23-december-1805-30-august-1834/569), it has no indication of the original source of the text.  Do you have a link to an actual book/journal of George A Smith that contains this information?

I also found https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-1838-1856-volume-a-1-23-december-1805-30-august-1834/563 and https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-1838-1856-volume-a-1-23-december-1805-30-august-1834/488 which talks about the same thing but doesn't have the detail about how people found him to be a great reasoner.

 

[the narrator]

18 hours ago, InCognitus said:

That's strange, at eighteen years of age Joseph never read the Bible through in his life

It's simple. Either Lucy was wrong or she was lying. Besides Lucy also reporting an even younger Joseph saying: "But I will take my Bible and go out into the woods and learn more in two hours than you could if you were to go to meeting two years," it is VERY clear that by the time he was speaking the Book of Mormon he could seamlessly interweave passages from all over the Bible into he sermons and writings. 

Now, it could be the case that Lucy was only saying that Joseph had never read the Bible from beginning to end, and that may very well be true, though unlikely. It is far more likely that she, like Emma, was concerned with defending Joseph's legacy and deliberately overplayed the idea of Joseph being the village idiot.

Edited April 27 by the narrator

[the narrator]

14 hours ago, Zosimus said:

The simple answer is, as one of the most respected Mormon scholars argues, he learned it while discussing books like Hume, Paine and Volney at the debate club. If those books were known to the youth at the club, why couldn't they also know the books like Dictionary of all Religions and Travels of Cyrus which were available at the Manchester Library? Both these books were widely circulating and popular. How is this far out?

And besides books, Joseph had access to newspapers that republished stories from across the country and were a wealth of information.

[Zosimus]

5 hours ago, webbles said:

Are you sure it is George A Smith?

The footnote in the Bushman article is confused or wrong. But found it here