The Fruit of “Fanatical Earnestness”: The Testimony of the Eight Witnesses
Bill McKeever recently took a look at the documented history and evidence surrounding the testimonies of the Book of Mormon witnesses. In “Did the Eleven Witnesses Actually See the Gold Plates?” Mr. McKeever wrote,
“Mormons generally believe that these eleven men actually saw the plates in question, and given what they said in their testimonies, it is easy to see why they draw that conclusion. The three witnesses stated that they ‘beheld and saw the plates and the engravings thereon.’ The eight witnesses, in a similar fashion, stated they ’saw the engravings,’ and that they had also ’seen and hefted, and know of a surety that the said Smith has got the plates of which we have spoken.’
“Despite the rather lucid description given by these men, it appears that their familiarity with the plates is not as it first appears. Did the witnesses actually see physical plates with their naked eyes? Or was this some sort of mystical experience that involved ’seeing’ an object that was not really there?
Though not mentioned in Mr. McKeever’s article, this reminded me of something I read some years ago. In Thomas Ford’s A History of Illinois (originally published in 1854) we find a description of the events leading up to the testimony of the eight witnesses:
“…I have been informed by men who were once in the confidence of the prophet that he privately gave a different account of the matter. It is related that the prophet’s early followers were anxious to see the plates; the prophet had always given out that they could not be seen by the carnal eye, but must be spiritually discerned; that the power to see them depended upon faith and was the gift of God, to be obtained by fasting, prayer, mortification of the flesh, and exercises of the spirit; that so soon as he could see the evidences of a strong and lively faith in any of his followers they should be gratified in their holy curiosity. He set them to continual prayer and other spiritual exercises, to acquire this lively faith by means of which the hidden things of God could be spiritually discerned; and at last, when he could delay them no longer, he assembled them in a room and produced a box, which he said contained the precious treasure. The lid was opened; the witnesses peeped into it, but making no discovery, for the box was empty, they said, ‘Brother Joseph, we do not see the plates.’ The prophet answered them, ‘O ye of little faith! how long will God bear with this wicked and perverse generation? Down on your knees, brethren, every one of you, and pray God for the forgiveness of your sins, and for a holy and living faith which cometh down from heaven.’ The disciples dropped to their knees and began to pray in the fervency of their spirit, supplicating God for more than two hours with fanatical earnestness; at the end of which time, looking again into the box, they were now persuaded that they saw the plates.” (177-178)
Extermination Order Not a Death Sentence
MormonTimes.com: Extermination Order not a ‘death sentence’
Feeling Lucky? The Probability of Exaltation
I just read Odds Are, You’re Going to be Exalted by LDS author Alonzo L. Gaskill (2008, Deseret Book). In this slim volume Mr. Gaskill seeks to reassure Latter-day Saints that even though they are not actually doing “all [they] can do” (2 Nephi 25:23), they can still expect to be exalted in the celestial kingdom. The book promises to provide readers “evidence that the [LDS] plan of salvation works.”
Mr. Gaskill lays odds that “you’re going to be exalted” because almost everybody will be. He writes,
“…literally billions of our Father in Heaven’s children have already been guaranteed exaltation in the celestial kingdom. Those who die before the age of eight, individuals with mental handicaps that limit their accountability, translated beings from various dispensations, many of the billions to be born during the Millennium, and a significant percentage of those who receive the gospel in the spirit world—all these and more, according to what has been revealed, will be exalted through the great Plan of a merciful and loving Father in Heaven.” (41)
The God-Breathed Words of Scripture
In early September (2008) one of Mormon Coffee’s LDS friends left this comment:
“On my other posts, I am finding a disturbing trend. I find that when I reference Christ’s words from the New Testament more often than not the rebuttal comes from Paul’s writings.
“I have developed a general rule of thumb when reading the scriptures. If there seems to be a contradiction in meaning, I give priority to the Saviors words.
“Because so much of what evangelicals seem to believe comes from Paul’s writings- often it would seem to the neglect of the Savior’s- would it be correct to assume that you worship Paul?”
Evangelicals, it should go without saying, do not worship the apostle Paul. Neither do we resolve what may seem to be contradictions in Scripture by choosing the words of Paul over the words of Christ. Rather, Evangelicals believe all the words recorded in the Bible are equally authoritative and fully reconcilable, presenting a consistent and seamless witness of the Truth of God.
God who acts as Heavenly Mother
God who acts as Heavenly Mother
“All the women were prostitutes.”
Tomorrow (September 11, 2008) is another anniversary of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the traitorous murders of 120 men, woman and children led by Mormons in southern Utah in 1857. This year a couple of new books about the Massacre have been published. One is House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre by forensic anthropologist Shannon Novak.
Ms. Novak’s book is quite different from the others I’ve seen. Rather than spend a great deal of time on the Massacre itself, Ms. Novak looks more intently at the greater American context in which the ill-fated wagon train of emigrants left Arkansas for a new life in the west. Having been privileged to study the bones of twenty-eight Massacre victims, bones that were accidentally unearthed in August of 1999, Ms. Novak approaches her understanding of the Mountain Meadows Massacre from an entirely different perspective than that of a literary (non-scientific) historian. Many details from House of Mourning are worthy of mention, and perhaps they will appear here at Mormon Coffee sometime in the future. But for today, I’ll present just one aspect of Ms. Novak’s research.
In the chapter titled “Constitution,” Ms. Novak wrote:
“Many traditional accounts of Mountain Meadows have claimed that the Arkansas emigrants were, in some sense, diseased. Some two weeks after he participated in the massacre, John D. Lee described the victims as syphilitic: ‘Many of the men & women was ro[tten?] with the pox before they were hurt by the Indians’… Soon it was reported in the Los Angeles Star… that William H. Dame, colonel of the [LDS] Iron County militia, had examined the bodies of the Arkansans and determined that all the women were prostitutes. As Bagley… points out, such stories seem to have been transmitted to reporters by William Matthews, a leading Mormon official in California, as part of a ’systematic defamation of the murdered emigrants.’
“This conclusion is no doubt correct. To understand such defamation, however, we must consider what it meant to be ‘diseased.’” (page 88, source citations in the original replaced here with ellipses)
After explaining multiple types of diseases common in Antebellum America and the health of the Arkansas victims as evidenced by their remains, Ms. Novak turned to a discussion of syphilis and it’s “endemic” status “within any nineteenth-century population center” (107). She wrote:
“The remains at Mountain Meadows, however, tell a different story. In the study sample of at least 28 massacre victims, there was no evidence of lesions that would be consistent with a diagnosis of venereal or congenital syphilis. Once again we are struck by the apparent vigor of this population.
“These findings are in sharp contrast to claims that were made in the immediate aftermath of the massacre… Though the skeletal evidence from the mass grave at Mountain Meadows cannot decisively refute the claims of Lee, Dame, and others, it casts doubt on the image of an emigrant party that was ‘rotten with pox,’ as Lee put it…
“For the sake of argument, however, let us grant the possibility that the victims bodies might have been examined for evidence of the disease and other abnormalities. How would anyone have been able to tell that they were infected with syphilis? Unless the victims were in the advanced stages of the disease, only a close examination of their genitalia would have revealed any symptoms. Needless to say, none of the newspaper accounts or journal entries provides details about how such a procedure was conducted. It is known that the bodies were stripped of their clothing soon after the massacre. So the possibility remains that the perpetrators, under the guise of medical examination, committed a final outrage on the killing field.” (107-108)
To place the charge of “defamation” into a proper context, Ms. Novak continued:
“Perpetrators of the massacre seem to have been justifying an especially ‘bad outcome’ for the Arkansas emigrants. In their version of events the emigrants themselves bore responsibility for their deaths. Such reasoning allowed even children to be viewed as morally corrupt…
“Thus, in the case of Mountain Meadows, to insinuate that parents were afflicted with disease—especially one such as syphilis—was to comment on the character, or future character, of their offspring. It was especially offensive to claim, as Dame was purported to do, that ‘all the women were prostitutes.’ Because an infant was ‘dependent upon the state of the mother’s blood from the moment of conception till weaned from the breast,’ emotional states such as anger, sexual desire, or envy ‘could potentially injure the nursling by contaminating its milk’… Such logic allowed the perpetrators of the massacre to deny the innocence even of the surviving children [aged 9 months to 6 years). Thus, on September 29, 1857, Wilford Woodruff wrote in his journal… 'Brother [John D.] Lee said that He did not think there was a drop of innocent Blood in their Camp for he had too of their Children in his house & he Could not get but one to kneel down in prayer time & the other would laugh at her for doing it & they would sware like pirat[e]s.’” (108-109)
So it went, in the aftermath of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, that the Mormon leadership, who ordered and carried out this horrendous crime, justified the brutal murders of 40 men, 30 women, and 53 children passing through Mormon country on their hopeful way to a new life.