I spent some time reading about the witnesses last night and found (like usual) it very frustrating because both sides put forward such different explanations of the same event that it feels impossible to ever really find out what happened. I suppose what I need to do is concentrate on the foundational questions such as “Was there really a complete apostacy?”, “Is the Book of Mormon an inspired work from God?”, etc.
~Dee
To my understanding no witness ever denied what they saw. Not one ever publically admited that it was all a fraud. I tend not to rely on second hand accounts. The author of this article has written a great book about the witnesses but the title escapes me. But the article is interesting:
fairlds.org/FAIR_Conferences/2004_Explaining_Away_the_Book_of_Mormon_Witnesses.html
Characteristics of the Witnesses
All right, if you go back to the first reaction to the witnesses of the Book of Mormon in The Palmyra Reflector, ridicule is pretty standard; character assassination; you can’t take these people seriously and their claim to be liars or really stupid; easy to convince people and superstitious.
And if you’ve read anti-Mormon approaches to the witnesses in the last five years, many of them are saying–they’re not really many and I’m not… I’ll be glad in questions to name people and so on but I’m really trying to work with issues–but the issue here is that people work with this idea that my approach in the little red book or the big blue book before that, the first edition, Investigating The Book of Mormon Witnesses, that approach says honesty and credibility was the hallmark of these people in their community.
Now I have to back off and say in the case of Martin Harris people said that he was terribly gullible because he believed the Bible and took literally the prophecies. So, credibility had a religious exception: he was credible in business but he wasn’t credible in his religious attitudes.
And, so, anyway I’m told that credibility and character and honesty are all irrelevant, if you’re going to be deceived you can be an honest person and be deceived so we don’t even talk about that.
Well, if Mark Hofmann somehow got out and offered us a new set of documents, credibility might be an issue. If somebody is a known liar, you’re not even going to get to first base in taking it seriously and so I say that these are really big issues and if you’ve crossed that huge chasm of having believable people who are saying “we saw the plates,” “we saw the angel,” or “we handled the plates,” then you’ve really come a long way.
Oliver Cowdery’s law partner said that he had never met anybody that was so well informed and this man went on to have a career in politics, a successful career in law. He did a really fine county history that’s not a bunch of blurbs but real history and wrote two paragraphs on early pioneer lawyers in his county. His name is William Lang, he apprenticed in Oliver Cowdery’s law office, and he said he had never met a person that was so well informed on so many different subjects. He sincerely admired the man’s mind and his capabilities.
Well if I tell you that I’ve seen the northern lights in Utah that’s a fairly improbable statement but it might be true sometime. You might say, “well does Anderson know the difference between the appearance of northern lights and the appearance of Salt Lake City in the distance?” And intelligence, perception is a great issue too. And these are really defined as, out of the way, that’s irrelevant. It’s certainly not irrelevant. We have substantial people bearing substantial testimonies.
A variation of this, their bad character, is quoting Joseph Smith on their bad character. And Joseph Smith has, I have to smile at it because we’ve all been in this mood and some of us have acted on it and others have had better judgment but anyway Joseph Smith says basically judgment for judgment, I mean he puts this at the beginning of this editorial in the Elder’s Journal in 1838 and he’s just had it with people that want to leave the Church and give him a bad time and all Missourians conspiring to throw the Mormons out and he is in a defensive mood and mode for sure. But he calls David Whitmer a dumb *** but he’s talking about Balaam’s *** in the Old Testament speaking the truth in spite of himself and he has an epithet for Martin Harris. I don’t really recall that he says anything about Oliver Cowdery except he does feel betrayed.
And so Joseph Smith did label the witnesses with those labels and so if you quote Joseph Smith it looks pretty impressive: “These people weren’t to be believed, and Joseph Smith said so, so don’t believe their testimony of the Book of Mormon.” Well that’s a neat reversal of reality, just based on circumstances, but that plays into the whole issue.
I’m told in some books that they are impostors; they are part of a conspiracy. Well Joseph Smith went out of his way to alienate them as they left the Church. The Church in Far West went out of their way to alienate John Whitmer, Lyman Johnson as an ex-apostle was along for the ride out, and David Whitmer and Oliver Cowdery and they were told you’re not welcome in town–get out! (It happens in many frontier communities, and Latter-day Saints are not insulated from emotions trying to explain instead of justify.)
If you’re run out of town and told that the people that you were with don’t want you around anymore and some rather extreme charges are made about your honesty on the way out, you would have a pretty strong reaction and so you get into this set and subset of somebody accusing, counter-accusing and escalating a whole argument and these emotions actually went on.
The witnesses are victimized by this and Oliver Cowdery stayed out of the Church partly because he waited for an apology which never came. But in spite of that, he said “I know.” So quoting Joseph Smith negatively is only to highlight the conflict that these witnesses bridged themselves and said for sure they had seen the plates in spite of all that.
