Why are people mormon considering it is obvioulsy fabricated?

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Stephen Van Eck, in his article, “The Book of Mormon: One Too Many M’s,” writes that Oliver Cowdery admitted to his law firm colleague, Judge W. Lang, that the Book of Mormon was a hoax, manufactured from Solomon Spaulding’s unpublished novel, “Manuscript Found”:

” . . . W. Lang, whose law firm the excommunicated Oliver Cowdery joined . . . wrote, ‘The plates were never translated and could not be, and were never intended to be.’ (This suggests that Cowdery still believed that there were actually plates.)

“‘What is claimed to be a translation is “The Manuscript Found” worked over by C.’ (Cowdery) ‘He was the best scholar among them.’. . . .

“‘Rigdon got the original at the job printing office in Pittsburgh . . . Without going into detail or disclosing a confidential word, I can say to you that I do know, as well as can now be known, that C. revised the manuscript and that Smith and Rigdon approved of it before it became the Book of Mormon.’"

Eck offers this explanation of Lang’s account:

“Apparently Cowdery had admitted the hoax to Lang, but took all the credit for it.

“This is not consistent with Cowdery being the servile follower of Smith that he had been. Had Cowdery given Smith the completed manuscript, furthermore, losing the first 116 pages of the dictated ‘translation’ would have scarcely been a problem. Cowdery, despite his apparent boasting to Lang, can be considered a collaborator at best, but a conspirator at least.”

secweb.infidels.org/?kiosk=articles&id=716
Lang made the above-mentioned claim that Cowdery had knowingly participated in the Book of Mormon production hoax in letter Lang wrote to Thomas Gregg of Hamilton, Illinois, in 1881.

Below are relevant, expanded excerpts from text of Lang’s letter to Gregg:

“TIFFIN, O., NOV. 5, 1881.

“DEAR SIR: — Your note of the 1st inst. I found upon my desk when I returned home this evening and I hasten to answer. Once for all I desire to be strictly understood when I say to you that I cannot violate any confidence of a friend though he be dead.

“This I will say that Mr. Cowdery never spoke of his connection with the Mormons to anybody except to me. We were intimate friends.

“The plates were never translated and could not be, were never intended to be. What is claimed to be a translation is the ‘Manuscript Found’ worked over by C. [Cowdery] He was the best scholar amongst them. Rigdon got the original at the job printing office in Pittsburgh as I have stated.

“I often expressed my objection to the frequent repetition of ‘And it came to pass’ to Mr. Cowdery and said that a true scholar ought to have avoided that, which only provoked a gentle smile from C.

“Without going into detail or disclosing a confided word, I say to you that I do know, as well as can now be known, that C. revised the ‘Manuscript’and Smith and Rigdon approved of it before it became the ‘Book of Mormon.’ I have no knowledge of what became of the original. Never heard C. say as to that.”

(quoted in Charles A. Schook, “The True Origin of The Book of Mormon” [Cincinnati, Ohio: The Standard Publishing Co., 1914], pp. 56-57); for the full text of the letter, see: solomonspalding.com/docs2/1914Shk1.htm#pgvii)
 
MelanieAnne said:
I guess the fact that these “witnesses” didn’t actually SEE the so-called “golden plates” isn’t troublesome for some people.
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Here is an account by a Baptist who joined the lds church. He was not one of the witnesses but this is what he experienced:

Zerah was first introduced to the Book of Mormon in 1831. He was living in Pennsylvania, and was attending a Baptist church. He heard the pastor say something about a “gold bible” that had been discovered. He said that the words hit him like a shock and he had a desire to learn more about it. In the fall of that same year a missionary came to his area with a Book of Mormon and preached to groups. Zerah interviewed the missionary about the book and about the Gifts of the Spirit. The missionary told the group that he had prayed and received a confirmation about the truth from the Holy Spirit and that all were entitled to the same. He prayed fervently for seven days to learn the truth. He gives this account on what happened on the seventh day:

“I think about the seventh day as I was thrashing in my barn with doors shut, all at once there seemed to be a ray of light from heaven which caused me to stop work for a short time, but soon began it again. Then in a few minutes another light came over my head which caused me to look up. I thought I saw the angels with the Book of Mormon in their hands in the attitude of showing it to me and saying “this is the great revelation of the last days in which all things spoken of by the prophets must be fulfilled.” The vision was so open and plain that I began to rejoice exceedingly so that I walked the length of my barn crying Glory Hal-la-lu-ya to the God and the Lamb forever.”

Okay, so he didn’t actually see “the plates”, but I think seeing angels holding the Book of Mormon and bearing testimony of it is close enough. Following his experience he shared the experience with the people of his church and declared that he was going to join the “Church of Latter-day Saints”. A large body of the congregation followed and were baptized along with him.

In 1833 he went on a mission converting and baptizing several people, including Wilford Woodruff, who would later become the 4th President and Prophet of The Church. Zerah followed the church from New York, to Ohio, to Missouri, and all the way to Utah. He was ordained and set apart as the President of the Quorum of Seventy in Kirtland, Ohio, and would later become a patriarch in Utah. He died 1 January 1872, in full membership in the church.

moroni10.com/witnesses/Zerah_Pulsipher.html
 
Here’s the interesting thing about the Witnesses and LDS Scripture:

Doctrine and Covenant 5:9-14

10 But this generation shall have my word through you;
11 And in addition to your testimony, the testimony of three of my servants, whom I shall call and ordain, unto whom I will show these things, and they shall go forth with my words that are given through you.
12 Yea, they shall know of a surety that these things are true, for from heaven will I declare it unto them.
13 I will give them power that they may behold and view these things as they are;
14 And to none else will I grant this power, to receive this same testimony among this generation, in this the beginning of the rising up and the coming forth of my church out of the wilderness—clear as the moon, and fair as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners.

So how did the Eight Witnesses come to view them, if “none else will I grant this power”???

How you ask? Why, Joseph Smith finished “translating” 2 Nephi 27:12-13, presumably after the previous “revelation”, which states:

12 Wherefore, at that day when the book shall be delivered unto the man of whom I have spoken, the book shall be hid from the eyes of the world, that the eyes of none shall behold it save it be that three witnesses shall behold it, by the power of God, besides him to whom the book shall be delivered; and they shall testify to the truth of the book and the things therein.
13 And there is none other which shall view it,** save it be a few according to the will of God**, to bear testimony of his word unto the children of men; for the Lord God hath said that the words of the faithful should speak as if it were from the dead.

This is too funny. First the revelation says that “none else will I grant this power”, and leaves it at that. Now, after the D&C revelation, Joseph Smith translates 2 Nephi, and it adds in “save it be a few according to the will of God”. :rolleyes:
 
RebeccaJ said:
Nothing but mormon lies. It may be that some are gullible enough, don’t expect that others don’t see right through it all.
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Except that some of these people left the church and their relatives were not mormon. But good response. A one liner fits fine into your world view.
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why_me said:
Here is an account by a Baptist who joined the lds church. He was not one of the witnesses but this is what he experienced:

Zerah was first introduced to the Book of Mormon in 1831. He was living in Pennsylvania, and was attending a Baptist church. He heard the pastor say something about a “gold bible” that had been discovered. He said that the words hit him like a shock and he had a desire to learn more about it. In the fall of that same year a missionary came to his area with a Book of Mormon and preached to groups. Zerah interviewed the missionary about the book and about the Gifts of the Spirit. The missionary told the group that he had prayed and received a confirmation about the truth from the Holy Spirit and that all were entitled to the same. He prayed fervently for seven days to learn the truth. He gives this account on what happened on the seventh day:

“I think about the seventh day as I was thrashing in my barn with doors shut, all at once there seemed to be a ray of light from heaven which caused me to stop work for a short time, but soon began it again. Then in a few minutes another light came over my head which caused me to look up. I thought I saw the angels with the Book of Mormon in their hands in the attitude of showing it to me and saying “this is the great revelation of the last days in which all things spoken of by the prophets must be fulfilled.” The vision was so open and plain that I began to rejoice exceedingly so that I walked the length of my barn crying Glory Hal-la-lu-ya to the God and the Lamb forever.”

Okay, so he didn’t actually see “the plates”, but I think seeing angels holding the Book of Mormon and bearing testimony of it is close enough. Following his experience he shared the experience with the people of his church and declared that he was going to join the “Church of Latter-day Saints”. A large body of the congregation followed and were baptized along with him.

In 1833 he went on a mission converting and baptizing several people, including Wilford Woodruff, who would later become the 4th President and Prophet of The Church. Zerah followed the church from New York, to Ohio, to Missouri, and all the way to Utah. He was ordained and set apart as the President of the Quorum of Seventy in Kirtland, Ohio, and would later become a patriarch in Utah. He died 1 January 1872, in full membership in the church.

moroni10.com/witnesses/Zerah_Pulsipher.html
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So, are you going to post any Catholic points of view on this issue? Or what about those that have had supernatural events that point to the truth of the Catholic Faith? Or are we not defending Catholicism today?
 
why_me said:
Except that some of these people left the church and their relatives were not mormon. But good response. A one liner fits fine into your world view.
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They were mormons whyme. The original, who built it all, on lies, and lied to their last day.
 
RebeccaJ said:
Stephen Van Eck, in his article, “The Book of Mormon: One Too Many M’s,” writes that Oliver Cowdery admitted to his law firm colleague, Judge W. Lang, that the Book of Mormon was a hoax, manufactured from Solomon Spaulding’s unpublished novel, “Manuscript Found”:
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)

Nice try again. I can publish an account what Pope Paul VI said to me but that doesn’t make it true. Go the source. Give an account what Oliver or any of the witnesses said first hand.
 
why_me said:
Nice try again. I can publish an account what Pope Paul VI said to me but that doesn’t make it true. Go the source. Give an account what Oliver or any of the witnesses said first hand.
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Blind. Period.

You should confess your mormon beliefs. You need help.
 
The Stanford text analysis of the Book of Mormon implicated Cowdery:

“Our results indicate that likely nineteenth century contributors were Solomon Spalding, a writer of historical fantasies; Sidney Rigdon, an eloquent but perhaps unstable preacher; and Oliver Cowdery, a schoolteacher with editing experience. Our findings support the hypothesis that Rigdon was the main architect of the Book of Mormon and are consistent with historical evidence suggesting that he fabricated the book by adding theology to the unpublished writings of Spalding (then deceased)…”

llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/23/4/465

Besides the testimony of Lang there are the comments of Lorenzo Saunders, a neighbor of the Smith’s, in 1885 and 1887 implicating both Oliver Cowdery and Sidney Rigdon in the production of the Book of Mormon.

In his 1885 statement, Saunders said:

“As respecting Oliver Cowdery, he came from Kirtland in the summer of 1826 and was about there * until fall and took a school in the district where the Smiths lived and the next summer he was missing and I didn’t see him until fall and he came back and took our school in the district where we lived and taught about a week and went to the schoolboard and wanted the board to let him off and they did and he went to Smith and went to writing the Book of Mormon and wrote all winter. The Mormons say it wasn’t wrote there but I say it was because I was there. I saw Sidney Rigdon in the spring of 1827, about the middle of March. I went to Smiths to eat maple sugar, and I saw five or six men standing in a group and there was one among them better dressed than the rest and I asked Harrison Smith who he was and he said his name was Sidney Rigdon, a friend of Joseph’s from Pennsylvania.

I saw him in the Fall of 1827 on the road between where I lived and Palmyra, with Joseph. I was with a man by the name of Ingersol. They talked together and when he went on I asked Ingersol who he was and he said it was Rigdon. Then in the summer of 1828 I saw him at Samuel Lawrence’s just before harvest. I was cutting corn for Lawrence and went to dinner and he took dinner with us and when dinner was over they went into another room and I didn’t see him again till he came to Palmyra to preach. You wanted to know how Smith acted about it. The next morning after he claimed to have got plates he came to our house and said he had got the plates and what a struggle he had in getting home with them. Two men tackled him and he fought and knocked them both down and made his escape and secured the plates and had them safe and secure. He showed his thumb where he bruised it in fighting those men.

After [he] went from the house, my mother says ‘What a liar Joseph Smith is; he lies every word he says; I know he lies because he looks so guilty; he can’t see out of his eyes; how dare [he] tell such a lie as that.’ The time he claimed to have taken the plates from the hill was on the 22 day of September, in 1827, and I went on the next Sunday following with five or six other ones and we hunted the side hill by course * and could not find no place where the ground had been broke. There was a large hole where the money diggers had dug a year or two before, but no fresh dirt. There never was such a hole; there never was any plates taken out of that hill nor any other hill in country, was in Wayne county. It is all a lie. No, sir, I never saw the plates nor no one else. He had an old glass box * with a tile in it, about 7x8 inches, and that was the gold plates;] and Martin Harris didn’t know a gold plate from a brick at this time.

Smith and Rigdon had an intimacy but it was very secret and still and there was a mediator between them and that was Cowdery. The manuscript was stolen by Rigdon and modelled over by him and then handed over to Cowdery and he copied them and Smith sat behind the curtain and handed them out to Cowdery and as fast as Cowdery copied them, they was handed over to Martin Harris and he took them to Egbert Granden [sic], the one who printed them, and Gilbert set the type.”

Lorenzo Saunders, Letter to Thomas Gregg, 28 January 1885
, Charles A. Shook, The True Origin of the Book of Mormon (Cincinnati, Ohio: Standard Publishing Co., 1914, p. 132-33). Cited in: Dan Vogel, ed., Early Mormon Documents, 3 vols. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1996-2000, 3:177-79.***
 
RebeccaJ said:
They were mormons whyme. The original, who built it all, on lies, and lied to their last day.
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Jacob was an exmormo and never denied his testimony:

Even though Jacob severed his relationship with the Church, he never denied his experience with the gold plates and the Book of Mormon. In 1888, John C. Whitmer, Jacob’s son, recalled his father’s last words about his part as a witness. This is what he said, “My father (Jacob Whitmer) was always faithful and true to his testimony in regard to the Book of Mormon, and confirmed it on his deathbed.”

If I were about to die, and I was about to go meet God, the last thing I would want is to keep a lie going. I would want to clear my conscience as fast as I could. He had every opportunity and every reason to do it. He had nothing to gain by keeping the story going, and nothing to lose by going public with a recantation of his testimony. The fact is that he never recanted, even on his death bed, because he knew what he had witnessed and signed his name too was true.

However this is not the point. MelanieAnn said that no witness saw the book of mormon. I refuted her claim. See the point? Now of course, I wonder how many exmormons like yourself have never denied their testimony on this forum.
 
Of course not whyme, they lied, do you think they are going to tell you they lied?
 
why_me said:
…Hiram Page did in fact see, touch, and lift the plates.
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To the best of my knowledge, Page never made a claim to have personally seen, touched, and lifted the plates; and certainly, those who did make such a claim, pointed out that the plates were “wrapped in a tow frock” during the entirety of the ‘viewing’ of them.

Rather, like many of the other ‘witnesses’ such as Harris and Cowdery, Page alluded to a spiritual experience which confirmed in him the legitimacy of Smith’s claims in one way or another. Perhaps you would be so kind as to correct my erroneous knowledge of this matter?
 
it’s funny that the LDS don’t see anything wrong with most of the Witnesses leaving the LDS Church or were excommunicated, and that the only ones that remained in the “True Church” were Smith Sr., Hyrum, and Samuel, aka his father and two brothers. All of the Three Witnesses, referred to in the Book of Mormon and D&C, to whom “all things were revealed”, left the church.

hmm…
 
oh and the LDS Church isn’t unique with having Plates revealed to a “prophet” with witnesses.
 
InNomineDomini said:
Hm? What are you referring to?
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The Strangite Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. James Strang was one of the people up for succession of Joseph Smith as Prophet. He too claimed to receive Plates after being directed by an angel, incuding the Voree Plates and the Plates of Laban. Interestingly, both Smith and Strang had many of their witnesses defect in some manner, with many of Smith’s witnesses leaving his church or being excommunicated, and many of Strang’s witnesses denying his Plates and leaving his church.

strangite.org/Welcome.htm
 
Here is something else that was said by Whitmer in his “An Address to All Believers in Christ”. LDS like to say that Whitmer maintained his testimony of the Book of Mormon until the end of his life, which he did. Here is another heavenly revelation received by Whitmer, after he was excommunicated:

“If you believe my testimony to the Book of Mormon; if you believe that God spake to us three witnesses by his own voice, then I tell you that in June, 1838, God spake to me again by his own voice from the heavens, and told me to “separate myself from among the Latter Day Saints, for as they sought to do unto me, should it be done unto them.” In the spring of 1838, the heads of the church and many of the members had gone deep into error and blindness.”

Seems like God wasn’t pleased with the true Church…Whitmer then founded his own version of the LDS religion, the Church of Christ (Whitmerite).
 
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