Introduction and Richard Bushman's Background

Part 1 of 5 · Ep. 47

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John Dehlin [00:00:51] In my estimation, Dr. Richard Bushman is one of the single most important figures in both 20th and 21st century Mormonism. Born and raised, a member of the LDS Church, attended Harvard for both his undergraduate and graduate degrees, culminating in a PhD in history, struggled with his own faith while attending Harvard, worked through these struggles to eventually become not only the world's foremost scholar on Joseph Smith and in the early years of the LDS Church, but also a faithful, devout, believing member father of six who has served as Bishop, Stake President and now Patriarch for the LDS Church. There isn't an anti Mormon alive who can claim to know more than Dr. Bushman about Joseph Smith, warts and all. And yet Brother Bushman still chooses to believe that Joseph Smith was an inspired prophet of God. In this multi part series, we will discuss with Richard Bushman at length his experiences as a Mormon scholar and we will attempt to delve deeply into each of the toughest issues surrounding Joseph Smith and the founding of the LDS Church, including the first vision story, treasure digging, peep stones, polygamy masonry and all the rest. In part one of this series, Dr. Bushman discusses his early years, his career as a Mormon historian, including his interactions with both Leonard Arrington and Sunstone Dialogue magazines, and his perspectives on the role of history, thought and candid dialogue within the modern LDS Church. Your story today on Mormon Stories,

John Dehlin [00:02:40] Doctor Richard Bushman. Thank you for coming on Mormon Stories Podcast.

Richard Bushman [00:02:44] I'm pleased to be here if you don't mind.

John Dehlin [00:02:47] It's sort of a tradition with Mormon Stories Podcast that we begin by having our guests tell a bit about their story. And so if you don't mind, I'd love our listeners and myself to learn a bit about your childhood, your early years and then we'll go from there.

Richard Bushman [00:03:06] I was born in Salt Lake at the beginning of the Depression and my family, like so many others, was part of the diaspora that left Utah in the 30s because the economy couldn't support the population and instead of ending up in California like my wife's parents, we ended up in Portland, Oregon. I grew up there until I left high school in Portland, when it was one stake, covered not only all of Portland, but south all the way to Eugene and east to the Dalles. So it was virtually the entire northeast, northwest quadrant of the state. And I think it had a great effect on my intellectual outlook because I never thought that Mormonism was powerful. I always thought it was weak. It was a little church just struggling to get a toehold. And so I did. In those years when people try to break free of something and establish their own identity, Mormonism wasn't strong enough to. To become worthy opponent for me. My parents were both faithful in the church. My dad was in the bishopric, and we were pretty much a faithful family. But I never felt any need to rebel. Where I rebelled was when I got to Harvard as an undergraduate in 1949 and my tutor there in my sophomore year, a very distinguished scholar, informed me in a gentle and kindly way that lots of people around there thought of Mormonism as garbage. And my first response was indignation. And it was that massive Eastern academic culture that seemed to me to be the dominant force. And if there was any rebellion in my heart, it was directed against that rather than against the Latter Day Saint Church.

John Dehlin [00:05:23] Right. So almost defensive.

Richard Bushman [00:05:27] Pardon? Defensive.

John Dehlin [00:05:28] Yeah.

Richard Bushman [00:05:30] Yeah, I guess so. I didn't want them beating up on my family. I knew they were good people, and to say that they were foolish for believing such garbage was very offensive. I thought it was a very coarse comment for a Harvard faculty member to make.

John Dehlin [00:05:48] So how did you respond to it?

Richard Bushman [00:05:50] I didn't fight him at the moment. I just sort of took it, soaked it up. I told the story a hundred times. I didn't realize how much the incident meant until late in life. I began relating it as the characteristic event in my early maturation.

John Dehlin [00:06:08] So he said this during class in a classroom setting?

Richard Bushman [00:06:12] No, this was a private tutorial. Just him and me sitting together and talking about books.

John Dehlin [00:06:21] So afterwards, how did you respond in your own private time, personally?

Richard Bushman [00:06:26] Well, I was enthusiastic about the church, and the Harvard kids there would get together every Sunday and we would talk about anything we wanted to. We were great speculators. A number of really interesting people were there. And since we felt absolutely no inhibitions on what we discussed, I've always felt very free in Mormonism. Never felt like there were constraints because I've always lived in free zones of Mormon culture. We talked about anything.

John Dehlin [00:07:06] Do you mean non Utah, basically?

Richard Bushman [00:07:08] Well, I never didn't live in Utah, so I couldn't really make a comparison. But the places where I happen to land, namely Cambridge, Massachusetts and Portland, Oregon. I had no sense of being constrained to toe the line or there are things we couldn't talk about.

John Dehlin [00:07:28] Okay, so with those students, you would have this free inquiry and discussion.

Richard Bushman [00:07:38] Right.

John Dehlin [00:07:39] And what came out of that for you?

Richard Bushman [00:07:42] Well, a sense of the richness and the mysteries of the gospel. We were in some ways sophisticated, in some ways very naive. We were not putting Mormonism up against elaborate systems of philosophy. We weren't comparing it to Spinoza or Kant or Freud, though I was taking courses where I was getting those kinds of people and sort of did a little comparison. But mainly we were like missionaries who like to investigate the mysteries, trying to figure out what this scripture, that scripture meant. So it wasn't profound. It was very much in house Mormonism, and it wasn't skeptical. We were all believers. We just took it for granted. We all believed the gospel, thought it was marvelous and true. I've often said I would trust my children at Harvard more than at BYU because there are so many smart people there who are really devoted to the church. So it was a wonderful atmosphere in which to sort of grow up Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:09:00] Would we recognize any of the names of the people you used to have these little study groups with?

Richard Bushman [00:09:05] Well, you might remember Chase Peterson. He became president of the University of Utah.

John Dehlin [00:09:11] Absolutely.

Richard Bushman [00:09:12] Carl for Broderick, who was a very powerful applied psychologist, lived in California, very eminent scholar. Jim Sandmaier, who about 15 years later came out and became a very prominent gay minister in San Francisco. Probably wouldn't know him, but he had a lot of notoriety at his time. Then my own roommate, his name was Joe Hubbard, became a neurosurgeon in California. Wouldn't know him, huh?

John Dehlin [00:09:48] Oh, go ahead.

Richard Bushman [00:09:49] It was just a lively group. We had a lot of fun together.

Faith Crisis and Spiritual Journey at Harvard

John Dehlin [00:09:51] Now, I read in an essay you wrote about your faith that you did in fact have a crisis of faith during your pre mission time at Harvard. Would you mind talking about that? Because I know that a lot of my listeners have either experienced that or are experiencing that now.

Richard Bushman [00:10:10] Yeah, well, you know, you never know how these things happen. Who knows why they believe what they do. It's a very mysterious thing. We all have reasons, but who knows what the real reasons are? Somehow I just began to lose my confidence in my second year. Maybe I was sinning. Maybe it was really an oppressive atmosphere of skepticism at Harvard. This was the time of Bertrand Russell's logical positivism that wouldn't accept any kind of spiritual experience as having the least bearing on discovering the nature of reality. Then I remembered writing this paper comparing Freud and Nietzsche for a social science course I was taking, and Freud was. Nietzsche was making the case that Christianity is the religion of the weak. It's a slavish religion because you abase yourself before God. It was just a series of those things floating around that sort of undermined my faith. I don't know how much my faith was really undermined. I did go on a mission, but I couldn't say when I went on my mission that I knew the gospel was true. I was sort of in this limbo of uncertainty about everything.

John Dehlin [00:11:36] And I thought it was interesting. You wrote in your book that when you were struggling, for you, it was never a question of some historical fact with Joseph Smith or some Mormon doctrine. It was either God or nothing.

Richard Bushman [00:11:50] Yep, that was the issue, because that's the issue at Harvard. No one was talking about history of the church there, all that kind of stuff that riles up young people at byu. It really was the whole question of faith at all. So I think that in a way, I'm out of step with lots of young people in the church who worry about the mistakes church leaders make, or they worry about the fact that Joseph Smith works with the Seer Stone. That all seemed sort of details for me. The big issue was any divinity in the universe at all.

John Dehlin [00:12:37] And so how did you become a believer again or refined your believingness?

Richard Bushman [00:12:44] Well, I probably never recovered at all. I'm not someone who has a simple faith that just everything is absolutely true beyond any doubt. During the mission, you know, I worked like crazy. If you read that little essay of mine, you know, that I worked like crazy to figure out whether or not I could believe the Book of Mormon. And finally, after sort of weighing everything that I had at hand, which was limited, I just had this affirmation. And it wasn't a set of. It wasn't a proof. It wasn't a set of historical proofs. It was just an affirmation that, yes, this is right. I didn't even say this is true. I said, this is right. I have no idea why that was, but that's the way it came out. And then over the years, I always could hear these questions. As I say in that essay, I'm a person who lives in this divided world. I'm very conscious of all the arguments against God and religion and to a certain extent, against the church. But so I always am hearing those questions and engage constantly in these internal debates where I try to make a point against an imaginary contestant of some kind. But what really comes around to me is a Very simple thing. The big word for me is goodness. I, above all things want to go where things are good. And if I turn away from what I know is good because there's some philosopher who tells me this can't be or some little fact in the history of the church that is disruptive, that's not enough to throw me out of the saddle. I want to go where I find goodness, where I become the kind of person I want to be, where I have brothers and sisters that I love and admire and work with. And where I live in a universe where I feel an incentive to improve to and grow better all the time. And I just get that over and over in church. I can't possibly turn away. It's more like the planting a seed image of the Testimony in element 32. The seed is good. I can't deny that. So I stick with it.

John Dehlin [00:15:25] Now I just have to ask you a bit about that because that's. I like to characterize my faith in a similar way. And I know that there's a lot of people out there who would want to be able to say that good as the criteria is enough. I know there are a lot of anti Mormons who are angry at the church who basically say there is no good in the church and the leaders are all dumb and the history is all fraudulent. I think that's hogwash. But there's also another strain of people who say the church doesn't allow goodness to be the measure necessarily. The measure is absolute truth relative to other religions, faiths, texts, prophets, etc. In other words, to sort of throw your cards in with the Mormon Church. There's a perception that you have to then say that all other churches are false, all other churches are an abomination, all other scriptural texts are inadequate. And this small population of less than 1/2 than 1% of the world's population is God's one and only true chosen people. There's sort of a pressure to say it's got to be all that or nothing. How do you help someone see that Maybe there is a middle way.

Richard Bushman [00:16:44] Yeah, well, I don't hear much of that in the church anymore. I don't hear the word abomination. It may be just the places I happen to live. People I know. I think as a church we're sort of lightening up on that. I don't hear that as much in general conference. There is a kind of a bogeyman view of the church that haunts people where it really is a fanatical organization. We think that that is the church as it's in its essence. But I don't think so. I think the church is much more complicated. Some people feel that way. But I would say this. There is a paradox here. To be zealous and striving and eager about anything that you're involved in, you have to believe in it. You have to believe it really is good, people will benefit from it. And that's true for whether you're trying to teach people to drink clean water in Africa or trying to teach Harlem kids they got to do their schoolwork and get an education or whatever. You have to really believe it's going to make a difference. And for Mormonism to be an energetic and effective organization, it has to have that kind of zeal that does come out with language like the only true church or this is God's way, and so on. But there are also scriptures in Mormonism which, as you well know, are prominent and easily found, that says the spirit of Christ is given to every person, that God reveals to every person in their language what is good for them, what is truth for them, as if heavenly Father is watching over his children in every little corner of the earth, testifying to them. It was good, leading them along, sending them prophets of a kind. So I think we just have to live with that fact that we're both universalistic, allowing God's spirit to reign over the whole earth, and it bless all people everywhere and particularistic. And ours is the true and good way. And if you're uncomfortable with that, you're going to be uncomfortable in Mormonism, because that's just the way we think. We got both poles in our minds at once.

John Dehlin [00:19:17] So you're acknowledging that that's paradoxical.

Richard Bushman [00:19:19] It is paradoxical. Right.

John Dehlin [00:19:22] But do you find some beauty in that? Or it's just how things are? Help people come to a place, if you can, where they can say, okay, I can live with that.

Richard Bushman [00:19:35] I think I find beauty in that. I think any scheme of life that is not paradoxical cannot do justice to life. Life is paradoxical. And if you think it's going to be a simple, clear plan that you can impose on the world, and. And that is it, you're doomed to disappointment. Paradoxes are everywhere. Carol Gibbons is coming up with a new book on the cultural history of Mormonism this year in which he describes Mormon theology in terms of a set of five paradoxes. And I think that's a very helpful way. It's not a set of principles, but a body of a group of tensions that we Struggle with all the time.

John Dehlin [00:20:22] I think there's a lot of wisdom in that. Thank you for sharing that. Well, let me ask you, so how did you become a historian?

Becoming a Historian of Mormonism

Richard Bushman [00:20:33] You know, I can hardly give an answer to that question. I started at Harvard planning to do science. I started in physics and then I migrated to math. By my second year I was doing history and science, but meanwhile I was taking some really terrific courses. That made me realize that you can think about history, it's not just a matter of remembering everything that happened, but you can conceptualize it. So by the time I got back from my mission, after I completed two years before I went it, I decided I would do history. And it was a huge decision, but I don't even remember wrestling over it. I just sort of backed into it. And it was strange because the worst grades I got in college were in my American History course. But I went into it anyway. It was just kind of blind luck because it turned out to be very useful for me. My own feeling is that for anyone making the best evidence that it's right is that it is self justifying. That is, in the process of doing history, I found it enjoyable. It wasn't reading history, I never have been a very great reader of history books, but in doing history, thinking about things, putting that evidence together. So I really enjoyed that. So it just kept reinforcing itself. And I went immediately on to graduate school, got my PhD.

John Dehlin [00:22:07] And where did you go to get your PhD?

Richard Bushman [00:22:09] I stayed at Harvard, finished up there.

John Dehlin [00:22:12] And you chose Colonial American history, is that right?

Richard Bushman [00:22:15] Yeah. At that point my religion came back into the picture. I had a dickens of a time not just believing that I was doing right myself and doing history, but justifying it to others. Our ward in Cambridge was filled with all these Latter Day Saint business school types and you know, they knew what they were there for. Everything was practical about their degree. What in the world is history for? And so I got an idea that maybe what I would do, spend the early part of my life working on sort of the cultural background of the Restoration, starting, you know, in the 18th century, working my way up into the 19th, and then sometime later in life do something on Joseph Smith. I had no idea what. So that's what I did. I got very, very interested in early American history, wrote three books on various aspects of it, and then finally late in life, decided now was the time to do Joseph Smith.

John Dehlin [00:23:21] So, so you kind of mapped out conceptually the fact that you were going to pursue colonial American history so that you could have a firm understanding of the cultural and historical background that led

John Dehlin [00:23:37] to the formation of the church.

John Dehlin [00:23:39] And then you would follow it through.

Richard Bushman [00:23:42] Well, yeah, mapping is maybe too strong. Too strong a term. It was a thought at one moment. And, you know, I would go five years at a time and never think of that thought. And in 1992, I thought, well, maybe now is the time to do Joseph Smith. I just finished a book and I was ready for a new book, but I decided, no, I'm more interested in early American farmers. So I actually steered away from. From the Joseph Smith book, thinking that Donaghill was plenty read for the purposes until Ron Esplin at the Smith Institute said we really needed one. And that sort of pushed me back towards Joseph Smith. So it's not something that governs my life. I was truly interested in these other books. I loved them. I thought I was finding stuff that was. Was useful and true that they had a kind of religious inner core to them. And I didn't feel any great need to go back to Joseph Smith until Ron Esplin came along.

John Dehlin [00:24:52] What year was that?

Richard Bushman [00:24:55] I can't remember exactly, but I think it was 1994 that he came to me. And then I started work in earnest in 1997.

Early Mormon Scholarship and Key Historians

John Dehlin [00:25:03] Okay, let's jump back for a bit, if you don't mind. I'd like to talk a bit about a couple of the books that came out and then sort of the era of scholarship in the 1970s. But let me start when Fawn Brody, it sounds like she wrote no Man Knows My History. Right around the time you were in your PhD or graduating with your PhD, is that right?

Richard Bushman [00:25:31] She published it in 1945. I started college in 1949. But she was certainly a presence in my mind. I was very much aware of the book. I read it in great detail as an undergraduate, marked up everything I thought was in error, filled with red marks. So, yeah, she's always been a presence.

John Dehlin [00:25:56] Did you read her book Premission then?

Richard Bushman [00:26:01] That I could not tell you, but it didn't have any effect on my testimony, as I recall.

John Dehlin [00:26:10] And now is that because you just. How is that possible? Like, what I mean is, is it because you just discredited her as sort of anti Mormon and so you could just throw away the thing she was writing? Or were you just so familiar with all the history that she was able to pull together that it was no news? You just saw it as sort of biased spin? How did you emerge from the Fawn Brody experience unscathed?

Richard Bushman [00:26:38] Well, I think Fawn Brody's great virtue is she is a colorful writer, but that undermines her authenticity as a historian. You have the feeling she'll do a lot of things for effect. And so I would go through and question the facts that underlay some wild assertion. Or I had a little code of letters that would indicate the nature of my critique so that, you know, I see I wasn't like you. I didn't have this. Never had this idealized picture of Joseph. And then she's just a smack in the face. I knew that Joseph Smith was contentious figure from the word go. And this is just one more example of him being contentious.

John Dehlin [00:27:40] Okay, so can you. Would you mind. Did you know Leonard Arrington, Lowell Bennion, and T. Edgar Lyon? And can you talk a little bit about, one, what you felt or experienced during what many have called the Camelot years of church history, and two, how you got hooked up to help Leonard Arrington with the sesquicentennial series that he was hoping to write. And then three and four, how you felt when that got cancelled and how you felt about the way that that era sort of concluded.

Richard Bushman [00:28:16] Well, I didn't know TF Yerlion very well. I knew his son very well. He was a bishop in the same building where I was. We both had a young singles ward in Cambridge. I knew Lowell Bennion only late in life. I didn't come up to that University of Utah pattern, but Leonard I knew pretty well. My first job was at byu, and when I arrived, somehow he had gotten wind of it, knew I was a PhD in history from Harvard, and wrote me a personal letter kind of welcoming me to the state in the historical profession. And I realized this is a guy who takes responsibility for the whole direction of Mormon historiography. And that really was his style. He was sort of the grandfather and dean of the whole operation, not just at usu, not just at the church, but everywhere. And then I worked with him quite closely thereafter. When my wife got started working on with the Boston Women in the Pink issue of Dialogue and Founding Exponent two, he got wind of it and sent those women a small grant, you know, a thousand bucks or so, to help put out Mormon Sisters. And it was just a gesture, but it was a gesture those housewives needed. They didn't need know if they could do it. They were just amateurs, of course. Among them was Laurel Ulrich, a very skilled amateur, but they were not historians. And he knew that a little something would sort of confirm their hopes for this book. So I just felt like he was an encompassing figure. Great personal magnitude. I really loved Him, I would say he was one of the men I've really loved during my life.

John Dehlin [00:30:32] And so what year was it that he gave this grant to your wife and the other women who were writing for Dialogue?

Richard Bushman [00:30:40] You've got me. But it'd be in the 70s, somewhere in the 70s.

John Dehlin [00:30:43] So he was a church employee by

Richard Bushman [00:30:45] that time he was at the church office building.

John Dehlin [00:30:47] And so here was the head of the church history department providing a grant for an upcoming Dialogue edition, is that right?

Richard Bushman [00:30:56] Well, it was really to produce this set of essays that became Mormon Sisters, which is a book of Essays on 19th century Mormon women still in print. And then about that time, he asked me to write the first volume of the projected 16 volume history of the church. The interesting thing was, years before that time, I'd written to him a letter telling him I thought, now is the time to repeat B.H. roberts work in 1930 of the Centennial history of the Church. He took up on that idea and really ran with it. Asked me to do the first volume, which I was quite willing to do. He actually approached me about coming west and my scholarship on the American Revolution. That time was bogged down and I very seriously considered for a time moving West. Figured I just couldn't get out of the conundrums that were paralyzing me in my other work. But I did write that history. The interesting thing is the first volume, which was Milt Backman's the Heavens Resound, had gone through the committee. It's been read by everybody who had to read it and they were rolling along. Then came along my volume, the Beginnings of Mormonism. And after it was cleared by Leonard and all his group, then it went up to some unknown group of general authorities to read. Never got a word back concerning it. But one day Leonard and I were. I happened to be in Salt Lake and we were called in. I think this guy's name was Lowell Durham. I think he was the head of the Deseret book there. And the news was delivered that they were canceling the series. They'd given big advances to all the authors, so they were into it financially in a big way. But they cancelled the series and Leonard was dumbfounded and horrified and it was really a terrible blow to him. I actually didn't mind it because I felt this series was not going to work. The problem is that if it comes out as an official church history, then they have to read everything. They have to take responsibility for everything that's written. And they would be constantly trying to censor what I'd said. They Couldn't just let me write whatever I wanted, because who knows what I or someone else would write? So I felt like, all things considered, it was better for the authors to work independently. But Leonard didn't see it that way. He was really set back a long way.

John Dehlin [00:33:56] And just a lot of our listeners will have no idea what we're talking about. So basically, the idea was 150 years of church history. Do a book for every 10 years or so and have sort of the scholar for that time period write, write that part of the book, is that right?

Richard Bushman [00:34:13] Well, close to that. It wasn't every decade. It was, you know, there would be a book on the Western migration, there'd be a book on the church in Europe and a book on the church in the South Pacific, and a book on New York and one on Kirtland and one on Missouri and one on Nauvoo. So it. He just divvied it up in a fairly conventional way, the way we think of church history. Tom Alexander's Mormonism and Transition was one of the books, 1890-1920.

John Dehlin [00:34:51] And I know one of my professors at BYU, Lamont Tullis, had been asked to do the Latin America book, right?

Richard Bushman [00:34:57] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:34:59] So what you're sort of saying is that the Church shouldn't get in the history business.

Richard Bushman [00:35:06] Yeah, I think they get into all sorts of conflicts because they're endorsing it. I think they themselves. I'm basing this on conversations with individual general authorities. Wish there was some middle sphere where church historians could write their work, take chances, explore this or that, and the church wouldn't be held responsible for it. But it's very hard to get that distance if you're a deseret book. There just could be loads of Mormons saying, well, if it's a deseret book, it must be the Church's view. Even BYU has a certain, you know, has a certain imprimatur to it. So it's a bit of a problem

John Dehlin [00:35:58] for the church because, as I understand it, they started by saying, we're getting our clock cleaned by secular historians. We have to get in the game here. And that was the intellectual impetus to calling Leonard Arrington to be church historian.

Richard Bushman [00:36:15] Right? That's right.

John Dehlin [00:36:17] But you're saying, and it sounds like the lesson learned from that whole era was that the Church needs to stay out of the history business and leave it to the historians.

Richard Bushman [00:36:28] Yeah, I think you could say that as a lesson learned. Whether it can be learned permanently is another question, because there's always a great desire to Create a history that will really speak for the church, because we value our history. It's part of our doctrine, almost. So the problem is, can you write a history that will have any validity to a general audience that also tells the church story straight? So we're trying again with Mountain Meadows. We're trying it again with the Joseph Smith Papers.

John Dehlin [00:37:07] So there's a bit of a pendulum going on.

Richard Bushman [00:37:10] Yeah, I think that's right. That you go to a certain point and you realize we've gone too far and it swings back. There we go.

Leonard Arrington's Tenure as Church Historian

John Dehlin [00:37:18] So how did you feel about the way Leonard Arrington's time concluded? You know, I've read Adventures of a Church Historian and it, you know, it paints this picture, this really sad picture at the end that even though he was called as church historian in general conference, when they released him, they released him quietly. And that now somewhere in church headquarters there's a mural of every church historian, but his mural isn't there. And it just gives you the sense that here was this wonderful man that I loved through text, you loved through personal experience that just wasn't treated in a loving way, in the way that things were ended. I know that that's an oversimplified view. And when I talked to Hugh Midgley, he basically claims that Lavina Fielding Anderson wrote Leonard Arrington's autobiography and that that wasn't what Leonard Arrington would have wanted us to believe at all. Can you help fill in the pieces there? For someone like me who's feeling sad

John Dehlin [00:38:15] for the way that that ended?

Richard Bushman [00:38:18] I don't think I can fill in any pieces. I wasn't close enough to know what was going on. My view comes almost directly out of Leonard's autobiographical writings. I know it was a terrible disappointment to him and I suppose it could have been handled or gracefully. I feel very sad that he was wounded by the whole experience. But in the long run, I don't think it's going to detract from his actual achievement because a lot of fabulous work came out of that period and out of his own mind. So I see that as kind of receding as a significant event.

John Dehlin [00:39:07] So some. Some would look at the. The anti Mormonism, especially on the Internet that exists today, and say that they have Leonard Arrington to thank for because he was given access to church archives. All these cans of worms got opened up and that has become the fodder for, you know, Michael Quinn came out of that. And. And a lot of the, A lot of the writings, probably Grant Palmer's entire book, came a big chunk of that out of what was unleashed during that 10 years. What if someone were to say that that whole era was just one big mistake? That the church will be forever damaged by all the stuff that came out of that period? I'm sorry if it sounds dramatic, but I sometimes wonder that. In other words, go ahead.

John Dehlin [00:39:55] Sorry.

Richard Bushman [00:39:55] I think that until you get down to the bedrock of the source material and what's there, you never are safe. You've got to base everything you write on what's there in the sources. And insofar as we created a picture of Joseph Smith that wasn't based on the sources, didn't take all those things into effect, we were in a very precarious position. I mean, you yourself have gone through this disillusionment that comes when suddenly it's all there. So, yeah, it's painful. And there are people who think we're giving comfort to the enemy by turning on all this stuff. But we'll never be secure until we can go out and talk about the sources and what's really in the historical record alongside all the critics of the Church.

John Dehlin [00:40:47] Okay. And I think your book is Rough Stone Rolling is a demonstration of that belief that ultimately truth will prevail and goodness will prevail. And while we need to be sensitive, we don't have to fear the facts.

John Dehlin [00:41:03] Is that right?

Richard Bushman [00:41:04] That's right. That's right.

Dialogue, Sunstone, and Mormon Intellectual Life

John Dehlin [00:41:06] So real quick, before we jump into Rough Stone Rolling, I just have one more series of questions. You know, Dialogue was started in the late 60s and then Sunstone sometime in the mid-70s. And a lot of people who just aren't plugged into the whole deal would be shocked to know that you yourself have presented at Sunstone symposiums. You've probably written articles for Sunstone and Dialogue. You know, and there was a time where, you know, Sunstone and Dialogue probably didn't have the reputation that it has now, the negative reputation. And I would just love for you to talk about, you know, because your perspective is so important. Here's a guy who knows all the facts and he's willing to talk about them openly, but he's also a believer. There's no one who could claim that you don't know Nietzsche, you don't know Kant, you don't know Peep Stones. And at the same time, there's no one that could argue that you're a believer. Well, role models like this seem to be in abundance in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and even 80s. We had Lil Binning, we had T. Edgar Lyon, we had Eugene England, We Had Leonard Arrington and all the others, Chase Peterson, and it was Dialogue in Sunstone that seemed to be the fulcrums around which these personalities emerged. But now that Sunstone and Dialogue have been denounced and sort of given a bad reputation and Sunstone more than Dialogue, where are these people today? They don't seem to exist. And so I'd love you just to talk about how you viewed Sunstone and dialogue in the 70s and 80s. I don't want you to condemn Sunstone or Dialogue. I'm not asking you to sort of publicly challenge them. But any thoughts you could share on whether you think. Think they did have a positive role, whether you think they may have served their purpose or even gone astray. Help us work through whether we should just see that as a whole horrible thing. The whole dialogue sounds so thing, whether it has a purpose and today what we have that could be comparable for a new generation of thinkers and believers to coalesce around. That's a compound question.

Richard Bushman [00:43:27] I got involved as the book review editor. I'd known Gene England for a number of years and he asked me to start out. I thought it was kind of fun.

John Dehlin [00:43:37] This is for dialogue. This is for Dialogue, right? For our listeners.

Richard Bushman [00:43:39] For Dialogue. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:43:40] Okay.

Richard Bushman [00:43:42] And I didn't see danger in it because, you know, I came out of this Harvard environment where you just chatted up everything. You didn't worry about dangerous ideas that might poison you. So I was warned quite vigorously by Robert Thomas, with whom I was working the Auditors program at that time to steer clear it would be too much and that my name would be stained by this association. Church leaders would never trust me again and all this and that. But I have a kind of a blithe confidence that if you try to do what's right and just go into every situation with an open mind, that you come out all right. And so I was willing to give it a try. And I like the idea that, that these journals have sparked a lot of thinking. It's like farms. I really like the fact that a lot of people are putting their minds to work on gospel subjects because they're so eager to prove the church in Farms. And Dialogue brings forth a similar kind of intellectual energy. So I feel pretty good about that. I am enough of an open minded person to recognize I could be wrong and that my confidence that we can talk about anything and talk about it openly may be naive and that there are dangers down the road that I can't foresee. So when the church comes out and says don't get involved in Sunstone, don't get involved in dialogue. I'm willing to say, all right, you may be right. And I go along with it, though I have been involved in modest ways here and there. So this is one where I'm willing to put the judgment on the shelf and just let it go. Your larger question, though, is do we need those kind of journals to bring forth our best intellectuals? And. I just think you can't repress Mormon intellectuality. There is so much energy that's sort of captured in our Mormon faith that anyone who has intellectual incarnations at all is just going to think about things and talk about them. I think the blogs are an example of how their people spend hours each day just chattering about Mormon subjects. And though I think a lot of that's a waste of time, I think there are some very serious sub Mormon intellectuals coming along at Notre Dame, at Harvard, at Duke. We're having a conference for graduate students in religious studies at Yale next month. A lot of very thinky, good people there who are trying to figure out what the Mormonism means in these days. So maybe we don't have a roster of giants that we can turn to, but I'm never one with those who think we've lost. The Great generation is now behind us. We have to content ourselves with Pygmies. There's some very powerful people coming up, and I'd like to find ways to get them together and get them thinking. This summer seminar that Carol Simmons Givens and I run has brought together over 50 say. It's really potent, people. Very active, very effective. I hope we can keep assembling them one way or another.

John Dehlin [00:47:52] So are these PhDs then, that you're bringing together?

Richard Bushman [00:47:56] They're usually graduate students, even some advanced undergraduates. We find some. Probably the smartest guy in the church is a guy named Jared Hickman, who came as an undergraduate from Bowdoin's Undergraduate Honors essay, which chest knock your socks off. It could be a book. Probably will be a book. He's at Harvard now doing marvelous work.

John Dehlin [00:48:16] What's the name again?

Richard Bushman [00:48:18] Jared Hickman.

John Dehlin [00:48:19] Jared Hickman. And he's going to be a historian.

Richard Bushman [00:48:23] He's in literature. But, you know, people who do literature also do kind of history, too. Okay, so they're one of these powerful people around.

John Dehlin [00:48:35] So new societies like Sunstone will emerge, you're saying, and they'll probably go through a similar lifestyle where they'll get their energy, they'll be formed, lots of great discussions will happen. And isn't there always the risk that they'll stray and maybe be denounced again. And they'll be just like you talked about the church's tendency with history, the church's tendency with symposia to sort of be hot and cold to it.

Richard Bushman [00:49:02] Yeah, well, maybe. But with the people I know, I don't think so. I will confess a little impatience with Sun Tzu, and I read through the list of sessions that they're supposedly it just tires me out, all these people working out their problems with the church and chewing away at some issue that troubles them. I'm more of a positive person. I want us to start exploring the potentials of Mormonism. What are its depths and its heights and where can it go? How can it help us to understand the world better? We should have an art critique that comes out of our Mormonism. That's what this new generation is going they're not sort of fighting through their doubts. They're sort of exploring, trying to find out what the potentials are so they can all go sour in time. And I guess there are people who worry about it, but not me. I like to let these guys rule. And if they get often, there's some heresies. That's not so bad.

Guest [00:50:23] This program has been a production of Mormon Stories Podcast. To comment on this episode or to peruse the archives of past episodes, please visit us online@mormonstories.org Also, please consider supporting Mormon Stories podcast by making a contribution today or by voting for this episode@dig.com and sustained.com org thanks again for listening.

Part 2 of 5 · Ep. 48

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Mormon Stories Podcast depends entirely upon the voluntary contributions of you its listeners to keep Mormon Stories alive. Please consider donating today@mormonstories.org to make a contribution to Mormon Stories. Just click on the Make a Donation button at the top right of the MormonStories.org website. For all this and more. Please check out MormonStories.org and thank you for listening. Welcome to part two of our multi part interview with Dr. Richard Bushman, author of Joseph Smith Rough Stone Rolling. I want to begin with a bit of a disclaimer. Some of you will notice that the audio quality on these two interviews have not quite been up to Paris and I wanted to briefly explain why. Brother Bushman was a real gem to conduct this interview while fighting a cold, but because his voice was a bit weakened I had to turn his volume up very high to make sure his points were heard. As a result, you will hear a continual buzz throughout the interview, although it's somewhat slight and some heavy static for the first two minutes or so of the interview. Please forgive the annoyance, but I felt that his points were so important that I could not bear to edit them out. After the first two minutes or so it becomes much more bearable. Now to the content. In this episode we tackle four main topics. First, Brother Bushman provides a high level review of the major Joseph Smith biographies that preceded Rough Stone Rolling, including Fawn Brody's no Man Knows My History. Next, Brother Bushman discusses the art of writing history and the challenges involved in trying to arrive at the facts, the truth for both historians and readers of history. Finally, we discuss in depth the first two of our top ten tough Joseph Smith issues, the first being the multiple accounts of Joseph Smith's first Vision story and second, Joseph Smith's involvement in folk magic and treasure digging. Joseph Smith's story and your story today on Mormon stories.

Previous Joseph Smith Biographies Evaluated

Richard Bushman [00:02:28] Well, there are interesting and valuable biographies in their own way, starting with George Q. Cannon, who wrote a very idealized picture of Joseph smith In the 19th century, one of our eminent intellectuals of that period. And I didn't consult it for information, but I think it sort of stands in the historiographical sequence. John Henry Evans Biography was the book that more than any other turned Leonard Arrington towards church history. Because Evans, he did it all with writing style, with his prose. He was just as laudatory as canon, but he wrote it in kind of a down to earth journalistic language that made it sound like Joseph Smith is a real guy who happened to have a lot of virtues and talents and so it was an appealing Book Woodbridge Riley at the turn of the century wrote his psychological portrait of Joseph Smith. This is his Yale PhD and it really laid out the arguments, the anti Masonry, anti Catholicism arguments that Fawn Brody picked up on later. It was marred by its unrelenting sarcastic tone. He was just scornful from first word to last, but he actually had a lot to say and so it has to go on the list. And then of course Von Brodie, which I'm now beginning to see, could be thought of as a positive work. Mormons couldn't stand it, of course, but in terms of non Mormon books written about Joseph Smith, it was a relatively sympathetic portrait. I still have friends who say they think it's a very sympathetic portrait of Joseph Smith. And of course Mormons are mystified by how anyone could say that.

John Dehlin [00:04:35] I see what you're saying. I left no man knows my history thinking that he was brilliant, that he was a genius and oh, good hearted man.

Richard Bushman [00:04:44] Yeah, well, that's exactly what I wanted to say. The final book I'd put on the list would be Donaghill, which I thought was a lot of historical substance there because Marvin Hill, her brother was helping her. And nicely written Peace, but not much on his Joseph's thought. And through it all that was what I felt was missing, was his religious life and his theological mind. And so finally I decided that's why I needed to write a book that would fill out that side of his character.

John Dehlin [00:05:30] So you're a humble man, so you're not going to grasp this, but were you hoping to write the definitive biography or is that just a silly word altogether?

Richard Bushman [00:05:42] It's a silly word. No one can ever define Joseph Smith permanently. I was very conscious that this is just one view of Joseph. Someone can go through and tell another story entirely. But I wanted it to be a view that would explain why so many really substantive people join the church and continue to believe in Joseph Smith. The great dilemma in writing about Joseph Smith is that if you start with the gold plates and end with polygamy, he really comes across as a scalawag and a fraud. But then you got the problem of why do so many people believe in him? And you know, substantive, sensible people like Brigham Young and Wilford Woodruff and then why do they still believe today? So I wanted to be able to tell the story that would deal with all the facts, but would write it empathetically so that you could see the world from Joseph Smith and the Mormons point of view. But that's just one angle. There are lots of other ways of telling that story.

John Dehlin [00:06:54] So this presents a bit of an interesting dilemma, because I agree, just focusing on the negative not only doesn't tell the full story, but it also comes across as being negative. But as I, as I talked to you beforehand about how we might approach this podcast, you know, I set it up from my own experience, and I'll just recount that because it sort of sets up how we're going to approach, you know, this podcast. But basically, you know, I grew up with a whitewashed view of Joseph Smith, and I have to admit, I didn't have parents who could school me in the nuances of history and of perspective and of depth. They're wonderful, smart people. But we just didn't have those types of conversations growing up, really, about the church or church history. So I had to rely not on what I read, because I didn't read much. So I relied on what my seminary teacher taught me and what my Sunday school teachers taught me. And I happened to have a seminary teacher who grew up in Salt Lake and was a Bruce R. McConkie, Joseph Feeling Smith Mormon if there ever was one. And so I didn't have any subtle, nuanced perceptions of Joseph Smith at all. And I just have to be honest. I think that people who are growing up in the church today, who rely on the church education system and general conference talks and Ensign articles or even New Era friend articles about Joseph Smith as their primary forms of input, get the same sort of perspective that I did, which is, here's this wonderful boy who was courageous and didn't drink alcohol when there was surgery happening to him, and he cared about God at a young age and prayed and had this miracle, and then for the rest of his life built this church and was always being thrown in jail for his. For his spiritual views, and he was always being persecuted for spiritual strength and wisdom to the point where he was ultimately martyred. That's the view I have of Joseph Smith. And of course, it's a silly, infantile view, but I got to age at least 25 with that view somehow while still getting almost a 4.0 BYU. So I don't think I was a dummy. But you know what? There are just so many thousands and thousands of people today every day on the Internet who grew up with a view like that. And then they're confronted with Fawn Brody or exmormon.org or some website, and it just blows them apart because they can't deal with it. And so while you and I discussed, with time limiting whether we should sort of try and do a balanced podcast where we talk about the good and bad or whether time would be best served by just attacking the tough issues. We decided that we were just going to tackle the tough issues head on. And so if there's time and we end up wanting to, we can come back at the end and do some of the more inspirational, uplifting stuff. But I'm just going to ask my listeners to bear with us as we try and optimize this podcast for a certain audience, which is those who are shocked and disturbed by a lot of what they have read, either through Grant Palmer or Michael Quinn or Fawn Brody or whatever. So that's the context that I was hoping to have this conversation around. And so I picked. Did you want to throw something in before I launch?

Challenges of Faithful Mormon History

Richard Bushman [00:10:20] Well, I would just say that I concur in your judgment that this is a major problem. I run into this all the time. And the trouble is, you're not just shocked by the new facts you learned, but you begin to question the whole teaching structure. You wonder why you were so deceived. And so it casts a shadow back on your teachers and everyone who runs the church. So somehow or other we've got to give people growing up the whole story or they're going to be in a precarious position, because who knows when they'll go out on the Internet sometime and get hit with all this stuff.

John Dehlin [00:11:00] So you do have people coming to you a lot.

Richard Bushman [00:11:03] A lot.

John Dehlin [00:11:03] How does that happen?

Richard Bushman [00:11:05] They just write me and tell me a story like you. You know, they've read the book and it's a problem for them. They feel relieved. They feel like the book helps them out a little bit.

John Dehlin [00:11:19] Right. Okay. Yeah. So with that, I've picked 10 or 10 or 11 issues just to tackle. And what I'm going to do is try and set up for you what the traditional perceptions are. Have you validate where the facts, you know, add the facts that tell the full story or the full story that we can tell so that we really know instead of what the stereotyped, you know, whitewashed view is, what the facts or the historical facts seem to demonstrate. Then we'll have a discussion on

Richard Bushman [00:11:58] you

John Dehlin [00:11:59] helping us understand how you might put these issues in historical context, how you might put them in spiritual context. And if there's any debunking that needs to happen, where there's a typical anti Mormon claim or position and it's just flat out incorrect, maybe you can inform us of that as well. Is that. Is that fair?

Richard Bushman [00:12:20] Well, let me begin by talking about the facts.

John Dehlin [00:12:23] Yes, please.

Richard Bushman [00:12:24] We sometimes think like these are little nuggets, like marble. They're just there, irreducible. But, you know, in any given letter, there are a million facts. And facts only become significant when they are turned into evidence. And they become evidence when there is a perspective or a theory or an idea that makes those facts relevant, then they become evident. And the reason I stress that is that what we think are just compelling facts, they just demand also have underlying them a perspective on Joseph Smith that ties those facts together into some scheme. And until we recognize that whoever is telling us these facts is selectively choosing out of the millions and millions and millions of little facts, the ones that he or she wants to tell his particular story. So it isn't just a matter of controverting the facts. It's identifying the story that's being told and asking, is there another story that can contain those facts that ends up being a different picture.

John Dehlin [00:13:54] Right. Yeah. And there's the whole discussion about history being subjective and people having agendas and never having the complete set of facts to then base your conclusions upon.

Richard Bushman [00:14:08] Yeah. And you can't just dismiss that and say, oh, well, that's what people try to do to escape. That is the reality. That is the reality that historians work with every day of their lives. We all know we're molding our stories to portray the world, the past, in the way we want to do it. And so in a way, what you choose as your facts or what you choose to emphasize and sequence you put them in is a reflection of you. You can't just say, if the facts compel me to think some way, you are making a choice about how you want to view the world. And I'm just sorry, but that is, we have to begin with that realization.

John Dehlin [00:14:54] Yes. And thank you for that. And do you have, as a teacher of history, do you have an anecdote, and this is putting you on the spot. Do you have an anecdote that illustrates this concept in terms of how a way that something may have been written and then it got rewritten, or a way something was told that sort of illustrates how precarious history, by its nature can be?

Richard Bushman [00:15:18] Well, I wrote an essay years ago called Faithful History where I told a couple of anecdotes. One was about the way the Constitution is interpreted, how it was turned from a noble document of high political ideals into an expression of the base pecuniary interests of the framers, namely wanting a government that could protect their investments in the national debt. And Charles Beer just flipped the whole country with his book on the economic origins of the Constitution because he sort of brought out this stuff. It didn't last. Someone qualified this and a different picture emerged, but he just turned this over that way. But the story I told to sort of make it more simple was if you tell the story of a woman dying, and then you say she died after her. Her lover had gone to war and had been killed, and then you say, then she died. You say, oh, poor woman, she died of a broken heart. And then you add in the fact that she also smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, then suddenly everything takes a different look. So you have to be ready for the whole world to be turned upside down when a new sequence of facts is thrown into the picture.

John Dehlin [00:16:51] So just the very selection and sequence of facts and the audio is a little bit low, so I'm just going to repeat that. So you say a woman died, right?

Richard Bushman [00:17:02] A woman dies. And then you say, well, why did she die? Then you say, her husband was killed in the war. Oh, she died of a broken heart. Then you add in the fact that she was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. You get a different view of it entirely, right? And I think that, you know, you can tell a hundred stories of that sort. The one I often tell is, what if in one of these reality shows you allowed a television cameraman to come in and film you day and night. And at a certain point they went through and they pulled out all the points where the mother in the family was scolding her baby, her child, maybe spanking it or getting angry at it. And over six months, there might be 10 or 15 of them. And you said, this is how this woman treats her child. You say, my God, she's abusive, abusive mother. But there's no picture of her sitting on the couch with the baby pulled up against her, snuggled into under her arm, reading a book, no kissing the baby as it goes to bed. And all of a sudden you've turned probably a pretty good mother into a horrible tyrant.

John Dehlin [00:18:25] And so someone could say to a church leader, for example, well, you clearly don't know the full story, or you're not telling the full story. And the church leader could turn back on the disgruntled person and say, well, you don't either and you're not either.

Richard Bushman [00:18:42] Yeah, that's all I'm saying. And I'm not saying that you can ever demonstrate thoroughly which is the truth. You just always have to realize that this is a story that's Being told and say, all right, that's your story. But I could tell it a different way. There are too many of these people. I met some in Berlin this summer, and they'd run onto this stuff. They had Grant Palmer's book, and they were just wiped out by it. They thought, it's all over. And it reminded me of that famous picture of the beautiful lady in the hag. You look at it at one moment and it's a gorgeous woman with an ostrich feather hat. You look at it another moment and it's a horrible hag staring out at you. Unfortunately, history is that way. It can take many forms.

John Dehlin [00:19:38] Well, that's very helpful. Thank you for providing that sort of overview of the animal that we call history. Let's jump in to the first issue, and that's the first vision, and I'll set you up so you can hit the ball out of the park, so to speak. You know, I didn't learn until well after I graduated from college that there was anything other than one version of the Joseph Smith story. That Joseph, you know, that there was a lot of revivals when he was young. There was some confusion in his family about religion, that he attended these revivals and didn't know which church to join. It's sort of the little Joseph Smith movie that we all grew up watching. And then when he's 14, a sincere boy goes to pray and he has a vision. And God the Father and Jesus appear to him as two distinct beings. I should mention that before the appearance that some evil spirit attacks him, but he sees God in Jesus, and they tell him that none of the churches are true and that he's to start his own. So that's what I learned growing up. Tell us how that doesn't necessarily paint a complete picture.

Variations in the First Vision Accounts

Richard Bushman [00:20:54] Well, I think the heart of this problem has to do with the variations in these two major accounts, 1832 and 1830. Then there's some other less complete accounts along the way. But what throws people for a loop is exemplified by he says Lord, as if it were a singular being in the 1830 account, and the father and the son in 1838. Actually, there are many differences. That's just one in those two accounts.

John Dehlin [00:21:27] What are some of the others?

Richard Bushman [00:21:28] Just so, Elijah, there's no account of Satan overpowering him in the first account, 1832. 1832 emphasizes he went to seek forgiveness. And the first words that were told him is, you are forgiven in 1838. Forgiveness doesn't fit you into it at all. And so it goes down the line.

John Dehlin [00:21:57] And in the 1832 version, it says, the Lord appeared to me, not God, and Jesus appeared to me.

Richard Bushman [00:22:03] Right, right. That's the one that usually jumps out at most Mormons. I find this problem perplexing in this way. For some people, this is a huge issue. He couldn't tell the story right. How could he vary on such a significant item as who actually appeared to him and so on? Other people say, look, whenever we tell a story second time, we always tell it differently. Different details spring forth into our minds and so on. So they just can't even get excited about the problem. So I don't know what to do about that. But there are two things I have to say. One is the 1832 account really has a different purpose. It is a very naive account. The sentences run onto one another. They're all compressed. The spelling is poor. It's sort of jumpy. It really is a naive story. It's sort of Joseph sort of unfolding what happened to him. The 1838 account really is laying down the foundation for the organization of the church, really saying this is how it all got started. And so the emphasis is very much on none of the churches are true, therefore a new church has to be established. In the first account, there's not much emphasis on that. Joseph is told that people are wicked, but all sorts of millennialists knew the world was wicked. You didn't have a sense of this institutional corruption, that everything in the religious world had decayed. So I see them as really having quite different purposes from beginning to end. That's one thing I have to say. The second thing is, for me, it's a great mystery why Joseph is so reluctant to talk about his visions. I don't think he ever told Lucy or Joseph Sr. About the first vision. He explicitly says when she asked him, he said, never mind, I'm well enough off. I learned for myself that Presbyterianism is not true. And it's not until Phoroni commands him that he tells the family about the visit of Moroni and the gold plates. And then he doesn't put the visit of John the Baptist into the church history until 1838. Doesn't make that part of the standard story, and never writes down the visit of Peter, James and John 18:36, Revelation in the Kirtland Temple. He had Warren Parrish write it into his journal, but so far as can be told, he didn't tell anyone else about it in all of Kirtland. I had no way of explaining that he's very concerned to Publish immediately his written revelations, the ones that are coming by the Holy Spirit. He collects them, he edits them, he sends them off to the press. He says they're the foundation of the church. But the visions, the visual presentations, are just not part of that story. Section 76 being the one example with the one exception. So the way I see it is that he's holding back on these visionary experiences. He never publishes. That 1832 thing I don't think we found until the 1960s sometimes. So I don't know what that means. But I'm not all that surprised that the detailed version of things varies when he's so reluctant to tell that whole story of the visions anyway.

John Dehlin [00:26:13] So it's almost like maybe he was humble about it or felt it was sacred and didn't want to go about just really harping on it.

Richard Bushman [00:26:22] I think so. I think he also was burned by that Methodist minister who told him it was all hogwash. And, you know, there is a visionary culture. If you read certain chapters of my book, you will know that there are a lot of people who claim to be receiving revelations. And I think he thought they were kind of kooks. And, you know, he's not really sympathetic to the. These extreme emotional expressions of spirituality. And I think he sort of felt like he didn't want to be associated with that visionary culture. But that's all speculation. I don't really know what's in his mind.

John Dehlin [00:27:06] So is there any evidence that he told his family about the first vision prior to 1830?

Richard Bushman [00:27:14] I don't think so. There is in section 20. There's a very slight reference to the fifth verse, to the time when this elder was received a forgiveness of his sins, when he's sort of recounting the major experiences. So he's making oblique references. But I don't think that that first vision story was really known by many people at all until the mid-30s and not really publicized until 1840.

John Dehlin [00:27:48] And that's something that our listeners are probably going to be really stunned about, because now you can't do the first missionary discussion without the Joseph Smith story. But it sounds like many of the converts of the early church, the fact that Joseph had seen God and Jesus didn't even enter in to their conversion.

Richard Bushman [00:28:07] I think it's almost certain it did not enter into their conversions until later. It's not absolutely certain they would have known the name of Joseph Smith. He was not presented as the key figure in those first five or six years. The revelation was always in the passive voice. Revelation has been Received or God is speaking to his people, but as a personality or a significant figure. There's no evidence they even talked about it. Parley Pratt writes the Voice of warning in 1837. He never mentions a Joseph Smith's name, and he doesn't even mention Revelation until something like page 122. So they were able to preach the gospel without doing much with the stories that for us now are the central part of the history.

John Dehlin [00:29:00] So what was the call, if it wasn't? Joseph Smith has seen God and has been told to start a new church. What was the call for people to convert to Mormonism?

Richard Bushman [00:29:11] It was fundamentally the restoration of the spiritual gifts and the building of the city of Zion and gathering in preparation for the second coming in a place of refuge. They would teach all sorts of other things, just simple gospel principles. They were sent forth, you know, to preach repentance to the people. They were not sent forth to teach. Joseph Smith, 1832. Joseph Smith writes an article for a newspaper which he tries to summarize their beliefs. Doesn't say anything about himself as a visionary, but talks about gathering in a city of Zion, preparation for the last days.

John Dehlin [00:29:49] So it's just basically have faith and preach nothing but faith, repentance and baptism to these people. The kingdom of God is at hand. You know, you need to follow Christ and come do it in Kirtland, right, Or Missouri.

Richard Bushman [00:30:05] And the key thing is the restoration of gifts. Revelations are now coming. Spiritual gifts are coming. It's Mark, what, 16 something or other? 16. 16, I guess. And that was an issue that was on people's mind. Everyone wants to go back to the primitive church, but they knew they didn't have the gifts of the primitive church. And Mormons say we do have the gifts, we do have healings and so on.

John Dehlin [00:30:36] Okay? And so people, people like Grant Palmer like to paint the picture in this way. And even Von Brodie, I think, did this. It's sort of like the Smiths were poor in the 1820s. Joseph Smith was always concocting these schemes. He decided that he was going to write a book because maybe he could make money off the book. And so however he wrote it, he wrote this book called the Book of Mormon originally, you know, with 116 pages, it was going to be more of a kind of secular war history. But then when the pages got lost and he wasn't able to duplicate it, he decided to make it a religious one. And Fon Brodie, I remember her writing that, that was sort of a real fortunate thing because that launched Joseph into the World of Religion and Church because he had to rewrite the book after the pages got lost. And so he writes the book, he sells it, he tries to sell it, and then all of a sudden this church thing just sort of starts happening. And then it starts really snowballing because of his charisma and whatever teachings are in it. And then the way Grant Palmer tries to piece it together is by 1838 there's some huge. Because of the Kirtland bank scandal, whatever, there's some huge apostasy. Martin Harris gets up and says, maybe we didn't ever touch or see the plates at all. And so he's trying to save the church from falling down. And so then he writes a version that's going to make it sound really authoritative, like God really called him to start the church. Church. And so he then wrote the first vision story then. And that's what stuck with us. That's a picture that's painted that, you know, that sometimes has teeth for people who are trying to make sense of all this stuff. What would your response to that depiction be?

Richard Bushman [00:32:24] Well, I think there are many sensible and reasonable people who would take that very seriously. The we had a seminar, Grant Underwood and I ran a seminar on Joseph Smith for college teachers, non Mormon college teachers. And they were very attracted to Grant Palmer's view of things because it's the way critics, historical critics of the Old and New Testament talk about the writing of things. That faith congeals over time. It doesn't just spring full blown from anyone's mind. So I wouldn't say that it's dead wrong. What I would say is that there's a huge amount of conjecture involved in that. You're postulating a lot of things with very few points of evidence along the way. One of the things that Browning makes a lot of is that Joseph Smith was not religious. And she gets that from the hurlbut affidavits that they had no indication that Joseph was religious. But I don't see how that could be. First of all, he lives in a religious culture. It's just saturated with evangelical religion. And as soon as he tells his story in 1832, and this is not long after this is before the Aphrodite man, he is involved in religion from the time he was 12 years old. This is a kid who has a private religious life. It's not evident, but he's really anguished about the state of his soul. He's worried about the existence of God. He's having to go through all the DEISTIC arguments. So I don't like any history that assumes there was no religion in Joseph Smith's life. And then you know, to say, I think I'll write a book. I don't know, where does that come from? I'm going to write a book where it's translated from gold plates. It's so far from anything that's in his immediate environment. What you did, if you were a young kid wanting to make a Korean religion, you became a preacher. That is the well worn path. You go out and get a little congregation and you preach to them and then they begin to support you. And he does very little preaching. Exhorts from the Methodists a little bit, but didn't win any followers as a preacher. So I would say, you know, you really got to do a lot of contortions to make that story work.

John Dehlin [00:35:02] Why was he doing anything for the Methodists if he had been told to start God's one true church?

Richard Bushman [00:35:10] Well, why not do something for the Methodist? His wife's a Methodist, his brother in law is a Methodist trying to make peace with the family. He doesn't know when it goes to the Methodist in the first place. The Methodist minister, he doesn't know whether to believe his own eyes. Can he believe that God has appeared to him? So it goes to the minister to try to figure out what's happened to him. And finally the minister who dismisses it persuades Joseph Smith that it wasn't true. He actually had the same thing. I don't think saying that his time to start a new church meant that he couldn't have anything to do with any other churches. He got very involved in the Masons. When he got along, he welcomed all churches in the Nauvoo, let them preach there and so on.

Joseph Smith's Theological and Cultural Context

John Dehlin [00:36:07] So that universalist background that maybe his father brought in was an important part of him.

Richard Bushman [00:36:13] Well now when I say universalist, I don't mean universalism, the denomination and doctrine. I mean universalism in the sense that God reaches out to all people, contrasted

John Dehlin [00:36:25] to particularistic through all faiths and creeds in some way.

Richard Bushman [00:36:29] Yeah, right.

John Dehlin [00:36:30] Okay, and just one last question on this point. Some would just say, now look, let's just really strip it down. When you see God in Jesus, that makes an impression on your mind. And so you're gonna at least say who was in the room when you were having the vision. And so the 1832 version, there's no room for him not just saying who was in the room or who was in the forest at the time of the vision. Do you have any response to that?

Richard Bushman [00:37:01] Well, this is sort of what do you think? What do you think? Sort of thing. Is it impossible for him to abbreviate his account by speaking to the Lord? I mean, God the Father just says one word to him, this is my beloved Son. Then Christ does all the other speaking. So, you know, you might get excited about it, you might not.

John Dehlin [00:37:23] Right. Okay. So at the end of the day, you just have to accept it on faith. Either he was a liar or he was, you know, telling the truth. But you're also saying that it's reasonable, that it's not an open and shut case, that there was deception or elaborate storytelling, that a reasonable person could conclude that. That the stories don't have to be inconsistent.

Richard Bushman [00:37:47] See, I go along this far with this line of thinking. That is, his purposes for writing the story did change as the years went by, and that affected the way he wrote the story. He's in a different position in 1838 than he is in 1832. He really is beginning to emerge as the founder of a Church by 1838. There's been a lot of emphasis on loyalty to Joseph during those apostasy years. So his own self conception is changing and that's going to affect how he writes that story.

John Dehlin [00:38:24] So he wasn't a strong figurehead leader in the church from 1830 to 1838. Like, I'm trying to understand exactly what his role was then, if it wasn't as a strong figurehead.

Richard Bushman [00:38:37] Well, I think he's a powerful figure. He's the one who speaks for God. And people almost immediately acknowledged he had that charismatic gift. Why they did that so fast, I don't know. But when he said, thus saith the Lord, they believed it from those very early years. So I'm not minimizing that, but I think the authority was in the gift rather than in the man. It was like the Irvingites in Britain. They would hear about people who had gifts and they would go search the kingdom to find these people and then just sort of listen to the gifts. But they're not interested in them as persons. They're just channels for the will of the Lord. And I think initially Joseph is kind of a channel. But as the years went by, he becomes more powerful as a person and he creates this whole structure where he's the president of the high priesthood. He has all these bureaucratic roles, not just his charismatic roles. All that made him a more prominent figure.

John Dehlin [00:39:50] So what this strikes at is the perception that sometimes seems to be encouraged in today which is that the church is the same yesterday, today and forever. That, you know, Adam and Eve were doing temple ceremonies just like we are now. That baptism is going on in the Old Testament times just like it is now. That everyone was not only plural married in the temple, but plural married, and that deacons were always 12 years old passing the sacrament with white bread. You know, there's sort of this mentality today that I feel like comes out of Cesar, that everything is and always was as it is. And it sounds like the church and our perceptions of the structure and the hierarchy and all this rigidity of what some would call a corporate church today wasn't anything like the 1830-1838 experience.

Richard Bushman [00:40:43] Well, I think that is true that we do want to make the case that things have never been different. But the strange thing is that within our own culture, we always leave room for radical change because of the principle of revelation. Things are always the same. You only need one revelation, and then that's it. You just conform to it. It's only because conditions change and all transformations need to be made that you need revelation at all. So I think we've always prided ourselves on adaptations. And I personally think the point of a prophet is how do you apply the principles of God enunciated in the Scripture in the conditions of our time? And that requires constant interpretation and reinterpretation. The chief criticism. One of the chief criticisms of my book, by the kind of people you've identified as critics, is that I see Joseph Smith as growing into his office as prophet. But I think he definitely grew into his office as prophet. He didn't know from age 14 on that he was the prophet of the Lord. And that was the. I think he had to stumble around. He had to find his way. That's part of the wonder of his life.

John Dehlin [00:42:15] And so change being the only constant is something that we would all do well to sort of absorb into our perspectives.

Richard Bushman [00:42:24] Yeah. The word only, I think, distorts it a little. It's sort of like the Constitution, which the courts are always revising. But it doesn't mean the Constitution changes or is insignificant, that it's just putty in the hands of the judges. It's an anchor. And I think the Scriptures serve the same way. They're an anchor. And everything has to sort of grow out of them and be adjusted to the modern age.

John Dehlin [00:42:53] But part of the genius, it seems to me like part of the genius of both the Constitution and Scriptures and even the Book of Mormon. And I learned this in my American Heritage class at BYU is that there was enough broad, I don't want to say vague, but enough general language to allow those documents to stretch, to conform to needed changes.

Richard Bushman [00:43:16] Yeah, precisely. And sometimes the scriptures are minutely specific about go on a mission to such and such, such a place, but usually they are just kind of a perspective on the world.

Treasure Seeking, Seer Stones, and Early Folk Magic

John Dehlin [00:43:29] Okay, so now let's turn to one of the hottest topics today, at least on the, you know, on the Internet with, regarding Mormonism. And that's, you know, treasure digging and folk magic. And if we can begin, you know, let me just start. And that's that, you know, you grow up in the church thinking that Joseph Smith was this all American boy that, you know, yes, he talks about some mistakes that he made, but just like when President Hinckley stands up today and sort of does some self deprecating humor, you really dismiss it as saying, no, this guy is about as close to Jesus as anyone will ever meet. He's close to perfection. That's how Joseph Smith was. He was that way as a boy, he was that way as a man. So we dismiss the mistakes that he clearly admits when he writes his own history. But then to extend that, you know, we're taught that Ouija boards are bad and evil, that even face cards are bad. And so we have this real disposition against anything that might be considered dark or black, etc. And then on top of that, you really don't. You may grow up hearing a little bit about seer stones, but you don't hear a lot about it. You're certainly never taught, here's what they meant by seer stones. And then, you know, the idea of treasure digging or water divining or, you know, however that seems to be about as far as your perceptions of Joseph Smith as you could ever have. And then just to sort of cap this off, we're taught about Joseph Smith being brought into court at various times in his life, but we're never really told why he was brought into court. And we're taught about people who talked bad about Joseph Smith and his family, but were never really taught what were some of the things that they were doing that might have caused a bad reputation. And then just to sort of round it all out when it comes to the Book of Mormon and we'll actually cover the Book of Mormon later, but we're, you know, we're taught that what he used to translate was this formal Urim and Thummim type thing that scholars of old, you know, prophets of Old Testament would have worn with A breastplate and some glasses and then he's doing this translation. But you find out that this peep stone that he used, that we'll talk about, arches and makes its way all the way into his, you know, his revealing of the Book of Mormon. So this is the perception that one grows up with and one just becomes completely shocked to learn about when he said he had weaknesses, what he meant and what was the cause of a lot of this persecution and bad reputation, etc. So lay out for us what we should know about this issue.

Richard Bushman [00:46:24] Well, contrary to some of the things I was saying earlier, I think this is a case where the facts are the facts. He was put on trial for glass looking. He did have a seer stone. He did put it in his hat to translate the Book of Mormon. He put great value on that seer stone. And that's just the way it was.

John Dehlin [00:46:49] How did it begin? Like, do you have a sense for when these expeditions started happening? Who, who was involved, what they would do?

Richard Bushman [00:46:59] It's a little hard. There is this debate about when Joseph Sr. Who is sort of the chief figure in all the treasure seeking, when he began this practice. Some people have said he did it in Vermont, which is altogether possible, but the evidence is weak. I think the chief starting point is 1822, when Joseph Smith, digging a well with Willard Chase, came across this stone that he believed had seer stone properties and persuades Willard Chase to give it to him. And then he uses that all his life.

John Dehlin [00:47:41] How would it have occurred to him that a stone could have special properties? Was that just because. Because people were having seer stones at the time or folk magic and treasure digging was going on just generally within New England at that time period.

Richard Bushman [00:47:57] I think you've got it right there. It's part of their culture. Willard Chase wanted the stone back so he could use it as the seer stone. His sister, Sally Chase, used the seer stone to try to find the Book of Mormon plates. It was he. It was not a totally respectable culture, but it was a strong undercurrent in Yankee culture all through that period.

John Dehlin [00:48:21] And what would be a typical expedition in Yankee culture for the time period? What would people do?

Richard Bushman [00:48:27] Well, I don't know. The hurlbut affidavits give various descriptions of magic rites, trying to find find the treasurer and then trying to get the treasurer because it keeps receding out of sight. The trouble is those accounts, you never know how much to trust them. Are they just jazzing them up to make it more dramatic or is that how it really worked. But there was a sense that there might be guardians over these treasures who would try to prevent people from finding them and taking them away. So the angel Moroni fits into that pattern pretty well.

John Dehlin [00:49:10] So totally disconnected from Joseph Smith. In New England in the early 1800s, people believed that there were buried treasures throughout the forests or mountains of America. They would go on expeditions to try and find them. Sometimes they would use a stone or some type of device to help with the visionary things. They would see things, they would get together and maybe even feel like they were experiencing something unified and seeing some type of treasure in the ground, that maybe there was a guardian there. And they would usually never find the treasure.

Richard Bushman [00:49:49] Right.

John Dehlin [00:49:50] Now, how could that be fun to go on an expedition to never find something?

Richard Bushman [00:49:54] Something. Good question. I don't know. But they just perpetually went, I don't know of a single account of anyone actually turning up something that was of any value.

John Dehlin [00:50:06] So were they just bored or really superstitious?

Richard Bushman [00:50:09] Well, superstitious is a majority word. These are people, they're good Christians, who believe in the powers of the supernatural. If you go back to Puritanism, there's a lot of this kind of magic running through New England puritanism in the 17th century. It runs through Christianity at all levels, including educated people. So it's a very powerful and prevalent culture. Magic. And Joseph Smith is sort of out on the edges of that, picks it up. We, of course, are. Are offended by it. If he did things that were in the Bible or came out of Protestantism, then we would say, well, that's okay. That is our definition of what are legitimate sources for revelation and guidance. We would never say something coming out of masonry or out of magic could be the starting point for a revelation. But I think that's a comment on our own parochialism as much as it is on Joseph Smith's situation. There are a lot of church scholars among them who love alchemy because it was an effort to raise the soul to a higher level. You're not just trying to turn base metals into precious metals. You're trying to turn a base self into a precious self. And so I don't. Maybe it's just because I've got accustomed to it, but I'm perfectly willing to say that that could be part of Joseph Smith's preparation for what otherwise was a totally fantastic thing. Looking in the stone to translate a record, no precedence for that in his immediate environment. But looking in the stone to find lost objects, it was one way that he could have got ready for it.

John Dehlin [00:52:07] So in other words, in other words, God knew that through spiritual or inspired, mechanical, somehow mechanical means, he was going to need to produce the Book of Mormon and other revelations. But the people didn't just do that out of their head. They did it through some type of product process that involved the physical body. And so by allowing Joseph Smith to be exposed to a type of magic based or spiritual based process or ritual, prepared him for being able to then produce an inspired work later.

Richard Bushman [00:52:51] Yeah, I think so. I think the same thing happens with Masonry Nauvoo period. We think that the translation of the Bible was the great source of his questions and was a very valuable source. But he got inspired from all sorts of things in his environment to think of, to ask questions and to get revelations.

John Dehlin [00:53:14] It's a fair question how much of that is how revelation works, period. We like to think that revelation happens even with prophets by God saying, pull out your pencil, you know, here's what you're going to dictate or here's the revelation. And you know, anyone who knows about Spencer B. Kimball or David O. McKay's attempts to try and, you know, come up with the 1978 revelation will know that it was much more nuanced and complicated than that and involved real experience and conversations and thoughts and experiences that led to what we would then call a revelation. It was not pull out your pen, this is God. It's time to dictate the 1978 revelation.

Richard Bushman [00:54:00] Well, I think that is our view of revelation when it comes through the mind of a prophet in his language, which means in his culture. And so you've got to have enough in that culture to, to make it conceivable holy to him. I'm a patriarch and I believe that I'm able to give blessings to people that come out of my temperament, my experience. Another patriarch with a different set of experiences could probably give another kind of blessing to them. There's just one way of doing things. It all is coming through the person who speaks God and has the imprint of that person's background on what is said.

John Dehlin [00:54:46] So in other words, you can't reveal with words you don't have and you can't grapple with experiences you haven't dealt with in your life.

Richard Bushman [00:54:58] I'd say so. I'm not saying you can't broaden your views a lot that you're really restricted because the revelations were some pretty remarkable things. I think the Book of Mormon is a fabulous story. Despite what all the critics say. I still don't see get that Whole book out of Joseph Smith's immediate garment. So you can get beyond a certain extent, but you're still tethered to your own culture.

John Dehlin [00:55:26] Right. So real quick. So Joseph started doing these expeditions regularly?

Richard Bushman [00:55:36] Well, it's hard to tell. He gets the seer stone in 1822 and it sounds like the hurlbut affidavits are talking about thereafter in the next few years. Then in 1826 there's this trial where Joseph Sr. Says in a very dramatic and powerful statement that we have used this boy's gifts for base purposes, seeking wealth rather than the higher purposes of God. So I think that's sort of the high point of Smith family money digging. And then it's going to run downhill. Dan Vogel comes up with all sorts of examples of money digging after that time. And I would not deny that it might have happened because you don't cut things off immediately usually. But it's much thinner evidence. It's not nearly as persuasive. And so I think there was sort of a four year period and then it tapered off pretty.

John Dehlin [00:56:43] And I think I remember from your Beginnings of Early Mormonism book that it may have even been that Joseph at times wanted to stop but his dad sometimes pressured him to keep going.

Richard Bushman [00:56:55] Well, yeah, I do think that his father was the enthusiast, not Joseph. He was pressing him into his service and there's little pieces in heavens to show that. Not that Joseph thought it was all wrong. You know, the Lord never repudiated money digging as an art. He repudiated, repudiated doing these things for wealth and it was the greed of the money diggers that he was to get away from. So, you know, when he goes off to Salem, when was that? 37, I think fall of 37 or 36. He's thinking he's going to find treasure in the basement of a house. So it kept sort of reasserting itself over the years. But it's on a minor, it's a minor key, minor theme. After that, after 1826.

John Dehlin [00:57:44] After 1826.

Richard Bushman [00:57:45] Now

John Dehlin [00:57:48] that's interesting because one of the things that, you know, one of the basic questions to ask, I think in just understanding the narrative is how did Joseph meet Emma? And tell me how much of the story I have right, that there's a man named Josiah Stowell who heard that Joseph had some special powers or gifts. He had reason to believe that there was a treasure mine, a silver mine in Pennsylvania. And so he said, joseph, come with me. I need you to help me find this treasure mine. And while Joseph and Josiah Stowell were in Pennsylvania, somehow they connected with the Hale family. And I don't even know if they took board with the Hails, but that's how Joseph Emma Hale. And as I recall reading Fon Brodie's book, it sounds like Joseph even took Isaac Hail with them as they went to find the silver mine. And Joseph leads them to the place of the silver mine and then says, oh, I'm sorry, it's too far down. We can't get it. And that was what made Isaac Hail. Say, this guy's a kook. He's a fraud. And that's why he wouldn't let Joseph marry Emma. And that's why Joseph and Emma had to elope.

Richard Bushman [00:59:05] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:59:05] Is that. Am I fair or did I miss something there, or is that true?

Richard Bushman [00:59:10] Well, it's always a question of the reliability, the evidence. It is true that he boarded with the Smith with the Hales, got to know Emma, and that Isaac was sort of involved in this. His name appears on some of the documents those miners were working on. So he's involved. Then he does become disillusioned. Whether or not it was from this experience at the treasure mine. You know, that's the part that isn't really well worked out, or the evidence isn't all that good. It's possible, but I'm not so sure of it. But it is a fact that Isaac heel was very critical. Joseph Smith after that time.

John Dehlin [00:59:54] And this is. This is post 1826. Right? So, I mean, this is the residue that you talk about. He's still doing it some, right?

Richard Bushman [01:00:02] No, no, no. This is not post 1826. The trial occurs after this incident.

John Dehlin [01:00:09] Oh,

Richard Bushman [01:00:12] they digging in what, November of 1825.

John Dehlin [01:00:16] In Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania.

Richard Bushman [01:00:18] Pennsylvania. The trial is, I think, the spring of 1826, as he goes back down to work for Josiah Stowell. And Josiah Stowell's nephew or something like that brings this suit against Joseph. So it's after that fact.

John Dehlin [01:00:36] And some have tried to claim that he brought him along to dig, as in with the shovel. And you would say that's not likely. His main purpose in going right, to

Richard Bushman [01:00:45] bring Isaac Hale along.

John Dehlin [01:00:46] No, no, no. Josiah stole, brought Joe. Some have tried to discredit this trip to Pennsylvania as Josiah Stowell bringing Joseph along to dig with his shovel. He needed hands to dig holes.

Richard Bushman [01:00:59] Well, I think he did that. But he doesn't bring Joseph down from Palmyra for that reason. It's because he's got this gift. That's. That's what he's interested in.

John Dehlin [01:01:08] And I bet you would say that if the critics are going to disparage Joseph Smith, they're going to have to answer the question as to why his father and other members of the community continued to believe that he had a power. Is that true? Because even Josiah Stowell after the trial maintained that Joseph Smith had power even though he wasn't able to find treasure. Is that right?

Richard Bushman [01:01:31] Yeah. Josiah Stow at the trial testified that he believed Joseph Smith had a real gift, and Joseph still joins the church and so on. So his faith in Joseph never wavers.

John Dehlin [01:01:48] This program has been a production of Mormon Stories Podcast. To comment on this episode or to peruse the archives of past episodes, please visit us online@mormonstories.org. also, please consider supporting Mormon Stories podcast by making a contribution today or by voting for this episode@digg.com and sustained.org thanks again for listening.

Part 3 of 5 · Ep. 49

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Mormon Stories podcast depends entirely upon the voluntary contributions of you its listeners to keep Mormon Stories alive. Please consider donating today@mormonstories.org to make a contribution to Mormon Stories. Just click on the Make a donation button at the top right of the MormonStories.org website. For all this and more, please check out MormonStories.org and thank you for listening. Doctor Richard Bushman, thank you so much for coming on Mormon Stories again.

Richard Bushman [00:00:50] Okay, it's a pleasure.

John Dehlin [00:00:52] I guess this episode we're hoping, I'm hoping that we can cover maybe two main topics. The first is Joseph Smith as translator, which would cover the Book of Mormon, maybe the Book of Abraham, and a bit about the Kinderhook plates. And then a second section, just about the three and the eight witnesses. So that's kind of the overview. Let's start talking about the Book of Mormon. When did Joseph Smith first learn that he was going to be helping out with the Book of Mormon?

Joseph Smith's Early Visitations and the Gold Plates

Richard Bushman [00:01:25] Well, I have no insight other than the traditional day in September 1823.

John Dehlin [00:01:34] And what did he, for those who may not know the story, what did he explain?

Richard Bushman [00:01:38] Oh, I see what you're getting at. Well, this is probably the most fabulous of all Joseph Smith stories. An angel appears in his room when he's seeking, when he, that is, Joseph was seeking forgiveness once more and grants him the forgiveness. But then rushes on to the main topic of the night, which was the presence of gold plates kept by an ancient people over a thousand year period or more with the fullness of the Gospel. And, and Joseph is told he's to recover those plates and translate them, which he did in time and published them in 1830 as the book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:02:24] Okay, and who did he tell? Did he tell anyone when he had this experience?

Richard Bushman [00:02:31] Well, yes, I think myself that he was very reluctant to talk about the first vision, may not have told his family, but here the angel exploded, implicitly tells him to inform his father. So we have a good account, Joseph's own account, him telling his father and instead of being scorned is believed. And so from then on it seems to become part of family lore. Everyone in the family knew about it. And I think there's evidence that the word seeped out into the neighborhood as well, little by little.

John Dehlin [00:03:12] So Joseph's family knew that he had seen an angel, an angel, Moroni, according to the account, and they believed him, thought it credible. And the neighborhood started wondering about that as well.

Richard Bushman [00:03:26] Right.

John Dehlin [00:03:28] And you know, what was the neighborhood's reaction? Did they persecute him for that?

Richard Bushman [00:03:37] Do we know, I don't think there's much evidence of outright persecution. You know, we can imagine a lot of scoffing and derision. And the best evidence we have of sort of the general attitude towards the Smiths comes from the hurlbut affidavits of 1833. And there, there's a general sense of the Smiths being given to fantasy, involved in magical money digging and perhaps prone to lying as I recall. I can't remember any direct description of the Moroni in the plates in that in their accounts. But you can imagine that those same attitudes would probably greet Joseph Smith if he were to talk about the angel.

John Dehlin [00:04:41] And so the understanding both from his father and from the neighbors was that Joseph was going was he. That he not only spoke with an angel but that he was going to produce a book or was the production of the book not as well known?

Richard Bushman [00:04:56] Well, I don't want to overdo the neighbors knowing all about this. I'm just surmising that they knew about it, the family. We do know they knew about it. And when the book comes into the picture, you know, it's hard to know except that in that those early months after the vision of Moroni, Lucy talks about him sitting with the family and talking and expatiating on the ancient inhabitants of America. So that implies that the family knew there was a history involved that isn't just a treasure, pure treasure seeking operation.

John Dehlin [00:05:41] And that was a question I was going to ask. I've read some accounts where Joseph would sit with his family by the fire at nights and go on and on about what ancient America was like and what the Indians were like and what the ruins were like. And this was all before he actually ever saw the plates. Do I have it wrong there?

Richard Bushman [00:06:01] Well, it's easy to exaggerate that. We depended upon Lucy saying, recording that experience. But it was only a matter of a couple of weeks. Then Alvin died and as she says, it closed down the whole operation. So you can't think of Joseph Smith as perpetually spinning tales of ancient America to his family. And so far as we know, judging from the hurlbut affidavits anyway, he didn't tell those tales to the neighbors either. The neighbors did talk about Joseph Sr. S intricate magic rituals. So they were sort of looking for fantastic stories coming out of the Smiths. But none of them mentioned ancient America or Indians or anything of that kind. So my guess is there might have been some of it, but it wasn't a big time constant advocation of Joseph's to tell those stories.

John Dehlin [00:07:12] When you read like Simon Southerton's book, he makes it sound like the entire county or state was just completely enwrapped and fascinated with the idea of Indian mounds and buried treasure and speculation as to the origin of the Native Americans. And that there was just this gripping era of fascination with all things Indian.

Richard Bushman [00:07:39] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:07:39] Do you get that sense too?

Richard Bushman [00:07:41] No, I didn't. It's a trick of the historians. You can, you know, you collect, you scrape and scrape and hunt and find every little account of Indians, every book ever written about Indians. You go back in time and find books about Indians and you pile these all together in 10 or 15 pages and it gives the impression that the world thought about nothing else but Indians and their origins. But you know that isn't true. You could do that for 50 subjects by collecting that stuff. I think you've got to find things that are closer to home to Joseph Smith. And, you know, you search through the, the newspapers around him and you know, something comes up once in a while, but it's a little tiny item buried in the back of the paper somewhere. And you don't find anything in Lucy's account or anybody who's close to Joseph Smith that they were up to their neck in Indian lore. So I personally think that there's a kind of a fallacy of magnification in just the way historians do their job. And until you can get something that's really closer to Joseph Smith, to his family or his immediate friends, I think you have to reserve judgment on how much they were interested in Indians.

John Dehlin [00:09:18] Okay. So that may be overstated that the way they paint that fascination. So it seems like the treasure digging that we talked about last time was happening kind of in parallel to the Moroni vision and Joseph visiting the plates real quickly. You know, there's been people who've written about that when they did their excursions, they would actually go to hills and see caverns underground with an angel guarding a sword and buried treasure. Is that happening in parallel to this then?

Richard Bushman [00:10:06] Yes, if you look through the folklore of that period, there's a lot of treasure seeking folklore. And frequently there was a guardian angel. I think that's probably found in lots of lore in all countries and many times. So yeah, that's in the air. I think it's definitely there for people who did that sort of thing. That would be kind of a common expectation.

John Dehlin [00:10:32] And are there accounts that describe Joseph on an excursion with people where there was an angel guarding something and stuff in the room that they couldn't get to or whatever. Are there specific accounts where they talk about what happened on an excursion?

Richard Bushman [00:10:52] There are accounts of describing what happens. I'm thinking primarily at the moment of the hurlbut affidavits going out and killing, what was it? A sheep drawing a circle in blood and that kind of thing. But are you talking about this? Are you referring specifically to the Smith family or the people in the neighborhood? What they saw?

John Dehlin [00:11:20] Yeah, was Joseph. I mean it's weird to hear about a sheep being sacrificed and somebody not saying the right word and so they weren't able to get to the treasure and they're being a guardian you think about well, was Moroni being the guardian? And it's hard not to blur these things together. So I'm just wondering to what extent these things were happening simultaneously and how one might sift through the real vision from the folk magic stuff or if they're not really overlapping.

Richard Bushman [00:11:53] Well, I think that's a hard thing to do and it is an inquiry worth making because I think there may be something to Dan Vogel's point that Joseph Sr. Who probably by this time was involved in treasure seeking would have put more credibility in Joseph's story simply because there were parallels that this is what he'd been led to expect. That's conjecture, but I don't think it's a far fetched conjecture entirely. But I'm not aware of stories involving Joseph and his father where there was an angel with the sword. There are stories of retreating chests and various things that are similar to it, the elusive treasure. But not someone can probably correct me on this up to this more than I, but I can him thinking of anything myself. And what always impresses me about this is in the stories we do have involving the Smith family, Joseph's kind of on the edge of it. He's in the house supposedly looking in his stone and Joseph Sr. Is sending in for information from him. So I don't think, I think it's undetermined just exactly how much Joseph Jr. Himself was involved in these expeditions.

John Dehlin [00:13:34] Okay, so tell us about the visits to the plates prior to him actually getting them. How many times did he go, when did he go? Did he ever bring anybody? And what happened when he would actually go? Do we know what happened when he would actually go to try and obtain the plates?

Richard Bushman [00:13:52] Well, we don't know what happened because the three best accounts which are Joseph himself, his mother and Oliver Cowdery all differ in significant detail. And Oliver Cowdery for example, has this huge long, many page speech from Moroni warning Joseph Smith about money digging and seeking the plates for his personal gain. Joseph sums that up in a sentence or two. So we have no idea where Oliver Cowdery claimed could have got this information, whether he's exercising what was thought at that time to be the right of historian to put speeches in the mouths of historical characters or what was going on. But. But basically there's the trip to the hill, the opening of the box, trying to get the plates out and being frustrated in some fashion. And that's where there's debate. Did he get them out and then he's whapped and they are no longer there or exactly what happens. I don't know if we're ever going to be able to straighten that out. But the point is he was frustrated in the early first attempt and told he must come back again. And the warning was to stay away from the money diggers, that there was something polluting about the money digging operation. So he sort of had to extricate himself from that culture.

John Dehlin [00:15:34] So was he told he would go four times or was he told to go once a year until he was worthy enough to receive them? And each time it was like a test, oh, you're not worthy yet, so come back next year.

Richard Bushman [00:15:47] I think it's the latter that he's always feeling like he may be failing the test. And Lucy obviously is anxious that he do something else or do something exactly right. And here you do get a little flavor of the money digging because it's as if the guardian is giving these instructions which must be met in exactitude. And then you'll get the plate. And that goes along with sort of the magical formula notion. And then there are all these stories. Well, you got to bring Alvin. No, you got to bring Emma. No, you got to bring someone else. Which are told a lot of them by his critical neighbors and actually money digging neighbors. So, you know, you don't know exactly what to make of them. But I could picture the family itself sort of being involved in that money digging mentality, sort of carrying over their attitudes there into this gold plates thing. They don't know what's involved. It takes them quite a while to get straight in their mind what this is all about. Anyway.

John Dehlin [00:17:06] Is it safe to say that they were financially destitute and that that was a strong motivator for the gold digging? They were hoping to get rich to ease their woes.

Richard Bushman [00:17:20] Destitute is a strenuous word. They're not starving, they have a farm, they've got work, so they're not flattened, but they are poor. And worst of all, they face the pressure of these mortgages on their house and on their land. And that is the scariest thing of all, that you'll lose your means of making a living. So, yes, they are moved. But to go to equate money digging with poverty, you know, that's a little raw. But we do know that people all over the world, the poor, always have that dream of money. I mean, they go gambling nowadays in Atlantic City. So, you know, roughly. There must have been some equivalent. My guess is, though, that it was more entrancing. They don't really think they're going to make a pile of dough. I mean, they're always hopeful. But to say, well, we're poor, we can't pay the mortgage, let's go out and dig up treasure, that's a little bit crude, I would say.

John Dehlin [00:18:29] It's almost like what you do when you don't have tv.

Richard Bushman [00:18:32] Yeah, a little bit of that. Entertaining, exciting.

John Dehlin [00:18:38] So the fourth visit. So he never brought anyone on the visits. No one ever came with him on the visits, Is that right?

Richard Bushman [00:18:48] To the hill?

John Dehlin [00:18:50] Yes,

Richard Bushman [00:18:52] so far as I know, no one. Emma goes with him to the hill on that last night in 1827, but we don't know whether she walked up to the site or sat in the carriage down below. I think Dan Vogel does say that she sat in the carriage. We may have a source for that, but so far as we know, he's alone. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:19:22] And one last thing. When he was unable to obtain the plates, did they do the. Did he try and get him and they would go into the earth, Was there this whole disappearing or going away from him as he tried to touch them kind of thing going on, do we know?

Richard Bushman [00:19:37] Well, as I say, there are lots of tales and it's very hard to straighten them out. I think the bottom line is we don't know for sure what happened, but

John Dehlin [00:19:50] there are some that claim that that was what happened.

Richard Bushman [00:19:53] Maybe something like that. I mean, this is what you would expect. These are money digging people, people who are talking about it.

John Dehlin [00:20:02] Okay, so in 1827, then, is that when he does finally receive the plates?

Richard Bushman [00:20:08] Right.

John Dehlin [00:20:09] And that's when he and Emma. He and Emma had eloped and moved to New York. And it was. It was while they were in New York that he got the plates, is that right? Or had they gone back to Pennsylvania? They had not yet gone back to Pennsylvania to live with Emma's parents again.

Richard Bushman [00:20:25] Right.

John Dehlin [00:20:26] So he gets the plates. And so how long does he have the plates in New York before they go to Pennsylvania.

Richard Bushman [00:20:35] I can't remember the exact date, but it's that fall, you know, they're being hassled by all their old money digging pals who get the rumor and think they have a right to some of this treasure. So that seems to have been one of the motives of going back. And I'm sure Emma wanted to reconcile with her father if she possibly could. So I've got in my mind November. But it was something like that in 1827 that they headed south.

John Dehlin [00:21:06] So they. And Emma was not allowed to see the plates. Right. Did Joseph's family know that he had finally obtained the plates?

Richard Bushman [00:21:15] Oh yeah.

John Dehlin [00:21:17] And did they try and get them or ask him to see him? Where did he hide them, do we know?

Richard Bushman [00:21:22] Well, they, if you believe Lucy, they're all trying. They're all helping Joseph Smith to conceal the plates. The curious ones are first off, the money digging neighbors, the chases, especially Willard, Sally Chase and probably others. And then Lucy Harris, Martin's wife, who is intensely curious about them.

John Dehlin [00:21:51] And how did Martin come on the scene? Martin Harris?

Richard Bushman [00:21:56] Well, Martin Harris is in the village. They know him, they work for him, they know he's a source of support. And there is this famous story which I suppose is true of him being open minded to the possibility of something marvelous going on. Defending Joseph Smith against the people in the village who were making fun of him and then offering to help him get out of town by paying off some of his local debts and paying for the cost of the trip. So that's, I think that's probably a fair account of what actually happened.

John Dehlin [00:22:36] Was he just a friend of the Smith family then? Martin Harris.

Richard Bushman [00:22:39] Right.

John Dehlin [00:22:41] Okay. And so Joseph and Emma decide they need to leave. They borrow some money for Martin. Right?

Richard Bushman [00:22:48] Right.

John Dehlin [00:22:49] And Martin knew that the plates existed, but he hadn't yet really been involved in what would become the book at that point. Is that right?

Richard Bushman [00:22:59] Right. He hasn't started to translate, he hasn't seen the plates. He's just an aide.

John Dehlin [00:23:07] What do we know about Martin Harris spiritual and religious life before he meets Joseph? What type of religious person? Spiritual person, Superstitious person is he?

Richard Bushman [00:23:19] Well, that's very hard to determine at this point because as soon as he, contrary to overwhelming negative public opinion in Palmyra, shows an interest in Joseph Smith, he's immediately demeaned as a superstitious character given to all sorts of fantastic beliefs. So at the same time, people say that he's a stable farmer, a man of judgment and wisdom. They also make these Accusations about his religious instability. So how do you straighten that out? I don't know. I don't think of him as a pillar of wisdom particularly. He seems to be fairly astute and shrewd. But I also wouldn't want to say that he would just tumble for any superstitious story that came along. I don't think we have evidence of that.

John Dehlin [00:24:23] Do we know if he was members of other churches or if he followed other charismatic leaders prior to Joseph? Do we know anything about that?

Richard Bushman [00:24:31] Well, you catch me out here. Why do I think he's a Quaker? I'm not sure, but I can't tell you for sure. But I don't think we know of him following other leaders. I can't recall anything to that effect.

John Dehlin [00:24:46] Okay, so he funds Emma and Joseph's return to Emma's house. The Hales. Right. And how are they received?

Richard Bushman [00:24:59] Well, with tears and rejoicing, all is forgiven, my dear. So they, you know, the father really loves her and she didn't want her to marry Joseph. This ne' er do well, but he's willing to accept them back and give them a place in his house. But then the plates get in the way and the fact that Joseph will not show the plates to Harris or to Isaac Dale is more than he can stomach. So he puts them out in a little house on the property where they could have a place of their own. And that's where a lot of the translation.

John Dehlin [00:25:46] There's an account I've read of this moment of truth between Joseph and Isaac where Isaac basically calls Joseph on the carpet. Joseph is, it seems like they say that he's crying and apologizing and some have even written that he's confessed that he never ever saw anything with the Seer Stone to begin with and that it was all, you know, a hoax. Where does that come from? And is that credible in your eyes?

Richard Bushman [00:26:14] Yeah, well, I can't remember exactly who recorded that, whether it was Isaac or someone else, but I can picture there being a scene like that. Joseph doesn't want to be at odds with his father in law and he may have said that he was not going to do anything in the treasure seeking vein or magical again, even though he certainly intended to keep on with the Book of Mormon. But I would be very skeptical of this account of Joseph saying he never had anything at all, it was all a made up story. There's a great tendency to want to attribute total falsity to Joseph Smith and so people are going to take any little inclination in that direction where he's apologizing for any offense he's made and turn it into a confession of error. And so I would want a lot of strong evidence, really accept that.

John Dehlin [00:27:32] Okay, so in your mind that's speculation or slander, potentially not something that you've said yet. He probably did acknowledge that what he was doing wasn't really legitimate.

Richard Bushman [00:27:46] Right. Because nothing in his afterlife led him that direction. He could have denied it anywhere along the line and he never did.

John Dehlin [00:27:55] So does that mean in your mind either A, the treasure digging, spirit seeking stuff that he did prior actually did happen, where he was really seeing treasure and angels in mountains, or maybe that he just thought he was. Those are the only two other explanations. Right. Either it was fraud or he really did see those things or he thought he saw those things. Is that right? Are those the three options? Where do you come down? Do you even have a. I know it's all. We're all guessing, but do you have in your mind an image of which of those was likely the case?

Richard Bushman [00:28:33] Well, I would like some evidence that he actually said, I see treasure in the earth. It's possible. I can imagine a kid under pressure from his parents trying to do something and listening to little hints and thinking maybe he's got a clue as to what's happening. And I do think he had this knack of finding lost objects. So I'm not denying there isn't a genuine magical strain in Joseph Smith's mind and culture. But I'm not sure that he said he saw caves with treasures in them. That's. I just not seen any evidence of that as being very strong. I could probably be persuaded otherwise if someone came up with a document. But I don't think we have to make that decision on a pure speculation that maybe he actually claimed to have seen such things.

John Dehlin [00:29:41] So the best, the best that you're aware of is that maybe the people who he associated with might have written about those types of experiences. But whether Joseph was actually involved.

Richard Bushman [00:29:50] Right.

John Dehlin [00:29:51] Other than, I guess, the silver mine in, in Pennsylvania. Right. Where Joseph actually did say that he saw the silver mine, but it was too far underneath the ground. Actually get.

Richard Bushman [00:30:03] That would be.

John Dehlin [00:30:04] That would be one where he did say he saw it. Right?

Richard Bushman [00:30:07] Yeah. You know, before I say anything on that, I'd like to see those sources again. I can't.

John Dehlin [00:30:13] Yeah, I know. I mean, I look at your. Your book is so huge. I can't believe that I would even try and ask you so much detail. It's extremely unfair. Yeah, but you're doing great, so thanks for being a good sport about it. I'm just thinking about what comes to mind. Anyway. Okay, so. So he. He comes back, he. They reconcile with the Hales. Isaac's still not crazy about the Book of Mormon thing. Yeah, I would think that. I would think that Isaac Hale would have been really disappointed that it would be like, okay, you promised to give up the treasure digging. Oh my gosh, now we have to deal with this book, right?

Richard Bushman [00:30:48] I think that's exactly it.

John Dehlin [00:30:50] So he probably was just had an ulcer from then on until. Until he died. Yeah, because it just kept going. Okay, well. And did Isaac ever come around to where he was a believer in Joseph or the church or anything?

Richard Bushman [00:31:05] No.

John Dehlin [00:31:05] No. And what about Isaac's wife? Do we know anything about her?

Richard Bushman [00:31:10] I think I can recall specifically, but I'm pretty sure she didn't become a Mormon. Some of Emma's siblings were friendly towards the church and welcomed Joseph and Emma into their homes in Illinois. But I don't think the parents ever really were reconciled to Joseph Smith's Mormonism.

John Dehlin [00:31:34] Okay, real quick, this is just a really going to seem like a base question, but why couldn't people see the plates? Why didn't you just show them to people?

Richard Bushman [00:31:45] Well, it is a good question. It would certainly solve a lot of headaches for us. I mean, here you're just. It's speculation. If people knew he actually had gold, if he actually had a pile of gold in his bedroom, he, you know, his life would be at risk. I would think that there would just be constant assaults upon him, so long as it remained in the realm of rumor and possibility and fantasy. The gold diggers are going to get excited about it, but probably the thieves

John Dehlin [00:32:26] are going to get more excited.

Richard Bushman [00:32:28] Yeah, right, exactly. So it could be just a very practical reason, keep him out of trouble.

John Dehlin [00:32:38] And then maybe God doesn't want people to believe based on proof. He wants them to believe based on faith. Maybe that's another explanation, Something like that.

Richard Bushman [00:32:48] But I can tell you, if they did exist and people saw them, then there'd still be criticisms of it. Nothing is going to satisfy everyone. So there'd be plenty of room for faith, I think.

John Dehlin [00:33:02] Even so, even if they had been shown because people could say, oh, they really didn't see them because.

Richard Bushman [00:33:07] Yeah. Or they were fakes of some kind or this or that.

Early Translation Experiments and Martin Harris

John Dehlin [00:33:11] Okay, so what does he do? When does the trans. You know, what are his early experiences or experimentations with the plates?

Richard Bushman [00:33:23] Well, we think, all right, he's got the plates, he's got the urim And Thummim, he just looks in the crystals and sees the translation, starts dictating, and that's that. I'm not so sure of that. I think it was a little bit more of a struggle. I mean, I. Oliver Cowdery tries to do this and he doesn't get very far. And so it may have required some kind of spiritual or moral powers that he had to learn. I also think that it's possible he. Even after he started translating, he wasn't absolutely sure he was getting it right. Because how does he change whether or not he's writing down the right words? I mean, there's no dictionary he can go to. He's not going through any normal translation process. And so I always had this hunch that one of the reasons for Joseph's interest in the Enthon transcript was to check himself out to see if he was doing something right.

John Dehlin [00:34:30] Now, you're referring to the early mechanics, sort of the Martin Harris and era mechanics of the translation.

Richard Bushman [00:34:35] Right, Right. The very, very start that fall when he's dictating to Emma. We don't know exactly when it began, but 1827, early 1828, before Harris goes to see Anthon in February 1828. So my guess is a kind of a trial and error period there where he's getting the hang of things.

John Dehlin [00:35:01] And your book almost gives the sense. Well, first of all, let's just jump back. When he got the plates, and you're saying he got what is referred to as a Urim, Thummim. Right. And you said it's two crystals attached by some type of chain to a breastplate, is that right?

Richard Bushman [00:35:20] I don't know if it's a chain, but supported by a breastplate.

John Dehlin [00:35:25] Okay, so there's a. The Urim and Thummim are those the only two things he got out of the hill, then the plates and the Urim and Thummim?

Richard Bushman [00:35:32] So far as I know, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:35:34] No sword or anything like that?

Richard Bushman [00:35:36] No.

John Dehlin [00:35:36] Or Liahona?

Richard Bushman [00:35:38] No.

John Dehlin [00:35:38] Okay, so he. So he gets the Urim and Thummim out, he gets the plates, they go to Palmar, they go to Pennsylvania. When he's doing the early translation or experimenting, he's.

Richard Bushman [00:35:51] He's.

John Dehlin [00:35:51] There's a nail up on the wall and there's a curtain. Is that right? And that's always shielding?

Richard Bushman [00:35:56] Well, that's been conjectured, but no one knows that for sure. There is no description of him translating with a curtain. We assume it would have to be if the plates were in sight. But later on, we know the plates were not in sight. They were wrapped in a cloth on the table. So it's quite possible that was the way it was from the beginning. They were wrapped in a cloth and he just looked in the ear on them and thumb them.

John Dehlin [00:36:26] So I remember people saying that the house where he supposedly did the translations still exists, and they actually went and saw the nail that was in the wall where the curtain hung.

Richard Bushman [00:36:39] I see. We know this nail hole must have held up the blanket. That's historical reconstruction, if there was any.

John Dehlin [00:36:49] So you're not one to buy that necessarily. That would be a valuable mail, though, don't you think? Someone would have to yank that out and put it in the church museum. Okay, so we don't know if there was a curtain, you're saying. Well, that's news to me, because I've always. But then I thought about the curtain. How hard would it be for all Oliver or Emma whoever to just kind of move the curtain and peek? Right.

Richard Bushman [00:37:14] Well, right. And yeah.

John Dehlin [00:37:17] Or if Emma was dusting, there's. There's. There's accounts of Emma actually lifting the plates to dust under them and stuff. Is that right?

Richard Bushman [00:37:24] Moving about on a table while she does.

John Dehlin [00:37:26] But if I think of my wife or anyone, you'd think they would just kind of take a little peek, don't you think? Well, I mean, Joseph wasn't in the room and. Oh, let me just make sure. This is. You know, it's hard to believe they wouldn't peek or really try hard.

Richard Bushman [00:37:43] Unless you believe what Joseph said of the angel that you are not to look, in which case there'd be a powerful taboo against looking.

John Dehlin [00:37:54] Potentially like an ark of the Covenant struck down dead kind of thing.

Richard Bushman [00:37:57] Right.

John Dehlin [00:37:58] So maybe the fear of God was what kept them from peeking.

Richard Bushman [00:38:01] Fear of God? Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:38:03] Okay, so when I was reading your book, it makes it sound like when Joseph was doing some of the early experimentation, he wrote some characters down. Is that right?

Richard Bushman [00:38:18] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:38:18] And it almost sounds like you're wondering whether he sent Martin off to find someone who might do the translation of the characters to then provide him sort of a Rosetta stone to go on and continue the translation. That. That might have been part of his motive for sending Martin off with the characters. Is there any. Did I get that wrong?

Richard Bushman [00:38:37] I didn't mean to say that. I meant to say he might have asked for someone to check the translation because, you know, one of Martin Harris counts of the Anthon interview implies that there were not only the characters, but Joseph's translation of the characters.

John Dehlin [00:38:56] Yeah. So he could check what he knew of Egyptian language with what Joseph translated it into. Right.

Richard Bushman [00:39:03] But it wasn't a Rosetta Stone thing where he's asking someone else to translate and then he would dope out what the characters meant. I don't think of that. I think he was just wondering, well, have I got this right? What do the learned people say?

John Dehlin [00:39:17] Okay. I mean, it would be. It seems like a Rosetta Stone would almost be impossible because for the amount of words that are in the Book of Mormon, there's not a one to one correlation between. I imagine there's eight times as many words in the Book of Mormon as there would have been characters on the gold plates. Right. Like, way more English words than actual Egyptian characters. There's not like a one to one character per letter or even character per word. Right. A character in Reformed Egyptian would likely represent sentences, if not paragraphs. Do we have any idea?

Richard Bushman [00:39:54] No, I don't know we have any idea. But if you try and figure out how many plates there were with characters on them, it's not 584 pages of those characters, those plates. So there must have been some compression.

John Dehlin [00:40:11] Yeah. How heavy were the plates, do we know?

Richard Bushman [00:40:14] 40 or 50 pounds.

John Dehlin [00:40:16] 40 or 50 pounds. Okay, so what happened when Martin took the stuff to Professor Anthon, then?

Richard Bushman [00:40:25] Well, of course, that's the great. That's the great dispute. He shows them the materials, and Anthon, according to his own account, immediately saw the hoax and advise Martin Harris to extricate himself, give up this silly thing. Harris thinks that Anthon has confirmed the validity of the characters in the translation, goes back and carries on with Joseph Smith. So, frankly, it's a mystery how they could have such opposite views. I mean, we can picture Anthon being embarrassed by even giving this guy the time of day once he found out what was involved and trying to prove he wasn't taken in for a second. But why would Martin Harris go back and keep working for Joseph Smith if Anthon had told him it was ridiculous? I just find it hard to bring those two together.

John Dehlin [00:41:35] So that's a real. That's a real mystery.

Richard Bushman [00:41:38] Yeah. Right.

John Dehlin [00:41:40] Okay, but. But Anthon definitely denies Martin Harris's account, right?

Richard Bushman [00:41:47] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:41:48] Okay, so Martin comes back energized, and then they. And then they begin the translation process full force. Is that right?

Richard Bushman [00:41:57] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:41:58] And how's. How's Martin's wife feeling about this?

Richard Bushman [00:42:02] Well, she's furious, of course. At least if we trust Lucy Smith, who had no love in her heart for Lucy Harris. Lucy Harris was something of a Virago, who wanted. First wanted to see the plates, and then when she was denied it, turned against Joseph Smith and discredited him entirely. And I'm sure it put a lot of pressure on Martin. So it's hard to know exactly what kind of a character Lucy Harris was, but I think it would be quite reasonable for her to be concerned that Joseph Smith was trying to swindle Martin. That was the established accusation against all the money diggers and why money digging was illegal. It's not because they thought people would steal anything. It was because they thought the people in charge of these money expeditions were trying to con the people who were going out on them. So she would, I think, quite naturally, think her husband was being taken for a bath.

John Dehlin [00:43:16] Right. So Martin begins helping out with the translation. And what do we know about the mechanics of the actual translation?

Richard Bushman [00:43:28] Not a lot. There are all these various theories about what's going on. I think what is quite evident is that Joseph Smith was not looking at the plates. We do have a number of descriptions of him. The plates sitting on the table, wrapped in linen cloth, plot he looking at his seer stone, not the Urim and Thummim, but his seer stone, which is in a hat, which he uses to darken the space right around the stone, which presumes that there was some light coming from the stone so that you had to read something that was faint. And if there were other lights, it would obliterate the shape of the letters. So we know that much. And there are these theories that the stone or the inspiration would plant ideas in Joseph's head and then he would find the words. So it's very much his language, his. It's his story as he's inspired to dictate it. That's one theory. The other theory, which is the royal Skousen theory now, is that the words of the translation actually appeared to Joseph Smith in the stone and he just dictated them off and they remained there until they were written down, and then they disappeared and new words came. And David Whitmer describes the process somewhat this way. So lacking a real explanation from Joseph Smith himself, I think we just have to leave it like that, that there are these two accounts. We don't know exactly which one is accurate.

John Dehlin [00:45:26] Now, I was under the understanding that when Martin Harris was involved, there wasn't a hat, and that he used what we would traditionally understand as the urimum Thummim, which is these crystals.

Richard Bushman [00:45:39] Well, there is some evidence of that, that is true. But there. And I have said, as much in things I've written. But people who have looked at that evidence, scrutinized it carefully, say you don't really have evidence that you had the Urim and thumb one, because they use this word interpreters, which could refer to the Seer Stone as well. Later on, Joseph Smith did call the stone a Urim and Thummim. So a Urim and Thummim is a type of an instrument. It wasn't necessarily that specific instrument with the stone set in the breastplates.

John Dehlin [00:46:21] So we don't know if these crystals in the breastplate were ever used. There's no account of them ever being used?

Richard Bushman [00:46:28] I don't think so, no.

The Translation Process and the Seer Stone

John Dehlin [00:46:32] Okay. And also. Sorry, I'm just thinking, oh, well, this begs a really interesting question, and I'm sure you get this a lot. And that is why ask the Book of Mormon prophets to spend all this time and energy creating gold plates, riding on them, handing them down through generations. Make Moroni walk all the way to Hill Cumorah from wherever he was to deposit them in the. In the hill. Have Joseph Smith go through all this pain to hide them, and then when it gets to the time to actually create the book, he doesn't seem to use them.

Richard Bushman [00:47:15] Yeah, that is a mystery. And it's a mystery that carries over to the Book of Abraham. Did he need those scrolls or not in order to translate? And I don't really have an answer with any authority behind it at all. It actually, I think, points towards the need for speculation about why. I mean, let's begin by accepting as the fact that the plates were necessary, that all that effort was not symbolic. They had to be there with the words written on them. Why would that have to be. And I don't really know, except that it seems to indicate some relationship between the physical and the spiritual, that for words to come into this man's head, you needed the presence of this physical object that was laden with efforts and thought of so many prophets preceding him. And, You know, I reach for analogies, and the one that comes to me is induction. I don't know if you know, the process of induction by which, if you move a magnet across a wire, you don't have to touch it, but just pass it across the wire. It sends. Makes the electrons in the wire move in a certain direction. And that's the way electricity is generated by making wires cross magnets. And there you have some force radiating from the physical object that has an effect on the electrical current. So, but, you know, that's just kind of a Fairly lame analogy, but when it comes right down to it, I don't have an answer to that question.

John Dehlin [00:49:17] So that's. You know, most people would be just stunned to know that there's no real evidence that the plates were used materially in the translation and that the Urim and Thummim, meaning the crystals in the breastplate, weren't used either. That's real different from the accounts that we kind of grow up with in primary and Sunday school and seminary.

Richard Bushman [00:49:39] Yeah, well, that's the account that's in the historical records, though. So we just have to live with it.

John Dehlin [00:49:44] So we have to live with it. And, you know, this really does bring up the question, oh, two questions. One is, isn't it completely dishonest or disingenuous to ever use the word translator or translation? Aren't those just the wrong words, first of all? And then I'll ask you the second question later. So let's start there. Why do we even call it a translation?

Richard Bushman [00:50:13] Well, Nibley's discoursed on that subject. What does it mean to translate, to carry over from one culture or one time to another? You know, we use the word translated to talk about bodies being resurrected or carried about one way or another. So I don't think you could call it dishonest. It certainly has misled us into thinking that, you know, I used to speculate did Joseph Smith learned reformed Egyptian, peering at those plates and coming up with the words. And that, of course, is beside the point if you see it this way. So maybe we do need to have another word. I think we certainly need to make clear to our children as we teach them or whoever, that what we refer to a translation is carrying a message from one culture into the language of another, not necessarily by using a dictionary. So you do have to generalize or change the meaning of translation from its ordinary use usage.

John Dehlin [00:51:35] Okay. And do you think we need to change the art and the pictures and the graphics and the motion pictures that we are using to depict the process? Do you think it's disingenuous to continue having the curtain and using some type of spectacles and showing Joseph staring at the plates, thinking earnestly and then, you know, dictating? Do you think that that's something we need to change? Maybe?

Richard Bushman [00:52:07] Yeah, I definitely think we need to change it. It's not because, you know, it's a horrible mistake because the guys who do those pictures are not trying to deceive anyone. That's what they think actually happened is it's just a matter of accuracy. And the Problem is, if you're not accurate, then you, down the line, you put your own credibility in jeopardy. And I just think all of our young people should feel like they're really getting the straight story on Joseph Smith or they're going to go through the experience you had. Disillusionment, anger. It's a very sad thing and it's unnecessary. So we do need to avoid that.

John Dehlin [00:52:52] So is it possible that somehow the mechanics were never really known? And so someone in the 1850s or 1860s and let's say 19th century correlation sort of just came up with this story and even subsequent apostles and prophets sort of understood that to be the way that the translation happened. In other words, when did we learn about the Hat and the Stone? Have we always known it and we just never talked about it? How did this creep in and how did it get allowed to creep in the way that it did?

Richard Bushman [00:53:27] Well, that's actually an interesting historiographical question. I mean, the stories of the Hat and the Stone were recorded very close to Joseph Smith's lifetime by the people who were there, Oliver Cowdery and, and David Whitmer and Emma Smith. So it's not like that. We've sort of made up this new version of it. It's been there. But I think what threw us off was our own embarrassment about Joseph Smith. We so wanted him to be, be kind of a 19th century Protestant view of a prophet, a noble soul, sort of partly ethereal, who speaks only spiritual wisdom, and not someone who's involved in magical practices, which is superstition and which Protestants are dead set against in the 19th century. And that effort to kind of suppress anything that would scandalize Joseph Smith or turn him into a scandal, I think motivated the desire to make it all sort of lovely and commonsensical rather than anything that would be magical.

John Dehlin [00:54:59] So someone along the way maybe felt embarrassed or said, people aren't going to buy this, or people aren't going to believe it, or people are going to think we're goofy. And so let's depict it. Let's rewrite history and depict it in a way that's a little bit more palatable.

Richard Bushman [00:55:15] Well, I'm not sure it's quite that calculated, but it has that effect that you just kind of bowdlerize the story, you whitewash it and it ends up this way.

John Dehlin [00:55:34] I know that life is more complex than this, but I know a lot of people, it seems like some of the people who leave, they don't leave because they're weak or they're sinners. Or they're adulterers. They leave because they've got this view of what integrity and honesty is. And they always bought that integrity and honesty was like absolute. That there are blacks and whites and that there's good and bad. And a lot of people would say to me, john, look, if the Church knows that they're depicting the translation process inaccurately, it is their duty and obligation to stand up, do a general conference, tell everybody, all right, here's the deal. You know, we were saying it wrong. Here's how it is. And from now on, whenever it's depicted in a motion picture or in the Ensign, we're going to stick his face in a hat with a stone in it. I know you can't answer for them, but do you have any thoughts on that? Or is that just something you just have to leave to the way things are in life sometimes?

Richard Bushman [00:56:28] Well, I think your depiction of the disillusioned person is probably quite accurate. It's the absolutist. It's that personality that sees things as black and white that is going to be shocked and deeply offended by this whole thing. It's not a personality that can't sort of tolerate ambiguity and realize people get caught in situations and there are all sorts of strange things come out that is going to feel like you've got to lay down the law one way or another. And the Church does failed to do that. So while I was thoroughly devoted to it at one time in my absolutist way, I'm now thoroughly against it in my absolutist way. So I don't know what to do about that kind of personality because they're going to have troubles with the Church. That's quite true.

John Dehlin [00:57:31] Yeah. And I guess the Church is in a bind. We are all speculating, but they just can't come out and say, we were wrong and here's the right way. Because one, people may still think it's goofy and that might cause them to leave, but also they'll wonder why there was the deception. And then what else have we been deceived about? Right?

Richard Bushman [00:57:48] Yeah. Well, I think there are all sorts of middle grounds. They could just begin to straighten up and tell the story as the records tell it and say, well, our artists previously had a different view of things. We now are in a better position, though I know there are still a lot of people who are averse to the magical thing. They think my book gets altogether too much credit to magic. I hope we can overcome that. There's nothing malicious about magic. It's A form of supernaturalism that people the world over have believed in. And people who study magical practices from times past find much that's admirable in them. Like there isn't freemasonry. It's not the Devil's tool. It's a form of human questing for powers beyond themselves.

John Dehlin [00:58:47] And how much of this understanding about magic do we owe to Michael Quinn, do you think? Or is he just one of many? Should we sort of thank him for the research he does did to help us really understand this better?

Richard Bushman [00:58:59] Well, the basic research was done before Michael Quinn by scholars of European culture and American culture. Keith Thomas, Religion the Decline of Magic is the key turning book. And then other books written about the Hermetic tradition and the Renaissance and Michael built on that. I suppose maybe many Latter Day Saints learned nothing about magic until they came to Michael. The trouble is his book. Doesn't really put things in balance. What it does is it just piles it higher and deeper, gets this huge material, collects it all, and assumes that this vast quantity of lore which developed over the centuries was in the minds of everyone who ever went out and searched for a buried treasure. So it kind of leads you astray at the same time that it opens up a new world to you. So I think it's a fabulous work of scholarship and ingenious, I must say, but it's really overblown in so many ways.

John Dehlin [01:00:25] Kind of like the dynamic about the fascination with Indians and trying to fit that back.

Richard Bushman [01:00:30] Yeah, exactly. You pile it all up and think everybody in the world is just totally absorbed in magic.

John Dehlin [01:00:38] Okay, so you talked about a couple theories. One that Joseph was compiling his own, using his own words and his own stories and understandings to come up with the text through this translation process. And the other one is that he's reading it word for word. And I've read the accounts where it says the words would appear and he'd read them and then they disappear. But if that were the case, then that would make one ask why changes were then made to the Book of Mormon and subsequent editions. If he was dictating from the mouth of the Lord word for word, why were tens or hundreds or even thousands of changes necessary?

Richard Bushman [01:01:15] Is that right?

John Dehlin [01:01:16] Is that right?

Richard Bushman [01:01:17] Yeah, that is a huge problem for Revelation generally. It's not just the Book of Mormon, but Doctrine and Covenants Revelations, which have many changes in them too. And goes into to complex questions about the relationship to a prophet, of a prophet, to the God who's revealing his will to that prophet. And I think to say that the diction of the Book of Mormon is the diction of God, first of all, implies God speaks English. And these words are not necessarily Joseph's words when they do seem very much to be within the vocabulary of a 19th century New Englander. So I think to eliminate Joseph Smith entirely from the picture, even if he was reading those words in the stone, is going to get us in trouble. And I just don't think it's accurate. And I can't find a really clear way of describing how a prophet, a prophet's mind relates to the mind of God. Is his mind just a blank slate that God writes on, or does he work through the prophet's mind and culture to provide the words, even if they're written on the stone? To me, that's not necessarily the key point here. It's how does God get these words into his mind? And I just think Mormons instinctively feel that somehow God is working through the mind of the prophet. He's not a blank slate, partly because that's the way we receive revelation ourselves. That's the way patriarchs receive revelation, bishops receive revelation. And I'm a patriarch. I believe very strongly that the Lord is giving me words to save people. When I go home and transcribe it, boy, I straighten up the grammar. I may change a word here there to make the sense clearer. And every patriarch I know does that. So it's just sort of the Mormon style, this somewhat loose relationship between the mind of God and the words that the prophet speaks. It's not one for one.

John Dehlin [01:03:49] So God doesn't dictate in his revelations necessarily?

Richard Bushman [01:03:54] Well, that's word for word. Word for word, yeah. Right. He works through the mind of the prophet.

John Dehlin [01:04:05] This program has been a production of Mormon Stories Podcast. To comment on this episode or to peruse the archives of past episodes, please visit us online@mormonstories.org Also, please consider supporting Mormon Stories podcast by making a contribution today. Thanks again for listening.

Book of Mormon Authorship and Historical Challenges

Part 4 of 5 · Ep. 50

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Mormon Stories podcast depends entirely upon the voluntary contributions of you its listeners to keep Mormon Stories alive. Please consider donating today@mormonstories.org to make a contribution to Mormon Stories. Just click on the Make a Donation button at the top right of the MormonStories.org website. For all this and more, please check out MormonStories.org and thank you for listening. There are theories that go around that Joseph Smith was the author of the Book of Mormon or that he collaborated with others to produce the book. And you talk about that in your book Rough Stone Rolling. But just to recap, you know, the typical Grant Palmer or even Fawn Brody type of argument is that, you know, at least I think Grant Palmer would say that like 20% of the book of Mormon is word for word from the King James Bible and that even we know what version of the King James Bible Joseph Smith had and that some of the errors that were in that edition of the King James Bible actually made it into the Book of Mormon. So it's clear that to some extent he was taking from an existing Bible and putting those words in the Book of Mormon for a good chunk of it. A lot of people like to say that Joseph's father had dreams just like Lehi's dream and somehow that makes it in. And Joseph had brothers and a relationship with his brothers. It was a lot like Nephi and his relationship with his brothers. So they kind of say that Joseph Smith family stories make up part of the Book of Mormon. And then they talk about how some of the wars with Andrew Jackson and I don't know what war was going on back in the 1830s. But you know, there are people who even try to tie the battles in the Book of Mormon to actual battles and formations that happened in the early 1800s. And then there's all the anti Masonic rhetoric that people talk about because there was some really uproar about Masons and secret combinations generally and that somehow maybe that made its way into the Book of Mormon along with oh, and then the View of the Hebrews, that there was this book called the View of the Hebrews and other books that speculated that were written five to 10 years before the Book of Mormon was produced, that even Oliver Cowdery apparently attended a congregation of the author of the Book View of the Hebrews. And the book the View of the Hebrews has a light race and a dark race or a good race and a bad race, and the bad race kills off the good race and they come of Hebrew origins, etc. And people sort of so this is sort of the attempt to try and explain this marvelous and wonderful book. And on top of that, a lot of people like to throw in the anachronisms that there's steel, that there shouldn't be steel in the Book of Mormon. There shouldn't be horses, there shouldn't be chariots, and all these helmets and swords. No one's ever found one. So, you know, there's a lot of people who attack the Book of Mormon from all different angles. None of them can come up with a. An explanation of how God created. But there certainly are a lot of people who feel like they can really come up with some of the puzzle pieces that start to tell that story. So, you know, what would you give as a rebuttal to someone who's inclined to believe those things or be concerned about them? How could you tell them either, here's where those things are wrong, or here's a way to say, yeah, all those things were part of what informed Joseph Smith's ultimate production of the book, that the Lord used those to help him create the book. How would you respond to all that? I know it's a lot to respond to.

Richard Bushman [00:04:10] It's a huge issue, and I'm not sure there is a single response where you can simply flick the switch and say, no, all of this doesn't bear. The fact is that when I read the Book of Mormon, it just always seems to me much larger in scope, much broader in conception, much more intricate and peculiar than any of these theories can quite account for. They're all the parts, but the parts, to my way of thinking, don't add up to the whole. Which is what he produced was another Bible. He produced an apocryphal Bible of Israelites coming to the new world and living their lives here. And so I think the question you have to ask is, why did this young person think he should write another Bible? And I suppose you could think of answers and say, well, it was a confusing time. He's worried about skepticism in the world, and this is his way of proving there is a God. I think Dan Vogel has some interesting ideas about his father, but they don't, from my point of view, add up to the Book of Mormon that I read. When I read it, I just find intricacies and complexities in one dimension after another that are never fully never accounted for. So even if you do believe that he had all these components in his mind, which has never been demonstrated, you can't prove it outside of the Book of Mormon, that he was thinking about the War of 1812, or thinking about Freemasonry or what have you. You just have to surmise it's in the air, so he must have breathed the air and there it is still. There is a step beyond that in which he composes it into this really fabulous narrative that goes on one character after another. Politics and the military and this measuring system and a geography and economic order and so on and so forth. It's still a fabulous achievement. And even if you granted everything that they say these analysts propose, you'd still have to say it's a work of genius. It is a work of genius. And, you know, we just keep finding one dimension after another in that book that you wouldn't expect to be there. So all I would like to persuade people is that the facts don't compel you to confess that Joseph Smith had to have made up that book simply by piecing together these little bits of the puzzle that were in his culture at the time. The facts don't compel you. This is a decision that can go either way. And you've got people who are well informed on both sides of the debate who see that book differently. And you're free. You are free to choose and still have a respectable view of the evidence and take all these things into account.

John Dehlin [00:08:04] So you're saying the evidence allows for sort of plausible deniability. You're not compelled to conclude that it's true by sheer facts and evidence alone?

Richard Bushman [00:08:16] Well, you're not compelled to by evidence to conclude that it's fiction. I mean, it goes both ways. You just can't. There's just not evidence enough on either side.

John Dehlin [00:08:29] Yeah, you're right. Right. That's what I meant. And I'm sure you'd add the spiritual stepping out of your historian for a second. I'm sure you'd probably add that the spiritual confirmation you've received is additional evidence for you in favor, right?

Richard Bushman [00:08:46] Yeah, I would say so. I mean, it's hard to know exactly what is spiritual confirmation, but I go along with Terrell Gibbons view that this becomes a moral choice. Do you want to live in a world where God speaks to a modern prophet? If you want to live in that kind of world and bear all the consequences of that, then the Book of Mormon makes sense. If you don't want to live in that world, if you don't want God to be speaking to prophets and guiding them, then it doesn't make sense to believe in the Book of Mormon. But I don't think the facts compel you to go down one way or the other either way. Right.

John Dehlin [00:09:40] So is it a big waste of time for farms to try and prove it's true or for archaeologists to go try and dig things up? And is it a fool's errand for anti Mormons to try and disprove it? Should that whole discourse just cease in your opinion?

Richard Bushman [00:09:55] No, I don't. I like anything that generates inquiry. And farm's desire to prove the Book of Mormon has generated huge amounts of inquiry. Mormons are studying things that they never in the world would learn about. And they are. They gain great skill in sort of pulling this stuff together to prove their the case. And I'm intrigued by it. I find it interesting. So I would say no, that's very useful. The animormons. I'm not quite sure what motivates some of them. I think it's. I think it's a concern that Mormons are horribly misled, but I'm never quite sure if that's their real desire is to straighten out Mormons. But the Mormons for Jesus I think do have a genuine religious urge. They think Mormons have lost the savior and need to be brought back to him. But I don't know what motivates Dan Vogel or Brett Metcalf. I think it's more an intellectual quest than anything else. Maybe you don't have to find a motive for them.

John Dehlin [00:11:17] Do you think the Book of Mormon, do you characterize it as containing the fullness of the gospel? Because. It doesn't seem to have much of what we characterize as Joseph Smith's full gospel when it comes to the three degrees of glory, of eternal marriage, of plural marriage, of baptism for the dead. I mean there are all sorts of these major fundamental missions of the church type doctrines that aren't in there. But then when he gets to Nauvoo, they're there. And you're kind of wondering if it contains the fullness of the gospel, why didn't it come with those in 1830? And why is it just a coincidence that Joseph developed those later when the book was produced before? Or do you just redefine what fullness means to mean an incomplete fullness?

Richard Bushman [00:12:09] Well, I think that's a very good question because sometimes we're unwilling to admit that the gospel evolves and expands and it certainly did evolve and expand. I think your second point, that we have to define fullness, what is the fullness of the gospel? And as is defined in certain parts of the Book of Mormon, it's essentially the atonement of Jesus Christ So the point about what it restores that was lost from the Bible, I think, is an interesting one. And part of that, that answer is once again, Carol Gibbons dialogic revelation. The idea that humans actually do speak to God and he speaks back to them, that's in the Bible. But it certainly had been kind of squeezed out by Joseph Smith's time. So that revives a sense of God's immediacy in human affairs. I also think that this is a little bit of a side point that the Calvinist view of human nature had so taken over Protestantism that it was the Book of Mormon was necessary as kind of a. As a block against that view of no human will, effective human will in making choices that would contribute to your salvation. So there are various parts of the gospel that did need to be restored, but it was the fullness of the gospel, not the fullness of the doctrine. The doctrine kept growing and I presume could continue to grow forever in its complexity.

Personal Witness to the Book of Mormon's Significance

John Dehlin [00:14:06] Okay, I'm going to ask you real quick to put on your. This is probably the most important question I'll ask today, maybe, and I'm asking to take off your historian hat and definitely your official. Any. Any official hat or representation you might offer. And this is just a really personal question on behalf of people who are struggling. And that's that there's some people who just say, look, the evidence doesn't add up that the Book of Mormon's historical. There's never been a sword or a helmet found. There's never been a chariot. The horses just aren't there. There's too much coincidence with all this stuff. I'll never be able to buy that the Book of Mormon, that there really was a Moroni, that there really was a brother of Jared in a barge with a cork in the top and the bottom. And, you know, it just doesn't add up. But, you know, to say that these people have to just leave the church then because they don't see the Book of Mormon as historical, I just see that as a disaster because I think that's, at a minimum, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But, you know, there may be also very practical negative ramifications for people who make that decision with family and socially and occupationally, etc. So do you have any counsel, just personally, for someone who is not inclined to believe the Book of Mormon is historical, but doesn't want to then conclude as well that they have to leave the church? Is there a middle way or a middle road for someone caught in that dilemma or do they just have to leave by conscience alone? They must withdraw.

Richard Bushman [00:15:45] I agree with you. I think it would be a mistake to leave. I think when you give up the Book of Mormon, you give up a lot. And I hate to see that happen. I think there are other ways of interpreting the Book of Mormon that don't require you to give it up, but in favor of what you're saying as a life strategy. The fact is, every Mormon in the world accepts the gospel selectively. They may say, I accept all the doctrines, every detail. But when it comes to giving talks, to making decisions, to speaking to their friends about the church, they always select something that is of significance to them, whether it's the family or free agency or Christ or whatever. So it's just impossible to encompass the whole gospel. You have to say, this is what I hold on to as giving me strength and guidance. And on top of that, it would be a great mistake to give up those things that are good and rewarding just because someone has persuaded you that the Book of Mormon can't be true. I mean, to abandon goodness in your life, that's a bad mistake. That's a bad mistake morally as well as in terms of your own personal salvation. You have to hold on to what's good or else you're being bullied by the world around you. And so I think these people have to find some way to emphasize the positive, as it were, and then sort of wait or just not mention or do whatever you want with the rest of the doctrines, but hold on to what is good. Otherwise you're sort of casting off your own integrity. You don't want that to happen.

John Dehlin [00:18:07] Well, thank you for that treatment of the Book of Mormon. Let's now turn to the three innate Witnesses. I'm going to try. And instead of really digging into the history like I was doing too much in the. In the beginning, previously, I'm going to just try and get to the heart of the issues. So basically, if you listen to Grant Palmer or if you listen to, you know, others who have written about the Witnesses in a disparaging way, the picture they paint is that the Whitmers weren't necessarily the brightest of people. They even Martin Harris weren't necessarily the brightest of people. They followed people before Joseph Smith, they followed people after Joseph Smith. They testified to the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon and the plates and the angel or whatever, but at the same time, they left the church and they testified to Strang or to others and other books and other visions and other angels. And so on the one hand, we feel like in your book, I was really touched by how you described how Joseph felt when he came back from the three witness experience. And why don't you just recount that real quick? Because that was pretty moving.

The Three and Eight Witnesses and Their Testimonies

Richard Bushman [00:19:39] The story is told by Lucy, his mother, that after returning from the three witnesses, he threw himself down on the floor and said, at last, I no longer have to carry this all by myself. I don't remember the exact words. Now there are others who have to bear testimony. So you have the feeling this poor kid was carrying the whole thing. And he knew he was surrounded by doubt and intense skepticism. And now he had a few people that he could depend on to speak out on the basis of their own visionary experiences.

John Dehlin [00:20:17] Yeah. So let's jump back real quick. The translation moves from Pennsylvania to the Whitmer home, is that right? Partly because of persecution and stress and other things, but it moves to the home. And the Whitmers become really central players in this whole process. They were witnesses to parts of the translation process, is that right?

Richard Bushman [00:20:46] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:20:46] Okay. And so the Book of Mormon gets translated, it gets finished, and at some point they start asking, they really start wanting to see the plates. Is that right?

Richard Bushman [00:21:00] Well, Martin Harris was the one who put the most pressure on to see the plates. But the Whitmers and Oliver Cowdery also were very interested, too. Yes.

John Dehlin [00:21:11] And I even remember reading your book where it says that Joseph says, you'll see the plates, and you'll not only see the plates, but you'll see the Liahona and the Sword of Laban too. Is that right?

Richard Bushman [00:21:22] I don't recall. Did I say that?

John Dehlin [00:21:25] I'm pretty sure I read it, but it's not a huge deal. So. So then at some point, Joseph says, today's the day. Is that right? What can you tell us just about the actual day, just at a really high level. We won't dig into it.

Richard Bushman [00:21:43] Well, why don't we get right down to the experience itself, that they go into the woods and pray and they see Christ or they see an angel and they see the plates.

John Dehlin [00:21:53] Okay.

Richard Bushman [00:21:54] They see it in two different groups. Martin Harris sees it with Joseph and the others see it together.

John Dehlin [00:22:03] Right. And Martin didn't feel like he was worthy at first. And so the other two, Oliver and one of the Whitmers, saw it without Martin, and then Martin had to come back and kind of pray again.

Richard Bushman [00:22:18] Well, Joseph goes off and finds Martin praying and they pray together.

John Dehlin [00:22:22] Okay, So I guess the big question here, I guess there are two questions that kind of strike at the core of people who are kind of skeptical. The first is that. The first is sort of the association with the money digging and the treasure digging. We have the earlier accounts of where they'll go to some hill and they'll all sort of whip each other up into really believing that they're seeing something. And I think if I remember reading Brody, that's sort of, you know, the allegation and that's that there's some ability or propensity to whip each other up into thinking that they're seeing something when they're really not. And that's where we get into what Grant Palmer talks about the eyes of our understanding or seeing with our spiritual eyes. So let's start with that and then I have a follow up question.

Richard Bushman [00:23:23] Well, this whipping up business is a psychological theory that Joseph Smith had the capacity to get people all excited and they saw things that didn't exist. But that's just a speculation about what might have happened. The key point is the spiritualized business because the witnesses did say that they saw these things with their spiritual eyes or the eyes of their understanding. And that's a great relief to people who are doubting this because it implies they didn't really see anything, it was just sort of something they imagined. It becomes illusionary and therefore the pressure of the plates being in actual existence is relieved. You don't have to worry about there actually being plates because these people just thought they saw plates. But the question is, is it any more real if you see it with your spiritual understanding? And here I'm thinking of Charles G. Finney, the later evangelist, who in his time of skepticism as a young lawyer in New York, just a year after Joseph Smith's first vision, had a vision in his law office after he'd been converted. He's converted in the afternoon out in the woods, he comes back to the law office and in the document he sees Christ standing there and takes this as a sign of confirmation of his conversion. And in his diary, which are in his autobiographical account which he wrote many years later, I think it was 50 years later, he said, I know he couldn't have really have been there and was just something in my mind. But it looked as if he were really there and then sort of left it at that. So there was a feeling among the Latter Day Saints, especially afterwards, that it was impossible to see God unless you were prepared. So it's almost a requirement that visions come through prepared eyes or prepared mind. And that is true for others who use this phrase in those times. But as they experience it, it's just as real as if they were not with their spiritual eyes. And so it isn't just like it's sort of fuzzy or vague or blurry. It's just that spiritual items have to be viewed with a spiritual understanding. So I'm not sure that the spiritual eyes means that they didn't actually experience it as a visual happening. It isn't just something they thought they saw in their heads.

John Dehlin [00:26:47] Yeah. So, I mean, a really condensed way to say that might be, you know, a spiritual experience or a spiritual miracle is a spiritual miracle. And to try and dissect it, it's a miracle. That's why you can't. If it were reducible to the material, it would no longer be viewed as a spiritual miracle. Is that right? And so whether you want to attribute it to actual eyes or spiritual eyes or a combination of the 2, 80% this or that, it's a miracle, it's spiritual. And there's no way to prove it. It's not a scientific thing. And so it's sort of not. It's a red herring, maybe.

Richard Bushman [00:27:25] Well, something close to that. What I'm really trying to say is that they experienced it as physical, as if it was a physical experience. That is, when Finney looked, he saw Christ. He didn't say, I'm just imagining Christ. He saw Christ. That's the way he emphasizes it. But he knew it had to be done through this mental process because he couldn't believe. He couldn't believe his own eyes is what it amounted to. He had to believe that God had just created this in his mind. But the experience was as physical as if Christ were physically present. So I'm just saying that Martin Harris may have very. Or David Whitman might, said there really were plates there, he saw them, he saw this angel, etc. Etc. But that this would only be possible if he had been given spiritual eyes to do so.

John Dehlin [00:28:30] And one of them seemed to have been quoted as saying, I didn't see him as I see this pen here on the table. And so it seems like at least one of them was trying to distinguish between what a temporal experience is and what a spiritual vision might be.

Richard Bushman [00:28:45] Right. It could be, except that he's saying that, you know, he may be saying it was more exalted, it was filled with glory. I was. My spirits were lifted. I mean, you do have to face the fact these guys said over and over again they actually saw these things. It's not like we keep trying to find some way to worm around Their testimony by saying, well, once in a while they spoke about it as being spiritual, when most of the time they spoke. Because if it's actual.

John Dehlin [00:29:25] So what is the 18. Do you know? Do you remember the 1836 event that Grant Palmer talks about where Martin Harris gets up in front of a bunch of people? Is it 1836 or 1838 where the Kirtland bank thing happens? Everything's unraveling. And Grant Palmer says that in this climax of catastrophe, Martin Harris stands up in front of everybody and says, oh, no, we never really saw the plates with our physical eyes. It was a sp. Spiritual thing. What is that story, and is it credible? And why did he do that? And what was the impact of it?

Richard Bushman [00:30:01] This statement that was recorded in a letter by Stephen Burnett was given at a meeting in Kirtland in April, 1838, in which all the dissidents were gathering and trying to figure out what kind of a church to organize. Now that they agreed. Joseph Smith was a fallen prophet and Martin Harris was among them. And one of the big decisions they had to make was what were they going to keep out of the old church. They wanted to throw out a lot, but they wanted to hold on to something. And one question was, should they hold on to the Book of Mormon? And Stephen Burnett was one of those. There were three or four others who thought the Book of Mormon had to be jettisoned. And he used as evidence this statement of Martin Harris, which he took to meaning that Martin Harris really did not see the plates after all. And what interested me about it is these guys were really dependent on evidence. It wasn't just a spiritual thing for them. They wanted to know. And the three witnesses and the eight witnesses really meant something to them, as did the scriptural prophecies that make a reference to Isaiah 29, Ezekiel 37:2. And he writes back after Martin Harris has made his statement that we now see that he didn't really see the plates. But once again, it's that question of spiritual seeing versus actual seeing. These guys want plain old sight. They don't want anything like spiritual eyes. So he interprets Martin Harris's statement to mean he didn't really see it. It was just sort of part of his imagination. The interesting thing is that Martin Harris, in the same meeting, got up in the afternoon and said, we certainly should not abandon the Book of Mormon. I know it's a true book. And affirmed everything he believed all along. And George A. Smith wrote a letter this meeting saying nothing about Martin Harris giving up on his witness. But Wrote back that he affirmed his faith as ever. So what I think it boils down to is this issue we were discussing before, which is becoming more and more interesting to me, what it means to see with spiritual eyes. For us, you know, that increases the value of a witness immensely. It means nothing. It's just his imagination. It's a psychological reality, not a physical reality. But for Harris and for others who heard these testimonies, it was just as real and persuasive as not spiritual eyes. So you don't really know what happens when they see a spiritual eyes. Do they actually see something like Charles G. Finney did, as I referred in my previous conversation with you, or was it just sort of a phantasm in their imagination? So, anyway, it's got me very interested in this subject, which I think we definitely need to look into, but it also sort of leaves this evidence a little murky. It isn't exactly sure that he's repudiating his testimony. He's just saying the things we've heard before, that it was a spiritualized experience. And until we know what that means, we won't know exactly how to apply evaluated.

John Dehlin [00:33:49] All right, so what do we know about why each of the. Of the three witnesses and the eight witnesses fell away, the ones that weren't Smiths? So, you know, a lot of people would say, how can somebody have such an incredible vision? How can someone see the plates and have a testimony to the divinity of Joseph Smith's calling or whatever. Can you just tell us briefly why they fell away? Because I never I've been given the impression, oh, they were weak. Oh, they were sinful. Oh, they were bad people. But then I think some of these people sacrificed more than any of us will ever be called upon to sacrifice. And so I don't feel right to demonize these guys as being weak or lacking faith. I want to think that they may have had more faith in any of us. So can you tell us about how they fell away and whether their reasons for falling away were actually sympathetic versus they were just clueless or bumbling or lacked faith?

Richard Bushman [00:34:50] Well, it's complicated. It differs for each one of them. Of course, I do think it's an error to demonize them after the fact, saying because they fell away. And I think now there's an effort to avoid that. His recent conference on Oliver Cowdery at BYU really was an attempt to rehabilitate him and say, this was a man of integrity and wisdom and we need to honor him, even though he did fall away from the church. I think it's, you know, it's part of that overall loss of the first generation of leaders that occurs in the church. Virtually all of them, this first strongest people, faltered in one way or another. So that there has to be a second generation that grows up, most of them in the later quorum of the 12 who go on to become the leaders who take the Saints west. I think it's hard for us to appreciate the pressure on Mormons at that time. John Corll, whom we don't hear about so much, but who was really an eminent figure, counselor to Edward Partridge and the bishopric and significant in many ways in Missouri, and a very reasonable man, a good reporter, finally went to Joseph Smith and said, nothing you say is going to happen happens. We're supposed to establish Zion. We get kicked out of Zion. Wherever we go, we have these promises, something wonderful is going to happen. And we end up being driven, beaten around, beaten up again. And so there's just this feeling that it was just hard to carry on. And then you add to that fact that you've got all the personal abrasions within the organization as a whole. And with Joseph Smith and trying to, in Oliver Cowder's case, trying to make a living for himself, trying to find some stable financial basis for his life, and then being required by Joseph Smith to make all sorts of financial sacrifices and this. And that was just too much for him. And then, of course, the confusion overpowered polygamy. Was he having an affair with Fanny Alger? So if you're actually dealing with these people close up, whether it's Joseph Smith or the people around him, there's just innumerable irritations that grow up and erode you. And I think a lot of them, according to the stuff I've read, found ways of saying, I'm not abandoning my first Testament. Certainly that's true of David Whitmer. It's the church who left me, not me, the church. And it's possible to think of Joseph Smith as a fallen prophet. Why not think of him as a fallen prophet? So you have this moment of glory when the powers of God were with you. But then the church wandered off and the prophet stumbled, and you have to carry on your life despite it all. So there are all sorts of ways that can happen. We have a feeling of the inevitability of the church, that it just had to be. And anyone who left it must have made a huge error. But at the time, it was anything but inevitable. It was tenuous year after year. So it doesn't Seem to me hard to imagine these lives sort of taking their own course with leaving Joseph Smith behind.

John Dehlin [00:38:43] Okay, so yeah, with Oliver, you mentioned a lot of the things he was struggling with. I still don't have a sense for why the Whitmers fell away. Is there one or two issues that might have been top of their mind? Was it the bank thing? Do we know what some of the key issues were for the Whitmers to make them fall away?

Richard Bushman [00:39:01] Well, they fall away separately and distinctly. But David Whitmer, I think, thought of himself as Oliver did, as sort of the founding elders of the church that deserved to be leaders alongside Joseph Smith. David was always jealous of Sidney Rigdon, felt that Sidney Rigdon led Joseph Smith down a primrose path. He objected to the doctrines of priesthood as they developed. He just, he thought Joseph Smith made lots of errors. And I think as he was sort of the power in the family and the others followed along with him. So we are so accustomed to following the prophet, but as a mantra of our religion. But for these people, you know, you never knew when that prophet might head off in the wrong direction. And I think David believed that Joseph Smith did.

John Dehlin [00:40:06] And to some extent that was fair because maybe Joseph Smith was learning as he went along and did make some mistakes. And so it's not. So that's. That's valid. Right. And so it's not for them too hard to jump from he's making mistakes to he's fallen. Is that correct?

Richard Bushman [00:40:24] Right.

John Dehlin [00:40:25] Yeah.

Richard Bushman [00:40:25] Right.

John Dehlin [00:40:26] So what do we make of. What would you say to someone who says, well, you can't have it all. You can't say that we value their credibility as people whose testimony should be relied on. Yet at the same time, we said all sorts of nasty things about Oliver when he was excommunicated, that he was, you know, doing counterfeiting and he was lying, etc. And David Whitmer and Martin Harris, they claimed that God physically or in a dream or in a vision, told them to leave the church and that they went on to follow other leaders and be testaments to the other non Joseph prophets, prophet leaders and their scriptures, etc. So how do we on the one hand rely on them as witnesses and at the same time say, well, when they were testifying to things that we happen to agree with, then we're going to accept their testaments as valid. But whenever they went off and testified of other things and claimed other visions, well, those were clearly they're being deceived and it was Satan. How do you work through that? Or if I mischaracterize the history.

Richard Bushman [00:41:36] No, that's. I think that's a very good question. And, you know, Richard Anderson is dedicating his life to proving that these people were men of integrity from the beginning to the end of their lives, and therefore we can trust them. But I think you always get in trouble if you think a person is going to be impeccable in every act of theirs and they're just certain to have done something that was slightly dishonest or questionable in our eyes and that is inevitably going to cast a shadow on their original testimony. So we can't say that those testimonies are ironclad, that there's no questions at all that can be raised about the men or their lives. I think the fact that they didn't. That you don't find many instances of them repudiating their testimonies, you're prompting me to go hunt up all of these supposed repudiations to see where they stood. You know, unless you can find really clear and consistent accounts of we were mistaken and I was wrong, and I don't believe that at all now, which they could easily have done, having left the church. The testimonies have to stand as something you just can't dismiss out of hand. Those words are there. So that's about all I can say. I'm not gonna. I don't want to claim too much for them, but I also don't want to discount them and say they're absolutely worthless. That, I think, would be a big mistake. Right.

John Dehlin [00:43:37] This program has been a production of Mormon Stories Podcast. To comment on this episode or to peruse the archives of past episodes, please visit us online at mormonstories.

Richard Bushman [00:43:46] Org.

John Dehlin [00:43:47] Also, please consider supporting Mormon Stories Podcast by making a contribution today. Thanks again for listening.

Part 5 of 5 · Ep. 51

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Mormon Stories Podcast depends entirely upon the voluntary contributions of you its listeners to keep Mormon Stories alive. Please consider donating today@mormonstories.org to make a contribution to Mormon Stories. Just click on the Make a Donation button at the top right of the MormonStories.org website. For all this and more, please check out MormonStories.org and thank you for listening. Hi, this is John Dehlin and thank you again for joining us on Mormon Stories. You are about to hear the final portion of my five part interview with Dr. Richard Bushman, former Stake President and current Patriarch of the LDS Church, professor of US History and author of the book Joseph Rough Stone Rolling. Before I play the interview, I wanted to share a few final thoughts. At the beginning of the series, I indicated that Dr. Bushman and I intended to cover 10 or so of the toughest issues surrounding Joseph Smith's history. Unfortunately, because of the breadth and depth of the first several segments, we burned through all the time that Dr. Bushman was able to offer and will not continue beyond this final episode. At least for now. Dr. Bushman has indicated that he may have time at some future date to continue the series, so there's still some chance. But for now, this will be the final segment of a five part interview where with Dr. Richard Bushman I want to take the time again to thank Dr. Bushman for his willingness to come on Mormon Stories podcast. In making that decision, it seems as though he had everything to lose and precious little to gain. In my opinion, Dr. Bushman walks a very fine and difficult line. On the one hand, he is viewed almost universally as a faithful, devoted member of the LDS Church, not only in good standing, but, as we mentioned before, currently serving as a patriarch for the Church. His books have been widely sold in church bookstores and many feel that he has at least tacit approval from the leaders of the LDS Church to do what he is doing. We should not underestimate the heavy burden that he must feel in this position notwithstanding, Dr. Bushman is not only a scholar, but remains a clear champion of more open, honest and accurate history within the LDS Church. He is not merely defending Joseph in the Church, he is also calling for change, improvements, if you will, on all of our parts. This position between the extremes can be a very lonely road to walk. On the one hand, he risks being criticized by conservatives as eroding faith by airing too much dirty laundry, as they say. On the other hand, he exposes himself to ridicule, derision and even blind dismissal by disaffected Mormons for acting out the role of apologist Again, this can be a very lonely road to walk, one that requires deep faith, heavy preparation, strong integrity and conviction. In my estimation, Dr. Bushman deserves great praise and admiration for trying to walk this middle path. While dissenting scholars like Brody, Quinn, Palmer, Compton and Vogel clearly deserve our deep respect. So does Dr. Bushman, regardless of what type of Mormon or ex Mormon you are. For those of us who are interested in mainstream members of the LDS Church finally coming to grips with the factual, toughest aspects of Joseph Smith and LDS Church history, including Peepstones Masonry Polyandry, Kingdom of God, the Nauvoo Expositor, the Kinderhook Plates, and all of the other tough topics, I cannot think of another Mormon historian who has done more to drive awareness of these issues deeper into mainstream mormonism than has Dr. Bushman. In that respect, he deserves credit and praise from all sides of the faith spectrum. And yet he continues to believe perhaps the most amazing, inspiring, and for some maddening aspect of all. Still, as I've re listened to these interviews, I remain almost stunned at the non traditional language Dr. Bushman is willing to use in his discussions of LDS faith. Even as a patriarch for the church. He describes his testimony as being centered upon goodness rather than the traditional language of truthfulness with a capital T, though I'm sure that he also holds the gospel to be true. Still, this is reassuring language from the many saints who struggle with the words no and true relative to testimonies, it is like a breath of fresh air. Instead of avoiding the issue, Dr. Bushman openly acknowledges the paradox of the honest yet faithful saint and scholar who experiences the conflict between a belief in the exclusive truthfulness of the LDS Church and the awareness that there is much good in the world outside of Mormonism and that there must be more to God's plan than what we currently know. This again is very refreshing. He boldly calls for more openness and honesty within our church at all levels, and acknowledges that perhaps our hesitancy to be candid with the historical evidence has caused many to feel unnecessary pain and feelings of having been deceived. He does not blame the victim. In addition, Dr. Bushman is willing to step out from the safety and control of the written word and directly confront charge question after charge question in my own narrative with both poise and acceptance, never shying away from the harder aspects of the history, always validating the historical evidence and and never resulting to ad hominem attacks as so many Mormon apologists have done in the past and continue to do. He is respectful enough to show deference to and even praise for someone like Dan Vogel, in spite of the fact that Mr. Vogel is not by any means a traditional believer in the church. And perhaps most Importantly of all, Dr. Bushman extends words of support and and encouragement to those who are struggling and questioning their faith. He does not demean them, but instead shows compassion and understanding for their plight and openly encourages them to continue the struggle to not give up the quest. He even reduces the dilemma to something very simple. He calls the belief in prophets a choice, something that our heavy emphasis in the Spirit is and feelings often does not allow. In conclusion, if every faithful member of the church, from apostle to prophet to general authority to stake president to bishop to ward member to neighbor and to family member, were to follow Dr. Bushman's example of how to deal with Mormon history and those who have been negatively affected by it, I firmly believe that there would be significantly less pain, anguish, suffering, divorce, isolation, disaffection, antagonism, loneliness, depression, and maybe even suicide within Mormonism. If I have any criticism of the interview at all, it is in a slight contradiction that I and a few others have noted in Dr. Bushman's narrative. On the one hand, he begins by speaking so highly of his early Harvard days, where he and other members of the church were able to spend hours upon hours of time studying, exploring, and discussing all aspects of Mormonism without any real fear of judgment or castigation. While I acknowledge that the Mormon Historical association allows for dissenting views, I remain uncertain as to what forums Mormons today have for similar types of discussions. Certainly not Sunday school study groups and symposia have been formally discouraged by church leadership. And while Sunstone has made great strides under the leadership of Dan Wotherspoon and others to emphasize what is positive and faithful within Mormonism, the stigma remains. I will ask our listeners and Dr. Bushman an open, somewhat rhetorical question. Where, other than on the Internet and in Sunstone and in dialogue, can faithful LDS members go to openly discuss the issues and controversies of both LDS Church history and other social aspects of the Church without fear of judgment, disloyalty or punishment? Where are the open forums for thought and faith within Mormonism accessible to all? Sunstone has definitely been through its ups and downs and but until I learn of a better place, I will continue to give Sunstone Dialogue and even the bloggernackle my time and support. For those who are not comfortable with Sunstone and dialogue in other places but are aware of the dilemma of disaffected LDS Saints due to history and other cultural issues. I'll ask this one last where can disaffected Mormons go for open, friendly, informed, non judgmental church sanctioned support? If it is not the church's role to directly and officially reach out to those struggling with their faith, what is their role exactly? And if it is not sunstone or dialogue, who who is it? And where do we go now about this episode after four hours of interviews with me, it was clear that Dr. Bushman felt as though, in his words, I'd gotten the best out of him. Once we realized that it was time to wrap up, there were a few final thoughts that Dr. Bushman wanted to share with my listeners. So the first part of this episode represents his final thoughts about the interview and the challenges of dealing with tough Mormon history in general. The last part of the interview, however, represents something that was very important to me. After drilling down so deep on the controversy of Joseph Smith's life, I didn't feel comfortable ending on a negative and controversial note. So I asked Dr. Bushman to share with us a story or two that would encapsulate his view and even testimony of Joseph Smith the Prophet. After a lifetime of studying both the man and the Prophet, this segment ends with that story and those expressions by Dr. Bushman. As a final request, if you end up appreciating, finding value, or even experiencing renewed faith because of this interview with Dr. Bushman, please take the time to send me an email@mormonstoriesmail.com addressed to Dr. Bushman and I will make sure that he receives the email, since Dr. Bushman is quite likely to receive some grief simply for coming on Mormon Stories podcast. Given our open format and our willingness to explore all sides of an issue, I would really appreciate it if if the listeners of mine who felt inspired or appreciative of the interview would take the time to let Dr. Bushman know how much his scholarship and faith have meant to them. And who knows, maybe we can even convince him to complete the series when the time is right, of course. And now, without any further ado on with the final segment of my five part interview with Dr. Richard Bushman, author of Joseph Smith Rough Stone Rolling your story Today on Mormon Stories.

Responding to Critics and Supporting Questioning Members

Richard Bushman [00:12:42] So all of that got me to thinking about the whole business of responding to Grant Palmer or other of these people who write attacks on Joseph Smith, and I keep trying to figure out why it is I can't really respond. It's never satisfying, it always seems partial and ineffective. And the image that came to my mind is someone being attacked by a swarm of bees being stung all over, all at once. So I come up and say, what can I do for you? And they say, I've been stung by all these bees. So I go to one of the bee stings and I try to take out the stinger and I try to administer some anointment. And, you know, it gets better a little bit, but it still kind of hurts and it isn't perfect. And I say, well, now do you feel better? And he says, well, no, I got all these other bee stings. And it's so difficult to sort of go back one by one and pick off each one of these little problems and satisfy them, because it usually ends up as not completely satisfying. It's always sort of in the middle, like this case. And, you know, you can say, well, that definitely discounts the witnesses altogether, as far as I am concerned. Or you can say, well, I can see they're witnessing to something that was very powerful, something that persuaded them. So we still have to take the witnesses seriously. So the result is not clean cut and you don't really feel like you've answered it. You just sort of moderated the problem. So those are a couple thoughts I had. I have some others. But do you want to jump in and say something in response?

John Dehlin [00:14:36] No, I. Yeah. And I. I just have to tell you how good of a sport you've been and you were, because. Yeah, it is overwhelming, and it's overwhelming to be. As you know, and you've acknowledged, it's also overwhelming to be on the end of the bee stings and to not. Because people don't. Sometimes when someone stumbles onto this stuff, they're accused of adultery or they're accused of kicking against the pricks or disobedience, but it's usually people don't fall into this because they care too little. It seems like the ones who take the time to actually study the history, most often they're motivated because they care so much. And that's what makes those bee stings so painful, is that I didn't ask. You know, and I just have to tell you that from the people who have sent me feedback on your interviews so far, I've had one lady actually tell me that she's now believing in Joseph Smith again after years of disbelief just from hearing your testimony. So, you know, I just want to say that it is overwhelming for you and for anyone to try to respond to the critics. And it's also a sad situation because it's overwhelming for a lot of the people who are struggling with it. But to try and fight off those bees and to try and help with the stings, it may not solve all the problems. But I don't know, to extend the analogy, sometimes I feel like it's better than leaving the person to be eaten by the bees. And that. That's sort of the spirit with which I was hoping to have the conversation. But I know it's not clean, it's not precise, it's messy. But I think you've, you've done a marvelous job in helping me and many of my listeners because who will stand up and try and answer these questions? Most of the feedback I've gotten as well isn't that, you know, isn't that, oh, they solve my problems. It's like I'm inspired by the fact that someone's willing to stand up, take the questions in an unscripted, uncontrolled forum and take the heat, because that shows a courage that and a conviction that this is something worth fighting for versus, like on a Sunday morning political talk show, trying to not answer the question or dodge the question or avoid even having to go answer the question. So I just can't say enough how, how courageous and helpful for many of us your time just so far has been.

Richard Bushman [00:17:04] Well, let me say something about that group that we seem to be conjuring up here, people who have encountered a lot of problems and are disturbed, they don't know quite what they believe anymore. Maybe they're angry and want to dump the prophet entirely. It's very easy to feel in a situation like that that you're outside the church, that you somehow marginalize yourself. You may even get excommunicated, or people cast aspersions on your sincerity or your morality or all sorts of other things. And one way or another, you feel like you're not in the church anymore. And I, for one, don't believe that. I think Mormonism is not just home teaching and bishopric meeting. It's all these individual souls wrestling with the scriptures, with God, with their own souls, trying to find out what's right and true and doing that sort of in this overall Mormon context. And I think people who are struggling may be obsessed with these questions to a certain extent, are showing us a kind of a worship and devotion that is deeply Mormon. I mean, who is more committed to the prophet? Joseph Smith and Dan Vogel think of the millions of hours he spent with very little reward on the prophet's documents, on his life. And even though we think he was an antagonist and probably an atheist when it comes to religion, still he is engaged to Joseph Smith. And there's a kind of a devotion there that I, for one, think has to be respected. So while the institutional church may have to protect itself and cut these people off and label them as agnostics, I think looking at it from God's point of view, that there are a lot of these people are really struggling souls, and some may be really evil, some may really be trying to harm and destroy. But I think there are a lot that are just trying to find out what they think is right. So I hope none of them feel like they're outside of Mormonism. They can't be outside of Mormonism as long as they think about Joseph Smith. That puts them inside of the Mormon cultural boundaries, and that's of great importance.

John Dehlin [00:19:40] Yeah, I'm sure that Dan Vogel and others and many of the people who feel that those people have been unduly picked upon will really appreciate those words.

Faith Transitions, Community, and Joseph Smith's Legacy

Richard Bushman [00:19:51] I had one other thing to say that I'd like to hear discussed, and you referred to it, so I have the nerve to bring it up. I'm just wondering. I think it would be good to have a discussion inside your group of what happens to a person sort of morally and spiritually after they've gone through one of these combats over Joseph Smith and the gospel. And, you know, we had this one image that I'm sure is true in lots of instances of people who kind of begin to let up on the standards. They don't pay tithing anymore, and then they may take a glass of wine and they may smoke a little bit and maybe have a few brief affairs or what have you. Not that they're becoming demons, but just sort of a slackening that moral rigor that is required of Mormons and is sort of upheld by the sense this is God's purpose and will. Once that's relaxed, you know, everything kind of relaxes. And I don't know whether it ends up with people stop praying or stop even thinking of God or not. But that's one course that I could see people following as a result of this disruption. But there's another course that I've seen in certain people I've known which is quite different. Not so much. I'm not thinking so much of moral standards because I don't have any evidence of how that works. But spiritually, these people begin to feel like of all the things they learned in the church, the thing that really registers and seems true and lasting is Christ. It's the sacrifice of Christ and the promise of forgiveness and the belief that Heavenly Father is working with his pitiful children to try to bring them along in some way. And Christ becomes very big. And I know that there are a lot of these ex Mormons for Jesus, for whom that's natural. But I've seen this even with more intellectual types that sort of stand on the margins of the church and they carpet the general authorities and this and that, but they still see Christ as of great importance to them. And so I'm. And these people I think probably pray, I don't know that for a fact, but they certainly have deep spiritual Christian yearnings that still govern their lives. And so I'd be just curious to have your people discuss what happens to those who've been beaten up by some of this historical evidence.

John Dehlin [00:22:50] Yeah, no, that's a great, that's a great topic. And I have some anecdotal experiences and I definitely think it runs the gamut. I think for many the initial reaction is to just loosen up on the standards. And frankly I've met far many unhappy people who have decided to throw it all away than I have. People who have found more joy than they had when they were in. And so I for one am a huge advocate of praying, of maintaining membership, of attending and not throwing anything away. I even know of a guy who couldn't feel good about paying tithing, but he couldn't feel good about not paying tithing. And so he instead picked his five favorite charities and started taking that 10% and reallocating it because he couldn't let go of the law of tithing even though he was struggling with the church. And so. But that's a great question. That's a really great question. You may be surprised that of all the things we've talked about the most, the most consistent feedback I received were the very brief comments you made about Sunstone. And I wasn't trying to egg you on. And I don't, you know, I acknowledge, you know, the feelings and the frustrations that you know, that you were expressing, especially in symposiums past about the Sunstone program. Although I think Dan Witherspoon's really tried to clean that up. But you know, my one question I have for you is where do people, you know, you can't go to Sunday school, you can't go to Elders quorum, you can't even go to your bishop to talk about this stuff. And a lot of people feel like fair and farms. It's kind of a one way conversation where they try and control the forum and control who gets to ask the questions. And control who gets to answer it. And while Sunstone, you know, may not be a perfect example of absolute, you know, perfect moderation and positivism, you know, where do people go? Where can someone go to meet like minded, like thinking people, to be inspired by people like you and people like, you know, Bennion and England and others who have found a way to reconcile all this, you know, a lot of people aren't fortunate enough to have you come to a fireside in their stake or in their ward. And if not Sunstone, where can people go?

Richard Bushman [00:25:27] Well, I think that is one excellent question. I think that is one of the most serious causes of these problems. It isn't just that you're hit by all this evidence, but there's no one who understands you, no one who can begin to cope with the problems. There's a great tendency to dismiss these issues, saying that you're being misled and you've just got to close it off. So there is a kind of loneliness that exists for these sort of isolated intellectuals. And Sunstone has found a group that brings them together. So that's all of the good. I regret that there are not more orthodox people in Sunstone. I think that's a sad thing, but how that all developed historically. Because what I always hope is that when these discussions occur, they're not strictly on the technical level of this fact versus that fact, but that they have something to do with the state of our souls. After all, what we're looking for is to evolve, to grow into better people. And we need to keep reflecting back on how we keep in touch with God, how we keep intelligence flowing into us. And I don't know if that goes on in Sunstone meetings or not. Whether there are any of those voices. I'm sure there must be some. I occasionally see names of people I think would talk and act that way because you don't want to just have it a place where the complainers get together and whine about their troubles. You do need to have a real searching of self, and I hope that does go on at any Sunstone. It's too bad if it doesn't.

John Dehlin [00:27:26] I've definitely felt that in the two Sonstones I've attended. But I'm just wondering when the denunciation of symposia happened. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy because if all the traditional, believing, somewhat orthodox members are told not to show up, well, that kind of forces Sunstone to be skewed towards the other side.

Richard Bushman [00:27:48] And it's almost see, unfortunately that's not happening at The Mormon History association meetings. There are all sorts of people give papers there. Dan Vogel gives papers there all the time, and others who are critical of the church. But Elder Jensen is there giving talks. Rick Turley is there. So there. And what I've heard some of these brethren say is we need a place where people can express all different views on our history. So I think there's a growing recognition that we have to have sort of neutral spaces for discussion where people of all persuasions can converse with each other. Whether or not we'll get that soon, I don't know. I've been hoping myself to organize some conferences on some of these issues, but it's just in the embryonic phase right now.

John Dehlin [00:28:51] Well, if I can ever help, I'm just one small little voice, but I'd love to help to that end. Well, Brother Bushman, I just can't thank you enough for the time you've been willing to take with me, but more importantly with the listeners to provide your very important, faithful, and still knowledgeable perspective. And as we agreed up front, I kind of hit you with a lot of hard questions in serial, almost like in a full frontal assault. But I wouldn't feel good if we didn't maybe end by having you share with us what clearly is the most important aspect of Joseph's work, I think no matter what your beliefs are, and that's the positive things that he did. And so I would love it and be honored if you might conclude with us a story or two that you feel captures Joseph as you've come to know him so intimately and maybe even share with us, you know, your final feelings about Joseph in a positive, affirming light.

Richard Bushman [00:30:02] Well, there's an awful lot to be said about Joseph and his achievements rather than trying to sum up everything he did, which I think is an incredible list of kind of revolutionary developments in the religious world of his time, then I just say a little bit about his character, because in some ways, that's what's most interesting and perhaps most difficult about Joseph is what kind of a man was he? I began my work on him with the sense of him being exuberant, supremely self confident, maybe even a little brash. And there was much to confirm that view of him. Howard Corey, his clerk during part of the Nauvoo years, said that no matter who came to visit Joseph, no matter what their level of education or their standing in life, he could always answer their questions. He was always sure of himself. And from all the other things I know, I think he may have Been the dominant person in every room he entered. He was the center of attention and was able very quick on repartee and had something to say. Usually kind of witty. Some people thought he was a little even light minded. He told so many jokes. So you sort of have that extroverted personality to the forefront, the way I thought of him for a long while. So it came as a surprise to me to discover that there was a sorrowful side to Joseph Smith. That in public he was exuberant and positive, as I had thought. But that when he was alone and left to contemplate, sorrows would come over him. He was like Abraham Lincoln, who similarly was great on the hustings and always had jokes and was a great speaker. But when he was alone, Lincoln would sort of descend into deep melancholy. And a recent book, it was argued this was the source of his real creativity. With these dark times, I don't think Joseph was quite as beset as Lincoln was, but he did have his melancholy moments. In fact, in those times of inactivity, they almost always came upon him. We find out about them because those were moments when he'd write to Emma and tell her how he was feeling. And one of my favorite stories has to do with one of these down times when he and Newell Whitney were returning from a visit to Jackson county in the summer of 1832. And as they were traveling along in the carriage, the horse ran away and Joseph threw himself free of the carriage. Whitney tried to do the same, but his leg was caught in the wheel and crushed. And Joseph had to nurse him back to health for a month. They were sort of trapped in Greenville, Indiana, by his illness, by Whitney's illness. And Joseph didn't have much to do, and he just went mad. He just couldn't stand the inactivity. And he wrote to Emma that every day he would go out into the woods and pray and try to commune with the Lord and keep himself in touch. And as he said in the letter, he would give vent to all the feelings of my heart. And then this is some of the words he wrote to her. I have called to mind all the past moments of my life and am left to mourn and shed tears of sorrow for my folly in suffering the adversary of my soul to have so much power over me as he has had in times past. But God is merciful and has forgiven my sins. And I rejoice that he sendeth forth a comforter unto many as believe and humbleth themselves before him. It's very reminiscent of Nephi's lament. This powerful young son, leader of the people, could do anything equal to every catastrophe. And yet lamenting at the end of his life how Satan had had too much power over him. And this was sort of characteristic of Joseph. He would fall into regret and yearning and begin to speak of death near the end of life. Particularly, he spoke often of the tomb and how he wanted his family all to be buried together so they could greet each other on the resurrection day. And in this letter to Ammon, 1832, near the end, he says, I will try to be contented with my lot, knowing that God is my friend. In him I shall find comfort. I have given my life into his hands. I am prepared to go at his call. I desire to be with Christ. I count not my life dear to me, only to do his will. I found that impressive because I sort of interpreted it as the underpainting in Joseph's life. You know how painters put layers and layers of different pigments on the canvas before they put the final pigment on. And that top color is all influenced by the depths below it. And if you look at Joseph's scriptures, you look at his passages on Enoch, you look at Mormon's lament at the end of his life, and you realize that just sorrow as well as of joy and sort of understood the depths of human suffering. And I think that this sort of underlies his whole gospel. I think Mormons themselves are sort of irreplaceably optimistic, maybe tending toward the smug and self righteous, but under it all is this sense of the depths and the struggles and sorrows of human life. And that's what gives the gospel sort of its resilience and its power over our lives. So I find Joseph and his teachings sort of deep, endlessly deep and profound. I really think the next frontier in Mormon thought is to explore the depth of his ideas. I don't think we've begun to understand just how they ripple through our understanding of the universe of human history. And we just have not produced scholars with sufficient depth and range to speak of all these implications. But they're on the way. There's some very promising young people coming along who value Joseph Smith's thought and see how it helps us to understand the whole world. And I hope that those people will have the freedom and the courage to keep exploring all those things. So that's my great hopes for the church. I myself have always sort of thought in the Joseph Smith mode. It's shaped my view of the world and my conduct. I've prayed and paid tithing and gone on a mission and taken every church call that's and been quite willing to give my all and to consecrate myself in the temple. And all through my life, living that way has brought so much goodness and brought me powers that are so far beyond my own capacities, which I consider to be very limited, that I would just be foolish to give up on all these good things. I wouldn't give them away for the world. So that's why I hold on to the teachings of Joseph Smith and why I hope that as a people, we'll be able to be worthy of them and to find out what their true meaning and possibilities are in understanding the world in which we live.

John Dehlin [00:39:19] Well, brother Bushman, Dr. Richard Bushman, author of Joseph Smith Rough Stone Rolling Let me again thank you on behalf of all my listeners for sharing with us your very important insight, your scholarship, and most importantly, your faith and your testimony. I can't thank you enough.

Richard Bushman [00:39:39] All right, it was my pleasure, John. I've enjoyed talking to you.

John Dehlin [00:39:43] Thank you. This program has been a production of Mormon Stories Podcast. To comment on this episode or to peruse the archives of past episodes, please visit us online@mormonstories.org Also, please consider supporting Mormon Stories Podcast by making your contribution today. Thanks again for listening.

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