Joseph Smith and the role of witness in the restoration

I thought that this blog format would be ideal for posting some version of my relief society lessons. A few weeks ago I gave a lesson about Joseph Smith. I felt rather pressured to cram in a bunch of ideas that I have had over the years, not realizing that the whole year next year will be devoted to his teachings. Now I will have an opportunity to expand a bit on my thoughts, but I thought first I would get down a rough version of the lesson I just taught so I don't forget it. I have the habit of doing talks and lessons on the fly thinking that I will remember them and increasingly I don't. Sometimes I run across something I wrote in the past and have no recollection of it at all, so it is more and more apparent that I need to start recording things. Blogging may be silly and trendy but if it does that it will do something that nothing else has in terms of my own documentation system.

Testimony is a term indicating a record of what others have experienced or witnessed. The story of Joseph Smith and the latter-day restoration highlights the role of testimony of others when attempting to interpret or understand events that we have little direct knowledge of.

Who we believe on a debatable subject often determines what we believe. What we believe usually also reveals why we believe it. For instance, most people don’t usually ask for advice or any kind of information from those that they are most certain have all the facts they are after. We usually ask advice from people like our parents or others that we want to mirror our lives after--those we want to be like, and want to approve of us.

In many ways the story of Joseph Smith varies with each perspective of who tells that story. That is true with any historical figure, particularly those which inspire debate, mystery, or controversy. In the case of Smith and his achievements, however, I have found it the usual case that secular historians often violate their usual methods of prioritizing historical evidence. Those methods are rather straight forward--who knows best knows most.

Even if a person giving a historical witness is likely biased, their witness is often the best we can come outside of knowing ourselves. For instance, nearly every subject in the court of Henry VIII gave a biased account of him on very peril of death, but their views are not necessarily discounted on that basis because to do so would be to choose ignorance.

So while most objective inquiry into a historical puzzle gives precedence to the testimony of those who had the most contact with that person, in Joseph Smith’s case, it would be his wife, family, friends, and closest advisors. Any biases those people have would be factored in, but it is obvious that those people would be the ones who had the most information to give. These people, however, usually do not figure prominently in most of the secular theories of the first latter-day prophet.

Instead, people who knew him only tangentially or even not at all are employed to provide the kind of evidence that skeptics often feel they need to sketch a likeness of him that would make him look like the charlatan or fraud they assume he was to explain in some secularly correct sense what he achieved.

Similar violation of academic tradition must be committed to arrive at the favorite secular theories of the Book of Mormon. Usually, because certain information about the ancient world is sparse, documents that could possibly give a window into that world are allowed the potential of being genuine in lieu of overwhelming positive evidence to the contrary (difficult to achieve as easy as it might sound to poke holes). Often spurious documents are allowed to circulate even if there actually is such overwhelming proof.

One example is the supposed last letter of Anne Boleyn to Henry VIII. Most Tudor scholars doubt that this letter could have possibly been allowed to survive by Anne's enemies who reigned for decades after her death. But this letter was felt to be so possibly illuminating and interesting that it is often cited even by those who concur it is a fake. In cases like this where curious scholars hunger for answers, it is very rare that the state of no information at all would be preferred to information that is suspect--except of course in the case of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. Most scholars are so certain of the limitations of its origins that it is eagerly dismissed, when there is not the luxury of being choosy about source material on its potential subject matter.

The Book of Mormon is a potential historical account of a place and time that any good information to illuminate is desperately wanting. When it was first discovered, it contradicted the most fundamental aspects of the pre-Columbian Ancient Americas at the time. There are countless aspects of the book that are incongruous with Smith’s own views of the Ancient Americas—assuming that they would have been at least mete with the best going opinions.

Apologetics for the Book’s contents is not my intention and much better efforts are available, but what strikes me is how often Smith would have needed to make himself look utterly ludicrous to the top notch scholars of his day if he had authored the book’s contents himself. And those scholars wasted no time in impugning him for the ways in which he obviously got it wrong. It was absurd, they said, to have claimed such advanced civilizations anywhere in the Americas at the time, for every historian worth his salts knew that native peoples on this hemisphere at that time were simple, superstitious and primitive.

And claiming fantasies such as sacred records on metal in anything as obviously conjured as reformed Egyptian simply compounded his simpleton effort as an author. Until, of course, ruins of such civilizations were found and similar examples of sacred documents became part of anthropological standard. Smith’s absurd unlikelihoods have been used confidently as evidence of the book’s fraudulent origin—until, of course, the moments that the unlikely scenarios he poses quietly transition to being so obvious that anyone would have thought of them.

So any objective critic would have to admit that any genuine historical account of the New World, because scholarly perception of what that history entailed has ranged so widely, would be hard pressed to look respectable in both Smith’s day and our own. Smith would very likely be forced to choose between respectability in his own time and in that of posterity. And if he truly were a charlatan, in what possible scenario would he benefit from deliberately sacrificing his own credibility until vindication over 200 years down the road? If he had possessed the simple ability, as his wife put it, to compose ‘a coherent or well-worded letter, let alone dictate a book like the book of Mormon’ he would have also, it seems, possessed the simple ability to mitigate the scathing reception of the book when it was published.

His own lack of familiarity with the book, originally offered as evidence against his credibility, actually, to those with a longer perspective, is evidence for it. If he had actually suspected that the geographical orientation the book laid out, in his own brief period of acquaintance with the story, really referred to the two entire continents of North and South America, his innocent mistake here would certainly be compounded by inconsistencies and errors in the book’s own internal geographic references—none of those, however, exist. The fact that he was confused about the book’s internal geography reflected the natural limitations of mapping it out after only two or three readings, not a desire to promote the validity of the facts as he saw them as the book's author. He was performing simple apologetics for the book with the very limited knowledge he had both of the book itself and current facts about the Americas. If he had had an author’s intimate familiarity with both, he would have spared himself the effort, one would presume.

The irony is that despite the book’s disastrous critical reception, if it had been taken as literal history in its day it would have greatly improved the contemporary view of the Ancient Americas. The reflex of scholars to discount it was to the detriment and delaying of understanding of the new world. This would perhaps be consistent with the willingness of Tudor historians to accept the unlikely last letter of Anne Boleyn, because the potential explanatory and illuminating potential of a historical document, when no better substitute is available, to a ravenously curious mind, outweighs the risks that it might have flaws or inaccuracies.

So after a lengthy diversion on a topic I am not really qualified to speak of, I am finally able to return to my main point, that the interpretation of Smith and the restoration is intimately connected to the credibility of its witnesses. Critics of Smith have had to rely on witnesses to his character and abilities that were much more remote than those cited by believers. The witnesses of his wife, his family and those who saw first hand what he accomplished are remarkably consistent with one another.

In fact a parallel doesn’t really exist when it comes to piecing together any other major historical mystery. If the main players in Tudor England, for example, had ever left any unified first hand accounts of disputed facts, the facts would cease to be disputed. Most historical mysteries are mysterious because the witnesses to them do not leave accounts, or leave accounts that dispute one another. If Anne Boleyn, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, Catherine of Aragon, Eustache Chapuis, and at least four others were ever on record agreeing about anything, which of course they never are, it would serve as the cornerstone of solid historical evidence around which all other potential disputes are oriented. NEVER so with Smith or the Book of Mormon.

But Smith and his witnesses understood the power of unanimous witness and its credibility over time. It is the reason that in a tumultuous and difficult period they paused to take record of it. And the fact that it is callously overlooked in a way that no other such evidence would be is a fact that, though ultimately unconvincing to the unbeliever as is all scholarly evidence, still troubles him. Historians, in their more frank moments, do admit how unusual it is for none of the central players in the Smith mystery to have slipped and betrayed the ‘real story,’ for many of them ended up with plenty of motive to do so.

And thus is also the role of the current believer or ‘witness’ of the restoration, to whom I am addressing this piece. It is not intended to convince any who don’t believe, for of course such is not possible. It is to speak to fellow believers such as myself and remind them that we even today are witnesses, asked to add our names and credibilities to the reputation of Joseph Smith and the magnitude of his accomplishments.

Ultimately, even as secular scholarship endeavors to chink away at the plausibility of the sacred documents that Smith generated, their ability to stand as genuine history is only one of the many remarkable aspects of their existence. For even if Smith had managed to blunder his way into pulling off something that passed for real ancient history, it is another thing altogether for him to have also succeeded at producing sacred works that are USED as such. For him to have succeeded at producing a book, and a religion, to which so many people are willing to add their witness, is an accomplishment that someday, someone will need to offer a better explanation for than any that currently exist. At least better than the explanation Smith himself gave, the most parsimonious version of all.