(August 8, 2014)
What
was fascinating to me was the description of Joseph Smith giving the plates to
Martin Harris, as described by Nephi through prophesy. It is particularly fascinating in light of the
fact that this part of the Book of Mormon was translated near the end of
the entire process, meaning that Martin Harris had already lost the manuscript
by this point, so Joseph Smith knew what had happened and knew the response of
Charles Anthon.
This
has been said by some people to discount the application of the prophesy, since
it is “clear” (at least in their minds) that Joseph was just detailing what
happened and applying scripture to it to provide plausibility. But that isn’t nearly as interesting to me as
the ways that Nephi’s narrative differs from what we know of the history.
It
seems clear that Nephi was not told of the failure of Joseph Smith in giving
the manuscript to Martin Harris. Joseph
had no reason to hide this – we have details of the revelations that he
received about his failure, and he never hid nor minimized the fact that he
made a huge mistake. But yet Nephi
describes this same incident in simple terms – the Lord said to Joseph, take
the book and show it to the learned.
This
would not be the way that Joseph would have written this event, had he been an
author. The loss of the manuscript was
such an important thing, so central to the translation process, that Joseph
would have mentioned it in some way if he was an author. But he wasn’t writing, he was
translating. And Nephi, being millennia
earlier, had no need to know of the Lord of Joseph’s failure – thus he was
merely told the words that the Lord spoke to Joseph and not of the
circumstances that led to the Lord saying those words.
No comments:
Post a Comment