Jim Lucas & Jonathan Neville explain why they think David Whitmer's description of the translation process of Book of Mormon isn't reliable. Check out our conversation...

https://youtu.be/TYPzopAsWyM

Don’t miss our other conversations with Jim Lucas: https://gospeltangents.com/people/jim-lucas/

Joseph’s Magic Show

GT  00:32  Did you finish what you wanted to say about David Whitmer?

Jim  00:34  No, we've got to finish David Whitmer.

Jonathan  00:36  We got sidetracked a little bit.

Jim  00:38  So anyway.

GT  00:38  That's what tangents are all about. Right?

Jim  00:39  Right. So David Whitmer, I'll make it quick. He's in Fayette, where 78% of the Book of Mormon is translated. But he's not a translator. He's not a scribe. He was never a scribe. He never really says explicitly that he was present for the translation, except for maybe this one time when he describes everybody was there in this one account where he says, "Oh, everybody was there; all of my family, the Smiths came over, and bunch of other people.

GT  01:17  He was there for the translation?

Jonathan  01:18  Sidney Rigdon was.

Jim  01:18  For the demonstration using the stone in the hat. So, he describes his one event.

GT  01:24  Was this like a magic show? What is this?

Jim  01:26  It's Joseph trying to satisfy people's curiosity by using his seer stone in the hat to try to give him an idea of how the translation is working.

GT  01:36 I mean, it feels like a woman with a crystal ball: "I can see the future." I mean, is that what he's doing basically?

Jim  01:42  Well, if you follow the seer stone in the hat account, that's what the whole thing was. And we're saying, no, no. That's not what the whole thing was. It was Joseph. I mean, there was an account of a cousin of the Whitmer’s was working at the Whitmer home, as a housemaid or whatever. And she was like, "What's going on upstairs? What are these two guys doing up there? This is really weird." They come down and they're all glow-y and spiritual and stuff. Something strange is going on here. I'm quitting and going home. And I'm going to tell everybody the Whitmer cousins have gone crazy, unless I'm told what's going on. So it was that kind of thing which Zenas Gurley uses this great expression "awful curiosity." And there's probably a lot of other people really [wondering,] "So what's going on? How's this work?" So, Joseph did this demonstration. He pulled out his peep stone, which was a seer stone, which he carried around with him all the time. I call it his pet rock. He really liked it. It's a beautiful stone, if it's the one the Church has in its archives.

GT  02:53  The white one or the brown one?

Jim  02:54  Yeah.

Jonathan  02:54  The brown one.

GT  02:54  Both?

Jim  02:56  Well, mainly people are talking about the striped one, the brown and white striped one.

Jonathan  03:01  Which Jerry says came from Wyoming or somewhere.

Jim  03:04  Right, right. Jerry Grover says that that kind of a stone was in the gut of a dinosaur, and that's why it's so smooth because dinosaurs, they're like birds. They'd have these stones in their guts to help them digest, and then when they died, it fell out and so forth. So, he says that that kind of a stone would be especially rare in eastern Pennsylvania.

Jonathan  03:39  Or New York.

Jim  03:40  So when Willard Chase found it, you can understand that he had never seen a rock like this before. I mean, you must know rockhounds, people who like to collect rocks. So, this was a really special, neat looking rock. That's what Joseph got and carried around with him until he gave it to Oliver Cowdery. So, it was like I said. I call it his pet rock. He really loved it. It was really fun rock. And, we'll get into the Martin Harris angle of that.

GT  04:12  When was this demonstration, approximately what year?

Jim  04:14  This would have been during that translation process, 1829, after they've gotten to the Whitmer home. So this is when they're translating the plates of Nephi, 1st Nephi through Omni. I mean, Jonathan, in one of his earlier books, speculated that it might have been when they were translating some of the Isaiah stuff. But, that's not...

Jonathan  04:40  Well even beyond that, that's the second stage of the speculation. Because nobody who was there recorded what Joseph was dictating on these occasions. So, we have no confidence, really, that what he was dictating during this demonstration is even in the Book of Mormon.

GT  04:55  Right.

Jonathan  04:56  I mean, David didn't say, "I was there when he dictated Nephi saying," whatever.

GT  05:00  Alma Chapter Two, or whatever.

Jonathan  05:02  Yeah, nobody said any of that. And so when David Whitmer, if you read his Address to Believers in Christ, he says, this is the manner that the translation was done. But he doesn't say, "I saw this happen." And so that's a tell for someone who's claiming knowledge about how something happened that they didn't observe.

GT  05:20  This sounds like something a couple of lawyers would do.

Jonathan  05:22  Yeah, well, it is. To us it is real obvious. I mean, it drives us nuts that nobody cross examined these people, because seriously, witnesses do that all the time. They say, "Well, this and this happened." We say, "Well, how do you know?" And they say, "Well, someone told me, or...

Jim  05:36 I heard.

Jonathan  05:37  Everybody knows.

Jim  05:38  I heard.

Jonathan  05:39  I heard someplace. So when I read through, including Emma is a similar. But when you read through what they actually said, they didn't really testify about what they actually observed. Emma did in a way, we can address her in a minute.

GT  05:52  I want to go to Emma, because to me, she's real key here.

Jim  05:56  Okay, well, let me take one minute to finish David.

Jonathan  05:59 Okay.

Jim  05:59  Okay. So David is not a witness. He becomes a witness when he has his three-witness vision experience/angelic visit.

GT  06:10  David was. Was he one of the three, or one of the eight?

Jonathan  06:12  He was one of the three, David was.

Jim  06:13  David Whitmer. But before then, he doesn't see the translation. He's not a scribe. He's not around for the large majority of the translation, which takes place in Harmony. Even for the part that's going on in his house, he's around working on the farm, but he's not upstairs with Oliver and Joseph. But he is a dedicated, early member of the Church. He's one of the three witnesses. And so, through the 1830s he's a dedicated member of the Church. He goes to Missouri. He's made one of the leaders of the Church in Missouri. And then in 1838, he leaves the Church. And that’s a whole history in and of itself.

GT  07:03  He was part of the Missouri persecution.

Jim  07:04  Right, right. So he leaves the Church, and he never comes back. The other two witnesses, Oliver Cowdery and Martin Harris, also leave the Church, but they eventually come back. David Whitmer never comes back. So David Whitmer settles in Missouri. He stays in Missouri because he actually helped out the militia. So, he gets a pass on being having been a Mormon. So, he settles in Missouri, and you basically don't hear anything from David Whitmer for 30 years: 1850s, 1860s, even into the 1870s you just hear nothing from David Whitmer.

GT  07:46  Probably that was understandable given how he was treated in Missouri.

Jim  07:49  Right. Well, I mean, nobody's blaming him, but just that's the facts that he just is not involved in any of the groups that split off after Joseph Smith's assassinated. He's not involved in trying to put together the Reorganization with Joseph Smith III. He's got nothing to do with them. He's got nothing to do with the Strangites. He's just sitting in his livery business in Missouri, minding his own business, and really not doing anything involved with the restoration for like, 30 years.

Jim  08:26  And then finally, in the 1870s he starts to emerge, if you will. And part of it may be because William McLellin comes around and is trying to get things going. The Reorganized Church has gotten going by then. Of course, the LDS Church is in Utah and is making a lot of waves. So, things are happening in the restoration, broadly spoken by 1870s and so David Whitmer starts to re-emerge. Now, he re-emerges partly out of his own efforts. He forms a little church of his own, which is basically the Whitmer family. And because he's in Missouri, he is not that far from St Louis. He's really accessible to the media.

Jim  09:23  So in the 1870s Mormons are starting to become big news. Right? And so suddenly, when newspaper reporters find out, "Hey, wait a minute. There's one of the original guys living right here down the railroad tracks in Missouri. We don't have to go trekking out to Utah to try to talk to Brigham Young. We can go and talk to this David Whitmer guy who's right here just outside St Louis. It's just a whistle stop on the railroad away.” So, he starts to get interviewed in newspapers and so forth, because he's very accessible. He now starts to push his version of the gospel. Now, David Whitmer came from a background. Like all the original Mormons, he was a very radical, strict Protestant. So he believed, like many other Protestants of his time, in scriptural inerrancy. In other words, the Bible is absolutely true, word-for-word and so forth.

GT  10:31  No mistakes.

Jim  10:31  No mistakes, which is a common belief of people of his background.

GT  10:37  And still is.

Jim  10:38  And still is amongst many people. So, he had two things that he was pushing. One, he continued to believe in the Book of Mormon, but his view of the Book of Mormon was the same as his view of the Bible. It was inerrant. It was without fault, just like the Bible was. This was the perception that David Whitmer brought to the Book of Mormon.