Daniel Stone on Forgotten Prophet

I’m excited to introduce Dr. Daniel Stone. He has written the first biography of William Bickerton, Forgotten Latter Day Prophet. William Bickerton was the prophet of the third largest Latter-Day Saint Church. We’ll get to know more about Daniel in just a moment.

Daniel: I’m Daniel Stone and I’m the author of William Bickerton – Forgotten Latter-day Prophet. I’m a Ph.D. candidate studying American religious history at Manchester Metropolitan University in England and yes, I am a Bickertonite.

….after I graduated with my masters, I started writing the book and I ended up finishing the book and I wanted to go on for my Ph.D. and I kind of had this dilemma personally because I thought, should I write the book first and then go for my doctorate or should I get my doctorate and then write the book? Because usually the traditional path is to get the doctorate and write the book.

But no one had ever written about William Bickerton. He is literally, it’s so rare to find an American religion, a rock that has never been unturned. And that’s William Bickerton. It’s unbelievable because now he started the third largest Latter-day Saint Church in the world. It’s called the Church of Jesus Christ. It’s in 23 countries. There are about 23,000 members and very few people have ever written about him and there’s never been one biography on him. So, I thought to myself, you know what? Let me try to write the book. I felt like I had a good enough grounding to do that. And then with the hopes of putting it out there and then maybe going for my doctorate because my fear was to get on a doctoral committee and I’ve heard horror stories sometimes we don’t like certain people on your doctoral committee and they make you put things in your dissertation that you don’t really want to do.

So I didn’t want to have to backtrack. So I thought, let me try to write a scholarly book. Thankfully Signature Books picked it up. They found it. I was only halfway through and they heard about it and they basically said, “Well, let’s see the book when it’s done.” Thankfully there were no major corrections. They just passed it open hand and it was peer reviewed so it was great. So then what ended up happening is I applied to grad school and I wanted to find a good advisor and I like to focus on Mormonism but I like to focus on Millennialism too within the American context and there’s a guy at Manchester Metropolitan named Andrew Crome who specifically focuses on Millennialism and he also does mostly English Millennialism, but he focuses with a little bit within America too. I’ll told him about what I was interested in and told them about Bickerton.

We will also talk about the Spalding Manuscript Theory.

Daniel: They’re somehow trying to connect Sidney Rigdon to Solomon Spalding because they’re from the same area and they just, people just thought it was more than a coincidence that Sidney Rigdon all of a sudden meets Joseph Smith in Ohio and he’s a Campbellite minister and that just so happens to believe in the gathering of Israel and communal living, you know, very similar. So, they’re like, oh no, Sidney Rigdon helped write it because according to a lot of the theories before they ended up finding the Solomon Spalding manuscript, decades later, I think it was in the 20th century, they found it. A lot of people were saying, “Oh, I remember Solomon Spalding, the manuscript. He wrote this novel and it talks about people coming from Israel or from the Middle East to come over to the United States. I remember names like Lehi and Nephi.” You have all these people saying, “Oh, I remember these words that are in the Book of Mormon.”

Well, we find out later that that’s not really the case. Solomon Spalding wrote this book. I believe it’s about Romans that get knocked off course and eventually land in the New World. So it’s kind of similar but not really. And Sidney Rigdon had nothing to do with the Spalding manuscript. But back then people really thought that was the case.

Check out our conversation…

Dr. Daniel Stone is the biographer of "William Bickerton - Forgotten Latter Day Prophet" — Dr. Daniel Stone is the biographer of “William Bickerton – Forgotten Latter Day Prophet”

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Guest: Daniel Stone
Denomination: Bickertonites, Rigdonites
Spalding Conspiracy
Historical Mentions Mormon History
Tags: GT Podcast, iTunes

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Date: September 13, 2018
Guest: Daniel Stone
Denomination: Bickertonites, Rigdonites
Spalding Conspiracy
Historical Mentions Mormon History
Tags: GT Podcast, iTunes
Posted By: RickB

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