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…
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. And the other thing was, of course, he had split with Joseph, and there was no reconciliation. This is not like with Martin or Oliver. He felt that Joseph, right after the Book of Mormon was done, had become a fallen prophet. And he felt that Joseph was absolutely a fallen prophet, and everything that happened after the Book of Mormon was falsehood. He rejected the Doctrine & Covenants. He rejected the idea of priesthood restoration, even though he was involved in calling the first Quorum of 12. He rejected the whole idea of priesthood offices. He rejected the idea of continuing revelation. He believed in the Book of Mormon.
GT 11:52 Even with Hiram Page? I thought they were buddies.
Jim 11:54 Well, they were in-laws. But the thing is, Hiram Page moved to Missouri too. He was in David Whitmer’s little church.
GT 12:02 Right.
Jim 12:02 But they didn’t have any more revelations or seer stones or anything. So that was David’s thing. So, by the 1880s everybody was coming to see him, because he was now the last surviving witness. He had the original Printer’s Manuscript. So, suddenly people from Utah came to see him. Joseph Smith, III, and other people from the Reorganized Church would come to see him. Everybody was trying to make nice with him. And so, he finally decided, and he had his own little church. And so, he decided, Okay, it’s time for me to give my story to the world. So, in 1878, just one year before he dies, he’s in his late 80s, I believe. He publishes this book called An Address to All Believers in Christ. And basically in it, he reiterates his testimony of the Book of Mormon. He reiterates his three witnesses’ statement, that testimony. He reiterates that. Then he basically goes on for the rest of the book, saying Joseph Smith was a fallen prophet, and he denounces everything Joseph Smith did from the time after the time of the Book of Mormon on.
Jim 13:37 This is where he then starts to give the stone in the hat account. And the thing is, like Jonathan was saying, he says this is the manner in which it was done. But he doesn’t ever say, “I saw Joseph Smith do it this way,” or “I looked at the Urim and Thummim and saw this.” Because he didn’t. He wasn’t a witness. He didn’t actually see things. But this stone in the hat account was now becoming widespread. William McLellin had gone around telling it to lots of people, and it jived with what David had witnessed when Joseph did this one-time demonstration. They were okay with the idea of seer stones, because his brother-in-law, Hiram Page had dabbled in it.
Jonathan 14:35 But it was also to refute the Spalding Theory.
Jim 14:38 And it refuted the Spalding Theory. So he was against the Spalding Theory.
Jonathan 14:41 He started off talking about Spalding before he talked about the stone in the hat.
Jim 14:44 Right. And the advantage of the stone in the hat is that the Spalding theory was that Joseph was behind a veil. Hence the “Mormonism Unveiled.” And so, the idea was that what he was hiding behind the veil was this manuscript from Solomon Spalding that Sidney Rigdon had doctored up. And so, he was reading it off, and then he’d throw out the pages.
GT 14:44 I’ve done a presentation on Solomon Spalding.
Jim 15:03 You did.
GT 15:04 But I haven’t released it yet. You saw it because it was live. I need to release that.
Jim 15:13 You did it at the perspective forum, right. So you know that.
GT 15:20 It was such a garbage theory.
Jim 15:21 But the point is that at this at this particular time, they still hadn’t found the manuscript in Hawaii.
GT 15:27 Right. Yeah, that was 1880s when they found it in Hawaii, I think.
Jonathan 15:31 Yeah.
Jim 15:31 But then to have it actually brought back, and people actually read it, it was not available at the time David Whitmer wrote this book.
GT 15:40 Right.
Jonathan 15:40 It was still the prevailing theory.
GT 15:43 Right.
Jim 15:43 But it always was the dominant theory.
GT 15:45 It’s the theory that will never die
Jonathan 15:46 Right.
Jim 15:47 Yeah.
GT 15:48 It should.
Jim 15:48 Yeah. So, David renounced that. The key thing being that he said, “Look, I was there at the beginning.” Joseph Smith was there, and my brother was there and Hyrum was there, and Emma was there. And none of us ever saw or heard of Sidney Rigdon before he showed up as a convert.
GT 16:09 Right. In December of 1830, I think. I can’t remember.
Jim 16:12 Okay, so that’s a valid point. David Whitmer around, and if he never saw Sidney Rigdon until he comes up after the Book of Mormon is published, that’s a pretty valid piece of testimony.
Jonathan 16:24 So he was refuting it that way, but also because he said there was no screen.
Jim 16:29 Right.
GT 16:29 Oh yeah, there was no cloth between Joseph and [the scribe.]
Jim 16:31 No veil, because he was looking in his hat, which is something that he had seen once.
GT 16:38 He had seen what once?
Jim 16:39 The stone in the hat, our little demonstration that we were talking about, that we think Joseph did, just to resolve the awful curiosity of all the folks around the Whitmer home at the time. Also, William McLellin had been going around spreading this. William McLellin didn’t join the Church until several years after the Church was founded. So, he had no firsthand knowledge whatsoever. But he picked up on this theory because he too was trying to downgrade Joseph as a prophet. Because he also was a “Joseph was a fallen Prophet” advocate. So, he and David Whitmer were the two guys really pushing Joseph Smith was a fallen prophet, whole meme.
GT 17:26 It’s pretty amazing that he fell in 1830. I can understand how people say Joseph was fallen when he brought in polygamy. But 1830 that’s pretty early.
Jim 17:35 Oh yeah, No, no. This was David Whitmer. He was one of the people who said, “I don’t know about this priesthood restoration” stuff. I don’t know what that is. I never heard about that stuff until years later, and so forth. So, just to conclude our story with David Whitmer, there’s a huge record, though. He was accessible. So, there’s tons of newspaper interviews, because he was accessible to everybody, He wrote this book at the end of his life “An Address to All Believers in Christ,” where he really laid it out all in writing. And this is firsthand. So he’s a readily accessible source. There’s lots of David Whitmer material to go by. But the fact is that he was never a witness to anything that he was asserting in these books.
Jim 18:28 Richard Lloyd Anderson, who was the leading scholar on the three witnesses and eight witnesses, formerly, he was a professor at BYU, now passed away. He wrote the books. He wrote the book on the three witnesses, and he spent his whole life studying the witnesses. We researched Richard Lloyd Anderson, and what he had to say. And Richard Lloyd Anderson didn’t think that David Whitmer was a credible witness. And the conclusion that Richard Lloyd Anderson came to was that having left the church, David Whitmer then remembered/redid the translation story in a way that was consistent with his decision that Joseph was a small and fallen prophet. Basically, David Whitmer was not a liar.
GT 19:30 It’s not that he was fallen because he used the seer stone, though. Is it?
Jim 19:35 No. He felt he was a fallen prophet, just because he started to get away from strict biblical primitivism.
GT 19:43 Okay.
Jim 19:43 See, that was what attracted David Whitmer, was that he was a super radical conservative Protestant. He believed the Bible was inerrant, and he believed in the primitive Church, as in the Bible. So, when the Church was established and said, “We’re going to have the church like in the Bible,” that was very appealing to people with David Whitmer’s background. But when Joseph started to elaborate and have priesthood offices and so forth, that’s when David Whitmer started to get in disenchanted, because that was no longer strictly what was in the Bible, at least as David Whitmer saw it.
Jonathan 20:26 The main thing that converted David Whitmer was his experience as one of the three witnesses.
GT 20:30 Okay.
Jonathan 20:31 That was his rock that he always held on to.
Jim 20:34 Right. But, after Joseph started to elaborate beyond the Book of Mormon; and the other thing, of course, that upset David Whitmer was that Joseph made revisions to the Book of Mormon.
Jonathan 20:46 And to the Doctrine and Covenants.
Jim 20:47 And to the Doctrine and Covenants, right. And this is Richard Lloyd Anderson.
GT 20:53 He was more of a Book of Commandments guy, if anything.
Jonathan 20:55 Yeah.
Jim 20:55 Right. So this is what Richard Lloyd Anderson points out. He said, David Whitmer had this scriptural inerrancy view, that the word of the Bible is absolutely true word for word. So he carried that over to the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon is absolutely true word for word.
GT 21:15 The original.
Jim 21:16 The original. And so, when Joseph started to make corrections and revisions, that really upset David Whitmer. Because that was no longer his thing.
GT 21:25 Do you think that the Church quotes David Whitmer too much in the Gospel Topics Essay and in Saints? Is that what you’re saying? Is that we’re driving at?
Jim 21:36 Yes. He’s not reliable. He’s a source. He’s there.
Jonathan 21:40 I would frame it this way. It’s not that they quote him too much. It’s that they quote Joseph and Oliver not at all. And so, people who read those materials don’t understand the whole context. I think it’s valuable to see what David Wimmer had to say, because he was one of the three witnesses. But I would not put him as more credible or reliable than Joseph and Oliver.
GT 22:02 Okay.
Jonathan 22:02 But the essay does.
{End of Part 2b}
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