Joseph Smith, Jr.

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<center>{{cquote|♫♬''Joseph Smith was called a prophet, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb. He started the Mormon religion, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.''♬♫|||South Park<ref>[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_About_the_Mormons%3F South Park - All About The Mormons]</ref><ref>The clip in [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvaTLs3XYZQ German.] (Nicht English, sorry.)</ref>}}</center>
 
<center>{{cquote|♫♬''Joseph Smith was called a prophet, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb. He started the Mormon religion, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.''♬♫|||South Park<ref>[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_About_the_Mormons%3F South Park - All About The Mormons]</ref><ref>The clip in [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvaTLs3XYZQ German.] (Nicht English, sorry.)</ref>}}</center>
 
[[File:Ovalportrait-josephsmith-Carter.jpg|thumb|The man himself]]
 
[[File:Ovalportrait-josephsmith-Carter.jpg|thumb|The man himself]]
'''Joseph Smith, Jr.''' was an [[United States|American]] who claimed to have met with an [[angel]] who helped him find and translate the account of [[Jesus]]'s time in North America.  He also claimed that, once upon a time, all [[Native American]]s were white.<ref>The exact phrase he used was 'white and delightsome', always used together, as though the two things were somehow interrelated; in Mormon theology non-white skin is always depicted as a negative thing.</ref>
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'''Joseph Smith, Jr.''' was an [[United States|American]] who claimed to have met with an [[angel]] who helped him find and translate a set of golden plates that mentions the account of [[Jesus]]'s visit to North America. He fabricated a supposed revelation from God by saying that he was instructed by God to build the one true church, and that all Christian sects and denominations were churches of Satan. He mentioned that he was instructed to translate the golden plates and publish the translations in a book called the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon according to Smith was the "most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion, and a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book (even the Bible, which Smith thought was imperfect because it was carelessly altered by ancient scribes and writers -which may be true)".  The book mentions that Native Americans are the direct descendants of Jews who left Saudi Arabia and traveled across the Atlantic Ocean towards the new promise land, which according to Smith, is in north eastern North America.  He also claimed that, once upon a time, all [[Native American]]s were white.<ref>The exact phrase he used was 'white and delightsome', always used together, as though the two things were somehow interrelated; in Mormon theology non-white skin is always depicted as a negative thing.</ref>
  
 
His neighbors didn't really consider him a [[prophet]], and so he had to keep moving, until he was finally martyred.  All in all, he was a fraud who started his own made-up religion.  There is a [[Jesus|very]] [[Islam|long]] [[Scientology|tradition]] [[Maratreanism|of this]], it seems, so Joseph Smith Jr. is in good company.  Most Americans still see him as a fraud {{fact}}, but his modern-day followers, known as [[Mormonism|Mormons]], still regard him highly.
 
His neighbors didn't really consider him a [[prophet]], and so he had to keep moving, until he was finally martyred.  All in all, he was a fraud who started his own made-up religion.  There is a [[Jesus|very]] [[Islam|long]] [[Scientology|tradition]] [[Maratreanism|of this]], it seems, so Joseph Smith Jr. is in good company.  Most Americans still see him as a fraud {{fact}}, but his modern-day followers, known as [[Mormonism|Mormons]], still regard him highly.

Revision as of 22:50, 6 December 2011

♫♬Joseph Smith was called a prophet, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb. He started the Mormon religion, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.♬♫
—South Park[1][2]
The man himself

Joseph Smith, Jr. was an American who claimed to have met with an angel who helped him find and translate a set of golden plates that mentions the account of Jesus's visit to North America. He fabricated a supposed revelation from God by saying that he was instructed by God to build the one true church, and that all Christian sects and denominations were churches of Satan. He mentioned that he was instructed to translate the golden plates and publish the translations in a book called the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon according to Smith was the "most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion, and a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book (even the Bible, which Smith thought was imperfect because it was carelessly altered by ancient scribes and writers -which may be true)". The book mentions that Native Americans are the direct descendants of Jews who left Saudi Arabia and traveled across the Atlantic Ocean towards the new promise land, which according to Smith, is in north eastern North America. He also claimed that, once upon a time, all Native Americans were white.[3]

His neighbors didn't really consider him a prophet, and so he had to keep moving, until he was finally martyred. All in all, he was a fraud who started his own made-up religion. There is a very long tradition of this, it seems, so Joseph Smith Jr. is in good company. Most Americans still see him as a fraud[citation needed], but his modern-day followers, known as Mormons, still regard him highly.

Contents

Early Life

Smith was born in Sharon, Vermont in 1805, the fifth child of relatively affluent and well-educated parents. In later years, he claimed to have had a vision of God in his childhood, although the year of this vision and exactly what he saw and what was said to him seemingly varied with every account; there are no less than four different accounts of the First Vision, all in Smith's own hand and all telling radically different stories despite claiming to be about the same event. He also claimed to have been later visited by an angel who showed him the location of a set of plates made of gold on which text was engraved. Both of these claims were actually made far later in life and there is no evidence of him having actually told anyone of these happenings when they occurred, not even his closest friends or family members. What the available evidence actually indicates is that he spent much of his youth and early adulthood as a petty con artist specializing in treasure-hunting and dowsing scams involving 'magic seer stones'. He was arrested and tried for these activities in 1826. In 1827 he eloped with a young woman named Emma Hale, whose parents disapproved of his less-than-legal vocation; she eventually became the first of his many wives.

The Book of Mormon

The book Smith purportedly found and "translated" from "Reformed Egyptian" on alleged golden plates was the Book of Mormon. The method of translation involved placing a 'magic seer stone' (the same stones Smith had once used as a confidence trickster) in a hat, placing his head into it, and then dictating what he saw to another individual, who would transcribe it. No evidence of these golden plates exists as Smith claims they were taken back into heaven after he did his translation. Absolutely no one has ever been confirmed as having actually seen the plates - they were not even physically in the room with Smith as he 'translated' them. The Book of Mormon is written (rather poorly) in a faux Elizabethan English style to resemble the King James Bible with tedious overuse of the phrases "it came to pass" and "exceedingly" and "dwindled in unbelief" and "sore wroth" (almost to the point of becoming a running joke) and with entire chapters and books padded out with verse after verse of meaningless filler (including several verses that consist entirely of the same sentence repeated three or four times with slightly different wording). The "gospel" portion in 3 Nephi is more or less cut and pasted from the Gospel According to Mark. The theology of the Book of Mormon is remarkably orthodox, with condemnations of polygamy and none of the other "whackjob" features attributed to Mormonism. Missionaries leave copies of the Book of Mormon with contacts because it is the perfect case of milk before meat.

Book of Abraham

Smith also made an alleged "translation" of an Egyptian scroll he bought, which became the "Book of Abraham". The Book of Abraham is the source of the Mormon belief that God lives near the star Kolob with his multiple wives; it also makes some rather...'interesting' claims about Egyptian history, such as claiming that 'Pharoah' is a name rather than a title and that Egypt itself was named after a woman named 'Egyptus' (it's actually derived from the Greek 'Aigyptos', which in turn was a mispronunciation of the Egyptians' name for their capital, Memphis).[4] Unlike the alleged "golden plates", this scroll really does exist. Scholars who have examined it concluded it to be common Egyptian writings with no relation whatsoever to the text Smith claimed he translated as the "Book of Abraham".[5] Though the Mormon church still officially accepts the "Book of Abraham" as scripture (it is part of the Pearl of Great Price, one of their four standard works of scripture along with the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and the Doctrine & Covenants), it is generally ignored by most members and there are rumors from Salt Lake that it will soon be officially removed from Mormon canon, mainly because this obvious hoax is a source of embarrassment for the church.

Facsimiles of some of the scrolls, copied by Smith himself, are included in the official church version of the Book of Abraham, along with Smith's labels and annotations pointing out who individual characters are and what certain words or phrases mean. The facsimiles are, at least visually, fairly accurate depictions of the original scrolls - the hieroglyphs are clear and identifiable, which makes it sadly easy to discover that they do not actually bear any resemblance at all to the translations Smith labels them with. In addition, every single character is misidentified - for example, Osiris is labeled as the prophet Abraham, the female Isis is named as the male 'Pharaoh' (which is given as a name rather than a title, which means that he would have been referred to as 'Pharaoh Pharaoh'), and Anubis (who is missing his snout in the recreation but retains the jackal ears) is inexplicably identified as a black slave with a vaguely Hebrew-sounding gibberish name. The facsimile of a round object (now identifiable as a hypocephalus) is even worse, being full of almost complete nonsense clearly copied from other sources, including several phrases composed of two different languages and large numbers of characters placed upside down, backwards, or in the wrong place in the word. Once the original scrolls were found, it was discovered that several sections are damaged or missing, and were presumably filled in on the facsimiles either by Smith himself or by one of his assistants with what they thought should go there; it's worth noting that the damaged sections in the original scrolls correspond exactly with those sections of the facsimiles that Egyptologists once had difficulty explaining.

In summary, the Book of Abraham is an obvious and rather poorly-done hoax whose plausibility relied entirely on the fact that the Egyptian language was unknown at the time of its writing. Even then, the flaws are glaring enough that, had genuine scholars of the time examined it, they likely would have readily been able to identify them. However, laymen of the time would have, generally speaking, been almost completely ignorant of Egyptian history, culture, or language, thus making it fairly easy to pass off such a fraud to them.

Egyptian Grammar

As a companion to the aforementioned 'Book of Abraham', Smith also compiled an 'Egyptian Language and Grammar' that claimed to teach the Egyptian language, which was not yet known at the time. The text remained in the possession of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints after his death and was eventually placed in long-term storage in a vault in Salt Lake City, where it remains as of 2011. The church originally had no intention of releasing it, but several pages of the text on microfilm were leaked by an anonymous source in the mid-20th century. Modern scholars and linguists have examined them and determined that Smith had absolutely no notion of the Egyptian language whatsoever; indeed, he achieved the noteworthy accomplishment of getting every single thing wrong. The resulting 'language' he claims to be teaching is pure fantasy; he made it up.

Doctrine & Covenants

Doctrine & Covenants is a collection of supplemental prophecies and instructions for the church, written mostly by Joseph Smith, who claimed he received them from God. The Doctrine & Covenants includes a prophecy that the one true church would be located in Independence, Missouri, and that present-day Independence was the site of the Garden of Eden. Funny thing, there is no mention of Salt Lake City in that prophecy. It also contains a series of increasingly restrictive and arbitrary rules members are not only expected to follow, but required to follow (or pretend they do) in order to be considered good Mormons. The Word of Wisdom is the most well-known of these many rules and instructions.

Death

Joseph Smith was killed in a gun battle with a mob of vigilantes while incarcerated in an Illinois jail awaiting trial for fraud and other crimes (central among which was his organization of a mob to burn down the offices of a newspaper that had published articles critical of him). One of Smith's last projects before being killed was his attempt at a wholesale revision of the King James Version of the Bible, with Smith making revisions as inspired by God making up those revisions himself. Also, just before his death, he was preparing to run for President of the United States as an Independent candidate.

His movement fragmented into several competing sects, with the prophet Brigham Young taking a wagon train consisting of the vast majority of the movement's members to Utah. This branch became the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or the Mormons, as they are usually referred to. The Missouri branch became the Reorganized Latter Day Saints, today known as the Community of Christ, while numerous smaller groups such as the Strangites and Bickertonites split off and went their own way.

Footnotes

  1. South Park - All About The Mormons
  2. The clip in German. (Nicht English, sorry.)
  3. The exact phrase he used was 'white and delightsome', always used together, as though the two things were somehow interrelated; in Mormon theology non-white skin is always depicted as a negative thing.
  4. Smith was apparently unaware that Egyptians did not actually refer to themselves as 'Egyptians'.
  5. Specifically, it's a 'Breathing Permit', an Egyptian funerary document intended to provide the deceased passage to the afterlife. In this case the deceased was named 'Hor', and not only was he not a prophet, he wasn't even royalty or nobility. The materials from which Smith 'translated' also apparently included a stone disc that modern scholars, going by Smith's own drawings of the item, can easily identify as a hypocephalus, yet another common Egyptian funerary artifact.
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