SITH in federal court

SITH (the "stone-in-the-hat" narrative about the translation that refutes what Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery always said about the translation), is now being litigated at the appellate level in federal court.

As if SITH wasn't bad enough from a purely historical perspective.

https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2024/09/25/lds-tithing-church-lawyers-push/

(click to enlarge)

The media often uses this photo of the "seer stone" that doesn't match the description Emma and David gave, and can't be the one that Wilford Woodruff claimed was the Urim and Thummim in Nauvoo anyway (assuming the narrative that this is the one Oliver Cowdery had is true, which is questionable given the poor chain of custody). 

Notice the fine print under the image: "(Rick Bowmer | The Associated Press) A picture of the "seer stone," shown in 2015, that Latter-day Saints believe church founder Joseph Smith used to help translate the Book of Mormon."

There are at least a few Latter-day Saints who still believe what Joseph and Oliver taught, such as Joseph's statement here:

I obtained them [the plates] and the Urim and Thummim with them, by the means of which I translated the plates and thus came the Book of Mormon.

https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/elders-journal-july-1838/10

Neither Joseph nor Oliver ever once said or implied that Joseph used a seer stone.

And yet, in federal court, the Church's own lawyer questioned what Joseph and Oliver said:

“Isn’t that a bizarre thing to say?” the church’s lead lawyer said of the plaintiffs. “They say specifically, ‘We don’t dispute that the Book of Mormon is true. We don’t dispute that it was translated by the gift and power of God. We dispute whether it was translated using the Urim and Thummim, a clear stone or an opaque stone.

“That almost sounds silly,” he continued. “Churches have the right to define, develop and evolve their own history. ... Who knows what happened in 1820 or whether he sat at a table and looked at gold plates?”

Think how different this would all be if LDS scholars had stuck with what Joseph and Oliver (and their successors in Church leadership) had said. 

But instead, the scholars decided Mormonism Unvailed, David Whitmer, and Emma's dubious "Last Testimony" have more credibility than Joseph and Oliver.

For a discussion of the SITH problem, see

https://www.ldshistoricalnarratives.com/p/the-sith-problem-1829-2024.html

The whole thing is an absurd mess, partly because of Rough Stone Rolling and John Dehlin's "Faith Crisis Report" that led to the Gospel Topics Essay on Book of Mormon Translation which doesn't even quote what Joseph and Oliver said.

And of course we have the famous scholars at Scripture Central and the Interpreter continuing to promote the SITH nonsense.

Thanks, Dan and Jack.

More later...

SITH sayers omit testimony of U&T

The website "witnesses of the book of Mormon" (https://witnessesofthebookofmormon.org/) is produced by the Interpreter Foundation and lists FAIRLDS and Scripture Central as "contributors."

Of course, all three of those organizations are SITH sayers, meaning they teach people to reject what Joseph and Oliver said about the translation because they want people to accept the SITH statements in Mormonism Unvailed, by David Whitmer, and the dubious "Last Testimony of Sister Emma." 

They have a page on John Whitmer that collects his known statements.

https://witnessesofthebookofmormon.org/eight-witnesses/john-whitmer/statements/

However, they omitted John Whitmer's statement about the plates and the translation that he gave during an interview with Zenas Gurley.

The speaker visited John Whitmer at Far West a few years ago. He is now dead; was then seventy years old. [John Whitmer died at Far West, Mo., on July 11, 1878.] He had seen the plates; and it was his especial pride and joy that he had written sixty [sixteen?] pages of the Book of Mormon. His neighbors all gave him a good character. He left the Church in 1837 or 1838, because of tendencies he could not approve; but had always remained true to the faith. When the work of translation was going on he sat at one table with his writing material and Joseph at another with the breast-plate and Urim and Thummim. The latter were attached to the breast-plate and were two crystals or glasses, into which he looked and saw the words of the book. The words remained in sight till correctly written, and mistakes of the scribe in spelling the names were corrected by the seer without diverting his gaze from the Urim and Thummim.”[1]

Fortunately, we're not required to accept the theories of the SITH sayers. We can all read the original, published testimonies from Joseph and Oliver about the translation, in which they taught that Joseph translated the plates with the Urim and Thummim that came with the plates.

Now we can also see that John Whitmer, despite his problems with the Church, retained his testimony that corroborated and validated what Joseph and Oliver always said about the translation.

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[1]https://archive.org/details/TheSaintsHerald_Volume_26_1879/page/n369/mode/2up