I'm finally getting around to annotating the Saints book, volume 1. We continually meet people who have read Saints and believe it is accurate.
I wish it was. It could easily be corrected, except no one in the Church History Department seems to care about correcting errors.
I noticed this example from chapter 3:
Look at this sentence:
Moroni said that God had chosen Joseph to renew the covenant, and that if he chose to be faithful to God’s commands, he would be the one to reveal the record on the plates.11
This is fun because note 11 cites Letter IV.
Oliver Cowdery, “Letter IV,” LDS Messenger and Advocate, Feb. 1835, 1:78–79 (see also later version, in JSP, H1:59); Lucy Mack Smith, History, 1844–45, book 3, [11].
Instead of linking to Letter IV in the Joseph Smith Papers, which would be easy and clear, the link goes to the cover of the Messenger and Advocate on archive.org!
Then you have to find pages 78-9 which looks like this:
and it is the wrong page!
Below is the passage on page 80, which of course they would never actually quote in Saints because Moroni specifically told Joseph he had the privilege to translate with the Urim and Thummim that came with the plates.
Instead, the historians want to make people think Moroni told Joseph he would "reveal the record;" i.e., that instead of using the Urim and Thummim and actually translating the engravings, Joseph would read words that appeared on the stone-in-the-hat (SITH).
It would be far more accurate, and clearer to readers, if Saints simply quoted the reference instead of paraphrasing it and completely changing the meaning.
Here is the actual passage.
He said this history was written and deposited not far from that place, and that it was our brother’s privilege, if obedient to the commandments of the Lord, to obtain and translate the same by the means of the Urim and Thummim, which were deposited for that purpose with the record.
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