Did Joseph Smith steal his ideas for
The Book of Mormon
from another book written 8 years before?
The Book of Mormon
from another book written 8 years before?
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The View of the Hebrews
Relatively unknown to the general public, View of the Hebrews is an 1823 book written by Ethan Smith (December 19, 1762 – August 29, 1849, no relation to Joseph Smith) which argues that native Americans were descended from the Hebrews. Numerous commentators on Mormon doctrine, from LDS Church general authority B. H. Roberts to biographer Fawn M. Brodie, have discussed the possibility that View of the Hebrews may have provided source material for the Book of Mormon, which Mormons believe was "divinely" translated from ancient golden plates by Joseph Smith, Jr.
Ethan Smith lived in Poultney, Vermont, the same town as Oliver Cowdery, who later acted as Joseph Smith's scribe for the Book of Mormon. Ethan Smith also pastored the Congregational church that Cowdery's family attended from 1821 to 1826 while he was writing View of the Hebrews. It is known that this book was sold in Palmyra bookstores, and the author came through Palmyra twice on tours promoting the book.
Thesis of View of the Hebrews
The first edition of Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews was published in 1823, and a second expanded edition appeared in 1825. Ethan Smith's theory, relatively common among both theologians and laymen of his day, was that Native Americans were descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, who had disappeared after being taken captive by the Assyrians in the 8th century BC. Terryl Givens calls the work "an inelegant blend of history, excerpts, exhortation, and theorizing."
Ethan Smith's speculation took flight from a verse in the Apocrypha, 2 Esdras 13:41, which says that the Ten Tribes traveled to a far country, "where never mankind dwelt" — which Smith interpreted to mean America. During Ethan Smith's day speculation about the Ten Lost Tribes was heightened both by a renewed interest in biblical prophecy and by the belief that the aboriginal peoples who had been swept aside by Europeans settlers could not have created the sophisticated burial mounds found in North America. Ethan Smith attempted to rescue Indians from the contemporary mound builder myth by making native Americans "potential converts worthy of salvation. "If our natives be indeed from the tribes of Israel", Smith wrote, "American Christians may well feel, that one great object of their inheritance here, is, that they may have a primary agency in restoring those 'lost sheep of the house of Israel.'"
Parallels between View of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon
It has been argued that there are significant parallels between View of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon. In 1922 B.H. Roberts (1857–1933), a prominent LDS apologist and historian, was asked to answer non-believer's five critical questions by LDS Apostle James E. Talmage. It is unclear when Roberts first learned of the View of the Hebrews or what motivated him to make the comparison, but he produced a confidential report that summarized eighteen points of similarity between the two works.
B.H. Roberts' list of parallels included:
* extensive quotation from the prophecies of Isaiah in the Old Testament
* the Israelite origin of the American Indian
* the future gathering of Israel and restoration of the Ten Lost Tribes
* the peopling of the New World from the Old via a long journey northward which encountered "seas" of "many waters"
* a religious motive for the migration
* the division of the migrants into civilized and uncivilized groups with long wars between them and the eventual destruction of the civilized by the uncivilized
* the assumption that all native peoples were descended from Israelites and their languages from Hebrew
* the burial of a "lost book" with "yellow leaves"
* the description of extensive military fortifications with military observatories or "watch towers" overlooking them
* a change from monarchy to republican forms of government
* the preaching of the gospel in ancient America
B.H. Roberts continued to affirm his faith in the divine origins of the Book of Mormon until his death in 1933, but as Terryl Givens has written, "a lively debate has emerged over whether his personal conviction really remained intact in the aftermath of his academic investigations."
Two internal Mormon documents authored by B. H. Roberts, called "Book of Mormon Difficulties" and "Book of Mormon Study" (never released to the public until after his death), provide a behind-the-scenes look at Roberts' honesty in admitting to Church leaders that the Book of Mormon had a number of very serious difficulties, and in the 400 page "Book of Mormon Study" Roberts concluded that Joseph Smith probably borrowed not only specific ideas but also the very framework of the Book of Mormon from "View of the Hebrews." Here are some quotes from Roberts:
-- "…Moreover, on subjects widely discussed, and that deal in matters of widespread public interest, there is built up in the course of years, a community knowledge of such subjects, usually referred to as 'matters of common knowledge' to which non-readers of books or of periodicals…have access…..Such 'common knowledge' existed throughout New England and New York in relation to American Indian origins and cultures; and the prevailing ideas respecting the American Indians throughout the regions named were favorable to the notion that they were of Hebrew origin…..All these notions were interwoven in the 'common knowledge' of New England and New York, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, respecting the Indian race of America. And with the existence of such a body of knowledge, or that which was accepted as 'knowledge,' and a person of vivid and constructive imaginative power in contact with it, there is little room for doubt but that it might be possible for Joseph Smith to construct a theory of origin for his Book of Mormon in harmony with these prevailing notions, and more especially since this 'common knowledge' is set forth in almost handbook form in the little work of Ethan Smith View of the Hebrews, and published from eight to five years before the Book of Mormon was published. "The question to be considered here, then, is: did such 'common knowledge,' supplemented by Ethan Smith's book respecting theories of 'origin,' and of 'history' obtain in the vicinity where Joseph Smith spent his early youth and manhood, and was he a person of sufficiently vivid and creative imagination as to produce such a work as the Book of Mormon from such materials? It will appear in what is to follow that such 'common knowledge' did exist in New England; that Joseph Smith was in contact with it; that one book, at least, with which he was most likely acquainted, could well have furnished structural outlines for the Book of Mormon; and that Joseph Smith was possessed of such creative imaginative powers as would make it quite within the lines of possibility that the book of Mormon could have been produced in that way."
-- "Did Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews furnish structural material for Joseph Smith's Book of Mormon? It has been pointed out in these pages that there are many things in the former book that might well have suggested many major things in the other. Not a few things merely, one or two, or a half dozen, but many; and it is this fact of many things of similarity and the cumulative force of them that makes them so serious a menace to Joseph Smith's story of the Book of Mormon's origin."
-- "In the light of this evidence, there can be no doubt as to the possession of a vividly strong, creative imagination by Joseph Smith, the Prophet, an imagination, it could with reason be urged, which, given the suggestions that are to be found in the 'common knowledge' of accepted American antiquities of the times, supplemented by such a work as Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews, would make it possible for him to create a book such as the Book of Mormon is."
-- And in the same study, with regard to the internal problems within the Book of Mormon: "I shall hold that what is here presented illustrates sufficiently the matter taken in hand by referring to them, namely that they are all of one breed and brand; so nearly alike that one mind is the author of them, and that a young and undeveloped, but piously inclined mind. The evidence, I sorrowfully submit, points to Joseph Smith as their creator."
Fawn Brodie, the first important historian to write a non-hagiographic biography of Joseph Smith, believed that Joseph Smith's theory of the Hebraic origin of the American Indians came "chiefly" from View of the Hebrews. "It may never be proved that Joseph saw View of the Hebrews before writing the Book of Mormon", wrote Brodie in 1945, "but the striking parallelisms between the two books hardly leave a case for mere coincidence."
Having this book on a CD is a dream come true. A wonderful feature of this CD is the ability to "copy and paste" any of the text from its nearly 200 pages into any other computer application/program. Try doing that with a printed book! Everything on this disk is fully searchable. And with so many pages and chapters to study, having built-in Bookmarks is definitely a time saver!
Do you like audio books? Another time-saving feature not talked about very often is the "Read Aloud" function of Adobe Acrobat Reader. This feature will allow your computer to read the text of the book to you, whether it be one page or the entire book! (Don't be fooled by others on ebay who try to pass off their eBooks as the only ones with this feature, as it will work with nearly any PDF in Adobe Acrobat)
Don't pass up this opportunity to obtain a copy of this awesome reference CD! Original hardcopy editions of these works have sold on Ebay for many times the cost of this disk. With this CD you can read the same pages on your computer, or print out any pages you like at your convenience. All files are in PDF format and are bookmarked for easy navigation.
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