Joseph smith biography videos
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It’s a great but flawed source, and Joseph said relatively little about his early years.
Joseph Smith’s practice of plural marriage is another example of an area with sketchy documentation, which has enabled polygamy skeptics to pedal theories separating him from the Principle for many decades.
One of the more interesting portions of the interview was when Turner was asked “How can we understand moments when Joseph claimed divine authority versus when he seemed to improvise?” He responded,
I resist the idea that if Smith ever improvised that it means he was a fraud through and through.
When someone refuses to show a hidden, valuable object to others, the simplest explanation is that he does not possess it” (40).
Josiah Quincy, the future mayor of Boston, met Smith a month before the Mormon founder’s death.
Given the position of John Turner’s biography as the first one post-Joseph Smith Papers to cover all of Joseph Smith’s life, there was a tendency to focus on topics that biographers hadn’t covered in detail for one reason or another.
John G. Turner, the author of a new biography of Smith, has relatively few illusions about his subject. One of the realities of completing a biography is that as one works on drafts, one reprises the life of one’s subject repeatedly. Would Joseph Smith have abandoned polygamy or expanded it? (If that was the case, it is possible to say that the Lord had a hand in the timing of his death, preparing the way for Brigham Young to take charge and stabilize the religion.) Or, he may have moved to the west and calmed down, choosing a more stable pathway.
(In addition to running for president in 1844, he formed a council to establish world governance after the Second Coming of Christ.) If he were a musician, Smith would be Jerry Lee Lewis, not Tennessee Ernie Ford. When a question mark hovers over an event, Turner applies Occam’s razor: What is the simplest, most plausible explanation? I don’t think it’s that simple.
I also love Laurie Maffly-Kipp’s smart point that scholars don’t hold politicians or entrepreneurs to the same standards of sincerity and probity as they do religious leaders.
In one famous instance, Jesus told Smith’s wife, Emma, to get on board with the polygamy program but not to take any lovers herself, lest she “be destroyed.” Another time, Joseph and his aide William Clayton both desired the same woman, who happened to be the sister of a pair of sisters Clayton had already married.
It also led to a bothersome instance of Turner forcing evidence to match his conclusions rather than the other way around. $35
Nothing we have written has challenged her domination. Mormon apologists purport to believe that Smith really possessed golden plates bearing spiritual secrets. It takes its place alongside Leonard Arrington’s magisterial American Moses as the essential, mutually challenging portraits of one of America’s greatest colonizers and religious figures.” The same could be said here—Turner’s treatment of Joseph Smith takes its place alongside Richard Bushman’s biography as the essential, mutually challenging portraits of one of America’s greatest religious figures.
Joseph Smith’s life is difficult to chronicle because of the truth claims he made and the ways they influence people’s lives to this day.
“When someone refuses to show a hidden, valuable object to others, the simplest explanation is that he does not possess it.”
Joseph claimed that he “translated” the Book of Mormon from secret sources, but Turner again opts for “the simplest conclusion,” that Smith wrote it himself. He tips his cap to the “chutzpah” of the Book of Mormon project, “a stunning display of American audacity.”
Smith lived dangerously.
“Readers deserve an author’s best sense of what transpired,” he wrote.