The most egregious, of course, is authors' deliberate violation of their own claim that they wanted to portray characters in their narrative present, meaning as those characters saw themselves at the time. This is an ideal way to write history; it puts readers into the actual world of the people they are reading about.
However, because of their desire to promote a modern narrative about Book of Mormon geography, the authors created a false narrative present by portraying figures in Church history as unaware of the Hill Cumorah in New York.
To create this false narrative present, the authors used a variety of selective standards. Let's look at some.
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The authors claimed that Joseph Smith never referred to the "hill in New York" where he got the plates as the hill Cumorah.
However, they know that Lucy Mack Smith gave us a direct quotation of Joseph referring to the hill as Cumorah in 1827 before he even got the plates. The editors avoid this evidence by editing around it, as I showed in another post.
They also know that in D&C 128:20, Joseph specifically referred to Cumorah. How did they get around this evidence that contradicts their narrative present? Simply by quoting portions of D&C 128 from before and after verse 20 (see p. 477).
The authors also know that Joseph Smith helped Oliver write the eight historical letters that they cited many times, but they don't inform readers that Joseph had the letters copied into his personal history, or that he approved the republication of these letters multiple times.
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They also apply a selective standard to the evidence they cite throughout the book.
Let's pretend, for the sake of argument, that the editors were correct; i.e., let's pretend Joseph never referred to Cumorah. Is that a justification for censoring the term?
The editors don't apply that standard with regard to other topics. Throughout the book, they write about what Joseph thought, felt, wanted, etc., all based on their inferences.
On page 434, they acknowledge that "Joseph himself left no record of his own views on plural marriage or his struggle to obey the commandment. Emma too disclosed nothing about how early she learned of the practice or what impact it had on her marriage. The writings of others close to them, however, make clear that it was a source of anguish for both of them."
This lack of an actual record is no obstacle because this is a topic the authors of Saints wanted to discuss. The book goes on to make speculative statements such as this: "Yet Joseph felt an urgency to teach it to the Saints, despite the risks and his own reservations."
Making reasonable inferences is fine, but notice the selective standard. The authors censor Cumorah because they claim Joseph "left no record of his own views" on Cumorah, but they also censor "the writings of others close to them" that "make clear that" Joseph and his associates all believed Cumorah was in New York.
IOW, on the topic of plural marriage, the authors of Saints speculate at length about what Joseph thought, based on the writings of others. But on the topic of Cumorah, not only do they censor what Joseph actually said and wrote, but they censor the writings of others that corroborated Joseph's own words.
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Another example is the treatment of Parley P. Pratt's autobiography and its sources. When Pratt wrote something that fit the narrative the authors wanted, they freely quoted from his writings.
For example, on pages 367-8, they related Joseph Smith's rebuke of the prison guards in Richmond, Missouri, in 1838. They provide a direct quotation of what Joseph said, taken from Pratt's Autobiography (which in turn was based on a letter Pratt wrote in 1853).
However, Matt Grow, one of the historians who defended the censorship of Cumorah in Saints, provided a different interpretation of this quotation in another book. Here's an explanation from an article about the topic.
Givens and Grow provide the following assessment of the narrative: “Written years after Smith’s death, the account describes a hero of inspiring proportions; if Pratt did not express such veneration during Smith’s lifetime, distance and the aura of martyrdom made it easier for Pratt, as his disciple, to describe such a moment of mythic splendor. With his tendency toward Victorian grandiloquence, his Manichean worldview, and the sense of poetic license, Pratt perhaps embellished the scene. . . . However, there is no reason to doubt the essentials of the account.” Givens and Grow, Parley P. Pratt, 144. The fact that Pratt did not even mention the rebuking incident in his History of the Late Persecutions (most of which he wrote between December 1838 to mid-March 1839), supports Givens and Grows conclusion that over time, the incident became even more impressive in his mind.
http://mormonhistoricsites.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/%E2%80%9CSilence-Ye-Fiends-of-the-Infernal-Pit%E2%80%9D-Joseph-Smith%E2%80%99s-Incarceration-in-Richmond-Missouri-November-1838.pdf
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I bring this up to show how, when it fits the desired narrative, the authors of Saints had no problem providing direct quotations, even when they knew the quotations were first recorded 15 years after the event, were never mentioned earlier, and were probably embellished on top of that.
But when a quotation from the same source contradicts the desired narrative, it becomes unreliable and subject to censorship.
The New York Cumorah contradicts the modern M2C narrative, so the authors of Saints censor it, even though Parley P. Pratt's Autobiography included the following quotation.
"This Book, which contained these things, was hid in the earth by Moroni, in a hill called by him, Cumorah, which hill is now in the State of New York, near the village of Palmyra, in Ontario county." p. 57.
The authors of Saints also dismissed Lucy Mack Smith's quotation of Joseph Smith referring to Cumorah in 1827, apparently because she didn't record it until 1845, although she related it verbally prior to that. M2C advocates say Lucy's memory was unreliable on this one point (the New York Cumorah), but they cite her account throughout Saints and other accounts of Church history.
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