Readers here already know how the Saints books, especially volume 1, created a false historical narrative present (meaning, how did historical figures think and act in their day) to accommodate M2C and SITH.
Every historical figure we read about in Volume 1 accepted the New York Cumorah, yet readers of Saints have no idea about that. The New York Cumorah was an important defense of the historicity of the Book of Mormon against claims that the book was fiction, copied from Solomon Spalding's manuscript or another source. If Church members knew that history, they could learn from it when the historicity of the Book of Mormon is challenged in our day.
It's impossible to understand Joseph, Oliver and their contemporaries without also understanding their experience and teachings. Yet the editors of Saints deliberately changed history by eliminating the New York Cumorah completely, purely to accommodate their colleagues who teach M2C (the Mesoamerican/two-Cumorahs theory).
Recently The Church News interviewed Keith A. Erekson, Director of the Church History Library. Brother Erekson does a phenomenal job at the library. I wish everyone could visit and see how well managed the library is.
Here's the link to the transcript of the podcast.
It's constantly amazing that they chose as the subtitle "The Standard of Truth" when the editors knowingly and intentionally falsified early Church history on these topics to create a version of history that aligns with their editorial preferences. The repercussions are wide-ranging and ongoing.
During the interview, Brother Erekson made the point that the retelling of our history should be accurate.
Sarah Jane Weaver: Well, from the earliest days that I had the opportunity to interact with you, you have been promoting this idea that we should be telling accurate and better stories. Why is it so important that our history and the retelling of history be accurate?
4:45
Keith A. Erekson: Well, I think there are several levels where accuracy matters. At the most basic level, we want to get the story right and we want to be true to the people who lived it. It was their experience, so we don’t want to distort their experience or turn it into something that it wasn’t.
Had the editors of Saints followed this advice, they would not have censored the New York Cumorah. The conversation progressed to discuss the very point of this blog.
Sarah Jane Weaver: And tell us what happens when we promote stories that aren’t true or that aren’t entirely true.
6:07
Keith A. Erekson: A couple of things happen when we tell those kinds of stories, and some of the most damaging results are for the hearers....
I think it also can be harmful if people then later learn: “Oh, there are parts of the story that they left out. Well, why did they do that?” Sometimes it can lead to feeling betrayed...
Everyone who is aware of the problems with Saints wonders why they left out part of the story. We all recognize it's not an encyclopedia. But the editors took care to both (i) falsify the history about Cumorah and (2) promote the fake Moroni/Mary Whitmer story. Both examples accommodate M2C at the expense of historical accuracy and harming readers who later learn the truth about these topics.
The next part of the interview highlights the problem of not correcting the Saints book.
Sarah Jane Weaver: Well, and I think we’re hearing more from a lot of Church members who are troubled by history. What is your message to them?
8:11
Keith A. Erekson: I think that’s true, and I think it’s important to first of all, acknowledge that anytime someone is struggling with a question about history or any other practice in the Church that their feelings are really important and really significant. And so, we need to pay attention to our thoughts, to our feelings, and if something is unsettling, then we need to address it.
The historians are absolutely refusing to address the problem of the New York Cumorah. Actually, it's not a problem; it's the omission that is the problem. They could easily correct Saints by relating what historical figures actually said and wrote, but they refuse, purely to accommodate M2C.
The interview proceeds to discuss the resources devoted to making historical information available, including the Joseph Smith Papers, but what good are the resources when the Church historians censor and de-correlate important aspects of the history? Not to mention, the editorial comments in the Joseph Smith Papers are full of M2C and SITH accommodation.
Brother Erekson spoke about truth:
[Truth is] more of a process. It’s more of a way of being. It’s kind of a way of thinking: “Am I pulling in all of the evidence that I can find? Am I connecting it to everything that I know about the present? Am I staying humble for what may come in the future that may change what I put everything together the best that I know how, and then something may come in the future that changes it? Am I humble enough to accept that too?” I think all of that is part of us seeking after truth.
Here again, this is a thoughtful, meaningful description of truth, but we can all see that the Saints book does the opposite of pulling in all the evidence that is available.
Finally, Brother Erekson gave a series of criteria for determining the best sources. I'll annotate it here.
Sarah Jane Weaver: Great, and how do people know how to know what is a good source? What is the key to say, “I’m going to keep this”?
20:50
Keith A. Erekson: Well, I think there are a handful of criteria that I use. One of them is accuracy. You want to look for information that is accurate, and that test for accuracy in history, but also in other kinds of information, is a word that we call “corroboration.” So, can we find another source that shares the same information? That increases the likelihood. If two people were in a room, and they heard Joseph Smith give a sermon and they both recorded similarly, that increases our confidence that we’ve got an accurate account of what Joseph said. So, I think accuracy is an important criteria.
Regarding the New York Cumorah, there are numerous sources that corroborate one another. Not only Oliver Cowdery's Letter VII, which you can read in Joseph's own journal and other Church publications from the time, but in the writings and recorded sermons of all of Joseph's contemporaries. Heber C. Kimball joined the Church in 1832 and visited the Hill Cumorah near Palmyra, saying he could still see the embankments around the hill.
It was only after Joseph and those who knew him died that RLDS scholar L.E. Hills determined Cumorah could not be in New York, but had to be in Mesoamerica. Eventually, many LDS scholars adopted the Hills approach.
Another one that we’ve touched on with the Elvis Presley example would be authenticity. Is it actually the thing that it purports to be? And so, in history, authenticity means it was actually created by that person at the time it was created, and we know where it’s been, and so we can say, “This is an authentic source of information.”
The authenticity of Letter VII and the other sources is beyond question.
And I think a third criteria would be reliability, and this one grows out of the first two, because for some kinds of information, there is only one source, and so you can’t corroborate it, and so you have to make judgments about it being reliable. So one way you do that is you look at all of the things that you can judge, and you can say, “OK, this person or this source has told me 10 things. Nine of them I can test or corroborate and nine of them hold up. The chances are that the 10th one is also going to be sound.” But if I’m going through, and I’ve got 10 things from this source, and the first three are just not accurate at all, then you know, “OK, I’m already in trouble here, because this isn’t a reliable source; they’re telling me stuff that doesn’t hold up.”
There are few more reliable sources than Oliver Cowdery, particularly because Joseph did not leave many written explanations. Oliver was an eyewitness to the translation, the plates and other artifacts, the repository of Nephite records inside the Hill Cumorah, and the restoration of Priesthood keys in the Kirtland temple.
I think the fourth criteria would be fairness. You talked about this a little bit earlier about knowing what people mean. I think there are ways that people can take information and take it out of context and present it in a way that’s not fair to the way it was originally used.
Fairness supports Letter VII because Oliver did not leave room for misunderstanding. He was so clear that the only way the M2C advocates can suppress his work is by censoring it, as we see in the Saints book.
I think the last criteria for me would be comprehensive search. So if somebody just said, “Hey, I Googled something, and I found the first hit, and here’s what you need to do for this latest health issue.” That’s going to be less persuasive than somebody who has studied comprehensively every major medical study on that issue in the last 40 years and synthesized that. And so now we have a comprehensive view, rather than just one piece of information that I found in a whole pile.
This is a key point. People who "Google" Cumorah typically find a barrage of M2C material, both from apologists in the M2C citation cartel and from critics who point out how the apologists have censored and de-correlated the New York Cumorah. It's not easy to find all the sources that teach and corroborate the New York Cumorah, but they do exist. If you haven't found them, keep trying.
Brother Erekson summarized the inherent challenges of historical research very well. Now, let's see if he can influence Church scholars to do the same.
The end.
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