Joseph Fielding Smith

According to David Whitmer, one of the original three witnesses to the book, Martin Harris was taking a bit too long to sell his farm to raise the cash.

So, looking for a solution, Joseph Smith looked into his seer stone.

Whitmer records that a revelation came through, instructing some of the Brethren to head up to Toronto, Canada, where they were told they'd successfully sell the copyright of the Book of Mormon for a good amount of money.

Hiram Page and Oliver Cowdery were dispatched, but, as it turns out, they came back entirely empty-handed.

Finally, we turn our attention to our last story, Suppressing the Historical Record, The Missing Dream.

The historical record shows a bit of a pattern of selective editing.

The Civil War prophecy itself was deliberately omitted from the first two printings of Joseph Smith's history, leaving out over 300 words without any indication of the deletion.

It wasn't actually printed until 1851, 19 years after it was originally recorded.

She said they could talk all night with nothing but the occasional comma between sentences.

Five years after that letter, in 1844, the night before Joseph Smith was killed at Carthage jail, a gun went off outside.

Dan Jones later remembered Joseph getting up from the bedstead where he had been sleeping and lying down beside Jones on the floor in, quote, close embrace.

Quinn later described that as Joseph sharing a bed with Jones.

Heber J.

Grant wrote that George Q. Cannon leaned over and kissed him after a dispute, and Grant said that tears of gratitude came to his eyes as he returned the kiss.

Joseph Smith used same-sex physical affection as an image in a sermon.

In 1843, preaching about the resurrection, he described two close friends laying down together at night, quote, locked in each other's embrace, end quote, talking about their love and waking together in the morning.

It's the closest thing Mormons have to a pope, right? That's the president of their church.

So, we're going to look at what he says, and he's gonna quote other Mormon sources, like Joseph Smith, and you're gonna hear from the horse's mouth, so to speak, what Mormons actually believe about this.

Then I wanna play for you a clip, a video, from Eric Hernandez, who's a friend of mine.

We're not close friends, but we're definitely on friendly terms.

There's this like thick veneer of PR material where it's like, well, we don't want to talk about exaltation.

We don't want to talk about like the Adam God doctrine that Brigham Young said God revealed to him that Adam was literally God the Father in the garden.

He said God told him that he was acting as the president of the church, the prophet at the time, the guy who took over after Joseph Smith.

You know, they want to talk about that stuff.

I know that there's some dispute about whether or not this was like legitimately said or who said it or how it was recorded.

I know that it's attributed to Joseph Smith and it's called the White Horse Prophecy.

And that's the

same.

So here's where I thought my research into this was going.

I'd be able to be like, good news.

Joseph Smith probably didn't say it.

But unfortunately, church history, as it will, has decided to be more annoying than that.

And not so much so they would just implicitly trust the Book of Mormon, which ha- it- it is just so pitiful in comparison to the Bible, historically, linguistically.

Though there is no linguistic for the Book of Mormon, right? All you've got is the, Joseph Smith's Urim and Thummim, the seer stone, hats, money digging.

Ugh, it's just amazing.

So I posted Psalm 119:160.

This is what they're talking about.

Um, it was a paper about how modern studies in the formation of memory help to explain why the many different accounts of the First Vision are not contradictory.

So, how memory is formed can explain why the early accounts of Joseph Smith don't have the Father and the Son as separate and distinct gods, but the later ones do.

No.

And yes, I'm John Dehlin, and we're here covering the amazing book, Brigham Young, Pioneer Prophet.

We did 41 episodes with John Turner for the Joseph Smith Podcast, and now we're four episodes into what's going to be at least a 20-episode series with John Turner on Brigham Young.

Now, John Turner, if Brigham Young lived way longer than Joseph as prophet, how can we do less chapters on Brigham Young than Joseph Smith? The math isn't mathing.

Maybe we're getting better.

[laughs]

[laughs]

... as, as we go along.

Well, just to quickly remind everybody, this series is best consumed sequentially, which means you go back to the Joseph Smith Podcast, watch all 41, then start at part one of the Brigham Young series, and then you end at part four.

They cannot even begin to imagine what that would do to them in their current state.

So the modern Mormon church is not the church of the days of Joseph Smith, and so when he died, he left lots of questions unanswered.

And so there were discussions, why is Jesus a god? And so there, there was speculation Jesus would get to marry and have children and go through the temple and stuff like that, which, well, if that's part of the eternal law of progression, okay, but there...

You couldn't do that in Jesus' day because that temple wasn't the same temple [laughs].

So we've, we've all recognized the f- fundamental foundational starting point, and now in social media, the Mormons talk about, uh, the creedal God and, and that type of thing, as if they can somehow change the fundamentals of Mormon theology.

And, and many of these online influencers, they are neo-Mormons.

They are-- They recognize the utter incoherence of Joseph Smith's final solution.

The final solution of the King Follett funeral discourse and the sermon in the grove of the immediate sermons before his death, uh, its final solution, it's not final.