Joseph’s Magic Show with David Whitmer (Jim Lucas/Jonathan Neville)

Gospel Tangents Podcast

Jim Lucas & Jonathan Neville explain why they think David Whitmer's description of the translation process of Book of Mormon isn't reliable. Check out our conversation... https://youtu.be/TYPzopAsWyM Don’t miss our other conversations with Jim Lucas: https://gospeltangents.com/people/jim-lucas/ Joseph’s Magic Show GT 00:32 Did you finish what you wanted to say about David Whitmer? Jim 00:34 No, we've got to finish David Whitmer. Jonathan 00:36 We got sidetracked a little bit. Jim 00:38 So anyway. GT 00:38 That's what tangents are all about. Right? Jim 00:39 Right. So David Whitmer, I'll make it quick. He's in Fayette, where 78% of the Book of Mormon is translated. But he's not a translator. He's not a scribe. He was never a scribe. He never really says explicitly that he was present for the translation, except for maybe this one time when he describes everybody was there in this one account where he says, "Oh, everybody was there; all of my family, the Smiths came over, and bunch of other people. GT 01:17 He was there for the translation? Jonathan 01:18 Sidney Rigdon was. Jim 01:18 For the demonstration using the stone in the hat. So, he describes his one event. GT 01:24 Was this like a magic show? What is this? Jim 01:26 It's Joseph trying to satisfy people's curiosity by using his seer stone in the hat to try to give him an idea of how the translation is working. GT 01:36 I mean, it feels like a woman with a crystal ball: "I can see the future." I mean, is that what he's doing basically? Jim 01:42 Well, if you follow the seer stone in the hat account, that's what the whole thing was. And we're saying, no, no. That's not what the whole thing was. It was Joseph. I mean, there was an account of a cousin of the Whitmer’s was working at the Whitmer home, as a housemaid or whatever. And she was like, "What's going on upstairs? What are these two guys doing up there? This is really weird." They come down and they're all glow-y and spiritual and stuff. Something strange is going on here. I'm quitting and going home. And I'm going to tell everybody the Whitmer cousins have gone crazy, unless I'm told what's going on. So it was that kind of thing which Zenas Gurley uses this great expression "awful curiosity." And there's probably a lot of other people really [wondering,] "So what's going on? How's this work?" So, Joseph did this demonstration. He pulled out his peep stone, which was a seer stone, which he carried around with him all the time. I call it his pet rock. He really liked it. It's a beautiful stone, if it's the one the Church has in its archives. GT 02:53 The white one or the brown one? Jim 02:54 Yeah. Jonathan 02:54 The brown one. GT 02:54 Both? Jim 02:56 Well, mainly people are talking about the striped one, the brown and white striped one. Jonathan 03:01 Which Jerry says came from Wyoming or somewhere. Jim 03:04 Right, right. Jerry Grover says that that kind of a stone was in the gut of a dinosaur, and that's why it's so smooth because dinosaurs, they're like birds. They'd have these stones in their guts to help them digest, and then when they died, it fell out and so forth. So, he says that that kind of a stone would be especially rare in eastern Pennsylvania. Jonathan 03:39 Or New York. Jim 03:40 So when Willard Chase found it, you can understand that he had never seen a rock like this before. I mean, you must know rockhounds, people who like to collect rocks. So, this was a really special, neat looking rock. That's what Joseph got and carried around with him until he gave it to Oliver Cowdery. So, it was like I said. I call it his pet rock. He really loved it. It was really fun rock. And, we'll get into the Martin Harris angle of that. GT 04:12 When was this demonstration, approximately what year? Jim 04:14 This would have been during that translation process, 1829,