Joseph smith is a fine, sensitive biography – deseret news

Joseph smith is a fine, sensitive biography – deseret news: "Joseph Smith" is a fine, sensitive

Ron Barney My primary purpose today, necessarily too brief, is to portray a few insights from the extant documentary record that must be considered in any appraisal of Joseph Smith and his claims as an authentic prophetic figure. This essay is part of a chapter from a book I am writing on Joseph Smith and his prophetic style.

I want to say at the outset that there have been many among the faithful scholars of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who have plowed some of this ground previously, though differently than I will today. To these other scholars we owe a great debt. I am one who has benefitted by the great work of the faithful explicators of the past and the present.

Perhaps, paradoxically, we also owe a great debt to the critics of Joseph Smith who, in their attempt to undermine the Prophet and the LDS Church, have demanded answers to hard questions and drawn conclusions, however misguided they have been, that have provoked us into a response. But I also believe that there are empirical matters that can either disqualify or corroborate an expression of faith.

In the case at hand, those empirical matters are the documentary record that survives today regarding Joseph and his claims to having been divinely appointed by God to restore what is now known as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is from the documentary record created during the early Church period that we find the evidence, sometimes in fragments and shards that confirm the divine appointment of Joseph Smith as an authentic prophet.

But I assert that this documentary record substantiates the posture that Joseph Smith was a truth-teller and that he experienced what he said he witnessed, however limited our understanding may be of the same. However, the selective use of some of these same documents by his critics, who seem to ignore the full range of the records that exist, can significantly skew the panoramic picture by a distortive arrangement of the evidence.

Or it may have been sheer invention, created some time after when the need arose for a magnificent tradition.