![]() ![]() Doulder, William Kaye, and Henry Silver, all from the Los Angeles area. The three handwriting analysts they cite are Howard C. Cowdrey-tell their story, attempting to document the links between Spaulding’s work and that of Smith years later. In a book to be published by Vision House, the three researchers-Howard A. Other pages-about 120-and fragments were obtained later.) Kimball in 1883 obtained the most legible of the remaining manuscript pages from the man who married Smith’s widow. In 1882 a wing of the house was torn down, and the contents of the cornerstone were scattered. Smith placed the original manuscript in the cornerstone of a house in Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1841. One-the edited printer’s copy-is in the archives of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Missouri. (Smith used a number of scribes in his work, producing more than 4,000 words a day for between sixty-five and ninety days, according to a Mormon authority. The manuscript section in question is part of the so-called Kimball acquisition of twenty-two pages of First Nephi, as dictated by Smith to “an unidentified scribe,” according to Mormon historians. Working independently, and unaware of the Book of Mormon connection, all three analysts concluded that Spaulding had written all the material they examined. These reproductions and known specimens of Spaulding’s handwriting were submitted to three prominent handwriting analysts with impressive credentials. They obtained enlarged photocopies of several of the original manuscript pages of the Book of Mormon that are in archives in Salt Lake City. Now, however, three young researchers in southern California claim they have a firm case. Until now, the critics’ case has rested on circumstantial evidence (similarities of style and subject matter, and testimonies of perhaps biased persons claiming to know of a relationship between Smith and another man who may have had access to a Spaulding manuscript). At stake also will be Smith’s credibility in other basic documents of the church ( Doctrine and Covenants and The Pearl of Great Price). If the book is ever proved to be something other than what Joseph Smith claimed, the church’s foundation itself will be in question. As such, it has been called the “keystone” of the 3.8-million-member Mormon church by LDS leaders. The issue is a critical one for the Latter-day Saints: they believe that the 522-page Book of Mormon is the divinely inspired, correctly translated Word of God. But as some of his contemporaries and a number of modern critics allege, the book is at least partly the pirated work of Solomon Spaulding (or Spalding), a retired Congregationalist minister and novelist who died near Pittsburgh in 1816. As Joseph Smith, the founder of the rapidly growing Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon), tells it in official church writings, the book is a miraculous translation of “reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics” on golden plates he dug out of a hillside in 1827 near Palmyra, New York, a village between Rochester and Syracuse. Ever since the Book of Mormon was first published in 1830, its origins have been disputed.
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