And He Spake Unto Me, Saying....

What I've found fascinating about LDS history is that it seems to me the first religion which grown up in the world of newspapers and archives. The stories of Joseph Smith are (& I suppose this puts me squarely in the anti-Mormon camp) at best false and at worse fraudulent. It doesn't have that distance that makes other religions at least somewhat plausible. But it grew up & now has many similar characteristics to any other religion: liberals & traditionalists, debates over scripture, schismatic sects, etc. It seems to provide a great way to study religion.

On the other hand, I can't agree with Sarah Gordon that it is essential to understanding American history. It's a great laboratory for studying religion, but I think it's basically a sideshow in American history.

For a crash course:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fbzoNT7iKY

Sardonic as this is, it's also accurate.

yes, that sums it up, just about.

It's a pity they didn't mention the book of Abraham and the translations from papyri. I especially like that story.

Yeah, one of these days I'm going to try to catch up with how they deal with the inconvenient circumstances of the Book of Abraham. That must take some real ingenuity to finesse. But it's a footnote to the basic story, which the South Parkers cover pretty well.

For the uninitiated: A follower gave Smith an ancient Egyptian manuscript, which, happily, turned out to be another important scripture he could "translate" via inspiration, the Book of Abraham.

About a century later, the papyrus turned up. It was a pretty generic chunk of the Book of the Dead with no mention (strange to say) of the Old Testament patriarch.

At one point I had a book on the matter by the most prominent LDS scholar but never found time to read it.

True. Thanks, by the way, for the bibliography in the Chronicle article.

I just tried to read some stuff by Hugh Nibley about this, but I don't have enough background or patience to read it.

The wikipedia page on Nibley, by the way, is a little bit over the top.

Actually that's who who wrote the monograph I was thinking of. Somehow the author escaped me. Not sure how you can forget a name like Hugh Nibley, but I did.