long ago ideas

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago." - Friedrich Nietzsche. Long ago, Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery conquered false claims that the Book of Mormon was fiction or that it came through a stone in a hat. But these old claims have resurfaced in recent years. To conquer them again, we have to return to what Joseph and Oliver taught.

Tuesday, October 9, 2018

Letter VII hidden in the Joseph Smith Papers

If you go to the Joseph Smith Papers and search for "Cumorah," you will get 16 results--and not one of them goes to Letter VII.

The M2C citation cartel has effectively censored Letter VII for a long time because it unequivocally and specifically explains it is a fact that the Hill Cumorah of Mormon 6:6 is in New York.

Now that Letter VII is breaking through and thousands of Church members are discovering it, the cartel has tried to persuade Church members to disbelieve the prophets who originally wrote Letter VII and their successors who have taught. There was an awesome post on Book of Mormon Central Censor not long ago that purported to tell Church members how to "understand and use" Letter VII. We discussed that here: http://bookofmormonwars.blogspot.com/2018/07/m2c-intellectuals-terrified-of-letter.html

That's not working out so well. Most Church members who discover Letter VII, especially in context, believe the teachings of the prophets and reject the intellectuals who repudiate the prophets.

Nevertheless, the censorship continues, as we saw in the new Saints book.
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Many Church members find it significant that Joseph Smith had his scribes copy Letter VII (along with President Cowdery's other letters about Church history) into his personal history. 

This means anyone can find it right in the Joseph Smith Papers.

But there's a problem with the search engine in the Joseph Smith Papers. Let's call it a "quirk" because we don't want to believe the editors of the Joseph Smith Papers have intentionally omitted Letter VII from their search engine.

But the fact is, if you go to the Joseph Smith Papers and search for "Cumorah," you will get 16 results--and not one of them goes to Letter VII.

The links go to the first edition of the Book of Mormon, the early versions of D&C 128, and even President Cowdery's Letter VIII--but not to Letter VII.

(Curiously, the search results give you a link to only one of the Cumorah references in Letter VIII. It omits this one, found near the beginning of Letter VIII. "I have now given sufficent on the subject of the hill Cumorah—it has a singular and imposing appearance for that country, and must ex[c]ite the curiosity curious enquiry of every lover of the book of Mormon."

The page in the Joseph Smith Papers you won't find by searching
for "Cumorah." Instead, you have to search for "Camorah," even
though both words are plainly visible on the page.
If you want to read what President Cowdery said about the New York Cumorah, you can search for Camorah, which is the typo in the original text. That will take you to the page in Letter VII. Of course, no one knows about that typo.

Here is the link: http://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-1834-1836/90

For more fun, once you get to that page of Letter VII, search for "Cumorah" and the search engine will give you 7 new references to Cumorah, 2 from Letter VII and 5 from Letter VIII. You can click on this link to see that search result. Only one of those references shows up when you search for "Cumorah" on the main Joseph Smith Papers search box.

As I said, surely there's an innocent quirk somewhere.

But it seems to me, on its face, that it is difficult to create a search engine that will find one word (Camorah) but not a nearby word (Cumorah) on the same page.
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There's another bonus.

Your searches for Cumorah will not take you to the critical quotation from Lucy Mack Smith about Cumorah. If you've been reading this blog, you know that this quotation was carefully censored from the Saints book, as well.

Here's what Lucy wrote:

“Stop, father, Stop.” said Joseph, “it was the angel of the Lord— as I passed by the hill of Cumorah, where the plates are, the angel of the Lord met me and said, that I had not been engaged enough in the work of the Lord;"

It's important to realize that Lucy put this in quotations, and that this even occurred before Joseph got the plates. He could only have learned the name of the hill from Moroni, as Oliver Cowdery and Parley P. Pratt taught the people during their mission to the Lamanites in 1831.

Here is the page:

Another page about Cumorah you can't find in the JSP search engine
if you search for "Cumorah."





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