Posted by:
dalebroadhurst
(
)
Date: October 23, 2013 01:30PM
AnonAbdulJabbar Wrote:
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> What is the earliest date that documents the claim
> that joseph made regarding the Moroni visit and
> the gold plates? I believe it was 1829, but I
> vaguely recall Joseph mentioning the gold plates
> to someone as early as 1827?????? Either way,
> there is no evidence that he spoke to anyone about
> Moroni or the plates in 1823 (when he claimed
> Moroni first appeared to him).
Jonathan A. Hadley, a Palmyra newspaper editor, wrote
this recollection, in 1842:
>Rochester, New York, July 14, 1842.
>...I went to Palmyra, the residence of the Smiths and
>of the early dupes of Jo, in the Spring of 1827, a
>year or two after the pretended finding of the plates
>from which the book of Mormon was translated. The story
>of the manner in which it is said the plates were found,
>I have often had from Martin Harris...
http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/dbroadhu/NE/miscne02.htm#072842areprinted here:
http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/dbroadhu/NY/wayn1840.htm#091442This recollection appears to verify that Smith was
"pretending" to have found golden plates, near Palmyra,
as early as 1827, and that Martin Harris was one of the
first local residents that began to spread the story.
Hadley's own publishing of the Mormon story, however, did
not appear until two years later:
>In the fall of 1827, a person by the name of
>Joseph Smith, of Manchester, Ontario county, reported
>that he had been visited in a dream by the spirit of
>the Almighty, and informed that in a certain hill in
>that town, was deposited this Golden Bible...
http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/dbroadhu/NY/wayn1830.htm#081129reprinted here, in the newspaper Sidney Rigdon usually read:
http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/dbroadhu/NE/miscne00.htm#100229See also some of the earliest preserved correspondence
to/from Smith family members, for possible verification.
UD