Since Worldnetdaily has whetted my appetite, I have to ask. Aren't the lost 116 pages supposed to be proof of Joseph's divine calling? The brilliant logic used to arrive at this conclusion escapes me at the moment. Would someone please clue me in?

Yes, and the dog ate my homework!

Yet Another LDS Red Herring.

I thought Joseph's fish was red snapper.

The lost pages are more suggestive of fraud than anything else. Smith couldn't get help from God to get the transcripts back? Then he used the lame excuse that someone would alter the document to make him seem to be a fraud. I can't believe how naive his followers were and are.

I do believe that Mrs. Harris was a sober thinker.

It was all written by hand, so wouldn't it be sort of obvious if someone changed it? The handwriting and ink wouldn't match exactly. They'd have to either squeeze in changes, or rewrite the whole thing. I can imagine squeezing in changes "I Nephi, havingNOTbeen born of goodly parents..." And then Joseph could still just say, "I wrote this copy, not that copy." What could the opposition say? "Nuh uh! You wrote THIS one!"

what does world nut daily have to do with it ?

How could someone comparing the two tell which was a fraud, <or Both, ha ha>?

Chris Johnson mentions the 116 pages were the same as another manuscript?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAGasQ7j_ZI

The church's historian office has known the truth about the missing 116 pages all along. It seems that Lucy Mack Smith needed some filler for the two-seater outhouse. Folks from all over UpState wiped their asses with the sacred record. The Sanitary Boner.

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I can just see Mormon, struggling to inscribe the "abridged version", looking up to heaven and yelling "I have to do this shit because in 1500 years WHAT'S going to happen!?"

Imagine how pissed off Moroni was after he lugged several sets of heavy plates from Cumorah I (somewhere near the isthmus of Tehuantepec) to Cumorah II (in upstate New York), all alone except for angry Lamanite bands intent on murdering him. Despite keeping the plates safe during this arduous journey, and carefully sealing them up under a rock on top of a small hill (watertight sealing was necessary to keep the tumbaga from corroding), and even showing them physically to Joseph over the course of several years, plus a few angelic visions to the "spiritual eyes" of the various witnesses...

Joseph didn't even need them there to create his translation!!! He used the seer stone to see images of the plates though they were hidden in the woods or otherwise out of sight. Joseph was even able to see and translate a piece of parchment written by the Apostle John, without having the parchment in his possession (see D&C section 7).

What a wasted life.