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The Prophet Puzzle: Interpretive Essays on Joseph Smith (Essays on Mormonism Series)

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These interpretive essays on Joseph Smith (JS) are a fresh air in the never-ending discussion of this remarkable man. He wasn't like the mysticists or like other grand persons of history, but a farm boy, low-educated, poor: but just after two-three years, he become divine, talking to Jesus and listening to the voice of angels nearly every day. The essays concentrate on this man and on his surrounding. Some essays bring up the work, which were translated/written by him, others go thru some specific points of his history. The essays contribute therefore to a holistic approach of this man.

Sandberg's essay is one of the best about JS. Thru the famous psychologist Jung and his works, he presents a JS who has transcended the material boundaries of language and sign and reached a spiritual salvation - which he describes in plain Enlighs language. This is particularly shown in the last essay, which is JS' own King Folett speach. JS sees himself to have solved the mystery of godhood, glorification and why we are on earth. How wonderful it would be for us normal individuals without any religious connotation to have this self-confidence like JS. I - to be more personal - admire JS. I would never be able to preach polygamy and say it came from god or that I have met an angel and been called for prophethood. Did he ever get nervous?

The answer is sort of ambivalent. The essays of Anderson and Foster tries to analyse JS psychologically. Anderson questions the fact that one could put a diagnose on a dead person, relying on contradictory sources. Foster however, believes that JS was mano-depressive. He means that the only way he could implement polygamy was thru this mano-phase, where one is absolutely sure that everything depends on one issue and is eager to change the world - like becoming a president - JS tried that too, without succes.

Bergera touches this issue of presidency and JS leadership - a good perspective. He bases his essay on the Weberian types of leadership, where charismatic is one of those and apply it on JS. Huggins and England are more interested in JS' as a theologian and a romanticist. Huggins goes thru JS own translation of Romans and finds that already in his revision of Romans, JS tries to excuse polygamy .... England, his style of writing is like a melody, making her best to find JS behind among others the King Folett speach.

One of the best - again - is Staker. Her essay appears for the first time in this compilation and sheds a light on the Book of Abraham and its relation to polygamy. JS introduced polygamy little by little and confined on his closest friends, marrying several of their wives. She finds an interesting link to the foundation of Relief society, which today has become a sort of charity organisation. Read it!

Jan Shipps and her way of ignoring the charlatan-prophet paradox is also in the book. Vogel - like his psychiography "Making of a prophet" promotes his model à la Shipps and treats JS as a pious fraud, a one that believed if white lies could bring humans close to jesus and god, why not lie, ie. the means justifies the end.

Two wonderful backgrounds, one about the New York area of those days - by Bringhurst and an overview of the biograhpies on Smith, from 1830s to 1970s by Alexander, are worth reading too (I'll end up recommending every essay soon....). Two essays treat what was introduced and analysed by Quinn, the magical tradition of early LDS.

Owens - depending a bit too much on "Refiner's fire" enhances JS hermetic side and Taylor, puts JS' treasure seeking in a similar magical context. Very briefly - it seems that the early LDS or the rest of people did not view magic as contradictory to religion. As this changed over time, LDS tried to minimise this context. I believe that this magical adventurous side of JS actually prepared make a prophet of him.

It is wonderful that a traditionalist appears in Signature among all the "heathens", hihi! We have Bushman, who thru his balanced view of history writes about JS' as a translator. His way of mentioning Book of Abraham is diplomatic. A very very "quoty" essay is the one by Wagoner and Walker. They go thru several sources about the translation process.

Will the book change a traditionalist view of prophethood? I don't know. I believe that much of being a prophet, is to be confirmed as such. In Swedish we say that beauty lies in the viewer's eye - funny it sounds in English. I have learned that being perfect - which is expected from president, popes and prophets - is a process and you can never say I am perfect and all-knowing today. If JS had the research about bible close to hand, maybe every thing would have been different. Maybe. If JS would be a feminist, he wouldn't introduce polygamy, or if he would, he would allow women to have several men. But as always, he was a child of his time and this influenced his religious and spiritual expressions. I don't believe he lied, I think he was sure of what he was doing, I think that he had this burning in the bosom all his life and tried to express this wonderful feeling by writing spiritual work. Gosh, I sound so "Pollyannish", hm.

The Prophet Puzzle is a collection of 15 essays about Mormon Church founder Joseph Smith. Previous reviewers have done a great job summarizing the merits of these essays. I echo their fine reviews. The Prophet Puzzle works as a wonderful supplement to any biography on Joseph Smith (be it Brodie, Bushman, Hill, Vogel, etc.), or simply as a stand alone work. The essay by Karl C. Sandberg is worth the purchase price alone. Mormons everywhere, expand your understanding of our great prophet and buy this book! You will come to a better understanding of the man from these 15 essays than you will from a lifetime subscription to Ensign. To everyone else: buy this book and get inside the mind of a complicated man and religious genius.

This 1999 collection includes essays by figures such as Jan Shipps, Dan Vogel, Richard Bushman, Newell Bringhurst, Eugene England, and others.

The editor writes in the Introduction, "The essays in this volume take up Smith's legacy of enigma. Using tools from disciplines as diverse as history, psychology, literary studies, sociology, and theology, the selections here represent thirty years of writing about Joseph Smith... The collection's purpose is to make a variety of interpretations of Joseph Smith, both previously published and new, accessible to a larger audience."

Here are some quotations from the book:

"(Fawn) Brodie's principal drawback is that while she recognizes Joseph Smith's tremendous creativity, her views require ambivalence about the religion he created. Her narrative makes it plain that Mormonism was attractive and religiously satisfying to thousands of people during Smiths' lifetime and afterward, but in the end she sees ... 'the barrenness of his spiritual legacy...'" (Pg. 10)
"I suggest that Smith really believed he was called of God to preach repentance to a sinful world but that he felt justified in using deception to accomplish his mission more fully. Like the faith healer who uses confederates to create a faith-promoting atmosphere in which true miracles can occur, Smith assumed the role of prophet... and issued revelations to create a setting in which true conversion experiences could take place." (Pg. 61)
"As time went by, Joseph played down the place of magic and seerstones in his early life... he knew that involvement with magic would discredit the church... in 1830 he gave up using seerstones and spoke no more about them." (Pg. 79)
"A significant amount of Missouri/anti-Mormon hostility stemmed from anxiety concerning Latter-day Saint views on the issue of black slavery... The expression of Mormon anti-slavery attitudes is not surprising given that Smith along with the vast majority of his Latter-day Saint followers were from nonslave-holding regions of the northeast." (Pg. 123)
"It was no accident that the Smiths' leading collaborator in their Palmyra treasure-seeking was Willard Chase, a Methodist preacher. Because of the intersection with religious seeking I prefer to call them treasure-seekers rather than the more sordid-sounding money-diggers. And if we recognize this intersection, then they do not appear such a bad lot for the Smiths to have associated with." (Pg. 147)
"How does any form of Bipolar Affective Disorder explain the Book of Mormon, Smith's revelations, or the Book of Abraham? At best, it only provides Smith with thoughtful introspection when depressed and energy when hypomanic. It contributes little to the explanation of these 'miracles.'" (Pg. 229)

Signature Books should be congratulated for their "Essays on Mormonism" series. Each volume gathers together important, even classic essays on a single topic in Mormon studies in convenient book form--essays that usually appeared in hard-to-find, rare periodicals. This book in the series is devoted to Joseph Smith, with essays that range from orthodox defence of the faith like that of Richard Bushman, to naturalistic disbelief like that of Dan Vogel. Other volumes in this series include "Faithful History", "Tending the Garden" and "Multiply and Replenish."

Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, was one of the most significant religious leaders of the nineteenth century. His efforts sparked the rise of a new religious movement that has proven to be lasting and dynamic. But who was this man Joseph Smith, and what made him unique? That has been a subject of considerable investigation by many observers. This book collects some of the more thoughtful recent explorations of this theme. The fifteen essays in this volume collect several of those previously published in journals as well as adding three that appear here for the first time.

This collection is a welcome addition to the literature on the Mormon prophet neither for its exhaustive consideration nor for the insights offered, but because it collects in one place several important articles on the place of Joseph Smith in the history of American religion. Several of the leading scholars of early Mormonism-among them Richard Bushman, Jan Shipps, and Thomas G. Alexander-are represented in the collection, as are outstanding non-Mormon scholars such as Alan Taylor and Lawrence Foster.

All the essays in this collection were thought-provoking, but one that I especially enjoyed was by Dan Vogel, "The Prophet Puzzle Revisited." Vogal notes that in one incident, Joseph Smith used his magic stone to see a treasure buried deep in the ground. He also saw the tail feather of a bird on the treasure chest, but when they dug into the earth, they found that the treasure had moved. The tail feather, however, was still there---an obvious case of salting.

In reply to Mormon apologists, Vogal says, "Despite an attempt to minimize his early involvement in treasure searching, Smith was in reality an aggressive and ambitious leader among the competing treasure seers of Manchester, New York" (p. 51).

Vogal was too kind in his use of "minimize." A more accurate description of these efforts would have been "lying for the Lord." See my review for the collection of essays by Mormon "scholars" edited by Donald Parry. Click below on "Echoes and Evidences for the Book of Mormon."

John Sorenson's essay in that collection is especially enlightening. Speaking of Humboldt's "Researches," Sorenson says "the chance is vanishingly small that the learned German's esoteric work would have been accessible anywhere in America except at a handful of the best libraries on the Atlantic seaboard, to which Joseph had no access before the Book of Mormon was published" (1830).

This confident, scholarly statement is completely false.

First, Alexander Humboldt was not an "esoteric" writer; rather, he was one of the most celebrated scholars (and explorers) of his age. Further, I own the book that Mr. Sorenson is referring to, and it is not "esoteric" but written for the general reader. Humboldt visited Thomas Jefferson, and they went to Philadelphia to see the "ninth wonder of the world," the first reconstructed mammoth in about 1805.

Second, Humboldt's "History of New Spain" was advertised on the front page of the Palmyra newspaper (Palmyra Register, October 6, 1818). Thus, there is every reason to believe that Humboldt's "Researches" was also advertized (the surviving issues are incomplete, especially for early dates).

Sorensen was being intellectually dishonest in saying "Researches" was only in east-coast libraries. He knows better. BYU has the microfilm of the Palmyra newspapers.

Every week, long lists of books appeared in the newspapers. The farmers were better informed about the classics than the people living in the area today.

Third, the Smith's subscribed to the newspaper, and they only lived two level miles from the Grandin Book Store. Earlier they lived on Palmyra's Main Street. Joseph's father had been a school teacher, and Joseph's brother Hyrum was on the Manchester School Board. Hyrum was also a member of the Masonic Lodge of Palmyra. Thus, all kinds of books could have easily come to the Smiths by simple borrowing, and lastly, the Smiths taught Bible classes at their house, according to Bushman.

This is not to mention that Joseph Smith's grandfather, Solomon Mack, wrote a religious autobiography when he was 78 (Joseph was ten). The book begins: "I, Solomon Mack" and talks about his parents. The Book of Mormon begins, "I, Nephi" and talks about Nephi's parents. Thus, at an early age, Joseph Smith had a novelists hardest question answered for him: "How do I begin my story?"

The Smith's could have had any book they wanted. Seventy percent of the books sold in the US were published in England and the book trade (both ways) was great--$2.5 million dollars for around 1820 (Joseph was 15 then). Lastly, some 200 book wagons roamed the American countryside selling books--money not being a problem because they accepted produce and bookstores accepted "clean rags" in payment.


Echoes and Evidences of the Book of Mormon