Talk:Spalding–Rigdon theory of Book of Mormon authorship

There's a couple of important points missing in this article that really ought to be there:

1. Hurlbut had a serious, dedicated agenda to disprove the Latter-day Saint religion, this agenda held far higher priority to him than anything mundane like telling the truth, avoiding misquoting, tricking people into saying what he wanted them to say in an affidavit, editing their affidavit, etc. Some of the people who signed his affidavits later reported they had never met him or signed any such.

2. E.B. Howe, in reporting in his newspaper that the Book of Mormon had been plagiarized from Spalding's manuscript, was holding a card that he wasn't showing. He himself had "borrowed" the manuscript from Spalding and was keeping it in his files, unseen, unable to be checked. Another man bought his paper (and his files), and when he retired, he moved to Hawaii. The manuscript was eventually discovered among his papers in Hawaii. Howe was hiding it so it couldn't be checked, so that his claim of plagiarism could not be debunked. Friendly Person (talk) 23:30, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Who Really Wrote the Book of Mormon?

Why is there no mention of:

Cowdrey, Wayne (2005). Who Really Wrote the Book of Mormon?. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House. ISBN 0758605277.

?

I think it is the latest book expounding on the Spalding–Rigdon theory?

TuckerResearch (talk) 05:42, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Broadhurst and Cowdrey

For good reason Cowdrey's book is not treated--it hardly qualifies as a scholarly work. Like his contemporary, Dale Broadhurst, and like Hurlbut and Howe from the start, the Spalding theory's proponents have never included any capable thinkers, but have operated in and promoted an artificial dichotomy which deludes casual and disinterested observers into thinking Spalding is the scientific alternative to the gold plates story. Here is one example of one major proponent's competence (http://www.mormonstudies.com/fragment.htm):

D. Broadhurst, in attempting to buttress the existence of the hypothetical second Spalding manuscript, asserts that Rigdon made use of the MS while dictating his own "biography." That the biography is written in third person, and heaps endless praise on Rigdon, and gives no indication of being truly autobiographical but was obviously written by a third party well acquainted with him, does nothing to deter Broadhurst from insisting that Rigdon could not dictate his own story without quoting from a MS he had stolen and committed to memory decades before. Or maybe Broadhurst imagines that Rigdon concealed Spalding's MS on his lap while dictating his extravagantly boastful history.

And remember, this MS has never been seen, but was only hypothesized when the extant MS was examined and determined to have little in common with the Book of Mormon. But Broadhurst and his ilk see Spalding in the haystacks--everything Smith and Rigdon wrote or dictated was based on Spalding's unpublished writings. Such is the intellect of the Spalding conspiratorialists, and such are the reasons that historians of even marginal competence have never taken the conspiracy seriously. --AGF 11/09/08 71.219.23.250 (talk) 21:10, 9 November 2008 (UTC)agfosterjr

1830

I deleted this text because it was essentially argumentative:

However, it still needs to be explained how Rigdon contributed to or influenced the Book of Mormon when he was first introduced to the Book of Mormon in Dec 1830 after it was published.

I actually agree with the statement, but that criticism needs to be made in some way that acknowledges what proponents of this theory say. The theory is, pardon me, essentially a conspiracy theory, and therefore discounts Rigdon’s accounts of his introduction to the Book of Mormon as unreliable, part of his plot to release the Book of Mormon under someone else's name. I personally find the story and the history that is known about Rigdon convincing against the S-R theory, regardless of the recent problematic computer analysis (Jockers et al.)—problematic for reasons that haven't been published and therefore can't be cited in the article—, but this article is about what the theory maintains, not about why people don't like it. If you want to put that argument back in, consider framing it in a way that acknowledges that theory proponents don't accept that Ridgon was introduced to the Book of Mormon in Dec. 1830 and in fact maintain the opposite. -Fenevad (talk) 23:42, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Rigdon biography: moved url

As of about 2011 the url to the above cited treatment of Rigdon's "autobiography" has been moved to: http://www.solomonspalding.com/bomstudies/fragment.htm