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Another interesting charge against Joseph Smith is the Book "View of the Hebrews". Before to analyze it I'd like to put togheter the information regarding this book.
By the early 1900s Elder Roberts evidently had become the
chief Church spokesman in defending the authenticity of the Book of Mormon.Roberts’s
interest in the origins of the book and his prompt and eager acceptance of almost any
opportunity to debate its virtues led him into written conflict with Theodore Schroeder, a
former lawyer in Utah who had been disbarred by the state supreme court for unprofessional
conduct. Theodore Schroeder
wrote a series of four articles for the American Historical Magazine, attacking Book of
Mormon claims by resurrecting the “old exploded Spaulding story” of its origins.
The anti-Mormon Salt Lake Tribune was reproducing the articles, and Roberts wrote the
editor, Colonel William Nelson, asking the privilege of answering Schroeder, who was
claiming to have found a second Spaulding manuscript. At Nelson’s suggestion Roberts
corresponded with David I. Nelke, the editor of American Historical Magazine, who
indicated he would consider publishing a response to Schroeder if it met the literary and
professional standards of his journal. The first Roberts reply was so satisfactory that
eventually all four of his responses were printed, along with Schroeder’s attacks.
I will jump the "spaulding manuscript story" because I have another page talking
about it.
Woodbridge Riley in 1902 was the first author to suggest a relationship between View of
the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon (The Founder of Mormonism, New York, 1902, pp. 124-26)
Schroeder claimed that the Book of Mormon was based upon a second Spaulding manuscript,
allegedly a story written in scriptural style and asserting that native Americans were
descended from Israelites. It was this second manuscript which Roberts spent 114 large
printed pages destroying; he never lacked for words or thoroughness in his polemical
writing.
The last of Roberts’s four articles on the subject was particularly germane in view
of his later questions about the Book of Mormon. He first declared that when the
twenty-two-year-old Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon he did not need the
assistance of a Solomon Spaulding, a Sidney Rigdon, or any other man—that Smith was
“superior in talents…[and] in literary power of expression” to any of the
supposed authors of the book. Second, he wrote, if the book had been produced as explained
by Schroeder “it would not have been so full of petty errors in grammar and the
faulty use of words as is found in the first edition of the Book of Mormon.…They are
ingrained in it; they are constitutional faults” as expressed by the uneducated but
brilliant boy prophet. Roberts concluded his four articles with the somewhat immodest but
perhaps accurate claim that they constituted “a successful rejoinder.[which] exhibits
how inherently weak, and foolish this Spaulding theory”27
Roberts first tackled the problem of whether the Book of Mormon was produced after the
publication, in English, of works on ancient American civilizations that would have been
available to Smith. As Roberts explained, “Was it possible for Joseph Smith…to
have possessed such a knowledge of American antiquities and traditions that they [Smith
and his associates] could make their book’s alleged historical incidents, and the
customs of its peoples, conform to the antiquities and traditions of the native
Americans?” He answered the question by arguing that to become acquainted with the
vast knowledge of American antiquities and traditions and then make them conform to the
story in the Book of Mormon was an insurmountable task for a youthful prophet who was
“not a student of books.” Roberts then listed the only works which “so far
as I can ascertain” might have been accessible to Joseph Smith: the publications of
the American Antiquarian Society, 1823; Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews, second
edition, 1825; The History of the American Indians, by James Adair, 1775; and Alexander
Humboldt’s books on New Spain, 1811. Roberts discusses these works more fully in his
“A Book of Mormon Study” presented in this volume, but it is interesting how
easily he brushed them aside in 1909. This list also revealed how little he knew of the
extensive literature on the subject of American antiquities. He was to spend several years
in study to rectify that omission.
Roberts authored a document based on his investigations of the Ethan Smith book. This
quite brief analysis of Roberts’s conclusions about a possible relationship between
the View of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon was apparently written during the 1920s and
given the title “A Parallel.”
After the death of Roberts, his oldest son, Ben E. Roberts, and perhaps others, informed
friends about the document, and soon it was public knowledge that the parallel of the Book
of Mormon with Ethan Smith’s work seemed to cast doubt on the authenticity of the
Mormon scripture. To correct this misapprehension, Ben E. Roberts in a letter of July 22,
1939, declared that his father had “found nothing in his study which reflected upon
the integrity of Joseph Smith’s account of the Book of Mormon.” On October 10,
1946, Ben E. Roberts discussed his father s work on the Book of Mormon before the
Timpanogos Club in Salt Lake City and, after the meeting, distributed mimeographed copies
of “A Parallel” to members of the audience. Dr. Mervin B. Hogan, of the faculty
of the University of Utah, obtained a copy and had it published in January 1956 in the
Rocky Mountain Mason. The parallel is composed of eighteen typed pages concerned with
eighteen items and with notes and quotations from both the Book of Mormon and the View of
the Hebrews arranged in parallel columns on each page. This short review, since its
publication in 1946, has been the object of many evaluations by both supporters and
detractors of the theory. “A Parallel,” as originally written by B. H. Roberts,
including handwritten additions and corrections, is included in this volume. The much
longer and more comprehensive “Study,” presented here, will now probably take
the place of the 1946 publication for argument and debate.
Ethan Smith, the author of View of the Hebrews, was a New England minister who was born in
Belchertown, Massachusetts, December 19, 1762, and died in Pompey, New York, on August 29,
1849. During his long life he was prominent enough to have a number of his sermons
printed, and he also authored or edited several books, including A Dissertation on the
Prophecies relative to Anti-Christ and the Last Times; Memoirs of Mrs. Abigail Bailey; and
his most famous work, View of the Hebrews. At the time he was writing this latter book, he
was the minister of the Congregational Church at Poultney, Vermont, where he served from
November 21, 1821, to December 1826.67 Early in 1827 the Reverend Smith apparently visited
Palmyra, because by December 31, 1826, the Wayne Sentinel posted his name for letters
remaining in the Palmyra Post Office (Wayne Sentinel, January 5, 1827). As some critics
who relate Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon to Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews
have pointed out, Oliver Cowdery, Joseph’s cousin and his scribe during the writing
of the Mormon scripture, had lived in Poultney for twenty-two years until 1825. In fact,
Cowdery’s stepmother and three of his sisters were members of Ethan Smith’s
congregation, according to the Poultney Church Records, Book 3 (August 3, 1818).68
Poultney is just a half-mile from the border separating the states of Vermont and New York
and about seventy miles from Albany, which marked the eastern end of the Erie Canal,
completed as far west as Brockfort in 1823, about forty miles beyond the village of
Palmyra. Today it is difficult to measure the importance of the Grand Canal as the
preeminent thoroughfare to the interior of the northern United States during the 1820s and
until the 1850s, when the railroad became the carrier of people and freight. To be
situated on the canal meant that the inhabitants of a village could receive freight from
New York City, about 335 miles away, on boats that traveled forty miles a day; passengers
and mail could move eighty to ninety miles in twenty-four hours. Thus, in about a
week’s time, news and goods could be delivered to families and businesses in the town
from the great metropolitan city at the mouth of the Hudson, and a constant stream of
freighters and packet boats made Palmyra a bustling and busy stop on the Erie Canal.
Furthermore, a reading of the town’s weekly newspaper, the Wayne Sentinel, indicates
that there were at least three bookstores which advertised wares to the citizens of
Palmyra: The Canandaigua Bookstore, and two local establishments, J. D. Evernghim &
Co. and the Wayne Bookstore, the latter run by Tucker & Gilbert, the publishers of the
newspaper. In at least two issues the Wayne Bookstore listed the titles of books just
received for sale, a four-column spread in the December 17, 1823, issue, and a similar
listing of new books in the November 24, 1826, issue. But usually Tucker & Gilbert
merely noted almost weekly “have this day received, several boxes of Books” or
“More New Books” at their bookstore, later renamed the Palmyra Book Store.
Occasionally, an entrepreneur would import a stock of books to be auctioned off, as did
one who advertised on August 30, 1825, “18 Cases of Books, recently received from New
York and Philadelphia, being the largest and most varied collection of Books…ever
offered at public or private sale in this village.…The books are fresh and new.”
With such opportunities to acquire books, it would be unusual if the Joseph Smith family
were not aware of Ethan Smith’s work.
In addition, Josiah Priest’s The Wonders of Nature and Providence Displayed was in
the local Manchester Rental Library, just five miles from Joseph Smith’s home, and
the membership records, now located in the Ontario County Historical Society in
Canandaigua, show that it was checked out repeatedly during the years 1826 to 1828.
Priest’s book included a long selection from Ethan Smith’s work and attempted to
establish that the Indians were of Hebrew descent. Very early in this century I.
Woodbridge Riley in his book, The Founder of Mormonism, had noted that Ethan Smith’s
“work was published in Poultney, Vermont, next to Windsor County, where Joseph’s
parents once lived, and by 1825 had circulated to westernmost New York.” But as Fawn
M. Brodie, another of the writers to hypothesize a connection between the two books by the
two Smiths, has pointed out, “It may never be proved that Joseph saw View of the
Hebrews before writing the Book of Mormon.” Yet at the same time she insisted that
the parallel features could not be “mere coincidence.”
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