People continuously create narratives about their own lives relying on selective memories. This is natural because our memories are formed by imperfect perception in the first place, and then our memories are reconstructed every time we retrieve them.
Historians create narratives in a similar manner. There is a limited, finite amount of historical source material that must be carefully curated to create and present a narrative. This is why the AHA includes this passage in its Standards of Professional Conduct:
Unfortunately, in some cases historians do create narratives and then defend them by simply omitting references to historical sources that contradict their chosen narrative.
A case in point is found in a recent book by Royal Skousen.
We'll start by observing that the pursuit of clarity, charity and understanding leads to a place of tranquility, peace, harmony, and happiness.
The goal is a Zion society where there is "unity in diversity."
Where people are "determined in one mind and in one heart, united in all things."
Where we are "of one heart and one mind," not because we all think alike but because we see clearly, have charity for one another, and enjoy understanding different perspectives and ideas instead of demanding uniformity through compulsory means and contention.
The first step is clarity, and for that we apply the FAITH model, which explains diversity in the spirit of charity and understanding.
When everyone has access to the relevant FACTS, everyone readily agrees about those facts. Then we can distinguish facts from our respective ASSUMPTIONS, INFERENCES and THEORIES to clearly understand how people arrive at their multiple working HYPOTHESES.
And voila, we all "follow after the things which make for peace, and things wherewith one may edify another."
It's easy to articulate the goals and methodology.
Let's see how it works in practice.
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In this case, we'll look at Royal Skousen's Part Seven: The Early Transmission of the Text.
The charity and understanding elements are easy.
Royal Skousen is one of the most meticulous, careful, detailed and conscientious scholars in Church history. I can't think of anyone who comes close, actually. He is widely respected by both scholars and casual readers.
Stan Carmack is a perfect collaborator who uses his knowledge of linguistics and statistical analysis to enhance Royal's research.
They do phenomenal work. I rely on their exemplary research all the time.
They are both awesome people, and we can readily assume they act in good faith.
They make their assumptions, inferences, theories and conclusions (hypotheses) clear so everyone can understand them. We can disagree with their conclusions without feeling any compulsion to have them or anyone else change their minds. We enjoy the different perspectives and seek unity in diversity.
In my view they trip over basic assumptions and inferences, but that's fine. So long as we have access to the relevant facts, different assumptions, inferences, and theories make life interesting as we all pursue truth through clarity, charity and understanding.
The challenge here is clarity, because clarity relies on a factual foundation.
In Part Seven, Royal has unwittingly or intentionally omitted highly relevant facts that deprive his readers of the ability to make informed decisions about his assumptions, inferences, and theories. Again, we assume he is acting in good faith, but we must build on a foundation of clarity, which means we want all the relevant facts.
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Here's one example from Part Seven: The Early Transmission of the Text.
The specific topic is a section titled "Another Account of Mary Whitmer's Viewing of the Golden Plates," starting on page 43 and continuing through page 47.
We will look at this in detail because the conclusion Royal presents here is a widely shared belief among many Latter-day Saints today. Actually, it's a nearly universal belief among young and new Latter-day Saints because it is conveyed in Saints, volume 1, and depicted in a famous painting.
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Royal writes, "For a long time we have known that Mary Whitmer was also shown the plates. These accounts are familiar and derive from David Whitmer and John C. Whitmer (the son of Jacob Whitmer)." (p. 43)
Then, on page 44, Royal gives us an excerpt of David Whitmer's 1878 account, recorded by Orson Pratt and Joseph F. Smith. This is all good.
Next he gives us the John C. Whitmer 1878 account, recorded and published by Andrew Jenson. This is the infamous account in which Jenson rejects what Mary Whitmer herself said. Quoting John, Andrew writes:
I have heard my grandmother (Mary Musselman Whitmer) say on several occasions that she was shown the plates of the Book of Mormon by a holy angel, whom se always called Brother Nephi. (She undoubtedly refers to Moroni, the angel who had the plates in charge.)
Royal recognizes the problem when he writes at the end of this passage on page 45, "We should note here that there is some issue about the identity of the angel. Mary Whitmer referred to him as Nephi, but John C. Whitmer identifies him as Moroni."
When we look at the passage, it's obvious it was Andrew Jenson who inserted the parentheticals. John Whitmer would not have put his grandmother's name in a parenthetical. More importantly, John was likely familiar with his uncle David's earlier account identifying the messenger, which Royal hasn't shared. This omission is our first clue something is wrong here.
Next, on pages 45-47, Royal provides an extended discussion of a "third account" which amounts to mere family lore, first recorded in 1958, complete with a fabricated direct quotation of the messenger who, contrary to Mary's own account, arrives and says, "My name is Moroni." From then on, Royal refers to the messenger as Moroni.
Finally, on page 47 (reproduced at the left), Royal writes:
We should also add here the earliest record of the angel appearing to Mary Whitmer. This is found in Edward Stevenson's interview of David Whitmer on 22-23 December 1877 and is recorded as follows in Stevenson's diary [Cook 13, Vogel 5:31]:
& the next Morning Daivds Mother Saw the Person at the Shed and he took the plates from A Box & Showed them to her She Said that they Were fastened with Rings thus: D he turned the leaves over this was a Sattisfaction to her.
[Note: Vogel 5:31 is Vogel's Early Mormon Documents (EMD), Vol 5, page 31, shown below.]
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| Quotation from Stevenson's diary, p. 47 |
Wait a minute. This is the "earliest record" but we don't get it until the end of this section?
Royal had announced his own standards of evidence back on p. 42.
In selecting witnesses and their statements, we hunt for those accounts that are firsthand, preferably in the witness’s own hand or otherwise based on fairly recent interviews of the witness. As with all accounts of historical events, we will find that they tend to change over time, which means that the earliest accounts are the most reliable ones. Most importantly, we find that the most reliable accounts are supported by more than one witness and that they end up being quite consistent. [emphasis added]
Instead of starting with the earliest account, Royal dedicates three pages on a hearsay account first recorded in 1958. He saves the earliest account for last.
But worse, he omits the key part of the earliest account!
Just a few lines before the sentence Royal quoted from the Stevenson's diary (see the images from EMD below), David Whitmer explained that Joseph identified the messenger as one of the Three Nephites.
"I wish to mention an Item of conversation with David Whitmer in regard to Seeing one of the Nephites, Zina Young, Desired me to ask about it. David Said, Oliver, & The Prophet, & I were riding in a wagon, & an aged man about 5 feet 10, heavey Set & on his back, an old fashioned Armey knapsack Straped over his Shoulders & Something Square in it, & he walked alongside of the Wagon & Wiped the Sweat off his face, Smileing very Pleasant David asked him to ride and he replied I am going across to the hill Cumorah. Soon after they Passed they felt Strangeley and Stoped, but could see nothing of him all around was clean and they asked the Lord about it. He Said that the Prophet Looked as White as a Sheet & Said that it was one of the Nephites & that he had the plates." [emphasis added]
(It is significant that it was Zina who asked Stevenson to ask David about this account. She first met David Whitmer when he and his missionary companion, Hyrum Smith, baptized her family in 1832. She even remembered that she wanted Hyrum to baptize her because he was more handsome. She apparently asked Stevenson to ask David about it because she heard this account from David in 1832)
To restate the obvious, David told Stevenson that Joseph Smith himself identified the messenger as "one of the Nephites." That is highly relevant to the identity of the messenger, and by Royal's own evidentiary standard, should be considered "the most reliable."
Yet Royal omitted this from his book.
Perhaps Royal reasoned that, well, Moroni was also a Nephite, so it could have been Moroni and Mary might have been wrong after all. But if that's his reasoning, he owes it to us to spell it out after first sharing the relevant facts.
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Royal's citation to EMD also refers to Stevenson's published account, where he clarified by writing,
David relates, the Prophet looked very white but with a heavenly appearance and said their visitor was one of the three Nephites to whom the Savior gave the promise of life on earth until He should come in power. After arriving home, David again saw this personage, and mother Whitmer, who was very kind to Joseph Smith, is said to have seen not only this Nephite, but to have also been shown by him the sealed and unsealed parts of the plates from which the Book of Mormon was translated. (emphasis added) Edward Stevenson, “Visit,” Instructor 22 (1887):55 [emphasis added]
Royal doesn't inform his readers about any of this.
To be sure, Royal isn't writing an encyclopedia. We don't expect him to include every available source. But by his own standards, "the earliest accounts are the most reliable ones." In this case, he was not unaware of the earliest account.
He even quotes part of it.
But he omits the most directly relevant part of the earliest account (Stevenson's diary) and doesn't share the more detailed account Stevenson formally published.
This practice violates the first principle of clarity and misleads readers. While we assume Royal acts in good faith, we also observe that the facts he omitted contradict his conclusion that it was Moroni who showed the plates to Mary Whitmer.
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To see how obvious this manipulation of history is, let's look at the page Royal cited from Vogel's Early Mormon Documents. Royal cited Volume 5, page 31, for the quotation from Stevenson's diary.
Below are images of pages 30-31 from EMD vol. 5. The passage Royal quoted from page 31 is the passage I outlined in yellow below.
The passage I outlined in red is where David Whitmer relates Joseph's identification of the messenger. Royal omitted this passage from his quotation, even though it is on the same page as the part he did quote.
Whether Royal omitted the relevant passage unwittingly or deliberately, he has misinformed his readers and should correct the error to rehabilitate the credibility of his work.
He can retain his opinion that the messenger was Moroni if he wants by rejecting what David and his mother said (the way he rejects what Joseph and Oliver said about the translation), but he owes it to his readers to explain his reasoning after providing the relevant facts here.
Especially when the facts he censored are those that, according to his own criteria, are "are the most reliable ones."
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Footnote 13, outlined in red above, relates a subsequent interview that Stevenson had with David Whitmer on 9 Feb 1886. On this occasion, David reiterated his statement that "they asked the Prophet to enquire of the Lord who this stranger was. Soon David said they turned around & Joseph looked pale almost trans¬ parent Se said that [he] was one of the Nephites, and he had the Plates of the Book of Mormon in the knapsac[k]"
You can read this account here:
https://archive.org/details/volume-5_202011/page/159/mode/2up
Footnote 15 is also interesting. This refers to the interview of John C. Whitmer by Andrew Jenson and Edward Stevenson together on 11 Oct. 1888.
Here we see how Jenson inserted the parentheticals, including John's name, the name of his grandmother, and the Moroni narrative.
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Jenson published his account in
Historical Record.
A few months later, Stevenson published his version of this interview. “The Thirteenth Witness to the Plates of the Book of Mormon,” Juvenile Instructor 24 (1 January 1889): 23
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In his version of the interview, Stevenson refers to the messenger as Moroni, having adopted Jenson's "correction" of what Mary Whitmer said.
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It's easy to see that Royal may not have wanted to go down this rabbit hole to get into all these interviews. But he provided considerable detail about the much later and less credible family lore on this topic, when these earlier sources were readily available right in the references he cited.
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Conclusion: If everyone involved with Church history research would join in the pursuit of clarity, charity and understanding, we could apply the FAITH model and agree on the facts. Then we could all understand and appreciate the various assumptions, inferences and theories that everyone uses to reach their conclusions (hypotheses).
And everyone would understand one another with no more contention.
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Additional Reference:
https://www.mobom.org/moroni-and-nephi
