New Witnesses for God (Volume 3 of 3)Roberts, B. H. (Brigham Henry)
Religion
New Witnesses for God (Volume 3 of 3)
Roberts, B. H. (Brigham Henry)
Book of Mormon; Smith, Joseph, Jr., 1805-1844
That the idea of the revelation (i. e., of the existence of the
Book of Mormon) as described by Smith in his autobiography was
not original is shown by the fact that a similar divine message,
engraved on plates, was announced to have been received from an
angel nearly six hundred years before the alleged visit of an angel
to Smith. These original plates were described as a copper, and
the recipient was a monk named Cyril, from whom their contents
passed into the possession of the Abbot Joachim, whose "Everlasting
Gospel," founded thereon, was offered to the church as supplanting
the New Testament, just as the New Testament had supplanted the
Old, and caused so serious a schism that Pope Alexander IV took the
severest measures against it. [39]
This description of the origin of Joachim's "Everlasting Gospel"
rests upon the respectable authority of Draper, in his "Intellectual
Development of Europe." [40]
Linn's argument is to the effect that this origin of the "Everlasting
Gospel" suggested the origin of the Book of Mormon because of the
resemblance between the celestial announcement of both, and also
because that both, according to his idea of them, were declared to
have the same purport--each was to be "a forerunner of the end of the
world." He also urges the frequent use of the phrase, "Everlasting
Gospel," in the discourses of the early Elders of the Church as
evidence that there was some connection between these two things,
the Book of Mormon and "The Book of Joachim." He further holds that
Sidney Rigdon, in the course of his ecclesiastical reading would come
in contact with the story of Joachim's "Everlasting Gospel;" that it
would be just such a story as would be attractive to one of Sidney
Rigdon's temperament. Linn throughout his work assumes a connection
and collaboration between Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon, and claims
that the latter suggested the story of the "Book of Joachim," as the
ground-work of Joseph Smith's account of the origin of the Book of
Mormon. Our author thinks that Rigdon may even have found sufficient
matter in relation to Joachim's "Everlasting Gospel," in Mosheim's
"Ecclesiastical History," to suggest the account he induced Joseph
Smith to give of the origin of the Book of Mormon, and makes the
following quotation from Mosheim in proof of his contention:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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