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Shannon said no to sociopath, psychopath, he was loving with his family. No mental issues, but he did test into the Mensa scale. I have a forthcoming interview scheduled with George Potter. He thinks he’s found Nephi’s harbor in Yemen. It’s a pretty interesting theory. I think a couple of other guys names Ashworth have a slightly different location in Yemen too. Yes, I agree with Hawk. Even if Joseph had no sex with any wives by Emma, Someone on Facebook posted a note saying, Quote:Let’s assume Brian is right. For some reason, Joseph married 30+ women and never had sex with any of them. For additional unexplained reasons, he felt too uncomfortable to share any of this with Emma even though he wasn’t being intimate with these women (enter flaming sword, etc.), and God didn’t deem it worthy to send an angel (flaming sword or otherwise) to convince Emma of this divine duty. But let’s put all that aside and believe this is exactly what happened.
Even if all of that is correct, every last word, it is undisputed that for almost 60 years, all of the church leaders and his successors did do all of this. Not only were they intimate with their polygamous wives, some of whom were very young girls, they celebrated those relationships and *condemned* monogamy. Not only were sexual polygamous relationships justified, they were *preferable,* considered the eternal order of marriage, and just like the relationship that God Himself had.
And that’s the best-case, faith-affirming angle Brian is arguing for.
Quote:Was part of the reason he did the forgeries to support the restoration ideal or was it to eventually discredit it, the founders, and subsequent prophets?
I think it would be good to get Mark’s answer for sure, but Curt Bench answered that in this interview:
https://gospeltangents.com/2017/06/03/lds-leaders-detected-hofmann-fraud/ ” class=”bbcode_url”> https://gospeltangents.com/2017/06/03/lds-leaders-detected-hofmann-fraud/ Mark initially denied trying to affect church history, but then admitted to it. It seems that Mark was disillusioned with the church long before his mission, but maintained appearances in order to peddle his forgeries. Curt said he was like a chameleon, appearing devout when it served his purposes, and then anti when that served his purposes. He was great at compartmentalizing.
Quote:Sometimes individuals “find Jesus” in prison. I wonder if in time his thoughts have gone there.
I’m trying to decide if I should give away too much, but once again, Shannon answers this in my upcoming interview. I don’t think Mark will ever find Jesus, but Shannon had some interesting things to say about Mark’s “religion.”
Quote:I suppose the second question is if he went through multiple failed attempts at his forged ink mixture before he got the right combination or if he hit upon it pretty much right away.
Shannon Flynn said it is relatively easy to find old ink recipes, and indicated that Mark did these forgeries with no practice. I find that hard to believe, but that’s what Shannon said. Shannon’s interview should be released in October, which is the “anniversary” (for lack of a better word) of the bombings.
Are you talking about Primary Children’s Hospital? It was once owned by the church, but the church-owned hospitals were sold to Intermountain HealthCare a few decades ago. The church hasn’t been in the hospital business for quite some time.
As for his belief in God, Shannon Flynn told me that he was there in the hospital when Mark admitted to his family he is an atheist. I just completed an interview with Brian Hales. Regarding Fanny, Brian said some interesting things. Quote:Don Bradley’s done some really good research and he dates the discovery to I think it’s June, May-June of 1836, so if the marriage occurred in say late April, May-June and lasted just a few months before Emma found out, which is entirely plausible, I don’t know that I embrace that, but Don at least we know when it broke up. We can date that pretty well, then it could have been a sealing. The authority could have been sealing authority that Joseph would have given to Levi.
He also said
Quote:But the other reason that I think this was an actual marriage and ceremony was performed was that Eliza Snow moved in in early 1836 to live with the Smiths and teach their children. In 1887, he was an independent historian, Andrew Jensen showed up at Eliza’s door and said I’m trying to make a list of all of the wives of Joseph Smith. He had been down to see Melissa Lott and Melissa Lot had given him thirteen names that he’d written down on this piece of paper and at some point instead of him writing down what Eliza was saying, he turned the paper over to her and gave her the pencil, and she wrote an additional thirteen names, and among those names were Fanny Alger.
So my theory is that if this had been an adulterous relationship, and he also wrote a paper on Fanny where he quotes Eliza as saying she was well-acquainted with Fanny, and that Fanny was the one that Emma made such a fuss about, so Eliza was there and I think Eliza would have known the details of what was going on. She considered Fanny a wife and so these two bits of evidence to me I think are convincing for me that this was in fact a marriage, probably not a sealing, and again I place it to late ’35, early ’36 but there’s really no way to date it.
But I think this is my favorite quote.
Quote:the people that Joseph Smith toldabout Fanny Alger as a plural wife, they didn’t believe him. But most of the people that learned it from Fanny did believewhich is interesting. Fanny’s family believed. The family that Fanny went to live with was Chauncey Webb and Eliza Jane Webb, they believed that this was an actual marriage, but Joseph is caught with Fanny and they’re in a haymow, they’re in a barn, and we were out there in Kirtland with the John Whitmer Historical Association meeting this last September, and I asked Mark, ‘where is the barn?’ He had no idea. It’s long since been destroyed. They were discovered by Emma “in the act.” We could assume that was something sexual. Some people want to say it was in the act of getting married by Levi, the ceremony. It’s a bit of a stretch. Maybe he was in the act of something affectionate. Virtually anything affectionate would have been over the line in Emma’s eyes understandably. She caught them, and she’s not accepting Joseph’s explanation at all.
‘This is a plural marriage. God authorized it.’
‘Yeah right. She’s pretty and this isn’t working for me.’
Joseph, according to one of the accounts gets Oliver and says in the middle of the night. ‘Oliver, come help me with this.’ Oliver hears the story and sides with Emma and thinks Joseph is having an adulterous affair. That was his opinion, probably right up until his death, that Joseph was not authorized to marry her. It wasn’t a marriage. He made hints to members of the high council that Joseph had been guilty of adultery. He did not accept any story of a marriage ceremony as being valid, and neither did Emma.
It kills me that Fanny was a more believable witness than Joseph.
