Revision as of 20:41, 15 October 2013

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A FairMormon Response to Questions Asked in Swedish Fireside with Elder's Jensen and Turley

1: BoM translation—2: Polygamy and Polyandry—3: Polygamy forced?—4: Book of Abraham—5: "Lying for Lord"—6: Mark Hofmann—7: Blood atonement—8: First Vision—9: Sanitized history—10: "Not all truth is useful"—11: Angelic affidavits—12: Blacks and priesthood—13: Temple concerns—14: Evidence of Vikings—15: Adam-God—16: Kinderhook

 ^{[needs work]}Need Turley answers?

Question:
I have a difficult question.

• The time of Abraham, God reveals that.... it’s OK to have more than one wife....does the church believe that it was a teaching from God that he married women who had other men that were still alive, and even some apostles wives when they were away on missions?
• One woman said the child that she bore she didn’t know if it was the child of Joseph or the child of, in this case, Orson Hyde....So that indicates that it was definitely not a spiritual marriage.

• Question: Did Joseph marry women who were already married to others?
  Answer: Yes.
  

* There is no evidence these marriages were consummated. They were likely to bind families together to Joseph as a sealing ordinance.

• Question: Was Joseph sealed to apostles' wives?
  Answer: Yes, in one case.
  

*Joseph was sealed to Orson Hyde's wife, Nancy Marinda Johnson Hyde.

• Question: Did Joseph marry the wives of men on missions? Answer: Yes, in one case. No in all the others.

• Joseph was sealed to Orson Hyde's wife Nancy after Hyde had been gone for nearly two years. Upon his return, the sealing was repeated with Hyde's permission.
• In all other sealings, the husband was not away on a mission.
• There is one possible exception (George Harris' wife Lucinda), but it is not certain that Joseph was sealed to her at all. If he was, we do not know the date, so cannot say if Harris was on a mission at the time.
• This charge comes from the notoriously unreliable John C. Bennett's anti-Mormon articles.

• Question: Did Orson Hyde's wife say she did not know if Joseph or Orson was the father of her child?
  Answer: No.
  

• Anti-Mormon sources often copy each other, and some have mis-attributed this story to Orson Hyde's wife. There is no evidence that Mrs. Hyde said this.

• Question: Did any woman say she did not know if Joseph or Orson Hyde was the father of a child?
  Answer: Very unlikely.
  

• The source that makes this claim contains many serious errors in the same paragraph in which the claim is made. The only evidence for this claim reads:

The Prophet had sent some time before this, three men, Law, Foster and Jacobs, on missions, and they had just returned, and found their wives blushing under the prospective honors of spiritual wifeism; and another woman, Mrs. Buel [sic], had left her husband, a Gentile, to grace the Prophet's retinue, on horseback, when he reviewed the Nauvoo Legion. I heard the latter woman say afterwards in Utah, that she did not know whether Mr. Buel [sic] or the Prophet was the father of her son. These men [Law, Foster and Jacobs] established a press in Nauvoo, to expose his alleged vicious teachings and practices, which a revelation from Joseph destroyed.

• Claims that we know are false in this single paragraph:
  • Ettie Smith claims that William Law, Robert D. Foster, and Henry Jacobs were on missions and that Joseph had proposed plural marriage to them. Law and Foster, in fact, never served missions. Henry Jacobs did serve a mission, but he was not gone on a mission when Joseph taught plural marriage to his wife.
  • Foster and Law did participate in publishing the Nauvoo Expositor, but Henry Jacobs did not. He was and remained a faithful member of the Church.
  • The destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor was undertaken by the Nauvoo city council. Some members of that council were not members of the Church--it seems implausible to think that they would bow to a "revelation" to Joseph requiring its destruction. The decision was made, instead, after 8 hours of discussion and after consulting legal references.

• The claim was from an anti-Mormon work notorious even among other 19th century anti-Mormon authors for being inaccurate:

Much has already been written on this subject much that is in accordance with facts, and much that is exaggerated and false. Hitherto, with but one exception [Mrs. Ettie V. Smith is noted in the footnote as the work referred to] that of a lady who wrote very many years ago, and who in her writings, so mixed up fiction with what was true, that it was difficult to determine where the one ended and the other began no woman who really was a Mormon and lived in Polygamy ever wrote the history of her own personal experience. Books have been published, and narratives have appeared in the magazines and journals, purporting to be written by Mormon wives; it is, however, perhaps, unnecessary for me to state that, notwithstanding such narratives may be imposed upon the Gentile world as genuine, that they were written by persons outside the Mormon faith would in a moment be detected by any intelligent Saint who took the trouble to peruse them.

—Fanny Stenhouse, Tell It All (1875), 618, on the work which made this claim.

• Such an admission would be scandalous—it seems very unlikely:

Talk of sexuality was avoided by the Victorian, puritanical Mormons; in diaries, the word 'pregnant' or 'expecting' is never or rarely used. Women are merely 'sick' until they have a child. Polyandry was rarely discussed openly by Mormon women.

— Todd Compton, "Fawn Brodie on Joseph Smith's Plural Wives and Polygamy: A Critical View," 166.

• DNA evidence rules out one of two Buell children as a child of Joseph's.

• It is historically implausible to have had Joseph Smith in the right place to conceive the child ruled out by DNA.

For a detailed answer, we recommend:

• Brian C. Hales, "Chart of Joseph Smith's Possible Children," "Sexuality in Joseph Smith’s Plural Marriages," "Did Joseph Smith Practice Sexual Polyandry?." Hales' three volume work is the most complete and up-to-date analysis of Joseph Smith's plural marriages. These links are available on-line, and his books can be ordered for those who want more details.