Mormons in the news -- 1830 version

PROVO, Utah — It isn't very hard to imagine what the subscribers of the Rochester (N.Y.) Gem  thought about Mormons a month after The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was organized. You can almost picture them gathering around while someone read aloud the May 15, 1830, edition story titled "Imposition and Blasphemy!! — Money-diggers, &c."

"Some months ago a noise was made among the credulous of the earth," the article began, "respecting a wonderful production said to have been found as follows. An ignoramus near Palmyra, Wayne county, pretended he had found some 'Gold Plates,' as he is pleased to call them, upon which is said to be engraved characters of marvelous and misunderstandable import, which he, but no other mortal could divine."

The so-called "ignoramus" was Joseph Smith Jr., translator of the Book of Mormon and the founding Prophet of the LDS Church. The newspaper article was one of the first to unknowingly fulfill Moroni's prophecy that Joseph's "name should be had for good and evil among all nations, kindreds, and tongues" (Joseph Smith — History 1:33).

Newspaper articles like these will soon be accessible to the general public, according to Paul Y. Hoskisson.

Hoskisson, director of the Laura F. Willes Center for Book of Mormon Research and the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS), told a class at BYU's Campus Education Week how the article in the Rochester Gem will be one of many in the new "19th Century Publications on the Book of Mormon" collection of documents in BYU's online digital collection.
 
"These are early published articles on the Book of Mormon," Hoskisson said.

The digital collection will cover articles from 1829 to 1844.

Like the rest of the digital collection, the Gem article showed the early reputation of the church. Martin Harris, for example, fared no better than Joseph Smith:

"A person more credulous or more cunning, than him who found the plates, ordered the translation thereof, mortgaged his farm, sold all he had, and appropriated it to the printing and binding of several thousand copies of this pearl, which is emphatically of great price!"

"Little did they know," Hoskisson said.

Hoskisson demonstrated another historic value of this particular article that was hidden within its mocking tone. The article describes the content of the Book of Mormon: "The book of Mormon ­ — containing the books of Nephi, Nimshi, Pukei, and Buckeye — and contains some four or five hundred pages."

"It is interesting here because we have the first attestation of how to pronounce Nephi," Hoskisson said, "because they are obviously rhyming it with Pukei and Buckeye. So we know, that even in 1830, it was pronounced 'Nee-fi.'"

The full collection, according to Hoskisson, is currently in beta testing and is scheduled to be released in November.

E-mail: mdegroote@desnews.com