Likewise, the famous Yale literary critic Harold Bloom, a Jewish agnostic, has been effusive in his admiration for Joseph Smith: While freely acknowledging that he didn’t accept Joseph Smith as a prophet and that he rejected Joseph Smith’s solutions, Raisanen marveled at Joseph’s penetrating awareness of seeming problems in the biblical text, long before mainstream scholarship began to pay attention to them. In it, the Finnish biblical scholar Heikki Raisanen appealed to European students of “Religionswissenschaft” to give Mormonism and its scriptures more serious attention. Instead, I’ll point to three non-Mormon writers - from among a number of others who might have been chosen - who definitely reject those claims but who nevertheless cannot simply write him off as ordinary or run-of-the mill:įor example, a German-language article titled (my translation) “Joseph Smith and the Bible: New Light on the Achievement of the Mormon Prophet” appeared in the academic journal “ Theologische Literaturzeitung” in 1984. He was anything but that.īut I won’t rely on the testimonies of those who accept his prophetic claims in order to make my point.
The notion of Joseph Smith as a lazy, scheming, yarn-spinning ne’er-do-well without a single serious idea in his head simply can’t withstand scrutiny. “Brodie's Joseph picks up ideas like a thieving magpie,” says Nibley, “throws them together haphazardly, and sells them from the pulpit.” But Nibley is surely right to observe that “Brodie’s Joseph is decidedly not the man who produced the Book of Mormon for the former is wildly imaginative, undisciplined, lazy, and short-sighted, while the Book of Mormon is the work (even if you take it as fiction) of an exceedingly sober, self-controlled, incredibly industrious, and well-organized brain.” (If you disagree, consider - among other things - Grant Hardy’s 2010 Oxford volume “ Understanding the Book of Mormon.”) His unbelieving 1945 biographer, Fawn Brodie, set the tone with her depiction of him as (in Hugh Nibley’s summary of her position), a “chuckle-headed, pipe-dreaming, glory-mongering” charlatan. Those who reject the claims of Joseph Smith often dismiss him as merely a shallow fraud who lurched from one crisis or opportunity for exploitation to another, improvising as he went.
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