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Version du 8 avril 2009 à 01:25
Historical context
Joseph Smith, Jr.
Joseph Smith, Jr., was born on December 23, 1805, in Sharon, Vermont, to Joseph Smith, Sr., and Lucy Mack Smith. The Smiths were a farming family who moved several times because of crop failures and ill-fated business ventures. In 1816 the family arrived in western New York, where they continued to farm just outside the border of the town of Palmyra.[1]
Smith family religious beliefs
Like many other Americans living on the frontier at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Smith family accepted the veracity of visions, dreams, and other communications with God.[2] In 1811, Joseph Smith, Jr.'s maternal grandfather, Solomon Mack, described a series of visions and voices from God that resulted in his conversion to Christianity at the age of seventy-six.[3]
Between 1811 and 1819, Joseph, Sr., reported seven visions,[4] which, according to his wife, Lucy Mack Smith, occurred when he was "much excited upon the subject of religion." The visions confirmed to Joseph, Sr., the correctness of his refusal to join any organized religious group and led him to believe that he would be properly guided to his own salvation.[5] Before Joseph Smith, Jr., was born, his mother, Lucy Mack Smith, prayed in a grove about her husband's repudiation of evangelical religion[6] and that night had a vision in her sleep, which she interpreted as a prophecy that Joseph, Sr., would later accept the "pure and undefiled Gospel of the Son of God."[7]
Joseph was also exposed to the intense revivalism of his era. During the Second Great Awakening, numerous revivals occurred in many communities in the northeastern United States and were often reported in the Palmyra Register, a local paper read by the Smith family. [8] In the Palmyra area itself, the only large multi-denominational revivals occurred in 1816-1817 and 1824-1825.[9] In the intervening years, there were Methodist revivals, at least within twenty road miles of Palmyra; and more than sixty years later a newspaper editor in Lyons, New York, recalled "various religious awakenings in the neighborhood." [10]
The family also practiced a form of folk magic,[11] which, although not uncommon in this time and place, was criticized by many contemporary Protestants "as either fraudulent illusion or the workings of the Devil."[12] Both Joseph Smith, Sr. and at least two of his sons worked at "money digging," using seer stones in (mostly unsuccessful) attempts to locate lost items and buried treasure.[13] In a draft of her memoirs, Lucy Mack Smith referred to folk magic:
I shall change my theme for the present, but let not my reader suppose that because I shall pursue another topic for a season that we stopt our labor and went at trying to win the faculty of Abrac, drawing magic circles or soothsaying, to the neglect of all kinds of business. We never during our lives suffered one important interest to swallow up every other obligation. But whilst we worked with our hands, we endeavored to remember the service of and the welfare of our souls.[14]
D. Michael Quinn has written that Lucy Mack Smith viewed these magical practices as "part of her family's religious quest" while denying that they prevented "family members from accomplishing other, equally important work."[15] Quinn also notes that the Smith family "participated in a wide range of magic practices, and Smith's first vision occurred within the context of his family's treasure quest."[16] Jan Shipps notes that while Joseph Smith's "religious claims were rejected by many of the persons who had known him in the 1820s because they remembered him as a practitioner of the magic arts," others of his earliest followers were attracted to his claims "for precisely the same reason."[17]
Richard Bushman has called the spiritual tradition of the Smith family "a religious melee." Joseph Smith, Sr., insisted on morning and evening prayers, but he was spiritually adrift. "If there was a personal motive for Joseph Smith Jr.'s revelations, it was to satisfy his family's religious want and, above all, to meet the need of his oft-defeated, unmoored father."[18] No members of the Smith family were church members in 1820, the reported date of the First Vision.[19]
- ↑ Smith (1832) , p. 1
- ↑ Quinn (1998)
- ↑ "About midnight I saw a light about a foot from my face as bright as fire; the doors were all shut and no one stirring in the house. I thought by this that I had but a few moments to live, and oh what distress I was in....Another night soon after, I saw another light as bright as the first, at a small distance from my face, and I thought I had but a few moments to live. And not sleeping nights and reading, all day I was in misery; well you may think I was in distress, soul and body. At another time in the dead of the night I was called by my Christian name; I arise up to answer to my name. The doors all being shut and the house still, I thought the Lord called, and I had but a moment to live."Mack (1811) , p. 25
- ↑ Smith (1853) , pp. 56, 58-59, 70–72, 74
- ↑ Joseph Smith, Sr.'s second vision as reported by Lucy Mack Smith exhibits many similarities to a dream given in the early chapters of the Book of Mormon. Bushman (2005) , p. 36
- ↑ Bushman (2005) , p. 26
- ↑ Smith (1853) , pp. 55-56Quinn (1998)
- ↑ Turner (1852) , p. 214
- ↑ Bushman (2005) , p. 36, 46; Dan Vogel, Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2004), 26, 58-60. "Indeed, it was the revival of 1824-25, his family's conversion, and his mother's pressure that caused [Smith] so much pain and suffering rather than the revival of 1817 or the one he 'remembered' for 1820."
- ↑ Mather (1880) , pp. 198–199Roberts (1902) .
- ↑ Quinn (1998) , p. xx-xxi A 1985 memorandum sent from the headquarter of the LDS Church Educational System to regional and local administrators read, "Even if the [Mark Hofmann] letters were to be unauthentic, such issues as Joseph Smith's involvement in treasure-seeking and folk magic remain. Ample evidence exists for both of these, even without the letters."
- ↑ Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971), 256.
- ↑ Smith (1838a) , pp. 42–43 (admitting that he was what he called a "money digger," but saying that it "was never a very profitable job to him, as he only got fourteen dollars a month for it"). Elders’ Journal of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints,1: 43 (July 1838). For a discussion of Joseph Smith's money-digging activities by a sympathetic academic biographer, see Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 48-49.
- ↑ Lucy Smith "Preliminary Manuscript," LDS Church Archives, in EMD, 1: 285
- ↑ D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View ((Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1987), 55: "Joseph Smith's mother did not deny her family participation in occult activities but simply affirmed that these did not prevent family members from accomplishing other, equally important work." In a note at EMD 1: 285 (n. 84), Dan Vogel argues that this sentence from the draft may have been excised from the 1853 edition of Lucy Mack Smith's memoirs because of its allusion to folk magic, "which was a sensitive subject for those not wishing to give credence to claims made in affidavits collected in 1833 by Philastus Hurlbut."
- ↑ Quinn (1998) , p. 31. Michael Coe, professor emeritus of Anthropology at Yale, has called Joseph Smith "a great religious leader...one of the greatest people who ever lived" because like a shaman, like "magicians doing magic," he began by faking his visions but ended up convincing himself (as well as others) that they were true. Coe interview on PBS "The Mormons."
- ↑ Shipps (1985) , p. 18.
- ↑ Bushman , pp. 25-27
- ↑ Quinn (1998) , p. 322. Quinn calls the Smiths "unchurched Christians" who "possessed seer stones, a dagger for drawing the required circles, as well as magic parchments to ward off thieves and communicate with good spirits to help find treasures."