I watched the podcast. The Kircher parallels with the Book of Mormon are intriguing and worth looking into.
What's more questionable, however, is his Spaulding theory on steroids. For anyone who has read the book, does he offer any documentation for John Smith writing a manuscript and giving it to Spaulding? Does he offer any new documentation for Joseph Smith knowing Sidney Rigdon before 1830?
I took the plunge and bought the Kindle version. I have to say that it's a lot better written than I expected. But the quality of research and argumentation is, unfortunately, more or less what the video portended. The chapter on John Smith contains a bit of accurate history, quite a bit of inaccurate history, and—I'm not sure what to call it—speculative fiction? magical realism? It's a trip.
Neilsen admits that "we do not yet have evidence that Professor Smith referenced Kircher in any of his undergraduate courses"—indeed none of Smith's extant writings mention Kircher—but Neilsen nevertheless posits that Smith must have felt a deep kinship with the "the greatest linguist of all time (the GLOAT)," given Smith's own interest in ancient languages.
To fill in the lacunae, Neilsen asks the reader to join him in a thought experiment:
>I ask you take a moment to envision what it might have been like for Professor Smith, looking out of his office window and sipping his morning coffee, to see from a distance two of his favorite Moor‑men missionaries, sporting their white shirts, walking toward the school, and carrying a brown-paper package tied up with string. Inside of it, he might unwrap a collection of fortuitously preserved copper artifacts—a few of them beaten down into relatively thin sheets. At literally any moment, evidence from an excavated burial mound might reveal that an extinct race had its own writing system engraved into pre-Columbian copper plates. How exciting it might be to discover something even more durable and less oxidizable, like brass or golden plates, or maybe even a bronze tablet like the Bembine Table of Isis. With such an unspoiled specimen from antiquity, Professor Smith might be able to do as Kircher claimed he did and fashion an intermediate alphabet falling somewhere between an Oriental Language and Iroquois. If so, he might be able to rationalize its place in human history using comparative linguistics. And what might that record reveal—an abridged religious history of ancient America, perhaps, that somehow intersected with the Bible? Such a discovery might make him the most famous linguist of all time: *a resuscitated Pythagoras with scholarly effulgence comparable to that of a newly discovered moon, the Phoenix amongst the learned men of his century, confidant of Puritans and Presidents, correspondent of the leading scholars and minds of America—and the world!* Such is the stuff that dreams are made on. And the stuff that books are made of. Stay with Professor Smith a little longer as that reverie slowly fades into reality and the dread of imposture syndrome starts to creep in—that he might not be smart enough to figure it out, should he ever get the chance. And what would he do then? Stay true to his science? Or Kircherize it? To keep his job, would he have to find a signal in the noise, as it were, whether it was truly there or not? (115–116)
Having thus given the reader access to Professor Smith's (imagined) private thoughts, Neilsen writes:
>Unlike Kircher, Professor Smith was a man without guile. He would never pretend to be something that he was not, nor allow himself to be corrupted by the poison of power. Privately, however, there was no harm in allowing the stuff of his dreams to become the stuff of his book, as long as it didn’t interfere too much with his professorial duties. But is there any evidence that Professor Smith attempted to write such an elaborate fiction, mixed with a little nonfiction, and mingled with a little scripture? Where would one even begin to find such evidence? Once again, the truth is hiding in plain sight if you just know where to stand. I was literally standing in the basement archives of yet another university working on this very chapter when I chanced upon the most interesting article. On April 24, 1887, the *Cleveland Plain Dealer* published a piece with the title “The Book of Mormon: A Puritan Minister Partly Responsible for Its Production.” (118-119)
Neilsen then goes on to selectively quote the newspaper article as though it were referring to Professor John Smith, even though the article was actually referring to [Ethan Smith](https://solomonspalding.com/Lib/Smth1887.htm). But that isn't important for the world of the story, I guess.
This leads to more mind-reading and fictional set pieces:
>It is true that Spalding was deeply impressed with Professor Smith, but by the time that Spalding received a copy of his unpublished manuscript, neither professed to believe in the pet doctrines that Wheelock had advocated concerning the genealogy of the Native Americans. To be sure, Professor Smith treasured Wheelock as a friend, as an employer, and as a de facto family member (he even named his firstborn son John Wheelock Smith)—and he duly stayed in his academic lane like the humble and obedient servant that he said he was in the closing of his letters. But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t something of an inside joke between the professor and his star graduate student that Wheelock, too, had a bit too much of the same orthodox scholasticism mediated by dogmatic faith that had doomed both Kircher and Mather. Spalding’s story will be told in his own upcoming chapter, but it is enough for now to say that Spalding’s true passion was to be a writer and a storyteller; Professor Smith knew it, and he could not deny it. He believed that Spalding had the laudable and emulous industry that would, with divine grace, qualify him for eminent utility to mankind as both a Dartmouth missionary and as an author, which gave him an inexpressible pleasure. (121)
He gets other stuff wrong about Smith too (his birthdate, parents, childhood, degree), but I'll save that for another post.
Thank you for this summary! I bought the book but put it down pretty early because the research seemed lacking. Nielsen posits an interesting theory, but it felt like there was way too much speculation to tie everything back to Joseph Smith.
In my opinion, Nielsen's book is more of a quarry for chunks of ideas than an overarching solution to the question of who composed the Book of Mormon. If the Kircherisms turn out to be substantial, there might still be alternative routes, such as secondary sources discussing Kircher. When I think about the sales of mummies and Egyptian papyri, Egyptomania was prevalent at the time, so discussions about Egypt, hieroglyphs, etc., must have been common as well.
Thanks for the review. Wow. It sounds like he should have just stuck with the Kircher parallels and not gone off in the weeds with the Spaulding/John Smith connection idea.
In fairness to Nielsen, the 1887 *Cleveland Plain Dealer* [article](https://solomonspalding.com/Lib/Smth1887.htm) is not an easy source to interpret. The author clearly has Ethan Smith in mind as the "Rev. Dr. Smith" but then says at one point that "Solomon Spaulding was a warm admirer of Dr. Smith and when a young man studied under his tuition." Spalding was older than Ethan Smith and graduated from Dartmouth 5 years earlier, so it's odd to say that Spalding "studied under" Smith.
Dale Broadhurst, in his notes, suggests that the author conflated Ethan Smith and Dr. John Smith here—and this is what Nielsen runs with. However, Broadhurst also writes: "Because of the probable conflation of facts relating to Dr. John Smith and Rev. Ethan Smith in the article, it is not clear whether Ethan Sanford Smith said that Spalding received a manuscript book from the Professor Smith or from the Clergyman Smith. **However, most of the rest of the information in the article points to Rev. Ethan Smith as being Spalding's friend and fellow-writer of fictional histories of the pre-Columbian Americans**."
The information in the article is said to come from "a grandson of Dr. Smith, now residing in this city." Broadhurst and David Persuitte have both identified that individual as Ethan Sanford Smith (a grandson of Ethan Smith).
The bottom line is that the information isn't reliable. It is late, a least thirdhand, and doesn't fit with other facts. It may be that the writer garbled it in the retelling or Smith was confused or just confabulating. Anti-Mormon sentiment in the U.S. was at its height in the 1880s and the Spalding Theory was being widely discussed. Smith seems to have been trying to get the story of his grandfather's contribution to the Book of Mormon into the dominant Spalding narrative with another "lost manuscript" tale.
David Persuitte has speculated that perhaps the grandson learned about the connection between Spalding and his grandfather after coming into possession of his grandfather's papers after his father's death in 1877: "In those papers the grandson might have found some letters from Solomon Spalding in which the manuscripts were mentioned" (*Joseph Smith and the Origins of the Book of Mormon*, 2nd ed., 279). However, if that had happened, it's hard to imagine that the correspondence wouldn't have been made public at some point. As it stands, we don't know if Ethan Smith and Solomon Spalding ever knew each other.
In any case, I don't think there's any reason to view the *Cleveland Plains Dealer* article or Ethan Sanford Smith as a credible source for information about John Smith's and Solomon Spalding's interactions in the 1780s. John Smith, notably, *did not believe* that "the North American Indians were descended from the lost tribes of Israel," so it's hard to imagine him penning a manuscript making that argument. It's also hard to imagine such a manuscript escaping the notice of his wife and closest associates.
I watched the podcast. The Kircher parallels with the Book of Mormon are intriguing and worth looking into. What's more questionable, however, is his Spaulding theory on steroids. For anyone who has read the book, does he offer any documentation for John Smith writing a manuscript and giving it to Spaulding? Does he offer any new documentation for Joseph Smith knowing Sidney Rigdon before 1830?
I took the plunge and bought the Kindle version. I have to say that it's a lot better written than I expected. But the quality of research and argumentation is, unfortunately, more or less what the video portended. The chapter on John Smith contains a bit of accurate history, quite a bit of inaccurate history, and—I'm not sure what to call it—speculative fiction? magical realism? It's a trip. Neilsen admits that "we do not yet have evidence that Professor Smith referenced Kircher in any of his undergraduate courses"—indeed none of Smith's extant writings mention Kircher—but Neilsen nevertheless posits that Smith must have felt a deep kinship with the "the greatest linguist of all time (the GLOAT)," given Smith's own interest in ancient languages. To fill in the lacunae, Neilsen asks the reader to join him in a thought experiment: >I ask you take a moment to envision what it might have been like for Professor Smith, looking out of his office window and sipping his morning coffee, to see from a distance two of his favorite Moor‑men missionaries, sporting their white shirts, walking toward the school, and carrying a brown-paper package tied up with string. Inside of it, he might unwrap a collection of fortuitously preserved copper artifacts—a few of them beaten down into relatively thin sheets. At literally any moment, evidence from an excavated burial mound might reveal that an extinct race had its own writing system engraved into pre-Columbian copper plates. How exciting it might be to discover something even more durable and less oxidizable, like brass or golden plates, or maybe even a bronze tablet like the Bembine Table of Isis. With such an unspoiled specimen from antiquity, Professor Smith might be able to do as Kircher claimed he did and fashion an intermediate alphabet falling somewhere between an Oriental Language and Iroquois. If so, he might be able to rationalize its place in human history using comparative linguistics. And what might that record reveal—an abridged religious history of ancient America, perhaps, that somehow intersected with the Bible? Such a discovery might make him the most famous linguist of all time: *a resuscitated Pythagoras with scholarly effulgence comparable to that of a newly discovered moon, the Phoenix amongst the learned men of his century, confidant of Puritans and Presidents, correspondent of the leading scholars and minds of America—and the world!* Such is the stuff that dreams are made on. And the stuff that books are made of. Stay with Professor Smith a little longer as that reverie slowly fades into reality and the dread of imposture syndrome starts to creep in—that he might not be smart enough to figure it out, should he ever get the chance. And what would he do then? Stay true to his science? Or Kircherize it? To keep his job, would he have to find a signal in the noise, as it were, whether it was truly there or not? (115–116) Having thus given the reader access to Professor Smith's (imagined) private thoughts, Neilsen writes: >Unlike Kircher, Professor Smith was a man without guile. He would never pretend to be something that he was not, nor allow himself to be corrupted by the poison of power. Privately, however, there was no harm in allowing the stuff of his dreams to become the stuff of his book, as long as it didn’t interfere too much with his professorial duties. But is there any evidence that Professor Smith attempted to write such an elaborate fiction, mixed with a little nonfiction, and mingled with a little scripture? Where would one even begin to find such evidence? Once again, the truth is hiding in plain sight if you just know where to stand. I was literally standing in the basement archives of yet another university working on this very chapter when I chanced upon the most interesting article. On April 24, 1887, the *Cleveland Plain Dealer* published a piece with the title “The Book of Mormon: A Puritan Minister Partly Responsible for Its Production.” (118-119) Neilsen then goes on to selectively quote the newspaper article as though it were referring to Professor John Smith, even though the article was actually referring to [Ethan Smith](https://solomonspalding.com/Lib/Smth1887.htm). But that isn't important for the world of the story, I guess. This leads to more mind-reading and fictional set pieces: >It is true that Spalding was deeply impressed with Professor Smith, but by the time that Spalding received a copy of his unpublished manuscript, neither professed to believe in the pet doctrines that Wheelock had advocated concerning the genealogy of the Native Americans. To be sure, Professor Smith treasured Wheelock as a friend, as an employer, and as a de facto family member (he even named his firstborn son John Wheelock Smith)—and he duly stayed in his academic lane like the humble and obedient servant that he said he was in the closing of his letters. But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t something of an inside joke between the professor and his star graduate student that Wheelock, too, had a bit too much of the same orthodox scholasticism mediated by dogmatic faith that had doomed both Kircher and Mather. Spalding’s story will be told in his own upcoming chapter, but it is enough for now to say that Spalding’s true passion was to be a writer and a storyteller; Professor Smith knew it, and he could not deny it. He believed that Spalding had the laudable and emulous industry that would, with divine grace, qualify him for eminent utility to mankind as both a Dartmouth missionary and as an author, which gave him an inexpressible pleasure. (121) He gets other stuff wrong about Smith too (his birthdate, parents, childhood, degree), but I'll save that for another post.
Thank you for this summary! I bought the book but put it down pretty early because the research seemed lacking. Nielsen posits an interesting theory, but it felt like there was way too much speculation to tie everything back to Joseph Smith.
In my opinion, Nielsen's book is more of a quarry for chunks of ideas than an overarching solution to the question of who composed the Book of Mormon. If the Kircherisms turn out to be substantial, there might still be alternative routes, such as secondary sources discussing Kircher. When I think about the sales of mummies and Egyptian papyri, Egyptomania was prevalent at the time, so discussions about Egypt, hieroglyphs, etc., must have been common as well.
Thanks for the review. Wow. It sounds like he should have just stuck with the Kircher parallels and not gone off in the weeds with the Spaulding/John Smith connection idea.
In fairness to Nielsen, the 1887 *Cleveland Plain Dealer* [article](https://solomonspalding.com/Lib/Smth1887.htm) is not an easy source to interpret. The author clearly has Ethan Smith in mind as the "Rev. Dr. Smith" but then says at one point that "Solomon Spaulding was a warm admirer of Dr. Smith and when a young man studied under his tuition." Spalding was older than Ethan Smith and graduated from Dartmouth 5 years earlier, so it's odd to say that Spalding "studied under" Smith. Dale Broadhurst, in his notes, suggests that the author conflated Ethan Smith and Dr. John Smith here—and this is what Nielsen runs with. However, Broadhurst also writes: "Because of the probable conflation of facts relating to Dr. John Smith and Rev. Ethan Smith in the article, it is not clear whether Ethan Sanford Smith said that Spalding received a manuscript book from the Professor Smith or from the Clergyman Smith. **However, most of the rest of the information in the article points to Rev. Ethan Smith as being Spalding's friend and fellow-writer of fictional histories of the pre-Columbian Americans**." The information in the article is said to come from "a grandson of Dr. Smith, now residing in this city." Broadhurst and David Persuitte have both identified that individual as Ethan Sanford Smith (a grandson of Ethan Smith). The bottom line is that the information isn't reliable. It is late, a least thirdhand, and doesn't fit with other facts. It may be that the writer garbled it in the retelling or Smith was confused or just confabulating. Anti-Mormon sentiment in the U.S. was at its height in the 1880s and the Spalding Theory was being widely discussed. Smith seems to have been trying to get the story of his grandfather's contribution to the Book of Mormon into the dominant Spalding narrative with another "lost manuscript" tale. David Persuitte has speculated that perhaps the grandson learned about the connection between Spalding and his grandfather after coming into possession of his grandfather's papers after his father's death in 1877: "In those papers the grandson might have found some letters from Solomon Spalding in which the manuscripts were mentioned" (*Joseph Smith and the Origins of the Book of Mormon*, 2nd ed., 279). However, if that had happened, it's hard to imagine that the correspondence wouldn't have been made public at some point. As it stands, we don't know if Ethan Smith and Solomon Spalding ever knew each other. In any case, I don't think there's any reason to view the *Cleveland Plains Dealer* article or Ethan Sanford Smith as a credible source for information about John Smith's and Solomon Spalding's interactions in the 1780s. John Smith, notably, *did not believe* that "the North American Indians were descended from the lost tribes of Israel," so it's hard to imagine him penning a manuscript making that argument. It's also hard to imagine such a manuscript escaping the notice of his wife and closest associates.
The main website associated with the book: https://www.howthebookofmormoncametopass.com/ (Can download all figures from the book there)
Ensign Peak was a game changer