Lectures - Joseph Smith the Seer

Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement (commonly called “Mormonism”), began his career as a teenage treasure seer. By peering with his spiritual eyes into a seer stone, Joseph led digging companies on quests to unearth buried treasure. The gifts he claimed evolved as he announced that a spirit had shown him where a book engraved on gold plates was buried. Using the same process of looking into the seer stones, Joseph dictated the words of what became known as the Book of Mormon. He also used the stones to channel what he claimed was direct revelation from God as he transitioned into the role of religious seer and prophet. In this new lecture, John Hamer of Toronto Centre Place will cut through the mythic portrayal of Joseph Smith to try to understand him in his historical context. Given that literary criticism has shown the Book of Mormon is a 19th Century document and is not the ancient history Smith claimed, must it necessarily follow that both were conscious frauds? How is the text still understood as scripture in Community of Christ, the second largest denomination in the Latter Day Saint movement? #lecture