1054: Joseph Smith's Treasure Digging - Dan Vogel Pt. 1
Mormon Stories Podcast
Dr. John Dehlin
4.5 • 5.7K Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2019
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After exploring historian Dan Vogel’s motivations behind his studies of the life of Joseph Smith in our first segments, we now delve deeper into Joseph’s treasure digging activities.
Dan devoted a portion of his book Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet to understanding not only the financial motivations for Joseph’s treasure digging practice, but also to explain how this practice possibly became the start of a chain of events leading to the creation of the LDS Church, best explained by a portion of the abstract in Dan’s book:
“Over time, Joseph became aware that people trusted him and that he could be an influence for good or ill, that even through nefarious means, God worked through him when his heart was right. He realized this when he led groups in search of Spanish treasure in New York and Pennsylvania. Although no treasure was found, the men sincerely believed that Smith had a spiritual gift and could see where casks of gold were hidden in the earth. This training ground in spiritual leadership was invaluable because the prophet learned how to create an environment for belief—one in which people could exercise faith and be converted to Christ through the sensible influence of the Spirit, all prior to the overarching work of restoring primitive Christianity.”
Transcript
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| 0:46.9 | Hello everyone and welcome back to my what I feel like is an epic interview, a historic interview |
| 0:52.7 | with Joseph Smith historian Dan Vogel. I'm Dr. John DeLin. It is January 9th, 2019 and we spent a good |
| 1:00.5 | two and a half hours talking to Dan Vogel just about some of his history. I realized that I tried to |
| 1:08.4 | do too much today. I could talk to Dan Vogel about his history for weeks, let alone two and a half |
| 1:14.1 | hours and we didn't cover nearly enough of his story but we got enough of his story to give you a |
| 1:20.7 | flavor for him and some of the various works, what got him into Mormon history, you know his faith |
| 1:28.9 | journey, some of the works that he's published and some of his interesting interactions including |
| 1:34.8 | some interactions with Brett McCaff and Mark Hoffman and others, Michael Markquart. Great stuff. |
| 1:42.1 | Make sure and check out the first two and a half hours on Dan Vogel if you haven't yet. What we're |
| 1:47.5 | now going to do is what I consider is the main purpose that I wanted to interview Dan today. |
| 1:55.2 | We are going to do a deep dive into Joseph Smith's use of folk magic and then Joseph Smith's |
| 2:02.6 | creation of the Book of Mormon. If we have time we're going to do a robust Q&A at the end but those |
| 2:08.0 | are the two main things that I wanted to cover. Again we are going to be featuring today the book |
| 2:15.5 | Joseph Smith, the making of a prophet. For me this is one of the most important books ever written |
| 2:22.8 | in Mormonism and I think it's a better biography than Rufstown Rolling. I don't want to say it's |
| 2:28.0 | better than Fombrotees. No, I know it's my history but it's certainly as important to modern Mormonism |
... |
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