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Mormon Stories Podcast

996: Kathleen Melonakos - How the Mormon Church Came to Be Pt. 3

Mormon Stories Podcast

Dr. John Dehlin

Religion & Spirituality

4.55.7K Ratings

🗓️ 11 October 2018

⏱️ 109 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today's release is the first in a new series devoted to interviewing prominent historians to gather their evidence-based take on the question, "How did the Mormon Church come to be?"

Kathleen Melonakos's book Secret Combinations: Evidence of Early Mormon Counterfeiting 1800-1847 has created buzz in many online Mormon communities and we are excited to launch our series with Kathleen's expertise and careful research. Her book chronicles the evidence that early Mormon leaders, starting with Joseph Smith Sr., dealt in counterfeit money beginning in Vermont, and continuing throughout Joseph and Hyrum's careers. It places the Smith brothers in the early American context where counterfeiting networks and some of their CEO-like bosses posed as preachers. It is the only book of its kind that uncovers the problems counterfeiters caused in early America and what really happened before, during and after the Book of Mormon appeared on the scene. Her book is both fact-based and fast moving, supported by more than 1400 footnotes and over 100 photos and illustrations. It is also based on nearly 10 years of research, conducted in Vermont, New York, Illinois, Missouri, and Utah.

In this interview, Kathleen attempts to provide the historical context for the life of the Smith family and the founding of the LDS Church. In particular, we focus on the counterfeiting culture of the time period (Part 1), treasure digging as a practice (Part 2), the origins of the Book of Mormon (Part 3), and finally we delve into how her research and work influences Kathleen's personal beliefs (Part 4).

Transcript

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1:22.0

So let's now, I want to hear your theory. If you've done a lot of thinking about how the

1:31.0

Book of Mormon came to be, talk us through how the Book of Mormon came to be. So we're

1:37.0

at 1827 Joseph Smith with Emma now. He's got all this history of treasure digging but they

1:43.0

can't do that anymore. We know that he's known all over for a while. Hiram's got all this

1:49.0

theology that he learned from Dartmouth. His parents, you said that Joseph's mom had wanted

1:56.0

him to write a book for some time. He wanted him to be a prophet. His dad had wanted him to

2:02.0

peer through his seer stone from his birth. So we've got all this cultural stuff in the soup.

2:11.0

And then we've got Ethan Smith's book. We've got Salomon Spalding's book that I call it Bible

2:17.0

Confiction of trying to explain where the Native Americans come from trying to tie it to the

2:21.0

blood of Israel. Like, you know, we've got all that in the soup. Right? And then of course we have

2:28.0

the Stephen Burroughs guy who wrote a book and made a lot of money. So give us your best story

2:35.0

of the origins of the Book of Mormon and how it came to be.

2:40.0

Ah, okay. Well, of course they have been doing this money digging. And now that people

2:48.0

are becoming on to them, you know, they had swindled quite a few people and Edna Colwell was one of the people

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