Thursday, November 19, 2020

Called by the ancients "Cumorah"

There are still members of the M2C citation cartel who insist Joseph adopted a false narrative about the New York Cumorah that was started by unknown early Church members. We'll discuss that more soon.

In the meantime, though, we should take another look at how Joseph first learned the name Cumorah.

Readers here know that, according to his mother, Joseph referred to the hill where he found the plates as "Cumorah" in early 1827. This was before he obtained the plates and before he translated anything. He could only have learned that name from Moroni.

We've seen that Parley P. Pratt said the "ancients" called the hill Cumorah.

Here is how David Whitmer explained it in his 1881 interview with the Kansas City Journal.

“Did Joseph Smith ever relate to you the circumstances of his finding the plates?”

“Yes, he told me that he first found the plates in the year 1823; that during the fall of 1823 he had a vision, an angel appearing to him three times in one night and telling him that there was a record of an ancient people deposited in a hill near his father’s house, called by the ancients `Cumorah,’ situated in the township of Manchester, Ontario County, N. Y. The angel pointed out the exact spot, and, sometime after, he went and found the records or plates deposited in a stone box in the hill, just as had been described to him by the angel. It was some little time, however, before the angel would allow Smith to remove the plates from their place of deposit.”  

This is yet another specific historical reference that our M2C friends will have to insist was wrong. That list keeps getting longer...