![]() ![]() ![]() Many battles, curses, and afflictions accompanied their subsequent wanderings and those of their numerous progeny. ![]() The resulting “books” turned out to be a record set down by ancient prophets, beginning with Nephi, son of Lephi, who had fled Jerusalem in approximately 600 BC and come to America. Second, he was operating in an area which, unlike large tracts of the newly opening North America, did possess the signs of an ancient history. So notorious did this local tendency become that the region became known as the “Burned-Over District,” in honor of the way in which it had surrendered to one religious craze after another. First, he was operating in the same hectically pious district that gave us the Shakers and several other self-proclaimed American prophets. However, within four years he was back in the local newspapers (all of which one may still read) as the discoverer of the “Book of Mormon.” He had two huge local advantages which most mountebanks and charlatans do not possess. In March 1826 a court in Bainbridge, New York, convicted a twenty-one-year-old man of being “a disorderly person and an impostor.” That ought to have been all we ever heard of Joseph Smith, who at trial admitted to defrauding citizens by organizing mad gold-digging expeditions and also to claiming to possess dark or “necromantic” powers. ![]()
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