On this issue of JS and the origins of the church holding up to scholarship, I think the church shares a good bit of blame for the situation. One example — I can’t be the only church member who has been long troubled that the church bases our teachings on the nature of the G-d head on the first vision. As a young missionary teaching discussions, I’d often think, it’s an account of a vision; how can we make doctrinal declarations based on it? After all, Moses didn’t teach that the almighty was a burning bush…………

Visions to me are mythological type constructs given to the recipient to illustrate something that can’t be comprehended within our normal state of existence. This makes sense to me since the almighty creator must be independent from his space-time creation in which we live in. If someone is to gain understanding of something outside of space-time, mechanisms such visions are required. If so, an account of a vision conveyed in our realm can only describe an aspect of what was actually experienced. The teaching methods used in the temple have a relationship to what I’m trying to say, in that, one only begins to fathom what is actually meant to be conveyed when one looks past the superficial actions and words. I’d really like to see an endowment based on the Matrix trilogy, but that is a story for another day.

I think the church made a good move in the last generation to move away from doctrinal and organizational emphasis back to the essence of Christianity. In other words, emphasizing the message of the protestant reformers combined with restored priesthood authority (although I’m still waiting for Amazing Grace in our hymn books. Tragic it’s not in there considering some of the clunker hymns we have). Had earlier church leaders made that move much sooner, I don’t think we be facing the current controversy. Our modern scriptures and “historical” accounts of the founding of the church wouldn’t be treated as history, just as the bible isn’t.

Outside of that, there are quite a few people that argue that there is good history to be found in the Bible (OT and NT (although less the second than the first)). Why? Because we have some idea of some of the biases that might have motivated the original authors, editors, and copyists to include what they included and discard what they discarded. Remember that much like how LDS Church History has come felt the full force of a skeptical public, the Bible is in the state it is in because it too is the object of a skeptical critique. The parallels are there because Ronan finds the treatments similar, not different.

Outside of this, as C. Terryl Givens points out, the reality of the spiritual phenomena surrounding the founding of the church is a point that is particularly offensive to other denominations. You are right in pointing out that the historicity of these claims are at the heart of current controversies, but doing away with them might make for an emptier LDS faith. “Fish-sticker Joseph”?

To me the gospels read like missionary discussions of their day. The purpose being to teach the audience about Jesus, their Lord and Savior. I don’t read the gospels as history. So if one gospel says the Sermon on the Mount occurred in such and such place and that contradicts another gospel, I’m not bothered. Variations of the Sermon on the Mount were probably delivered hundreds of times almost everywhere Jesus went. It was “The Speech”. His traveling followers had the thing memorized and the essence of the speech was written down on various occasions later. There were probably many gospels (most of which are lost) used for missionary purposes, none of which were/are history.

An Old Testament example would be the genealogies back to Adam and Eve. I assume these were based on an oral history before being written down. The people mentioned in each generation are likely people of renown. The generations with “nobodies” (which would be most of the generations) are skipped. Hence Adam and Eve could have lived 60,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago, etc. Adam and Eve are most likely a mythological construct to represent a group of people from which we all descend anyway. In short, it’s not history, but has profound religious significance nevertheless.

Once again, I’m a scientist, not a Mormon scholar, so I’m not saying I have all the answers, but I hope that clarifies where I’m coming from.

Does that mean that we can know nothing about history? Of course not. It is simply an acknowledgement that all sources and all historians reflect some degree of bias in their use. Clearly, this was the case in the Gospels. But there is no compelling reason to assume that just because the Gospels are biased, they contain nothing that can be called (even in a modern sense) historical or that the historicity of a given event be necessarily thrown out.