Martin Harris

From MormonWiki.org

Jump to: navigation, search

[edit] See also

"I never saw the golden plates, only in a visionary or entranced state. I wrote a great deal of the Book of Mormon myself, as Joseph Smith translated or spelled the words out in English. Sometimes the plates would be on a table in the room in which Smith did the translating, covered over with a cloth. I was told by Smith that God would strike him dead if he attempted to look at them, and I believed it. When the time came for the three witnesses to see the plates, Joseph Smith, myself, David Whitmer and Oliver Cowdery, went into the woods to pray. When they had engaged in prayer, they failed at the time to see the plates or the angel who should have been on hand to exhibit them. They all believed it was because I was not good enough, or in other words, not sufficiently sanctified. I withdrew. As soon as I had gone away, the three others saw the angel and the plates. In about three days I went into the woods to pray that I might see the plates. While praying I passed into a state of entrancement, and in that state I saw the angel and the plates." (Anthony Metcalf, Ten Years Before the Mast, n.d., microfilm copy, p. 70-71.)
"[I] held them [the plates] on his knee for an hour and a half, ..." ("Testimony of Martin Harris" in the Latter Day Saints Millennial Star, 34:21, August 20, 1859, p. 545; also in George Reynolds, "Myth of the Manuscript Found," in Juvenile Instructor, 1883, as cited in Case Against Mormonism , Vol. 2, p. 40, Jerald and Sandra Tanner, SLC, 1968)

"There can't anybody say a word against Martin Harris. Martin was a good citizen ...a man that would do just as he agreed with you. But, he was a great man for seeing spooks." - Lorenzo Sauders, one who claimed to know the Harris family well. (Ronald W. Walker, "Martin Harris: Mormonism's Early Convert," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, vol. 19 (Winter 1986): 34-35) [1]
"Martin was something of a prophet: — He frequently said that 'Jackson would be the last president that we would have; and that all persons who did not embrace Mormonism in two years would be stricken off the face of the earth.' He said that Palmyra was to be the New Jerusalem, and that her streets were to be paved with gold. Martin was in the office when I finished setting up the testimony of the three witnesses, — (Harris — Cowdery and Whitmer) I said to him, — 'Martin, did you see those plates with your naked eyes?' Martin looked down for an instant, raise his eyes up, and said, 'No, I saw them with a spiritual eye.' " -John H. Gilbert (Wilford C. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, Vol. 1, 1958, introduction)