That shiftless boy from Palmyra

Everybody says Joseph Smith was lazy because of the things he didn’t do, but what about the things he did do? What good does it do to say that you, with your tiny routine of daily busywork, think another man is lazy if that man happens to accomplish more than ten ordinary men in a short lifetime? Joseph Smith’s activities are a matter of record and they are phenomenal. You might as well claim that Horowitz doesn’t know how to play the piano to a man who owns a library of Horowitz recordings, or that Van Gogh couldn’t paint to the owner of an original Van Gogh, or that Dempsey couldn’t fight to a man who had fought him, as to maintain that Joseph Smith was a lazy loafer to the historian who gets dizzy merely trying to follow him through a few short years of his tremendous activity.

I think this constantly reiterated unfailing charge that Joseph Smith was a raggle-taggle, down-at-the-heels, sloppy, lazy, good-for-nothing supplies the best possible test for the honesty and reliability of his critics. Some of them reach almost awesome heights of mendacity and effrontery when, like Mrs. Brodie, they solemnly inform us that Joseph Smith, the laziest man on earth, produced in a short time, by his own efforts, the colossally complex and difficult Book of Mormon.

“The Myth Makers,” Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, 11:144-45

Posted from Istanbul, Turkey