It’s fascinating to see how, in today’s reading (2 Nephi 27), Nephi takes the prophecy about Jerusalem in Isaiah 29 and “likens” it to his own people, the fate of the record that would become the Book of Mormon, and the latter-day Restoration (including details about Charles Anthon).
I need to be very brief tonight, and simply want to call attention to verses twelve and thirteen, which allude to the calling of the Three Witnesses and the Eight Witnesses to the Book of Mormon.
The testimony of these witnesses is enormously important. I fear that many members of the Church don’t recognize the strength of their collective witness to the Book of Mormon, and I know that many critics undervalue it or summarily dismiss it altogether.
So, once again, I recommend as a starting point one of the best books ever published by a Latter-day Saint scholar, Richard Lloyd Anderson’s Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses. If you haven’t read it, you really should.
Of course, that book scarcely exhausts his contributions on the topic, let alone his more general work. (And he’s not done yet.) I’m especially fond of his article “Attempts to Redefine the Experience of the Eight Witnesses,” because I effectively pestered him into writing it.
But I also recommend such pieces as “A Brief Biography of Oliver Cowdery,” “Personal Writings of the Book of Mormon Witnesses,” “Reuben Miller: Recorder of Oliver Cowdery’s Reaffirmations,” and “The Credibility of the Book of Mormon Translators.”
Trained at both Harvard Law School, where he earned a juris doctorate, and the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. in ancient history, Richard Lloyd Anderson ranks among the finest scholars the Church has ever produced, and he has been, for decades now, the foremost expert on the lives and characters of the Witnesses to the Book of Mormon.
Bryce Haymond’s striking colorized versions of old daguerrotypes or photographs of the Three Witnesses, shown above — of a young Oliver Cowdery (recently discovered), as well as of Martin Harris and David Whitmer in their old age– along with explanations of the provenance and restoration of the images, can be found on the website of The Interpreter Foundation.
Posted from Kaanapali, Maui, Hawaii
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