Oliver Cowdery Analysis

From page 89 Oliver Cowdery informs us “I do not pretend that he (Joseph Smith) is not a man subject to passions like other men, beset with infirmities and encompassed with weaknesses”. And as noted earlier in this account Joseph Smith himself continued to claim he committed many sins and transgressions. Oliver Cowdery attempts to excuse these sins and transgressions by saying “but if he is, all men were so before him”. He shows a very ample case of ignorance concerning mans behavior as from all the court actions and prison inmates we see that all men are indeed very different from one another and cannot be excused from their sinful actions by simply saying “all men were so before him”. Would this ever be accepted in a court of law anywhere in our land or any other land as a reason for sinful acts against society?

From Joseph Smith’s own words, he claims he committed many sins and transgressions and continued to claim
The churches of his day were friendly with each other as has been clearly shown above and indeed none of them made any claim that they were “the only true church”. Members of one church would visit another denomination freely and without any animosity and on any given Sunday a person could be found in a Baptist, Congregational or other denominational church. This is not to say the various churches were not trying to get new members to join them as they were trying to build their congregations as they are doing to this day. They all wanted their own building to worship in but there was no evidence of any of the churches claiming they were the only one and true church of God and everybody else was wrong. The only one actually claiming such a belief was Joseph Smith and his claim came after he had started his own church and was making such a recall of memory some twenty years after it had allegedly