Ok all you Mormon theologians...
Here's something I was thinking about, when trying to come to grips with the story of the ghost/angel from early Mormonism...
Here is Mark Ashurst-McGee,
Philastus Hurlbut collected Willard Chase’s description of Moroni as a treasure guardian in 1833. However, at the same time, Hurlbut collected Abigail Harris’s statement describing Moroni as “the spirit of one of the Saints that was upon this continent” as well as Henry Harris’s statement identifying Moroni as an “angel.” Although the Chase account predates the official history of the Church, it does not predate Joseph Smith’s 1832 history, which describes Moroni as “an angel of the Lord.”
http://mormonhistoricsites.org/wp-conte ... ll2001.pdf
Yet the 1832 account does nothing of the kind:
when I was seventeen years of age I called again upon the Lord and he shewed unto me a heavenly vision for behold an angel of the Lord came and stood before me and it was by night and he [the angel] called me by name and he [the angel] said the Lord had forgiven me my sins and he [the angel] revealed unto me that in the Town of Manchester Ontario County N.Y. there was plates of gold upon which there was engravings which was engraven by Maroni & his fathers the servants of the living God in ancient days and deposited by th[e] commandments of God and kept by the power thereof and that I should go and get them and he [the angel] revealed unto me many things concerning the inhabitents of of the earth which since have been revealed in commandments & revelations and it was on the 22d day of Sept. AD 1822 and thus he [the angel] appeared unto me three times in one night and once on the next day and then I immediately went to the place and found where the plates was deposited as the angel of the Lord had commanded me and straightway made three attempts to get them and then being excedingly frightened I supposed it had been a dreem of Vision but when I considred I knew that it was not therefore I cried unto the Lord in the agony of my soul why can I not obtain them behold the angel appeared unto me again and said unto me you have not kept the commandments of the Lord which I gave unto you therefore you cannot now obtain them for the time is not yet fulfilled therefore thou wast left unto temptation that thou mightest be made accquainted of with the power of the advisary therefore repent and call on the Lord thou shalt be forgiven and in his own due time thou shalt obtain them
Smith speaks of "Maroni", but only as an engraver of the plates. The angel is not named as none of the angels in the Book of Mormon were. There is no teaching from Smith or anyone else that angels were resurrected humans or pre mortal spirits at that time. Those teachings came later.
There is a difference at the beginning, the personage was described as a "spirit of one of the Saints", [dead person], a bloody ghost [dead person], Spaniard [dead person], etc.
It was not until after 1827 that the dead person becomes an "angel". But... Did Joseph Smith and others from his family consider dead people as angels? We simply don't know. In 1823 Joseph was partial to the Methodist Faith, and was a member for a time in the Juvenile debating club in Palmyra and a part time Exhorter. What did the Methodist's teach about angels? Angels were considered to be God's special messengers, winged creatures created by God, and though they were spiritual beings, they were not dead or deceased humans.
In the Book of Mormon angels are mentioned 145 times, but not one of them is given a name. In the Bible this too is the case for most of the appearances of angels, with only a few very important angels being named. That is because they were looked upon as a creation of God different from human beings:
“The existence of the spiritual, non-corporeal beings that Sacred Scripture usually calls ‘angels’ is a truth of faith. The witness of Scripture is as clear as the unanimity of Tradition” (#328). Given that we do believe in angels, we define them as pure spirits and personal beings with intelligence and free will. They are immortal beings. As the Bible attests, they appear to humans as apparitions with a human form. (From the Catholics)
Thus when the Book of Mormon was first introduced to the public, it was a generic angel who appeared to Smith, "the spirit of the almighty". (Palmyra Freeman) Joseph didn't even clarify that angels did not have wings until much later in his career.
So.. for those like Ashurst-McGee to make such statements is disingenuous.Where is it in this statement that he identifies Moroni as the angel?
The character of Joseph Smith, Jr. for truth and veracity was such, that I would not believe him under oath. I was once on a jury before a Justice's Court and the Jury could not, and did not, believe his testimony to be true. After he pretended to have found the gold plates, I had a conversation with him, and asked him where he found them and how he come to know where they were. He said he had a revelation from God that told him they were hid in a certain hill and he looked in his stone and saw them in the place of deposit; that an angel appeared, and told him he could not get the plates until he was married, and that when he saw the woman that was to he his wife, he should know her; and she would know him. He then went to Pennsylvania, got his wife, and they both went together and got the gold plates... (Henry Harris, Mormonism Unvailed, 1833, 252.)
So when Joseph began calling the personage an "angel" in 1827, it was simply a generic term for a "spirit of the almighty", and not the dead Moroni. That came later. There are those who try to claim that Moroni was identified as the angel in 1831 by Leman Copley, but that's kind of a stretch. They story goes that Copley heard it from Joseph Knight, that Smith was on the road one day and saw an old man who had a box and said do you want to see what's in it, it's a monkey, give me five coppers. Smith answered that he had seen lots of monkey's so... no thanks, and went on his way. Smith then prays about it and finds out it is "Moroni" and God told him that he had the plates in the box and that Joseph could have gotten them back. Told third hand and published in Mormonism Unvailed. E. D. Howe loved the story and had a picture made which appears in the front of the book.
There were all kinds of these stories going around during the manuscript phase, with old men appearing with plates and angels harrowing fields, etc. It's really not good evidence of anything.
Ashurst-McGee argues that since Joseph Smith & Martin Harris, & other witnesses are all first hand accounts, they take precedence over any and all other accounts. It's rather ridiculous. I'm thinking he didn't consider Stephen Burnett's account of what Harris told him in Kirtland or lots of other evidence... and he claims that even if Joseph's accounts contradict each other... it just doesn't matter cause other evidence does the same thing... But you see just this one example of his flawed methodology... I'm not impressed by any of his arguments that the angel story came first.