Stan Larson

Stan Larson {[email protected]} is retired from the University of Utah Marriott Library. He received his PhD in New Testament Studies from the University of Birmingham, in Birmingham, England. He is the author of Quest for the Gold Plates and editor of A Ministry of Meetings; What E’er Thou Art, Act Well Thy Part; The William E. McLellin Papers; and The Truth, the Way, the Life.

Articles

Textual Variants in Book of Mormon Manuscripts

Dialogue 10.4 (Winter 1977): 10–45
A great value of these early manuscripts is that for the most part they substantiate the correctness of the present Book of Mormon text—fully 99.9% of the text is published correctly. In textual criticism, however, evidence should be weighed, not counted, since a unique reading in a reliable source may be better than any number of readings in less reliable sources.

Omissions in the King James New Testament

Joseph Smith once wrote of the Bible: “I believe the Bible as it ought to be, as it came from the pen of the original writers.”[1] Unfortunately, none of the manuscripts penned or dictated by…

Intellectuals in Mormon History: An Update

More than twenty-four years ago, Leonard Arrington asked some fifty prominent Mormons to identify the most important intellectuals in Mormon history. He published his findings in the spring 1969 issue of Dialogue: A Journal of…

Henry D. Moyle: A Chapter from Richard D. Poll’s Unpublished Biography

In 1980-81 Richard D. Poll, vice-president of Western Illinois University and former professor of history at Brigham Young University, was re searching, interviewing for, and writing a comprehensive biography of LDS apostle and member of…

A “Meeting of the Brethren”: The Discovery of Official Minutes of a 1902 Meeting of the First Presidency and Twelve Apostles

Documenting the daily is difficult. Women save wedding dresses, not house dresses. Men polish the handles of hand-braided buggy whips, but toss worn-out hammer handles into the fire. Nineteenth-century Mor mons were historically among the…

Another Look at Joseph Smith’s First Vision

The Odyssey of Thomas Stuart Ferguson

Dialogue, 23.4 (Winter 1990): 55–93

The odyssey of Ferguson is a quest for religious certitude through archaeological evidences, an attempt at scholarly verification of theological claims. Early in his career, Thomas Stuart Ferguson was instrumental in reducing our conception of the geography of the Book of Mormon from nearly the whole of both North and South America to the more limited area of southern Mexico and Central America. In the middle years of his career, he organized archaeological reconnaissance and fieldwork in the area of Mesoamerica. But in the last years of his career, he concluded that the archaeological evidence did not substantiate the Book of Mormon, and so he reduced (in his mind) the geography of the book to nothing at all in the real world.