Jonathan Neville opines on changes at the Hill Cumorah

It’s hard to know if Jonathan Neville is being sarcastic in his June 11, 2021, blog post, “Letter VII coming to Cumorah in New York!”, or if he’s just trolling his critics or trying to sound like he has inside information that will impress his followers.

In any event, he’s clearly again playing the role of Uzzah and trying to correct what he perceives as the Church’s failure to present the correct message at the Hill Cumorah site in New York. He believes that Oliver Cowdery’s letters—which will be canonzied by Heartlanders when they finally apostatize and form their own church—should be the most prominent message at the visitor’s center and the angel Moroni monument.

Keep in mind that Jonathan Neville believes he knows better than Elder LeGrand R. Curtis Jr.—the Church Historian and Recorder, Executive Director of the Church History Department, and member of the First Quorum of the Seventy—as well as Elder Curtis’s entire staff of professionally trained historians, on how to present the Church’s message at the Hill Cumorah.

Being a retired lawyer and FTC-cited purveyor of medical fraud gives Neville the advantage in these matters.

(For the record, that was sarcasm.)

—Peter Pan
 

Neville accuses a general authority of publishing anti-Mormon material in the Ensign

As I predicted last week, Jonathan Neville is not happy with some of the content in the January 2020 issue of the Ensign.

In his January 2, 2020, post on his Book of Mormon Central America blog, Neville accuses the Church-published Ensign of containing “revisionist Church history.” Specifically, he criticizes the article “The Translation of the Book of Mormon: A Marvel and a Wonder,” by Elder LeGrand R. Curtis Jr., who is a general authority Seventy, Church Historian and Recorder, and the Executive Director of the Church History Department.

Neville objects to Elder Curtis quoting David Whitmer’s testimony of Joseph Smith using a seer stone to translate the Book of Mormon. Neville rejects Whitmer’s account because it was published in An Address to All Believers in Christ, the same book in which Whitmer gave his reasons for disassociating himself from Joseph and the Church. Neville rhetorically asks:

Obviously, the Ensign does not condone that part of David Whitmer’s book [where he accused Joseph of drifting into errors], but why accept uncritically any of that book? Why refer readers to it at all?

Neville apparently cannot distinguish between David Whitmer’s eyewitness testimony of something he personally saw and Whitmer’s interpretation of events. The former is an objective statement that has great validity; the latter is highly subjective. One can believe the first without agreeing with the second.

Furthermore, Neville himself is inconsistent in the way he treats historical material: He accepts those things which support his unusual theories and rejects those things which do not, even when they come from the same source. For example, Neville rejects David Whitmer’s 1887 testimony of Joseph’s use of a seer stone, but he accepts Whitmer’s 1887 testimony of meeting one of the Three Nephites who said that he was “on his way to Cumorah.” It must be awfully convenient for Neville to pick and choose which evidences he accepts and which he does not.

Jonathan Neville‘s doctored cover of the January 2020 Ensign

Neville also included in his blog post a doctored image of the January Ensign that has a photo of the title page of the 1834 book Mormonism Unvailed. It was the first anti-Mormon book, and it derisively called Joseph’s seer stone a “peep stone.” By publishing this fake image, Neville is asserting that a general authority Seventy has published anti-Mormon material in the Ensign, the Church’s official magazine.

Jonathan Nevile is a critic of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The most dangerous critics are the ones who are within the Church, for they carry a veneer of authority and respectability. They “only want the best for the Church,” they claim, and are thereby able to spread their poisonous message of “soft apostasy.”

All Latter-day Saints should reject Neville’s aberrant views and criticisms of the Church and its leaders.

—Peter Pan