The reason I ask this is because a friend has said that he believes JS was a charlatan/fraud, specifically a "knowing fraud."
I told him that I disagreed, and that most modern historians bear this out.
Then he said "what historians," and I realized that I was speaking from a general knowledge or perception of the scholarship, and not a specific one.
Certainly Bushman does not think Smith is a knowing fraud. Harold Bloom, although not a historian, does not consider him a knowing fraud. I want to say that I read in Brodie's biography, that it said that while Brodie considered him a knowing fraud, that the history that has followed does not take this same approach.
So what about the other historians and biographies after Brodie?
If my friend were to make a list of reasons why he thinks JS is a knowing fraud, it mainly has to do with abuses of money, sex, and desire for power. I.e. Kirtland bank, marriage/sex with other men's wives, and Nauvoo in general.
Now what are the arguments that he was not. I think, in essence, it is that JS cannot be boiled down to just one trick. And that is what he would be, if he were a knowing fraud. He displayed too much "religious genius" (Bloom's words), he attracted followers that were solid people (not all of them, but many of them--I don't think early Mormonism=Jonestown), he is just too complex, too fervent, to have not considered himself a prophet. And not only that, he paid too high a price, for too long, to do it the way he did it, if it was merely about sex and money and prestige.
If you read D&C, at least to me, there is a prophetic voice there. Not a PT Barnum voice. But a prophetic voice that believes what it says.
Anyway, I have brought a pea shooter to a gun fight, I need to know what the scholarship says, and I would prefer to get that information without actually reading books.
