Welcome back to Come Follow Church History.

I'm Lynn Hilton Wilson.

I'm Jack Welch.

And we are excited about talking about Section 18 in the Doctrine Covenants.

We're part of the Scripture Central team where we build enduring faith in Jesus Christ

by illuminating the restored scriptures, making them more accessible

and defensible and comprehensible. And as we talk about the historical background, Jack is the

perfect one to talk about the title page and some of the printing research and the timing of

the Book of Mormon, as well as some of the background specifically to this wonderful section

of the Doctrine Convents that was given to Oliver Cowdery. But I want to start out with some of the background specifically to this wonderful section of the Doctrine

Convents that was given to Oliver Cowdery. But I want to start out with some of our hard questions.

Did Joseph Pirate the Spalding manuscript? That question that we had about the Spalding manuscript

doesn't really surface much now, but in the 18th century, it was a lot bigger of an issue then. But I think it was part of

the adversarial efforts to take away some of the belief in this new text by saying, oh, I think

there was somebody who wrote something about something that might have had something to do with

this. But the Spalding manuscript was lost and they couldn't

ever test it. But I have read it and I just laugh that people thought this was, I mean, it's

not even talking about the same century or the same people. Well, the Spalding manuscript had

never been published. Right. And so nobody had read it. But when Philastris Hurlbutt writes his book, Mormonism Unveiled,

which is published by E.D. Howe. But Hurlbutt had been excommunicated from the church,

and he's coming up with all kinds of criticisms, most of which don't hold any water at all.

But he's disgruntled about the experience that he had in the church.

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