Rebuttals from the Critics?
In response to my comments above, one critic pointed out that B.H. Roberts assumed that Joseph Smith wrote the journal entry that was contributed by William Clayton, and asked if this invalidates my discussion. Absolutely not – almost everyone who has read published entries for Joseph’s journal has assumed he wrote them. It was later work that showed the sloppy practices involved in the serialized publication of Joseph’s journal long after his death. Now we know that William Clayton wrote that 1843 entry on the Kinderhook plates. B.H. Roberts did not know that. The same critic noted that B.H. Roberts quotes Joseph’s journal on the Kinderhook plates as coming from the Millennial Star, vol. XXI (see New Witnesses for God, Vol.3, p.62) and asks why I didn’t show the Millennial Star as the source for Joseph’s entries, apparently believing that the Millennial Star was a contemporary publication from Joseph’s days in Nauvoo, and that I was obfuscating by saying that Clayton’s entry for Josep
