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Old 06-03-2017, 02:01 AM   #5
MikeWaters
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Bushman talks about the Book of Mormon as a counter-cultural work, one that depicts an Indian Apocalypse where the white fair people are destroyed. Rather than the actual belief and ongoing narrative in America of the whites destroying the Indians.

It's probably hard for us to understand the Book of Mormon in the same way as Joseph Smith's contemporaries did. According to Bushman with the revelation of Jackson County, they viewed the second coming as imminent. The idea of an apocalypse was not so far-fetched to them, as occurring near and soon.

As the idea that saints would gather in Jackson County died out (in Nauvoo period), it seems that some of these ideas started to fade away. And JS had the revelation that I still don't understand, that if he lived to such and such old age, he would see something or another related to the second coming.
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