The Eleven Witnesses and the Twelve Apostles

A critic sets martyrdom as the test of a witness, runs the Book of Mormon witnesses through it, and then never runs his own apostles through the same machine. So let us run them both.

The Charge

It arrives in a fixed order, and it deserves to be laid out at full strength before anything is said against it. Eleven men signed for the Book of Mormon and the signatures are worthless, because Martin Harris saw the plates with spiritual eyes only, alone in the woods near his home. Oliver Cowdery handled them under a cloth, then left and called Joseph Smith a fraud. David Whitmer walked out and founded a rival church. Hiram Page later confessed he had seen the plates in vision. Four of the Eight were Whitmers and a fifth married into the family. Relatives, in other words, and a hallucination shared among them at best.

Then comes the comparison that is supposed to finish the job. Twelve apostles saw the risen Christ with their eyes and touched Him with their hands, and every last one of them paid for it in blood. Peter inverted on a cross. James under Herod’s sword. Thomas run through with spears in India. Paul beheaded at Rome. John boiled in oil and banished to Patmos. Not one defection among them. It sounds airtight, and it is meant to. So how much of it survives an afternoon with the sources? Almost none of it.

Errors Before the Argument Even Begins

Martin Harris, alone, near his home. No. Where did it happen, and who was standing there? The experience of the Three happened in late June of 1829 in the woods by the Whitmer farm at Fayette, New York, and Martin was not by himself. He withdrew from the other two believing his own unworthiness was blocking the manifestation. Joseph Smith then went and found him, and the two of them prayed and saw it together. Every detail of the setting in that sentence is wrong.

Oliver and the cloth. That description belongs to Emma Smith, not to Oliver Cowdery, and it belongs to the translation rather than to the testimony of the Three. Emma told the Saints’ Herald in October 1879 that the plates lay on the table wrapped in a linen cloth she had given her husband, and that she traced their outline with her hands and heard the leaves rustle with a metallic sound. She was describing an ordinary household object she lived beside for months. And what did Oliver himself say about it? The opposite, four decades earlier and in public. At Kanesville in October 1848 he told a whole congregation that he wrote the entire book as it fell from the lips of the Prophet, and that he BEHELD the plates with his eyes and HANDLED them with his hands.

Hiram Page confessed to a vision. Where? Produce the document. The record that actually exists runs the other direction, and it comes from William McLellin — a man who left the Church and stayed out. McLellin recorded that in 1833 a Jackson County mob ran Page down and beat him with whips and clubs, and that they offered to stop if he would deny the book. His answer was a question: how can I deny what I know to be true? He died in 1852 with the testimony intact.

Leaving Is Not Recanting

This is the hinge of the whole objection, and it is a confusion. Oliver was excommunicated in 1838 and practiced law in Ohio and Wisconsin for a decade. David quarreled bitterly, left, and never returned to the Church. Martin drifted for years through the Strangites and even the Shakers. Is any of that denied here? Not a word of it. Every one of those facts is granted, because every one of them is true.

And so what? A man who resigns from a company does not thereby confess that its products were imaginary. What the objection needs is a DENIAL, and there is not one to be had. These men were excommunicated, sued, dispossessed, mocked in the national press, and in several cases personally furious at Joseph Smith. One word from any of them would have collapsed the entire structure and made its author a celebrity overnight. Fifty years. Dozens of recorded interviews. ZERO retractions. Name one.

David Whitmer got tired of reading in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that he had recanted, and he answered it in print. His Proclamation of March 1881, published in the Richmond Conservator and signed underneath by the leading citizens of Ray County vouching for his character, states it flatly:

David Whitmer, Proclamation, Richmond, Missouri, March 1881

“That I have never at any time denied that testimony or any part thereof, which has so long since been published with that Book, as one of the three witnesses.”

Six years later, in An Address to All Believers in Christ, he extended it to the other two — neither Oliver Cowdery nor Martin Harris ever denied their testimony, and both died reaffirming it. He was in the room for one of those deaths. Oliver died at Richmond on 3 March 1850, and Whitmer reported his last words as an instruction to stay true to the testimony of the Book of Mormon.

Then set the words aside and watch the conduct, because conduct is harder to fake. What does a man do who knows the thing was a con? He stays gone. Oliver walked back into the Church at Kanesville in November 1848 and asked to be rebaptized as an ordinary member, requesting no office and no restitution. Martin was rebaptized in 1870, came to Utah, and was still bearing the testimony with his last audible words in 1875. Forgers do not petition to rejoin the organization their forgery created.

Spiritual Eyes, and What the Phrase Meant

Not one of the “spiritual eyes” reports is Martin Harris in his own hand. They come through the printer John Gilbert, through Pomeroy Tucker who wrote a book against the Church, through the disaffected Warren Parrish and Stephen Burnett, and through the pastor John A. Clark at thirdhand. Set against them are Martin’s own words, repeated for forty-five years and given in the plainest physical register — with these eyes I saw the angel of the Lord and I saw the plates, and with these ears I heard the voice of the angel.

Even granting the phrase, does it mean what a modern skeptic hears in it? David Whitmer was asked exactly this by Anthony Metcalf, and answered in writing:

David Whitmer to Anthony Metcalf, in Ten Years Before the Mast (1888), p. 74

“Of course we were in the spirit when we had the view, for no man can behold the face of an angel, except in a spiritual view, but we were in the body also, and everything was as natural to us, as it is at any time.”

That is the language of Daniel by the river, whose companions saw nothing while he saw everything (Daniel 10:7). It is the language of Peter on the housetop, who fell into a trance and was afterward perfectly clear about what had been shown him and why (Acts 10:10–11). Was Peter’s vision therefore a hallucination? The whole Gentile mission turns on it. A critic cannot treat that category as reliable revelation in the New Testament and as psychiatric evidence in 1829.

And every word of the objection misses the Eight entirely. Their statement mentions no angel and no voice and no vision at all. DAYLIGHT, weight, and the turning of leaves.

Now Put the Apostles Through the Same Machine

How many apostolic deaths does the New Testament actually record? Exactly one. Herod killed James the brother of John with the sword (Acts 12:2). That is the whole list. Everything else on that list is later TRADITION, and the dates are not close. Peter crucified head downward first appears in the apocryphal Acts of Peter near AD 190 and in Origen a generation after that, quoted by Eusebius in the fourth century. Thomas speared in India comes from the Acts of Thomas, a romance composed around AD 200. John in the cauldron of oil comes from Tertullian, about AD 200 — well over a century after the events it describes.

Take the boiling oil in particular, because it shows how little the list has been examined by the man reciting it. What does Tertullian actually say happened in that cauldron? That John came out of it UNHURT and was then sent off to his island. He SURVIVED. It is a deliverance story, not a martyrdom, and the tradition itself has John dying old and in his bed at Ephesus.

None of this comes from a Latter-day Saint. Sean McDowell is an Evangelical apologist who wrote his doctoral dissertation defending apostolic martyrdom, published as The Fate of the Apostles, and he graded the evidence figure by figure:

McDowell’s Ratings

Highest possible probability — Peter, Paul, James son of Zebedee, James the brother of Jesus

More probable than not — Thomas

More plausible than not — Andrew

As plausible as not — Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, Thaddeus, Simon the Zealot, Matthias

Improbable — John

His summary of the popular version is that while it may well be true that all the apostles but John died as martyrs, it cannot be demonstrated historically. So the standard the critic set — died for it, and documented near the event — is cleared by four of the fourteen men McDowell weighs. Seven of them are a coin flip. And the death described in the most cinematic detail of all? That one his own side rates as improbable.

Judas, and the Night They All Ran

Zero defections from the Twelve? Judas Iscariot was one of the Twelve, called and sent and trusted with the bag, and he sold the Lord for silver. The Eleven had to convene and fill his seat by lot (Acts 1:21–26). If a defector on the roll voids the roll, the Christian list voided first and by a wider margin, since one in twelve is a heavier rate of loss than anything the Book of Mormon witnesses ever posted.

Then Gethsemane. “And they all forsook him, and fled” (Mark 14:50). Peter, the chief of them, denied that he had ever known the man — three times, with cursing, to a servant girl and a few bystanders around a fire (Matthew 26:69–75). Earlier, a whole crowd of disciples had walked out over a hard sermon (John 6:66).

Now hold that beside Hiram Page under the clubs, refusing to say the words that would end the beating. The point is not to shame Peter. Peter repented and became a lion, and the man who denied Christ by a fire went on to feed His sheep. The point is that the argument is a DOUBLE STANDARD wearing a sermon. Human weakness is understood and forgiven on the one side of it and treated as proof of conspiracy on the other.

Relatives, and Who Else Is Disqualified

The family objection is real and worth stating without softening it. Four of the Eight were Whitmers, Hiram Page had married a Whitmer daughter, and the remaining three were Joseph’s father and two of his brothers. All eight were kin to somebody in the story. Does that weaken a testimony?

Apply that rule evenly and see who is left standing. Peter and Andrew were brothers. James and John were brothers, and their mother was managing their careers by the time of Matthew 20:20–21. James, named by Paul in the resurrection appearances, was the Lord’s own brother (1 Corinthians 15:5–8). The tomb was found by women of His circle, and the risen Christ appeared to disciples and relatives and to nobody at all in the Sanhedrin. Every witness of the Resurrection in the New Testament is a follower, a relative, or a convert. Why would it be otherwise? That is how witness has ALWAYS worked, because the people present at an event are the people who can testify of it.

And the law God gave requires exactly this and nothing fancier — in the mouth of two or three witnesses shall the matter be established (Deuteronomy 19:15; 2 Corinthians 13:1). Eleven is a generous margin over three, and Moroni had promised the arrangement centuries in advance (Ether 5:2–4).

Two of the Eleven Meet the Standard as Written

Hyrum Smith was one of the Eight. He was shot to death in the jail at Carthage on 27 June 1844, with the event documented within days by participants, opponents, and the county press, having never taken back a word of the testimony he signed. Measure that against Thomas in India. Which of the two can a historian actually verify?

Samuel Smith was another of the Eight. Riding toward Carthage that same day to help his brothers, he was chased by armed men and told his mother afterward that he had taken an injury in his side during the chase. He never recovered, and he was dead of fever within the month. Say what the record says and no more — but he was hunted, and he did not recant, and the roll of the Eight was two men shorter by August.

The Verdict

The comparison was offered as a demolition. It is a mirror.

Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead in a body of flesh and bone, ate before His disciples, and told Thomas to reach out his hand. Peter preached it in Jerusalem where the tomb could be checked, and Paul staked the whole Christian religion on the testimony of men who could still be interviewed. Every bit of that is true, and this site defends it without a single reservation.

What is also true is that the apostles fled, one of them betrayed the Lord outright, another cursed and swore he had never met Him, and the manner of most of their deaths is known to us only through documents written a century or more later. Does anybody sane conclude from that catalogue that the Resurrection is a hoax? Of course not. So the same charity, applied honestly, cannot convict eleven men who were driven out and impoverished and beaten and buried, and who to the last hour of the last one of them never took back a syllable.

A test that only ever runs in ONE direction is not a test. It is a verdict looking for a reason. Reject the Book of Mormon if you must — but reject it on evidence, and be prepared to have the identical evidence turned on the Gospels tomorrow morning by somebody less friendly than a Latter-day Saint.