An old acquaintance on Wikipedia

[Miestră Schivă, UrN-GC]

Some of you may know of a fellow called James Strang, who after the death of Joseph Smith Jr. decided that he should be the new Prophet of the Mormon faith, and set himself up as a literal king on Beaver Island, Wisconsin.

What I didn't know until today is that he made his own knockoff of Joseph Smith's Golden Plates, called the Voree Plates, apparently out of a brass teakettle.

Finding my way down that Wikipedia rabbit hole, I renewed my acquaintance with someone you guys may remember with a particular interest in the Mormon faith and in oddball history...

Keith Thompson alleges that the text on the plates matches Strang's published translation. Although he did not identify the values of specific characters, he claimed to have shown how words such as "and", "in", and "are" appear in multiple places.[16] According to a Strangite website, Derek J. Masson, a non-Mormon scholar, reportedly argued in an unpublished 1977 paper that Strang's translation was sound.[4] This same site alleges that a second scholar, Robert Madison[17], concluded in 1990 that the text on the plates appears to represent a genuine, albeit unknown, language, and that Strang's translation appeared to be "a superb (if poetic) rendition of that text into English."[4]

Independent scholarly assessment of Masson's and Madison's conclusions does not exist.

Interesting point that when you search for "Robert Ben Madison" on Wikipedia, you get Talossa's webpage. Which is woefully out of date and badly formatted. Someone should fix that.

[Iason Taiwos]

I was unaware of Strang and the Voree plates. Thanks, this (and the related Wikipedia pages) made for an interesting read this morning.

[Miestră Schivă, UrN-GC]

In 1990, as we all know, Ben Madison was a 25 year old grad student in history and committed Mormon whose reckons on whether fringe Mormon stuff is true were probably not reliable, let alone scholastically authoritative. I can't wait to see someone out there cite The Berber Project.

[Iason Taiwos]

In 1990, as we all know, Ben Madison was a 25 year old grad student in history and committed Mormon whose reckons on whether fringe Mormon stuff is true were probably not reliable, let alone scholastically authoritative. I can't wait to see someone out there cite The Berber Project.

The Berber Project is my favorite of all Ben's stuff. Yeah, we know it's horseshit, but it's interesting and well done horseshit. We Cjovani have been majorly influenced by it in creating our own mythological back-story. (We've at least adopted an annual "snail eating day" in tribute to the proto-Talossan tribe mentioned in the book.)