The Three Witnesses
As a group, the Three Witnesses served only one other role in the church before they were excommunicated in 1837-38. After Joseph Smith had selected the council of the Twelve Apostles from among the veterans of Zion's Camp, the Three Witnesses "called out the twelve men and gave each one a blessing."
The Three Witnesses became closely associated with Joseph Smith. Martin Harris made a significant financial contribution to the printing of the Book of Mormon. In addition, some modern interpreters of Mormonism have argued (as did some contemporaries) that the Witnesses had a similar magical worldview. One of these, Grant Palmer, a former director of LDS Institutes of Religion who was disfellowshipped by the LDS Church in 2004 after writing An Insider's View of Mormon Origins, argued that moderns "tend to read into testimonies a rationalist perspective rather than a nineteenth-century magical mindset....They shared a common world view, and this is what drew them together in 1829."
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Famous quotes containing the word witnesses:
“My tendency to nervousness in my younger days, in view of the fact of a number of near relatives on both my father’s and mother’s side of the house having become insane, gave some serious uneasiness. I made up my mind to overcome it.... In the cross-examination of witnesses before a crowded court-house ... I soon found I could control myself even in the worst of testing cases. Finally, in battle.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)