Perhaps the most strained "parallel" in Palmer's book is his appeal to the "Golden Pot," by E. T. A. Hoffmann. . . . It is Palmer's contention that "The Golden Pot" had a direct influence on Joseph Smith's story of how the Book of Mormon came to be.

Palmer believes that Joseph Smith's understanding of, or acquaintance with, the tale "The Golden Pot" "most likely" came through Luman Walters, a magician and necromancer who may have once studied in Europe and there have become acquainted with Hoffmann's work (p. 141). Palmer does not claim that Joseph Smith ever read "The Golden Pot" but only that he got ideas about it from hearing Walters. The problem with this assumption is that the evidence for a direct connection with Walters is tenuous, to say the least. Citing D. Michael Quinn, Palmer says that Brigham Young, Lorenzo Saunders, Abner Cole, and others "confirmed" the fact that the Smith family had contact with Walters in the 1820s. For the most part, however, such "confirmation" is based on secondhand information or on long-term memory, and it seems from reading the writings of Brigham Young that he himself was really not clear on the possible connection. In the 18 February 1855 speech cited by Palmer, for example, Young does not identify Walters by name, though it is evident that this is the man he described as "a fortune-teller, a necromancer, an astrologer, a soothsayer," who, he said, "possesses as much talent as any man that walked on the American soil, and was one of the wickedest men I ever saw." How Brigham knew him is not clear, but the only story he tells is simply that Walters "rode over sixty miles three times the same season they [the gold plates] were obtained by Joseph" in an effort to get the plates for himself, and that he was sent for by some of Joseph's neighbors. Brigham told essentially the same story, with a few variations in detail, a little over two years later, noting that he did not even remember the name of "this fortune-teller." The point Brigham was trying to make was that many people believed there was treasure, or gold, buried in the Hill Cumorah, and that three different times they sent for a fortune-teller to help them find it. When he repeated the story to Elizabeth Kane in 1872, he finally remembered Walters's last name. None of this, however, provides evidence that Joseph Smith actually knew Walters, or, even if he did, that he knew him well enough to get the "Golden Pot" story from him, if Walters was at all familiar with Hoffmann's tale. Palmer also cites an obscure 1884 statement by Clark Braden, an anti-Mormon Congregational minister to the effect that Joseph Smith had "made the acquaintance" of Walters, but it is not clear at all how Braden came to that conclusion.

More important, however, is the fact that Palmer's comparisons between Joseph Smith's story and "The Golden Pot" rely on carefully chosen, widely spaced examples that, when read in context, are not really what Palmer makes them out to be. Not even the general story line is recognizable in Palmer's selected references. "The Golden Pot" is a remarkable, complex fantasy told in twelve "vigils," or chapters. The edition I read covers one hundred pages. Palmer's parallels are highly selective and do not reflect the whole story, either of Anselmus (the hero of "The Golden Pot") or Joseph Smith. What's more, Palmer finds it necessary to pull strands from four different accounts by Joseph Smith in order to make his case.

. . .

Such comparisons continue throughout Palmer's chapter, but there is no space here to deal with all of them. Suffice it to say that nearly all the parallels are equally forced, merely "proof-text" in nature—that is, they are presented in such a way that the context in "The Golden Pot" is distorted and the comparison with Joseph Smith's story is contrived, often depending not on what Joseph Smith himself said but on what someone else (Abner Cole, Oliver Cowdery, Lucy Mack Smith, Orson Pratt, and others) said he said. This is neither good history nor convincing evidence that "The Golden Pot" was the source for anything that Joseph Smith reported. There may be a few similarities between "The Golden Pot" and Joseph Smith, if the text is trained, but they are ripped out of a hundred-page story line that has no similarity at all to that of Joseph Smith. However, let me encourage the interested reader to go to Hoffmann's work itself and make his or her own comparisons. You will find the story so different in thrust from what is presented in Palmer that you will wonder how and why he ferreted out such obscure parallels at all, when the whole story itself is one massive unparallel. But if you like Old World fantasy, you will have a delightful read.

The significance of all these parallels, many of them superficial, pales in comparison with things about the Book of Mormon that Palmer does not consider but that LDS scholars have studied and written about for years, and that provide powerful evidence of the book's authenticity. . . .