Rian Nelson pulls a Michael Scott

Rian Nelson—manager of the FIRM Foundation’s blog and social media sites, author of Moroni’s America – Maps Edition, and hardcore conspiracy theorist—has written a new book: These Stones, Fastened to a Breastplate.

In the product description for his book on the FIRM Foundation’s website, Nelson declares:

I believe Lucy Mack Smith is credible and not Martin Harris, David Whitmer, or even Emma Smith, who all spoke about the stone in the hat but never saw the spectacles, the breastplate nor the plates during translation.

This is, of course, the same argument made by Jonathan Neville. It’s a bizarre, fatally flawed claim, in that it gives undue credence to Lucy Mack Smith, who never witnessed the translation of the Book of Mormon, over three key firsthand witnesses to the translation process.

I do have to confess, though, that I found this statement on the back cover of Nelson’s book to be unintentionally amusing because of its resemblance to a famous quote-within-a-quote:

—Peter Pan