Mark Ashurst-McGee (2000) A Pathway to Prophethood: Joseph Smith Junior as Rodsman, Village Seer, and Judeo-Christian Prophet. Masters Thesis, Utah States University.

If Mark wrote this in 1980 and had been the first to dig up and cite all the primary sources that have now been collected into volumes by others, he would assuredly be exalted into the pantheon of New Mormon Historians rivaling only Andrew Ehat for most impactful thesis. As it now stands, Mark’s thesis exists in a post Early Mormons and the Magic World View world. Despite this, Mark dazzles with new insight and vision and serves as a splendid correction to the preceding valuable but in some cases flawed work.

Like Ehat, Mark presents not only a chronology of events, but a system of understanding them that resolves the tension in a narrative that is foreign to the correlated history. A Pathway to Prophethood follows the Smith family and delineates their beliefs in folk magic and in the future of their progeny. We see Joseph’s interplay in the sundry forms of progressive divination, from the folk arts to theophany and back.

Mark shows us the stones that Joseph owned and how (and why) they are significant or not. We see how the prophet progressed in his translation and in the tools he used. Perhaps the most significant contribution of this thesis is the explication of Joseph’s own views of his premortal self as manifest by his stone.

Mark does pull one or two of his punches on debated chronology, but all in all, I recommend this volume as a must read and I will likely squeeze a few posts out of it. It is available from UMI dissertation services (Order Number: 1402648) for $41. It arrives on double sided loose paper. Enjoy!