Mormon Church Parallels to Gadianton Robbers
Posted by skiutah on Friday, April 4, 2008
Elder Ballard, Ensign Nov, 1997: “The Gadianton robbers … they have secret signs and code words. They participate in secret rites and initiation ceremonies.”
Mormon temple ceremony?
3 NE 1:29: The Gadianton robbers use lies and flattering words to get converts.
Mormon missionaries?
3 Ne. 6:12: The Gadianton robbers rank themselves according to wealth and education.
Stake presidents? GAs? Apostles?
Sperry Symposium on the Book of Mormon 1991, p.246 – 247: “…to the Gadianton robbers, we see example after example of those who professed principles that were opposite to what the truth really is…”
Polygamy, racism, evolution, treatment of women, church history, and so on…
George Reynolds, A Dictionary of the Book of Mormon: “Gadianton was a crafty, capable man, full of strategy and cunning; a flatterer… bound its members together by the most horrible and blasphemous oaths and covenants…”
JS and the temple ceremony?
Monte S. Nyman et al., Helaman through 3 Nephi 8, According to Thy Word, p.169 – 170, speaking about Gadiantons: “For instance, most good people do not have any aspirations to join organizations that are universally considered to be evil. But they can dwindle into believing seemingly proper, yet false, philosophies taught to them by respectable people and naively participate in hurtful practices and attitudes without fully realizing what they are doing.”
Mormon church?
President Heber C. Kimball, JD, 26 vol, 11, p.85: “The atmosphere of many parts of these mountains is doubtless the abode of the spirits of Gadianton robbers, whose spirits are as wicked as hell…”
This has got to be Park City, Utah, right? 
SkiUtah said
Interestingly, many of the Mormon prophets have taught that the Gadianton robbers were still living in the West:
in 1851, Brigham Young commented to Saints at Parowan that the local Paiute Indians were “descendants of the old Gadianton Robbers who infested these Mountains for more than a thousand years.”
More recently, Spencer W. Kimball taught that the Gadianton robbers lived in the Hogback mountains of New Mexico and that the Temple of Nephi was in Bolivia.
Here’s another commonly repeated Gadianton Robbers story:
Near the town of Modena, Utah reports by freighters going to the mining camps in Nevada. Hauling to Pinoche and Panaca, freighters went through a rocky gorge there that was said to be haunted by the Gadianton robbers. Huge rocks were supposed to have tumbled down on freighters. But most important were the ways in which the rocky cliffs on either side of them would close in around them, keeping some trapped forever in the gorge to die of the heat and of starvation. Many others narrowly escaped these cliff rocks as they attempted to close in around them, watching Gadiantons swoop down upon them when the rocks closed and kill and rob those whom they trapped.